Taking another's inventory not just a 12-step thing

As a recovery blog, this is primarily about my recovery from both alcohol abuse and addiction, and sexual abuse.

But it's also, at times, about general issues in sobriety, including my observations in sobriety support.

I started in AA, before discovering secular sobriety and moving on to it. And, I heard the comments in AA warning about "taking another person's inventory." The old-timers didn't say don't do it, they just warned about it. It's like Jesus saying, "don't judge, lest you are judged in return," but he did not say never do it.

Anyway, it happens in secular sobriety, too. And it's insidious when an inventory is taken in private and another attitude is presented in public.

It's generally bad, outside of that, if the person taking the inventory isn't a sobriety rock themselves.

And, I think that's the main reason the warning arose in the AA version of the sobriety world.

Taking another's inventory is much more than the cheap "when you point at someone, you have three fingers pointing back."

The big issue is that for a person with relatively little sobriety time to take another's inventory, it usually involves not taking a good inventory of their own sobriety standing.