“Fooled Into Wanting To Do A 5th Step” 😂😂 AA Speaker – Matthew M.

Matthew M. walks into his second AA meeting still carrying the weight of Catholic school—specifically the terror instilled by nuns in black robes who made him believe that thinking about sex as a teenager meant burning in hell. By 14, he’d already internalized the message that God wasn’t just watching; God hated him. When he lands in recovery, he discovers Step 11, which asks him to pray for knowledge of God’s will. But there’s a problem: his version of God is still the angry, punishing God of his childhood.

What makes this talk so honest is how Matthew M. describes getting swept up in the energy of early meetings. The second meeting he attends is one where they don’t celebrate sobriety birthdays—they celebrate Fifth Steps. Every week. It becomes this celebrated milestone, this big deal, and Matthew finds himself caught up in it. He describes the experience with humor and self-awareness: he got “fooled into wanting to do a Fifth Step” because everyone around him was doing them, and it seemed like that’s just what you did in recovery.

The trap is real. In early sobriety, especially in the first few weeks and months, there’s enormous social pressure in the fellowship to move through the steps. Meetings have energy. Other members are excited about your recovery. And if your home group celebrates Fifth Steps like birthdays, there’s an implicit message: this is what we do here, this is the milestone we mark. Matthew describes falling into that current without questioning whether he was actually ready, whether he actually understood what the Fifth Step was meant to do, or whether his relationship with God had shifted enough to make confession meaningful.

What’s particularly striking is his willingness to name the God problem head-on. Recovery asks us to develop a relationship with a Higher Power, but if your only template for “higher power” is a punishing God from Catholic school, that’s not a small issue to work through. Matthew doesn’t minimize that. He sits with the discomfort of it—the contradiction between what AA is asking him to do spiritually and what his nervous system learned to fear when he was a kid.

The humor in how he tells it—”Geez, it’s going to be crowded cuz all we ever talk about is sex”—keeps the talk grounded and real. This isn’t a lecture on theology or a therapy session about religious trauma. It’s one guy describing what actually happened in his early sobriety: the collision between his past and the program, and how he navigated trying to move forward while still carrying all that baggage.

For anyone struggling with God or a Higher Power in recovery, especially those with religious trauma or a complicated past with faith, this talk offers permission to slow down and do the actual work instead of just going through the motions because the group is doing it.