Personality Change – Threads of Recovery Workshop – Part 2 of 4 – Michael C.

our final speaker of the can't wait to hear him speaker set and this because we all got to have a nickname right because it shows that we love you good comments comments like little tidbits of history and he just shares after people that i think he's a well-known so we will listen to mike c and his topic start at the beginning michael chambers an alcoholic um good mentors um aas 12 steps and you the fellowship substances since march 25 of 1993 and i too am eternally other people my home group is the triangle group of uh in waco texas thank you thank you all for asking me to share on this topic of personal personality change here it's group meeting of alcoholics anonymous uh roy k uh marky f and and bill g for their insight you know it never fails that um when you tell your story i see mine in yours always hear what i need to hear it's kind of like we're just sitting around a campfire telling stories uh yeah and i'd also like to thank mike mckay and and debbie mckaye and janet and um and if i'm missing anybody uh thank you all for your service road of happy destiny uh you know there's a as bill sees it members uh always two sides to a story right a page one personality change out of as bill sees it uh it has often been said of an alcoholism. That's not true. We have to get over drinking in order to stay alive, but anyone who contact knows ever stops drinking permanently without undergoing a profound person 1940 and then we thought conditions drove us to drink and couldn't, to our entire satisfaction. Our drinking went out of hand and we became alcoholics. Change ourselves to make convey work. And that's from the 12 and 12 page 40. Kind of reminds me, you can take the rum out of the. My mom used to love to cook fruitcakes, too. And I started drinking there innocently enough, walking around age of 16 in the year 1965. I used to be overly concerned that way I know the death of my younger brother the younger of my he just stopped breathing on his third birthday of all things and that the 1960 i was then and i grieved a great deal um in addition uh i seem to go to a lot of um one for a good friend who got hit by a truck in another corner who i had my eye on um whether this left me with a love disorder where I just don't know. I think my story would best fit the time section of the big book stories. I never reached some of the more advanced states that I'm sure I would have. As a somewhat fortunate one, I had no acquaintance with delirium jails, treatment center. I had been just adjusting to the slow journey of circling the drain, hadn't yet lost my home. I think God slam dunked me into, and this was as a result of an, and with the patient of some good education about alcoholism and some writing and mandatory attendance of 12-step meetings where I and hope of the God gave me the sense to quit digging for a deeper bottom. Me, I wasn't much of a joiner. My company paid for me to go to treatment um and um and and my continued employment was contingent on me getting through treatment success both at treatment and at work uh treatment issued me a big book a 12 and 12 and a so i was well with books there even though i didn't do anything with them for quite a few write a goodbye letter to my alcoholism and read that to my treatment group and then write about my powerless group. Uh, I had to shut up and let the group feed back to me, uh, did do the feedback. It had to be something about themselves. And that was a valuable lesson. talk about myself. The fact that I was putting pen to paper had a sobering effect time, but here on paper, I had a litany of troubles, alcohol. I soon felt the power of the support of my meetings that the meetings gave me over. I had a literature commitment, a literature service commitment, which helped me. It was really good. My first stab at the steps was in I was 19 months over and I wouldn't recommend waiting that long. Bob would do his he'd take him through the steps immediately he treated this rough cut at the steps as an event and sleep God guided me to another big book workshop where I from a Joe and Charlie tape session we would read the appropriate part of the big book with it. I was almost six years sober by then. I started out this workshop as a participant at first and then actually chaired that workshop. We would go through the steps a little more I've existed at this for 11 years, and that repetition really, really, really helped. That workbook we use reminds me of the Joe and Charlie showed us that he got for Father's Day. and do you know about that book 18 times yeah that's it deb i'm keeping amazon in business uh so far so following the holiday and i guess i'm good period of the as bill sees it so a journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. I learned triggered an uncontrollable physical craving to call for the intake of more and more alcohol. One says I'm powerless over alcohol. It means I've developed some kind of an allergy to alcohol. And that may be allergic to strawberries or pollen or eggs. I'm allergic to alcohol First drink, the physical powerlessness is experienced I also like the effect This great inciting, great exciting in control feeling And I'll mention before, I think the 12 and 12 just extemporaneously without plan. Little did I know I was headed for the gates of insanity or death. Um, during a long with some more admissions about times I tried to quit, but had never found a way to see the pattern. My alcoholism emerged a vicious, a vicious circle drunk. I got into more and more. And when all the trouble got bad enough and I tried uh, kicked in. And while I might go for a week or a month, uh, in the end, I'd all start to cycle all over again. Hopeless is what Dr. Silkworth called it. I'm absolutely that is, uh. For the alcoholic, Silkworth argued alcohol is poison and and me, the alcoholic. I miss powerless over alcohol as some people are the penicillin and and all, speaking of poison. So it's a little past four months into sobriety when I thought there was no way in consort with my company were going to let me go on an And this was a sort of a week-long sales conference, and I went as the computer technician. You know, they surprised me when they said I could go. Now, my hands. After years of drinking with these sales types, afraid they were going to make me drink. Okay, this plus treatment. Since when something slipped, she busted my treatment group buddy on this trip. I also had my pride involved. I fancied myself. I'd been doing pretty well up to this time. And I'd be losing that. Um, looking back now, I, I kind of see how I was backing myself up into being, um, I heard how the fellowship had been relying on God with statement off, uh, and, but for the grace of God. Uh, so I took a leap of faith and asked, got tested, uh but I made it through the week successfully without drinking and instead of there might be a God and he might and he did help me. And I too, I think it was Roy said that, I too had a newfound friend The God idea, Debbie, worked. And my big book, Nine Months Sober, nine months. Hey, I've got this. Hey, yeah, I got this when I read this chapter. so to paraphrase uh dr young in a return letter to bill wilson he said um his the alcoholics craving for alcohol was the equivalent of a low level on a low-level of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language that union with God. Let me tell you, alcohol was a lousy God substitute. So bring the body and the mind will follow. This is a simple way to convey the deeper truth that this is a program of action. Steps three through 12 are action steps designed to bring about what Carl Jung called a conversion experience or a spiritual experience or spiritual awakening or personality change. This emotional rearrangement in the mind of the alcoholic, hopefully mine, had to be powerful enough to overcome alcoholism. Take enough rigorous action and soon the mind will change. Worry about it, think about it. talk about it, and I'm very likely to remain unchanged. I felt convinced of the pertinent ABC ideas, and i recited the third step prayer standing and holding hands with my workshop sharing partners. There's about 14 of us, and about 14, andI think we went to dinner after this after that step. So that was a little ritual. I don't think the place we were at was big enough for us to get on our knees. But standing and holding hands all together, that was powerful. So it was a woman who facilitated this workshop, and she was a big book enthusiast. I use that term instead of Nazi now. And she was adamant that we didn't take anything to the grave with us. We spent a few weeks learning about and preparing our fourth step in preparation for the fifth. I was unknowingly beginning to take steps that answered part of, as Bill sees at page one, personality change. I slowly learned that something had to be done about my vengeful resentments, self-pity, unwarranted pride. I had to see that every time I played the big shot, I turned people against me. I had to see that when I harbored grudges and planned revenge for such defeats, I was really beating myself with a club of anger I intended to use on others. I learned that if I were seriously disturbed, my first need was to quiet the disturbance, regardless of who or what I thought caused it. Fancy the real? To see how erratic emotions victimized me often took a long time. And I could perceive them quickly in others, but only slowly in myself. First of all, I had to admit that I had many of these defects, even though such disclosures were painful and humiliating. I'd been punishing my parents and my behavior because they divorced. And then I had affairs as a single guy with married women. My still small voice knew that was wrong, and I suffered for that. Such is the high cost of low living. Where other people were concerned, I had to drop the word blame from my speech and thought. This required great willingness even to begin, but once over the first two or three high hurdles, the course ahead began to look easier. For I'd started to get perspective on myself, which is another way of saying I was gaining in humility. I had begun to learn tolerance, patience, and goodwill toward all men, even my enemies, for I looked at them as sick people just like me. I listened to the people I had hurt by my conduct and I was willing to straighten out the past if I could. You know, I swallowed and digested some big chunks of truth about myself. Oh, and by the way, we did lose some participants in that workshop at this juncture. It tends to happen at the fourth step. I had to have a sponsor to complete treatment successfully, but I never worked with him. I vaguely remember him asking me to read chapter five, which I didn't do. By the time I had my fourth step ready in the workshop, I thought, hey, let me give this guy a call, my sponsor, an opportunity to take my fifth step with me. It had been close to two years since I'd talked with him. He declined. He said he didn't know me well enough. Uh-oh, I got another crisis. I didn't want to hold up the workshop because I was the only one who hadn't gotten their fifth step done. So, I asked another alcoholic, a woman who was a friend of the workshop facilitator. I believe this step, the fifth step, is the real price of admission into our 12-step program. And I've come to believe it's the price of submission into life as well. When all said and done, recovery is about healing relationships. And this step clearly identifies the three primary relationships I'll have to deal with as a human being and directs me into healing each in its turn. I find that to be human, I have a relationship with myself where we humans are the only creatures on Earth able to stand outside of ourselves and look and look inward. Consciousness is both a blessing and a curse. what i see at first is usually not a pretty sight and i often am usually merciless than my own self-judgment uh i remember being asked early in recovery what i would do to anyone who said to me the things i've been saying to about myself my response is i'd kill him well that of course exactly what i'd been doing killing myself with alcohol and as i as i took step five uh um yeah as i took step five uh with myself uh i began to let go of this false self this ego self uh which i'd been trying to kill and began forgiving and finding my true self coming to see i'd done the best i could uh with what i knew what i new at the time uh admitting the truth to god is also an important part of healing relationships Can I share my fourth step with God and find a truly loving father welcoming me home like the erring child I am? Yes. Now, what about taking the step with that other human being? This is the part I find most difficult. The woman and I had a long, long talk, and I felt like I had offloaded a tremendously massive weight when I was done. Um, uh, she wasn't there to forgive me only to accept me. And she was, and she was sitting as sitting in as the representative of the human race. Uh, for the first time now, um, uh. For the first Time someone now knew all of me, someone had all the pieces of the puzzle, uh, knew all my secrets and my fears and they were still my friend. Uh that was the day I really joined the AA Fellowship, and that was the day I joined the human race. Welcome back to the human race this night. Steps six and seven form the turning point in the program for me. Bill Wilson wrote, this is the exact point at which we abandon limited objectives and move towards God's will for us. My experience with these two steps goes something like this. I'm paddling my canoe down the river of life i'm doing pretty good i'm working my program i'm in touch with god and loving my fellows uh this generally lasts all of about eight seconds then suddenly someone or something comes along read that life happening on life's terms and my imagined and short-lived security is threatened um i perceive something or someone as a threat and so i react uh the reaction to this fear generally takes the form of anger, either expressed or suppressed. My canoe starts taken on water. My serenity is gone. I lose the connection I had to God and I lose the love I had for my fellows, especially the someone usually who caused whatever problem I perceived them to have caused. Read that as projection. Now, this is where steps six and seven come in. I'm perfectly free to continue in this state of emotional and spiritual blockage for as long as I choose. You know, I can curse the guy or gal who disturbed my imaginary peace for an hour or a day or a lifetime, but I pay a price. The price is that this blockage in my spiritual life blocks out God and it blocks me from being my true self. Pain begins to build. The anger and resentment turn inward and I get depressed. This is step six at work. Ain't it grand uh this is part of the getting ready to have the defect removed i always get to say when i've had enough when i'm done with step six and the pain has made me ready i move on to step seven read that thank you god i need exactly that lesson now beaten by life the way i was beaten by my alcoholism, I recognize when I try to face it without God. And then I remember once again that there is a solution. I get the point. I gained the humility that I lacked just a few moments ago and I turned to God and I say something like this. My creator, I am willing that you should have all of me good and bad. I pray now that you remove from me every single defect of character, which stands in the way of my usefulness to you and my fellows. Grant me strength as I go out from here to do your bidding. Amen. Now is it possible to do all this without holding on so long and getting hit with all that pain? Well, someday I hope to reach that point. Bill wrote in the 12 and 12 that since the defective relations with other human beings have nearly always been the immediate cause of our woes, including alcoholism. No field of investigation could yield more satisfying and valuable rewards than this one. Step eight is critical to the process. The big book reminds me our real purpose is to fit ourselves to be of maximum service to God and the people about us. Yeah, Markie made a really great point with that statement. And in step eight, I begin to bring my newly emerging self into right relationship with those I have harmed in my life. I'm directed to make illicit these people I've harmed. Going through the process of becoming willing to work this step drives me further and further and further into the arms of God and into thearms of my newly found friends and sobriety. This step requires that I grow up and take responsibility for my past actions, whether they were done drunk or sober and whether the other person had harmed me or not. Sam Shoemaker, an Episcopal priest and the one that Bill Wilson credited with teaching him and Dr. Bob all the spiritual principles that underlie the 12 steps, had this to say on this business of relationships. He said, I want to remind you that our experience of God is all bound up inextricably with our human relationships. I can't have God without all of you. I've simply got to change. Taking the steps is what changes me. Taking The Steps, I changed the three primary relationships in my life. One, my relationship with God. Two, my relation with God, and three, my relations with God myself. Three, my relationships with people. The first three steps fundamentally changed my relationship with God. In steps four through seven, I make a fundamental change in a relationship I have with myself. Then in steps eight and nine, I turn to the healing of my relationship with others. Making direct amends to people I've harmed offers me the opportunity for healing my past and freeing me from my guilt and shame, as well as from the remorse and fear I carry into sobriety. My sponsor took me through this part of the program and helped me sort through the different categories of amends I needed to make. Yeah, I'm reminded of Judy's talk just recently where she talked about that. Some could be done immediately. Some would take time. Some would have consequences for others and require their consent. And some were dropped from the list entirely because they would only benefit me at the expense of other people. Wow. Considerate of others, huh? What a concept. Getting direct guidance from people and from God in handling these amends is critical. My first time through the steps, I didn't pick up on the significance of steps 10, 11, and 12. You can read that as I just didn't do them. So it's been said that the good is the enemy of the best. And if I want the best out of sobriety, I'm going to apply these steps in my spiritual life. I now see my step 10 is my walking around step, my throughout the day step,my continuous growth step as are 11 and 12, my early warning step, my gateway to the fourth dimension step. And because of Bill H., I can now add my what not to do step. In step 10, I continue to watch for selfishness, dishonesty, resentment, and fear. These usually make their appearances emotional pain, emotional pain. When, not if, these crop up, I ask God at once to remove them. You know, I used to always get that confused. I'd say, I asked God to remove him at once. Oops, can't be dictating the gut. I discuss them with someone immediately, especially if I'm having trouble seeing the truth and make amends quickly if I've harmed anyone. Now here's where my pride and ego are likely to step in and prevent me from doing this. And I wind up catching it in my 11-step retire at night routine. Yeah, I remember one time I didn't make that amends right away, and I had to wait a whole month to do it because I didn' t see the person for a whole month. um and and uh and then i'm supposed to resolutely turn my thoughts to someone i can help and uh i'm glad you guys have been reminding me of that here lately um uh then love and tolerance of others is our code i think the 10-step promises uh ought to get uh at least some of the accolades that the nine-step premises get i think those 10-stepped promises are like really great um okay step 11 um i i received some definite and valuable suggestions my prayer life was not existent and the word meditation wasn't even part of my vocabulary as were a great many words the fellowship used and i think one of our new members uh is kind of going through that too uh uh when i first got to aa yeah you guys talked a whole different language. So I have my night instructions where I can look at the results of my thinking during the day, see what I need to work on and stay on the road I want to be on. Then I have My Morning Instructions asking God to redirect my thinking for the day. And thank you, Bill H., for that redirect idea because my malady wakes up 20 minutes before I do. and is my thinking. So I practice this routine to remind me of my commitment for each day. The third valuable suggestion deals with indecision, where I don't always have the knowledge or understanding or the capacity to handle things to come up throughout the day. You know, it's all right for me not to know everything. If I'm having difficulty with a problem using my self-will. I hope to get better at realizing that and turn the problem over to God, then relax, take it easy, not struggle, and free myself for other things like helping his kids. What a concept. Now, just before the fourth valuable suggestion, it says I've meditated. And I thought this doesn't sound anything like what I've heard today's meditation is like. I prayed the prayer in the big book and finished my morning routine, praying for people both alive and dead. Reference page 55 in the fundamental idea of God obscured by calamity, pomp, and worship of other things. Obscured by my search for money, power, prestige, sex, and other things, I was never told to look for assets. They're not blocking me from the power. All I've looked for is for the damaged and unsaleable goods, the lousy stock and trade. As I progress through the steps, every step is designed to remove something. The lousY stock and tradE that resulted from my selfish, self-seeking, dishonest, frightened, and inconsiderate personality have been removed and the good things have come to the surface. As the selfishness is removed, the God quality of unselfishness arises. As dishonesty is removed honesty comes into my life. The result is then I'm rocketed into the fourth dimension of existence. To live without selfishness and dishonesty is a new experience, an adventure. Yes, Judy, thank you for pointing out that word, adventure. Appendix two says a spiritual experience is a personality change sufficient to recover from alcoholism. And I'll know when I've had one, when I'm tapped and unsuspected in a resource of strength, the assets. All the good God qualities have always been there. With the garbage gone, I've tapped into something brand new and I'm living an entirely different life. I can get up in the morning and say, God, what do you want today? Redirect me. I can love. I can believe I can do things I could I couldn't do on my own unaided will. Spiritual experience is as different as everybody in these Zoom squares. But William James, smart guy, Harvard professor in his book, of Varieties of Religious Experience, describes four qualities common to these experiences. And the first quality is that they are ineffable. And that simply means they can't be described precisely with words. I struggle to put mine into words. I'd need to be a poet. The experience is beyond my ability with words to communicate. And so the language I'm forced to use is the language of metaphor, like Wilson's description on page 63 in A.A. Comes of Age. It goes, my depression deepened unbearably and finally it seemed to me as though I were at the bottom of the pit. I still gagged badly on the notion of a power greater than myself, but finally, just for the moment, the last vestige of my proud obstinacy was crushed. All at once, I found myself crying out, if there is a God, let him show himself. I'm ready to do anything, anything. Suddenly, the room lit up with a great white light. I was caught up in an ecstasy which there are no words to describe. It seemed to me in my mind's eye that I was on a mountain and that a wind, not of air but of spirit was blowing. And then it burst upon me that I was a free man. Slowly the ecstasy subsided. I lay in the bed, but for now I was in another world, a new world of consciousness. All about me and through me there was a powerful feeling of presence with a capital P. And I thought to myself, so this is the God of the preachers. A great peace stole over me and I thought, no matter how wrong things seem to be, they are still all right. Things are all right with God and his world. The second thing James says about the experiences is that they are transient. That simply means they're brief. Have a spiritual experience and it will probably last only a moment. James' third point about spiritual experiences is that they are noetic. And that is a scientific way of saying the experience doesn't just produce a set of feelings, it brings about a way of knowing. Wilson said right after his spiritual experience that he knew something. Listen to him again, he says, no matter how wrong things may seem to be, he knew they were still all right. Things are all right with God and his world. Maybe I have only three days of sobriety, but I know things are all right. Maybe I Have Only 50 Cents in My Pocket and Debt's a Mile High. Things Are All Right. Maybe My Girlfriend Took Off and My Family Doesn't Want to See Me Again. Things Are Alright. Wilson said he knew that his drinking problem was over from that day forward, and slowly did I. The fourth and final quality James noted was that spiritual experiences are transformative. And that means they have the power to change me. I did a 180 degree turn. So to paraphrase the big book, it says a spiritual life isn't just a theory. I have to live it. It has to become real. For most of us in the program, the spiritual experiences won't be as dramatic as Bill Wilson's. Most of us won't being taken up to windy mountaintops. My experience was slower and more gradual. They're what William James calls the educational variety. They were like me waking up from a very, very long sleep. But whether my awakenings sudden or slow, the end result is always the same. In sobriety, I don't just stop drinking. In sobpriety, I wake up to God's presence in my life. I wakeup and I see that God's doing for me what I couldn't do for myself. Just like your testimony when I first got to AA, I slowly become aware, like Wilson was aware, that no matter how wrong things may appear in the moment, they are still all right. Things are all right with God and with his world. If I've got 12 stair steps up to the second floor bedroom to go to bed, the bed is my destination. The purpose of the 12 steps is nothing less than to provide me with these stair steps that will lead me into this new world of consciousness. Bringing about this spiritual awakening is the whole process of the steps. It is what awaits me at the end of my climb up the stairs. Once I've been there and I've seen it, once I've tasted it, whether my awakening is fast like Wilson's or slow and gradual like most of us, it then becomes my sacred duty and my privilege to carry the message of awakening to those who still suffer because of its existence. I start to square my debt to AA with this effort. This is now where I turn my thirst towards the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous have changed my life and I might be the only big book others ever get a chance to read. Thank you for listening. See, okay. Thank You Mike.