Rigorous Application of the 12 Steps – Workshop – Wilson House – VT – Part 6 of 7 – Raymer W.

It has worked for me. Great question. You talked about reading inspirational books, reading literature. I don't know, probably about close to a year ago, I kind of substituted the word meditation for contemplation. It happened to me on one of my... I do a lot of deep hikes. I do 15, 20-mile hikes and I'll go overnight. and when I get out on that trail and I do it solo and I'm by myself especially when I'm going up those hills and you feel that heart something happens I know exactly what you're talking about it's one of the things that I do as soon as I get up I'm praying in my mind and then I get on my knees right away it's just become a habit and I'll do that 11 step clear former book that I kind of wrote in my head Good morning, y'all. My name is Myers Raymer. I'm an alcoholic. I can't tell you, I think that I stay pretty grateful most of the time, but I was sitting out there in one of those little parks and the flowers and stuff or over by the post office, there was just a little quiet place and I kind of took a little detour and sat over there for a couple minutes this morning and I just can't say enough about it. I can tell you how overwhelmed I've been with the countryside and being able to talk with you guys one-on-one about things. And a lot of times we just don't get a chance to do that, and it's frustrating. You know, you sit in an airport, and sometimes you'll be there for hours, and you'll go, I didn't get the chance to say that to them, and I didn' t get the change to that, and I know she was agitated when I left, and I wanted to talk. And here we have a chance to talk some, and I'm pretty excited about that whole deal. And everything that we talked about, everything that we do seems to always come down to this talk. It seems to come down to this idea of sometimes I wish we could just flop this around and we could do this first thing Saturday morning when everybody's here so that we can kind of get it out of the way because a lot of times folks will miss out on Sunday stuff or when we talk about this 12-step stuff. If there's an area that we've completely seemed to ignore in a lot of areas. It's 12-step stuff. It was completely foreign to me. Guys, I sobered up in 88. I spent seven years sitting in middle-of-the-road meetings where we did no 12-stepp works. Our 12-steps work, quote-unquote, was sharing. We were just there. I'm not going to put too fine a line on that. I don't think that that's what Bill had in mind, guys. I'm just telling you. I think that if Bill Wilson had thought that sharing was the important thing, he would have said, step 13, share. I don't think that that was the way it was set up. I thought that it looked more aggressive than that. Intensive work with other alcoholics seems more in line with some of the stuff that we're going to talk about. I move over from these guys where I sobered up originally and I moved over with Cliff and those big book guys and it's an amazing kind of an experience. I sat over there for two years studying the book. Now, I'm book smart, but I still got this kind of crazy attitude we were talking about this morning like that. I want to, as a fast caveat, if you're out there beating people up with the big book, stop. Please don't do that, okay? There's this sort of blush in learning text and in learning how to teach the work that we're doing, a lot of times you'll go through these periods where you feel this kind of self-righteous, kind of stoic, I got this, you poor bastards don't have it yet kind of thing and you just go like, oh man. And it causes all kinds of problems out there in AA land and so I think some of the problems that we had in Dallas for years and years at Primary Purpose Group, we created. We created because we had little guys that got full of zeal and became zealots. And there's a huge difference between the two. It was not a good thing. And so we're delighted when you study and we're excited when you get more comfortable with the work itself. But at the core of all of this is love and at the heart of all this is an honest and open desire to be of service to somebody else. You can't be of services if you're preaching at them. You see, it's a different deal. So now I'm seven years sober. I have two years sober sitting on my butt at Primary Purpose, and finally I'm kind of beginning. I'm feeling much better, but I'm coming apart in gentle ways. It's not this big egregious stuff that I had before, but it's just like I can look around the room and I can go, oh crap, I'm still not like them. I'm somehow different from the people that were sitting in that room. and I remember one night talking to Clifford about it and he said, this is what he does. He takes his glasses off and he goes, and he says, Myers, I'm going to tell you one more time like he's ever told me before at all. I don't remember this conversation. He says, I want to tell You one more times. I want You to get busy helping others or go away. And my head says, well, this Is Tuesday night. He means go away until Thursday night. And then I realized that quick he meant, no, go away, wake. We want you out of here. And I'm kind of going, man, where's the love? I just like kind of caught off guard again. But the reality was is he'd been trying to tell me all along. Now, at this stage of the game, guys, I'm Cliff Bishop's book boy. I'm driving him all over town. He's got three or four commitments a week, and I'm diving him around and carrying his book bag. And then as soon as he's done, he's doing all the sharing. and he's doing all the teaching. As soon as he's done, I grab up all the books like this and head for the door. Man, I've got my cell phone on. I'm a businessman. I've Got Things I've Gotta Do. And I'm not doing anything else. And Clifford's always asking me, you could stay and light some cigarettes and help me for a while. Yes, sir, I'll do that. No, no intention to do it. See, because guys, the reality of this stuff is what I really, really, really want to do is look like I'm doing 12-step work. I don't really, really, really want to do 12-step work. I don' t want to be face-to-face with some crazy-ass drunk that's likely to say something crazy or do something. I mean, these guys are mental. I don''t want to go around them. I'm just missing the whole show. I'm missing everything about it. It's like there's a part of me that knows that that's what I need to do, but there's another part of my that's saying, man, you just don't do this, you see? And so these old ideas again that would conspire to kick my rear end. And so Cliff tells me to go to Salvation Army. I'm not going to go through this whole story, but he asked me to do it. He asked me if I could go to the Salvation Armies. I said, we always go up there on Wednesday night. And he said, I know. Well, I'll meet you up there. We'll get you busy. I'm going to give you a page to read and you can read and we'll get your story started. And I said yes sir, okay. Well, when I get up there Wednesday night and there's nobody there. It's just me. And they had set this up. I mean, they just got it all planned out like that. I just get screwed. And so I'm nervous. I'm so nervous, and it turns into kind of a crazy deal. But let me just tell you what happened. So I get through this whole experience, and I'm completely caught off guard by how transformed I was at what had happened. Those gentlemen up there at the Salvation Army asked me to come back the following night, and I was blown away, and I did that. And then I stayed there for a good bit of time and then moved over to another couple of places where I stayed for years and years and year. but it altered everything about my experience began to shift the moment I did this and so it refocuses what happens around sponsorship if you end up with 5 or 6 people that you're sponsoring brand new because of your efforts at a 12 step place you can't be ambivalent about 12 step work and you can'T be ambivolent about sponsorship you have to figure out how to make it more streamlined if you're listening to that many 5 steps you can' t listen to 8 hour 5 steps You have to figure out a way to get it pared down. And so it's like self-preservation makes you focus on and learn what you need to learn. There was a guy that had called me years ago. I've known this man for 10 years, and he called me and he said, I got something you've got to see. And I said, What is it? And he said、Man, you're going to be out here next month. I'll just show you like this. And I says、Just tell me what it is. And he says、It's a bunch of articles. I'll see you when you get out here the next month." And he hangs up the phone. Well, when I get out there to do this talk, he hands me a boot box, two of them, this big by this big, full of articles, newspaper articles. And what these are are newspaper articles from 1939 to 1944, all of them relating stories about Alcoholics Anonymous and the members of AlcoholicsAnonymous from several different locations across the country. He was in California, but these came from other places and stuff. And so I'm looking at them, and he said, you're not going to believe this, can you help me organize them? I'm a bookbinder, so I said, you bet, I'll do this. And so we take all these things, turn them into PDFs, and we put them in book form, and we're looking at these things. And I began reading these articles. And let me tell you, what these articles were were illustrations of what it was like in AA. These guys would come in, sober up, and immediately get busy helping other people. There wasn't any of this meeting. There was no mention in any of those articles. I don't remember how many there were. There's probably 60 different articles. There was not a single article or no mention of meetings in those articles, none. Today you can't talk to anybody in AA without them putting the meeting into the center of the dot. There was lots of reference to the circle and triangle. There was lots of reference to what it was like to detox drunks, what it Was like to have your couch burned by cigarettes. You understand what I'm saying? But these were just how to deal with this stuff. Fascinating, fascinating articles. But an amazing disconnect, those articles, between what we've been taught in most AA stuff. Yesterday we talked a little bit about these articles. I used to think that we just over a period of time began to change. We won't get into a bunch of it, but just for a little quick side road, in the late 70s, excuse me, the mid-70s, there was a huge push from General Service Office to change a bunch of stuff. There were lots of committees on literature and this kind of stuff, and they were changing a whole bunch of stuff but remember we always hear this thing of we stay sober one day at a time? It's not in our big book. We stay sober for good and always is twice. You see? This one day at a time stuff was started later on. Listen, I understand the logic behind it. I understand that. I understand what's in the goodness of it. I'm not knocking it. I'm just saying you have to understand once we begin to... What you begin to see is you begin To see literature move to a position where they begin to talk about how you keep yourself sober one day At a time. Well, listen guys, if you're like me, the moment you think that you have some power to keep yourself Sober one day AT a time, you have power. And if I have power, I don't need program. I don' t need power from God because I' m keeping myself sober one day at a time. And the literature began to reflect it and some of the books that they put in there. The idea that they would take the circle and triangle off the literature against our best wishes. Nobody had any vote on that. They just arbitrarily sent a letter unsigned and it was gone. Isn' t there a lawsuit? There was a bunch of lawsuits but our fellowship was suing other people in other countries around printing the circling triangle like we owned it. We stole it originally. We didn't own it, you see? But anyway, here's my point. My point is that there was a shift in the psyche of our whole program, of our entire culture in AA that began to move us away from a spiritual solution to our program and the importance of 12-step work over to a more meeting-based, we keep ourselves sober one day at a time kind of thought process. And in certain areas it caught on like we dumped gasoline on it and lit a match to it. I mean, it was just like overnight it seemed to replace all of the old fundamental ideas that we had about this deal. I want to tell you two real quick stories to illustrate something and understand my life changed drastically the moment I stopped playing AA and the moment i started doing what they asked me to do originally when i when i began to align myself with what original tech said one of the things that was a guy named matt that i've sponsored for years and years and ears was a member of night watch In Dallas, our group is the biggest single supporter of Nightwatch program. If you call Dallas-Fort Worth any time after 5 o'clock in the afternoon or before 8 o' clock in the morning, you're going to be talking to one of our members, and we all sign up and rotate through every quarter. I'm there manning the phones all night long doing the deal, and it's just part of our gig. So Matt calls me, and he says, Man, I've got a guy on the other line that is coming apart and this was like 3 o'clock in the morning. And he said, I've been talking to his daughter for two hours and now I've got him on the phone and he's a mess. And I said, well, where is he? He said, we'll go get him. And he goes, no, no. He's in California. And I says, there's not much we can do. I mean, I can plug you in with some people I know out there. And I say, if you could get him here, maybe we could do some stuff. And he says, okay, I'll call you back. And he hangs up. And the next morning he calls me back, Matt did, and he said, he's on a bus heading our direction. He'll be in Tuesday. And I said, okay. So this guy, Glenn, detoxes three days on a boss coming from California. I mean, I don't know who I feel more sorry for, Glenn or the people on the bus. Because you know it was just, it must have been a nightmare. And so when he gets there on Tuesday night, we have a meeting on Tuesday night, and when he get there, he is too sick to come. And so Thursday night he shows up and he's pretty shaky still like this, but he's there in the meeting. Saturday night, so now he's a week on this detox, and so Saturday night he comes in and he is doing better. You can tell by he is walking and he talking to a few people like this. And so he walks in and I am sitting with Matt and he walks kind of over and we are watching the front door and this place is filling up. There is a couple hundred people in there. and so I asked him how he's doing and he said okay and we just talked AA stuff for a minute and all of a sudden this guy walks through the door and it's like the door is right over here and this guy walked in and you know how you can tell a really, really wet one I mean it's as if you could smell this guy the moment he walked in the door I mean you can see bottle flies around him I mean he's just a mess looks like a gerbil licked his hair all up and he's juste a total mess and I look And all of a sudden I thought, hey, Glenn, you see that guy that just walked in? And he goes, yeah, he looks a mess. And I went, yeah I know he does, Glenn. I said, why don't you go greet him and see if you can help him? And Glenn goes, no way. And I said Glenn, I didn't ask you to sponsor him. I just want you to go greet Him. And he says, I can't. And I say, Glenn do you want to get sober? He goes, yes. And I asked, do you wanna stay sober? He says, yes I said go greet that guy. And he gets up like this, and he's looking back at me like this. And I said, what do I say? I said tell him who you are, tell him where the coffee is, tell him were the crapper is, and then come back and sit down with me. And he goes, oh okay, okay. So he's wringing his hands, and walks over like this and you can see him, he kind of put his hand on this guy's shoulder like this and you could see him pointing to where the coffe is like this and talking. And he's talking to him like this but he comes walking back past me I can now begin to hear a little of the conversation and then he walks away from me and I can't hear the conversation and they talk for a couple more minutes and then Glenn points again like this and then He comes back over and He sits down next to me like this. When Glenn walks back like this, He's doing this like this and He's walking back and I guess He goes, and I said, Glenn, what did you tell Him? I just told Him how we do it. I just trolled Him about it. And Matt's looking at me, Matt's going like this, going like what, what, like this. But listen guys, for 10 or 15 minutes before that meeting, Glenn owned Primary Purpose Group Dallas. He sat there with his arms folded like this and looking straight ahead like this Now, we have a world of people saying that these guys can't do anything, that we're going to wait until they get comfortable, that we are going to do all this other kind of stuff. I'm saying, man, you use your own judgment in any of that kind of thing. But based on what I read in this text, nothing will so much ensure immunity from drinking as intensive work with other alcoholics. When I read this and I read those letters, those collections of archives, and I see how they did business in those days, I just tend to be more leaning into that whole idea of watching what they did. You understand what I'm saying? I mean, it's just an amazing thing. Glenn's sober today and kicking butt and taking names. I want to tell you one more real, real quick story that is related to this thing. But I want you to understand this. There was a girl that I love to death. I'll change her name. And she was a member of our group for a long, long time. And then she got a real fancy-schmancy job and she was trying to, she was single lady and she Was going to try to adopt a kid from Europe someplace. and she got real busy with all that. She stopped going to our group and she started going to a group over kind of by where she lived, which was real convenient for her. Unfortunately, in our area, it was, you guessed it. I mean, it was just one of those kind of meetings where they just let her do whatever they wanted to. There's no accountability. There's not a lot of people there's no book work. There's 12 steps up and she starting getting sicker and sicker and stuff. I kind of lost touch with her for about six months. I got a call one afternoon about 6 o'clock in the afternoon, maybe 5 o' clock and this lady said, do you know Cindy? That's not her name. I said, do you know Cindy? I said yeah. And she said, can you come see her? And I said what's up? And she says well she's real sick. Now this little gal had been ritually abused when she was a kid in ways that I don't even, I can't even talk about it. It was so bad. Satanic weird stuff. And she was one messed up little girl. But she'd gotten clear of it. And so, anyway, I go over to her house, and the yard's full of cars. And I walk in, and The Front Room's full of people, and I don't know any of these people. And I said, where is she? She's in her bedroom, and so I walked in the bedroom, now this is like my sister. I mean, I've known this girl forever like this, and i looked at her, and she's laying in bed, and shes got a nightgown on, and there's three or four ladies in the room like this and the curtains are all drawn like this. And I said, Cyn, what's up? And she goes, um, nothing. And I looked at this lady that was standing there and I said, what's going on? And she said, well, she had this psychotic break and she's a fruitcake. And i said well, what are we doing sitting here? There's a hospital down the street. Let's get her to the hospital. She goes, no, she won't go. And l said, What do you mean? She says, She won't go because if she goes, she'll lose the baby. They'll find out about it. There'll be a record that she's a mental patient and they're not going to let her adopt this baby. Andl said, Oh, what a mess. What a mess. And so this lady says, well, I don't know what to do. And I said, how long has she been like this? And she said, she's been in bed for three days. And I say, well... Okay. Let me think about this just a minute. And I had to get out of the room. These people were just... It was just oppressive. And I just... I had you get out. So I walked out through the backyard and I'm standing out in the back by myself. And all of a sudden I have this thought. And I went, no way. and I sat there for a couple of minutes and then I went, I'm not going to do this like this and I'm telling you, if you know me very long, anytime my gut says don't do it, I know I need to do it. It's just my natural deal and so I walked back in and I said, can you girls get her cleaned up and I am going to take her and they go, no you are not and I went yeah, I am and so go ahead and get her dressed and this lady's grabbing my arm and pulling me and she says, you're not taking her anywhere. And I said, lady, I'm taking her if I have to fight everybody in the room. She said, where are you taking her? And I say, we're going to go do some 12-step work. And these ladies went nuts. I'm talking fruitcakes from hell nuts. I mean, they were yelling and screaming and doing all kinds of stuff and they were going and getting their husbands and they weren't doing anything and they just said, guys, y'all aren't helping. I'm just telling you, go get her cleaned up. I'm going to take her. Look, She's not doing anything laying in bed. How much damage could I do? And you go, well, okay. So get her gathered up. Homeward Bound had a meeting on Friday night. There was a men's section and a women's section, and I called one of the girls from Primary Purpose Group and I said, would you come help me get her up there to the girl's side of this while I'm doing the guy's side? And she said, absolutely. She met me over there. We put her in a car, drove to the hood, unloaded. I went in my side. She went in her side. And we're sitting there like that. And so I pitch for about 15 minutes, and I can't stand it any longer. I mean, I'm coming apart. So I go back downstairs, andI'm standing in the parking lot, and I'm just waiting for her up there like this, and I'M just like rocking back and forth. I'M so nervous trying to figure out what's going to go on because I don't know whether she's goingto be a fruitcake up there or whether something's goingtogon happen. So when she comes back down the stairs, she'S standing inthe middle of the parking light like this and she'S looking at me like this from the deal, and she kind of raises her hand like this. And she smiled at me, and l smiled back. and then I walked across the parking lot and I'm kind of leaning into her a little bit and I said are you okay and she said yeah and she says Myers I'm not perfect but I know I'm going to be okay and she got in her car and before she left I was talking to the girl that took her up there and I asked her what happened and she told me and she talked for a couple of minutes and this girl wanted to talk and she was kind of crazy and Cindy got in there and got her quieted down and started talking to her like this, and it was the damnedest 12-step stuff you ever heard in your whole life. And we spent the rest of the day, the rest of the hour, she talked to these girls in a way that was truly profound, and I went, man, this is just exactly what we needed. A week and a half later, she leaves, goes to Russia or wherever it was, got her baby, brought her back and that little girl was little bitty when she got her, and now she's in high school. It's been a while. My point is this. is that we don't know, guys. We don't knows what God's going to do and how God's gonna use us in our ability as we become servants to another human being. We don' t know where it's gonna take us. The problem I've got is and the problem that is all of our problem is that have a psyche that wants to tell us that we're not good enough to do this work. We're too slow. We're stupid. We're busy. We're to this. We're that. Quit! Quit! it. We are so desperate to have you in the trenches so that you can have the same transformative experience that the rest of us had by simply submitting to a process. At the core of this program was being of service to somebody else, you see? But we've taken it away in a lot of ways and we kind of spread it out and we took the teeth out of this program and kind kind of domesticated it and made it look kind of lame sometimes, you see? Instead of the ferocious program that it was in those articles, these guys and gals are Amazons out there defeating this dark side left and right. We end up in a situation where we just look like... I mean, in some geographical areas, in Some places, we just looked like idiots. All the chanting and the goofy crap and all the crap. I'm not trying to be disrespectful. Sometimes we look crazy. affordable care is coming down the pike, guys. There's going to be 64 million brand new patients with insurance now. It's going open up treatment, some kinds of treatment, outpatient treatment, some inpatient treatment to jillions of us, jillions of us and what you're going to find is we're not prepared here. We'll go through the same kind of crap we did when they were unloading guys in the 70s and 80s. We were unprepared in the way that we needed to be prepared to help people with a clear cut message that was guaranteed to transform their life. You see, we were unprepared and I don't want to go through another season of that kind of deal. I'd love us to be unified shoulder to shoulder walking a path helping people have new lives. I'd Love you guys dearly and I can't tell you what an honor it is to have a bunch of new friends and a bunch OF new buds to correspond with and stay in touch. If there's anything we can do to help on our end of the deal by all means let us know. Okay? I love y'all. Thanks. You know, one of the first lessons Bill Wilson learned when he was getting sober was one ofthe first lessons that he learned was kind of pointed out to him by his wife, Lois. He came in one day and he said, you know, for the past six months I've been trying to get people sober and not a one of them has gotten sober. And she looked at him and she said, well, you have. Now, that was one of the first Alcoholics Anonymous lessons, I believe. Now, there was another series of lessons that we learned. When we were over, Myers and I had a chance, some other people had a change to go across the street and look in the Griffin Library. And in there are all the Saturday evening posts and Liberty Magazine articles, all the historical articles that brought attention to the Fellowship of AlcoholicsAnonymous. Now, here's what would happen when one of those articles was published. There'd be a little Manchester group of AAs, okay? There'd been like five people who've been around for four or five years, they're staying sober. All of a sudden the Liberty Magazine or the Saturday Evening Post magazine article would come out and Alcoholics Anonymous would get deluged with phone calls. All of the sudden that group in Manchester of six or seven people would be 40 people. and what they would have to do is they wouldn't have a lot of resources they would Have to take somebody through the steps and then have them taking somebody through the steps almost right away so it wouldn't be unusual for somebody to be a week sober taking somebody else through the steps that's in our history that's some of the things that we've learned that we need to be ready to do You know, Myers is talking about the Affordable Care Act. There's a tsunami heading our way. There really is. And it's going to be different in each state. We don't really know what it's gonna look like. But I'll tell you what, if all we have is discussion meetings for these people when they get out of treatment, then, you know, the treatment might be three-day detox. It might be 28-day rehab. It might be a pharmaceutical intervention. We don't know what's really going to come our way until it starts to happen, but I'll tell you what, we definitely do need to be prepared to be able to carry a message to these people because if we just sit back and we let them fill up our meetings and raise their hand and start sharing about what they know, it is going to be a problem. One of the things I did a number of years ago, and I've lost this book, so I'm planning on doing another one. I took a big book, and you know, big books are like tools. I believe that this is a tool. A carpenter doesn't just have one hammer. They'll have a roofing hammer. They'llhave a framing hammer. They'llhave a trim hammer. I've got a numberof different big books. I'vegotabigbookthatiusewheniworkwithsomebody. I've got a big book that I use when I come and do a workshop. There's big books that I carry around in my car that I'm ready to give out, you know, if it's a 12-step opportunity. So I have these things. But one of the times what I did was I got a number of different highlighters. And I highlighted all the instructions in the book in one color, all the promises in another color, all the spiritual principles in another colour. And I went through the big book, and I put different colors to different things that the big book is trying to tell us. And as I was going through the chapter working with others, I was highlighting the instructions. I nearly highlighted the whole chapter. There are so many instructions in the chapter Working With Others. It's unbelievable. There's almost as many instructions as there are in the preceding chapters. Now, do you think that that's a coincidence? Do you think that, you know, the chapter working with others is something we should wait a year to look at? You know, I don't think so. I think the chapter Working With Others is a very, very important chapter. Now, when I first came in, you would hear a lot of things in AA. And this is before I could discern whether it was AA or whether it Was Opinion or whether It Was Treatment Center or what. But a lot Of people were sharing things like you have to give it away the way you got it. You can only give it away the way you got it. And basically, I got encouragement. I got somebody telling me you should probably get involved in service. I had some sponsors that understood that I should be helping other people. But if I was to be carrying the message to the people that I work with the way it was carried to me in 1989, I would have a lot of relapsing people on my hands because it was just done differently back then. No one was using the chapter, in my area, no one was useing the chapter as a tool to work with other people. A whole new set of easier disciplines had taken their place and they looked kind of like this. Oh, there's a new guy, let's go up after the meeting and give him our phone number. Oh, another thing that still happens in my area is they get a meeting book and you sign your name and you put your phone number and you pass it around the meeting. So the new guy gets a meetingbook with 40 phone numbers that he's not going to call. Every once in a while somebody calls it. Now, I'm worried. You know what I mean? Like, what's this guy calling me for? You're not supposed to call if you're a newcomer. Maybe he's non-alcoholic. You know, but there's all these new tools that people have decided are the appropriate Alcoholics Anonymous kind of way to address a newcomer. Now, in the chapter Working With Others, it's extremely specific. It talks about the first visit. It talks About What You're Supposed To Do The Second Time You See The Person. it tells you to ask the person to read the book it tells YOU to be SURE that you're working with an alcoholic so there's an identification process that needs to take place there's instructions about are they willing to go to these links after they've been given the dignity of understanding what any links looks like because they've bee given this book they're to be asked are you willing to GO to any links Are you willing to do what's in this book? And we're supposed to share a bit of our story. We're supposed allow them to share a bit if theirs. It's kind of a sales job. I mean, we're to convince and help them convince themselves of what powerlessness looks like of what it looks like to have alcoholism and the fatal nature of this particular malady. we're supposed to get them to understand that, and then we're supposed to say that we have found a solution. What is the solution? It's certainly not the discussion meeting on Tuesday night. That's not the solution. The solution is the 12 step recovery process. That is what we're supposed to share with the individual. We're supposed to tell them how this 12 step experience worked for us we're supposed to tell them about the spiritual awakening how the spiritual awakening has manifested in us what we did to get that spiritual awakening how we've become a recovered alcoholic and then we're suppose to tell them that if they are willing to work with us if they're willing to work with us we're willing to work with them we're willing to walk a hundred miles with them, if they're willing to do this work. And we'll make ourselves available for their decision, which is the third step decision. We'll make ourselves available if they'd like to tell us their story, which ist basically the fifth step, and we'll mentor them through the 12-step process. That's what we're gonna do. So often, so often we misunderstand what true intensive work with others, true 12-step work with others is. There's a lot of activity I got involved with that was of a service nature that was really good. You know, I would drive people from the treatment center to the AA meetings. I would make coffee. I would give out my phone numbers. I would talk to people on the phone. I'd go out to the diner with them after the meaning, and I'd share my experience, my strength, and my hope with them. But what I was doing was I was offering encouragement. I wasn't offering them the recovery program which would give them freedom from alcoholism. What I wasdoing is I was helping them with some relief. I wasn't helping them find the freedom. And this is quite common, and I'm not knocking that type of activity. I think that we should be friendly in the fellowship. I think we should do things with each other. I think мы should have sober softball. But we have to understand that what is the most important thing? The most important thing is offering somebody a recovery process that will solve their problems. There's other AA groups today that I don't put my support behind. I won't say I disagree with them, even though I do, Meyers. I'll just put it this way. I don'T put my SUPPORT behind them. And what these groups believe is important is home group loyalty and sponsorship authority. And there's a lot of these groups around, and they can almost appear cultish to me. And what they believe in is they believe that your sponsor is your guide forever. And this person is going to be helping you to make all of your decisions moving forward. And when your sponsor calls up and says that you've got to come down to the car wash for the Alano Club, You better be there. And all this other stuff, and there's a huge amount of sponsorship authority. And then there's home group loyalty. There's home groups that believe you joined this home group. You have no other commitments anywhere else. This is your home group, and I think they're shining the light in the wrong direction. I believe this. I believe that we have God, authority. God is our authority. And I believe Alcoholics Anonymous is where we need to share our loyalty. Still Suffering Alcoholics is where мы need to share our loyalty. You know, I also believe that there's different meetings and I'm okay with different meetings. Think about back when you were drinking. Think about the bars within a couple of counties. You probably were familiar with a couple dozen of them if you were like me. Now, you wouldn't go to some of these bars to drink. You didn't really feel comfortable in those particular bars. I think AA meetings can be the same way. I think that we need to find meetings that we can put our support behind that are doing what we believe is the right thing for the alcoholic. Now, I go to discussion meetings. I go through step meetings. I go as Bill sees it meetings. I pepper those into my Alcoholics Anonymous activities, but I certainly don't go there to get. I don't going there to fill up my spiritual gas tank because I'm going to come away on E if I do. What I go there for is for an opportunity to look for people to work with, to look für people who I can share the message that Alcoholics Anonymous has, the message of hope. From my own personal experience, there was an evolution in how I worked with people. I spent a whole lot of time encouraging people to stay sober and go to meetings. I spent years doing that. When I had a true experience with the recovery process from this book, I started to bring people over to my house and take them through the steps. I was one of the first people in New Jersey to do that. And people were looking at me like I was a wackadoo. You know, Chris has got people over their house doing the steps. What is that all about? Why don't you just tell them to go to step meetings? There was a complete disconnect in what I was doing and what it looked like I was doing. And then I started a home group, which was a big book home group. It was a workshop home group at this point in time. There was step meetings. There was discussion meetings and there were speaker meetings. There was not meetings where Chris taught the big book. So there was a big problem in my area with Chris for a long period of time. I lost all of my AA friends when I did this, but I knew it was the right thing to do. I knew a book study was the Right Thing to Do in this area at that time. So I did that. And along the way, there was a change in how I approached newcomers and how I approached sponsorship and how i approached working with others. It went from a fellowship-based opinion, one liner, you know, I do it this way kind of of a thing, and it's come across the spectrum to, I follow very closely, very closely the chapter working with others today. And I've found through this experience, I've find something out that's very, very important. And if you're an alcoholic like I am, you'll understand the importance of this right away. When I was encouraging people to stay sober as a sponsorship tool, they were drinking on me. Okay? You ever have people drink on you? It makes you look bad, doesn't it? Start to lose status in the home group. Is Harry yours? You know that he's drinking, he's hitting on the newcomer women, and yeah, Harry's mine. I'll talk to him because I was letting him run wild I was let him run wild just yeah just come you know I'll see you at the meeting tomorrow night now as there was the transformation into bringing him over to my house and opening the book up at the title page and started to move through that and where there's an instruction hold on let's be clear on this instruction let's do this instruction and then we'll move on when I started to use this book as a tool to sponsor an amazing thing happened and it's just this the people who would go through do the third step decision do a fourth step, share a fifth step put a list together of amends actually go out and make amends start the discipline of 10 and 11 and start to sponsor and take other people through the steps, every single one of those people is still around, is an AA member in good standing, is continuing to work with others, and their life gets better every year. And these are people that I started taking through the Steps in the early 90s. They're still, all of them are still around. The people who wouldn't go through these steps, who saw a four-step as quite possibly an overreaction to a problem that they really kind of can control. This time, they'll be able to control. This time I know that I shouldn't drink, kind of people. Or the people who saw the ninth step as dramatically overreacting to this alcoholism thing, like I can't do that. those people are all gone so I've got the people who went through this work are all still here and the people that didn't go through this work, that balked and said Chris is nuts I'm going to go with the guy that wants me to be the cookie guy at the meeting I'm gone with the cookie guys all of those guys all of these guys all of them I don't know if they're drinking You know, they might have moved. But all I know is I don't see them anymore at meetings. They're not in our recovery world. So, you know, that's an important lesson to me. Why would I do it any way different? I would be guilty of involuntary manslaughter to work with somebody another way after having this particular experience. and listen, are there people who don't go through the steps with me one of the things that I'll ask you to do if you're detoxed enough and you ask me to sponsor you I will ask you to read the big book and highlight some certain things because I've got some questions for you after you do that we're going to sit down and I've Got Some Questions For You after you do that I want you to be very clear what it's going to look like Having me as a sponsor or a spiritual advisor. I want you to know what's coming, and I want to gain agreement from you that you're going to work with me, and we're goingto do this. A lot of people are gone before they're done reading the big book. You know, I'll ask them to read the big one. Listen, if they're too shaky, I'LL have them come over and we'll read the Big Book together. That's fine. I can tell whether somebody is shaky or not. But if you can't even do that, if you Can't even read the book and highlight some things Or go through the doctor's opinion for God's sake Or read Bill's story and do some exercises If you can' t do that Then we've got a real problem What you want is a drama coach What you Want is somebody to just back your play and you want me for cover, leave me alone. Chris S. is my sponsor. And I don't want to necessarily play that game. What I want is I want people who understand this book. I want People Who Will Meet With Me and go over this and will find their truth about the first step. A lot of times they're powerless over drugs. not necessarily alcohol and you know that's fine too i think it's important to know the truth rather than hide out in the wrong fellowship so uh so it's really listen are there people who don't do this are there other people who are just going to go to the meetings they're okay with just going to meetings theyre not okay coming over my house going through this book you know are there going to be people like that? Yes, absolutely. Those people are the people I would be wasting my time with anyway. The chapter working with others makes clear very, very, very clear that our time is valuable as a recovered alcoholic. Our time is valuable. If someone says, I don't think I'm going to do these steps or I've got another way or there's this other guy that is talking to me about primal scream therapy what we're supposed to do is we're suppose to say God bless you, here's my number if you ever decide to change your mind that's fine but what we are supposed to say is bye bye that's what we were supposed to say if they are not willing to work with us we are suppose to go find somebody who will be and you know what if there is nobody around this book tells us to go look. This is another discipline that we've kind of dropped by the wayside, going and finding alcoholics. Yes, we have a question. Quick question, have you had run across any people, because I had an old time sponsor and I had a close friend of 14 years we would go to intense book studies at houses, one was at my house, another in a trailer and we would gather 15-20 drunks and we'd all get together and we'll go through the book word by word squiggly writing. We'd stop at paragraphs, we dissect, we'd say what's your opinion of this? What do you think of this, you know because we were taught squiggly writing in the book is very important. You know there was an emphasis on that stuff. But three or four of these people I don't know if it was lack of balance, I'm fearful because I don' t know why but a lack of of balance or to their own self be true, but they went out by their own devices. One went out in bed ODM, one went out on crack and you would think, I mean where I'm at or where I feel, I'm so grateful to have the second life that I don't understand how we did this for years on years on day and day and, you know, two or three times a day at times. But then all of a sudden some of them just, the big book thumpers, some of whom part due to the disease or their own perception or something. I mean, I'm lost to, fearful to the point I don't want to get into something that I don'T know what it is. You know, I'M going to share a few things. I'M not really sure they'RE in answer to what YOU'RE talking about. But there's a couple of guys that I know that can recite the big book backwards in pig Latin. And they know it so well. They've been in every big book study. They've done big book studies themselves. They sponsor using the big books. But there is a piece of their program that's missing. A lot of times what it is, is a true belief in God. A true trust in God, a lot of time that's what it it. But sometimes it's an amend that they are unwilling to do. And what will happen is the weakest link in that program is what's going to trip them up. So these guys, they sound like the best big book people in the world never get a year. You know, and I think it has to do a lot of times with their adherence to these principles. You know we have to work all 12 steps in our lives. We have to practice all of these principles in our life the best way we can. We can. And, you know, a lot of times you'll get a lot of people in big book studies and their motivation isn't necessarily to recover from alcoholism, to gain access to a powder greater than themselves. Sometimes it's because they're interesting or they want to be able to share better or maybe they want to be available to sponsor better. You know, somebody that Myers and I know says this, and it's a very, very true statement. You can study a menu in a restaurant and starve to death studying that menu. This book basically is a book that, sure, we go to big book studies and literature-based meetings, and that's all very, very well, but this is a books to be done. You have to do what's in here. It's like we can have a ton of information, but self-knowledge is not a defense against alcoholism. So these people that I know, I'm sure you know some too, Myers, that can recite the big book backwards and forwards, sometimes they're relapsing because they don't take it from intellectual into action, actually going out and doing this stuff. I would definitely... I'm going to turn it back over to Myers to do the last five minutes here. but I want to task everybody in here with one thing get a highlighter and look at the chapter working with others and every single instruction in that chapter please highlight it and at least once a month or so go through that chapter and become familiar with what it's telling us to do working with other people it will make, listen You may lose people because it's not about quantity when you're working this way, but the people who stay with you are going to thrive. The people who are willing to work with you in this chapter are going TO THRIVE. They're going to recover from alcoholism. It's going to end up being part of building up the fellowship that you crave. these are going to be lifelong friends a lot of times and it's something that this book tells us that you do not want to miss this is an experience you don't want to miss, bringing these pups up I want to thank everybody for coming it's been a wonderful workshop thank you very much a couple of questions quick question coming up in the fellowship I had a lotof great sponsors and people who were teaching me the big book, but not in depth. And I always wondered what it was the old-timers had that kept them coming back and kept them with a better life and the things that they were showing me was possible. Now I've become one of the old timers. And it ain't what I thought it was. And now I'm wondering how to bring back this message to older timers that I'm very close to and friendly with who are stuck in exactly the mode they're in. And they're great folks, and they have great lives and great integrity, but they're holes, like you're saying. There's something they're not wanting to touch or go to or deal with that's making them, now that I'm close to them, appear vulnerable. That if I say, why don't we just do what we're told to do over again? Why don't We just start over and do what We're told To do? And there's been some resistance around it. Hey, I've been around long enough. I don't need to be told what to do again. And I didn't get here doing the wrong thing, obviously. So do you have any words on... The late, great Joe McQuarrie from Joe and Charlie told me specifically, because this is a question that I had. I remember asking this question back in the 90s because I was getting resistance galore in the meetings that I was sharing in. He said, do not try to turn the people that have been there longer than you. Concentrate your attention on the new people. Work with the newcomers. It'll change. It's going to be very difficult to go up to somebody who has 20 years and say, buddy, you ain't got a clue. Sometimes that causes a schism that makes it more difficult for you to do your work with other people. They start warning people away from you, and now you've kind of shot yourself in the foot. But I'm also finding that my association with these folks isn't feeding me. it's not good for me. And I find that I have to be saying bye-bye to them in a way that's not saying fuck you, it's just see you. Sometimes it's like that. We don't get to pick our families, but we do get to Pick Our Friends. Yeah. And so sometimes there's enough pushback and enough toxicness between in these situations that it's better, it's healthier just to gently push off and go get involved in the fellowship that you crave. and there are tens of thousands of them coming up that desperately need what you know. Just a real quick observation, and then we're going to go. I remember a time many years ago when I was in kind of mainstream AA and I wasn't doing anything in terms of helping anybody to speak up. And I remember I'm an avid gardener. I love to garden like a big dog, and I remember being out there, and I'm frustrated the sun's going down, and I'M still trying to pick these stupid worms off the tomato plants, and I'm still trying to just... I mean, I'm just frustrated with everything. I'm restless, irritable, and discontent all in one little package like this. In a couple of minutes, I'm going to get to walk in the house and I're going to be in the room with this beast of a woman that I'm married to. And I've got these kids that drive me to distraction. They're just like little chiggers hanging off of me. I don't even want to go there, you see? And I'm frustrated. I've Got to get up in the morning and go to a job that I absolutely hate. and I bump into this old dude named Cliff and Krusty Cliff takes me through the work and I have an experience that I never really dreamed that I could have based on his insistence that if I just did the work, I would have the experience. And I did. And I didn't. So fast forward some years. I'm still on my knees in that same crazy garden picking different bugs off those plants and I'm kind of excited and I can't quite put my finger on what it is and then all of a sudden and it just flows in, and I just realize exactly what just happened. In a couple of minutes, I'm going to get to go into a house and be with the woman that I absolutely adore. And I'm gonna be around kids that I cannot wait to be around. And I get to get up at 4.30 in the morning and go to a job that I actually love. Absolutely love. So the question I want to leave you with, the question i want to ask is, guys, did the job change? Did my wife change? My kids? No, none of that changed. My perceptions of all of them changed as a direct result of God's divine hand in the middle of this selfish, self-centered, drunk life. It is an honor to know you guys. Thank you.