Objectionable Behavior and Character Defects – Workshop – Part 4 of 7 – Raymer W.

so much within our fellowship is to see thousands of men and women who are truly, truly wonderful people who have let all kinds of objectionable behavior back into their life again, but they don't want to admit that it's objectionable. Because if you admit it, you're going to have to actually deal with it. And so they're living these weird double lives. They've got a girlfriend on the side. They're cheating their boss. I mean, sometimes it's not that egregious. Sometimes it's just goofy stuff. The porn slipped in. We see this a lot with men. And and the just goofy stuff. And so to see that it's objectionable, look at the things that you don't ever address that may not have come up on your deal. What about areas of pride, arrogance, bigotry? I mean, these are character defects that didn't come up in my deal, but look, I'm not prideful. Oh really, Hoss? Let me ask you this question. The next time somebody cuts you off at a gas station when you got in to get some gas and somebody got your pump in front of you how do you react are you okay with it or is it over the top are you looking for your concealed carry I mean how are you dealing with this stuff these are the things that we began to look at how about oh I got a good one how about a sense of entitlement any of you guys ever come up with a little sense of entitnement I love y'all that's perfect but listen I'm a card carrying member and if you've been in these rooms for very long I guarantee you there's some entitlement nibbling around the edges like that you ever walk into a room and somebody's sitting in your chair who's that somebody think he is that's my chair I've been sitting there for 20 years I mean it's just crazy like that but this idea or sometimes it'll be disguised a little bit It'll look like this. I don't need to sponsor somebody. The new guys need to learn how to do that. I've done my stuff. Entitlement. I don' t have to do that. Make coffee? That's new guy shit. I don''t have to do that stuff. That's entitlement. You see? I don ''t want to put chairs up. Listen, primary purpose group Dallas, I still make coffee for 18 years. I still make coffee every Tuesday night for 260 people that are in that meeting and set up tables and chairs for 260 people in that deal like that. Because no one can make it right. Call them one. That dude. I'm thinking of me. How did you know though? No, but you get there. You don't really. Do what? You don' really. Make all that coffee? Yeah. Get out of here. I do. I do, but let me tell you who's doing it with me. All the new guys and the men that I'm sponsoring like that, they come and sit with me and they'll make coffee and I can go, no, it's too much. I can kind of get them straight. They're going to mess up without me doing it. Control. You're married, right? Yes, sir. Okay. Control. But the thing about it is, though, if you pay attention to who you really are based on what you just saw in the inventory. Because let me tell you, if you've had a good inventory, if you had an experience with the inventory, then what you're going to do is you're gonna stand up. What I did, the last inventory I took with Clifford, the last big one that I took him, I stood up and just started crying. And he said, where'd that come from? And I said, I mean for all these years I thought I was perfect. I didn't realize that all this stuff was still in my life and that I was dealing with this stuff. and there have been people that have tried to show me and tried to tell me but until I saw it in writing and realized that I'm a bully that I am just a big old bully and I got to get my way on certain things and there is some pride that crept into that thing there is som ego that's dealing with this can I have a conversation without telling people what I do in AA I can today but I couldn't for a while there I am how you perceive me and that's a horrible place to be Horrible. You don't want to go there. Because listen, in that respect, you're giving everybody else the power to determine your self-worth. And it's a horrible place to be. If they like you, then groovy. But what if she's had a busy day or she's talking to somebody else and I walk in but she didn't look up and smile at me and wave real big when I walked into the room? Then I'm sitting there the whole meeting going... And by the end of the meeting, I've got it built up into this big old deal where she hates me. She's always hated me. She's just like, and pretty soon my self-worth is just in the, quit that crap, quit. And inventory is invaluable at that, getting clear of that kind of stuff. Can you speak on our positive attributes? My sponsor did that with me when I was running my inventory. He says, where have you gone well? What have you done well? Look at the way it's written on the stuff. When ready, we say something like this, my creator, I'm willing that you should have all of me good and bad. Listen, this entering and exiting of character defects is God's business not our business. It's like if you ever tried to get rid of self-will by exerting more self- will good luck with that. It's not going to work real well. It's the same way on character defects in general. It's an inside job and God sometimes uses piss poor character defects for other reasons. Sometimes it's just you teaching your group patience. I'm just saying. It's a crazy deal like that. And so sometimes you look at that, but there are great things. The inventory will also begin to turn up things that are pretty cool about you too. You know? For sure. Wasn't that your experience? Yeah, absolutely. And so they give us this prayer. The one thing I want to point out before I turn this back over to Chris is in this seventh step prayer, right before we get to the seven step prayer there was a line in there that I thought was absolute genius can he now take them all every one that's a question if we still cling to something we will not let go we ask God to help us be willing where we're on page 76 top of the page and still in step 6 getting ready to slide off into step 7 but look at the way this stuff is set up because there may be there may be things going on that you're not ready to give up now listen you can fool me and you can fool your brothers and sisters sitting in the room if you want to but you can't fool God and this is a deal we're working out here with God I mean this is spiritual coolness 101 and so you can if you have a girlfriend on the side and you already know that you're not going to give this girlfriend up then you need to do what it just said like this if we still cling to something we will not let go we ask God to help us be willing we see this stuff all the time. All the time. The cool part about it is if you'll simply be honest and it takes a bit of courage to do it, but if you're simply look honestly at your situation and admit to yourself I'm not ready to give the porn up yet. I'm ready to do that, but I'm willing to have God look at it. I'm willin' to have God deal with it. Then you'll be amazed how quickly at some point in time in there it'll be readdressed, you'll have to look at it, and about the time she walks in and catches you, at some time it'll come to a head and you'll need to deal with it, you see? And so, you have to explain weasel porn to your wife. I mean, or whatever. Weasel. Why would God give us the most, the wife that he has picked out for me, why would he give me her if I'm not willing to let go of that? It's a great question. It's sort of like going to a big huge buffet and eating the crumbs off the floor. It's an easy thing All the good stuff is on the table. So once I'm ready to give up living on my knees picking up the crumbs off the floor and pouring whatever you want. Only then can I go in line with the rest of them and get what's right for me. I totally get that and totally agree. Let me, just one last little thing. We'll talk about this some a little bit tomorrow but at this point in this thing when we're looking at these character defects and we're look at the things that we're asking God to get us clear of how many of you have ever begun to slide back over and re-evaluate what gratitude really looks like. We used to listen. In AA, we used to make jokes all the time about gratitude meetings. Oh, geez, this is my fifth gratitude meeting this week. We just thought it was like... Well, I come from a big book tradition now for the last 18 years anyway. I don't go to those meetings and I miss them dramatically. I miss the thing. And sometimes I think that we... The statement that you just made is what made me think about this stuff. The idea that God brought an amazing woman into my life me, a busted up drunken dope thing who's a bully and any other character defect that we can talk about that we want to connect to this thing. I mean, I'm not the Marquis de Sade. I'm Not Charles Manson but I'm as egregious to being in a marriage with somebody like me. I mean it's just an ugly thing and to be able to sit on the edge of your bed and take a deep breath and realize how absolutely cool it is that we have spiritual tools at our disposal so that we could begin to see who we really are and then have the vehicle to get us clear of what some men will die with. They will never have a way to get clear of it. You understand what I'm saying like that? I mean, it's God's grace at its very finest when we finally had enough and said, I want to go do what those men and women do. Pretty cool. Do a little 8-9 and then we'll go swim sometime. Absolutely. Thanks, Mark. Thank you. Step eight, made a list of the people and the institutions that we've harmed because of our character defects. Because I was operating from a default setting of selfishness and self-centeredness, I've created some problems and I've caused some harm out there in the world. I've identified them in step four. I've shared them in steps five. In step six, I became willing to have God remove these defects of character. In step seven, I humbly asked God to remove these effects of character and humbly is really from a place of surrender, really. I mean, to humbly ask God to move these defects of character, the best place I can be in is really understanding the destruction, not only to me but to other people uh because of these character defects understanding that they're larger than me and i'll need help uh in their removal and humbly asking god to remove them uh you know it's it talks about in the in the 12 and 12 it talks About going to God with your character defects the same way you went to God With your alcohol problem with that sense of urgency that sense of desperation and if we've done a good job with with four five four and five you will you'll understand that this is more than you can deal with and it's uh it's you know your your life is a series of small destructions so um so in step seven we humbly ask god to remove these defects of character in step eight we make a list of the people in the institutions that the the manifestation of these character defects has caused harm too. And it basically says in the book that we've made this list when we did the fourth step. You'll find that in the fourth column of the resentment inventory, there's going to be some names. That's part of the eight-step list. You'll notice in the fear inventory that you might or might not have listed down people that were harmed because of your fears. and certainly in the conduct, the sex inventory. Who did you hurt? There was questions like that that you have to answer. So a lot of the material for the eight-step list has been put together. What I like my guys to do, though, is to take that information and put it on a new list and to really examine it and see if anything was missed. There might have been some things that were missed on that list. there might have been some people that you've harmed that you're not resentful at, you're not afraid of. Maybe they don't even know you harmed them. They don't know you ripped them off. So there's no real resentment. There's no fear. But they need to be on this particular eight-step list. It's important for us to balance the scales. I think something that was driving me into Alcoholics Anonymous was a need to balance the scales. I had really gone down pretty far by the time I was in my last year of drinking, and I had a young daughter. And it was really, you know, my top priority was to basically not go out in disgrace, Not disappear from her life when she's a small child. My father died three days into my 12th birthday, and it messed me up in a number of ways. And I knew how difficult it would be for my daughter if I died from alcoholism while she was seven years old. I knew that would be terrible. So, you know, there was a real need, a sense of need coming from me to stop drinking and to try to become the type of person that my daughter would be proud of. You know, I think we have, you Know, instinctually, we want to do the right thing. I've dealt with a lot of alcoholics over the course of time, and I've never met an evil alcoholic. I've met evil people in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, I'll tell you. But you could not convince me that those people were alcoholic. A lot of people show up in AlcoholicsAnonymous and their agenda is not recovering from alcoholism. They're in the room for a whole other reason, whatever that might be. But I've never met an alcoholic, someone that I've qualified working through the steps. I've Never Met an Evil One. But most of them have done evil things. You know, I've never met somebody who purposely set out to cause all this harm. So I think we're sensitive to the damage that we've done. At a very, very deep level, we suffer because of the damage we've made. Prior to going through and making all of the amends that were possible or appropriate in my life, it was very difficult for me to walk up my street. It was difficult for me to go to certain towns. It was difficult for me to go into certain stores because there were some unfinished business. If there was a family wedding it was difficult for me to go to it because I was still in conflict with the number of people that were going to show up at that family wedding. My life was made very small because of these unresolved conflicts. So I had probably the most difficulty with step nine, actually going out and making direct amends. I probably had more difficulty with this than any other step. There were periods of time where I would pray for a month, God, please, please give me the courage and give me power to be able to make this approach so that I can get together with this person and make this amends. And sometimes I prayed a lot to be able to get that power because I had a ton of self-centered fear around this. You know, your ego is going to try to talk you out of all this stuff. You're alcoholism is going try to talk to you out of all these stuff. And every single amends that I came up with there would have been a way I could talk myself out of it. But if I wouldn't have done that amends, I would have shortchanged my recovery an unbelievable amount. I found that the harder amends the amends where I just had to suck it up and go through the fear those were the amens that did the most for me. And it basically says in the book about these amends that the tougher amends are going to be the ones that are going benefit you most this book is just so on the money as far as this stuff if you look in you start to look at around page 77 and 78 it starts to talk about 8 and 9 practically every amends that you can come up with the instructions for an appropriate amends is in this book here's one, most alcoholics owe money here's another one, one paragraph down perhaps we've committed a criminal offense what if other people are involved it says usually however other people were involved there's a paragraph on that what about going to jail what about if we make this a man that could cause us personally a whole lot of trouble it says here we think we ought to be willing to do that if necessary how about domestic problems you might have stepped out on the missus or mister you know what do we do about that perhaps there are some cases where the utmost frankness is demanded perhaps not how about if we can't see the person if there's a reason that we can see the person all of these specific directives are covered for handling these amends here's basically how I'll handle it if I'm working with somebody and they're approaching their amends. I like them to do amends cards. Does it matter if you do a list or you do them on cards? Not really. I've found it pretty cool to use the index card. So each amend goes down on the index card. Information on that index card can be where to find the person, the phone number, the wrong that they're clear on and I want the person to come over and talk to me about these amends before they start making them. I'll sit down with the individual, and we'll go over each one of these specifically, each of these amens specifically. We'll gain alignment on the approach and the practicality of the amends. I'll talk about things like motives. I'll ask some leading questions about these particular amends just so that I'm comfortable that when he goes and knocks on the door, he'll be prepared with the right way to address the particular amends. And when we're done with that meeting, he'll know which ones are inappropriate to do because they'll involve other people and we'll both be in alignment on what is going to happen next. We'll have made an agreement, okay? These are the amends that you're going to do and we know how you're going to due them. And that's kind of how I go through the A-step list and then shove somebody out to do amends. There's been periods of time where I've gone on some amends with some people. There's been some crazy amends I've had some really amazing amends experiences myself I think we all will It says in this book that nine cases out of ten, you'll get, you know, the person will offer a generous response to the amends. And I've found that that's an understatement. Even times where I've been thrown out of the office, a little bit later down the road, I've Been Able To Make Contact With The Individual When They Were A Little Bit More Ready To Hear It and I've been able to cover them. So even the 1 out of 10 where I get thrown out of the office, that usually works out well too. And it's my ego or it's My Alcoholism that says, No, don't go there. This will happen. That will happen, you know. I'm projecting that I'm going to go to jail or I'm gonna be made to feel small or they're gonna take this story and use it against me or, you now, whatever. All these things come up in my mind. This is definitely where I need to trust God. You know, I've covered this with a sponsor or a spiritual advisor. We're both in agreement on how to handle these amends. Now I need to go do them. I think the word actually should start off step nine because it's probably one of the steps that gets skimped the most. Is there a practice that you utilize to derive some names that didn't come from the resentment list or sex list or fear list, but you know that we need to go out and find these people. But, oh, it wasn't on that step four list, so I can easily skate over top of that. You know, I think prayer, before any of these spiritual exercises, I think it's very important to pray, maybe a little bit of meditation. What we want to do when you're doing inventory or when you're doing your A-step list or whatever, you want to be as close to guided as possible. The best possible experience with these steps is when the pencil is just moving itself. It seems like these names are coming. It seems that these names have been written. It seems it's like these resentment spheres or whatever are coming and you're in a zone and you are just writing and it feels like it's just being channeled through you. I think that's not everyone's experience every time but I have experienced that and I've come out of it you know, and I looked at the clock and it's been an hour and a half and I have ten pages of inventory you know that's been my experience I think we need to have God help us with all of these steps with uncovering, discovering and discarding all the stuff that we need too and prayer and the deepest kind of connection we can establish with God is probably the way to do it. Is every single thing that you've ever done wrong going to show up on your first eight step list? That's not my experience. Three eight steps lists in, I remembered that I had trashed a house in college. I mean, literally, we were thrown out of this house for loud parties and we decided the next night to have a house trashing party. And we destroyed this house. We ripped all the doors off and burned them in a bonfire. Every single piece of sheetrock had fist holes in it. I got up on the roof and kicked the chimney off of this house. I mean, we trashed this place. And I had forgotten about this many years ago. It was like 15 years prior, or yeah, at least 15 years earlier. And one day I'm writing an eight-step list, and I go, oh my God, the house. So, you know, what I did was I paid attention to the instructions in here. It says when other people are involved, we need to gain their consent. So there was two guys that lived with me. One of them was dead from cirrhosis of the liver, go figure. The other was the guy who got sober when he met the little missus, you know who used to drink with me, and I got a hold of him. I hadn't talked to him in years, but I basically said, Jeff, here's what I plan on doing. He goes, God bless you. Go ahead. don't tell them where I live okay, I can deal with that and I moved forward with that amends I'd really like to be able to say I was able to track the people down and pay the money back that's not the case but I exhausted every avenue in looking for them they were an elderly couple and they had died they didn't have any children so I had to take the money I estimated the amount of damage to that particular house, and I put that money back out in the universe in the best possible way I could have. That was what me and my sponsor decided was the best way I could set that particular scale. So again, don't just do this stuff once. There's a school of thought that you go through steps 1 through 9 once and then you'll live in 10, 11, and 12. And I do believe that there are people who have enough discipline to be able to stay on top of everything. To do that, I'm not one of them. The guys that I work with are not oneof them. What I've found is over the course of time, more will be revealed. And what I try to do is I tryto do what the 12 in 12 states Is it annual or semi-annual housecleaning? And I try to do that at least once a year, a full-blown inventory, you know, one through nine. You know, full-bloan. And I've found that that works for me. You know we each – there's a coin that you get in the north. Down south you get poker chips. Up here you get the brass coins and on the back of the coin it says to thine own self be true. And I think we do need to be true What works for us? How much attention to these recovery principles do we need? How often do we needs to be paying attention to this stuff? And we need to know that, and we need become disciplined at it. Thanks Chris. Excellent, excellent. Let's go get wet or sleepy, whichever, and were supposed to be back here. I want to verify because I think I left my little deal just so you guys will know when you're out there. If I'm reading this right, we're supposed to eat dinner at 5.30? 5. 30, yeah. We've got 15 minutes. Why don't you fix the mistakes I made? Let me just tell you real quick what the deal is. This thing about this inventory deal, the idea of forgiveness is one of the coolest things in the whole wide world. And one of the areas that he hit on That I think is This idea of omission There are a lot of things that were on my Grandparents End up in this category a whole lot of times We didn't do anything physically against them There were no resentments tied up in it I just simply ignored them I treated my grandparents like they didn't even exist Like this And it's these kind of things That you can go back if you can And make profound restitutions And amends for listen um um graveside amends uh letters bill wilson those cats when they put this thing together um no we're not talking emails and no we'RE NOT TALKING A FACEBOOK POST NO SHOUT OUTS okay you're gonna you're going to you're gONNA if you want to write a letter and some of these things then you certainly could do that yes sir uh early on in the program my sponsor knew um because he was a bigfoot pumper uh he kind of knew a little bit about me i guess and uh He took me over to the graveyard where my first wife was buried, and he brought a box of Kleenex, and he threw it in the car, and he said, you know where we're going? And I guess God said, yeah, you don't. So we went over there, you known. So I made amends there, which was actually kind of gratifying in a sense because, you knows, we would both cry together and did that. And he also had a tendency to take, he always gets the sick AA people, the real sickies, and he would take them and he'd put them at his kitchen table, one after a short period of time, he would do six, four steps, so to speak, one of the ones that you're not going to take the 900-pound pencil and write down, you know, the stuff that you want to hide. So he would, like it says in the big, he wouldn't do an oral one with them and then kind of get some of that out. And then it seemed like the majority of people would follow up then with the, you know, and go through the rest of the steps. There's a great deal of historical evidence that that's exactly the way a lot of those early inventories were done. Wally Patton and some of those guys that have done a bunch of research on early inventors a lot of them were oral because people were afraid to write stuff down and so they would just share back and forth there was still some direction there was some focus on what it was they were trying to do and it wasn't just strictly a confessional deal but you bet there are some guys who simply cannot get this thing mentally they're not to a place where they can write this kind of stuff I've done inventories with at least a dozen men that were totally illiterate they couldn't write anything and so you're going to sit and do some oral inventory and it's fine we signed up to help and so we're going to do the best thing we can with what's been given us to work with I heard a lady one time in a meeting say you know I heard somebody do something about a graveside amends and I said that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard of I'm going to tell you this little deal real quick she was so condescending I just kind of looked at her like this and I just said are you do you really feel that way and she said dead's dead and there's nothing you can do about it Two years later, her son would OD. He was in the military during the service and he OD'd and died and they brought him back and there was a long convoluted thing and she didn't get a chance to see him before he died and this sort of thing. And I saw her probably eight or nine years after this happened. I saw here in an AA meeting and we were talking to her and we talked back and forth and she said she looked horrible. And I asked her if she was okay, and she said no. She said, I can't get past my son's deal. And I said, buddy, I got an idea, but I don't know if you'll go for it. And she said, you're talking about going to a gravesite of men's? And I says, yeah, absolutely. He's buried in Grand Prairie, Texas, and she's in a little military place over there. And she says, would you go with me? And I say, not yes, but hell yes. Pack. Let's go. And we got in the car, and we drove over there, took six hours. I got my Kindle with me at the time, and I had a thing full of books that I just sat back and read. And she went, it was the funny thing, she went over there and she sat with him for about an hour and a half and then she got up and she came back and about halfway through, back to the deal, she started crying. She was standing between her little grave site and my car and she's crying again like this and I just went, go back, go back. And she just turned around and went back over like that and sat down next to this grave like this and almost four hours later she came out and she was all apologetic and I said, buddy, you've got to be kidding. Listen, The same God that could stir our souls and make us do the things that we needed to do, don't you think that that same God could give us the relief that we need in a place regardless of the situation? Forgiveness is forgiveness. I mean, it doesn't make any difference like that. Sometimes the hand gets dealt and we don't get control of that kind of situation. Sometimes we don'T get to see these people and the thought that I can't resolve something that somebody left that I cannot resolve it is ludicrous. You can resolve it. You can. It may make you feel a little foolish, and you may feel a Little goofy about it, depending on how you've been read, how you're being raised. So what? So what the freedom of getting clear this stuff is an amazing deal. Of everything that we talk about in AA land, we could talk for the next 10 days with just you guys in this room about experiences that some of you have had around the area of men's stuff. I'll say this again, not to be distracting and not to be provocative why aren't we talking about that in AA than I got mad because I couldn't get my kids bicycle put together you understand what I'm saying yeah it's a cheap shot sorry but I'm just saying that you guys have stories and experiences that are amazingly deep that need to be shared with new people that are coming in here let me tell you I don't know if you're like me I sat in meetings looking at the lamp shade. And when I got down to the part about the amends, I went, oh no, no, we're not going there. You see? I think our membership, especially our young membership, needs to know what you know about a profound experience around forgiveness. For darn sure. That's all I got, brother. I'm just chomping at the bits to do some... Okay, I'll tell you what. We are going to meet at 2.30 right out front. Be a little car caravan heading down to the quarry. you know if you want to pass on that there's some great things in town if you've not been in Manchester that's awesome Bill Wilson's grave is right up the street enjoy yourself until tonight around 5.30 when we're going to have I'm sorry but what about the questions you were speaking about the question you said that you will give us questions oh we were going to give a little bit of homework you're absolutely right thank you what we'd like to do Tonight we'd like to get some people up here Who are willing To do a little bit of inventory Just a couple, not all nine Right Let's go to page 64 Real quick Now in your folder What you have is You have a blank piece of paper here This is all you'll need The blank piece OF paper Take a look at page 65 Where it says I am resentful at Okay the cause and affects mine these are the first three columns and this is a good way to do what we'd like you to do is pick one resentment that's been bothering you for a long time something maybe you just haven't been able to get past and we're going to ask a few people to volunteer and come up and share this so change the name to protect the innocent if you're going to be one of those people who's going to volunteer But column one, I'm resentful at. Column two, the cause. Column three, affects my. And it could be sex relations, pride, self-esteem, personal relationships, security. There's a couple of other ones on the next page. Those are the first three columns. Then go over to page 67. Two paragraphs down. It says referring to our list again. this is the instruction for the fourth column so you can have four columns, this is a fourth column putting out of our minds the wrongs others have done we resolutely look for our own mistakes, so in the fourth column you're to answer these four questions, where had I been selfish dishonest, self-seeking or frightened and if you've been selfish self- seeking, frightened or dishonest just write that in the forth column we'll keep it very very simple and what we'll do is Myers and I will go through a couple of these, then we'll ask for some volunteers to come up and we'll be kind of like the inventory inquisition. We're going to help whoever volunteers. We're gonna see if it's possible to help them get a little bit deeper, a little clearer understanding of what's going on with this particular inventory. Maybe possibly help them pass this. And if we don't get time to do it all, we got some other stuff that we gotta cover tonight so that we're caught up or in the morning for what we're going to do. So we're not going to spend a whole lot of time with it. But sometimes a simple illustration, sometimes just seeing it out there. We go, I know how to do that, I don't know how to do it, and we do all know how to do right up to the point that we don't. Right up to point that were faced with reality that perhaps we don' t understand something about it and so if we can look at this from the viewpoint of sponsors looking as their protegees then we can begin to see if we could help you see some of the things that you need to be, just the things you are watching for when you're going through this deal. And this is a very simple exercise. I know many of us have used Hazleton guides and all this other stuff. What we'd like to do in this particular workshop is to bring you right back to the basics, right back to old-school simplicity because there's an amazing power in the economy and simplicity of this type of inventory writing. Perfect. All right. We'll see, whoever wants to come, we'll see them out front in 20 minutes. Who wrote a little bit of inventory that's willing to share some of that with us right now? I can do it. Okay. Come on up if you would and... You know my... Here, you sit right here. No, no, no. Pull another chair over. So it's going to be quick, eh? Yes. It's going be pretty short. Absolutely. It's like a band-aid. Absolutely. So. All right. Column number one. I just took one, eh. Well, what's in column number one? So it might... I have three sons. Okay. So it is number two. Okay. So his name is Antoinette. The cause. Where my mother passed away this year, the last January, he stayed silent for at least a month. No communication, no support. All right. So, affect. What does it affect? So, self-esteem, personal relationship. His attitude put myself, you know, in doubt, being the mother. did he care did he not care you know perhaps he's insensitive to my pain did I do something wrong when I raised him you see so it triggers some of the guilt I could have being an alcoholic mother and using alcohol when he was growing sure and perhaps underlying that, the fear of losing the relationship so I didn't say anything but I was thinking because as he's living in France I was not able just to put that face to face because I didn' t see him yes we Skype each other but it's not the best way just to clarify the situation forget about the email and, you know, the phone is not the ideal either. So here I am with that. Okay, those are the first three columns. Your resentment is basically because there was silence after the death in the family. There wasn't... I was putting my mother, you Know, it was not something... It's true that our relationship with my mother was not at the best one. Nevertheless, you Now, we had a pacific relationship and, You Know, she was sick And I was giving my children the news along the things. And when she passed away, the three of them learned the news at the same time by an email and a phone call. But he didn't react. He didn't say anything. He was silent for a month. Okay. What do you have in column four? Where were you selfish, dishonest, self-seeking or afraid? Did you put anything down for that column? I know. I feel good alright that's easy let's look at this stuff because this is classic this is a classic piece of inventory because it comes up and it's so easy to sit in both chairs to sit back and look at your perspective is the easiest thing in the world because as a parent I might react exactly the same way let's just look at these things without judging it Let's just look at the big picture of what's going on. In self, which is usually the big bugaboo, that's usually the one that kicks our rear end, there are expectations, immediate expectations that we set up like this. I expect somebody to behave the way I want them to behave in a certain situation. The reality of that, looking at it from some distance, is that it's possible that not everybody handles grief in the same way. You get people that handle it... Some people are just absolute cowards around grief. They don't face it. They shut down. They just kind of close up and stuff, and it may be that situation. He may have also been in these situations totally embarrassed by his lack of involvement in her illness and the things that were going on and this kind of thing. We don't know. We don' t know. But what we do know is that there' s a lot of pain that we' re carrying based on something that they are doing and we don' T really know the whole story. It' s like having just half of a story, and what's going on on the thing. Now, the questions that would be fun to ask would be kind of interesting to look at is why you felt that maybe you couldn't talk to him about this. Why you couldn'T just say this may sound childish to you but I am grieved because you haven't been involved in this. This hurt me. Just be transparent with it and just talk to Him which will be interesting. I will do it but face to face when I will go to Paris you know in a couple of months at the moment living a lot of kilometers away I cannot do that I completely get that so if we look that self plays a role in the resentment remember you got to understand this is not coming from a point of judgment for sure because in that situation I can certainly see that deal self plays a big role in this deal where was I inconsiderate I mean, there's a piece of inconsiderate stuff there because I'm assuming that he knows what I think. That I would assume that he just simply knows how to behave and what it is that I need to connect all the dots around this death and this sort of thing. So again, it comes back to some assumptions that are tough. There's a lot of freedom when you look at the fourth column and you answer the questions to the best of your ability, where was I selfish? Where was I dishonest? Where was self-seeking? Where was frightened? If this was me, if I was in your shoes and I was going to be filling out the fourth column, some of the things that I might say is I could be self- seeking in that I would like certain reactions from family members to be a certain way. where could I be a little bit dishonest because it may not be the most honest thing for me to think that I know how people should react I'll give you a for instance Myers is absolutely right, when death is concerned sometimes we don't know how to react I'll tell you how I reacted when my father died. My mother gets a visit from a couple of people. You know, they talk with her. They leave the house. They were basically telling her that her husband died at work that day. She came in. She sat down and she said, Chris, your father died at worked today. And she got up and she went back into the living room. Listen, this was her husband that had just died. Now she's got me to take care of and the house. I mean, I can't imagine what was going through her mind. So for a while I thought that it was kind of inconsiderate for her to just dump that on me and then leave the room. I believe now today that she was dealing with it as absolute best she could. Now here's how I reacted to this information. I didn't believe it. I could not imagine never seeing my father again. Remember, I'm three days into my 12th birthday. The enormity of something like that just didn't dawn on me. And it was about six or seven days later when I was walking around in my backyard, everybody's grieving, that I realized, you know what? This is real. He's not going to come home. And it took me about six days just to deal with that. Now, you know, I'm sharing this to basically show that each of us deals with death in a different way. I know some people that I've been very, very close to and Alcoholics Anonymous who've lost a loved one and there is no grieving. There is no griefing because they believe in their heart of hearts that they've gone to a better place. They've gone into a new room and their suffering is over and they're in paradise and they are the lucky ones. I know people that feel that way. We're being a little bit self-centered or a little bit dishonest when we assign a role for somebody and how they're supposed to act out that particular event. There's a great deal of freedom in that and being able to back away from that need to assign the role, and we all do that. I mean, none of us are immune to that. But to be able to not do that, there's a Great Deal of Freedom. We just simply experience what they're experiencing like that. I know a guy that I sponsored who had lost a parent, And when he called me, I said, buddy, so what did you do? And he said, you know what I did? I laughed. I just laughed. And I said what do you mean you just laughed? He said, I just laugh. That was the only way I could react at the moment. The emotion that came out, I laughed, I was so uncomfortable that I just I just laughed. It was crazy. I can understand that, you have your personal way just to react to such a thing. the thing at the moment when you were speaking about expectation, I think that when you lose somebody so close to you you expect from your children a certain support I totally get that because I can imagine that if he's losing for example a friend, he's going to be there because he went to the funeral so I didn't go because I couldn't at that time that he went so I can I totally you know understand and accept the way he reacts but there is a difference between the way he faced the death of his grandmother and the way you know he's going to support his mother which is me so that's you know the thing so the resentment is there it's not a huge one but it's you know it's there and they're lying somewhere yeah I think these are interesting because sometimes these things have a tendency to work themselves out. It's like the degree that I connect with this and hold on to this idea is the same degree that I risk a bigger headache coming down the road because if he doesn't later do what I want him to do, I will still hold the resentment. And so the only safe place here is just to simply back away and give him some time and see if he'll come around full circle. He may be going through his own season of growth and his own Season of trying to figure out and sort out what's going on. I give him the benefit of a doubt. He's your kid. Okay, he's 37. He's not 80. He'll always be your kid, though. That's right. So it's... You know, but that's it. And I know that I will probably have to open the door and just to go not really confront him but just to ask him What did you do? why did you have such attitude because it was quite painful you would certainly be within your right to do so there is nothing in the cosmic rule book that says that you have to be mum around something because you know if it isn't a resentment do I am supposed to make one amend I think that you look at who's the healthiest one here in the assumption here we're assuming that you are the healthy one you're the one on a spiritual path So often the burden is on us to take a high moral ground and approach, and we do it in a loving manner. But there is a responsibility with coming with being on that high moral ground. Not necessarily because we're wronger, but sometimes because we are stronger. That's the point. Yeah. You betcha. And it's possible, it's impossible that when you talk to your son about this, he will not be conscious of the actions that he's taken and how they could have hurt you. He may not even, that may not ever be something that's gone through his head. I'll tell a real quick story that happened to us just last weekend. My wife and I are dealing with a couple, and this is the dysfunctional couple from absolute hell. The crack addict and the drug addict wife, and there's kids, and my wife was over there today doing like a partial intervention. This has been our crazy couple that we're working with right now. And we were doing some step work with both of them and their child. Here is what happened. The son ODs and ends up in the hospital, comes this close to dying on heroin. The husband and the wife go to the hospital to support the son. The husband takes one look at the son, goes, oh my God, leaves the hospital, gets into his car, goes to Newark and starts smoking crack for three days. The wife is going through cancer treatment. She just had a double mastectomy and needs to go back into the hospital for more surgery. And this guy drives to Newark and smokes crack for two days, okay? Now, that sounds like the most inconsiderate thing in the world. His son is OD'd in the emergency room. His wife needs to come in for surgery. He needs to get in for injury the next day. And he takes all the money and he goes and he smokes crack in Newark. Now, you would think this is the loser of all losers. This is the most pathetic human being in the world. You know, this is The Most Unbelievable Expression of Selfishness You've Ever Seen. But I start working with him and his wife a couple of days later and they come over to do step work. And he's really a sweet guy, this guy. And when the wife starts talking about how disappointed she was because she didn't feel like she had support for her surgery, he started crying. It looked like it dawned on him at that moment he was wrong. Now we're all thinking, how does he not know that he's wrong to abandon his son in the hospital and his wife who's having surgery the next day? But he didn't. It just didn't dawn on him. He did what he needed to do, what his addiction told him to do And he went for it. And when the smoke cleared and we're all sitting there talking and we were all going through some step work, he realized how much he had let his family down and he started crying. He was like, my God, you had surgery the next day. And it was honest. I could tell that he was being honest. It didn't cross his mind that what he was doing was wrong, believe it or not. until the smoke cleared. Sometimes we don't have the capacity to understand that we're harming someone or we're really letting somebody down because we don' t think about it. And it may be possible that this didn' t even cross your son's mind. It may be. That's possible. It is. Thank you for doing that. I appreciate it. That's so perfect. That's exactly what we were looking for. How about another volunteer? Okay. Over here in the corner. All right. All right, all right. Sit in the hot seat here. I showed him first. Okay. Okay. I'm Heather. I'm an alcoholic. My resentment is towards... I put my old place of work, male, like the male system. Just listen. The cause was an anonymous death threat and rape letter from one of my students that affected my self-esteem, my security, and my personal relationships within the classroom. My ambitions and pride. My ambitions to continue on with my work and the security because I didn't feel safe. I had police involved and my self-esteem because I kind of feel like shit. Yeah, and then for the fourth column, I put, I guess, my mistakes or my wrongs or fear. And I just kind of want to get... If I can find my part in it or deal with what I have to, then I want to get rid of it because it's been eating me up for about eight months. You know, we'll see what we can do. We can do this. To be clear, let me just make sure that I understand this. You teach and you got an anonymous terrible threatening letter that really upset you. Yeah. I can imagine that that would knock you off your game, something like that. it probably affected everything your personal relationships, your security your ambitions your pride, everything sometimes when abuse happens say if you're a child and you experience child abuse or something like that when you truly are what would be known as a victim Most of the time, you know, we shoot ourselves in the foot. We play a role in how we're harmed. But every once in a while, we can be a victim. When you look at resentments like that, it's hard to say what were my mistakes in this because it's obviously a case of you're a victim You might not have done anything to set up this problem. But what happens after that, what we do with these things is really what we need to look at. We need to work out how we've thought about it, how we behaved about it after it's happened. Because what we're really looking for with these inventories and what we are looking for with the step work, is we're looking for freedom. We want to get free of this stuff. And there's a power in looking at the fourth column. There's a Power in seeing what kind of actions we could have taken maybe a little bit better, how we could've responded to this.