Step Three and the Fourth Step – The Big Book Conducted by Earl H – Part 1 of 3 – Earl H.

Thank you very much. Who gives a hoot what kind of alcoholic we are? Why should we have to fit into any particular category? Excellent question. Seconded by this woman over here. Yes, and I agree with you. All that stuff is in the beginning, I think, is people can say, oh, well, I identify with that or identify with THAT a little bit or identify WITH THAT. And it just allows you to move on. You'll hear people in meetings say, Hi, my name's Bob. I'm a real alcoholic or, you know. I mean, as opposed to the rest of us, you know, who thought AA sounded like fun. We'd just come. You know, alcoholic, you know, I agree with you. We never, well, we can't point to anybody else and say, you know, I'm an alcoholic and, well Actually, in a meeting I did here one time, it was one of the greatest things I ever saw at an AA meeting. I was at my home group on a Monday night and they asked for anybody that's new to stand and give us your name and the nature of your disease so we can get to know you better at the break, right? And at my meeting, we actually do that, right. And this guy gets... Anybody new in this camp goes up and this guy stands up. My name is Claude and I'm an alcoholic. And he goes... And so's that guy over there. And sits back down, right? I thought that was the greatest thing I ever said. You know, he's right. That guy is. I've heard him say it before. I love that stuff, right. Yeah. It's just stuff that you can go, yeah, well, that's me. Carry on. You know. I'm an alcoholic. Who identifies me as an alcoholic is me. Nobody else. You, nobody else. What we identify with, how we come to that is how we came to that. A lot of us knew it before we got here. It's amazing for me because I'm a low-bottom, damn near dead drunk when I got here and went, yep, that's me, yep that's you know what I mean? There was no question. It's just amazing to me because it's outside my own experience but I see it happen are the ones that come to A that aren't convinced have somehow gotten here not yet convinced that this is where they need to be. It must have something to do with the amount of education that's gone on in our communities over the last 25 years that they find their way in here. Or they got the nudge from the judge, you know what I mean, or a family member's forced them in, or they're here under threat of some terrible event. And they go through this process and discover that they are. It's just amazing to me to watch that happen. I love watching that happen It happened to a guy I'm sponsoring right now. Let's see, he's got to have about 57 days now. Yeah, 57 days. He's very funny too. We were at a meeting. The last meeting I was at with him, he had 51 days and there was a guy who'd shared right before him who had 41 days. So he had 10 days more than this guy. So the guy's sharing about his plight as a recovering alcoholic at 41 days, right? And the guy is going through a lot. And my guy raises his hand, you know, Dave alcoholic. And he looks at the other guy and he goes, and I got 51 days. And brother, I got to tell you, I've been there. Yeah, last week you were there. Oh God, we're classic, aren't we? So did I help with the question? Thank you. We all right over here? All right. Any more questions? We've covered so much already. All right, step three. Made a decision, right? Turned my will and my life over to the care of God. I mean, to keep this one simple for me, some people apparently have no problem with this step. They come in with a significant spiritual life in place. It's odd that the normie thinks, How can you be an alcoholic and have a spiritual life at the same time? Easy. You have a profound faith in God, and you drink uncontrollably. That's how you do that. That's why that happens. But the third step for me was very scary. This was a very scary step because I knew going into this process that my life was on the line. I knew that I was in the last house on the block. I knew that if this didn't work for me, I was a dead man. I knew there wasn't another game that I would get in that would help me with this. This was going to have to work or I was screwed. Because I was so angry at God when I got here, what the third step meant to me was was I going to become willing to turn my will and my life over to the care of a God I was incredibly angry at? Was I willing to return my will my life over the care of a God I saw as an unjust and unforgiving God? Was I willing to turn my will and my life over the carer of a god I may or may not understand? I may ou may not believe in. That this is all up for grabs. This unseen, unknown, untouchable presence. This experience where I had yet to meet the individual who could tell me about the face of God. This was really an alarming leap into the abyss, if you will. For somebody like me. The beauty of this thing, though, is that on the one side I had my experience of 16 years of chronic alcoholism and drug abuse. And on this end I had a bad relationship. I jumped. I pulled the trigger. I got down on my knees and to the best of my ability turned my will and my life over to the care of a God I did not understand. That was the best I could do. The best I Could Do is I don't understand if this is what I must seek to relieve me of these problems, how can this be the same God that I've had these other... Right? There was so much self. There was such a lot There was much self inflicted upon this relationship. There was so much willful behavior inflicted upon this relationship. There was such dogma in my head that I was inflicting this relationship with that I couldn't see it for what it was. It was so befuddled and enmeshed. I couldn'T just let it be what it is. So, I did this. I turned my will and my life over to the character by getting on my knees and saying the third step prayer and getting back up. And how that felt was... And I felt it was spooky. Right? I mean, what I basically felt was is that my life is on the line. I just took two, a pair of dice, and I don't even know what the game is we're playing. And I threw them out on the board having no idea what to expect. That was the leap of faith, right? In spite of my own experiences, I must go this way. In spite OF my own crippled belief system, I MUST GO THIS WAY. Those who have what I want are saying go this way. See, that's the amazing thing about Alcoholics Anonymous is I'm sitting around in meetings and there's guys like the late Fred Ellis, right, in these meetings. And this man would talk, and I believe everything that man said. If I stood next to him, if I felt like I'd taken 20 milligrams of Valium, I'd just, boom. Nice. Fred makes me feel good. Now, I was too afraid to talk to Fred, right? So at the Thursday Night Beginners Workshop in Brentwood, California, Fred was always there. At the end of the meeting, Fred would stand up like right over here by the podium and guys would come up and talk to him. to Fred. Guys he sponsored would check in with him and ask questions, and Fred would share his experience, strength, and hope with him. And I would stand behind Fred and burglarize their conversation. Right? I did this for many, many weeks. And then one day, Fred was talking to these guys, and all of a sudden, Fred turned around and went, hi, Earl, how are you? He stuck out his hand and I went, paralyzed. My God, he knows my name, which was entirely too close a relationship for me in early sobriety. And there he was. Hi. Hi. Hi. Got to go now. You know, run home. Pace. Jesus Christ, Fred knows my name. So I did this step. It felt like, you know when you get on the roller coaster and you're going up, the thing is going click, click, clic, clic. The third step is where you hear the click and stop. he's like well buckle your seat belt here we go you're on the ride now pal and that's how it felt to me it felt to me because as soon as i did it felt a little spooky it felt like wow man i really did that i did that as well as i could do it at that time and i got back in my seat in the book and basically the book says at that point we were hoping you're serious about what you just did? Like, oh, now you tell me. Couldn't you have said, you better be serious before you do this, right? I could have hovered right there at the brink of three for several years having heard that. But he said, we hope you were serious about what you did because see, now we have to embark upon a plan of rigorous action, right, or this is all just a conversation, right. A lot of guys sitting around in the bars, you know, going, you know, that third step is a bitch. Anybody in here ever heard of a guy named Mike Ross? It's apparent I need to tell you about Mike Ross. Not one hand went up. Mike Ross was bigger than life in every respect. Big man. I think when I got sober, Mike must have had, I don't know, like 1,100 years of sobriety. He'd been sober forever. He was this old guy. Gruff, gruff man. We used to love the guy. My friend Christopher and I, we would go to this one meeting where Mike always went. And if you didn't have 10 years, he wouldn't even talk to you. You know what I mean? Because he figured you could die at any moment. There's no point in investing any time in you. I mean, just this hard edged guy, right? But what we loved, we didn't care. You know what I mean? What we loved about the guy was what he shared in meetings and the way he would say goodnight. Because I mean every time you'd see Mike and he'd be walking off towards the door to leave and we'd be behind him and we would go, goodnight Mike! And Mike would think that a friend of his was calling out to him and Mike would turn around and he would find a friend he just dismiss us you're not even worth saying and i do you know we only had like eight years you know guy was hysterical but he saved my life more than one time we would be sitting in a step study i remember going to this one step study brand new and i mean my head's on fire i'm in flames just nobody can see it you know what i meeting. I'm walking into a meeting, and I'm sitting in the AC, and we're going to talk about the steps. Okay, good, good. Apparently the steps are a big thing. We'll talk about steps. Four step. Ah! Four step! Haven't done that yet? Let's hear all about it. Great, great, great. I'm just sitting in a meeting. I'm like, out of my mind, but people are walking up and going, how you doing? Fine. How you doing, Earl? Fine! My newcomer mantra. How you doin'? Fine. Fine. In my head, I'm thinking things like, you're not being attacked. You're not being attacked. He just said hello, you're not being attacked, mayday, may day, person coming at me, huh? Dicey in my head and I'm sitting down and a guy shares about the fourth step, talks about the four step, great length, great detail, minutiae, just, I mean, just God, could there be any more about this step? It's brilliant. I remember thinking, gotta get the guys in there, fabulous, fabulous. Broke the step there. What more could I need to know. Next guy raises his hand. Goes on for five minutes about the fourth step. Just fabulous. Unbelievable. Couldn't be less like what the last guy talked about, but delightful. Very entertaining. Great stuff. Thinking, okay, all right, we've got two ways to do this now. By the fifth guy, you know, I'm thinking to myself, okay well I don't need to buy a new gun because I'm only going to use it once. I'm ready. This is it. I can't do this. And all of a sudden in the back a big mitt goes up in the air and the guy calls and I hear, Mike Alcoholic. Here comes Mike Ross, right? And he goes like this and I go, geez, maybe he knows an old guy. You know what I mean? He turned around and I see this go up. It goes like that. Like this. I got to ask, has anybody in here read this? And I just went, thank God for this guy. And he just basically says, when you do your four-step is when you're done with the third. I got that. That sounds good to me. He made it very clear. When should I do my four-stepped? Did you do the third? Yep. Get on it. Make a list. Make a listen. Oh, okay, okay. The guy just had a way of... Don't want to go round and round and around. Want to move. Want to carry through this process. Because here's the thing about this whole thing. You are not going to get this right, according to Mike, in your first pass. This isn't about getting it right. This is about getting doing it. Having an experience is a result of the process. The cool part about the steps is, you know, it's like, okay, does everyone in here recognize that you're allowed to do the steps once? We don't allow you to do it any more than one time. See, you better get it right the first time. Because if you don't, you're screwed. You know? You will be relegated to the half measures room. And there you must stay until one day, mercifully, you just drink. No. If I do the steps to the best of my ability, I'm doing something. I'm taking an action. As a result of the action, an experience comes. As a resultado of the experience, I change. So that when I come back to step one, I am looking at it from a different perspective. It's a new step. Right? I remember going into a meeting. I was 11 years sober and there was a guy. I was meeting this woman at this meeting and I go in there. I'm not going to a meeting, I want to meet her. Right. And I slide in, and right before the meeting starts, and there's one seat. She's got a seat for me in the front row. Oh, good. All right. Now, the front room is six feet from the speaker because it's just a table, you know, a fold-down table, and there' s the leader and the speaker sitting there. And this guy, Jack, is going to talk on step one for 20 minutes. Oh, Christ. you know and i'm in the front row and i can't just go can't hang with the jack and run out the door you know what i mean i'm stuck i'm gonna have to sit and listen now i gotta live in your sobriety at this time right you can't tell me a thing about step one i have done step one it's done put it to bed case closed 100 done step one you're not gonna i don't want this is hell i'm hell i gotta listen to this guy go on about step 1 well turns out the guy was Jack Prose, who had 43 years of sobriety at the time. He talked for 20 minutes on step one and blew the top of my head off. He was talking about concepts and ideas and a level of awareness that had never even occurred to me before. Just talking about the step, just kind of tripping on where he was at with it, right? And when the meeting was over, I looked at my friend and said, she said, well, what step are you on? I went, well one. Apparently I'm on step one. And the cool thing about AA is that if you hang around here and actually pay attention, that's going to happen all the time. All the time! I thought I was very cool with God until a woman, I was about 16 years sober, and a woman with two and a half years got up at the podium, started to talk about her relationship with God. Blew my mind. It was great. That's what goes on around here. Different people coming at it from different perspectives and different directions. So if you're thinking about doing that, if you do the book, if You come up to me at the end of this and go, delightful or very entertaining, however, I do it a completely different way. Okay. That is my response. Okay, good. That means more dialogue. What I love is people who get up here. Occasionally We'll do this sort of stuff, and somebody will come up to me and go, Earl, I find your comments on the process of recovery disturbing. Really? Yeah. Yeah, I think you're killing alcoholics, Earl. For Christ's sake, you need to do it this way. Here's my workbook that I've developed over the last eight months. And I'd like you to take this workbook and explore what I've seen as the relationship between God, self, and others. And I say, okay, cool. And Earl, please, for God's sakes, just don't talk in AA anymore until you've read my book. Say, all right, thanks for sharing that with me. That's lovely. And I love how pissed off people get about this stuff. It's hysterical to me. I'm standing in a room with a bunch of dead people sitting up pretending they're paying attention to me, right? We're alcoholics and drug addicts, and we're arguing over how to develop a relationship with God. It's like, okay, I can't get too upset about this, all right? It's just, it's crazy, right? What we're doing, we're wrestling with the concept of God here, right, in this third step. I wrestle with the, that's what Israel, Israel means one who wrestles with God, right. The book that says to me in the portion of chapter 5 that I've heard God knows how many times in 22 years. God couldn't would if He were sought. It doesn't say God couldn'd would if He was found. God couldn' it would if You were sought then I must seek God. I'm given very, very specific instructions on how to go about doing that later on in the steps. I must see God but what I've got to do at first to throw myself at it, to open up my arms and say, I let go. I let God. I surrender. I can't. God can. I'll let Him. God could restore me to sanity, soundness of mind, relieve me of the obsession to drink. What's interesting is that the action of these steps where I seek this God is remarkable to me. It's about my willingness to get the stuff that I place between me and God and me and my fellows out of the way. I put it there, I get rid of it. I don't ask God to get rid of it, I do it. I don's sit in my apartment and wait for life to come knock on the door. I must get up and go outside. I had a second sponsor after Donald died. I had another sponsor for six years. He's a great friend of mine. I love him dearly. Al S. He's the guy that gets between those. He's very difficult to talk to. because he's just being there while you're talking to him. He's a fantastic example. He's the sponsor. You don't do what he says. You just watch him and feel him. You know what I mean? Just right there. He's an amazing human being. Absolutely amazing. But he said, if you give your life to God and sit in the closet which he gets coat hangers. Right? It took me six months to wrap my head around that. It's like, all right, I'll be back when I have any idea what that means. Donald used to say to me, you're all God comes in shoe leather. Okay. Apparently God is a shoe salesman. I don't... So I get it, right? There's these actions I take to open myself up to this experience of a power greater than myself. I can assure you I do not understand God. I pray to a God I don' t understand. But I do pray to God that I see the evidence of in my life on a daily basis. On a daily base. It's there if I want it. That's a lot of what the big buzz is for me. These sudden realizations that if I just stand still and feel the life that is around me, that there's something quite remarkable going on all the time. That's the cool thing, man. It's better than any drug I ever took. I took so much LSD that I was classified legally insane by the military. Right? And this buzz is better. You know? This buzz is better. Yeah? I've done enough heroin in one night to sit around, you know, just checking my pulse, just... Yep, there it goes again. Good. I've slowed it way down. I've drank enough alcohol to come to in different cities. Right? No buzz better than that clarity of being completely present in a moment and feeling the presence of God. That's an amazing, amazing event. And this is the only way that that's available. How I begin that process is by being willing to turn my will and life over to the care of God as I understand Him or don't understand Him. To get out on my knees and say the third step prayer. And I mean literally get down on my knees, not figuratively speaking. For me, literally. I literally get Down on My Knees and say that prayer. The reason I do that is I've got to humble myself. Humility is the willingness to learn for me. And I have to present myself willingly. And that way, I know for a fact. There's no mistaking. I can't say, well, I feel willing as I stand there with my chest out. But if I'm willing to get down on my knees and just do it from a position, I'm not being submissive. I'm relinquishing power. I'm relenting control. Come on. I'm here. I'm will. If I ask, God will come. That's what the book says. I have to ask. I got to ask so I do. So that's step three for me. Nice and simple. Easy. It's about the experience of it. It's About Gathering an Experience. It's about creating an opportunity for a deeper and more meaningful experience. That's what it is. Step four, I just pulled the trigger in step three. Boom. I'm in. The ride stopped clicking. Here we go. Right? It says I must immediately, I get up from step three and I embark upon a plan of action immediately. What's the action plan? For me, four through nine. Four through nine, Four and five is me, six and seven is God, eight and nine is you. Nobody else to play with. That's everybody. We're all covered. What do I do in four? Well, according to this, according to this I do a resentment inventory, a fear inventory, and a sex inventory. Why do I doing on those three things? Because if you want to see where I can leave the playing field, Those are three pretty good areas to take a look at. We're going to see a pattern develop here that a blind man could see, all right? Then that's why I do it, and I just do it out of the book. I do a resentment inventory, right? I do one in four columns. There are those that will tell you it's three columns. There are others that will tells you there's four columns, but three of the columns are broken down into four specific areas. There are others that will tell you that there are two columns that are broken down into one into three areas and one into two. There's others that we'll say we do it in black and white so when you do your fourth column we suggest you use these four things and write a sentence detailing specifically how those things have come into being. To all of this I say okay. Sure. Whatever floats your boat. Whatever you can look at and go well, you know, that makes sense to me. I can see that. Great, then dive into that. Just do it. Just do It. First inventory I did, I went to my sponsor who was not a big book guy. Donald wasn't a big book guy, he used to rant and rave at us. He called us little book thumpers. The little book thumpERS. He goes, before there was a book, there was one alcoholic down in the dirt sharing his experience, strength, and hope with another alcoholic. Well, that's true. We're going back to the book now. and you would get into the book and in my first inventory I said what do you want me to do he said get rid of the garbage so I wrote 27 pages of garbage and told him about it and I got my first direction from my sponsor my first reaction was we don't kill people here one day at a time which I thought was very reasonable doable just one day at a times, just today and I haven't killed anybody one day at a time. I was actually planning a murder when I came to AA, so he felt compelled to tell me immediately we don't do that. Yeah. My best thinking again. So I do a resentment inventory. I make a list of and it talks about it in the book. If you guys want me to, I can waste a lot of time up here, Put my glasses on and read it to you. Exactly what it says and why you do it that way. But I'm figuring these are readily available. You know? These are readily valuable. You want to see precisely how it is in here? Go here and look, read it. What I'm telling you is what I did was I went here when I finally did an inventory that was out of this book. That's when things changed for me. The getting rid of the garbage was great. It made it possible for me to take action that suggested I was making a commitment to being here. That was of value. Doing it completely different than the book told me to do it was of valor, absolutely of value, I think what that did was it allowed me to then feel like I'd earned the seat I was sitting in, right? That I had a right to be in AA that I was an active member. I'd written 27 pages of this stuff, right? Down on paper. I was doing something in support of my own life, in support OF MY OWN RECOVERY. I wasn't acknowledging that this was my problem. I WASN'T ACKNOWLEDGING THAT THIS WAS MY SOLUTION. I WASNT QUIETLY SLIPPING OFF THE COUCH TO MY KNEES SAYING THE THIRD STEP PRAYER AND POPPING BACK UP. I was actually at the direction of another human being, my sponsor, writing down all my secrets, all the stuff I was going to my grave with. It was really, really valuable. Did it change my life? Yeah. Did doing out of the book have a more profound effect on my life than that? Yeah, much more so, much more so because I was able in this inventory out of the book to see the pattern of behavior in my life. When I looked at my inventory, when I looked at my side of the street, when I looked at how resentment, fear, my sexual behavior was isolating me in the world. When you looked at My Whole Inventory, I saw one word, powerlessness. A powerlessness to be effective in the World. Powerlessness in terms of my own individual well-being. Powerlessness in termsof my relationships with other people. That I was in fact a self-centered, frightened man and that this was ruling my life. In my sexual relationships I was either completely in control or totally unavailable. Right? Never in the middle. Never an equal participant. Unable. Completely unable to do that. My relationship with God, I already told you about that. That wasn't doing so well. Relationship with self filled with self-loathing. All of my relationships were just in the trash can. This was a painful experience. I listed my resentments. I lifted the individuals that I resented. I relisted the institutions that I resended. I listened to the principles that I had great objection to, you know? Loving and being loved, being on time, being accountable for my actions. Hated all that stuff. When I got to this enough, I realized I just got out my address book. Because it basically got down to because the question I ask myself when doing an inventory is how free do you want to be? How free do you want to be when that thing goes by and you go Well, not really, right? Well, if it floated by, write it down. We can discuss it later whether or not it's pertinent, right. And people always ask me, Earl, can you have a resentment in your life that you have no part in? And my answer to that is probably. There weren't any in mine. But I have actually sponsored a couple of guys that had some things listed. And there was, they had no part in it. Right? They had no party. There are circumstances that can occur in life that can cause you great deep-seated resentment that you have no part of. Yeah, I've actually seen it and I'd be happy to discuss with anybody one of these breaks that we have along the way. For you smokers, of which I am now a proud non-member of that group. The smokers. No, here's the smokers Anyway. So you do the inventory, right? I list my resentments. I resent my father. Call him too. Why do I resent him? What's my specific resentment against my father? Well, I got 54 resentments against my Father. Right? 54. List them. 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D, or 1-1, 1-2, 13, 14, 1, 157. 1-57. I've got 57 resentments against my father, specifically. What areas of my life are affected by this? I use the seven things that I was taught to come up in the book. It affects my personal relations, sexual relations, pride, self-esteem, security, ambition, pocketbook. Yeah, that's seven. I list any or all of those that are affected as a result of this specific relationship. What's my part in it? I list four things in the books. Selfish, dishonest, self-seeking, frightened. What are these things that aren't in the book? And specifically how did this come about in my life? Next. Now other guys break it down way more than that. One other guy that I hold in high regard, adore him, has now come to the belief that there is no fourth column. That it's a three column inventory. I have yet to discuss this with him. I have absolutely no idea what he's talking about. But I'm willing to listen. I'm not going to reject it out of hand. Fine, you got another way of doing it? Let's hear it. It works for me? I'll give it a shot. Because this isn't about this way. It's about doing it. It's not about getting this stuff down on paper and being relieved of this. This is the stuff that I put between me and you and me and God. So I get out my phone book because basically I realized at one point my address book, if I knew you well enough to put your name and phone number in my addressbook, at some point you had frightened me. And if you frighten me, you piss me off. You frighten me, I resent you. Now early on all you had to do to frighten me was walk up and say, how's it going? Well what the hell are you asking me that for? How the hell am I supposed to know what's going on? I don't know what'S going on. And clearly you don't either or you wouldn't be asking me. I hate you. This is all entirely too much work, talking to you. Write them down. I had Thomas Jefferson on my inventory. Have you ever read this guy's life story? The stuff that he did? Who could live up to this? Hated that man. Institutions, groups of people. And what you write down, it doesn't have to look good. You don't have say, oh, you know, I don't really like that I feel that way. Write it down. That's your best way out of it, right? You may discover that you're a bigot. A racist. A liar. A thief. You may discover that your all of them and that you don't like that about you. Maybe those lessons your daddy taught you are not lessons you should have embraced or cared to embrace. And you've gotten to a point where to be who you really are which is not a racist not a biggot, not a thief, not alive. That the ills of your father, that you can say, no, this is not who I am. I disagree with this. That you can get to a place in order to save your own life where you can make your own father wrong. Not easy to do for a lot of us. But we get there in this process. If we write it down and see the pattern of your own light, see it right there. I resent this stuff, right? Fear inventory. What am I afraid of? Fear of flying. Why? Because I crashed, right? It's not a phobia. Thank you. He gets an extra bagel. It's not a phobia, it's based on my experience, right, that I'm afraid of flying, right. Why am I scared of crash? And then move through your inventory, move through. Basically what I've discovered is I'm afraid of two things. I'm afraid of rejection and I'm a freighter of abandonment. So I'm afraid of pretty much every fear I've got, you can put under one category or the other, right? In the 12 and 12 in the seventh step, right second to last page, it says self centered fears the chief activator of all my defects of character, either I'm not going to get something I want, or I'm going to lose something I already have objection and abandonment, and it gets real real simple so that when I'm functioning in my life, I don't have this blanket, vague, unexamined wall of fear that I can throw up in the world. You know what I mean? So when you walk up to me and suddenly you're confronting me, Earl, I hate your discussion about step three. Wall of fear. Now lob things over the wall until this person goes away. Yeah, well, I like your clothes. I don' t like your discussion on step for? I hate you. I don't like you either. Screw you! Make him go away, he's scaring me. Then the person goes away. But if I recognize all I'm afraid of is fear, I have a fear of not getting what I want or losing something in my hand, I'm scared of two things, right? So you come up and you scare me, and I throw my wall up here, and it's gone. Oh, that didn't work. I've got to take a deep breath and go, what am I afraid of here? I'm afraid I'm not going to get something I want to be accepted by you, or I'm going to lose something I already have. The reason for being here. Or just fill in your own blank, whatever it may be. What works for you, right? And it's just silly. And so then you say, you know, I don't like your thing on step three. And I go, well, you know what? Let me take you back to the room back there. There's a whole bunch of tapes and stuff of other guys back there. Some of whom I think are really good at talking about the book. Maybe one of them has got a way of breaking down step three or step four that you like. May I suggest Joe and Charlie? Right? It's got nothing to do with me. You don't like it? Okay. Fine. I personally delight in the way I do this. find your own way this is just one little glimpse of it I don't have this thing wrapped up I'll come back here next year sit down and go remember that time I was out here you got a tape of that last one burn it we got a whole new way of doing it what would that mean would that means that I was wrong today no would mean that I've continued to explore the process. I have another way of communicating it. I have a different experience of it now, which requires yet another way of communicating. So you just find your way through. Some of you are going to become big Joe and Charlie fans. Those are going be your guys. So that guy and that guy and that one guy? Crap! Then you're going to pick out a Joe H. guy. The rest of us are peasants. find your own way it's all good because what you are if you're prescribing to a particular path is is that you're saying i'm an alcoholic and i seek this thing i seekthis process i seek this unfolding in my own life and that's what it's about so that's all we're doing here today is wrestling with it this way today all right so i do these four column inventories on resentment fear and sex right now in step five i'm supposed to reveal these before god to another human being I'm supposed to sit down with somebody and get it out I would suggest doing that really, it's not that deep do you know what I mean? what you have to do the specific way you go about it the book will suggest this is how you go about it a bill talks about all kinds of stuff in the fourth step He talks about, only thing in the 12 and 12 I disagree on. This is just me. I actually disagree with something he says. He says, well, if you got a bunch of really, really heavy stuff that you read most of it to your sponsor and then you go to another person, there's one paragraph, and talk about the rest of it with somebody else. I don't go for that personally. I was so good at compartmentalizing my life when I was out there. That was one of my major problems was that nobody knew the whole story. This guy knows a little bit. She knows a Little bit. That guy knows A little bit You know a little Bit but nobody Knows her Oh really nobody Knows the whole deal and There's pieces in each of Those compartments that say An awful lot about who i am So i had to find me that's Just me i had To find a place Where i could give it all up All of it in one place so That's what i did before god Do another human being and i Sat down and i laid out my Four columns and resentment Inventory and i did it in columns, right? And I read it in rows, right. I wrote my resentment list until it was done. Then I went to column two and answered the stuff in column two. When that was done, I went to column three. When I read it to the individual that I read it to, I read it across in the rows. One one, one two, one three, one four, one five, till one was done then I went two and I read across. And that was how it became a completely different document, doing it that way. Instead of just this way, all of a sudden I'm doing it in another way. And this incredible pattern of behavior in my life is revealed to me, right? So that was the fifth step. I sat down and I did it. Was I happy about this? No. Was it a comfortable experience for me? Absolutely not. Did I have a lot of discussion with my sponsor as I was reading it to him? No. Anything that was said in that meeting other than what I had written down was conversation that he introduced. My job was to show up and read what I Had Written, not offer further explanation, not going to read what was written, not an occasional preemptive strike where I would sit and go, now this next one. Let me discuss this next one with you. I want to restate that I was not in my right mind, that I personally do not consider this to be an example of who I am. None of that. He'd just shut up and read it. And I read it, and occasionally he would say, time out. Right? Read that last one again. I love that one. And he would do that to me. Or he would do the wonderful, loving sponsor type thing where he would say, that reminds me of a story because he'd see that I'd read one that I was particularly ashamed of. And he would say, That reminds me Of a story and he tells some atrocious story about something he'd done that was very, very similar to this hideous event in my life, right? And it relieved me. I mean, there was healing that went on as the process took place. Because of who he was. I mean, it was just an amazing, amazing experience. Did I feel, and at the end of the step, fifth step, I felt different. What I felt was remarkably exposed. That's what I felt. And it was remarkably uncomfortable. But it was the only way I was going to discover for myself that I could tell you the truth about who I was and you wouldn't throw me way. That you would just consider me more as one of yours is with you than before, right? That was it for me and that was the only way a guy like me was... Believing you because you told me some? Nah. Not like I got it when I did it. When I did it, I was in. I was In. I showed up and I looked at my sponsor when I was done with my fifth step and I said to him, now all I have to do is wait for you to die. And he looked at me and he said, oh isn't that lovely? And then he walked away. Amazing experience. An amazing experience. Let's take a break. Thank you for listening.