Why the First Three Steps Are the Operative Skeleton of Recovery – Bob B.

The Grace of God in A.A. since the 10th of December 1967, for that I am very grateful. It's good to be here in Bellevue and Omaha. Dick Martin is my sponsor, and it's been a lovely thing for me since I lost my sponsor five years ago, and I have great love and admiration for Peggy and Dick Martin. I'm going to the meeting is going to be two hours all together including a break. I'm going to spend about a half hour, 25 minutes telling my story and then I'm gonna go into my experience with the steps. I am going to do it a little differently than I normally do it so what I hope is that there's some continuity in that. I will probably stop after around step three every ten minute break and we'll come back. So the tapers can set up a different cassette and all that kind of stuff. I started drinking when I was a freshman in high school. I was 13 or 14 years old. When I was in highschool I was 4 foot 11, 95 pounds, second smallest kid in the class. Had a big mouth, was kind of the class clown. You can't be the class athlete when you're I tried out for football but I had a back problem I had a yellow streak down the back of it so you're just insecure you know we all it seems like everybody else got to school an hour early held a meeting decided what to do for the day and I kept missing the meeting you know it's it's so you just kind of look around you start to you know decide or evaluate what other people want to see, and you do your very best job of kind of showing them what they see. And through a lot of hard work, I got to be a marginal member of the in-group. And I went to a military high school on a college campus, Catholic Military High School. We drank in high school like most people drink in college. We had fraternities. Our parents were the Second World War veterans that came back. They worked hard, played hard, drank hard, made life look very easy. The cocktail parties were the order of the day, and we stole booze from our parents and found out who would sell it to us underage if we had a necktie on and all that kind of stuff. So when I started drinking, it was just like a—it was wonderful. As our speaker talked about last night, it wasn't like an improvement. It was more like a sex change operation. It just kind of went through every portal of my body and just kind of transformed me from a marginal member of the group to kind of feeling like I was a group owner. All of a sudden, whatever discomforts I had in that process just melted and disappeared. And I chased, you know, of my six or seven closest friends in high school, four of us are members of Alcoholics Anonymous and two of the wives are members of Alcoholic Anonymous. That is, you know, and we're all still married, which is kind of unusual. A friend of mine says I live in a Catholic non-divorce zone, so it is, I was born and raised in a Catholic ghetto, so that was, so I drank my brains out. It was, we drank hard, and early on I got in trouble. I was the guy who made the false ID cards for everybody in the, you all my friends and got in a lot of trouble car accidents I got arrested a couple of times and I thought I really thought my drinking problem was that I was underage you know you couldn't there was no easy comfortable way to do it unless you know when you were comfortable while you're with your buddies but you were not comfortable when the cops caught you or your parents culture different parents reacted to it differently my parents were never quite okay with me drinking. And so I didn't really think I had a drinking problem, I didn t think I drank differently than my parents, I did n t think I drank different than my friends when they started having me go to psychiatrists. My psychiatrist said, I think you do, I just pick different friends and do it more often. And there was some truth in that, I d n t like it. By the time I finished high school, I wanted to get out of town. It was just the The heat was on, I was starting to develop a reputation. Had a chance to go away to college, thought I'd get away from the authorities and everything would be okay, and it wasn't. Drank my way out of the University of Notre Dame in the middle of my senior year. I'm in the yearbook with my class ring and I walk out of, but I was in civil engineering carrying 25 credits a semester going to school one day a week. Just kind of tough to bluff your way through a thermodynamics exam. And I had the highest test marks of the there were a dozen of us in my class that went down to Notre Dame It was the only one who didn't finish That's my story. That's our story. It is you know, we interview well. We just have a performance issue We can get in we just have trouble performing them other than that it's really not not a bad deal and I was a class drunk I mean they use my room as a study hall I started out as a B plus A student and ended up as a 2.000 guy who wouldn't have been that had I finished my first semester of my senior year. And I was due to be commissioned in the Army, and I had to get a medical release or I would have been drafted into the Vietnam War, and the medical release I got was for alcoholism. I was diagnosed an alcoholic at 19. I thought that was goofy. I just, I mean, didn't think I was old enough to be an alcoholic. You know, I mean, there was nothing about that label that seemed like I was looking for neurosis or some sort of something, you know, that they could medicate. And when I was an alcoholic, it got me out of the service. I came home. I met a set of very disappointed parents, and I finished school at a local university in St. Paul, Minnesota. When I finished high school, my dad asked me to leave home. He said, I'm one of seven kids, great set of parents. He said, we love you, but we do not know what the hell to do with you. Got a job at a liquor store. It's important to use your gifts. This is now the last year of my drinking. I'm drinking a fifth a day. I'm loaded, driving the delivery truck. I'm stealing booze from the place I work. Just goofy. I get fired after about six months. I got in trouble with a ticket, and they fired me. I took a job as a waiter in downtown Minneapolis. I'm living not on Skid Row but damn close. You know Dr. Seuss, the child author? Those are actual photographs of people I lived with during the last year of my drinking. So I worked as a waitress. I got up about 10. I drank a couple of beers, went to work, worked from about 11 to 2. At 2 o'clock, I went to a bar, drank beer for three or four hours, went back on shift at 6 or 7 o'clock and worked till, you know. But I'd buy a pint, put it in my uniform, and I drank through the evening. And no one knows, this last six months especially, no one knew where I was, which was just fine with me. My life was about as tacky as it could possibly be, and I was more than pleased that people did not know the details of how and with whom I was living. And I went to a party one night, got my face kicked in. And I got fired as a waiter. And I had no place to go and I went back to my family and asked if I could move back in the house. They allowed me to come back in The Home. They asked me not to drink. I promised I wouldn't. I was unable to keep that promise. Never occurred to me you can get in trouble stopping drinking. So I started to go through withdrawal when I moved back in THE House. When I moved BACK IN THE HOUSE, I was about as tired of being the family jerk as they were of having me be the family jerk my sister was Phi Beta Kappa got a degree from the Sorbonne my brother was a great student at Notre Dame everybody thought Notre Dame was really tough until my brother went there I had everybody convinced that it was the difficulty that was causing my trouble and turned out it wasn't the difficulty it might have been something else And I was lodged between those two show-offs. And when I moved back in the house, I really tried to alter my life. I thought, okay, now I got back together with Linda. Would you stand up for a second? I know you don't like that, but that's... Linda is a soon-to-be 48-year member of Alcoholics Anonymous. It's this month, isn't it? What did I say, AA? Oh, no, no. She drinks a dozen steps. It's a bad combination. Not work and AlcoholicsAnonymous. She's an Al-Anon, I'm sorry. to relate the importance of that in our partnership would be almost impossible it is to have someone who has their own program it's a wonderful thing for marriage the habit we've run into to examine our own part even when you're married to a raging horse's ass it's really nice to have somebody willing to take some ownership of the process so we don't turn the laser on each other with the regularity that we would if we didn't have a program that encouraged that. We're not sure anymore, we're so old. We had gone together for about a year, broke up for, I don't know, nine months or something like that. I'd call her about once a month just like a bad headache just so she couldn't get anything going with anybody else. I went to the draft board I got accepted into Officer Candidate School they lost my file they said you've got to take the physical again and then I went back to the physical for the fourth time and they failed me for a hearing issue I can't hear dog whistles and tree toads and I got exempted which was really good then I got a job as an executive trainee in a manufacturing concern bought my first car rather quickly, not too long after that I asked Linda if we could get back together and seriously consider marriage and she allowed that. She was a psychiatric nurse working in an alcohol ward so while she's attractive she's one sandwich short of a picnic I think would be the way I would describe that but we were young and in love and you know, love conquers all everything's going to be okay and so now I'm going to become a grown up suit and tie, go to work every day. I could not quit drinking. It never occurred to me. I had quit for three months I don't know at the end of my first part of my senior year and my life didn't clean up I didn't become what I thought you were telling me I'd become if I just wouldn't drink. I didn't become a great student. My life was still a catastrophe. Sober, it was more unbearable than it was drinking. And I thought when I'm really, I can quit, I just quit for three months. So now I get this job and I can't quit. Now I'm the company drunk. I stand out like Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer. I use up my sick leave in the first three months of work. I'm coming in late, I'm falling asleep at my desk, sleeping my hangovers off in the darkroom. We had a photographer friend of mine that would hide me when I was in really bad shape. When I went back to make amends with my boss, he said, God, you interviewed so well. I said, yeah, we do. So I quit that job at six months and I take a job as a salesperson to figure that gave me more flexibility and have a tougher time keeping track of me and I had that job, I think a couple of months and a buddy of ours got married and weddings were always good for a pretty good run and I went out on a four day drunk and I woke up on a Thursday sometime in July 1967 hugging the toilet doing my morning exercises and that was my moment of truth and that wasn't my moment we all have those moments some of us pass them but that was not my moment and I called Alcoholics Anonymous. And they sent two guys out to see me, and as soon as I got off the phone, I found out I still had a job, a fiancé, and a place to live, and I thought maybe I had overreacted when I called alcoholics anonymous, but I wanted to go see what an alcoholic looked like. I had this curiosity, so I went and met these two guys. One guy had six months, and one guy had 6 years, and they sat me down in a cafe about 2 miles from our house. And they said, we're from AA, we had a drinking problem, I found a solution for it. I want to share it with you. We hope it helps you. If it doesn't help you, don't worry about it. For some strange reason, it helps us talking to guys like you. And they told me their story. And they changed my life. When you're young and in trouble, my parents put me in front of every kind of help you could possibly be put in front OF. I have been to doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs, bishops, priests, nuns, psychologists, psychiatrists, proctologists. I had had just about every kind of help that anybody could have in that process. But I never talked to another person who had a drinking problem. I was always kind of the subject. You were always in a room being asked a lot of questions, and a lotof the questions had to do with why. One of the great things when you finally come to Alcoholics Anonymous, why did you park the car in the living room? They don't ask you why. They have a story, something like that. They know why. the why needs no explanation and in the sharing of their lives with me they changed my life and I went to my first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous that night I drank twice after that, I drank once after 30 days I was out on the west coast on a business trip I was told to call AA, I did not, I told everybody I had a bet and I wasn't drinking and I stayed sober one week and drank the second week, got into a lot of trouble, drove back and then I was sober around 90 days and Linda and I were married and I had a little slippy poo on our honeymoon. And you know where the divers dive off those cliffs in Mexico? I dove off those cliffs on my last honeymoon. I was in the audience watching a world's high diving contest. I thought, God, that's not so tough. And I got up to about 90 feet, split my swimsuit, cut my leg I'm watching the waves, you know, to kind of see how it goes I'm trying to decide whether to jump or dive. And when Joe Leith talked about it, when Norm Albee talks about seconds and inches, and I figured out how to help with it, and I decided to dive. If I would have jumped, I would Have Dived. You have to get out 30 feet to hit the middle of the channel. I did not know that. I might have known it intuitively, but I did Not Know It Detectively. And God does watch after drunks and fools. I made it, and I had my last drink on the airplane on the way home December the 10th, 1967. One week after our wedding. You can imagine how Linda felt with her horse's ass lodged up on the cliff looking at I've been going to AA meetings at that time for four months. Linda had been driving me. I lost my license. I lost it a lot. A lot of bad luck. so I come back turn myself in to my sponsor I met my sponsor at my first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous his name was Warren McGinley he died 5 years ago Warren was the 12 step champion of the uptown group of Alcoholic Anonymous he did more 12 step work we had around 800 members maybe 600, in all the different meetings. We had this funny thing called squads. So we had 6 o'clock meetings and 8 o' clock meetings and there were discussion groups and he was a powerful ordinary man. Second World War vet, lost half his crew in Italy in a bomb disposal crowd. His wife was Linda's sponsor and everything that I've had the privilege of doing in Alcoholics Anonymous has come from being Warren's wingman. I just started copying him and I fell into being a very active member of Alcoholics Anonymous which has been the best thing that ever happened to me. He sat me down in a chair. I can still remember the chair I was sitting in when he told me this. He said, Bob, alcoholism is a disease physical, mental and spiritual. Threefold. Once you cross the line from problem drinking into alcoholism, your alcoholism affects you all the time when you are drinking and when you were not drinking. the idea that my alcoholism could affect me when I was not drinking was a very new idea he said do you ever quit I said yeah, he said did it work I said no, he didn't work for me either he said in AA abstinence is not the operative word sobriety is the operitive word once we take our last drink or pill whatever it is we use the 12 steps of the AA program to change to find a different way to live that's better than the way we lived before so we don't have to go back to drugs or booze to do something for us that we're unwilling or unable to do for ourselves. If you don't change, you will not stay. Gettysburg Address to Alcoholics Anonymous. It would be hard for me to tell you how impacted I was. Now, I'm 23 years old. I had my last drink when I was a week after my 24th birthday. I'm in a room with grown-ups. I mean, probably maturity-wise, I'm 18 years old bodily. I'm 24 years old, having a large liver. And I'm in a room with mostly Second World War vets, a really attractive group of men, and 30 men and two women, Rose and Helen. And there were two women on Wednesday night and two men on Thursday night. That those men had the same issue that I had was almost mentally astounding to me. And to listen to them talk about, I wasn't married. I didn't have a career. But to lace in and identify with what was going on with the unexplained behavior, the broken promises in every arena of my life, I started to see, and they said, look, kid, you're in a garbage truck. You know where it's going. You can get off at any time you want to, but if you don't get off, it's gonna go all the way to down. You're just earlier in the process than some of us were, and you're not all that damn early in the progress. She was a pretty good drinker for a young guy. They didn't tell me I, you know, they spilled more than I drank. They were very welcoming and glad I was an alcoholic nomad. So I started my journey through the steps. In Minnesota, in St. Paul, Minnesota, 95% of the meetings when I came in were closed step discussion groups. You got the step, you gave it for five minutes, we broke up into two or three different groups and we finished the discussion and then we hang out. I was a pretty active member. I'm going five, six, seven meetings a week. And so I had this feeling. I finally found out what was wrong with me. You know, and I thought, okay, if I've got the problem and AA's got the answer, I mean, I'm home, baby. This is, you know, I're finally going to be. My mother always said, you're not very bright, Bob. Dress well. And I looked like the guy you wanted on the team. I was a guy who, you know I scored well I was the guy that you would expect if you were saying, who's going to do well well that kid should do okay well I never did okay over a long period of time for short periods of time I had my moments of brilliance with long gaps between my moments of brilliancy and so I had significant living problems I think today and I really felt so what were my living problems I couldn't get up in the morning small problem if you have a job I later found out that it had something to do with when I went to bed but I did not know that at the time that I was wrestling with this issue I had financial difficulty I was spending about three to five hundred dollars more a month than I made which if you do that over a long period this is 1967 dollars now, if you did that over a long time period of time, you end up in debt. I just want to report that to you in case you don't know where this is going. And we started to have children pretty soon after we were married and I was loud, impatient, angry and sometimes violent with my children as they got a little older not as they were infants and I'm still ashamed of it But I was deeply ashamed of that. That was a pattern that was in our home, and it was three or four generations old, and I was carrying it on, and I'm responsible, not the pattern. And I had a gambling issue. More of a hobby. Four or five hours a day, four or five days a week. It wasn't a big deal. But I'm making five to ten grand a year playing backgammon. so I've always supported myself by gambling I was a pool player and a card player and it was just, I mean the fact that I gave up my education to be a good pool player and a car player along with being a drunk you know, I went back Notre Dame has had me down twice to give talks at Notre Dame I went black and I walked that campus and I see how young the people are and I have this memory about how I was screwed up which I did And, you know, it just was amazing. You know that movie Rudy? He really went there. I just kind of passed through. I never had the experience I was intended to have. I mean, it's just nuts. But that's what we do. You don't have a life. If you're an alcoholic, it's going to rob you of every qualitative aspect of your life. And along with the gambling issue, I had work issues. I had trouble getting to work. I had some difficulty staying at work and it was, I didn't do much work at work other than that I was a pretty good worker and I'm going to take that issue in a few minutes and spend a little bit more time on it even though it's an old issue I'm gonna use it kind of as an example to go through the steps with you because I had a level of powerlessness around that, that was probably the most stark example for me that I had. And each of those issues, when I came in Alcoholics to Alchemists I had a wall built up around me. The wall builtup around me kept you from seeing, I thought it kept you, I didn't know it was made of glass. I thought it was make of cement. And I kept you form seeing what I didn' t want you to see about me. And the thinking that went on behind the wall said you like me but you only like what I let you see about me. If you could see everything about me, you'd hate me. I hate me. And who knows more what a crummy, lousy, insufficient person I am than me? I'm walking around comparing my inside with your outside. And I finally got so sick and tired of myself, I just couldn't stand it. And I called out Gleisner. So I started to tear the walls down. I tore down them the first time I met with those. I shared stuff in that first contact with those men. I hadn't shared with my psychiatrist of four or five years. I continued that conversation with my sponsor, and I tore the wall all the way down when I took my first fifth step and I made a discovery. The discovery is you're not unique. Your personality's unique. Not your illness, not your behavior, not your experiences, not you feelings. And I started to have a sense of hope that would work for you could work for me. Most of us come in with such an overdeveloped sense of uniqueness, especially today. But I mean, this is the generation of me. I mean it is, the level of self-centeredness has gotten to be such an art form, it is just almost impossible to, you know, society used to be more cooperative, used to be more, you Know, but today it is the level of self centeredness is just taken so far over the top It's almost indescribable. But if you don't lose some of that uniqueness, you're going to look for the differences rather than the similarities, and you're moving yourself out of alcoholics anonymous. That breaking down of that wall, that surrender experience is absolutely essential to us when we come in. I don't think we appreciate it to an extent because for a lot of us it's invisible, and yet the old-timers can see the change in us. We often can't see the changes in ourselves. It is just amazing. You don't know it, but someone finally lit your pilot light. It had been out. And once the old-timers kind of saw that event happening, where all of a sudden the unteachable person, the impenetrable person is offering information about themselves, is going to four or five meetings a week, is asking for help, reading the book, having conversations. I mean, things that we would never do. I mean it's just astounding. The conversations that I sit in AA meetings, you wouldn't dream of having those conversations about a spiritual awakening or how you're doing with your men. I mean, those would have been so far removed from our way of life and even our ability to be able to participate in a conversation like that. So I had these five or six problems. I went through the steps in the first, I don't know, six months when I came back. and I had all those problems with gambling, parenting, marriage, sex, gambling, work, money and none of those made my first fifth step. My first fifthstep was a recitation of the worst things that I'd done in my life. I did it in the form of a general confession which is hinted at in the book and I didn't get to any of the causes and conditions but I felt a real sense of relief. You know, I didn't do it according to the strict manner of the book. I didn' t have a good sense of my defective character during the first year I was sober. The first nine months. I was on a honeymoon. I just loved everything about AA. I just couldn' t get enough of it. Well, it was the only place in my life that worked. I was the youngest guy in the group for a couple of years. Everybody's patting me on the head telling me what a great job I'm doing. Work's not working. Home's not workin'. Parenting's not workerin'. Money is not workerin'. I'm not workerin'. I mean, it's not going good. AA is the only, you know, that was my haven. And it's amazing how many skills I've learned in Alcoholics Anonymous that I've been able to take out into the world and forge a better way of living. One by one, that list of five or six unmanageabilities in my life that I told you about were presented to me at the end of my first year and end of second year of sobriety. One by when I took them on. And I thought, okay, you got me sober, I'll learn how to be a husband. You got me sober, now sober I'll know how to work. I'll deal with my gambling. I will do better with money. I wasn't able to do any of that. I'd make some progress but overall I didn't make much progress. In my third year they started to bother the hell out of me. In my fourth and fifth year I was deeply troubled by the fact that this answer I had found didn't turn out to be as magical, you actually had to do something about life. It is brick by brick I built the damn wall back up and I found myself seven years sober in Alcoholics Anonymous with the wall built back up. I thought when I came into Alcoholics Anonymous I was going to find someone with so much insight about life and the wisdom of Alcoholics anonymous that they could look right through me and see specifically what was wrong with Bob Bazans. I never found that. I have not found that to this day. What happened to me is I surrendered and I became an alcoholic, and I was surrounded by all sorts of people that knew alcoholism and the answer and the recovery from alcoholism. They didn't deal with Bob Bazans specially. They dealt with Bob B., the alcoholic. Little did I know that that was going to be my path to resolve the peculiarities of Bob. Now, I'm not very peculiar. There's a lot of people in AAR, but I'm none. So I found myself at 7 or 8. I'm telling my sponsors 65% of what's going on, and I know in Nebraska you tell your sponsors 100%. I think that's really cool. But I was only telling myself 65% of what's going on. Life is lived for, but it's understood backwards. You do not see it while you're in it. You see it in retrospect. And so I was pretty stuck. I found myself at seven or eight years of sobriety in real trouble. I wasn't thinking about drinking, but I was thinking about putting a gun in my mouth. I was about as tired of the pattern of starting well and finishing poorly or not finishing at all. I was a suit. I mean, I really looked good. I sounded good. And there was no one home. I mean I just, you know, I was the guy that they'd ask in college to be the emcee of the program. Me and one of my drinking sober friends now we were the emceeds. We were the life of the party. We were socially skilled. But no one was home. And when it really came to living life I didn't know how to do it I did not know how to do, great examples around me my parents were my heroes I had extraordinary parents I have astounding brothers and sisters and I did not know what to do and it wasn't as if I could tell you what to do I just seemed to be not willing or able to do and at first it's just oh I don't have the rhythm I'll get this. But as the pattern goes on, I'm not going to get it. And so at seven or eight years of sobriety, I'm in deep crap. And I thought, at the time, I was also deeply ashamed of being seven or 8 years sober, having problems that I don't think you're supposed to have at seven or 8 year sober. And since I've been around a while, it is the rule not the exception. It seems to me that all of us have a second come to Jesus session somewhere between 5 and 15 years of sobriety. You do not get it all done in the first year or the second year which is a little deceptive because in the first and second year we do so many astounding things with our lives. In the shadow of our surrender we take on issues. I see young people in sober houses doing stuff I'm just damn glad I don't have to do today and they're doing it with dignity it's fun to watch, they're in the game they're doin' the deal and it's fine to watch the lights come on it's finn to watch them empower you know, be empowered in their lives and that's the privilege that's why we say the new person is the most important person in the world tell my favorite joke there's this kid on top of this hill with a bicycle and down below at the bottom of the hill is this minister reading the newspaper waiting for the bus. And the kid comes down the hill, the bike goes out of control, the kid crashes the bike, bends the wheel, tears his pants like it cuts his leg, and the little kid stands up and says, son of a bitch! And the minister says, son, you should not talk like that. I mean, the next time you really have a difficulty in your life, I want you to stand up and say, Jesus help me. So six months later, same kid, same minister, same hill, same bike kids on top of the hill minister down at the bottom of the bus stop the kids come down the hill the bike goes out of control he goes head over key kettle comes down bends the wheel of the bike tears his pants cuts his leg and he stands up and he says Jesus help me and his leg healed and his pants came together and the wheel straightened out and the minister said son of a bitch and that is what we get to see we get to see empowerment and grace at a level that is transformative not just improving, not just a little bit better, we get the lights come on I see it a little more in women I don't know why that is but you see these women come in and it's like there's no one home. The lights are absolutely not on. And all of a sudden, you know, two months later, I don't know what that's about. Two months later they come in and it looks like they're a different person. They look different. They just look different And there, when your spirit is awakened, it's noticeable. Noticeable to almost everybody in the room. So I found myself, well, I'm dragging this on. At any rate, at eight years, I was at the end of my rope. interestingly enough my wife also had a kind of a collapse at seven and a half, eight years of sobriety and I out of just fear of not getting drunk but fear of being a sober jerk I went back through the steps for the third time powerless and unmanageable you bet you know what I had lost I lost up to. I believed it for us but not for me and I had a refined step too and I started to see people with bigger problems than I had with smiles on their faces walking through walls I was trying to avoid with dignity and I came to believe at seven and a half years I regained my belief that God was going to restore Bob DeZahn's insanity I took step three on my knees with my sponsor in his office we didn't do that in those days much and it was awkward and a little bit embarrassing but I said this time I'm going to dot the i's cross the t's and I did my third fourth step best fourth step I think I've ever taken because of the level of pain I was in and I went and I took my third fifth step and I talked with my sponsor and I had done the previous two with clergy which is how we were kind of trained to do we had clergy lined up to do them and I said look when I'm done with this be careful because whatever you recommend I'm gonna do I said I feel like I'm dying of thirst lying next to a lake. I know what to do. I just don't or can't do it. And I'm tired of that. Did my fifth step. When I was done with my fifth step, one of the recommendations, he said, look, you've got a lot of issues around work, money, failure and success. My father was a pretty successful guy and I'm never going to be as good as my dad all that kind of stuff he said I want you to find a psychologist that works with business people my sponsor was a mailman and he said I want to go have a conversation with him about those issues and I want him to bring the conversation back to me so I found a guy found a psychologist recommended he wanted to get my parents involved I said no my parents are not going to get involved I said, well, you get your wife involved. She thought, oh, crap. Well, when your wife's in the room, there's a whole bunch of data that is not in the room when she is not at the room. The conversation has a tendency to go in directions that you don't always control. Yeah, I'll get my wife involved if you want to have my kids there. And I was, what the hell do you want my children there for? and I don't remember if they went all the time or they just went once or twice so I'm in this room and we're there four or five times and I'm trying to explain to them my company is going down the chute and I have to file bankruptcy and I bust in my ass two or three hours a day oh, I know you've not had this problem I hope you enjoy it at my expense and he looked at me and he said why are you so afraid of failing and I wanted to punch him I was just like he had punched me I mean I just wanted to jack him I said look I've lived in this town all my life I'm in the real estate investment business I'm about to lose everything I have they're going to publish my name in the paper I said you're a doctor You go broke, you go bankrupt, you just walk down the hall, pound your sign on another door. Within six months you're making a hundred grand. I'm about to lose everything I had. Nod your head up and down if you understand that. He looked at my wife and he said, Linda, if Bob lost everything he had, would he lose you? Linda said, no. Wouldn't lose me. And he asked the kids that question. They said, No, wouldn't lose us. if you can't lose, you can play. I didn't even make, I was a sales guy, in fact one of my chief responsibilities, I never made sales calls. I just phoned up activity reports. I never took the chance that you'd grab me by the throat and drag me across the desk and force me to sell you something. I never. And what I discovered in that man's office that day was fear. Now, I had done inventories, but apparently I had done incomplete inventories. But the fear inventory was dogs, snakes, and tall buildings. And I discovered I was afraid of being a husband. I was afraid of father. I wasn't afraid to work. I was afraid to failure. I'm swimming in fear and I do not know it. A little while after I was home one night reading the other big book, I had a horrible day. I went to work late, left early, got in the back end of the game. I won 600 bucks. I missed dinner. I missed the meeting. I came home. I slapped one of the kids and got in a fight with my wife. one of those days you like to have videotaped and sent to the general service office to show what eight years can do for you. I said, gee, it happened again. I said it happened again. Weren't you there? He said, yeah, I was there but it's so habitual it's almost like I'm in a blackout. I don't even have to think about this behavior and all of a sudden I realized that was a bunch of hooey. My life was the way it was because I designed it that way. I sounded like a guy who wanted to quit gambling. I wanted to gamble whenever the hell I wanted to gamble for as much money as I wanted to gamble and not have problems because of gambling. I wanted money without work. I wanted my wife and children's love and affection without spending time with them. Not a very good design. And all of a sudden I realized that I had tried as hard as I knew how to try to clean up my act and I had failed. And for some reason and I was able to say that to myself and stay with it. And I was given the opportunity to take the sixth and the seventh step at a level that I had not taken them before. The sixth step said that we're entirely ready to have God, not Bob, remove our defects of character. The seventh step said we humbly ask him to remove our shortcomings. I had spent seven or eight years trying to get rid of him. I do not have the power. I have the responsibility. But it happens through me, not by me. I am the pipe not the well a doctor doesn't heal he creates an inceptive environment creates an atmosphere in which healing can take place and God heals a farmer doesn't grow he plants his seed in the fertile soil and creates an environment in which growth can take place and God grows and we don't change we create an atmosphere where change can take place and we're empowered the power comes through us and we change in that process it's the attitude of being honest open minded and being willing and I think the attitude and power involved with the 6th and 7th step of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous that night I got down on my knees and took the 6nd and 7st step I quit gambling that night I knew that if I didn't put structure in place I'd make lots of promises and never fulfill them that I needed some structure I made a deal with my sponsor about when I'd go to work how long I'd stay to work and what I'd try to do at work I turned the checkbook over to my wife, who can manage money. Not all spouses can manage Money. My wife can. And I went on an allowance. She still puts $140, and I was up for $100. I feel like I'm kept. She still put $140 on the dresser every Friday. I don't think you did before we left. So I went out on an allowance. Later I would have, and I was on that allowance with no extra money for probably three or four years. I went to a psychologist to learn how to be a better parent. I think being a parent takes 125% of whatever you have. I mean having children is like having a bowling alley installed in your head. The instruction manual is a little skinny on some of that. And I started dating my wife. I dated my wife every Friday night for the next 35 years. It was one of the best things we ever did. We finally, one of her complaints was how active I was in AA and how inattentive I was on other matters. That date night, real live dangerous date. No one else went out on it with us. That date tonight turned out to be, you know, we could kind of slough things off because we were out talking about kids and bills. I mean, that isn't how we fell in love. We had to regain a romantic foundation for ourselves, and that allowed us to do that. And pretty soon, all of a sudden, the guy that didn't know how to work, my life took off like it was on a rocket ship. In the next 10 years, I made enough money to burn a wet elephant. Linda was able to quit work, and we were able to get some help in the house, and life got a lot better than it was. I never made less in a month after that day in my living room than I made in that year for the rest of my life up until now. The change was just astounding, such, I believe, as the empowerment of the 12 steps. I mean, you know, when we're empowered, I mean we're like lamps that aren't plugged in. I mean the difference is just indescribable. I go down, we winter someplace, and people find out you're an AA or don't drink. Oh, you're a don't-drink. Oh, yeah. You go to AA? Yeah. You still go? I said, yeah, why? She said, talk to Linda. Because normies don't get that. They think if you're sober 10 years, why would you continue to go? They just don't understand what we do in Alcoholics Anonymous. so that second surrender was as powerful for me and as life changing for me as my entry was into Al-Qaeda we if you talk to most of us casually and ask us the question what's the most important thing that's happened to you I would say AA has happened to me my recovery is the most important thing upon thinking about that. I don't think the recovery is the most important thing and the only thing. I think the most important thing that happened to me in my life was my collapse which brought me to my recovery in a way that I was able to stay. That surrender, which is invisible to some of us is what is the foundation of why we are here doing the work, doing the deal in applying the spiritual principles to our lives and maintain our spiritual condition. Without the surrender, we were unreachable. We are the most unreachible group of people in the world until we're reachable. And the thing that happened to us is being broken. It's a life-limiting experience. You're out on the edge of your life not knowing what to do. Your life collapses, and you open up. And in that opening, your ego collapses. And it's the collapse of the ego that allows us to be momentarily accepting and teachable. Without that collapse, we're a pain in the ass. Nothing happens. Our minds are so dense. Our uniqueness is so strong that people have been telling us for years what was wrong with us and what to do, and we heard nothing. and in a moment we were touched the same way Bill Wilson was touched someone asked Bill Wilson later about his spiritual awakening he said people make a real big deal out of that but I think if you took all the spiritual events of most members of Alcoholics Anonymous and compressed them into six minutes they too would see the sun and the stars it is astounding what we avail ourselves to the gift we've been given, not the gift of abstinence the gift of life the ability to be able to use the gifts that we have. Most of us had our gifts in a box under the piano with the ribbon still in the box unopened never to answer the question what instrument we were supposed to play in the business of living life when the players that I spend the most time with keep going through the steps the steps are the operative skeleton of our spiritual program they're the structure and it is in the steps deep when we first get here the steps may seem somewhat mechanical different the words seem a little odd but all of a sudden when we really start to get into them they progress as we progress in the program So I've had a lot of issues, if I were to take you up to date, for 10 years I had this wild success in business. In the middle 1980s they changed the tax act and my life collapsed. I lost $10 million, we lost our big house, our three children. We have three sons who are sober and alcoholics anonymous. They have 27, 25, and 17 years of sobriety, give or take. My father was an alcoholic synonymous, I have a brother an alcoholic synonymous and asserted other relatives as you go through the thing so if you talked about a level of gratitude because your children do not want to get sober by your help. My business partner of 48 years is 51 years sober and we've partners for the state for 40 48 years something like that 45 years when I go back through so my involvement with the steps has been kind of ongoing for a number of years we had step groups that were specially designed we get 15 or 20 people together and we make an agreement that we're going to go through and take the steps together they were not read them not study them we were going to take the steps. You did not have to do a fifth step with the group, but you had to make an appointment and they had to do the fifth step. And so we read the book, you know, we used Dr. Paul and Jerry Jones' little outline, that 16-page thing that you see that you go through, and we did it. And I found myself doing fourth and fifth steps with a rapidity that I didn't like. Oops. But when I see people, the tendency of... I sponsor quite a few men and when I've got a guy who's in trouble, his pants are on fire, he's been sober 25 years, he's lost the gift, he's trudging and he wants to know what to do and the only thing there really is to do. The only thing I know what to do is take people back through the steps. The tendency of most of us, if we were just left to our own demise to go through the Steps, is to go to Step 4 and 5, assuming that we don't have any issue. I'm 25 years sober. I got it. But for most of you, for most one of us the core issues of the troubles in our lives today are grounded in the first three steps. They're grounded in the fact that we're trying to manage our own lives and we're not effectively managing our own life. We now think with the information we have, with the knowledge we have with the experience we have with the words we have with the book we have I'll take it from here. I could answer the question for you. You could ask for a problem that you have in your life I know what the answer is. I know What the answer Is for the problem of my life. then why the hell can't you demonstrate it? I mean, the problem is that we know the answer to the booby prize. We can't demonstrate at a level that is... We can'T deal with ongoingly. That's the human condition. It is a dilemma. I mean it's the nature of the spiritual walk. Life is fired at you at point-blank range. There's no preparation for it. As one of my meditation books says, I didn't design you to know what to do. I designed you to be close to me. So when we go back to the steps, when we Go Back to the First Three Steps, to really engage powerlessness, because the ultimate dilemma that we're facing is we're trying to manage our lives with the information we have. We're trying To Manage Our Lives With The Program We Have. and that's you know not possible we don't have the power to do that we have to access the power in order to access the power, we haveto surrender how the hell do you tell someone how to surrender it is, I mean you can point to it you can describe it but because it's a spiritual process you can't contain it in words so when Bill talks about pain being the touchstone of growth, that's what for most of us is pain that brings us back to the work. But the mind says look why don't you go to a fourth and fifth step workshop I think if you get a little better technique on the fourth and fifth, does anybody in the room not know enough about their defects of character? Some people early in the process don't, I mean they really aren't but for those of us that have been doing the work for a while Lack of information about what's not working in our lives is not what's going on. We may not be engaged with it in a very present way, but we may have denied and stuffed and packed away and we're not in relationship with it, but we know it. The problems that we have in the room, the problems that I have in my life today, they aren't weeks old. They're years old. and some of them are really in the way in essential areas of our lives and some of us have just kind of despaired in that process and say that's just the way I am oh bullshit, it isn't the way you are it's what you do you can change your behavior you can buy a Chevy rather than a Ford doesn't change who you are you can start to be kind rather than angry all the time You can start to tell the truth rather than lie. You can stop stealing. That's just what you do. It's not who you be. But you don't have the power to do that. You do not have thepower to manage your own life. You can't even control your thoughts. Try to meditate? I mean, when you try to meditate, you find out how busy your mind is. My God Almighty, it's just unbelievable how much stuff goes through the pipe. And if you really think you generate your thoughts, stop them. We can't. Okay. We can. So not only can we not control the thoughts that we have, we can't control the emotions that attend to those thoughts. We have to access the power greater than ourselves. When your emotional content gets to a certain level, your IQ cuts in half. so emotion dominates the intellect but spirit dominates both of them spirit is access to the main frame it brings a healing, a power a wisdom and a knowing that is not available in a psychological and intellectual process a process of psychology and intellect is not enough, and insight is not enough to give us access to the transformative power of the steps. And we again have to go back and see that our lives are powerless and unmanageable. That our alcoholism, someone said, are you cured? No. Well, if you're not cured, we may lose the relationship to powerlessness. We still have the mental and the spiritual aspects of the disease active today, which is why we attend to Alcoholics Anonymous to maintain our spiritual condition. So I have to go back and reclaim the first step in a very real way, not an intellectual way, because if all I have it as a mind thing is not going to be deep enough and powerful enough to transform, I'm not going get the result out of the steps. The steps are not mechanical. If they were mechanical, all you'd have to do is click your heels and say the third-step prayer and you'd be back in Kansas. There would be no issue. But sometimes you go say the prayer and no one's home. It's dry. And sometimes going through the steps in a perfunctory, mechanical way is okay. Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly. I mean that. But over a period of time, we need to engage like we're really powerless because that's the core and central issue that I will come back and talk to after a five minute break