The Progressive Disease That Only Got Better as He Grew – Bob B.

You should be okay, so not to give you a big head or anything, but Bob come on up here I need your help, Bob. Good evening, my name is Bob Pazans and I'm an alcoholic. I'd like to thank the committee for the opportunity to be here and for my experience this weekend. It's really been a very pleasant experience for me. I was feeling kind of, I'm missing a conference at home and I've been feeling kindof like I should be at home part of me but after being here and listening to the talk show this weekend I'm very clear why I'm here this weekend They were very meaningful to me. You've had some excellent talks so far, and not ordinary talks. So I always like that, you know, when people—I had not heard Jim. You know, I enjoyed that very much Friday night, and then Tony I'd not heard, and it's always exciting to me that it was a marvelous talk this morning. and keith and sue i've heard many times and uh but it's very special uh something very different came through either i never know if it's a speaker or the listener you don't think you can sometimes you can sit in an audience i remember one time john harris was talking and i brought a young man i specifically wanted to hear john and john didn't have didn't touch him at all i mean this kid didn't think he was very special two years later i brought the same kid to hear john harrison john knocked him off the chair about five minutes into the talk he just cried the whole morning you know he just couldn't john just blew him off the chair and it's just the same you know same talk but a different listener and some of the other talks i've not had i wasn't able to attend because of the timing of it but i like what i've been experiencing here this weekend and i thank you for the opportunity and uh i'm gonna wait so i'll talk a little bit about what it was like for me and what happened and and what it was like, what it's like today. Before I get into that, the other thing I'm kind of looking forward to is hearing my dear friend Jerry tomorrow morning. Jerry Jones is one of my closest friends in AA, and we shared an awful lot. He and his wife Billy are here this weekend, and that's one of the main reasons I'm here, both the invitation and the chance to be with Jerry. So you're in for a treat tomorrow morning, the guy who walks like he talks and has a good program. So we're going to have a hell of a good weekend. I took my first drink of alcohol when I was 14 years old. It was a real big deal for me. It was big deal to me because I was 4'11", weighed 95 pounds, and was the second smallest kid in my high school class. And as far back as I can remember, I never liked who or what I was. I always wanted to be something different. I wanted to bigger, better looking, wanted to an athlete. I kept trying not to play football, but I had a back problem. I had yellow streak down the back of it. And for some reason that didn't work out very well. I was a follower. I was the guy who didn't feel very good about himself, and you know, no matter where they are, there always seems to be a group of people who know more about the business of living life than you seem to know. It seems a lot easier for them, and so there was an in-group, and I wanted to be part of the in- group, and and I was willing to be whatever I thought I had to be to be part of that group. And so when they wanted a class clown, I was the class clown. When they wanted someone who would do something daring that no one else would do, I'd do it. And I was successful enough at doing that that I got to be a marginal member of the in-group. But even after I got there, it didn't feel like I belonged. It felt like I was a member of their group because I was being what they wanted me to be. And if I ever stopped being what we wanted to be, they wouldn't want me anymore. But one night we were out at a party, and a friend of mine had a fifth, and we went out and we split that fifth, and I made a discovery. The stories that I put alcohol inside of Bob's eyes, I got a feeling of comfort and well-being. Delights of which I had never experienced up until the time I took a drink of booze. It was magical. You'll hear people describe that in lots of different ways up at the podium. Still amazing to me how it just kind of changed my whole perception of things. You know for that moment I didn't feel like I was a member of the group, I felt like I owned it. I just literally transformed. It was easier. It's like I discovered the secret. From that time on, I became a social drinker. Anytime anybody else said, I'll have a drink, I said, so shall I. Just never passed up an opportunity to do it. I did a lot of drinking. When you do a lot drinking and you're underage, you get into a lot trouble. By the time I finished high school, my drinking problem was the largest subject of negative conversation in our home. come from a really neat home. My mom and dad and seven kids know particular reason why I should have been a drunk other than genetics. We have very good genetics for alcoholism in our family. But I didn't think I had a drinking problem. I thought my drinking problem was my family's attitude about my drinking. When you're underage and you drink, it's illegal. So if you get caught by your father or the police, never made any difference if you had one drink or 22 drinks. You just wanted to know were you drinking period. Well I never wanted to get caught with one drink. That never made very good sense to me. Thought at least I was going to get caught, I was gonna have had a good time so I thought my getting in trouble was just the fact of the circumstances. So I thought if I had a chance to get away from the authority of the home and for the police and go away where I could drink like an adult, my drinking would become normal. So I had a chance go away to school and the large part of how I made that decision was based on that and had my drinking normalized, I guess you would've had a different talk here tonight. Make a long story short, I drank my way out of the University of Notre Dame in the middle of my senior year. One day I just walked out. And a whole bunch of things has to happen to kind of a status conscious young guy before he just kind of walks out of school in the middle of his senior year, but I you know I just lost the ability to predict my behavior once I took a drink of alcohol. I started out as a B-plus student and ended up with a C student. I just had run my string out. I was in civil engineering carrying about 23 credits a semester and it gets harder and harder to kind of bluff your way through a thermodynamics exam. As good as I am, I just got I was due to be commissioned that June as an officer, and I was in the ROTC, and I had to get a medical release or I would have been drafted. And the release I got was for chronic alcoholism. I was diagnosed an alcoholic at age 19, which is kind of unusual back in 1962, I guess, when that happened. I ran into a psychiatrist who had a pretty profound understanding about the disease of alcoholism I thought he was nuts. I mean, I was really deeply disappointed in that diagnosis. I didn't think I drank differently than my friend. I thought I drank, you know, the way I looked at it, I drank similarly to my friends, except what I discovered is I just picked different friends and did it more often. In high school, I did it one or two nights a week, and in college, I would do it five or six nights a year. I was doing it with other of my friends but I was just picking different people and going through it but I wasn't the constant factor in all that activity. But I left Notre Dame, showed up at home to a set of very disappointed parents and I finished school at a local college in St. Paul and about the time I finished school the family threw me out of the house said we love you and we care about you but you're a mess and you're just causing too much problems and good luck and with my college degree and my newfound freedom I struck out to make my mark in the world and I took a position as a carry on going to liquor store I almost killed a little girl one day back out of a driveway with that truck I lost that job for going 80 miles an hour with a delivery truck. Ended up working as a waiter at a private club in Minneapolis. I'm living on Skid Row, I'm drinking a lot, around a quarter of a day. I'm getting up in the morning, this is kind of the trough of my alcoholism. I had about a year where it was about as tacky as it could get. The rest of the time I had a great deal of class but I just ran into a period where it was kind of tacky. But I'd get up in morning and drink a six pack of beer or take a couple of extra drinks a couple of extra drinks and I'd go to work. I worked as a waiter from about 11 to 2. At 2 o'clock to 5, I'd drink beer at a bar. At 5 or 5.30 I'd buy a half pint or a pint or fifth of Southern Comfort and I would put it in my locker and drink it. I never had a place to stay. I had a couple bags of clothes. I had an apartment in St. Paul. I was working in Minneapolis. St. Paulo is 8 miles away. In the 6 months I worked there, I made it home twice. You keep meaning to get home you know, but just something keeps happening. So I just literally slept around with different people. You know Dr. Seuss? Those people in those books are actual photographs of people who I drank during that period of time. At the end of that time we had a guy I worked with. He was a heroin addict. His wife was a prostitute. And she and I shared a room for a couple of weeks. And when she had a customer, I used to have to go walk around the block until she was done with the customer. Then I got the room. And things went down real well. You know how you got a plan? You know, how you think your life's gonna go? You know things just weren't shaping up the way I thought they were. One night at a party I got the help knocked out of me and I got my face kicked in pretty good and they fired me as a waiter. They didn't want me on the floor looking the way i looked serving food and I had no place to go. I mean I was just out of a job, out of money, out a place to live to live. And I thought, God, the family must miss me. Mom hasn't seen me for a while and she must really wonder where I am. You know. So I went back home and I asked if I could move back in the house and they said, yes, under certain conditions you can move back into the house. And I did. A good little drunk, I promised to follow the rules. They let me back in. Alcoholism meant a lot of different things. Maybe it would have meant more than anything else, but every six months I had to start my life over. Anybody who's an alcoholic knows a lot about starting over. You know, we don't know very much about finishing, but we know a lot about staring over. It occurred to me by this time that if I could put certain things into my life, I could order my life. That if I Could maybe find a woman that I loved and she loved me and we got married and I got some structure because I got structure problems. If I could get a job that was really a career sort of thing, if I can get the hell out of the house, which was interesting because I was just moving back in the house. So I started to put the things in my life that I thought would change it. I got back together with the girls that I'd gone with for a couple of years and broken up with for the better part of a year we became engaged to be married today she's my very lovely wife linda who's home watching our youngest and uh she's an active she's a neat lady but she's a active member of alana i know that none of you had any problems after you sobered up but i even had problems after i sobered out and i think if we not had each of us had a program in our house uh it would we would have been in deep trouble i mean i was really don't have enough to say about the program at Al-Anon and what it's done for our marriage. So I got back together with Linda, we became engaged, we married, and I got a job as an executive trainee with a manufacturing firm when I got my first automobile. I thought, hey, it's finally going to happen. You're finally goingto be what you always wanted to be when you grew up. Only it didn't happen because I continued to drink and have difficult. Big corporations are kind of tough places for budding alcoholics. You know, they've got a lot of rules, they're kind of rigid, they like to have you come in on Mondays and stay on Fridays, and God, they got lunch hours and all sorts of stuff. And it wasn't working out very well at all. And after about five months, I had a sense that I better be moving on and I quit that job. I took a job selling business equipment. And I had that job, oh, I don't know, three or four months and I went out on the four-day drive. The first couple of days in which I called in, the next couple of ways in which didn't call in and I woke up after about a 12-hour blackout, woke up in a friend's apartment, and I didn't know if I had a job, a fiancé, or a place to live. And all of a sudden the recommendation of my father and my psychiatrist that I look into Alcoholics Anonymous didn't seem so impossible. I picked up the telephone, and I called AA, and I got an old-timer down at the central office by the name of Stu, and I said, My name is Bob, and I think I may have a drinking problem. He talked me for about a half hour on the telephone, then he got on another line and called a couple of guys, and could you go to this such-and-such a diner in about an hour and meet two guys and I said I said that I couldn't and they got off the phone and I called into work and found out that I had a job I called Linda to work and find out I had a fiancee and I caught my parents at home and found out they were concerned and concerned is always better than mad and I thought you know why the hell did you call alcoholics anonymous you're not an alcoholic just feeling guilty I always feel guilty when you get up you're 23 years old for God's sake, she can't be an alcoholic. I think the first example of maybe a higher power working in my life worked at that moment. They just made a promise to a total stranger that I had to go meet two other strangers and I felt some obligation to go. And I went and I met these two guys in the cafe. The other reason I went is I wanted to go see what an alcoholic looked like. All minority groups look alike. I thought maybe if I could see what an alcoholics looked like, I probably would have a better idea as to why it wasn't one. And I thought I could handle myself. If you wanted to talk to me about my alcoholism, you also had to be taught either about the rottenest thing that I knew about you, or you had to willing to wade through as much anger as I could put out. And the idea was that you can come and get me, but it's not going to be for free. And as a result, not too many people had heart-to-heart chats with me about My Alcoholism. But these two guys knew how to make a 12-step call. They started me down in the booth. They told me a little bit about what it was like for them, what happened, and what it was like today. There is something so you know, we've talked about the power. I mean, we have heard more about the Power of our program through example. We listened to I don't know, six or eight talks this week, and the four or five that I've heard have been very powerful talks about recovery. One of the most wonderful things about our fellowship, I think, is the addition of sharing your experience rather than your ideas. There's something so powerful about sharing who you are. And I hope that we never lose that tradition and when we sit down with a person eyeball to eyeball an alcoholic's anonymous we understand what our message is in our message of their own experience members of aa and drugs don't care what you think they don't care about your ideas they care about who you are and what your life is like there's something in that that there's a power to change people there's magic that happens when someone shares their life it doesn't happen each and every time but when it does happen i don't think we absolutely understand what all that magic is and when these two men sat me down and told me a little bit about their life i could have gotten up out of that booth and said i don t want to do what you two guys are recommending that i do but there was no way i could've gotten up under that booth and not have known that what they were saying to me was so it was just true it was just the way it was for them and they weren't getting a toaster for signing me up there was no business involved in it they told me when they sat me down in the booth that they were there as much for themselves as they were for me and it was very clear in that conversation that they weren't there for themselves you could just sense it when they asked me to go to a meeting the next night i said yes i did and i was the next time i was allowed the privilege of my first meeting at alkali stanham i was to make a couple of discoveries over the next two months which would have changed my life before i share those two discoveries with you i also want to share the attitude that I brought into the front door of AA. I drank twice after walking in the front door of AAA. Once on a business trip to the West Coast, I was told to call Alcoholics Anonymous the moment I got off the plane and I didn't. I told everybody I had a $200 bet and I wasn't drinking. That cut me sober for about six days and cut me drunk for about ten days. And then I stayed sober for around three months and Linda and I went on our honeymoon and I think everybody in the group knew I was going to get drunk on our honeymoons except me. I had this delusion but I got drunk. And we honeymooned in Acapulco, and you know where the divers dive off those cliffs in Acipulco? I dove off those cliff on my last trunk. I was in the audience watching a world's high-diving contest, and after about eight planters' punches, that doesn't look so tough. And if you're picturing something classy, get it out of your mind. I mean, this was, I was pretty drunk. I went over and introduced myself to the ex-president of Mexico, and And, you know, that was kind of classy. His nephew had been my roommate at Notre Dame. And then I went down and dove. I climbed up the cliff. I split my swimsuit, cut my leg. My wife's trained to bribe people to get me down off the mountain. I got up about 90 feet, and I got stuck. I couldn't get up. I couldn'T get down. And God watches after fools and drunks because I dove, and it was okay. And the last drink I had was on the airplane on the way home, and that was the 10th of December, 1967. seven. And, you know, that was the last drink I had. Now, when I walked into the first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, I had a particular attitude and I share it with you because it's part of my story. The other reason I share with you is an attitude that sometimes recurs in my life today and causes me some difficulty even yet. I used to get asked questions by people who cared a lot about me were kind of confused about the fact that I seemed to be tearing my life apart. They just asked me questions like, Bob, why do you drink the way you drink? And I never had a very good answer for that. I was always in trouble when I got asked it, but the thinking that went on was something like this. I said, I drink because I have problems. I don't have problems because I drink. If you know how many times I started out to have it all be okay and something, the wheels just kind of came off. And if I could just pick my batting average up about five points and get rid of a few of these problems, I wouldn't have a drinking problem. So why don't we just kindof talk about something else? I was lodged between a sister who did graduate work at the Sorbonne and a brother who was five years at Kaplan law school when you're live between two show-offs like that you don't look very good i used to get asked questions like bob wouldn't you like to be like someone else i said yeah i'd like to be like somewhere else what are the directions and how do you do that i mean i really would you know they i don't know how to do it i really don't like everything that's going on i'd like to emulate other people i'd liked to have their accomplishments but i somehow don't seem to be able to do that they come to me and they say you know bob the hell of a guy if he just wouldn't drink. They gave me the very clear message that what was wrong with me was swallowing bourbon and if I ever stopped swallowering bourbon, my life would clear up. Well like a lot of alcoholics, I had a chance to stop drinking. Just before I went back to my senior year in college, I got into a heck of a lot of trouble and I was beaten up and I was robbed and I rolled and pistol-whipped and shot at and thrown out of the second story of a hotel and ended up in a state of shock in an alley in a long-storied shirt. I ended up at the hospital. And after they patched me up a little bit, they'd send a psychiatrist in and they weren't going to let me go back to school. They were going to observe me and keep me in the psychiatric ward for a while because they thought I was trying to destroy myself. And if any of you enjoyed my talk here this evening, you should have heard the one I gave 26 years ago to get out of the psych ward at Miller Hospital. It was one of the better talks under stress I've ever given. And they let me out. They let me go back to my senior year of school on the condition that I wouldn't drink. And I went back, and I didn't drink for almost three months. My life didn't instantaneously get better. I didn' t all of a sudden become what I thought you were telling me I'd become if I just wouldn' t drink. I didn''t become an A student and a model kid. And I thought I proved two things to myself. It was, number one, that I could quit drinking any time I wanted to because I was a daily drinker, and I just quit for three months, and, number two, I just quitted, and my life didn' d get better, so don' t tell me what' s wrong with me or swallowing bourbon. Bourbon' s my answer. By and large, I' ve never found anything in my life that worked as good as booze. Blues works. We keep talking in AA about all the problems it causes, but for most of us, for a very long period of time, it worked and worked very effectively. I know how much of it to get, where to get it, what it'll do, and once in a while it screws my timing up, but by and large, it's as consistent as anything that I've found. And more and more you'll hear people say, I think blues kept us alive until we got to AA. Because I think there's something, I don't know why it is that we seem to be people who are reasonably well-equipped for the business of living life, but yet the way we go at life, it just seems to be unbearable for us and booze somehow just takes the edge off of that and makes it okay the other thing they said to me they said Bob I think you're an alcoholic and I said well I can see with the information you got about me why you think I'm an alcoholic there's a lot of information about me you don't have there's information about you that no one has I think if you knew about all those hangups and all those problems you know I had problems before I ever picked up a drink of alcohol I think If you knew about all these dark purposes in my life you wouldn't think I was just an alcoholic some of the worst problems I've had I've had cold, stoned, sober. Some of the worst behavior I've ever had, I've been sober. Not just drunk. Some one of the worse thoughts I've got, I have sober. If you knew all those things about me, you wouldn't think I was just an alcoholic. Thanks a lot for your concern. Why don't you just get off my back? That to the very best of my recollection was how I presented myself to you. I was 23 years old. I was scared stiff. I thought you were going to give me a test to ask me what an alcoholic was. I knocked on the door and went into my first meeting with Alcoholics Anonymous. the two discoveries I made that were to change my life is this number one, that alcoholism is a disease you say well God everybody knows that well I didn't know it I thought alcoholism was something that happened to you when you were a lot older and a whole lot sloppier and you had a problem living your life because you were just physically drunk all the time but I was told that alcoholismo was a disease that affected me as a total person that it was physical but the physical part was only about 10-15% of it was also mental and spiritual that once you cross the line from problem drinking into alcoholism, that alcoholism affected you all the time when you were drinking and when you weren't drinking. And I can't tell you how important it was for me to know that there was some sort of mental side because if I knew anything in the deep recesses of my soul, I knew that just not drinking was not the answer for me. I remember one old-timer came to me and he said, Bob, you don't have a drinking problem. And I said, could you put that in writing? And he said no, smart aleck. He said, you've got a drinking problem, but if all you have is a drinking problem, all you'd have to do is quit. He said. Have you ever quit? And I said, yeah, I've quit. He said did it work? And I just said no, it didn't work. He said I didn't think so. He says what's wrong with us is alcoholism, the symptom of alcoholism is a drink and drop. But he said what we do in Alcoholics Anonymous is once we take our last drink of alcohol and our last drug because we use the 12 recovery steps of the program of AlcoholicsAnonymous to find a different way to live. A different way to live that's sufficiently better than the way you lived before so that you don't have to go back to drugs or booze and do something for you that you're unwilling or unable to do for yourself. If you don' t find another way to live, you're going to go b ack to use them because you didn' t know how to live sober. I've never been told a truer thing than that. The other discovery I made at those meetings was that there was an awful lot of alcoholics who had drunk an awful amount of booze and taken an awful bunch of other chemicals and now they weren't doing it. The only observable reason for them not drinking is they liked what they found in sobriety better than what they'd found in a bottle. Now that really intrigued me. And it occurred to me by now that I might have to quit, but God, I thought my life was over. I thought it was just going to be kind of dull and tacky. But I listened to you share your story. You were out there chasing it, some of you longer and harder, and some of you not quite as long or quite as hard as I was. We all reached our own end of our own rope, and we got to a point where we quit. It was very clear to me that your lives weren't over. There was a zest and a vitality and an energy and a spirit about you that I found a tractor from the very moment I walked into Alcoholist Anonymous and I wanted to find out more about what that was. Because I found a loving God in Alcoholist Anonymous, I've been able to stick around and start the adventure. As much as it's kind of interesting when we share our stories about what our drinking was like, I think the real adventure is in survival. I'm so glad. It seems like the answer to a problem has to have the same characteristics that the problem has. So if the disease is progressive, and we never get over the disease, but the disease always present, seems like recovery is also progressive, in that we never kind of get it handled like we just own it or like we obtain it. That seems like it's ongoing forever. Seems like it has the same characteristic. But it isn't one of the things, at least for me, and I found my it's not predictable i also found that my alcoholism wasn't very predictable i think there's patterns doing i think just patterns of recovery people who seem to know about the disease can predict patterns but mine seemed to be at least for me my pattern was indistinguishable to me i'm kind of glad that my recovery wasn't predictable because if i could have predicted it it wouldn't have been much she would have asked me to write down what i wanted out of my recovery when i came to alcoholic synonymous i mean i would have sold that on a manhattan for a few little baubles and i would have written down just get me out of trouble just get the heat off my back you know give me five ten thousand dollars get me a better job get me a new car that's literally what i would've written down on the list some of the things i would need it on that list more than anything else i wouldn't have put on the list and had you recommended that i put them on the list i wouldn''t have wanted them on my list i wouldn'nt want them to lodge something else off the list that i might you know but I really want it. The first thing that happened to me that was a major event in my recovery was kind of the breakdown of my alibi system. The first time drinking robbed me, it was a little bit extra than it took to be a success at anything that I did. It just kind of took the hop off my fastball. Then pretty soon I wasn't doing enough to get by, and when I wasn'T doing enough to get buy, I started to lie and cover up and build a wall between you and me. And the thinking that went on behind the wall went something like this. It said, You like me. But you only like what I let you see about me. But if you could see everything about me, all the dark, dirty, lousy, unattractive, insufficient things about me you wouldn't like me. Because I don't like it. You don't want to like me and who knows more what a lousie kind of crummy person I am than me. I was walking around comparing my insides with your outsides and the only way you come out doing that is second best. But at some point in time behind that wall I got sick enough and tired enough and hurt enough that I started to tear that walled out. And for the first time in my life, I shared the whole deck of cards with someone. Up until that time, I had never told anybody my whole story. I'd never shared the full deck of cars. My family had part of it. My wife had part if it. My friends had part iof it. My employer had part of it. No one had all of it, and I could kill you with a piece you didn't have. You'd come to me and you'd try to help me, but you only knew a segment of my life. And whatever advice you gave to me, I could neutralize because of what you didn't know about me. I wouldn't give you the information that you needed. I would just neutralize the impact you had on me. Classy says many interesting things, but one of the things I like more than anything else, one ofthe things I liked the most about what he says is he says if there was ever a flag that all of us in Alcoholics Anonymous could stand and pledge our allegiance to, the flag would say, but I'm different. And there is something about each of us that has a deep thinking that we're that unique, almost terminally unique. We hear this conversation, we feel it before we take our first drink, when we come to Alcoholics Anonymous, when people are talking to us about our alcoholism, we're positive, they just don't understand because we really do feel unique. If you're truly unique, if you're true and truly unique you're going to die in AlcoholicsAnonymous because if you are truly unique something that worked in my life won't work in yours. That I think uniqueness to that type kills more alcoholics than anything else. And I got to a point where my pain got high enough that I started to tear that wall down, and for the first time in my life, when I called Alcoholics Anonymous and started to share it, I continued to share at meetings, I continued to share with my sponsor, and I dumped the whole load on my fist tip, and when I tore that wall totally down and forthe first time shared all of me with someone, I made a discovery, and the discovery was that I'm not unique. My personality may be unique, but not my illness, not my behavior, not my experience, not my feeling. For the first time in my life I started to have a sense of hope that maybe something that operated in your life could operate in mine. That maybe a solution that worked for you could work for me. See because all my life I've been just a little bit different. I'm kind of like you I mean it's close, we've got a lot of similarities but I'm just a Little Bit Different. You know I was in a great family and the family seemed to work less well for me than it worked for my brothers and sisters. I was at a great church, I liked my faith and I got to a point where I couldn't play the game anymore and it seemed to work better for other people than it worked for me. I went to a great school with one of 14 kids that went down there from my high school. I had the highest test grades when we went down and I was the only one of the 14 kids that didn't finish. See, I'm a great starter. I mean, I kind of like you. I mean it's close. There's a lot of similarities but I'm different. All my life you told me when you stood up here and you said well 98 people out of 100 would do this I'd be very interested to know what the other two did because I'd become almost positive without even knowing what attributes you would attach to the other 2 I would just almost assume when I'm starting out that I'm in that exception because all my life I've tried to use the exception to live my life when I came to Alcoholics Anonymous my biggest fear was that I was an exception I kind of felt that I wasn't accepted it's so funny because when you started to tell me when I first came in that you helped me see that I might be alcoholic, I resisted it with everything. And then when I finally identified and admitted that I was an alcoholic, I even had this worry that I wasn't bad enough to belong. You know what I mean? I had kind of a secondary reaction. But there's a funny thing about alcoholics is we seem to heal pretty fast. When I tore that wall down, pretty soon in Alcoholics Anonymous I started to build the wall back up because I had an idea when I came to Alcoholics.com and I said, okay, I'll buy it. I've got the problem. If I've Got the Problem and you've got the answer, that's a pretty good deal. But if I've GOT the Problem and you'VE GOT the answer I've gotta four or five other things that are going on in my life. And if I'VE Got the problem and you got the answer you oughta be able to make those other things go away. And hell, I'LL be reasonable it might take a year. Well, my problems didn't go away in a year and they didn't go away in two years and they don't go way in three years. I'm going to spend much of the rest of my talk talking about issues and problems in sobriety. And I don't have enough time to be able to share all the things I'd like to share about it. It may sound like my sobrietry wasn't much fun. My sobriery was wonderful. It was progressive, and I think it was just everything that I wouldn't go back and I wouldn'T change any of it. But you know how when a person stands up and takes their first year cake, they thank you for changing their lives? and then they get up and take their second year cake and I tell you how sick they were the first year but now things are better. There's something about the way we look back on our sobriety and back on our recovery that we start to give ourselves permission to see different things in the experience and that's what I'm doing because recovery is a progression of experience. You know what I really thought recovery was? One of the biggest problems I had is I was just so dumb. I mean, I was immature because of lack of development, I was also immature chronologically. Hell, I was only 23 years old. There were just a lot of things about life that I didn't know. And what I thought recovery was was the absence of problems. If you would have asked me what recovery was, I would have thought that I would get someplace where I wouldn't have any problems. And if you ask me why, I'd look at my sponsor who was sober almost 14 years when I came to Alcoholics Donovan and hell, he didn't have any problems He just didn't have any problem. I looked around the room, and most of the people in the room that I was going to meetings with, and hell, they didn't have any problems. I mean, I look back at that, and I'm just kind of amazed that I had that attitude. And the reason I had it is I was so self-involved, I almost couldn't see anybody else. Now, when we were at meetings, they were sharing their life with me. They were sharing a problem with me, but if their problems were less than mine, hell, I didn't even hear them. I mean, if I would change places with you, almost by definition, you didn't have a problem. So, I mean it was just, I'm in this goofy, you know how self-involved you are? I mean its almost like you have children but you don't have them. I mean they're just extensions of you. They're not individuals. It's kind of like your wife, you're a spouse if you're really, I mean you almost don't grant personhood to people until you get, when Keith talks about hearing the pop, I mean I don't know when I heard the pop as I extracted my head from my rectum but it was, you know, quite a while in my recovery process at Alcoholics Anonymous, I want to say. So I'm a guy who I grew up in my faith and in my family, I thought if you were a good guy, you didn't have problems. If you were the good person in your religion, you wouldn't have any problems. So when I got into AlcoholicsAnonymous, my assessment of recovery was that I'm going to be problem-free. When I get this thing together, I'm going to be on a roll. I'm just not going to have any issues. Well, I had about five or six problems that were fairly serious and fairly persistent in my life. They were kind of ordinary, but they were causing me a hell of a lot of trouble. I couldn't get up in the morning. Set the alarm clock for 630, and I'd get up at 8. It's hard to be at work at 8 when you get up today. I mean, it's not impossible, but it's tough. And then I got to work, andI had trouble staying at work. I never could figure out what the hell to do at work." I don't know what it is about, you know, you go to school and they train you to do this kind of stuff. And I showed up at my first job and I had no earthly idea what to do. I mean, they put me behind a desk. I kept looking for the steering wheel. I mean I had not idea what the hell you did behind this desk. It was just very difficult adjustment. So work has never been one of my favorite things. I went to work and I didn't stay at work very much. And when I got sober, you now, I went out for those two- and three- and four-hour AA lunches because any time anywhere the hand of AA reaches out, you're supposed to be there. You know, and that wasn't helping work a little bit. I had a little money problem. I spent $300 to $400 more a month than I made. That doesn't sound like much now, but 1967, that was quite a bit. And if you do that over a long period of time, this reports you, you'll end up in debt. I know that you might, you know, but if you keep that up over a longer period of Time, you'll wind up in death. I had, we started, Linda and I started our family, We had young children, and I had issues about being a parent. I was loud, and i was immature, and angry, and sometimes physical, and had issues about being the parent. And I had a gambling problem. It really wasn't much of a problem, it was kind of more like a hobby. Three to four hours a day, four to five days a week, but I was making five to ten thousand dollars a year playing backgammon, and I thought it was a part-time job. And I had a wife who was wondering if one of the places I was supposed to practice the principles of the program was in our home. And I thought, God, that's none of your business. I mean, you've got your program, I've got my program, you should be happy. I'm sober and growing and things are different. And she was a young, attractive, vibrant woman and didn't seem to want to have me at meetings seven to nine nights a week. She thought maybe being down in a smoky basement with lit candles with people in their late 70s. It wasn't her idea how she wanted to spend the rest of her life. I wondered if I was supposed to start paying some attention to her. I thought she was ungrateful. And those were the issues that we were having in our life. And those are not annual issues. They were not quarterly issues. They were non-monthly issues or weekly issues. They were daily issues. Now, I had every one of those problems in my first year of sobriety and never noticed them. They absolutely didn't even show up. When people were talking about defects of character, my focus was on bigger things. Immediate issues. Bad checks. Employment was one of my problems. I had a driver's license. Just kind of figuring out how, when you have a DUI, how to get to work and how to get the meetings. Paying my insurance was one of the biggest issues. Stuff like that. So some of these issues didn't show up. But I started through the process of recovery, one by one they floated to the top of the punch bowl. One at a time. And I started to take them on and I started to have a sense. I used to watch the people after the meetings, and they'd sit down, and they would be talking about fights with their wives. I'd go over and listen to all these old-timers. They'd be talking of problems at work. They'd talk about financial issues. And I thought, what in heaven's name did this have to do with not drinking? And I felt we'd be sitting around after the meeting talking about how not to drink. And we almost never talked about how to not drink. We talked about problems that people were having. So I just hung around just because I thought maybe you were supposed to hang around. It took me a while, and I started to see the application of the program in our lives. And I started working on these issues, and worked on them diligently, and one by one, I started failing with doing much about this problem. By the end of my second year, I was pretty significantly involved in trying to get rid of these defects of character. And by the third and fourth year, they really started to bother me. By the beginning of my fifth year, it started to eat my lunch. and I had these problems consistently all the way through and I worked on it pretty hard I'm a guy who, I care how I live my life I want to be a good man so I thought I should really try to get rid of these issues and I wasn't having much luck with getting rid of them but when I first had the problems I started to lie and cover up I kind of instinctively didn't want you to see that one more time I had failed I didn't wanted you to say that I was different I thought that I shouldn't have the problems so I didn'y talk about it so here I was having these issues hiding the issues. I'm going to six or seven meetings a week, and I'm not talking about the most important things that are going on in my life. My life is getting less manageable and less manageable and less tangible. And I'm four or five years sober, and everybody's telling me what a good job I'm doing. I got a very active sponsor. I've started to be very active. I was going to all these meetings. I went on all these committees. And everybody's telling me, what a great job I am doing. And they're saying, good job? I mean, can't you see? I'm just nuts. I mean if you really have insight into me, and we're really close, I'm going to meetings with you all the time. Can't you see my lifestyle management? I mean, you know so little about me. And I started to separate myself from the program of Alcoholics Dynamics. I'd go to meetings and I'd talk about some heavy stuff in the program of Alcoholic Dynamics, but the stuff that was really going on in my life, I for some reason just wasn't able, I felt like a failure. I felt as if my program wasn't working and it just was very difficult for me to sit down one more time, one more place, because you would help me deal with my alcoholism. I was sober. I wasn't, I was not only sober, I had removed the behavior that I couldn't, you know, there were certain things that I couldn't do sober. So I wasn' drinking and I wasn''t doing those things and I was an active member of AA and you would have helped me with my alcoholicism. But I was having problems with my finances, my marriage, my parenting, my job, my gambling and such. I thought, you've helped me with my alkalism, I'm supposed to be handling needs in my program, right? So the issues and problems must have something to do with me. And I, you know, so that was, and the further I got into my recovery, the more problems and issues I had with them. But what I realize now is of course you solve some of those issues. They didn't seem unusual to you. You had a lot more tolerance for them than I had. I always had standards that were far too high for me to obtain. You didn't find those issues surprising. well you know I'd be at the club and a new person would come you know we have a way of greeting a new person with kind of non-judgmental love and understanding that I think is second to none a newperson can come in the room tonight and tell us they're having a love affair with a zebra and two of us will get him a coffee and tell him we too are having a love affair with a zebra but let a guy eight years sober walk in the room and tell you he's doing that and he may get thrown the hell out of the room And I don't say that as a support for bad behavior. I'm not trying to be supportive for bad behavior, I'm just trying to draw a distinction that we have sometimes less understanding for unmanageability when we've been in the program for a while than we do when people come in when it's new. And I think that all of us are dealing with unmanagability in our life, but the very nature of our recovery you know, part of what I didn't realize is the problems I was having in my life weren't as a result of going backwards. They weren't a result of my life falling apart, they were a result of growth okay i didn't i had all those problems in my first year that didn't bother me and as i grew and as i got more honest and as I got better you bump into what doesn't work in your life but drunks were kind of backwards i mean we get ashamed when we identify a problem i mean anybody else would feel like it would be growth to identify a product not me i mean i identify the first thing i do is hide the damn thing you know i don't want anybody to know. I've been a lie about this, you know, God. But it's the natural process of growth in Alcoholics Anonymous is to discover power. You run into what doesn't work in your life and it starts to request that you do something about it. So my life became a very loud request that I start to do these things. And I was really having a hell of a time with it. You know, a new person would come in that room in our AA group and I'd get them a cup of coffee and we'd sit down and they'd share all their problems with me and I would say hey, as bad as it is and as hopeless as it seems it's going to be okay. I know that you don't know how it's gonna be okay and you don''t have to know how it''s gonna be ok. Just keep coming here and doing the things that we do in these rooms and your life''s gonna be OK. See that guy over there? God, his life was really messy and now it'''s really straightened out and he'''S doing a fine job and it''''s gonna be Ok for you. But I get in the car and I drive home at 11 o''clock at night and I say Bob, when'''it gonna be ok for you? You're sober five years, Bob. When are you gonna learn how to work? you're sober five years, when are you going to stop spending money you don't have to buy things you don' t need to impress people you don''t like that's Cecil Corrigan God Cecil told me that 20 years ago and I just thought that was wonderful when are we going to learn how to be a father when are he going to know how to become a husband when the hell are you really going to get your act together about? I mean, I didn't know. I mean it got to a point where I was either going to commit suicide or talk to my sponsor. You know, one of those very profound things. You know it's amazing the desperation. You know, it always surprises me that we can have a profound experience. You can listen to someone like Keith get up and tell their story, or Tony tell their story, Jim, those are pretty rough stories of alcoholism, pretty profoundly alcoholic people. They had an experience, they had a surrender experience, and never took another drink. That was one thing that just kind of blew my mind when I read those stories in the book, because you read those studies, they're pretty dramatic stories, and something happened to those people they had an experience and they never took another drink that's amazing to have something the habit that that profound in our life and they have something that transformed our lives enough that we never took Another Drink if anybody should know about transformation if anybody Should Know About recovery if anybody to know about surrender and miracles we should know about it and we talk about alcoholism in our books talks about the drinking is a symptom alcoholism. Now drinking is a symptom of alcoholism and when we stop drinking, our alcoholism becomes mental and spiritual. The physical part of it's gone. Well how does it exhibit itself if it's mental and the spiritual if it is not in drinking? And I never kind of thought this through. It exhibits itself in the same sort of issues that I was having trouble with. Exhibits itself from the compulsion because if it's itself in every area of our lives and if it is a disease and if I'm powerless over I end up kind of surprised you know it's just amazing to me that I accept the fact that I am powerless over alcohol that I rely on a program and a power gradient myself to relieve my alcoholism I never had any doubt in my life that I didn't have anything to do with relieving my alcoholism but the moment my alcohol is it becomes non-physical the rest of it I'm doing. I'm grabbing my problems by the throat, and I'm dealing with those problems. And there gets to be an issue with that. You don't have enough power to deal with your problems. If you had the power to do it, if you didn't deal with their problems, you wouldn't need Alcoholics Anonymous. Because our power in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous is in surrender. But there's a problem. I kept growing up, I kept trying to deal avec these issues. I was unsuccessful at dealing with them. I felt more isolated. And I started to discover, I started to look for people who really had their lives together. People who really have the kind of quality of life. One of them was our dear friend Bob White. And one of them was my sponsor and I've been blessed with good teachers and all-powerful autonomous ever since I've gone in. And I've started to see a similarity into what they had in their life. But each of the people, men and women, who I saw that were leaders and attractive to me had was a personal relationship with the god of their very own understanding but there's a problem with that and the problem that i found out with it is you know let's say i want to have a relationship with god i buy the fact that i'm not doing very good on the door and god says who's there i said god is back god says what do you want i said well my life's a little messy right now i'm having a little trouble i'm sober six or seven or eight years and my life isn't working the way i think it would work and I'd like to have a relationship with you. It seems to me that people who really got something going with you more than I got going with them, their lives have a higher quality than my life has. So I'd love to change it. But I'm going to say to God, what should I do? And God's going to tell me, Well, Bob, stop gambling. Get up in the morning. Go to work. When you get to work, stay at work. Be nice to your children. Be nice for your wife. I'm just saying, hell, if I knew how to do all those things, I wouldn't need God. What is the use of establishing a relationship with God if you can't fill the conditions of the relationship? So my idea was, as soon as I get my act cleaned up, then I'll have a relationship. As soon as i really know that I can stop doing all these things that don't work, then I can have a friendship. But if you aren't going to stop the things that do not work, you don't have a right to a relationship I was stuck in that place for about three or four years. And it really gets kind of, I mean, one more time. I'm in a place where I have values up here and behavior down here, and I'm just full of pain. Don't like me. I'm feeling tacky. I've got a wall built up between you and me. I don't want you to see the unmanageability of my life. I'm running around giving AA talks, and I're depressed, and I'M upset, and IM angry, and MY wife's not very happy, and MY life's a mess. I'm experiencing a lot of the same issues, a lot of the same attitudes and feelings and sobriety that I was having drinking. Keith talked so eloquently about that today. And out of desperation I went back to the steps. I've always been, in our country not like I wasn't in them before we constantly go over, we go to step groups but I went Back to the Steps with a formalness or a completeness or a thoroughness that I hadn't been at them for a while and I went Black and I took Step 1 and found out what powerlessness and unmanageability meant to me eight or nine years sober. And you know, there's a real difference in that. I mean, they're really, I came to find out because I used to think more about the power, the insanity of having to do with my active alcoholism. But I didn't have any trouble going back at eight or 9 years and finding out that my insanity, if sanity is the ability to cope with reality, which is one of my sponsor's definitions of sanity. i didn't have the ability to cope with reality i was running away from everything in my life towards some sort of magic that was going to happen out in the future and i spent almost no time in the present i spent most no time with the reality of my life i didn t like the reality of my marriage i didn d like the rea lity of my recovery i didn ll like the realty of my finances i didn l like much of the reality of m y life i just wanted it to get better and i was kind kind of running towards something in the future, and I couldn't stand in front of my life. I took step two with the depth that I had not taken. You know, step two was a step for me that was kind of overlooked. I just kind of accepted it, of course, come to believe that a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity. Step two, I believe for us corporately, never had any doubt that God would restore us to sanity, But I had, by my seventh year of sobriety, lost the sense that God would restore Bob Bazan to center. Because here I was, a very active, hardworking member of Alcoholics Dynamics, and my life was pretty damn unmanageable, sober six and seven and eight years. And I started to say, well, I must be kind of like you, but there must be something a little bit different about me. There must be some sort of change in me. There must have been something about me that just doesn't work. I must have a built-in failure mechanism. you know my whole life up till that time seemed like I was always good at getting close I was the guy who got close we had a mile race I'd be a guy in the race and I'd have a great pair of tennis shoes or a great looking pair of shorts and I would have a nice tank top and I had my number painted on my shirt and I was a guy who would talk like a racer when we got at that race if there were 500 or 600 people in that race I would talk in such a way that you would know that I had quite a bit of race experience and I would probably be among the first four or five people in that race. And when we started that race and we took off, I'd be in the top four or three. I was one of the top five people for about the first eighth of the race. And somewhere around the middle of the racer, I'd fall down and hold my leg and I'd end up on the side. And everybody at the end of the racing said, boy, that's really a crime. That guy was really doing great. He's kind of an experienced racer. It's really too bad. I wonder what happened to him. but if you knew about me if you had been in a helicopter following me around in my life for the last 15 years you could have predicted within 50 feet when I'd grab my leg and fall down and wouldn't finish the race because I never finish anything I'm a great starter I'm not a great talker I sound awfully good I dress well my mother always said Bob, you're not very bright dress well everybody used to talk to me about potential they talked to me about potential like I had this whole room full of possibility that I wasn't using and at any moment I'd turn on the afterburners and I'd become a Rhodes Scholar in Olympic athlete probably I had everything I ever had always on the road at all times I never had any reserve, it was all after and it wasn't worth it See, I'm a great starter. I just never finish anything. I didn't finish school, I didn' t finish my family, I did' n't finish my religion, you know, I' m having trouble with my marriage, I am not doing a good job on my job. I don't finish anything and here I am in the most important thing in my life, in Alcoholics Anonymous, a great start. I mean, I got here early, I was one of the youngest guys in my group for two years. I worked my fanny off in Alcoholics Anonymous. I'm on all these different committees. I'm a real active member, and now, just like it is in every area of my life, I'm not going to finish it. It just seems like I'm going to miss out. There's sort of like a built-in failure mechanism. There's something different about me. I'm kind of like you. And once again, I'm comparing my inside with your outside. Sober six or seven years in Alcoholic Anonymous with all this stuff going on. I had lost hope in the second step and I had to go back to step two and just out of the recovery that I saw just outof the dignity one of the things I loved about the talk that you've heard is the dignity with which the people live their lives that you have heard so far this weekend I mean it's profound it's encouraging to me one of those one of things I like you know I mean there are days when you get on the airplane to go give the talk hell you don't want to go I mean you just flat don't wanna go you should be home doing some stuff for doing. And one of the reasons I go with the frequency that I do is I get encouraged. I listen to some of the talks and I'll go home and I'm more willing to go back at it and practice the principles of my affair than I was before I got here. And I had to get back and come to believe that a power graver in myself will restore me to sanity. Me, not just us. Me, sober right here. The third step got to be, the third step is, to me, just a recognition of a fact. My life has always been, is right now, will always be in the care of God as I understand Him. It's just the nature of God and the nature of man. I'm an ant on a log going down a river. When it goes around the bend it looks like I'm steering it. It's an illusion. Okay? I took a first step and took a fifth step with my sponsor. And when I took the fifth step I said, be careful. Whatever you recommend that I do when I get out of this fifth step, I'm going to do. And I got out of that fifth step and one of the things he recommended to me was that I go to an industrial psychologist with some of the work issues that I had. I can't tell you how much I didn't want to go to a psychologist. It seemed like an admission to the failure of my program, but I promised that I would and I did. And I went in there and I got in touch with one of the biggest issues in my life was the fear of failure. If you can't fail, you can play. You just can't play. I remember one time I was in that guy's office and he said, why are you so afraid of failure? I wanted to tear his nose off. I mean, I just wanted to reach across, you know. I said, what do you mean? He said, well, why is failure so bad? I said so bad because you lose everything you have. I mean you file bankruptcy, they put your name in the paper, you lose anything, you got that turkey, I mean just, you don't know, everything. He looked over at my wife and he said, if Bob filed bankruptcy, if he lost everything he had, would you still be there? And Linda said, yeah, I'd still be here. He said, but I want your kids to still be there. And I said, yeah, my kids are still there. We started to have a conversation that opened up that maybe I could start to survive failure. When I had a sense that maybe I could survive failure, I thought maybe I Could Be a Player. All my life I've been in the stand. I bought a uniform. I'd put the uniform on. I'd run around in circles. I'd do the calisthenics. I'd talk dirty and I'd go in the locker room. But when the game started and they blew the whistle, when they got into the block and tackling, I never wanted that part. I was up in the stands. There's a funny thing about life. There are no stands. It's all playing field. And I often wondered why I had all these bruises on me if I was out in the stand. And then I had the bruises on me because I was in the middle of the damn field not thinking I was on the field. But when you're in the field and you think you're on the stand, you're going to have some unusual experience one night when i was home it's not too long after i took my fist up and i had a horrible day one of those days where i hadn't done anything that i was supposed to do and i got a whole bunch of things that i wasn't supposed to doing i got into a game and i won about four or five hundred dollars and i came home late for dinner and late for the meeting and got into a shouting contest with Linda and I slapped one of the kids and I'm in the living room at about 9 o'clock at night and it's a pretty sad day. And I said to myself, gee, it happened again. All of a sudden I said, gee it happened again, weren't you there? I said well yeah I was there but this has become so habitual I mean it's almost like I'm going on automatic pilot I don't even have to think about these defects of character they just kind of take over and I just kind of wake up afterwards and it happened again. And all of a sudden, I realized that that was a bunch of crap. That wasn't how it happened. That those defects of character were not automatic. They were habitual. Sure they were habitual, but I sounded like a guy who really wanted to change those things in my life. If you talked to me about my gambling, I would tell you that I really wanted to stop gambling. That was the truth. But I talked to you like I really thought it was Now what it was, was a complaint. I complained about my gambling, but it wasn't a real issue with me. If you really took me seriously, go ask my wife if I really wanted to quit my gambling. Go ask my business partner. I wanted to gamble and not have problems. Okay, I wanted money problems. It sounded like I wanted to not have money problems Not true I wanted To spend as much money as I wanted to spend whenever the hell I wanted to spend it on whatever the hell I wanted to spend and not have money problems That's the truth When I came to Alcoholics Anonymous The thing that changed my life was step one I surrendered And I took step one of my life change and never took another drink of alcohol What surrender was for me one of the things it was was standing in front of my alcoholism like standing naked in front of a mirror looking my alcohol ism in the eye and telling the truth about my alcohol there's something about standing in the truth that changes your life and you're never quite the same again when you stand in front most of the defects of character in my life were kept in place and i never told the truth but the truth is is that every one of those defects of character were exactly what i wanted they were like treasures to me anybody who got in in the way of those things, better get the hell out of my way because I was going to run over them. I wanted to gamble. I didn't want to get up in the morning. I did not want to work. I wanted him to be able to spend money irresponsibly. I talked about all those things. I do not want us to pay attention to my wife and pay attention to my children. I had their love and affection. It was the rest of the world's love and affections that I wanted. I was so self-centered and immature and I just did not want the responsibility of my own life. All of a sudden I realized that my life was exactly the way I had designed it and I was working pretty hard to keep it in place and I realized that if I didn't change it, I might not be able to stay sober. And then I tried everything that I knew how to get rid of those defects of character and I had failed. And all of a sudden I realized I was exactly where I was supposed to be in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous and I allowed the opportunity to take the sixth and seventh step of the program of Alcoholic Anonymous. The sixth step said we were entirely ready to have God-remembered defects of character, the Son of God said we humbly ask him to remove our shortcomings. I have spent eight years trying to get rid of my defects of character. I submit that you go about the process of getting entirely ready to have God remove your defects of character differently than you go out the process of trying to remove them. I was trying to use muscle. I was trying to used intellect. I tried to use insight to get rid of the defects of my character and I don't have the power to get rid of it. My power, when I have power? I'm a pipe. The power that works through me. I'm not the source. Okay? I have spent six or seven years in AA trying to be the source to change the issues in my life. And the issues of my life were not the problems. They were the results. Money problems don't have to do with money. Sex problems don' t have to deal with sex. They're dealing with ego. I was at the end of the pipe trying to push the water back into the pipe where the water was coming out. took me eight years to find out that there was a faucet at the other end but i'm dealing with the results it's like alcoholism our problem is not just drinking when we stop drinking we have to go back to the sort of mental and spiritual aspect to do with our disease that night i got down on my knees i took the six and the seven stuff in the club of all these anonymous and four of the major problems in my life disappeared you know we change you know probably synonymous you know a farmer doesn't grow creates a fertile soil plants a seed creates an atmosphere in which growth can take place and God grows a doctor doesn't heal he creates an atmosphere in which healing can take place and God heals and we don't change we create an atmosphere in which change can take place the attitude involved in the sixth and the seventh step of the program involved in all these synonyms the three requirements of being honest open-minded and being willing and God changes us I asked God to change those things in my life. I took the 6th and the 7th step of the program about Valle Sanimus, and I started to cooperate. I built a program of support. When you're really serious about something, you build a program or support. I hired someone to get me up in the morning. You know, I never missed a plane trip. I never miss a fishing trip. I just missed work. So I called someone who I respected enough that I would get up for when they called me. I turned the finances over to my wife. My wife had more maturity about money. She could pay a third of a bill. Damnedest thing I ever heard of in my life. I started to date my wife once a week. I actually started it sometime before that. For the last 15 years, I dated my wife once a day. Once a week, usually on Friday nights, but when I'm gone out of town, I took her out this night on Wednesday. She has my undivided attention. It's a real, live, dangerous date. day. No one else goes on that day, just Linda and I. She just knows we're going to have each other's undivided attention. We're goingto have some time to talk about whatever the hell we have to talk about. I started to get some help. I spent hundreds of hours trying to learn how to be a parent and get advice about how to grow up and learn how to become a parent. Today we have three children, a 20-year-old, an 18-year old, a 9-year adult. And it made some significant stuff. I stopped gambling. I made appointments with my psychologist. I made apartments with my sponsor about going to work and staying at work. And in a relatively short period of time, I started to replace all those patterns that I had before with different patterns, and I told the truth about my life. I opened it up, got some fresh air in it, and I startedto get support. One of the most magical things that happened to me and I think changed for me when I came in, prior to coming to college synonymous, I was this unique guy called Bob. And I kept on looking for someone who knew Bob so well that they could just see right through my baloney and just blow it out of the way and tell me how to live my life and change my life. I never found anybody who knew enough about Bob to do that. When I came to Alcoholics Anonymous, it was almost like Bob died and I became an alcoholic. And the moment I became a alcoholic, I found a group of people who were experts in alcoholism who could teach me and help me live my love. For about two years, I'd ask questions and I'd get an answer. About the end of my second year, I would ask a question and I would get an answer and I weren't sure you were right. So I started to reassert my ego and I started becoming Bob again. I started to become an individual. The more I became an individual, the more separate I felt. And little by little, the issues that I started experiencing in sobriety, I attributed to Bob. And I didn't deal with some of those issues in Alcoholics Anonymous. I that they had a damn thing to do with alcoholism. And little by little, I became more separate in my recovery. When I was over seven or eight years, I had lost some of the confidence I talked about in my program. That night in my living room when I took the sixth and the seventh step, I put my whole life into the program. I didn't realize that I had separated part of my work life and part of mi marital life and part o my parenting life and my issues out of my program that I thought I was supposed to deal with. That night, I put everything back in the circle. One of those stories or jokes I heard about a drunk, because they talked about a drunk walking or driving down the street. A guy's driving down the street after this panel truck and he sees a guy who's got a panel truck about every two blocks. The guy gets out and beats on the side of the panel truck with him with the broom. Finally after about a half a mile of this the guy stops and says what in the hell are you doing with that broom? He says well you see that truck? He said yeah. He says that's a one ton truck. Guy says okay I know that. He said I got two tons of canaries in there. I got to keep one ton in the air at all times, but I can't drive a truck. And that was kind of how my life was. My life was, you know, like I had 14 things to do, time to do 10, and I got four done. That night when I surrendered, my life came together, and from that time on I really only have had one thing to do. I really have only had one think to do and if I keep my focus on my recovery To keep the focus on my powerlessness. You know, one of the things that I, when I'm in the room of Alcoholics Anonymous, I know more about who I am than any other place I've ever been. There's all sorts of times when I're out in the business world that I forget who I am. There's also at the time where I'm not sure how I'm supposed to be and I get a little confused out there, but when I sit in a meeting with Alcoholics Anonymous. When I'm with you, I'm home. I know who I'm talking to. I know what I am and I know where I am. I'm more comfortable and I'm grounded I'm a you know I just I know what is important in my life when I'm out there I'm going through some pretty difficult time on the real estate business and I for many years was had just unbridled success it was just you know how was that a role that was just second to none within two years of taking those steps in my living room I was making more a month than I made a year and that was true for the next eight or nine years in my life, I just made enough money to burn a wet elephant. And then they passed the 1986 tax act and God cut my allowance in half and my life changed a little bit. And I am now dealing with some issues that I haven't had to deal with in a while. I'm dealing again with financial issues and ego issues and I'm having to adjust my living. I've been getting back into it and Linda again involved in the finances of my life. I am experiencing a lot of things that I thought I was done with. But see isn't that kind of funny about issues that you think you're done with, how things keep reoccurring in your life. And I'm saying, and I don't like the circumstances that I'm going through, but it's just what's next. I mean, I got for a while I thought I was exempt. I thought, God, for 22 years, 20 years of sobriety, God's just blessing you. You're just this wonderful guy. And you're just on a roll and I think you'll be on a role forever. And it didn't happen that way and I started to have some issues and problems. It's just my turn. It's no big deal. Now when I'm alone and I don't know who I am, and I'm home dealing with those issues, I think it's the biggest deal in the world. There are days when I want to crawl under my desk and get in the fetal position and suck my thumb. I feel sorry for myself. I feel like it isn't fair. This shouldn't be happening. Something's wrong, but I'm doing it. And then I get into a meeting at Alcove East Nanite, and it's no big deal. It just isn't any big deal! I mean, one of the wonderful things is that you just don't care about the circumstances you almost can't feel sorry for yourself at a meeting of alcoholics down there I mean, I go there intent on feeling sorry for myself intent to focus and obsess on my own problem and you just can't do it there's just too much energy there's juste too much power we don't get involved in the circumstances we get involved with the solution and once again I walk away like I will walk away this weekend and I will be enlivened I will not take myself so seriously i won't be so damn involved in the circumstances of my life my business won't be so important and i will be as grateful as i can be for my recovery i'm as grateful that i could be that i'm loved with my wife i'm not as grateful as i can be that i have a good relationship with my three children everything that i have in my life i didn't have anything when i came to alcoholist anonymous i built my life in alcohol is not i treasure the program of alcoholist animals i hope we keep the integrity of the program about i mean they're just it's so damn confusing out there today it's kind of hard to tell a player without a program i mean that's just they're just we've become part of the world you know for the first when i came in they used to put a paper bag over your head you know when you walked in the meeting didn't want anybody to see and now my god it's just i mean it's everywhere and there's you know I have worked as hard as I know how to work the last 22 years to get my life together. And I made a lot of changes. and i think people who know me would say yeah bob has changed a lot the truth is i haven't changed much at all i came to alcoholist anonymous and you just allowed me to discover and bring out things in me it was almost like i came in here and i was a chunk of marble you started to chip away take away the things you didn't want or i didn't need that god didn't want in that picture and you started defy i started to find out what bob really was you started to chip away certain pieces in that block and Bob started to show up and everything that's in my life today was always in my mind I'm not going anywhere Chuck Chamberlain in 1971 when he did a conference at Gopher State Roundup I remember he sat down in the room and I want to share this with you in closing and he said to me he said son you're not going anymore you already are everything you're ever going to be and he said I can tell how disappointed you are in that and I really was because I wanted to be something different than what I was and that's what I thought would happen to me when I came to Alcoholist Anonymous is you turned me into something different but that hasn't happened to me you simply turned me into who I am and if I work for another 20 years in Alcoholist Anonymous and make a lot more changes my sense is that I'll still be bad so sometimes when we're sitting out of the room and we have a disappointment our lives aren't working exactly the way we'd like our lives to work I want me to know and I want all of us to know there's nothing missing you already have everything in place to be as successful in this program as you're ever going to need you don't need anything anybody else has you already are where you're going to go and if you turn yourself over to this program if you surrender and get out of your way if you become a channel rather than a source, if you lose your weakness rather than your head this program I think will clear away the wreckage of your past and restore you to a wholeness and a sanity and will bring about miracles and changes in our lives that we would never dream about just were almost impossible that we don't need anything else Thank you very much.