Bob B. at the Solutions Weekend – 1993

Hi, my name is Bob and I'm an alcoholic. To the grace of God and the help of the program, I've not found the answer to take a drink. It's the 10th of December 1967. Well, we're going to spend quite a little bit of time together this weekend. I'm going to tell my story tonight. And tomorrow we're through the steps in a couple of sessions and that'll be probably more my story rather than just kind of talking about the steps just telling you about how they relate to my life and what's going on in my life today and then hopefully by the end of the weekend we'll have a you'll have a little better idea and i'll have all the better idea about how those principles relate to what's going on well i think that's the challenge for all of us to So, see how our practice is alive. I think the steps are a practice, spiritual practice. I started drinking when I was pretty young. I was 13 years old and I was a freshman in high school and I was 4 foot 11 and I weighed 95 pounds and I wasn't sure and I was kind of insecure and I was a kid who always it's kind of interesting when you get to be a parent you get to re-experience some things about yourself as a child that you you know didn't know or didn't have insight into as you did I was an attention deficit kid that was antsy it was kind of always in trouble for talking I got thrown out of grade school quite a few times and in high school I don't know high school it kind of settled down I was a little bit better but I was always want to be the center of attraction I always felt kind of insecure I always wanted to be part of the cool group you know I was seems to me that no matter where you are in life there's always a group of people who seem to know more about life than you do it was kind of like they're the end group and it's like someone described it once it's as if they had a meeting in school an hour before school started and you missed the meeting and everybody else kind of decided what was going to go on and you kind of felt like you were playing catch-up all the time and that's kind of how i felt i kind of pretended i was at the meeting and uh you know wanted to overhear what they were talking about at the meeting and uh but when i went out when i was at a military school on a college campus we were and we had fraternities we did a lot of we drank in high school like most people drink in college it was a catholic military high school and we i don't know from the freshman year on we just you know kind of did it and uh we had a lot or two or three of us almost died of alcohol poisoning in high school of my five best friends in high school four four of them are now colleagues anonymous two wives and we you know we knew each other all the way through grade school so there was just a lot of good genetics going on there well i was at a party one night and a friend of mine had a fifth and we went out and we split that fifth and my life changed i mean it was just magic time it was if i discovered the secret that made life easier i felt totally unaware all the things all the the anxieties I had about being small or being different or not being part of and at our school you didn't hang out with upperclassmen you got in trouble if you showed up at the wrong party you'd be shining shoes for a month so we were you know hell I'd get drunk and we'd go to a party and there was no issue I didn't care where I was you know I mean I just had a sense of freedom that I had never experienced up until that time and it really was magic it really just kind of changed my perception. And I drank at every opportunity that a young guy had in those days, and most of our opportunities were stealing booze out of our parents' liquor cabinets or paying people to go buy booze for us or sneaking out after school with a six-pack of stite and a straw. Well, for some reason, I don't know why we thought if you drank stite through straws, you got drunk faster. I don'T know what wives tale that was, but we did that when we were 14 and 15 years old. Everybody would line up. We'd go over to some girl's house after school and drink two cans of beer and think we were big deals. By the time I finished high school, I had a reputation for drinking. I was in trouble already for drinking a number of times. I'd gotten one car accident. I'd been making false ID cards. Just my whole life revolved around drinking. My buddies were the drinkers. I didn't think I had an drinking problem. My parents thought I had drinking problems. I thought it's kind of hard when you're a young guy, you know, just you're not allowed to drink. Most of the issue was being underage and most of the issues had to do with driving and drinking. So you weren't allowed to drink and you couldn't hang out. And my parents were the generation where there was just a lot of cocktail parties. Cocktail parties and weddings and there was just everything revolved around booze. My parents' friends all drank a lot. There was, you know... So there was plenty of parties that we could go to and you just kind of knew where you could go and where you Could drink. So I wanted to go away to school Figured when I went away to school, I'd be away from the authorities. I went way to the University of Notre Dame. Thought my drinking had become normal. My drinking got a lot worse when I got to Notre Dame when I kind of got away from any kind of schedule. When I went to college, in those days they still had hours. You had to be in at 10.30 during the week, believe it or not. Had to be at 12 o'clock if you were a freshman on the weekend. But we paid people and we snuck out And we had, I remember damn near killed a guy my freshman year. We had a German track star who was on scholarship and he thought that it was part of the priest who was kind of convinced this guy that it wasn't part of his scholarship to turn people in who were sneaking out. So he got like three guys kicked out of school and he was not our favorite guy. And the halls were real long halls and he'd sit down in a chair and he studied with a lamp and a chair in the hallway looking for people who were sneaking out. So we were at a card game late one night. We decided we were going to sneak out and go visit these girls in Chicago. But we knew this guy was a problem, so we snuck down the back hallway. And at the end of the hallway, you go all the way down this hallway about 100 feet long, and you open up two swinging doors, and you go down three steps, and they've got a fire door. So one of the jocks held me over the swinging doors and he put down the fire hinges so that the doors opened one inch and stopped. and then we threw our suitcases, made a hell of a lot of noise and threw open the outer door and this track start came all the way down the hall about 100 feet going about 100 miles an hour and hit the two swinging doors and they opened one inch and stopped he broke his nose I mean he was in the hospital for him we just kind of looked over the door got on our train went to Chicago and I don't know. I was in civil engineering. I started out as an A student, ended up as a C student. I just never was able to maintain myself. I had trouble studying. As I said, it was attention deficit. I think any time there was any kind of disturbance going on, a bridge game or a poker game, I wanted to go do that and then school kind of came second or third. By the time I got to my senior year, I just ran my string out. I was only going to school about one day out of every ten. and it's kind of tough to bluff your way through a thermodynamics exam. And one day I just walked out. I was due to be commissioned that summer as an officer in the Army. I had to get a medical release. My medical release was for alcoholism. I was diagnosed an alcoholic when I was 19 years old. And I was at a restaurant the other night, and I ran into this psychiatrist who diagnosed me when I Was 19 years Old. He and his wife were out to dinner. and over the years he would call me from time to time to go call on some of his clients. You know, I'd go down to the hospital and the psych ward and take him to meetings and I don't know why it was interesting. He had written a pamphlet on alcoholism. Not too many doctors in 1960 you know, one, two or three knew that much about alcoholism but this guy did and I thought he was you know I thought the diagnosis was inaccurate and he said there's just something about the way you drink I said yeah I get in trouble And he said, no, it isn't just bad luck. There's something about the way you drink that's different than the way your friends drink. He said, I think you're an alcoholic. I think You're one of those people who shouldn't drink. Well, they got me out of Notre Dame, got me Out of the Service, and when I showed up back at home, my parents were very disappointed. They finished school at a local college, St. Thomas College. By the time I finished school, the family asked me to leave home. They said, this isn't working. I'm one of seven kids, but I'm number two of seven. And they just said, you know, you're a mess. You don't follow the rules. You know, everybody, I mean, it's kind of hard to tell everybody else what to do in this family when you don't do it. And, you Know, now that you got your degree, I think you ought to get the hell out of here. So I got the hell Out of there. And then my life really went down like it was a grease slide. I went, I Think I had one summer school course to finish and I was working at a liquor store and I'm drinking a fifth a day. I'm drunk, I'm driving the delivery truck. I almost killed a little girl, knocked her off her bicycle backing out of a driveway one day. Just a mess. I got a ticket for going 80 miles an hour with a delivery truck I got fired, took a job as a waiter at a private club in Minneapolis and I've got an apartment in St. Paul and I work in downtown Minneapolis 7 miles apart and I think in the 5 months I worked as a waitress I think I made at home about eight nights. You know, I just had a couple of, you know, paper sacks with my stuff in it. And I just slept around. You know? I'd bunk up with someone, a waitress or a waiter or, you know, just, you know, Dr. Seuss, that child author. Those are actual photographs of people I lived with during those years of my life. It was, it was, you know, and I'm 210 pounds and I You know, I'm just a basket case. I'm drinking, you know, three or four beers in the morning, taking a dexedrine, and I'm going to work. I'm working from 10 to 2. At 2, I go drink beer at a bar from 2 to 5, and at 5, I'll go buy a fifth, and I put the fifth in my locker and pour it into a half-pint bottle. And, I mean, that's just tacky. I mean everything about my life. I'm living, you Know, in single-room occupancy hotels, you know, three four or five bucks a night. And it's pretty dim and we had a party one night I got into a fight and I got the hell knocked out of me and I they fired me as a waiter because I looked like they got the hell knocked outta me. And well, the guy is from St. Paul and when I got fired from that job, I had no place to go. And I went back to my family and asked if I could move back in the house. And my father said that if I followed the rules of the house, I could move back in the House. Greetings, guys. No problem. I moved back into the house and it was not much fun being the family problem. You know, everybody talks about when you're married, your wife gives you the look. Well, I have my mother giving me the look at my brothers and sisters, and I was always in trouble. And, you know, once or twice a year the police would bring me home and my mother would be hysterical, my father would be very upset, my sisters would be crying, my brothers would want to beat the hell out of me. And we'd be having discussions about what to do with me. And I would never enter into the discussions. I was a subject but not a participant in those conversations. I really wanted my life to be different. everybody's attitude about me was that I was fairly well equipped it seemed like there was no reason why I couldn't have gone out and you know I was supposed to be fairly bright and I should have been a good student they had them kind of convinced that Notre Dame was a real tough place and then my younger brother went down there and got an A average so it was kind of shot the hell out of that their attitude about me was that I was a screw up that I obviously was hell-bent to tear my life apart, that I didn't care about the values of the family, that I was a consistent underperformer and just didn't care. And that wasn't true. I was a guy who I think I wanted to be a good student. I know now that there were some impediments, including my alcoholism, attention deficit. I have two ADT kids, and you learn a little bit about that as you go on. And they talked to me like I was the guy with a lot of potential, and at any moment I would turn it on and become a Rhodes Scholar or an Olympic, you know, athlete or something. And I wasn't turning much on. Everything I had was out there on the street. I was doing the very best I knew how to do and it wasn't working. And I made, I really tried to put my life together when I lost that job and moved back in the house. I mean all my friends are kind of now out in the job force and they're, you don't know, pretty good starting jobs and they are out there doing it. I got engaged and remarried. I thought maybe if I could some structure in my life that'd make a difference and i got engaged to linda who's now my lovely wife meet lady real active member of al-anon that's been an important part of our lives together and uh i got a job as an executive trainee with the manufacturing concern you know about my first car you know i really thought now it's going to be okay and it wasn't okay it was got worse i was i just couldn't stop drinking i was a bar drinker and it seemed like most of my friends who were pretty heavy drinkers in college toned it down you know when we got on out and got a job it seemed like they were able to put the screws on it enough that they were able to you know start their careers and go doing it i just you know after work i'd go have a couple of drinks and you know i closed the joints and i'd be you know just barely you know coherent at seven o'clock in the morning trying to get up and You know, I'd pull my car over to get five minutes of sleep on the freeway and I'd be sleeping about 9.30, supposed to be work at 8. Or I'd go to work and I, you know, go get my mail and then go to the john and I would fall asleep in the john. Someone would tage me and I could be stumbling down the hall with both my legs asleep, kind of a classy thing for a young executive. We had a photographer at that company who was asleep, my hangovers off in his darkroom. And I'm the company drunk. I mean, it is, you know, when I was at Notre Dame, I was a class drunk. We had four guys in my civil engineering class that petitioned to have me removed from the civil engineering class. I mean that was, they were thanks also, but you know I was the class drunk, they used my room to study in because I was never in it. It was just kind of, I wasn't the joke of the civil engineering class and it was kind of all of a sudden I'm in a company of engineers and I'm the company drunk and I am in trouble and it's not working out. I went back and I made amends with that guy a couple of years after I was sober, and he said, I never could figure out what's wrong with you. He said, you seem like you had a lot of moxie, and you just never seemed to do anything. You know, you just couldn't put it together. Well, I could never put anything together in those days. I quit that job after six months and took a job selling. Went out to sell business equipment, adding machines, business machines, and that kind of stuff. And that didn't work out very well either, and I went through training and then I'm one of my buddies got married and I missed work for about four days and I called him the first one or two days of that, didn't call him the next one or three days of it, and woke up about two o'clock one afternoon in an absolute panic, and I thought I would be fired I thought, I wasn't sure how Linda was thinking about me, she hadn't seen me in a couple of days you know, wondered whether or not I still had a place to live at home that my parents were really fed up. The only reason I was still around is I was getting married in December, and this was like August. They were just kind of counting the days. They counseled my wife. They were worried about my wife marrying me. They just kindof sat her down and talked. I mean, it was really most places, you know, that's the opposite conversation. You know, they wanted to have a conversation with her to make sure that she knew what she was getting into. Thank God she wasn't in love. Didn't listen very hard to those conversations. so I woke up that day and I'm in a panic and you know I was lucky enough that my father recommended that I go to AA and the psychiatrist had recommended that I go to EA and here a couple of years after that that day I was scared enough that I called AA and I got an old timer down central office he talked to me on the phone for a while and then he called a couple guys and I met two guys at a cafe at 4 o'clock one afternoon in July of 1967 and my life changed i had never in all the time that i was in trouble ever talked to anybody who drank i'd never talked to anybody you had a problem with drinking i talked to doctors and psychiatrists and psychologists and nuns and priests and bishops and judges and attorneys and all that kind of stuff i've never talked to anyone who had my problem when i went to this meeting thinking it was going to be a couple of guys were going to interview me what usually happened when you were in trouble ask you a bunch of questions about yourself and then make a recommendation I sat down in the booth and that wasn't what happened at all I had a couple of guy one guy had six months of sobriety one day about six years and they sat me down and told me the stories tell me about what their drinking was like would have half done how they got into alcohol it's not missing what they're doing today and it was it was profound I think that's one of the greatest traditions we have an area is that we share our experience strength in how we share our lives with someone, not our thoughts. And there's something about sharing your life that every once in a while the earth moves when you do that. And that day my life changed and they asked me if I wanted to go to a meeting and I went to my first meeting of AA that night. I drank twice after walking in AA once on a business trip after about 30 days of sobriety and I didn't call AA like they told me, recommended that I do, and I drank down the west Coast and got in a bunch of trouble. Then I got sober for about two and a half or three months, and I got married, and we—I drank on our honeymoon in Mexico. And the last drink I had was in Mexico on the way back on the airplane. And when I came to AA, I was—you know, early on in AA, made a couple of discoveries which kind of laid the foundation for my recovery and kind of changed my life and uh the two discoveries was one of one that alcoholism was a disease and almost everybody knows that today i didn't know that when i came to aa i had no idea what it was just absolutely no idea and it was just like a miracle i mean from the very first moment i walked into alcoholic synonymous i liked it it was like coming home i was like a group of people who knew more about me without knowing me than I had ever been anyplace. And these people sat me down, they told me that alcoholism was a disease that affected me physically, mentally, and spiritually. And the message that I always heard from the psychiatrist and from everybody else was, what's wrong with you is you drink too much. That's what alcoholism is. You need to stop drinking. Well, I had had almost everybody who's got problems with drinking has had a couple of periods of time where they didn't drink. And just when I went down to my senior year, I got into a whole bunch of trouble just before I went back down to school. And I was beaten up and robbed and rolled and shot at and pistol whipped and thrown out of the second story of a hotel and ended up like in a state of shock in an alley, ended up in a hospital. And they patched me up and they were going to put me in a psych ward and not let me go back to school and I talked my way out of that and they let me come back to school and I didn't drink for almost three months and during those three months my life didn't get much better I mean, I thought you're telling me what's wrong with me is swallowing bourbon if I quit swallwing bourbon my life's going to be okay I went back to school and I quit drinking and I just couldn't put it together I just could not put it together and I thought obviously what's right with me is just not drinking I just quit and it didn't get better and obviously what was wrong with being isn't just drinking because that looks like i can quit you know and uh so i thought i'd just prove that but these people told me what was wrong with me was alcoholism the symptom of alcoholism was a drinking problem but that alcoholism in addition to being physical was mental and spiritual and once i crossed a line from drinking problem into alcoholism my alcoholism affected me all the time when i was drinking and when i wasn't drinking and boy that was important i never had I can't tell you how important it was for me to find out that there was a mental, emotional, psychological, spiritual aspect to alcoholism. And they told me that once they took their last drink of alcohol, what they did is they used the 12 steps of the recovery program at AA to find a different way to live. A different way of life that was better enough that they wouldn't have to go back to drugs or booze and do something for them that they were unwilling or unable to do for themselves. if they didn't find a different way to live they were going to go back and not live sober so it was explained to me almost from the get-go that was this was about remember i was really kind of shocked that they told me that not drinking was about 10 percent of what aaa was about now when you walk in the front door you think not drinking is about 100 of what it's about i thought if if not drinking as ten percent what the hell's going on here and i you know kind of hung out the other discovery i made is that there was an awful lot of people who were out there chasing it pretty hard and drinking a hell of a lot now they weren't doing it and the only reason it seemed like they weren t doing it is they liked what they found in sobriety better than what they'd found in a bottle and my concern was i could kind of understand why the older people quit but it seemed to me like i was a had kind of a bum deal that i showed up a little early you know i was 23 and i you know seemed like i got there about 10 years earlier than i should have gotten there and if i could just take a rain check and come back i'd be happy uh i thought when i had to quit drinking my life would be over so much of my identity tied up in the activities of drinking and the people that i drank with i didn't like people who didn't drink and all that sort of stuff that life was looking pretty dull for me you know if i was abstinent But I looked at these people, and their lives were not dealt. There was a zest and an energy and a vitality and a spirit about the people that I saw in AA that from the very moment I walked in, I liked the laughter, I like the energy, I like your reverence and all the stuff that I found in alcoholics. And I had a great group. I came in from the moment I came In. I was telling a joke at dinner. I had two sponsors. One guy assigned himself to me by the name of Bill, another guy that I asked after I was sober about a month in a warrant. And I see those men all the time. They're still my sponsors. So St. Paul's kind of a small, of the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, St.Paul's kindof the Fort Worth, the Dallas-Fort Worth with a small town. So I still see people all the times that I went to grade school with and I see people that I want to high school with. and I've had an opportunity to just kind of be around the people that I came in the program with all the way through and an awful lot of the people I came with are still sober. A lot of them are dead, and some of the People Moves, but I've got a real continuity because I didn't move in the People. And that's been kind of nice for me and important for me is consistency was not the hallmark of my early sobriety. But I got involved with men that were very active. there's a lot of 12-step work and almost from the moment i walked in aa was doing 12 stuff we were going to jails and prisons and workhouses and we were on the list down at intergroup and we're going out you know i just kind of write shotgun for warren and the other guy warned the guy with him a bottle made the first call on me those two guys got about 50 percent of all the calls that came into our club and so i was you know i don't know i probably wanted one call a week or something like that and we did a lot of 12-step work in those days and it was exciting for me we'd go to meetings at i guess i probably went to three or four meetings a week during night and then i had two or three meetings a week here in the day and we have step classes sometimes on the weekends and we were just always kind of interacting with each other and you'd go till meeting at eight o'clock you probably wouldn't get home till midnight i mean you know we'd both one or two nights a week they had allen on and linda was starting to go to al-anon she was reluctant about it but she was going, and it was a dutiful wife. And you know we'd go to the meetings, and in the afternoon meeting we sit around and we talk, and the conversations had almost nothing to do with not drinking. If a guy had a slip we talked a little bit about drinking, but the conversations had to do about life, had to be about work, and having a fight with your wife, and you know money problems, and paying bills, and steps eight and nine. You know at first it's kind of confusing to me about why these men are sitting down with Warren who's a mailman, and this guy's a business executive why he's sitting down talking about financial issues with the mailman and uh pretty quickly became clear to me that they were applying the principles that we were discussing in the meetings to their lives and what they were sitting around was talking about what was going on in their life today it was a real real conversation and so i got excellent training literally from the beginning i was kind of an idealist and i think my expectations have always been pretty high when i came to aaa i thought okay i'm now 24 years old had my last drink my life has been a real disappointment to everybody including me up till now and it seems like if i've got the problem of alcoholism this is where you go for the problem with alcoholism and you've got this solution my life ought to take off now And so I expected that I'd be a better everything because I was now sober. And my first year of sobriety was just kind of wonderful. I was on a honeymoon, just all the kind of excitement about the discoveries that you make and meeting the people and taking the steps and going through that. But I had about five or six persistent issues that were in my life, and they were gambling, loved to gamble. It's kind of how I supported myself through college, playing cards and pool and the backgammon. And I had money problems because I always spent more money than I made. If you do that over a long period of time, you'll end up in debt just in case you're running that experiment. You don't know where that goes. and I've got a work problem I've been getting up to go to work I've had a problem staying at work once I get to work and don't know quite what to do newly married my wife is I think both of us had expectations of what marriage was and the experience of marriage was different than our expectations I think she had a wonderful father who came home every night at 5 o'clock I don't yet know if I'd meet at home at 5 o'clock in 26 years of marriage. So we had mutual expectations, and they were different. I was real active in AA, and she saw more of me when we were dating than she saw of me once I joined AA. She's working as a nurse. She's getting up at 6 to go to work, and I'm in bed. I come home after work and catch a quick bite to eat, and I go out at a meeting, and I am back at 11, 30, 12 o' clock, and she's not seeing me. And so she's a little disappointed, and Father knows best. Little white picket fence with an apron meeting her husband for dinner was not turning out to be how married life was. Then we started to have children, and that was a real challenge for me. I was a young and mature angry spring-loaded parent, and sometimes violent. Not a very good combination for a father. and the challenges of all those sorts of things making a living and you know but those are the issues in my life and I thought that AA would start to straighten those things out and as I started to go forward in my life it seemed like they were getting worse they weren't getting better I think there's a phenomenon that happens in recovery whether the period of time my first year I had all those issues and never paid much attention to them I was kind of in the honeymoon then all of a sudden about the end of my first year into my second i started to get a sense of what having your own program meant and having to start to get the sense of of what the steps had to do with life and the fact that what your defects of character were and how they operated and one by one i started to get my life issues handed to me as i went through and uh i kind of took them on and as i'd identify him i really tried to change them and i found myself uh to my great distress i wasn't changing they were pretty persistent issues they weren't annual issues or monthly issues they were daily issues i was struggling with these things and as i say it seemed like it was getting worse my experience now tells me what was happening to me as i was getting more honest and as I got more honest less able to deny the issues in my life they became more prominent and more real and unavoidable and i couldn't deny them and i couldn t stuff them and i could n t sidestep them as easily as i was able to and i still was able too to some extent but less so that was my perception i think i was getting better going forward i think as you start to get well you start to move forward in your recovery and you start to bump into what's in your way anytime you take a new task on you know if i said okay gang okay we're going to go to colorado at nine o'clock tomorrow morning everybody in this room right now is going to get into a bus and we're gonna go well between now and nine o clock tomorrow morning you'd have a lot of telephone calls to make a lot of things to line up and money to get and clothing to get there'd be a lot of things you'd had to do to be prepared to take that trip and up until the time you start to take that trip none of that stuff was even in your thoughts that was kind of what recovery was for me all of a sudden i started to go forward and started to take the steps and pretty quickly what was in the way of me putting these principles in my life started to show up immediately as soon as i took two steps forward i ran into me i ran into my dishonesty i went into my gambling i ran out of the way i spent money i ran into my marriage and parenting and every issue, work, all those sorts of things. Ran into them in the conversations at meetings. I ran into them on 12-step calls. You just kind of run into yourself. You find yourself having a conversation with a new person. You're having it for that person, but it's exactly the conversation that applies to your life. You know, just exactly what you should be hearing. We've all had those experiences on 12 step calls. but I started to think that maybe I was different again I came in and I think the great wonder for me when I tore down my wall I had a wall that all of us have I think when you're an active alcoholic that separated me from you and I thought it protected the things that I did not want you to see in my life I thought I was four feet thick and eight feet tall and no one could see through it and I didn't know it made of glass it's about an inch thick everybody could see through it but I thought thinking that when I'm behind the wall so you like me but you only like what I let you see about me because if you could see everything about me you wouldn't like me because I don't like me I had all these dark, dirty, unattractive, lousy insufficient things about me that I was hiding and I figured if I showed them to you and I talked about these things, it was really funny I wasn't like you said, it didn't come up with my sponsor. But now that I'm sponsoring a lot of young guys, I think they expected a 23-year-old or 24-year old to have some of the issues I was having in life. It wasn't surprising that I didn't know exactly how to handle my money. It wasn'T surprising thatI just had issues at work and I don't knowexactly how honest I was with all those conversations. Certainly didn't have a very honest conversation about my gambling. That was kind of a hidden conversation for an awful long time. But all of a sudden I'm four and five years sober, and I'm starting to think something's wrong. Everybody else seems like they're making progress in their life and I am going backwards. I'm sitting in meetings and people are telling me what a good job I'm doing, what a great member of AA I am, but my life is really unmanageable. Maybe as unmanagable right now, sober three, four or five years as it was ever before. It's not very good. can't you guys see this? And I'm going to meetings with you three or four days a week. You know, it would seem to me that you'd have a better insight. You know? It seemed to me like AE wasn't working for me. And, you know, my idea was, I think my definition of recovery was the absence of problems. I think I thought that if you had recovery, you would solve the issues of your life. And here I am. I've got recovery. I'm four years sober. I'm five years sober, and six years sober and I not only haven't solved the issues in my life, It's like I'm in an automobile going 30 miles an hour towards a tree with the steering wheel tied in the position that it's in. It doesn't look like it's able to move and I'm going to hit the damn tree. My life is, I'm not able to turn it and I am doing a lot. I'm trying to work my program the best I know how. I'm starting to change these things and going backwards. And, I don't know, I guess I've always known the answer was God. I had known that since my early religious upbringing. I knew it from my sponsor, and I knew it from some of the people who had lives put together the way I kind of thought I'd like my life put together. But it seemed like the problem was, how do you have a relationship with God if you can't fulfill the conditions of the relationship? As soon as I go to God and sign up for the relationship to get my life better because the people who have a better relationship with god had better lives god's going to ask me to quit gambling i've been busting my ass to quit gambling for five years i can't quit gambling he's going gonna ask me to get up in the morning and go to work when i get to work stay at work gonna ask you to stop spending money he's gonna ask to be nice to my children and be loving to my wife i'm doing the best i know how to do but i don't know how to do those i'm not able to it doesn't seem like as much as i seem to want to or try to do some of these things i'm not able to grab my life by the throat as soon as i get rid of these things. I will have a relationship with God, but there isn't much sense in going now because I don't seem to be able to clean that up. And I was kind of stuck in that place, I think for about two years. It was really kind of a problematic, very difficult place for me to be. And in lieu of trying to do something spiritual, which is what I was thinking that I had to do, I went back to step one at about the time I was sober seven years. Now, I don't think the timing of this has much to do with, you know, the fact that I was seven years sober. I think it took me that long because I was young, and I think, you know, this issue may happen to you when you're three or four years sober, it may happen to your ten years sober. I think sometime in your middle years of sobriety, you're going to run into a second level of surrender you're going to run into a second level you're gonna run into a surrender that needs to deal with your mental and spiritual problems of alcoholism because i think when the physical part of alcoholism goes it's almost as if your alcoholism was underground and starts finding a new place to reside and many of us you know find that all of a sudden we've got a couple of compulsive behaviors in our lives you know whether it's television or money or sex or violence or anger or eating or work or whatever but you know behavior patterns that are pretty strong pretty destructive have a lot of the same symptoms to me of alcoholism you know a lot of denial around them a lot almost like blackouts you know god i'd get into my behavior and i mean if i was going to go gamble when i was gonna go leave work it was just like i'd go into a blackout i just you know kind of come in and say oh gee i better go downtown and pick something up you know two days later i'd come back you know sober now you know i'd be down get into a game it'd be just eight or nine hours nothing very serious and uh so i went back to step one sober uh almost eight years and i found out and took another look at powerlessness and manageability at that point time in my life. And it wasn't very hard to see that I was powerless, pretty hard. It wasn't really hard to say that my life was unmanageable. That was about as obvious as anything had been for a long time. And I think I came to a second surrender. It was really sad. It's different, I think, than the kind of surrender I had when I first came in. But it was clear to me that whatever I whatever I was doing wasn't enough and when I went to take the second step at that level at that point in time my sobriety was different the second step was a step if you would have asked me casually do you believe in the second step I'd say hell yeah it was just kind of throwaway I've always believed in this second step well what had I discovered at eight years of sobrieties I believed in it for you but not for me I could have put my hand in lie detector test and said do i believe that god's going to restore everybody in this room right now to sanity if they participate in the program put the principles in action in their life my answer is yes at that moment i didn't believe it for bob designs because i was going to four or five meetings a week i was active in service i was sponsoring people i mean i'm really active and committed in my program and my life's going backwards so i thought there was something else wrong with me i didn't believe god was going to restore me to sanity and i had to come to believe at a second time that god would restore me the sanity and I came to believe that by looking at you I think when you're in trouble you either get more active or less active at that point in time I got a little bit more active and I for some reason was given the grace to kind of get my head unstuck enough to take a look around what was going on I had pigeons that were making more progress than i was making there were younger people coming in that were dealing with issues that were just as profound if not larger than mine you know they had not much more as much as i had to work with and they had a smile on their face and they were breaking ice and they were moving ahead with their lives and mine was going backwards and i started to see the power of the program and the grace of god worked in these people's lives and i came to believe again for me. I stopped looking at myself as an exception. There's something when I came to NAA and surrendered and took step one the first time I think what I wanted more than anything else in life is I wanted to find an expert in my I wanted someone who knew so much about me they could literally look through me and they could talk to me in such a way that I knew they knew so much about me that they would just tell me something to do and I could go do it. I never found that. What happened to me is I came to Alcoholics Anonymous and I took the first step and became an alcoholic and once I became an alcoholic, I had lots of people who knew an awful lot about alcoholism and could teach me and they taught me about alcohol. As I started to get more sober in that period of time, I stopped becoming an alcoholic and I kind of became Bob again. My ego asserted itself and I became more interested in the little peculiarities of Bob and I started to look for an expert in Bob again. And so I'd be in meetings with Alcoholics Anonymous with people who knew an awful lot about alcoholism, and I started to be less interested in that, and more interested in me. And I started to look at the differences of me, and i found myself being a real active member of AlcoholicsAnonymous but not feeling as much part of as I used to feel part and when I had my took my second took the first step again at depth I became an alcoholic again I became more teachable than I've been for an awful long time and all of a sudden my peculiarities weren't as important as my alcoholism in the applicability of the steps and all of a suddenly I'm more teachible than I'd done for a long time And I took the third step on my knee with my sponsor in his office. And I had not done that before, and it was awkward, a little bit awkward for me. But I didn't want to miss anything. I did a fourth step. I'd already done two fourth and fifth steps in my sobriety, and the previous two fourths and fifths steps I'd done with clergy, with my sponsor. And I went to my sponsor, and I said that we went to his office, and I took my fist up with him. I said, when I'm done with this, I said I'm going to do whatever you recommend that I do. I've had an enormous amount of pain. It seems kind of silly that I'm this sober and in this much pain. I know that I'm surrounded by the answer, and and I just haven't seemed to be able to access it effectively in these areas of my life. But I feel like I'm in a spot where I'm ready to make some big changes. I took my fifth step with that man. And when I was done, one of the things he wanted me to do was go to a psychologist. I didn't want to go to an psychologist. It seemed like that was a mission that my program didn't work, or that it was different or weird or something. But I did go to another psychologist. because I had an awful lot of issues around money and success and failure, and I had a lot of issue about fear and work and sales and all this sort of stuff, and I didn't know. It was so uncomfortable for me, I don't think I ever really fully kind of examined those arenas of my life and kind of ignored them. So I was able to go to the psychologist, and Linda and I both attended, and Peter and Bill attended a few sessions, sessions and I was able to get in touch with how much fear I had around failure and I think that was one of the biggest issues in my life just to explain to you how big that was would be kind of hard for me it was just I had a very successful father I just thought that my job was to go out and kind of do what my dad did and sure never looked like I was going to be able to do you know, a fifth or sixth of what my father accomplished. And here I, you know... So I'm pretty uptight. It just seemed to me, I was, you now, if I looked at all the people who I went to high school and college with, it seemed like you were supposed to go do X. You know, I don't know what it was, but you were suppose to be a vice president or this or that. And I'm a schmuck. I mean, I can't even get to work is what I can do. I'm salesman who can't make sales calls. and my life's gone you know seems like I'm stuck in the mud and it was it was interesting for me and that failure felt like dying it didn't feel like feeling it felt like done and some of those conversations got me in touch with the fact that maybe I could survive a failure you know maybe I've been going Because if you can't fail, you can play. You just can't play. And I was a guy who wasn't playing. I was the salesman that wasn't making calls because I knew people didn't want what I was selling. Wouldn't even take the chance, you know, that someone might accidentally order something in case I walked in. I was just falsifying my sales charts and my calls and all that sort of stuff. At this time, I had quit. I had a sales job with Burroughs for a short period of time, worked for my father for four or five years, quit working for my father and I started my own company with another man and I'm out. And it's my job to sell certain investments. We were in a real estate investment company. And there was a real good opportunity and we're just on the verge of going down the chute, you know, because I wasn't doing my job. And all of a sudden, well, I'll get to that in a minute. So I took that first step, went to the psychologist, got in touch with some issues about work, and I really felt like that first step was powerful for me. It was really more powerful than the previous two first steps. And then I had my second most profound spiritual experience up until that time in Alcoholics I had a day that was just horrible. I went to work late, left early, went down and gambled all day, won about $800, missed dinner, missed the meeting, came home, got in a fight with my wife and slapped one of the kids. It was one of those days where you would have liked to have them videotape it and send it to the general service office to show what AA can do for you at eight years of sobriety. And I mean, it was really a doubter. It was, you know, I've been working pretty hard at doing all this stuff, and I kind of had a sense like maybe I was now going to, my life was going to make a turn, you know? And I remember, I could picture the room. I was in, we were living in an apartment, old apartment that I turned into a condominium. Big high ceilings, and I was sitting in the living room reading some non-conference-approved literature. And I was saying, gee, it happened again. And I'm saying, what do you mean it happened again? Weren't you there? I mean, you know, it's your life. But my life, as I say, was almost like watching it on TV. It seems like these habits were so strong I almost didn't have to make a decision about what I was going to do. It was like it was just kind of automatic. And what I realized is that was a bunch of crap. it wasn't automatic that i had made these decisions i was responsible for my life my life was the way it was because i designed it that way and what was keeping the problems and issues in my life in place were lies and the lies were if you talk to me if you sat me down had a hard conversation he said bob is working with your life and uh it was not working i would say oh gee i got money problems you know i got a lot of bills got almost as many bills right now as I did when I came in AA. I really would like to learn how to spend money. I didn't want to learn to spend money, I wanted to buy whatever I wanted to by whenever I wanted it not a money promise. I would sound like a guy who wanted to get his finances in order and I was not a man who wanted to give his finances. I will tell you that I had issues with the father what I wanted with my children's love and not spend time with them. It sounded like I wanted have a good marriage and what I wanted was my wife's love and affection. I spent time with my wife. I wanted to gamble, not have problems gambling. I want her to have money and not work. Those were, I mean, I don't know where I got these ideas, but I mean it just came naturally. It was just a gift. You can imagine that if those were your ideas, you know, that if you ran those too far they wouldn't work. And it's not very surprising that i had some of those issues in my life and that my life was not working it wasn't as if i didn't love my wife and it wasn t as if I didn't love my children I was an immature person doing the best I knew how to do at that moment in time and it was n't working nothing I was doing to it and uh I realized that I tried as hard as I knew how to try and I did want those things to change I also wanted them to change but the truth was is what was underneath them was more important to me than the change i wanted relief from the symptoms i did not want to change these things were like treasures to me i don't know why you know i may look at them now once i got over it and discarded them they were little trinkets that i was trading my life for but if they weren't little trunkets in those days they were important major issues in my life they were turds but they looked like diamonds And I realized that I had tried as hard as I know how to try to clean those things up, and I'd failed. And I was given the grace to realize that I was right where I was supposed to be. And I had been given the opportunity that night to take the sixth and seventh steps of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous in a way that I'd never taken them up until that moment. And I got down on my knees, and the sixth step said that we were entirely ready to have God remove our defects of character, stuff said that we humbly ask him to remove our shortcomings i had spent eight years trying to get rid of my defects i had spend eight years tried to be a better man i had been eight years using my power my intellect my role to try to grab my life as best i can how to grab it learning what i could learn from the aaa program kind of with the idea that you get me well from alcoholism and I'll take it from there. And I had failed. And I realized that if I didn't do something significant about it, I think I was in danger of getting drunk. And I wasn't in danger OF getting drunk, I was IN DANGER OF HAVING ONE OF THE TACKIEST SOBER LIVES THAT A HUMAN BEING COULD HAVE. AND I BECAME ENTIRELY READY TO HAVE GOTTEN WITH THE EFFECTS OF CHARACTER AND FIVE OF THE MAJOR ISSUES THAT I WAS TROUBLING WITH DISAPPEARED THAT NIGHT. AND I HAD TO PUT CERTAIN THINGS IN PLACE, which we'll talk a little bit more about tomorrow in order to have those things happen I think when you're serious about making changes you put support structures in place and I put some support structures in place to make sure those changes would take place but what's clear to me is that my power was insufficient that was a surrender of depth that night it was like taking step one with my life I think I had taken step one with my alcoholism and given AA my alcoholismo and everything related directly to it but I didn't give it my sex life, my finances, my parenting, my marriage, and my work. And that night I did. That night, I think prior to that night, I felt like a guy who had 15 things to do, the ability to do 10, and I got four done. And that day, that night after that night it was like I had one thing to do. I don't know if I could tell you exactly what that was about, but my life became less complicated. I didn't have divisions in my life. My work life wasn't over here and my sex life wasn'T over here and my marriage wasn'T overhear in little self-contained areas that I was managing. My life was just my life, my program was just my program. There were no barriers or boundaries within it and I realized that I was insufficient to make these, to have my life be the way it was that I needed. That I was the pipe, I was not the well. That the solution happened through me, that I Was responsible, I Was a participant that could not happen without my will, without my cooperation, without my effort. But that alone, I could not grab my life by the throat and make it the way I intended it to be. that was one of the most important moments in my life it still is one of those important moments and it's interesting that I kind of get a kick out of Peter the Apostle he lived with Christ for three years when he got in trouble he said Jesus who? he's in the garden he lived with God he's not sure if he knew him and we have it's amazing how profound experiences we can have in our lives and walk away from them and if we if they are not maintained you know it seems like what we need is our daily bread seems like we have to kind of keep doing it you know you can't just do it once and own it and I think that's kind of what I thought you could do I mean it seemed to me that the people who were more sober had accomplished it and they had arrived. And now, of course, that I'm sober 25 years and I have a more mature view of that and I've got a lot of friends that are sober a long time, I know that you don't accomplish it and arrive. And there are accomplishments in sobriety and there are arrivals in sobrietty, but it's a new journey daily. You get to be a better practitioner. You get the more likely that you will put the principles in action in your life. You have some more protection against certainly against a relapse you know against some momentary craziness that you might go back out there and do it but it seems like life is fired at everybody at point-blank range there isn't real preparation for life it just kind of shows up and let all of us feel like we've got our plates pretty full whether you're six months over or six years over 16 years over it seems like we got lots you know full agenda you know that were you know engaged in process of life and it seems like work and parenting and you know all those sorts of things you know is a pretty big task and a lot of us are I find myself today anxious and confused and I have a very active emotional system it owns me less than it has ever owned me in my life but it's still there and it's still very active I don't have to I think my emotional system is as active it's ever been. It's just that I don't pay as much attention to it, which is a great relief. I used to bounce off walls paying attention to my emotional system like that was the most important thing because I felt it you know and as long as I felt or thought it I had to pay some attention to them. Now I don t get on every train that comes from the station. A lot of a few trains go through in its quieter, simpler life. So I think all of us are kind of in the same place. We're trying to deal with our alcoholism using the 12 steps, trying to find a different way to live that's efficiently better so we don't have to go back to the craziness that we had in alcoholism or the craziness that we have living with an alcoholic and the crazness that we have when we have a self-directed life rather than a God-directive life. Well, you're at the center of your own life. There's probably nothing that's if you want to really screw yourself into the ground, just give yourself your own undivided attention for about an hour. I mean, it's just nothing better than your own Undivided Attention to you know really get you going and my life today is for that moment on my life changed enormously I went back I built with my partner built a company with 400 employees and became pretty successful made it enough money to burn several wet elephants and have a great marriage. I have a better relationship with my children today, one of whom is here in the room, than I have ever had. It's still the most demanding area in my life. I think being a parent takes about 125% of whatever you have. You know, it's just a pretty big game. Marriage is a pretty good game. Sobriety is a very good game too. life. Maintaining a lifelong relationship with any person, any program, any God, any company, any city is a pretty big thing, almost calls for an adult. I mean, you really, you know, you're going to have to make several significant changes and adjustments in almost every area of your life in order to accommodate and maintain those relationships because it's just the nature of life. Life is like a sine wave. It's not like a flat line. You know, when you're in the hospital and you have a flatline on the screen, it's a bad sign. I think most of us want the flat line, though. You know, what do you want? Do you want a flat line? I want no surprises. After that period of time in my life, for about 10 or 12 years, my life was about as easy as it's ever been. Work was easy and everything just kind of took off. And the company we built was a real estate investment company. in 1986 they changed the tax act and my life business life became a almost a nightmare and all the wealth that I had built up became a jeopardy and disappeared and my company became at risk for losing it and it was you know I went through three or four of the of the toughest years I've ever had in my life and I've had to learn some of the greatest lessons that I've ever learned. I don't like the school that I went through but I liked the lessons that I went though and I had to kind of find out who I was. I think during those years where I became so successful, success was so important to me and money was so important to be. It was a real active number of AA all the way through that time when those things were going well so it didn't seem to me like I was you know, out of balance, but I was out of balance. I just, you know, I thought I had solved all the financial issues in my life. I hadn't. I'd just made so damn much money it didn't make any difference. And when I started to not make as much money, I started finding out that some of the same issues that I had in my life earlier were still there and still an issue. My life became more about things. My life became a lot more about what I wanted. There's an arrogance in if you want something you just go get it and that's I went through a number of years where if I wanted it I went and got it paid for it didn't seem like there was any big deal about that but my life got to be more about me and I think when your life is more about you and spending money gets to be kind of a power thing I didn't understand that as fully as I understand it going backwards as I did going forward. And I was badly out of balance. And about five or six years ago, I got myself a spiritual director and one of those great funny conversations, I said to my spiritual director, she said to me, what do you want to have happen in your life? And I said, I want two things to happen in my life. I want to be less materialistic. She said, I think I spend way too much time thinking about stuff and money. I want it to be more loving. And just after I had that conversation, I started to lose everything I had. It was kind of what I would have been much more careful with that conversation than I thought. What I meant to say is I wanted to keep the stuff but not be as materialistic. I wanted it to be a little bit more materialistic and I didn't want to keep it and keep the money and not have it be as important. God didn't hear it that way. It was one of those mistakes you wish you could go back and change the conversation, just put a couple of conditions on the conversation. It's been a hell of a ride. So my treasure got taken away from me, you know, 20 years over. I started to lose a lot of the things that were really important to me and it was not like changing clothes, it was like tearing skin. I mean it was really not a minor deal. I went into a very significant depression over that. What was great about it is I was in an enormous amount of pain for a hell of a long period of time. I think I was in so much pain because I paid so much attention to myself. During the easy time in my program of AA, I just paid little attention, not as much attention to myself when I had my attention out there. When I started to have all this chaos in my life again, I focused my attention on me and I just was crazy. I mean, I just was obsessed with what was going on with me. And during that period of time, it was interesting. It felt like I was dying. And mostly what I was doing was just losing money. I had the same wife. I had to save children. I had a same house and the same car, the same job. It seemed like I would die and almost nothing changed other than my internal impression of what was all in my head. It was just, you know, I mean, I think almost anybody would notice what was happening to them. You know, you gain 40 pounds and lose $8 million is probably going to get your attention. But life, the day-to-day experience of life was not that much different. So I had to find who I was independent of the things that I had. I had go back in, and I got much more active in the program. Started to sponsor more guys. And finally, inch by inch, I kind of clawed my way out of that. Today, my business is still precarious, but I have a good job and it looks like it's going to make it much better today than it was a couple of years ago. But I have an attitude in life, and one of the things we can talk about later tomorrow, I'm a guy who doesn't like process. I want the resolution. Even if it's a difficult resolution, I want it now. you know i'll take a poor solution immediately over a good solution that's 10 minutes later just give it to me let's get on with it and what i found that most things in life aren't designed for quick solutions okay so most issues in relationships aren't designed for immediate solutions and parenting aren't design for immediate solutions and business aren't designed for immediate solution so if you would have grabbed me about two years ago or three years ago and said what do you want I said I wanted over this has been just the most god-awful stretch you know I want it done and I don't think I want to done I think I got to a part a point in my life where I had an arrogance where I thought I was exempt from problems where I got that you know I'm such a good guy and sober a long time I'm doing a great job. God bless me. Isn't that wonderful? You know, what a bunch of garbage. I mean, you know. And so when he started to take it away, what do you do? Are you a good guy when he gives it to you? You know? Are you schmuck when things start to go backwards a little bit? You know what I mean? Is he up there saying, I think I'll take it way and see how it goes? So I had a goofy attitude when I was getting the money and I had an uglier attitude when I wasn't getting it. When I was losing the money. And today, I don't want to know because what I think it is is life. I think its pretty hard to go through any significant period in life without your turn on the barrel. It's pretty hard to go through a 10-year stretch and not have a significant illness in your family, a significant financial issue. Something's going to go on in your life. We aren't exempt from the business of life. Recovery is not the absence of problems. Recovery is having a spiritual awakening and being able to be spiritually awake in the midst of life, being able TO be spiritually awakened in the midst of an illness, or a financial problem, or a parenting problem, or marital issue. Being able to be the very best you know how to be. And because of my participation in the program, and it was a struggle for awhile, but I've been able to now be spiritually awakened. Today I don't want it over. I'm still at risk. I'm in a risky business. It's better, but still risky. Could I lose it? I could lose it. I'm not as afraid of losing it. I just want to be a good person going through the process. I want to... It just isn't, you know, my life is no longer dependent, as dependent upon the circumstances in my life as it used to be. I want the peace regardless, independent of the circumstances. And that's, I think, the message that we've always had now called Islamist, and I lost it for some period of time. I wanted to have a certain, my life got to be about having, adjusting the circumstances in my life to have it be comfortable. And you can't always do that. But you can adjust your attitude. You can have a program such that we can be comfortable, we can being peaceful, and we can have some resolution as you go through difficult times. And I think that's happened to me more regularly in the last two years than it has, and that's kind of what we'll be discussing more about tomorrow. So I'm looking forward to kind of hearing the general way what's going on with me, but tomorrow maybe you'll hear it a little more specifically. But I have today more belief in our program than I've ever had. I feel privileged to be a member of Al-Qaeda Islamists. I feel privilege to have a place to go that I can discuss my life with other people, to have partnership and recovery with other people, that we could sit around a table talking about what's going on in our lives today and how we're practicing those principles, and we can pick each other up and give each other the insights. And in those conversations is where I hear God speaking to me. And I hope I have as well that this weekend. Thank you. Thank you very much.