Bob D. on Steps 5, 6, and 7 — Building a Spiritual Weapon

I get up, I'm like a two-hour-in-the-morning guy. If I had, I got up this morning at 6.30 because I wanted two hours to drink some white tea and talk to God. And I need that. One of the worst, oh God, when I have my business every once in a while, the alarm, I'd sleep late and I'd get up in a rush. Oh, I hate that. Because the day is a bad day. Oh, it's a bad way to get up. It's a good day when you got it. When you're, from the beginning, attacking the day, it's a bad day. So I'm alone at perfect peace and ease. Our fears fall from us. I could tell you an hour's worth of stuff that I became free of. Fears that drove me all my life. Some of them I wasn't even conscious of. Sometimes you don't even know. the problem that i have with fear often is i can't see it because i adjust to it as if i think worry apprehension and anxiety is normal like as if I was born to be neurotic but you adjust to It and you don't know that it's gone you don' t even know you have this I didn't even know I had certain fears till all of a sudden they're gone And I realized, man, I'm not driven by that anymore. And I didn't do that. It's grace. It's Grace. We begin to feel the nearness of our Creator because I've moved enough stuff out of the way that was between me and God. We may have had certain spiritual beliefs but now we begin to have a spiritual experience. I love that word experience. This is experiential spirituality. It's not theoretical or metaphysical. It's experiential. It means it's got to be real for you. It's gotto be part of your actual experience. The feeling that the drink problem has disappeared will often come strongly, and it does. Now, it's not saying that we're placed in a position of neutrality yet. That doesn't come until step 10. But often after step 5, man, you start thinking that getting that sense, like it's kind of a scary thing. Like, oh my God. This isn't just another one of those self-help deals where it's, you know, after a couple months I'm going to be me again and back to drinking. That maybe this will work if I kept doing this. Oh my God, maybe I can stay sober the rest of my life. One day at a time. Wow. Wow. We feel we are on a broad highway walking hand in hand with the spirit of the universe. Well, I didn't find myself skipping down the U.S. freeway, but I felt tired. After I did my fifth step, I felt wrung out. I felt something, I experienced something, I don't know that I've ever experienced sober before. I've experienced it heavily medicated, but I don' t think I've never experienced it sober. It's peace. You know, the chatter and craziness in your ears, the spinning, it had stopped. I thought something was wrong. No, really, really true. I thought someone was wrong! It's like if you, it's like I saw in a movie one time, a guy who grew up underneath the L train in the Bronx and he went camping out and he was out in the country and he just is in a panic in the middle of the night. And the guy said, what's wrong? He says, don't you hear that? He says I don't hear anything. He says yeah. I didn't know what to do. It's it felt awkward to me. So I took a nap. I didn' t know what else to do man. I just took a nap. Returning home, we find a place where we'd be quiet for an hour, carefully reviewing what we have done. We thank God prayer. There's two post-fifth step prayers before I go to step six and seven. We ask God if we have omitted anything, for we are building an arch through which we shall walk a free man at last. for the first prayer we thank god from the bottom of our heart that we know he better the second prayer we ask god if we admitted anything and often uh i'll send a guy home after the fifth step and he'll call me 45 minutes later and there's something happens and it's not that he's admitting anything consciously some things are just swept so far under the rug that we just we We don't see, we're caught up in these other things in the fifth step and we never get to it. And it's almost unconscious. And it is usually stuff that we should have gotten to. But it is convenient that it is way under the rug. A guy will call you up and say, Bob, I forgot to tell you I stole some money from where I work. Oh yeah, how much? $450,000. Forgot that, did you? Yeah, uh-huh, yeah. I bet you did, yeah. But whatever, you know, you call your sponsor, you clean it up, take care of it. Page 76, two very small paragraphs, two huge, huge steps. As a matter of fact, I think, I think if we were to give honest, honest transparent talks in aa about our actual sober experience i think you could label our talks step six of how we become entirely ready my sponsor has a great analogy he says when you're beaten by the bottle you surrender you throw the towel in and you come to aa and he said then you just get just enough self-esteem to be dangerous so when nobody's looking you sneak that towel back and you'll spend the rest of your life tearing off little bits and pieces of it and throwing it in the irs those people like aren't doing it right in aa the people that share stupid stuff on and on and your boss and how do we become entirely ready uh well i'll tell you one of the most misunderstood i believe lines in aa literature is in the 12 by 12 and it says in there that pain is the touchstone of all spiritual growth now i thought and had an approach towards a lot of this stuff for a long time in alcoholics anonymous as if what that meant was pain was the catalyst in other words to change or grow i gotta hurt well i'm here to tell you that that's not true unfortunately it's true a lot of times for us because of our stubborn self-willed nature but it doesn't have to be true you don't have to cultivate misery in order to grow spiritually actually what that quote means in medieval times blacksmiths had a device called a touchstone and when they were forging a sword or a spear they would get the sword they would have it in the fire and they would hammer it and get it on the anvil just right and in orderto find out if they've made it right they'd slam it on the touchstone and if it shattered they knew they had to go back and start over again and if didn't shatter they knew that they'd made it right and pain really is the touch stone what i i didn't i tell you i i never imagined that god was in my life as much as he was until i went through some tough tough times and i and i found when i when i went through that divorce and i i you know i found out my best friend and was sleeping with my wife and everything i i never would have imagined that i had built i had essentially built a spiritual weapon over the years in aa that i never suspected i would need one day you know I'm just doing it I don't know I've gone to the HNI meetings and I'm sponsoring these guys and I pray and I do doing inventories and I am doing all this stuff and if you had asked me honestly Bob do you really need to do all this well I don't know probably not but I should I didn't even I didn' have a clue that I was building something that was going to save my life and the pain was the touchstone when that when the when the when the caca hit the fan if I hadn't done everything i had done in alcoholic synonymous i would have shattered just like an unimperfected made sword sword would shatter on the touchstone and we are we're very lucky that's why good sponsorship we try to encourage people to be diligent it says in chapter five we beg we beg of you beg of you to be be fearless and thorough from the very start don't don't screw around with this stuff even if you're even if everything in your experience and everything entails you this is i'm over correcting here this is over the top i don't really need to do it this is life and death it's better to err on the side of prudence It's better to do one or two actions too many in Alcoholics Anonymous than one or too not enough. It's the one or twonotenough that you're sitting in the county jail, you're siting in detox. I had a guy, I love going to the county jail Wednesday nights because just last year there was a guy in there, I knew him for a year and a half, he was part of AA, He came around, around the A. Never really went much for that sponsorship. Had a guy name only for a little while. Never wanted to do much service or really work those steps. But he'd go to meetings, drink the coffee, flirt with the girls. You know, I'd do all that stuff. And I go into the county jail meeting and he's in there and he has this horrible look on his face. He is a young guy. And he comes up to me and he says in this whisper, he says, they gave me 10 years today and he didn't say anything else but I'll tell you something it hung in the air and what hung inthe air was I wish I'd have listened to you guys I wish i'd have gotten a sponsor I wish how to work those steps but it's too late now now he never said that but I could tell by his demeanor he felt like it was too late now I know it's not I've done a lot of AA in prisons he can be real service in there, he can help a lot of people, maybe have a new relationship who knows, I don't know yeah, he'll know a new freedom and a new happiness I don' t know why I say that kind of stuff, the devil gets in me or something so we're we're at step six and it says it says if we can answer to our satisfaction that's the questions on the bottom of page 75 we then look at step 6 we've emphasized willingness as being indispensable are we ready are we now ready am i now ready to let god see i didn't know it said you know what i thought it said am i not ready to straighten up i'm now ready to be good? Am I now ready that I've seen the error of my ways and all these defects of character not to ever do that stuff again? No, it's am I now ready to let God remove from us all the things which we have admitted are objectionable? Can he now take them every one? And I went through many years in Alcoholics Anonymous under this illusion that I got to beat my character defects. That is painful. And I'll tell you my experience is that every there's a law in the universe for every action there's an opposite and equal reaction and there's something about they talk about this later in the in the in working with others about when we try to to fight the bottle through self-will it says that we end up with a bigger explosion than ever and that's the same thing with my character defects if I'm If I'm going to fight something on self-will, what happens to me? I become the reformed whatever. I become The Intolerant Guy. If it's sex, well, I become the guy that's judgmental of everybody else's sexual behavior. I become THE Uptight Person. Then I eventually have an explosion. If it cigarettes, it could be something like gambling, any other side addictions. You stop on self will. What do you become? you become the person that's intolerant of everybody else confucius said in the dow that the chains that bind us most closely are the ones we have broken in other words if you're doing this on self-will you're just as much a hostage to the behavior as when you were doing it you're not free we're not talking this is we're talking about something that's almost imaginable and that's freedom. That's why if you go down to a detox where people can't imagine living free of the obsession to drink and drugs, the best they can imagine is fighting it with self-will. And you tell them that you have alcohol in your home or you go to cocktail parties or if you tell me, oh, if you work the steps, you could be around it all the time. It won't mean anything more to you than the furniture. They're going to look at you like you're crazy. it's beyond their experience but we're looking for power here to incur freedom we're not looking to get over, we're Not looking to fight something. It says twice in the book we remember we've stopped fighting everything and everybody so I must access the power and in order to access the power I have to be entirely ready to have God remove this defective defense mechanism and all my defects of character are things I've picked up over the years because I'm afraid isn't lust just simply my defense mechanism against a life that I'm afraid is going to be boring and blah and lonely and I don't know how to be intimate so I settle for sex and i i use sex because i'm afraid of the loneliness and the vacancy in my life trying to fill up those those holes inside of me or anger what's anger except it's it's a cover-up for fear i i mean i if god if i really became entirely ready for god to remove my anger and he did then what happens the next time somebody threatens me who will stand up for me who will take care of me maybe god would have to do i trust him am i entirely ready i saw a tv show when i was a little kid i remember goofy stuff out of my childhood it's funny you work the steps and all of a sudden anything that was in your experience that can relate to stuff And now your new experience, it kind of lines up. And I saw this TV show when I was just a little kid. I don't think I was more than four or five. I don'T think maybe six. There was a TV show called Rescue 8 on TV. If you ever go to Universal Studios, they still have the firehouse there from where they filmed it in part of the studio lot. And it was on every week and it was about these two paramedics that worked out of this firehouse and they'd go out and help people that were in trouble and this one episode was about these guys get called out and there's this little girl she's i don't know maybe three or four years old and she's got her arm wedged up in a vending machine and she're crying and she stuck she can't get people are trying to get her out to can't hit her out she's stuck up in there and her parents are there and they're freaking out and everybody's going crazy and they've pulling they got fire trucks there and paramedic trucks and they're pulling heavy equipment they're going to cut the door off the vending machine they're going to do all this stuff and one of the paramedics is standing there looking at this little girl he finally says to me says sweetheart you got something in your hand she looks at him she goes uh-huh what do you got in your hand uh candy bar sweetheart would you let go of the candy bar no no it's my candy bar it's my candy where it's making work sweetheart we can't get you out unless you're like no it'S MY CANDY WHERE IT'S MY CANNY WHERE AND HE SAYS TO HER AND BECAUSE SHE BELIEVED HIM HE SAID SWEET ART IF YOU LET GO OF THAT CANDYE BAR I PROMISE YOU I'LL GET YOU TWO CANDEY BARS SHE LOOKED AT him she said really he said i promise you and she she let go of the candy bar and her arms slid right out of the vending machine i got some candy bars what are your candy bars chuck used to say it's a process of uncovering discovering and discarding what are you holding on to things that you know intellectually from your track record have caused you pain, have caused your remorse, have caused to have those emotional hangovers where you feel like crap. Why are you hanging over it, onto it? Because there's an illusion of value. It's like that old story, the guy goes into the psychiatrist's office and he says, Doc, Doc, you've got to help me. I'm having a tough time here. And the doc says, Well, what's wrong? He says, well doc he says my brother-in-law is living with me doc he's crazy he thinks he's a chicken every morning he runs up and down the block naked flap in his arms the police are over there all the time the neighbors won't talk to me he's ruining my life please doc do something the psychiatrist says oh here just sign these committal papers i'll put your brother-In-Law in the state mental hospital your problems are over guy says oh doc i don't know if i can live without the eggs there's eggs believe me there's eggs i've never hung on to anything because i'm self-destructive there's legs what was the eggs and drinking is the illusion that i could party like i did in the old days i hung on do that illusion years after that was a dead horse and my parents thought I was self-destructive. I wasn't self-destructive. I was a victim of a delusion. And most character defects are tied to delusions. It's funny, you know, in Bill Wilson's story in the beginning of the book he talks about steps six and seven differently than anywhere else in AA literature. Boy, when I read this it was like I got something I never got before. He talks about approaching his father, approaching God and asking him to remove these things he says root and branch as if there's two parts and there is and when I started to get clarity of why I hang on to stuff there's the I'm asking God to take things away but it's not honest I'm askign him to take away the branch which is the consequences i want to hold on to what the illusion of value there was a guy in southern california polly probably knew him named cubby and he died a few years ago as a great writer great a member cubby used to say i want i want to be free from anger but am i willing to give up the pleasure of judgment you can't separate them they're part and parcel so to uncover, discover and discard to get to that place those if you really want to get an accelerated if you want to get an accelerated version of step 6 sponsor a lot of people because if you're anything like me you'll start becoming entirely ready to have God remove some stuff. It won't even be causing you pain. It will cause you a little bit, but nothing you can't live with, I mean, for God's sake. But you'll stop coming to the table in step six because you'll realize that you're not the kind of example to the people you sponsor. I went through a period I'm not real proud of. Polly went through it when she was new in sobriety. I went through it after my first marriage. I was like a serial monogamist. I just went from one relationship to another. A lot of people got hurt, and it was just I got hurt. They got hurt。 It was a bad deal, and I'm driven by this vacancy in my life. At about that time, I started noticing some of the guys I sponsor are doing some ofthe same stuff, and I started becoming ashamed of some ofmy behavior sober. I was at a restaurant. This is maybe 10, longer than that, maybe 12. I don't know. It's been a while ago with a bunch of guys. And one of the guys just keeps talking crap about other people in AA that aren't there, you know, judging their program and them and all this other stuff. And I got sick of it. I said, stop it. I said where the hell do you get that stuff from? And one or the other guy starts laughing. He says, oh, weren't you doing a little bit of that last week got it in recalendars? I thought, oh. And sponsees are like children. If you have children, you'll know this. You could have impeccable language 99.99% of the time. You say the F word once. That's all they say for the next three weeks. They grab haunted that. And Sponsors are like that. You could be a stellar example of alcoholics. I have one little area that's a little slimy, and that's the area they gravitate to. So if you sponsor a bunch of people, what happens is it brings you to the table because I don't want to be that guy for them. I love the guys I sponsor. Does that make me perfect? No, not by any means. But I'll tell you, It brings me to the table in step six. Brings me to the table and I think that's all we have to do. And in step seven one little side note the great symbol of Judaism was the temple of Solomon and there was two pillars at the temple that held up the temple OF SOLOMON. I think it's the exact same thing we have in AA in the realm of the spirit the one temple one pillar was called Boz and the other pillar was called Hakim and they represented the law of spiritual cause and effect and the others and the one represented love and I think we got the same thing we don't try to grow I don't think most of us really try to grow along spiritual lines because we're altruistic spiritually minded people it is the law of cause and effect and the pain I incur when I'm out of line and also my love for the people in Alcoholics Anonymous that brings me a desire, which comes from Greek words meaning of the Father, a desire to grow along spiritual lines. I want to move in that direction. And the seven-step prayer, if you want to say this along with me, it's in the middle of page, about a third of the way down, page 76 which is the year this country got its independence when ready we say something like this my creator i am now willing that you should have all of me good and bad i pray that you now remove from me every single defective character which stands in the way of my usefulness to you and my fellows. Grant me strength as I go out from here to do your bidding. Amen. That is the first amen. There was no amen after the third step. Matter of fact from page 60 all the way to page 76 if you follow the timeline you're not very far you're just one prayer right after another right after other. It's almost like I'm in a continual i'm enmeshed in in actions realizations and prayers that are almost non-stop until i get here and finally say so be it amen that what a tremendous uh prayer this is that you know it's bill wilson uh is an amazing guy he i i know i know that bill wilSON was self-centered like i am i know he struggled with his ego like i do he was also a depressive alcoholic like i've been uh he had problems in a lot of areas of his life like i have had and yet he had a tremendous humility i want to read this letter to you it's And in 1960, there was a group in Chicago that sent Bill Wilson a letter that just tore him apart. They took his inventory in every area, and Bill was very human. I mean, have you read any of the stuff about Bill Wilson? He was human in capital letters. He was everything that you are, that all of us are. He was not perfect. He was not a saint. And they found a lot of reasons to find fault with him, and they told him about it. And here's his response. And when I first read this, I just fell in love with him even deeper. I thought, man, this is my guy. He said to this group in Chicago, he says, Well, that you seem disillusioned with me personally may be a new and painful experience for you, but many members have had that experience with me. yeah bill most of their pain has been caused not only by my several shortcomings but by their own insistence on placing me a drunk trying to get along with other folks upon a completely illusionary pedestal a station which no fallible person could possibly occupy i'm sure you will understand that i have never held myself out to anyone as either a saint or a superman i have repeatedly and truthfully said that aa is full of people who have made more spiritual progress than i ever or can make that in some areas of living i have made some decided gains that in others i seem to have stood still and in still others i may have even gone backwards i am sorry that you are disillusioned with me but i am happy that even i have found a life here that's my guy i am the bill wilson type of alcoholic um he did you notice he didn't defend himself he didn'T say no you'RE wrong he said you know you're right and what a tremendous tremendous letter and in step seven it talks about humility and some of the greatest humility in step 7 comes from the from the fact that i'm not having even a say in what god's going to remove i am simply i'm giving it up i'm asking him simply to take away the things that stand in the way of my usefulness and he has to decide and i i don't know i wouldn't have written that prayer bill's humble i wouldn'T have written THAT prayer i would have said take away the THINGS THAT STAND IN THE WAY OF MY BEING HAPPY i mean i get happy don't i for god's sakes after all i've been through don't i get HAPPI i get USEFUL i'll tell you I've known happy, and I've known useful. I'll take useful. Polly? Sorry, we had a little tete-a-tete there. Make this up as we go along. I know. This is what I love. It's just totally a God deal. I'm going to go back over five a little bit, and one of the things that I love is one of the things that happens is I have heard, and like Bob was saying, I've heard a lot of fifth steps. And when I did my fifth step, my sponsor had heard a whole lot of things and he had heard about a lot of fifths steps. And he was just about 10 years ahead of me was all. But he had hurt a lot of fifth step as well. And one of things that happen is that I think it's imperative that we are careful about who we tell a fifth step to. And one of the things that I totally agree with is that it be a sponsor. Now, I have listened to people's fifth steps when the sponsor could not do it. And I feel like that that's fine and I'm more than willing to do it, but hopefully the person who... If that person is in my life and they're my sponsor, it would be wonderful if that person knew everything about me. And the book talks often about to tell my life story. And when I was in treatment, I wrote an autobiography because I was a five-step treatment program. I will assure you that that autobiography did not do anything for me. except justify me some more as to how wrong people had done me. But they hadn't wronged me at all. But what happened was is when I was able to put down all of these resentments and fears and the sex inventory, I began through that process to tell my life story, to tell myself. To tell my story to someone. And not only that, I've done it a lot of times. because more will be revealed. I have remembered things that, and I've had to go back and clean them up that I didn't remember when I did my fifth step. And one of the things that I'd like to say, and I believe that this is for anybody in AA who listens to a fifth step, and Bill wrote, most people approached, most People asked to hear our fifth step And this way we'll be glad to help. Not only will they be glad, they will be honored by our confidence. And that's what I consider it. I consider when somebody comes to me and asks me to hear their fifth step, I consider It a privilege to be able to hear Their Fifth Step. Now where I get embarrassed is when they call me back and say, Well, you remember when I told you that on the fifth step? and I'm like oh my god I don't remember I mean you know they kind of all go together and the other one where we have the column because Bob was talking about we'll get stuck a lot of times I got stuck the women that I'm working with will get stuck and they won't be able to see what their mistake is I don' t know how you feel about it but I am very willing to point out the mistake, because I'm there to help them through this process. And maybe they can't see their mistake, but and I can. So I will tell them what I see and help them through the process. I believe that's part of it. I don't just sit there like a dummy and let them read. And a lot of times when I'm listening to a fifth step i will even take them maybe back through their childhood with an issue or with a resentment or with the fear that they have i will take them back to their childhood and have them look there and say they're like resentful at somebody and i'll say well let's go back and take a look at mom or dad and let's see where that resentment started and what i'll do is it And all I do is do just what Bob did, is I just invite God in and just to use me as an instrument to help this person. Just use me. Just let me be useful in this situation. And let me do everything I can to help them see. Because they're sitting down there, they're scared, they'RE bearing their heart. And I want to be able to help in any way I can. And when these things happen, it's not anything of me it's just you get that intuitive feeling it's like back over in the promises after step nine we will intuitively know how to handle situations that used to baffle us and all of a sudden i begin to intuitively know How To Handle A Situation That I Would Never Have Tackled Before helping another alcoholic the other thing is is I do five six seven and eight all in one sitting and so I'm going to kind of talk about that because the book is really clear here and I believe in doing what the book says and it says here returning home we find a place where we can be quiet for an hour. Now, the only difference that I do here is I have the person go be quiet for an hours. I just don't have them return home. But I just have them go into another room and you know, I'll go fix dinner or do some other stuff and I'll say, just go in there and think about what we've just done. And then I have them ask, you know I point out to these questions down at the bottom. Because what we want to do is, I want to ask these questions. Is our work solid so far? I mean, have you told me everything? Think about it. Ask yourself the question. Ask God when you sit down. We thank God from the bottom of our heart that we know him better. And then we ask. We ask, after taking the book down, we ask, is there anything I've omitted? Have I omitted anything? And then we ask ourselves, is our work solid so far? Are the stones properly in place? Have I done these steps according to the directions in this book? I go back to that. If we follow a few simple rules. These are the few simple rule. This is not hard stuff. these are a few simple rules have we skipped on the cement put into the foundation I've got to stand here hopefully and stay sober one day at a time for the rest of my life am I willing to give it my all so that I can be free of the things that cause me such humiliation and pain that I'm really that I cant keep from drinking over them Have we tried to make mortar without sand? If we can ask satisfactorily to these questions, we're at step six. Now, again, I do a little writing. And I do it because it's something that I need to do for me and I have my girls do it. And then when we get through with that, then I have them come back and we list the character defects that are there. and then on the other side of the page I have them say what is the opposite if I'm full of self pity what's the opposite of self pity being others centered the big book is going to come to say in this book that we have constant thoughts of others I'm a person who has had severe depression so badly that before sobriety, I had horrible diagnoses. Manic depression, bipolar disease, you know, chronic depression, all of this stuff. I'm a person who's come into Alcoholics Anonymous behind three suicide attempts. I don't, I have it so bad and I used to read everything I could find on Bill Wilson because he had depression too. And I wanted to find out what did he do for depression? And I would read and read and reed. And what I, and I would just think, think about others, thinkaboutothers,thinkaboutothers. And And I didn't get the answer to that question until I was 12 years sober. I got the answer in 1989, to what was wrong with me. And it's because I picked up a book or it was given to me because when I gave a talk it was give to me and the book was called The Language of the Heart. And that book is Bill W.'s writings to the grapevine. And I'm like, I am like Bob. Bill's my man. That's who I identify with. I identify avec Bill mostly because of the depression. And that depression, I read in that letter, and he says in the letter, I've worked these 12 steps. Why can't these 12 Steps relieve depression? and what I didn't see all those 12 years and I think I did a little bit better than him because he didn't seem to leave us 24 years sober. So I believe because of his experience, I didn' t have to go to 24. But what I began to see was I had faulty dependencies that the greatest character defect I had was faulty dependences And the biggest faulty dependency I had was what you think of me. And I had an old man that I used to follow around, Frank Honeycutt. When Dave and I were going through that bankruptcy and all that, and I usedと say, but Frank, I can't talk about that from the podium. What will people think of mе? And he'd look at me, and he was so kind. And he says, you know something, darling? It is none of your business what people think of you, but your very life depends on what you think of them. And see, that was the whole thing. I was dependent on what you thinkof me, and what I should have been thinking about is what I think ofyou. Because if I'm holding a resentment, if I have anything that's going on between me and you, that makes me have an ill feeling about you, then you're tied to me. Absolutely tied to me. We're connected like an umbilical cord. And so what I do is I take, try to pick out those character defects in step four, and the fourth step, and find out what they are in the fourth column. And then I write them down and then make another column of what is the opposite of those character defects because that way i get to look at the character defects i get to take a look at them and what i can do is while you know i can while god is going to remove these character defects there's no question in my mind that's god's going to move these character defects but one of the things that happens is is that i i just want to see what is standing in the way of me and having the relationship I want to have with God. And what happens is, is if I'm mindful, it's amazing if I am mindful that I gossip too much, is that I can sit down and start having a conversation and I can start spewing my mouth and I might say, geez Bob, you know what? I need to stop. I needと stop right now because I'm gossiping And doing that is going to get me in trouble because, listen, I'm a real alcoholic. If I start gossiping about somebody, I don't just gossip about, I embellish it. I make it bigger than it is because I'ma real alcoholic, so I got to add a little twist to it and make it sound bigger and better because you know I like it I want it with glitz and make it funny and all this stuff at somebody else's expense and the bad news is is I can remember Chuck Chamberlain saying when he would talk and he I had the privilege of going out to his house one day and he was pretty old then and he was talking there was a whole bunch of us and they were sitting around and he said when you go out to talk I sure hope you don't start believing your own press because if you start believing your own press, you're in trouble. And you see, if I start gossiping and I start telling things, before I know it, I'm going to start believing it. And that character defect is going to tie me to you because I'm gonna start believing that and I have just assassinated your character and by doing that, I've just harmed myself. So I need to know from me what they are. So we put them down on paper. And I just do the opposite. If I'm self-centered, full of self-pity other-centered and start doing whatever I can. Sometimes I just have to act as if. And sometimes that gets on my nerves when somebody used to tell me, act as if. What do you mean act asif? That's not honest. if somebody comes up to me and says, how are you? And Frank Honeycutt used to say, I never had it so good. Well, you know what? He probably, he doesn't always have a great day, but you know the truth is he never had It So Good. Never had It so good He says you don't have to stand there and be honest with somebody and spill out your whole guts. You don't Have to do that. and I'm going to throw in something else at this point that I like to tell the women I sponsor when you go to AA meetings opinion, opinion okay it's not in the book, it's opinion when you Go To AA Meetings I'm one of these people that says I don't mind sharing like we've been sharing today and telling all the things that we did and that we give you the solution but I tell you I hope you're not coming to my AA meeting dumping your stuff You haven't had a solution. You haven'T run it by your sponsor and just leave it there and contaminate the meeting I'm going to. I believe take the mess to your sponsor and the solution to the meeting. Newcomers are in meetings, and this is a program of solutions. And that's the way. I'm like, I'm pounding, I get pointing, I get so emphatic, like preaching, Get on my little, you know, bandstand. But it's important to me. It's important for me that we don't water down Alcoholics Anonymous. That we don' t come in here and just water it down and this is some kind of emotional dumping ground. Because I don't believe that's what this is. This is where we take the solution and share it with each other. Gosh, if I'm suffering from depression and I can't get out of bed, I want to hear somebody's solution. And one of the things that helped me immensely is when I was suffering from depression, this person said, boy, I was offering from depression. I've been having such a hard day. I call my sponsor, and they told me to get out of bed take a shower and take a walk. oh my god how simple is that and that's a solution to what's going on a solution i'm be willing to take a look at the things that are the things that are blocking me from god i want it i want to be able back in step five it says we analyzed them. We took a look at them. We analyzed them I want to see what's keeping me from God and the only thing that's going to remove that character defect is God and I tell you some of them that I have to keep repeating are really humiliating and the most humiliating ones and the one I catch myself in the most is just what I'm talking about. Judging somebody who am I to judge anybody for what they've done I don't have any room to make any judgments on anybody and I think sometimes that's what we do in Alcoholics Anonymous we're just too quick to tear each other apart and what happens is is when it talks about an intolerance one of the worst character defects Bill talks about intolerance causes people to leave Alcoholics Anonymous, people who leave that we could have helped. And we don't help them and they leave Alcoholic Anonymous because of our intolerance. That's serious. And I don't know about intolerance is what I like to think about in AA meetings because we get in and I love structured meetings and I love everything to be running smoothly and I love enthusiasm and I like people to get in there and be happy about being sober and smile and carry on. And then about the time when the best speaker, and I got sober in Southern California so if we didn't have a circuit speaker every Monday night I felt that I was, you know how dare the secretary get this person I mean who are they? But you know just about the time they're into the best part of their story, and a drunk walks in the room. Have you ever watched Alcoholics Anonymous get so intolerant over an alcoholic? This is AlcoholicsAnonymous. And I mean, we'll, you know, just get so indignant that this alcoholic has walked in the meeting and disturbed the meeting. How dare them? Sometimes we can be really intolerant, and I know because I've been there. I've seen it with the best of them, but I love to see it when an old man like Frank will see a guy and he'll grab hold of it, especially if it's a guy, and he will put his arm around him. He'll say, come on, partner, you and I are going to go outside and talk. And, you know, just kind of nicely just take the person out instead of just sitting there. What are they doing in here? Well, you know, a long time ago when we first got started, you know they'd just go drag them in wet as they could be into Alcoholics Anonymous. Intolerance. Find out. Criticism. How easy it is to have what we call about constructive criticism. most of the time I criticize somebody because if I criticize you it makes me feel better jealousy another one of the character defects Bill talks about jealousy as being the thing that just absolutely I can't remember the words he uses but I use soul rot jealousy will rot the soul i had a lot of jealousy especially after dave and i married i thought he was the cutest thing that walked the face of the earth and i sponsored all these women who were younger than me and prettier than me and worst of all they were thinner than me and dave i mean dave loves the women i sponsor and he does not make any bones about showing how much he likes them. And I found out about the jealousy. And what was that? My insecurities. Taking a look at my character defects and find out what's going on with me and what's been eating me all these years and then asking god to remove them and uh i love this prayer and uh when it talks about you know these some of these character defects i tell you they must be useful for god because i keep asking and asking and most of the time i can catch myself on them now but i would so much rather not be humiliated and step into it first because it It just seems like I'm one of these people that just opens my mouth and in goes my foot. But I love this. In the 12 and 12, in step 6, it talks about this is a step that separates the men from the boys. This is the step that I'm really willing to take a look at what's really, really wrong with me and who I really am. and the good news is no matter what I've done or how bad I've done it, it's not too big that God can't remove it and set me free and that's the good news. And then what we're going to do is we're gonna embark upon what I call the freedom steps. So you guys want to take a break? Six minute break. Quick sit around.