Clearing the Debris of Self-Will in Steps 8 and 9 — Bob D. Part 1

an alcoholic? Can we ask you to take a minute and for us, maybe more than for you, could you guys move up closer so we don't feel so distant and lonely and all that other stuff up here? So we can get a bigger sense of who we're talking to. We won't bite. Clint will but you have to ask him nicely. Can you see up here without any light? Are we okay? Glowing? My name is Bob Darrell, I'm an alcoholic. I'd like to start with a prayer, if you'll just kind of go along with me or just take a moment of silence. Lord, help me to set aside everything I think I know about you, everything I thing I know myself, everything I think I know others and everything I know my own recovery for a new experience in you, Lord, a new experience in myself, a new experience in my fellows, and a much-needed new experience in my own recovery. Amen. The title of this workshop is Romance and Finance, and it's being brought to you by a recently divorced single guy and an attorney. Only in AA is there a spiritual rightness about that. You won't find that anywhere else, but there's something right about that in AA. And what we're really going to talk about is step 8 and 9 and how it relates to possibly step 11, to getting closer to the power. There's nothing in Alcoholics Anonymous, in my experience, that is designed to teach me how to better manage my own life. Instead, it's designed to make things right in my life through the amends process so that I can be a receiver of good stuff. we're going to what we're going to do is we're going to go back and forth a little bit we're gonna cover some of the stuff in the book and then at the end we're going to open it up to questions from the floor so I'm going to talk a little bit about my experience with step eight and nine and come a touch on a couple things in the book and then Clint will go for a little while and then I'll go for a little bit back and forth my initial experience back in the 70's when I started coming around to Alcoholics Anonymous looking at step 8 and 9 was terrifying to me and I remember sitting in meetings of AlcoholicsAnonymous and listening people talk about making amends and I thought that that's a good thing for you. I mean, I could tell by looking at you that that's probably a good deal for you, you know? You guys, I'm sure, if I could tell you, were nice people, basically, and maybe you got too drunk one night and said something unkind to someone, you should make it right, or maybe you padded your expense account, but I sat there and I thought, I can't do this. See, I live like an animal. I hurt a lot of people. There's a guy to this day that I've hired investigators to try to find that I opened up his chest with a knife, with a blade about that long and he'll never be the same. And I thought, that's fine for you, but I can't do this. You don't understand. My case is different. And I'll tell you what my experience has been in Alcoholics Anonymous is that my experience with Step 9 then was similar to the experience that a kid, say, in the fifth grade would have if he sat down and looked at the exams that he had to pass in order to graduate from high school. He would be overwhelmed. He would say, I might as well quit school. Not only can't I pass, I'll never be able to pass these tests. I'll Never Be Able To Understand The Questions. But a funny thing happens. As he continues to go to class and do his assignments, by the time he gets to the end of the 12th grade, some things have changed in his life and he can pass those tests. And that's what my experience with Alcoholics Anonymous has been. It's been the experience of synchronicity. And synchronicity is a principle that Carl Jung talked about that when the student's ready, not only does the teacher appear, but when the students are ready to make changes in their life that are absolutely impossible to make from the moment of commitment to the change, the universe starts lining up everything that's necessary to go from point A to point B. where prior to that it was an abyss that could not be crossed. And that has been my experience in Alcoholics Anonymous. There's a reminder on page 76, and it talks about the eighth step. And it says, now we need more action without which we find that faith without works is dead. Let's look at steps eight and nine. we have a list of all persons we have harmed and to whom we are willing to make amends we made it when we took inventory if you've just finished your fifth step and your sponsor wants to go out in the country somewhere and do a little ritual and burn your fourth step make a copy first because you're going to have to, the book implies that you're gonna pull your eight step list off of your inventory it goes on to say we subjected ourselves to a drastic self appraisal now we go out to our fellows and repair the damage done in the past we attempt to sweep away the debris which has accumulated out of our effort to live on self will and run the show ourselves if we haven't the will to do this we ask we ask until it comes Remember, it was agreed at the beginning we would go to any lengths for victory over alcohol. Remember alcohol? Remember the point in your life where you thought it was absolutely impossible to ever get into a state where you would be free of the obsession to drink? Where you couldn't imagine life without it? sometimes I work with guys and by the time we get up to step 9 they've just adjusted to being sober and they forget the thing that drove us in here that I have a disease called alcoholism and the book says if we haven't the will to do this we ask until it comes my experience is there's nothing in Alcoholics Anonymous I've been asked to do that I can't do When I get to step nine and step eight, as I did, and there were some amends that I, I'll tell you, be honest with you, I could not imagine facing these people. In my mind, they were going to kill me. I had other amends, that if I faced them, I was going to go to prison. I couldn't imagine it. I don't have to do anything at that point except if I can just ask God for the willingness. I've discovered that in the eighth step, all the amends that go on there kind of fit into four categories. There's the category of the people where I know where they are, got the wherever, and I have the willingness. So that's an easy deal. I just go make that. I just goes to those people and make the amens. then there's the people where I know where they are but I'm too full of self-centered fear to walk through this so in that for those people I ask for the willingness and I ask until it comes and then there are those people and I had a lot of these where I really am willing to make the amends but I don't know where these people are I've had guys, I just found one a couple weeks ago that I owed an amends from like over 27 years ago. And I have the willingness, and God has to provide the opportunity. It doesn't mean I shouldn't look. And I'll tell you what my experience has been with that is I've had guys that I've looked for like at three and four years sober could not find. And then at 17, 18, 20 years sober, 24 years sober all of a sudden I'm able to find them. And in a couple of those instances, it's perfect timing. There was a guy, there was a gal that I owed amends to named Anna from Pennsylvania. And I went back to Pennsylvania and I searched for her for a whole week. I talked to everybody I knew and she had fallen off the face of the earth. And this was probably 1981 or 82 that I'm looking for her. She was not listed anywhere, nobody knew where she was Her parents had moved Dead end street I'm back in Pennsylvania at a conference At 17 and a half years sober And just on a fluke sitting in the hotel room With nothing to do I picked up the phone book and opened it And there was her name And I called the number and it was her She answered the phone and I said my god I was looking for you she said oh yeah I got married changed my last name moved away we got a divorce I moved back here uh I bet back to my maiden name and we started talking we started the dialogue and I got to make amends to her I owed her a little bit of money and also I owed her really I had to I wanted her to get it that I knew what I did to her and how much I really regretted it and my sincere desire to do whatever it took to make it right and we became friends as a result of that and she started calling me and sending me little cards and stuff and her and her fiance the guy she lived with were best friends with a guy named Jim who I knew Jim had owned a bar in Pennsylvania and I used to go into Jim's bar at a time in my alcoholism where I probably was the worst drunk Jim had ever seen because and I'm not like I fancied myself a gangster but I was really a public nuisance you know what I mean. I mean I'm the guy that I would go in there I'd get out of line when somebody went to the bathroom I'd drink their drink or steal their change and he'd catch me you know it's pathetic stuff and he catch me and he throw me out then I'd go it was the only bar I could walk to from where I was so I'd be shaking and need a drink, and Jim would feel sorry for me, and he'd let me back in. But no more of that stuff. And I'd say, oh yeah. And then I'd get drunk and get out of line and do the same thing again. No exaggeration, he must have thrown me out of his bar 15 times and let me be back in 15 times. So Anna and him are really good friends. And Anna's telling me, yeah, he just got out of Chit Chat Farms for the second or third time. And as I said to her, has he ever been to Alcoholics Anonymous? and she said, you know, I asked him that one time and he said he went to some meetings and chit-chat. He didn't like the people. He thought they were self-righteous do-gooders, not his kind of people. There was nothing there for him. He didn' t think AA had anything to offer him. It wouldn' t work for him and I said to her, I said, would you do me a favor? Would you call up Jim and would you tell him I'm sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous sober 17 1⁄2 years at the time. This is many years ago. about a week later i get a phone call and it's jim this is this he used to call me red daryl is this red daryn said yeah this is red there are you sober i said yeah no come on tell me the truth tell me the truth are you so i said i'm so but you're on meds or something i'm not on anything i don't think you smoke stuff no i don' t smoke you're not really so i said i swear to god i am sober i haven't had anything nothing nothing nothing for over 17 years. And I started to tell him a little bit about my story and what, and I knew that he'd had a bad experience in AA and I talked to him about my bad experiences and my misjudgments of AA in the years I was in and out. And Jim started giving Alcoholics Anonymous another try and I haven't talked to Him now in about two years but He would have several years of sobriety if He stuck with it all this time and I started to get it why I was able to find him he why I was ableto find Anna who led me to him at 17 and a half years sober and the door was absolutely closed in my early sobriety when I diligently sought her and I I started realize it in that God is the great the power behind all of this is a great choreographer that it's it's in it's in a perfect, perfect, when it's wherever, it is in his time and his place. And as it should be, probably. I know that there's some people I still look for. My unmade amends, I have a willingness. They're like stones in my shoe. This guy that I stabbed that I've looked for for years, he may be dead from alcoholism. But him and a few other guys I've never been able to find, I tell you, I'm ready to do it if I can find them. Clint, you want to share a little bit? Thank you, Bob. I'm Clint. I'm an alcoholic. I just sit in there transfixed. I've never stabbed anybody in the chest with anything at all and I'm feeling a little inadequate. Do you know what I'm saying? It's like, God, why couldn't I have tried at least when I was out there? Why couldn'tI have been involved a little bIt more in the lives of others? I'm just proud to be part of finance and romance it's we presented it on a lie that's nice get you in on that title and then start talking about steps eight and nine so if you brought your engagement ring in here guys just put it away I'm I'm glad to be here. I'm happy to be in this conference and with friends like Steve and Bob. We've had a lot of fun so far. It's a great connection here. We are very much people that ordinarily wouldn't mix, and the mixing is just wonderful. I had my last drink on the 14th of August in 1966. And so this 36 years is a little to do with my showing up, and that's about it. It happens suddenly, doesn't it? It's just like there's a day when I'm a bad drunk, and then the next day I didn't drink anything at all. That is such an astonishing turn of events. you'd think it'd take a long time for God to create that miracle. And the fact that he did it without my consent really is, who cared? You've surrendered. That's the end of it. And it was a long Time before I really turned my attention in earnest to these 12 steps. And because of these 12 Steps, the last dozen years of my sobriety has been by any standard the sweetest of all by any standard and I take guys through the steps and we usually on Saturday and Sunday morning in my office we got a bunch of guys that are in various stages of going through this and the light comes on and they're very excited about it we notice that the there's a lot to be said about the first step in the big book and a lot to be set about the second And we get to the third step and decide that in some weird way, we are going to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God. Make that decision. And it's a good thing we do that because steps four through nine are against my life and contrary to my will. And if I don't turn my will and my life over to The Care of God, The rest of it is going to be kind of a surface stutter step in a lot of ways. And then we move on to four, and Steve was talking last night about the struggles with four and with five. And when we get to, like Bob said, I hung on to my written inventory because I was told to hang on to it until I could, at step eight, go through it and begin the list of people that I had harmed. And then I was told, take it someplace, respectfully dispose of it because it's not who you are anymore. It's simply a chronology of who you once thought you were or how you tried to live in the world. And we're now looking at not that so much but how we're going to make amends. The principle of step eight is forgiveness. There are a lot of people that I have harmed. and I believe and justify that conduct because I believe they harm me too. In fact, usually I have it wired up that they started the whole mess and all I was doing was protecting myself and retaliating and that turned out to be not at all true not at All True I have in order to forgive somebody to let them off the hook for my notion about what they did. It's very important that I accept responsibility for the way I reacted to whatever situation it was. That's all I have to do because as long as I'm blaming them for how I feel, I've got a huge problem and the problem is that they've got the power and I don't. I give them all that power. There's an interesting sentence in the book. In effect, it's our troubles arise out of ourselves. It isn't shit happens or any of that. It's it arise out of ourselves and the subtext of that important sentence, just a single sentence is this. Nobody has to change for me to get free and I've always wanted you to change. I've wanted dead people to change if only my grandma you know that whole thing I want other drivers to change lanes go someplace else and I blame them because they won't change and I blame them for how I feel and if I hold them responsible for my experience of an event I'm giving them all the power and it suggests that I have any power and I've somehow lost it And I lost it a long time ago if I ever had any power. And so my job, my job in AA is to be at best possible terms with all people. And in order to do that, I have to clean up the harm. And it was not just my amends, just my inventory that became the source of these people to whom I owed an amends. If I had harmed them, they got on my list. In order for me to really fully look through my life, I had to go back to high school annuals. I've discovered, I remember how surprised I was on the picture of our graduating class. It said, the story of my life. Clint Hodges not shown. Yeah, sad story. But I went through that high school annual looking for people, and I found a half a dozen names. Oh, my God. Oh, I took that person's dignity. I made fun of that person. I stole money from that person I would never have been able to resurrect that without going through that. I went through Christmas lists and birthday lists and anything I had access to until I had a list of people that I believed that I had harmed, people to whom I owed an amends. And the next step for me in coming to that, and I'm still in step eight, is to become willing to do something about that. It's much easier if you're willing. And I always thought willing meant gun to the head time. And it turns out they sent me to the dictionary, and willing means, are you ready for this? Willing means gladly ready. And oh man, how the hell am I ever going to get gladly ready to go to these people, I'm deeply frightened of them, mothers-in-law and fathers-in law creditors and this person i have to be driven to it no you have to be in a state of being gladly ready and the only way i can do that is to ask god to take me to a place where i'm gladly ready to make these amends and so i made my list of people they told me to get it all down on three by five cards just a technique so that when i had made an amends i could discard the card and i'd have an increasingly diminishing list on my dresser at home and that um i put the person's name in the upper left hand corner this little card i'd put the harm that i had done whatever it was, you need to be clear on the harm. To simply say I wasn't fair with you is not going to convince that other person that you're there to mean business. To say I stole money out of your dresser drawer in an amount of $80 in 1958 lets them know you're there to make amends. And they told me, if you're going to make financial amends, they said, take money. Take the cash. Or be prepared to set up an arrangement. Seems simple enough. They told me to make direct amends and I want to know can I make ammends by telephone? And they said did you do the harm by telephone. No, I showed up for that. Good. Get on the plane and go to Denver and visit your sister. I have a list. I haven't all reduced to three by five cards. There's an important little thing in the upper right hand corner of the card they told me to write a minus or a plus. What is that for? Well, that signals whether you're really willing to make the amends. Why do I want that up there? Because if you try to make an amends that you are unwilling to make, it's going to get to be a mess. You can't really make it until you have prayed for and received the willingness. In some of these, you're not going to have the willingness until after you've made half of your amends and find out that it's probably the most important single thing you can ever do in terms of being on good terms with other people. It's an amazing thing to walk into a room of AAs, for example, and not have anything going on with another human being in the room that isn't positive. I'm what we call much married. Bob is recently married. I was married twice when I got to AA and divorced. I remarried my second wife after I got married. There is something that's an interesting challenge. If you ever do that, come see me. We'll chat. She hated me when I drank. I hated her when I didn't. I had three sons, all these in-laws, married after I got sober and then married again in sobriety, I had a lot going on with women. See, I never distinguished the way I felt when my mother treated me certain ways. I didn't distinguish that from who I am and so I felt unworthy and I felt bad and I felt this and that always felt like I was unacceptable and all of the I never I didn't know the difference between a relationship and a an arrangement big difference big difference and you taught me that and I'm making this list and so I've got all of this and I got a father that's a drunk and I I've got a brother and a sister and a little brother, and all of them are on the list. And I have had lots of schooling and lots of problems with schooling. Difficulty when I was at the dental school at the University of Oregon, they threw me out of there, but there were some people that I needed to make amends to up there that had been patients at the clinic. They just come out with a new high-speed air-driven handpiece. I won't go into it, but it was a problem. And they were relieved when I got thrown out of there. So I have this list, and it's a pretty extensive list. And I have it reduced to these little cards. And now I have to make certain that I'm willing to make amends to them. And if I'm not, to pray for them. But they said, just get started. It overlaps this whole thing. And so I started on a couple of easy ones. I owe you $50, and I have for a while. I wrote a guy whose couch I burned down when I was in dental school. He and I were roommates. and somehow that couch caught fire when I was in it. I don't know what happened exactly. I remember he and I lugged it out into the street that night, still flaming. I didn't write. I finally wrote him a letter. I said, I'm sober in AA. Here's a check. I'm so sorry about the couch. He was thrilled. He wrote me back. He sent the check. He said, I'm glad you're sober. Donate that check to AA. And maybe someday I will. It could be. We don't know. The key to the whole thing, I think, is this forgiveness piece. We really must separate the meaning we gave the situation from what it was because there may be no inherent meaning at all in the fact that, as far as I'm concerned, in the fact that my father was an absent alcoholic. For me, it meant I'm worth less than the booze. For me it meant he doesn't love me. And it doesn't mean that at all except that I give it that meaning. And to give it the meaning that it truly deserves which is no inherent meaning means that I can look anew at it. That's the essence of the forgiveness in the eighth step. It's a very important part. We have to look again at who they were and what they knew and what training they had in raising kids and what their terrible afflictions were and their anger. Every time when my dad finally left that my mother saw me, she saw my dad. She inflicted some beatings that she wanted to inflict on him. And, of course, it's hard not to take that very personally. But I finally came to the day when I had to kneel at her grave. And it was 40 years after she died that I got back to that grave and made amends to her. And it Was an astonishing day. But the whole power out of it comes from 6 and 7, which is the way I select and implement and I'm given new ideas about how my life has been and about who you are. And then step eight, to see that I really have harmed people. Bob said something incredibly important the other day and he may say it, I don't want to steal his thunder, but he said, if that other person had never harmed me, could I more easily see that what I did to them was terrible? Yes. Yes. If all that person ever did was love me, would my conduct have been acceptable in any way? No. If it wasn't acceptable then, it's not acceptable now. And an amends has to be made. And I'll say one other thing that is probably the most important thing I can say today. There is such a huge difference between having done 80% of your amends and having done all of them. the 20% or the 10% or the 5% is worth all the rest and it is possible to finish your amends I think to be really free and to really have the sweet life we have to do that Bob is still an alcoholic The last few years, I've been getting a lot of guys asking me to sponsor them or take them through the steps that are sober a long time. Sober 10, 15, 20 years or more, and their life's fallen apart. And there are six figures in debt, and they've got so many bad relationships in meetings in AA that there's meetings, most of the meetings in AA they can't even go to because she's there and she's there and G's over here and then the other one's over there. And it's like they're really in a bad spot. And not always but invariably we will find that what happens to a lot of us, and this ties in with Clint said about the difference between 100% and 80%, is that, and I experience is you start working the eighth and ninth step and you start getting relief and you're repairing these relationships and there's a certain elation about that that can seduce you into a false sense of, well, we're kind of done here, you know? I know in a vague way that there's some more stuff to do and I'll get to it sometime, eventually. And then what happens is that these guys have these unmade financial amends and what happens unconsciously they will destroy themselves financially periodically over and over and ever again. And they wonder, guys making $80,000 a year, why they're $100,000 in debt. And their credit cards are maxed out. And they're going through it. If you look, it's all unresolved stuff. Have you ever seen the movie Flatliners? Wonderful eighth and ninth step movie. It's about these doctors in medical school that get fascinated with death and in controlled laboratory conditions they take themselves back over to Flatline where they're clinically dead and then they bring themselves back. And they started going back and staying there too far and they came back and they started being haunted by ghosts that were, they didn't understand what was going on. And the one doctor figured it out. He figured that these ghosts were people from his past that he'd hurt and never made it right with. And there's this one scene in there where this one doctor, Kiefer Sutherland, it's played by Kiever, is being attacked by this little kid with a knife that's trying to kill him, and he's on top of him trying to stab him. And then for a moment, it shows what's really going on, and he's doing it to himself. And the one guy figures out that he has to go back and find this person that's haunting him that he'd hurt many, many years ago, make the amends, and what happens is the ghost goes away, and he doesn't have to hurt himself anymore. And I think that that's the essence of what we do in Step 8 and 9. If Einstein said that the great illusion of mankind was that there's more than one of us here, and if that's true, what I do to you, I'm going to sense doing to me. It's like the old story of the, there's this earthworm and he's crawling through his territory and he's feeding grounds and he's burrowing along and he encounters another earthworm that's in his territory. And he flips out, they start posturing, you get out of here. And the other one says, no this is my territory, you Get out of Here. And they go to war and they attack each other and the guy finds out that he's attacking his own tail, right? It's the other end of the worm. And when I do something to you in the world of the spirit, I'm somehow doing it to me And one way or another, I believe I am compelled to get even with me for. And I think what happens to guys like me is that when I'm not even with you, I can't fool me about it. There's a part of me, I can sweep it under the rug, I can do all the rationalizations, the justifications, but I think I'm incapable of fooling that spirit inside of me. There's an aspect of me that always knows. there's a part of me that is beyond my own justifications and rationalizations and defense mechanisms, there's a part of me that always knows that the person I'm rationalizing hurting was really the other end of the worm it's really just another one of God's kids and what Clint was talking about has really been my experience in the book many times it says we must disregard the other person involved entirely where were we to blame and so i'm a lot like most of us and most of the guys i sponsor i have a tremendous ability to defend myself rationalize justify minimize what i've done blow up what you've done until i can almost justify any behavior left alone and what i try to do with some of the guys I sponsor that are very defended in these areas, I ask them, you know, you were in this relationship and she did all this and that's why you did all that, right? Yeah, yeah, because I wouldn't have done any of that if she hadn't cheated on me and she hadn'T stopped. And then I say to them, if it's true what it says in the book, that we disregard the other person involved entirely, what if you would have, the way you reacted to her, what If you would've acted that way towards the perfect mate, towards the person who never did anything to you except love you. How out of line would your actions be then? And they go, oh God. And in the resentment section of the inventory, there's a part in there where it says we must get free of these resentments. We must or they kill us. What do we do? And it says this was our course it says you must realize that means i gotta get it in here that the person who has harmed me was like me spiritually sick so maybe in essence this person i've justified retaliating against maybe they were the person that really was the perfect person and just on a sick day as i have sick days they were acted out on their own self-centered fear and the sickness of their spirit and I've been punishing them for it and justifying it ever since right and if I'm really supposed to disregard the other person involved entirely then I must I got to look at these people as if they could no longer they could know more they were no more guilty for what they did than I was at some of my worst moments because my sponsor told me in early sobriety he said he said you're not guilty for anything you've ever done drunk or sober but you are responsible I'm the guy that did it when I hurt you did I mean to did I set out no I've listened up probably 150 fifth steps and I've never heard I've heard a lot of stories of how people have gotten hurt a lot but I'll tell you I never once in one of those fifth steps had I ever heard the story of a guy who set out intentionally to hurt anyone. I've never seen that. It's always driven by a hundred forms of fear, self-delusion, self pity. We step on the toes of our fellows and I heard a lot of people in my life and I'll tell you something I never once ever set out to hurt any of them. Did I hurt him? You betcha. Am I guilty? I don't think so. Am I responsible? You betcha. I'm the guy who did it. There's no one else I can pass the buck to. I'm that guy that did it, and I'm the guy that has to square the books. I'm they guy that have to make the amends. This financial... Sometimes with some of the guys I sponsor, getting them to make financial amends is like pulling teeth. And I was very fortunate. I had some financial amends that really showed me some stuff in early sobriety. I owed my father many thousands of dollars, and it was for times when I had fines to pay where if I didn't pay him, I was going to go to jail and he'd loan me the money, or times when i had borrowed money to keep from being homeless so I wouldn't be thrown out of the place I was living. And when you take eight or ten years of that, It adds up, and it was quite a few thousand dollars. And I'm in early sobriety, and I'm almost at the end of my first year of sober, and I saw my mom and dad for the first time, and I had my list of everything that I owed them, and I head it down on paper, and I went to them to make the financial amends. And by this time, I had taken my mom and my dad to my home group. They knew my sponsor, the guys I hung around with. And my dad said to me, he said something that I'll never forget. He looked at me and he smiled at my mom and he said, Rob, we don't want you to pay that money back. We are just so happy that you're sober. And it's the first time in many years that we feel that something's different in your life. All we want you do is keep doing this AA thing and that's it. We don't what the money. It's fine. We just love what's going on in your right now. And I walked away from that meeting with my folks on cloud nine. I mean, I felt like I'd hit the lottery. And I'm on my way over to my sponsor's office and I'm just on this pink cloud and I're thinking about some of the other people I owe financial amends to and if I could get them to see the light. You know, maybe I could tell them all the service I do in AA, you know. And I go and I'll never forget, I went into my sponsor'S office and I told him, my dad said I don't have to pay him, this is awesome. Like I felt like I'm getting the gift and he said, I don't care what your dad said you owe him This is your amends. It's not hurt his he he can take you off the hook all you want You have to pay him to take yourself off You sold your integrity a nickel and a dime at a time and you got to buy it back And I said but what do I do? I he's not gonna if I send him a check for 50 bucks a month month. I had it figured out it was going to be 12 and a half years to pay him back, 12 and a half year. And my sponsor said God will provide a way. You just have to be willing to do it and he'll show you how and where to do i. And it came to pass that I was, I realized one day that I'm working as a cashier in a store and my father had a great obsession and it was to collect coins. And back in the late 70s, there was still a lot of silver certificates, gold certificates, silver coins, war nickels, wheat pennies in circulation. And I got, I think that was inspired. I thought, I'll just start saving this stuff for my dad. And I went to my boss and I said, can I put it aside and can I buy it out of the bank at the end of the week when I get my paycheck? And he says, yeah, I don't care. I don'T save that stuff. Do whatever you want. and it took me what I believed would have been four and a half years to what I thought would have been 12 and a Half years to come up with the amount at face value not not what it was really worth but at face Value the amount that I owed my father and I was able to give it to him and he couldn't give it back if I just sent him a check he could have probably tore it up but he could for him to give back these coins and stuff would have like a crack addict giving back an 8-ball. I mean, he couldn't have done it, right? It was impossible. And my father died that following year and I was able to get on a plane and go back to Pennsylvania and be with my mother and my sister and I Was able to mourn my father and I experienced something that I hadn't experienced with my grandparents. when my father died i was able to bury him and there was no i was not haunted by his spirit and i knew what it was like to be haunted by spirits of dead people i was haunted by the until i wrote the letter and then later just a few years ago i went back to the grave sites until i written the letter to my grandfather i was hunted by the ghosts of i wish i would have never done that. I wish I would have told him I loved him I wish on the morning that his wife of 60 some years died and we were going to the funeral that he didn't have to find me laying on the floor of the guest bedroom in a puddle of blood with a needle in my arm because I had found her the meds that she was on the night before she died, the Demerol and the barbiturates and I told him in this letter how sorry I was that I had done that to him and I thanked him for all the nice stuff he did for me as a kid. And when my dad died, I wasn't haunted by those ghosts. My dad died knowing that we were even. I knew we were Even. He knew I loved him. He knew that I knew that he loved me. There was no separation. There was nothing. There was not enough stuff spinning in my head about my father as a result of step nine. We were even, we were event. I think that step nine is where I integrate myself back and I claim my inheritance I think that there's something I was working with this guy that was 20 some years sober and he had had some great jobs and he was living on the edge of Skid Row making $80,000 a year and when we started to talk, we realized that there was all these financial amends that he's never made and he never made them because he didn't have to. They weren't chasing him but he always knew that he owed and I think him and I are a lot alike. I think it's pretty hard for me to accept abundance and great things that God would give me if I secretly inside myself someplace know that I've been an SOB and I owe all these other people. What happens to what my experience is, is that I became an unworthy receiver. And I had that experience with a lot of years of sobriety. Clint helped me walk through a thing in my business a few years ago. Actually about six years ago, seven years ago I received a shipment of merchandise in my business that was $22,000 worth of stuff, right? And we didn't get an invoice. But I thought it came from a strange place through this other company, and I thought, well, it'll come in next month's statement. Next month's payment came, it wasn't on the statement. So I said, well because it didn't come through the normal channels, it'll probably be on the following month. The following month it still was not on the payment. not on the statement so I had my I told my bookkeeper I said call him up and find out what the deal is so because she's she loves me and as always has my best interest here's what she does she calls them up and she says could you check through your records and see if there's any chance that we have an outstanding bill or anything we owe you and they came back to her and they said no there's nothing you don't owe us a dime we're four square and she told me that well but I know right I know I owe them $22,000 and I you know here's what I thought to myself okay I owe him and I'm gonna have to pay him but this is not a good month to pay this we're having a little bit of financial problems here and there'll be better times I know to pay them and I tell you what happened over the next couple years my business got worse and worse and worse and until it got to a point where I understand one day I just knew what was going on I knew that it was caught in the realm of the spirit there's some kind of weird cause-and-effect here and I knew without ever intending to something about carmatically involved with me is causing me to sabotage my own business somehow that I don't understand. And I thought to myself, man, if I don' t make this amends, if I wait another two years, I'm going to be homeless, right? Because I could see the pattern. I could say what was going on. And I had to go and take a second out of my home in order to pay the money whereas when it began, I could have wrote the check. It would have been a little inconvenient but I could've wrote the cheque. I never felt it except it would've been... And amends is about walking through the fear. I run into people all the time that their attitude towards the financial amends is, well, I know I owe it, and if I ever have an extra 50 grand, I'll pay it. And you never have an Extra 50 grand. There's no such thing as extra money. I mean, really, think about it. When have you ever had extra money? And I think we just bite the bullet, we walk through the Fear, we pay the stuff back, and we learn something. We learn that God takes care of us. That all my fears about if I do this and pay that back, what will happen to me? And I'll tell you what my experience is. What will happento me is I will be taken care of. And from the moment I paid back that $22,000, I started to have some good luck financially. And the bleeding stopped. and I some people I've had told that story to people and they think ah you're just making a big deal out of it it was just it was juste coincidence maybe but I've seen enough for those kind of coincidences that I think there's I think in the realm of the spirit if I'm going to change my karma, I will do it in step eight and nine. Clint? You guys want a break? Five minutes okay let's take a five minute break come back at two o'clock and the uh i'll say two things about a living amends one is that they can sometimes be well i don't really want to go to that child and make amends to him for the way i've treated him because, and we hope the child won't remember or will not understand the amends. So I'll just make a living amends to him. And my experience is that if I can go to that child and tell him what I told you was real was never real, it is such a calming influence on a kid because he knew it wasn't real but he wanted to believe me that it was real and it left him with a little quirky thing going on when he and i clean it up like that or i go to him and say you know if i had that to do over again i would never have spoken to you that way because i know i owe you as much respect as any other human being and i was disrespectful to you and i'm talking about that conversation we had they always remember and it makes a huge difference or a woman. You said, well, I wasn't. I just fell asleep in the car. I didn't really mean to. I wasnít with anybody else. And you have to be a little careful about that. But, you know, the night I told you I was asleep in a car all night, you knew and I knew that was a lie. And Iím really sorry for my conduct. Of course, weíre going to treat those two people differently. You can call that a living amends if you want to. But basically, the principle of Step 9 is atonement, and we're atoning by the quality of our lives for our conduct. But I don't think living amends is a proper substitute for going to the person and doing it in a verbal way if we possibly can. And does anyone else have a comment or a question? Yes, sir. When I first got sober, I jumped to the ninth step way before I dressed up and took a trip And, of course, we went with the AA and A-5, and after that trip, I sent logs to them, And so, I believe that it may or may not be what I have found in that. There will be a minute until I get his question and then I'll repeat it. this is being taped and no one can hear you so the question was let me just take the question the question had to do with an attempted amends pretty early in sobriety. He contacted his family that he had deserted, and he told them that he wanted to resume a relationship with them, and there may or may not have been any kind of a spiritual component or prayer about it. When he left that part of the country, he sent cards to make sure that they understood that he wanted to be in their lives, and then he waited, and they didn't respond and the response ultimately was we don't want to have you in our lives now many years have gone by and he's now many many years sober and older and wiser and has a basis that's spiritual for his sobriety and the question is should he go back and make another amends to those people from here to them where in whatever state they are in and that's basically the question. I think it requires a prayerful answer. I attempted to make amends before I was ready to do with an ex-wife, and it turned out badly. It turned out bad. And I will get into that a little bit. But it's a prayer full thing, and requires a lot of feeling out because sometimes we can do we have no right to impose ourselves on other people just to kind of drain off a little of the guilt and we have to be very careful about it and it would take a lot of talking with your sponsor I'm Bob Darrell I'm an alcoholic the step says make direct amends but there is a thing that happens sometimes where you in the book it says There's a long period of reconstruction ahead. A remorseful mumbling won't fit the bill at all. There's a gal in my group, I'll tell you a little story, there's a gal in my group who, she got sober and she had a tremendous resentment and state of separation with her father. And I'll tell you why this happened. She was a white gal from down south and she fell in love with this black guy and they got married and had two beautiful little kids. But her father was an off-the-wall bigot, I mean like Ku Klux Klan kind of guy, right? And he called her every name in the book. He disowned her, would have nothing to do with her. He just browbeat her over this relationship and this marriage and these children. He made fun of them, et cetera, for years. And now she gets sober and these kids are like a little bit bigger and there's that resentment towards her father. The book says we must disregard the other person involved entirely. Where were we to blame? Well, her sponsor, she had a good sponsor and her sponsor told her that we're going to do that. We don't care what your father did. The reality is you used all of that as an excuse to be a lousy daughter. To be a you justified being a your behavior, you justified all your bad behavior towards him because of what he did. He said and she said to her, to this gal, she said I want you to start sending him pictures of the kids little notes about yourself about your life. I want you to send him Father's Day cards, Christmas send him a present for Christmas send him birthday cards and just keep doing that and she did it and they would come back to her on you know return to sender she would call him and he'd call her a name and hang up on her and i'll tell you something she persisted with those loving actions in the face of his rejection and animosity year after year after years and at four and a half years sober chelsea came to my old home group with a letter four and a half years of doing this and she started reading the letter and in the letter her father said how sorry he was for being such an asshole how he knows he doesn't deserve to have her and those kids in his life anymore but if if there if she would ever want to give him another chance he would do anything to make it right. And I'll tell you, there wasn't a dry eye in that meeting when she read that letter. And I will tell you what I saw. I learned a couple of things from that. I learned that I think it is absolutely impossible to keep hating someone who continually tries to be on your side. Eventually the love will wear you out. But unfortunately guys like me who are event oriented people, I want to make the amends, have the brass band. I want to have it all be right in 15 minutes. And if it's not right, screw you. I'm going down the street. And I watched Chelsea do that for four and a half years with no payoff until it finally... And another thing I saw is the power to heal was not just in her. That amends changed him. It eventually wore him down. I don't know if it was two years or two and a half years or three years that he started opening the cards and stopped sending them back. But somewhere along there, he started reading the letters and looking at the pictures and opening the cars and seeing how this daughter that he was estranged from was doing nothing but loving him and was never judging him. What a powerful thing. And I had to do the exact same thing with my parents. You know, in addition to the financial amends, I had a lot of personal emotional amends to make to them I one of the worst things I did to my parents was not the money that was immaterial one ofthe worst things i did to them is I broke their heart over and over and over again it's because sometimes I would get back up on my feet and I would get their hopes up that I've changed and it's going to be different and I'm sober and I call him from some treatment center and I tell him how I have learned my lesson and they'd start and they would believe me. And then six months later, I'm in jail or I'm embarrassing them or I're in the paper and they're feeling humiliated in their community. And I did that to them over and over and the emotional battering that they took as a result of loving someone. And the only thing they ever did wrong is they loved me. And I punished them for it for years. So when I get sober, people in AA are telling me, you've got to start repairing the damage to your folks. I said, you don't get it. It's too late. Five years ago, maybe, before I did some of this last stuff, before I robbed them, before i did some of that stuff, maybe I could have done it then. But it's too later now. And the people I talked to in Alcoholics Anonymous didn't believe anything I believed. And they said, just do it. First thing they told me, they said we want you to call your mother and don't call collect. she's i said mom it's rob how are you rob are you in pennsylvania no i'm in las vegas mom but you didn't call collect no i paid for the call you you paid for the call she couldn't believe it then it was like what do you want what do you want you know and i got my feelings hurt because she didn't trust me and she was she had her walls up as she should have had and i kept sending her mother's day cards and I did that and I did that. And see the people in Alcoholics Anonymous believed if I took enough of the right action, I could overcome all of the things I did to her. And what it was, I don't know if you can call it a living amends or it's a sustained I haven't given up yet, I'm continuing to do it direct amends. But it was direct and I just kept at it. And eventually my parents and I had a tremendous relationship. My dad's spirit is with me. I talk to him sometimes, and I feel it sounds stupid. Some of you will think I'm losing it, but I feel like my dad's presence sometimes in my life. And it's a good feeling. It's a warm feeling. Clint? I was given a very helpful format about Step 9 because I had a stack of cards, and I tossed one out. The minute I made the amends and I was really feeling complete on it, I would simply discard it. But I had another card, and on that card I knew exactly what I was supposed to do with each amend. And the first thing I had to do was, of course, make an appointment to be with that person. I had to see them somewhere. And they said, don't make it a private place, not her apartment, not yours, not hers. You can go to a business office, that's probably fine. A coffee shop is fine. Don't do it around a meal. You don't want all of that. And besides, it doesn't take as long as you think to make amends because it doesn'T take very long to tell the truth. it's what you've been telling them all this time that has taken all that time telling the truth is pretty straightforward and short so make an appointment to see the person, and when you sit down with them, wherever it might be in a library, a hotel lobby a coffee shop any number of places thank them for meeting you if they're in AA, you've already told them I'm doing step 9 and I need to talk to you and that moves pretty quickly. Can I meet you after the meeting? Will you meet me at the coffee break? Can I talk to you for three minutes? And you can make an amends that way with somebody in your home group, and it doesn't take long. It just cleans up an important area where you can be at peace there with that person. You know and I know that we all have situations in our AA experience where we walk into a meeting and we don't see that other person. They have their part of the room, I have my part of the room. I don't go over there. And that's a whole area of fellowship that is cut off for me. And I have to say to that person, Julie, I really need to talk to you. I'm in step nine. If you could give me five minutes it would help a lot. I did that for a guy that had that kind of an uneasy non-relationship. When he took a cake, I went, oh my God, I owe him an amends. And we met for coffee and cleaned it up. Are we great friends today? No. Am I always glad to see him in a meeting? You bet. Is he glad to See Me? Yeah. A whole area of lack of fellowship just dropped out and fellowship took its place. So I want to sit with that person face-to-face in some neutral place, not involving a meal or a lot of people. I want To tell them when we're sitting there, if they're not in AA, I'm looking over my life and I'm cleaning it up and I harmed you and I am here because I want to make that right. And the next step is to tell them the harm and be specific about it. when I was working for you, I stole money. When I was workin' for you I lied to you. When I worked for you I didn't show up. When I workin', I also had somethin' else goin' on out here. When I married to you I took your dignity with my conduct and my lies and the money and I want to return that. Tell him as specifically as the situation allows because you know it's a funny thing they remember the things we hope they don't remember and tell them the harm and ask them if they need to tell you how that made them feel and they will tell you they will tells you if they haven't already and then the big one is is there anything that you remember that I have not said and they will tell you yeah what about that time you did what about and you listen and you might say do you need to tell me anything more about anything else or how it made you feel and at some point it's at an end and then the question is what can I do to set that right what can i do to clean that up with you sometimes you hear just coming and talking to me about it is all you have to do. Sometimes you hear, well I need that money back and I'd like you to pay it back. Can you make the best deal that you can? And sometimes it's yeah you can do this and you can't do that. And I had two of those that ended the opposite way. During the time I was going through this process I was with a woman who had a little boy. And we had talked a little bit about moving in together. And it's like the universe gave me an envelope, and in it I look in it and there's a beautiful woman and there is a little kid, and you go, give me another envelope. I don't want the kid. Like the lady, my kids are all gone. I'm out of the kid-raising business. I didn't do it well then. I don' t think I'll do it now. But I didn't feel quite right about that. And there's something about asking somebody, what can I do to make this right? That impels you to listen carefully to the answer. Because there is something spiritual about that answer. It's a message. It's an answer. A message at a spiritual level. and so this lady had been married and the ex was the father of this child and he was a drunk and a drugger and he wasn't always able to take care of this child. One thing I knew about him is that he hated me for being in a position to take care of the child because he loved that boy and I knew the boy loved him and another thing I knew about him was that he was shopping for rifles to shoot me one of these days so I wasn't entirely easy in his presence since he wanted to shoot me I thought and one day the lady said I can't get back to LA she was some place and tomorrow morning Daniel is having a Halloween event at school he was then five could you please go over there and could you please take a camera and he'll love to see you and just get some snapshots of this event. I said okay. I didn't want to go but I went by the office and I grabbed a camera that I used for evidence and I went over to this little school in Santa Monica, California. When you go to an event like this when four and five-year-old kids there's two kinds of parents. One is like me, I'm sitting on a chair about this high, feeling like a jerk with my little handheld Kodak and the other kind of parent is in the business and they roll up with a truck and about a thousand feet of cable and all kinds of video equipment and they're, you know and here those people were and I'm like a jerk on that little chair but he saw me Daniel, he loved me and he, oh hi, and he waved and I got some photographs, and that morning I had prayed the prayer you must pray every day when you're in amends. Dear God, please take me to my next amends and give me the power to make it, and I had paid that prayer, and then I had gone over to the school, and I wasn't thinking about much of anything, certainly not about amends, and in the other door came his father to see him too and I thought oh man oh and Daniel's waving at him and he's waving and after I went up and said good job to Daniel and they took him back to class whatever and his father had also said something to him and before he left I said John we gotta talk We got to talk. This guy hated me. He'd been shopping for rifles. He was furious, and I knew a lot about him, and he hated that. And I said, will you have a cup of coffee with me? And we went and sat down at a coffee shop. And I'm praying all the way over there. I mean, give me the power to make this amends. and I sat down with John in a kind of a quiet part of the coffee shop and I said, I'm in step nine. He knew what that meant. I said I've treated you, I haven't overtly treated you badly but I have in my heart not wished you well and I have never interfered and told Daniel anything about you but I've always been kind of glad when you were unable to take care of him and I've wished you ill and i'm really sorry for that because i know it's infected your relationship with dan i know that you have hated me for any number of reasons and for that and i i just would like to clean that up with you and uh i mentioned a couple of things and he uh finally i got to the part is there anything i haven't mentioned that and boy did he have some things to say he said yeah you know what you totally dismissed me I know I'm not a good member of AA but you treated me like a subhuman and I thought I did that I did that he said you acted like I'm the scum of the earth and he had a couple other things and I suddenly saw how I had no compassion for him And I had no ability, I had not cushion where he was concerned because I was afraid of him, physically afraid of and he's a big guy and a crazy and angry guy. But I wasn't, I was past that. And we were just talking and here is this wounded guy that didn't want to be in the emergency room when he was supposed to pick up his kid. He didn't want to be in four point restraint when the last event occurred. And he was just so, I said what can I do to set this right? There was a long silence and I didn't know what he was going to say but he said this, He said, take care of my boy. And I knew when he said that that he knew he could not take care of his boy and I knew that if there was a message from the universe in that that it was going to be up to me to take care of that boy because the boy loved me and I had been given that responsibility just by the nature of how he and his mother and I have come together. I didn't like that message. Take this cup from me, I said dramatically. It was like, oh, I don't want to go there. I'm not a good parent. I got so angry with my kids and this is a loving boy and the universe didn't care about that. Take care of the boy. And for the next five years he and his mother and I lived together. His mother then moved out of state and took the boy with her and she had her own path to follow. But we had some amazing experiences. One day I said to her early on, I said, you know, I just don't quite know how to be with that boy. She said, I'll give you a clue. All he knows how to do is play. Oh my God, I will have to learn to play? you got it big boy i learned to kneel down with a child and pray listen to him thank god for the fact that he was born at the top of the food chain like oh my god oh my God they told me to go to northern California he and I were together that weekend I said I'm traveling with a six-year-old. Bring him along. We'll pay your airfare when you get up there. Somebody just canceled. We got off the plane in Oakland, got into the rental car. We're driving along. I said, Daniel, I love traveling with you, man. By this time, I knew he loved me and I knew I adored that boy. And I'm a good parent. All you have to do is be respectful and they will do anything to please a respectful parent. We're traveling up there. I said, you're a great traveler, Daniel. He said, thank you, the way they do. I said well you know when that kid came across the alley wanted you to go on the back of the plane to play I'm glad you didn't do that. He said well I didn't know him that well. I said I'll tell you something I just think he wanted to go back there and get in trouble. And Daniel looked at me. I'll never forget it. I'm driving. He's over here. He looked at my face. He looked to me. He said, we don't know that about him. I went, whoa. Shut up. You've been talking to your mother too much. She talks like that. No, I just laughed. But he taught me so much. And only because I made amends to that guy and because I listened to what he said I had to do to make it right. And his father had already died in a motel with a needle in his arm in the San Gabriel Valley that hot summer. And Daniel was distraught and had an awful lot of trouble with that. But he had me, and I had him. I learned unconditional love in that experience. The second experience was my son Michael, my youngest son, lives in Newport Beach. and he's always had a tough time with his mom and I'd gone to Michael to make amends to him and he and I talked and he is the apple of my eye this guy I love him like a rainbow and he has a wife and he haves a family and my grandkids I just cherish them and they're just wonderful kids my oldest grandson Michael's oldest son just finished his first year at Harvard