Dog Turds Wrapped in Gold Tinfoil — That’s What We Call Our Worst Defects and We Guard Them Like Treasures 🤣 – Bob B.

About This Speaker Tape

Bob B. from St. Paul, Minnesota, shares his experience with the 12 Steps at a step study workshop, drawing on 28 years of sobriety dating from December 10, 1967. He opens with humor about recent dental surgery and traces his drinking back to age 14, describing how alcohol gave an insecure kid a sense of ease and comfort he had never known. Diagnosed alcoholic at 19 by a psychiatrist in 1962, he drank his way out of Notre Dame, got a medical release from the Army for alcoholism, and was asked to leave both his family home and later his father's business. Two AA members met him in a cafe in July 1967 and changed his life by sharing their own experience rather than lecturing him. His last drink came on his honeymoon in Acapulco.

Bob walks through Steps 1 through 7 using his own life as the textbook. He describes three profound surrenders across his sobriety: at the beginning, at eight years when gambling, debt, anger, and marital problems had made his life as unmanageable as when he walked in, and again around 21 years when a tax law change wiped out an eight- or nine-million-dollar net worth built during a decade of extraordinary business success. He argues that surrender cannot be manufactured mechanically and that the power of the program lives in powerlessness, not in accumulated information or memorized pages.

He is searingly honest about problems that persisted deep into sobriety: compulsive gambling, violence toward his children, chronic overspending, workaholism in reverse, and an anger he calls a gift he never asked for. He frames these as alcoholism gone underground, the emotional and spiritual disease expressing itself in new channels once the bottle was removed. He challenges the audience to admit that most of us protect our worst defects like treasures, making unspoken deals with spouses, sponsors, and friends to leave certain subjects untouched.

Bob closes the first half of his workshop with a passionate case for ongoing spiritual growth. He references Elizabeth Kubler-Ross on the stages of dying as a metaphor for the pain of real change, quotes Scott Peck on depression doing its work, and invokes Lao Tzu and Suzuki on beginner's mind. His central message is that transformation is a change in being, not doing, and that the program's promise of spiritual awakening means the old behaviors fall away as you wake up rather than being wrestled to the ground by force of will.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Bob introduces himself, mentions dental surgery and the humor of losing teeth in drunk stories at Notre Dame
• 5:00 Describes starting drinking at 14, feeling insecure at 4-foot-11 and 95 pounds, and alcohol giving him a sense of ease and integrity he never had
• 10:00 Drinking through Notre Dame, medical release from the Army, family asking him to leave home, and his father as his hero from the WWII generation
• 16:00 Diagnosed alcoholic at 19 by a psychiatrist in 1962, referred to AA but rejected it after reading a book linking alcoholism to latent homosexuality
• 22:00 Two AA men meet him in a cafe in July 1967, share their experience rather than interviewing him, and his life changes that day
• 30:00 Last drink on honeymoon in Acapulco, December 10 1967, and the reality that sobriety did not make everything wonderful overnight
• 38:00 Step 1 discussion: the power of surrender, ego ground to dust creating an opening to receive the message of alcoholism as allergy and obsession
• 48:00 Lists five or six problems that persisted into sobriety: gambling, anger and violence, overspending, inability to work a full day, marital trouble
• 58:00 Step 2 crisis at seven years sober: as much debt as when he came in, poor parenting, fired by his father again, lost belief that Higher Power would restore him to sanity
• 70:00 Fourth and fifth step discussion: did four inventories over 28 years, each getting closer to causes and conditions, warns that we protect our worst defects like treasures