Dryness and Character Defects – Bronx Big Book Step Study – Part 3 of 3 – Cynthia M.

Hi, everybody. My name is Cynthia. I'm an alcoholic. And I appreciate the opportunity to be here with you all today. And thank you to Esty for inviting me and amazing lead up and I really appreciate our speakers experience with the first three integral steps of this program. and of course carol ann didn't even realize that that was you when i read the flyer so how awesome her uh her partner tommy is a member of my jersey home group which is designed for living uh sunday and wednesday nights and i also am an active member at the atlanta group in new york city tuesday nights and uh i've been participating in a boston meeting five days a week on zoom which is amazing and I have to tell you we go through the steps on the Boston zoom meeting at noon and in the beginning my sponsor was booking the speakers and she asked me to speak on step four but focused on fear and sex and I was so terrified to do that but the cool thing was I had to really amp up and get writing on those two areas of my inventory um which enlightened me to so much more oh my god like I revealed so much about myself to Arisa when I went over that inventory I'm still perplexed and I love it because I'm able to share that now with other women and people in meetings. I don't even know strangers. Um, so I have a sobriety date, which is March 17th, 1994. So I celebrated 26 years alone in my living room the first couple of days of this pandemic. And my sponsor, as I mentioned, her name is Arisa. She resides in Boston and started the beacon group up there many years ago when she moved up there. And I met Arisa in New York at our home group, I was new to the Atlanta group that year and I had four and a half years sobriety and I was as dry as a forest fire in California. I was really, really toasty and dangerous, you know, and I come to realize through doing my inventory that, wow, the amount, and maybe it's because I had, you know more of a memory during those five, you know years of my sobriety than I had when I was drinking but I really concluded that a lot of the damage that I had done were to people during those five years you know damage way back but I just carried it on and the and the damage control didn't halt when I did my fifth step in like I probably had five and a half years sobriety at that point. Some of that damage, those character defects, they didn't fade out. Many of them took many years to fade out and some of them are still with me today. I wake up in, in a way that only this spiritual program is going to squash and help me live to be a better person on a daily basis. And I mean, I would love to say, you know, at the end of the day, when I do a nightly that I've been clean, clean in my thinking and my actions, but that's hardly ever the case. You know, I'm definitely not a mother Teresa. All right. I am going to go and grab these lids that my cat is swatting around really quick, five seconds over here kitties take them elsewhere okay oh my god i should have done damage control with the kittens it's uh it's tough being a mom this is the first time for me uh i've only had cats i've never had kittens since they were little so this and two okay so god bless you if you're uh expecting twins or have twins but all right so what what i think all right first off i'm not going to get any of this program or realize the severity of my disease unless i really understand that i have that mental obsession you know and back then it was about the drinking and the partying and how am i going to get what but that mental obsessions with me every day like i said if if i don't quilter this in the morning with prayer meditation, I'm doomed and not necessarily doomed that I'm going to pick up a drink. But in 26 years, I used to say I could count on one finger how many times the thought of drink came back to me. But unfortunately, with time, the thought of drinking to help me cope with life came back maybe five times now. And, you know, that's I sometimes I don't even know how, how like God intervene. Like it is, it's magical. Yes. And it's puzzling and it is scary, but I believe it's from all of, you know, you guys helping me get through the situations that have, you Know, come along my way over these years that I didn't resort to picking up a drink. So if I get the whole, you KNOW, physical allergy, mental obsession, you know, that we learn early in the program, you know that's great, but that's not going to keep me sober. You know, self-knowledge is not going to keep my sober and you know I could look at the insanity throughout my sobriety, you now, and kind of know that God could restore me to sanity, but what am I actually doing to have God remove them? Now of course I did a formal third step with Arisa many years ago and a few sponsors over the past 26 years. I've had the best of the best, I have to tell you. I had great sponsors. A woman that lives down by me, a woman that live in New York. And Arisa even attributes most of my biggest growth spurts in the past 22 years that she's known me have been when I was sponsored by those other women. because you know what I had my back up against the wall due to my behaviors that got me into trouble where Arisa has said to me you need to find somebody that you can be eyeball to eyeball with to help you get through um your troubles and it's not like she was pointing me off and she didn't want to deal with me she was that concerned about me that she um got that through to me. And actually, one day, it was Christmas Eve, like for almost six years ago, where on the phone, I mean, I say she fired me, she doesn't use that term. But you know, she had to let me go because she said to me, you're so close to a drink that I could taste it. And that resonated with me. And that day, I made a phone call to a woman who was not my favorite person in the world. but I knew that she was going to help me see the truth about myself and that's you know and I think I'm kind of segueing first into the fifth step um because if you if you're not being on you're screwed if you'RE NOT BEING HONEST let me tell you that was that's been a big part of my story and you know what I think too I me personally I think that some people are gravitated towards me in recovery to talk to, and I'm not saying they asked me to sponsor them, but they feel comfortable talking to me is that I have relatable issues that have happened in sobriety. So the, because I thought that once you got here, that nothing else is going to happen to you, that you're going to be clean and free of all of this garbage. So as I'm still carrying the garbage, because I'm too afraid to disclose it. I'm wondering, does you know, like, why isn't why aren't those promises coming true for me? You know, why Isn't this working for me Why aren't I getting what they have, you know that whole, like jealousy envy thing, it was never leaving me because why I was not being honest. And yes, when I sat down with Arisa and started telling her some of the things that I had done, because some of those things were still occurring in sobriety. You know, because I couldn't get up from her kitchen table and go to work that night and not continue with that behavior, I still continued the behavior. And I wasn't being honest with her. And, and I think that that had a lot to do with me, like not believing in this program. So what I'm trying to say is that it took me a very long time for me to finally get honest, get rid of everything. I don't want to step on, you know, a couple speakers down the road toes. Um, but once I finally started meeting those people that I did all that damage to making formal ninth step amends, did I ever experience any promises? I had to go all the way that far in my recovery to, to finally get with what you guys were trying to sell me on basically. Um, so with that, I think first, before I talk to you about personal situations in my fourth step, um i do just want to pick out a couple of sentences from the chapter into action which starts first of all this chapter if someone out there doesn't know out of 274 people into action chapter six uh has step five all the way up to step 11 in one chapter that's how much earlier in the big book is dedicated to the prior steps one through five so one through four rather so here in the chapter into action it says we have been trying to get a new attitude a new relationship with our creator and to discover the obstacles in our path so and we have admitted certain defects we have ascertained in a rough way what the trouble is We have put our finger on the weak items in our personal inventory, but without Arisa and the sponsors that I have had doing Fit Steps, I'm not looking all around the damage. I'm just looking at a piece of it, a part of it. So it wasn't until, and by the way, that first Fit Step was from 1999. So it was a long time ago. And today, Arisa sponsors a large sum of women and many since then. So she's gotten very fine-tuned with this step. But back then, I think it was a little more, I guess, flimsy, if not a better word, where we were trying to make attempts at this step So, yeah, I was trying to unroot some of my troubles, but it didn't really get dug up until later in my sobriety. But I'm never going to be able to do that without the help of a sponsor and any any good sponsor if they're not going to take on all of your stuff. What they are going to take on is obviously taking you through the big book, helping you to understand what this program is and what they're trying to convey to us. But I think the biggest goal of a sponsor is for someone like me who doesn't trust in that higher power is to help us put trust, get some sort of relief and understanding in a power that's too big to comprehend as a newcomer. And, you know, I still don't even comprehend it today. It's still too big for me to totally understand. But all I have today is the experience of the work that I've done so far to come to rely upon this power to get me out of here so I could be more useful to you. I didn't understand that, that I have a job here. I took it for granted that I was going to stay sober on just going to meetings, going out for coffee or to the diner, throwing my yearly sobriety hoopla at my house. And, you know, that was going be okay. You know, I had no idea what the real request is of me. And, and actually, I don't even think I would have, if someone really explained to me that my life was not going to be mine any longer, once I started getting and staying sober, that my whole entity belongs to something else. I don't think I would have had the capacity anyway, but may, I don'T know, maybe she was trying to explain it to me, but it went in one ear and out the other, like many other things. But, but anyway, I just wanted to jump over to page 73 because I love this little paragraph where it says more than most people, the alcoholic leads a double life. He is very much the actor to the outer world, he presents his stage character. This is the one he likes his fellows to see. He wants to enjoy a certain reputation but knows in his heart he doesn't deserve it. Story of my life. I never wanted you to know what was really going on in here because you know why? I, I was manipulating and trying to, you know, mask and figure out and get whatever it is that I wanted for the day, you now. And, and I'm not talking about when I was drinking, I am talking about many years into my sobriety. I was still trying to coast along and figure out what's best for me and how am I going to get that? So, you know, it took a few more forceps for me to figure all of this out. You know, like how deep rooted my selfish and self-centeredness was. So now I, here, I'm just going to take a couple minutes to give you a little background about what makes, were what made me tick. I grew up, I had three older sisters who were very close in age and they were buddies. And then there was a gap, then me and then my brother. And I wanted to be with the girls, but, but I was too young. They were too old, you know, like they didn't want anything to do with me. I was so angry and resentful against this entire family, not just three of them my whole family that i was gonna make you pay and you know who paid the worst and it was my little brother you know because you know why he was the easiest victim that i could possibly like you know get at and he was three years younger than me and i started from the time basically he was born and i mean i'm not saying that I should be in prison for some of the things that I did to him. But you know, I was not a nice person. I was horrible, horrible. And when he got old enough to start, you know expressing himself and conveying to my parents and you know that's when I learned how to gaslight make them be the crazy ones, right? I mean, I'm talking like I was like single digit age. Yeah, I was already manipulating the scenario from back then. And from that, I, I grew up like that, you know, I was always going to make you see that they're to blame, not me. I was a master at that. I mean I should have written screenplays for some of the things that I came up in my head. I mean, it was pre Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese, but I definitely could have helped out in Hollywood, you know, with some ofthe things that i had going on and even trying to manipulate and create. And, you now, um, and that was another thing too. I'll make you think that my idea is the best you know and i'll play out the whole scenario of how it's going to work out and you know what just when we're about to do like the the heat of the moment you know like whatever that danger or you know damage is going to be you know you can see the the the this here are the sirens coming from down the street and i will figure out a way to dance around you and run down the block. And you're the ones, you know, being hauled into city hall into the police station. I mean, that's just the way that I operated. You know, I had the great ideas and I wanted you to implement them. And, you now what, if we got away with it and we were able to, you Know, loot the store then, you Now I'll be there to get the goods that I want. But as soon as trouble is, is, uh, as soon As we're going to get caught, I'm out. And you guys are going to be stuck holding, holding the brick, you know, and I'm not saying I did that. But, um, you Know, that's how I operated. But you know that's how myself was showing up everywhere. You know, I just thought I was like the queen of everything. And so now as I'm getting older, and you know I'm getting more say like sexually active and, you know, manipulating in that area. And then now I'm working in a restaurant with cash and, um, I'm figuring out ways to do that. And, you know then eventually I manipulate the guy into asking me to marry him. And then, you, I I'm in a marriage that I don't care that much about the guy, but he's paying half of all the bills. And, you know, and then I'm doing everything that I want behind his back. And I mean, and it was like such a vicious circle. And God forbid, he tried to confide in one of his friends, I would make up stories about him to make sure that they think that he's the crazy one and not me. Little did I know that everybody had my number from way back then. But I don't know this yet, because I'm still too sick in my head. So anyway, and I'm angry at everybody, you know, like the resentments that are going around, it wasn't just towards my family, it wasn'T just towards like, the white collar people in Hoboken, where I was living, you know? And bartending, it was like, I hated everybody, everybody. So here I am, you know at finally I bottom out in sobriety. I get into like, quote unquote, recovery. Like I said earlier, I'm not drinking and go to meetings. And, you know, I thank God through a marriage counselor, Mike and I were able to separate and divorce, you Know, with no problems. Thank you. But I also immediately jumped into the next relationship. But you know what, that's not good enough, because now I'm, you know, in all these other extramarital relationships too. And, you know, I'm implicating people in the program to cover for me. I mean, I was, I was just like spiraling down in recovery and I am so grateful to the guy. I wasn't dating him. I just, I just happened to meet him at an AA dance. He was the one that asked me in that four and a half years of my sobriety, what step I was working on. And, you know, I call that my deer in the headlight moments because I got caught and I told him, you know, and he was like, but I don't understand you have all this sobriete time. And I'm like, yeah, but you know? And, uh, he was the one that brought me to my home group in New York and that's where I met Arisa. And that's Where we started reading this big book together. AndI started realizing that, you know, maybe the people that, you know I was dancing around that fire with weren't really that bad after all, you know and maybe I gravitated to the weakest in the bunch, you know? And, you Know, I do have to say like, although when Arisa and I went to, I think it was St. John the Divine Church in New York to do my third step, It was very symbolic as far as getting on my knees with another human being, but she really did say that if I really want these things, I really, really have to get busy. And, you know, I made a lot of promises in sobriety, you know, not just to her and her. Her sobriete wasn't banking on, you know, me doing this stuff. But I made a lot of promises to myself that I couldn't keep. And, you know , she laughs about it. We laugh about it today that I would show up just like I did in high school with my homework assignments half done. You know, she would take time out of her day to, you know, give me the time to go over my inventory. And I would come up there with like scribble in a notebook, you Know, with barely anything done. And i would lie and lie and lie and say that i had it done. Until, you Now, it happens all the time, i hit another bottom, and then i'm forced to do it. And that's what happened. I finally got it done? And you know what? Um, and I do have to clean, you know, up something here. I, I should have had my most current four step inventory done a few months ago. But of course, you Know, procrastination is one of my biggest character defects. And I haven't finished my inventory. Like I said, I did my fear and sex back a few month ago when I spoke. But for some reason, I looked at my resentments last night. And I had eight, eight that I still had to do. So I did two last night and then when I talked to Arisa this morning, we were talking about some principles and I realized that I have to add some principles to my resentment inventory. So here I go again, but oh you know what I gotta pocket my pride and go to it so anyway I want to talk about how I set up my fourth step and how I sponsor women I consider my fourth step although they're not all going to require the same amount of attention but i break up my fourth step into six sections this first section is even though we're going to use this for steps six and seven but this is a character defect list and you know we didn't have the internet back then when i was getting sober so it is pretty easy now you could google character defect list aa or whatever and you get an assortment of character defect lists i mean I think I seen one that was like 200 long, but many of them fall under the same umbrella. But for me, I asked my girls, you know, to pick out like a couple of dozen, you know, maybe 20 character defects that you feel keep showing up in your life. And like I said, procrastination, it's an easy one for me. Jealousy, envy, you know, that that still shows up in my life today in the business that I'm in. you know, self-importance or, you know even worse the opposite but now that's another thing too so we get the definition and then on the other side of the paper we put the opposite so that's going to help us with our fourth step so we Get That Done hopefully it takes you, you know, an hour or two to do but now we're going to go into the sections of the fourth step And what I think, I mean, so far of all the women that I've talked to or heard speakers at meetings, resentments are the biggest chunk. So it's going to require the most time. So resentments. And then I separate, well, okay, the next one are our fears. Now my first four step, it was like fear of spiders and heights, but that's not what we're talking about here. And I'll get into that in a minute. And then the next two sections, I separate harms done to others and our sex inventory because I feel like especially my harms done to others because something's come up recently with a situation in my life where I've caused harm to someone specifically and some other people, um, around the same issue. So I've had to do some inventory on that to get to see where my mistakes are. And then, like I said, the sex, and then the grand finale is our sex ideal. And of course, you know, young in sobriety, I think I just, my sex ideal, I probably wrote down back then, tall, dark and handsome with a lot of money. But, you know, that has nothing to do with the sex ideal that I come to understand today. So if I'm going to break down and see the benefits of these sections, I'll start with I'll start with the resentment because, you know, the book tells us that resentment is the number one offender. It kills more alcoholics than anything else. So, so it's telling me it kills more Alcoholics and alcohol. Yeah. You know, I mean, today I take this book for everything it says to be, to be true. So if I'm looking at this as my number one offender. And believe me, it has been like, I've come to find that my resentments against other people in situations have caused me so much angst that it has almost taken me out, you know? And uh, okay. So if I'm going to break down a resentment, all right if i'm gonna i'm just gonna have a blank piece of paper here but in a notebook and i i like to do it with with a spiral in the middle so on this side that the little section over here is going to be where their name is so the name and then i'm going to put the cause. So my little story, my bullet points of why that person has annoyed me or whatever it may be. And then over here in almost like half of this page, I'm putting the seven parts of self that were affected from this resentment. But the thing is now in my early days of recovery our seven parts of self or actually i think back then was um five right because you remember i don't know if you ever heard scott redmond he's now passed on but during his talk he used to call it a five bagger but now we and back then it had these little you know setup things that you make copies of on your xerox machine and it had this little boxes that you just check off. But today, I don't get to check off those boxes. I have to write how it is affected. So how is my self-esteem affected by this resentment? How is my pride affected bythis resentment? My pocketbook, you know, my financial or, you know, property, whatever affected my personal relations. And here's the other thing too, with the help of a sponsor, like I mentioned earlier, I look around, you know, what others can I put down? So maybe just that one person in the office that keeps coming up. Well, you know what? It's also her personal assistant. And you know What, it's also a client that she worked with that I thought I should have worked with. And, you know what? It's also the owner of my company. I'm really agitated at that because I think that she gave them my client. I don't know if that's true or not, but you know, it did irritate me an awful bit. And now my ambitions, you know my goals, my plans and designs for the future. And then six, number six is my emotional security, my sense of well-being. And the last is my sex relations, my basic drive for sexual intimacy. And, you know, I mean, I'm not saying that every resentment is going to touch all of those areas, but the ones that are real big in my life, most likely many of those seven are going to be affected. So here, here is like, that's why I like doing it on a spiral notebook because I'm just, and I'm going to refer to the book. Okay. So on page 67 at the top, it says, though we did not like their symptoms and the way these disturbed us. So their symptoms is basically column two and the ways that they these disturbed US that's how it affected me. Column three, they like ourselves were sick too. so can I see that truth in other people you know we asked God there's the prayer to help us show them the same tolerance pity compassion and patience that we would cheerfully grant a sick friend when a person offended we said to ourselves here's the pray this is a sick man how can I be helpful to him. God saved me from being angry that I will be done. So that is what I went, whenever I go and do inventory, that's what this spiral signifies. Okay. Is that paragraph? I'm going to put aside what the person did to me on the left-hand side of my notebook. and I'm now going to write my mistakes. Okay, I almost said my part and I don't want to do that but it's so like ingrained in me. So again, I'm just going to read a little bit where it says putting out of our minds which is a challenge for me the wrongs others had done we resolutely looked for our own mistakes. So that's what I'm writing over here on the right side of the spiral, my own mistakes. And then over here, and you know, I call this my fifth column. That's where I'm going to put this specific character defects. I'm not going to putting a story here of what my role was, like what my mistake was. I'm going to put bullet points, but I know I have some glaring character defects that I need to ask God to remove. So that's what I'm gonna put over here. Okay. So anyway, so we're looking for our own mistakes. Where had we been selfish, dishonest, self-seeking and frightened? So that is going to bring okay, though a situation had not been entirely our fault. we tried to disregard the other person involved entirely. Where were we to blame? The inventory was ours, not theirs. Okay. So that's my chunk of resent for resentments. And I'm going to go through the whole list of people or institutions and principles and go through them one at a time and you know, one column at a Time. And then, you know what, it gets very repetitive for a reason because I'm the same person showing up in all of these resentments. Okay, so now the next section is fear. And I think during this pandemic, I got, I think people, some people who I never met in person kind of knows me as FOMO, fear of missing out, because I gave a talk on that. And then all of a sudden, I had some people from their home groups asking me if I could talk to present to their group, my FOMO, my fear of missing out. Well, the day that I did that inventory before I went to the beacon group to speak on it, the inventory that I wrote on that fear was so incredibly deep. I couldn't even believe it because I got it stemmed so far back to fifth grade grammar school, fifth grade. So I don't even know how old I was, but it had to do with the dodgeball game that we played after school. And it was boys against girls. I'm sure I came up with a stupid idea back then, but if you, you know, throw the dodge ball and you get somebody out or they get you out or whatever, you had to go and kiss in the middle line. Okay. So I had a boyfriend back then believe it or not in fifth grade, he was the cutest boy in grammar school, but he, um, you know, we kissed a couple of times, but then I had to go home for dinner and I lived further away than everybody else. And I found out the next day that Jennifer almost had her last name, but that Jennifer kissed my boyfriend 26 or 27 times. And I was furious. I mean, everybody suffered. Okay. But most of all my schoolwork, uh, I was really, really effing pissed. And from that, this is how I went through life. I had to be everywhere at the same time and I was going to figure out how to do it. And you know how I did it mostly when I was drinking, drinking and driving. Cause if, you know, if I'm in the wrong bar and I think, you Know, that guy that I want to be with is somewhere else. Well, I'll scope around the bar, see if anybody's in here that I'd be more interested in than him. And then if he's not here and nobody good enough for me is there. Then I go speeding like a drunk maniac to the next place and then to the Next Place. And it wasn't just, you know, those nights drinking and driving looking for the hot guy. I mean, it was whatever I needed to fill that empty hole in me. So I mean And that's how I went through life with even in recovery. And what I discovered when I was doing the inventory to prepare for that talk was that I had an iPad, my laptop and my cell phone going through early pandemic Zoom all at the same time because I wanted to be in three meetings at once, even four. but I didn't have another, you know, iPad. But so I was in three meetings at the same time like, woohoo, look at me, Cynthia's here. But Cynthia wasn't there. There was absolutely no way I was able to absorb, retain, understand nothing that was going on in any of those meetings. And you know how I know? Because some people saw me in those meetings and they would not question me, Like, were you, you know, they would say, oh, hey, did you hear what so-and-so said? And I would be like, yeah, you know. But anyway, when I looked back on my fears, that's what I concluded. And believe me, it went bigger than that, but I'm running out of time here. So I want to jump over to my next area was my sex inventory. and I don't have a big sex inventory today, thank God. Um, but I did harm an awful lot of people during the course of, of, um, my sexual prowess or whatever you would refer to it as. But, uh, but the worst part was that, you know, I used people left and right to get what I wanted at all times. And it even happened after I bought my house down here, you know, I ended up buying a house that's 130 years old. Well, you Know, if you buy a house 130 years old, and you're as sick as me, you better start checking out all the contractors in town and figuring out how you're going to barter to get some work done on your house. I know that sounds really sick. That was in 19. I mean, in 2000. So give me a little slack here. It was 20 years ago, but I'm just saying that that's not, not what I did. Okay. And you know, when Roy was telling the story of him being on the motorcycle without his helmet and driving papers, you know, I thought to myself, just go keep driving, keep driving. I mean, what are the chances they're going to pull you over? You know, maybe there'll be, you Know, look in the other way. But in all honesty, I'm 54 years old today, but at the age of 14, 24, 34 and 44, I would have driven without the helmet and papers and used my sex powers. That's basically what the book says. I use my sexpowers because they're sometimes good. They're God-given, right? But, um, but today, you know, well, obviously I'm 54. So those powers aren't as potent, but at least today I see a little better how my behavior is not really good for my self-esteem because yeah, maybe I would pull away without getting a ticket, but really how does that make me feel inside? And if, if I believe those first three steps that were talked about, and if I believed that my job here is to be of maximum service to God and his fellows, and my fellows, his children, then I can't be pulling that crap anymore. Because that means I'm going to be useless. So anyway, if I'm gonna bring myself up to date here, I am gonna go, God, I can'T really scroll through all of these people to really take inventory, but something recently happened that I did that was harmful. And I'm not going to say what I did because I think it would bring in an outside issue to an AA meeting and I don't want to do that again. But I caused anxiety and anger in somebody else. And I didn't do it to cause anger or anxiety. I thought I was doing something to be cute and it wasn't, it was taken really, um, it Was harmful. And as soon as I heard that I changed it, changed my behavior and I did inventory on it. Well, then someone came to me and said, you know what? This person is really upset. And, um, what are you going to do about it? So I immediately called up Arisa and, and this is after I emailed her my inventory. And I, I said, this is what I did and I, I need to make restitution. And we went over it and I see a hundred and 10% where I am at fault. And we came up with a plan and I went back to the, the middleman and presented my plan. And, um, and, uh, you know, so now I'm in the middle of that right now. I mean, this all, this is all just transpired. It's very current, But the point is, is that I know for me, we're all human. And when things get brought to my attention, it must have been pretty bad if I can't see it myself today. So therefore, I know I really have to step up my game. And if people don't bring things to my attention, then things are going to get overlooked definitely by me. And I'm going to start cutting corners again. And I've like, I don't know if you could see one of my two kittens behind me. I mean, maybe I'm a little feline in my, in my head. I don't believe in that. But if I am cat-like, I don'T know how many lives I've used up. I mean, several. So I DON'T want to take a chance if I'm riding on my ninth life here. And I have to believe everything that this book tells me is true, that my behaviors are going to lead me back to a drink. And if I believe that I suffer from a deadly disease, like all of you, then I am doomed an alcoholic death, whether that be me drinking, living in the streets or me being six foot under and joining my brother who died of this disease as well. And. If it means all I have to do today, which is so crazy, what we have to do is so minimal in the morning and the book tells us and you'll hear it in a couple of speakers on awakening. It gives us exact directions when we retire at night, exacted directions. So here it is, you know, it's laid out in black and white, but why does Cynthia always think that she could bend the rules a little bit? It's part of my nature, but I have a chance every day if I stay close to God. And I believe that I have that chance from good sponsorship, great meetings that I attend that I mentioned earlier. And by continuing to surround myself by people that are on the same spiritual path as I am. And for that, I am so grateful. And Esty, again, thank you for inviting me here to spend my day with all of you. Thank you. Thank you, Cynthia. Thank you so very much for a powerful lead on steps four and five. Thank you for a wonderful message of God allowing God to speak with you. We will now have a break until Russell takes us through steps six and seven. Let's now have a moment of silence, please. Thank you.