Four Defects Fell Away in One Night When I Finally Took the Sixth and Seventh Steps for Real — Bob B.

About This Speaker Tape

Bob shares his story at a fellowship breakfast in Plantation, Florida, with nearly 38 years of sobriety dating back to December 10, 1967. He began drinking at 13 as an undersized kid at a military high school, where alcohol transformed him from an insecure outsider into someone who felt like he belonged. His drinking escalated through college — he drank his way out of Notre Dame in his senior year — and continued through a string of lost jobs, broken promises, and increasing isolation. He ended up living in ten-dollar-a-night rooms, drinking a fifth a day, estranged from his family, until he finally called AA's central office at age 23.

The heart of Bob's talk is the brutal honesty of his middle sobriety. He describes how the first year felt like a honeymoon, but by years five through eight, the deeper issues — rage toward his children, compulsive gambling, inability to hold a job, chronic overspending — were grinding him down. He knew the program's answer but couldn't execute it. He tells the pivotal story of an industrial psychologist who asked his wife and kids if they'd leave him if he lost everything, and they said no. That cracked open his fear — fear of failure, fear of success, fear of responsibility — which had never appeared on any of his inventories.

Bob describes the night everything shifted: after another terrible day of gambling, missing dinner, fighting with his wife, and slapping one of his kids, he sat alone at 11 PM and finally saw that he had designed his life to be exactly what it was. For the first time, his failure to fix himself felt acceptable rather than shamning, and he was able to genuinely take the sixth and seventh steps. Four major issues — gambling, work avoidance, overspending, violence toward his children — fell away that night. He built structure around the change: scheduled work hours with his sponsor, weekly date nights with his wife for 30 years, and hundreds of hours invested in becoming a better parent.

He closes with the theme of transformation versus mere behavior modification. Bob argues that real change in AA is spiritual, not mechanical — it happens through surrender, not effort. He describes his later financial rise and fall, losing ten million dollars after the 1986 Tax Act, and how that loss taught him who he was without money. He shares that all three of his sons are now in recovery, and reflects on the privilege of being in a fellowship where people genuinely want the best for each other.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Introduction and appreciation for the fellowship breakfast and fellow speakers
• 5:30 Started drinking at 13 at military high school — alcohol as a transformational solution for insecurity
• 9:00 Drank out of Notre Dame in senior year, diagnosed alcoholic at 19, father asked him to leave home
• 13:00 Last year of drinking — liquor store job, waiter job, ten-dollar rooms, face kicked in at a party
• 17:00 First AA meeting at 23, met sponsor Warren who he still has after 38 years, drank twice more including honeymoon cliff-diving story
• 23:00 The wall metaphor — tearing it down through the steps then rebuilding it brick by brick in sobriety as deeper issues surfaced
• 30:00 Years five through eight — suicidal thinking, encouraging newcomers while driving home asking when it would be okay for him
• 36:00 Industrial psychologist session — wife and kids say they would not leave, discovery of pervasive fear underneath everything
• 42:00 The 11 PM living room moment — sixth and seventh step surrender, four major defects removed that night
• 50:00 Rise and fall in business, losing ten million dollars, all three sons finding recovery, closing message on transformation versus behavior modification