Fourth Step Inventory and Fear – S. and Charlie P. – Springtime in the Ozarks Big Book Study – Eureka Springs, AR – Part 2 of 5 – Chris S. and Erika – Chris Schroeder and Erika

this is going on is it possible that on that day telling you like that was the best he could possibly do and roy goes never occurred to me for a second that's what i'm talking about when i talk about self-centeredness and being inconsiderate out he said that never has ever occurred to me and i watched a 40 year old resentment against this guy's father dissolve through the process of this inventory work through the prayers that take place in here so it's important not to skip over these prayers because this prayer the resentment prayer takes me from the third column to the fourth column and it gets me ready to look at it from an entirely different angle then we get into this thing where it says referring to our list again putting out of our minds the wrongs others have done this isn't where i look at my part or because if i got a part and you got a part your part's going to be a little bigger but but what mark used to say is if we're talking about a resentment where i've only got 20 of the as far as i'm concerned i've only got twenty percent of the resentment in this piece of work i got to take 100 ownership of my 20 we're not talking about them here because their part is not what's killing me I got to be looking at my part and it says where was I selfish dishonest self-seeking frightened I tried to disregard the other person where was i to blame when I saw my faults I listed them this is that fourth column that some people say is not in the book but we place them before us in black and white that seems pretty clear to me we admitted our wrongs honestly and we're willing to set those matters straight. To me, that is the four-column, fourth-step inventory. But I like to put a little column between the third and fourth column to make room for a checkmark so that when this – between the first column and the fourth column, they've done this prayer for this person of trying to take into consideration where this person was going, and perhaps maybe they were sick just like me. Thanks. Chris is going to do fear. You know, there is a line of demarcation in between the third and the fourth column that is very, very important. We're supposed to shift our vision of these resentments and really, like Charlie said, really take responsibility for the part that we played in it. And one of the most important paragraphs in the book is that paragraph on page 67 where it says referring to our list again. That talks about the information in the fourth column. What you find in your fourth column of the resentment inventory and some of the other inventory material we're going to talk about, you're goingto find the information that you need for step 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. So it's vitally important. If rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path, We need to be about the business of thoroughly following the path. We need To pay attention to this paragraph. Now, then it says, notice the word fear. Oh, I'm sorry, we need to make an announcement. Amber Rogers, please come to the registration desk for a message. If Amber Rogers is here. Okay, notice word fear is bracketed. with resentments it's going to be very very difficult for you not to be angry or not to be fearful in some way I'll give you a for instance this is how I look at it I like to sometimes simplify things because I work with a lot of people I need to be simple in how I explain things so that I don't overwhelm somebody or I'm talking at a level that they can't understand because most alcoholics whether they understand you or not will say yeah I understand head. So here's the way I'll break it out. Let's look at instincts and let's look at ambitions. Instincts, that's, look at that selfishly. Insticts are things that we have that we want to protect. Ambitions are things that we don't have that we wanna get. Those are the things that are self-seeking. Unless something harms, threatens, or interferes with your instincts or ambitions, there's not going to be any reason why you're going to be angry. So the fear is that something's going to take away something you have or interfere with you getting something that you want. A lot of fear comes from that. And fear is an incredibly damaging emotion. It talks about it talks about here that it's an evil and corroding thread the fabric of our existence is shot through with fear now this was true in my life but if you would have come up to me and you would have said something like chris you're you're a real fearful guy i don't think i would have reacted real well to that you know when i was brand new because i thought of myself as very very courageous. You know, I used to race motorcycles and, you know, I used cliff dive. And when I was drunk, I'd pick on the biggest guy in the bar, you know. I mean, how can you say that I'm filled with fear when I'm, you know such a maniac, so insane, you know. Well, the fact of the matter was I was looking at fear in the wrong way. I had a lot of anxiety. I had a lot of things, a lot of feelings inside that made me uncomfortable with myself and uncomfortable with my environment. It was difficult for me to step out and to show up. And that was because of fear. That fear kept me from being able to do things like ask for a raise at work. Ask a girl out on a date. Go back to school to get a degree. All of these things that would have been doing the right thing at the right time for the right reasons, fear kept me from doing most of them and toward the end of my drinking kept me in one room in one house drinking a bottle of bourbon and talking to the bottle. You know, like, it's just you and me! They don't understand! You know what I mean? I mean, that's really, that is the evil and corroding thread And that's what had happened to me. I couldn't leave the house toward the end, you know, without a drink. I couldn'T go out and get the mail without a drank. It would have been years since I'd been in a store with like fluorescent lights, you know what I mean? And that was because of that anxiety, that high level of anxiety. I went to the doctor one time, and because I was drinking so much, I was actually detoxing every morning, you Know, with the shakes and, you know the loud noises and i remember going to the doctor and going doc you know i'm like i feel nervous and i'm anxious in the water you know just feel like there's a stress and all this do you got anything for that and and he goes well yeah we have this brand new drug called xanax okay so i go what kind of miller grimaces you got those things in you know I'm gonna need the big ones and uh and and that's thus started like seven or eight months of of not a minute sober you know at all i i started weighing these annexes out in my hand it was way too inconvenient to have to count them so i would weigh them out my hand and i would chug down a quart of vodka with them you know the biggest letters on the pill container no alcohol but that's that must be for the amateurs you know and uh and i would just sit there and like drool you know for like hours and and and i'm telling you it's because of the fear you know fear is an evil and corroding threat we need to inventory it why do we have the fear is the first question they ask us this the the the they they ask is to identify the fear and then why do мы have the peer then there's a redundant question isn't it because you have the reason you have that fear isn't it because self-reliance has failed you and here's the thing where alcoholics just have a real hard time saying well self yeah self-reliance has really failed me i i take i take meetings into treatment centers all the time where the people want to tell me what they think about all this recovery and everything and they got a plastic handband with their name on it on their wrist. You know what I mean? Buddy, you're in the hatch. You're trying to tell me about, am I interested in what you think? I don't think so. I'm really uninterested and your perspective on life, you're in pajamas. You know what I mean? Anyway. Anyway, it's very, very difficult for us to come to terms with this defeat. A great line in the 12 and 12. Who among us wishes to admit complete defeat? Glass in hand, we've warped our minds to such a state that only an act of divine providence can relieve us of this obsession. I mean, think about what that sentence says. Really, who among us wishes to admit that we are absolutely hosed on our own and unless there's God shining through the clouds on us, you know, we're not going to survive? You know, I don't really want to accept that, thank you. You know, and again, when we look at, when we start to look at this inventory, this inventory is opening up, opening up the doors to stuff that we really don't want to look At. For the longest time we thought our problems were coming at us and this is telling us our problems are coming from us. Oh no! You know? This is This is a problem, you know. And this is why you lose so many people at the fourth and the fifth step. Oh, where's Harry? You know. He joined another 12-step group, you Know. We don't see him at the meetings anymore. But the fact of the matter is you shift. This inventory helps you to shift and see that your problems really are of your own making, you Now. You really have done this because the foundation of your life system was based on selfishness. That's why all of this transpired. Now, it talks about the fear prayer. Charlie was saying it's very, very easy to miss these prayers. It's very easy. It's very, very easy to miss them. But whenever I have somebody doing their fourth step inventory or we're doing a fifth step, I want them to say this fear prayer for every single fear that they have. It's basically, we ask God to remove our fear and direct our attention to what he would have us be. And that's a fear prayer. Now, this is at the bottom of page 68, just before the sex inventory. Now, if you want to outgrow fear, outgrowing fear is tied directly into freedom. You have to understand, I really thought I was free, stuck in that room, drinking a bottle of bourbon and talking to it. And I was so freaked out by so many things that I'd have the TV on, I'd be drinking a barrel of bourdon, I'd have a guitar in my lap you know, I'd be reading a book I mean, you know I just couldn't be with myself there was no freedom and I thought that I was free and I'm going to have to start going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings going down into church basements every night during primetime TV and talking about God kill me now you know don't they put horses down that are lame I mean, I really thought my life was over. You know, I'm going to be with the rollers. And the fact of the matter was, I was trapped in that room with that bourbon. Those were the chains, the bondage of self it talks about in this book. The bondage itself, being chained to that selfish perspective. And the freedom comes from recognizing this stuff and moving through this process. Now, the fear inventory is very, very important. So is the inventory. I call it the harms to others inventory with a huge emphasis on sex. I don't know anybody else out there, but I made a real mess out of the intimate relationships in my life. And I always thought it was like the ungrateful women. You know what I mean? When I look back, when I inventory my actions, they were insane to have said hi to me in the first place. I was just awful. the last 8 years of my drinking I drank with a vengeance because my wife left me when I needed her most you know what I mean she left me when I need her most and I start inventorying this stuff well I threatened her with a knife you know you know I had forgotten that You know what I mean? Oh, God. So that's just how sick we are. I told 100 bartenders that story. And there's 100 bartengers out there that thinks my ex-wife is selfish. And the fact of the matter is I had a really, really bad perspective on this. But in this inventory, in the sex inventory, It talks about having, most alcoholics need an overhauling of their intimate relationship operational methodology. Okay? Does anyone in here know what an overhauling is? Like if you're going to overhaul an engine, you take it absolutely completely apart down to nothing and put it back together with all new parts or the new parts that need to be put back in. It's not a mere tune-up. You know, we alcoholics don't need a mere tune-op with our intimate relationships. We need an overhauling because nowhere do we cause more harm than in these relationships. Because we're coming from a place of selfishness and self-centeredness and manipulation, what we do is we really expect things from other people that they're not willing to give, maybe that they shouldn't give. When I started to inventory my past relationships, a number of things started to pop out at me. One of them was that I was using women like I would use alcohol or drugs. I was thinking about my relationship with a woman and about how it would make me feel. Just the way like looking at the bottles above a bar. Ooh, that gray goose. That would probably make me feel really good. I was looking at women the same way. I wasn't thinking about could I bring something to this? Could I help participate in developing a wonderful relationship, a supportive partnership? That wasn't what I was thinking of doing. So I needed to start looking at this and I needed to start inventorying the things here. Some of the instructions are we review our conduct over the years past. Where had we been selfish, dishonest, inconsiderate? Whom had we hurt? Did we unjustifiably arouse jealousy, suspicion, or bitterness? Where were we at fault? What should we have done instead? We got this all down on paper and looked at it. Now, seeing just how great my incorrect participation had been in these relationships, being able to list it all out with every single person, I got to see the patterns. I gotto see the things that I was doing wrong in these in these relationships. A typical Chris action would be to notice a woman who noticed me and was attracted to whatever charms I was emitting at whatever period of time that was. Usually it was a very disturbed individual who became attracted to me. My first sponsor said, Chris, there could be a gymnasium filled with women. And in that gymnasum, there would be an axe murderess wandering around that gymnosium. And if the cops wanted to find her, they'd just take you, put you in the gym, and wait until you became attracted to somebody and throw the cuffs on her. And a lot of times that was true. you know, and I'm like, I'm like two months sober when my sponsor tells me, no, no Phil, that's not true and then, you know today absolutely true anyway, what I would do is I would find a woman who was like susceptible to, you now, whatever bizarre charms I was possessing at the moment and, you kno, we would go and we would do our deed and, yo, I would kind of lead on that, you kno, there's a future here, you know, we're going to be together. This is really cool. And we'd get the deed done and then I'd think, how the hell do I get out of here? You know, oh my God, I'm going to have to move. You know what I mean? It's like, now this is not, you know, how you should be dating. If you're new or just coming back, you You know, this is not instructional. But this caused me grave harm. I mean, you know, I was lonely, you know? And I had no significant other. So inventorying all this stuff, what I can do is I can see all the things that I've done wrong. I can say, oh, my God, I'm going to see all of the problems in the relationships. I can why I keep shooting myself in the foot and why i'm not attracting anything at all healthy you know so um so through through inventorying this it asks us it says that through using this information all of this four-step information we can develop a future ideal for our sex life or our intimate life we can development ideal based on what we don't we know doesn't work and the character defects that we have, we know what we don't want to be bringing to the next party. You know, now we can start to write down some of the attributes of the things that we want to bring to the new people that we're bringing to the Next Party because it's a truth that you attract what you are. You attract the people you're ready to attract. If you're living at a high spiritual level, you'll attract other people at high spiritual levels. If you'RE healthy, emotionally healthy, You'll attract emotionally healthy people. So, you know, if I want to have extraordinary relationships in the future, I need to be preparing myself to be able to do so. There's a lot of healing. We come into this world with a lot OF damage. You know, psychologists and psychiatrists, they make a living at quantifying the damage that happens to us In childhood, you know, the trauma and all this other stuff. And believe me, I don't mean to minimize it. It's out there and it's really, really true. The thing is, we as alcoholics need to take responsibility for this harm. And we need to start moving forward. We need to participate in the healing of this harm and a lot of harm we've caused. we not only need to take responsibility for the harm that has happened in our lives but the harm that we've caused out there in the universe we need to make sure that we need to take responsibility for it and the fourth step is really the place where we begin to really look at that in a way that's going to make sense for us moving forward what time is it We've got about ten more minutes. Want to move into five? Do you want to finish off some four? I think we ought to just finish off some four and do five, six, and seven when we come back. All right. You know, I just want to touch on one little thing. You remember back at the beginning, I like to look at places where the book restates the deal we made in step three. And the deal that we made in step two is that I'm going to quit playing God and then now he's the director and there are several places in the book the one i didn't see for a long time in the fear inventory is when it says we asked ourselves why we had them wasn't it because self-reliance failed me and so what i didn'T SEE ABOUT FEAR FOR A LONG TIME IS WHEN I'M ON THIS BASIS OF RELYING JUST ON MYSELF TO RUN EVERYTHING THERE'S A VERY SMALL LITTLE SPHERE OF THINGS THAT I HAVE CONTROL OVER RIGHT WHAT I'M and a half for lunch you know what i might say or not say katie would say i have no control over that um you know um but area things that fall outside of that little sphere of my control scare me and what's amazing is when you do a fear inventory with somebody there's really only a couple of things in the fear inventory i don't see a lot of columns in the fair inventory it says we listed our fears we asked ourselves why we had them and it says wasn't it because self-reliance failed me and what's amazing is how many times you can go over that fear list with somebody and you go okay this fear you got inside your area of control or outside your area of control and it's nearly it's always stuff that's outside self-reliance you know am i going to get cancer management level decision you know how are my kids going to turn out is katie or katie and i are going to stay married forever you know all these things that scare me am I going to go broke am I going to get sick am I gonna is all stuff that's God stuff but when I when I'm off self-reliance this stuff scares the crap out of me but I can't walk around talking about how so I'm just constantly trying to stuff that stuff below the surface and so it's another example of a manifestation of self and you know and that's the same thing when we roll into this inventory I love you where it says we're trying to shape a sane and sound ideal for our future sex. In the sex prayer, it says here it is again. We ask God to mold our ideals and help us to live up to them. How can I know? It's not like Larry and I or me. I have a sponsor, a 22-year-old college kid that looks like a movie star and has a body like he's carved out of wood. His sane and sound sex ideal is probably different than mine as a 53-year-old married man, right? But it's not when I operate outside of my mother's sex values that I get in trouble. It's when I cooperate outside of our own values. But how am I going to know what my values are if I don't ever establish a sane and solid ideal? And that's what this whole thing, besides being aware of who we harmed, It says we ask God to mold our ideal and help us to live up to him. And then it says whatever ideal turns out to be, we've got to be willing to grow toward it, got to being willing to make amends where we've done harm, provided we don't bring about... In other words, we treat sex like we would any other problem. In meditation, we ask, God, there's another prayer, what we should do about each specific matter. The right answer will come along if we want it. You know, and then it goes on forever, but there's a prayer here on page 70 about shaping this ideal. It gives me four things to pray for, and I've seen an exercise where those four things are written down on a 3x5 card that I'm carrying around with me, and I'm seeing it with a lot of guys. Well, without getting too controversial, Internet porn is a huge problem with men in recovery these days, And I've seen guys that it is clearly outside of their sane and sound ideal, but they're still having a problem with it. And it helps to carry this card around, and it says we pray for the right ideal, for guidance in each questionable situation, for sanity, and for the strength to do the right thing. You know, and I always tell these guys, you know, the time to ask for guidance and strength is not when you've logged on and you've got a cup of coffee sitting there in front of the laptop. You know, the horse is out of the barn by then. You know it's in advance and it's trying to ask God for strength to carry out this new ideal that I'm trying to establish. I hope that's not too controversial of a topic. But it says if sex is troublesome we throw ourselves into helping others. We think of their needs and work for them. This takes us out of ourselves. It quiets the imperious urge when the yield would mean heartache. So it's all about getting out of self. It's all About Manifestations of Self. And it's All About Looking at Where Decisions Based on Self Have Caused Me Trouble. You know, I'm really looking forward to what Chris is going to do 5, 6, and 7. But once again, remember this thing about self-will that I missed for so long? Look at what it says at the inventory again. In this book you read again and again that faith did for us what we could not do for ourselves. We hope you're convinced now that God can remove whatever self-will has blocked you off from him. Are you convinced? You know, that's the thing. Because Katie likes to talk about putting your hand over a flashlight. You know if I made this decision to identify with the power, what we're doing in 4 through 9 is removing what's blocking me from the power. In the fourth step, I'm trying to uncover that flashlight a little bit because when I'm blocked with all this stuff, God could be sitting next to me with a bullhorn and I can't hear him. So when it says we're in a strenuous effort to face and be rid of the things in ourselves which have been blocking us. So that's what we're doing and all that stuff. We're going to go to lunch now, and when we get back, we're goingto talk about 5, 6, and 7, and we'regoing to try to roll back into the rest of the work. Thanks a lot, you guys. See you back at 1.30, 1. 30. Okay. Everybody back in here? I'll tell you what, Katie? I thought I was going to have to get you to whistle there for a minute. Raise your hand if you're not back yet. Is everybody we see here? Yeah, is everybody we seeing here? All right, I hope everybody had a good lunch break. We had a nice lunch. it into town. It's just a beautiful area, a beautiful day. I appreciate y'all spending it inside with us today. Chris is going to roll into, we finished the fourth step in the last one and now we're going to role into what to do with it and what to deal about it. So take it away Chris. Alright. Okay, just a brief word on the handouts here. If anybody did not get a handout after this session or during break, come up. There's there's a whole bunch here. And I just want to talk just real briefly on this handout. This would I put this together with some of my sponsors and it's what I've been working with currently. I'm not attached to particular forms. I like what Charlie said about being able to do this with a big book and a piece of paper. I definitely believe in that. But this is what I've been working with currently and giving out to the people that I work with currently. I'm always open to better methods, and I'm not a slave to the actual hard mechanics. If you have a different kind of form that you use and it goes more across and you use that form, then that's the form that you should use. What's really important is answering the questions that the big book poses to us and following those directions. How we do it is almost immaterial, but whether we do It is very, very important. So find something that works for you. If you like this form and want to use it, great. If you've got something that works better, that's also cool too. Yeah, people aren't dying out there from doing the fourth step improperly. They're dying from not doing it at all. That's absolutely true. Okay, so we've recognized the fact that we're alcoholic. We've fully conceded to our innermost selves. We've come to the conclusion that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity. We've made a decision to head toward that power however we possibly can in step three. In step four, we've inventoried where we've fallen short of the causes and conditions of our failure at life. We've pinpointed a lot of the manifestations of our alcoholism, how our alcohol isn't presents with resentments and fears and guilt and shame and all the other emotional things. We've recognized a lot of that in step four. The next step is to share this with someone. Now, I've got a couple of experiences. One of one of my experiences was when I first went through the steps. Now, now this is North Jersey, 1990. OK, so that's all. That's all I'm that's the only the only area I'm going to be criticizing. But what was going on in that area in 1990 was there was no one with really any clue as far as the mechanicals of the steps. There weren't forms like this. Maybe there was a Hazleton handout or something, which was generic. It was for sex addicts and tower snipers and everything. It wasn't necessarily an Alcoholics Anonymous four-step. It was for anything and everything, and it was incredibly confusing and long-winded. So I didn't use that, but when it came time for me to do a four-stepped and then a fifth step, I didn' t have much direction. Basically what my sponsor told me when I asked him how do you do a fourth step, he said, Chris, you do it with a pencil. Okay? And I'm like, thanks for that. So what I did was I went home and I did the best I could, okay? I realized later he didn't know how to do a four-step. That's why he used a one-liner like that on me. So what do you do? You go to the 12 and 12 because they have a chapter on step four, don't they? Wouldn't that make sense to you to go to the fourth chapter in the 12th and 12th where they talk about the four-stepped? So that's what I Did. I read that chapter and it confused me even more because it was talking about the seven deadly sins. And I know I had 14 of them, you know, and it talked about all kinds of other stuff. And what I ended up doing was the absolute best I could do, which was like a half of a life story with some of the dirty little things that I had never admitted to anybody and some of the patterns of my character defects. And then I went and I did the fifth step, you know, called up my sponsor and said, I'm coming over. And I remember, you know, I was very ashamed of all this stuff. I had it, you Know, I had a pile of papers, and it was underneath the spare tire in the trunk of my car just in case anybody would find it. And i remember and i you know i sat there and i read this stuff i read the stuff to my sponsor. And when i got done with it, It was probably the first time in many, many years, if ever, that I started to feel like I was a member of the human race. Up until that point in time, I really thought I was scumbag. I was an unredeemable scumback. Now, I wasn't just a run-of-the-mill scumbags. I was special scumbaga. I wasnít a scumbago like you. But you know how you have this bizarre self-esteem stuff going on. And I really thought I was irredeemable. I mean, I had done some bad things. But by the time I got done reading them all to my sponsor and he was throwing sticks to his dog like it didn't even affect him, I started to think maybe I'm not evil. Maybe I've just been caught up in something. And he verified it with me when he said, Chris, here's what I believe. I believe that you were an alcoholic before you even drank. You were like a campfire with glowing red coals. And when you're 13, you get your first bottle of booze, it's like throwing gasoline on that campfire. It flared up and it burnt you and everybody close to you. And he goes, you've got to understand that right now what you're doing is you're trying to put that fire out. There's a whole lot of alcoholics out there and there's only a small amount of them that are really trying to do something about improving their life. And you're one of them. So why don't you lighten up a little bit on yourself? And I started to feel like, you know, I was a part of the human race and I wasn't that bad of a person. And it was a significant event for me. Now, it was not a big book four step that I did that first time. The next time I did a fifth step with my sponsor. I had done a big book fourth step. I had gotten the Joe and Charlie tapes and I'd listen to them and I opened the big book and I really tried to do it right. Still, there was nobody in North Jersey that was doing this stuff. There was one guy, Howard Gee. But because he would come into the meetings with a bigbook, people would warn you away from him. Here comes Howard. He's got the bigbook. He's Got the Clap. I mean, I was like, whoa, don't sit next to him. You know, I mean it was, it was just, it was really, really bad. So he was like the only guy, but, but anyway, um, I did it the way I understood it from the tapes. I did het the way that I understood it from the big book this time and I did the best I could. And I remember showing up at my, my sponsor's house and, uh, he takes, he takes a look at what he goes, what are all these columns for? Where's your story? I mean, you know, that's just what was going on in North Jersey at that time. But, you Know, I started reading and I started reading my resentment inventory. Then I read my fear inventory. Then I red my arms to other inventory. And that was a significant the first fifth step I did was basically confessional. I confessed stuff I already knew. I didn't discover any truth about my stock and trade that I didn' t already know because all I was writing down was stuff I already had and already knew in my head but when I started to do the big book four-step I had I discovered truth about myself I discovered what was going on and that was a completely different experience when I shared that with my sponsor it was freeing at a level I just I had never never really realized now Now, one of the problems with the spiritual life is we have attitudes and we have belief systems before we get into it. And we know, OK, we've never done a four step, but we know what that's like and what that is going to do. We know, we have preconceived prejudices, perspectives and opinions on everything. And it's very, very difficult to convince a newcomer that they need to move through this work because they know that can't possibly be the solution for their problem. And, you know, for one reason or another, I just decided to do it this way, and it wasn't out of any sense of virtue. I didn't want to be a better AA member. What I wanted to do is I wantedto stop feeling bad Because one of the ways alcoholism manifests is it manifests in emotional pain. It presents within depression, anxiety, guilt, shame, remorse, self-centered fear. That's how untreated alcoholism presents. And I had become convinced at least to a certain degree that the answer was in the 12 steps. And I found that that's absolutely true. The 12 steps treat the unmanageability. They treat the emotional, psychic and spiritual dysfunction that goes on in our minds. That's what the steps are for. And that's where the healing comes in. So when I get done with the fifth step, when I had done it the way it was basically instructed to do in this book, it was incredibly freeing. And all of a sudden power started to flow into me and I started to be able to do a whole lot of things. In a very short period of time, I was sponsoring like 50 guys. You know, I'm not recommending that. As a matter of fact, I had some bad experiences with it when I started the show. I started it to sponsor psychopaths. I had four psychopaths in a row this one time. But, you know, be that as it may. They should have been in Psychopaths Anonymous, I think, is what their problem was. But be that as it may, what happened was all of a sudden things started to happen. I started to get promoted at work. My family started to call me up and ask me, like, well, what do you think? It had been an awful long time since people in my family called me up to ask me what I thought. They didn't want to hear from me. if I started to tell them what I thought, they'd just tell me to shut up. Shut up! We don't want to hear what... You know? You know what I mean? You're living in a car, you know? You know What I Mean? So anyway, it was a great experience. Now, here's the thing that a lot of people don't understand. Without a fourth and a fifth step experience, I don't believe recovery is possible. Not the type of recovery that's offered in Alcoholics Anonymous. Not the type of spiritual awakening that comes as the result of steps that you take. Now, if you've got a sponsee or somebody who's balking or if you're balked on the fifth step, I don't see why I've got to do that. They told me never to admit to nothing even if they got you on video. You know, I mean, if you are one of those people, I want to read some things in this book that you may find or you may not find convincing. There are unbelievable warnings about not doing this and not doing it to the best of your ability. All right, this is just some excerpts from chapter six. We usually find a solitary self-appraisal insufficient. So if we've done a four step and we think we've got it now and we don't really need to share this, they found through their experience back in the day a solitary self-appraisal was insufficient then it says if we skip this vital step we may not overcome drinking that's an important warning sign especially for somebody like me who to drink is to die if i would have kept drinking another six months i probably would have had a heart attack in the dts i probably i might have killed myself do you know that that alcoholics are something like 40 to 60 times more likely to take their own lives through suicide than non-alcoholics? Why do you think when you're applying for life insurance, the first thing they ask you is have you had treatment for alcoholism? Because they know they've got to charge you a little bit more for the suicide part. Trying to avoid this humbling experience, they've turned to easier methods. it's almost invariably they got drunk. What does invariably mean? It means like almost without variation. They had not learned enough of humility, fearlessness, and honesty in the sense that we find it necessary until they had told someone else all their life story. And what happens when we don't do a fifth step? He is under constant fear and tension and that makes for more drinking. then it says we must be entirely honest with somebody if we expect to live long or happily in this world what if that sentence is true what if the sentence is really true because I got to tell you from my experience this big book has a lot more truth in it than not if we're not entirely honest about everything with someone we may not expect to Live long or be happy in this world. Now, here are some instructions. Rightly and naturally, we think well before we choose the person or persons with whom to take this intimate and confidential step. This book was written when there really was only a couple of AA groups and they expected that this book would be mailed out and people would find mail-order recovery from alcoholism. They really thought that when this was written. In actual experience, they found that it's best passed on from one person to another. Because this is a textbook, it's important that it be taught rather than just mailed to somebody. There were recoveries from people getting this book in the mail, but they were very rare. Almost always, one alcoholic would show up with this book or with the recovery process and take somebody through it for there to become a recovery or an AA area or group to start. But what they're telling us in this book is who to look for. You want to find a closed mouth. That means somebody that will take this in confidence. Sometimes you even want to talk about it before you share this stuff. Hey, this is a fifth step. This is going to be in confidence, right? This is between us. It needs to be somebody who will keep it in confidence and understand and not try to change your plans. It talks about maybe going to your parents or maybe to go into a friend. Today, you can't shake a stick without being able to hit somebody who's experienced enough to hear a fifth step. So it's not really that much of a challenge anymore finding the person. I would say what you want to do is you want find someone who's experience with this. Who's done a fourth and a fifth steps? Who's heard this steps before? And you want to do that because they'll be able to share in a unique way. An alcoholic who has a common problem and a common solution can be sometimes a little bit more helpful than maybe a psychiatrist or a priest. And, you know, it does say that if you have the type of religion where you have confession, you must share it with a priest, So I would say if you're a practicing Catholic, share it with a priest and share it with a sponsor because it says we think rightly about the person or persons we are going to share this information with. So you can share it with more than one person. I've got some experience doing a multiple fifth step. I've Got some bad experience with it and I've got some good experience with it. One day I decided that I was going to share a fist step with one of my sponsees, one of our friends and one of his sponsee's. And I sat down and I shared my fist step with three other guys. All guys who had done this work before and they literally beat me bloody. I mean, well what do you mean by that? Isn't it true? Could it possibly be? And they just went after me. And when I got done with that fist step I was chirping like a squirrel. I mean they had roughed me up and uh and you know i was humble i was right size and it was a really really good experience for me you know I recognize the fact that you know my mind is still trying to take control my mind istill trying to minimize my alcoholism and I'm still not I'm still not really really trying to the best of my ability to apply these principles in my life and i recognize that from this multiple fifth step and then one of the people that was in the fifth step started talking about all the stuff i was sharing and one day one day one day uh uh my my wife is getting her hair cut and and the barber starts talking about stuff on my fifth step that he had heard from somebody who heard it from somebody about some other woman, which was not much to my consternation. Oh man! So I had some bad experience with it and I had Some good experience. I will tell you this, the person that broke my fifth step confidence, it hurt him more than it really hurt me. Anyway, Anyway, it says here that we are engaged on a life and death errand on this fifth step. A life and depth errand. That's strong language. So I would pose this for your consideration. Is it possible that you are supposed to get drunk if you don't go through the first five steps? Is it impossible that you're supposed to? You ever have somebody come into a meeting, a discussion meeting, raise their hand and say, I don't know what happened. I got drunk. I stopped going to meetings and I got trunked. I don' t understand. I don''t know what happend. Well, you were supposed to get drunk, you moron. You know what I mean? You stopped going in meetings. You stopped working the steps. You have no service ethic. It's all about you. Everything is about you and you got drunk, you're supposed to get drunk. You know, how about that? And sometimes we worry about people's feelings so much like, oh, you'll do better next time. Just keep coming. Sometimes that kind of stuff will kill people. I needed to get active. I neededto get busy and I didn't need somebody minimizing my life-and-death errand by not wanting to hurt my feelings. Today, really, when I'm working with somebody, I would much rather step on their feelings than their grave. And you know what? I will tell them the truth as I see it. And if they are falling short on the spiritual program, I let them know it. And if они исчезают на встрече, они получают от меня интервью от Exit. interview from me what that exit interview is is it's basically a phone call and i call them up and i say you know you're not you don't have any service commitments yeah you know we haven't been doing any step work at all no as far as i know no prayer meditation yeah and and you're not i don't see it means anymore yeah well you do know you are going to get drunk and alcoholism over any considerable period of time always gets worse it never gets better You do know that, right? Well, thanks for sharing that. And I mean, that's my exit interview with people because, you know, people come and go. People come and goes through this fellowship. How many people have you seen, especially the long timers, how many people you've seen cycle through Alcoholics Anonymous? You know, I save group membership lists from the home groups on that. And every once in a while, I'll pull them out and I'll see how many are still around. You know, it's usually 5% of the people from the meetings back in the 90s are still around. And I believe that you don't have the power to stay in Alcoholics Anonymous. I don't think it's a choice. I don'T think we consciously choose, well, I'm just not going to go to meetings anymore. I think it'S a bigger issue than that. What I think is, is you don'T have the Power to stay IN AlcoholicsAnonymous unless you'RE participating in your recovery process enough. In other words, you have to give a lot to the Alcoholics Anonymous process to be able to get back enough from AlcoholicsAnonymous to beable to stay. Does that make any sense? And if you're not participating at a sufficient level, you're no going to get enough power and enough enthusiasm from Alcoholic Anonymous to want or be able to stay. And you'll find other things to do. You'll be back on primetime TV or something. And then, you know what? You get drunk and you come back into meetings. I don't know what happened. I don'T know what happend. And then somebody points you to me or Charlie because you're hardcore. You're like a multiple relapser. You should go talk to those guys. And then we get them. Right, Charlie? The knuckleheads. We pocket our pride and go to it, illuminating every twist of character, every dark cranny of the past. And then there's a series of promises, a wonderful series of premises here. We can look the world in the eye. We can be alone at perfect peace and ease. Remember what I told you about when I was drinking by myself up in the room in my mother's house while I'm 32, living with mom? I'm up there, I've got the TV on, the stereo on, a magazine in front of me, a guitar on my lap, you know, talking on the phone, eating. You know, I can't be alone at perfect peace and ease. I don't know what perfect peaceandease is. The fifth step gives us sometimes the first glimpse in a very long time or forever of what peaceanddease is about. You know? You add up all these promises and you're going to come up with an absolute unbelievable deal. You know, as alcoholics having a progressively fatal illness that over any considerable period of time gets worse, it doesn't get better, we get a deal like Alcoholics Anonymous where if we just do these wonderful God-given 12 steps, stay consistent with a fellowship of people that we grow to love and then find ways to be of service and service brings about deep levels of happiness anyway, that is the best deal that anyone with a progressively fatal illness ever is going to get. Ever. The crazy thing is that there are people who get exposed to this recovery process who walk away from it. Isn't that unbelievable? Before I go into 6 and 7, do you want to share anything else? Well, he offered, Katie. Katie and I do some big book workshops together and we are constantly fighting over the microphone. I love what you said. That was great stuff. And a couple of just little scattershot points as we were going through there. There's one line where it says, We explain to our partner what we are about to do and why we have to do it. for a long time I had never given any thought to that line what am I trying to do and why why do I have to do it you know and it's I'm trying to face and be rid of the things in myself that are blocking me from God and that's what this whole exercise is about and I like taking that awareness into it I'm going what am i about to do why am I having to do because it's my only shot I love what you said about, you know, should I be drunk? You know, I mean, it's like there's a meeting I go to on Monday nights sometimes where they have the person close with a promise. They say, Chris, you're going to get to close tonight with the promise of your choice. Well, I started noticing that everybody likes all the little happy promises, you know, about we feel the nearness of our Creator. Well, then I started reading ones. If they called me, I was like, here's one. For if an alcoholic fails to perfect and enlarge his spiritual life through work and self-sacrifice at others, he would not be able to survive the certain trials and low spots ahead. You know, and it talks about, you know, there's other places where it talks About the insanity of drink returns, and alcoholism returns, and we drink again, and I go, and that's a promise. You know, I mean, but it's like the book has negative promises. They're more like guarantees. The book tells me what will happen if I take these actions. It also tells me What Will Happen If I Don't Take These Actions. If I'm a real alcoholic, I don't get to just laugh off these little negative promises, you know. So I had a spot-seek call just a couple of days ago, and I had done three exit interviews with this guy where I would talk this guy off the cliff, He'd lay there on his couch and he'd look and he would go, Oh, it's Charlie. And put the phone back down. Well, finally he would answer the phone and I would go... You know, your disease, it is all over you. You are just not drinking yet. The first thing it is going to do is separate you from your support group. It is going take you away from your Support Fellowship. You are going to get away from any disciplines. You are not going to be doing any service work. You are gonna stop talking to me and you are gonna start talking to our whole crew because Chad was calling him, I'm calling him and he goes, oh man you know, thank you so much for calling this is what I always do you know thank you and then he disappeared again and we talked him off the edge of the cliff about three times and finally he gets to the point where Mark used to say I'm not going to work harder at it than the new guy's willing to work at it and finally he gets up and we go okay dude, why don't you just keep doing what you always do and see if you don't get what you've always got and he left me a voicemail about You know, the strangest thing. In fact, Chad sponsored him. And, you know, Chad sent it out in an email going, Strangest thing, he stopped working the steps and he started getting loaded again. I've never seen anything like it. But he left me a message going, well, I started, you now, last Wednesday. And he almost said, I don't know what happened. And you could hear him go, oop! You know? That's right, I'm talking to Charlie. I know exactly what happened, you kno? I mean, but it's good to give them that clarity of like, here's what you're doing. You can't see it, but we can, you know. I think it's interesting to point out that we don't, this one promise here that Katie is fond of, it says we begin to feel the nearness of our Creator. It doesn't promise me that after the third step. It promises me that. It says we may begin to have a spiritual experience in the third set, but in the fifth step is where it's saying we start to feel a nearness to our Creator The only other thing that I wanted to talk about is over on, when it says we're delighted, if you go back to page 64 in the first new paragraph.