Fourth Step Workshop Showed My Deepest Resentment Wasn’t My Wife or Sponsor — It Was Higher Power – Kenny T.
About This Speaker Tape
Kenny T. shares his story at the Monday Night Blue Chip Speakers meeting at the Nava Club. Originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he moved to Grambling, Louisiana at age ten when his mother remarried, experiencing intense culture shock and racial hostility that planted deep resentments he would carry for years. He took his first drink at fifteen — Old No. 7 in his grandparents' basement — and describes the instant transformation: the stuttering stopped, his confidence soared, and he made a silent vow to keep that feeling for the rest of his life by any means necessary.
His drinking progressed through college basketball at an HBCU in Tallahassee, where he discovered cocaine as a way to control the alcohol, then crack, which accelerated the destruction. He found himself taking his small children along on drug runs while his wife worked nights. He stumbled into an AA meeting by accident — he was looking for the other fellowship — and a man named Rocky stopped him at the door, opened the Big Book to the Doctor's Opinion, and showed him that the book addressed drug addiction too. That encounter kept him coming back, but he spent years treating meetings as classes, collecting signed slips, and missing the actual program.
After accumulating fourteen months and two days, he relapsed and stayed out six miserable weeks. He came back on July 14, 2007, his wife gave him one last chance, and he moved to Georgia where he connected with sponsor Don Bryan and the Heavy Hitters men's group. Don pushed him through the steps with urgency. A fourth-step workshop revealed his deepest resentment was toward Higher Power, and a stranger at a men's spiritual retreat spoke directly to that wound at the exact moment he needed it. He describes a later low point — fired from his job, sitting in his garage contemplating suicide — when his children came through the door and jolted him back to purpose. He closes with the Step Five promises from page 75, visibly moved by how the program dismantled his anger, racial resentments, and self-destruction and replaced them with the capacity to laugh, cry, and show up for his family.
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