Generational Alcoholism and Why Step Work Broke the Cycle – Dustin B.

My name is Dustin Barnes, and I am an alcoholic. First of all, I'd like to thank Chris for throwing me under the bus. I didn't know I was speaking today. Sorry, I just need to get these baskets. But the other thing is, I don't know, I am from St. Paul. My home group is the Firing Line Group of Alcoholics Anonymous. In the rare chance you ever make it out to St. Paul, Minnesota, come talk to me afterwards, and we'll get you plugged in with the information on how to find us. I can only share my experience. That's it. I can only share from what's been given to me in Alcoholics Anonymous and what has taken place in my life. It's always a little bit different when speaking in an area outside of my own because I have no clue what it's like in New Jersey. I have none. No clue. All I know is my personal experience in the town I come from and what I was brought up into. So it's kind of a disclaimer because I'm really just... If you don't do it the way we do it in Minnesota, cool. I can't share what it's like to do it the way you guys are doing it here. Never been here. One of the things that happens all the time at the speaker, meetings in the Twin Cities, is a guy will get up, or a gal, and they will say, I'm not going to talk about my drinking that much. I'm going to talk about recovery. And a lot of times what happens is that person that just said that goes on for 35 minutes. Most of the speaker meetings are only 40 minutes. And then about five minutes before the end of it, they say, and then I came to AA, and everything's been great ever since. I don't know if that happens out here, but... I'm actually going to try not to talk the whole time about my drinking. I'm just really not going to. My job, as it was laid out to me through strong sponsorship, is to share what I was like, what happened, and what I'm like today. You know, what happened to me is not that tragic event at the end of my drinking. Have I had many of those? Yeah. I've had a bunch of horrible things that have happened. I've had lots of what happens if that's what happened. The problem is none of that stuff ever changed me. You know, one more trip to the asylum for Dustin, that never changed me. You know, ending up on the streets of Minneapolis, that never changed me. You know, the family coming to, and just, why are you doing this? Why can't you stop? The kids crying, the sad wives, the whole deal, it never stopped me from picking up the next drink. It never did. So that's not what happened. I'm going to touch on that, but I'm going to try to share, what happened is, as I see it, the thing that changed me, the thing that allowed me to be the man I am today, standing right here before you, is the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. That's what changed me. That was the thing that brought me to a different way of life. You know, the other deal is what I'm trying to be like today. You know, I hope somewhere through this talk, that you gather from my language and my point of view, how I came to have a relationship with God. Because that's the only thing I know that works. It's the only thing that works, and it worked for me. Now, no one told me I had to believe in their particular idea of that power, but they told me, Dustin, you're going to have to seek the power. You're going to have to seek whatever that is. Call it God. Call it higher power. Call it whatever you want. But Dustin, if you want to live, you're going to have to seek that. So hopefully you get that. I don't know. I'm just hanging out here. We'll see what happens. This is so cliche, but I was born in an alcoholic home, which is true in my case. And that's not an opinion on my part. My parents met in AA. I was doomed from the get-go. They were married in an Alano club. I understand you don't have many clubs, but my parents were literally married in a club back in Minnesota. I'm a third-generation member of Alcoholics Anonymous. I am proof positive that 13th Stepping works. I don't know what to tell you. If my parents wouldn't have 13th Stepped each other, I wouldn't be here. So keep that in mind. Some of you would be wishing they hadn't. You know, I don't know. The deal is, is I come up in this home that is two people that met in AA. And I think I have kind of a neat experience that would help me in reflection of my own life later on. Because I have two different things. I have a father who left the marriage and went out and went back to drinking. Started setting up franchise families and drinking. And burning his life to the ground. And going to jail and all that stuff. Okay, so I get to see what active alcoholism looks like. Right? Then, but my other guide, if you will, my other teacher is my mother, who I don't ever remember her going to meetings. Ever. I don't remember her ever doing anything. I remember her having these cute little Bratz chips every once in a while. But I don't remember her actually going out to meetings. Or, you know, there was never any drunk women in the house she was working with. I don't remember any of that stuff. What I do remember is my mom locking herself in the bathroom day after day after day. And crying herself to sleep. Crying in that bathroom. Absolutely torn up by the life she was living. Not drinking. 14 years without a drink. She looked crazier than my old man. And my old man was snorting cocaine and drinking alcohol. So this is what I come up in. And the deal is, is I, I don't know, you know, I liked everything. I liked everything about booze. Long before I ever had it. You know, I remember watching the family get together. And once the drinks started pouring, that weird tension that was just in the room before the drinks were poured, kind of started to go away. And by the end of the night, everyone's laughing and having a good time. So alcohol looks to me like it's going to be a pretty good time. And, you know, the other big cliche is, I always felt different when I was a kid. I did. You know what? I was getting walked to the school bus by the principal because they thought my dad was going to kidnap me. You know, my dad was getting hauled out of the house in cuffs. I had all this insane stuff going around, coming up in this alcoholic home. So, yeah, I felt a little different. You know? I don't blame those people for what happened to me today. I don't blame those people for being an alcoholic. Man, it was, it was that upbringing that allowed me to be the nice guy I am today. You know? Those people helped to mold me into a person who was desperately seeking a solution. Because I was. I was, man. And I remember walking down the stairs, about seven, eight years old, and I'm swishing water in a glass, wearing a robe, pretending I'm a mob boss. Okay? Like, this is who I am. You know? And so eventually I started, you know, doing outside issues, sniffing outside issues, doing things you're not supposed to do when you're in third and fourth grade. And, you know, I never really quite got enough in me to do what these things would end up doing for me. But then I did. You know? I remember the first time I got enough alcohol in me to understand why my family looked the way they did after they had a few drinks. I didn't know I had that much weight on my shoulders until after the first time I got drunk. Once I got drunk, I realized, you know, just how horrible my life sober really was. Because alcohol provided a sense of ease and comfort that nothing up to that point had ever done. And so now I had this feeling of ease and I could just, you know, just be a kid. And so there's lots of trauma coming up. And, you know, I could very easily qualify the new person here tonight out of Alcoholics Anonymous. I used to sit here and go, you know, oh, my dad did this and my dad did that and, you know, and then there's my issue. My dad killed himself. You know? And he did. And he did. You know, in a way, I was real blessed out there when I was drinking. Because my father killed himself on January 15th, 1999. And it gave me a perfectly reasonable excuse to drink for close to 10 years. Because the second you question me about my drinking, I just throw my childhood in your face. The second you question me about my drinking, I just throw my days on the streets and my days after my dad killed himself. And I throw that in your face and you back off because you don't know what that's like. And you don't want to push me over. And you don't want to push me over the edge. Little do we both know, I'm so far past the edge at this point, it's unbelievable. You know, the day that he died is when the drinking kicked up into full gear for me. You know, I know for, without a shadow of a doubt, because of the men that I've sponsored and the people that I'm friends with and Alcoholics Anonymous, that those things did not make me alcoholic. Because I got friends that didn't have those things happen to them who were just as brutally drunk as I was. You know, but I'll tell you what, it sped the process up. You know what, the stuff about the sexual abuse when I was a kid, that sped things up a bit. The drinking definitely progressed at a pretty quick clip due to the drama and the circumstances of my life. I won't take that away from me or anybody else. But it didn't cause my alcoholism. So as I'm going through this deal, I drop out of school, I hit the streets running. It is just, it is a bloodbath from the get-go. That is just how I started. And it got worse and it got worse and there's lots of things that I don't share about from the past. And I don't share about it from the past. I don't share about the podiums of Alcoholics Anonymous because it's just not responsible of me. It's not AA. But I did a lot of things that make you go really, really quick and not sleep very often. You know? And so as I'm in the process of doing that, I'm getting burnt up. I'm doing the crappie flop on the floor of a gas station 17 years old. You know? And in our area, people always say stuff like, I've spilled more than you drank. Really? Well, maybe you shouldn't have been so sloppy. You would have gotten here quicker too. You know? I was a dead man 17 years old. Absolute dead man. Like ER runs and the whole piece. And I was, I just got burnt up. And I did what every pistol-packing drug dealer does when he's in trouble. I called my mom. And she put me in a rehab. And I went to rehab and guys, anybody who's had the full-blown DTs can probably touch what I'm talking about here. But I'm talking about the type of psychosis where you are hearing things that are not happening and you are linking together every single person you've ever met, everything you read, everything you hear into a gigantic conspiracy to get you. And I went through nine months of that. Nine months of that. And during that period, I got out and I really desperately wanted to know, never, ever put anything in my body again. Ever. No more alcohol. No more of that other stuff. I could not do it. I was burned to a crisp. Completely insane. They couldn't tell me if I was going to get better. And so I did what they told me. And I went to a meeting every single night. You know? Just don't drink. Go to meetings, Dustin. You're going to be fine. And I did that. I mean, I was chairing meetings. I was going to meetings. I lived in meetings. And, you know, the thing was, when I came in, sobriety looked like a solution to the problems I had going on in my life. But what started to happen was the meetings started to become tedious. And my trouble in personal relationships started to get the best of me. And I'm just, I'm walking down the street one minute and I'm completely content. And the next second, I just want to, I just want to check out because the depression and the misery is on me and I can't, I can't stand this thing called sobriety. So what used to look like a solution to a problem, as I get further and further away from my last drink, starts to look like it's more and more like a problem. Sobriety starts to become a problem instead of the solution that it was when I came into this place. And I come to the tables desperately, dying. I don't want to go back out. And what do I do now? Just go to more meetings. Go to more meetings. I'm kind of, sort of, you know, kind of working the steps, I think. We're going to, we got lots of step meetings. Tons of step meetings. We just share about the steps and I'm doing that. And basically, long story short, I chose to drink, you know. I don't know. It looked better than suicide at that time. Taking a drink looked better than shooting myself. And I went back out and I, you know, I convinced myself I wasn't a real alcoholic. I was other things, but not an alcoholic. And that first night, I drank way more than I intended. I fell up a hill. I'm not sure how you do that, but I fell up the hill. I went home, called my girlfriend by a different name and we were off to the races. You know, it was just back in the saddle, you know. And I told myself I was never, ever going to do those other things again. Ever. I started drinking two weeks later. I won't apologize for this because it's just a part of my story. Two weeks later, I'm sticking a needle in my arm for the first time. And guess what? It scared me back to the bottle. And I came back to AA after another suicide attempt. And they told me, buddy, just 90 meetings in 90 days and you're going to be okay. And I went through about 30 days of that and then I just couldn't, I just couldn't do it. And it was no big drama, that second relapse. That second relapse in AA was no big deal. I was at work. Somebody said, hey, we drink after work. I said, okay. You know, I was in a meeting yesterday. Didn't even think about it. The next four and a half years is an absolute bloodbath in my life. It was just unbelievable. I listened to the people in the meetings. And the guys in my area were talking about how they had lost their wives, lost their jobs, lost their houses, you know, and had DWIs and did all this stuff. And so the obvious conclusion I came to, if that's what it means to be an alcoholic, I desperately don't want to be an alcoholic. So I set out to get a wife, you know, keep a driver's license, not get a DWI and have, you know, some kids and buy a house. Therefore, not alcoholic. I can show my family my stuff. Look at my stuff. I know there's bottles and cans everywhere, but look at my house. Four and a half years of that. And, you see, I had vowed that I would never come back to Alcoholics Anonymous. Ever. Ever. Come back to AA. I had, I had plenty of reasons to come back. My family was sending Al-Anon literature to the house for Christmas to my wife. I desperately needed to come back and looked like I should be here sober, but wasn't going to come back. And, uh, basically the end of the line came and running through the house at about seven o'clock on a Sunday morning. Bad stuff always happens to me on Sunday mornings. I don't know if any of you've had that experience, but seven o'clock on a Sunday morning, I am searching through the house for people that are not there, which is freaking my wife out and scaring my kids. Okay. And I mean, my, it's not funny, but in retrospect, it is kind of funny. My kid came up to me and he said, why are you doing this? And I, I just paused for a second and did the only thing I could do at that point. And I pushed him out of the way. And kept on searching for the people that weren't there. I passed out for a couple of hours and I woke up to my wife sitting on the edge of the bed. And she looked at me and she said, you know, Dustin, I have to put up with this. You're, we have a mortgage together. We have all of our bills together. I have to live like this. We are committed, but your children don't have to live like this. I'm taking them to my mother's if, and when you get your stuff together, maybe you can see him. You know, there was no argument. There really wasn't. I just knew it was true. I just, you know what? I shouldn't be around the kids. And, uh, I do what a guy like me does when I get down and out. Suicide starts to look like an option. I don't know if that's because of some deep reason. Cause my dad died because my, you know, cause my grandma died because of all this stuff. I have no idea, but it looked like a solution to me. And that night I sat out and I drank and I gave alcohol one more shot, one more shot to start working for me again. See, alcohol never stopped doing to me what it does to me. You drink enough alcohol, you're going to get drunk most of the time, but alcohol stopped doing for me what it had been doing for me. I would drink and I would still have the fear. You know what I'm saying? I'd get the alcohol in me and it wouldn't give me the ease and comfort anymore. It wouldn't relieve the tension. I was still a prey to misery and depression. It just stopped doing for me what it used to do. And so I tried one more time. It didn't work. You know, and all the time we hear people come into our meetings, you know, I'm going to get sober for my, my kids and I love my children to death today, but, but I'll tell you what I know from the bottom of my heart, I can't stay sober on my kids. I just can't. I picked my little baby boy up. He was a year old that night. I gave him a kiss on the forehead. I gave him his bottle. I put him in his crib. I went into the kitchen. I grabbed the, uh, the phenobarbital that we had up in the cupboard. I took about 50 pills of that nonsense, went, sat in a tub, sliced my arm open and, uh, gave it my best to get out of here. Uh, don't worry guys. I lived. Supposedly I was airlifted. Well, I was brought by ambulance. Then I was airlifted down to, uh, one of the bigger hospitals in the Midwest. And, uh, you know, they were preparing my family for me to die. They had called my, I mean, I woke up to my entire family standing around me crying with tubes running down my throat, strapped down to a gurney. You know, a real vision for you. And they said, we've done everything we can do for him. We've pumped his stomach. We pumped him with charcoal. We've done what we can do. His phenobarbital level is still rising. He won't breathe on his own. He's not sustaining himself. And, uh, my family was ready. Then I woke up and, uh, you know, I, I have to tell you, I wasn't real happy to be here. It wasn't like, oh, thank God that didn't work. That was a cry for help anyway. I mean, I was furious that they brought me back to life. Here I am one more time. I can't live and I can't die. I honestly started to believe that I had died in a previous overdose or something. I was now in hell and it was just going to be nothing but desire chips and folding metal chairs and bad coffee and nasty rehabs for the rest of my life. I mean, I'm just, I was so angry to be alive. And this doctor came in and he sat down next to me once again, detoxing pretty hard. And he looked to me like a, like a Jewish rabbi with the curls. And then I blinked and he's an Asian doctor and I'm just kind of like, what is going on? And the guy asked me a simple question. He says, Dustin, do you think that you got a problem with drugs and alcohol? No, no, no. I have some situational depression. You see, if the wife would just act right and the kids would stop crying and I'd go back to work, I'd be fine. No reason for me to drink like this. I don't have alcoholism. I'm not a drug addict. I'll be fine as long as everything else fixes itself. Guess what, guys? They didn't believe me. I don't know why, but they thought I had a problem. Now, I don't know what it's like out here, but you hear all this stuff in the meetings about how you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink or not drink. As the, case may be, you can't force someone to get it. Well, I'll tell you what, the state of Minnesota is not familiar with that policy. They will force you to not drink. And they started the commitment process. And I went in front of a judge. Long story short. And I walked in there and said, yes, I got a problem. Yes, I need some help. Yes, I'll go today. See, I'd called an old sponsor in AA, and he told me to do that, because what I was going to do was take my list of demands, to the judge, you know, what I will do, what I won't do, where I will go. They don't smoke there. I'm not going there, you know. I just went in and said, fine, whatever. Now, I walked into this wonderful little facility in St. Peter, Minnesota, where they house the mentally ill and dangerous. It was a state facility. And I walked in and they handed me a big book. And they said, you're going to need to give that back. We don't have money to give it out. Which irritated me, because don't you know who I am? I'm the boy wonder. You know, I got my own house. I'm 23. I got a big money job. Don't you know who I am? And I'm in this little dungeon of a treatment center. I can assure you that we didn't have craft hour. Okay, there was no nature walks. All right, it was, we weren't making macaroni paper plates and colored sand bottles and just getting to feel our inner child. There was none of that. It was this dungy little clinic. We ate lunch in the old surgical room of the St. Peter Hospital, where surely people have died over the hundred years. This place is in existence and you can smoke. I'm so grateful that I went to that place today. I really am because had I went to some warm fuzzy rehab, had I gone to some place where they just patted me on the back and told me it was going to be okay. I probably went to had the experience. I ended up having to see what I was left with in that state hospital. Minnesota was the absolute hopelessness and futility of my life as I had been living it selfishness driven with alcoholism. Absolutely just dying in my own skin since I can remember and a big book of Alcoholics Anonymous. Welcome. This is a good deal. See, I did something kind of crazy instead of going to meetings and talking about what I thought I knew. I actually read the book. I had never done that before in and out of meetings. Tons of meetings, hundreds of meetings, conferences, road trips. Never had I read the book. I would sit in meetings and say I'm an alcoholic. Thank God nobody asked me what that meant. I would have had no idea what they were talking about. Well, I drink too much. That's all I could have said. I don't, I didn't know what it meant to be. What's like going out and fixing the tire when your car won't start? How do you know that's going to work? You don't even know what the problem is. And that was my story. I didn't know what the problem was. I thought it was, Dustin, you're a bad boy when you drink, you can't drink. Which is phenomenal if you could pull that off. But the problem is that I didn't see until I got into that place and I started reading and I identified. That big thing of identification where I sunk home that this is me. These crusty old bastards in Akron were talking about me. These guys wrote this book and it's me. It became real to me. And what I realized was the first step for me wasn't that I couldn't drink. You're a bad boy, you can't drink. That wasn't the case. What I found out was if I was a real alcoholic, which I was pretty sure I was, without a shadow of a doubt, there's going to come a time and there is going to come a place where I will not be able to say no to the first one. And I will drink. It's not that I can't, it's that I will. And I just thought I was choosing wrong, you know? And here's the thing. And here I'm reading about this fatal illness that won't allow me to choose right every time. And I started going through this and I'll tell you what, I was a militant atheist. Second step, you know? Oh, come to believe in a power greater than yourself. I know what you're talking about. You're talking about God. I don't believe in God. And I'd like to tell you why I don't believe in God. Oh, you believe in God? Let's talk about that for a while. And this is the mind I brought here. Argumentative, hostile, plain old mean. And never want to lose an argument. Guess what happened this last time? I got beaten into a state of reasonableness. You could have told me the only way to get sober was to go sell Bibles at the airport. I'd have been on my way. I didn't care anymore to argue with you people. Because why? I couldn't die and I couldn't live. I couldn't drink successfully. I could not drink successfully. I was absolutely doomed. And the only prayer I had in the world was that, maybe, possibly, there was something that was going to fix what was wrong with me. That was it. You know, I sat in that place, being a non-believer. And I just, I kept reading this book and calling this old sponsor. And I literally said a prayer out of the big book, the third step prayer, to a God I didn't believe in. Praying to ceiling tiles the whole time. Because I didn't, I'm willing. Sure. I don't, nowhere else to go. So I sat down in this place. And I'm on a pretty good size commitment. And I don't know what happened. I just, I just realized that I needed to start to actually write a fourth step. And so I did my best. And I called this guy. And he guided me a little bit. And I started writing this fourth step in that place. You know, and I'm a guy that, since then, has gotten really into the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous. And as a guy that says, well, I don't read the stories. But you know what? My first time sitting in that hospital reading a story. And it said, I knew I had done my third step. Because I had started writing on my fourth. I knew. I had a piece about me. Why did I read that story that night? The day that I started my fourth step. Why did this thing lead me to a story where the person's talking about exactly where I was at? Well, it's probably just a coincidence. So I kept writing. And so I called this old sponsor up. And I said, you know, John, I'm not going to do my fifth step here. I'm going to wait and do it when I get out. Do it with you. And he says, well, why? He says, well, why is that? I said, because, well, this guy's paid to be here. This is a state treatment center. This chaplain, he's paid to be here. And I just, I don't think that's very spiritual, John. And he said, Dustin, I'm pretty sure God owns the state of Minnesota. Do your fifth step. Click. People thumpers are so unreasonable. Do your fifth step and hangs up on me. That's very unkind. So I did my fifth step. And then because I wasn't going to meetings and I didn't know that you were supposed to endlessly try to fix yourself, I just did six and seven right out of the book. I just didn't know any better. I just, well, it says here to do this now. So I did it. Did I become a holy roller big time believer at that point and just shed all my sins and walk away? No. I just, something started to happen to me. I started to change. I had no idea what I was doing. I didn't, up until I was two years sober, I prayed the prayers out of the big book because I had no better ideas. I just didn't know anything, which I've found time and time again in working with others that the guys that don't know when they get here are better shaped than the big time believers. The guys that know everything die. The guys that go, whatever you tell me to do, I'll do. Those are the guys that seem to stay sober. And so I went through this process and I got out and I met a guy who you're not going to believe this. He insisted that I actually make amends. Get out of here. I actually wanted to have a conversation with him about living amends. I was like, Paul, I'm just going to live right today, okay? He said, Dustin, go to this page. He said, if you're the real alcoholic, you'll drink again doing that. Dustin, how well did it work for you last time? My mind doesn't allow me to see that what I'm trying to do today failed me in previous sobriety. My mind doesn't allow me to see that I'm determining what I will and won't do one more time and where did that get me. The deal is, I had this idea as I'm starting to get willing to make these amends that I have to like it. You don't have to like it. It's unreal. I don't care if you like alcohol or not. You drink it, you're going to get drunk. That was my experience with the amends. I didn't like them. I did them anyway. He got me out and moving. I didn't like them. He got me out and moving. He said, Dustin, you've got to go face these people. And so I wanted to do like Dr. Bob. The guy went out and made them all in one day. Well that sounds better than dragging it out. So I go down to the town where most of my wreckage in the universe was and I'm going to do it Dr. Bob style. And I'm knocking on doors and I'm calling people and nobody's home. Absolutely nobody's home. I can't get a hold of one person. I'm thinking, what a miserable prick. This guy did it in one day. I'm still a little angry. I'm still a little angry. And so I'm starting to pray now and I go, God, you know, real humble like, God, I just want to make my amends. And if you'll put someone in front of me, I'll make them. I am not even slightly exaggerating. The second after I said that, my ex-girlfriend drove by on the right hand side. And now I'm praying a whole new prayer. God, anybody but her. I will make amends to Satan himself. God, anybody but her. I will make amends to Satan himself. God, anybody but her. I will make amends to Satan himself. God, anybody but her. I will make amends to Satan himself. God, anybody but her. I will make amends to Satan himself. Because I was still living under the illusion that she had done more to me than I had done to her. You know what I mean? I mean, but something told me, just do it. I followed her to Wal-Mart. You know, it was, she's like, I thought you died. You know, you know how many times I've heard that? Seriously. Like, go track people. I thought you were dead. You know? And we sat down and, you know what, she would not have been the first person on my list to call. You know what, she would not have been the first person on my list to call. You know what, she would not have been the first person on my list to call. But she sat there with tears in her eyes and she said, Dustin, if you can get sober, I can get sober. She had two little baby girls and she was using like a, just unreal. I have no clue what she's doing today. I do not know. But why is it I always think that she's doing something that's not real? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I just think this process is about me. My amends aren't about me. It's about me setting things right with others. And I don't know why God put me in that place, but I've seen that when God put me in this place, even though I didn't like it, phew, there was power in that experience. You know, the deal is, after getting through this process and starting to work with others and to sponsor other men, it's so hilarious when we get to the ninth step and people are just like, phew, but I don't wanna. You know, I know. But if you don't, you're gonna drink. But I'm gonna drink. I don't want to drink. Yeah, I know. But if you don't make your amends, you're going to drink. But I don't want to drink. I understand. That's why you've got to make your amends. I don't do it anymore. I just go, this is what the book says. This is my experience. Every time I fail to go out and find these people and set things right, I drank again. So you take it for what it's worth. You know, I don't know. I can't argue with you. The cool part about sponsorship is we got two great persuaders. We got a spiritual life which has all the benefits thereof. And we got the alcoholic death which has all the pains thereof. So I don't argue with these guys. I don't beat people up into making their amends. You don't want to do it? Cool. So I started going through this deal. And this guy, he sat me down. And I am literally 60 days sober. I have made a bunch of amends. I'm selling things to pay back money. I used to say, I lost my bike when I got sober. That's a lie. I sold my motorcycle to pay back people I owed money to. I didn't lose anything. I got a relationship back with family members I never would have gotten paying them five bucks a week. Ever. He sat me down and we started to do this 10 and 11 deal. You know, he showed me how to continue to watch for these things as I went through my day. To start to apply the principles from the first nine steps in my daily life as I walked around. He showed me how to pray. He showed me how to pray. In a way that was meaningful to me. That meant something to me. That connected me to something I could touch, taste, feel. That I could believe in. And this guy, he suggested, you might want to take up meditation. Which sounded like a great idea. If you want to be some loser sitting in the lotus position on some hill somewhere. Which I didn't. But, because I had no better ideas, I determined I would try. Now here's what, this is pathetic. I'm going to get beat up in New Jersey. I went into my room. And I lit a candle. And I put on this meditation CD, like spirit flutes. And I'm going to get spiritual. I sat down and I'm going to get spiritual. You are such a loser. This is never going to work. Look at you. And my head starts grinding on me. There's this meat grinder just cranking away. Oh, man. Meditation. There's a blast, you know. Serenity. Sure. If you're brain dead, I'm not brain dead. My mind never shuts up. I don't have any problem with the think, think, think on the wall. Never been my issue. I can believe in that slogan. That's all I did when I got here. So I'm sitting there going, okay, what do I do? And I start to read more in the book. And I start trying to practice these principles it's outlining. And it said be quick to see where religious people are right. And I sought out a teacher. A guy who'd been teaching meditation for 30 years. And I sat down with him and we went through this process. And I have a prayer and a meditative life today. I have a way in which I can get connected to that which is keeping me sober no matter where I'm at at any time. I don't need to run to a meeting if I'm feeling squirrely. I can sit in quiet with that which sustains me. It's a pretty good deal. Now, 60 days sober. He calls me and this other guy. We got the same sobriety date over to his house. And he says, Dustin, Jason, I need your guys' help in the trenches. He was going and taking all these meetings at the treatment centers. In Minnesota, we got a treatment center on every block. It's ridiculous. If you don't have a commitment carrying the message into a treatment center in Minnesota, it's because you don't want one. They can't give them away fast enough. And so he says, I need your help. All these guys keep asking me to sponsor them. And I just, you know, would you please help me do this? And I was like, buddy, you need a meeting. I can't sponsor anybody until I've been sober a year. And he looked at me and said, where is that in the book? Where is that in the program? See, this is a man who came from a different cloth than I was used to. This was a guy who knew that if I didn't go out and try to help somebody else, I wasn't going to stay sober. I couldn't just wait around until I got better to go help somebody. If I didn't go help somebody else, I wasn't going to give better. I wasn't going to be healthy. I wasn't going to be able to make it through the day without a drink if I didn't go give this thing away for free. And he got on me and he got me out the door. Now, I can tell you this. It's just like anything else in my life. I made a lot of mistakes and did a lot of stupid stuff trying to carry the message and help others. You know, I'm sitting in a meeting one day and a guy is whining and complaining about his pathetic life. And I've got a pathetic life too at this point. I just don't want to talk about it all day long. So I said, do you got a sponsor? He said, no. I said, well, come on. Get in my car. And I said, well, I'm not going to talk about it all day long. And I said, well, I'm not going to talk about it all day long. And I said, well, I'm not going to talk about it all day long. And he said, well, I don't know what you call it here, but we call it kidnapping in Minnesota. And I brought him to this park and we got out. We did some reading and we got on our knees and we did a third step prayer. I left him there with a pad of paper, my big book, and a pen. I said, write your inventory. This guy had been around for 20 years. Write your inventory. I came back four or five hours later. We did a fifth step. I said, do six and seven. I'll be back in an hour. I came back. I picked him up. He went out and started making amends. I'm not condoning that sort of sponsorship. It's illegal in most states. But what I'm saying is it got me out of myself that day. I picked up another guy and tried to do the same thing because you know how we are. If one thing works, ten is better. So I set out to do the same exact thing with a different guy. I came back five hours later. He was sunbathing on the beach. It was hilarious. It was like, I'm willing to go to any lengths to get a suntan. He was kicking it on the beach. It's unbelievable. So through this process, guess what happens? I caught fire, man. I hope if you haven't had that experience yet that you get the chance to absolutely fall in love with the program of Alcoholics Anonymous because it saved my life and connected me in a way I had never been connected to you or to God or to anything. I caught fire. And then what always happens after that is a crusade. I got on the white horse. I went into meetings to tell them how it was because I've been sober, I think, 90 days now and we're going to do this thing. So I'm going into meetings. I'm robbing my employers. I'm talking about God in the steps. I'm taking extra smoke breaks in the port-a-potty and not showing up for work and stiffing my ex-wife on child support. There's a spiritual life. And, you know, bleeding my current girlfriend dry. And then I met another teacher and Alcoholics Anonymous was brought to me. And I realized that the 12th step wasn't just about going into those rehabs and pounding the book and carrying the message and sitting down and working with others and going to detox and going to that. That there was a much more important demonstration of these principles in all my affairs. That working a program included paying child support. That I need to get up to par on that deal. That working a program included taking my children when I was supposed to have them. That working a program included giving my employer an honest day to day life. That I needed to get up to par on that deal. That I needed to get up to par on that deal. That I needed to work for an honest day's wage. I can't just work this program when I'm with you people hanging out in the fellowship. I've got to apply this into my life because it's a way of life. If I make Alcoholics Anonymous the steps, the meetings, and service work a part of my life, what seems to happen is it becomes a smaller and smaller part of my life. It's a way of life today. And I had a guy who showed me that guess what, Dustin, you're going to have to eat some crow with that ex-wife. See, I'm a guy that got sober and lost his wife and kids. I didn't get sober and get them back. They left. It was a done deal. And you know what, I don't know if you've noticed this or had this happen to you, but we get sober sober 30, 60, 90 days, 6 months and we expect people to feed us grapes like Julius Caesar. Like, why have I been sober 6 months? Why don't they trust me? Because I used to steal from my kids' piggy bank to get loaded. That's why they don't trust me. You know, it was through practicing these principles and continuing to make these amends and to get current on those amends that I realized something very deep, profound, and psychological. You know why I felt guilty my whole life? Well, I always just felt like I was going to get caught or like I always was and I just felt so guilty and so horrible. I usually don't do this because it's an outside issue, but I'm going to share this with you. It is psychological, so bear with me. Maybe it's even Freudian or Jung said it. I felt so guilty. My entire life because I was guilty. It's crazy. I did it. I was a horrible father and a horrible husband and a horrible friend and a horrible employee. That's why I felt so horrible all my life. Because I had actually been behaving that way. I was guilty. That's why I felt guilty. Practicing these principles in all my affairs, starting to show up in that relationship with my ex-wife, pay the child support, take the kids, starting to show up with those kids, pay that money back that I took out of that piggy bank to get drunk. Changed my life. I could sleep at night. I mean, right away. No more tossing and turning, wondering about tomorrow or regretting the past. This thing absolutely revolutionized my life. Today, I can't even begin to tell you how good it is. I really can't. You know, and sometimes I feel guilty saying that in Alcoholics Anonymous because I look around and I listen to people who just, life sucks for them. And I can relate to that. But it doesn't suck for me today. You know, it just doesn't. I've made it through a lot of garbage in sobriety. I've watched people die that raised me more years than my dad did. You know, the difference between me and my dad is one thing and one thing only. They brought me back to life. Heck, at least when my dad tried to kill himself, he didn't do it in the house with his kids like I did. You know, the deal was, if you read, you know, the coroner's report from my old man, it says that he pulled his car into the garage and he took a bunch of pills, he left the truck run, and he pulled the trigger and shot himself. See, but if you read the suicide note, it says a completely different thing. It says that I can't stop hurting the people that I love. I can't stop. And you'll all be better off without me. You call it what you want. My old man died from alcoholism. And I'm that man. And thank God, the program of Alcoholics Anonymous and the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous allows me today to live in a way in which I don't have to die like that if I'll continue to seek this power through action, through works, through practice. That I don't have to die like that. That my kids can have a father that they're proud of today. You know, at the end of the drinking, my son would walk in, I would walk in the house and he would cower. He would cower and get out of the way. He was two and a half years old. And he already knew. You know, you don't know if I'm going to throw a chair or a remote or, you know, just throw a temper tantrum just like him, just bigger, you know. Nowadays, when we go to drop him off, he doesn't want to leave. He wants to stay with his dad today. You people gave me that. It was through a process of each one teach one that I learned how to be a father to those children I abandoned through alcoholism. It was through a process of each one teach one that I learned how to start being a husband to the new wife that God has put in my life. You know, you hear people say this stuff, this God-limiting belief systems that we have in Alcoholics Anonymous. You know, God's just not going to drop a job on you. It doesn't work that way. You've got to get out and pound the pavement and do all that. You know, who are you to say what God's going to do? I'm sitting there one day in a job I hate. I mean, hated with a passion. Just doing my job because of what was in front of me to do. And the phone rings. And the guy says, I'd like to offer you a job. I thought that didn't happen. It happens. Some people. I don't know. And now I get to start growing. New journey. New deal. God has absolutely changed and revolutionized my life. And it was because I did what you people told me to do. Not you specific people, but people just like you in rooms just like these. Sacred circles of Alcoholics Anonymous telling me what it was I needed to do to get on the spiritual path they were on. Such a cool deal. You know, who would have believed a hundred years ago that if we would simply work some stupid steps that weren't comfortable, go to a meeting, get involved in that on a regular basis, to get involved in the unity of other alcoholics trying to have this spiritual life, to be of service to the people about us, that we could recover from a seemingly hopeless state of mind. Who knew that thousands upon thousands of us don't have to die every year? I didn't know that. You people gave me that. An experience with God, plain and simply. An experience with this God that I couldn't believe in no matter how much I wanted to. You know, the deal is, for me, that if I continue to listen to the people who have the light on in their eyes, that I can continue to have the light on in my eyes. But more importantly, if I continue to help others get that light on in their eyes, I get to have a pretty good life. Doesn't mean it's all just coasting from here on out. But that I get to wake up in the morning and not have to worry about making the decision not to drink. Because my Heavenly Father made that decision for me. What a cool deal. I, uh, I appreciate the opportunity to share my story with you tonight. And, uh, there's something I usually say when I get done. Because I know sometimes I get riled up and I say things that may be taken one way or another. It goes something like this. If there's anything that I said to you tonight that's hurt you or, you know, upset you in any way, made you angry, if you could go home tonight and, uh, open up your big book to Chapter 5, How It Works, whip out a pen and a piece of paper, write down some inventory and get down to why you're bothered by something some idiot from Minnesota said, you'd probably have a better life. Thank you.