Had to Forgive the Unforgivable and Learned They Just Didn’t Have the Information – Sean A.

About This Speaker Tape

A Hollywood writer and movie producer with 13 years of sobriety delivers a passionate, funny, and deeply moving talk at the Tri State Roundup. He breaks down the first three steps in plain language — honesty as "the mouth moving," open-mindedness as listening to sober experience, and the spiritual life as something he stumbled into rather than understood. He warns about the ego transforming itself into "spiritual gobbledygook" around the fifth year, and makes a pointed appeal for unity, arguing that old-timers who withhold experience from cross-addicted newcomers are putting lives at risk.

He tells the story of his early sobriety: his sponsor forbidding any emotional decisions for a full year, the six-month mark where he was "manifesting every psychological disorder there is," screaming on the Hollywood Freeway in a three-piece suit, and consuming gallons of Haagen-Dazs to replace the sugar from quarts of vodka. His first spiritual awakening came while failing to nap — he yelled at a Higher Power he didn't believe in, then waited three weeks to see if he'd be punished.

The emotional center of the talk is his relationship with his father, a fellow alcoholic. Through the amends process he came to understand that both parents loved him to the best of their ability. When his father was dying in his eighth year of sobriety, he flew home, told his father he loved him, lied that his pregnant wife had already delivered the grandchild, and released him to die. He credits this peace entirely to the steps and the fellowship.

He closes with a luminous scene on a Hawaiian beach with his two-year-old daughter Kate running naked in turquoise water at sunset, her red hair the same color as the sun — a life he says he could never have conceived of, let alone dared to dream, on his first day sober. His daughter, raised in the program, has been twelve-stepping her nursery school classmates.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Opens on honesty and Step 1 — admitted means the mouth is moving, not just deciding or thinking
• 2:30 The ego must be crushed — warns about taking credit for sobriety by year five, wrapping ego in spiritual language
• 5:00 Unity crisis — old-timers withholding sober experience from cross-addicted newcomers, challenges them directly
• 9:00 Cocaine addict friend Larry and the tumbler of scotch in the microwave — 'I was a falling down blackout drunk and I never did anything like that'
• 13:00 Step 2 and the medical dictionary definition of insanity — 'a seeming inability to learn from one's mistakes'
• 16:00 Sponsor's first-year rules: no divorce, no moving, no new car, no falling in love — 'I don't give a damn about love, work on good manners'
• 20:00 Six months sober on the Hollywood Freeway screaming in a three-piece suit, consuming gallons of Haagen-Dazs
• 23:00 First spiritual awakening — yells at Higher Power he doesn't believe in, waits three weeks for punishment that never comes
• 30:00 Father's death — flew home, lied about granddaughter's birth to release him, freed by completed amends
• 38:00 Hawaii beach scene — two-year-old Kate with red hair the color of the sun, running in turquoise water at sunset, a life beyond anything he could have dreamed