I Married My Psychiatrist Which Isn’t a Terribly Smart Thing to Do 🤣 – Ajit

Like Mark Twain, I'm always embarrassed when people compliment me. I feel they're
not saying enough. Thank you, Don, for the very warm welcome. Thank you, Popeye, for
inviting me, for giving me the privilege of being a service. And before I tell you
my name, I'll spell it for you. It's A-J-I-T, pronounced Ajit. It's not a jet.
It's not our shit or any of that stuff. I've been given about 99 versions to my name.
What a beautiful crowd. I put my glasses on so I can see you. So unlike my very first
meeting in Detroit, Michigan, actually a suburb of it, was a dark, dingy room, six
women, average age, deceased. At least they were beautiful like you. About my age
that I am today just seems so alien to me to walk into something called
Alzheimer's.
I think that's what I thought. I think Al-Anon is a con job. It says it's for those
people who are affected by someone else's drinking. I think it should say those people
are affected by their own thinking, the stinking thinking. I cannot say, I do not refer to
the alcoholic in my life, which is now my former wife, as my qualifier. If you read
the Al-Anon literature, I think the word qualifier is not listed any place in there.
I came here because I was affected by my own thinking, my own obsession over other
people's actions. And that started when I was born, I think, people pleasing. I think
when I came out of the womb, I told the doctor, don't slap me, I'll cry for you.
The name is Indian in origin. It's not the casino kind Indian. It's the quickie
mark kind, as they say.
Yes, unfortunately, I don't own any of that stuff. I don't own any of that stuff. I don't own
any Shell gas stations. I don't have a call service. I don't write software. I'm not an
engineer or a doctor. I do wear the spikes on my golf shoes on the inside. I want to
greet my friends in Al-Anon. The Al-Anon's in here. And I'll salute you. I won't do the
Al-Anon salutes. Any recovering or otherwise alcoholics in here. I welcome you as well.
Members, I'll give you the salute.
You must be schizophrenic.
You must nudge yourself when you're hearing stuff.
I'm teasing.
I heard an AA speaker by the name of Polly.
She said you strip away the alcoholic and you've got a flaming Allen on.
So welcome.
You belong here.
Are there any former Allateens or Allateens in this room today?
If you are, very special thank you to you for being here
and blessings because I have been an Allateen sponsor,
and I tell you I'm always amazed and surprised at what this program is capable of
in transforming those kids into good citizens of society
because I heard stories where a kid said,
and he's talking about he's telling a baseball score.
He said, my father would pick me up and throw me against the window,
and no emotion, no sadness, just stated the way it was.
So I'm glad to be here.
I cannot tell you exactly when I walked into the meetings of Allen on,
but I can tell you to the moment when she walked into AA, May 25th, 1983, 8 or 2 p.m.
So that tells you where my head was.
And I love what Don said about practicing the program.
I read someplace that we don't work this program, we practice it.
And practice makes you perfect, but in this case, thank God it doesn't make you perfect.
Because I'd be walking around like a castrated angel
and would not be able to identify with any of you.
And you wouldn't be able to identify with me either.
So it is practicing these principles, practicing this program,
and part of what I'm doing today, thanks to Popeye asking me to be here,
the privilege of being a service.
Abraham Lincoln said, better to keep your mouth shut and be thought of as a fool
than to open it and then remove all doubt.
So I'm going to remove all doubt because I think I'm amongst fools.
And which is okay, because there's an ancient Indian saying that said,
a fool is no longer a fool when he realizes he's a fool and a wise man is no longer wise.
See, that confuses you when he thinks he's wise.
So you're neither wise nor a fool.
That's why it's progress, not perfection.
I'm so grateful for that.
I came in the rooms of Al-Anon in 1980.
I can't remember when, so I just say December is my, because it was late fall.
It was a cold evening, and I remember that much.
And I came in because.
I was not, they say if you're, if you're bothered, but I wasn't bothered.
Pardon the expression.
I was pissed at the drinking that was going on.
I really didn't think the drinking was really the issue in retrospect.
I was bothered.
I was, I was not bothered.
I was embarrassed by what was going on because, see, I grew up in a home.
I grew up in a home where the mantra was, what will they say?
So.
I wonder what's going on.
There's some kind of an echo.
There's another presentation going on.
Ah.
Okay, we'll have competing interests here.
I'll shout louder.
Okay.
We'll have the other one there.
Trust you and I will do $15 a million in payrolls.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Can you hear me if I talk?
Are you okay?
Yeah.
Okay.
I wait.
Papa is going to go straighten it out.
Talk amongst yourselves.
I'm glad I'm here
and not out there
listen to this guy
he's pretty loud
that's odd they have the sound system
so wrapped up
it won't work
they probably have a pickup
a wireless mic
they don't realize it
the microphone
that belongs to Dicobi tapes
it's like a very expensive microphone
disappeared last night
so they might be using that
and it's connected to his
there's something here
that's the
that's the
for if you needed it
and you don't
I guess
some people relax
yeah
talk amongst themselves
like the Saturday Night Live thing
we have a moment of silence
for September 11th
you want to give it a shot again?
sure
I guess Popeye's
saw the light
and saw the problem
I'll give you a little bit more
of the problem
I'll give you a little bit more
of the problem
let's say it came in
somewhere in 1980
and so since
as they say
I've heard AA speakers say
thanks to the God of my understanding
the big book of AA
and my sponsor
I haven't had a drink since whenever
thanks to the big book of Al-Anon
my sponsor
and the God of my understanding
I have not had one obsessive thought
since 1980
and I have
I haven't had a drink since 1980
I take it you don't believe me
and I understand
and I'll obsess over that
you know
if thinking were a disease
I'd be slipping all the time
in the way my mind works
so I'm grateful that I keep coming back
it's been a long journey
and it hasn't
it did not really
hit me
until 1997
I started in 80
but I was
as Saint Francis would say
I was more into orthodoxy
which is right doctrine
I knew the steps
I could read them back and forth
I could philosophize on them
I could talk about the concepts really well
but I wasn't into orthopraxy
which is practicing the program
practicing the steps
doing the footwork
because I could talk the talk
but I wasn't walking the walk
and I didn't realize that
because I slid into
service
which makes
made me feel
I won't speak for the others
but made me feel like I was working a wonderful program
I use the word work here
because people come up to me
oh you work such a great program
you're into service
I was intergroup rep
district rep
world service rep
you name it
every rep that could happen
I was secretary
treasurer
I was going to meeting
and sponsoring people
and I was leading meetings
and I was asked to speak at conferences
and stuff like that
so I really thought I was hot assed
you know what
that I was working this great program
and wow
I didn't realize that
what I had not done
has gone into the darkness of the fourth step
I had not really dug deep into
who I was all
what I was all about
because I had surrounded myself
with the packaging
rather than the substance
and as I said
the embarrassing part
because when you grow up in a house
would say
what would they say
but I was not
I was not
I was not
I was not
I was not
I was not
I was not
I was not
I was not
I was not
I was not
I was not
I was not
I was not
I was not
I was not
I was not
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I was not
I was not
I was not
I was not
I was not
I was not
I was not
I was not
I was not
I was not
person
person
person
person
person
person
person
person
person
person
person
person
person
person
person
person
embarrassing. And I just didn't want her to not drink. I just wanted her to drink two glasses
of white wine, specifically Chardonnay, because the third glass was where it tipped over.
And you know, the problem was, she was not the problem. If you ask me today, is alcoholism a
disease? And I'll say, I really don't know and I don't care. It's what's the difference between
ignorance and apathy. I don't know and I don't care. Because the problem was my obsession with
behavior. There we go again. So the problem was obsession. We'd go to dinner someplace and my
friends would say, what's your problem? I'd say, she's got mozzarella on her eyelids. She's got
pepperoni on her cheeks.
And she's slobbering all over the place and you're asking me, what's my problem?
And they said, she's having a great time. And she was. I was the idiot who was so focused on
what was going on. Now you might, just to give you a brief introduction as to how I
ended up being with an alcoholic in Detroit. I was born in a home in Bombay, India.
And when I finished my school and I graduated, did all my work,
I walked up the mountain.
I walked up the mountain in my
loins, underwear, and my turban. I never wore none. It's a bad visual.
And I asked my guru, O Great One, how do I seek serenity? And he said, go to Detroit,
Michigan and join Al-Anon. I'm just saying that by effect.
So I left the shores of Bombay, India in May of 1974,
warned by well-meaning friends and family. He said, do not get involved with American women.
And I said, why? They said, because they drink and smoke in the open like men do.
Indian women are discreet. They do it behind closed doors. So I didn't care
for the fact that the American woman smoked, but I loved the fact that she
drank. Because they say, candy's dandy and liquor's quicker. It made my progress in
an evening extremely cost-effective and expedient.
Little did I know, I was about to embark on a journey that would just be a very transformative
process. And I'm very, very grateful for that. So I don't refer to the alcoholic in my life as
my qualifier. I refer to her as the angel who brought me into this program. Because every
encounter has, if I read in retrospect, has been a spiritual encounter. It's just that I did not
recognize it at the time. It was my God guiding me. And I don't have a God of any understanding,
meaning I don't understand God. I just appreciate the mystery. And that's good enough for me.
And that's what the third step allows me to do. I was so hung up on God as we understand
him. He said, understand whatever you want to understand, because it's beyond concept.
I think the Zen Buddhists have a wonderful saying. They say, if you meet the Buddha,
kill him. Because it's a mental construct. It's anything I think of is a mental construct.
So it's beyond me, but there was something guiding me. And I didn't know why or what,
but I'm so grateful that I was guided into the 12 steps of Al-Anon. And thank God for
that.
That there were alcoholics ahead who actually gave us those 12 steps and the people beyond and
beyond and beyond and beyond. I've really come across priests. My present wife is of Greek
ancestry, and she's Greek, from Greece. And we go to church at the Assumption Church in Long Beach.
It's a Greek church. And the priest there had invited a priest from Massachusetts,
who was Australian, but he was Greek Orthodox. And he came and spoke on
forgiveness. And when he was done, I walked up to him and I said, you know, what you were talking
about sounded more like 12 steps of the Gita. He said, oh, all wisdom is universal. He said,
but I don't, I'm not an alcoholic, but I go to AA meetings. And I said, why? He said,
because I find more spirituality in an AA meeting than I do in my own church. Because in AA,
they recognize their brokenness. And they know that there is God to be there. And there's no
religion drilled into you. I read Richard Rohrer. He's written a book called The Spirituality of the
12 Steps, Breathing Underwater. And in that, he talks about the same thing, finding spirituality
in AA meetings than in the own church. And it's fascinating that you find people of the cloth
actually finding more spirituality in these programs. So I'm deeply humbled and grateful
to the alcoholics in my life who gave us this program of Al-Anon as well. So it's derivative
of that. And for that, I truly, truly am grateful. I don't hold any alcoholic in my life or otherwise
in sheer condemnation. I view with compassion, love, and gratitude. And I'm grateful for that,
that I have that experience. But anyway, so I come out here and I meet,
decide that I'm going to meet someone who is quicker with liquor. And I went to work
for Xerox. And I used to go to a bar with the boys called Yesterday's to find my soulmate du jour.
You recognize that, right? And I wasn't very adventurous, except I would invite the young
ladies to go with me to a wonderful place called Greektown, which was an adventure for people in
Detroit. Greektown was a little enclave within Detroit. It was very safe because it was policed
by the Greek mafia. And in those days, back in the 70s, you could get a four-course meal
for about 25 bucks. And it included an elixir called Roditas wine. Roditas wine had the magical
quality of transforming an absolute stranger into the most intimate of associates, persons.
So when I met my wife, and she turned out to be alcoholic, I said, oh my God,
we all know and scary a bean. Alcoholic, no, don't waste your time. Alcoholic, don't waste your time.
When I met you, you were a real alcoholic. You were a real alcoholic. You were a real alcoholic. You
were a real alcoholic. You were a real alcoholic. You were a real alcoholic. You were a real alcoholic.
Your beam took off, and my beam said, here's the woman I'll make excuses for, tell her lies,
men damage relationships, and pay her bills, blah, blah, blah. And yours took off, and you said,
here's the idiot who's going to do it all for me. Let's get married. And she said, no. She said,
if you, if, I said, I met all those women, and I didn't marry any of them because they didn't
have the bean. She said, if you had married one of them, you would have driven them to drink two
like you did me. So she owes me a debt of gratitude because she found a,
okay. So life was wonderful for about 15 minutes. We met because I suffer from a disease called
image management because of the what will they say, just ingrained in me, what will they say.
Image management is I may feel like crap, but I got to look good
because you're judging me based on how I look, walk, talk, and the company I keep.
That's what's going on in my head at the time. And I was invited to a party by my
boss, and I was seeing a woman that did not fit the image I wanted to. God is a sense of humor,
man, I tell you. So I decided to look for the right image, and the right image showed up in
the form of this woman at a student hangout called TJ's at the university. I was a part-time
lecturer there. And she came up, and my beam took off, and her beam took off. And I asked her out,
and she said, you're the first patron I've decided to go out with. And I walked out feeling so
wonderful. Not really, but I was like, I'm going to go out with this woman. And she said,
that this was the beginning of a phenomenal journey. So we went out to dinner one evening
before the party, and warnings were happening. The flags were going up, because normally when
I went out to dinner with a woman, I listened with an open mind, in one ear, out the other.
Because I don't multitask. I see the men identify with them, the women know.
So when a guy's nodding in your first or second date, he's not really listening to you.
He's just wondering, how am I going to get her from here to there?
But in this case, it was scary. I was actually indulging in intellectual intercourse with this
woman for about three hours. I should have left at the restaurant and gone away. But no, we decided
to go out. And we went to this party, and warning number two showed up. His name was George. And he
said, how long have you and Susan been together? Eight, nine years? I said, George, I just met
this woman two weeks ago. So he said, oh, you look so comfortable together. Now, my only time I give
advice from this woman is when I go out to dinner. And I said, George, I just met this woman two weeks
ago. Can we talk tonight? And he said, yes. He was like, why, how? And I'm like, well, I could
talk to her tonight. He said, we could talk. And he said, well, I'm other than just our
doctor. I'm a scientist, and I don't really know how I'm going to be of any help to anyone
without you. And he was in a very bad sense, and he didn't remember anything and the next
day I called this woman in Las Vegas and said, we've been talking about this and this and
this and, and this and생 We falta muchas personas para ir a bienes con mi, y yハm
con mi.
So I said, well, thank Harold.
What time is your appointment?
Tell me.
I talked to remains for
over a month.
Then we left and we've had nasat parents in the ten years that we've been around together.
And this is where the thing started to take place.
It was a midweek evening, and there was a knock on the door.
And I opened up the door, and this woman standing there with a lump on her head.
And I said, what happened?
She said, my mother beat me in an alcoholic rage.
And the personalities I did not know existed in me, the knight in shining armor, the caring parent,
whatever it was, a father figure, everything jumped out.
And I said, you will not move in with that woman.
You will move in with me.
Now, a Hindu from Bombay, India, does not ask a Polish Catholic girl to move in with him.
But that wasn't the scary part.
The scary part was watching her God-fearing mother, who disavowed sinful relationships like living together,
actually helping her daughter move in with me.
It was quite a sight watching them bring the stuff in.
That should have been a warning, but I decided to stay put.
And find my serenity, even if it killed me in the process, which it almost did.
We lived together in blissful sin for about 15 minutes.
Doors would get banged, loud noises coming out of the bedroom, and I'm not even in there.
And I'm walking around saying, shh, what will the neighbors say?
I said, who the heck do you think you are, Prince Charles, your stuffed shirt?
You can't even get angry.
See, I didn't know feelings.
Because I had to protect an image.
I had to protect an image.
The feelings are deep inside, and I have no idea.
Today I'm married to a woman who has all feelings in one way, because she has such a deep understanding of feelings.
You know you have a problem when one of your sponsees calls you up and gives you condolences for when Spock died.
You know, Leonard Nimoy.
He says, my condolences, because that was my hero.
I said, the man says, no feelings, no emotion, reason only, logic.
I remember coming from my men's group one time, and the men were talking about feelings.
And I said, my God.
And I'm driving, and I'm sipping on a can of Coke.
And all of a sudden, my chest starts to well up inside.
And I'm saying, oh, my God, I'm experiencing a feeling.
But I'm not happy, happy.
I'm not sad, sad.
What's this feeling?
And all of a sudden, carbon dioxide escapes me, and the feeling was gone.
That's how clueless.
See, denial for me is progress.
I'm usually clueless.
Now, this is to give you the thing about denialists.
I'll tell you a story that illustrates denial, from cluelessness to denial.
This guy goes to the doctor, and he said, when I sit in my living room watching TV, and my wife's in the kitchen, she cannot hear me.
I think she's going deaf, because I keep asking her what's for dinner, and she does not respond.
So the doctor says, I tell you what, what's the distance between the rooms?
And he said, about 11, 12 feet.
He said, we'll start at 10.
10 feet.
You go home tonight, stand at 10 feet, and ask your wife what's for dinner.
And you do that.
So this guy goes home at 10 feet, at 9 feet, at 8 feet, at 7 feet, 6, finally gets to 1 foot.
She turns and says, you moron, are you deaf?
I've told you nine times, it's spaghetti with meat sauce.
Totally unaware of his own thing, and that's, I'm totally unaware of my problems.
I'm focused on the other person's problem.
Anyway, so here I am, with the feeling gone.
I have no feelings in me.
I'm angry, but I don't know I'm angry.
I want to be very, very calm about this.
So nothing's changing.
Still, the sky is screeching, door's shutting, and I decided we'll do the next indicated thing.
We'll get married.
Everything will be okay.
So we get married and moved into this little condo in Warren, Michigan.
And I did not know that the half bathroom served as a personal bar.
I walk into this half bathroom.
I'm in the cabin, and six or seven empty cans would be able to pop out.
And I was so upset that they were not in the trash can.
I would go up to her and say, why didn't you put the empty cans in the trash can?
She said, oh, and I said, what were they doing in the bathroom in the first place?
And she said, Aunt Bunny came over and had a few beers.
Aunt Bunny was my wife's aunt.
And I said, never questioned Aunt Bunny.
Why would she take a six-pack into the bathroom?
I mean, was she illiterate?
Was she eliminating the middleman?
I don't know.
And this I have not been able to solve.
My friend came over and I said, would you like a glass of wine?
He said, sure.
I reach into the cabinet, pull out this bottle of wine.
It's got the cork.
It's got the silver thing.
It's got the red tag.
But the bloody thing is empty.
I'm shaking it, and I'm looking at it.
I'm confused.
I don't know if there's a store for alcoholics that sells long syringes to suck the booze out
without making it look like the bottle's empty.
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.
But the bottle's been open.
So I won't go into the gory details of all the noise that was happening, the drinking
that was taking place.
Either she was being kicked out or I was being kicked out.
There's a lot of in and out going on, a lot of fighting, a lot of embarrassment, a lot
of shame, at least on my part.
Promises I'll never drink again that I, you know, we believe, we want to believe every
time there's a sober period.
She was a periodic, and I didn't know it.
Later on, when she got sober, she told me I was never periodic.
I balanced myself out between the binges.
And one day I decided, I said, I'm going to leave.
I don't need this.
We don't have any kids, not many assets.
So I put my stuff in a little cloth bag, like a porky pig, I'm teasing.
It's a little bag.
I'm walking out.
And she said, if you leave, I will commit suicide.
And I was so angry.
And I'm not going to deny how dreadful suicide can be.
I've lost some close friends to suicide.
But I was so angry at the time, I said, that I want to watch so you don't botch it up.
And I left.
I should have kept walking.
I turned around and followed her into the kitchen.
And she is whereabout Barbara and my wife are sitting.
And I am here, and there's a TV set behind me.
I did not realize that in those five, ten seconds, her intentions changed.
From suicide to homicide.
And there were dishes and knives flying at me with alarming velocity and accuracy.
She should have been a pitcher in some frickin' baseball team.
And I'm dodging these as they're crashing by me, because I don't want to go running out.
Because if I do, then my neighbors will know.
And what will they say?
It brings me to the point in my talk.
Why?
Why?
Why?
Why do alcoholics get anonymous after they get sober?
If you drank anonymously, it would save a lot of embarrassment.
I had a friend who said, I don't have a drinking problem.
I have a stopping problem.
Anyway, moved to California.
She finally found sobriety.
I mean, it's insane.
I can't blame the alcoholic at all, because the grip's of a disease.
But I had no excuse.
I really had no excuse.
Here's a woman passed out on the floor.
There's stuff coming out of her mouth that a six-month-old would have said, she's drunk.
I had to go and inspect the garbage can to see what she'd been drinking.
And I was such a snob, I would critique her choice of alcohol.
Kmart champagne.
You've got to be kidding me.
Red wine.
And she didn't let it breathe.
It's got a twist.
What kind of?
And I went to my sponsor, and I said, Don, I've been studying garbology.
This is awful.
And I think they sent sponsors to one upmanship school.
And he said, that's nothing.
I said, what do you mean?
He said, I worked in the army.
At night, I would have a flashlight in my mouth so that it would be dark.
And I would fix those jeeps so my hands would be free.
And that came in handy, because I could go through two garbage cans.
And that's it.
That's it.
That's it.
That's it.
That's it.
That's it.
That's it.
I didn't have the heart to tell him that you can go to an industrial supply store and buy
a miner's helmet.
So if you are into studying garbage, get yourself.
Be nice to yourself.
You don't have to hold a flashlight.
It was when the twins came to my rescue.
And I'm talking about Ann Landers and Dear Abby.
Before that, I tried every trick, man.
Schick Shadle.
Have you heard of Schick Shadle?
I don't know who wrote it.
It was an alcoholic who wanted to do a number of Al-Anons.
When I found this half-bathroom is where all the cluelessness and the denial came crashing
down, because my family had moved into the area, and I wanted to introduce the white
sheep of the family to them.
So we got in the car, and I smelled an excess of binaca and some alcohol.
And I said, I can't take you in this condition.
You're going to go back, and I'm going to go and see my family on my own.
He said, that's good.
So I turn around.
And she goes inside and rushes into this half-bathroom, and something made me follow
her.
And as I look, she's trying to shut the door to this cabinet, and there's a 55-gallon drum
of Gallo wine.
It was half a gallon, but that's what assumed these enormous proportions.
See, it's always a problem of perception, right?
So I look at it, and all of a sudden, a voice in my head comes on and says, your wife's
an alcoholic.
Your wife's an alcoholic.
Your wife's an alcoholic.
It's like time stood still, and there's nothing moved.
And a voice inside me said, you went mad.
We won't need you anymore, because we won't need her anymore.
You will think her thoughts, feel her feelings, experience her emotions.
And you'll have conversations with her, and she's going to respond.
But she doesn't have to be there.
And I said, God, you're crazy.
That's not going to be me, because I'm individuated.
I don't need this.
And that's exactly what happened for the next three and a half years, is she would breathe
in a certain way.
I knew she was going to drink.
If she said good morning to me in a certain way, I knew she was so enmeshed with what
was going on.
I was up.
She was down.
I was confused.
It was just horrendous.
So I'm watching this commercial.
Sheik Shadal has said, if you have a drinking problem, the wife goes up to her husband and
says, darling, you have a drinking problem.
He says, sweetheart, you're so right.
And they go off to get treated.
So I believe in the truth in advertising.
So I walk up to my wife and say, darling, you have a drinking problem.
She said, you're an idiot.
I don't.
So I figured I'd catch her in the act, and she'll know I know she has a drinking problem.
So I sit on a couch, staring at an empty television set at night, because I want to see the reflection
of what's going on in the kitchen.
I can't be watching TV, but I have to pretend I'm doing something else.
So I do the crossword puzzle.
And I'd be looking, and I'd see her drink, and I'd make this big exclamation, aha, like
I've discovered a new law in physics or something.
And she'd take a drink, and she'd go up, and I'd move the bottles around, thinking when
she gets up at 2 o'clock for her nursing feed time, she'll know that I know.
Because she won't find the bottle where she left it.
Little did I know that alcoholics have their stash in 16,000 places.
I actually was almost arrested for molesting my vacuum cleaner, because I was pawing it
to see if she'd hidden the bottle there.
But I was saying, Ann Landers and Abby came to my rescue and said, if you're a mother
or a father or a child or whatever, if you're an alcoholic, go to Al-Anon.
So I finally go to my first Al-Anon meeting.
I walk in.
And as I mentioned, there were six women there.
And I walked up to Wuling.
It was what looked like the kahuna of the meeting.
And I said, how does this work?
And she pointed me to the literature table in the distance.
And she said, we work the 12 steps.
And there's a pamphlet there.
Go read it.
So I'm a pseudo-intellectual.
I walk up, and I pick up the pamphlet, thinking, oh, this is a cinch.
You do the 12.
You read them, and you know what it is.
And there's some number shows up that tells you this is the magic formula for getting
her sober.
So I read the first step.
Admit it.
I'm not powerless over alcohol that our lives have become unmanageable.
I said, I'm not powerless over alcohol, and my life isn't unmanageable.
Today, the first step is all about unmanageability to me.
I don't think about the, you know, I hear people in Al-Anon say, well, I'm powerless
over people, places, and things.
And that almost sounds like a sense of helplessness to me, because in the business world, you
talk about, how do you influence policy?
How do you control the circle?
Blah, blah, blah.
I'm not into it and say, I'm powerless over people, places, and institutions.
So rather than having a big debate with myself, I focus on the areas that are unmanageable
in my life.
And I look at it.
When I'm obsessed with someone else's behavior, or I'm obsessed with a certain outcome, or
I'm obsessed with certain results, my life does become unmanageable.
So here I am, totally unmanageable in this room, and I'm saying I'm not unmanageable.
That was pure, pure cluelessness and denial.
So I move on to step two.
I came to believe that a power greater than myself is unmanageable.
I'm not unmanageable.
It's true.
I believe so.
I believe you can.
A human mind cannot imagine all these Amaur worlds.
I believe the world, my name, in the end, can produce a reality of emotions that step
to pieces.
Certainly
. . .
. . . . . . .
. . . . .
. . . . . . . . .
. . . . office, activity, sea.
But you don't kill someone.
Salvation was not an option.
I was going to kill her.
So they're going to take the icicle, stab her, take her to the basement,
dig up the cement.
I don't know anything about concrete and what have you.
But who cares?
Minor detail.
And I was going to lay her to rest.
This is all happening in nanoseconds.
And then the thought occurred to me, my mother-in-law lives five blocks away.
She'll find out, dust on my wife's scar, and she'll call the police.
And kiddo, I didn't come all the way from Bombay to befriend some guy named Bubba
in a Michigan prison.
Being traded for cigarettes was not an option.
And I felt so guilty for even thinking this that I shared about it in my Friday night meeting.
And a woman walked up to me and she said, oh, God, I'm so glad you shared that.
I said, why?
She said, my husband was passed out on the couch,
and I was going to take a pillow and snuff him out.
And I said, why did you not do it?
And she said, I thought she would say, boy, that's a terrible act.
It's immoral, blah, blah, blah.
Instead, she said, oh, they would have found cotton in his nose,
and they would have known I've done it.
And we call alcoholics self-centered and selfish.
I think we are worse in some ways.
I think Al-Anons, and I say this in general because of what I hear and see,
and including my, we're more arrogant because we don't have the disease.
I hear people say, that's alcoholic.
That's such alcoholic thinking.
Well, certainly, that's such Al-Anon thinking, too, man.
Come on.
Generalizations bother me.
So generally speaking, I don't like generalizations.
I know that's it.
So step two, I'm not insane.
I moved to step three.
I made a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of God.
I said, wait a minute.
God helps those who help themselves.
Why give to God that which he's given to me in the first place?
That would make God an Indian giver.
I can say that.
So I moved on to step four.
Took a fearless and personal moral inventory.
I was perfect.
Nothing wrong with me.
I came in without any defects of character and now have many defects.
This bloody program doesn't work right.
So I'm going to step five.
Admitted to God, to myself, and to another human being, the exact nature of our wrongs.
Oh, that goes against image management.
A, nothing's wrong.
B, I'm not going to tell you about it.
Are you nuts?
Six and seven, which are the underpinnings of my program today, I glossed over
because seven had a word in it that was alien to my vocabulary.
It said humbly.
I was so humble, I was actually very proud of it.
I moved on to eight and nine.
Made it, you know.
I made amends to people or what have you.
I said, eight is made a list of people I'd harmed.
They deserved it.
Nine, when are they going to make amends to me?
When is she going to make amends to me?
So it was all about me, me, me, me, me.
I was spiritually awakened in about three and a half minutes.
I said, enough is enough.
I looked at her.
I said, now what?
And she said, keep coming back.
And I said, why?
She said, because you're all sick.
And she said it with a lot of emphasis.
She must have been psychic.
I did.
Every six weeks, I'd go back.
How can you change by going to class every six weeks?
It's really going to class to learn a new way of living and thinking,
a new way of entirely changing your perspective.
I know when I was so focused on, is it a disease?
I hope people here don't do this that they did in my first.
I was at the Al-Anon meeting.
They compare it to cancer, and they compare it to diabetes,
that if she had cancer, you wouldn't leave her.
If you had diabetes, you wouldn't leave her.
So I walk out of the room, and my head is now broken
up into six different committees, and they're having a debate.
And one side said, if she has a cancer-like disease,
why is she seeking chemotherapy?
If she has a disease like diabetes,
why not insulin therapy?
It wasn't until I got to my first Al-Anon meeting in Chicago area,
I'd been transferred.
I walk into my first Al-Anon meeting, and I brought up this disease thing,
and a guy looked at me and said,
if you want to understand this disease stuff, go to the literature table.
I said, there goes the literature table again.
He said, there's the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous on the Al-Anon literature table.
I was surprised, but they said that now I learned that we only use conference-approved literature and all that,
but they had taken a group conscience to decide to have the text in there that's the basic text.
I've heard all-time Al-Anon speakers say that there's such a big fuss about the big book in a lot of meetings.
I'm not suggesting you have it in your meetings.
I'm just telling you my story.
This is what happened in the Chicago area.
I read the big book of AA, and I came to the understanding that this disease transcends any physiological
and physical definitions of disease and psychological definitions of disease.
It's so confounding even to people like Carl Jung and Silkworth were unable to,
to grasp the disease part of it, that two people had to get together and just talk about and discover how to deal with it.
And neuroscience has determined it, and chemists have, yes, it is indeed a biochemical problem.
It is a neurological problem.
When I say problem, just the way it's structured inside.
They've done brain scans, and they found out that alcoholics and drug addicts have different neuroreceptors
and different paths or what have you.
I totally understand that.
But to understand why a person drinks, and I asked a friend of mine, Rich,
he ended up like,
I go to golf occasionally, and I said,
is there a moment of choice?
Is that that moment of decision before you decide if you're going to drink or not?
He's been sober 25 years, and he said,
Ajit, you and I can walk into a bar after a golf game.
You can have a couple of beers, and you'll know where you'll end up.
He says, I have a couple of beers.
I won't know where I'll end up.
And he says, so I know that, and that's why I don't take my first beer when I've finished golf.
I have a soda or a glass of water, and that made sense to me.
So here I'm reading the book.
I've done all that.
Now I'm getting into the literature.
See, this is where it got crazy for me, because once I started reading the literature,
started reading the whole thing and understanding the steps, I thought I knew the steps.
So someone would talk to me about the fourth step.
I could go ad nauseum on it.
I could talk about the sixth.
So I could talk a lot about it, but nothing was going on.
Until my wife then got sober in 1983 at 8.02 p.m.
at the University United Methodist Church on the corner of Jeffrey and Culver.
Reminds me.
And things were hunky-dory.
But something was not right, because we started talking divorce in the first year.
And friends of ours came and said, everyone, a lot of people in AA decided to change everything in their first year.
Just hang in there, guys.
You'll be okay.
And we did, and we started popping babies after that.
Justin and Kayla, my twins, showed up in 1985.
Well, thank you.
And followed by that, Corey showed up in 87.
We had moved to California, Irvine at that time.
Thank you.
Great program, both AA and Al-Anon in Orange County.
We have over 120 Al-Anon meetings in a given week and 10 times more AA meetings.
It should be the other way around, but that's what it is.
And just before my last child came, Nathan, about eight years into her sobriety,
my former wife said that she had been having these dreams and impressions and memories of the past.
And it came out that very nasty things had happened.
It happened to her in her childhood by her father and by a priest and by an uncle, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And the dynamics of our relationship started to change.
What was a reasonably decent physical intimate relationship became a non-physical relationship.
And eventually, we were sleeping in separate rooms.
And seven years into this slowly deteriorating situation, she got up one morning and said, this marriage is over.
I'd been praying for a divorce because the thing was so awful.
I couldn't touch her.
We couldn't talk to each other.
Just everything was going to hand and help us.
We were sleeping in separate rooms.
Here we have kids.
And for some reason, I got really upset.
OJ Simpson showed up at me and I took a cleaver and I'm banging up on the kitchen table.
I'm throwing her books around.
I'm just going nuts.
Excuse me.
And I decided to sue her.
I went to see an attorney and sat across from her.
I wanted to prove to the world that she was incapable of raising children.
Now we had four children.
Incapable of owning a house.
Blah, blah, blah.
The whole nine yards.
As I'm talking to her, my sponsor showed up.
God rest his soul.
Dean was a father figure to me and a sponsor.
And his definition of step one was, what is the problem?
Identify the problem.
See, I realized.
One day, as I'm driving from a men's group, I go to a wonderful men's group.
And I attend groups and mixed meetings as well.
And the question about acceptance.
In a one-day-at-a-time book, it says acceptance is admitting the existence of a reality.
Simple.
And I'm driving and my mind says, wait a minute.
Isn't your reality contingent upon your perception of the reality?
And I said, yes.
And it says, if your perceptions are off, then what is yours?
What is your reality?
I was having an LSD moment.
And I've never used LSD.
But then I recognized, my reality truly is contingent upon how I view it.
How I'm looking at you is not you.
It's what my impressions of you are based on what I'm collecting in terms of the data that's coming in.
It has nothing to do with real reality.
And I'm reading this thing by Richard Rowan.
It talks about early Christians were very much like Buddhists.
They did not cast their shadow upon reality.
They accepted what was.
It's in the moment as it is.
And that's what the beauty with this program is.
We live one day at a time.
And the early Christians did not have churches, did not do sermons, did not do any of that.
In fact, they were called desert fathers and mothers, abbas and amas.
And a lady walked up to an abba and said, abba, what do I have to do to find heaven?
Because they didn't have the concept of heaven and hell in terms of the duality.
And he looked at her.
He was twining rope.
And he said, I'm doing it right now.
Which means he was fully committed to the moment and conscious presence.
And that's where he was.
And so my reality is confounded by how I view people because I'm judging constantly.
And I have the gift of rationalization, which is awful.
I don't judge.
I make observations.
I'm not sarcastic.
I'm blessed with acerbic wit.
So how can you clear yourself if you're constantly disguising it with these fancy means of explaining away defects of character?
And so my sponsor taught me this whole process of Al-Anon, the 12 steps era, is pulling away the masks,
one painful mask at a time, to come face to face with truly what's been happening inside.
So here I am confronted with this one.
The sponsor shows up.
So what's your problem?
I said, I do not want to lose my kids.
And he says, what makes you think you're going to lose your kids?
Because my reality is I'm going to lose my kids because every woman wants the maximum child support she can get
by taking 100% custody.
That's what I've heard.
That's what I've listened.
So I know my wife is that way.
And he said, how do you know?
And I said, I don't.
He says, why don't you ask?
This is all happening in my head.
My sponsor's talking.
So I walk out, and I call my wife, and I said, I will not take you to court on one condition.
She said, what's that?
I said, I don't want to lose the kids.
She said, you're an idiot.
We have four.
I don't want them to my cell.
My divorce cost me 700 bucks.
All the paperwork.
We decided we were not going to have custody issues.
We were going to parent jointly.
My kids have been blessed as a consequence of that.
I'm not going to tell you that they're perfect kids.
No one is perfect.
They're wonderful, wonderful kids.
I love them dearly, and they love me back dearly.
I know that.
And my former wife was actually living in the house for the longest time that we both owned,
so the kids could all graduate from that house.
And then she decided not to move, so eventually we had to go to court.
And my present wife really helped me through the process,
because I tend to be this I-don't-care attitude when inside I'm caring and I'm upset,
but this outside, and my wife brought me to the truth that, hey, this mattered,
and I need to take care of myself because I was being taken advantage of.
But we still do not have an acrimonious relationship.
Through the process of the legal issues, I did not have any ill will to this woman,
and that's the gift of this program.
So here I am walking out.
We've done this thing, and we saw a divorce therapist.
Okay.
Marriage therapist might have been better, perhaps, but it wasn't meant to be.
And the divorce therapist said, do not get involved with women, period, for a year.
I said, woman, I'm moving to the island of Lesbos in Greece,
where there is an island of Lesbos which is founded by a lesbian, but that's not true anymore.
So I'll be around women, but not with them.
And she smiled.
She said, you'll get a two-by-four across your face if you get into a relationship.
And as I said, I'm a master of rationalization.
She said, you.
You have to go through this and go through the process of getting rid of all the baggage before you meet someone else.
So I moved out on July 4, 1996.
In August of 1996, I walk into my Friday night meeting, and there's this woman sitting,
and she's making flirtatious eyes at me and smiling at me and all that.
And I knew I'd known this woman.
For some reason, there was a seat only next to her.
Now, this is angel number two that comes into my life, and I'll tell you why.
I'm sitting next to her, and I can see there's an energy going on, and I ask her out, and she said yes.
And I said, jeez, you know, I've been separated for seven years at the house, two years sleeping separately.
So I have moved on, I tell myself.
We decided to go out, and it became a very, very intense relationship.
But thank God it was for a very short time, and I say thank God for a reason.
I'm really grateful that she came into my life and gave me everything that was lacking in my marriage for the last X number of years.
I'm really grateful that she came into my life and gave me everything that was lacking in my marriage for the last X number of years.
Physically, emotionally, every which way.
So I really got lost again.
I did not get into a jeet.
I was so caught up in this relationship.
And again, you know, people would look at me, oh my God, you've got a beautiful woman next to you, and what's going on with you?
You've just come out of the divorce, and you're great, blah, blah.
I wasn't even divorced.
I was separated.
And as the divorce therapist had suggested, a two-by-four hit me about eight months later when the woman decided to leave me.
And as the divorce therapist had suggested, a two-by-four hit me about eight months later when the woman decided to leave me.
And as the divorce therapist had suggested, a two-by-four hit me about eight months later when the woman decided to leave me.
And I was so devastated, even more so than I was with the divorce.
And I was so devastated, even more so than I was with the divorce.
And I was so devastated, even more so than I was with the divorce.
And I walked up to my sponsor.
I said, do you have a gun?
He said why?
I said, I have too much of a God to shoot myself.
Will you kill me because I'm in too much pain?
Instead, he said, when was the last time you'd been alone?
He said, I can't recall.
My sponsor never told me what to do, how to do, when to do.
He always would be there to offer suggestions, to reason things out, what have you.
and too much pain. Instead, he said, when was the last time you've been alone? I said, I can't
recall. My sponsor never told me what to do, how to do, when to do. He always would be there to
offer suggestions, to reason things out, what have you. But this time, he gave me a very clear
directive. He said, why don't you do a fourth step differently this time? I want you to lock
yourself up for a couple of days and use the page 345 in your courage to change. There are four
questions. The first question is, who am I? The second question is, what are my values? I've been
to Catholic school 12 years in India, where I knew the values were honesty, fidelity, blah, blah, blah,
but I never really practiced any of them to the best of my abilities, because I had veered and
wandered many times. He said, I'll change that for you, because you're a thinking guy, not a doing
guy. So we're going to ask you, what do you value and how do you show it? The next question is, what
traits of character do you wish to keep?
And the last one was, what traits of character do you wish to get rid of? So it was November of
1997, Thanksgiving time, I locked myself up. I'd done some readings before that, and my therapist
had recommended a book called How to Be an Adult, written by a recovering, I think he's a recovering
alcoholic, the guy, beautiful book, hitting me between the eyes in terms of the kind of people
I brought into my life and the energies I pulled into my being. So I read that, and I read another
book called Conversations with God.
It's a book about how to be an adult, and I read it, and I read it, and I read it, and I read it,
and I read it, and I read it, and I read it, and I read it, and I read it, and I read it, and I read it.
And I read all this stuff just to kind of get ready for this thing, and I'm reading
Al-Anon literature, and I locked myself up, and we had pages in those days, if you remember
those little things. I shut that off, cell phones off, TV off, and I told my former wife,
I said, please have the kids with you, don't send them to the house this time for a couple
of days. I started to write, who am I? See, I denied who I was. I wanted to be James Bond,
but it's very difficult to walk up and say, hi, my name is Shahani. It doesn't have that cachet,
like, hi, my name is Bond, James Bond. Because my family was refugees from now what is called
Pakistan. It was all India. And so we had, I was born in Bombay, but they had come, and
with that, there was a lot of shame and embarrassment because they'd left all their wealth behind.
But the community that I belonged to did extremely well as refugees, so they were the source
of envy for a lot of people. So we were targeted in many ways in terms of, you know,
majorities and what have you. So I didn't want to be who I was because of that. In school,
people would tease you for who you were. I just wanted to be someone else. And so I did not really
get to know, there was no introspective work going on because I had this mask around me that kept me
from realizing who I was. So I'm writing this, and I'm really angry, angry at my father, tears
flying out because he didn't play cricket with me. He didn't play ball with me. My father didn't
know what end of the bat to hold, for God's sake. His job, his job, his job, his job, his job,
his job of that generation did not say, I love you. They made sure you're closing your
back, roof of your head, went to school, had a decent meal. That was their business. Angry
at my sister. I mean, I didn't realize the victim that was there was just pouring out
on that piece of paper, and I'm raging. And a friend of mine told me I almost had a near
psychotic experience with that, with the doctor being there. What are my values, and who do
I value, and how do I value? How do you value my children? How do you value your business?
How do you value Al-Anon? I'm writing all this stuff.
And I'm going through the traits of character I wish to keep, traits of character I wish.
I did not believe I had any insecurities, any feelings of envy, any of that. None of
the baser instincts belonged to me, but here they were pouring out like crazy because the
truth was coming out. It was Friday evening when I was done. I heard an air speaker put
it about as well as anyone. He said, I had my feet firmly planted in midair. And for
the longest time, that's what had happened. That Friday night, thud, my feet hit the ground,
and Darth Vader showed up. Welcome to the dark side.
And I'm so very grateful that I was able to integrate the not so good about me with the
good about me. And I love, I get this meditation from the Richard Rohr Center for whatever,
and I feel free to talk about how this program has led me to integrate some of the stuff
that connects with the program, where he talks about St. Francis.
St. Francis is a favorite of mine. We have that whole reading in the back of our Al-Anon
literature. It's a bookmark, St. Francis of Assisi prayer. And St. Francis literally thrived
on the fact that he had defects because he did not want to achieve any kind of perfection.
And to him, a defective character was a blessing because that made him realize the need for
being in connection with a power greater than himself, a power that he called God or whatever
he called it.
And I'm grateful today that I have defects of character. I was really ticked off at my
wife's sponsor, who said, you know what? You're a codependent. You have codependency issues.
See, my wife and I met each other in Al-Anon in 2005. No, she didn't bat any eyelids at
me or what have you. We were friends, and I got invited to a party. I don't know if
you know Scott R. He's dead now, but he's an AA speaker. His wife invited me his 20th
AA birthday.
And I invited Vicky.
Vicky?
Vicky to go with me and her friend. Her friend decided not to show up, and Vicky and I went
to make a long story short. What ended up just as a friendly date turned out to be a
romantic date, and we started to see each other. But in the years that we were together,
both had brought baggage. She brought trust issues, and I brought all kinds of issues
that I wasn't even aware of. And we broke up three times during those 10 years. And
every time we broke up, it was a spiritual shift.
So that's angel number three in one sense, because I realized, as I'd read someplace,
but it did not resonate at the time, that we're all addicted to something. And this
one said, most of us are addicted to certain patterns of thought. And I did not realize
that an element of my relationship with my now wife was addictive. It was a need rather
than a want. And I didn't recognize it, because I know how to twist my things by rationalizing.
Every time we broke up, it was the last time when she broke up with me, I looked at myself
in the mirror and said, I am okay if she never, ever comes back into my life. I'm totally
free right now. I'm in pain. I'm not going to deny that. But I'm totally free. And I
think finally God said, now you're ready for a real relationship.
And in fact, I had proposed to her, and she had accepted, and she broke off. And she returned
the ring to me. And I thought when we got back, I'd just hand the ring over to her.
She said, no, you got to re-propose. I said, re-propose? What do you mean? She said, yep,
I'm not accepting the ring unless you tell me that you want to ask me to marry you again.
And I was telling a sponsor of mine who had gone through the same thing, I said, so are
you going to re-propose to your lady? He said, what do you mean re-propose? We've done it
once. I said, you don't understand women. Re-propose.
So we've been blissfully married since November 1.
We are confronted with addiction in our home. And it's a whole different story. You know,
it's easy to detach when you're not dealing with addiction or what have you, when you're
not in a relationship. Now I'm in a relationship, the most intimate of relationships. And my
stepson, her son, has moved in with us. And he was brutally stabbed in 2013. He got into
a fight with one of his best friends, well under the influence.
And the young man decided he didn't have an addiction. And his usage then became just
over the weekends. And then we discovered it's a daily thing with mostly THC. And it
turned out that it's not just THC. It also does ketamine, which is a horse pill and some
other stuff. I'm pretty much detached from the young man. But I found myself not detaching
with compassion.
And it was a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very,
very, very, very.
Just bordering on apathy, like, I don't give a shit. It's what you're gonna do. This is
your bloody life. Go do it. But I'm recognizing that's not detachment, it's just distancing.
And I don't want to be distanced.
My issue's more with my wife in the sense to watch her in pain and watch her struggle.
She has 13 years in program. And I heard her say, I cannot be experiencing this now that
I'm in program 13 years. And I was laughing. I said, it took me 17 years to come to that
realization that you never, ever can both be in pain.
You never, ever not have that.
My sponsor used to say,
just because you're in a program doesn't mean your thinking doesn't get screwy.
It simply means when it gets screwy, you know where to go.
So I keep coming back to deal with my screwy thinking.
So we're dealing with that at home right now,
and hopefully this program will sustain us both
and walk us through the whole process.
Difficult at times to watch my wife and the pain that she has
because it's a son, it's a child.
I don't have that connection.
We have that conversation.
I said, I cannot sit there and talk with you about this in any deep way.
You need to be doing this with your sponsor,
only because I don't have a frame of reference.
Even though I have a now 30-year-old son,
he was 23 when he got a second DUI,
and his mother says, he said he was going to move to a university campus,
and his mother said, and you cannot drink.
And I started to laugh, and he jumped up and he said,
Mom, I'm not alcoholic.
If I decide I'm alcoholic, it will come from within.
And I looked at him, I said, son, I'm already going where I need to go,
and if you're an alcoholic, you know where to go with your mother.
He had asked me, he said, I have to go to these AA classes.
How do I introduce myself?
I said, you can get up and say I'm Justin.
I'm a member of DAM.
He says, what's that, Drunks Against Mad Mothers?
He didn't think that was too funny.
Okay.
Today he tells me he does drink, but sometimes to excess, I'm sure.
But he doesn't live with me, and I love my son, and I accept him for who he is,
and I know that, you know, the beauty about this deal is we were listening to this guy
who was a Lutheran but became a Buddhist, and he writes books,
and he said something that was a pure detachment.
He said, I deal with a lot of alcoholics and drug addicts, he said in his talk, and he said,
and some of them in their darkest of moments find connection with spirit.
Who are we to interrupt the process?
And that hit me between the eyes.
I don't know when this young man is going to connect with the goodness and God
of his own misunderstanding or beyond comprehension.
That's between him and his God.
Who am I to stop that process or interrupt it or create a crisis to make it happen?
We have a beautiful saying in Al-Anon, we don't create a crisis,
but we don't prevent one in the happening.
So anyway, I'm done with my fourth step.
I'm there now doing my fifth, my sponsor, and I moved on.
Six and seven have been my saving grace.
Six.
Six is where I make a list of the effects of character that I'm getting ready,
and I was fighting that step for the longest time because I thought that I had to find payoffs
for holding on to my, I had to be totally ready to get rid of a defective character.
And then I reread it in this book by Richard Rohr, where he says,
you become entirely ready for God to remove.
I don't have to do all the grunt work.
It's a paradox of the 12 steps.
The paradox of step six is I do all the work, then I stop.
It's God's turn now to take over.
And I become entirely ready to say, God, you have it.
So today, six and seven have been the underpinning of my program,
where I not only let go of defects of character to God, they keep coming back.
And my sponsor reminded me, remove is not to extinguish.
It's simply moving someplace else.
Re-move is moved.
So it's always there, but if I do the do's,
I don't have to worry too much about not doing the don'ts.
Eight has been a wonderful trip as well.
I read this thing about guilt.
It tells a story about an ant that met an elephant in the circus,
and they fell in love and they got married.
And the night they consummated their marriage, the elephant died.
The next morning, the ant looks heavenward and said,
oh, God, for one night of pleasure, I have to spend a lifetime burying it.
That's the impact of guilt.
Beating myself.
Beating myself up for something I've done.
My God has already forgiven me because my God never judged me in the first place.
There's a beautiful saying in one of the ancient readings that says,
the actions of mankind are left untouched upon God,
because I don't have to worry about this is my existence if I commit mistakes
and I do some things, my program gives me the tools in step nine to make amends.
I have distinguished for myself the difference between saying sorry and making restitution.
My four-year-old taught me that.
He said, Dad, you always say sorry,
but you never change what you're doing.
It hit me like I should have aborted him at age four, but I didn't.
I didn't realize he was my sponsor at the time, too.
So today I know just saying sorry doesn't mean anything.
I have to make restitution.
It's been a long journey, and the steps have been my savior in the process.
I have cleared up my thinking somewhat so I don't focus on people so much.
The more I've accepted myself, the more I accept you,
the more I feel comfortable in my own skin.
This has been the process for me.
I heard at 80 in my Al-Anon meeting explain disease
because I fought the word disease for Al-Anons.
I said, we don't have a disease.
And she explained, she said, disease is dis-ease,
the insides not matching the outsides.
And that resonated.
Today I feel more comfortable.
My insides match my outsides more than it ever has.
I'm not going to tell you that I reached it.
I asked my sponsor, how do I know when I've arrived in Al-Anon?
He said, when you're twice as good as your wife thinks you are
and half as good as you think you are.
So I'm still a work of progress and it's taking time.
I think I'll finish with this.
It's a story about the footwork we have to do in our program.
It's this guy, he goes to this wonderful banquet.
He's having a phenomenal time watching people,
thinking he's going to have this wonderful meal.
But waiters and waitresses are bustling by him
and no one is waiting on him.
And he's really getting upset.
15, 20, 30 minutes go by.
And now he's steaming until he comes to the realization
that he's at a buffet.
So this Al-Anon, AA, all these sorts of buffets,
we have to get up, we have to do the footwork.
And we can't, at least for me, I can't wait.
I don't like the word, oh, I'm blackbelting the program
or what have you.
There is no blackbelt here.
There is no fight here.
This program is a program of surrender.
Lady from Toronto, she's a former nun.
I don't know if she's spoken here or not.
She's an AA speaker.
She put it beautifully.
She said,
She said,
Michael Angelo always knew the Pieta was in the stone.
He chipped away at the excess.
And this program has been chipping away
and it's worked hard on me.
I'm like the cliffside that the ocean has just been battering against
and it's taken a long time because this thing gets in the way.
The rationalizations, the intellectualizations,
the conversation that happened here,
sometimes there's a constriction
that does not allow the program to seep in.
But as I keep coming back, even when I get into a state of complacency,
and my sponsor reminded me, you will get into a state of complacency
because you've heard the same spiritual pablum in those meetings.
You've heard the same crap.
You'll say that to yourself.
Sometimes you'll feel that the only wise thing that's coming
out of the program is out of your mouth and that's arrogance,
which means I have to go back to the basics.
So we are back doing basics.
My wife and I work a program together and independently.
We go to sessions with some friends.
We have friends to work on a step.
We also go to a couples meeting,
which is designed for working coupleships
because, you know, she's a feeling person.
I'm a thinking person.
And when my wife sits and talks about feelings in the past,
I would explain to her that feelings are based on perceptions
and if you alter your perception, your feelings will change.
Who cares?
She's experiencing a feeling.
And I had to literally, and I'll finish on this
because this program has really altered my relationships.
It's a program for relationships.
My third son, Corey, was most affected by the divorce
and what have you because he was babysitting the youngest.
At nine years of age, he was caretaking a six-year-old.
He's very, very angry.
And he grew up, he started to live with me.
And one day he looked at me, he said, I am so angry
that when I leave you, I will never, ever set foot
in this house or see you again.
And I had him sit down with me.
I said, if you're this angry at me, just pour it out.
Tell me what you're so angry about.
He says, I'll think about it.
So he came one day, he said, I'm ready.
He sat down and he gave it to me with both barrels.
Now, in the past, this man would have given him 16 different
reasons why his feelings were not valid, like I did to my wife.
You're wrong.
The stuff, something in me made me just sit and listen.
And I looked at him, I said, some of the stuff I can remember
that you're telling me, but some of the stuff I don't.
But that does not mean it did not happen.
And I apologize for everything, but I can't change the past.
I heard an Al-Anon speaker beautifully said, we cannot change the past.
We can only change our relationship with the past.
I said, I'm willing to move forward if you are.
He said, I'll think about it.
I said, you son of a, in my head, I didn't say anything to him.
Three days later, he came and said, I'm ready, Dad.
He gave me a hug, and today he works with me.
And that's the beauty of this relationship.
The same thing with my wife.
When she broke up with me, now a sponsor of mine, he wasn't a sponsor then.
As I was walking by him, he said, oh, my God, Ajit, my sponsor has asked me
to do a third step on my relationship.
Bing, went home, and I started to write.
Some of the things that Vicky had seen about me had given her false impressions,
but they were very real.
And as I wrote, I said, oh, my God, if I were in his shoes,
I might draw the same conclusions.
This is the gift the program has given me, that despite this venue of arrogance
that is there with me and the ego and all that,
moments of light come through when I can see things
from someone else's perspective and connect differently
than I've ever done in the past.
And I'm so grateful to this program for that.
Long ways to go yet, and a long trip, so I come to the buffet,
and I do get up and help myself.
I have a sponsor.
I work with the program, and I sponsor people now differently.
I don't tell them what to do unless they ask for a specific direction.
And I'm grateful for all that.
I'm grateful to you again for letting me take an hour of your time or more.
And I hope you have a wonderful day.
Ocean City is beautiful.
Good to come back.
I know my name is not.
I'm unusual because the last time I came here,
I was hosted by a guy named Zippy.
And today I got invited by a guy named Popeye.
So Ajit is no longer that unusual.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.