Julie A. at the Don’t Sweat the Summer Big Book Workshop – 2025

hi I'm Julie I'm an alcoholic let's get situated up here okay I'm losing my voice a little bit it's gonna be great okay my sobriety date it's August 18th 2012 you know I've been starting off with this lately when I speak and it's it's still with me so I'm going to continue you know saying that until something else moves through me to start these talks and I've heard other speakers say it or a version of it but what becomes really clear to me more than ever on on days that I speak because I have a lot of fear of the fear that hasn't left me and I speak quite a bit and um and I go through a whole a whole process to continue to get up here there's a lot of fear that I walk through and what I come starkly into contact with every time I speak is um is I return to the truth and the truth is that I want desperately I need desperately to live in God's world I need to live reality I have to if I am not seeking that i'm not well stone cold sober not well i have to surrender to what is every day and um and there are there are tasks in alcoholics anonymous that uh that that force me to do that on some days more than others and this is one of them so what i recognize standing up here today is first of all i have only one thing to talk about ever up here and that's god that is all there is right and what the problem is that drove me to god and i like to recognize that we're here together in a moment this particular group of people and i don't know that all of us just us will ever be together again in a room just us experiencing this this is a moment in time we will never experience another one like this is exactly how god designed it right me up here with my sore throat the vessel is the vessel is frail today guys it's frail you know and i was driving we were driving here in my head and then i'm thinking and it's like these aren't the thoughts that are in the front of my head they're in the back was like i gotta speak my sponsor i gotta impress my sponsor you know like not like a bozo on the bike i gotta express nicoletta and then it's funny then the thought this must be intuitive thought the thought that comes to the front my head is like why don't you impress her by making that unfinished amends. She'd probably be really impressed if you called her and said, I'm ready, right? My head is like, no, I got to do this, I gotta do that. I have a feeling the four of us, and I love these three dearly, and Julie, thank you so much for doing this. Julie was one of the first women I started sponsoring when I moved back here to New Jersey and I was in rough shape, and she helped me a lot. I'm up here to talk about steps two and three, so I have a lot to cover. I take that really, really seriously, but I want to qualify myself briefly before I do. And I'm just going to use a couple illustrations to describe kind of how I was, and I think you'll get the picture pretty quickly. So the first is that it took me seven years after the first time I stepped into a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous to actually get sober. And what the seven years in between looked like was me loaded in meetings. I was loaded in readings. I was that one, sharing. I got something to say. I want to be a part of, you know? at one of these in a very early meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous I was sharing that was the first problem right and the second problem in this particular meeting was I was sharing about drugs and after the meeting the chairperson a really nice man an enthusiastic member of Alcoholic Anonymous came up to me and pulled me aside and he said he tried to explain singleness of purpose to me and why we try to limit our conversation to alcohol and this is how you know we honor this in this meeting so i got mad and caught a resentment and left because i knew more than than anybody else about how alcoholics anonymous should be run this beautiful container that doctors have recognized as the only thing that restores alcoholics of sanity that exist and I don't even know how many countries around the world different languages different religions different not non-religious all of it right but I come in and I got something to say and I'm kindly introduced to one of the things that you know we try to do in here and I know more and I am angry and I storm out so so and this is and take that example and just insert it into that that was me that was mean as I was either the smartest one in the room i knew more than all of you or i absolutely hate myself and they go very quickly that shatter the chatter the false sense of self and the best way i cannot take it seriously is to share it i come up here and i get transparent it's it's my calling to do so is to speak in that way um i have experienced uh i've experienced the utter failure of self-will um when i stopped doing that when i started listening hypnotized by my own voice by my own insanity at 10 years sober completely blew up my life but we'll we'll get to that a little bit in step three so um so step two you know nicoletta who i mean is she incredible come on i mean the spirit right she's helped me so much you know to tap into that but she talked about wanting to kill herself or stay locked up and isn't it interesting that in the big book in um on page 25 and there is a solution they talk about the the blotting out the consciousness of our situation go mixing up all the words uh let's just open the book here shall we we were in a position where life was becoming impossible and if we had passed into the region from which there is no return through human aid we had but two alternatives one was to go on to the bitter end blotting out the consciousness of our intolerable situation as best we could and the other to accept spiritual help and we talked a lot in here about jails institutions and death right it isn't interesting that that's the thing we wind up wanting more than anything institutions or death and my experience was the same i was suicidally depressed before i found um, substances and that relieved the condition, the ism for a while until it didn't. And then I had two problems, which was, you know, I was suicidally depressed and now I couldn't stop drinking no matter what. I couldn'T stop drinking in these rooms. I couldN'T stop drinking when I lost everything. I COULDN'T STOP DRINKING after being committed to psych hospitals and getting out and going through horrific detoxes and withdrawals and, um, and starting the cycle over and over again, over and over and over and over and over again. And this was my life. And I came in here agnostic. The big book talks about, you know, they tell us that so we start in the chapter to the agnostics. They say about half the original fellowship was agnestic, right? So that half the original fellowship was Bill and Bob, right? Bill was the agnóstic and Bob was the religious. And if I asked you guys how many people in here came into Alcoholics Anonymous agnostic so that's like i don't know roughly half the room so it's we're just geeked out big boogers so we ask this a lot time when we speak and i like to see it's it seems to be the same about half of us come in agnestic or atheist or something like that and that was me um like my sponsor i pursued a degree in philosophy and um i and uh um i i accomplished that and i prided myself on being able to have big profound conversations about you know philosophical things and um and and so in step two you know we recognize that there's uh that we are powerless right and nicoletta set us up for that really well and we come to believe that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity and i was taught that the word that is very important in the second step that we're not believing in yet we are believing that it's funny it's like the ego of the alcohol it's like i need to i needto know before i get to step three before i turn my will my life over to the care of god as i understood him i have to know well why would i even why would I do that? What will that power do for me? So I learned that in step one and then they say, here's the solution to your problem. And the big book talks about lack of power was our dilemma. And it talks about seeking power is what this book is about. That's what this look is about. Do you guys know this is not a book about how to get sober? Because it's just the understanding that we can't get sober. We can't do it. I couldn't get myself sober guys my mind hypnotized me my entire life and it continues to in my own voice with thoughts, ideas and the most seductive the most seductative thing it ever hypnotized me with was alcohol not the only thing I have been battling the same thing throughout my sobriety but the most seductve one was alcoholism i had no power and i always thought i was going to find it there was always a way there was always a plan there was a method there was this or the i'm gonna well stay on this and i'll do this for the anxiety and if i treat that and i make sure i don't do that i'm going to go here and we bounce it i mean it was um it was relentless it's painful you know so i get a book about how to find how to seek power and how to find that power that's what this book is about that's good news and I want to talk about a couple on a kind of address what I see I guess is like a couple um myths in step two and this is an opinion mixed in with how I with how I read this book based on experience my experience I did this and the experience of taking hundreds of women through the work the book talks about you can find your own concept you can have your own conception of God this is great news and they make it really clear all through the chapter to the agnostics right and then they say at one point therefore when we speak of you of God to you of God we mean your own Conception of God so now I'm set up that for the rest of this book when I see the word God they've told me more or less we're using this word to connect us so we're talking about the same thing but we're talking to you personally about your own concept they they they really walk us through um a process of undoing the prejudice that they know we have in the in the second step and so they talk about you know being able to have our own concept of god my experience uh when i got to step two was um that felt very important to me you know it's funny it's like we Now, when we get to two and three, they're considerations before the action steps. Two and three are considerations, then we're going to go into action. And it can be easy in these steps to do the same things I've always done, which are worship my thoughts and feelings. So I'm going to think a whole lot about God. I'm got to come up with the concept. It's going to be right. It's gonna be this. And these people are wrong. And I'm gonna follow this one. And I mean, what if that doesn't feel right? That's not what step two is about. that God is, there's going to be an experience. There's going to be experience. That's why we know that alcoholics cannot find God in a church, right? You can go to church and worship and have faith and do these things in church but the answer is not to be found in coming, that's more mind stuff this is the problem, this is what I did my whole life, worship my thoughts my feelings, now I'm going to sit and I'm gonna come up with this concept and it's not about that right and i did it but you know i take people through the work and i tend to get a lot of agnostic so i walk through this and it's like you want to obsess about your concept but it's like but but you won't write your fourth step you know what i mean it's it's more it's more self-will it's how i start inserting my self-willed in this work you know and i would like to talk interchangeably about what it looks like to work steps two and three new newly sober and then also um with a long period of sobriety like I have now and I'm just going to move back and forth to do that and um you know it's funny I had the experience I just described I had a very similar one a couple years ago I did that stone cold sober and what that looked like was that I guess this downfall started at about eight years sober um what happened was I stopped working a program of self-examination it's really very simple that's what happened I could give you a whole lot other details I can give you my trauma history I could give you the big thing that I really wanted in life that I didn't get that I still don't have and then I started to feel victimized around that but I got hypnotized by that idea just like I was hypnotized by alcohol just like i've been hypnotized by relationships just like I've been hypnotized but it says in the book the great reality is in the last analysis it's found deep down within us right but we're sleepwalking dreaming we're awake so we're going through life and we're and it's out we think it's there somewhere right it's not it's never found there so at eight nine years sober I simply stopped working a program of self examination right and then covid came and it was great because I could just see ya you know I'll go on zoom now and then turn my camera off you know and I was repelling sponsees and people were just kind of falling away from me and I Was relieved honestly because it's hard to think about you and I'm so busy thinking about me because I got to think real hard about how to solve this problem right now I haven't picked up a drink in 10 years this is not about alcohol this is about I'm an adult and I need to fix my life up and when we talk about step three if you want to see the areas where you're currently agnostic just look at the areas where your life isn't thriving look at where it's hard feel where it is hard that's it but I became convinced and this wasn't a conscious decision it's the decision that happens back here because here's when decisions back here start being made when I stopped working a program of self-examination and just like when I came in I thought I was a super complicated you know I came in the last time I got sober I came in 45 pounds lighter than I am right now now with the skin on my face and my arms clawed off, holes in my arms. I couldn't walk. I was crawling upstairs. I didn't walk upstairs. Hysterical all the time. This is how I came in, right? And I thought I was much more complicated than all of you. So at 10 years sober, I'm in that delusion again. I got a problem, I gotta fix it. And when I stopped working a program of self-examination, the next saying you know i'm just i'm running on self-will and things aren't quite working out but i think if i you know can rest satisfaction happiness if i only manage well so i'm going harder i'm trying to fit this but i'm trying to figure it out and um and that's and that'S what happened And so, spoiler alert, it didn't work. It blew up like really bad, really bad. And I owed a bunch of amends, serious amends. There was, I took prisoners along that I hurt people. Maybe I'll get a little more into the specifics of the story later, but it's not important. You just insert it. I think something's about one thing, but then it comes about untreated alcoholism. And that's my truth. I've demonstrated this truth. I didn't think that was the truth at 10 years sober, but it was. That's my proof. That's the truth. You have to be armed with the facts about yourself, right? So I drift away from this program of self-examination, but I'm still participating in spiritual activity. So I'm going to these meditation retreats, and I'm doing these crazy meditations. And I'm, I'm dealing all spiritual stuff, but I'm not working a program of self-examination. I'm that doing four through 11. And then so subsequently, I am not doing 12, right? I'm kind of pretending I am, but not really. And I am doing, and am into some pretty groovy spiritual stuff. And I might get up here a little later and do some of step 11 if I still have a voice left and i can i'll talk about that but um what i have found is that when you when you do the spiritual stuff without the program of self-examination um it doesn't work i don't know what to tell you it's wild it just doesn't work and when i tell you spiritually spiritual stuff i'm telling you four-hour meditations with energy to my throat chakra and my heart chakra but then i'm getting up and i'm and then i's lying so you can't spoiler alert you can clear your throat chakra when you're lying there's no energy can do it it doesn't i tried so hard you can trick god you can't trick the great reality why because it's found deep down within us i can trick you guys for a little while but you are going to get the idea eventually because we're fundamental we're all one that gets some to some far out stuff but that's what i believe i believe this is these are the containers that create the appearance of separation but we are deeply connected and eventually you know and you drift away from me but i can usually fool you for a little while um i have a lot of experience with um so so back to my concept of god you know today i am and i've had many throughout sobriety i don't have one today i'll tell you guys you know i really don't care if god exists or not it says on page 46 i think we're not going to be able to comprehend fully comprehend this power it's we're not going to right i don't really care if god is real or not because i'll tell you guys when i submitted to this power surrendered to it but not in steps two and three are felt retroactively you go on through the rest of the work you have an experience with two and three so if we're sitting working on your second step concept for a month you're dying and you're rolling the dice and you are doing mental gymnastics for nothing right Okay, so, I have no current concept. I don't care if God is real or not because that power has enabled me to help. I don't know how many people have helped over the last 12 years I was taught to be disciplined and alcoholics anonymous I bring the vessel in whatever condition it's in I show up God works through me that's not the kind of person I was if I was depressed I stayed in bed for two weeks I worship my thoughts and my feelings because of that I have a relationship with my nieces and nephews I'm one of their first relationships and that was my big grief was that I'm not a mom. But I have five kids in my life under the age of six. And we love each other so much. But I want to worship the self-pity that it didn't look the way it needed to look. I didn't grow and birth the human, so I'm now a woman. I'm a real woman. See, these are the old ideas, the prejudices, the preconceived thoughts and opinions is what prejudice means these are the things that hypnotize me that when I worship them without a program of self-examination it's not going to turn out well and you're going to get hurt, I guarantee it because I'm going to have to start moving people out of the way to get the things I think I want I'll give a couple examples of current agnosticism one recent one was in November i my niece she she's six she had just turned six in november so she's a new six you know and she's my best friend and i saw her suffer there was pain and i thought the results of it what happened you know manifest and um i went really dark and I kind of decided this idea that I've been toying with since I was six years old which is that life is terrible it's just bad people suffer, kids suffer I can go there real easily I created a philosophy career I've said it fancier but that's really the right but all that had actually happened was that i was identified with my niece a i love her more than i've never it's a love that and if you have kids or like things like that in your life i never knew an attachment like that until they came i never knew a love like that till they came so to see her hurt and it was similar to things that happened to me when i grew up i identified and that identification myself with the capital s identified with her and now i decide that life is terrible but what happened 10 years 12 years before that when i had a profound spiritual awakening had the mental obsession removed and began uh taking the bus around austin texas to sponsor people because i didn't have a car and i'm on fire and i'M FREE there was another six-year-old child somewhere suffering worse many of them actually why wasn't life terrible then because self wasn't identified self wasn'T right in the middle of that the only difference is when self identifies I then I make a decision I make judgment it feels real because the body in the mind mind really isn'T in the body essentially isn'T it and I become hypnotized by that so this was so um so current agnosticism can look like something like that for me just what it looked like a few months ago right self so we talk about this self um i am i just want before i go on i'm gonna try to move into three keep my eye on the time but i want to stop and last night chad and I were sitting at our table with our books out, and he said, you should really consider to start talking about this in your talks because it reminds me of you. And I said, oh yeah, what's that? He said, I'm 48. On the top it says, we often found ourselves handicapped by obstinacy, sensitiveness, and unreasoned prejudice. Many of us have been so touchy that even casual reference to spiritual things made us bristle with antagonism. That's so sweet. Handicapped by obscenity. It's the first words I saw. So I wanted to read that to you guys. It's true, though. This chapter is really good. The chapter to the agnostics is good. Find yourself in it. Find your prejudice. Find your old ideas. Different lines will jump out to you, but it's unbelievable. Written by another egoic alcoholic up against himself. so when we get to step three um we we've got to be uh there's a couple things i have to be convinced by it's what they tell us one is steps one and two that i'm powerless over alcohol and and what the way nicoletta is so identified with and i'm going to paraphrase but she laid out the idea that there's it can't be this sort of idea of sometimes power that doesn't work I've never seen it work I've seen it work maybe for the hard drinker but if you have what I have, if you drink no matter what if you lose everything around alcohol, ifyou cannot stop no matter what if you do things like pay to therapists to lie to them and sit in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous and get drunk if you have that thing then you don't have a little bit of power i can assure you there's none you got to be defeated and so i had that experience finally um and the darkest and i i've been to some dark places in step i was a low bottom drunk streets and um selling myself and and doing things for for alcohol and other things that um you just keep lowering the bar yeah you have to i'll pay back next time well just you know this i know this guy so it's taking a little money you know well i don't know this but that person introduced me to this guy and then so they know it just the bar kept lowering and by the time i came in i was destroyed i could 30 years old and i couldn't walk um i was really close to death and then so so the assumption at step three is I'm convinced of that and that I'm convinced that no human power can relieve my own in the power greater than myself is the only thing that can restore me to no human aid right and if anyone here that you know that has kids that it's it's like it's when we get like frustrated with sponsees when they won't do what we say and things like that it's like you can't even stop for the love of your children but I think you're going to be able to but I thank you should do what I say right it's the insanity and so I recognize that out of desperation not because I'm a godly woman but out of Desperation right these people have the thing in their eyes I want what they have I tried to come at it sideways and siphon what they had another way it didn't work they waited for me patiently they were still here they're not mad at me that I drank in their meetings shared in their meanings they understand exactly what I'm suffering from so the third step I become convinced the failure of well and a lot of times when I hear the third step talked about it's it's a beautiful prayer right and there's a beautiful third step prayer but what's really laid out in the third step is a really big problem and that and Shannon's gonna come in here and my aim is to set him up for that fourth step because the better you understand that problem that they're laying out in pages 60 through 63 is exactly how you're going to understand what we're going for in the inventory process so and again at my first go through this I start to feel disturbed as I read it or tell me I'm very self-centered you know and I'm like I thought I came in here to get sober you know what is this about a price had to be paid the destruction of self-centeredness how about the destruction of alcohol right now that's that's just gonna be a byproduct so it says being convinced so convinced of one and two all right and then it goes down to say the first requirement is that we'd be convinced again that any life run on self-will can hardly be a success that's it are you convinced of that how did the fruits of your life flourish when you're when you live in on self-well you know honestly it looked worse sober for me than it did loaded that's the truth this disease is progressive and fatal and I almost died around this it was really bad I really hurt people I didn't mean to I meant to start a family that's all Isn't that what adults do? Right? But my truth is I can't have a good life unless I'm deeply convinced of the failure of self-will. I'm surrendered to that. I'm participating in the actions necessary to continue to work a program of self examination and I'm putting helping others first. that's my formula for a good life and you know what, I guarantee I'm going to learn that lesson again you're hearing me up here 12 years sober at 16 years I'll probably have another horror story I don't know or some version of it hopefully it resolves a little quicker the big book talks about us being victims of the delusion that we can rest satisfaction and happiness if we only manage well i have never i have never derived any satisfaction from successful management i just haven't it's all so simple you know i thought my problems were this is the problem it talks about selfishness self-centeredness is the root of our troubles and sometimes we say that wrong we say the root of our problem it's a normal mistake to make but that's very different see i could stand up here and i could tell you about a couple of my problems you know i'm a product of trauma i am blah blah blah even though i've got two younger sisters who are also a product of trauma and they are not alcoholic they have a glass of wine on saturday night and that's it they don't drink and drive they don'T get a bottle of vicodin from the dentist and take it the same night i find it in the cabinet three years later it's absurd it's observed so what i have is not not a result to that right but i have some problems that i could tell you guys about But what they're talking about in the big book is the root of my troubles. Troubles as in daily mental agitation. So, the root of my daily mental agitation is my self-centeredness. Driving here this morning, thinking about how I got to impress my sponsor. I'd love to sit here and say I was just praying for the newcomer of the whole ride. That'd be a lie. Now, when I get myself I'm not capable of that now when I get myself out of the way and bring the vessel and I connect that is very real I don't think I've experienced I haven't experienced anything greater in this life than sitting knee to knee with another woman who can't actually benefit me by doing something for me but just loving her and taking her through this work that's the truth i've never had that that feeling is foreign to me this woman who's self-centered and neurotic to the core but that's what happens when i show up that we were that that's how we recover by doing that so i begin to see that i'm self-centred and not just self-centric in the way like you know like I line up real fast and take the last cup of coffee even though I know you want some I'll do things like that when I'm sleepwalking, trust me but the self-centeredness is deeper than that. It's this I go through life on autopilot I got a pair of headlights on and they highlight my old ideas and where I fit into every equation just like I shared when I identified with my niece in November and um and um it's destructive it's destructive right some days it's low level some days its high level but it's it's it never it doesn't it doesn' generate truth it's all delusion it's all it's outrageous right that we can walk around here and it's like you know we've all seen people in the streets that are maybe suffering from like schizophrenia or something where they're talking a lot out loud about delusional ideas, but that's us. Isn't that your head? And you can dress it up, right? And so it doesn't generate truth, but I go through life in this delusion and I can only see things that... I can always see the evidence of my belief systems and my old ideas and my prejudice and where I fit into everything right and it says we are the producer of confusion rather than harmony and for a long time I thought that meant um confusion uh that the others are can I produce confusion for other people and I do but what I read today is that I'm the one that's confused I tried so hard to make this work but something is it doesn't feel right I'm the one that's refused it's me I am the problem the bottles are a symbol we are different from other people we suffer from a physical allergy and a mental obsession we are different that needs to be dealt with but that's the symbol this thing is so corrosive this thing is so brutal that I am so uncomfortable I go through a nightmare I detox I go through the whole thing I come out and I'm so uncomfortable i pick up again it's insanity these steps are about recognizing this insanity I should probably wrap up right so our troubles we think are basically of our own making of my perspective is a big problem I think that's important to take with us into that fourth step right Shannon's gonna I there's a line on the page before it says we realized that we were somewhat at fault but we were sure that others are more to blame and that's very similar to the idea that Nicoletta laid out about sort of a little bit of powerless doesn't work right when I can go through and sort of pretend to be the adult that's like yeah when my when my nephews are fighting over a toy they're two and four the two-year-old is bigger than the four year old any you know he gets the toy you know and then you know the four-year-old flips out and cries, and I'm like, but you stole it in the first place. But it doesn't matter. The melt, the victimization, the melt, right? Because they're children. But then we grow up, and then we have to blend, right, so I go through and I am like, all right, I see that I might have done something there, but I am sure that it is all of you, right. And they are saying this isn't going to work. See, what is going on in this program is it is a real all or nothing kind of thing. these are concepts that until i'm beaten into that state of reasonableness i'm going to continue to try to do it my way by the third step i need to be out of options and ideas and you know what the truth is i need to remain out of option options and ideas at 10 years sober this is my truth this is not everybody's experience but i'll tell you i share this stuff and i get a lot of women that come to me and want to work with me as a result because they're having that experience they're having the experience at several years sober of the failure of self-will and what i can tell you is no one was more more shocked than me when after my four hour uh throat chakra meditations and pineal gland activation everything else i limped into a meeting of alcoholics anonymous at 10 years so people thought i was a newcomer i had 10 years and a woman came up to me and said i can take you through this work you can have a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps it was jamie you know military cop team and um i just looked at her you know i i was like it's the same thing it's the same solution and i thought it was something different i thought it was different and it was you know and this surrender to self-will and this freedom was one of the educational variety they talk about the different types of spiritual experiences in the appendix my first experience was um the huge sudden spectacular one to be honest with you guys it's not that's not everybody's um but i had a tremendous surrender at about three months sober and the mental obsession was removed um this this surrender to self-will and this awakening has been of the educational variety and we've been shipping away at um six and seven and i got beaten up a couple of times and I've had to, um, uh, show Nicoletta a side of myself. That's embarrassing at 12 years sober. It is. But, um. But she understands what I suffer from. She understands that I, you know, I get hypnotized by self again and how to wake up. This is a process to wake up, but I'm not, I have to understand the problem to do that. Pages 60 through 63 in this book changed my life and they continue to. There's a prayer we ask to be relieved of the bondage of self, not alcohol. So we can do God's will first run through the steps. It's not going to happen on step three. but we get set up to continue through this program of action and that that the experience of god is the one they're talking about that's what they're taking about and that's where they get real serious about how we work these steps our own concept however inadequate they don't tell us in here that many things can be inadequate right they suggest we make all our amends they suggest we get entirely honest so those are the instructions that I really need to take to have the experience of God because when I'm experiencing God my beliefs become unimportant right alright I think I'm done thank you Thank you.