Sandy B. Steps 1 2 and 3

Go ahead and get this thing started. Let's get on the announcement out of the
way that always gets a few boos. It has to do with smoking, but you don't get it.
no controversy
there's no must
but
really just
during the
actual progress
of the meeting here
if you would refrain
from smoking
in this main room
if you need to smoke
and can get out
why go ahead
and
sneak off to either side
and have a smoke and come on back in.
But it just won't.
I'm sorry.
Oh.
I thought there was an announcement.
I'd like to start out by reading the preamble to AA.
I'm sorry.
I can hear every word.
I keep breaking my train of thought.
I'd like to start out by reading the preamble to AA.
Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women
who share their experience, strength, and hope with each other
that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from alcoholism.
The only requirement for membership is the desire to stop drinking.
There are no dues or fees for AA membership.
We are self-supporting for our own contribution.
AA is not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, organization, or institution.
It does not wish to engage in any controversy.
It neither endorses nor opposes any causes.
Our primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety.
My name is Sandy Beech, and I'm an alcoholic, and I'd like to welcome everybody here this morning to a discussion of some of AA's steps.
And we're running this on tape for the last time.
Maybe we'll settle back down to our normal schedule, but the Psychiatric Institute Foundation is going to get a series of these tapes that they can use in some of their other hospitals.
And so that's what this is all about.
So if you want to stay anonymous, laugh with a different tone in your voice
and nobody will know you were here.
If you have friends who can recognize you,
I know her laugh anywhere.
Here on the tape, and there you are.
Your anonymity is shot to hell.
And you know how concerned we are about that.
Anybody finding out that we are in AA,
we don't mind them finding out that we drink a lot
and throw up on our lawn every morning.
heaven forbid that they should find out that we're in Alcoholics Anonymous
because that's just going too far
so I'm just warning you ahead of time
and since we're starting at the very beginning
this is my favorite spot
that means I get a chance to talk a little bit
about the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous
and then eventually get into the first three steps
and I enjoy talking about the fellowship of AA
I enjoy observing it
and I enjoy being part of this phenomenon
that has only recently started in 1935
which really isn't that long ago
when you consider where it has come
since that day in June of 1935
when it got started with just two members
um my own personal opinion is that there has um really been but one or two
phenomenon similar to alcoholics anonymous that i can recall that has what i call this a social
phenomenon where principles are put into practice and and get these kind of results because that's
all that's happened is that certain principles were put into action and in the period of 40 some
years they have achieved in excess of a million miracles and it's just hard to look back through
history and find a whole bunch of events where certain principles are put into practice and then
you had that many miracles it's such a positive force and so aa from a purely a social point of
view is an interesting phenomenon there's more books being written about it and i'm sure there
will be eventually probably courses taught in college trying to understand how something like
this could develop at least it'll be taught in psychology and philosophy courses i'm sure just
trying to come to understand that and when they do i am sure they will have to address
the 12 steps because that's going to be the explanation of why it works is because these
12 steps have been put into action but for those of you that are brand new and are just
coming around here trying to learn a little bit about aa learn a little bit about alcoholism
uh and have maybe attended a few meetings i'm sure you've heard uh reference to the big book
in reference to the co-founders and bill wilson and dr bob and a few of those names so let me
just review a little bit what my memory will tell us about that and that is that the two co-founders
oddly enough were from vermont and i don't know what that means but it always has intrigued me
that the two co-founders and the two drunks came from vermont i didn't know they did that much
drinking up there but that's where they came from for those of you know we're really interested in
this trivia thing and there it is they both came from vermont but they didn't have that
isn't where they got sobered up the one got sobered up in new york and with uh and that
was bill who was a stockbroker and a wheeler dealer and remained a wheeler dealer all the
way through his sobriety and i mean let's face it if you read his story you realize there were
two distinct personalities and uh i relate much more to bill than dr bob dr bob got sobered up
sort of very practical and went to meetings and had a more simple approach to life and Bill suffered
with ideas of grandiosity all the way up until he died even though he had 30 some years of sobriety
he would have depressions and was always looking for something else another way to get this thing
going so it was marvelous to find out that one of the co-founders was as screwed up as I am
and you know and had real life problems every day and because I go gee whiz I ought to be able to
get rid of some of these anxieties and things like that why should you the co-founder couldn't
that makes me feel a little bit better that we're just attempting to put these principles
into practice and very difficult to do it perfectly but he had achieved a measure of
by a measure i mean about six months of sobriety through um sort of a word of mouth um bit of
information about the oxford movement which had preceded aa but they were both very spiritual
oriented uh type of approaches but his sobriety well you know was being handled by himself
he was it and um his initial thoughts before he went off to akron on this business trip
were that he could go out and find some other drunks to talk to in an attempt to help them
and those were his motives then
prior to going to Akron
because he felt pretty good about having a few months
of not drinking and
was willing to share this
but it wasn't until
he got on this business trip
and I don't know if any of you can relate
to this but here was a guy
who had once been very successful had a lot of money
had really done well in
Wall Street as a broker and now
you know had been reduced to nothing but was
making a rebound and was
on his way back up
and the total recovery was dependent on this deal in Akron.
And I don't know if any of you have had everything depending on this one event.
The total future happiness, your whole future is depending on this one.
I don't know how we get ourselves set up in deals like that,
but we do it all the time.
You know, if this doesn't come through, that's it for my whole life,
forever and ever and further than forever and ever.
And so, you know, when you get in that kind of a mental set,
you really are ready to be upset and he arrives in Akron and the deal gets wrapped up in a lawsuit
and there's people going back and forth and it's obviously not going to turn out the way he had
ordered it to prior to leaving New York and as you read the history you find you can sort of
picture him in the hotel in Akron and he's coming down he's really starting to get upset about this
and looking for some relief.
How can I feel better?
I can't stand all these feelings that are sweeping over me.
And he's coming down through the hotel lobby,
and the piano music is coming out of the bar,
and he can hear the laughter over there.
Now that's the bar over on this side of the room.
And at the other end of the lobby is a directory of churches
in the Akron area.
And he looks and looks, and boy, that music sounds good.
and you can just sort of see this conflict that's going on back and forth.
And I believe that this is the moment that my higher power gave us AA,
was right at that moment in the hotel lobby,
when somehow the thought was allowed to appear in Bill Wilson's brain
that said, in order for me, in order for him to stay sober,
he's going to have to find someone else to help had nothing to do with helping the other person
this was the time when the emphasis was shifted in order to stay alive himself he's going to have to
find someone else and just at that moment he went and turned went over and got one of the telephone
numbers off of the directory there called up and said you got any people having a problem with
alcohol in your church and they said oh do we boy have we got a guy so you won't believe it and he
We went and saw Dr. Bob, who was a practicing doctor there,
hardly practicing, more practicing alcoholic.
And it's interesting, when they got together,
Dr. Bob's main concern, and how many 12-step calls,
those of you who have been around a while, can relate to this.
You have a 12-step call, and the guy starts relating a little bit.
Yes, I understand.
Oh, of course, I do have a problem similar to yours,
and I'm willing to go to any length to recover.
But you're talking about making an admission of my alcoholism.
You're talking about me becoming honest.
And I just can't do that to my family.
I just can't do that because if I admit, you know, that I'm an alcoholic
or try to make amends with the past or anything like that,
my patients are going to find out.
And then they won't have me as a doctor anymore.
And then my family will starve to death.
And so, I'm sorry, but it doesn't seem, you know, in the interest of my family, I'm not going to stop drinking.
We're still saying that today, you know, on a sort of routine basis.
I'd like to stop, but I can't. My family enjoys it too much.
What about my wife's social life? What am I going to do? Stop her from having fun?
I'd like to join, but I can't.
So that was sort of, but fortunately, the relationship clicked and both of them never had another drink until they died.
And that was the beginning with the stockbroker and the doctor in Akron.
And they set out best they could to talk to other alcoholics to find them in hospital settings.
and very early on they would emphasize that this particular illness
had no way that a human power could do anything without follow-up.
It was going to have to be a spiritual recovery
and they were novices in explaining this.
They were doing the best of their ability
and I think we still are today in an attempt to convey this particular message.
And at the end of 18 months, which is a lot of time if you think about it,
they had ten members in the world. So it got off to quite a start. Ten members in three
groups, one in New York and one in Cleveland and one in Akron. And I'm sure they're sitting
around going, hey, how are we going to run the meeting? And they're sitting around in
homes and discussing and just sort of getting an idea of what is working and what isn't.
came the year 1939 when they had about a hundred members so you can see its growth get off a very
slow start and at that particular time Bill did most of the writing for the fellowship
and then I guess he'd run it by some sort of an editorial board and they may make a few changes
here and there which they did in the big book but it essentially was written by Bill and there for
For the first time, they set down AA's 12 Steps.
And those of you that haven't read the big book, it's on sale in all the meetings,
a big book called Alcoholics Anonymous,
and it's just a story of how thousands of men and women have recovered from the illness of alcoholism.
And in it, it's funny how things are divided into 12s.
I don't know if it was done on purpose or by chance, but it has 12 chapters,
and 11 of them explained the program
and then the 12th chapter consisted of 30 stories.
So 30 out of the original 100
had their stories in the first big book.
And, of course, those people had anywhere
from one to three years of sobriety.
So there wasn't long-term sobriety contained in those stories,
but it was the beginning.
And it was where, for the first time,
the 12 steps were written down.
This became sort of the basic text of Alcoholics Anonymous, and it's referred to as A.A.'s Bible and A.A.'s official book, or whatever you want to call it.
And as you stay around A.A., you realize there truly is no one in charge, that there really is no head person,
that it's been set up to have just principles, that each group runs their own meeting, they do it the way they see fit,
they share experience with each other, and maybe some other group has a better idea,
and that's sort of been how the fellowship got put together.
And it was here in the big book
that these steps got written down for the first time.
Now, these steps were borrowed from other fields.
There's nothing new.
If you look at the steps written on the wall
at almost any AA meeting,
you'll see that those principles aren't new.
I sat out there at meetings years ago
and went, what's the big deal?
I've known about those.
You know, my sponsor said,
why didn't you ever try any of them?
You know, there's a big difference between knowing about them and using them.
Heaven forbid, why should I use them?
I had my own plan.
It wasn't working too well, but it was my own,
and I certainly didn't want to give up something that I wrote
for something that looked as religious.
This was very suspicious to me.
It looked kind of religious, and I didn't want to get involved in that.
I had given up bingo years before.
I was fed up with religions, and it didn't have anything to do with it,
So I didn't want to really study that.
But as I looked at it intellectually, I saw that there was nothing new up there.
And the AA literature admits to that.
It said, no, there's no new principles here.
They've been borrowed from religions.
They've been borrowed from philosophies.
They've been borrowed from medicine, psychology.
And they've just been assembled here in kind of an interesting fashion.
And AA 12 Steps, I suppose, have a couple of things that make them work.
One of them is the person who is sharing the steps is not a boss or a policeman or a doctor.
It is another alcoholic.
And so the message is coming not from someone who has developed a theory,
but rather from people who have used this and are willing to share,
hey, this is how I got out of hell, would you like to listen?
And if you really are in hell, sometimes you do want to listen.
It gets uncomfortable in there,
and that's the reason that our mind starts to open up slightly towards these steps,
is that we realize the message is coming from someone just like ourselves.
So one of the things that Steps has going for them is who is giving the message.
It's not an authority figure looking down.
Everybody that we've talked to prior to coming to AA is talking down to us alcoholics.
You people ought to stop drinking out there.
Very good advice, but we don't like the direction that it's coming from.
We're lying on our back in the street, and people are pointing down,
talking to us about our drinking, and we don't like that relationship.
And here's someone who's been there who wants to share how they got up on their feet.
The other thing that is interesting about the steps is the manner in which they're presented.
I often wonder, and I've been wondering in some of the AA literature,
how these steps would have fared had they been written as commandments.
And now you're new in AA and you sit down there and a guy gets up there with sort of a German accent
and says, you will admit your pile is over alcohol and your life's unmanageable.
you will do this and i think we would have run right out the door because that is never related
to being ordered into doing anything and here it was i wasn't even in those steps i didn't say
anything about me as a new person all it says is we did this we people who have already done it
i'm not even there until i've done it and i'm looking at it and i'm sort of an outsider and
they're sharing what they had done. These are steps that we've taken that have worked as a
program of recovery for us, and if you're interested in recovery, this works. I mean, at least it did
for us, and that's sort of, there it is. They just sit there on the wall, meeting after meeting, as we
attend the meetings and look up there, and they're always there, and they're always waiting, and they're
very patient. These principals, they'll always work. They're quite reliable, and I think they wait
until we've heard enough to want to try them.
And then we say, what is that stuff about the 12 steps?
Maybe I do want to take a shot at looking at those.
So that's sort of a little bit about the general nature of the 12 steps.
There's a lot involved to the steps.
In order to make them simple, I think you have to do a lot of groundwork.
I really think that, yes, we do attempt to keep it simple.
But keeping it simple requires a great deal of effort.
I compare that to watching a good golfer.
When their swing is perfect, it looks so simple, it's ridiculous.
It hardly expends any effort.
Look how simple that swing is.
And I see some people's lives who are that way.
They just live so comfortably and so simple, following just some basic principles.
But it took a great deal of effort to weed out all the other ideas,
to weed out all of the alternatives that we brought with us into the fellowship.
And that's one of the steps, too.
They enable us to get rid of all of the things that prevent us from keeping it simple,
from keeping it down to what these principles really teach.
And so keeping it simple is true, but it requires a great deal of effort to get there.
As time went along, I think the co-founders realized
that they were learning a great deal more about these principles they learned number one that they
truly were working for everyone because as time went by there was more and more groups more and
more states around the country started getting into groups and started going around into other
countries and so they knew as time went by number one that the steps were working as written and of
course none of the words have ever been changed and the big book remains essentially the same
except for adding more in different stories near the end as AA began to
encompass more and more women were coming in more and more young people and
so they got stories appropriate to put in the revised versions of the big book
and so in 1952 the second book that I think is of interest to us which is
A.A.'s Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, was written and published.
And here, with 13 more years of sobriety, the founders were able to expand a little bit on the Twelve Steps
and to take a little deeper look at them.
And this book has become my favorite, the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions,
as a source of reading to look into what these principles are, how they can be applied to my life,
and how I might find a better plan for living
because I really believe we all come in here
with our own little way of approaching life.
And we've learned it probably through half-open eyes
from a TV set, from an older brother or an older sister,
a little bit from our parents,
and the neighbors threw some ideas in,
and a mean schoolteacher banged a couple of deals in there,
read a couple of books, saw a couple of movies,
saw I had a hero in a movie who I had to be like,
And I put a plan together of what was the way to react and how life went.
And it got me locked up a lot.
I also threw up a lot.
I had DTs.
I was frightened.
But I did have a plan.
I mean, you know, it was chugging along, putting me into an early grave.
And I did not want to relinquish this plan.
I really didn't.
It was sort of mine.
And I knew how it was.
And I like to say little things like this.
But I've always done it this way.
i've always done this i mean why should i change now and that is well maybe if you've heard enough
you'd be interested in a slight change to your plan and uh my plan did not involve anything
spiritual my plan didn't involve it involved getting another car in the garage that was
important i had learned that very young the three car garage with three cars and it means you're
happy and i knew that and i never did get three cars in a three-car garage although at one point
i had two cars in a two-car garage and i knew that i was close to being happy i was still miserable
but i was almost going to get ready to be happy with one more garage and one more car and then
i'd finally be happy and i wouldn't be frightened and angry all the time and i never got the other
car but i did get happy so maybe my plan was wrong in the 12 and 12 they um have in the introduction
they write the following little sentence says aa's 12 steps are a group of principles spiritual
in nature which is practiced as the way of life will do two things and one is it will expel the
obsession with drinking and the second one is it'll enable the suffering alcoholic to become
happily and usefully whole and there's two words in there that fascinate me one of them is
obsession and the other one is useful uh one of those are critical factors in sobriety it turns
out that in the first step which says we admitted we're powerless over alcohol and our lives have
become unmanageable that it's a process of education if there is one thing that prevents
us alcoholics and getting sober it's ignorance it's not knowing what alcoholism is and not knowing
how to live without alcohol and so in the process of learning about what it means to be powerless
over alcohol we find out what aa has to say about the disease of alcoholism and it points out that
it is like a double-edged sword and the one edge of the sword most of us are quite familiar with
and that is the physical allergy type of reaction to alcohol this is what happens to the alcoholic
when alcohol is put inside of him or her and we all are quite familiar with what this is as the
years have gone by we find that when we put one drink in we have a compulsion to drink a whole
bunch more many of us intended to only um have one drink and we ended up spending a week before
we came back. And we find that strange things happen to us as we're putting the alcohol inside
of us. We lose control over our lives. We stop any of the plans that we had before we put the
alcohol in. And then we find out that it is sort of destroying us from the inside out. It's taking
away our self-respect. It's taking away our physical health. We're getting locked up. We're
getting fired from jobs we're going to the doctor and he's suggesting that our
liver may go on display after we die and the biggest that has ever been captured
look at this and we're you know and so we're finding out what is happening to
our system by pouring vast quantities of vodka through the experiment here and
that seems to be the end of the problem in many people's eyes that this is what
you study is the effects of alcohol and and it turns out that we can all realize
that you keep it we keep pouring that amount in there it's going to kill the
person that that's sort of part of the illness of alcohol we are going to die
from this particular illness that is something that is of interest to doctors
and I think it's of interest to students of alcoholism,
but it's not very much interest to Alcoholics Anonymous.
AA really says, well, that's nice that people have big livers,
it's nice that alcohol does this to people,
but what do we care about that?
You don't find that meeting, everyone sitting around drinking,
trying to figure out, well, how big will the liver get,
and let's do some more research on this.
AA's not interested in that part of the illness of alcoholism
because that's not the part that really does the damage um if if we had a similar reaction
uh to mayonnaise we probably would stop eating and using mayonnaise if we found mayonnaise was
destroying our liver and was tearing our insides up we wouldn't be doing the things we're doing
with alcohol we would simply say hey i'm one of these people i was born with this kind of
an allergy and i'm going to eliminate it i'm allergic to penicillin and i am very careful
to inform every doctor i do not want another one of those reactions that cause all kinds of
horrible physical problems and some you know i just very careful to not uh have any penicillin
get in my body and that's what i would do with mayonnaise if i had a similar allergy it would
not be like alcohol i would not be going to bed at night thinking uh wonder if my jar of mayonnaise
is still in my closet
and somebody's taking it
and then I'd run over
and look in the closet
and yeah, okay, it's there
and I'd be able to sleep
knowing that my mayonnaise
was there.
I wasn't going to take any
but at least it was there.
I would have the mayonnaise
in a Hellman's jar
even though it was
giant brand, you know.
Because I, you know,
think I couldn't afford that now we're starting to get to the part of the
alcoholism is the killer this is this strange relationship with thinking about
drinking all the time with thinking about that source of all our trouble
because the source of all our trouble appears to be the answers to all our
problem it has disguised itself as our plan for living and that's what the vodka was
i was absolutely obsessed with the idea that i had discovered the fountain of youth
i really think that that's what i thought alcohol was i said chase i have stumbled on
the answer to life i've stumbled on all of religion and philosophy and psychiatry rolled
up into one vodka label. There it is. The answer to everything. If you're worried, you
drink. If you're frightened, you drink. If you're upset, you drink. You're going to a
party, drink before you get there. You don't have to learn to adjust to people. You just
drink and then they can adjust to you. Let them clean up the vomit. What do I care about
this? I've got a different way of handling this stuff. All you have to do is get enough
money and you've got it you can buy your way into maturity that was sort of how i approached
drinking and therefore i had developed an obsession with thinking about drinking people
would say to me look the way you can get over this relationship about the girl in high school
that left you which was 20 years ago you realize you have been patching up that hurt with vodka
but it's still there after 20 years,
maybe you should try and deal with it emotionally as a mature person.
Why would I want to start doing that now?
I mean, why would I want to start growing up at age 40?
I mean, you know, that's for somebody who's a teenager to do it.
Well, you're getting a lot of pain.
No, you see, I can simply buy vodka if it really gets bad.
If it really gets bad, I can start drinking.
And that's what the obsession is.
it's this constant thought that is triggered in our minds to think hey if it really gets bad
i can always drink and all a.a is saying and this is what a.a is trying to deal with a.a is trying
to remove that obsession once that obsession is removed which is done on sort of a daily basis
uh we can be comfortable we can then go about our lives and start dealing with our other problems on
a mature human basis but until the obsession is removed it's going to appear anytime it wants to
because that's the nature of an obsession it's just going to come in and dominate our minds
and prevent us from doing other things like the rest of aa's steps like uh like growing
spiritually like maturing whatever it is and so the problem is how do you get rid of an obsession
how do you stop thinking about a single thought that keeps popping into your mind and we joke
around about that you know okay starting right now i'm never going to think about drinking that's the
end of it i'm going to use my willpower you know just focus my attention on the day problems as
they come along starting right now and then blood wiser comes right up into the head where did that
come from okay let me start over again i'm not going to look at any magazine keep the television
off and all that never going to think about drinking we suddenly find out how do you do
you can't do that you just can't do that and that is sort of aa's message in the first step is
the situation is much more hopeless than you thought it was that's the message when you
come into aaa no matter how bad off you thought it was aa starts right out by saying oh wrong
it's much worse than you thought it was and until you believe it's much worse than you thought it
was the steps are going to just stay on the wall unread unless you think these things really
probably should have a thing over the top says in case of emergency take the 12 steps you know
that's sort of our initial entrance into those steps is when we really believe that we're going
to die and until we understand that obsession our illness is liable to be different from other
people we're liable to say yeah i relate to other alcoholics dying but i don't see where it's going
to kill me because i can just stop really if it got that bad is that guy over there who's into
of those DTs in the way.
But if I ever get like that,
I would stop.
But if we're an alcoholic
and we have this obsession,
we're just a little sooner
down the path.
We're just, you know,
a few years behind that, man.
And it's absolutely inevitable
that that's where we're going to go.
And the problem is,
how are we going to get rid
of that obsession?
And it turns out
that there is no human power
that can get rid of it.
That we're forced into
a admission of absolute defeat and i think if we have a good sponsor when we first come into aaa
that we will be taught how hopeless our situation is and if you if you are new i hope you do get a
sponsor who hammers that in that your situation is absolutely hopeless there is no way that you
can do anything about that obsession and you may think you can but forget it and it's under those
conditions that i myself and i think other aaa members become willing to really listen to what
the heck's going on i said my god you mean that there isn't a chance for me and that's right there
isn't given our own resources and our past if we go out and attempt to solve this on our own it's
inevitable that we're going to pour more alcohol in there and we're going to just repeat it and
it's going to get worse and so we truly are on a inevitable crash very similar the person jump out
this window and on the way down says maybe it's not so bad as i thought it was i had heard a lot
about falling but it doesn't seem to be hurting now this is what happens when we get an a.a and
our health returns a little bit we're not shaking anymore yeah it's not so bad you realize that it's
going to take a miracle to prevent you from hitting the ground and so the point of aaa's
first step is why don't you start asking for a miracle that's what the first step is trying to
teach is to get our attention with a two by four whatever so that we go help and once that happens
then it seems that we're saved it's one of the first paradoxes in aa that you win by giving up
as soon as you admit that you've lost you win but until you admit that you've lost
you're going to lose and it's very strange but that's how it seems to work because that we have
to break that will we have to break that self-centeredness and boy those old ideas
they've got a death grip on us we don't want to let go of them we got a plan we know we don't
want to hear we don't want to hear that's exactly right i don't want to hear anything there and
somehow we're going to have to listen and learning to listen is you have to think that you need to
listen in order to really listen that's what the first step does it gets our attention long enough
so that we're willing to listen how can i be saved how can i get this obsession removed well this is
how we had it removed we decided that we needed something besides ourselves to rely on the
philosophy of self-efficiency wasn't paying off and we needed to come to believe that a power
greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity which is a second step a power greater than
ourselves can restore us to sanity in the beginning this power may be the a group and it
may be that the group that you join you finally can believe um can do something about your
alcoholism and you look about the group and they say yeah i've been sober six months i've been
sober a year i've been sober two years say well they know more about uh sobriety than i do maybe
i'll let them um take care of my drinking problem i'll go that far is just sort of listen to what
they have to say about the drinking problem and that's the beginning of the second step of coming
to believe that this group which is a greater power than we are can restore us to sanity and
sanity in the 12 and 12 is defined as soundness of mind and when we get into thinking about what
a sound mind is it doesn't I don't think we want to race back and think about some of the crazy
things we did while drinking uh that's uh non-alcoholics do crazy things when they're
drinking you pour enough alcohol onto a brain stops working and that doesn't mean that that
brain isn't sound that has nothing to do with soundness of mind the crazy thing you might do
with drinking soundness of mind is kind of like when you've been in the program a couple of months
and you've been through pi you've been through detox you've been through aquaquan you've been
in the emergency room six or eight times.
You've had 12 jobs in the last two years.
You don't know where your family is.
Your health is kind of borderline.
And now you've been in AA a couple of months
and you finally have come to realize
that all of your problems are caused by drinking.
That every single mishap you've ever been in
was caused by your drinking.
That every time you drink, you vomit,
you get sick, you throw up all over the place,
you tremble, you shake.
And now you sit with nice clothes on.
you've just been to a meeting
and you come home and you say
you know, life isn't so bad
I think I've finally got a handle on it
I've been taught about alcoholism
I've been taught I'm an alcoholic
I think I'll have a drink
that is
what we're talking about
is return us to sanity
where did that thought come from
with all of that information
with all of those facts
laid out on the table
the guy says
therefore I think that I shall have a drink now that is what we're gonna we're
trying to prevent from happening is that kind of a thought from filtering its way
up because it's there it's lurking in the in this computer brain of ours it's
just waiting for a resentment to produce it you know how a resentment can start
those kind of thinking you know that we get somebody at the office says
something like your work isn't perfect what kind of a put-down is that
they don't like me at work told me my work isn't perfect oh my god i knew it was true i really am
no good well here i am at home non-perfect me disliked at work rejected again well what are
we going to do about it well you know a drink i guess yeah i've been positive drinking will
kill me well yeah but geez when you've been rejected death is better than being rejected
i'm going to go in there tomorrow and they're going to say we don't like your clothes either
you know we don't like your political part we don't like anything about you I
know that's coming and then it starts I know what I'll do I'll get out of the
bar and hang around the people down there and bring ginger ale because they
understand me down in the bar and we come down there you know what happens
and then this is the type of thinking that is so dangerous I think a must
where alcoholics just like high-risk situations it's exciting to walk around on tall buildings
on the very edge and look over i think we sort of like to live that kind of life
but there are other ways of achieving excitement we've just never explored them yet and we find
out about it here in the fellowship that a spiritual life is quite exciting places we've
we've never been before but we're about to be pushed into because I think our
alcoholism as we learn about this coming to grips in the second step in the book
the twelve and twelve goes into a long discussion of the different types of us
that may arrive and I'm sure this many people we have that kind of a cross
section here today we have people who once had a great deal of faith the
second step is relating directly to faith and found that it didn't work or
it appeared not to work you may have been brought up with a nice uh church training as a child and
you come to understand a faith and you thought you had a higher power and then somewhere along
the line it just let you down it just plum failed and for the last half of your life you've been
sort of living on your own my own resources and that isn't working either so you've tried both
the philosophy of self-sufficiency and a higher
you're sort of wandering around
aimlessly with no
decision one way or the other
whereas the atheist has an
advantage over you, at least
he is absolutely convinced of something
whereas you're not
sure either way, you don't have anything
that you're convinced of, atheists
convinced there is no, he can prove the non-existence
of God, the agnostic is sort of
coming around going well I just don't
really believe it
I don't think there is but I can't prove it one way or the other and we come in
here a mixed bag many of us come in here the intellectually self-sufficient this
is very common in the Washington DC area
intellectually self-sufficient it's the reason you may not know about it is all
of us intellectually self-sufficient people keep it a secret
so that we don't embarrass the non-intellectually self-sufficient.
So you see, each of you that are sitting here
has your own little secret about being, you know,
going, look at this crowd that I'm in with.
And you sort of look around the crowd.
But when you're doing that, you've got to realize
there's someone else looking at you the same way.
Hey, I'm sitting in here.
And we secretly float above the rest of the people.
And we have this marvelous potential that we've never used.
we do have the answers
we're just not going to use them
I do know how to behave
but I choose to misbehave
that marvelous sense of maturity right there
but we don't share this with anybody
you know it's our little secret
we had this in bars
I used to go in very low neighborhoods
and I could feel superior in the bar
they loved me
because I was bringing a lot of money in there
and they'd all take it
and it was a sort of an even exchange I paid to feel superior and then when I
left everybody really felt the period as they ripped me off so it was winning in
that deal but that's the type of crowd that comes in here that is asked to
rally around the second step is that really is sort of a rallying point for
all these mixed breeds and half breeds and different varieties come in and come
against the same dilemma whatever our paths have been we're going to have to forget them
and all start on the same road here at the second step we are going to have to come to believe
that something greater than ourselves can get rid of that obsession or we're all going to fall by
the wayside and we've discussed the wayside before at other meetings and we've had several people
who've been to the wayside recently who have reported it as a bad place to go it is not a one
of your higher class spots the wayside is a bad spot to fall by and it was even back in biblical
times they talked about the wayside it must have been bad back then too because when people fell
by the wayside they were never heard from again a bad spot to fall and um and it still is and so
here the second step is sort of where we consider well whatever the past has been i'm going to have
to forget it and get involved in finding my own personal higher power i'm going to have to find
that in order to prevent these old ideas from constantly doing to me what they've been doing
all my life and so that's sort of what the second step is it is the rallying point for the great
variety of uniqueness that comes into a if you sit here new and think you're
unique that's right that's what everybody does when they come in we have
a unique set of problems and the newcomers favorite expression is so you
don't understand you don't understand my situation that is just you ought to have
a saying on the wall but you don't understand because it is one of the most
off-quoted statements in the fellowship of Alcoholic Abundance you don't
understand? My problem. Anyway, this is going to kind of unite us in this purpose. And then
comes the third step, which is kind of the doorway into the rest of A.A.'s 12 steps. And that is,
made a decision to turn our own lives over to care of God as he was putting.
This step is the first one of A.A.'s steps that requires action. These first two steps were
sort of an acceptance, sort of an intellectual process that we went through. But the third step
does require an affirmative plan of action.
Because while we understand the concept of the third step,
of making a decision,
there's one key quality that is necessary in order to accomplish it,
and that is called willingness.
And this willingness is a quality that each of us can develop,
but may be lacking due to our old ideas.
the growth in A.A. is a strange
I look upon it as almost a paradox in itself
because the way we build ourselves up
is by tearing ourselves down
the way that new ideas seem to come in
is by getting rid of old ideas
it's a constant process of inventorying
ourselves in order to find out what's wrong
and removing it
And eventually we're left with what's right.
And it turns out it has been there all along.
And the third step is the entranceway into this process.
It is the process by which we develop this particular willingness to make this attempt.
This is not a new practice. I think it's been around for a long time.
It is one of the processes that is used in many religions and philosophies
to attempt to get rid of the self,
to make a decision to turn our lives over to the care of some higher power.
And AA has always been very careful.
It was written now by other drunks,
and they knew damn well that if they tried to define a god for a new drunk coming in,
he'd turn right around and walk out.
and it says no you're going to have to come up with the definition of your own higher power
you personally are going to have to come to grips with what a higher power is for you whether your
name is joe or mary or fred what is your particular god and what is the relationship that you can
establish with it because until you are able to come to rely on that you're going to continue to
rely on yourself and this reliance on yourself is going to produce the same
results that have been produced all these years some of the writings that
our co-founders had are quite interesting and I before we're running
out of time and I did want to read something out of the big book then I'll
get back and wrap up the third step this was written at the end of the very last
page two pages in the first eleven chapters in the big book you got to
back in 1939 and Bill Wilson is writing he's wrapping up his story to or the
story of a a that's what they attempt to tell him here is trying to say hey you
got a hold of this book well this is we're gonna tell you about a a and he's
wrapping it up and he says someday we hope that every alcoholic who journeys
will find a fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous at its destination to some
extent this is already true some of us are salesmen and go about little
clusters of twos and threes and five of us have sprung up in other communities
through contact with our two larger centers those of us who travel drop in
as often as we can this practice enables us to lend a hand at the same time
avoiding certain alluring distractions of the road about about which any
traveling man can inform you
Thus we grow, and so can you,
though you be but one man with this book in your hand.
We believe and hope it contains all you will need to begin.
Still you may say,
but I will not have the benefit of the contact with you who wrote this book.
We cannot be sure.
God will determine that.
So you must remember that your real reliance is always upon him.
He will show you how to create the fellowship you crave.
and I just noticed that crave was in there
and there's this Dr. Thiebaud's discussion
of the phenomenon of craving for alcohol
and maybe that was the craving
for this kind of fellowship
that we were seeking in that bottle
that Bill picked up in this particular discussion here
that we will learn how to create intuitively
the fellowship that we crave.
Our book is meant to be suggestive only.
We realize we know only a little.
God will constantly disclose more to you and to us.
Ask him in your morning meditation
what you can do each day for the man who is still sick.
The answers will come if your own house is in order.
But obviously you cannot transmit something you haven't gotten.
Seek to it that your relationship with him is right
and great events will come to pass
for you and countless others.
This is the great fact for us.
Abandon yourself to God as you understand God.
Admit your faults to him and to your fellows.
Clear away the wreckage of your past.
Give freely of what you find and join us.
we shall be with you in the fellowship of the spirit and you will surely meet some of us as you
trudge the road of happy destiny and i like that word as you trudge the road of happy destiny
because that's the journey that we seem to be on as we move through the third step
as we've been in aa over the years this has been i've been to a lot of closed meetings and
discussion meetings and I hear the third step discussed probably as much as any
other step how am I going to get out of the driver's seat how am I going to turn
my will and my life over to a higher power how am I going to do this how will
I know when I've done it what does it feel like do you get some kind of a
blast of light what is this event and you know third step simply talking about
making a decision to do this simply making a decision and the willingness to
do this to take our willpower and the third step ends with a discussion of
willpower and it is an essential ingredient in sobriety it's an essential
ingredient in life it's essential ingredient in developing discipline and
our problem prior to AA had been the misuse of willpower we had attempted to
bombard our problems we said i'm not happy i'm going to force happiness i'm going to use my
willpower and achieve this and it suggests in the third step that the proper use of willpower
was an attempt to bring our will and all of this effort and energy into harmony with that of a
higher power to somehow learn through these other steps what this what we should be doing what is
the right thing how can i be useful come up with a whole set of new directions and then use this
energy to achieve that and so i would say that the answer to the question how do i know if i have
taken the third step can be the answer that my sponsor gave to me when he said
let me see the piece of paper on which you wrote your fourth step inventory
and i would say if you can produce the piece of paper you have indeed become willing
because that is no small effort
to move into the remainder of A.H.'s 12 steps.
They involve a lot of pain.
They involve a lot of effort.
They involve other people.
They involve things that are contrary to our nature
and they involve abandoning our plan for living
that we brought in here
and are clutching on to with our death grip.
And that truly is the measure of our willingness.
If we find ourselves sitting on the third step
saying, I don't think that I understand it,
I think we're just procrastinating.
I think we're just spinning our wheels because the true effort is in a day-by-day attempt
at moving through the rest of the steps, which we'll discuss when we come back next week.
This ends our little discussion this morning, so let's take a ten-minute break
and we'll come back in and let you all participate in the discussion meeting.