Step 11 and the Right Answer Bubbling Up – Dan

The format of this meeting is a step workshop. Our speaker tonight is Dan. Hi everybody, I'm Dan. I'm an alcoholic. Well, I don't have this half hour planned and plotted out. Last time I was invited to speak in front of a meeting, it occurred to me I didn't have a plan for that pitch either. And I joked to a friend about it. I said, you know, I'm fairly good at organizing my thoughts since like three minutes sharing at an AA meeting. But I don't know, about half hour. He said, why don't you just string together 10 three-minute pitches Let's see if it makes sense. So that might be the best you get. So step three, and again, I don't have a plan, but what occurred to me instead of answers to step three or my experience, the first thing that occurred tome was a bunch of questions like why did I need to take a third step in the first place? why do it? Why surrender anything? What does it mean to me? What actions are implied if I take step three? And what am I surrendering to? I'd love to have an organized pitch and just systematically get through all those questions and handle it that neatly. I'm not sure I will. But I can certainly tell you why I needed to. Why I needed to take a third step is because I needed a power greater than myself that could restore me to sanity. I needed it badly because I'm powerless over alcohol and drugs, and my life had become so unmanageable that I just got here desperate, shipwrecked. Just briefly, I got here at age 37. I was homeless, had been kicked out of mom and dad's house where I'd been trying to live. I'd be a drug dealer for 20 years. I'd have been busted a few times, but that didn't bring me to my knees. So I was penniless, unemployable, in bad health, didn't have a car, owed a lot of people money. the wrong people, some of them. Dangerous people, some of me. And I thought my biggest problem was that my girlfriend had left me. I was 37. She was 21. I was heartbroken and all of my internal drama seemed to be focused on that. And the fact is I was powerless. Finally, I got here and it was explained to me. You know, I tried to fight it my way and I tried I knew how to live, which was crazy. I didn't know how to at all. I just didn't what to do with myself. And I wound up borrowing my parents' car and going out on one final binge. I left on a Friday in my dad's car and had this hideous bender that lasted till Monday. Monday, and I hadn't called home, and so Monday I drove to the beach, because the beach always kind of quieted me down and sorted me out. I didn't feel any better there, and I took a nap, and then I didn' t feel any better after that, and ate a couple burgers, because food always helped, and that didn' t help. At 5 or 6 o'clock that afternoon, I was just as spun as when I woke up after this bender. This is at the tail end of a fairly hideous two years. I found myself getting back in my dad's car, kind of petrified as to what I was going to say to my parents, clueless as to where I was gonna go or how I was just gonna conduct my life and driving up Pico Boulevard from the beach in Los Angeles and turning left under the tent and onto the street, winding up at a friend's house that had been in recovery. Walking in their door, if I choke out, I choke up. This happens to me. It was like they were expecting me. They're sitting there at their dining room table. They look up. As I recall, They weren't surprised at all. My friend Cece and her husband at the time, Danny. And the words that came out of my mouth I had no intention of saying were, I think I'm ready for supervision. That was my initial surrender. And she said, come on in. And my parents didn't want any more of me. They wanted their car back, and my mom brought over two big garbage sacks full of my clothes and dumped them on the floor. She said, that's it, stay away from us. And I had a couch to sleep on, and I had to ride to meetings for my friend Cece, and that was the beginning of my sobriety. So I had very good reason to have to surrender to something because what I had been doing wasn't working, and I didn't know a smarter way. And I came to these meetings, and people had gone through very similar things to what I'd gone through and hit bottoms that felt like my bottoms and described feelings that matched my feelings. And somehow they had grown away from that into something new that I hadn't experienced yet that I wanted. So I got a sponsor. I actually had three sponsors in my first year, and I'm just going to make them all into one sponsor because it's easier. One of the things that I learned is that because we talked about surrender and how hard it is, One of the things I learned pretty quick was that every time I took a drink or a drug, that was a surrender. That was a jump off cliff into the wild unknown because each time launched me into some kind of disaster. They said, why don't you surrender to something benign instead of something evil that's going to destroy you and that made sense to me. They told me about my condition, they told me I had an obsession of the mind and an allergy of the body and that the allergy of the body if I had it set me aside as a subset of the general population and if I had that particular problem which is when I start drinking I can't control the amount that I have a problem that most people in the world don't have, and it defines me probably right there as an alcoholic. But if I never started drinking in the first place, that allergy wouldn't matter because if I didn't take the first drink, I wouldn't continue to drink. I wouldn'T cause all those problems. So the problem centers in my mind. And that made sense to me because let me backtrack. The thing about continuing, I need to do the first step before I get launched into the third step, just because I have to. It always puzzled me why we talk about in AA about overshooting the mark. If I'm aiming for here, if I'm aiming for this nice buzz that just works for me, how come I wind up passed out or crazy or driving 120 and just missing a retaining wall on the 10 freeway. It doesn't make sense. Why, if I'm at a bar and I'm just right, what's the next drink for? Because the next drank ruins it. It doesn' t continue it. The next drink takes me into sick to my stomach or maybe a blackout or in my particular case I learned that cocaine can get me back on this side of the mark but then I get nervous and so I have to drink more and then I got stupid so a little more coke and then i get jittery so I took a valium and on and on it goes and so I wound up on a balancing act that just didn't work very well and got worse and worse and harder to maintain So I got here with this huge problem, beat up and alone. And they suggested that there was something inside of me that I could borrow from you guys if I didn't understand it myself. That could change my life. So that's why I needed a third step. am I turning my life and will over to?" This did occur to me, not as part of an overall plan, but it did jump out at me when I was thinking this afternoon about it. I had a friend, Greg, who is no longer with us, and he said religion is a finger pointing at the moon. He said if you spend too much time looking at the finger, you'll never get the moon, And so all my disagreements with formal religion, all of my little quibbles and judgment about this established religion and what those people do is me staring at the finger and missing the moon. And it occurs to me that I have a dog that if you point at something, he'll stare at my finger. And that makes me as dumb as my dog. If I'm judging people's religions. So I'll tell you this, because I like to read. I'm kind of a cerebral guy. I like think things out. I want it explained. I want them to make sense. And what I've found is that the more I think or read about God, the less sense it makes. There's too many paradoxes and puzzles involved. What I've arrived at at this point in... You know, it evolves, it changes. What I have arrived at this time is that I have a little God and a big God. No one can ever disprove or take away from me because it's as simple as this. It's a part of me, it's a heart of my psychology that I can tap into. A guy I sponsored once said, you know what? Because he had the biggest problem with his higher power. One day he came to me and he said, I finally get it. He says it's like a transistor or a chip or something, I forget what he said. as if some transistor or chip worked for the first time in my brain that I never knew about before. Something just turned on for them. And so there's some part of my psyche that I hadn't been in touch with before, and the book refers to it in the appendix on the spiritual experience as a previously unsuspected inner resource. And I can go with that. And that has nothing to do with water to wine or virgin births or ascensions or anything magical or supernatural. And I can work with that. And that is perfectly sufficient for me to turn my life and world over to. Now, if I have that inside of me, you have that at least inside of you. And so all of a sudden it's just not my little guy and it's each of our collective little gods. We come here in a room, and we talk about it and think about it, and suddenly it becomes something in the room that develops as a link between us. In fact, I think it's what binds us in the first place because I think of it as what's best in me and what's most important to me and what allows me to be loved and to love people back. That's what connects us. And so from there I can go, okay, all the people in the world have this internally. Potentially in it. And so in that way I'm connected to everyone. And possibly there's some huge spiritual thing in the entire universe that's connected to the material world and there's a connection there as in the traditional idea of God. But I don't have to have that big idea. I can live with the little I do. I can have a little God and a big God. I can quibble about the big God all day, but no one's going to take the little God away from me. And that's all I need to stay sober. The action is implied in a third step. Start with a prayer. I got something to say about the prayer room. Hey, how long am I going? Ten after. I got here in a condition I already described to you. And so you could say that I had a lot of difficulties. And I was taught a prayer that said among other things please take away my difficulties. And within a year most of those difficulties were taken away. That's a pretty amazing thing. Again, I was homeless. I was pretty much friendless. I was painingless. I was unemployable. I couldn't stop drinking or driving. My family didn't want to see me. All those things. Oh, I'm in trouble with the law. The state wanted to put me away for four to six years. All these problems were reversed in a year based on my coming here, doing the things that I was told here and saying a prayer that specifically said please take away my difficulties. in order that I might bear witness to others of Thy power and Thy love and Thy way of life. Is that it? I'm blanking right now. And I think that's miraculous proof to me of the power of prayer. So, the third step action-wise for me starts with a prayer and then simply goes on and says continue with the steps in order which means I take inventory which means I read the inventory to somebody which means I proceed with 6, 7 all the way through 12 The third step implies to me that really I'm just trying to surrender Surrender just means acknowledging what's real The initial surrender was that I have a problem with drugs and alcohol, and I can't kick it. That's real. And from there, I've taken the first step, which is surrender. And I need help. But then part of alcoholism, I found out, is that I'm always in conflict with the world. And in the fourth step, I find out all the different ways I'd always been in conflict mit the world and all those frustrations and all of the anger and all the harm that I'd done and how I lived and how quick-tempered I was. I remembered this the other night at our men's group that one time I had a P.O. box on Wilshire Boulevard up in West L.A., and there was an alley that was convenient to park in right next to it. Otherwise, it was hard to park, and you had to feed the meter, and I didn't want to do all that, so I'd just leave my car running, and I'd run in and get my mail and get back to my car. And I got back to the car this one time and a meter maid was giving me a ticket and I didn't want a ticket, so I argued with her and she kept writing the ticket, so I threatened to turn over her meter maid cart. Because that was my mode of problem solving at the time. It made sense to me. And I was furious. It was just one more resentment. And I can't live like that sober. Can't live like that sober. And so through inventory, you know, because in the third step I'm turning my life and will over to the care of God, but as a newcomer I had no idea what that meant and so I had to break it down in inventory and see what I was turning over and why. Excuse me, we're faced now my wife and I with with alcoholism in our own, and so we see it face-to-face. And I'm seeing exactly the feelings and the frustration and the outbursts of anger from our son. It's not fun seeing it firsthand, looking right at it, seeing how insane it is, realizing that that's how I was. And it's a fresh reminder of exactly how severe this problem is and how severe it could be for me. If I stopped doing what I'm doing here, I'd probably revert back to that because that's the evidence I keep seeing from people that leave us and come back. The third step finally is simply a statement of my primary purpose. When I was brand new and sitting in a sponsor's house at a monthly meeting of the guys he sponsored, I didn't hear anything. It was just all buzz to me. But something stuck out. It was all fog. I heard... I remember some key phrases that still make me laugh. These are the things I remember. I remember allergy of the body and obsession of the mind because people kept saying it. I remember a guy that turned out to be quite crazy He had 20 years sober. But he always talked about it's an inside job, and that stuck. I remember somebody saying taking drugs for a guy like me is like having sex with a gorilla. Drugs and alcohol, you're not done until the gorilla's done. And that was... I didn't hear a lot of stuff, but these lodged in my brain. And I'm sitting and I'm kind of blank-brained as everybody's droning on at this meeting at my sponsor's house. And somebody says, primary purpose to stay sober and help another alcoholic and me with nothing left in my life and no prospects and just a long dark tunnel of a future that it seemed like. I thought, okay, I can do that. I can doing that. I think I can stay sober and carry this message, whatever it is. And so now I'm staying sober carrying the message at home. And so parenting... I heard somebody say a really kind of terrifying thing yesterday. She had so much trouble with her son and this is someone we really love. she said that if she could if she knew what was going to happen can I say this? it's anonymous if she new how it was going to turn out she wouldn't have had kids now we're having a lot of trouble at home but I'm not there yet and I hope I never get there because this parenting thing which was a surprise to both of us is a pain in the ass, but it's a sacred mission. So that said, given what we're facing today, it's perfectly in line with my primary purpose carry the message even at home and help another alcoholic and so I can think things through all I want I can gather information I'll use this as an example I can ask 15 people I can describe our current situation, and I will get 15 different answers. And you can group them into, you know, kind of similarities. There'll be a few people that say slam him into rehab. There'll been some people that said kick him out and let him fly or not on their own power. Someone said today smack him. He's my size, and then I said if I smack him we'll both wind up in the hospital. But I've learned in Alcoholics Anonymous to go out and talk to people and share my, you know, whatever's up for me and see what comes back. I was just curious how your message is being received at that time. When does question time? Will you ask me that? And I'll do my best to get to it. And so, you know, you hear a lot in Alcoholics Anonymous people say, God speaks to me through you. I have a slightly different take on it. I say God tells me which one of you to listen to. Because when it's a unified message, you are definitely speaking to me. But when it is not, I have to discern. and sometimes I go for the answer I want but if I truly listen I discern brightly so I gather information I go into prayer part of my third step, part ofmy eleventh step however you want to look at it and I hope that the right answer bubbles up past my selfishness and past what I want and past my fears and into whatever most effectively brings things to a positive growth and whatever is consistent with spiritual principles. Because that's what I've been taught here. So it's all pretty interesting. You know, I've had a bump free... We had a rocky road back sometime 16 years ago, I think. And other than that, it's been a pretty bump-free ride until this last year. It's just been a smooth sobriety for me. And all of a sudden, it has been... Gosh, they are taping me and I will say it anyway. It has been a clusterfuck. It has just been crazy. and between some money issues and the kids. And so work has been a problem for me, and I pray about it. And I don't know if it's just because I'm damn lazier or because I am afraid of what I call cubicle hell because I don' t want to do it or what, but I have not gone out into the workforce. I've tried to recreate this lucky thing I've had for so long and it hasn't happened successfully, and yet it seems at the moment perfectly appropriate that I'm home while this is happening in our home. And so, again, we might go broke in the process and all look back and go, gosh, I should have been working. But at the momento it seems like that the appropriate thing is for me to be where I am. and at the moment it seems like the actions we've taken have been appropriated each step and when I get the times I get spanked badly by the world for the action or inaction I take is the time I can go okay Dan that was self-will you clearly weren't surrendered on that and there's a lesson to learn but since it's been a fairly bump free ride for a long time I'm not patting myself on the back but I guess I've done something right and for me doing something right is simply submitting and being in compliance with the deal we're doing you know so life's up in my face right now not particularly liking it I've balked, here's where I've balking at taking a step that I should be taking it seems odd to have to write inventory. I resent my son and my daughter and here's why, and here is how it affects me, and here's my part in it, and heres what I'm afraid of. It doesn't seem odd actually when I say it, it seems perfectly natural. Why have I been postponing it and postponing it? I told my sponsor last time I saw him, I said, Cliff tell me to write the damn inventory about my kids so it's a direction from you instead of just me knowing I should do it. He said, write the inventory. That was a week ago. More stuff has happened and I still haven't done it. So, you know, I'm not a perfect model of action in sobriety. You know, if I put stuff off, maybe it will clearly make me a better parent as it's made me a better citizen and general human being if I simply write the inventory, do the surrendered thing. It's all back to a third and eleventh step. I think I'm pretty wrapped up on the third step. That's all I've got. Thank you. There will now be a question and answer period of 15 minutes. Like I just said, please make sure your question relates to your topic or step discussed this evening. If you have a question, please raise your hand and you will be called on. I'm Jared. Questions? Yes. Hey there. Sorry to interrupt. I'm just kind of curious how it's being received. How it's being received? By the kids? You're dealing with alcoholism with your kids. Right. Our 15-year-old daughter says, leave me alone. I smoke pot once in a while. So what? She wants permission or at least approval and permission to just do it on her terms. And we had And we caught her high on ecstasy the night before New Year's Eve and sentenced her to, you know, grounded her and sentenced to some young people's meetings. She goes and listens and kind of likes it, but doesn't think she qualifies. And our son has now gone to a couple of meetings. And what did he say? He still thinks he can have a beer now and then. It's not a problem. He just is better off staying away from the hard stuff. And what it tells me is simply you have to be in a lot of pain before you're ready. You have to pay a lot for it. You have a lot to pay before you are ready, and I don't think there's anyone in this room, unless you're here in a court card. A court card is painful, but it's not that painful. Or maybe it is. Maybe a court car will tip you into going, wow, what they've been telling me is right. I belong here and I hope that's the case because otherwise that's it you know he's not in enough pain and so he doesn't hear it I don't know how to answer better than that oh boy that opens up some fun stuff thanks for asking when I took the third step the first time how did I do it and how do I take Swansea's through it the first time I was so blank brain I was just so in a daze I that just did the best they could with me and we read the twelve and twelve he said read the 12 and 12 read the first step and call me up and tell me what you think like what I thought I thought it was worth anything, but he was generous enough to do that for me. And I called him up after the first step and gave him my opinion on how well written it was and what I really thought about the problem of alcoholism. And the second step and the third step, and what happened in that process is I stayed sober for six months, and that was a miracle in itself. And just by being willing to comply, you know. and then I switched sponsors I ran out of steam about 7th or 8th step good place to run out of scheme got another sponsor started over, pretty much the same thing in a year sober all those troubles I told you about had been pretty much mitigated at least and I was working stuff was a lot better for me and yet I felt really empty inside and I didn't like how I felt. I didn' t feel like drinking, I didn''t feel suicidal, homicidal. I just wanted to sleep a lot. Just going to meetings was kind of running out of juice for me. I heard a speaker that was on fire and he said, hey, without going into the whole thing I wound up meeting this speaker and describing my condition and he sounded like I was suffering from untreated alcoholism. And I said, what do I do? so there is another turning point for me beside my original surrender and what we did was we sat down with the big book and he made me read out loud and then he'd interrupt me and we'd talk about something and he said if you get to a place that you don't agree with stop and tell me about it and when we got to a prayer we'd say the prayer together we got through an instruction He clarified the instructions. And so everything... Oh, and he said something interesting. I don't hear much. I hadn't heard before. He said, turn statements about alcoholism into questions that you can answer. So it becomes interactive, like a process, like a dialogue with you in the book. And it opened up and made it more interesting for me to read. And so when I walk somebody through the steps, we read. When we stop and we talk. and if they walk at a certain point, we get through that. Thanks. Yes? I'm Teresa. Teresa. The word will is the one that always grabs me. I'm a local person, and it's struggled. And I was just wondering if you had any tips on how you maintain that balance between taking necessary action. I think your example of your home is good. It depends on every situation, but what kinds of signs do you think you get that help you to know when to surrender and then when to take action? What kind of signs Do I get? I'm not sure I can... I understand the question. I'm sure I Can repeat it back for the mini-mic. But the first thing the question triggers for me is this was really useful for me. And just for me, because other people have different slants or different emphasis on it, I looked up the word will in the dictionary and one of the definitions in my Webster's was desire. And that triggered something for me if I'm giving up my desire. And the funny thing about alcoholism for me is I always have an image of it is that there's this switch over here. That when the switch turns on, I'm going to drink. And when it's off, I don't have to drink, but it turns on all by itself, and I can't reach it. It's just too slippery and too far away. And untreated, as an alcoholic, it's going to flick on and kill me whenever it wants. It's jut going to keep going. It just kept flicking on all about itself. It was spring-loaded to turn on and make me drink. And that switch was my desire for alcohol. And the first thing that was removed when I surrendered here was my Desire for Alcohol. And if I look at my fourth step, everything was driven by my desires, by my desire of comfort, my desire security, my desire companionship, my desire what I want. And so a convenient definition, a working definition for what I'm surrendering is my desire. Because that comes from deeper than... I can't override it except with a bigger desire. So if I turn it over to a power greater than myself that I assume the very nature of which is a beneficial desire then I'm better off than I am with my selfish desires. So what are my signals from the world when I'm baffled, or when I am conflicted, or when angry, or hurt, or clearly fearful? It's time to appeal to what I say is kinder and smarter than the day-to-day me and, again, hope that bubbles up as the right answer rather than the one that's driven by my selfish desires and my innate cleverness that will always figure out the shortcut to get what I want. Anything else? I'm trying not to talk. I have a two-part question. When you ask, when you do your third step prayer, I think you said, and especially like right now when you said you're not working and you feel that it's kind of good that you're at home, you say you might feel that, you know, you need to be working. Do you ask for specifics in that third step of prayer? Like, do you wake up in the morning and go, God, you don't give me a job? And if you do, the second part of the question is, you know, because I'm finding that I'm just reading the specifics out and saying, you can probably do that well. and I didn't have too many specifics to ask for. So, but luckily. And when you do ask for specifics and say you don't, have you had enough time to look back in hindsight and see when God works more? It seems like will, you know, desire will create you to go, God, you'll give me a job, give me girl, give me car, give Me, you Know. And that's kind of not really turning your will over. That's kindof wanting your will, You Know. And does hindsight show you that one works better than the other? The specifics over just a more general Bible. I don't ask for specifics. The book is pretty clear on not praying for ourselves only. I'm stopping in a couple minutes, right? I have an illustration for that that I really like. If I can talk my way through it, because I usually wind up... Here he goes. When I was a year sober and had dated some and had gone through all these uncomfortable feelings of dating as a newcomer and all that stuff and didn't know about not praying for ourselves only and prayed for companionship and for healthy relationship and I wound up at a year sober going out with somebody a couple times and flipping out and obsession and all that. And then she bailed on me for the boyfriend she'd had all along. And so I told people, and I sniveled all around, and people said, why don't you just get back to your primary purpose and do these steps and surrender to this process and let go of the idea of a relationship. People would say stuff to you around here like, in God's time, not your time. And I really did that at a gut level. I really didn't know what was going on. I really never did that because I was tired of being obsessed with something I couldn't have. And I was just tired of it. And so I really Did That and weeks or months went by. I don't know anymore. It was a long time ago. And I wind up at a meeting, a Thursday night meeting up in Los Angeles. Listen to a speaker. I'm sitting there. I would get up because I was well trained. I got in line to thank the speaker. And at the end of the, you know, I met a woman there and we talked. And we just wound up talking and seemed attracted to each other. And I wasn't hunting that night. and I was not acting on self that night. I hadn't prayed for a relationship anymore because I was over that. And, you know, here she is. And it's 20 years later. And she gave me these two marvelous kids. Where did that come from? And so, back to the idea of a primary purpose and surrendering to it. It's my experience that I have no idea what's best for me. And so kind of like the old horse and carriage, the horse with the blinders on, if I go, okay, I'm supposed to do this God service thing and I do this, a job came from over here and the wife came from under here and family came back and new friends came in. And they all came from while I was pursuing this primary purpose and not praying for myself. So yes, hindsight did show you that. Hindsight certainly confirms what we're talking about. Thank you.