Step 12 and Working With Others – 2025 – Part 2 of 2 – Big Book Study

So with that, I'm going to bring up Chris. Good evening everybody, my name is Chris and I am an alcoholic. I want to thank Lisa for talking us into doing this. We've had a great experience here, Karen for putting together half of the speakers and being here a lot more than I actually was, and I way appreciate that. Tonight we're going to be talking on Step 12, and my experience with Step 12 started the day I came back into Alcoholics Anonymous. This was right around New Year's of 1990, the beginning of 1990. What had happened was I had taken a stab at AlcoholicsAnonymous for a couple of months earlier that year and ended up relapsing, ended up going through an absolutely horrific time of being motivated out of desperation to go back to Alcoholics Anonymous. And this time I understood intuitively that I needed to give a lot more of myself this time. I needed the time to try a little bit harder than I had the time before. So on day two back in AA, I bumped into a person who had been my contact out of rehab. I never asked him to be my sponsor, but back in the day when you went through 28-day treatment, they would usually hook you up with a sponsor in the local AA area where you lived, and this guy was my sponsor. So I saw him on my second night back in Alcoholics Anonymous, And I went up to him and I said, Phil, these are my exact words. I go, I've been in hell. I need to get out. Will you help me? I mean, I was incredibly desperate. And he laughed. You know how sponsors are. You come to them with these deep, horrific problems and they'll like chuckle at you. And he laughs at me. And then he says to me, you know, I could use a new pigeon. And, you Know, I had never heard that term before. I was like a little bit horrified. He wanted me to be his pigeon. And the only pigeons I knew about were stool pigeons. I figured he wanted me to spy on the rest of his sponsees or something. But I was desperate enough to say, okay, I'll be your pigeon. And really what I did was without fully knowing what I was doing I placed myself under his care and protection because I recognized at that point that alcoholism was going to kill me, that if I could do something about it myself, I probably would have done so a long time ago. And so maybe he had a better plan. Supposedly he had 10 years sober and I'd run out of plans. I knew trying to just not drink is not going to work for me. I was in way more trouble than to be able to do that. So I placed myself under his care and protection. Now, remember this is like late 80s, early 90s in the Basking Ridge, Morristown kind of area. And at that period of time, the big book movement had not started yet. Where you hear a lot of different meetings talking about big book sponsorship, they're talking about going through the steps in the big books, But this was not something that you were hearing about in the late 80s and the early 90s. It didn't exist. If there were people who were paying attention and actually trying to do the steps, they were usually trying to them out of a step book or something. It was � the pendulum had swung way toward fellowship at that period of time. And right now we're in the midst of basically a renaissance where a lot of people are paying attention to and getting back to the basics of recovery as they're outlined in the big book. But that didn't exist in the late 80s, at least in our area. So there's three things of utmost importance if you're really alcoholic and you're coming into Alcoholics Anonymous to find a way to survive. One of them is consistency at meetings. The other is working the steps out of the big book with a sponsor or spiritual advisor. And the other is to be of service, to carry the message to the still-suffering alcoholic. If you're in real trouble with alcoholism and you don't do those three things, if you're able to stay sober, your quality of life is going to be in the toilet. That's if you'RE able to STAY SOBER. Most people can't. Most real alcoholics can't So looking back, you learn so much in hindsight. And I can look back and I can see why I survived. And it was basically because my sponsor insisted that I go to a meeting every night. His directive to me was, Chris, I want you at a meeting every night until I tell you to stop. He goes, this is not a 90-90 program. I'm telling you to go every night until I say yes. Until I tell him to stop, I did. And I did that for eight years. He never did tell me to stop He moved away before he told me to stop. Anyway, you know, listen, I didn't have a better plan. It wasn't like people were lining up to, you know, do things with me at night. I didn'T have a better plan, so going to the meeting was, you know, the best part of the day for me. You know, I met, I made a lot of friends there and, you know, hooking up with those people every night was kind of a solace to me. It was, you know it was comforting and that's what I did. And so that's one thing out of the three that he asked me to do. The second thing he wanted me to get involved with was service. This was a guy who had a service ethic. A small percentage of the people in Alcoholics Anonymous do 99% of the work. Those are the people who have that service ethic, and Phil did a lot of things. One of the things he did was he was a main volunteer at the treatment center that I went to in Morristown. It's closed its doors a long time ago, but it was CAI treatment center. And he organized the volunteer work for that place. He's the one that would put on the picnic for that treatment center every year. He would bring two meetings a week up there, bridge group, which was bridging the gap between treatment and recovery. And he was very, very involved and he wanted me involved too. And I had a shattered, bizarre self-esteem issue back in those days. I mean, I was the typical, had a big ego, had so much lack of self-esteem I couldn't look you in the eye, but thought I was better than you, but couldn't even imagine that I could talk in a conversation with you. It was, you know, that bizarre alcoholic dichotomy of insanity. And it was very, very tough for me to do this. It was very very tough from me to share, it was very very tuff for me too engage in these service activities. I remember this one time he asked me to come out and be a cook behind the grill at the CAI picnic. And he put me behind the hill. He was fish food filled because he had a seafood restaurant and he was a seafood consultant and all this stuff. So, he brought all the free seafood for this thing and he had me behind a grill cooking crab legs. You ever grill crab legs for four hours a day? I got to tell you, I smelt like a burnt crustacean and the wind was like blowing in my eyes and my eyes were watering. And I'm looking over there and people are playing volleyball and, you know, drinking iced tea and eating hamburgers and I'm stuck behind the grill. And I'm like six months over and I am thinking this is, this ain't right. You know, I shouldn't have to work like this, you know, but I did it because I had a lot of respect for Phil. Now, that's those service commitments. What they were about for me was Phil couldn't come up to me and say this, which would have been true, he couldn't really come up and say this to me because I had sensitive alcoholic feelings. He could not come up to me and say, Chris, you're the most selfish self-centered, self-seeking, self absorbed bastard I've ever met in my life You have never done anything for anybody in your whole entire life without expecting something back as a result. Selfishness and self-centerness is the root of your trouble, you pathetic cretin Now what I'm going to do is I'm gonna make you do all this stuff for fun and for free to yank you out of that self-absorbed morass that you're living in. But he couldn't say that to me. So what he would say was, Chris, I need some help at the picnic. But trust me, he understood what my real problem was. My real problem is I was pathetically self-centered. And that's what we die from, folks. We don't die from drinking. We die from that separation, that selfish and self-absorbed perspective that we walk around with thinking that we are our own planet and figuring out how everything impacts and affects us. That's what we die from. Anyway, so two things I'm doing for my recovery that Phil asked me to do. Meetings and service. But remember, there's no big book back then. There's no opening up the book Alcoholics Anonymous and going through the steps. It just wasn't done. People, you know, did whatever they needed to do. A lot of people became very meeting dependent back in those days. You don't see that today like you did back in the late 80s and early 90s. But meeting dependent. There were people with 20 years who went to 14 meetings a week. You know what I mean? And, you Know, they'd talk about this and they'd ask him, Have you ever taken your wife out for dinner, you know? You go to 14 meetings a week. Are you ever home? Is this really what this is about, hiding out in Alcoholics Anonymous? But that's because if you don't do the recovery part, if you Don't Do The Steps, you've got to hang on like a sumbitch. And that's going to take a gazillion meetings, a lot of service, and you're still going to be back shit crazy if you're an alcoholic. So anyway, here I am. I am a mess. I'm going to 14 meetings a week. I am doing service commitments whenever and wherever my sponsor is asking me to. And I'm shattered. I'm self-absorbed. I am depressed. I have anxiety that's like just freaky anxiety. I mean, you know, I worry about like walking into an AA meeting. What are they thinking about me? I mean, I was just so, my heightened self-absorption was like on 10. And my personal relationships were still in the toilet. You know, I'd go home at night and I'd Go to make myself a drink and there'd be like no ice in the ice cube tray. And I'd freak out. There's no ice In the ice Cube Tray! Don't you know I need ice? And I just shared about gratitude at the meeting a few minutes before. You know what I mean? I was nuts. I was still spending all my money on things out here to put in here to try to make me feel better. I was a collector of all kinds of crap. I came to an Alcoholics Anonymous with a monstrous comic book collection, a monstrous science fiction collection, 30,000 LP records. You know, just boxes and boxes of crap that I would buy to try to make me feel a little bit better inside. I mean, I truly, truly was a mess. I hadn't had a decent intimate relationship in at least 10 years or more when I came into AA. And I was just an absolute mess. And going to meetings and doing service commitments did not help that. They're not supposed to help that! Yes, we're supposed to learn some wisdom teachings in Alcoholics Anonymous, you know? Like the old-timers were great with the one-liners. The one- liners are great ways to get a message across. And these old- timers were just wonderful, you know, they'd come up to you and they'd go, kid, underneath every skirt's a slit. You know? And you'd go like, whoa! Whoa! You know, how brilliant! You know? Someday when I get my head out of my ass, I'll see how stupid that is. But right now, I'm unrecovered. Anyway, anyway, I digress. So I'm a mess. I mean, emotionally, spiritually, psychically, just my health is really bad. But I'm going to a lot of meetings. I'm going to allot of meetings and I'm doing a lot service commitments. Now, I think I shared earlier that what happened to me was my buddy Radio Shack Mike came along with a stack of 8 90 minute tapes this one time and what it was, it was a big book workshop and in this big book work shop it talked about actually going through the book Alcoholics Anonymous following the directions in the book alcoholics anonymous paying very close attention to the like 25 musts in the books alcoholics and, you know, where there's an exercise, stop, do the exercise, and then move on. Now this was revolutionary to me. I had been to a thousand meetings by this time, and I had never heard of such a thing. That's not how we do it in New Jersey, you Know, was my first reaction. My sponsor never told me about that. I had a big book that they gave me at the rehab, and everybody signed it, and then I put it away and never looked at it again because I went to step meetings, you Now? That's what everybody did back then. So this was a revolutionary concept for me. I didn't accept it right away. It was something that I fought because it went against what my experience was. It went against how I was being taught in my Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, you know? How can this be so significant if I've never heard of it? It would be like going to the hospital for 14 years with cancer and then all of a sudden somebody giving you a set of tapes that talks about chemotherapy. You'd be like, what? Why haven't I heard about this before? This can't possibly work. And that was my initial reaction. Well, some things happened to me, and I went through a period of time where the crap hit the fan. If you hang around here long enough, you're going to have a time in the barrel. It happens to all of us. And what that looks like, it's like two or three or four or five big things in your life. Deaths, loss of jobs, you know, problems with cars, you put them all together and they hit you one right after another and it just knocked the wind out of me. It was going to take me out, this depression that I was in. So I remember listening to these tapes and saying, you know, the message in these tapes had haunted me. I listened to them like I listen to anything for entertainment, you know, on my ride to work. But these tapes were very, very deep and profound, and they had a truth, like a rock-solid truth that haunted me? I wanted to say, you now, these guys from Arkansas don't know anything. You know, this isn't the way we do it. But they talked with such authority and they made such sense that, you know, their message haunted me. So when I got to a point where I was at an emotional bottom, pitifully and incomprehensibly demoralized, I pulled out these tapes and I started listening to them, and I went through the 12 steps following their guidance. And as I did this, I was kind of unaware of what was going on at the time, but basically what happened to me was I started to recover from alcoholism. That's the whole point of the 12 Steps, awakening your spirit to the point where you're no longer that self-absorbed, self-seeking individual. Your spirit has awakened and you're conscious now of really what the whole plan is here. And that's what was going on with me as I was going through these steps. Now, I had sponsored prior to this. I actually started sponsoring with about seven or eight months. and there was a number of guys that I had for one reason or another I guess because I kind of came off pretty crazy back in those days I would get crazy people asking me to sponsor them you know, one lunatic after another would ask me and my automatic response because I still kind of had self-esteem issues was yes do you want me to support you? yes okay now what's your problem? Which are, that's the wrong way to ask those questions, by the way. Anyway, I had a whole bunch of guys that were drinking on me, you know? These responses that were making me look bad because they were drinking, you know, and they were running around hitting on the new women and causing all kinds of trouble in the meetings. And people would come to me and say, hey, is this guy yours, you know? Yeah, I'll talk to him, you And so about a year earlier, I'd taken myself kind of through the big book. And again, a lot of that self-centered fear, a lotof that depression and anxiety was being lifted because of the process to the steps. I was feeling a lot better about myself. I was worrying about stuff a lot less. And I came to the conclusion that this really has worked for me. I know what I'll do. I'll bring these guys over to my house, and I'll take them through the book. And we'll both go through the books. We'll start at page one. We'll read the whole book. We'll do all the exercises. And that's how I'm going to sponsor from now on. And that was sometime in the early 90s. And I started to do that. And I learned a couple of very, very significant lessons. One of them was I kind of felt like I can't ask anybody to do something that I'm not willing to do myself. So the first half a dozen guys I took through the steps, I went through the Steps myself too, again. So in a very, very short period of time, I worked through the Steps a number of times. That helped me a lot. That's one of the things that I learned. Again, if you're an alcoholic, you're so sick, you don't even know you're sick. You don't know how sick you are. You're minimizing it. And then you start to get better, And then you realize that you're sick, but you're not as sick as those people over there. And then finally, finally, you get to a point where you realize you're sick and you're, you're just like everybody else. You're just at a different place on the continuum, you know? And so I'm bringing these guys over and here's the second thing that I learned. The second thing I learned was the guys who went through this with me, who didn't balk. There were people who saw the fourth and fifth step as an overreaction. There were certainly people that saw the eighth and the ninth step as something that they didn't feel comfortable with. And what would happen is they would extricate themselves. They'd slowly drift away. The people who didn' t go through the steps and they're all gone. There's nobody left who said, you know, Chris, I'm not doing the fourth step and they' re still in AA. You know, no way. They're all gone. Every single one of the guys that went through the steps with me are still around. And, you know, they're celebrating 17, 18, 19 years now. Every single on of them. And they're all sponsoring people. And you look at their quality of life and it's amazing. I mean, they've got growing pains just like the rest of us. You know? Things aren't perfect. But my God, are they experiencing and appreciating life. However that's coming at them. And I still got these, these are friends of mine that would take a bullet for me. They're still very, very close guys. And I didn't do any of that out of a sense of virtue. It wasn't like to be like a better AA. I did it all out of kind of a senseless sense of desperation and a sense of not wanting to feel bad anymore And a sense of not wanting to let my guys down. If I'm sponsoring somebody, I didn't want to let them down. If I could help them not drink, I took that responsibility seriously. So this is how I learned how to sponsor. Now, sometime in the late 1990s or whatever, I started to study a little bit of Alcoholics Anonymous history. Nothing like Bill over here. Bill is quite possibly one of the top five AA historians on this planet. I mean, he knows what Ebi Thatcher was wearing when he showed up at Bill's house. But I did study some of the early AAs, and I got a hold of some ofthe early tapes of the first 100, and I studied the Oxford group, and Istudied Sam Shoemaker and Father Ed Dowling and a number of these other people that were very influential in the formation and growth of Alcoholics Anonymous. Now, here's some of the conclusions that I've come to. In the early days of AA, this is what it would look like if you were an AA member. On Monday night, you'd go to a meeting and meet with the rest of your guys. And you'd get together and you'd strategize about finding other alcoholics. That's all it was about. It was about, hey, who are you working with and where are you going to find more guys to work with? That would be Monday night. Tuesday night, everybody would split up. Some people would go to the loony bins. Some people Would go to The jails or the detoxes. Wednesday night, they'd Go to the hospitals. They'd go over here to Greystone. They'd Go talk to doctors or lawyers or judges. All throughout the week, they Would go and look for prospects. A prospect is You try to dig for prospects You try to find people who may want what you have to offer, who may be alcoholic and may want to get over it. And you do that out there. You don't do it in the meetings. You do it out there, most of your work is out there and that's what the first five or ten years of Alcoholics Anonymous looked like. It was a recovery program. It was finding people to take through the 12 steps. finding people who wanted what you have to offer what you need to offer is not meetings what you want to offer is the 12 steps the recovery process the inventory the confession the restitution the prayer and meditation the working with other people all of that came out of the Oxford group and Sam Shoemaker and a number of other people and that was the business that you were about as an AA member, finding people who might want to do that. And they went through a lot of people. You'd go through 10, 20 people before you'd find somebody who's receptive. And when you found somebody that was receptive, they were now a protege. They went from being a prospect to a proteege. Your protege was somebody who was taking the steps with you, who you were giving spiritual guidance to about how to develop their relationship with God. And if they were a prospect, you could invite them into the meetings. You know, back in the day, they didn't just let anybody in the meetings if you weren't about the business of working the steps. You know? You don't have an honest desire to stop drinking and, you know, you couldn't just wander into an AA meeting in the first 10 years. You know. You had to show that you meant business. Now, so I'm learning all this and then I'm thinking to these Joe and Charlie tapes and I'm thinkin', you know what the hell? What the hell has happened in Alcoholics Anonymous? We went from a program of recovery with a sport fellowship to a fellowship of sobriety. Because that's what it was like when I came in. It was a fellowship as a bride. Hey, just stay sober. Just don't drink no matter what. Even if your ass falls off. Just think the drink through. Keep it simple, stupid. Hang on. Let go. You know, I mean, that's all it was. And, you know, go to meetings, go to meetings. Make coffee. Go to meetings Go to meetings. How the hell did we get from people that were witnessing to the power of God to shoving people into the meetings? What happened? So I started to look into that a little bit and you know there's a number of things There's a lot of things that have contributed to to the change in Alcoholics Anonymous Many things. I think that when the step book came out, I think that that detoured us away from our primary purpose. I think when alcoholism became a disease in 1956 by the American Medical Society, I think it made opportunities out there for every kind of wackadoo treatment program you've ever seen. Anybody in here sober before 1993? You remember all the treatment centers? Remember all the treatement centers? You couldn't shake a stick without hitting a Happy Hills somewhere, you know. And some of them were wackos with what they did. Just wacky. They would hire patients who just got sober and make them counselors. I mean it was just the craziest crap you've ever seen in your life. And they were everywhere. And I think that helped to throw a couple of torpedoes into Alcoholics Anonymous and what AlcoholicsAnonymous was about. And, you know, I also think that some of the AA promotion, you know some of this stuff that comes out in New York, if you pay attention really closely to what General Service does and their initiatives, you'll see that they're more about membership numbers, They're more about quantity than they are about quality. So what will happen is that they want to send this message out that the more the merrier. Do it any way you want to do it, just come on in. And that's great for the revenue, but it's not necessarily good for holding onto a primary purpose and holding onto recovery process really tightly. If you open up the door so wide to let every kind of thing in in the world, you're going to dilute this. And that's kind of what happened over the decades in Alcoholics Anonymous. We had become diluted. And that is really a shame because I have been around a long time. I have gone to a lot of meetings. I know a lot people in recovery. and I have to tell you that the people that I see that have recovered that really have that awakened spirit, that have the promises have come true for them they don't wish to shut the door on the past nor regret it they know a new freedom and a new happiness the best years of their lives are ahead of them, God is doing for them what they cannot do for themselves those people, they always have a step process in their history. The people that go back out always don't. You know what I mean? Listen, lots of people cycle through Alcoholics Anonymous. Two years ago in the Grapevine magazine, they went back to the gray pages. The gray pages were information from the professional alcoholism and drug treatment industry and they like to put the gray page pages in there just to educate us on, you know, what's going on out there in the medical world that relates to us. And every once in a while you'll get statistics and you get studies that are done, like about us. And this one study was about how long people have been in the meetings. And there was an independent group of people who did this survey. And they came up with some staggering survey numbers. They came up with the fact that 45% of the people, and this is all 12-step programs, it's not just AA. AA I'm sure would have better statistics but they went to all these different 12-stepp fellowships and interviewed people coming in and out of the door and they found that 45% of the people going into 12-step meetings have less than two months sober. Forty-five percent. Now, is anybody else horrified by that besides myself? I mean, what does that say about our effectiveness, you know? And for a long time I was also aligned with and hooked into the professional alcoholism and drug treatment community. I wasn't a counselor or anything like that. I don't have the patience for that. But what I was doing was I was doing some media work and I got a chance to meet a lot of people who are professional drug and alcohol treatment people. They own the rehabs and they write the articles for the DSM-IVs and they do the scholarly articles and they put on the symposiums and all this stuff. And I met these guys. Now, that led me into doing some LinkedIn and some Facebook blog stuff. I got involved in some blogs. And this guy went after me one time on the blog. I'm very pro 12-step because it's really my own experience. If you've got another way out there, show me 3 million people it's worked for. Alright? Otherwise I don't want to hear about it. Because everybody's got people who have equine therapy. You don't need to go to AA. Just work with the horses. I mean, everybody's got an idea. They do. And they're going to make money off you, too, while they do it. And the world is just populated with these knuckleheads. And this one guy goes after me. He's a non-12-step clinical psychologist, okay? And he doesn't send people to AA, and he let me know why. He goes, do you know that AA's statistics are 6%? He goes I can get better results offering placebos. That was his comment to me, 6%. Now if you were to stand out by this door for the next 10 years and survey every single person that's walking through here, you'll probably find that only 6% of the people that's in this room tonight are going to be here in 10 years. Okay, I'll give you that. However, rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. That is still true. That is till true. The people who thoroughly followed the path that I laid out for them in the steps are all still here. They're all still there. The people that didn't are gone. Now, I had to rebut this guy, okay? Because I may be recovered but I'm still going to win arguments. And how I rebutted this guy was like this. I go, okay, let's say you have cancer, all right? You've got pancreatic cancer. And you go to the hospital and you sit in the waiting room and you talk with other people in the wait-in room about your cancer treatment. And they're in for cancer. Let's talk about our cancer treatment, let' s talk about cancer treatment and then you go home and you come back the next day is sit in the waiting room and you talk about your cancer treatment again. Well, what kind of treatment are you going to have? I'm thinking about having this. But you never go in for the operation. Should the hospital be held accountable to your poor statistics? In other words, is it the hospital's fault if you die of cancer? You went to the hospital, but you didn't follow their suggestions. You didn't go in for the surgery. You didn' t go in for the operating. The same thing happens in Alcoholics Anonymous today. Lots of people come in and sit in the waiting room. We sit in the waitng room and we talk about the steps and we philosophize about the step and then we read about the steps, we share about the steps but we don't do them. Now can Alcoholics Anonymous really be held accountable if you go out and drink? Did AA really not work? Did that hospital really not work? Because rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Right after it says that, it lays out the path. So if you're not about that path, you can't be part of the rarely. You're not allowed to be part of the really unless you follow the path, so Alcoholics Anonymous has changed. Now there's a renaissance going on now that's all about following the path getting back to following the pack. We spent decades away from this, you know, decades away from this and now there are groups that are talking about this, that are bringing it back into conversation. There are people who are starting to sponsor this way again. And listen, this is all to the good. Does every meeting have to be like a big book meeting? I don't believe so. I really don't. But I think that each area should have a couple of literature-based, solution-based meetings because part of our recovery process is going to, we're going to need to encourage each other to do this. The steps are not easy. You know, the steps are NOT easy. When you get to Steps 8 and Steps 9, you know, that's a big playground. And, you Know, it takes a lot of encouragement. So we need to be about the business of helping each other. Now, in the book Alcoholics Anonymous, there's a great chapter. It's called Working With Others. For many, many years how I was sponsoring, even when I was starting to take people to the steps, I was winging it. I really was. I was listening to a lot of the oral tradition in the meetings. People who sponsored. I was perking up when they were talking about their sponsorship style and everything. And what I realized one day was when I was reading the chapter Working With Others is that's how you're supposed to work with others. Duh! You know, I mean, so often, I'm the type of alcoholic so often the truth will be right there in front of me and three years and all of a sudden I'll say, hey, I just discovered the truth. Well, it's been in front of you for three years. That's just me. Now, in the chapter working with others when I first looked at it, I thought, wow, this is hardcore. This really is hardcore. Compared to the alcoholics the liberal Alcoholics Anonymous I came to in in the late 80s. Yes, it was hardcore. Yes, it was hardcore. Because we didn't tell anybody what to do. You can't tell everybody what to doing, eh? You know, I don't know where... All this crap came from bad treatment centers, by the way. All these little slogans and everything. Anyway, anyway, in the chapter Working With Others, it talks about finding a prospect. And then it talks about the first visit. Then it talks about the second visit. On the first visit, leave the person the book. The book Alcoholics Anonymous. Ask them to read it, you know, if they're capable of reading. Ask dem to read it in the interval between your first and your second visit. On the second visit back you know what you're supposed to do? You're supposed ask them, well are you willing to go to those links? What links? Are you willing to go to any links? What links ? The links in the book! You read the book, are you willing to do that? And if they say no or they have any other answer except an unqualified yes, you're basically supposed to say, well, here's my phone number. I really only know one way to recover from alcoholism. Here's my telephone number. Give me a call if you ever mean business. Bye-bye! Now, when I was first exposed to this method of sponsorship, of mentoring someone through the steps, I was pretty horrified. I thought you had to trick them. I thought you had to reel them in and land them over the course of a couple of months and manipulate them and trick them into doing good things for themselves. But that's really not the case. I have had a lot of experience with a lot different people. And I have wasted an exorbitant amount of time working with people who really weren't willing. Why they asked me to sponsor them, I don't know. Maybe it was just for me to co-sign their crap. Maybe it Was, you know, if they could say, well, Chris is my sponsor, people would leave them alone. You know, maybe they were inspired at a meeting and, you know, boy, this sounds really great, and they asked me. But there was really not really a lot of follow through. And these individuals wanted me to be one thing. They wanted me To be their drama coach. Okay? They wanted to be able to call me up every time they got in the jackpot. Oh, you wouldn't believe what happened to me this time. Well, yes, unfortunately, I do believe what happens to you this time because you're an idiot. You know what I mean? And you are so your own worst enemy. And the first mistake you made this morning when you woke up was start to think. You know What I Mean? And I mean, for the longest time I was, I was the drama coach. Middle of the night, phone calls. You know, I just need to talk. Well, I'm here for you, you know? And hour after hour of these phone calls, most of these morons ended up sliming their way out of Alcoholics Anonymous and disappearing anyway because they weren't about the business of recovery. You can't recover by sharing, you Know? And that's all they wanted to do. And they wait. So you spend time, your daughter meets him. It's bummed out Bob, Danielle. This is bummed-out Bob. You go to the park together and you go to Dirty Park and into New York City and then they slime their way out of Alcoholics Anonymous and then your daughter is going, it's bumbed-out Bobby, daddy. Well, sweetheart, he's a loser. And he slimed his way out Of AlcoholicsAnonymous. I mean, this happened to me for years. so slowly I started to pay a little bit of attention to this chapter working with others this chapter working with others will save you all of that heartache of sponsoring people who are on the half measure program it really will because it's hard core it basically lays it out ok I've got to qualify the individual I've gotta be sure he's an alcoholic I have to be not them I have to be, if I'm going to work with them. And if I am not sure I don't need to work with them, if i am sure and they want help, I have to work, you know but I don' t need to work with somebody that is not an alcoholic. Have I been helpful over the years? Have I even taken people through the steps who weren't alcoholic, who were drug addicts or whatever? Absolutely! But as an Alcoholics Anonymous member it's not incumbent upon me to do that. If they are a heavy drinker or disco drunk or something, you know. They don't need me. They can go and share somewhere and they'll be fine. If, however, they're alcoholic, they're going to have to be about the business of recovery or they're gonna slowly die an inch at a time because that's what happens to us. Anyway, so my first visit. Qualify the individual. Talk a little bit about my story. Allow the individual to tell me about his story. Try to identify because that's what happened with Bill and Dr. Bob. Dr. Bob said when he talked to Bill Wilson, it was the first time in his life he ever talked to anybody who understood the drinking game. It was the first time. And he was only going to give this bird 15 minutes and they spent like 7 hours together and he moved them into his house the next day. Moved Bill Wilson into the house the last day. Because here was somebody who identified. That identification is powerful. That's why we're here. So in my initial contact with the alcoholic, I need to spend that time. I need to talk about drinking. I don't just say yes in an AA meeting. Somebody come up to me, hey Chris, I want you to sponsor. Are you available? I don?t just say, yes. I?m not supposed to. I'm supposed to meet with the individual and become convinced that they are an alcoholic. And leave them the book. Has anybody ever asked you, are you willing to go to any lengths, and they're not giving you the dignity of even understanding what the hell that means. What is any lengths? You know, you dress me up in a diaper and march me down Fifth Avenue? I mean, you know, what the hell is any links? Do I got to wash your car every Saturday? Well, what does that mean? You know, I never could get any answers from these mutton brains back in the day. Any links, the only way you're going to understand what any links is, is if somebody shows you the book Alcoholics Anonymous. The book Alcoholic Anonymous is any links. Are you willing to go to these links in here? The steps. Read Bill's story. First eight pages of Bill's story is the tragedy. The second eight pages is the recovery. Read the second eight page of Bill Wilson's story and tell me if you're willing to do that. Because that's what recovery looks like. Now Now, I've got to admit to you, not every single person that asks me today ends up being sponsored by me. But I don't waste time anymore with people that are not willing. You're not supposed to. The book Alcoholics Anonymous says your time as a recovered alcoholic is extremely valuable. Never waste time working with someone who is not going to work with you. There are people out there that are much more desperate and willing to work with you. So cut, cut the ties. Don't work with these people who are barely willing to get to meetings, let alone go through the steps. We're not supposed to bother them. Are they welcome in the meetings? Absolutely. This is an open fellowship. Do they deserve to work v?i us? No, not necessarily. Not necessarily. So in the book, Alcoholics Anonymous, it explains how you are to show the individual how to go through the steps. You know how to do it. You know to go to the steps because you've just had this experience. This leads me to believe that if you haven't gone to the 12 steps of AlcoholicsAnonymous, it's going to be very, very difficult for you to be an effective sponsor or mentor or show people how to goes through the step. How are you going to show them how to amends if you never did them yourself. How are you going to do that? It's going to be an empty intellectual exercise instead of a sharing of experience, strength and hope. So I believe it's incumbent upon us as sponsors to have our own experience. Now, I believe that there's a lot of latitude in the steps. I know that none of us do them perfectly. I know that each of us has personalities that have specific challenges where it comes to some of these things. I don't think we get an A, B, or a C in how we go through the steps. I think it's pass-fail. You know what I mean? And if you do enough work, you're going to pass and you're gonna recover. So again, I'm not a stickler for the mechanics. I'm more interested in the spirit of these exercises. And there is, you know, if somebody has a four-column or somebody's got a five-columns or they've got a four column fear and only two columns, I don't really care about that stuff. I look for thoroughness and I look f�r honesty when the people are going through the steps. And there's a lot of latitude. And many of us have already a connection to the grace of God. and it's that grace that kind of intuits through us how to do some of these step processes. You know, I've seen so many people come to so many profound conclusions about their life going through the fourth and the fifth step. I've seeing so many lights come on in the eyes of dead people when they've gone through the eighth and the ninth step and I've see so many people improve dramatically their quality of life praying and meditating and carrying the message to other people that you have absolutely no idea. The miracles, there are miracles among us in Alcoholics Anonymous but you have to work for these miracles. You know there's a religious controversy out there and there has been for hundreds of years now. One of them is justification through faith. You are saved through faith alone and then there's a book of James which the Alcoholics Anonymous, all the early Alcoholics Anonymous members used as a sounding board for their meetings where it basically says faith without works is dead. I believe that if you're an average person, you can be saved through faith alone. I have no argument about that. I will tell you this, if you are an alcoholic you are not going to recover by belief alone. You're going to have to recover by work. Alcoholics Anonymous and Recovery is not a spiritual I'm sorry, not an intellectual endeavor it's not about learning more you know, I do a lot of big book workshops in a lot different areas one of the things I always qualify in these big book workshops are if you're here just to learn or just to sound better, share better at meetings that's all well and fine but don't expect to get a lot out of that if If, however, you're going to this big book workshop because you want to gain some knowledge about some things that you can turn into your own experience, some practical application, and learn the mechanics so that you Can actually go out and do it, that's a whole other thing. You're going To have a whole another experience with it that way because it's through the doing. It's not just the thinking or knowing. It's through The doing that we recover. and you know that's been my experience and my experience with just a ton of people in Alcoholics Anonymous now one of the things that I believe very strongly in and it's kind of a call to action and I'll end with this is if every single one of us in the rooms of AlcoholicsAnonymous would take very very seriously what the chapter Working With Others says and just find two people to get through the steps in the next year. In ten years, alcoholism will be over. You know what I mean? Exponentially, this is how it spread in the early days. In the early years, Alcoholics Anonymous doubled in size like every couple of years, if not less. And it's because of working one-on-one with the alcoholic and showing them a recovery experience. We don't do that much anymore. We've become a lazy, meeting-dependent kind of a fellowship. Certainly not the people in this room. I'm not talking about us. In general. And if we could just get back to the power of the actions that they talk about in the chapter working with others, we could really, really save some lives out there. There's no doubt. Now, I was on a head-on collision with ruin. Death and ruin in the late 80s. My alcoholism had progressed to the point where I was literally poisoning myself to death with hard liquor every single night. Alcohol poisoning myself every single day. Every single night, and I could not stop. But that sickness, that physical sickness wasn't even the worst part. It was the psychic and emotional trauma that I was putting myself through. Now think about this. The recovery process for alcoholism. If all it did was offer us separation from alcohol, it would be worth it. But it offers so much more. The recovery proces offers so muc more. It offers soundness of mind. it offers an awakened spirit being able to intuitively know the right way to act coming to the right thoughts having compassion what recovery has offered me is I was able to move my structure off of a foundation built on selflessness self-centeredness, self-seeking and self-absorption to a new foundation, and that new foundation is built on love, service, and compassion. And that's a complete shift in perception. It's a completely new perspective. It's looking at the world with a complete new pair of glasses. And it's way more. I am so grateful because it's much more than I think I deserve the way I was living at the end. So alcoholism is an aggressive, progressively fatal illness. It kills you and before you even know it, you have it. It kills You. But if you're lucky enough to be part of the crew that actually recovers from it, there are some serious promises that are attached to it. Knowing that new freedom, knowing that new happiness, understanding what serenity means, being able to be alone at perfect peace and ease not having to fight alcohol anymore not having to fight anything anymore these are incredible promises but we need to work for them and again I've had a really great time doing the talks here at this workshop the Montclair area has really got some stuff going on I love coming down here I've got some good friends in this area and I want to thank you for being here tonight. Thank you. Thank you for listening.