Step 2 — Came to Believe – Joe C. – 1998 – Session 22

It destroys more alcoholics than anything else. From its stem all forms of spiritual disease, for we've been not only mentally and physically ill, we've been spiritually sick. When the spiritual battle is overcome, we straighten out mentally and physically. In dealing with resentments, we set them on paper. So the first thing we're going to do is look at these resentments. Now I think we need to look at that word and make sure we understand what it means. The word resentment is made from two old, old words. First are the letters R-E, re. When you see re in front of another word, it always means to do again. Like repaint, replay, redo, always means to do again. The last part of this word, sentiment, comes from an old word called centery, which means to feel. So the word resentment itself means to re-feel. Okay. Let's say we're going through life, which we do on a daily basis, remembering always that everybody has got self-will. That's one of the problems. It's standard equipment. Everybody's got self-will. From time to time, other people get sick in self. Maybe their social instinct is out of culture. Maybe their security instinct or their sex instinct is fouled up. And they do something to me that threatens one of my basic instincts of life. Maybe they put me down in the eyes of other people, and it threatens my self-esteem. Maybe they do something to threaten one of my personal relationships. Maybe they rip me off and steal my money from me. Maybe they do something to interfere with my sex life. Or maybe they do something that threatens one of my ambitions for the future. Now, when they do that, that's a wrong on their part for doing so. That's not a resentment. It doesn't become a resentment until, I go over in the next room, or I go home that evening, and I replay that thing in my mind, and I feel the pain the second time. The first time they did it to me hurt me. But when I go over here and replay it, and feel the pain the second time, then I'm doing it to myself now. They did it to me the first time, but I'm doing it the second time. And after a while, I'll replay it again. And I'll feel the pain the third time. And what I've found in my life is I'm not always completely honest with me. Because it seems as though when I replay this thing, each time I tend to change it just a little bit. And I tend to make what they did to me just a little bit worse. I tend to make what I did just a little bit less. I tend to make the pain just a little bit deeper. And you let me play it over in my head enough times, after a while I can say to myself, I was just standing there doing nothing. And they come along and did it to me. And they come along and did it to me. I love to watch football games. And in a football game, you'll see a guy called a quarterback that sometimes will throw a pass. And the guy that's supposed to receive it, many times it's thrown up high on purpose so the other guys can't catch it. And the guy that's going to receive it, many times has to jump way up in the air to catch it. Now the members of the opposing team, they have learned that if you can hit this guy while he's still up in the air, before he really gets good control of that ball, you can knock it loose from him. So they wait until he jumps up in the air. And when that ball touches his fingers, they knock the hell out of him. Now he's completely defenseless now. And they'll hit him and sometimes it'll just turn him upside down. He'll fall on his head. His neck bends sideways. His legs spread. One arm bends completely behind his back. And it just hurts the hell out of him. And you can see that he's hurt. Now the football game, though, is like the game of life. It's going to go on. They're not going to stop it very long. One of two things will happen with this guy. They'll run out there and check him over. And if he isn't hurt too bad, they'll pump a little air in him and get him up and get him going again. If he's hurt too bad, they'll get him up and get him going again. They'll drag him off to the side. They'll put somebody in his place. And the game starts again. The football game is going to continue. I don't care what's happened. Now the announcer up in the booth, though, he's got a resentment machine. Because after a while he'll say, let's look at that again. And this time it is in slow motion and living color. My God, it looks twice as bad as it did the first time. You can see how far his neck really did bend. How far his legs spread apart and how badly that arm was bent. And it looks twice as bad as it did the first time. After a while the announcer will say, let's look at that again. The game's been going on now for 15 minutes. The announcer's still bouncing this guy up and down, up and down, up and down off the ground. Now we alcoholics have up here in our heads a little resentment replay machine. And we get up in the mornings and we toot it up in living color. We clean the lens on it because we don't want to miss nothing. And we shine it on the world all day long. And we record everything they do to us that's bad. And we record everything they do to us that's bad. And we record everything they do to us that's bad. And we go home at night and sit down and play it over in our head and make ourselves sick and blame it on them. Now once in a while we have a bad day. Once in a great while they won't do anything to us. That's a bad day for an alcoholic. We've got our machine cleaned up. The lens is clean, tuned up. We shine it on the world and nobody will do anything to us. We don't have anything bad to record. Don't record. We don't record nothing good. Do you know what we record those days? By God, we record what they're thinking. That's what we do. We go home at night, play it over in our head and make ourselves sick. Now there's a bad thing about resentment. Because each time you play it over your head, each time you throw it out there, after a while it turns around and it comes back at you. And when it comes back at you, it comes back as self-resentment. And we begin to resent ourselves for being in a position to have those things happen to us. And after a while self-resentment turns to self-pity. And that's the sickest, sickest that a human being can be up here in their head is to be filled with self-pity. And we alcoholics love self-pity. We love self-pity. We like to get up early in the morning, put self-pity on as a cloak of dignity. And as we go out the door, we say, Here I come, mean old world, just do it to me. I know you're going to get me because you always do. It is a sick, sick way to build our self-esteem. Because after all, if the whole world is picking on us, we must really be somebody. And my God, we love that self-pity. If you want an alcoholic mad, if you want to make them mad, you try to feel sorry for one of us. And we'll tell you in a hurry, don't you feel sorry for me. That's my damn job, you know. Is there any way that God can enter a mind filled with that kind of crap? No way. Our thinking is controlled and dominated by these resentments and all the things that go along with it. God is absolutely completely blocked out of our mind through these resentments. At the very least, we're going to have to do something about them. Now the instructions on how to do them are here in the big book, Alcoholics Anonymous. They're just so simple that we never could see them before. We've given you a sheet in your handout material called a review of resentments. I believe that's page 9 and 10. And what I would ask you to do now is take those last two columns and try to fold them over where you can't even see them. Where all you're looking at is column 1, 2, and 3. The example on page 65 has already been filled out. And we didn't know the procedure that Bill used to fill it out. That's where a lot of our confusion is. So what we've given to you in the first three columns is page 65 in the blank form. We want to emphasize, we're not trying to bring another inventory in AA. We've already got enough of those. Page 65, the resentment sheet that you have, is 65 in the blank form. Column 1, I'm resentful at. Column 2 is the cause. Column 3 affects my. Now let's see if we can't find the instructions on how to fill it out. In dealing with resentments, we set them on paper. Here we are. Okay, you've got the paper now. And we're going to start setting them down. You know, we're always taught to read from left to right. And if you read from left to right and trying to figure out the inventory on page 65, you would start with Mr. Brown. And you'd write down the resentment. And then you'd change your mind and go to the second column and write down the cause. Then you'd change your mind again and go to what part of self was affected. And you'd have to use those basic instincts of life and try to write down what part of self was affected. Then you'd go back to the first column. Then you'd go back to the first column mentally and write down Mrs. Jones. And then you'd change your mind again and go to the second column. Well, you get the idea. If you do that long enough, if you have a mind like mine, it says tilt. It's just too much information. And I say, well, what the hell? All they wanted was a life story anyhow. So I just disregard this. Well, we didn't know how to fill out this column. It seems to us that you fill this out one column at a time from top to bottom, leaving a little space in between the names in column one. So you fill this out one column at a time from top to bottom. So you fill this out one column at a time from top to bottom. So you fill this out one column at a time from top to bottom. So you'll fill that in over in column two and a little bit later. Because our book said that we listed people, institution, or principal with whom we are angry, period. From top to bottom in column one, we would simply write down all the people, principals, or institution with whom we are angry from top to bottom, leaving a little space between each one of them all the way down. People, that's self-explanatory. Institutions are those things such as the police department, the internal revenue, the federal government, the church, etc. Principals are those old, old guiding, I hate to use the word laws, but it's the only thing I can think of, natural laws that's interfered with our style of living. The Ten Commandments, that's a set of principles. And when I was out there drinking, I don't want to hear nothing about the Ten Commandments. I'm breaking all of them but one, and maybe I broke it in a blackout too. I don't know. Another old principle I'd always hated said, what goes up must come down. I never cared for that one. Another one said, what you give out is what you get back. Another one said, there are no free rides. You'll pay for whatever you get. And my dad used to say, when you lay down with dogs, you'll get fleas on you every time. Those old, old principles that interfered with our style of living. Now, you don't need to be sober very long to do this. All we got to do is take these things out of our head, put them down on paper. You don't have to have a high education to do this. If you can't write, you feed the names to somebody else and let them write them down. And while our mind is on one thing and one thing only, let's fill out the first column from top to bottom. I've never seen an alcoholic yet that did not know just who and what by God we're a matter of. I've never seen an alcoholic yet that did not know just who and what by God we're a matter of. We spend thousands of hours sitting around in bars talking about it. All we got to do is take it out of our head, put it down on a piece of paper, and we would have completed the first instruction. And hopefully, the same thing will happen to you that happened to me when I did this. They came to me and they said, list your resentments. And I said, I don't have any. And they said, surely you got one or two. Maybe you don't understand what the resentment is. And they explained to me that it was to refill old pains and old hurts. And I said, oh yeah, I got a couple of those. They said, put them on paper. Leave a little space in between each one. So I got a sheet of paper and leaving space between like the book does, first thing I knew, I had about eight names on that sheet of paper. And I reached over and got another sheet of paper. And after that, I got another sheet of paper. And after a while, I had eight more listed. And I got another sheet of paper. And next thing you know, I had eight more listed. And I got another sheet of paper. I got up to about 152. And I said, man, you're a matter of hell at everything. I did not know that. You can only see one resentment at a time in your head. I don't think any of us will ever see how many resentments we really do have and how much they could have helped us. And how much they control and dominate our thinking till we get them all down on a sheet of paper and see them in their entirety for the first time. Now, we've made a decision to let God direct our thinking. And if we've got that many resentments, then resentments direct our thinking and God can't. And it's just that simple. Just by the listing of the names, we learn something very valuable about ourselves, how resentful we really are. You just can't see this stuff in your head. It has to go on paper. So we filled out the first column. Now, Bill said, Mr. Brown, Mrs. Jones, my employer, and my wife. He probably had more than that. I think he just didn't want to use any more space in the big book. Mine was that long, long list of about 152 names, Joe. We asked why we were angry, period. Stop right there and go to the second column, the cause. Now, he's in the illustration, and he used here very short and sweet, just four or five little words, not too many words to describe the cause. Simplicity is the key here in the second column. Now, he's resentful of Mr. Brown. Why? His attentions to my wife. He told my wife and my mistress, Brown may get my job at the office. Now, I don't even know Mr. Brown. I'm already mad at him myself. You know? Now, he's resentful. Now, he's resentful. He's resentful of Miss Jones because she's a nut. She snubbed me. She committed her husband for drinking. He's my friend, and she's a gossip. What she did was put his old drinking buddy in the nut house, and he don't like that at all. Now, he's mad at his employer. Why? Well, he's unreasonable and unjust and overbearing. Probably said, Say, Bill, by the way, where were you all day yesterday anyhow? He threatens to fire me for drinking and padding my expense account. That's unreasonable as hell, isn't it? Yeah. Very narrow-minded. Now, he's really mad at his wife. She misunderstands and nags, and she likes old Brown, and she wants the house put in her name. Yeah. You tie that together, like an old Brown wanting the house put in her name, it's about time to get a little bit upset, isn't it? So, simply in the second column, we just write down, we ask ourselves why we were angry beside each name one at a time, using four or five little words to describe the cause. There may be, there may be one cause, or there may be two or three causes, but we simply write them down in the second column. We're not going to write any big, long essays. No. Just a few simple words by each name, and it may be one cause, or there may be multiple causes as we have here. Whatever it is, we put it down. I filled out the second column, and I began to realize something that's become very valuable to me. I began to realize it's not the people and the institutions that I'm upset with. It's what they've done to me that's got me upset. You know, I can take Mr. Brown out of here and put Mr. Green in. I'll be just as upset with Green as I am with Brown if he does the same thing to me. I could take Mrs. Jones out of here and put Mrs. Smith in. If Smith does the same thing, I'm going to be just as upset with her as I am with Jones. Or I could take my wife out of here and put my mistress in. And if she does the same thing, I'll be just as upset with her. I begin to realize it's not them that's got me upset. It's what they've done to me that's got me upset. Now, the reason that's valuable is because of this. I'm getting ready to start out on a lifetime-changing process to develop the best possible relationship that I can with the world and everybody in it so I can have maximum, peace of mind and serenity. A part of that relationship is a little later on in my program, I'm going to have to go to a bunch of people and ask them to forgive me for what I've done to them. By the same token, I'm going to have to forgive others for what they've done to me. And a part of that forgiving process can start right here. When I begin to realize it's not them, it's what they've done that's got me upset, that starts getting names out of the way. And it's not them. And it's going to make it a lot easier to handle this in the future. So I filled out two columns now. Number one, I learned how resentful I really am, how much that blocks me from God. And number two, I've learned it's not them I resent, it's what they've done to me that I actually resent. Two valuable things. Now let's look at the third column. In most cases, it was found that our self-esteem, our pocketbooks, our ambitions, our personal relationships, including sex, were hurt or threatened. So we were sore. We were burned up. On our grudge list, we set opposite each name our injuries. Was it our self-esteem, our security, our ambitions, or our personal or sex relations which Ben interfered with? We were usually definite as this example. And again, using that information that we got from the basic instincts of life, we simply fill out the third column, what part of self was affected by that? What basic instinct was threatened by the actions? If those people did? I can't be upset with you unless you've done something to threaten one of these basic instincts of life. If you threaten my social instinct in any way, my self-esteem, my personal relations, etc., you're going to upset me and make me angry. If you threaten my security, either material or emotional, you're going to upset me and make me angry. If you threaten my sex life, in any way, you're going to upset me and make me angry. And as I begin to fill out the third column and put down the part of self that is affected, in most cases, I begin to see a pattern develop. Maybe if I decide each name, I'm putting down self-esteem. Maybe I begin to see my main problem is self-esteem. Maybe I'm putting down security. Maybe I see where my main problem deals with security. Maybe I'm putting something under sex each time. I begin to realize that the sex thing is my main problem. I begin to see which part of self really does stand out. Probably going to be a combination of all three. But I can certainly see which part of self really does predominate and stand out when I keep seeing it appear over and over and over and over again. When I fill out the third column, here's where I've learned something that I think is the most valuable thing I ever learned about me. As I filled out the third column for the first time in my life, I could see where anger comes from. I've always had a problem with anger. I've always acted and reacted with anger. I would do something that would hurt other people. I would be ashamed of it. I'd say I'll never do that again. I'll turn right around and get angry and do it all over again. You can't do anything about a problem until you understand the problem. I never did understand where anger comes from. I always thought it was just one of those feelings that flitted into your mind. You could do nothing about it. Today I realize that anger comes from a threat to one of these basic instincts of life. Now, my basic instincts are under control at the level that God intended. If my relationship with God is okay, you can do about anything you want to do. You can do anything you want to do to me and I'm not going to experience anger over it. But I'll guarantee you, if my instincts are out of control, my relationship with God is not right. About anything you do to me that threatens a basic instinct creates anger. And I romp and stomp and raise hell with you and everybody around you. You know, this lady that I'm married to today, hopefully I can introduce you to her tomorrow. She's here with us this weekend. A beautiful lady named Barbara. If there's any such thing as a black belt Al-Anon, she's one of them. She's got now about 31 or 32 years in the Al-Anon Fellowship. Great, great program. But Barbara is like all human beings. She has self-will too. Now, once in a great while, she'll get sick in self. Al-Anons do that once in a while. Not too often, but once in a while. And she'll do something that threatens one of my basic instincts of life. And when she does it, it hurts. Now, I've found that if my relationship with God is right and my instincts are at the level God intended, I'm able to say, well, the poor old thing, they're sick just like we are and they can't help it any more than we can. And that thing will just slide off of my back and just, it just won't bother me at all. And I just go on about my business. Now, 30 days later though, the same lady does the same thing. Only this time, my instincts are not under control. And my relationship with God is not right today. And I react to what she did with anger. And I romp and I stomp and I raise hell with Barbara and everybody around me all day long. The same lady did the same thing. But I choose to react to it in an entirely different manner based upon my relationship with God and where my instincts are that day. Thank God I've learned that. Because you see, I can't do anything about Barbara. And I can't do anything about any other human being on earth. But I can do something about my relationship with God. And keeping my instincts under control where I don't have to get angry. And if I don't have to get angry, I'm in much less chance of drinking than I am if I discontinue that anger over and over and over. Thank God I've learned that. One of the best pieces of information I ever found. Now, we have filled out three columns. Column one, we listed the people we're angry with, resentful at, and we realized how resentful we really are and how much that blocks us off from the sunlight of the Spirit. Column two, we've learned it's not them we're resentful at, it's what they've done to us. Column three, we've learned it's not even what they've done to us. It's how we choose to react to it based on our relationship with God and whether our instincts are under control or not. Now, we're going to fill out a couple names. We're going to fill out a couple names here from our inventories. We're not going to do the whole thing, but just two or three names as an example. The first name on my sheet was this lady named Barbara.