Step 4 and the Sane and Sound Ideal – Bob D.

And now about sex. No, now, not how. We know this crowd. How about sex? Keep your clothes on, Troy. Please. As most of you probably know, we got a bunch of new people here who may not have seen this before. I remember the first time I did a Joe and Charlie workshop. The one thing I came out of that workshop with was knowing the location of sex inventory in the big book. Everybody comes out of there saying it's primarily on page 69 in the big book, Alcoholics Anonymous. That's the one thing I remember coming out of that workshop. Many of us needed an overhauling there, but above all, we tried to be sensible on this question. It's easy to get off track, you know. In the middle of 69, the part I like is toward the bottom of that first paragraph. We want to stay out of this controversy. We do not want to be the arbiter of anyone's sex conduct. We all have sex problems. We'd hardly be human if we didn't. So in this sex conduct inventory, the intent is not for you to come out of it. The intent of the sex inventory is to shape a sane and sound ideal for my future sex, like mine. Not Bob's, not Jeff's, now Marty's, not Steve's, not anybody, not any of my sponsees, for myself. And it's personal. This whole idea is personal to each person. And check this out. My ideal can change. There's some young guys in here right now and their ideal, newly sober, is I just want to chill for a minute. I want to date. I'm not ready. Some people came out of a bad marriage or bad relationship. And that ideal can changed four years from now. somebody can be in here and say i have no thoughts or desires to be in another marriage you know i just finished that relationship miss me with that and four years from that can change it's fluid in this dynamic this lifestyle that we're in is ever changing and it's ever growing and i'm ever changing and growing don't limit yourself and don't treat yourself but this idea of sex inventory It's a new way of looking. People subscribe, people read Cosmo and M and Mademoiselle and all kinds of books. And all the books on relationships always talk about how to find a mate, how to found the perfect mate, the things they look for in a mate. Twenty signs of him and do all this stuff. They got the dating sites and the rest of this and making somebody compatible. And the thing I like about the process of recovery, and it's consistent, it's persistent in all our steps, This process of recovery is not a looking outside process. It's not a look-outside-myself exercise. Rather than me looking at the traits in a mate that I'm interested in, this idea of sex inventory has to do with what kind of mate do I want to become, the traits within myself that I want bring to the table. Whether it's just as a partner that's dating, whether it's as a future husband or wife, whatever it is. There are people with alternative lifestyles. I'm not, we are not in that period. That's not my business. That' s not my business. You know and so what it is and so sponsors you know it's amazing with sponsorship sometimes when I become a sponsor it seemed like I just automatically stayed at a Holiday Inn Express and I got an idea and opinion about everything yeah I'm a marriage counselor I'm a sex therapist I'm uh I'm psychologist I'm gonna shrink I'm a psycho I got my financial advisor I'm all these things that I can't do for myself, but I can do it for all my sponsors. You know, I always say to anybody I work with, don't know about anybody else, my life is unmanageable by me. Yours damn sure is. That's not my job. My job is to get you in touch with a manager. Get you in touch with the manager because I got a manager I got to manage and it's not my sponsor. I have a sponsor and he's my sponsor, but i'm under new management we talked about that in the Thursday and so this idea of sex inventory reviewing and evaluating my conduct over the past how do i do it well the first thing i do is with everything i look over past relationships when i do sex inventory and i've inventoried every relationship of significance and many that were not of significance in my year in the years i've because i do i i do inventories on a regular basis and some people will say well what about a 10 step you know and yes yes but i'm the kind of person that i'm messy and it's i liken it to to a house and we haven't got to the 10 steps so i'm previewing but i likened it to to the house and if you clean up your house and you get it clean and now you start every day washing the dishes every day making the bed every day picking up stuff but see every day i don't do the walls And every day, I don't go under the beds. And every date, I won't mop the floor. And every today, I'll go in every nook and cranny. I like to think of it, I had a mom that every year we did spring cleaning. That's the title of this workshop this week. So every year, I do, because I don' see anything wrong with cleaning a clean house. But there might be something wrong with not cleaning a dirty one. So I do this business inventory. First time I did a sex inventory, I inventoried six relationships. And the people I was working with at that time, they suggested, Ralph, you might want to look at anywhere from three to six people. I'm always on the greedy side. I told you I got interested in seeing what about this guy named Ralph. I got interesting in him. So I looked at six of my past relationships. I looked in my ex-wife. I looked who I was with at the time. I looked to two people I had serious, two serious girlfriends. I looked at a married lady I'd had a relationship with, and I looked at a fling I'd have. Because I wanted to see Ralph in all the various manifestations when I'm in relationships with somebody else. And sex conduct inventory has nothing to do with inventorying sexual positions. We're not interested in a Sober Kama Sutra deal, you know. That's not the deal. It's not an inventory of, you, know things that you didn't know. Sex conduct. And in the book It says, I want to shape a sane and sound ideal for my future sex life. And there are nine questions that's in the big book Alcoholics Anonymous that I ask myself. The first eight questions look at my past conduct. The ninth question is a guide to my future behavior. Where have I been selfish? Where haveI been dishonest? Where have l been inconsiderate? Where did I unjustifiably arouse jealousy? Where did l unjustifiability arouse bitterness? Where didl i unjustifiably arouse suspicion? Whom did l hurt? Where was l at fault? What should I have done instead? I guess it would have helped me to show you guys where those questions were. But they're sitting up on 69. It says, we reviewed our conduct over the years past. And in that paragraph are the nine questions I asked myself. And here's where it says one more time, we got this down on paper and we looked at it. And we looked it. Where have I been selfish? And we subjected each relation to this test. Was it selfish or not? Well, every relationship I've ever been in was selfish. Why would I be in it if it's not something in it for me is the first question that I ask. And I think that the question that the big book is posing when it says, was it selfish or not, it simply means this. Ralph, were you the only person present in the relationship? Sounds funny. Okay, some of you guys will get it after five seconds, you know. But somebody else has probably been in here and been the only one in the room or the only personally present. My opinion is the only ones that counts. I don't pay any attention to your opinion I don' t pay any attention to your thoughts I don''t pay any attention to your desires You do not have an understanding And some of them Some of the more serious ones Yeah, I thought I was like that And some are the more casual ones I had a relationship, I had to fling with a girl that was married And all I wanted, I was selfish Because all I expected was for her to be available to me When it was convenient for me I was inconsiderate because I didn't think about her kids I didn' t think about my wife So I asked myself those questions and I ask them in just that way. And there's a level of selfishness and there's the level of dishonesty in relationships. And the most serious dishonesty in relationships between men and women usually starts with the dishonesty with myself, dishonesty about things. Has anybody in here ever entered a relationship that I knew I wasn't going to be serious about and you knew the other party wasn't gonna be serious and you both agree, yeah, we like each other, we like one another, we like either physically and nobody's, we made an agreement, nobody's gonna get serious. I'm the only person that ever did that? Wow. You know. And then, and then, when one or the other people wake up and now I can't get rid of them because they're calling me all the time, I have the nerve to say, I was honest. I went in there saying exactly what it was. What makes me believe that I can have a verbal contract that's enforceable on feelings and emotions. Does anybody in here know feelings and emotions that can be restrained by a verbal contract? And there are all kind of levels of dishonesty underneath that because guess what? I'm going in here and I don't want anybody to be serious but I got other character defects working at the same time. One of them is a fear that you won't like me So I go into this non-serious relationship treating you like I want you to take me serious, right? And so then every now and then it works. Every now and Then it works there are no complications But guess what's the downside of that? It's probably because she didn't like you now. I got this other thing going Oh man, so now i'm calling her because I want You to like me and then when you like me So it's a cold thing, but there's so many levels of dishonesty in those kind of relationships. Somebody in here, we talked about fear. I have a fear of rejection that runs so deep I won't ask the question unless I already know the answer is going to be yes. So I do these categories in my head, and I think of girls who seem to be a couple of rungs below me because if you're my level, and this is all subjective thinking, right? I shouldn't let you guys into my thinking, but that's my thinking. And so if you'RE my level or above, I'm scared of you and I won'T approach you. But if you're a couple of rungs down here, ooh, yeah, she should be grateful to be with me, right? So now I'll ask you because she's a fixer-upper and I can work with her, right. Well, the cool thing about that, the cold thing about having a fixerer-upler is if she thinks of you as a fixerver, right, and let you both in this deal, you know. So just this whole deal of human interaction and lying and the rest of that. And so sex inventory, that level of it, that's where I start when I start asking myself where was I dishonest. The dishonesty with myself. The idea that two people can lay down and one person won't wake up with feelings. That's a big dishonesty that people practice. And it's all kinds, and I wish I brought a hand up, but the way I do sex inventory is real simple. I answer those questions as they're outlined in the book. I write them in a narrative form, and i just start answering. I was selfish because I never considered her views or her thoughts or opinions. I was selfless because I only wanted her to be available to me when I was available to her. I was dishonest because I led her to believe I was serious about this one all the time. I knew I wasn't. I was dishonest because I told myself if we did this, nobody would be hurt. If we just laid down and went on about our business, nobody will get hurt. Whom that I hurt, I hurt her kids by taking time from them that should have been spent with their mom. I hurt my kids by spending time with her that should have been missed spent with my kids. I hurt My wife by being with this woman when I should have been at home. I hurt family by taking money from the house that should have been spending at home I hurt my employer by taking off time and saying, you know, I was sick because she had some time that day and we wanted to rendezvous. You know, I hurt myself by going off with her when I promised this guy I was going to listen to this. So it's layers. It's layers。 It's not just me and you that's involved. When I do the sex inventory, I do it comprehensively. And I do what you know. And I unjustifiably arouse jealousy. And arousing jealousy, you could be married. And that word is critical in there when you write about it, unjustifiably aroused jealousy. You're married. You do this deal. You've got sponsees. Somebody calls you and they're in a bad way, and you're laying in the bed. You're both looking at a movie. People like Steve, and I know his wife, and she does this deal like he does. And you're looking at the movie, and it's the best part, and we're eating popcorn, and it's romantic. And I call Steve and say, Steve, I'm hurting, man. Can you come get me? I need to talk. And Steve jumps up. Now, Dawn might get mad, but that's not unjustifiable arousing jealousy. That's not unjustifiably. I've got to know when to let somebody be in their stuff, you know. But by the same token, Don could be sitting up here, Steve sitting up there. Okay, baby, I'm tired. I don't want to do nothing. You wanted to go to the show tonight. I'm not going to go. Bob calls and says, hey, Steve, can you come over? We're going to play poker tonight. Steve gets up. That's unjustifiability arousing jealousy. Whole different deal. You see what that is? Whole different thing. Whole different detail, you now. So that's why that little thing. I used to say, why would they put in there unjustifiably arousing jealousy, suspicion, and bitterness? Because if you're in this deal, and if you own this path, there are times when you'll be with a mate and you'll do some things that are the things that we do. That are the thing that we don't do. And some of the time I have to say the reason I'm the guy that you're with is because I do these kind of things. You don't want me to stop. And I don't you to stop, and I can unjustifiability get jealous of you going and working with one of your girls, But in the big picture, please go do that because that's why we are who we are. So that's the reason. So when you get to that question, where did I unjustifiably arouse it? That's why it's sitting in there like that. And I just do it in a narrative. And then I get tothat ninth question, what should I have done instead? And I don't take a pass on I shouldn't even mess with them. That's part of it, but I want to know every step of the way what should I have been honest with myself. you know I should have been communicative I should've been you know I should of kept my commitments I should whatever it is because I need to see how I need act differently going forward everything in my life you know there are no mistakes in Alcoholics Anonymous and I'm grateful for every experience somebody says all the time two things happen with any experience lessons and blessings lessons and blessings that's the only thing to happen so don't get tripped out and Don't get ashamed, and don't get embarrassed about things that happen. Now I'm armed with some stuff that I get to share with somebody else and I get the benefit from going forward. Lessons and blessings. What happened? Oh, I'm done. Bob, I'll call it. How many people in this room objectively think that they either haven't done this inventory the way it is in the book or maybe they've done an inventory but they think now that they might have missed some stuff or maybe not really followed the format of the book? Okay. If you haven't been there, if you haven' t done this, when you get to the beginning of it, the resentment section, it says resentment's the number one offender. If you're like me, it may feel like that's not true. it may feel like guilt should be the number one offender because most of us get sober and we have tremendous feelings of guilt but oddly enough guilt is a very small portion of the fear inventory because all guilt incurs fear fear of karma, retribution fear of what people think if they found out fear of confrontation all the different multifaceted fears that are around something that you would do that you feel guilty about, fear of whatever. But resentment, oddly enough, seems to have a permanence that doesn't go away. You can't wish it away. I was a precocious kid growing up. I think I had that ADD before it came out. I don't know. I was always in trouble as a kid. You know, I was a kid from hell. And I did a lot of things 10, 11, 12 years old, 13 years old. Up until the time I found alcohol, I did a lot crazy stuff for adrenaline. I think adrenaline was my first drug of choice, getting in trouble and trying to get away with it. And I didn't do anything. I did all these things that after I did it, I felt guilty. Do you know I can't tell you what most of that stuff is today? I can't remember the incidences unless somebody made a big deal about it I don't remember because the funny thing about guilt is in time one of two things happens either the feelings of guilt will drive you to face the fear and face the deal and make it right kind of like making amends you go to the store and you take the thing back you stole or whatever the deal is or and then you're no longer guilty or a significant period of time goes by and nope you can't there's not a a number you can put on that but there's a point somewhere chronologically where you're far enough away from the incident that you felt guilty about where there's absolutely now no way in the world there's ever ever ever going to be any retribution you're really out of the woods did you ever notice when you get in that zone, you're no longer guilty? You kind of forget about it. But resentment, I could tell you stuff my second grade teacher did to me. I could Tell you things my parents did to be preschool. I could. It's like I got I got files on these people in my mind. And ever noticed when you Get a resentment from the moment then what is a resentment isn't it a judgment towards someone i'm judging them to be fill in the blank and do you ever notice from the moment you get to the judgment the resentment it alters your perception and from that moment on you can't observe them doing anything good they can't do anything right from that momento and if someone comes and tells you something that the person you resented that was wonderful, you'll discount it. Oh, they're just phony. They're just doing that to show off. You'll find a reason to make them wrong again. They can't be right. They can not be because you are. The ego demands that it is right and it alters my perception. I freeze frame those people. Isn't it bizarre that you can have a resentment that's 30 years old, and in your mind they're the same exact person they were 30 years ago? Somebody could come up to you and tell you they changed. Nah, they didn't change. They're the SAME SOB that they were 30 years before. They're 30 years AGO. Now, that's ludicrous. There's no reality in that because people change. That's the one thing you can count on in life is change. You can't escape it. you could try do you ever try not to change life will just wear your ass out it'll wear you out and so i'm freeze framing these people they they never change some of us um are very defended when it comes to stuff like this uh especially guys there's a lot of guys that are so defended that they don't want to admit even to themselves that they have resentments they don't want to admit that anyone could have actually ever hurt them as if you're bulletproof i i was uh working with a guy who was this is 10 nine nine years ago eight and a half years ago nine years ego a guy with 23 years of sobriety he's actually sober a little longer than i was came to me and asked me to sponsor him and he was 23 years sober and he hadn't done anything in the steps he didn't sponsor anyone he had done when he was brand new kind of a life story inventory that did nothing for him and then have never done anything since well he's got 23 years of untreated alcoholism and he is insane I'll tell you how crazy he is he's going to commit suicide and he's perfectly okay with that he's glad to do it But the problem is, and the reason he came to me for help, is in the process of planning his suicide, the obsession to drink returned. Which I understand. If you're going to kill yourself, you might as well get drunk first. Right? Because it might hurt. You need some anesthetic on the way out. I mean, I understand that. Now, he don't mind killing himself. He just does, he can't stand the idea that after he's dead, everybody's going to know he lost his sobriety and are going to be talking about him. He don't mind dying. He just don't want to look bad. So he comes to me and asks me for some help, so we start going through the steps. We did a third step on our knees after talking about the third step for a while, and I told him, I said, I want you to get a tablet and I want your name on it. I want to start listing all your resentments. This guy's kind of a blustery guy. He's an ex-Navy chief. Oh, he's the kind of guy that talks to you like this all the time. I said, I want you to list your resentments. He goes, resentments? Eh, I don't have any resentments I said really? Now anybody who knows this guy Knows he's uptight about a lot of stuff Man You don't even have to know him Watch him walk across a parking lot from 100 yards away And know he's upright I said you don't having any resentment He said nah, I just let that stuff go Don't bother me So what I said to him next was i think inspired i think it came from god because i didn't know to say it i said to him okay jerry i said in your case we're going to do something different i want you to make a list of people you feel smugly superior to and he got this look on his face like oh my god that's a long list and what are we doing aren't we really making a list of people we've built cases against, people we have judgments against. And then we list in the second column, as Ralph was talking about so eloquently, the things in us that were hurt, threatened, affected, injured. What they did... No, I'm sorry. Column number two is the bullet points of what they did as we build our case against them. We're really putting the case down that we have inside us anyway. Column number two and the only value of the first three columns is in but in column number one column number two i separate the person from the things they did and what an interesting thing is when you start thinking about it if they hadn't done what was in column no. 2 you wouldn't resent you wouldn' hate them it's not the person you hate it's what they did right that in itself has a little value and then what was the manifestations of self and that's what column no 3 is the manifestations of self. You know why it's manifestations of self? Because here's how it talks about column number three. We're looking for our self-esteem, my self-esteem, my pocketbook, my ambitions, my personal relationships, my security, my sex, me. It's all aspects of me. We're working for, as it said in the beginning of the inventory, the manifestations of self which have been defeating us. Now, this in and of itself is of no value except to maybe see how self-centeredness has set us up and how the person isn't what we hate. We hate their actions. But this case we've built on these people is necessary in order to dismantle it. You can't dismantle something you're not aware of. So in order for you to dismantled a judgment machine that is your ego, you have to put it out in paper and we're going to start to discover something that may be hard on some of us we're gonna start seeing that the exact nature of our wrongs was how wrong we had been about everybody in our whole life chances are there are people in this room that are like me, the idea of being wrong is unpalatable and if you can't stand being wrong you're going to have a hard time recovering from alcoholism because it's a lot of what we do here it's changing our perception to see the truth to see past the story we've told ourselves in our head about what happened to see what really was going on we call it an awakening we awaken to the truth a truth we didn't know the book promised in the beginning Ralph covered it We're fact-finding, fact-facing to discover the truth about stock and trade. We're going to wake up to some stuff we've never woke up to before. I think alcohol is to have untreated alcoholism is to be asleep in your own life, living in the daydream in your head that you tell yourself about your life and being actually disconnected from it. Alcoholics don't live in reality. We live in a story about reality. that's why in AA we have a book as Bill sees it, Al-Anon has Lois Remembers we don't, as we see it well what's that have to do with reality well not much but it's what I think do you ever have the experience I sat down with my sister now my sister is not an alcoholic she's a pretty level headed person we sat down one time we're talking about a childhood and i'm aghast i'm wondering where did she grow up her perception of our childhood was so different from mine and i want to straighten her out except i restrain myself because i in the back of my mind i'm thinking you know if one of the two of us' perceptions wrong. I wonder whose that might be. What are the odds that it would be her? With my track record. I tell myself stories about my childhood. My friend Sandy says something, he's sober 40 some years, he says it's amazing, the longer he's sober the nicer his childhood becomes and some people say well you're deluding yourself about it no you're starting to see the truth you deluded yourself you were deluded coming in here as you told your as your ego told you the stories to make you right have you ever seen the movie uh two towers the second lord of the rings there's a scene in there that is it's like me and my ego and the scene is when king theoden has been possessed by the spirit of sherman and his emissary is a guy called worm tongue who sits next to the king and just chatters to him about how wrong don't listen to those people in aa they don't know what they're talking about your sponsor's stupid don't listened to him just this worm tongue just Chatters, chatters, chatter, chatter. Worm tongue is the name of the character in the movie. I thought it was apropos. Worm Tongue. So we list, and then on page 66, I'm not going to read this, it just goes, it really spends the whole page hammering in a point. And it hammers it in, I think, seven times that this stuff's fatal. it's going to kill us it uses all kinds of terminology it's grave, it's poison it's infinitely grave we're going to die shuts us off from the sunlight and spirit just to get to a point in the second to last paragraph in the 2nd line it says we are prepared to look at these things from an entirely different angle are you surrendered enough that you would rather be free than right if you still need to be right about the people in your life you're not going to move on you're stuck to have active alcoholism feels like being stuck Stuck in the same reoccurring emotions Do you ever notice when you change cities That the same idiots show up They have different faces But you're stuck Alcoholism is often like that movie Groundhog Day The worst thing about alcoholism It gets worse, worse, and then it gets the same It's the same You're stuck Are you prepared to look at it from an entirely different angle? All these judgments, are you prepared? So in order to look at it From an Entirely Different Angle, how do you do that? Well, first of all, to see what an entirely different angle would be, I think you have to kind of get the angle you're looking at it to start with. You can't make 180 degrees turn from a point you can't find on the compass. You have to find the point first in order to go 180 degrees from it. So how am I looking at it? Well, aren't I looking as if I'm a prosecuting attorney? So what would be an entirely different angle from a prosecutting attorney? Wouldn't it be to cross the courtroom and sit on the defense table and now start to look at it from the perspective and the perception of the people on the defense table. How did it look to the person you're judging so harshly? What did happen between you and them? I know one thing, I bet you it looked different than it. I bet you the story they're telling themselves and their experiential reality was different than yours. How Did It Look To Them? If you were pleading their case, how would you plead it well and trying to be genuine and realistic and honest how what would you say if you were looking at from their time their point of view the book goes on a couple lines down says in the state we see how these the world that's people really dominated us in that state the wrongdoings of others fancy to real had the power to actually kill now they're starting to slip something in on us here. An implication. The implication that some of these stories I've told myself about people to some degree, if not totally, are fancied. Now the ego, if you're like me, my ego balks at that. Man, I just want to be right about this stuff. But am I prepared to look at it from an entirely different angle? Fancied or real? And it says that even Even fancied resentments have the power to actually kill you. I'll tell you a story. When I was fairly new in sobriety, I used to go out to coffee with people after meetings quite often. There was a guy named Billy Taylor. Billy was an old-timer in A, sober quite a while. And I sat in a coffee shop with him one night and I told him my secrets. You know, the stuff that you're ashamed of? The stuff you don't want anybody to know about. The sleazy, disgusting, embarrassing, humiliating, pathetic stuff that your skin kind of crawls when you think about what you did and you feel ashamed of yourself. We all have stuff like that. I don't know what yours is. Maybe you went out to party with some people one night and you left your kids at home. You didn't come back for a long time and you shuddered to think what might have happened. maybe hung over one time when you were really sick and hated yourself or maybe really drunk in a drunken rage, maybe you beat your kids maybe occasionally you still see that look of terror in their eyes as they cowered from you maybe you let somebody else take the blame for something you did and it cost them dearly and they never knew that you really did it maybe you did something repeatedly to hurt people who loved you until you know you just broke their heart and they'll never be the same maybe you had sex with someone you wouldn't even want anybody to know you had lunch with maybe you had sex outside your species I don't know what your thing was I just know every alcoholic comes here was something they're ashamed of people they disappointed and let down lies they told a sense of phoniness and a fear of being found out so i told billy my stuff my deepest darkest secrets the things i was the most ashamed of and he didn't reject me but i'll tell you something it would have helped if he would have said me too he didn'T say that what he said instead was i'm sure you'RE not the only one that ever did that someday that might help somebody little aa party line sounding like stuff you know but i i he didn't reject me so i didn't i didn's think nothing of it went home that night my shift got changed i've been working eight to four now i was working four to midnight well my whole meeting schedule got turned upside down now i'm going to noon meetings for the most part and uh a good part of a year went by and i hadn't seen billy just hadn't run into him because I don't go to the same meetings anymore. And one night, on my night off, I went to a meeting I normally wouldn't go to and he was in the meeting and he Was across the room from me and the meeting Was getting ready to start and I saw him and I was delighted To see him. I hadn't seen him in a long Time. I was lit up, man. Hey, Billy, How you doing? And he Wouldn't say hi to me. Matter Of fact, he looked At me with a look that appeared to be disdain. A look that Kind of said You and then he couldn't even look at me anymore and turned away and sat down and the meeting started and I know exactly what's going on I know that SOB's been judging me for that crap and I gotta tell ya there's a part of me that didn't blame him God knows I judged myself harshly enough for that stuff and I think somewhere I always secretly believed if you knew about me what I knew about you'd feel about me the way I feel about you I think that's why I kept a lot of my life secret I can take I'll take the self rejection I just can't hear it in you and I knew he'd been judging me for that stuff and I was hurt but I don't stay hurt I've got this knee jerk reaction when I get hurt is I get angry it's like a defense mechanism with me and so I'm starting to get angry and I'm started to cook I'm thinking about that hypocritical guy telling me all that stuff he's been judging me and then in the midst of the anger i had this epiphany like experience where all of a sudden i got this real clarity and i thought to my i thought oh my god the reason he can't look me in the eye he's has been telling people that stuff and it became very clear to me i had just asked a girl out and who would not go to coffee with me and he knows her i knew he had told her that stuff. There was another guy who runs around with him and he'd been a little distant, a little kind of standoffish lately. I knew he'd told that. He'd been now I'm enraged. By the end of the meeting I am prepared to go beat the crap out of this guy and be justified doing it because if he's doing that to me he's probably doing it to other new people. The meeting's getting ready to shut down and the chairman says anybody have a burning desire? And this guy Billy Taylor raises his hand, tells everybody in the room that the biopsy came back and the tumors accelerated malignant and he has a very short time to live. And I sat there and I felt about this big as I realized what had happened. That on the day he found out that he was terminally ill, saying hi to Bob was not a big deal. That he was so afraid at his imminent death as I would be, that he was so far up in his head scared that he didn't even notice me or anybody else was there. That the look of what appeared to be disdain and pain on his face had nothing to do with me. That he'd never said or thought anything negative about me. All he'd ever done was love me. It was like a postcard from God. Dear Bob, you don't know crap. Love God. Here's Here's the horrific part of this. I shuddered to think what would have happened to me if I would have attacked a man who had done nothing but try to help me on the absolute lowest day of his life and then found out what I had done. I am convinced I would've had to go drink myself to death because I couldn't have come back into these rooms and faced him and all the people who loved him after what I did. it would have killed me and you know the tragic pathetic part of it is i would have died over nothing over an imagined resentment and i'll tell you why this is important because a couple years later i'm going to do an inventory out of the book and i knew something i knew that i can be really, really wrong and think I'm right? And if I could be that wrong about Billy Taylor, was it possible that I could have been that wrong about my mother and father? Was it possible that I could've been that long about the police? Could I have been not wrong about some of the women I was involved with? Could I've been not long? Or do I still need to be right? the ego just freaks out with some of this it just freaked out did you ever see there was a an episode of happy days when the whole half hour series was about the fawns trying to say the words i'm wrong he couldn't say it he kept going I couldn't say it was wrong. I sponsor guys. I go to tell them to make amends. They come back to me, oh, I made amends, what'd you say? I said that it was a shame that that happened to him and did you say you were wrong? They don't want to say they're wrong. They don'T want to see me say that. They don' t want to hear me say the words I was wrong they want to say it's like I'm the kind of guy that ends up in court and I say guilty your honor but with an explanation right I don't want to admit that I'm wrong and yet a lot of my recovery is based on how wrong I've been if you want to get a change of perception you have to see how wrong your present perception is so what do we do uh the bottom of page 66 after it spends all this time telling me this stuff's going to kill me it says how could we escape we saw that these resentments must be mastered oh my god i can see it it's been a whole page telling me they're going to kill me i'm going to drink again without i'm gonna drink again and for me to drink is to die how can i escape they must be mastered but how we could not wish them away any more than alcohol the self-knowledge that you have them doesn't help i think we play a deadly game in alcoholics anonymous and the deadly game is you come here and after because of our desperate need for acceptance and to fit nae we learn in very short order that resentments are bad so we just decide We don't have any, and we're never going to have them again. That's not how you get free. That's how you build an ulcer. Right? So what do you become? You become the pretend guy. Oh, nothing bothers me. I'm just going to go home and think of how you should die. I don'thave a resentment. I just have conversations in my head with you all the time when you're not around. It's not a resentment. I don't have a resentment, you really are an asshole. So how do we manage? We can't wish them away any more than alcohol. What do we do? And here's what it says. This to me was the part of this process that changed my life the most. I've never been the same since this. It says this was our course. and it's asking me to make a realization in other words to make something real within me that had never been real before this is where i start to discover the truth this is где я начинаю найти и встречать факты которые я никогда не нашел и встречал раньше это где моя percepción начинает 180 градусный путь это просит меня понять что люди, кто меня ошибил, were perhaps spiritually sick yeah yeah i can see that they're sick and they're idiots too that's not all it says in the next line this is where it nailed me it says though we did not like their symptoms what's the symptoms column number two would these people that i would have loved if they hadn't done in column number one number two if they would have been themselves and the person i loved would they have been capable of doing what they did in column number two though their symptoms column number two and the way their symptoms disturbed me column number three what was affected hurt threatened injured interfered with then here's the kicker I'm supposed to realize how they are like me perhaps spiritually sick this is not a well person looking down on a sick person you know what this is this is two cancer patients in a cancer ward both suffering at different times recurring symptoms of the chemotherapy that both painfully manifest themselves in the individuals in different manners, and as now you're having a bad day with the chemo and I look at you and I go, my God, I'm so sorry. I know you're irritable and I know it's not you. I know I know through your tray across the room. I remember last week when the pain of the chemos was on me and it made me nuts. It's seeing yourself in that person. it's really realizing what would have to be going on within me to make and drive me to do what you had done to me how would i have had to have been abused as a child how would I have had to been hurt in order to make me hurt you the way I hurt you what would have had how sick would i have had to be how sick then consequently were you when you did to me what you did and all of a sudden what happens is i start to get you i start the reality here what's really going on all i've been seeing is the symptoms and how they annoyed me now i start to get you i start to wake up i start to have something that most of us never have this thing that's a word that's thrown around the english language most people don't know what it means the words compassion means comes from two latin words come meaning with and passio meaning pain in other words now i'm sitting with your pain see i get you I know why you did to me what you did. My God, I would have done the same thing if I'd have been scared like you were scared, if I had been hurt and abused like you've been hurt, abused. If I'd been angry and frustrated, if I've been lonely and driven and vacant, I could have easily done to you what you do to me. And then all of a sudden, the great awakening is I'm awakening to the me that is in you. see the guy I hate that's me it's me on a bad day but it's me that's me there's an old American Indian story about an earthworm a big earthworm that is territorial and it staked out a big plot of earth it's rich with minerals and it burrows through the earth doing its deal and kind of making sure there's no other earthworms in its territory animals sometimes are territorial one day it's coming around this little rock and it's in its territorial it runs into another earthworm well it starts getting a little aggravated there's another earth worm in its directory so they just start you know positioning and posturing towards the other work firm and the other earth worth worm is positioning and postering back so finally it attacks the other earthquake and it realizes it attacked its own tail right if what einstein said is true when i'm in conflict with you i'm Inconflict with me isn't it funny that that every time i've hurt you somewhere down the road i had to hurt me there's no free lunch here one of the great things about Alcoholics Anonymous is we get to change our karma I didn't know what karma meant until just a couple years ago I was listening to a brilliant, brilliant theologian and scholar a guy by the name of Alan Watts do a series for PBS he's an amazing guy, very alerted in every religion in the world, and he said something I never knew before I was talking about karma, and I always thought karma was how the universe will spank you or slap your hand for being out of line. And Alan Watts said that's not what karma means at all. Karma literally translated out of the Hindi into the English would be the word doing. In other words, you hurt these people over here, so it is your doing that you're unconsciously sabotaging your life over here. the problem is you're asleep and you think life's doing it to you you're doing it to you and you don't even know it and you don't ever know it the reason you're having problems in business and money is because you never paid back those people over there the reason you have problems in relationships because look at the people you've hurt the reason is always connected there isn't there is a unity in the universe everything is connected nothing happens by mistake it comes from In Dr. Paul's story in the book, nothing happens in God's world by mistake. It's all connected. It's All One. And so I start to realize and wake up to what's really going on here. And isn't it odd that we make these lists of people that we resent, that we're unconsciously... Aren't we really making a list of people we suspect owe us an amends? these are the people that hurt me and you come out the back side and what happens they're on your amends list it seems unfair they trick you into it but you wake up to the truth you wake up and then the last part referring to our list again putting out of our minds the wrongs others are done we resolutely look for our own mistakes I Ralph mentioned this I used to I used to say I refer to this part of the book when I was sponsoring guys and talking in meetings about with this is where we look for a part and that's okay if you want to look at it that way that's fine but I ran into trouble with that and here's the trouble I ran into ice I was talking to this guy sponsored about we're going to go clear up your side of this street and deal with your part in this deal well he goes to make amends to this guy for his part and he gets pissed because after he made amends the guy never cleared up his part because he's still unconsciously holding on to the reservation that you had a part as if your part made my part how what's that old unconscious thing we say to ourselves sometimes I was like, look what you made me do. Right? Look what you made me do. The book says we disregard the other person involved entirely. Where are we to blame later on if it's putting out of our minds the wrongs others have done? So what if I really did that? What if I really pushed out all their bad behavior. I can't, it's not on the board anymore. It's not on the table. I cannot look at that. I disregarded completely. I put it out of my mind. Now what kind of a son was I? What if I had perfect parents? What if there is no mistakes in God's world and everything was perfect and I just had to look at what kind of a sun I was in the light of a perfect world? What kind of a Son was I?" Oh my God! If I cannot use the things my parents did wrong, I was a bad kid. I made their life hell and I used things I found wrong with them to justify my position. I was terrible boyfriend. Iwas a terrible employee. Ias a terrible brother. I wasa terrible friend and I looked diligently for your mistakes so I could justify myself. self i could justify my own selfish behavior but what if i start looking at this stuff in its own light for some of us it's the first time in our life we ever stood up away from the justifications and the rationalizations and really looked at ourselves dead on dead on how do we look to the people on the other side i i realized that i never saw myself the way other people saw me And there's a line earlier in the book that says, sometimes people hurt us, seemingly without provocation, seemingly without any reason. But we will invariably find, and this is where we find it, we will invariably found that we have made decisions based on self, which later placed me in that position to be hurt. So in that light, I start to ask myself these questions. Looking for my own mistakes. Where had I been selfish? Where had I been dishonest with you? Where had I lied to myself or I lied to you? Where had I been self-seeking where really it was just about me and attaining and getting for me and doing for me? Where was I frightened? Where was I so afraid that I wasn't going to get my own way that I pushed and controlled? Where did I talk about you behind your back trying to get my own way what did i do though a situation had not been entirely my fault tried to disregard the other person entirely where was i to blame the inventory was mine not the other one other persons there's a prayer that comes with this was our course and the prayer is a call for action and it's asking i'm asking god to help me to to take some actions to help me to show them which means to demonstrate towards them or to act towards them to show them the same patience pity and tolerance i would cheerfully grant a sick friend if if i start if i could take away everything in column number two is it possible that that person if they hadn't have done that or if they were forced by emotions or a sickness in their heart beyond their control to do what they did to hurt me and i can have the compassion and that's not the issue anymore would they be my friend could i have the same compassion tolerance pity patience what i couldn't am i willing to act towards them that way and i ask god to help me to do that i'll give you two uh little quick examples maybe i'll know time for one um so i'll give you one a lot of people relate to the i got two of the people relate so i'LL GIVE YOU THE FIRST ONE i didn't you know you do things in aa sometimes you don't know why you're doing them did you ever notice you ever did you do all kinds of stuff you do service and inventory and you're sponsoring guys and you'RE HELPING PEOPLE WITH THE STEPS AND YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHY YOU'RE DOING IT AND THEN ALL OF A SUDDEN SOMETHING SLAMS you out of nowhere maybe it's self-induced and you don't even get it because you were asleep in your life and you made decisions based on self and now something's coming at you you're getting crushed in sobriety by a self-imposed crisis you could not postpone or evade and little did i know that i'm spending years building a weapon that i don't even know that I need until the day I need it and my when I was 10 years little over 10 years sober i was married for four and a half years to a gal in aa we had a daughter that was almost two years old but just about two years old at the time who i was absolutely in love with until i am to this day she's she took my heart i was there when she was born and gave her her bath and was the first human being to help hold her and i fell in love with her and have never stopped and i am almost i'm over 10 years sober and my wife comes to me one day and wants a divorce here's how self-centered i am i'm so wrapped up in in working building this company that i'm building and doing all my many AA commitments and sponsees and all that stuff that I don't even know there's a problem in the marriage. I think everything's fine. I'm asleep in my own life. So now she's asking me for divorce, so I get a hint there could possibly be a problem here, i suppose well we i talk her out of it let's and we i talked her into let's let's try to fix this i'm a fixer let's trying to fix it we'll go to marriage counseling i started going to marriage council well my sponsor at the time my first sponsor had retired he bought a bus he was all over the east coast he was in he didn't have a cell phone he was pretty much incommunicado so i'm going through a rough patchy road and i'm using one of my sponsees as my confidant with all this stuff and go to the marriage counseling and then I'd talk to him, tell him what's going on. Well, after a couple months of marriage counseling, my wife comes to me one day and she says, I don't want any more marriage counseling. I want out. I live in Las Vegas, and Vegas, an uncontested divorce happens so quick. You can get a divorce so fast in Vegas that you've been single for two weeks and you haven't even got the visa bill for the divorce yet. I mean, that's how fast. I mean it's quick. and we were divorced on a thursday i find out friday the next day that my daughter and my ex-wife of one day moved in with my sponsee my confidant for all my marriage problems and then i discovered that they'd been sleeping together for the whole last year of my marriage and it seemed like everybody in aa knew about it except me now i'm over 10 years sober and you guys have been telling me for 10 years there's no such thing as a justifiable resentment i got one now i i'm even getting old timers in a to agree with me you know i had some old guy i was telling him about my tail of the well he says to me didn't you just buy her a new car bob i said yeah i did and the nail holes from the cross in my hands opened up a little bigger and if you're like me uh you know this this being hurt being a victim stuff the shine the ego shine of that wears off very quickly and you start to get real sick then I started to get real sick scary sick scary like maybe drink again sick bad sick frightening stuff and I don't know what else to do I tried to do this inventory right away and I couldn't do it it was like some damaged sore or a bruise or something you can't touch it before you can even touch it I couldn' t touch it sat down and tried to write it but I couldn''t do it and God was very gracious to me through droves of guys sober a long time and newcomers that were all going through relationship breakups. I'd fill my car with these knuckleheads. We'd go to the meetings and be like the depressed section of the meeting. You could hear the secretaries telling the chairman, don't call on them. But they bought me islands in my day where I'd be so wrapped up in their pain that I was free from mine, temporarily. And then I was eventually able to come back after a period of time and do this resentment process on what had happened. I'll tell you something, I didn't like what I saw. I listed both their names. I listed in column two the cause, what they had done, the infidelity, the lies, etc., etc. column three what had been hurt threatened injured affected interfered with everything every aspect of self everything from pride to pocketbook everything had been everything and then it says am i prepared to look at it from an entirely different angle am i compared to look through their eyes and i was thank god i was like the rat i don't want any more cheese i just want out of this trap I wanted to be free of this. I really wanted to be free. It was eating my lunch. And I started to look at it through both of their eyes. When I started to look at the eyes of my ex-wife, I was embarrassed at what I saw. What I saw was a woman who fell absolutely in love with a guy and she wanted to spend the rest of her life with him. And unfortunately she fell in love with a guy who at the time hadn't grown up enough to know how to do a relationship. A guy who worked 70 hours a week under the guise that he didn't know how to deal with relationships so at least he'd be a good provider. A guy whose job was to take care of his family and who had such alcoholism that when he had to do all these commitments and go to meetings and she found herself in short order married to someone she'd built her whole life around that who just wasn't there very much and i started to get a sense of her loneliness and desolation in the marriage and how it must have ground on year after year you see i don't know anything's wrong because my life is full and satisfied but i was her life and her life was desolate and i'm too wrapped up in me to even see it and then when i really woke up to what was going on with her i remember thinking to myself my god how did she go as long as she did i could easily see how i could have an affair and she had an affair with the guy who was around the most my favorite sponsee and i i and when i when you get the compassion you also get the price they paid that's what I always hated about when people hurt me I don't mind if you hurt me if you're properly ashamed of yourself what drives me crazy is if you hurt me and when I look at you all I see is your defense mechanisms and it looks like you didn't pay the price that's What makes me nuts and I started to get the price she paid it was a horrible price I'll tell you in a minute what that price was and I saw it when I went made amends to her when i put myself in his position it was it was easy i mean he's a guy i mean you know the most noble honest honorable intention guys in the world in a compromising situation with a woman where a woman touched him and made moves on him you can't find those where's those noble intentions they were here a minute ago i mean i've caved i have caved if anything if wisdom incurs anything it doesn't mean that you get better it's you stay out of situations where you're going to do something you don't like yourself for and i could get him he said he could his first couple years of sobriety couldn't even get a date with anybody he said to me one time he said god mom if just someday i could have what you have with karen i didn't know he meant specifically i thought he meant more in a generalized way and then when i got what had happened to him and what i really got what he must have felt like after he caved my god i was his sponsor he almost lost his sobriety over that it haunted him for years and years I think it still somewhere affects him to this day many many years later when I went to make amends to both of them the most dramatic one was my ex-wife I went to her to reduce the separation admit where I was selfish dishonest afraid I told her how afraid I was when Kate was born how i'd never been uh i'd never been responsible for even myself in my life now i got a wife and kids it was made me nuts and i don't when i get afraid i just i don't know what else to do so i stay busy i just worked harder you know threw myself harder into aa and harder into work which fed her problem and i didn't know that and i said to her at one point i told her i said i I am so sorry that I was so wrapped up in myself that I never understood what I was, how lonely you must have felt in that marriage. And I said to her, I said, I know that you by nature are not the kind of person that would have ever cheated on her husband. I am sorry thatI was absent enough to have driven you to that. And she started crying because all she ever wanted me to do was get it. She just wanted me to get it We're very good friends to this day She's actually becoming a minister She didn't go to AA anymore I don't think she's alcoholic She hadn't been to an AA meeting in 12 years probably She's a minister and in my small way I may have driven her to the Lord I don' t know And we're We're very close friends. She calls me up and asks my advice about stuff and talks to me about what's going on with her. We're pretty close friends, and Craig and I are very close. We're close friends again, too. I actually, after a little while, started sponsoring him again, which is amazing. This is really crazy. There was a point in there where they got married because they were driven to it. It was like everybody judged them very harshly, and part of my amends to both of them was to go around and tell the truth about what had happened, how it was really me that set that whole thing up. And it was. If I would have hired a board of the most brilliant psychologists and sociologists in the world, at the day I got married to Karen and I would've set them down, I said, listen, you've got to give me a game plan that I can implement over the next couple years that will make this loyal woman cheat on her husband. Can you give me an idea? Can you get me a new game plan? I'm telling you they couldn't have given me anything more effective than what I did over the next couple years. And yet, I don't even get it because I'm asleep in my own life. I don'T EVEN GET IT THAT I DID THAT. AND THIS IS WHERE I STARTED TO WAKE UP TO IT. YOU KNOW, THEY SAY THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE, BUT SOMETIMES IT MESSES YOUR DAY UP FIRST. But let's take a 9-minute, 12-second break.