Step 4 Inventory and Step 5 – Step Study – Part 2 of 4 – Scott R.

Hi, everybody. Will you please join me in the serenity prayer? God, grant me the serentity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Step five in our book, the section on it, which is about two and a half pages, is just gorgeous. And it talks about alcoholics leading a double life, crushing down, waking up, realizing this horrible stuff I've done and then crushing it down. And that says something to me that's very important. It says this made for more drinking. It doesn't say it made for drinking. The reason why that's important to me is I have one core issue. My core issue in Alcoholics Anonymous is that I have alcoholism and my primary purpose is to carry the message in to help other alcoholics. The other things that sometimes I hear about the men I sponsor talk about as core issues, they might very well be core issues in their psychology and other things, but they're not their core issue as a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. I'm not saying that they're non-important. They might be extremely important. But if it was a core issue, that means if my family problems were a core issue for me in AA, that mean I could go to therapy, work out my family problem, and not have a drinking problem. One of the things that I, another symptom of over sober for me is when people would say, well, I drank because of this. I drank when I was sad or I drank while I was acting like a miserable parent or a miserable son. And I would think, well that's not why you drank. But you know what? They're telling the truth. That's why they drank. Here's the missing piece. It's not while I can't stop drinking. So I've jettisoned the idea that that's not why they drank. I drank. I drank when it was miserable. I drank while it was good. Lots of people drink, but that's why I can't stop drinking. I can stop drinking because of this horrible alchemy, this mix of these three elements that have conspired to put me in a situation where I've been plucked outside of the opportunity to be helped by well-meaning members of the clergy, well- meaning therapists, medical doctors, loving family, et cetera. So that's a really key part of this for me in step five when it says that this made for more drinking. It says that I go ahead, I unearth these things, I turn over each stone, and the thing that has been extremely important for me and valuable is that this happens within the confines of the inventory for me. I read my resentments, I read My Defects of Character, My Fears, and My Sexual Misconduct, and I read all of this. And the sexual misconduct, it's funny. They ask us to write on those seven different points, and it says to put them all down. It doesn't say, but in connection with alcoholism, it doesn't ask me if the moon was full and the Chablis had a blush. It just asks where I've been selfish, dishonest, or inconsiderate. In other words, and I write about that. How was I doing? What kind of lies did I tell? You know, when I left my wife for another woman before I got sober, What should I have done instead? Well, people fall out of love. People get divorced. People start other relationships. That's part of life. We know that in the big world. So what I should have done instead was not I never should have started another relationship. It was very simply I never would have I never could have done both things at the same time because it injured a lot of people. That's the kind of man that I want to be. I wantto be able to expose myself to the truth despite the consequences And sometimes I act in a way where everyone won't be happy. I left my sponsor and my home group at 10 Years of Sobriety. We had just a great talk at lunch, and it was really one of the worst things that's ever happened to me. I felt like my skin was removed. And all of my governors on what was the right or wrong thing to do in sobriety and whether or not I was taking a step toward a drink or away from it was gone. and it was also important for me to do it. It wasn't, there was some stuff happening there that I'm just not going to go into that it was really important for мне to get away from and my relationship with my sponsor had become unproductive and injurious. You know, this 12-step work, this involvement in Alcoholics Anonymous can be very difficult and very taxing at times. My sponsor said to me, at the end of the day, despite the fact that it's difficult and taxing and at times very unpleasant at the end of the day it should be pleasurable and comforting and at the end of the day if it's not pleasurable and comforting in the long run then what am I doing then I got gray tunnel sobriety trudging down a gray tunnel once a year a cake comes down I blow it out and I just keep trudging you know that sounds like fun let me tie a five pound sack of flour to my face while we're at it you know It's just being a member of a friend of mine used to call it the frozen chosen, you know. And it's just, it's, I really like having a good time, you Know. One of the most misquoted and abused lines in the big book of AA is I've heard people say my worst day in here is better than my best day out there. No, no. I had a great time out there. You know, let's see. Let's see, a pound of cocaine in an all-female jazz band or a panel at the prison. I don't know. What do you want to do? You know. What the guy at the end. That just slipped out, okay. I've never thought of those things. I picked them up in my reading. what the guy at the end of chapter 3 says is something really wonderful he says at the beginning of chapter 4 I wouldn't trade my worst day in here for my best day out there because I wouldnít trade this way of life I wonít act like a sap anymore I won't settle for a nickel today when I can have a quarter tomorrow I just wonít do it that makes good sense to me let me just take a quick look at these things before we move into this session there's a suggestion and I've heard of this book now and I want to read it it's called The Hiding Place it's about a Dutch Christian thrown in a Nazi concentration camp and I believe the guy in the book actually lives in Southern California at any rate it's a great book about forgiveness I've read about it and I'm going to read it. What a great question. Is there an action that goes with I forgive him or her? Funny you should ask. The method of forgiving is this. Now, I was resentful at my first sponsor for injuring me and I wrote about it and I'm going to get more into this in the 10 step. I'm going to really talk about this at great length at the 10th step, but I'll read you the thing that MF Fox writes and then I'm on to get into the details of it later on. The method of forgiving is this. Get by yourself and become quiet. Repeat any prayer or treatment that appeals to you. Read a chapter. He says, read a chapter of the Bible. You could read a chap through the big book, whatever. Then quietly say, I fully and freely forgive X. I loose him and let him go. I completely forgive the whole business in question. As far as I am concerned, it is finished forever. I cast the burden of resentment upon the God within me. He is free now and I am free too. I wish him well in every phase of his life. That incident is finished. The truth has set us both free. I'd thank God. Then get up and go about your business on no account repeat this act of forgiveness because you have done it once and for all and to do it a second time would be tacitly to repudiate your own work. Afterward whenever the memory of the offender or the offense happens to come into your mind bless the delinquent briefly and dismiss the thought. I say oh I'm forgetting that I forgave him. Oh I'm forgetting and touch it like a feather on a bubble just touch it lightly and move on and for me if it nags and persists then i'll write about it again and humble myself to another alcoholic and see what demonstration i can make because you know that when we resent um we are tied to that person as if by a steel cable a jailer needs two people it needs a prisoner and a jail keeper and they're both in prison. Baba Ram Dass, a great old acid head and spiritual teacher, Richard Halpert, great guy, used to teach. He might still teach meditation in prison, and one time he was teaching, and he said to these prisoners, if you meditate the only people that here will be in prison will be the guards. Do this however many times the thought may come back. After a few days it will return less and less often until you forget it altogether. How many times have we seen things that would be unsolvable and we surround them with the light, and after a while it gets starved out through seemingly disconnected and unrelated actions? It's a war of attrition. It gets starves. Then perhaps after an interval, shorter or longer, the old trouble may come back to memory once more. But you will find now all bitterness and resentment have disappeared, and you are both free with the perfect freedom of the children of God. Your forgiveness is complete. You will experience a wonderful joy in the realization of the demonstration. Our books are sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They'll always materialize if we work for them. Now I think any member who has been in AA for an appreciable amount of time can testify to the fact that they used to have hatreds that are out of their life completely. And in many of our cases, certainly in me, there are certain ones that have been persistent and nagging and very difficult. and sometimes God uses what I want most to rope me in, you know. And I've had to take a look at those until my back has been broken by them. In the case of my sponsor, I wrote about it, I read it, I wrote it, and I read about it until it just fell apart. And my sponsor finally said to me, so you've done everything. I said, everything. He said, you've done everything except forgive him. And I was confused. I didn't know that it was mine to dispense. I didn'T understand forgiveness. I thought if I forgave you, it meant I was telling you you were wrong, which to me was antithetical of my whole spiritual treatment. I thought I needed to take responsibility for these things. I didn' t understand that to forgive you was to forgive you for a perceived wrong. I don' t know if you were right. Again, some things really are wrong. Some things are not excusable, but they have to be forgivable. And if I say I am willing, I am absolutely willing to accept the fact that you're spiritually ill, then my world gets a lot bigger. Because if I deny you the ability to act the way you're acting, and I do that with enough people, then I wind up in Scott Redmond land, which is like a psychological theme park. it's a terrible place to live there's a lot of lights and it's very shiny and very bizarre so there is an action thank you so much for asking me that I just read from a copy from Emmett Fox's book when my daughter was five she told me you are too mad for what I did. Isn't that just incredible? You are too bad for what I did It took me eight more years of drinking and several years of sobriety to learn from this That is just so gorgeous So gorgeous Toddlers are a great expression of alcoholism in terms of their self-centeredness And I just want to tell one of my favorite toddler self-centered stories, because it reminds me of alcoholics. My wife runs a progressive nursery school, play-based nursery school. Extraordinary place. And she approaches these two little girls. They're both three. And one is Nicole and one is Jane. And they're both drawing pictures. And Nancy walked over and looked over their shoulders and said, oh, Jane, that is such a beautiful picture. Jane, you have such a wonderful color in there. Jane, that is so lovely. And Nicole looked up at her and said, oh, Nancy, you're calling me Jane. I don't know. It doesn't get any better than that. But it's just a silly mistake she was complimenting somebody else. Could you expand on what the categories are for step four and give a full example about what an inventory, I'm sorry, what inventory entry might look like. Yes, I can. I talked through resentment pretty good. I resent Felix Scott for being a fad father. It affects my self-esteem pocketbook, ambition, personal relations, and sex. Now it might not affect all those, but in this case it does. and that's SPAPS, self-esteem pocketbook, ambition, personal relations and sex and that is 65 and 66 and then the fear image and that section one resentment and defects of character that feed the resentment and make them possible brought to you by and then the fear list is simply I am frightened of and write the fear not in connection with personal resentment sometimes I write a fear I realize that it is connection with personal resentment, and it will swing me back to the resentment inventory. And then I write on the seven points. I left my wife for another woman before I got sober. The names on the people are on the top of the page. Who was injured? My wife, the other woman, her family, the people at work. It was a workplace deal, our children, me. Top of the stage. Where was I selfish? I'm not going to go into great detail on this, but I write about where I was selfish. I wanted to have both women. I wanted the whole thing for me. I wanted to be a bigger big shot at work. I write about where I was selfish, dishonest. Well, I lied to my boss. I didn't disclose that this was going on. I was dishonest to my workmates because I was doing special things for this woman in the workplace and cheating them out of my time and attention and goodwill. Where was I dishonest? I was lying about my intentions to both women. And I write About How I Did It. I was honest to my children because I really wasn't showing up as the whole dad. You know, there were pieces I had to leave behind because of my incredible self-loathing and hatred for others. Tough to know which was winning at that time. Selfish, dishonest, inconsiderate, I wasn't being considerate of my workmates, of my boss, of my employers, of the people who had invested in the project. I wasn'T being considerATE of, you know, I could go into each one of these buckets and talk about how I wasnT considerATE to this woman's parents because she was watching them suffer and seeing her being tossed around in the tempest of this thing? Selfish, dishonest, inconsiderate, unjustifiably aroused jealousy. Well, I created jealousy in both of the women. I created jealous at the workplace because the workmates were jealous of the attention she was getting. And I was jealous of people I felt weren't in my bind. I was jealouse of people that I thought had normal lives and were moving through them with some degree of grace that I certainly wasn't. Suspicion. I became suspicious of my own sanity. I became ambitious of all of my intentions. I didn't know what to believe about myself. I certainly created suspicions in my sons because they lived now in even a more disrupted and unsure landscape. And again, I could make a case for how I created suspicion in this woman's family. Was she going to be mistreated and go up? At any rate, jealousy, suspicion, bitterness. Well, I created bitterness in all of them, and I wrote about that. Eventually turning away from this woman, turning back to my family. Not that that was any great shakes for my family by that time. I was sort of the booby prize at that point. I want them, I want they've got them. It's like having a flaming bag of dog shit left on your doorstep. At any rate, and talked about the bitterness, how I injured this woman. I injured the project I was working on, and I could talk about some degree of injury. What should I have done instead? I should have never done both things at the same time. I should Have acted like an employee who was showing up and giving them a dime for their nickel and not cheating them out of money, stealing money really if I'm squandering their resources. And I wrote what I should've been doing instead. So that's a pretty, for me, a pretty succinct overview of the inventory, the three buckets, and how I make entries. I read it in step five, and then I sat down and I did steps six and seven. I went over my defects of character. I had a conversation with God about them. I talked about them, I read the one-page piece in the big book of AA, and I went through each individual one, and I said, Pop, please remove this terrible fear. Please remove this horrible mind reading. Father, please remove this terrible people-pleasing. Father, Please remove this fear of confrontation. Father, Please remove the self-centeredness. Father, Please remove their self-seeking. Father, Please remove his unwillingness to accept spiritual sickness in myself. Please remove its unwillingness to accept spiritual sickness in one of God's kids. And when I did the big inventory, you know, sometimes men I sponsor will come to me and they'll say, you know be working on a fourth step and they will say, Oh, this hurts so much. Can I just come over and read you what I got? And I ask them not to. The book doesn't say write a little, read a little or write a lot of things. Write a little. Read a little They encourage you to read the whole thing because perhaps you will be so crushed under the weight of it the demonstration of the illness will be so overwhelming that you'll be so deflated of ego at depth that something supernatural will happen to you where this ego, this desire for separation this incredible war this personal war to somehow be special, individuated and to feel like the ego is contained and standing up in the face of this big, brutal, horrible world will be deflated enough for me to actually, and maybe it's at first just being connected to my sponsor. I don't know. Maybe in some way this little kernel, this little breeze can move through this death lock, this spiritual corner I've painted myself into that's why I see a great value of saying I'm resentful at a couple hundred times I am frightened of 50 times and the terrible evidence of this sexual inventory of really going into the bones of how I have trespassed in these areas and what I've injured and stuff and a guy once said to me he wanted was get it on with the newcomer. And he asked me what I thought of it, and I said, well, you know what? Don't get it all with the new comers. Instead, try something instead. Go to a hospital, go to ICU, and find a woman on life support and unplug her from her machines and have sex with her and then plug her into the machines again. It's the same thing. And he went, ugh, and he was so glad he had asked me that question. And I think it's kind of like standing at the doorway of a hospital and welcoming people and saying, you know what, I'd really like to get it on with you before you get in there and, you know, get your treatment. I wish I could spit it out some other way, but that's just the way it seems to me. Although, again, I judge no man because I'm so spiritually developed. But that being said, I think a lot of people can testify to the fact that I know people who started going out when they were really new who've been married for 30 years. So, I mean, I know some people who have been married and I know a couple who have found them. So I'm not saying that that happened to Beverly, by the way. I'm just looking at her because I love her. But I – matter of fact, you dated George when he was new, I thought. No? No, okay. but so I don't think I just don't believe there are any hard and fast rules but I certainly think that it's something because it says in our book if we're not sorry for this and we continue to do it we're quite sure to drink wow what do they mean it just doesn't seem to be very mystical to me if I continue todo this and I continueto injure people I'm quite sureto drink um so that was my six and seven on my defects of character and my six and seven uh with fear i love i want to share it with you it's on page 67 68 and i jump around a little bit something my sponsor shared with me and it's been a great great help to me On the bottom, right above now about sex In the last sentence it says We ask him to remove our fear and direct our attention To what he would have us be Once we commence to outgrow fear The paragraph above it The last two sentences say We are in the world to play the role he assigns Just to the extent that we would do as we think he would Have us and humbly rely upon him Does he enable us to match calamity With serenity So the prayer that my sponsor gave me was, Father, please remove this fear of. Okay? I don't know what it is. It could be fear of confrontation. It could being fear of animals. I had a terrible fear of mammals when I got sober. Fear of the dark, whatever it is, turn my attention to what you would have me be, which means what's your plan? The Scott Redman plan is be terrified. That's clearly a Scott Redmon plan. Okay? Now, I want to tell you also that I have a lot more colors on my palate now than I did when I Got Sober. I had just a few, you know? I had terror and coma. That was pretty much it. I didn't have a lot of gray area in between. And now I have fear. I have excitement, nervousness, reasonable anxiety. When a shark swims toward me, I don't have fear, I have alarm. There's a big difference between the two. One of them is a spiritual sickness, and one of them is smart, you know? Also, excitement. Early on, I misinterpreted that as fear. Maybe it was because I made so much about everything about me that I could easily make it into fear instead of just excitement. Sometimes people ask me if I get scared before I speak, and at this point I can honestly say no, I get excited, which is fun. I'm kind of an excitement junkie. I like that a lot. Whee! Yeah, I likethat. But it's not fair. So, dear God, please remove this terrible fear of animals. Turn my attention to what you would have me be. In other words, God's plan is not for me to be scared. And it doesn't say I walk through all my fears. That's a real Arnold Schwarzenegger-ish kind of idea that I always have to walk through my fear. In this case, the voice said, stay away from animals. It didn't say go buy a puppy. It didn'T say anything like that. It said, just stay away from them. And then it says, I humbly rely upon you, which means I'm actually going to follow the suggestion, okay? Because a lot of times, you see, the last sentence of the sexual inventory, 6 and 7, it says the right answers will come if I want them. And a lot OF times, I don't want them, you know? Like, I was 320 pounds, and I'd say, I'm resentful at Scott for being overweight. It affects my self-esteem, pocketbook, ambition, personal relations. What are the defects? I'm self-serving. I'm not letting anything feed me except me. I'm experiencing all of this stuff, this miserable stuff, and I read it to somebody else. And then I have a pie and a bowl of spaghetti. You know, I just repeat the same thing. And the voice said to me, go to OA. And I'd go, yeah, okay. What else you got? Because I'm a circuit speaker. I have no business doing that. I'm too spiritually developed, you know. And I continued to suffer. And then I would write about it. The right answers would come if I want them. I would say, go to OA. So I go to OA. And I say, you now, I'm a circuit speaker. And they said, yes, and a very fat circuit speaker at the time. And I said, well, would you like me to talk? And I says, no, no. And your mouth's full, so it's not polite. I humbly rely upon you. And sometimes the answers will come, and I don't want them. And I say, what else you got? God. God. Reach into your bag of tricks, God. And what else do you got ? And God's going to go, oh, he didn't like that. Oh, shit. Let me see what else I got. There's got to be something else in here. Dear Father, please remove this terrible fear of animals. turn my attention to what you would have me be. Stay away from animals, and I stay away from animals. I humbly rely upon you. That's the six and seven movement for me with the fear inventory. And I was at a conference at the Brazos conference. Who was I talking to about that? I was at that conference at Brazos and a puppy ran up to me and I realized I wasn't scared anymore. I embraced this puppy and played with them and had the time of my life that weekend. And I was sober a long time, but I had just stayed away from animals, you know. And it happens when I'm not looking at it in the middle of the night, in between breaths, when I am not even focusing on it. Anytime a guy I sponsor says that he is working on himself, I want to go, step away from yourself, sir. Step away from yourself. put your hands on the car and step away from yourself my disease reacts so poorly to a frontal assault it always has and I'm not saying that I can't act with purpose and with deliberation about things that I want to be rid of but when I'm working on myself it's one drunk talking to himself and nothing ever good has happened in my life because of that So that's how, and then 6 and 7 on the sexual inventory are beautifully described in the last two paragraphs on page 69. In this way we try to shape a sane and sound ideal for our future sex life. We subjected each relation to this test. Was it selfish or not? We asked God to mold our ideas and help us to live up to them. What a beautiful partnership. What a living, breathing relationship. Mutual, intimate relationship with God. We asked God to mold our ideas. We remembered always that our sex powers were God-given and therefore good, neither to be used lightly or selfishly, nor to be despised or loathed. Whatever our ideal turns out to be, we must be willing to grow toward it. We must be will to make amends where we have done harm, provided that we do not bring about still more harm in so doing. In other words, we treat sex as we would any other problem. In meditation, we ask God what we should do about each specific matter. The right answers will come if we want it, not if we like it. I'm going to talk more about 6 and 7 and how it has presented for me as part of the 10th step. Step 8 and 9, except for step 12, which is outlined in an entire chapter of the Big Book of AA, there is more written really about examples and ideas and suppositions and problems in the discussion of 8 and nine than any other step. I think they knew that this was really going to be a problem and really difficult. A story I love to tell, and I'll just repeat it here instead of tonight, It's the best reading of Step 8 I've ever heard. I heard it, I was two weeks over at my first home group by a guy who I had never seen before and I'd never seen him since. He had a heavy New York accent. His name was Nino. I haven't seen the guy in over 22 years, well, 21 and some years. And he was there with a hospital group. He had never read Chapter 5 before. He was reading it for the first time. He had hospital plastic on his wrist. And by the way, the OA thing and all that, what does that have to do with sobriety? absolutely nothing unless you're going through it. You know, I've sponsored guys who have had to go to Sex and Love Anonymous because they couldn't stop getting arrested. And they went to Sex in Love Anonymous and have never gotten arrested again. And I've heard people from podiums of AA talk about these things pejoratively. What a crazy idea. I mean, first of all, it's an outside interest. you know second of all how why why would i suppose that i could tell a man how to encounter and engage with a power greater than themself that can solve a problem that's got them in a death lock again my experience with these guys in my experience is that i've never done anything instead of aa i've done it because of aa if i had one book that i Could give to my sons i love my sons, and I really want them to have a great life. Although I can't cheat them out of one minute of their misery. And they don't live miserable lives. They have very successful, interesting lives. But if I could only give them one book, it would be the book that would be the gateway to all the other books. It would be a doorway to the world. And I believe that that is what The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous is. If it's a dead end, I'm screwed. It's got a shelf life. As a conduit to the face and the breath of God, it's limitless. And if we read it with an open mind and an open heart, it is pretty clear. It keeps inviting us out. It keeps saying, go talk to people. Talk to these well-meaning people. There is a lot that can be learned. These areas that we used to condemn, that we use to have such a jauntous view of take a look at what's going on there you know um you know sometimes a guy will say to me i you know that's that's why i drank or that's where i drank and i always kind of think well if you found out why you drank if this you sure that this is it then maybe then you can if you can find out why your drink then we can find how to get sober and you know if you can find that way, you know, then I smell money. We've got a little recovery empire we can start here, you now. It's a mystery. At the end of the day it's a mystery to me. Okay, I fell down a little rabbit hole. Eight and nine. What? Thanks. So he's reading chapter five for the first time in front of this group. I don't get a I lost a lot, but when I do, it's I'm in the backseat of the car. I'm telling you that. And everything seems very far away. Boy, they changed the whole design of this automobile. And he's reading it and he gets up to step eight. He's got a heavy New York accent and he read, made a list of all those we had harmed that became willing to make amends to them all. Jesus Christ. And he looked out into the room as if to say, have you seen this? Do you know what's in here? It was gorgeous. It was the purest reading of the step I have ever heard because it's the only thing I saw. I didn't see anything else. I just thought, oh man, not that money, not those people. I would not have taken that much money if I knew I had to give it back. No way. You think I'm a moron? A guy had lent me a car and I had sold the car. because I'm a genius. I'm above average intelligence. Me and Nitro, we're above average intelligence. Yikes. The founding of Alcoholics Anonymous dates from Dr. Bob working the ninth step. Got sober for a few months with Bill. He went to a doctor's function that he used to go to in Atlantic City. Went on a roaring bender and then did the rounds in his area. But before he did the round, we meet the real hero of Alcoholics Anonymous, the man who gave more than anybody for the founding of AA. Bob had to do this proctological surgery, and Bill fed him a couple ounces of booze to bring him down from the jitters and then sent him into the surgery. He gave him a bottle of beer and a goofball. The guy he operated on that morning gave more for Alcoholics Anonymous than anybody in the history of the fellowship as far as I'm concerned. He is our unsung hero. I think we should have a statute to him. I don't think he knew. A bottle of beer and a goofball and a scalpel. Go with God, Bob. I don't even know if the statute of limitations was up on that when they published the book. But at any rate, my night step experiences were pretty remarkable. I didn't know what to do about my kids or my wife. I had been loaded on heroin the night my father died. And it was just one of the great nightmares of my life. I just didn't know what I was going to do about it. It was horrifying to me. And it just was my black hole. It was something I wasn't going to get over. I couldn't imagine how this was going to go away. My father was lost to me, I mean, anytime anybody talked about him or saw a picture of him, I felt like I got hit in the side of the head. I couldn'T even go in and give him a kiss and touch his cheek and watch him take his light into another room because the ice around my heart had already gotten so thick my father was going to rot And that was it. That was the deal. I had so rearranged my life to accommodate alcoholism by that time that there was no connectivity in my life at all. And when I came in, I hadn't told anybody I was loaded on dope that night, although people might have known, but I didn't talk about it. And it was all over my inventory. And my father was gone, and, you know, people said write a letter or visit the grave, and I tried all that, and I didn't get a bit of relief. And I don't indict those methods. I believe in them. I know them because many men I'm close to use them, and have used them to great effect, and women. But I didn'T get any relief, which scared the crap out of me because I thought there was no way out for me. I was in my first couple of years of sobriety, and I needed some relief from this agony I was In. And I was sober about a year, and I was on the line to buy lunch. I was On My Way to Work and there was this guy in front of me and he was buying a can of Colt 45 with, you know, change and lint and a half-eaten milk dud or whatever else he had in his pocket. He had been there like all day trying to get this can of malt liquor. You know, it was just a pain in the ass, you know? And he looked at me. I was a couple of months sober and he turned to me and he said, what are you looking at? And usually I would have said nothing, but I said, how are you doing? And he said, you don't know how I'm doing. The only people who know how i'm doing are the people in Alcoholics Anonymous. So I went out and I talked to him, and some guys told us to take him to the county general hospital. I didn't know much about 12-step work. I didn' t know about what the resources were in our community at all. And a guy told us that take him down to county general and dump him off at the door. Don't show them that he has any resources. Just dump him off the door. I've got a guy with a little more time than me, you know. But for some reason, we didn't dump him off the floor. We went through the whole process. We walked the guy through the whole deal down to county. And about midway through, he said to us, I feel like I'm dying. And the guy I'm with said to him, that's because you are. And I said, oh no, how can you say that to him? And I pulled the guy aside and I'm afraid the guy's not going to like us, you know. And I said, how can you say that to him? Now, the guy has been told a lie that he's got blood in his urine to break his way into a county facility. What are we supposed to say to him, you're just having a bad day. It's all right. This isn't a bad thing. I'll let you know when you're having a Bad Day. This is what it feels like to die, you Know. And I know you've seen this and I know some of you experienced it. But you see people at Alcoholics Anonymous who come in with a bottom, and you look at them and you go, well, they're done. They're never going to drink again, not with what's happened, not with the disarrangement of their family and the destruction of their life. And after a while, if they don't find a way to blow on the embers of this thing and keep it above the horizon and keep this thing invigorated alive as a spiritual organ, they will drink again. It'll become a bad day. it won't become their bottom. It'll sink below the horizon, it'll stop presenting itself as a real piece of business and it is incredible to watch the mechanism. All of a sudden it becomes okay to bad mouth people, it becomes okay to live and stay in fear, it comes okay to be taking advantage of people in relationships, it gets nicked. With me it starts with littering. To this day if I try to drop something I try walk away and the voice says in all your affairs and I go back and I pick it up. I don't know how lame that is, you know, but that's what life is for Mr. Excitement. For me, the drink starts with littering. It just does. That's how it functions with me. And I've traveled back long ways to pick things up. I mean, it's kind of silly. And we walked through the whole process with the guy. A couple of years later, I was sponsoring a guy and he just, he had had it. He just was done. He just told me to take a hike. He said, look, blow up, man. You know, I just, I've had it with you and this crap and your book crap and your step crap. And if you can fit it into your busy schedule, die, you know, and leave me alone. And he ripped the guy off on the program. He stole stuff from the guy's apartment. He stole a car. he did all this stuff and he was making me look pretty bad and I wanted to sit down and explain a few things to him you know Dr. Bob in his wonderful story he says that when a guy asks me when he's going to want to stop drinking I take him to two places I take them to step 10 where it says that the alcohol problem will be removed you won't even be fighting it And then I take him to the last page of Dr. Bob's Nightmare, where he says that for the first two and a half years you wanted to drink almost every day. Wow. And then he says this gorgeous thing. He says, but I had so frightfully abused my right to drink, I had lost it. And I love that. I've so frightful abused my rights to tell people where they stand in the universe, I've lost it I've still frightfully abuse my right to do a lot of things, then I've lost that right. And how nice to be divested of that heavy weight, you know? And I wanted to talk to this guy, and my sponsor said, well, I don't think you have the right to do that. Armors and flip PJ for ripping people off in AA and making me look bad. It affects my self-esteem, pocketbook ambition, personal relations, and sex, and I write that 10-step. What are the defects of character? Spiritual pride. How dare this guy come into contact with someone of my spiritual caliber and act thusly. It's hard to believe that he would do such a thing. Probably grandiose winds up there. Now, I'm a guy who borrowed a car and sold it. Maybe hypocrite is on there, and I'm impatient. This guy's not getting well on my schedule. And I wrote about it and moved on and worked with the next guy. And a year or so after that, this guy, P.J., found out that he had a fatal illness, and he called me because I was, I guess, maybe the only guy who hadn't told him what he had thought of him. And he called a county agency, and they said all we can do is take you down to County General and dump you off at the door. And I knew that wasn't so because I had done my job in Alcoholics Anonymous. And I got to be there for P.G. when he died when I couldn't be there from my pop, and my pop came back into my life. I didn't know that was going to be my ninth step road with my father. I didn�t do any of that stuff with PJ, so I'd get my father back. Years later, when my sons were in a band, they were 19 and 17, and their adorable best friend died suddenly and unexpectedly. A 19-year-old kid had a congenital heart problem nobody even knew he had. He was this adorable boy, and he died in his sleep. And my sons had lost their friends. Suddenly and unexpectedly, you know, it's such a deep trauma. And I sat in a Jewish chapel, which I was never going to walk into again, and I held my sons while these big boys had their heads on my shoulder. And Micah said to me, Dad, what can I do? And I said, Son, I do three things. I make sure I have nothing blocking me, that I have no resentment against my dear friend. I find a way to continue to have the relationship, and I make Sure I'm not being opportunistic about it. And we hugged and kissed, and we felt the presence of his friend like I felt the presence of my father that day. And I realized that my sons had no relationship with my pop because I was too ashamed to have a picture of him in the house. It just was too hard for me. I couldn't look him in any eye. And so I realized once I was relieved of that agony and I started having pictures them in the house and telling the boys stories about their just their great grandfather who's just a great sweet guy with a big heart did a shitty job of being my dad but he was a great guy and i missed him terribly and um who knew you know who knew we don't know what we're doing half the time that we'redoing it we just put it in there we throw a pebble in the pond you know I had a friend named Howard Cooper, who you guys would have just loved. He was my friend Bobby, who I told you about before. Howard came off Skid Row, too. He died 22 years sober. He really helped Bobby because Bobby came off skid row, too, and Howard, in his first year of sobriety, was asked to go with a friend of his down at this Fleabag Hotel down on Skid row and 12-step, a guy named Sullivan, and him and his buddy went down there, and they talked to this guy, Sullivan, on either side of the bed. And Sullivan subsequently drank himself to death and died. Ten years later when Howard was about 11 years sober, he was at a meeting and a guy came up to him and said, I just want to thank you. You saved my life. And Howard said, you're welcome, but I don't know you. And the guy said, do you remember this guy Sullivan? And Howard says, yeah. And the guys said, well, I was hiding under the bed the night you 12-stepped him and I heard everything you said and I never had another drink again. We don't note what we're doing half the time. doing it. Howard was driving out to Vegas one time this is right before he passed on get out there at night straight shot from LA to Vegas if you're out in the desert at night and he's driving through the desert cop pulls him over and goes oh crap this cop walks up to the car and says to Howard are you a friend of Bill's and Howard said yeah what And the cop said, well, I saw your bumper sticker. He said, I'm in the fellowship and I like to start my shift with a little fellowship. So I just wanted to. He was an old English guy. We had a couple of English guys in our group, in the North Hollywood group at that time. One of them's name was English Bill. He said he was, he said, I'm the town drunk of London. he was a sweetheart and I will tell this story for him because it was his favorite story, he told it almost every time he shared yikes he used to tell this story about an old timer got a 12 step call and he grabs this new guy who's got a couple of months and they get in the car and they drive out to the country off the asphalt, Ottawa dirt road, off into the boonies They reach a lean-to, and the door is just like a burlap sack. And they walk in, and there's this drunk in filthy underwear sitting on a stained mattress, sucking on a bottle of wine, and here's a candle flickering in a can. And the new guy looks at the guy and says, look, I've only been here a couple of months. I don't know much about this deal, but I know one thing for sure. If you don't stop drinking, you're going to lose all of this. I want to talk about my ninth step with my children for a bit before we break. The idea of making amends to my sons and sitting down and apologizing to them was unbearable to me. They were six and three. What a terrible thing, I believe, that would have been to do to them. Another confusing, over-emotional, self-indulgent, awful thing. For me, it would have been putting it back on them. I think children should be taught everything that they can understand and they shouldn't be given a lot of information they can't take in in a reasonable way. That's a hard thing to figure out sometimes, but it's a real great way to go. Three-year-olds shouldn't see Spider-Man, in my opinion. It's too scary. It's two hard. Five-year-olds shouldn't see the X-Men, just in my opinion. It's it's too big a scary world. This is not a criticism. It really isn't. I mean, I didn't I didn' grow up knowing this stuff. You know, I have found out about it, you know, at any rate. So it was like with my dad. I wish that I had those other things that worked for me. I didn't know how I was going to get relieved of this stuff, and I was resentful of myself for being a bad dad and not showing up for my kid's birthday and all of this stuff. And my sponsor said, look, Scott, I don't know what you're going to do. My sponsor wouldn't play God with me. He wouldn't give me this list of tasks to do that would relieve me. He said, I don' t know. I don''t know how you're gong to do this. So let's do your job in AA. Do your job at Alcoholics Anonymous. Take your inventory as your spiritual task, And now let's go do your job. If you study AA history at all, it will bring you back to a group called the Washingtonians. The Washingtonians was an organization that existed in the United States in the 1800s, and they were gigantic. They were started as a group that was interested in achieving and maintaining sobriety. And then they became a group with no traditions, wound up involved in money, property, and prestige. They became actually, it would be if our grapevine was used to represent either a Democratic or Republican platform. Their organ, their publication became a political organ. Abraham Lincoln actually talked at a, we have one letter from Eisenhower that we save. It's just saying, good going guys, we're really pleased about you. And we've got other letters too, but we have no opinion, no opinion. At any rate, to duplicate, we have 3 million plus members of AA worldwide. To duplicate the size of the Washingtonians in ratio, we would need 10 million members of AAA just in the United States. That's how gigantic these guys were. No one knows about them. all they exist about now pretty much is a cautionary tale for members of Alcoholics Anonymous. And after the Washingtonians, you know, in the 1900s, there was a group called the Oxford Group. And the Oxford group was a first century Christian group that welcomed members of all sects of Christianity. They were a really interesting group and they had some things that were really wonderful. And a lot of work that they did was wonderful. They had something that they referred to as the four absolutes, absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness, and absolute love, the opposite of which is progress is not progress, not perfection. And a wonderful group that Bill Wilson was 12-stepped by a member of that group. He joined that group One thing I love is that he actually shared at that group completely stinking drunk, which I just get a huge kick out of. They couldn't keep him off the podium that night. And the Oxford group still exists. There's a couple of members in it in Holland. They're scattered. They exist pretty much as a cautionary tale, again, because they had no traditions. But this – the history talks about a six-step program that we had, which was not a codified six-stepped program. It wasn't a six‑step programthat was on the wall. It was just six basic steps based on powerlessness, confession, and restitution. That was basically the structure of it. And then when Bill sat down, when we were moving away from the Oxford group and he started raising funds, trying to raise funds for Alcoholics Anonymous, which I think is just hysterical. And, I mean, basically they went out and said, we need money. And they went, why? Well, for AA. Well, what do you need the money for? Do you need a special place to do this in? No, we can pretty much do it anywhere. Do you needs like a special hat or slacks or something like that? No, you can wear anything. Well what do you need the money for? I don't know. But can we have the money? And the answer is we don't need the mone. You know, I mean, we need money now to have GSO and to have La Viña and the Grapevine and to Have Literature and to put on every five years we have a wonderful celebration of our international. We had that stuff. And built into that system is something they refer to as institutional poverty. We have institutional poverty built into our system. They have, I don't know if it's a six-month or an eight-month or a one-year prudent reserve at GSO. I forget which the number is. But that's what we have, and when we go over that number, we reduce the price of our literature to divest ourselves of that extra funds. It's incredible, and they do it in such a lovely way. They do it slowly so that central offices all over the country don't get stuck with this more expensive literature. They give the GSOs, the local places, a chance to divEST themselves of that literature at that price, and it gets replaced with the other stuff. It's this perfect machine. You know, the two biggest landowners in New York City where, as you can imagine, land goes for quite a bit are the city of New York and the Catholic Church. And eventually the Catholic church excommunicated the Oxford group. And Bill had to really make a move there, you know, because if you couldn't be Catholic and a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, they could have held the meetings in a phone booth. So the Catholic churh got into it with the Oxford Group. They said you can't be Catholic and be a member of the Oxford group. So when they were writing, these sample – the writing of the big book started really as a fundraising thing. They're writing chapters and going trying to raise money, and they always get the same thing. What do you need the money for? And they couldn't really come up with anything, you know. And Bill finally – one of the things I love is when he sat down to write chapter five, they had written the first chapters, and then he had to do it. He had to write how it works. And as you can imagine, it was a pretty daunting thing for him. And I love the thing they describe in Pass It On. They say, Bill Wilson would have rather sat than stood and rather laid down than sat. That's the story of my life. I've been in a prone position most of my wife. I love that. And he laid down in bed, and it just rolled out. And then in A.A. Comes of Age, they describe this, and I love it. He finishes the 12 steps. the thing that we know is going to be named one of the biggest spiritual, transformative, cultural events of the 20th century. He finishes writing it. And in comes two newcomers who rip it apart. He's got a guy with 90 days going, Oh, I don't know. I don' t like that. I'd change that. It's just perfect Alcoholics Anonymous. It's like Moses coming down And, you know, some guy's at a bar ripping apart the Ten Commandments. You know, it's – by the way, I just – this is one thing I just love. Our emblem, our three-sided coin, our triangle, a couple of years ago, if you don't know, we gave it away. We had some lawsuits against companies that were making chips and all this stuff. There was a lot of revenue being created by the use of the emblem. And GSO said, you Know, we're stopping fighting everything or anyone. We're not going to get involved with these lawsuits. We give it away. It's done. It's not ours anymore, which to me is like the church saying, you know, we're done with the crucifix. I just, you now, Madonna's using it, you kno, Slayer and Danzig are using it and we're done. Take the crucifex. it's almost the same thing in a sense we it's just the makeup of Alcoholics Anonymous so these steps these these bridges to this power to me it's so interesting to me um AlcoholicsAnonymous was really formed by the confluence of William James Carl Jung the Oxford group in the Sermon on the Mount. Bill and his friends used to, Emmett Fox had a church in lower Manhattan, and he also was, he was a big deal in his day and actually gave talks at Carnegie Hall, and they went to see him there. He was a real iconoclast. He begins his book to the Serman on the Mountain in a way that's really incredible. He says, look, I don't know what you think of Jesus Christ. You might think Jesus Christ is the Son of God. You may think that he was God. you might think that he was an extremist who came to a bad end. I mean, he just goes, and this is a guy, I don't know if you can have a deeper faith than Emmett Fox. And then he says, and he opens the door and the air rushes in. He says, I don' t care what you say, but you must admit one thing. He's had a profound effect on the world. A profound effect upon billions of people. So come, come sit with us. Let's talk about this. Let's take about the idea, the big idea. Not the dogma, not the, you know, in our religion, you put oats on your head. And if you say, I don't like oats on my head, you're out. But if you're okay with the oats, we let you go through, you now? My favorite is the Buddhists. I mean, Buddha was about groundlessness, about no entrenched position, about no entrained power, about there's a wonderful story about a talk that Buddha gave at a place called Vulture Mountain, and all of his followers were brought there. And what the message to his followers were, stop taking my words and codifying them. Stop believing in me. Don't let my words in my teachings be a doorstop. Let them be the gateway. And it says in that when this Buddhist nun who I love named Pema Chodron, who is a great teacher, she has two wonderful pieces, one called The Places That Scare You and one called When Things Fall Apart. And she says that in the story, in the Buddhist story, it says when he said this, people actually had heart attacks and died. And she said, I think probably they just like went home. But I love that. I love because to me it's the spirit of Alcoholics Anonymous. It's come on, let's go. Let's go, let hit the floor running. Let's hit the panel, let go what we're going to learn, what are we going to learn what's going to happen, you know. So that confluence, that magic alchemy that took place when William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, which has fed and fueled the open spiritual democracy of Alcoholics Anonymous, Carl Jung and his advice to Roland Hazard, which was, you Know, that the only thing that is going to help you is getting on board with this collective unconscious, with being part of the real deal of having a spiritual experience. And I love that, you know, Roland Hazard said, well, I'm good. I'm a deacon in the church. And then Jung said that thing to him, that horrible, wonderful thing. I wish that was going to be enough. I wish that affiliation was going to be enough. But actually, your roots are going to have to grasp a new soil. You're going to have to go through where I'm talking about a transformation that is really not related to that. The Oxford Group, which was a wonderful, wonderful organization. Again, unfortunately without traditions and the Sermon on the Mount, Emmett Fox's teachings and again the open Christian society that he encouraged and he was part of. I love the big book of AA but at the end of the day it's not going to keep me sober I used to sponsor a guy and I'm going to end with this story and then we're going to take our five minutes it's a guy named Jay he was a great guy and he was worth millions and millions of dollars and he had a lot of money and he said he was a captain of his industry he was one of the guys that ran the business the international business and he started drinking kind of late in life late 20s and started dying right away His company tricked him into going to a recovery home in Oregon, and he called his brother who was a member of AA and said, look, I heard a tape of a guy named Scott Redman, and this guy could do it. He could really – I don't know how I'm going to get in touch with this guy, how I am going to reach him, but if I can come into contact with this guy, I'll be cured. And his brother said, you're a moron. Scott Redmon is my sponsor. You've eaten dinner with him. Um, you, uh, stood next to him at my wedding and you have the mind of a chicklet and you're, uh, you're an idiot. So it wasn't a big problem for the guy to come into contact with me. Um, and you know how long I kept them sober? Exactly no minutes. And, um, he was always coming up with it. I got it. I got It. I got I got. it. Some of his extremely wealthy friends sequestered him on a privately owned island in the Caribbean, and he stayed sober until the minute he got off the island. And he used to call me and say, I got it. I got It. And one time he calls me and says, I've got it. Come on over. I come over. And at that time, there's about 100 of the original big books left, the big red one with the original cover. There's about, I don't know, somewhere between a hundred and five, but there's a number. And they're very pricey items. And he had one. He had bought it for like seven grand. You know, this is a while ago when seven grand was seven grand and I said, I got it. I opened it up. I said it doesn't even look like it's ever been read. I mean, he says, yeah. I said, so you got the loser book. You got the loser book that's been handed down from loser to loser for 65 years. Congratulations. And eventually the noise got so bad in his head that he tied his neck to a pipe in the side of a wall and sat down until he was dead. A spiritual experience. And did Jay have a spiritual experience? I saw him have a couple of spiritual experiences, but it's not enough if I don't have a spiritual experience that takes place in a spiritual community then I allow them to be the shepherd and the encouraging agent to blow on the embers of that spiritual experience it won't work it won' t live it has to be reignited and that he never did that he ever did and he was a sweet, sweet man at any rate, thank you so much You guys are so great. Thanks so much for giving me so much, and thanks for your attention. Let's take five, and we'll start driving this home. Hi, everybody. Would those who care to please join me in the serenity prayer? God, grant me serenety. Accept the things I cannot change. Encourage the change of things I can't. And the rest doesn't matter. We're going to spend our next – our end of the deal here – probably take one more little break before we finish – on 10, 11, and 12. And step 10, continue to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admit it. I take my tenth step exactly the way I did my fourth step. I write my resentments, defects of character, fears, and sexual misconduct. And I write them down. I read them to another person. I get some input, some additions, and I take action. And there are times when things don't change. It happened to me with my eating disorder. It's happened to be at work. It's happen to me in my marriage. It's happened to me in many situations. This recidivism has been, at times for me, terrible of continuing to suffer. What's my goal? At the end of the day, my goal is to not drink and to be free, to stop suffering and not to be afraid to die, to stop offering to not be afraid of dying. Wow, what an extraordinary thing. my suffering tends to continue to be things that are not real pieces of business but are complaints and they remain complaints and I think somehow I can continue doing them it's that insane idea that I can continue doing things that every indication, every piece of my existence and my experience tells me that I cannot do successfully I don't drink, that's a real piece of business all the time I've had a spiritual experience and I don't drink, but I have continued to do that stuff. I had problems with money. I made a lot of money and it didn't solve anything. I fell deeply into debt. I was $80,000 in debt and sobriety. I'm resentful at Scott for being in debt. It affects my self-esteem, pocketbook, ambition, personal relations, and sex. What are the defects? I'm stubborn. I won't stop. I'm asleep. I'm in self-delusion. I'm self- delusion. I'm sobering. I'm grandiose. I have shame and guilt. I'm greedy, and I'm impatient. And I would write it and read it, and I just got deeper into debt. And I tried to solve it with money, and I made a ton of money, and I fell deeper into death. And then finally, four years ago, I started to write the resentment one more time, and I was so sick from it, I couldn't. My back was broken, and I surrendered. I had that surrender. There's a wonderful book by Harry Thiebaud. I know you can get it off the Hazleton thing. I'm not promoting Hazleton, but it's the only place I've known where you can get this book. And it's a collection of his papers on alcoholism. Thiebault, of course, is in a lot of our AA literature. He was one of the great first friends of AA. He was the therapist that brought Marty Mann and some of the first pioneering members of Alcoholics Anonymous to AA. He writes some papers about the first three steps that, to me, are the greatest things I've read about the first three Steps. He writes about the horrifying self-medicating and self-mending properties of the alcoholic mind. And it's really quite something, his take on the first Three Steps, which in the Big Book of A.A., there's no written instructions on how to take the first two Steps in the big book of A A. I mean, you could take a look and say, you know, Steps – you know the second and third chapters are about Step 1 and 2. Well, that's true. But there are no written instructions on how to take the first two steps. There's written instructions On Every Other Step, which makes good sense to me. And I'll tell you why. I think that the framers knew that if you didn't think that you were an alcoholic, that I could piss an oil gale force wind. And there was nothing. It was not on me. You know, I've started to work the steps with a guy and I've said, Are you an alcoholic? And the guy said, No. And I went, Well, you want to go to the movies? because I'm not going to sit here, number one, and convince you. And if you're not an alcoholic, I don't know what the hell we're doing. Let's play Yahtzee. I don'T know whatthe hell to tell you, you know. But I think that these guys pretty much knew that these were intuitive. And ifyou didn't have some suspicion that there was something wrong, there was really nothing they were going to do to convince you of that. Otherwise, it seems to me that there would be sort of a line you had to cross or a specific action you had to take, but they're just in the three pertinent ideas. That's the only place that they're landed. You know, if you can answer yes to these questions, you can move, you know, you could go, okay, fine. That being said, we're being convinced we're at step three. Convinced, who the hell knows what that means? I mean, I was convinced to as much as I was confused at that time. I'm a lot more convinced now. I had a very mild case of alcoholism at first, very mild. And it's gotten worse. I mean, it's horrible. It's fatal now. And it was not fatal for a long time. Took a while. Infection enters through the ear. So at the end of the day, I would like to stop suffering and I would not be afraid to die. That would be a wonderful design for living for me. So in step 10, as I have continued to suffer from these things, I want to explain to you the journey that Step 10 has offered me. So I'm resentful at Scott for being in debt. It affects those things, and I mentioned the defects. And then I write it and I read it, and then I borrow some money. I increase my credit card debt. I want my kids to have a certain thing at a certain time, so I finagle it. You know, I do an end run around it. and I create more suffering, and I create more mind reading, and create more not living in today. I can't live in the moment when I'm experiencing this stuff. So I continue to repeat it. So what do I do? It says in step six and seven, now I do my tenth step. So, I read my inventory, and then I do six and seventh. It's part of my tenth step, it's partof the process. Now, what does it say in six and sevent? It says I go over the first five propositions in the book, andI ask myself, am I trying and make mortar without sand? Am I ready to move forward? Am I really ready to bring this to God and say, will you relieve me and be willing to be relieved? 6 and 7, humbly ask him to remove these shortcomings. Humbly isn't take them if you can, big guy. Humbily isn't take them, you rotten son. Humbely is, Pop, please, please help me. I can't bear this. I can not I can' t bear pretending I'm a grown, mature man to show my sons how to live and living in debt and irresponsibly and having to sort of lie about why I can't pay certain things off. And if you're my friend, you're probably lending me money. It's really ugly. And I'm 80 grand in debt, 10 years, 12 years sober. I'm $8,000 in debt today. and it's because I surrendered. It's because my back was broken, because I went back to the first five propositions in the book and said, why are you not changing this? Why is this a complaint? And I want to tell you, a complaint in sobriety is an ugly thing. It's a lot easier for me to stay drunk and complain than be sober and suffer and feel the full impact of that miserable feeling about me. Is it step one? Am I not really? No, let's just take it. Let's take the first five propositions and let's laser in on this specific problem. This specific thing that keeps... I don't care if it's your weight, if it is cigarettes, if it any of that. What does that have to do with sobriety? Nothing unless you are going through it. Does it have anything to do with Alcoholics Anonymous? Of course it does if I hate myself. Resentment is the great destroyer of all alcoholics. It's the great destroyed. It's a source of all spiritual illness. How can this not be pertinent? Do I need to share about it from a podium? No. No, I don't. I don�t want to offend people and piss people off and cloud people up. I don �t want a newcomer to sit there and go, �I got to stop everything.� I�m not interested in that. I really am not. I don' t want to piss people of. It�s not interesting to me. It� s not fun. I� m not here to teach them anything or take care of them. It�S a lousy job. is it step one am i not admitting that i'm powerless over money and that my life is unmanageable around money and if i'm not really bringing step one to bear with money what can i do how can i demonstrate what demonstration can i make what can I do to appreciate the fact that I really am unmanegeable is it the stuff about do I not even know the price I'm paying for my credit card debt do i not even know that it's so unmanageable that i won't even get the information about what i'm really paying okay a way to demonstrate my own manageability is to find that out that would be an action i could take to find that out i don't want to do that it'S TOO PAINFUL IT'S HORRIBLE AND I DON'T WANT TO I'D RATHER JUST PAY THE BILL LEAVE ME ALONE I'M NOT WILLING TO PAY THAT PRICE ANYMORE OKAY IS IT STEP TWO DO I NOT REALLY BELIEVE THAT GOD CAN God can restore me to sanity here. It's like with food, right? God can keep Saturn on its axis, but he can't order lunch for me. What the hell is that all about? God can Keep all the electrons moving around all the atoms in the universe, but I don't think he's going to handle my credit card. I just don't see it. It doesn't match up. So if I'm not applying step two, if I'M not allowing myself to be restored to sanity in that area, what demonstration can I make? Do I have to expand my prayer life? Do I Have To See What How God Is Operating In Other People's Lives And Not Susie Ormond. I'm Very Happy For Her Okay Or Whatever Her Name Is You Know And Maybe That'll Lead Me To Her Maybe That Will Be A Good Thing. I Don't Know But I Want To See How God is Being Implemented By My Fellows And Then I Don'T Want To Be Sarcastic. It'S Like A Funny Cute Thing To Say But She Might Want Be Exactly What I Need To Do The Books I Need To Read In The CDs I Need I Don'T Know. I don't know. Or is it step three? Have I really not made a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of God in this situation? Which means that when, you know, sometimes my brain is like, I grew up in New York. When you turn the lights on, the roaches scramble for the door. And sometimes when the light goes on in my brain, theroaches scramble for the door, you know. And it says in step 11, I pause, I take a breath, I ask for some help, I let something else in. So maybe with step three to make this decision to turn my will in my life, how can I demonstrate? What action can I take? Or is it step four? Am I not doing enough inventory? Are there pockets like that little dental thing? Somebody told me they were like the dental thing. But it's a little pinprick and I open it up and there's this whole other thing I haven't examined. Resentments against being brought up poor, not having any dough, thinking if I throw dough around, it'll make me feel like I'm more in the world. You know, resentments against, you know, I used to have these friends and they were very wealthy and I used think they made me come to their house once a year to look at their pool, you now. And what they were doing was inviting me over to their house, those disgusting pigs, you know, terrible people. But when you're about you, you know it's all just, you know, a big cavalcade of failure, you know. Or is it step five? Step five says something so beautiful. It says that sometimes newcomer will keep facts about themselves that's later placed them as a bit, you know, and they drank. You know, so what am I withholding here? What am I? Is there something I'm not admitting about this? Is there something about big shot ism about thinking that I have the largest to move through my life and not be bothered with this stuff like, you know, interest, you know, or these annoying things, you know, that the world seems to be. I'm a spiritual being and I don't need to be bothered by this stuff. So I go back to the first five propositions in the book and I try to apply them to this thing that I continue suffering from. And step 10 has been my route back to the first 5 steps. It has increased my appreciation and my experience of the first 5 Steps in a way that nothing else has. Now Bill says in the 12 and 12 something I agree with and I think is incomplete. He says that growth, that pain is the touchstone of spiritual growth. And I think it's incomplete. I think pain is a touchstone of spiritual growth. For me there are many other touchstones of spiritual growth. Joy is a touchdown of spiritual growth for me. I like this and I want more. And I take action based on more. You know, because it's fun. You know it's like that thing we were talking that wonderful question about putting your partner first in a relationship. It's fun. It's a delight. It's not a selfless act, not for me. Not for me, it's not selfless.