Step 4 – Twelve Step Workshop – Part 3 of 4 – 2002 – Bob O.

The distraction of constantly looking at this thing that didn't work. My relationship became better with my kids today. I just have a wonderful relationship with my kid. But what I was doing was I was hiding a character defect, a fear of leaving, under a good intention. Do you see? where you camouflage character defects with good intentions. And so I said, no, I've got to stay here for the kids, hell or high water. I have to do it. And I kept being told, get out of there, Bob, it's killing you. And I refused to go. And in fact, my ex-wife finally had to come in and said, I want a divorce. And believe me, the first thought in my mind is, thank you, God. hurt my sex relations because you know i haven't even had a date since i've been divorced and the reason why is because i got to be clear about all this stuff i just i don't want to go in to some other relationship just to be in one and i don t want to into it without being clear about what the truth is about relationships because there are many many relationships that just work wonderfully Did it hurt my pocketbook? Man. You know what? I've done that twice. I've had a serious self-worth twice in my life and I lost most of it both times. But now I'll just go out and do it again, okay? So, oh well. that's why i write inventory okay because i want to know the truth i don't like any of this stuff i don' t i mean i don''t like see that because what it is is it means that i'm operating on on some sort of basis that is not the truth and and i wantto operate in the truth and i wanna operate with clarity and what writing inventory is about is challenging your beliefs Now, I'll tell you something. You know about how to inventory. I'm sure almost all of you, except someone who is really new, knows how to write about people. Okay? People you just write down why you're mad at them or what they did to you and then what it affected and then you go back through selfishness on self-seeking and pride. When I went back through that about my wife, my ex-wife incidentally, I was selfish because I wanted to stay in a comfort of a relationship that was uncomfortable, which is just an idiotic paradox. I was dishonest to believe that I was there for the right reasons, and I wasn't. I was self-seeking. I can't remember what I wrote in that. I was selfish. I was so seeking. Part of that was because I didn't want to lose my assets again. and I was frightened to be by myself, okay? So people anyway know how to write inventory for the most part about people. Institutions, you can talk about things like schools or courts or whatever. They're pretty easy to write about. Now let's talk about principles. What are principles? principles? Well, that is a principle. Well, here, our principles are the road signs to our life. They're what we believe. It's what we operate by. Whether you know it or not and whether you've ever looked at it or no, you act by a set of beliefs which are the principles that guide you all right we make decisions based on what we believe and those those beliefs that guide us are our principles now some of those are really faulty and so so someone challenged me one time to write a an an inventory about principles and some lights went on for me. And they said, you have beliefs, Bob, that are counterproductive, that are self-defeating. And I want you to look at those. And so I wrote down what I believed. And one of the things, and just to sort of trailer it onto what I was talking about inventory, One of the beliefs was that no woman would be interested in me based on who I am. So, I have to put window dressing on it to attract them, right? Which is my value to other people, women, in relationships is how much money I make. Okay? I don't want somebody like that I stopped trolling I did I'm real careful about how I present myself to people real careful and you know one of the problems that we have is we go way past the norm once we react the pendulum swings way too far and so we need to be careful about how we do that. So I believed that my real value to other people wasn't me or what I believe or what i represent or whatever the connection was but it was about how much money I make. Okay? I choose not to believe that and I took it through the inventory and that does affect my self-esteem because it means that by myself I'm worthless. Okay? and it affects my security because what if I don't have money, nobody will come around? Or if I do get into a relationship about money and the money stops, the relationship is over. If you ever get in a relationship based on anything other than wanting to be with each other, you're setting up a recipe for disaster. If it's based on anything other then wanting to being with the other person, you're going to get disappointed. because at some point that thing will go away. And frankly, women bargain with tools also, you may have noticed. And so what the hell are you trolling? Well, what I wanted to share is like Bob has his self-esteem issues. I had my, nobody would want me for me unless I gave him sex. And so, you know, that's what we're talking about trolling is, and finally, you Know, I hadn't realized until I made a decision with God's help, I couldn't get a man that was worth anything. And then when he didn't get sex, then I found a man, and we have great sex. So, I mean, it's true, but that's the thing about it. Thank you for sharing. My sponsor tells me that consider I haven't had a date for almost a year and he's going well, I'm going to bed with my wife And I'm sitting there going I don't want to hear this Right At some point Can I ask you Please How do like how do all these physical things that they would relate to and then we do the fourth step and try and make some adjustments and things like that go together with what we heard about earlier, that we can be happy in just about any situation. Yes. And I'm always struggling with that. You know, I even got into AA for the wrong reason and just trying to turn it around and try to be in AA and stay in AA for a while. And so, I mean, this applies to the whole stuff of what you just heard applies to me with my relationships, you know, and I'm just really trying to be happy anyways and try to make it work or something like that. Here's the problem. If you, and let's just say that you're out there trolling sex to attract someone. If you get in there and it doesn't work, the relationship's over. If they lose interest, whatever. ever. The risk is to just present yourself, just to say, don't have any bait out there. You just say, see, and people, we all seem to suffer from a lack of self-esteem, and so we rarely think that we are sufficient by ourselves. So we're constantly dreaming up this window dressing. And we'll dress up or smell good or, you know, all those things are fine. But if it implies something that you're not, at some point the truth will come out. And then people will know that they've been handed a bill of goods. And the whole thing will come crashing down and then the complaint is how could this have happened the way you set it up okay it just let me hasten to say that sex is good in that it is a natural consequence of two people really liking each other but it it should be the cart not the horse okay from my point of view right my name is Mike McAuliffe yep I think also it works the other way we don't see the person through them when we are we imagine them in something different we're not seeing the truth yes yeah yup Jesus I'm still struggling trying to get out of that It's, well, so principles. I've sponsored, and I don't, one of my beliefs is men don't sponsor women. So I'm going along with that and every once in a while some woman would come up and say, will you sponsor me? And I'd go no, and one day I was sitting there and this woman came up and sponsored me. The woman came out and said, will you sponsor me? And my intuition said yes. Now here's the problem. I'd been in this marriage and nothing had been going on for a long time and this was a very attractive woman. And I'm going, God, you've got a really funny sense of humor. And I're thinking the worst thing I can do is get hooked up with this woman. So I said, okay, let me tell you what the ground rules are just so we're both clear. Because I needed to be clear too. And I said here's what I'm going to ask you to do and I described the 12 steps to her and I said and here's what our relationship is and as soon as it changes from that I become totally ineffective in helping you in any respect and I will not do that. so no up front here's the deal and that was the deal now we got into we got into the inventory and when we got to principles I found out that a lot of women believe the same thing that I believed about money they believe about sex which is what Camille just said and that is that unless they have something over and above to offer besides just them that they are insufficient. And so I challenged her and several women since then to take a look at what their beliefs are about themselves. Now, I believed about myself, number one, that I had to have money to attract anybody. I believed that I was kind of a mongrel, really. That I, you know, I was brought up in just despairing circumstances. Living with foster homes and farms and all kinds of places. And absolutely felt that I had no value at all. As a consequence, I believed that I was probably a failure. I took all of those beliefs and there are two kinds of beliefs basically. One is that you develop over time and another one is that you inherit. Now, I can't tell you how many people that I've worked with who I get in the steps and they say I have a little problem with concepts and you go, why? And they go, well, I'm not very bright. I'm not kidding and you go who told you that and they go my dad or my mom or whatever or this kid was walking down the street or standing in the backyard or whatever and one of their parents came up and said hey stupid and the kid believed he was stupid and still believes he's stupid and some of the brightest people I know think they're stupid and you take those beliefs which are so contrary to the circumstances of your life and you still believe them. Jesus, my IQ qualifies me for Mensa and people were telling me I was stupid and I believed them. I thought it was just dumb. You know what? Think you're dumb, you act dumb. You become whatever it is somebody else tells you you are. That's why it's so important, so incredibly important to make the decisions that God allows us to make today about who we are, what we are who our friends are, what our principles are because once we've done that people can come up and call us stupid and you go, huh, interesting. because you already know, okay? You can know who you are. So you challenge these beliefs. The ones that in my experience that are the most destructive are the ones that we inherited, that people told us about. If you start in this process of challenging what you believe and you start with the premise of I know some things that I believe about myself which are self-defeating. You'll get a list. And then you take them through the process and you ask why they... These things are all self-destructive and you asked them why they affect your self-esteem, it's a no-brainer. They make me feel awful. They make my life They make be believe all these terrible things about myself. You know, don't let your past determine your future. I don't care what you did. If you're not doing it anymore, it's over. But people walk around with this sense of guilt and shame about all the things we did as alcoholics and we think we're still that person. And it's just unadulterated BS. We are not who we were. We're who we're becoming. So if you want to feel guilt and remorse and shame about everything that you did in the past, please understand that God tells us through this book that no matter how far down the ladder we have gone, we can see where our experience can benefit others. And let me tell you. So, you know the thing I was most ashamed of? I was sentenced to prison when I was 17 for assault with a deadly weapon. Okay? I mean, I was the quintessential choir boy. and all of a sudden I'm being sentenced to a penitentiary and I'm thinking how the hell would that ever help right you know what I do today I have God has this enormous sense of humor I have to tell you I provide training and therapy to inmates in the criminal justice system now God's sense of humor is about therapists I have some biases about therapists that I won't share with you I think it's... I have a son that's a psychologist. And in my view... In my view, it's a very inexact science. But the Colorado Department of Corrections asked me to get in that business after I had trained all their parole officers and everything in business skills. And so today I have doctors of psychology and licensed clinical social workers and professional counselors that work for me in my business. And I tell them when they come to work for me, I don't really believe in what you do. But that's a silly bias that I have, so don't be offended by it, and I won't. And so you go out and do the best you can, and we're going to go out there and provide the best service we can to these inmates. So today, about three nights a week, I wind up locked in a room with about 25 inmates. and every once in a while they'll say what the hell do you know about this because these are most of the people that suffer from what the psychologists call antisocial personality disorder and when you ought to go to an AA meeting and my first response to that was out of my mouth before I understood I was saying it, and I said, hey, I was sentenced to a penitentiary before you were born. And so today it's really kind of funny because the word gets around among inmates. And if somebody challenges me, it's generally an inmate that speaks up. And they'll go, hey he's cool, he's OG. That's prison slang. Actually it's prison slang, it' s almost a term of endearment really. I mean, it's not pejorative. It's like he's one of us, okay? O.G. means original gangster or old gangster, okay, and it means this guy was in the system and understands the system before we even showed up. And so they'll say, well, he's O.J., and then the inmates will listen to you, okay. And so that whole business about having been sentenced to a prison when I was 17 years old has turned out to be an enormous benefit. And my experience, no matter how far down the ladder I've gone, can benefit others. And so what these inmates see is someone who has no trappings of being an inmate, who has apparently gotten out of the system, which incidentally between us is very sticky, and has gone on about his life and has become a success in business and has most of the things that every inmate wants. And I would have never believed that that experience would become useful to me or God. So that's what happens. So, what I would ask you to do is to challenge your beliefs because that is the basic reason for inventory is to challenging what you believe. And you will find out in the middle of this, even if you've been sober 30 years, that you will still be challenging self-defeating beliefs. And some of them that you inherited when you were children. You will do things for self-preservation as children that become ineffective when you grow up. And then they become self- defeating. And the same thing that saved your life when you were 12 years old is keeping you from being successful when you're third see anybody got any questions yeah hi me coming home. But it says that we have gone the maybe last 10 or 15 years and you don't have to go there. But then it says in other places that you have to get your bottom before there's no way to stop unless you want to stop so the business about hitting the bottom is fine but you can bring the bottom up that's what they're saying and then if that concept is troublesome to you the trick is are you ready are you desperate, are you done? And that is any point you want it to be. So some people may reach depths that are unthinkable and other people don't. And it has a question about how much can you stand? And, you know, our circumstances will take us to a point where even though we haven't reached the bottom, where we feel there is no other alternative and that we finally have to throw ourselves at God's feet and go, I'm done. I can't do it. And that point is different for everybody. So here's the deal. People come in and they get caught up in all these questions, okay? They're questions, and then we get focused on the questions. And the real truth about this is, to hell with the questions, okay? Well, just go do what it says, and the questions will be answered or they'll become irrelevant. So don't worry about how to get there because God's going to do it. And see, if you think that you can get sober by just deciding without God's help that you're going to just go manage this as an act of the will, you probably won't do it. If you're drunk, you won't be able to manage it. You won't know how to do it, so at some point, this is a tendency, especially new people in the program, there's a whole tendency here to refocus. you'll be looking right at the problem and you'll talk about something over here. Well, why don't you stop drinking? You know my dog has rabies? Yeah, but you're dying from drinking. Well, you ought to see what my wife did to the car. The car is irrelevant. If you don't stop drinking you're going to be dead. I'm having trouble at work. Okay? That's refocusing. There's an enormous amount of that with new people in Alcoholics Anonymous is that they avoid the primary issue. And the primary issues is how the hell are you going to keep living? Your alcoholism is killing you and you're looking in the other direction. So we do that sometimes by asking questions about, but how does that work? I don't know. It just works. So that's what my sponsor told me when I asked him to be my sponsor. I started asking him those questions and he asked me about what I had done and I told him I'd gone to meetings and was a nice guy and all that stuff and he said, you did everything but follow the directions. And once I followed the directions, all that stuff really fell into irrelevancy. It just didn't make any sense anymore. The questions weren't even pertinent. So you have to have a very narrow focus here initially. and the focus is I don't know how to solve this problem so I'm going to take direction and I'm not going to mess with the direction I will not under any circumstances practice license political license or poetic license or whatever with the directions I will just follow the directions and what we each could do for ourselves, that we would each benefit by, is if you've never done it, to just dogmatically go through the process without lending any poetic license to anything the first time and see what happens and see if your life changes and see si the questions don't go away and see i things didn't change See if you don't have a new concept about life in general and where you belong in it and how life works. One of the promises in that book is that we'll learn how life works, okay? I'm not particularly proud of the way it works. I mean, I'm no real happy with the way it works sometimes, but it is what it is. So, yeah. I want to share with the group also is that I was in the middle of a doctorate program and I did inventory with Bob. And I told him, I said, I was stupid. i said that was my belief system is that i was stupid they sent you into a doctorate program and i said yeah but you don't understand they just did because they felt sorry for me blah blah blah you know i'm in the middle of the program you know and so then he said what's the evidence you know when i came up with all the stuff but to make a long story short is that i did finally graduate but the thing is that i don't feel stupid today but i had to walk through hell to get it and just because you feel that way doesn't mean that it's gonna be easy you gotta walk through the fire and uh you know bob's had to walks through the part but a lot of people have this illusion that if you do all this it's going to be easy and it's not but god's there to help you and he really holds your hand but i have to say that was one of my demons and I can't say that anymore. I think it sometimes, but I can' t. You know, when I look at the evidence, it's gone. It's just like drinking. You know? I'm not a drunk, but I ca' n't say tha' because I had to look at the evidence. I used to hear this in my head because I could hear him say, well, what's the evidence? Anyway, I did not care that much. We'll believe things in the face of overwhelming information to the contrary. All right? I don't know how we pull that off. i mean we are we are ignoring the obvious and we will snatch defeat from the certain hands of victory my name is i have an area i'm an alcoholic in response to what mr nick when he was saying about questions and that's the bottom and how low it's got to go i didn't lose anything on the outside when i got here because i had said enough with enough women and that was the bottom i needed to hit uh i had a sponsor who was homeless in a nut house at rehab you know on the street all that stuff and i thought maybe i can't stay because i didn't go there and she told me that i could get off this just any time i wanted to as long as i was done and not looking And I was great at it. He told me that because I might not have stayed. And, you know, I did my investigation and it wasn't what it was. But it was just, I took the direction. I didn't understand it. And he said, I don't have a question. I had a lot of questions. I still do. Good. I got a question, another one. Do you know? But I asked him and he answered them. And my question became, as time has gone on, I just wanted all this information. I found out the information isn't as important as what I'm doing with my kids and what actions I would take. That's when the questions came because I had no understanding about what I was doing and I just want to know how can I solve it. So my questions came from all of that. Do you know, thank you, do you know that people are afraid to ask questions because they're afraid they'll look stupid? Do you now that? Do you want to now what the truth is? If you don't ask questions, you look stupid. Okay? Yeah, nobody looks stupid anyway. I mean, but people go, Jesus, I'll open my mouth and I'll stick my foot in it. Well, if you don' t open your mouth, how are you going to find out? Okay? There are no stupid questions in AA. And if you're... I challenge the hell out of my sponsor in this book. I have challenged everything in there. You take something like at some point in the past we made a decision based on self which later put us in a position to be hurt, right? And I'm sitting there going, I don't think so. And I was always asked to challenge that. So I did. And I'd get hurt and then I had to go back and see where I made a position based on myself which placed me in that position. It's infallible. Okay? All that stuff. We'll talk. Aren't we breaking for lunch? Yes. Okay, see you this afternoon. What you believe, and it's about finding the truth. We talked about people, institutions, and principles, and we talked about four columns. So let's talk about defer inventory because that comes next. the book indicates that we're all full of fear I've never met an alcoholic that wasn't terrified so you know the idea that we deny that's pretty absurd and the business about it being an evil and corroding threat is true fear truly is evil and people go, well, what if there's a rabid dog in front of me? That's something else. The fear that they're talking about in Alcoholics Anonymous for the most part is ungrounded, unfounded fear. And it's almost the fear of what might happen under the right set of circumstances. And we have a tendency to involve ourselves in useless speculation. Here's how I dealt with that. Someone told me, as an aside, on one occasion, that if I ever wrote down everything I was most afraid of, that I'd find out over time that none of it happened. So I did. I'm willing to challenge that, and I had a day timer. Actually, I had one of those little flip calendars, and every day for six months I wrote down the thing I was most afraid of. And at the end of the six months, I went back through it, and none of those things had happened. so there's a line in the book that says to the precise extent that we allow these, allow allow, that means we participate in it, okay to the concise extent that we allow these do we otherwise squander the hours which might have been useful so what's that mean that means if we're sitting there allowing resentment and fear into our lives, that those hours are gone and that that is a portion of your life that was wasted and that you will never ever get back. Truly resentment is the gun that shoots backwards. If we indulge ourselves in resentment because we like the feeling, we're the ones who suffer. First it takes our time away from us. Then it puts us in danger of drinking. And so to the precise extent that we allow those kinds of emotions, do we otherwise squander the hours that have been useful? Well, I don't know about you, but I'm not up to squandering a lot of hours these days. And the reason why is because there's so many more positive things I can do about my life than sitting around trying to figure out why I'm mad at somebody. One of the reasons why I chose to decide who and what I wanted to be and what my principles are is so I can avoid that. Because I always believe that if someone told me that I was something, there must be some foundation in what they said. And so I would go into all this introspective BS about maybe I really am that. One of the things that you'll learn here if you do this long enough is that this whole process is a two-edged sword. AA is very introspective, which means that we do a lot of self-examination. Self-examation is wonderful until it just becomes navel-gazing. And as soon as we indulge ourselves in that, we have gone over the line. And if we're just sort of sitting there staring at ourselves for the fun of staring at yourselves, which is not fun. It's another paradox. It becomes self-destructive in itself. So one of the things that happens in here that we need to put some balance on is about being introspective. If I spend all the time, it's like people, we have people in Denver who never stop writing inventory. I mean they write an inventory and then they write another inventory and then they're hiding a character defect under a good intention. And what they're saying is, I'll find the truth and I'll be more spiritual than you are. Actually, it's a deal about spiritual pride, which is just as dangerous as any other kind of pride. And they're going, you know, I'm really in the trenches in AA. And the truth about that is that too much of it is not good either. So go in there and take a good look. One of One of the really important phrases in the book is, and go on about the business of living. If all you do is sit in here and do all this introspection and you never go out and start living, what the hell's the point? This is really about going on about the Business of Living. This is about taking us, people who are unprepared for life, basically, or ill-prepared for their life, and putting us back in the mainstream. I had serious doubts about whether I could operate in the mainstream. Actually, I do it very well. And you can too. This isn't rocket science. It's just about getting out there with the right perspective. So let's talk about fears. When you write inventory, actually an example, they will put fear in parentheses when they do that. I do that too if I have some fear connected with a resentment, okay? And if you have trouble getting started in your fear inventory, if you make notations in your resentment inventory, you have a whole list of things to start on. You know, if I wrote that inventory or when I wrote that inventory about my relationship with my ex-wife, one of my fears would have been being inadequate to any relationship. About re-experiencing indifference or content. I would be afraid of all those things. So I can key a lot of my fear inventory right off of my resentment inventory. It's helpful to do that, so I make little notes. And then when I start my fear inventory, I go in there and I pull all those notes up first. And usually then you've got a little head of steam and you can get on into your other fears. Do you have any questions about fear inventory? One of the questions in the book is, wasn't it because self-reliance failed us? Yeah. Boy, I'll say. The book says that we should stop being self-reliant and we should start being God-reluent. So the real question here is, if I'm standing with God, do I have anything to fear? And the answer is no. Yeah. I just have a comment. I just had kind of a neat experience with fear inventory recently. And after I read this inventory, it occurred to me that, like the part about how has self-reliance failed me. Yes. And some of the things that I did in pursuit of self-will. The way that my fear drove me to do certain things, that really hit me hard that that's also sort of like forthcoming stuff. because in the process the ways that I was driven by fear affected other people yes and in many ways they've driven by my fear I stepped on a lot of people's toes right I caused a lot harm because I was That's not easy stuff. There's a line in the book that says, if we've done as well, we've swallowed some large chunks of truth about ourselves. I think that's a very graphic description of that and most of them are unpalatable the stuff I don't want to see I found doing fear inventory to get to the bottom line usually I'm not going to be all right and then I that's when I have to turn myself back again back to and realizing that I'm going to be okay regardless of what happens. So it's fate for me to go from that fear and that's the way that I get back into my faith and know I'm gonna be okay and I'm able to work through that fear that way in a very different way because I find that I will be alright regardless of what happens. I mean, I don't dislike it, but that's the way the world works, and I'll be okay. I have a 10-step friend who has a favorite saying which coincides with what you just mentioned. And that saying is that the hardest thing about trusting God is trusting God. I did just you know go ahead to see Thank you. You know, truly, there's an awful lot of things in here that are acts of faith where you just have to try it. For me today, my concern or my fear is not about whether there is a God. My fear is, what's he up to? So, see, my greatest difficulties come when God's will and my will aren't in concert. And God will go, Bob, I want you to change this. And I'll go, no. And he'll say, Bob, look, I need to move you to a better place. And I'll go, I don't want to move. You'll have to excuse this. I'm sorry that I, but it's the only way I can explain it. It's called my pile of shit. Right? Can I, the argument there is, it may be a pile of ship, but at least it's my pile as shit. And so we remain in circumstances which are offensive and degrading and all sorts of things because we're at least familiar with it, okay? And so, we will stay in the lap of familiarity to avoid the new. And unless we agree to change, God won't take us there. So somehow, we have to find the willingness to let go of those things that we have been resolutely hanging on to in spite of the harm that's being caused by staying in those circumstances and trusting that God will take us to a better place. That's a tough thing to do, okay? I've got to tell you, though, you don't have to settle for second best day anything. And the hard part about that is submitting to God to allow Him to take you to a better place. It's my view, it's my opinion that if we allow God to, if we invite Him to make the changes in our life, He will take us to places that we never even considered. To places that are so superior to anything that we've experienced that we haven't even come to consider them. I have a list of things. Because of all the difficulties I've had in the last year, I have lists of things that I take down when my kids come over, but I put them on my bathroom mirror. And it's the truth about God because what happens is when we get in difficult circumstances, we forget what the truth is. And we get caught up in a bunch of silliness. We get caught in a lot of things and we get got up in thought and ideas that are all destructive. So I have this list on my bathroom wall. It says, you almost died. That's the first one. And I was in a corroding, toxic relationship. And it wasn't only to me. It was to Mike's wife, too. I mean, Ima wasn't the only person that was suffering from the nature of that relationship. so the second thing that i've got up there is you were irrelevant and i was to my ex-wife i was not relevant to her at all in any respect and i don't like to be irrelevant it makes me feel bad okay but see i what i was looking at was i was irrelevant to her but i'm extremely relevant to my children i'm extremely relevant to people who are friends and who are fellow AA members and all the rest of that. And see, remember the thing about the 24 good things and the one bad thing? That's the one big thing. But I was irrelevant, which means I don't belong there anymore. The third one says, you can't, God can't will not move you to a better place unless you agree. So God's got to have my agreement. If I'm tired of being there, and I know I'm just staying there for the familiarity, and I want to move to a new place, I've got to tell them, God, I'm ready to leave now. It may be a little painful. I'm willing to go through it. I'd rather sit through two years of pain than the rest of my life. You know, I knew what I was going to pay coming out of that marriage. and I'm paying it and I knew it. But I also know that that is finite in terms of its length. And so I would rather take a beating for two years instead of take a meeting for the rest of my life. The next one is the most rewarding years of your existence lie ahead. Straight out of the book, okay? Well, I haven't found anything in that book that isn't true. And if I am on a spiritual path, the most rewarding years of my existence lie ahead. The last one is be patient. God has wonderful surprises in store. You know what? There are two things that don't occur in the spiritual world. One is time. and the other one's money. Now think about how you guide your life with time and money. Those are the major issues in everyone's life, time and Money. And they don't exist in the spiritual world. Now you're going, what world are you talking about? When I die, I'm not taking any money with me and I'm going to go off into infinity somewhere I suppose. I don't know it. But those two things cease to be relevant. And so why am I tying so much importance to them today? Well, because I like to drive nice cars and live in clean houses and do stuff like that. But that should not be the center of my life. The center of My Life should be the consciousness of the presence of God. Usually, a lot of times when we're in fear, we're in fear about time and money, okay? I think that it's a useless exercise. When I got sober, I owed $14,000 and it took me two and a half years to pay it off. When I ran into this huge crisis when I was seven years sober, I had to close a business. I had another business that worked real well, but I owed 125,000 bucks. and I was in despair of ever paying that. And nine months later, it was all paid. And I went to my sponsor and I said, how the hell do you explain that? And he said, doesn't need explanation. And I said why not? He said because God's got all the money he needs. Okay. I don't know. I don't think that there is a challenge that I will ever face in my life that God isn't strong enough to stand there with me and take care of it. A lot of times the challenges are in my own perspective. So sometimes I just need to change my perspective and God will go, hey, stupid. Not really. You know, I think God treats us like I treat my kids. I don' t call them stupid. I've never called them stupid You know what I tell my kids? I go, you're handsome. You're smart. You're really nice. You've got a good set of values. You're going to go anywhere you want to go. You can be anything you want to be. And they believe it. And they believe it because I'm their dad. And so that's what I tell them. And if kids grow up believing that, they do. Really interesting deal. Well, Well, sex inventory. Anybody want to talk about sex inventory? You think it's about sex and it isn't. Did we unjustifiably arouse jealousy, suspicion, or bitterness? Were we selfish or not? we need to look at each one of our relationships and see what we were up to. Where are we here? Actually, it says now about sex, which is interesting because from my point of view it's as much about how we interact with other people as anything else. We reviewed our conduct over the years past Where had we been selfish, dishonest, or inconsiderate? Whom had we hurt? Do you know sometimes you hurt people that are out of the direct sphere of what you're up to? Do you see that? Sometimes I would go get in a relationship when I was drunk and it just didn't work.