Step Study – Jerry J. – Steps 4 – 5 – 6 – 2005

Hi Bunch, I'm Jerry Jones and I'm an alcoholic. Been sober since January the 1st of 1973. So we were taking a pretty good shot at the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Who are we going to bury there? We've got four laid out, it looks like. It's good to be back. Told them I'm a little bushed tonight for some reason. I may go to sleep in my own talk. I've never done that before, but I feel like I might. I was telling my wife how many young people there were here when I went home the other night. And she said, well that's good because you know you can learn from young people. And she reminded me of a story that used to be floating around a lot about the little boy and the preacher. The Baptist preacher had a next door neighbor who had a little boy. And he said, well, I'm going to go to sleep tonight. I'm going to go to bed. And the little boy was out playing in the yard one day and he was riding his tricycle down the sidewalk. And he had a chug hole. Bent the wheel of his tricycle, threw him over on the ground, tore his pants, skinned his knee. And the little boy jumped up, didn't see the preacher at all. The preacher was standing beside a tree there. And the little boy jumped up and said, son of a bitch. And the preacher said, no, no my son. No my son, no. He said, when adversity comes upon us, we don't say words like that. We say, praise God and look at it as a new opportunity. The little kid just looked at him and drug his tricycle off, you know. As luck would have it, about 30 days passed, same kid, same street, preacher, everything just alike. Kid's riding the tricycle. He's gotten it fixed. He's going down the sidewalk, hits that same chug hole, bends the wheel on his tricycle, falls over, tears his pants, skins his knee. And the preacher's watching him. And the little boy gets up and limps around there a little bit. And he looks up and he said, praise God. And it just got real quiet. And the wheel on that tricycle just straightened up. And his pants were mended. And his knee was healed. And he just swung on that tricycle and went riding it right down the street. And the minister said, son of a bitch. It's a little like AA. You know, we do a lot of talking about what it's like and how it works and all that sort of thing. And then we see it work. And it always kind of surprises us when it does. I want to review just a little bit some things that we talked about and some we may not have. The book tells us that we've got a basic decision to make about this spiritual program thing. We're going to have to have some spiritual health. And it makes it pretty easy for us. It says when you track it all out that God's everything or he's nothing. God is everything or he's nothing. And it says we will find the reality, which is that power, deep within ourselves. That's the only place it could be, our book says. And we start looking for that reality. And in looking for that reality, we find that we've lived a lot of things that we've never lived before. And we've lived a lot of things that we've never lived before. And we've lived a lot of things that we've never lived before. And we find that we've lived a lot of our lives in unreality. First of all, the very first thing we have to do to find reality is quit changing or attempting to change reality with anything that's mood altering. It just won't work. If you're going to deal with reality, you've got to get your head clear of drugs and chemicals. That's just the way it's got to be. The next thing you've got to do is something that, to do that, you've got to stop drinking. And I found out when I first started drinking that I had a terrible time staying in the now. They talked to me about staying in the now. They asked me, what time is it? It's now. Where are you? Here. I was never here or now. I was always somewhere else, thinking about some place I needed to be, some place I had been. Always I was somewhere else. When nothing was happening in there now. I dealt with resentments and anger for a long time. When all I had to ask myself, what's happening to me now? What is that person doing to me today? And the answer was nothing. I'm here and there in a way to hell. I don't even know where they are. But I'm letting them beat up on me just as though I was with them again. So it's really important that we start off becoming aware of what's going on in our minds. Self-awareness. Of what you're thinking. You know, that's something that only you can answer. A lot of people guess what you're thinking, and some may think they know, but nobody really knows. Except you and I, what's going on in our own head. And we're going to have to be a part of our recovery. We're going to have to think about what we're doing, and we're going to have to become aware of what's going on in our minds. We've got to know we're powerless. And we've got to spend some time recognizing and thinking about how we're powerless, and how our lives are unmanageable. Check it out. Just how much power have you really got? Begin to look at life as it comes to you. There's a lot of things you want to exercise power on, but begin to think about what power do you have, along with thinking about the drink and wishing you hadn't, wishing you didn't. Another thing I learned about that score was that you can't think about but one thing at a time. Now, my mind switches back and forth pretty quick sometimes. But I was going to get drunk if I spent any time thinking about drinking. I just had to put that out of my head. I can't spend any time thinking about it. I've got to think about something else. Anything else. Do the multiplication tables. Do them backwards. Do anything, but don't think about drinking right now. Just put it out of my mind. And so I began to try to do that. I had to come to believe that there was this power here, and as we talked about last week, I saw it somewhere in this room. You know, it's pretty obvious when you stop to think about it. You stop to think about the power. There's something bigger than we are in this universe. I mean, it's a complicated place, but everything functions just right. We figured out a lot of it. We understand how it works, but we don't know exactly how it got started or where it's going. We can predict with absolute precision when the sun's going to come up 15 years from now. The precise spot on the point of the universe. So there's something out there. There's some... There's a power that exists. Where I had trouble was, how's that going to apply to me? Who gives a damn about me? If there is somebody up there counting and keeping score, how could they possibly have time to fool around with something like me? And the answer to that is that the power's been there always. And you and I have to lend ourselves to the power, not the power lend itself to us. So we have to give ourselves up to this idea, these new thoughts. That's the way it's going to work for us. It's going to work for us if it's going to work at all. Now, the first thing you have to do when you're going to do that is to make a decision. The third step says that we made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him. There's an old AA deal about three frogs sitting on a log. One of them decides to jump. How many frogs are there sitting on a log? Well, I said two. And that's wrong. There are three. There are three because all they did was decide to jump. They ain't done a damn thing yet. They made a decision. They made a decision. Another story I heard about it one time was the high wire walker, great aerialist, strung a cable between two buildings in New York City, those big tall trade towers up there, World Trade Center. And he's out there on a bicycle riding back and forth between those towers. Just a fantastic thing to do. And he had a... He had a... He finally got off to one side and he had a microphone there and there was a big crowd assembled down below him. He said, does anybody down there think I cannot ride that bicycle across that wire and back again? Nobody. Nobody held up their hand. He said, okay, would somebody come up here and get on the handlebars? Now, that's the difference, you see, in action and just sitting there deciding. Yeah, they decided he could do it again. But now somewhere along the line we're going to have to start doing some things. We're going to have to take some action. And part of the third step, part of the action of the third step, you can take in your own mind. It has to do with a thing called self-centeredness. It says that we have... The first requirement for step three is to become convinced that a life based on self-will or self-centeredness can hardly be successful. It goes on to say that... It goes on to say that... It goes on to say that... It goes on to say that... It goes on to say that... That selfishness and self-centeredness, these were the root of our troubles. So our troubles, we think, are the basically of our own making. Neither could we reduce self-centeredness much by wishing or trying on our own power. We had to have God's help. What are we talking about? The very first time I ever read the big book, when I got to that part that talked about selfishness and self-centeredness, I skipped the rest of the page because it didn't apply to me. I wasn't selfish or self-centered. I wasn't. Hell, I've been supporting kids and giving to churches and stuff like that for a long time. I'm not self-centered. I'm not selfish, for God's sake. I give more than I should, really. I don't get enough credit for what I do, really. A few people know about it, but some of it have to give away and nobody ever finds out about it. And that's just wasted, the way I saw it, you know. Then I began to deal with this thing. This is about as difficult a thing to describe with words as I've ever encountered. Everybody feels like we're on the inside looking out through our eyes and there's everybody else and everything else out there. There's a feeling that we're separated from and different from. Start off by asking yourself, who am I? Who am I? Well, I'm a man. That cuts me out of about half of the universe right there. The other half is women. And I'm not a man. I'm not one of that. I'm white. That changes me. Makes me a little different. I'm Texan. That lops off a bunch again right there. I'm from Dallas. I'm a lawyer. Oh, we lost a bunch of them right there, didn't we? A bunch of would-be friends just went out the door on that one. But you go on and you begin to name more and more. And the more things you can name that I am, the more distant you get away from everybody else. And one of the nicest things we have in Alcoholics Anonymous is when we start up and say, I'm an alcoholic. And that's all-encompassing in this room. Because that's what we all are. Our steps talk about we. We're getting away from this idea about being separate and different and alone. Were you lonely when you got here? Are you lonely now? Some of you answered yes to both of those questions still. A lot of you didn't. We start off somewhere in your life and you have this idea about, you know, what you need to be happy. What you need to be okay. You need to have attention. You need to be accepted. You need to be, you need to have some fun. Have some pleasure. Those are things that you need and you want. And you need to be important. There's some things you don't need. You don't need rejection. I guarantee you we don't need rejection. We hate that. We don't need to be ignored. I didn't like being ignored. I wanted to be, I did not want to be insignificant. I didn't want to suffer pain. So it's just those little set of things of my needs I began to try to live. And I began to try to get what I needed. And the more I worked at trying to get what I needed, the less concerned I became about what you needed and what you wanted. I tried to get it my way. I complained. I stuck up for my rights. I fought and scratched to get what I wanted. Then when that wasn't working too good, maybe I tried doing what I thought you wanted me to do. Now that's a kicker. Spend your life trying to guess what people want you to be, what they want to do. I already see I've got some tension. I'm going to try to get it. I've got some frustration going on inside me now. It's like running across the side at the end of a street that says one way with an arrow pointing both ways. That's frustration. You don't know what the hell to do, but that's what's happening to us, you see. You know what you want. You know what they want. You've got it pulling inside you. You have tension now. And you begin to feel pressure. And we drank for that. We'll still drink for that if we don't find ways to understand and deal with it. We will get drunk again if we do not find a way to live comfortably. And the way we have to get to live comfortably is we've got to deal with this thing called self-centeredness. I don't know where you found yours. I found mine in little places first. I found mine when you would walk in a room and not speak to me. Well, seldom did I wonder, are they having a bad day? No, that didn't cross my mind. What I wondered is, what did I do to that sumbitch, you know? I took it personally. I took it personally. I took a lot of things personally. I drive a car a lot. I don't know about you, but I own one lane of traffic. I do. It's called my lane. And what goes on in my lane is my business. You don't casually pull in front of me in my lane because I take that as a personal affront. And somebody, somebody by God has got to straighten you out when you act like that. It's my responsibility to, you know, nobody else is going to take care of it. You just got to train some folks. And how you do that is you switch lanes. Now, when I switch lanes, that becomes my lane, doesn't it? That's right. So I speed up and I run them off the road. Then I get back where I wanted to be, you see. And you don't stop in my lane. Not when I need to go. And you know these little old ladies that pull up to stop in the right lane, when I need to turn right, and stop and wait all the way through a light. Irritates the hell out of me. Doesn't bother me at all for me to pull up in the right lane and stop and go on straight because I'm, that's where I'm going anyway. Those damn fools that want to turn right, they're honking at me now. What's wrong with them? Don't they know it's perfectly legal to be in this lane and go straight ahead? But I spent years not knowing that was going on. I had no earthly, I had no earthly knowledge I had no earthly idea that I was reacting in a personal way to a whole lot of the world going on around me. Now, what is this reaction we're talking about? What is it? Well, the reaction is you have a feeling. Self-centeredness and the reaction to self-centeredness produces feelings. They're called negative emotions. I have anger. Well, I'm in a hurry. I need to get to the 30 seconds to get to the second floor of my building. And some little idiot gets on there and punches about four floors trying to find out where they're going. You know, just, they don't understand how busy I am. And I feel anger. I don't wonder about how insecure and what it must be like for somebody that doesn't know where in the hell they're going. I don't think about that at all. I just want to get them off that elevator and cancel those stops and get to where I'm going because I have important problems. Not like your problems. My problems are big problems. Yours are little bitty problems. I can solve your problems easy. Did you ever notice there was never a person who didn't have big enough problems to get them drunk? Everybody. I don't care what you, you lock them up in a room with nothing in there and they'd find, well, they'd be locked up in a room with nothing in there and you'd have that kind of problem, you'd drink, wouldn't you? We find ways to manufacture pressure out of these situations. And these get us drunk. They produce these negative emotions that we're talking about. They produce fear. They produce all those things. And we have to find those things ourselves. You and I have to look at our lives and find those things that are causing us these problems. No one else can do that for you. Now, I can give you some examples the way I did here and maybe that'll be helpful to you. But really, you're going to have to start looking in your own life and convince yourself that a life based on self-centeredness can hardly be successful. Why? Because you lack the power to achieve the things you want to achieve. If everyone in this room could do exactly what we wanted to do tomorrow, how many of us would go to work? So there's going to be a whole bunch of other folks in town that are wondering where the hell those people I hired to do this work. We're going to be somewhere else. We're going to be down in Fort Lauderdale, splashing or whatever they do down there. That's the way we function. So it can't work. And it doesn't take any great genius to see that it doesn't work, but you have to stop and think, can it work? And am I living my life so that it's based on self-will? If I had been an Al-Anon, I don't think I'd ever gotten sober. Because sometimes you want the right thing. Sometimes you have really good motives for what you want. My wife had excellent reasons for having me sober. She put up with a lot of nonsense on my part. And it became the most important thing in life, for her to get me sober. It almost killed her, trying to hang on and get me sober. Because that idea, she ceased to live on her own. She was so obsessed with getting me sober, that she ceased to live herself. And what Al-Anon did for her, was say, that's a wonderful motive, it's just fine, but hey, you're demanding of life that you have your way. That Jerry live the way you want him to live. Sure, maybe you ought to live that way, but your insistence upon it, is a form of self-centeredness. And we have to see in our own lives, where we have that self-centeredness. What we do, you see, is we try a new way. We decide that we're going to stop living a self-centered life. We decide that now, for right now, this day, this moment, I will quit insisting upon anything. What I will do, is try to turn my life, since I can't do a damn thing with it anyway, over to the power, to do with it as He will. I'm going to try to do this thing called God's will. That's what I'm going to try to do. Now, I hear people all the time in meetings, sit around talking about doing God's will, and working on step three. Just working on step three, trying to figure out what God wants me to do. But you see, that's not... You haven't got a chance. I didn't have a chance at step three, of knowing what God's will was. I just had to find out what it wasn't first, and decide to stop doing that. So when you stop doing that, you're open to something else. A lot of people die on step three. A whole lot of people die on step three. They never get into the real action part of the program. They get to this point, they go to meetings, what step are you on? I'm on step three. I'm just trying to turn my will and my life over to the care of God. You haven't got a prayer. Don't know what to do. The other steps we have tell you what to do to find God's will. That's what you do when you make the decision. That's when you stop making the decision, and you get on the handlebars, and take a shot at it. And most of us intuitively know that. We kind of know that if we ever make that decision, we're going to have to get off our duff and do something. And you don't have to read very far ahead to recognize there's some pretty unpleasant things they're talking about in those steps that you don't want to have a hell of a lot to do with. I didn't. I can read. So I put this off for a while. And we really procrastinate a lot on this point. All of the old defense systems that come out, you know, like denial, like rationalization, like justification, all those sort of things begin to work when you get on the fourth step. The fourth step says that we made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. The book, you ought to ask yourself, when do we do that? It says that though our decision, step three, was vital, and a crucial step, it could have little permanent effect, unless at once, at once, followed by a strenuous effort to face and be rid of the things in our self which have been blocking us. Blocking us. We had to get down to causes and conditions. Blocking us from what? The power. Lack of power was our dilemma. Three times in the fifth chapter of the book of Alcoholics Anonymous, it says essentially that alcoholics, when you deal with this thing called self-centeredness, and do your part to have God remove it, as it goes away, you will experience the power. You will begin to feel this power that exists all around us in your life. Not a theory, but a fact. As much of a fact as anything else that this power will begin to work in your life. How will it work? It will work in ways that produce things for you that you were never able to achieve for yourself. Will you have a top of the mountain experience like Bill Wilson? I don't know. I didn't. But I've had a top of the mountain experience that's grown over a period of time where my life has changed from what it once was to what it is today, and you can't get to the, from where I was to where I am today. I tried. You couldn't get there. So what we've got to do is begin to study this thing, and everything about our self-centered nature begins to conspire against us. The first thought I heard about this when I was in fearless and thorough moral inventory. Mm-hmm. Yeah, let's see. Well, that's sort of like going to that psychiatrist I went to, I guess. We just talked about everything in my life. Just talked about everything. Not much reason for me to do it, is there, since I've paid in a psychiatrist a lot, or probably a lot of these other people have. They may need it, but I really don't. And that's not in his depth. That psychiatrist that I went to, he didn't have a chance. He didn't have a chance to find out what the truth was because I didn't know what it was. If I had known, I might not have told him, but I didn't have an idea in the world what was going on inside me. I had no idea what self-centeredness was. I had a devil of a time getting started on this inventory. It seemed like everybody became sort of just a little bit nutty about the fourth step, about the time I got on it. I mean, they were hanging around the clubhouse all the time. If you had a headache, they said, have you done your fourth step? They said, have you lost your job? Yeah, I lost my job. Have you done your fourth step? And it's as though the damn thing would just cure everything. And I kind of began to think, you know, maybe they think I ought to take this damn thing. And I began to think about it. And I decided, well, I'll do it. I'll do it. I'll just do it. Now, how do you do it? Well, I don't know. I hadn't thought about that. Let me think. How would you do it? So I went and got the book, and I read about Ms. Brown and Ms. Jones, and I didn't know any people like that or their names. I couldn't understand those columns in that book, just absolutely beyond understanding what Chapter 5 said about the fourth step. I began to look around and find guides. A lot of people were putting out guides. And I got a copy of every one I could find. There was one I couldn't find. It was called the Sponsor's Guide. It was such a hot commodity that just sponsors passed it from one to the other. And I just had to get that damn thing. It was in California somewhere. And I never have found it yet, but I was looking for that. Finally, I got enough guides that I said, well, maybe I ought to start with what I have. So I sat down and I started to write. And all I had was a yellow pad. You wouldn't want to do a yellow, you wouldn't want to do a fourth step on a yellow pad, would you? The pages tear out. God likely leave it anywhere. So, well, if I had another, I don't have anything else to write on today, so next week when I'm downtown again, I'll buy me a little notebook like this, a three-ring notebook. That'd be nice. You know, you could shift the pages around and this sort of thing. And I got that home with me, and I started writing that. And I thought, well, you know, how silly of me. You can tear the pages out of this thing just as easy as you can with a yellow page. So I couldn't possibly use that again, could I? Well, next week when I'm downtown, I'll buy me a spiral notebook. Finally, I got a spiral notebook, and then guess what? We haven't even addressed the question of what color pen we're going to write this with. I mean, this is not something, this is serious. You're going to write resentments in red, you think? Or maybe that ought to be saved for sex. I'm not sure. And I just was squealing, well, what am I doing? What am I doing? What I'm doing is, I'm dealing with those old defense systems which I have had for years. I deny any need to change. I deny the need to take the action. I rationalize why I'm not doing it right now. I justify my conduct. I put it out of my mind. I haven't got time. I'm too busy going to meetings. I can't go to meetings. I either got to make a choice. I can either do the damn four-step or I can go to meetings. Your choice, I'm not a sponsor. You tell me what to do. Don't tell me I got to do them both. And you just do all this stuff for a while. I wrote about 40 pages. Took it on a trip with me. Couldn't leave it anywhere. Couldn't leave it anywhere. Took it up there and I was sitting in an airport in Indianapolis and damned if I didn't just walk off and leave it. I don't have any idea what somebody picked that up and thought they had found to read. But they thought it was weird, I'll tell you that. Well, I finally got back and the way I started mine was I said there's something wrong with me. I am afraid to write. I'm resisting writing this four-step. What it is, is I'm afraid. I'm afraid to see who I am. I'm afraid to see who I am. More than that, read ahead one step. It says that I'm going to tell God that ain't so tough. He's probably supposed to know everything anyway. Myself, I know it too. And another human being. Oh my God. Well, I ain't going to do that so why do the four-step, you know. But it was that fear. Fear of you or someone finding out who and what I was that was just immobilizing me and keeping me from writing. But as I wrote that, then I wrote my commitment that I was powerless over alcohol. That my life was unmanageable. That I'd made this decision. That I came to believe in power and that I'd made this decision and now I'm going to write the best damn inventory I can. How do you write an inventory? Well, I've had a lot of experience writing inventories. I've written many more than one. And I've heard a lot of fifth steps. In my experience, the best guide for taking a fourth step is the book of Alcoholics Anonymous. Because it works like a drunk if you'll do it. Unlike a drunk, you've got to do it one step at a time. What I was trying to do was all parts of it at the same time and it won't work. What is the one thing in the world that a drunk can tell you when it comes to Alcoholics Anonymous? He can tell you what everybody else did wrong to him. Now that was not difficult for me. I was a little bit more careful. It was difficult for me. What you have to do is make a grudge list first. Why are we making a grudge list? The book says that we're going to find the more common forms of self-centeredness in our lives. One of those is called a resentment. What is a resentment? A resentment is a memory. A resentment is where I can sit in this chair tonight and remember what he did to me umpteen years ago and get the same feeling in the pit of my stomach that I had the day he did it. That's a resentment. A memory that evokes a feeling. And it's a feeling that somebody screwed up bad. And it was them. They did it to me. Of course I'm the way I am. Wouldn't you be the way I am if they had done that to you? Of course you would. And we never get past blame, our book says. I had forgotten. See, I wasn't living in the now. Nobody was doing anything to me tonight. It's what they had done a long time ago. I even had favorite resentments. I could just think of a bunch of them. I'd just pick out the kind of the one I wanted, like playing off tape, you know. I'd just pick out the one and I'd play that all over. And I generally changed the ending of my resentments. Because then I got even, you see. I punished hell out of people. I blew them up. I played this Walter Mitty deal with them in my head all the time about what I was going to do to them next time. Fantasy is not living in the now. Did you know that? I lived a lot of fantasies. I was way out there with fantasies. And I had to get back to reality. So I had to start off with making a list of a grudge list. The people, places, and institutions that harmed me. And I didn't have much trouble making that list. I even put my name on the list because I was a disappointment to me. And I felt bad about myself. Then it told me to do something that I would never have thought about. It told me to get specific. I have to take one name off that list and put it in one column on a piece of paper. My wife. We'll take a little time on this one. My wife. The next question you ask, why do you resent her? She doesn't understand me. Did you learn anything? No, and I wouldn't have either. I wouldn't have learned anything either if I'd have stopped there. But they make me get down to specifics. She wouldn't. She forbade me to go play poker with the boys. That's embarrassing as hell. You know. Of course, I didn't tell them that. You've got to lie about something like that. But, you know, it's either this marriage or poker. Your choice, Clyde. And so you have that deep feeling of resentment. Why did that bother me? That's the next column. Because it... What? It hit my self-esteem. It interfered with my relationships with my friends. And it just gave you about three choices in the book on that column. It can be your society, your security, or your self-esteem. And you write down how this specific event caused you a problem. And then you go to the next thing about your wife and you write that specific down. And you write the next... You say, how did that affect me? And you answer that. And as you go along, and as you move through this thing, for the first time in my life, I began to understand what had been going on here. A lot of people say that they... A lot of people think they'll get drunk doing the four steps. They say, I can't get back in that stuff. I'll get drunk. That's not what it's for. And if you're doing it to whip yourself, then you're doing it for the wrong reason. The reason we're doing it is to learn some lessons. We've had a lot of experiences. By the time I got to Alcoholics Anonymous, I had had 40 years of experiences. I had learned damn little from them. This gave me the opportunity to go back and look at those experiences for the very first time and to learn some lessons from them. I have new insight. I have new insight about what might be working in my life here. And I began to go back through those events and understand what self-centeredness was doing to me. Every section of the fourth step has three parts. First, you look at resentments. You write them down. Then you reflect on them. What have they done to me? Well, I'll tell you what they did to me. I never had any fun having a resentment. I spent hours dreaming and thinking about resentments, and I never had a good time, one time, doing that. I thought I was punishing people. I wasn't punishing them at all. They're out there happy as hell. They don't know what's going on or anything. I'm sitting here in my chair, drunk, mad as hell at them, and they don't even know it. Happened all the time. It's happening to some of you right here tonight. They're out there fat and happy, and you're in here madder than hell. And you ain't having any fun. Besides that, because you're spending your time on that action, you're blocked from the sunlight of the Spirit. And viewed in this way, you can see these things are real. Resentments are facts. These are real feelings that we're having. My body, you see, doesn't know. When I get one of those things going around in my head, it doesn't know whether it's happening in my head or whether it's really happening. The adrenaline gets to pumping. The anger comes up. The muscles tighten up. I get stressed. I'm ready to run, fight, or whatever the hell else I'm going to do, you know. And nothing's happening except I'm sitting in a chair. Maybe looking kind of calm, like I'm just sitting there kind of meditating. What I'm doing is just rolling one of those things up, and it'll get me drunk, and it will kill us. These things have the power to kill us. Viewed in this light, it says the people of this world have the power to kill us. But it's power we give them, not power that they possess. So we have to look at those. And then there's another column. Oh, that's an interesting column. That one's called, Where Was I at Fault? That's where you stop and say, They messed up. They were wrong. They shouldn't have done that. But what did I do to cause that situation? What did I do to experience that resentment? Well, for one thing, I've kept thinking about it and stirring about it for years. That's one thing I've done. And in most all of the instances, you can find where I operated out of my own self-interest, and I offended someone, and they took action against me. And so I had to deal with it. I had to write a lot about those. I had a lot of resentments. I had fears. Fears is the next category. Fear is worrying. It's another thought, you see. It's worrying about something out in the future. I had lots of fears. But I couldn't say that word. I was raised in West Texas. And I wasn't afraid. Men were not afraid in West Texas. Did you ever hear John Wayne say, I'm afraid to go fight the Indians? No. He said, I'm afraid to go fight the Indians. He just doesn't fight Indians. That way you're not afraid. I had changed language around. I hated things. Now, what do you hate? Well, one of the things I hate is snakes. What kind of snakes? Any kind of snakes. How big? Doesn't matter. They can be as long as a pencil, or as couldn't fit them in this room. And I hate them all just the same. It's my God-given obligation to kill every one of them that I find loose. Been that way all my life. Why? Why? I'm scared of them. I was raised in West Texas walking around barefooted. And there were rattlesnakes, and there were bull snakes, and all kinds of snakes out there. And my folks couldn't teach a kid my age which one was a good one and which one was a bad one. So they just said they're all bad. That's safe. And they've got a... Snakes have got a bad disposition. I've never seen a happy snake. They're all just the same. Near as I can tell, they all got a mind to bite you. And you can't see the damn things. Did you ever notice that? Get them in a bunch of grass or something like that, then I'm going to have to walk through and you can't see them. So you're too close. So it's too late really. And that's causing fear. And I've got to go through that grass. So I had fear. I feared. I said I didn't fear anything. I literally was shocked through with fear. I feared losing. Because if I lost, I didn't want to be a loser. Nobody wanted a loser around. And I just couldn't stand it if I had the idea that you would think of me as a loser. I couldn't not compete. If they were throwing quarters at the sidewalk, playing football, whatever the hell it was, I had to be in the middle of that because I had to establish that I'm doing something that makes me worthwhile. And I'm going to win it. I'm going to win it. I may have to cheat a little, but I'll win her. And that was a driving force in my life. That need. That need not to be thrown away. That need not to lose. And that pushed me. And that drove me. And that was the fuel of my existence. And you think about what that's done in my life. And that was the evil and corrosive thread that ran through my entire existence. And I'd never been able to see that. Now every time after you find it and appreciate it, they give you a prayer to say. They give you a prayer to say in the four-step. They give you a prayer to say about the people that have offended you. And then they give you a prayer to say about fear. And the one about fear is you confess to this power that you have it, and you ask, what would you have me be? Not what I want to be. Not what I've got to be. But what would you have me be? And that's yourself. Here and now. And then there's sex. Sex. A fairly personal item. It's hard to get much more personal than sex. We just, you know, we have a hell of a time with it. I don't know. Everybody our book says has a problem with sex. I solved it. I did. I didn't write about it. I thought about it. I knew they asked questions about it, but I checked. I've got two kids. I'm married. Not messing around at all right now. Must be doing something about it. I'm just going to leave this alone, you know. If it's working, don't fix it. And I skipped it. I later on had to kind of double back on it, but I skipped it. Now, let's go on with it for a little bit, though. It is the epitome of self-centeredness. We worry about how we are going to be, how attractive we are to the other sex. How we will be thought of by our fellows because they see the way the other sex treats us. Whether we have good looking girls or good looking guys or whether we are asked to the dances or whatever is going on. Some people feel as though they do not exist unless they are in some character of relationship all the time. And we misuse it. We all use sex for power. We talk about it. We brag about it. We have headaches and won't get over them until something else is done. All kinds of things go on with sex that we have to deal with. And we have to write about it. And if you look at your relationships, if you haven't had any good ones, you are going to find they all look about the same. Write about all of them. Yeah, this one and this one and this one and this one. There are hundreds of lessons to be learned in this situation. As a matter of fact, it is not just sex. It is all relationships that are close to you that really need to be examined. You need to ask yourself those questions they give us in the book. Questions that have to do with where we are going to be. Where was I selfish? Where did I cause harm? Where was I dishonest? And you start looking at the relationships in your life and try to appreciate what has been going on in those relationships. How you made yourself dependent upon a person. How you needed to dominate. How you stood in the middle of relationships looking down at some people and up at others. And we come even if we work the program of Alcoholics Anonymous and we look each other eye to eye. There is no big timers. There is no little timers. This is a fellowship. A fellowship is a company of equals. And that is what we have in Alcoholics Anonymous. A company of equals. And you get to where you look at the whole world the same way. And these relationships that we have and that we go through are the most important part of our existence I think. A lot of people tell me that God works through these relationships and He has in mind. I see God in you. And I think it is terribly important that we go back and look at those relationships and study them. And it wasn't until I had been in for a little while that I began to understand the real need that I had to do that. As I was writing my inventory I had a lot of problems thinking about who I was going to do my fifth step with. I just couldn't seem to find anybody that was suitable to do it. To do a fifth step with. I thought about doing it with a preacher and I didn't want to do it with a preacher. And I thought about, you know, it talks about doing it with doctors and I didn't want to do it with my doctor. He wouldn't give me but five minutes and I would have to have my clothes off while I talked to him and I just wasn't going to do that. I was asking, I did something that was really strange for me. I asked my sponsor a question one day. I said, did you find it necessary to do a fourth step? He said, oh yeah, sure, sure I found it necessary to do a fourth step. I'm sobering. I said, well, did you find it necessary to do a fifth step? He said, yes. Yes. We do fifth steps. We do four steps then we do fifth steps. That's the way we do it. I said, how did you do that? He said, well, it's kind of funny. He said, I wrote my fourth step. I talked to my sponsor some as I was doing it. Kind of like you have. Then one day I got through and I said, I guess I ought to have to do a fifth step. He said, yep. I said, would you like to do the fifth step with me? He said, yeah, I'd be fine. Come on over to the house when you get through. So I went over to the house when I got through. I got over to the house and I had my little book that I'd written my fourth step in. He sat me down in the chair and he said, is that your fourth step? I said, yes. He said, may I see it? He said, I gave it to him. He began to kind of thumb through it. He said, did you write it all down? I said, oh yeah. Yeah, I wrote it all down. Everything I think of. He thumbed it and then he just took it and tossed it in the waste can. He said, that is the past. It is gone. We're all through with it now. I said, yeah. I said, that's it? He said, that is it? Well, I thought about that conversation a lot the next few days. And it occurred to me if his sponsor took a fifth step with him that way and I asked my sponsor to do a fifth step with me, wouldn't we do it the same way he did it? There wouldn't be any need to read the damn thing out loud or anything like that, would there? So I decided I'd ask my sponsor to do my fifth step with me. So I asked him. And he graciously agreed and we set up a time and I went to his office one day after work. And we sat down and he said, did you bring your fourth step? And I said, oh yeah, I got it right here. And he said, may I see it? And I said, certainly, certainly. I handed it to him and I began to look around because we're going to need a wastebasket here in just a minute. And he read it for a little bit and he said, well, he said, would you like to read this to me or would you like me to read it to you? I was like old Job in the Bible. That which I had feared had come upon me, you know. So for the next two or three hours he read it. And I leaned over the desk and read upside down and pointed out that, now that's really not quite as bad as it sounds. I mean this, oh, it was a gut-wrenching experience for me. Even without sex. It was a gut-wrenching experience for me. To have somebody know those, you know, it wasn't like I was John Dillinger and had committed a murder or anything. It would almost have been a relief if I had something really horrible to do. But what I had was a bunch of little trashy things. I mean trashy stuff. Stuff you didn't want anybody to know that you were that kind of person or whatever in your life, think about doing that to another human being. Just crap. And he read through that thing and he went through the whole deal just right onto it. Just ground the damn thing out. And we finally got through. And he stood up from behind that desk, walked around it, put his arm around me and said, I think you did about the best you could do. And I think that's a good four-step. You may want to do another one sometime, but right now I think you're on a good road. You're on the high road. And I want to tell you what. I felt something then that I hadn't felt in a long time. I'd been kind of expecting a spiritual experience to come out of the four-step. I heard people that said that they had kind of a real high of some kind. Mine wasn't like that. Mine was just kind of a quiet, okay. Okay. And when I went to Alcoholics Anonymous, the next time I went, I walked into that room for the very first time, I felt like I really belong here. I've invested some of me. I've taken a chance. I've done what they asked me to do. And I felt good about myself. I really felt good about myself. I think this is probably one of the most freeing steps that we can take. I think it's really important. I think it's really important. I think it's really important that we take it with a person that we respect. You know, you hear all the jokes about taking it with a Chinaman on his way to the Orient or, you know, some such thing as this. Somebody that can't hear you. Somebody that can't see you. You know, we get all these ideas. But the fact of the matter is that you miss something. You miss something when you do that. Doing it with my sponsor, I saw him the next day, you know. I was able to see and be around him. And he liked me before. He had been helping me. And he kept on helping. If anything, we were closer before than we were. And I think it's important that you do that. I'm not trying to tell you to do it with your sponsor. I think it's a real good idea. I don't think it makes so much difference who you do it with, I guess, as long as they understand what you're trying to do. You needn't be talked out of any of it. You need to just go ahead and do it. And it's important that you do that. You need to have confidence that somebody's not going to, you know, tell some of the things you say in there. Although I haven't heard a lot of people that had any real problem with that. Today, I can't imagine why I thought most of that little tacky stuff I was doing was very important. It's just kind of, you know, it's kind of gone. And I learned a lot of little things. I learned a lot of lessons from it, though. I got a real good education in what self-centeredness was and what it was doing in my life. I could see that I took a lot of things personally. My self-esteem and my ego were totally involved in my life. And they still are to a large extent. But because I've had the experience of going back and looking for them throughout my life, I'm easy, much easier, it's much easier for me to see them today than it ever was before. I think you need to do it as soon as you can and as completely as you can. There's a book that's called, Why I'm Afraid to Tell You Who I Am. And it's written by a man named Powell. It's not conference approved. But it just happened that I read that book along about the time I was doing this. And it makes a lot of sense to me. It says that if you and I sit down at a table, and share the facts of world events, if we talk about Super Tuesday and what happened on Super Tuesday, we won't learn anything about one another. Oh, you'll learn my political convictions and I may learn yours. But as far as knowing you as a person, I won't learn anything. If we were to go a little further and I was to talk to you about my philosophy for life as a whole, you might begin to get a little deeper flavor for me. But, if I were to tell you how I feel, that is my personal reaction to life. That is something that is absolutely unique to me. When I begin to talk to you and tell you about the experiences in my life, and how I felt about them, and how I reacted to them, I'm sharing with you, sharing me with you, at a depth that's seldom done. We're said to be immature people as alcoholics. This book says that to the extent you share yourself, and share these feelings, is the beginning of maturity. And you'll never know it any deeper than you share with another human being. There's something about saying it. There's something about getting it out in the open. There's something about talking about it that's the most freeing thing in life. I remember in the beginning, I remember in the weeks that followed that fifth step. From time to time, I would have something come up. We might be talking about fear, and my stance in life had been forever, I am not afraid. And I could prove it to you, I've taken some real good country whippings, rather than admit I was afraid of the guy that gave them to me. Because I was afraid of you finding out I was afraid more than I was of getting the whippings. If you follow that, you've got to be a little sick to do that, but that was my stance in life. And I'd start to say something, or start to posture myself, and be not afraid, and then I'd remember, wait a minute, my sponsor knows about me. He knows I have fear. He's a member of this fellowship, and so, hell, let somebody go tell him that Jerry Jones is the only person we ever knew that's not afraid. And he'd know he's lying again. And I'd probably have to do another fourth step. So I'd, why not be myself? Why do I have to worry about this anymore? Why can't I just tell you and be who I am and what I am? And I want to tell you, that's a nice feeling. Weakness aware of itself is the greatest strength there is. What are you going to do to me now? What are you going to do to me when you've found out that I'm fearful? You're going to make an, you know, you're going to tell somebody about it? I've already told you. Yeah, I have some fears. I function through fear. I function through my fears. I function in spite of my fears. I've had resentment. I've had greed. I've done all sorts of tacky little things. I've stolen little things. I've done all kinds of things that I didn't want anybody to know about me. But as I told it, and as I got it out on the table, then I got comfortable with it. Now, I'm going to tell you something. I am a cynic of the first water. I'm like, you know, there's, you know, I got a gun. I'll close my eyes with that God knows what you're talking about. Shut the guard down. Shut the company down. a lot of it. I gave people a hard time about it. Now, what I'm about to tell you about is how I had the first close experience in my life with another man. He was my first pigeon. He asked me to be his sponsor. Scared the hell out of me. I had about a year of sobriety. And so I checked with my sponsor and he said it would be all right. And damn if he didn't go do a fourth step just like I had. And then he called me up and said he'd like to do a fifth step with me. And I said, I don't know whether I can do that or not. And so I called my sponsor and I said, can I do a fifth step? And he said, what do you mean? I said, can I hear one of those things? He said, oh yeah, sure, hell yeah, you can hear one. And I think maybe it was him that told me about the sponsor's fifth step prayer. Did you all know there was one? It's, dear God, please let there be something new. We just do the same things over and over and think we're unique. Well, I... I... I... I... I said, okay, we'll do her. And I began to try to read how you take a... how you receive a fifth step. And I'll just tell you, forget it. There's nothing in the literature about it. It just... I finally found a lady named Faye who told me what she did. And so I sat and listened. And he talked and he talked and he talked. I thought he never was going to get through telling me about this stuff. He seemed like he was really important and I was just bored to death with a lot of this stuff that was going on. But I did listen. And we got through and I remembered what my sponsor had done to me and what was meaningful. And I did. I kind of appreciated him asking me and sharing it with me. And I stood up and I walked around and gave him a hug and said, thank you for doing that with me. I appreciate it. And he went his way and I went mine. A day or two later, I called him up and I said, how do you feel about that fourth step? That fifth step? He said, well, he said, I feel pretty good. Half an answer. Pretty good. What do you mean pretty good? Well, he said, you want the truth? I said, certainly. I'm your sponsor. I want to know the truth. He said, well, he said, I feel like you know what I'm talking about. I want to know the truth. I want to know every damn thing in the world about me and I don't know anything about you. And what I'd really like is if you'd do your fifth step with me. Is that tacky? What kind of respect are you getting? Did you ever hear anybody, any damn pigeon demanding their sponsor to give them a... Well, I would have told him hell no, except I had skipped sex back when I did mine. Remember that? Well, I got thinking about it, so I had sneaked off and I'd written that section in my inventory. And now what am I going to do? Who am I going to give it to? My sponsor? Who am I going to give it to? My sponsor? Am I going to admit to him that I didn't write about sex? It just happened that Tommy showed up, so I got to do the whole deal again with him. And we got through and it took a long time. And we got through and we felt good with each other. I became closer to that guy, I guess, than almost any man I'd ever been around. And he went to Canada. I needed to call him. I really don't know why I needed to call him. Hadn't called him in months. I just kind of had to go call him. So I dug out the telephone number and I called him. And I couldn't get him. And I had to call his sister to find out where he was. That day his house had burned to the ground. I mean, everything he owned had been in that house and is gone. A year or so later, I had an emergency appendectomy, ruptured appendix. That day he was in Canada and he just had to call me and check on me. Strange stuff, huh? Probably a coincidence. Probably a coincidence. But it's a sweet thing to have another human being that you can walk in a room with and sit down and in a matter of minutes, you're right back where you were. Talking to him, sharing with him, knowing him. I met him again at the International in Canada a year or so ago. And it was that way. In a matter of ten minutes, we were on track, sharing just the way we had. I met him again. I met him again. I met him again. I met him again. I met him again. I met him again. I met him again. I met him again. I met him again. I met him again. I met him again. I met him again. I met him again. And we were on firmly in theoule. But he wasn't there at the time. I met him. And after almost a week, he says I was on gear. And he said, I was at the scene of an emergency. After about a week or two. We had them there, and he said, are you waiting on dressER turmeric? Are you waiting for them to try it, bitch? And I said, no, you remember his saying that he was getting a bandnail, you know, and he bought it. I just wanted to hear this one. And now the damage is over. I've never been on gear. And this guy didn't want that. He never did that. He decided he was going to get up of foot pedal to get on his knee aan that I've shared with and that they've shared with me. And it's a great honor to either give or receive a fifth step because you're allowing someone to share your life. And you're demonstrating the commitment and the courage it takes to make it work in Alcoholics Anonymous when you do it. It's a vital step in our recovery. And when you've finished it, the book says you are on the broad highway. You are beginning to have a spiritual awakening or a spiritual experience. It says that the need to drink will often leave us now. And it's a very, very important thing that we do. I think that's got it for tonight. I appreciate it and see you next week.