Step Zero Before Step 1 – Astrid H.

Hi, I'm Astrid, and I'm definitely an alcoholic. Hi, I want to thank so many people in this room. I hope I can remember a couple names real quick. I want to thank John Syracuse, and I know I'm saying his last name because there's just way too many Johns, so sorry if I'm breaking your anonymity. And I want to thank Jeffrey and Tracy and so many of the women that took me out to dinner tonight, Marcia, Leslie, Pat, Patty, Dave back there somewhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And Howard, oh, my gosh. Jeff, oh, my gosh, I'm remembering. Danny, and I've had such a good time, and I've met so many cool people. And I'm very, very comfortable in prime time and around prime time, and this is my home group even though this room isn't my home group. And I can say that because this is the most comfortable format for me. And the format of alcoholism, ego, and self in steps one, two, and three is just a format. We don't have anything over anyone else. There are thousands, there are tens of thousands of meetings with all kinds of formats. Sometimes it's pick a topic or read one paragraph or pull something out of a hat or pass a baton. I don't know, bingo, you know, a step study. And we just have a specific format. So we have a specific way of talking about the steps in prime time. And prime time is as AA, is as alcoholic. Alcoholics Anonymous as Apple Pie is to America. It's totally, totally AA. I don't say anything from the podium ever that isn't out of my own experience with the steps and with the print. The print that we use here in prime time is the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, the 12 and 12, the Emmett Fox's Sermon on the Mount, which is historical AA literature. It was the first piece of literature that Bill and Bob used before they compiled the Big Book. And the Harry Thiebaud papers. And the reason why we use these four components is because they give us a much broader spectrum on the nature of the soul sickness that the Big Book itself is talking about. And what we try to do here is we try to get a hold of the underpinnings of untreated alcoholism so that we all have a better awareness and understanding of what's really wrong with us. You know, everybody, our time is valuable today and we don't have time to drive 45 minutes to a meeting to hear what it was like, what it was like, what it was like, and what it was like. You know, Alcoholics Anonymous has thousands of meetings and I tell people if they want a what it was like meeting, please feel free to go to a what it was like meeting. We're just not serving that here. You know, I've broken out in handcuffs. I've lived in the street. I've had five DUIs. I've had been arrested for drunk, drunken public, open container possession of a controlled substance, prostitution. Loitering with the intent to prostitute just lived in the street for three years. I've pushed a shopping cart. I've lost my child. I lost my self-respect. I've had guns put to my head. I've puked and peed and vomited all over anything and everything there is to. And we all know the story. And the reason why I don't know that the story is that important is because we have a physical allergy. You see, 6% of the population in the world are allergic to alcohol. And these people in this room, we share a common problem. We're all. We're all allergic to alcohol. So I don't really need to teach you anything. And I don't know that you necessarily need to identify with my story. What you want to identify with is the fact that you're allergic to alcohol. You smell Purell and you have a reaction. I taste a rum ball or some tiramisu and I really jump. I do. I, whoa, whoa, whoa, what is that? And it's very, it's an interesting allergy because unlike strawberries or shellfish that would put you into anaphylactic shock where your throat swells up and you can't breathe, alcohol creates a phenomena of craving. And it tricks me. It tells me that I want more where really it's pickling me and killing me. And it's unstoppable. The phenomena of craving when it's on and cracking, it can trump over everything. I swear I'm not going to have another drink. I'm just going to go have one. And you know what happens. By the end of the night, I'm so drunk that I can't find my car keys. I can't get home. I, you know, I've got to chew gum and try to tell a lie and all of these problems. And the days turn into weeks and the weeks turn into months and the months turn into years and the quality of our life has been destroyed by alcohol. The people in here have suffered so much pain and alcoholic torture, it's not even funny. The amount of pain in this room tonight is incredible. It's incredible. If I could feel all of it and take on everyone's burdens, I'd burst into flames and I'd die. It's a painful, painful disease. It's not a moral disease. It has nothing to do with morals. We do pitiful and incomprehensible things when we're drunk. We tell family secrets. We have sex with our sister's husband. We steal things we never would have stolen. We climb out of windows. We max out credit cards. We do incomprehensible things. We're full flight from reality. We're outright mental defects. And I have to see and concede to my innermost self that the body and the mind are completely different from a normal person, that my body is as abnormal as my mind, that I am abnormal, that sometimes I am full flight from reality, that I could possibly be an outright mental defect, that I'm willing to turn myself a problem drinker, but I cannot accept the fact that I could possibly be mentally ill. So interestingly enough, we put the plug in the jug, and we come to the room of Alcoholics Anonymous, and there's this very strange, preconceived idea that when we come to AA, the monkey's off our back. We can breathe. Everything's gonna be okay. Now I'm wife material. Maybe I'll hold down a job. I'll stop bouncing checks. I'll stop flipping people off. I'll stop interrupting people. I'll like the people that I hated. I'm now gonna get along with my mother. they're just fine. And where those ideas come from are self. AA doesn't say that. It doesn't say that anywhere. It doesn't promise that we're going to get our families back. It doesn't promise that we're going to hold down our jobs. It doesn't promise that we're going to get rich. The promises are internal. The promises are that I'm going to be able to handle situations that used to baffle me. That I'm going to respond instead of react. But an incredible amount of internal dialogue needs to be considered before I would even go for the solution. So in primetime, what we do is we discuss step zero. Before I even get into step one, I got to see what the real problem is. The root of the problem. The underpinnings of the problem. We use Harry Thiebaud as literature in primetime meetings. And there's a lot of literature out there on the circuit about the ego. But the only one that has anything to do with Alcoholics Anonymous is Harry Thiebaud papers. I do not ever want to disrespect AA. I do not want to dilute the message. And I don't want to name other spiritual teachers from this podium. I feel that it's very disrespectful. I want to use those four pieces of material that are a part of AA history, their historical literature, their conferences. And I want to hit from that place in order to give you a real AA message that has spiritual principles in it that shows you the problem and then shows you the solution. So I start with the Thiebaud papers. And I want to see the underpinnings of the alcoholic. And Harry Thiebaud was a very close friend of Bill Wilson's. And he was a psychiatrist in the 30s and 40s and 50s. And he couldn't get the alcoholics sober. He worked in an alcoholic hospital. And they'd come in, pitiful and incomprehensible. And one of his patients was Marty Mann, a beautiful woman who wound up staying sober for many years and was an advocate for Alcoholics Anonymous. And she would come in and out of his hospital and in and out of his hospital. And he was able to spin or drive for 20 or 30 days. And then she'd go out and she'd disappear. And she'd show up six months later, all crazy and hardened and motherfucking busy. You know, and he'd always thought that maybe if he could just get down to the bottom of the ocean, he would be able to get out of the ocean. And he would go to the core of, was she spanked? Or how was she treated? Lie on my psychiatric couch. And if I can figure it out, maybe you'll stop drinking. He had no idea anything about a spiritual solution or a spiritual plan of action. He said his missing link was the surrender in a therapeutic process. He didn't understand that if the alcoholic was not surrendered, that all bets were off. So he kept trying to deliver some kind of message. And he kept trying to deliver some kind of message. And he kept trying to deliver some kind of message. And he kept trying to deliver some kind of message. To alcoholics under protest. And he had very little success. And he was a very frustrated alcoholic. And then as the big book got compiled, and it was this huge volume of God knows what, it winds up on Harry Thiebaud's desk, as it did with, I don't think maybe 20 different doctors and medical technicians, to look at it, to view it over before the whole thing was published and sent to the printer. And he got a lot out of it. And he asked Marty Mann, who was the director of the book, to please look at it. And she said no. And he said, maybe you could go to this meeting. And she said she didn't want anything to do with it. And at first she walked away and she pooh-poohed it. And she went out and she got wasted one more time. And then she came back and she was a little more humbled and convinced. And she went to AA. Harry hadn't been to AA yet. She went to AA and she came back stark raving sober and so on fire for this spiritual plan of action. And she said, Harry, you have to look at it. And he said, no. And he said, maybe you could go to this meeting. action. And she said to the psychiatrist, you've got to see what these people are doing. You've got to come here. And he walked into AA and he met Bill Wilson and he listened to meetings and these huge lights went off in his head and his whole entire psychiatric practice had this brand new blood and life in it because he figured something out that he'd been missing. These people were humbled. They didn't need to be any place anymore. They were having a spiritual relationship with God. They were treating their disease one day at a time, one moment at a time. And he said it just revived everything. And here Tebow and Bill Wilson began to build a friendship and work hand in hand together. Tebow was on the board of Alcoholics Anonymous for many years. And you have to understand, psychiatrists weren't a dime a dozen like they are today. There was maybe one in a whole city. This was a very special thing. Bill Wilson was incredibly invested in helping the alcoholics. He was an alcoholic and constantly looking for more ideas, more therapies. He would bring in nuns and pastors and priests. At one point, he even took in a controlled environment. He took LSD and people like Bill Wilson lost his sobriety, took LSD. It's not like that. He took LSD because he loved us so much. He thought maybe in a controlled environment on LSD, he could find out something more. He was searching. You see, we're 77 years old. We know so much more today than we ever knew. He didn't know what we know. He had no idea. We have so much more information and we have so much more experience about what works with the steps and what doesn't. And the singleness of purpose and holding AA together is imperative. Unfortunately, AA all over the world is becoming diluted. It's falling apart at the seams. It's a sinking pirate ship. And a lot of people are jumping bail. And for the most part, you go to an AA meeting and they just talk about it. They just talk about their dead canary, their bunkie snorted, their psych meds, their sponsor screwed their old lady. And there's all these problems and all these dramas. I'm not blaming anyone. It's just that most of the time, you can only get as healthy as the healthiest person in the room or the healthiest person in your home group. So hopefully, you'd want to hang around with some winners that carry a message of depth and weight. And then you learn to carry a message of depth and weight. And then you come to Alcoholics Anonymous and your dinky little five-minute share will be a big part of your recovery and not about getting a fender bender and having some bald tires. That's for your sponsor or somebody outside of the meeting. Mind you, if you're in grief and there was a death or something, I completely understand. But the amount of toxicity and the drama du jour that is spewed daily from the podium of Alcoholics Anonymous keeps everybody else sick. And AA doesn't know it, but most of the time, it's actually invested in keeping people sick. I'm not invested in keeping people sick. I'm not invested in keeping people sick. I'm not invested in keeping people sick. I'm invested in putting an oxygen mask on my own face so that I can pass the AA baton and put the oxygen mask on somebody else. Maybe I can say something through my experience and through the study of this literature that's going to help somebody. And so this primetime format is very, very near and dear to me. And I know sometimes people come in and they go, what are these people talking about? It's just a slightly different tune of the AA message. So Harry T. Ball, I'm going to read you a little bit of the AA message. Harry T. Ball talked about these ego factors that he found in sober alcoholics. And he said that on a psychiatrist's couch, he would find that they were immature and that their inner psyche did not grow up. And he coined, he used the coined phrase that Freud used of the king and the baby, his majesty the baby, or her majesty the baby. And that there's an infant ruler of everything inside of me that throws a shitload of shit at me. And that's what he said. And that's what he said. And that's what he said. And that's what he said. And that's what he said. And that's what he said. And that's what he said. And that's what he said. And that's what he said. And that's what he said. And that's what he said. And then there's also a queen in the same breath that just cuts your head off. And there's no middle ground. There's no such thing as humility. You see, he said that this was sober. He didn't say drunk. He wasn't talking about drunk. So we're grandiose and we're immature. My ideas are better than yours. I can't hear what you have to say. I throw you away in a split second. I take the conversation and I can. can hit the high and the low with one person somebody walks in and let's just hypothetically say they're missing a couple of teeth and they're like disheveled and my mind right away I'll say wow you know nice grill what's the deal here and I'll take the superior position and then they open their mouth and they say they just completed a PhD and also their father was an amazing inventor and they just inherited 40 million dollars and then I go downward oh my god a PhD 40 million dollars and you see my mind speaks to me with great authority and it's loaded with opinions and I go up and I go down and I go up and I go down and I go sideways and I'm warped inside and my perceptions are warped and they come from a very very primal place where somewhere in my life and in my biography I learned how to view the world and I learned how to respond to things or I learned how to react to things so we go into the childhood of the alcoholic most alcoholics came from a real hard childhood I can tell you right now I came from hell every once in a while somebody says you know I was loved both parents were nurturing but most of the time if you want to make your child an alcoholic spank him and hit him hit a child over and over and over you know degrade them call them names call them stupid don't show any love to them at all and usually by the time they're five the inner pathology for self-hate is already there now how it's going to manifest I don't know some children go inward and they they're read and they're quiet and they eat a lot and they get a little bit chunky not so with the alcoholic we come outward I'm in your face I hate you you're never there for me we're climbing out of windows we're hanging out with you know we're 12 years old and sleeping with guys that are 18. we're all over the place we're the one that's so hard to handle that's really indicative of the alcoholic we're the troubled child and why that's good news today is because the child that didn't eat and hide and read and sit in their room that one is completely out of touch with its feelings the alcoholic is so thin skin that after we're all done with booze we come in and we still feel a lot everything still hurts so there's a big chance for a great amount of recovery for us this is good news what was our horrible liability can turn out to be our greatest asset but if I don't take into consideration that I have the underpinnings in my ego of a queen and a baby of this thin-skinned mentality then all bets are off because I can't go into a step two process and treat my disease unless I really really know what's wrong with me not you but what's wrong with me and the disease is designed not to see itself it's never going to show itself to me it's never going to say I'm in my ego it's only when I begin to separate myself from the disease and I start to hop up higher and look down at the function of the mind that I come to the realization of oh my gosh I'm not my mind I'm looking at it and it's reacting all over the place and it's self-talking and it's not me and this is untreated alcoholism the beginning stages of watching it so my queen and my baby mentality I look at most alcoholics do everything in a hurry I have delayed gratification I can't wait for anything we put things on layaway we meet a guy hurry hurry hurry I know I've only met him known for a week but we're moving in together look I'm wearing a ring oh my God you know six months later I hate him and we're getting a divorce that lying piece of and over and over and over our past becomes our future we rush in we rush out we rush in we rush out we have a very hard time finishing things we have the attention span of a hummingbird and if the shoe doesn't fit then don't wear it this might not apply to you I'm not saying this is a blanketed statement I'm saying that this has been my experience in A.A and this is what the literature talks about and this is what that dear dear dear psychiatrist Harry Tebow was talking about we have the inability to accept frustration you know a coke machine I saw one real real recently on a YouTube thing or something the coke machine didn't work and the lady's hitting it and hitting it and hitting it and she takes a newspaper and rolls it up and lights it on fire and stuffs it in a it up in a thing and there's a security camera and the whole coke machine blows up and it melts all the coke and the money and the everything seems that's so alcoholic give me give me my 75 cent code now or I'm taking down your four thousand dollar machine it as a the punishment never fits the crime but I don't care because you don't know you mess with the wrong girl and that's the way I roll sober I'm not talking drunk I'm talking sober this get weight loss I'm not talking about any kind of frustration it's an inability to accept any kind of frustration you know the washer or the dryer breaks and I keep kicking things I bang things the TV clicker doesn't work and I throw it my phone I bang things I hit things I don't know how to meet calamity with serenity I don't know how to maybe get an appliance person in there or ask somebody else for assistance I have no idea how to accept these things I I go to the crosswalk I want across the street you know the little hand from a red hand to a white. It only needs one time. But I got to make sure. Got to make sure a bunch of times, a bunch of times, a bunch of times. And then it's not turning fast. So I'm going to do it a bunch of times more. And you see, this behavior operates below the level of consciousness. I'm not aware that I'm doing it. If I'm not aware I'm doing that, imagine how many other things I'm not aware of. This whole program is about awareness of who I am. It's this self-seeking so that I can see self in the day that I'm in because I don't want to be with self. I want a relationship with God. So I have to see my inability to accept frustration that I'm the kind of person that people call security on. I go crazy. I just yell and scream. I get in a line at Starbucks and all of a sudden we've been waiting and waiting to get there. And the lady in front of me, what's the difference between a grande and a venti? Is the hazelnut better? And I, you know what? I'll show you a hazelnut. Come on, lady. And you know, I've forgotten where I came from and I've forgotten how incorrigible I am and how much money the state has paid to incarcerate me, you know, and, and how much of a menace I've been to society and how much pain I've put my child and my parents through. Just give me my fricking coffee lady, get it together. And you know what? I walk and I maneuver through the world. With this frustration and I infect the room with untreated alcoholism. I infect my relationships. I infect the freeway. I infect Starbucks. If I come to you and have lunch with you in that mode, you don't know why, but you're just uncomfortable around me. You don't like me. There's not an open space. I'm always on my muscle. There's always an opinion. There's always something turning. There's always something spinning inside. I don't know what a surrendered state of consciousness is. I look at surrendered people and I think, oh, you know, they have a different kind of blood type than me, or they have a different kind of upbringing, or maybe they got therapy. I don't think in my wildest dreams that I could actually have that in this lifetime. It doesn't occur to me that whatever's broken and damaged could actually be discarded and a new character could be put in its place. I'm just jealous or I even have opinions about people that are suffering. I don't know what a surrendered state of consciousness is. I don't know what a soft spoken. They don't cuss so much. They say, excuse me. Thank you very much. You know, they keep their mouth shut when they should. There was a space where they could have really sliced and diced somebody and they just don't get involved, you know, and I don't know those skills. I'm impulsive. Everything just comes flying out in the beginning. Why are all these things so important? These things are important because only two to five percent of alcoholics ever take a five-year cake. So we need to see the thought. Proceeds the first drink. What keeps sending everybody back to the liquor store? What keeps sending, but why are all these rehabs so full? Why are they making so much money? What, where, what's not being delivered here? And maybe it's the message and the underpinnings and what's really wrong with us at the core of our being. What untreated alcoholism looks like. And you know, it's not like we have to pick it apart and pick it apart and pick it apart. It's just, it's information to take home so that you can start to get self-honest in your own life and maybe start looking at your own behavior and maybe have an aha moment and go, gosh, I do that. And maybe not all of these fit. Maybe only some of them. I know I had to do this for my own life. Way down in the second half of step one where my life is unmanageable and my life is unmanageable because my ego is infected with untreated alcoholism. My ego is damaged and broken and I can't do anything. Never use it again. The I-ness inside of me is so broken. I can't take it into the world anymore. I need to follow the dictates of a higher power, but I first need to figure out how to get away from this self and this ego. And if I don't see what it is, I'm not going to go for it. So one of the other ego factors is that I'm omnipotent. And what omnipotent is, is that same thing like the queen or I think I'm God. And it operates below the level of you know, maybe you invite some people to lunch and you don't invite me or you invite some people to your birthday party and you don't invite me. My feelings get so hurt. I want to kill you. I want to burn that party down. I cannot stand not being invited. And I know it comes from my mom segregating her own children. You're invited. You're not invited. You're invited. You're invited. You're not invited. You're going to get a good gift. You're not going to get any gift at all. I mean, my mom was sick. She was a war survivor. Her skills were nil. She almost shouldn't have had children. She did the best she could, but the damage she did before I ever even picked up a drink, I carry with me through all my drinking years, and I arrive in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, and the damage is still there. All the wiring is warped. I'm warped. I'm bent. And I really need a lot of help. So I want to look at this omnipotence and this queen and this grandiosity that I have this, you know, I think I should be treated a certain way, and I don't know where that comes from, and most of the time I'm not even in touch with it because I'm asleep until I wake up in a step two process. So I look at the ego of alcoholism and of the alcoholic, and the next thing I want to do is I want to see what alcoholism is itself. So the ego gets triggered, and it says, it shouldn't be this way, or I don't like your ideas, or I'm impatient. And then untreated alcoholism starts to talk. It starts to self-talk, and it starts to speak destructively, and I'm going to kill somebody, and I should kill myself, and I hate this world, and there's just too many pesticides, and Monsanto's coming, and there's going to be a war, and Romney, and Obama, and oh my God, I can't fucking deal with it. And if my mom had only done this, and if they'd only done that, and if I didn't just get discovered someday, everything's going to be fine, and I'm in the wrong job, and it goes on and on and on. And I wake up, and first thing in the morning before I even pee, the thing is on. It's speaking to me with great authority, and it's telling me very bad things. It's telling me things that keep my vibration way down in the basement, in the pits of hell of untreated alcoholism, without any liquor. Liquor's a symptom, along with all these other symptoms I'm talking about. And liquor is that last thing when I can't stand to live with what I'm explaining to you. That's why it has to be explained, it has to be considered, because there is a solution, and it is booze, one more time. You know, and I'll say this, alcoholics die a slow death. They don't die fast. It takes a long, long time to drink yourself to death, and it's ugly, especially for a woman. You know, when the liver starts to go, and your skin is all crepey, and your teeth rot out, and you can't remember anything anymore. And because it has to do with the liver, you're angry, and you're pissed off. Maybe you can shut up and leave me alone. And you're, you know, your whole entire nervous system is fried, and it's not pleasant, and it's not pretty. So I look at these ego factors, and I look at untreated alcoholism. And to me, alcoholism and ego are Siamese twins. They're woven together. And the alcoholism speaks to me. I don't know if you've heard of alcoholism. I don't know if you've heard of alcoholism. I don't know if you've heard of alcoholism. I don't know if you've heard of alcoholism. It speaks to me over, and over, and over. And it tells me things about you, and it tells me things about me. And it separates me from the world. I can't have a true partnership with another human being. The book says I have a total inability. I can't look you in the eye. I hate you, and I'm ashamed of me. And very few emotions, just hate, and frustration, and fear, and anger. The love was squashed out of my system so long ago, I can barely feel anything anymore. And what are you going to do for me, and where's mine, and my entitlement? And what are you going to do for me, and where's mine, and my entitlement? And what are you going to do for me, and where's mine, and my entitlement? And I throw people away. And I just, my opinions are horrible. And if I start to watch the thoughts that surf the waves of my brain, I'm not even that clever. It's the same opinions and the same stories over and over. Neuroscientists say there are 46,000 thoughts that surf the waves of a person's brain. But with the alcoholic, there's four thoughts that go 46,000 times a day. It's a repetitive mind function that goes over, and over, and over, and over. It picks the drama du jour, and it just spins and spins. It spins and spins on it. Where is he? Where is she? Where is mine? If only this, this, this, and that. And it hurts me. It is incredibly painful. And then I look at the self, and self is the container for alcoholism and ego. And, you know, all through the book it says selfish and self-centeredness, we think, is the root of our trouble. So it didn't say alcohol is the root of our trouble. It said that the selfishness and the self-centeredness is the root of our trouble. It says we must be rid of the selfishness. We must be rid of the self, or it'll kill us. You see, the self is the container for alcoholism and ego. So it's really saying, we must be rid of all that crap I just told you about, or it's going to kill me. The prayer says, God, I offer myself, or I offer my untreated alcoholism to you. Build with me. Do with me as you will. Relieve me of the bondage of self, or relieve me of the bondage of untreated alcoholism, so I can better do your will. You know, my creator, I'm now willing that you should have all of me, good and bad. Please remove from me every single defect. I have no hands in the way of my usefulness. You know, it's in there, it's everywhere. Any life run on self can hardly be a success. It says it all through the literature and yet we mow over it, or we get confused and we think that that's only for church, or for saints. It's not, it's for alcoholics. It's in our literature and we want to take into consideration that if it's in our literature, well, maybe we should apply it to our life today. You see, the steps aren't something to memorize, or a homework assignment, they're experiential. And all of this stuff needs to be experiential for each person in here. And if you're not having an experience, then you're dry. You're in untreated alcoholism. Every day is the day that I must carry the vision of God's will for me into all my activity. God's will for me is to be alive and vibrant and free from the bondage of self so that I can feel joy and forgiveness and love and really like my life. And have new ideas and have good relationships and have healthy interactions with people. But if I don't look at how self stops me and blocks me from everything, all bets are off. So I look at alcoholism, ego, and self. And I'm a self-talker. My mind never shuts up. It goes on and on and on. But if I start to watch it, I'll see it like a bad radio station. Like, where in the hell is all this garbage coming from? It's just talking. And talking. And talking. And talking. And if I can see that my mind is speaking, then who's watching and who's speaking? There's a very big spiritual aha moment. That's a spiritual experience. Because only the God consciousness can view the untreated alcoholism. So I'm either with self or I'm with God. And that first initial space of viewing the ego and the untreated alcoholism and the selfishness and the self-centeredness is going to rocket me into a step two process because I'm going to want to come back. I'm going to believe that there is a power that can restore me. So I look at step one now. And there are two parts to step one. We're powerless over alcohol. And you guys wouldn't be in this room if you weren't powerless over alcohol. We have a physical allergy where that 6% cannot even sniff Purell for me. You know, no alcohol, mouthwash, anything. I mean, things trigger people. Rubbing alcohol is very interesting. What can really trigger it? Even rubbing alcohol on the skin, sometimes people say they've got a trigger or a phenomenon. I mean, I don't know if it's a phenomenon or a phenomenon of craving. So we must be very, very careful because once we put a drink in our system, all bets are really off. A think is bad enough, but a drink, you're lost. There's almost no hope in reeling the alcoholic back in. But this dash that my life is unmanageable, I just explained to you the magnitude of the unmanageability for me and my lack of empathy and my lack of the ability to forgive. I hate you forever. If you did something in 1972, I don't care, man. I don't want your guts. You should be buried. I should have you up by a rope somewhere. I should have a hot poker. I should be putting it through your eye, burning my name with a cigarette all over your back. I am morbid. I'm crazy. I got Tonya Harding baseball for your kneecaps, and it's on and cracking. And the punishment never fits the crime. You hurt me once, and I just need to kill you. This is what my mind says I hate. I hate so deeply because I'm so injured. I'm so injured inside. Healthy people don't have that kind of hate. They have the unmanageability. They have the unmanageability. hate. They can let it go because they had enough love to balance things out or trump over it. I'm bankrupt inside. I'm depleted. There's nothing left to give out yet. God has to fill that place. So I look at step two and it says that I have to come to believe that there's a power greater than self that can restore me. Well, self is a really big power. It's a huge power. I am a very powerful person. I could go to lunch with you tomorrow and I could hurt you so badly in 15 minutes you would never want to be around me again. I could do that. I have that kind of power. I could go into your person. I could steal from you. I could bold face lie to you. I can hurt people. I have a lot of power in me. Sober. I'm not talking about liquor. I'm talking about today and the day that I'm in and untreated alcoholism, the things that self will authorize. So how do I? Build this relationship with God. You know, Emmett Fox in the Sermon on the Mount, he says in the first beatitude, he says, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. And he says, to be poor in spirit means to have emptied myself out of all preconceived idea of the search for God or anything I think I know. Just like the set aside prayer, I set aside everything I think I know about God, about my untreated alcoholism, about recovery, about love, about forgiveness, about you, about me, about mothers that are war survivors, about bitches that can't order at Starbucks, about whatever. I empty my mind out. I don't need to know anything today. It's a spiritual principle in application. I'm applying something to my life. I'm allowing a surrender to take place by saying, OK, I'm going to let go of the steering wheel, God. I don't know anything. And you see, I can only do this demonstration in the moment that I'm in. I don't just do it once and then the whole thing is done. It's constant. It's all. All day long. Every single day. All day long is the day I must carry the vision of God's will. It says, practice the principles in all my affairs. It didn't say some of my affairs. It said all of my affairs. My affairs start with my thought life. So I really need to bring God from a subconscious roly-poly little place like, yeah, maybe there's a God of religion or this or that, to my consciousness. I have to be conscious of my relationship with God. That's the only way out of this mess. And we're in a mess. This is not a fun disease. It's horrible. It's so horrible. And everybody knows somebody in here that's so dry they could start a forest fire or spontaneously combust. I don't want to be that person. So I look at this principle in the Emmett Fox's Sermon on the Mount of the poor in spirit or those who aren't all spirited and revved up. They don't think they know anything anymore. They've let go absolutely. They are living in the one day at a time principle. They're in a surrendered state of consciousness, and the best way to do that, especially in the beginning, is through repetitive prayer. So when my mind begins to speak to me with great authority or sometimes it's just a creepy feeling inside, that's my cue to instantly go to God. God, can you help me with my mind? Can you help me with these feelings? I'm having that same old creepy, creepy thing going on or that anger or that feeling of resistance or impatience or I think I know everything. I hate the world. Can you help me, God? And I back down immediately. You see, if you let alcoholism ignite itself, it gets out and it gets on the hamster wheel. And once it turns two or three times, the hamster is going and it's very hard to put the brakes on. So I want to babysit my mind with spiritual principles, and I don't want to self-talk anymore. The demonstration and the application is to nip the thing in the bud, not to wait until my whole head is burning in a forest fire and then try to reel it in. It's almost too late. But if I live in a state of prayer. If I live in a state of communion with my power, then it's much easier to treat my disease. And it says in step 11 that I'm seeking to improve my conscious contact all the time with God. My conscious contact doesn't mean yesterday. My conscious contact would mean when I'm conscious all the time. So these steps are there with a lot of spiritual principles and application. But if somebody doesn't break this stuff down for me, I don't know anything. I really need a lot of help. I need this information for my life so that I can take it and apply it to my life and take it out in the world and be a better person and live in a higher state of consciousness. So I ask God to protect me from my mind and I ask God to be with me. And I ask with intention, like Emmett Fox says, I do scientific prayer. I pray with intention and I mean it with a whole hearted desire for the search for God. And I say, God, I really need your help. Could you protect me from my mind? Can you help me with my disease? And because they're really is a God, I start to get grace. I start to get the peace that passes all understanding. My mind gets quiet and it's like smoking something. It's like taking a pill. It's like it gets so quiet. Sometimes I sit there and I go, I can't believe this is happening. I can't believe this is quiet. Can it be this quiet? I was just in a shit storm an hour ago. It can't be. But it is. God lifts it. I'm not trying to fix it. I'm trying to hop out to another state of consciousness away from it. There's nothing down in that basement to retrieve. There aren't enough tools to send the plumber down in there to fix everything. The pipes are broken and everything smoking and burning all over the place. I can't go in there. And a step four process is when I go in there only in a step four. I don't need to go in there daily over and over rummaging around in that stuff, ripping skeletons up into my conscious. My God, you know, there's things jumping out all over the place at me. So I start to build a relationship with God and I improve my conscious contact through prayer, through meditation. Through the desire and the want in my heart to be a new person with no reference to the old. What that looks like most of the time is I don't know anything anymore and I don't need to know anything anymore. I don't need to know anything about you. I don't need to know anything about me. I don't need to know anything about the weather or politics or how fat or skinny a person should be or what success looks like or a bank account or what's wrong with the wrinkles on my face or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't need to know. And I start to let go. Absolutely. I start to live in a surrendered state of consciousness in that surrendered state of consciousness is an incredible amount of wisdom, wisdom that comes from the inside. I'm wired for enlightenment. I didn't know that God was inside of me. There's a brilliant, brilliant amount of intelligence inside of me waiting to blossom. But the brick walls of untreated alcoholism have squashed it down so low that the little candle and the little light cannot ignite itself. I have to. I have to remove self in order to have this new experience with this God. And I'm the only one that can do this in the light of my own circumstances. And that's the proper use of my will every day, all day. It says in the literature, constantly reminding myself I am no longer running the show constantly means constantly. It means all the time. And when I go into step three, I look at what is my will in my life. And it's my thoughts. And my actions and my alcoholism is in my thoughts. So I treat my thoughts first and then I'm not as apt to lie, cheat, steal, flip you off, get into an argument, hate, character, assassinate, whatever it is. I'm able to back down and I'm not holding a spring down. I'm not like, just shut up, shut up, don't say anything. It's not like that. The thing's been removed. But the ego, like Harry Thiebaud says, has amazing recuperative powers. And it's always trying to resurrect itself. And it's down there in the basement. It has a whole new wardrobe of things. It comes out with a different hat and gown and gloves or goes shopping in the middle of the night. And it's like, where did you get that? And it's always trying to recover with a new story or a new dialog. And it's something I have to treat for the rest of my life one moment at a time. But the quality of my life becomes so much better and I become very awake and very aware. And in that state where I don't have opinions about you, whoever you are, I can have a new experience with you. I can look and I can stare into your eyes for a long time. And I'm not afraid of eye contact anymore. I'm not one bit afraid of it because I'm not looking at you. God is. That's a bold statement that doesn't come from spiritual pride. God's running the show. God's the manager for my life. I can forgive my mother situations that used to baffle me. I can handle them. I can practice the principles in all of my affairs. It's an unbelievable process. And way down in those first three steps before I've even stepped into a four step inventory, I now have a foundation in the first three three steps for my life today. Alcoholics Anonymous and the steps. It's not a race. It's a way of life. It's a spiritual plan of action to treat what we have, which is a physical allergy and a mental obsession. And the mental obsession isn't just for drugs and alcohol. It's for anything and everything that's out there. We are mentally obsessed. We don't think about our problems. We obsess on them. And I've got to treat this or the quality of my inner life is going to be very, very, very limited. And that's what we're all here talking about tonight. Primetime is my home. This is a way of life for me. I love this format. This is as a as anything else. We just hit it from a slightly different angle. And I want to thank everybody for coming here tonight. I feel really honored to be here. Thank you so much. Good. The meeting is open for. Questions and sharing. So we're going to do a little differently tonight. We ask that you limit your share to three to four minutes so that everyone may have the opportunity to participate. We also ask that you share only about alcoholism, ego and self and the first three steps. If you stray from the format, you will be gently asked to stay on topic. We also ask that you come up and use the microphone when sharing. Our timekeeper tonight is Debbie. She will let you know she will ring the cowbell when there's three minutes. So the floor is open. Hi, I'm Marcia and I'm an alcoholic. Thank you so much, Astrid. Boy, she just puts a fire to it. What I wanted to share about tonight is in listening to Astrid share about letting go and doing it constantly, sometimes I'm not able to stay in that state of surrender and sometimes my ego gets so comes up and I don't even know it. And before I know it, like the hamster on the wheel, I'm in it and I don't even know I'm in it. And I had a situation just this last week. My son's in the Air Force and he's in tech school and we haven't known where his first station is going to be. And I have a new granddaughter and and his wife and my granddaughter are living with me. And I found out he's going to England, my only son. And I'm not married. I'm by myself. And let me tell you, I obsessed on that for a solid week. All this week. And. It just kept going and going. I had the most horrible week because I couldn't get out of it. And I didn't even know I was in it, actually. And I spoke to someone just the other day, a good friend of mine in prime time. And and she made it so clear to me. That it's my ego, that I'm I'm just on it and it's making everything miserable. And it's it's like stuff I would do when I was drinking. And I'm not drinking. And so by talking to her and and actually understanding that I was in that place. I actually was able to go to God and to really pray with intention. And and amazingly enough, he lifted it. He lifted it from me. And I was able to have total peace. And once I realized what total peace is, oh, it is so absolutely wonderful. I can't. It is so it's such a drastic difference for me now of living in that state of of alcoholism and having that surrender. I'm so grateful for this message and for all the people in prime time and the people that I talk to. I talk to people from L.A. and from the the prime time meeting down there. And it's just the most absolutely wonderful message and wonderful group of people that you'd ever want to know. Thanks. Hi, everybody. My name is Lynn and I'm a real alcoholic. After hearing our share tonight, I'm a real alcoholic. You know, it's actually coming up on just about a year ago is the first time I ever heard one of Astrid's, one of the prime time speakers on CD. And it was Astrid's share. And I was having an emotional week. And my sponsor had given me the CD and I kept it had in my car and I was going to listen to it. And I was literally driving over the San Mateo Ridge. And just, you know, and I didn't know what it was, but I knew I wanted to kill my older sister. You know, it's just like in my mind, throttling her on the phone with my husband, driving like 80 miles an hour across the San Mateo Bridge. What kind of family do I have? Skip disappointment right to devastation. You know, it was so bad. And and so I got to my meeting. I thought I got to get it together. You know, I'm the secretary and and my sponsor said, you know, did you listen to that CD I gave you? No. Does that have to do with anything? You know, but what I heard in that in that share was, you know, it just describes so much what my mind does to me. You know, my mind absolutely tortures me when I'm in untreated alcoholism. And when I came into program, you know, the first my coming in, it was like, well, if everyone was just nicer to me, I wouldn't have such a crappy life. And then I learned, oh, my problems were my own making. But I still didn't really realize how my mind tortures me, you know, and how the untreated alcoholism, it has all those opinions about what I what I should be and who you should be and, you know, how I should be treated and all of those things. And and to be able to to monitor that and really just, you know, like watch it. And what I heard tonight, like that God moment of like, yeah, I'm able to like watch it, which means I'm not in it because I'm able to see it because I didn't used to see it. I just would get upset. I'd react. And then, you know, I was either the bad guy or the good guy. You know, I couldn't discern any of that, you know, but it has just been so, so helpful to me in the last year, you know, coming in. Like I said, I was nine years coming up a nine year sobriety last year and to have those thoughts in my head, like how do I have nine years of sobriety and think such hateful thoughts about somebody that I actually love so much in my life? And, you know, I don't have to live that way. And just recently this week, the set aside prayer. Somebody else shared that with me and I'd never really heard it before. And I have a lot of work anxiety that that white man, I wake up and it's already been going for like hours. Apparently in my head and to pull up to my office and say, you know, God, please help me set aside everything I think I know about how this place is supposed to run, how I'm supposed to be treated, what's really good for everybody here, you know, because I'm like every there was mom or their kid, you know, running around and it's been really helpful and I feel it. You know, I just feel that serenity of the quietness of like being able to just focus on my tasks, do my job, be a worker among workers instead of just. That director, you know, I must have my way. Listen to me, don't shut me up. Why don't they listen to me? And so I don't even know where the timer is. Am I done? I should be done. Thank you. My name's Norman alcoholic. Thank you so much, Astrid. You know, when you're when when you were talking this time and in previous times, when you talk about the ego and the self, I am in a state of surrender a lot of the time now, and so I don't think that way. And so sometimes I can delude. Myself and I think that's my ego or my self talking, saying, oh, I don't do that. I never did