Steps 1 and 3 – Chance for Change Workshop – Part 2 of 6 – 2008 – Myers R.

For some of you guys that may have slipped in here, after the fact, my name is Myers R. and I'm an alcoholic. You know, it's a cool thing. I know talking about this stuff makes people feel uncomfortable. Not everybody, but some people, it makes you feel uncomfortable It made me feel real uncomfortable when they were talking about it at seven years sober when I'm so goofy and I look at this stuff. It makes me real uncomfortable too. and again let me remind you that I have not forgotten that you may not have the same experience that I do, your experience may be completely different than what mine is what's of interest though is that as much as I travel and as much As I'm gone on doing AA stuff you know what, that licorice right there has got me jonesing like a big dog I'm telling you man give this you go ahead no that's like my crack cocaine right there i mean i'll spend the rest of the day with a big old piece of this hung up in my tooth right here and i'll see who my real friends are the ones that'll tell me hey you got something big hung up on your tooth right there um any of you guys ever do that go to a big aa function and you get home and you look in front of the mirror before you you're like this and there's something weird about your face and not one of your brothers and sisters in the fellowship told you that you had a big piece of spinach hung up in your deal like that? Don't do that, man. Come on. This is the kind of stuff that we're talking about. This is The Kind of Stuff where we say, well, I love that guy. I love him so much I'm going to let him walk around and look like a fool all night long. If a guy's got bad breath, give him a search. Fix him. Help him. That's what we do in this deal. Um... Oh, where my head goes like that. Do you ever get into the deal like this and you get off in a little deal like this and then you find yourself in some verbal cul-de-sac and you can't seem to figure out how to get it back out of there? It's like all these little things going up in my head. Let me ask you this question so we can kind of get back on track on this stuff. Have any of you guys ever been wrong about anything? That's a fair question. Believe me, I've talked to people who say, no, I'm never wrong. And truly believe that. I've sponsored guys just like that. I bet you have too. But collectively, we generally can think of things in our past that we've done where a week, a month, years later, we go, ha, that's just flat wrong. We connect it up and we make the realization that that's the case. Well, if that'sthe case, if we could be wrong about one thing, could we be wrongabout other things? Sure we could. Sure we couldn't. so if I could be wrong all I'm asking this whole process of this thing about the common solution was about an idea it was about a concept of being able to give yourself permission to be wrong about things that you've held true as dogma for years and years and yours you see and sometimes and it takes some courage to do that and I'll be the first to admit that I've been through that same kind of thing but for most of us if you were like me When you came into Alcoholics Anonymous, you were in a room and you had a whole bunch of people that loved you to death and they scooped you up. And day by day, you began to piece together a doctrine based on what these people told you in the meetings. All of them coming out of love. I never met a jerk in AA that said, You know what? I'm going to screw this room up and I'm gonna tell them something really weird. It doesn't happen. I mean, it's never been my experience anyway. Most of these people were loving people who were sharing what they had been taught by their sponsors. We go back to this oral tradition type thing. More and more in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, we're encouraged not to bring big books to meetings. They do a lot of that in our neck of the woods. It may be different here, but they have AA groups in our area where you can't even take a big book into the meeting. They'll stop you before you even get to the meeting They've got no need for the meeting because we don't use it, we don'T want it there. They get so irritated by the idea that somebody would rely on a printed set of directions on how to work the work, that they simply just made this decision that they're not going to allow big books into the meeting. I know two of them in our area that are like that. And as I travel, I see more and more of it. They won't say anything about it, but they don't have to say anything. They can't look at anything else except your big book. They'll just be... And you can just feel it. Oh, he's like that, you see? This kind of deal. And so while we're thinking about doing here what we would like to do, ideally if we could do this worldwide it would be great. If we could just say on a collective day, on one particular day, we could Just Say, I want everybody to take everything that they think they know about Alcoholics Anonymous and set it down on the floor. Just set it now. We're going to label that old ideas. Now old ideas don't necessarily have to mean bad ideas. They're just old ideas, these are the ideas that we've developed than we brought up in through the fellowship. Some of them are good, some of them may not be good, some of em are effective, some em are not effective. But we have to set it down collectively on the floor and then take a look at it. And then what we would do is worldwide, we got thousands and thousands of drunks doing this, we could just read back through the literature and gradually reassemble our program based on a new baseline that the big book set up. Wouldn't that be the coolest? Because what you could do is, That's the reason why I'm such a fan of literature-based meetings, where we're studying the literature and the literature gives us the directions and then we begin to reassemble the stuff that we thought we knew about recovery. And there will be some old concepts that we may have to leave laying on the floor that we May never pick up again. There may be some new ideas that we'll see and go, shoot, that seems to work great, let's do that. And coming from that perspective, I'm not sure why this is such a controversial idea. I'm Not sure why it's such, why it seems to offend so many, but it does. I've had, guys, I answer emails for two hours every morning, Saturday and Sunday included, two hours, every morning hundreds and hundreds of emails from people all over the world. And I am blown away by how often people will write me irritated by the idea that we would ask them to set aside their ideas. I'm not saying that you don't have to if you set them down and you realize hey wait a minute everything I set down I still believe in I want to pick it all back up again pick it up I'm just saying from a perspective of investigating it and trying to see what it is if you're like me what you'll find is there are a lot of things that are in direct conflict with what the big book said pick one 90 meetings in 90 days is there anybody in here including me that hadn't told people that I mean it's been around AA for years and years and yet the The big book never says anything about that. That would be one of the things I would set aside. Not because it's evil or mean or bad, it just is not in the literature. And so as I began to reformulate and reset up this new baseline that I'm going to filter everything through, that would be on that I would set aside, and you'll find hundreds of those things. You'll find bunches of little one-liners and this kind of stuff and all this kind of... Do you see what I'm saying? interesting part is from my experience is, and here it is, I'll just share what the experience has been, is that as I began to do that and I beganto reset this baseline, I began to find the peace and the comfort and the loss of anxiety that I had carried into this fellowship. I began t connect dots. Imagine if you will what it was like to be sitting in a meeting with a bunch of big book thumpers one night and I've been at primary purpose group for about 3-4 months and we're talking about this deal about step 1 truths about why we were drunks, why we are alcoholics and all of a sudden it just clicked and for the very first time, now what is it I'm like 7 years and 3 months over by then and I'm looking at this thing and I am going wait a minute, that's why I drink the way I drink, that is it now for all of these years before I had not understood that I'm here because a judge said, you're a drunk. Go to AA. Or my wife would look at me and go, you are a stinking drunk. Go to AAA. You see what I am saying? And we have a whole bunch of us that get here that way. It's not right or it's not wrong. I am not judging it. I am just saying that sometimes we get here and we never are allowed to investigate why we are. Are we an alcoholic? it. So what I want to do is I want to start at that point and we're going to pretend is there anybody that's not I'm going to use him again, okay because he's a sensitive kind of guy and he's going to we're not going to turn this into a big book study. What we're gonna do is we're gonna look at some big pieces of this work and look and see if we can see where the conflict and the contrasts are between early AA and AA today in most places. And there are some big areas where we've sort of gotten sideways in this. And we'll look at them piece by piece by peace, and if we remember, nobody's holding a gun at your head saying that you have to adopt any of this stuff. At the end of the day, you could go back doing it exactly the way that you're doing it. Interestingly enough, though, what I think you're going to find is that some of you cats are going to fine yourself in a position in AA just where I found myself. Where you're having some pain, and you're in some discomfort and distress, and you're ready to make a change. You see? I can't think of any other way that it works. Most of us got here because why? We were in a bunch of pain. I'll fill in that blank for you. You know? I mean my frothy emotional appeals, remember those? Your family's going, come on! Go! You need it! I do. I agree with you. I need it. I need It. And six months later, we have the same conversation. A year later, we havethe same conversation frothy emotional appeal. It's their pain, not my pain. I'm not hurting enough yet. And that's the interesting part about alcoholism is that at some point in time, the dilemma of living in a situation where you desperately don't want to drink anymore but desperately can't stop. There's just no way you can seem to connect the dot up like that to quit. The pain becomes so intense that most of us finally say, okay I'm willing the two most repeated themes in the big book are willingness and action and they're repeated over and over and over again but you have to be willing to do that stuff but the only thing I know that makes a drunk willing to do it is enough pain that they finally say okay I am going to do this I mean if there's a magic word guys if you come up with it tell me we'll save a million drunks that way tell me what it is but if you're like me most every phrase most everything I think you should do it for her don't you love your daughters wouldn't you like to quit for them nothing more I'd like to do but it ain't going to happen when you write down to it and look at it, it's just not going to happened until I finally get to a point that's the reason why so many of us don't sober up until what happens she leaves or the job goes away these are big things in a man's life and big things probably too in a woman's life And most of us just don't do that until those big things happen, and then we go, okay, okay. I'll do it. I'll give it a try. And so that's where we find ourselves in this deal. Let's pretend for the sake of example that this little knucklehead comes in here and he's detoxing and he is hurting like a big dog and we got a chance to get him gathered up. Now if he comes in in Dallas, we may not even acknowledge his presence in the room if he comes in we're too busy talking to our friends and talking about other stuff, talking about our day we maynot even notice him for a while but if he's sitting there like this we're certainly not going to approach him we might stick out a hand and introduce ourselves and just keep right on walking but we're not going ask him anything because to try to qualify somebody is big Q word qualify? well that's not my job Interesting. The literature says that it is. That it is! Chapter 7, working with others, goes on and on and On and On. I can't label this man a drunk. That's not my job. Dig? My job is not to say you're a drunk My job Is to give him enough information So that he can look at it and say Yes, that's me. Go back and look at Fred's story Or Jim's story Or any of these illustrations Especially Bill When Bill goes and sees Dr. Bob What did Bill do? Bill told him what about himself? He told him a little bit about himself, and Bob goes, well, here's a guy that understands. This is a guy That's just like me. And then finally, Dr. Bob did the same thing that Fred did, the same Thing that Jim did, The same thing, all these illustrations. He said, tell me what you did. And that's where we want to get this guy right here. We want to tell him enough of our story that we identify, and he knows that I'm a drunk Just like he is. And then we're hoping that what he'll say is, what did you do? And then I'll tell him what I did. and then there will be enough similarities between us, he's going to go, I can't evade it. I'm just like you. I drink just like You. I've tried to stop as many times as You have. I've been in the same kind of trouble. I've done all this other stuff. I must be a drunk. You see? But let me explain something. There's a part of our heads that say, well, but we do that all the time. That's what we do. It's not. It's Not What We Do. What we let this guy do is we let him sit in our meeting and flounder until he either talks himself out of recovery which happens lots of times, he'll talk himself out of it or he'll come into the program with enough ambivalence about his own disease that he's totally ineffective at sponsorship and totally ineffective to do much of anything. We see guys like this all the time, guys. Guys that have... There's just an underlying ambivalENCE to their disease. Step one truths are really important. You see, guys, that a guy comes in, a week later he goes back out again. And some old coot says, well, he didn't want it bad enough. All right, maybe he didnít. But what Iím seeing from my personal experience more and more and More is is that he didníd understand the truth about the chronic disease of alcoholism to make the decision about whether he was one of us or not. there's a line some of you guys that have been around long enough to listen to some old Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young stuff like that there's one of the lines that just jumped out at me one day that was so real it said confusion has its costs and guys I'm telling you confusion has it's cost the thing that blows me away today is how many of us in the fellowship that have bene around for long long periods of time still are ambivalent about our own disease we are still not convinced here that we're drunks And let me tell you what happens like this. Collectively, if he's not convinced that he's an alcoholic, if we can't get him to a point where he says, You know what? I'm one of you. I can't label him. That's not my job. But I can help him see his truth. And if I can get himto say, You know wat? I am one ofyou. I understand that I have a chronic disease that is going to kill me. There is discomfort there. There is pain in that realization. This isn't about weakness. This is not about willpower. This is about being sick enough that I may die. Alcoholism kills more than any other disease in the world, including cancer. Alcoholism is a deadly, progressive disease. And this is what we need the guy to understand. Coming from a point of discomfort, I'll do anything you want me to do, won't I? I'll doing anything you ask me. I'll submit to the process of the work. I'll submits to the inventories. I'll submitted to the amends process. I'll do whatever I've got to do to get clear of it the flip side of that is, is that if he can't make the realization what's going on if he kan't understand on a gut level if he takes it on an intellectual standpoint, yeah I'm one of you oh yeah I am one of u if he just keeps it right there on that intellectual basis like this, he'll stay with you right up to the point that you ask him to do something hard how many of you guys sponsor guys and you get them up to inventory and they say, see ya, wouldn't want to be ya. They just leave. And people say, well, I don't understand what the deal was. I don' t understand why. And then we start questioning our deal. Maybe I didn' t do it right. Maybe I did' n't do this. Maybe I di' n' t as a sponsor do this . . . Guys, I'm telling you right now, it always seems to go back to this step one truth stuff. Always. Let me ask . . ." Let's take it on another deal like that. If Dougie came up this morning and he said, hey, Myers, golly, I got some bad news for you, brother. I just found out that I got cancer. And I said, Doug, God, I'm sorry to hear that. What are you going to do? And he said, well, I am supposed to be at a clinic on Monday morning and we are going to look at it and we're going to see what we are doing. Do you think Doug would miss his appointment at the clinic Monday morning? My guess is he'd take that hot rod of his and he'd be tires burning. He'd be sitting there at 6 a.m. waiting for the doctors to get there. Open, open, open. Come on, open! I'm going to die here. Open! there's no way he's going to miss that stuff because what? He's convinced of his illness. And yet we have a generation of us in here that trivialize alcoholism. We think it's just a bad place on the road. We just think if we just talk about it enough it'll go away. It won't! It won'T! And your new guy that's in here needs to understand it on that level. They need to understand that I will die of this deadly disease and unfortunately I'll kill half the people that I'm with. I'll affect every life I touch because of this deadly deal. It's horrible, guys. Horrible. It used to be in the old days in the fellowship, those drunks, those little busted up knuckleheads came straight to us. They were here. It was the only place that they could go. There weren't treatment centers or jitter joints or places that they Could go. Now they go to the jitter joint first and then they come see us and we see them all polished up. Maybe they had a little treatment center romance going on. They got food in them. they got you know i mean they're they're let me let me ask you this question guys i mean just let me clarify something real quick i had this lady in australia one time come up after the after a talk and damn near jerked me off the podium i mean she was mad mad and she said um i don't understand why it is that you treat women with such disrespect and i said excuse me did you not hear my talk did you not hear me spend 30 minutes talking about women's issues in aa did you not hear any of that? And she said, no, I didn't hear any of it. And I said, okay. And I said what seems to be the problem here? And she says you call everybody guys. I said yeah, I do. It's a it's a Texas thing. I call my girls guys. I said guys come on. It is time. What it boils down to is if I say guys and gals isn't this it becomes real tedious and it just takes up more time and I already talk faster than anybody I know there's just a lot to cover and if i have to if i have to keep referring to everybody as guys and gals if i'm have to be gender specific when i'm talking that it's tedious and that's the reason why i do it it's not out of disrespect it's just out of my inability to convey my stuff better it's Just me so guys and gals have you ever I can do it for a while i just can't maintain it i just Can't keep it going like that if you ever have you ever gone to this stuff is like god dang I want to eat that so bad right now that I'm just about to come out of my skin have you never have you every gone to a treatment place and you met somebody at treatment okay you walk into a room and there he is he's sitting across the deal like this and he's just he's beat up he's looking at the floor and his face I mean, hair's all messed up and he kind of looks up at you and there ain't nobody home. He's hurting like a big dog. And you just walk up to him. Yeah, smells perfect. He's got that ripeness about him and you know here's a brand new guy in the deal. And you talk a little bit and you share a littlebit and when you're done he goes, buddy. And after the talk he comes up to you and he says, Bud, can you please help me do what you do? Sure, sure. Now, depending on where this treatment place is, they may let you do some step work with him while he's in treatment, but what's happening more and more in our neck of the woods, they won't let you to do that. A lot of these places are state funded and they won' t let you talk about God and steps in the meeting. So it becomes difficult to do. And so what happens is, you give him a big old dose of it while you're there and you shoot your best shot, man. You just tee off and you hope that you hit it true. And there it is. The lights are on and you walk at him like this and as you're back out of the room like this, you wave back at him and he's sitting back there and there's hope in his face. There's spring in his step and he'S smiling at you and heS going, buddy, this is going to be so cool. All right, fast forward 27 days. You haven't seen the guy but one more time since then. He's had 27 days of good food, a little exercise. He's dealing with his other issues, this kind of stuff. But he walks out like this and you're looking at him, and he walks right past you. He just, Hey, hey, Sid! Hey! And he turns around and he goes, Oh, hey Myers, I didn't recognize you. And we start talking a little bit, and I say, Hey, you ready to do this stuff? Well, yeah, I am. I am soon. Real soon. There's just a few things I've got to do first. Oh, it's going to be like that, is it? You see, in 27 days, his arrogance and his ego has rekindled itself and he's bulletproof. He's bullet proof and you guys know exactly what I'm talking about. Turn to page 24 if you've got your books on the thing. In italics, top of that page you guys have read this a thousand times the fact that most alcoholics for reasons yet obscure have lost the power of choice in drink our so-called willpower becomes practically non-existent. We are unable at certain times to bring into our consciousness with sufficient force the memory of the suffering and humiliation of even a week or a month ago. We are without defense against the first drink. You give a drunk two or three weeks to get his crud back together again, to get His wife looking at Him again, we call it the AA Trinity, the job, the girl in the car. You let any of these pieces come back into place and I promise you, He doesn't need your stinking steps. He doesn't need this crazy program, because he's got what he wanted in the first place. Manageability around the external things in his life. And as long as that illusion is there... But guys, how many of you guys that have been around for a while know exactly what that's like? That's the craziest idea you could possibly have. How many of your guys drank when you had everything in the whole wide world? Well, how about when you didn't have anything? When you lived in a big house? when you lived in a burnout trailer someplace? When you had the best looking girl in this county on your arm, did you drink? Yeah. When you said, when you had the sister of Satan hanging off your arm? See, I mean, it's so precarious, guys. What it is, it's this deal, it's like herding cats. We don't ever get them really lined up. It's like by the time I get two of them headed up the same way like this, then the job goes south and the income stream goes away When the income stream goes away, the car goes away. Now I'm back in it. You understand what I'm saying? We never quite get it there. It's all an illusion. I wouldn't drink if I had a good looking girl. How many years did I buy into that? Forever. Forever. If I just had a great job, here I am at my brand new bindery with a big old sign on the side of the building that had my name on it. Man, I'm running the ship. Man, it's all great. It couldn't be any better. Except I can't stay there past noon because I can't figure out a way to stay sober. See? It's that kind of stuff. Crazy. So here is the dilemma. This is why there's some humor and some agitation when we sit in meetings and people want to tell war stories all during the meeting. And in our neck of the woods, almost all the meetings are just that. Every meeting we do the same thing. We tell our war story. We tell her war story there's an appropriate place to tell your war story guys I'm not making light of any of it the book talks about it in great length in chapter 7 the appropriate place to talk about your war stories is in a 12 step call when you're trying to identify with this guy and he's trying to identity with you to see if you're some psychologist in disguise that's trying shove some therapy up his butt or if you are the real deal alcoholic that's what he sees that's he's try to see anyway the interesting part is when we talk about these things in the meeting over and over and over again guys I'm not even going to remember my own war story enough to keep me clear of the booze much less yours it just seems like a bunch of wasted effort going over and over and over I think what I would rather do is see a whole bunch of those meetings get converted into deals where we were trying to pull these guys with some vision and some hope instead of trying to outdo each other in the Billy Badass column which we do because all we end up what we don't understand is that what we do is we're alienating a lot of people by the stories that we tell We do. So you've got to be careful about it when you're going through it. It's like the book tells me that if I don't get busy doing something within a week or a month, I'm not going to be able to stay clear of the booze. And it isn't about anything else other than the fact that we got sick again. And as we get sick, when the pain and the suffering gets great enough, we'll just simply drink. That's how that stuff works. I'm nicht sagen, dass die Geschichte nicht wichtig ist. Ich sage nur, dass in bestimmten Teilen der Gegend we've gotten to where that's the only thing we want to share is the story but the story carries little and then less and less weight as we go on down the road in your book turn to page 44 so let's pretend that this guy is sitting at our meeting and he's come in and we're going to sashay up next to him and we are going to talk to him for just a minute about alcoholism and about what we know about alcoholism and in that case we may share a little piece of our story to identify this kind of stuff it would be an appropriate place to do that stuff And then we take this guy to page 44 and we ask him these questions here. In the preceding chapters, you've learned something about alcoholism. We're at the We Agnostics. We hope we have made clear the distinction between the alcoholic and the non-alcoholic. This would be interesting stuff. If when you honestly want to, you find you cannot quit entirely, or when drinking, you have little control over the amount you take, you are probably alcoholic. Hold your finger right there. We're going to talk about that and then we'll come back to this thing. they're talking about choice of control of choice and control have we lost the power of that you see guys in most places if we did a straw poll and we just went around the room and we asked you why are you here why areyou an alcoholic and then we'd ask the same question of him and him and her and her and we go around like this what we would find out is that the vast majority of people sitting in our rooms think that they're here because of the external drama of their life That's the reason they want to talk about it so much. And what this literature is telling me here is that that's not it at all. If when you honestly want to, can you stay clear of the booze? That's the power of choice. So in an illustration, if I go home to my wife and I say, okay, sweetheart, I'm done. I know I've acted a fool. I knowI've been in trouble. Iknow all this stuff happened like this. I'll never drink again. And then two weeks later, I find myself back in some strip joint drinking a beer. I've lost the power of choice there's a part of me that didn't want to drink and yet here I am for some reason or another I find myself back into the deal once I start drinking if I call my wife and I say I'm going to start dinner I'm heading that direction I'm gonna have one beer with these guys and then I'm wanna be there and in closing time you come running in or whatever the deal is you fill in the blank about how much you had to drink but if you drink more than you set out to drink bam There is the physical component of alcoholism as we know it. The allergic reaction set itself up, and you once again drank more than you said you were going to drink. That's the physical components. That's control parts that they were talking about right here. So see, we could get off in a big ol' long story with this guy about how he went to jail and how he did this and how did that and what all this kind of stuff. We could spend all kinds of time talking about that or we could read him one simple paragraph and ask him black and white. I don't care how bad he's shaken. I don't care how bad he's detoxing. He could answer those questions. If when you honestly want to, can you stay clear of the booze? Uh-uh. Let me ask you something. When you drink, do you drink more than you intended to drink? Uh-huh. Check your it. When I found that out, I discovered that I was an alcoholic. I didn't label him an alcoholic When I did the same thing that you did and I came up with that realization, I had to realize that based on this text, I'm a classic alcoholic. you see and then he's then he is true think but guys stop and think how cool this would be to be sitting in a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous for your first time and have somebody help you see your truth about your disease so there is no question in your mind you can see the truth wouldn't that be the coolest because from that point you could start heading off helping people right off the bat you could save yourself all kinds of time I sponsor lots and lots and lots of guys that are over 15 to 20 years of sobriety and I'm amazed at how many of these guys I run across that don't know whether they're alcoholic or not. When you ask them, they'll dance all over it. They'll dance around it, through it, under it. They'll do everything in the world except come up with the real answer. And you can't make any more progress. You can't do anything else step work wise until he understands that. Until he's able to make that connection. You say, well, I don't understand why. I was way off into it before I realized it. That may have been your truth and I understand that. That happens to a lot of us. But stop and think how more effective you would have been as a sponsor if you were clear about the nature of your disease early on and then you could get up in there and rock and roll. Coming from a point of ambivalence, if I'm questioning my disease, I will question everything you tell me about AA. And I'll be really hip about your program. I'll do everything you want me to do right up to the point that I won't. Right up tothe point that you ask me todo something that makes me feel uncomfortable or makes me question something and then all of a sudden I'm just not going to do it. You ever see these guys? They won't make amends, they won't do any of this other kind of stuff, they won'T do... We always want to come back to other things but I'm telling you guys from my personal experience in working with hundreds and hundreds of men, it almost always, sometimes there is other things at play, but almost always it goes back to step one truth. You got a guy that's not convinced that his disease is chronic in nature and that it will kill him. Offering coming from that he's going to be weird. And then interesting, where your finger was still holding it on that page, the next three lines say, if that be the case, you may be suffering from an illness which only a spiritual experience will conquer. Okay. I promised I wasn't going to do this, but I got to. I just simply can't pass up the opportunity. Let me ask you a question. How many meetings do you have to go to to have a spiritual experiment? A spiritual experience. Good answer. None. None. so why is it we're telling these guys to come and just like the meeting is the deal not knocking it guys I'm not saying don't go to those meetings because I'm telling you they saved my bacon they saved me they saved my life I'm not saying that but when this literature tells me right there that I'm suffering from an illness which only a spiritual experience will conquer I need to be able to be clear on that how do I have a spiritual experience should be my very next question And if he doesn't ask it, I'm going to ask it for him. How do you think we would have a spiritual experience? These are the steps that we took. You bet. We're going to gather this stuff back up again and get back into the steps as quickly as we can so that we can get this guy through the work so that he can have that psychic change. It's the only way I know to get clear of it. Guys, I am the poster boy for Middle of the Road Solution for seven years. I can tell you right now from my own personal experience that you can come to AA, you can stay in the rooms, You can drink coffee. You can talk jokes. You can be there. You can play dominoes. You can go to dances. Anything like that you want to do, and you may be able to stay clear of the booze. I did it. I'm telling you, you can do it. The caveat, the fly in the ointment always seems to be, can I stay happy doing the same thing? Some of us have managed to do that, and they are the most vocal in our fellowship. I went to dances and played dominoES, and I'm sober today, and I'M happy. Super. Super. I'm delighted that it worked for you that way. But for thousands of us that came, it's not working. Our problem guys today and forever has not been how to get guys to come to AA. Our problem has been how do we keep them here once they're here? We let them get so sick. How many times have we sat in meetings with guys that have been sick for weeks and weeks and we've not done anything? We know they're sick. We know there's a problem. We know their in trouble. We know the're dying. We know they're not going to make it. We know. And yet we just let them stay there. And guys, you know, sometimes we don't let them stay there because we're mean. I never met anybody that did it out of maliciousness. But sometimes I think we let them stay because we are not real clear in our own head how to handle them. How to deal with them. How do we help this guy? He's real vocal in the meeting. He's really loud and he's real angry. You can see it half the time. He's packing a pistol in his back. I mean, it's just like... Welcome to Texas, guys. I'm telling you, man. Half the drunks in our rooms are carrying. And it's juste... But you've got to be clear. That's the reason why I try to get guys back into the literature. One of the greatest things that ever happened to me was one day when I realized that I was real clear on how to get somebody through the work. In the last segment today, we're going to talk... That's all we're gonna talk about for that segment is the specifics of how to do that. Of how to help somebody to get from point A as busted up drunk to a recovered alcoholic out there kicking butt and being happy. That's what this whole thing is about. That's the reason why we're here. And the process of doing that changes everything in our life, but we're going to talk specifically about that stuff. So let's just say for the sake of example that we've got this guy in here like this and he's come through his truth about this stuff and he knows beyond a shadow of a doubt what the lowdown was. I asked this guy, I said tell me what you know about God. Give me the Reader's Digest condensed version of God. And he says I like God. Or he'll say, I hate God. They come in that flavor, guys. I've said in years, I've sat in meetings where people go, I'm working on step two. I'm, I're working on step... Guys, there's nothing to work on. You either do believe that there's something out there or you don't believe there's something out here. Bill knew it was going to be a stumbling block so he wrote a whole chapter, chapter four, working with other, I mean, we agnostics. His whole thrust of the chapter was to see if you could get clear of that idea of whether or not you're ambivalent about God. about this deal. You see? You don't have to accept my idea about God. That's the reason why I don't even offer it. I don' t want you to do that. I don''t want to give you my idea of God. I want you develop your own concept of God so that you can be for maybe the very first time in your life comfortable with the idea of loving God in your live. It''s the coolest thing in the whole wide world. But Bill and especially Dr. Bob later on, when you read a bunch of stuff that Dr.Bob did, it''s amazing to see what he did. And when he talked about this stuff, he said, guys, there is no other way to get from point A to point B. You will either address the solution, which is a spiritual connection. You will neither address that or you won't make it. We let people come and stay and sit, and we tell them it's going to be okay, and we tells them it'll be okay. It probably won't be okay I want you to understand that Bill and those guys were real adamant about getting guys to understand that even if God was sideways in your crawl when you got here, and He was for me, I can assure you. I'm the guy sitting in the Sunday school classes looking at everybody else going how come these little sunbeams of Jesus get this stuff and I don't get any of it did any of you guys feel like that but me I mean I'm just sitting back there scratching my head going damn all these guys must have they got the Sunday School Teachers Edition in their lap or something they know all the answers like that I don' t know any of them I'm not the guy I'm kind of going why me why don't I feel this closeness why don't I feel stillness Why don't I feel any of it? God didn't talk to me last night like He talked to the rest of you spiritual giants. And that's how I came to AA. And so this idea that we could make a beginning by simply being willing, there's that theme that repeated again, by being willing to accept the idea that there's something out there. I don't need to understand it, nor does this busted up little gay who just came into our fellowship. He doesn't need it. There he is again. He doesn'T need to, he doesn'T needs to understand anything about God. We make the mistake of thinking that we have to have this full-formed view of God before we accept Him. Don't do that. You may never have it. You may not. You may ever have all the ducks in a row and figure it all out, you know? We may get up there and God may be a female cat. I mean, I don't know. If I die and start going to heaven and start smelling like kitty litter, I'm going to be in trouble. I used to tell cat jokes all the time, and I realize now I own one and now I just want to take it all back. I just... So it brings us to this point so quickly. Now you have to understand in the course of talking to this guy, we're still sitting in the same meeting with this guy. The meeting is gone. We've done our Tradition 7 stuff and we're spending some time with this guys after the meeting. He's not going anywhere. We're not going nowhere and we are just talking about this thing. He's come to grips with his step 1 truth. he's come to grips with his step two idea that he's willing to accept the idea that there's a loving God out there that might be able to save his bacon and we're ready to look at step three this took 10, 20 minutes 30 minutes sometimes it might take a little longer sometimes it Might take a Little Less but it sure shit didn't take six months or a year to get him through that remember guys I know we used to have this old guy in my club that used to go this ain't a race yes it is yes it because of the stuff that we just read on page 24 it is a race you got a head that is not your friend you got a head that's getting ready to tell you that you don't have a problem at all you gotta the first time you get laid guys I promise you your head's gonna be saying you know I don't know maybe I was just making a big deal out of this whole thing I don' am I right or am I alright I am and all of a sudden life is worth living again it's just perfect and it all happens you see because of the way that our ego rekindles itself we stand to be in real, real trouble. And that's the reason why if we were watching this thing in a bell curve, you'd watch it and you'd get busted up drunk here and you get down here and then it goes up and it goes up and then life looms large. There's no program in place. There's not spiritual connection. This guy's not a seeker. He's just taking up space drinking coffee. And pretty soon, life hits him up the side of the head and he begins to just decline. And we watch him decline and decline and decline until the pain becomes so great that he does one of two things. He either kills himself or he drinks. That's his choice. That's our choice. That's yours and mine. That's the path that we take if we're not careful. I have done this, guys, from both perspectives. Remember, I came up through seven years of this thing of taking lots and lots of time to work guys through the work. Six months, a year, two years. It took me two years to do it the first time I did it. We're not very diligent at it at all. You see what I'm saying? But I'm looking at it from two different perspectives and I'm watching the wreckage and destruction of that way compared to the coolness of working with hundreds and hundreds of drunks and getting them through the work in 45 days. And guys, I'm telling you, when you watch man after man after manner spring forward completely relieved of the disease of alcoholism because of spiritual work they did in the steps in 45 Days and you see it over and over and again, pretty soon it doesn't take a rocket scientist to go, oh, you know, my old way probably didn't work as well as it could have. It may be better to do it this way. And you'll see. We'll talk about that some later on this afternoon. However long you want to take, that's fine. But when you end up butting heads with a guy that you're sponsoring on down the road and you realize that it's been eight months since he came in and he still hasn't done a third step and you're buttingheads with him, you've got to own part of the problem. You've got it. Because you can't... Remember, you're trying to enthuse him to get busy in the work but he's got a head telling him that the problem doesn't exist anymore. That's part of the mental component of alcoholism, and that's where it gets kind of ugly. One of these days when you don't have anything else to do, look in your big book and look at how much effort Bill and Bob and those cats spent trying to teach us about the mental obsession. Everything from, in Bill's story, I mean, in the doctor's opinion, they address primarily the physical allergy. But once you get clear of that, and you get clearer into Bill's store, you get to the end of Bill's story right there it begins and from Bill's story through two chapters to We Agnostics which is chapter 4 from those two chapters everything that they talk about 99% of everything that's talked about in those chapters is trying to get us to understand the truth around the mental obsession why is it stone cold sober do I pick up a drink why is completely removed from the booze do I pick up a drink you see if my only problem is just staying away from booze just say no thank you Nancy Reagan. If I could just say no, it'd be sweet, wouldn't it? It'd be suite. I could just say no and be done with it. Unfortunately Nancy never considered the mental obsession. Never considered the ugly part of our disease and it's the part that truly is baffling to you as a drunk and it is bafling to your family. Truly it is. So in that same meeting, we're still sitting in that same meeting. We're going to ask this guy if he's interested and stopping for good and for always. And he says, yeah, I am. Terrific. I said, let's look at this third step stuff. We'd like to get you through this prayer tonight before you go home. And he said, terrific, let'S go do that. Look at your book on page 60. Let's look a something real quick. We'll work through this pretty quick. 60. Of note on 60, I want you to see first the ABC's which we're all familiar with we read it a million times a week in our meetings in the step two stuff that we were just talking about where it talked about C that God could and would if He were sought there's something about seeking that's cool and it's of interest because every time I read it it always said to me that God couldn't and would if He was found and I'm thinking I'm back in Sunday school class again and I'm going to be one of the ones that didn't get it. And so it was always quite troublesome until I realized that it just said that if He were sought, we'd be okay. It's in the seeking that the miracle happens. We just have to be willing to submit to the process of seeking, which is pretty cool. We could do that. Sure we could. Okay, I'm gonna read a couple little pieces of this thing as we kind of connect the dots on this thing. And this would be just as I'm reading with this guy if we're sitting there. The first requirement is that we be convinced that any life run on self-will could hardly be a success. Now, on this basis, we're almost always in a collision with something or somebody even though our motives are good. This is really interesting, guys. I'm thinking, first and foremost, that my problem is booze. Maybe in some cases those other outside issues. But that's the problem. All I've got to do is just get rid of that and I'm going to be okay. Well, if that's true, how come so many of us in our fellowship get clear of the booze and then kill ourselves? We get clear of the booze and then we slowly unravel. This is what they're trying to address. I'm thinking, you guys ever look at the definition of selfishness in the dictionary? I want to read this to you. You'll get a kick out of this thing because there's a caveat, there's little twist on the end of this that makes it really kind of funny to think about. It says, Selfishness, concerned excessively or exclusively with oneself, seeking or concentrating on one's own advantage, place or well-being here it is without regard for others guys when I stepped on you in business it wasn't because I was stepping on you because Iwas mean I wasn't trying to hurt you I just didn't even know you were there I'm not even considering that you're there and that's why my selfishness gets so ugly because my head says I'm not a mean guy. I'm Not a bad guy. I'm NOT. Then how come I got so much wreckage? Well, I have so much wreckage because I treat people like they're not there. I don't consider their feelings at all. And it's not because I got up one morning and said, I think I'm going to be mean to everybody I know. It's not like that. I just don't even... You don't even exist. I'm so focused on what it is that I'm trying to get that I'll step on and do and say whatever I have to say. And what it did was it helped me understand why I could do so many things, why I Could Be So Offensive to So Many People. It was a big help. So we look through this stuff. It says each person is like an actor who wants to run the whole show. For years I read that and I never really saw that thing. Each person is likes the actor. I'm not even the director and I want to runthe whole show I'm just the actor, and I want to run it. But isn't it true? It is. It is, and so it says, if only people, I'm at the top of page 61, if only People would do as he wished, the show would be great. Everybody, including himself, would be pleased. Life would be wonderful. That's my head game. And trying to make these arrangements, our actor may sometimes be quite virtuous. He may be kind, considerate, patient, generous, or modest in self-sacrificing because it's clearer to see it. Guys, men specifically, I want you to look at your relationship with women as you were courting them. Couldn't you be just like this? On the other hand, he might be mean, egotistical, selfish or dishonest. But as with most humans, he is more likely to have varied traits. And what usually happens? The show doesn't come off very well. He begins to think life doesn't treat him right. He decides to exert himself more. He becomes on the next occasion still more demanding or gracious as the case may be. Still the play does not suit him. Admitting he's somewhat at fault, he is sure that other people are more to blame. He becomes angry, indignant, self-pitying. What is his basic trouble? Here it is. Is he not really a self-seeker even when trying to be kind? Now guys, we'll read that page, this page, the next two pages and they don't mention booze at all. Look at the top of page 62 where that paragraph starts out. Selfishness, selfcenteredness, that we think is the root of our troubles. Why did Bill do that? Why didn't those cats in the first 100 when they wrote this thing, Why didn't they put booze and crack cocaine? That we think is the root of our problems. What I mean, it makes sense to me. That was my problem. That's what I'm thinking. That's where my head goes every time. The booze caused my problem, the booze cause... It's my mantra. And so I am caught completely unawares, completely off guard when booze is completely out of the picture and my life looks horrible, horrible. Because what's not being addressed is what? My own selfishness and self-centeredness. Bill and those guys knew exactly what they were talking about when they did this stuff. Selfishness and soft-centered that we think is the root of our troubles. So our troubles we think are basically of our own making. I'm not going to read the rest of this stuff but it's important to understand if you flipped over to the page and you looked at the third step prayer look right in the middle of that prayer. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I might better do thy will. Again, I don't understand why Bill Wilson didn't call me about this. Why he didn't just say, Hey Myers, how do you think we ought to write this prayer? And I'd said, Hey, relieve me ofthe bondageof booze. That would be a great line. Put that in there. But they didn't do that. They didn't even mention booze in it. Why? Because booze is not my problem. It's not. I know that's going to surprise some of you newer guys but it's not my problem what is my problem? selfishness and self-centeredness Myers is my problems my little crazy games that I play in my head to get the things that I want that is why I stay in collision course with everybody else and left on my own devices I won't see it that's the reason why the inventory were there any you guys that felt like I did that kind of went why did Bill write these pages? When you got out of the first part of this thing and you got to 60, 61, 62, and 63, didn't those pages seem like they were stuck in later? Like he wrote the whole book and then Bill goes, oh, oh shit, I've got a whole page or two here that I've gotta stick someplace. Let's see, we'll stick it right there. It didn't make any sense to me why he put it there until later on when I understood. Of course at that time I'd never done any inventory work either. But once I began to do some inventory work, I beganto realize, whoa, wait a minute. This is the stuff we're trying to illuminate. This isthe stuff we'retrying to see. And if I can't get my nose rubbed in it real good first, I need him sitting there going, yeah, that could be me, yeah, yeah. It's not painting a real pretty picture, is it? Nope, it's not, it''s not. And then we slide off into the inventory stuff, which we're gonna do right after lunchtime, and we're going to break this thing down a little bit. And I think, and I hope anyway, We're going to look specifically at some things around this inventory that we may not have seen before and try to dispel some of the myths about inventory that keep us so jammed up. We'll talk about this a little bit later on like this, but let me ask you something. Is there anything that caused you more fear when you first started sponsoring people than the prospect of hearing somebody's fifth step? I mean, most of us, it's the genesis of every piece of anxiety I have in AA is this idea that I'm going to have to try to help somebody see his truth in this inventory. And this is where we're going to get clear of a whole bunch of this stuff. One more real quick thing before we stop and take us two seconds to talk about it. There's another line in that prayer that I always found of interest and it said, relieve me of the bondage of self that I might do that well. Take away my difficulties that victory over them. Yep, yep, yep. I was thinking of another thing like that. around this thing of take away my difficulties that victory may bear witness to those I would help with the power of love thy way of life you guys before he died, do you remember Clint Hodges? Do you guys ever know Clint personally? He was a great, great speaker he's a real slick AA attorney I mean a real sleek attorney out of LA and I met this guy years and years ago and we were talking about this thing one time specifically. He'd been around for probably 20 years before he really got into this inventory stuff. And it was interesting, he went to out on the east coast and he met with a couple of guys out there. Don Pritz was one of the guys that he met with out there and they spent some time in a hotel room and they went through some of this work and they got on their knees and they said this prayer. Clint goes back to L.A. and within a two week period of time he lost his job, his wife left him, he lost income stream there and he had to move out of this big fancy trophy house that he had. And he calls Don on the telephone, he was telling me about this thing later, and he called Don onthe phone and he says, Hey, I thought my life was supposed to get better as a result of all this stuff. I didn't realize that my life was going to fall apart, you see? And Don said, You know, I know that it looks that way right now, but do you ever stop and think that God may be removing the things that you have set up as more important than Him in your life? And Don says, Clint said there's just dead silence on the phone. And he didn't know what to do. And finally, as I understand the story, he just gently set the phone down. And the conversation was over. But what he realized was is that when he had turned his will and his life over to the care of God, it meant that he was turning everything over to God and that God would give and take. And that if there were things in his life that he held more dear than recovery and more dearer than his work on this earth in terms of trying to help a drunk, that God might just decide that it needed to be removed. And it was indeed removed, just like that, you see? So I say this of interest. Once you sponsor guys and you get into a situation, don't always expect it to head in the direction you think it's going to go. There may have to be some dismantling of a bunch of arrogance and a bunch of ego and a whole bunch of material things first, I'm not saying you're going to lose everything. I'm just saying my experience in working with a whole bunch of guys is that a lot of times there's a period of dismantling first where we get to look at things from a fresher perspective and then we can come back in and rebuild it on a better foundation. It's cool stuff. I'll see you guys right after lunch, okay? Thanks, man.