Steps 2, 3 and 4 – O, CO., Step Workshop in West Virginia 2002 – Part 1 of 2 – 2002 – Bob

We were talking about the second step, about coming to believe, and the reason why we come to believe is because we have to. What's this thing running around that doesn't have God in it, Alcoholics Victorious or some stuff like that? What's that called? Are you aware of it? Well, you probably wouldn't be aware of It because it's not very successful. But there are people who rail at the idea of God so much that they don't want any part of it, so they basically have the big book without God. Which is interesting because the big books about God. The whole point of this thing with the second step is that we are presented with this idea that there is no other choice. And if people will clearly describe that to folks like us, and and part of that process that's necessary is for this new person to understand that they can't stop that they are without resources and well you can go at it directly can you stop drinking then you stop are you done that's the best question if you got a new person that's the best question you can ask them are you done and if they're not don't mess with them okay because if you got somebody that's kind on the fence you may be preventing them from getting desperate enough to find sobriety so you know that the old expression in our home group was if alcohol or if God drives you out alcohol drive you back okay now some people yes I'll tell you what a guy came up to me the other day that was like that I watched him come in and out and using people, right? And he came up to you and up to me and he's a whiner. All he wants to do is come up God Jesus I hate those kinds of people. I'll write inventory about it it's okay. But there is a certain kind of person in AA who doesn't want to get sober they just want you to ride with them. And they go on these big emotional loops now here's how you can tell if somebody wants to get well so believe me this works if you're working with someone or you agree to work with someone or you even agree to sit down and talk with someone and you talk to them for about an hour or so if you get up and you're energized by that conversation they want to get wealth if you get up and feel like you've been hit by a truck get as far away from them as you can get do you know what they want they want your power they're like spiritual leeches and you can tell those people by the way you feel after you talk to them and you know we're going to talk about some things in here that people don't normally talk about but I'm telling you that if you're hanging around with someone who drains you every time you talk to them, get the hell away from them. They don't want to get well. They want to use you. They want a good life. They want your power. And a lot of those people believe that your power is something that's yours, that they can take it away from you and use it because they're watching you. you know power is uh is highly attractive and if you have i mean i have an enormous amount of power isn't that isn't an awful thing to say the truth is i do and it's not mine okay and what other people will see is they'll see that power and they want it and they'll think it's ours so they'll come and try and take it away from us and that's what wears us out and they don't understand the dynamic of this, that God has given us that power to help others. If you go through the book, I've done all these exercises because I'm just curious. I'm spiritually curious and I hope you are too. I went through the books and read everything ads say about power. Lack of power is our dilemma. That's the first thing it says. um then it's it talks about people uh who are willing to believe and it says we felt new power flowing in now that's not just some sort of pipe dream that's talking about feeling like power okay that we start feeling some sort energy in our life that we hadn't felt before which is what you were talking about here a minute ago and then it talks about people people who choose this process who are willing to believe in it and people who have god is the central fact in their life now god isthe central factin our life means that we try and revolve our life around our belief that we try and carry god's vision into all our activities so it says that people who have god as the central fact in their life have power peace happiness and a sense of direction now what else do you want do you see this that's about everything anybody ever wanted if you have power that's good but don't get caught up in it because if you think it's yours and you try and usurp the power you will go into a tailspin which can be pretty devastating you got to understand that power and God are synonymous and it doesn't have anything to do with us. Peace, which means you can get up in the morning and your first thought isn't oh damn, what's going to happen today? Happiness. I was walking around I have a tendency to be a little intense. Which is not if you read Thomas Merton there is no virtue in intensity. And there is no virtue in intensity. I just get excited about stuff and want to go do it. Happiness is a choice. That's going to come as bad news to some of you because your lifestyle has been so far from that, and you find out that that's a choice that you have, that you've been hurting yourself, denying yourself all of this time because you can choose to be happy in the middle of the most absurd circumstances. Happiness is truly a choice. I would be willing to bet you, based on the fact that I don't see anybody drunk in this room, that every one of you is experiencing the benefits of God. But our inclination as alcoholics is to have 25 areas in our lives and 24 of them will be just wonderful and one of them won't suck. And that's all we focus on. Huh? Sure is, isn't it? And so we'll go, oh man, am I ever living in... Yeah, this is really... Oh God, my life is awful. Okay? And other people will go, how can you say that? and you go, well, this is going on. And they go, yeah, but look at everything else. You go, I don't want to look at anything else. That's why I have 10-step friends. Do you know that? You know, I'll tell you about 10-stepped buddies when we get to it, but there are people that you can talk to that give you permission to talk to them. Call them anytime and talk to him about perspective, which is a lot of what the 10-steps is about. You call up and you tell them what you're thinking and they'll go, whoa. See, and these days, because I've got to tell you, my 28th year is probably the toughest one I've had in Alcoholics Anonymous. And if you think, and I don't mean to be a little scattered here, but I really want to say these things before I forget to say them. People have a tendency to take their spiritual temperature by how they feel. And nothing could be further from the truth. You know, if you feel kind of sappy or you feel kind of out of sorts or whatever, a lot of people get up and they will interpret that into saying I'm not spiritually fit. And the truth is nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that sometimes in the most dire circumstances we are the most spiritual. Okay? That that's... You know we don't go looking for God in good times. We aren't going to turn to God if we've got everything we want. So it's in those times when we have no other place to turn that we go looking for God again, and God then becomes the central fact in our lives again. You know the bedevilments where it talks about not being of real service to other people, misery and depression, all that stuff? If you get in that mood where you're making heavy going out of life, fall back into that position, which is the second step position, where you fall back into it and you go, I see what's going on. I'm worshiping other things. I'm worshipping my job or I'm workshopping money or I're worshiping other people or I am worshiping something but it ain't God. And so maybe what I can do to get back into power, peace, happiness and a sense of direction is turn my thoughts to God. Now a lot of people in Alcoholics Anonymous us read Emmett Fox. Emmett Fox was a tent preacher back during the time of Bill Wilson, a guy who came from England. And he used to preach at Carnegie Hall and Bill and Lois Wilson would go down and listen to him. And a lot of stuff that's in the book is influenced by Emmett Cox. And Emmett Fox doesn't say, you know in the tent step where it says turn your thoughts to someone you can help, Emmett Knox says turn your thoughts to God. Okay? Anything that turns us out anything that turns us out of ourselves so I don't want to talk all the time anybody got anything to say yes the word worship and you talk about it now we acknowledge don't let any prejudice you may have or old ideas attorneys honestly asking yourself what these spiritual terms that you both talked about mean to you right and I never really did that exercise formally but I came across the word worship and I saw it one day and then a few days later I began to take half of the workout and somebody talked about the word Worship and they said it really just means to lean towards. Okay. Literally, in the true sense of the word and that made sense to me because I didn't understand Worship because I wasn't the kind of guy who naturally got down on his knees and worshipped anything or did anything about it in the wake of prayer or whatever. I would be like Don talked about I want the spiritual bellhop to fix this now. Very impatient, whiskey did that, life didn't work that bad, that kind of stuff. So I was leaning towards a lot of stuff that had nothing to do with God. Right. And my experience too, in the good times, you know, thank you very much God, I'll take it from here. Right. That kind of attitude always brought me to a state where I had to be reasonable again. Right. And start really from scratch, which ultimately was a big payoff. And I couldn't see it, of course, to separate right and forth. We come to that. I can't tell you what an important ingredient spiritual curiosity is. If you don't want to know more about God, you're going to have a hard road ahead. Not that we can understand God. The spiritual theory about that is if we understood God, we'd be God because he's beyond our comprehension. But we go looking, and in our own feeble way, we go working for God. When I got sober and I was presented with this idea, you know, I took the steps, and no one showed me the instructions early on. so I'd read the step and just figured I'll try and do that and this business about turning your life and your will over to the care of God as you understand him honestly, I'd get up in the morning and I would pray and I'd say, God, I'll give you control from 8 till 10 in the evening in the morning there's no joke, I mean as insane as that sounds and if you screw it up I'll take care of it and that's kind of the way i got into it just by believing all that screwy stuff um um i want to so so this whole business about desperation will take us to god even if we don't want to believe even ifwe can't believe evenif we can't see touch or feel it at some point our desperation will take us to the idea that I am incapable, as are all those around me, incapable of stopping me from drinking. And without divine intervention, deal's done. I might as well just put on a black suit because they're going to be planting me pretty quick. so um so then we're we're uh we're presented with this whole idea about what alcoholism is you know early on in uh in the book it talks about the symptoms of alcoholism and when you go through this with new people um what was done with me is that there's all these descriptions of alcoholic behavior in the first chapters. And my sponsor would always go, does that sound like you? Which is what people used to do early on in AA when they'd visit people in the hospital and they'd talk about their experiences. And what they're doing is they're trying to get you to see that that behavior is not the type of behavior that occurs in an average temperate drinker. Okay. When they're talking about blackouts and all this weird behavior that we go through, what was presented to me was, do you ever do that? And I'd go, uh-huh. And they'd go do you know that people who aren't alcoholics don't do that. And I go really. And my sponsor would say no. Bob, people that do that are alcoholics, okay? People who, you know, was brought up last night, people who experience craving, okay, doesn't occur in the average tempered drinker. You know what craving is? Having a drink and wanting another. You know, another description of an alcoholic, when it talks about heavy drinker, and people sometimes get confused about that heavy drinkers are people who who uh drink a lot and and they they wind up in duis and courts and divorces and in all the places uh treatment centers and all that stuff where where regular alcoholics wind up except if they're given sufficient reason they can stop as an act of the will which means they just abruptly stop okay and and no spiritual experience no nothing just about i don't think i can do this anymore it's not good for my health and they just pull up short and don't do it anymore that's a heavy drinker an alcoholic will go out of control okay at some point they lose all control and that means that there is no ability to make an act of the will a decision that can prevent them from drinking again, okay? And that's the difference. So when you talk to someone about their alcoholism and you go through the first part of that book, that's what we do is we talk about those experiences and most of those experiences are experiences that don't happen to temperate drinkers, okay, all right. So we are, in the third step, we're told about alcoholism all of a sudden. And it's nothing that made any sense to me. It says selfishness, self-centeredness. That we think is the root of our problem. And that concept is foreign or was foreign to me and my sponsor was sitting there saying, here's the rootof the disease. And he said, what do you think the disease is? And I said, it's a compulsion to drink. And he said, no. And I said, but that's how it manifests itself. I mean, if I'm sitting there and a bottle is sitting there, I drink it. And he's going, what do You think the basis of that is? And I Said, I like to drink And he Said, no He Said, the basis of that Is selfishness and self-centeredness and I'm going they don't connect right wait a minute now you got some kind of Zen thing in the middle of it and and I am trying to figure out how those you know I'm trying to connect the dots there and I don't know why selfishness and self-centredness make me drink but they do. And he said, now here's the curiosity, Bob. These manifestations of self which defeated us, and he said you were defeated, weren't you? I mean, God keep that clear. The things that defeated you were manifestations of itself, selfishness, dishonesty, resentment, fear. and if you practice not avoidance but overcoming those things or managing those things or running those through the process two things will happen you won't drink anymore and more importantly you won' t want to drink anymore and I'm going that's inconceivable those things don't make sense and I don't know how Bill Wilson came up with this or maybe inherited from the Oxford group or maybe inherited from the Washingtonians or whatever but somehow they got this idea that if we deal with these manifestations as self the desire to drink goes away so how do I do that well first of all it's curious and there's this whole thing in there about the actor. And most people don't catch it, and I didn't early on. And it talks about this actor that's trying to direct the whole show and the scenery and the players and all the rest of this, and I'm going, yeah, so what's your point? And I always thought I was pretty sharp. I mean, I thought I Was pretty smart, and I Didn't catch It. And my sponsor said, he's an actor, and I went, right. And he said, he's not the director. Oh. Yeah, right, right Well, I think a light just went on. So and it says that the net result of that is that he irritates all those people around him and they retaliate seemingly without what? Provocation. Yeah, he's been provoking the hell out of these people. Right? And he's going, why are you mad? And you go, because I now won't say it. But see, the people are like a tornado that goes through other people's lives trying to manage everybody. And if everybody just do what they want to, we want them to do it. Everything would be fine. And it's all based on what can you do for me. That's what it's about. Now what can I do for you? You want to have a good day sometime? Spend your whole day doing something for somebody else. If you don't believe that, go do it because you'll spend the whole day out of yourself and you'll get done with that day and you're going, boy, this has really been a nice day. This has been wonderful. Okay? And what you can learn from that, and certainly what I can learn from that is that if we go out with the intention of being of service to God and our fellows, that our lives will become much, much happier than they ever were when we were running around concerned about what do we get now. So it's been our habit to take new people through that step by getting them on their knees and holding hands with them. Now, there was a guy in Denver, you may remember his name is Bill Saul, was a bartender out on the east side. Denver on the west side, out on East Colfax is a pretty tough area. Bill Saul was a light heavyweight gold gloves champion. and he used to beat people senseless because he didn't have anything else to do and he was a bartender at one of the real dives out on East Colfax and he came to Alcoholics Anonymous nobody would sponsor him in fact they were afraid to go near him because he'd just go off and people were terrified of him and one day I was at a meeting and I was talking to this guy named Tom and I said, who is that? And he said, you don't know him? And I said no. And he says, that's Bill Saul. And I said, why doesn't anybody talk to him? And they went, well you don' t know about him. And I said, well what's that got to do with it? And he said he just you know the guy is a guy is uh let's stick a dynamite nobody wants to go near him he the guy could kill you um and so i walked up to him and i said hi bill how you doing he said fine bob and i did when are you going to pull your head out of your butt And you want to see people running in the other direction? Do you know that we're protected? Do you Know That? We don't have to be afraid of that. See, he knew what the truth is and wondered why nobody talked to him. And he said, I don't know how to do it. Okay? So the reason why I bring him up was he was tough, and that was his stocking trade. and so when he got around to the third step i had him i said we're going to have another guy that's in the same position that you're in in the steps here and all three of us are going to get down and do the stay the third set prayer together and he said okay and this guy was really wimpy in fact he was kind of effeminate and so i made bill get down on his knees and hold hands with this guy just to see if he was willing. That's kind of mean, isn't it? He's still sober today. It just doesn't have anything to do with me. It has to do with his willingness to engage in the process. We are really... Do you know that we're irrelevant to that other than being clear that other people getting sober has to deal with them and doesn't even have to do with us. It has a lot to do to do with whether we know the message or not, okay? And just knowing the message is no great deal. I mean, all you have to do is involve yourself in the process and remember what you did. So the real thing that makes a difference is whether they're willing and whether they are inspired or desperate enough to go through this process. It's our habit to tell people precisely what that third step prayer means. Tell them what the deal is before it. Do you know, never do this with anybody that you haven't told all this to before you start. If you're ever going to sponsor anybody, before you starts, tell them what these steps are and go through each one of them. It takes like 30 minutes. And you just say, I need your ear for 30 minutes, sit down, I'm going to tell you what the deals is and then you tell me if you want to do it. and then you sit down and you describe everything you're going to ask them to do in each one of these steps and the reason why you do that is so they can't at some later point say you never said anything about doing this because that leaves the door open and when you tell them about this process and what it's going to require them to do precisely, explicitly then you say do you want to do that and I'm not talking about doing the first three or the next four or anything else. I'm talking about twelve. One, two, twelve. And I need to know if you're willing to fight your way through that whole process because I can't help you if you don't. If you're not. Okay? Don't be afraid to tell people the truth. Don't being afraid to tell people what, well, we don't talk about God here. Really? What do you call your meeting? it ain't Alcoholics Anonymous. You know, if you've only got three steps in your program, don't call it AlcoholicsAnonymous either. Call it the Richmond Sobriety Association. You just... You know AA has 12 steps in it and you have to tell people up front this is what I'm going to ask you to do are you willing to do that? And that's what you do. Okay? The business about we thought well before making this decision and knowing that we could at last abandon ourselves utterly to him is one that probably bears some explanation. And so tell people what utterly means. That means wholly. That means completely. And so abandoning ourselves utterly to God is an interesting statement because abandoning ourself, which is what got us in trouble, selfishness, dishonesty, resentment, and fear, abandoning that whole idea about being self-centered. That's what this is about. It's about making a decision to live a spiritual life and tell people that's what the deal is. It's also important to tell them that there is no gap between three and four. And I would like there to, you know, I mean, at the end of that third step I was pretty exhausted spiritually. And I was hoping that Don would say, well, take three months off now. This has been rough on you, Bob. So you need a little breather and we'll get back to this when it feels right. What's the strongest statement in the book? Anybody know? With all the earnestness at our command. How many alcoholics do you see begging? With all the earnestess at our command, we beg of you to be fearless and thorough from the very start. And that means not only when you begin, but all the way through. So there is no gap. There is no cap anywhere. And if anybody is so imprecise or so foolish as to tell you that you can do this at your own speed, it's at your peril. How much do you want to get well? How much you want the nightmare to be over? We made a list of people, institutions and principles that we were angry at. It's a grudge list. We write the first column first, come back, write down this second column about how these people or people or institutions or principles offended us. And you know everybody goes oh now i'm going to tell the story don't bother just write down a phrase about how they offended us okay and then and then in the third column we write down how it affected us how it affected our self-esteem our security our ambitions our personal relations our sex relations in our pocketbook and so you know I a lot of people and actually the example does that and I'm going to tell you some things that I do but I do them for clarity because the first time I wrote it inventory I wrote down self-esteem security personal relations and then when I got to fifth stepping and I couldn't remember why okay so what I did then after that and what I still do today is I write down self-esteem because and I explain it and the only reason why I do that and if that is because I want to be clear when I get to the fifth step so I write the reasons why those things were affected okay and then in the fourth column where it says that we went back and we looked at each of these and we see where we're selfish dishonest self-seeking and frightened, if I'm not mistaken. Which is where you really see the truth. Now, people are terrified of seeing the truth about themselves because they already know it. You know, it's like avoiding a wart on your nose. It's just there. Okay? You want to get it taken off? People go, I know that stuff, I don't want to look at it. And it's just like, why not? well who is it Martin Luther King said there whoever it said the truth will set you free the truth we'll set you free you don't have to be you anymore wouldn't that be nice yeah because I think that's an area that I know I had a hard time that's when Joe came up with the words I am And that's what helped me. But the problem with that, it became ritualized. Right. Okay? But I know that you and Don are real clear on that. But, you know, if you could maybe give some examples or... Well, okay, I just went through an inventory. And one of the things, I was divorced about a year ago. And it's just awful experience. One of the thing in there was my wife meets me with... indifference and content and how does that affect my self-esteem Jesus your self-steam so you feel about yourself okay affect my self-esteem because if my own wife thinks I'm contemptible I must really be a piece okay how does it affect my security yeah I mean my marriage was in parallel I got three kids for God's sake my security was seriously threatened my ambitions you know my ambitions are I did I just like to be married with something gives a shit you know I make a joke about that I don't care if they don't love me I don' t care if the don't even like me I'd like them at least to be indifferent to me um and which is a joke i don't you know i'd i'd love to be married to somebody that cared and on some basis other than money yeah say i asked don about this and i said don when i wrote inventory i found out some awful things about how that marriage occurred and he said what were you trolling and i went what he said what were you troling and i said explain that and he said you don't think you're good enough for some woman to think youre okay so you were throwing some packaging out there what was it some window dressing okay And I said, money. And he said, that's what you caught. And when the money left, when I was sick for about a year and I went from earning a huge income to earning nothing at all, and instead of sort of battening down the hatches, what I was told is you may have to leave. And I was seriously, seriously ill at the time. and he said well bob that's what you caught and i don't want to catch any more of those okay i just don't i i couldn't experience this again i don' t have the strength to go through this again so um my ambition is to first of all my ambition is to be in a relationship. I don't care if the last two didn't work. My ambition is to find someone that I can spend the rest of my life with, and this flies in the face of that ambition. So my ambition was affected by what I did, and ultimately we see that we've been the captain of our own ship. God, I hope you see that. And that our problems we think are of our own making. Our problems are of our own thinking. If you're running around blaming other people, you've got a real problem with your perception because you're the one to put you there and if you can't see it, go looking a little harder. My personal relationships, one of the things that came out of that inventory was that I looked at all women as potential adversaries. Oh, my. I just cut more than half the world's population right out of my life. Okay? And my experience was adversarial with my ex-wife for almost 10 years, which almost killed me. Okay? You get in a relationship like that, you might as well just drink Drano because that's what it's doing to you. Okay? And what I did, and another thing that I found out in this inventory was that I had always clearly to other people in my group and everything said, I'm in that relationship because I want to protect my children and I want be with them. And it kills me, even though I have joint custody, to not be with my kids all the time. But what I found out was that my relationship after the divorce of my children because I didn't have the distraction of constantly looking at this thing that didn't work. My relationship became better with my kids today. I just have a wonderful relationship with my kid. But what I was doing was I was hiding a character defect, a fear of leaving, under a good intention. Do you see? where you camouflage character defects with good intentions. And so I said, no, I've got to stay here for the kids. Hell or high water, I have to do it. And I kept being told, get out of there, Bob, it's killing you. And I refused to go. And in fact, my ex-wife finally had to come in and said, I want a divorce. And believe me, the first thought in my mind is, thank you, God. it hurt my sex relations because you know i haven't even had a date since i've been divorced and the reason why is because i got to be clear about all this stuff i just i don't want to go in to some other relationship just to be in one and i don'T WANT TO GO INTO IT WITHOUT BEING CLEAR ABOUT WHAT THE TRUTH IS about relationships because there are many, many relationships that just work wonderfully. Did it hurt my pocketbook? Man. You know what? I've done that twice. I've had a serious self-worth twice in my life and I lost most of it both times. But now I'll just go out and do it again. okay so oh well that's why I write inventory okay because I want to know the truth I don't like any of this stuff I don' t I mean I don''t like see that because what it is is it means that I'm operating on on some sort of basis that is not the truth and and I want operate in the truth then I want to operate with clarity and what writing inventories about is challenging your beliefs. Now, I'll tell you something. You know about how to inventory. I'm sure almost all of you, except someone who is really new, knows how to write about people, okay? People you just write down why you're mad at them or what they did to you and then what it affected and then you go back through selfish dishonest self-seeking and pride. When I went back through that about my wife, my ex-wife incidentally, I was selfish because I wanted to stay in comfort of a relationship that was uncomfortable which is this just idiotic paradox okay uh i was dishonest i was dishonest to believe that i was there for the right reasons and i wasn't i was self-seeking i can't remember what i wrote in that um I was self-seeking. Part of that was because I didn't want to lose my assets again. And I was frightened to be by myself, okay? So people anyway know how to write inventory for the most part about people. Institutions, you can talk about things like schools or courts or whatever. they're pretty easy to write about. Now, let's talk about principles. What are principles? Well, that is a principle. Well, here. Our principles are the road signs to our life. They're what we believe. It's what we operate by. Whether you know it or not and whether you've ever looked at it or not, you act by a set of beliefs which are the principles that guide you. All right? We make decisions based on what we believe and those beliefs that guide us are our principles. Now, some of those are really faulty. And so someone challenged me one time to write an inventory about principles and some lights went on for me. and they said, you have beliefs, Bob, that are counterproductive, that are self-defeating. And I want you to look at those. And so I wrote down what I believed. And one of the things, and just to sort of trailer it onto what I was talking about inventory, one of my beliefs was that no woman would be interested in me based on who I am. So I have to put window dressing on it to attract them, right? Which is my value to other people, women, in relationships is how much money I make. Okay? I don't want somebody like that. I stopped trolling. I did. I'm real careful about how I present myself to people. Real careful. And, you know, one of the problems that we have is we go way past the norm. Once we react, the pendulum swings way too far. And so we need to be careful about how we do that. So I believe that my real value to other people wasn't me or what I believe or what I represent or whatever the connection was. But it was about how much money I made, okay? I choose not to believe that. And I took it through the inventory. And that does affect my self-esteem because it means that by myself I'm worthless, okay. And it affects my security because what if I don't have money, nobody will come around. Or if I do get into a relationship about money and the money stops, the relationship is over. If you ever get in a relationship based on anything other than wanting to be with each other, you're setting up a recipe for disaster. If it's based on anything other than wanting to be with the other person, you're going to get disappointed because at some point that thing will go away. And frankly, women bargain with tools also. You may have noticed and so what the hell are you trolling well what i wanted to share is like bob had his self-esteem it's just i had my nobody would want me for me unless i gave him sex and so you know that's what we're talking about trolling and finally you know i hadn't realized until I made a decision with God's help, I couldn't get a man that was worth anything. And then when he didn't get sexed, then I found a man and we had great sex. So, I mean, it's... But that's the thing about it. Thank you for sharing. I can share things like that. My sponsor tells me that. Consider I haven't had a date for almost a year and he's going, well, I'm going to bed with my wife. and I'm sitting there going I don't want to hear this right at some point can I ask you an extension please how do like how do all these difficulties that they with relationships and then we do the four steps and try and make some adjustments and things like that go together with what we heard about earlier that we can be happy in just about any situation yes I'm always struggling with that you know I even got into AA for the wrong reason and just try and turn it around and try to be in AA and stay in AA for the right reason. And so, I mean, this applies, the whole stuff that was just applied to me with my relationship, you know, and I'm just really trying to be happy anyways and try to make it work or something like that. Here's the problem. If you, if you, and let's just say that you're out there trolling sex, okay, to attract someone. If you get in there and it doesn't work, the relationship's over if they lose interest, whatever. The risk is to just present yourself. Don't have any bait out there. You just say... See, we all seem to suffer from a lack of self-esteem And so we rarely think that we are sufficient by ourselves. So we're constantly dreaming up this window dressing and we'll dress up or smell good or, you know, all those things are fine but if it implies something that you're not at some point the truth will come out and then people will know that they've been handed a bill of goods and the whole thing will come crashing down and then the complaint is how could this have happened? It's the way you set it up. Let me hasten to say that sex is good and that it is a natural consequence of two people really liking each other but it should be the cart not the horse okay from my point of view right my name is Mike McAuliffe I think also it works the other way we don't see the person through them when we are we imagine them as something different we're not seeing them through yes yeah yep jesus i'm still struggling trying to get out of that it's uh well so principles um i've i've sponsored and i don't it's But one of my beliefs is men don't sponsor women. So I'm going along with that, and every once in a while some woman would come up and say, will you sponsor me? And I'd go, no. And one day I was sitting there and this woman came up and sponsored me. A woman came out and said, will YOU sponsor me ? And my intuition said, yes. Now, here's the problem. I'd been in this marriage and nothing had been going on for a long time and this was a very attractive woman. And I'm going, God, you've got a really funny sense of humor. And I am thinking the worst thing I can do is get hooked up with this woman. So I said, okay, let me tell you what the ground rules are just so we are both clear. Because I needed to be clear too. And I said here is what I am going to ask you to do and I described the 12 steps to her. And I said, and here's what our relationship is. And as soon as it changes from that, I become totally ineffective in helping you in any respect. And I will not do that. So no up front, here's the deal. And that was the deal Now, we got into the inventory and when we got to principles, I found out that a lot of women believe the same thing that I believed about money. they believe about sex, which is what Camille just said. And that is that unless they have something over and above to offer besides just them, that they are insufficient. And so I challenged her and several women since then to take a look at what their beliefs are about themselves. Now, I believed about myself, number one, that I had to have money to attract anybody. I believed that I was kind of a mongrel, really. You know, I was brought up in just despairing circumstances, living with foster homes and farms and all kinds of places. and absolutely felt that I had no value at all. As a consequence, I believed that I was probably a failure. I took all of those beliefs and there are two kinds of beliefs basically. One is that you develop over time and another one is that you inherit. Now, I can't tell you how many people that I've worked with who I get in the steps and they say, I have a little problem with concepts. And you go, why? And they go, well, I'm not very bright. I'm no kidding. And you goes, who told you that? And they say my dad or my mom or whatever. Or this kid was walking down the street or standing in the backyard or whatever and one of their parents came up and said, hey, stupid. and the kid believed he was stupid and still believes he's stupid and some of the brightest people I know think they're stupid and you take those beliefs which are so contrary to the circumstances of your life and you still believe them. Jesus, my IQ qualifies me for Mensa and people were telling me I was stupid. And I believed them. I thought it was just dumb. You know what? Think you're dumb, you act dumb. You become whatever it is somebody else tells you you are. That's why it's so important, so incredibly important to make the decisions that God allows us to make today about who we are, what we are who our friends are what our principles are because once we've done that, people can come up and call us stupid and you go, huh, interesting. Because you already know, okay? You can know who you are. So you challenge these beliefs. The ones that in my experience that are the most destructive are the ones that we inherited, that people told us about. If you start in this process of challenging what you believe. And you start with the premise of I know some things that I believe about myself which are self-defeating. You'll get a list. And then you take them through the process and you ask why they... These things are all self-destructive and you asked them why they affect your self-esteem. It's a no-brainer. They make me feel awful. They make me believe all these terrible things about myself. You know, don't let your past determine your future. I don't care what you did. If you're not doing it anymore, it's over. But people walk around with this sense of guilt and shame about all the things we did as alcoholics and we think we're still that person. And it's just unadulterated BS. we are not who we were we're who we're becoming so if you want to feel guilt and remorse and shame about everything that you did in the past please understand that God tells us through this book that no matter how far down the ladder we have gone we can see where our experience can benefit others and let me tell you so you know the thing I was most ashamed of I was sentenced to prison when I was 17 for assault with a deadly weapon, okay? I mean, I was the quintessential choir boy. And all of a sudden, I'm being sentenced to a penitentiary. And I'm thinking, how the hell would that ever help, right? You know what I do today? God has this enormous sense of humor, I have to tell you that. I provide training and therapy to inmates in the criminal justice system. Now, God's sense of humour is about therapists. I have some biases about therapists that I won't share with you. I think it's... I have a son that's a psychologist, and it, in my view... In my view, is a very inexact science. But the Colorado Department of Corrections asked me to get in that business after I had trained all their parole officers and everything in business skills. And so I today have doctors of psychology and licensed clinical social workers and professional counselors that work for me in my business. And I tell them when they come to work for me, I don't really believe in what you do. But that's a silly bias that I have, so don't be offended by it, and I won't. And so you go out and do the best you can, and we're going to go out there and provide the best service we can to these inmates. So today, about three nights a week, I wind up locked in a room with about 25 inmates. And every once in a while, they'll say, what the hell do you know about this? These are most of the people who suffer from what the psychologists call antisocial personality disorder. I went, you ought to go to an AA meeting. and uh and and my first response to that was it was out of my mouth before i understood i was saying it and i said hey i was sentenced to a penitentiary before you were born and so today it's really kind of funny because the word gets around among inmates and if somebody challenges me, it's generally an inmate that speaks up and they'll go, hey, he's cool, he is OG. That's prison slang. Actually, it's prison slang. It's almost a term of endearment, really. I mean, it is not pejorative. It is like he is one of us. OG means original gangster or old gangster. And it means this guy was in the system and understands the system before we even showed up. And so they'll say, well, he's OG, and then the inmates will listen to you. And so that whole business about having been sentenced to a prison when I was 17 years old has turned out to be an enormous benefit. And my experience, no matter how far down the ladder I've gone, can benefit others. And so what these inmates see is someone who has no trappings of being an inmate, who has apparently gotten out of the system, which incidentally between us is very sticky, and has gone on about his life and has become a success in business and has most of the things that every inmate wants. and I would have never believed that that experience would become useful to me or God. So that's what happens. So what I would ask you to do is to challenge your beliefs because that is the basic reason for inventory is to challenging what you believe. And you will find out in the middle of this even if you've been sober 30 years that you will still be challenging self-defeating beliefs and some of them that you inherited when you're children. You will do things for self-preservation as children that become ineffective when you grow up and then they become self- defeating and the same thing that saved your life when you were 12 years old is keeping you from being successful when you are 30. See? Anybody got any questions? Yeah. Hi. You said that no matter how far down the ladder you're going, I'm sure it's a chance to go to others, and I believe that. But it also says, I'm not sure if it's in the big book or if it went either way, but it says on the rest, I'm going to be coming home. Okay. But it says that we have gone the maybe last 10 or 15 years for you, and you don't have to go there. And so then it says in other places that you have to hit your bottom before you come into AA and really want it. And I don't know why I'm saying that. there's no way to stop unless you want to stop so the business about hitting the bottom is fine but you can bring the bottom up that's what they're saying and if that concept is troublesome to you the trick is are you ready are you desperate are you done and that that is any point you want it to be, okay? So some people may reach depths that are unthinkable. And other people don't. And it has a question about how much can you stand. And our circumstances will take us to a point where even though we haven't reached the bottom, where we feel there is no other alternative and that we finally have to throw ourselves at God's feet and go, I'm done. I can't do it. And that point is different for everybody. So here's the deal. People come in and they get caught up in all these questions. Okay? They're questions and then we get focused on the questions. And the real truth about this is to hell with the questions, okay? Well, just go do what it says. And the questions will be answered or they'll become irrelevant. So don't worry about how to get there because God's going to do it. And see, if you think that you can get sober by just deciding without God's help that you're going to just go manage this as an act of the will, you probably won't do it If you're drunk, you won't doing it. so at some point this is a tendency especially new people in the program there's a whole tendency here to refocus you'll be looking right at the problem and you'll talk about something over here well, why don't you stop drinking you know my dog has rabies Yeah, but you're dying from drinking. Well, you ought to see what my wife did to the car. The car is irrelevant. If you don't stop drinking, you're going to be dead. I'm having trouble at work. Okay? That's refocusing. There's an enormous amount of that with new people in Alcoholics Anonymous is that they avoid the primary issue. And the primary issue is, how the hell are you going to keep living? Your alcoholism's killing you and you're looking in the other direction. So we do that sometimes by asking questions about, but how does that work? I don't know, it just works. So that's what my sponsor told me when I asked him to be my sponsor. I started asking him those questions and he asked me about what I had done and I told him I'd gone to meetings and was a nice guy and all that stuff and he said you did everything but follow the directions and once I followed the directions all that stuff really fell into irrelevancy it just didn't make any sense anymore the questions weren't even pertinent so So, you have to have a very narrow focus here initially. And the focus is I don't know how to solve this problem so I'm going to take direction and I'm not going to mess with the direction. I will not under any circumstances practice license, political license or poetic license or whatever with the directions. I will just follow the directions and what we each could do for ourselves that we would each benefit by is if you've never done it to just dogmatically go through the process without lending any poetic license to anything the first time and see what happens and see if your life changes and see if the questions don't go away and see si you don't have a new concept about life in general and where you belong in it and how life works. One of the promises in that book is that we'll learn how life works, okay? I'm not particularly proud of the way it works. I mean, I'm no real happy with the way it works sometimes, but it is what it is. So, yeah. I want to share with the group also is that I was in the middle of a doctorate program and i did inventory with bob and i told him i said i'm stupid i said that was my belief system who said i was stupid he said well they sent you into a doctorate program and i said yeah but you don't understand they just did because they felt sorry for me blah blah blah you know and so then he said what's the evidence you know and i came up with all the stuff but to make a long story short is that i did finally graduate but the thing is that i don't feel stupid today but i had to walk through hell to get it and just because you feel that way doesn't mean that it's gonna be easy you gotta walk through the fire and uh you know bob's had to walks through the fireplace a lot of people have this illusion that if you do all this it's going to be easy and it's not but god's there to help you and he really holds your hand but i have to face out with one of my demons and I can't say that anymore. I think it sometimes, but I can' t. You know, when I look at the evidence, it's gone. It's just like drinking. You know? I'm not a drunk, but I ca' n't say tha' because I had to look at the evidence. I used to hear this in my head because I could hear him say, well, what's the evidence? Anyway, I did not care that much. We'll believe things in the face of overwhelming information to the contrary. Right? I don't know how we pull that off. i mean we are we are ignoring the obvious and we will snatch defeat from the certain hands of victory my name is i have an area i'm an alcoholic in response to what mr nate when he was saying about questions and the bottom and how low it's got to go i didn't lose anything on the outside when i got here because i had said enough with enough on the inside and that was the bottom i needed to hit i had a sponsor who was homeless and not have good rehab you know on the streets all that stuff and i thought maybe i can't say because i didn't go there and she told me that i could get off this descent anytime i wanted to as long as i would be done and not looking And I was great, and she told me that because I might not have stayed. And, you know, I did my investigation, and it wasn't what it was. But it was just, I took the direction. I didn't understand it. And she said, I don't have another question. I had a lot of questions. I still do. Good. I got a question. Another one. You know. But I asked her, and he answered them. And my question is the same as time has gone on. I just wanted all this information. When I found out the information isn't as important as what I'm doing with my kids and what actions I would take, that's when the questions came because I had no understanding about what I was doing and I just want to know how can I solve it. So my questions came from that point on. Thank you. Do you know that people are afraid to ask questions because they're afraid they'll look stupid? Do you want to see that? Do you not know what the truth is? If you don't ask questions, you look stupid. Okay? Yeah, nobody looks stupid anyway. I mean, but people go, Jesus, I'll open my mouth and I'll stick my foot in it. Well, if you don' t open your mouth, how are you going to find out? Okay? There are no stupid questions in AA. And if you're... I challenge the hell out of my sponsor in this book. I have challenged everything in there. You take something like at some point in the past we made a decision based on self which later put us in a position to be hurt, right? And I'm sitting there going, I don't think so. And I was always asked to challenge that. So I did. And I'd get hurt and then I had to go back and see where I made a position based on myself which placed me in that position. It's infallible. Okay? All that stuff. we'll talk aren't we breaking for lunch see you this afternoon