Steps 4 and 5 – Don’t Sweat the Summer Big Book Workshop – Part 3 of 6 – 2025 – Shannon B.

About This Speaker Tape

Don’t Sweat the Summer Big Book Workshop - 2025

A sudden sharp relapse after seven and a half years of sobriety serves as the catalyst for Shannon B.'s exploration of the 'bondage of self.' He describes the subtle whispering insanity that led him to take Percocet from a subordinate in a Manhattan office comparing the mental slip to the same logic used to justify a drink. Shannon dismantles the narrative of the 'spiritual hole' in his soul arguing that he wasn't spiritually sick but trapped in a mental construct. Through a rigorous Fourth Step inventory he confronts the wreckage of abandonment—his father's absence and his own failure as a father to his son—and the generational curses of abuse and trauma. He maps the shift from viewing his mother as a failure for 'allowing' abuse to seeing her as a traumatized child herself. The talk culminates in the realization that the inventory is not a study of the true self but a dissection of the false self.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Introduction and lighthearted banter about the drive from Illinois.
• 4:15 Discussion on the necessity of the Fourth Step and the danger of 'filling an internal vacancy' with external things.
• 8:30 The 'subtle insanity' story: Relapsing on Percocet in a Wall Street office after 7.5 years sober.
• 13:45 Analysis of the Third Step prayer and the 'bondage of self' as a mental construct.
• 18:20 The 'master list' process and the distraction of painting the apartment (Laughter).
• 24:10 The realization that he is not 'spiritually sick' but suffering from a mental narrative.
• 31:00 Step 4/5: Confronting the resentment toward his father and the discovery of his own abandonment of his son.
• 38:45 Reframing the resentment toward his mother through the lens of her own childhood trauma.
• 44:10 The distinction between innate fear (the mama bear) and the egoic 'fear' mentioned in the Big Book.
• 52:00 Discussion on 'conduct' and how resentment toward his ex-wife affects his relationship with his daughter.
• 58:30 Closing thoughts on breaking generational curses and the inventory of the 'false self'.