Steps 8 and 9 – Sandy B. – Saturday Morning Live – 1994

There we go. Well, good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Saturday morning live group of Alcoholics Anonymous. My name is Sandy Beach, and I'm an alcoholic. How are you all doing? It's customary to start our meetings with a preamble. Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strengths, and hope with each other that they may solve their common problems and help others to recover from alcoholism. The only requirement for membership is the desire to stop drinking. There are no dues or fees for AA membership. We're self-supporting through our own contributions. AA is not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, organization, or institution. It does not wish to engage in any controversy. It neither endorses nor opposes any causes. Our primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety. On step number nine. Today, three more weeks, we'll get to 12, and then we'll have the traditions, and then we're adding, I want everybody to be thinking about this, we're going to try it on one trial basis, right after the traditions, and before we start the history of AA, we're going to have a week of questions. And there'll be a basket in the back, and if you've always had a question about AA, about a certain principle in the steps or whatever, then you can put your name in the basket, draw them out here, and we'll just spend a whole hour answering questions. And we're just going to see. If it's a bomb, then we'll do it once, and that'll be the end of that. But people have asked about it, and we said, well, we'll give it a try, and if it fails, why, we won't do it. If it's fun, then we'll leave it in there. So be thinking about that. We're on step nine today, which is made a list of corrections. Made direct amends. Most of such people, wherever possible, except when to do so, would injure them or others. And that's the step we're going to talk about, which is the amends step in our program. But before we get there, there's always new people here, and I want to make a few comments about the steps in general, and then sort of lead up to step nine. If you are new, let me just say this. The 12 steps, that's what AA is. If somebody says, well, what is AA? It's the 12 steps. That is what individuals... Individual members of Alcoholics Anonymous do in order to get happy and sober. And notice that I said in order to get happy and sober. And you have to get both. It's impossible to just stay miserable and sober for any extended period of time. That's what going on the wagon was. You just don't drink, and you hold your breath and grit your teeth, and you walk along just not drinking. And all you can think about is what a great... ...sacrifice you're making every day, and it's Saturday, and I'm not drinking. I don't know about you, but that's going to be hard to do for 50 years. You know what I'm saying? So, the answer is you have to get happy with not drinking. Now, that is what the steps are designed to do, is to give us... And anybody who's been here a while will start telling you, yeah, I sort of got free from all that thinking about drinking, and I go through life... ...and I go through life... ...a day at a time. It's not even a problem. And that is what the steps are designed to do, is to enable us to get happy and sober. Now, in the beginning, granted, you have to just not drink, and it may be tough, and you're just... But the point is we're going to these meetings, and we start working these steps, and they are designed precisely to do that, to enable us to become happily and usefully whole. The second thing I would say about the steps, if you are new, is, and I always like to make this point, they don't look like they should work. That's very important to understand, because when you arrive here, you arrive with your intellectual self in charge, and you are used to problem solving. And so when you find out that you're an alcoholic, and you finally accept that, then you want to fix it. I mean, that's the natural human tendency. Well, what do you do about being an alcoholic? And then you come back. You come in here, and we say, oh, you know what you do? You surrender. And you go, huh? Well, what else do you do? Well, you don't do anything else about that. You start doing other things. And so it's just so confusing that we always go out of our way to say it doesn't look like it should work. But it does. It's not where you understand alcoholism. We don't teach you very much about alcoholism. You already know what it feels like to be an alcoholic. And so we work on a spiritual program, and you get the gift of sobriety. It is just a gift. And so when you go to tell people about AA, they will come up to you, and maybe you've been sober three or four months, and they'll go, Mary, you look wonderful. What is AA? And you'll start explaining it to them, and they'll just give you a blank look because you look so happy, and your life is changing, and you explain to them, and the way I get this happy is I go to my home group every Thursday night in a church basement, and there's 20 of us, and we sit around a table, and one of them is a leader, and they come up with a topic like resentment, and we all get to talk about it, and then we go home. And that's why I'm so happy. And people are going to say the same thing that we're saying now. It doesn't look like it should work. But it does. So you have to experience it. And of course, we always say, drinking didn't look like it should work. Does it really? Even after all the drinking you've been doing, does it still look like it should work? Do you ever have a new person who's never had a drink, and they don't know how to dance, and you say, would you like to know how to dance? Drink this. And they go, are you telling me if I drink this, I'll know how to dance? Yes. Yeah, I'm telling you that. I can guarantee you'll know how to dance if you drink this. And you'll be able to get a lot of resistance. from that person, right? How could a glass of something that smells like motor oil show me how to dance? It doesn't make any sense. Hey, just take my word. If you drink that, you're going to be out there. And if they never drink it, they could be doubting you to this day. What a preposterous statement that if you drink that, you'll know how to dance. And you may feel the same way about the steps. When you come in, you have your own problems, they're all very pressing problems, they're worrying you, you're filled with anxiety, you're not drinking anymore, so you have no place to get any relief from your problems. And you know exactly what they are, and you know what it would take to solve those problems. And someone says, welcome to AA, the solution to your problems are these 12 steps. So you run home and you read them, and you can tell from reading them, they're not the solution to your problems. I remember looking at it, there was no $2,000 loan in there. And I was looking for that, and there was no woman walking in the door, that wasn't in the steps anywhere. And I could tell from looking at them that they had no connection to the reality of my life that might be nice to do someday after you get your life straightened out and get the pressure off. So we always say this up front, those of you that are new, what it requires is that you just accept them and take our word for them, that this indeed is going to be the answer for the rest of your life. You're going to find this. And that's because this is a spiritual program. And we're not interested in answers. We're interested in power. Life had overpowered you. When we say in our first step that we were powerless over alcohol, that's the heart of a spiritual program. We got overpowered by alcohol. Everything was too much for us. It wasn't that we weren't smart. It wasn't that we didn't know what to do or various things. We just got bowled over. Things we just couldn't handle them because they were too much. That's why we went to alcohol, for relief. And we went and got the power. And we got the ability to meet our own fears and to calm ourselves down and the ability to sleep and the ability to make a decision. We got so frightened and frustrated sometimes we couldn't make a decision. And just be going, I don't know which way to go. Many of us had that. That's all I remembered during the whole drinking life was, I don't know which way to go. I don't know what to do. And so what was the answer to that problem? Go get a drink. That was the answer. I can't make up my mind what to do. I just don't know what's going on. Run out in the kitchen. I'll have the answer soon. Down it went. Down it went. Down it went. Down it went. Down it went. Down it went. Down it went. And then it calmed everything down and all of a sudden I was able to think. I could be a total person. And so I needed the power of alcohol in order to get me through this world. So we're coming in here and we find out in our first step that we're powerless over alcohol so the whole spiritual answer is power. That's what all the steps are designed for is to get us access to a power so that we can get through this world. So that we can get through this world. So that we can get through this world. So that we can get through this world. that we will then be able to move through life in a happy and comfortable fashion and nothing will be too much for us. That's sort of the AA program in a nutshell. So as you can see, it's quite different from your intellectual approach to life, which we all have, where we're going to figure it out, we're going to get the answers, and we come in here and the answer is power. So it starts out by saying we're powerless over alcohol and our lives have become unmanageable and that's the first step. And if you go along with that, what you have said is, whether you admitted it or not or whether you realize it or not, unless there's a power to take care of me being powerless, I'm never going to make it. That's what that first step says. It says you're powerless. It doesn't say that you're ignorant about alcohol. If somebody could just teach you something, then you'd be out of here. You know what I'm saying? I remember trying to get the answers so I could get the answers. So I could get out of here. Because I didn't want to stay because I knew if you stayed too long, you'd stay forever. Because I heard people in here, they said, well, I'm celebrating 10 years. And I went, 10 years? You haven't got it yet? I mean, I remember just going, I'm going to be out of here in a month. What are you doing here in 10 years? I'm just waiting to get this answer and I'm out of here. I was always out of here. I don't know about you all, but everywhere I went, I was there. I was there temporarily. Never, I was never anywhere permanently. It was like, I'm here, but I'm out of here. You know, and that was, I reserved the right to be out of here. So it isn't an answer. You don't really learn anything in AA. This is a spiritual program, so everything is backwards. So when I say you don't learn anything, well, what do you do here? You know what you do? You unlearn things. That's what you do. You get rid of wrong information. Our whole program is getting rid of things. Old ideas availed us nothing. So we've got to get rid of old ideas. And this whole thing, as we move through the program, you're going to find that a spiritual program is getting rid of those parts of ourselves that are causing problems. Character defects, resentments, anger. We're talking about getting rid of, getting rid of. And as we do that, our burden in life becomes lighter and lighter and lighter. Sobriety is like a balloon ride. Louie, a balloon ride. I remember you going on one once. If you want a better view, you throw things overboard. And then it goes higher. And you can see. Or you can use the power to generate more heat to go higher. But the whole point is, if you get rid of ballast, if you get rid of excess baggage, you immediately rise. And that is what sobriety is like. First, we get rid of alcohol. And then as time goes on, we get rid of all other things that are blocking us from a higher power. So that's why this is so different from our previous way of solving problems. In the AA program, we don't solve problems. They never get solved. Solved means you figure them out. But in sobriety, when we work this program, problems get removed. They just get lifted out. Never having been figured out. And I remember having a discussion with a guy one time, and he said, I'm not sure if I want to get rid of a problem until I figure it out. Does anybody's ego, does anybody relate to that? You have all these horrible problems and you'd like to get rid of them, but you don't want to let them go until you figure them out. My friend Clancy talks about that. The guy on the Titanic, and he won't get in the lifeboat and pull away, and he just stands there and the ship's going down. He says, I'm not getting off this baby until I figure out what caused this accident. That's the way we are a lot of times. We want to figure things out rather than simply have them taken away. And so our human ego gets in the way of spiritual progress very often along the way. We're given a free gift of something and we say, I don't want to do that until I figure it out. And so as sobriety goes along, we learn how to accept much faster than the requirement to figure things out. That's our old intellect saying, you've got to figure things out in order to make some progress. Well, I don't have any more of an idea today why I'm an alcoholic than I do the day I came in here in 1964, and I'm not remotely interested. I could care less because it has no value in knowing. I might be able to go on a talk show if I knew why, but it has no value in staying sober, knowing why I became an alcoholic. All I have to do is work on having a power come into my life that removes my alcoholism and I'm home free. And so I've learned that that is the answer we're working on here rather than figuring anything out. And it's a great freedom to not have to figure everything out that we can simply, immediately accept something and work to have it removed and move on free as a bird. And this is a tremendous new way of life. But it all starts with admitting you're powerless. And if you don't admit that you're 100% powerless, you won't get the rest of the program, which is why our first step is so important. The only step we take 100%, the only one we can do 100% is the first step. The first step is to be able to You have to totally understand that we're powerless over alcohol with no reservation. You can't be almost powerless. I'm almost like these other people, but my case is a little different. You see, there were certain circumstances that led to my drinking. And this makes me a little bit different from these people, so I'll be working the steps a little different than the other people. And I'll be modifying some of this stuff and I'll be doing this. And boy, I'll tell you, you are signing a death warrant when you start screwing around like that. That is suicide to start messing around with almost powerless because I'm going to tell you something. You almost need the steps. You almost get a sponsor. You almost get a home group. You almost work the program and you almost get sober. And almost getting sober is, as we said last week, like almost having a parachute. You know what I'm saying? You get thrown out of the plane. And you say, you know, I almost took a damn chute. And the other guy said, no, I didn't even think about it. Well, I'll tell you, you're both in the same boat. Almost. Getting a chute is of no value whatsoever. So almost being powerless over alcohol. So that's why it has to be worked 100%. It doesn't open the door to this need for a higher power. And the reason that we're able to accept, the higher power in our lives, which this whole program is based on, is not because someone convinces us that there is a higher power. AA does not attempt in any fashion to convince anybody of God. We don't try to prove the existence of God. We don't do any of that. Our specialty is to convince you of the need for God. And if you accept in your life that you are in a situation where the only answer is a higher power, if you can open your heart to that degree, the higher power will be there. That's all that is required. All we have to do is be totally open to the idea. And then it'll be up to you to explain what this higher power is. So in AA, we talk about higher power as you understand Him. God as you understand Him. So this thing becomes a very personal experience, but it all begins with you getting totally honest and admitting that you're powerless, and unless there is something else other than you, you're not going to make it. And if you can get that open by changing your mind in the second step about a higher power, and then deciding that this has to be the top priority. If our number one problem is powerless, then our number one priority should be access to a power. So that's what step three made a decision to turn our life over. And then the rest of the steps are, having access to this power. And like we say every week, you don't have to go anywhere to find this higher power. It's already inside of you. But you have, through free will, the power to block out a higher power. You can become so totally self-centered, which all of us did, that there is no evidence of any higher power anywhere in your life. You hear about it, but you've never experienced it. So as far as you're concerned, all the rest of people are lying. There's no such thing as a higher power. I never saw any evidence of a higher power. And this is true. This is absolutely true. You wouldn't be lying if you said, I don't believe in God. I never saw any evidence of anything. All I see are people killing each other, and all that. And then you'd be telling the truth. But what we find out is, once we become open-minded and start removing character defect blockages to a higher power, that this power comes rushing in, and we have a whole different attitude and a whole different outlook on life. And that's all we're talking about. The proof of a higher power is the unexplainable change in personality that occurs in AA members. That's the proof of a higher power. There's no other explanation for someone being so happy with life because circumstances have not changed at all. All they've done is become open to allowing something to come into their lives, and then they start blossoming and walking around. So when we talk about spiritual awakening, we're talking about a personality change where suddenly you're walking around positive, and you're talking in a happy fashion, and you're interested in life. That's the rewards of a higher power. Now, you may call that higher power your group. You may say, well, that's happening because, I go to my AA meeting, and so it's the power of that group. That's fine. That can be your definition of a higher power. That's as far as it has to go. In reality, this is what most of us did. But as the years went by, and we continued to work the steps, we started going, I think there's something beyond the group. And maybe it's AA as a whole. And then as more time goes on, you start realizing, maybe it's beyond that. And we start establishing a relationship with something very personal that is indeed much more infinite and bigger and powerful than AA itself. But that's a very personal journey, and you will have your own experience with it if you follow directions. And that's all the steps are, are a game plan for living which you can follow. So we've been talking about removing blockages and inventorying them in four and five and sharing them with another human being and then becoming willing to get these blockages out of the way. And then we get into eight and nine where we are now. And we're saying, while we have made progress in understanding that we need to get rid of resentments, we need to get rid of fear, we need to ask that all these be lifted out, there's still a problem in having a happy sobriety and living in the tenth step one day at a time, which is what we'll get to next week, next week, next day at a time step. And what the problem is, is the past. Even though we understand the program, even though we're now working on these character defects to open up a channel and so on down, there's a burden that we're dragging around that makes it difficult to live one day at a time. And as we talked about last week, it's very difficult to live on March 5th, 1994. Just stay in March, March 5th, 1994 and drag your actions of the 80s with you. You know, all the stuff that you did over those drinking years and maybe even before that are filed in your memory and you're walking along on March 5th, 1994 hoping you never run into Fred Jones. You know what I'm talking about? You're happy going down the street and the guy that looks like Fred Jones is walking down the other side and you go, pew! You're into the, there's a drugstore in there. Is he gone? Well, maybe there's a whole list of people that you really hope you don't run into today. Former bosses, wives, husbands, creditors, banks, the government, the FBI, the police, people whose cars you borrowed that they didn't know you were going to borrow and little things that have happened in the past. And so it's very, what we're saying is we have what we call the wreckage of the past and this wreckage exists in your head and since it exists in your head it's a threat to your sobriety. It's a threat to your serenity. It's there disturbing you a day at a time while you're trying to live a day at a time. And so steps eight and nine are designed to clear up to the best of our ability this wreckage of the past. Once we do that, we're going to have a lot of people We don't clear up the wreckage of the past going back 20 years again. Hopefully, if you're living the program right, we're working step 10 a day at a time and we're trying to clear up the wreckage of the day as it occurs. And so that's what we get into next week in the 10th step. So this is a one-time deal where we're going to go back and try and clear up this wreckage as far back as our memories will take us. And last week we talked about we made a list of all the people we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all. That's the beginning of this clearing up process. And we talked about harm. There's all kinds of harm. It's beyond punching somebody out or just owing them money. There's withholding affection. There's gossiping. There's keeping people off balance. Not really telling them the full truth. I mean, all of us are just experts at this. And never being cheerful. In other words, if you didn't have a good weekend, why should anybody else be happy? So you went at work, you just walk around sort of grimacing at people that are smiling and giving a strong signal. I would prefer if you don't smile near me, please, because I'm not happy and I don't think anybody else should be. So you can just see, you know, people go, well, I had a great weekend. Uh-huh, uh-huh. You know. Wonderful the way we spread all this. Around the world. So we were great creators of disharmony. And this is what the lesson that we learned out of this eighth step was, if we didn't like the world that we lived in, we created it. Our sullen nature causes other people to be sullen. And then we live in a sullen world. Everywhere we go, nobody's happy. That's because we're there. As soon as we leave, they all get happy again. And this wonderful, happy world out there that we don't have a clue about. And so we learn on a spiritual sense when we finally start getting willing to look at ourselves instead of blaming the world, we find out that we create this. Well, if we create it, then we can create a happy world. And that's what happens when we get in here. We learn how to live in harmony and how to bring joy where we go. And our whole attitude and outlook changes and the whole world changes. All of a sudden, people seem to straighten out. How many people have come to AA and said, you know, I came to AA and my family straightened out. How did that happen? You know what I'm saying? How could your family straighten out? They don't go to the meetings. Well, it's us. We just started bringing some joy back into the house and everybody responded to it and you found this great thing that you never knew existed. And so one of the great rewards of step eight is this understanding that we cause our little personal world to be as uncertain and dreary and threatening and intimidating as it was. And that now, once we've made these amends and then start working the rest of the program, we will find the world is a very happy place to live in and when the world is a happy place to live in, it's easy to not drink. Because why did we drink? Because things were so rotten and so threatening and so uncomfortable. That's why I drank because it was so hard to exist with all these people around that were so unpredictable and mean and uncertain and I was so uncomfortable. There was such a high level of anxiety. That's why I was drinking to change the world that I lived in. And it worked. So we all should recall that we have had personal experience that it's possible to change the world you live in with some power greater than yourself. In my case, it was vodka. Vodka could literally turn the world into a wonderful place that I love. It made people marvelous. Marvelous. I remember sometimes I'd go into a strange town and sit in a bar and I'd have four or five drinks and the bartender would come over and I'd be sobbing. Tears coming down. I'd say, what's the matter? I said, I'm overcome by the beauty of your customers. I'd never seen such magnificent people and buy them all a drink. I just, this is the most wonderful collection. Anybody ever, I'm not the only one who has some of this. It's the most wonderful. And three drinks later they're all assholes. Pushing them all out. There was that moment, you know, when this power came in and the way you saw everything, there was all these wonderful people. That's why you went back to that bar. They're the most wonderful people. It wasn't just the people were wonderful, it's that you saw everything as being wonderful. And if you see it that way, that's the way it is. That's the way it is. That's what the program is designed to do. It's only, it's a much better, higher power. And it comes in and you see the beauty in the world and it's very easy to get along and people respond to you that way because you're coming up going, hello. And all of a sudden you've just changed everything by changing ourselves. And so that's, the eighth step gives us a great deal of insight into ourselves and then we come to the ninth step where we're going to take this list of people and we're going to go make amends to them. And making amends is a fairly straightforward thing. If you owe somebody money, you call them up and you say, hi, I'm calling up because I owe you $350 and I've just gotten a job back. It's generally suggested that we just go right down and do something very unusual. A lot of people come up and they go, what should I say? You know, why am I making this phone call? I haven't called this person. What do you think I should say? And I remember hearing my sponsor tell me, why don't you try something very novel? The truth. The truth. Hello, I'm in AA. I'm an alcoholic. I am recovering. I owe you money. I am now going to meetings and I'm getting my life straightened out and I'm making amends and you're you're on my list of people who I want to straighten things out with. I have a job. I can pay you $5 this week and I can do that. That would be one approach. The other approach is my uncle died, left me a little money, thought I'd send you $5. Now we've got to live with another lie but you can have you can have your own, you know, even back in the big book written in 1939 Bill suggests when we go back and talk to predators that we tell them about our alcoholism and they're like, and that's back when the stigma was incredible. So anyway, it is suggested that that is one approach and so we have this list and we start down it. If we can find people that are nearby we immediately go do it. I've been to meetings where people say in the ninth step and boy, you will hear this. Trust me. You get to the ninth step and the leader or someone in the group who's been around a while will say, you don't want to rush into this step. I'm going to just tell you that ahead of time. The ninth step has this PR guy running around saying, don't rush into it. Well, you say don't rush into it to an alcoholic and I remember going, hey, that gives me about eight years right there and the reason they say that they take out of context something that's in the 12 and 12 where it says we may not want to rush into this comma we may want to wait several weeks or longer. Several weeks is the time frame and then he goes on to say we want to make sure that we're sober. We want to make sure we've got a handle on this sobriety but once you know that this is working then go ahead and start telling people in the office or wherever you're going to make these amends and just start doing it. And so somebody's saying, well, how soon should I do a ninth step? I would say several weeks. Do you have several weeks sobriety? Now, check with your sponsor but I'm just giving my own version and then I will also pass along when one of our co-founders did his ninth step. Just for historical perspective, Dr. Bob did his ninth step with four hours of sobriety. So I just passed that along. He performed surgery on that person and then went out and Bill didn't know where he was going to go. He spent the whole day going around Akron, Ohio making amends to people that he owed money to, told them he was an alcoholic, he was getting his life straightened out and when he came home that night he had relieved himself of a lot of burdens that were causing him to drink. Guilt, fear of running into people, his reputation in the town, all of those things and he straightened it all out in one afternoon. So there's tremendous value in this ninth step. The rest of the step is fairly straightforward. I'm going to make amends. If I don't know where the person is then I have it on my list that if I can find out where they are I will try and contact them sometimes done by phone. In person is the best and we have to be prepared to handle two types of situations. Both of them are equally dangerous. The first one is you come in and you say hi, I'm here I want to make an amend I owe you this money and I know it's from ten years ago but I remembered it and I'm an alcoholic and I'm an AA and so here's ten dollars and I'll be paying the rest of the rent and then the person says this is the most wonderful thing I've ever seen. Someone came back ten years later I can't believe you're the most honest person I've ever met. You're the most wonderful person. I tell you this is very dangerous for an alcoholic to get any sort of treatment like this because you come out of there with your head so big that you're liable to get drunk because you're close to sainthood and it looks like God wants you to have some wine. So this is that's a very dangerous situation and you may be prepared with some guy coming in here going I don't care if you pay me the money back you're still an asshole and that's the end of that. You know what I mean? So you got total rejection and you're paying it. Doesn't matter. The issue is closed. You have cleaned off your side of the street and you're totally free of this matter and you can walk on with great dignity. Which brings me to another thing the oath. There may be people that we can't find so we have them and if we run into them we'll try to do it. I remember a guy that I've been sober oh I guess 15 years and out of my memory bubble just came I'd totally forgotten about this guy and it was like I was lying in bed one night and all of a sudden this name Bill Marseille came into my head and I went Bill Marseille yeah and then I remembered I owed him he paid my rent one month for my wife and I down in Florida because I drunk all my money up and I promised I'd pay him the next payday but he got transferred and I got transferred too bad for him ha ha ha but I still remembered it all these years and as soon as I thought of it I said why the hell did I think of Bill Marseille now I gotta find him and I thought I don't have he'd be impossible to find put it out off to the side now I'm lying around you try to go to sleep what about Bill Marseille shut up will you you know why'd I have to think of that damn guy's name now I'm gonna have to find him so I screwed around for a couple months saying it's impossible to find him and finally I said alright I'm gonna try it was a Sunday afternoon I'm gonna try and if I can't find him hey that's it so I said how would I start so I said well you know he loves to ski there's a chance he would end up and he was from New England he could have gone back to Vermont we'll try Vermont if he's not there forget it so I call Vermont do you have a Liam Seymour say yes shit first shot he's there so I call him up hey Bill oh he was thrilled to hear from me and then I told him what I was doing and he didn't even remember it and I said well I'm in AA and I want to do this and that so I send it off to him turns out he owned a gift shop up near a ski resort and all those little gifts I'll tell you about a month later I got a package it must have been $300 worth of gifts in it from his little shop this is what I sell up here photographs of planes that we flew and a lot of old mementos and this and that so there was one where it just turned out to be quite a great experience there may be situations where if we make the amend it will cause harm to other people and there's a principle in the ninth step which says we cannot buy our own peace of mind at the expense of others so if you've been married you had an affair some years back and it's bugging you you feel guilty it just won't go away it's always on your mind you could tell your spouse and say you know I want to be totally honest now he or she feels terrible because now they're jealous they're all upset it's the worst thing in the world you're sleeping well at night and they're up all night you know what I'm saying so we transferred the problem over to this next thing and caused all kinds so it says except when to do so would injure them or others now talking to Derek on the way out here the other example in the big book is maybe we've stolen a little money down at work or borrowed a few pieces of equipment you know everybody else does it so we take a few things here and there a couple computers or whatever it might be and it's a burden we realize we've done this so we ought to go down and confess so we just decide to call the chief of police of Arlington County I'd like to turn myself in I ripped off a bunch of computers and so they come over and they have no choice but to put us in jail and now our family and children have no one bringing any income in and they're all starving to death and we're in jail and so that may be an extreme solution so we talk it over with our sponsor maybe there's another way of handling this and we come up maybe we can accumulate some money and then go see the employer and tell them what we're trying to do and etc but it's something we're willing to work out but we're not going to take a rash action that would immediately put somebody in jail and have other people suffering as a result of it now the last thing I'll say about this ninth step and I think this is real important then I'm going to read the promises and we'll wrap it up and that is Phil writes in here that we're not ashamed while we're doing this ninth step this is not an exercise in beating yourself on over the head because you've been such a bad person making an amend in a spiritual sense is a very dignified process we are doing the right thing we are setting a good example for the people for ourselves and for people around us and so it was suggested to me a long time ago that you don't go alone when you are doing a ninth step that if you have an appointment to go see a former employer and you're nervous about it and Mr. Brown is a very intimidating figure that when you get to the building you go up to the ninth floor wherever Mr. Brown's office is stop in the restroom on the way in and get the serenity prayer out read the serenity prayer and talk to your higher power and see if he's busy see if he'd like to accompany you on this little ninth step amend and when the secretary says yes just say would you tell Mr. Brown that we're here to see him and you and your higher power go in there and just with great dignity just say Mr. Brown I'm here and just I can't I'm here because I want to make an amend I am and just you're doing the right thing you're not some dirt ball who's worming in there this is a very wonderful thing that's happening this is a very important moment in human relations there aren't enough amends made in this planet if there were more made it would straighten things out and reduce tension you do a ninth step so treat it that way and don't go walking in there like oh I feel awful just be there you're not arrogant you're just trying to do the right thing and you're totally willing to have the situation turn out the way it's going to turn out in wrapping up we go in our big book we find that the promises of AA are in the ninth step if we are painstaking about this phase of our development we'll be amazed before we're halfway through we're going no matter how far down the scale we have gone we will see how our experience can benefit others that feeling of uselessness and self pity will disappear we will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows self seeking will slip away our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us we will intuitively know how to handle situations which used that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves are these extravagant promises we think not they are being fulfilled among us sometimes quickly sometimes slowly they will always materialize if we work for them and we got a wonderful way to wrap it up with the Lord's prayer for anybody who would care to join in how are we doing good father Lord in heaven hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not to temptation but deliver us from evil for thine is the kingdom the power and the glory forever and ever amen keep coming back it works if you work it out it works if you work it works it works it