Tenth Step Is the Cheat Sheet to the Fourth — Four Defects, Three Instincts, Seven Sheets of Paper – Bill D.
About This Speaker Tape
Bill D. shares his story at the Blue Chip Speakers Meeting at the NAVA Club with 45 years of sobriety, having gotten sober at 17 in Louisiana. He grew up the sixth of seven children in a Catholic family with a violently alcoholic father who was a wildcat oil man, creating a boom-or-bust childhood where the family alternated between wealth and getting clothes from the Salvation Army. He started drinking at 12, was drinking regularly by 14, and by 16 was spending every dime from his job on beer and cigarettes, sneaking home before breakfast since nobody did a bed count with seven kids.
His attempts at controlled drinking after his brother John got expelled from LSU law school for blackout drinking ended disastrously — a gun-and-fist fight during Mardi Gras, a police chase he outran, a fender-bender with an off-duty officer he then sued at the police station during shift change, and finally a 50-mph head-on collision that sent everyone to the hospital except him. His brother, 90 days sober at the time, listened to Bill pour out his entire drinking history during a two-hour blackout conversation and mailed it all back to him in a letter — Bill did not remember a word of it.
In early sobriety Bill only wanted his court slip signed, but a French old-timer named Ronnie gave him the "buy a fifth of Jack Daniels and drink one shot a day" test that cracked his denial — Bill knew he could never stop at one. At the World AA Convention in New Orleans, sitting alone in the top row of the Superdome ready to walk out and get drunk on five dollars, he threw open the door and his sponsor was standing right there among 50,000 people. His sponsor Mike taught him the tenth-step shortcut to the fourth step — four sheets of paper for selfishness, dishonesty, resentment, and fear, plus three for sex, security, and society — and Bill discovered that all his resentments and relationship failures fell into the same repeating patterns. His deepest insight was that his lifelong anger was really fear dressed up as something socially acceptable for a man, and that self-centered fear remains the root of his problem 45 years later.
Bill describes his daily maintenance today — gym four days a week, meetings two or three, three pages of the Big Book every day, ten minutes of quiet meditation, and a simple prayer for strength and guidance. He credits these habits with a life that includes 30 years of marriage, three children, no arrests, and a circle of friends from early sobriety who are all still sober. He closes with the story of his father, who had four years of sobriety then never drew another sober breath, telling Bill on his deathbed he was "just not ready yet" — and a man he took from detox to a meeting on Thanksgiving who was dead on the train tracks two weeks later.
Discussion
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