The Fearless Moral Inventory – 12 Steps by Sandy B – Part 2 of 3 – Local AA Speakers

My name is Sandy, and I'm an alcoholic. good to see everybody here we're preamble to get the meeting started Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength and hope with each other that they may solve their common problem 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 sex, denomination, politics, organization or institution does not wish to engage in any controversy neither endorses nor opposes any causes. Our primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety. And for the benefit of anybody new, that is our preamble briefly describes AA and what everybody is doing here. I like to think of it that we're able to do something as a group that none of us was able to do alone and we sure as hell tried and especially after we got to AA or heard about alcoholism and figured out we were an alcoholic, a whole bunch of us said, great, I'm so glad to know that. Now I can stay sober on my own. And that's what alcoholism is all about. Knowing everything you know, you still can't stay sober because our problem is powerlessness and we need each other and that in turn gets us on the path towards sobriety and if you're new we just urge you to stick around we have about 125 meetings a day in the Washington area so there's a lot of groups and things ought to work out good on steps four five and six in setting the stage for that because I know every week we have new people that are here and you go launching into a talk about a fearless moral inventory and the average drunk is going to pack his bag and turn around and walk out the door and claim that he made a horrible mistake and got in the wrong place obviously, because it didn't occur to him when he got out of bed this morning that he ought to spend Saturday taking a fearless moral inventory. Hey, maybe I'll go to a ball game or take our fearless moral inventory and inventory won out. That doesn't happen very often, and so you may wonder if you knew what everybody's doing in here talking about such things as inventories and spiritual growth and topics that didn't occur too often at bars. I don't remember any of them, but I don' t remember any other conversations either, so that doesn't say too much. What happened was we as alcoholics got confronted with a problem and the problem was our drinking. Each one of us has our own story, but we suddenly realized that our drinking was going to kill us. And as this set in, some of us decided to do something about it. We said, gee whiz, should I keep drinking and die or do something? And part of us said, maybe we ought to do something. You know what I mean? But it was a close vote. It was really close. and so we had help of people around us cops and bosses and wives and husbands and they're trying to help us with this tough decision and we end up in AA meetings we end somehow and then we end in these rooms and we start moving along towards doing something about not dying from toothache and as our brain clears up and we start getting the picture of what's going on, we immediately look for an alternative. That happens to a lot of us. We go, yes, I understand people are staying sober in AA by following the 12 steps, but there must be another way because this does not come natural to most of us I don't know about you all, but my game plan for living, I understood what the 12 Steps were all about. They involved getting your act together. they involve getting everything straightened out and your house in order in time to meet judgment day somewhere down the road but why do that today? I mean, that's something that could wait until the last week and since we're overachievers we can get it all wrapped up in a big hurry and arrive in just as good shape as somebody who's been screwing around with it for the last 30 years and in the meantime we would have more fun than the person who was messing around with this stuff because as you look at the steps in your early months at AA meetings and you see these charts on the wall and your mind wanders up there because the speaker's boring and you look over there at all this stuff it doesn't jump out at you as boy is this going to be fun I don't know about you but it didn't jump out at me, I just went oh boy isn't it too bad that's up there what saves us And the marvelous thing about us alcoholics is the illness doesn't go away. It just stays there, and we're always confronted with the fact that unless we get some change, we're going to die of drinking. It's always there. And to me, this is the extra gift that alcoholics have. To me, that's been the greatest gift I've been given was my weakness regarding alcohol because it forced me to go down a road that I never would have gone through choice, which knowing me, I don't think I would have. And so being powerless is why we're all here, and being powerless is the force that initially drives us into the steps. And then after we get rolled along on the program a little bit, we suddenly realize the rewards that we're getting out of doing these steps are of value also. So we find ourselves now motivated from both directions. We don't want to go back into the hell we came out of, and we don't wanna lose all the wonderful things that we have gotten by going down this road. And that is sort of the dilemma that we wrestled with in the first three steps when we ended up making a decision in the third step to go ahead with the whole program. Up till that point, we were going to meetings, not drinking, listening to our sponsor, following all the advice sort of enjoying the atmosphere of Alcoholics Anonymous but we hadn't really come to the grips of our own personal higher power and many of us resolved this debate in the following fashion and it is sometimes a real intellectual thing that you hear us drunks who are going to argue the existence of God and I've always found that kind of amusing. You get a couple martinis and you sit at the bar and debate whether there is a higher power or not, you know, and then you both pass out no one remembers who won the debate but it was a lot of fun to get into that kind of stuff and when you come into AA you suddenly here's the way it's presented you have a disease of alcoholism which is a fatal illness that's going to kill you the only thing that can save you is a higher power what you ought to do is change your mind about a higher power and you just sort of go god that doesn't leave much elbow room for discussion does it and when you're dying you don't want to get into a debate over the health that's about to be extended to you it's like if you've been out in the ocean floating around, no life preserver and somebody comes around and throws one over it is suggested that you grab it first and then get into the discussion of what's going on rather than ask the person who threw it what their background is you know and get all the qualifications first and then grab it so we end up grabbing a higher power not even knowing what it is you know what i'm saying many of us haven't progressed much beyond that definition of a higher tower you just go please whatever there is help and then you get help and you go my god i was wrong there was something and you spend the rest of your life Try and explain what it is. And that's what our third step says, God as we understood him. And I think we find all different definitions, but that's not the important part. The important part is to realize we can't do it alone, that this is going to involve some form of assistance. And we call that assistance a higher power, and we don't get into a semantical debate about what it ist. we found we were lost if you can't buy powerless then buy you are lost you didn't know where the hell you were you couldn't navigate through life but we were self-centered and we were convinced that we could if other people would just listen that we could figure it out and our self-centredness reminds me of learning of demanding of yourself in learning how to sail that you can sail without regard to where the wind is coming from. See, that's a self-centered. That's the way you just go yeah, I understand they have books on sailing and you're supposed to be able to, you know, if the wind has something to do with it. But I'm the type of sailor that just goes straight ahead. You know, I want to go from here to there and I'm just going to aim. So there you go and then you go and you bitch and complain. You've got to understand this whole thing is this force called the wind. Screw that! I'm going straight ahead, you know, and that's us power drivers. I want to hear about all this other stuff. And we go nowhere. We have to rely on what's been passed on by others and we have to relay on something other than ourselves. And for many of us, this is a great leap of faith, but it's necessary in order to get the program going. I relate to being lost as a great way of describing the dilemma of a spiritual program. just lost. There wasn't anything that I could start. There was no starting point, there was no ending point nothing made any sense and we're asked to believe that there is such a thing as a higher power and a group of principles that are universal, that work no matter what your background is and many of us go, oh I don't believe anything like that and I always go back to when I was only in it for a year but I remember that one year I was in this Boy Scouts and they were shown us the compass, and the lecture about the compass went, I know you're not going to believe this, but there's this big rock up at the North Pole, and if you hold this thing, the needle will point at it. Now, you've got to figure, somebody in the crowd is going, do you believe that? A big rock at the South Pole, they hand you this, and then they get you out in the woods, and they spin you around 12 times, and you're going to get out of there by following this little thing and when you think about it that's the most preposterous story that anybody ever made up and yet we all went out there got this thing and if you and you know it turned out to be true turned out that it worked turned out if you understood this and relied on that particular force that you could not get lost that this was a way of navigating through the woods and so it is in belief in a spiritual program. What the people that came before us in AA have told us, and this is the AA message, we can show you how to get in touch with a system that will navigate you through life. There is a problem and the problem is self-centeredness. Part of you doesn't want such a system to exist and you go, oh I can't believe that I can' t believe that and did you ever have this kind of a thought go into your head you're at the program they're talking about third step turn your will over to care of God as you understand him and then we're going to get defects out of the way and then prayer and meditation we're gonna get done all of a sudden did you never have the thought inside of you that says enough of God what about me that's a strange thought to have I mean enough of god what about maybe that's the self-centeredness that's see a higher power is a great threat to me. If there's a higher power, then possibly that's the center of the universe. And you know, I go, I don't like to think in those terms. I don' t like to form the world that the center is over here. I like it better when I am. And so what the navigation system requires that we refocus this, that the center be somewhere else, and then we're able to see our way through and to hear our way through. And I like to think of the quote out of the Bible that being able to listen to the still small voice within us. And I really believe that that's what all the remaining steps in housecleaning and all that, that's the purpose of doing steps 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 really is to clear out all of the static which are known as character defects that prevent us from hearing the navigation system that can show us how to get through life a day at a time. We end up, at the end of this process, talking more in terms of intuition. You know, just sitting around and suddenly it occurred to me I ought to go down to intergroup and do this. Or it occurred for me to call my sister and I did and I was plugged into this. And then it just occurred to be to do this and we get navigated along through the day by these little intuitions to move over this way or to go that way and we said we're in harmony with things and we find the days are coming together like they've never been together before and there's a sense of being guided along by a set of principles and by a much more efficient way than we were doing in the past and all that has to do as we find out in the 12 steps with getting the character defects out of the way that's what's blocking the signal from coming into our lives and so the purpose of doing uh the fourth and fifth step in particular six and seven all of them are to get ourselves out of the way in other words that is the nature of spiritual progress is to move as much of this degree i like you know the prayer of saint francis talks about freeing up the channel to make me a channel of thy peace and there's just the wreckage of how many episodes in my life as a practicing alcoholic, there are just literally 10 million shipwrecks in this channel. Water can't even come in there. It's just racking up all over the place. And I'm wondering, what the hell is the problem? Why doesn't the light flow along? And they're going because you got all that crap in the way. That's why light can't flow through there. Every time a nice thought, somebody smiles at us, somebody wants to be a little bit cheerful, it does and it comes in and we go, how come that guy's cheerful and I'm not? Hey, screw you! And there, you know, here was some joy trying to wiggle its way through us. And now they send it back. There's no joy in the world, I can tell you that. It can't get through us, it cannot move through this barrier of character defects that we have. And so our process is, in other words, character defects are just junk to get out of the way. And so the first step that we're talking about today is an inventory to go through and all that, the fourth step really is, when Father Martin talks about it, is instincts over intellect, emotions over intellect whatever you want to call it. It is the challenge that us human beings seem to have been born with that we need all these basic drives for sex, security, and society. That's the way they put them in the 12 and 12, the big book talking about resentment and anger. I think we've got a rough idea of what we're talking about it's all the things that bother us it's All The Things That Were Filled With Demands That Don't Seem To Be Met, and we just walk around at any given moment if we were to ask one of us how do you feel right at this moment you say everything's alright except I need more money whatever little signal is going off all of a sudden the money one goes off I need a woman I need to get promoted. I'm nobody at work. I've been there five years and I'm just nobody. So now we need the promotion one and then there's other ones and they're just firing off all over the place. And the problem is, we just start being controlled by these. That's our signal. We get up during the day and we go, okay, where am I going today? Oh, I got to go find a woman. Yeah. Okay, now I got a better job. We don't know what's going to wake up in the morning and we're just controlled by all these things. And one way to solve that, what you need, when you have a million little buttons going off at once and they all are screaming upstairs, hey, what about me? What about me?" You've got to have a universal answer for all of that. Vodka! I don't know if that's the case with women or getting promoted or trying to find a house where I can put it together and get my own things. I don' t know which one of those three to do. I'll just drink. Okay, prepare all three. You remember that? I don't need a house, and the woman won't even get me promoted. I'll just sit right here. Everything is mine. So I had a universal answer to all of these demands that were going down there, and I thought I was taking care of character defects by drowning them. Then they couldn't talk anymore. You remember that? Shut up, you guys down there. There, peace of mind. I had all my character defects drunk. And they shut up, and I got peace of mine. So I was on the right track. I was on the right track. I had the wrong higher power. And you find in the program, that's exactly what we're going to do. We're not going to meet all those demands because they are infinite. I mean, you go out and you get $50,000 and you go there, that takes care of the money demand, and the money demand goes wrong. You put a million in this, it needs five million. Boy, that is a big hole down there. Infinite. So when we try to meet demands, so our alcohol reduced them. A lot of times when drunk they stop talking and that was the right track. That's what the spiritual program does is to reduce those demands down to a manageable level so that they are in balance and that's what our inventory is all about is to see how out of whack all these things are and we get a chance to look at how we are jerked around on a daily basis by our anger, by our resentments, by our fear, by our guilt, by our remorse, by our constant judging, all the things that are standard challenges for human beings. In other words, everybody has all of the character defects. We just have different quantities in each one of us. Some of us have more of this and less of that, and we just specialize in guilt, or we specialize in manipulation, or we specialize in anger, or we specialize in pouting, or we specialize in debating, endless debating. who's the loser? No one ever wins an argument with a debater. At three o'clock in the morning, you call the guy we're arguing with all day up, but I have one more point. We just cannot ever be wrong on this pressing home. And so these are defects in the sense that they are blocking out all of this help that is freely available to us. And that's why surrendering is the term that we use to deal with these. In other words, what we're going to do is just identify them, get them in perspective, and then we're gonna have a conversation and we're not going to surrender to something that can get rid of these. But the problem in the fourth step is pride and fear generally. We just come along and look at these and part of it says, well really, I was a bad actor after I started drinking. Now that I'm not drinking, I'm back to being perfect again. I was a chemical alcoholic. I was basically a well-adjusted human being who fell victim to vodka. And now that I am sober, all is well. All I have to do is not drink. Now if you have a pigeon like that, this is what I would suggest you say to them. Gee, I'd like to get your family in here to verify that. And then you get, well, we don't want to drag them in here. Maybe I'll just call up your husband or your wife and say, hello, Mr. Perfect is here, but you don't have to call him. He doesn't have a deal with you. So it might happen in sobriety, but it's still a lot less. It hasn't been fixed. All we are doing is not drinking. And very often the pain of how bad things really are is very acute. And the other side of the coin may be guilt, which says inventory is a very good idea. There is a lot of things wrong with you. As a matter of fact, there's more things wrong mit you than anyone else in the world. You are uniquely horrible. as a matter of fact it is so horrible you have never dared look before and the more you think about that you go, that's right I have avoided ever taking a good look at myself and for good reason it is so bad that once I find out I'll probably get drunk so in the interest of sobriety I will stay an asshole that sort of thinking and then we go that was close such is the power of our instincts to not want to be investigated they just don't want to be discovered because once they are they're liable to be put in perspective and not be in charge anymore and this is what makes us self-centered it's being controlled by the character defects that jerk our chain around and resentment and anger But most of us drunks are the lead contenders in the race of character defects. And in order to stay sober, the big book says we have to be free of anger. And I believe that. I really believe we have? be set free of that anger. And this is the process for which it is accomplished, is through the process of inventory. A fearless inventory, and when you think about that, this dramatizes to me that the 12 steps are power tools, that you have to be tied into a higher power in order to do them. They just don't work. You can't go take a fearless moral inventory through your own resources because as soon as you go home and you go, I'm going to take an inventory, part of you goes, no. And there it sits. And how are you ever going to make a fearless inventory? You're going to have to get your higher power involved. And the point of doing the inventory is to clear it up so the higher power can get in there. So it sounds like, well, how am I ever goingto get anywhere? It sounds like an impossible dilemma. and all we can do is make a beginning the whole point of this is the more we do this the more we clear out the more power that is available to us to keep doing this and so praying is a part of doing an inventory I would recommend that the serenity prayer any tool that we can get help in other words you sit down and just go I just need help to do this I need help I need to do and that will get us in the frame of mind to come close to a fearless moral inventory pencil and paper we sit down we just get the various lists of seven deadly sins any sort of a reference thing so that we have a way of looking at ourselves and at the end of that it talks about the list is our first evidence of our willingness to go ahead with the program because that is the heart of the third step is willingness in other words a willingness to go ahead and um that isthe first step in getting the third step done is getting that list down almost every list will be the word rationalization now you have a list you've been very thorough you've written down all sorts of things in taking a fourth step we made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves and right on top of the list it says rationalization well if you think about it if the word meeting off the list is rationalization, how you know anything on the list is right. Everything you've just done is subject to question. It has no validity because you could be rationalizing here, there, everywhere so this list has to be subjected to a process whereby we can determine what's accurate what's way out of perspective what have you taken and minimized that ought to be dramatized a little bit. In other words, we need a process to take this piece of paper and give it a third dimension so that we can see you in perspective, in some sort of a perspective. And what we have found out from just life's experiences, this is just, if you look back on it, the process of sharing with another human being just goes back probably almost to the beginning of recorded history. This is how one validates life's experience experiences is to share them with another human being. It is similar to the photo processing that I remember flying in photo planes. You had to bring back two photographs of the same target, and they overlap by about 60%, and if you had two of them, then the photo interpreter could see height and depth. When he put that little scope on there, and it just jumped out, and all of a sudden, you just saw it. I mean, it was no longer a mystery. It just that everything could be seen in a whole new perspective that couldn't be seen without doing that. Thanks for listening.