The Promises Materialize if We Work for Them – Bill C.

Hi, my name is Bill, I'm an alcoholic and an addict. And by the grace of God and the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous, I have not found it necessary to take a drink or take a drug to change my mood since October 24th, 1975. And for that I am grateful. Now I'd like to qualify myself as an alcoholic. every speaker who came to this today got a name tag with a blue ribbon on it mine fell off now on my topic they will always materialize if we work for them what will materialize they said the theme of this conference was the 12 promises of Alcoholics Anonymous and I'd like to qualify myself as an alcoholic again, I said wait a minute there's a 13th promise which is better which is more magical than the other 12 promises combined and that is that they will always materialize if we work for them now to the book this is the book Alcoholics Anonymous this is what I tell everybody it's a good book, you ought to read it sometime it says here and I'd been around for a while before like you know we have the tendency as drunks to read the end of the book first and the first part of the last it says here in the preface we of Alcoholics Anonymous are more than 100 men and women who have recovered from a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body to show other alcoholics precisely how we have recovered is the main purpose of this book and then in the part of the book where it talks about we read this at the meeting all the time but I heard this for years and it never sunk in until just recently A. that we were alcoholic and could not manage our own lives B. that probably no human power could have relieved our alcoholism and that includes the power of love of the people who loved us the most and our love for them our families, our friends, our parents, our children. That love was insufficient to relieve us of our alcoholism and see that God could and would if he were sought. Okay, the magical part of that for me is that God would and would if he was sought. Not could and would consider it for four or five years and let me know that he would. If I took some action, if I sought God, they will always materialize if we work for them. The peace of mind, the happiness, which is a free gift to this program of Alcoholics Anonymous, is something that I didn't dream about when I was drinking. When I started drinking, I got a magical happy feeling in me and I laughed and I forgot that I had zits all over my face and I forget that my father was the principal of the junior high school in the town that I grew up in and blah, blah, bah, bah. Pour me, pour me, drink. And I forgot all these things. Unfortunately, I also forgot where I was. So my first large-scale drunken blackout I ended up passed out on a parking meter hanging by my coat collar on the main street of a small town in northern Minnesota. I had friends, and they took me down, and they stood me up every time the police came by. And that was just the beginning. That was justthe beginning, and I lied to cover that up, and I continued lying for seven years, drinking and drinking, and pretty soon I ended up in jail, and they suggested I go to treatment, and it was a 28-day program there. They said, hey, 28-day program and I'm so smart it only took me 71 days to get out of that place and they sent me to a halfway house and they suggested I go to Alcoholics Anonymous. That's where the magic happened, was in AA. I came into AlcoholicsAnonymous and I told them every reason I could think of why they should kick me out drug addict and under criminal charges and all this stuff and they said, glad to see you, hope to see You back next week and the next week they were happy to see me and they held out their hand and they said, Hi, it's good to see you here. That's something I never experienced before. If I didn't have money or the means to get high, there weren't too many people interested in me and I wasn't interested in too many People. This is a whole new feeling for me. I'd have People say, Yeah, it'll be okay. And yeah, we're having fun here. And I could see it. I could See it in the People's eyes. I could Seed in their laughter. I could see it in what they did for other people. The magic of this program is not a deep, dark secret. The magic in this program of Alcoholics Anonymous is one drunk helping another. And that's the action which has helped me more than anything else, which has held me more than all the therapy and all the insight and all reading. Faith without works is dead. And that is what they say in this book. And behind me are the pictures of the first two drunks who got this program and how many thousands they helped because they were given this free gift of sobriety. Now, Bill, he held out the hand of AA friendship to a lot of people over his life. One guy, like in all, they had this new guy and his name was Bill. And him and Lois went out for the afternoon and they came back and their house was full of gas. The guy had turned on the gas and killed himself. And that didn't stop Bill from going out and extending his hand to another drunk. He knew that the good feelings from this program come to a great extent from giving it away and seeing people, seeing people. And I see this in my meeting. I see people who come in and they look like they've been dragged in by the dog and pretty soon they're looking better and they're speaking English. And it's just amazing. to see this happen and maybe even to take a little bit of a part in it, saying, Hi, my name's Bill. It's good to see you here. Just like those people told me, it's that attitude of gratitude that keeps me coming back and keeps me sober and keeps us happy. It keeps me happy. AA up here got started because a guy by the name of Pat wrote to New York and said yeah, I read your article I read the article in the Saturday Evening Post about Alcoholics Anonymous and I sure would like to know some more about it and these two sports writers who happened to be up here from Chicago dropped in to see him now they could have gotten they had any one of a number of other things that they could've done but they went and they seen this drunk and because they went and seen this junk this guy got the message of Alcoholics Anonymous and started to work with some other people here in Minneapolis and this is how he got up to Winnipeg is that some people from Minneapolis drove to Winnepeg once a week to put on a meeting I bet you they had a lot of laughs in the car on the way up and the way back and good fellowship but that was a byproduct that was something that materialized because of what they were doing they didn't say well let's get in the car and drive to Winnipeg and laugh all the way like you know that frame of mind doesn't work it's let's go out and do something carry this message give away this gift which has been freely given to us they will always materialize if we work for them. It doesn't say they will always materialize if we sit home and watch TV or if we get this thing. Like, you know, some people have a tendency and I'm one of them to hoard the good thing and then they tend to dematerialize. Like, this is sort of like science fiction. They will always mineralize if we worked for them a friend of mine named Michael says well geez it sounds like you're talking about science fiction but oddly enough if we don't keep up what we're doing it will dematerialize also and there are miserable days and there aren't miserable hours and that's usually when I've stopped doing the maintenance steps to this program it's hard to admit I'm wrong if I never take personal inventory it's hard to make amends if I haven't bothered to look at what I'm doing a while back when I was drinking Sunday liquor stores in Minnesota are closed I was willing to go to Wisconsin though and when there was such a blizzard that cars weren't running, I'd walk to the liquor store, especially if I didn't have any money. And that didn't stop me. But we hear, oh, it's so cold out, I don't want to go to AA or I want to play tennis, it is so sunny out, blah, blah. But there might be somebody there at that meeting for their first time that you being there could make the difference between whether that person lives or dies. Staying sober or not, it's important to be there. What if everybody else decided to play tennis? Then what would the new people do? I'd come here, there'd be a room, there wouldn't be any coffee, there wouldn't have been any people. That's not what was there when I was there. There were people there when i showed up for the meeting and they had time to talk to me and and they have the courage to say after i rambled on about my personal problems for a large part of the meeting they asked me if i had a sponsor and i said no when they appointed me one and he said let me read the book and go to meetings and And when I calm up, when I'm in a jam, the first two questions he asks me is, are you still going to your meeting regularly? Are you reading the book? These are the basics. And that's where it all begins. And he gave me a guarantee. He said, if you can come up with a good enough reason to go out and take a drink, I'll go out and take one with you I've been looking for 23 years for a good reason to take a drink and all I've come up with is excuses and don't give me any of this broken heart BS either and I haven't come up with a good enough reason to go take a drinking I've came up with a lot of excuses for not doing things that were positive in my life but I haven' t come up with a reason to go to take it drink now they will always materialize if we work for them and part of the continuing legacy of alcoholics anonymous are the 12 traditions of alcoholic synonymous now see from time to time in the paper i see anonymity breaks i see people quoted as saying they're an alcoholic synonymous or they're in AA or they go to AA meetings. Now the tendency is to get mad at that person for breaking anonymity. But that's not the person who's at fault. The people who are at fault are the people in their meeting who didn't properly instruct them on the traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous and a lack of good and positive sponsorship. That's where the trouble lies and I am responsible for carrying the message of the traditions to the people I sponsor and the people in my meeting and to the best of my ability I try to do that. The Twelve Traditions of Al-Khalid's Anonymous are not something which they didn't put it in the book because they needed filler. It's a way of living out there in the world that makes sense it gives me guidelines for my conduct in the world outside of myself I mean AA is not something to make a buck on and AA is not something that I need to discuss with the general public and it's not the news media's responsibility to keep our anonymity It's our responsibility. We can't put it on other people. And the whole thing about the traditions, the Twelve Promises will always materialize if we work for them. Bill Wilson said that if this fellowship is destroyed, it will not be destroyed from the outside, it will be destroyed form within. and our anonymity and our traditions are there so that the people so that the drunks who are now watching Sesame Street will have an Alcoholics Anonymous to come to when they need it what if this thing would have blown up 20 years ago how many of us would be alive today how many of us would be happy and sober and respect ourselves that's something I didn't have before I came to Alcoholics Anonymous it was too much self-respect I still haven't got a surplus amount and that's work we'll always materialize if we work for them now work, I don't mean drudgery because every one of these steps are liberating steps every one of these steps frees me from that ooze that muck, that quicksand of alcoholism I mean I didn't have a full deck before I started drinking and I thought I did the whole time but I come to Alcoholics Anonymous and I looked at those steps I thought they were 12 essay questions the first time I saw them I thought well I'll have this done in a week and then they'll let me out and I can go on living my life and just play it real cool and someday I'll be able to just be real social and all this other stuff and that's not the way it works at all. But people at the meeting said, keep coming back and there's an old saying, if you hang around a barbershop long enough you're going to get a haircut and it worked for me. I came out of treatment with no more of a desire to stay sober and I went in with and I came into Alcoholics Anonymous with a sincere desire a sincere desire to say stay out of jail and that's a very sincere desire and it doesn't even say it has to be sincere and I knew that these people wanted me to not drink for a year I had a sponsor he was a judge and I wanted to see him once in a while I had an attorney with me and he was very interested in my progress and and I stayed around Alcoholics Anonymous enough to catch a little bit of the magic that was there a little Bit of the Magic rubbed off on me and I started to do it for myself when it was no longer necessary to do It for the courts and that's the miracle that's a miracle because it started to mean something to me and one of the four steps now see when I think of work I think as a fourth step you know back then it was one of these things you had to do to graduate from treatment and I thought okay I want to get out of here and so I wrote down every evil terrible thing I'd done and I laid it on this Lutheran minister and they let me out and I thought well now I know how to do the fourth step and so I repeated the performance a year later only with some different stories and so on then after listening to my sponsor for about five years I read the book and it gives specific instructions on the fourth step and rather than it being drudgery rather than it being terrible and degrading and horrible. It's liberating. It says, write down your resentments. And I had resentments against some of the people in this room. And I carried them for years. And I hear it. And of course, being on clock I wasn't satisfied with just having resentments against people. No, I had resentment against God and the church and the government and work and, you know, pick a drunk, any drunk and ask their opinion of something and you'll get an opinion, you Know. And I had resentments like, You know. And so one of my sponsors, and I said, Well, I want to do a four-step. How do I do a fourth step? He says, Buy a notebook and a pen. See, like, you Now, he's used to working with people that got me with brain damage. And he says, write on the cover. He says, right on the cover, write, Bill Cairns' four-step. And I did. And he says, and then open the cover of the notebook. And so I decided I'd do a page. Okay? I'd do a page on this person, a page on this person, a page on my friends, a page on the government. And of all the pages in that notebook, the one with the longest list of resentments against any one person on this planet was resentments against me things i hated about myself things i'd been hating myself for for years and it was freeing to write all that down and my fears and examining sex situations where was i selfish what did i do wrong that was free rather than degrading and that fourth step started to seem a lot less like work and a lot more like freedom it says in this book that the fourth and fifth steps are building a triumphant arch through which we will march to freedom and then six and seven became entirely willing to have God remove all these defects of character. What we're talking about here is for me becoming entirely willing to have got to remove all these defective characters seeing what a drag they are in my life and how it keeps me from people. This isn't slavery, this is freedom, this is new knowledge. I thought that God, I have a right to do these things and I found out that uh and i found out it's keeping me from who i want to be i mean i do not want to run around for the rest of my life being a diseased person that people have to be afraid of or like you know if you ask me the time and i tell you i want you to believe me now at one time when i was drinking if you asked me the Time you better ask somebody else just to make sure you know so uh so this is a full circle. A full circle to wanting to humbly ask him to remove our shortcomings. Seventh step. Now, how do we humbly asked God to remove our shortcoming? Well, the strongest prayer is action. And the most valuable action is doing something that i believe is right like you know in the 11th step they talk about sattva prayer meditation to improve our conscious contact with god as we understood and praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry that out now i haven't gotten any letters from god lately telling me what i'm to do for the next week like you know a lot of times i would like god to make it very clear to me what I am to do but what I've been given is an intuition about what's right and wrong something I had my whole life but I didn't listen to I wouldn't listen to that little voice inside of me saying no no it's stupid get out of here when i was holding up that drugstore no i wouldn't listen to that voice telling me that what i was doing when i'm drinking was wrong and i don't believe it and i don't know why i'm doing it i'm scared of hell and i don't like it i didn't listen to that voice that voice is a guide hopefully what we've done in the moral inventory is find out what we believe in and this is a gradual process this is a continuous process find out what we believe in and what we don't believe in and strip away those layers of delusion of doing things out of fear step eight and step nine made a list of all persons we had harmed now now uh to me i thought for years that oh yeah i have a list i have list up in my head yeah And it's up there, sure it is. And every time I see somebody I owe money to, I cower and hide and feel less of myself. Now making a list implies... If you have a grocery list, I write it on a piece of paper. If I have a list of people I've harmed, I write the list on a paper too, and that makes a lot of sense. Because then I can put it down there and that's freeing that's freem and then the ninth step made direct amends to such people whenever possible except when to do so would injure them or others the easiest amends to make are monetary amends that's where you send the money off in the mail and it's done but what about the people closest to us our friends, our family our parents, our children making amends to them is a gradual process I cannot go back and change what happened for Christmas 1973 or Thanksgiving 1974 I don't even know if I was there or not that's how much recollection I have about that particular period of my life but I know that I wasn't with my family and that hurt them deeply. And an amend like that is being there, taking an active part in their lives. Saying I'm sorry was something I was very good at. It was sort of like, it was sortof like, I'm so sorry, beam me up Scotty and it got me out of the situation. I hoped. Or it gotme out ofthe corner for a while. And that's how I use that. Sure, I was sorry. I was Sorry I Got Caught. And it's a little different. And it takes some time. And action is the key. If you say, I'm sorry, and then disappear again, you haven't done a thing except say, I'm Sorry. But if you say I'm SORRY and you come back and you take an active part in these people's lives, that's a difference. That's action. That's faith. That's growth. 10, 11, and 12 keep us in today. It's sort of like the old saying, yesterday is a canceled check and tomorrow is a promissory note, but today is ready cash. And you know a canceled cheque isn't going to get you groceries and you know that a promisory note is only as good as the person it's written to and the person who wrote it, But cash is real. I can hold it in my hand and I can feel it. And I can do something with it today, anything I choose to. One day at a time, one minute at a time, one decision at a time. And if I was perfect, I sure wouldn't need those maintenance steps, would I? And if I was perfect, I wouldn't, like I could do the first nine steps once, and I'd be okay after that. But that's not where I am at. Maybe that disqualifies me from talking, but it's going back and fixing up to best I can where I've wronged people. Sobriety and peace of mind. Here's a little card from 20 to 18. They give it to you at your four-step class they offered on there. It's called Practices principles. All our lives we have been looking for some objective to work towards, something to make us feel valuable to our community. It is a rare and delightful privilege to be able to extend a helping hand to one of our fellow men. If we could but live the 12 steps to the best of our ability each 24-hour period and carry this message to another man deep in alcoholic trouble, we can feel indeed that we have done God's will today. This is no weight our religious program. We know by experience that we must have a spiritual knowledge of God as we see him to create a love for our fellow man. Good luck. Practice these principles in all your affairs, 24 hours at a time. Thank you. Thank you very much, Bill. I think we were told before that the open call-up meeting from 4 to 5 has been canceled. So the last speaker who has no time constriction or very few Dr. Bud P from Minneapolis yeah I figured that I could leave early because you were all going to have a call up meeting darn it some of you stayed that doctor stands for MD MDity pardon me you may have known some like me MD Manic depressive, mentally deficient, morally depraved, martini drinker. My topic is, if we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are halfway through. And if you look that up in the big book, you'll find out they're talking about the eighth and ninth step to be painstaken and thorough about. And that's before the promises come around. We've got to be painstaking and thorough about the eighth and the ninth step where we try to make amends for all the things that we harm, where we feel guilty and ashamed. And my God was that awful with me. I was brought up over here in St. Paul, not too far from here. I can remember hearing Glenn Miller here at the prom back around 1940. Five years later, I can Remember getting drunk here and getting mad at a girl and leaving her off someplace along Snelling Avenue here and trying to make Amends the next day. uh you can see that i got in trouble early uh in life uh i was brought up in a family that was kind of calvinistic puritanical very rigid there were rigid codes uh of behavior i had a grandfather who was an alcoholic um my father used to say about my grandfather if he could just get a little character get some backbone he wouldn't have to drink so much and my mother might add well really if he can find religion and see the light then he wouldn't have to drink at all that's what i thought i think many of us thought about alcoholics that somehow they were bad people uh their bad characters when i got into medical school i was taught differently though there i was thought that alcoholism was a symptom of some underlying psychological problem anxiety depression obsessive-compulsive neurosis unresolved oedipus complex penis envy something of this nature wasn't until some years later i found out that penis envy was supposed to be a female problem it bothered me well i was envious and resentful about everything you know rodney dangersfield's line rodney said that he was arrested for flashing but they took him to small claims court i don't get no respect well so i felt guilty inadequate about a lot of things uh growing up i started drinking as a teenager i was a hard-working compulsive kind of perfectionistic kid, but deep down insecure. Deep feelings of inadequacy. I think you hear this all the time, that terminal uniqueness. And I started to drink around 17 or 18 years of age. Some of you may be familiar with a very famous psychoanalyst, Eric Erickson. He's probably revered next to Freud right now. And he talks about these stages of ego development. In the stage between 18 and 25, he talks about the stage of intimacy versus isolation that's the period when you're starting to form firm commitments close interpersonal relationships and I never really did this I substituted a relationship with a bottle for relationships with people and a higher power other people have talked about this period as getting out of this resolving this dependency emergency conflict sort of thing. How do you have good relationships with those that you're nearest and dearest to, mother, father, sister, brother, spouse, kids, that sort of things, and still be an independent individual in your own right? I was one of these people that somehow decided, probably my rebellious nature, I didn't need anybody else. I could do it by myself. Well, I did need somebody else, and it turned that I had to start using the bottle. That became my major coping mechanism in life. And I drank for many years and it got worse and worse. And it substituted for close relationships with females as well as men. I had all kinds of sexual hangups also. Women scare the hell out of me. I mean, that's what their clothes on. I'd be 50 years old and never been kissed if it wasn't for booze. I first went into the hospital in 1965 to dry out over at Glenwood Hills. Then I was willing to call myself an alcoholic, the guy who wanted to keep me there for a couple more weeks. But I figured if he did, people would find out, so I signed out AMA against medical advice. I didn't want anybody to know. Turned out everybody already knew I was the last one to find out. And about that time, Bill was talking about getting over to Wisconsin on Sunday morning. Hell, I had to go to Wisconsin. On Sunday morning, I was over there waiting for the liquor stores to open up. I can remember being parked outside of the place at 730, waiting for them to openup. I first went into treatment in 1967 at Hazelden and got into AA and started to try to work the steps and tried to work the eighth and the ninth step. Now, the eighth step is to make a list of all the people we had harmed. So I made a little mental list, my wife and the boss, and I kind of made a half-assed sort of amends to get my wife back and to get me a job back and went on from that. It was not a thorough and painstaking job. Oh, well, I ended up in a mental health unit a couple of times and then I'd go out and I'd try it again and make a few amends. And I had made the eighth and ninth step a half-assed stab at it about three times back to the same three or four people, and they were kind of getting tired of seeing me after a period of time. And my last drunk, I went out and got drunk and tried to medicate myself back to health with pills. And my office is right on the ward of the hospital and I'd lock myself in my office and I wouldn't go home and I was zonked out on pills about 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning and the men's room is up the hall from my office and I went up to the men'S room and on the way back I missed my office got into a patient's room and lied down in bed with him now that's carrying bedside manner too far nothing in the Hippocratic Oath it says thou shalt lie down beside them and you can imagine uh i was suspended from my job i was afraid they're gonna take my medical license uh away from me my wife wanted a divorce i was literally immobilized by guilt and remorse and shame and i went through treatment at st mary's hospital and you know they get through the fifth step there and then they put you out in the world and there was something you're supposed to be able to come back and talk to your counselor then i had three appointments and i came back and and I wanted to talk about the eighth and ninth step, and I think she'd had kind of a hard day. And she said, oh, you're just doing great. And I was going to really be good about this eighth and the ninth step. And I worked through it. I made the list of the people that I had harmed, how I'd harmed them, the men's that I'd made. I had a list, and I'll go through it in a little while. And I stuck around there at their AA groups at St. Mary's, and I saw these people coming out of treatment for the next couple of years, and they never got around to the eighth and ninth step. In the group I was in, we used to every August and September we would work on the eighth or the ninth step so if you got out of treatment in November or December it might be a year before you even heard about the eighth or the nine steps so I decided to do something about it. I asked there if I couldn't start an eighth or a ninth step for people who had been out of treatments for just about eight weeks. Have them come back in a couple of months and get them to work on this because it was so damn important to me. I had no good feelings about myself at all. I was miserable. For the first two or three months, back into AA, I'd been going for three and a half years before then, but it wasn't until I was really pretty well through my eighth and the ninth step that I had any good feelings about myself at all. And I did start an eighth and a ninth step group and ran it for about three years on Thursday morning, and they used to send their people in, and they kept it going for a few years after that, but there wasn't anybody that dedicated to it. I still see this problem with the eighth and the ninth step. So I'm up here, I'm kind of nervous because I'm going to have to read to you right now, and I don't like to get up here and read. I like to be able to talk from my own experience and talk extemporaneously. But these are some of the notes that I had from my eighth and ninth step that I used to talk about. If we are painstaking about this phase of our recovery, we will be amazed before we are halfway through. We will comprehend the word serenity, and we will know peace. And the chapter in the 12 by 12 on step eight starts out. Step eight and nine are concerned with human relations. What did I say my problem was? Never got that good relations with other people. The whole idea of getting intimate, the intimacy versus isolation conflict and the ego development that happens about 18 to 25 when I was starting to drink. Here again on page 82 in the 12 by 12, defective relations with other human beings has nearly always been the immediate cause of our woes including alcoholism well i started to find the eighth step made a list of all the people we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all well what did i try to figure out what kind of harm have i done well of course there's the emotional and there's a financial uh harm and then the mental uh harm you can do the worry and all those uh sorts of things and i wrote physical harm and i didn't remember anything like that oh yeah one time when i was drunk i had actually took a swing at my wife and i had meant to miss but i hit her and i was devastated uh by that but it wasn't until i wrote fiscal down that i remembered uh uh that i'd done that uh professional theirs or mine uh my madam met uh well the story you're walking down the on the street and you meet this girl and you say hello to her and your wife says, who was that? Oh, just somebody I knew professionally. And she says, who, hers or yours? Or in the words of Shashak Gabor, since I got into AA I feel like a new man today. Oh, no. okay how have we done the harm and then i tried to be really searching and fearless about this by drinking by dominating rigidity blackouts when i didn't know the things that were going on uh neglect self-centered isolation again depression anger self self-pity lying cheating stealing envy jealousy gambling critical callous self-righteous examine the whole area of human relations do not delay because we are afraid uh don't say well i'm just being prudent uh that's often a sign that we're just trying to evade a tough one and remember it helps us more to make amends to an enemy than it does to a friend if you're having problems uh with this, again, consult families and other affected. Consult with our friends, our sponsors, spiritual advisors, group leaders, God. Amends are not complete without meditation or prayer. If the wrong bothers you, it should undoubtedly be amended. Remember that in most cases it will be a lifetime before we complete step nine. The whole idea in step nine is the willingness to do it uh i'd act like a real son of a bitch uh back during the vietnamese war to a relative of my wife who'd come over uh and stayed over for a couple of days from tacoma washington he was a policeman uh out there i was really hard on the hard on thee establishment and drunk and a bunch of other things oh heck he's out at tacoma it's the only time i ever saw him it was eight or nine years uh afterwards that he finally was coming through town i met him in a parking lot went up and shook hands with him and started to make amends right away. I'd already in my mind made amends as soon as I started to see the guy I'm willing, in other words, I am willing to make amends for anything I have done in the past. If it was really important and I couldn't contact him of course you can always send the letter but really the willingness is the important thing and formulate a plan of action. Make a list of all of the people not some of the people all of the people our name heads the list we learned what Bill said about who he had the most resentments against. Check step four. You know, you got your grudge list in step four and they kind of tell you how to make out your list. Who am I resentful at? What caused it? How did it affect me? And it usually has something to do, as Bill says, In one place, romance, prestige, or money. In another place, he calls it sex, self-esteem, and security. Psychiatrists have called it love, self esteem, and control. But it has the ability to love and be loved and feel worthwhile to ourselves and others and feel like we're an effective member of society. Friends. Enemies. It's more helpful to make amends to an enemy than a friend. families, creditors, and debtors. Anybody who owed me money, I hated them too. Bud, speak till 415 or 430 if you like. I'm hoping to make it. Oh boy. Do I connect the 12 traditions, 12 concepts of world service? And you'll all want to stick around for my beautiful spiritual awakening. colleagues in-laws neighbors uh neighbors others the deceased how do you make amends to the deceased it's a problem my father had been dead for 17 years uh when i sobered up uh i was in japan in the service uh when he died i had never been back uh to his grave I had constantly blamed my compulsions, my perfectionism, all that, trying to please him, overcompensate him living through me, all of those sorts of things. I'd been driving about four or five months driving down Wayzata Boulevard and I was like this and God damn it, I've got to get that done, I've gotta get this done and if my father wasn't like that I wouldn't be like this and then all of a sudden I said, Bud, you are responsible for your feelings, you are accountable for your behavior, when are you going to let go of your father? and it started. A few weeks later, I happened to be driving by an all-long carpenter there in Roselawn Cemetery, and the car just went in there, and I parked beside my father's grave and meditated for a while and made peace. And I am at peace with my father. Other people have done it that way. Vern Johnson sent up a prayer to his father when he has a good day. There are ways to make amends because you do it in your imagination. That's what really counts. If you can't do it up here, you haven't done it to God on a daily basis. How do we make amends? By maximum service to God and the people around us. Be open and honest. Make appointments where necessary. That was always really a tough one for me, for the people that I didn't like too well. And, you know, we're talking about my part of this business, It's not whatever they had to do with it. That's another issue. Bill wrote, I think it's in the big book, we sweep our side of the street and we let the other side ofthe street alone. I would try to get them at a social event or at a meeting or someplace where they were in a good mood if I could. But if it has to be done and it was bothering me, I had to go make appointments. the toughest one was going back to the hospital where a year before i had written a note saying that if i ever uh did it again i would resign my position now some for some reason or another they took me back i don't know what on behind my back and i had to go in there and tell them uh and i have been there three times before uh making uh amends and i try to explain how this time it was different. But I really had faith in the program this time. I knew it was different, and I said, don't judge me by what I say. Judge me by my behavior. That's what I really want to be judged by, how I'm acting. And when somebody told me a few months later that, gee, bud, you seem to be really doing the right things, I thought I was being damned by faint praise. I think it's one of the most important things we can say to somebody you see people are doing the right things doing the steps going to meetings having a sponsor listening to them and you just know down in your gut uh that they're going to have a good sobriety and a spiritual awakening uh along with it a lot of people for themselves how is how we make amends listen to others try to understand their point of view put the best interpretation on other people's behavior i love to play blemish you know find something to matter with somebody else and bring them down to my side. And constantly finding fault and trying to jab people behind their backs, holding resentments, lots of revenge and resentments. And as you know, resentment has destroyed more alcoholics than anything else, and it is a source of all sorts of spiritual illness. Accept other people's forgiveness. I can forgive other people, but it's very hard for me to accept their forgiveness. Accept God's forgiveness? How forgiving ourselves forgive other people be trusting be real be grateful we will not live in a resentful or angry mood goodwill to our enemies we cannot hate and make amends at the same time if we work this step if we were painstaking and thorough it is the beginning of the end of our isolation from our fellows uh and from god and that's uh because this thing is about the restoration of relationships it's about handling those feelings of guilt which makes you feel like you're a bad person like you're wrongdoer and those things about shame lots has been written about shame they say that out uh that alcoholism is a disease that produces shame and shame is one of the major issues. Shame is that feeling of inadequacy and that inferiority, a feeling that I'm worthless and no damn good. The isolation that goes along with it. Now, after I finished early while through the eighth and the ninth step, some things started to happen to me. I started to have some good feelings about myself. I started to feel differently about these people in AA. This whole shared honesty of our mutual limitation i didn't have to be god anymore i didn' t have to the m deity now everything in the universe seemed connected and i seemed uh part of that i belong here uh and i you know i literally feel when i talk here now like you people are a part of me and i'm a part of you and i really care and i am delighted to be here i was scared as hell when i got up here because i've never given this talk on the eighth and the ninth uh step anymore except just in a little group with a notebook and i don't usually get that frightened anymore and i know why i should be so frightened about what you think about me because i know that you love me and i love you and that everything is connected and we're all a part of something much greater than us. And because of that, God, Alcoholics Anonymous, it's not been necessary for me to take a drink of alcohol or a mood-changing chemical since July 19th of 1970. And such a big part of that was doing the eighth and the ninth steps. And, because of that, the promises have mostly come my way. Not completely. I'm not free of these. Bill wrote this is a very imperfect society it's made up of imperfect people uh but why don't i read the promises once and let's finish uh on that again we are going by the way i carry i carry two things uh in my billfold uh one is a little card in the 12 steps in the twelve traditions that i got this is the second one i've had i got one back in 1965 uh at 2218 and i picked this up at Minneapolis Inner Group. I've always carried this with me, and I've got another card here that I just received a few months ago. This is from Ray O'Keefe. Some of you may have heard him from the world-famous Mamarionac Group here, and it has the third step prayer, the seventh step prayer and the promises on it, and those are things that I carry in my billfold and look at. We're going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past and wish to shut the door on it. we will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace no matter how far down the scale we have gone we will see how our experience can benefit others the 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 on life will change fear of people and economic insecurity will leave us we will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves. Are these extravagant promises? We think not. They are being fulfilled amongst us, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They will materialize if we work for them. Thank you.