The Twelve Steps of AA (4.5 Hrs) – Part 2 of 4 – 2019 – Sandy B.

wronger. In the wrong contest, you seem to be winning. Although I'm wrong, but my wrong is already nowhere close to how really wrong you are. And that was so meaningful to me because I did it so much, so much that one more time in AA, you guys ate my lunch. You ate my launch, ate my watch, ate by lunch. So by the time he got through this section on step three, which again has been a step, which for me, I took on a very primitive level at first and has become much, much bigger for me as time has gone on. And on the bottom of page 62, it says, this is the how and the why of it. First of all, I had to quit playing God. Well, for me that's been very meaningful. I can't boss people around in AA and assume that I'm stopping playing God. I can't be saying to God, you know, I think you can keep Saturn on its axis but I don't think you can take care of my kids and manipulate them in a proper way. I can' t do that. Got to laugh from the right person at any rate. It's okay. She's great. And this whole notion of stopping playing God which for me has been a real cautionary tale in terms of some AA big shot ism that I've suffered from in the past that I have to really beware of because I'm prone to it, because I'm just so damn spiritual. And she finally getting the respect that I deserve. I have a friend named Bobby Ruiz. I want to tell you this story. Take a minute and tell you the story. He was a skid row bum who near the end went to his home and took off his crunchy clothes. They were all stiff from filth and went in and took a shower and one of his three little daughters turned to his wife and said, Mommy, when are you going to learn that you can't turn that creepy man into a daddy? He heard his daughter say it. He put the crunchy clothes on and walked out of his house. He went to a bridge overlooking the train tracks down in downtown L.A. and stood on top of that bridge and said to God, if you don't want me to die, tell me now. A wind came up and blew him off the bridge back onto the bridge. He walked down to a phone booth, called A.A., and never had another drink. And he's just one of the best guys I know. Graduated the Harbor Lights down at Fifth Street. Great guy. And he made a deal with God about his health and started running and went to run the L.E. Marathon. And when you went down there, We had to fill out stuff about why you were running the marathon, and he wrote down I was a Skid Row bum. The marathon, I made a deal with God. The marathon runs through Skid row, and that's why I'm doing it. And the guys on Skidrow read the article and put together a cheering section for him when he ran through Skedrow. The guys were standing there with placards and stuff. And they wrote this because they wrote the article up in the L.A. Times so the guys found out about it. I went down. I had the honor of being asked by Bobby to go down to the Harbor Lights, the Skid Row Salvation Army place, to go downstairs and watch a ceremony which was called the Hall of Miracles. And the Hall de Miracles is you're inducted into the Hall of Miricles if you've come out of the Harbor lights and you're sober for over three years. One of the tragic things about this is there was no news teams down there. What a terrible thing, you know, to not cover something like that, A room with 100 people who've come off Skid Row and are experiencing this kind of success. But they weren't there. That's okay. I was. And there were hundreds of people, you know, the families there. Everybody's dressed beautifully and their kids are running around. And this is – I thought of this one that baby gave me a little editorial there. Because I used to get really angry sometimes when kids would bug me at AA meetings. And I still, you know, that can be a problem. But at any rate, what really, this guy in the Salvation Army just straightened me out that day. He said something so beautiful because kids were running all over the place down there. He said, please do not allow the sounds of the children to make you angry or to distract you. These are the sounds Of Families That Shouldn't Be. And it just killed me. It was just so on the nose, you now, on the money. So sometimes when I hear a baby's voice in an AA meeting, it sounds like music to me. And then it says, it does what it does over and over again in the book. It talks about the difficulties that we've had that are real. And then he says, but we experience these difficulties in a way that will actually kill us because we have a sickness of the soul. So we have to take a different position. We have to quit playing God. We have let God be the agent. We're going to be his kid. We're going to start following him on some level, even though we really don't know how to do that yet. What can we do? Well, we're goingto really find out big time in a few minutes. And then it says that you might want to provided that we that we he provided what we needed if we kept close to him and performed his work well, kept close him through step 11 performed his job well for me. That's pretty much nine and 12 doing making amends, carrying the message and practicing the principles. OK, and if we do that, we become more and more interested in life as opposed to ourselves. We all know this to be true. If you've been on the program and done the work for any appreciable amount of time, you know that you will get out there. And I didn't know what a pathetic, tiny little Scott Redman life I had when I got here. I could barely do anything, talk to anybody or go anywhere. I put my arm around my wife one night. She must have felt my accelerated breathing or smell. My breath. And I heard it just come out of her in a gush. And it wasn't even pointed. She just said, you disgust me. And I thought, yeah. Yeah, me too. Me too. It was just the truth. That's where we had wound up. And my life's huge now. Absolutely huge. We felt new power flow in when we started thinking about what we could contribute to life. We enjoyed peace of mind. We discovered we could face life successfully. We became conscious of his presence. We began to lose our fear of today, tomorrow or the hereafter. We were reborn. We are now at step three. Many of us said to our maker, as we understood him, if anybody would like to join me in taking step three right now, let's pray. God, I offer myself to thee to build with me and to do with me as thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self that I may better do thy will. Take away my difficulties that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of thy power, thy love and thy way of life. May I do thy will always. We thought well before taking this step, making sure we were ready that we could abandon ourselves utterly to him. I don't know what that means. I'm not going out and buying a robe now. I'm just, you know, I abandoned myself as utterly as I could at that particular time. And then it says something I've always loved because we found it very desirable to take the spiritual step with an understanding person such as our wife. That's shit. My wife! Oh, yeah! Let's pray, honey. I don't think so. Not that week. Now with a couple of months of sobriety under my belt, I was waking up at night and staring at her jugular vein pumping and thinking, couldn't I just press down on that? Will that work? You know, I mean, shortly before I got sober, my wife came home and I had I was on the floor I started cooking something and I died in the middle of cooking I was laying on the floor holding a pan of eggs and the stove was on and my wife came in and kind of touched me with her foot and said how are you and I looked up at her I looked at her and said I'm exhausted so she found an empty vial and an empty bottle she called the doctor and the doctor said why are you calling me there's a blue Jew on the floor of your kitchen I mean he's call the paramedics so when my wife tells the story it kind of gives me the willies because she always says I hung up and you know I cleaned up a little thought But then I called another doctor for a second opinion. So I wasn't going to take the third step of their. There's several questions. Sometimes people say, when should I start my fourth step? And there are three, to the best of my knowledge, three places in the big book of A.A. where it tells you to start your fourth step. In Bill's story, he talks about that he started his fourth step. He did it with Abby his first couple of weeks of sobriety in the hospital. Right here it says that if you expect the third step to have any permanent or lasting effect, it needs to be immediately followed by a strenuous effort to face and be rid of the things in you. Now, a lot of different AA families, I know one AA family suggested you don't do your inventory until you're six months. Some other AA families demand that you do it in your first year. I think they're all right. I'm just talking about what's in the book and what's been my experience. I don't think anybody's wrong about this because we're all staying sober. And my favorite place, actually, where it talks about when to do a fourth step is in Chapter 7. It says a guy might ask to start the work, but it might be a mistake because if he stumbles later on, he might blame you for rushing him. Then you turn the page and it says, but on your second visit, feel free to. So it just says, don't start at the first conversation. Don't get them on the inventory when you meet them that day, which I've always loved. The inventory was explained to me at six months of sobriety. And my sponsor read Chapter 5 to me. And I had heard at that time all sorts of terrible stories about an inventory, about what to do about inventory, about how scary it was. Oddly enough, on the last sentence of Chapter 5, it says if you've done Step 3 and an inventory of your gross or handicaps, you've made a good beginning. All it is is a start, you know? So if you're new here and you're scared of it, I urge you to just do it. It's been my experience. It doesn't even matter how long it is. The longest fifth step I've ever heard was 22 hours. shortest was 15 minutes and they're both dead because neither one of them continue with the rest of the work you know the third step will have a little permanent or lasting effect unless followed by a strenuous effort to face and be rid of the things that have been blocking me and it's been my experience that the fourth step will add a little permanence or lasting effect unless it's maintained by the rest of the work it just becomes some event some big event. My life was a series of events, not a life, just some stuff that happened. And this can just become in a little glass case. You know, my sponsor at Six Months of Sobriety sat me down. He read chapter five to me. He worked the first three steps with me and then he went back and gave me instructions on how to do a fourth step from the big book of AA. And there's a lot of controversy. A lot of people do it a lot different ways. I was told to do three sections of the inventory. I was told to do three columns of who I was resentful at, why I was resentful Adam and what the cause was in my sponsor gave me a little kind of shorthand for it which has been very good for me and he called it spaps SP APS self-esteem pocketbook ambition personal relations and sex I'm resentful at my father for not playing with me and when I was a kid what did it what is it in effect it if there's affect myself esteem yes I put an S did affect my pocketbook. Not really. I put a dash when it doesn't affect something. My ambition. Yeah, my ambition is to feel like a fully grown man or whatever. I'd put in a personal relationship. That's literally sex. Not really. So I just put a dashboard. I always put a dash when it does affect something and I put the initial when it goes. And after a while with that shorthand, it was just helpful to me because I was able to write my resentments kind of in a more facile way. And then when I read them, I knew the shorthands and I was able to spit it out that way. So that was one thing that he had me do. The other thing he had me do is very interesting stuff. Number one, he asked me to ask myself every time I wrote something is this resentment my fault? Now when I initially wrote my inventory and I came to him and I read my inventory, very few of these things were my fault. She knows the truth. And the fact is, if I finally am able to turn that corner and take a look at it, if I really realize the difference between the event and the resentment, it is always my fault. There is no possibility of the resentment not being my fault The event is a different case. And it was, again, so akin for me. When I went, how could I have possibly sat down with my aunt and apologized to her if I had never separated the event from the resentment? But I want to tell you, when I sat down without aunt and I apologized for refusing to open my wedding gift that she gave me in front of her so she would deny her the joy of seeing me open the gift. I mean, mean, means stuff, you know. And I carried that into AA. hey, you know when somebody, I don't like certain AA speakers. I know you guys love all AA speakers, so we're a little different, but there's a few that kind of I find sort of annoying. And so what I would do in the old days is if somebody said, boy, I heard this guy, he was great, I really liked him. I'd go, oh, no, you didn't like him. He's no good. You didn't Like him. No, no. He liked him! He just said he liked him, but why do I have to change his mind? Because I somehow have to character assassinate this guy. And until I got it, until I did an inventory, I did that a lot. You know, I haven't done a thank God in a long time. If somebody likes somebody, why would I possibly try to talk them out of feeling a little closer to God through somebody else? You know? And that's what I did with my aunt. So he asked me to take a look at was the resentment my fault, which I found out, you know, it was a trick question. You know. And now you know the trick. And something that was really valuable to me, because in the description of the inventory, it says on page 66. Sometimes it was remorse and then we were sore at ourselves and the resentments I had against myself were just remarkable. Now, I I had a lot of resentment against myself, but don't get me wrong. I hated you way more than I hated me. I mean, I hated me fine, but nothing compared to how much I hated you. I hated You. I'm not a suicide guy. I'm a homicide guy. That's just where I go. You go first. I vastly prefer your death to mine. I always have. And I am not knocking the suicide people. This is not a put-down at all. I mean I just think it's sort of the flip side of the same coin, you know. But I'm an homicide guy but what he asked me to do was every time i wrote a resentment to ask myself scott do you have any resentment in connection against yourself in connection with this and boy it was really helpful to me it really helped me you know when a dentist goes in and sees a little pinprick of a hole in the tooth opens it up and it there's like a cavern in there that there were certain areas of my life that i was able to gain entrance to in that way and say oh man and the shame and guilt I felt around that was just unbelievable. So that expanded my inventory also. If you're new, I want to share with you now what used to be my favorite sentence in the big book of AA. And if you're knew it could be yours too, if you'd like it to be. It starts on the bottom of page 65 and continues to the top of page 66. And what they're assuming is that you have written down a list of resentments. You have written down a list of what people have done to you and they don't argue with you, okay? And they say, if you're looking at this list, they say the first thing apparent was that this world and its people were often quite wrong. That's all for today, right? And I just used to read that before I go to bed. don't read the next two pages. The next two pages will destroy your life. Okay? Because what the next few pages put forward is the following notion, that you don't just not like stuff. No, no, no. You hate with a hot hatred that you wake every day in water like a little flower. You care for this hatred. You nurture it. You develop it. You gain, you pick up more evidence to support the hatred. You proselytize and try to carry the word about the hatred and perhaps get some converts over and bring them into the hatred pipeline. You hate with a hate that eats your brain and your heart and turns your life black and throws you out of your own life. You don't just dislike stuff. If you could just dislike stuff, you'd be in very good shape. Just disliking is a lofty goal. Let that be something maybe you'll attain at a later point to just dislike something. Now it says on that same page, it says something that so explained my life to me. It says that for every minute I spend in resentment, I'm squandering the hours that could have been spent in a more worthwhile way. And it's true. For every five minutes I spend in resentment, it's five minutes wasted. For every 5 minutes I spent in resentment it's 5 minutes that I could have fished or done something I really like. It says I cut myself off from the sunshine of the Spirit I drink again and for me to drink is to die. So it's also 5 minutes where I've cut myself from God. So every 5 minute of resentment is 15 minutes down the toilet. And I just want to tell you what a powerful explanation that was for me. My life was exhausting. How many times have we heard people over and over again? I mean, it's the hallmark of AA. How can I do it all? I'm doing so much. Who the hell ever knew that I could do this? I mean whoever even thought it? Because my life was so exhausting and I believe that's the explanation for it. When you're on that spiritual hamster wheel, when you're wasting that amount of time, it's just damned exhausting. But one of the things I've been set free in AA, and, of course, another common malady that we've seen in the program is when people start realizing themselves on that way, some of them, certainly not all of them. Then become disconnected to the reason why they're able to do that. And they spin off. And they get cut off from the foundation. And some of them do quite well, and some of them drink and die. And someof them drink and suffer horribly. And I had a sponsor who was an incredible example. When he had a hard time, he did more, and when he hada good time,he did more. He always did more so whenever he hadatough time,they never had to say, geez,I better start doing this.He was already doing it, you know? And whatagreat example for me. I've just always done more. And not because I'm smarter or a nice guy or anything like that. But I can't tell you how many times when I was new, I heard people get up to podiums and say, You know, things got good and I drifted away. And I just didn't want to be one of those people. I really heard it. I really hear it loud and clear. Things got good, and I drifted away." So that's been a tremendous help to me. This description of how I experience resentment resentment is the great destroyer of all alcoholics the source of all spiritual illness it will cut you off from the sunlight of the spirit drag your ass out and kill you dead but don't be alarmed I didn't understand it again when I was new I was able to understand it on a very primitive level but now that I've seen people I've seeing people stop drinking and I've see them sit in their rooms there's a speaker in AA who tells this story it's the whole story for me He's in an AA meeting in L.A. A woman comes in drunk, has a seizure. It's an AA meet-up. The meeting doesn't stop. She's having a seizure, she's flopping around like a boated fish, she turns blue, somebody puts a wallet in her mouth, and then she relaxes. The meeting goes on, you know. She wakes up probably going, oh, wallet mouth, you knows. Probably has the taste of wallet in their mouth most of the time, you know. And she's, you now, catching her breath, and she's getting pink back and he says he watched her this whole time and she sat down in a chair, she's just had a seizure froth at the mouth, her skirt's over her head she's been a complete spectacle to this entire room and she sits down and then he says she looked up and looked around the room and saw the 12 steps and went like this and then got up and just walked out and he saw the whole story of alcoholism the seizure, the realization, the separation the grandiosity well I've had enough of this I'll just wind up with a wallet in my mouth or something and when I finally got it when I really got what resentment does, what it is how it cuts me off again as I've grown in Alcoholics Anonymous as I have seen people walk in And look, the AA drill, and I've seen it thousands of times now in 14 years. People come in, do the work and change or people come in. They don't do the Work. They don' t change. They get sick. They get Sicker. They get to the podium. They share their gift with us and they share their ass right out of the door or sit here and become columns of human sewage and sexual predators, although I judge no man, and just become radioactive. And that's it. That's the drill. And I've seen it hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times. So, it was really clear to me when I reached that page, that opposite page, I have to realize, not that I'm wrong, not that i haven't been screwed, these people have screwed me on page 66. We know we have to be, if we were to live, we had to be free of anger. That doesn't mean I'm never going to be angry. I didn't come here to be some brain-dead moony, but I can't be driven by it anymore. It can't Be the centerpiece. You know, it's not, it doesn't say that I'm ever going to get angry again. It says I have to be free of it. The grouch and the brainstorm were not for us. This was very confusing for me when I came in. I didn�t understand in 30s parlance what brainstorm meant. I got scared about that because I'm creative. I want to have, you know, I want have a brainstorm. I want creative active thinking. It's not what it meant in the 30s. in the 30s it meant a storm over your head it meant depression and it was just important for me to find that out the grouch and the brainstorm were not for us they were the dubious luxury of normal men but for alcoholics they were poison I'm wasting all this time when I'm harboring such feelings I know it says the world and its people are often quite wrong but if I continue to just stay there I will experience this dislike in a way that again eats my heart and my brain and throws me out of my own life I have to do something radical I have to put aside the wrongdoings of others the big book never says they're right and you're wrong it never says you haven't been hurt it says you've been hurt and you are dead you are right and you are dead we have to do something and there it goes right from the bottom of 66 through 67 it says look this is what we have got to do we have to start appreciating and admitting what is it in us that drives us into this argument in a way where we lose every time, where we experience this dislike in away that shuts us off from anything good in our lives. And it says the only thing that we have found that will do this is by taking a look in ourselves at what has cut us off and asking God for the removal. Let's say God's got a magic wand. He comes down and He touches in my head. What poison is it in me that if God would remove, I would be able to live another day? If you're bored, I want to welcome you to AA. I want to tell you my favorite story about being bored in Alcoholics Anonymous. It happened to an old friend of mine, this guy named Jeff D., who used to go to my old home group. And he was brand new. He was shifting around his seat in a meeting. And his sponsor said to him, what's the matter? And Jeff said, I'm bored. His sponsor said, well, you know why you're bored. Jeff said no, I don't. His sponsor said, you're bored because you're boring. That's why you're born. And for Jeff, it was like an acid moment. He went, wow, wow. He thought it was such a cool thing to say. He could hardly wait till the newcomer told him that they were bored. 13 years later, no newcomer had told him they were board. He's 13 years sober. He's at our home group again with a young lady who is new. She was shifting around in her seat and he said, what's the matter? And she said, I'm bored. He said, well, you know why you're bored? She said, yeah, because I'm with you. So now that I've talked for nine hours, if you're boarded, it's probably because you're with me. and I'm going to break for lunch and come back later and do some more of this. Okay? My name is Scott Redman. I'm an alcoholic. Could you please join me in the serenity prayer? God. I pray in the spirit of unity that we accept the things that cannot change and courage to change the things that can and wisdom is not a difference I love that stuff with the cell phone. There's a meeting in my area that if your pager goes off during the meeting, you've got to throw a buck in the basket. If your cell phone rings, you've Got to Throw Five in the Basket. And the whole high-tech nature of sobriety now is fascinating to me. Cybersex is this whole new thing which comes up on inventories all the time. I didn't even know what the hell it was. But it's given me the opportunity now. I've actually got to give the following direction to a man. Go home, pray, and don't touch your mouse. So it's just a whole new area. I don't think our founders really ever saw this one coming. I was acting in a Broadway play. I was in my early 20s, and just before that, about a year before that I had to catch alcoholism when I came to Alcoholics Anonymous I caught a mild case at first I became mildly alcoholic The disease tends to enter through the ear The infection enters through the air at the meetings Then infects you, and you start actually infecting other people and the more I have worked these steps the more serious a case of alcoholism that I have developed and one of the things that I I'm going to talk about drugs a little bit here I don't mean to offend anybody I really do believe in the signal as a purpose of AA but the fact is I use drugs to avoid catching alcoholism and it almost killed me if you're a drug addict I'd like to welcome you to AA If you're a dope fiend, which is somehow worse than any of us, I'd like to welcome you to Alcoholics Anonymous. And just stick around. I want to strongly urge you to catch alcoholism. We'd love to give it to you. There's a new, very exotic group of people who have just kind of shown up on the scene. I really love them, the Tweakers. Love you, Tweakers! Hand up in the back. Probably forgot why you put your hand up, didn't you? And, wow, my hand's up. This is cool. And I understand AA's putting together a liaison group to try to contact the tweakers and develop a common language with them and stuff. And I'm not making fun of you, although, boy, I'm coming pretty close. But the fact is, is I'm just trying to make fun of people. I'm trying to not make it funny. The thing, you know, you might be a drug addict. that's fine. The fact is, is I use drugs to avoid catching alcoholism and man, it almost worked. It almost worked and so I, you know, did something. I called it swapping addictions but I never swapped anything. I was addicted. I'm addicted to alcohol. When I have a drink, it goes boom. Normal people drink doesn't go boom. When normal people take a drink they don't go down to the middle of their bone. They don't experience the kind of release and relief. They don' t care about 99. They don''t care. I do, because when I drink, when I see a smoky, brown, short, stout glass sweating into a cocktail napkin sitting on a bar that stinks from rotted yeast and there's some genius with a ribbit of drool coming out of his mouth sitting next to me ready to plan the future of the world, I'm a happy man. One moment of clarity I had when I was drinking. Near the end during the holidays, my wife would take the kids and just evacuate, just get the hell out of town, go to her parents' house. And I used to drink for free at this one place in Beverly Hills called the Ginger Man because all the guys who tend a bar there were my buddies from New York, so they'd never charge me. So there I am, Thanksgiving night, eating Thanksgiving dinner at the bar with free drinks. This is what my life has become, sitting there with the little paper couplet of cranberry sauce and, you know, having Thanksgiving. And in comes a guy, a dentist. In comes a dentist, loaded, just grilled, stewed. And he and I are drinking together. He says, oh, I love Thanksgiving. I love it. He says Monday, oh it's a bonanza. All the old people break their bridge work on the bones, on the turkey bones. He says it's an old man. It's a gold mine. It's an bonanza! Ja! Drool coming out of his mouth, talking about old people breaking their bridge work. And I said, how did this happen? How did I wind up here? How did this become Thanksgiving? It just was unbelievable how little your life can become. And I was in a cycle at that time. Just before I got into my 20s, I became an intravenous drug user. I was shooting heroin and I shot some heroin And my father had a massive stroke And I was taken to the hospital And I couldn't show up for my old man I couldnít be there The curtain was down Sound of the heart machine couldnít even get through Because I was so numb And thereís a couple of times in a kidís life You ought to be there for a parent This is probably one of them And I could not answer the call And what happened to me Was my father was lost to me I couldít talk about him I couldn't look at pictures of him, and when I would think of him this horrible black place would come up where I would just cringe and hold my breath, and it was like that black hole. And if you're new here, I don't know what that is for you. I don' t know what you're coming in with that's your really black place. I will tell you that ten years ago a man in a rehab looked at me in the eyes and said to me, you don't understand. I can't get this thing. I was stoned on heroin the night my father died. And I can tell you that I looked into that man's eyes and I told him the truth. I told them what had happened to me. It says on the third page, I guess the second or the third pages of the chapter to the family afterward, once we've placed our dark past in God's hands, we can help others avert death and misery. Not bad for a little, I'm grandiose. I like that on a business card. Scott Redman helps others averted death and mystery. I'll buy that. And the first step of it was this inventory process. So my father was lost to me, and shortly after that I was acting in a Broadway play, and a new usherette walked in with long brown hair. And I took one look at this woman. I didn't even say hello to her. I walked back into the dressing room, stood up on a chair, and announced to the male members of this cast who were a bunch of exuberant breeders, And I said, if anybody talks to the new usherette with long brown hair, I'll break all the bones in your hands and feet. And any time anybody would walk near Nancy, he'd kind of go, ah, and dash away. And the earth swallowed me up, and I fell absolutely in love with this woman. And we gave things a lot of time. A couple days later, we woke up together. And I saw that she had been awake and had been looking at me. And I said, what? And she said, you're trouble, aren't you? And I said, yeah. Oh, yeah And, you know, 23 years later And we became just tremendously, tremendously troubled and sick together We sold this car we had borrowed And she became very sick from prolonged exposure to me And we had our first son, Micah, and he was really welcomed into the world. We were surrounded by friends and family. There were a ton of phone calls and a lot of flowers. And two years and nine months later when Jesse was born, there were no phone calls, no flowers, nobody around. We were completely isolated by the disease of alcoholism. One of the great things, we have these pictures in the hospital when Micah was born. In every picture, she's standing up and I'm laying in the bed. You know, Al-Anon attention. I have an Al-Alanon approved Al-Alanon joke. It's approved by my wife and my sponsor's wife has been in Al-ALANON for 37 years. This Al- ALANON woman went to see Phantom of the Opera. It's a hard ticket to get and she's next to this normal woman And the normal woman sees that the Al-Anon woman's got an empty seat next to her. And the abnormal woman says, geez, who's sitting there? And the woman said, well, I, you know, got the ticket from my husband, but he passed away. And so I'm here. And the women said, Well, and this is a story about release. And the womens said, It's a hard ticket to get. Couldn't you give it to a friend or a relative? And she said, Oh, they're all at the funeral. It's Al-Anon approved. That's an Al-Alanon approved joke. In my wife's Al Anon family, this is not an uncommon thing. I've heard a lot of people do it, but she was always encouraged by her sponsor. Just to give you an idea how spiritual this woman is who I'm married to. When they're in the heat of something, some difficulty, that they're encouraged to say, You know, you could be right. You could be Right, honey. You could Be Right. So about a year ago, we're in the car and we're tootling and we were in some really important fight about some ridiculous thing. We're into it. And my wife goes, you know, honey, you could be right. But not today. No, no, no. Not today. Perhaps you'll be right in some future date that I can see. But you're out of luck right now. and when Jesse was born he had transitive tachypnea of the heart he was taken up to neonatal intensive care and my wife was all alone in the hospital and I don't got to tell you there's a couple of times when you should be in the middle of your community and one of those times is during the birth of a child that's exactly when it should be happening right then and there that's when the love should be right there and we were all alone The ice around our heart had become so thick we had repelled everybody and everything around us. And it wasn't because people didn't love us. It just hurt too damn much to be around us, and a doctor called me that night and said, Mr. Redman, your baby's in an incubator. Your wife's here all alone in really serious psychological duress. We need you down here, and I said, look, I want to come down. The fact is I can't find anybody to watch my 2-year-old son, And a doctor who I had never met before said to me on the phone that night, well, I'll tell you what. I'll give you my number and my address. Why don't you bring your kid over to my house? My husband will take care of him. I mean, what an extraordinary offer to make, a doctor making it to a stranger. And I said no. There was no way that I could accept this woman's generosity. And I think one of the reasons why, in retrospect, is I would have had to have taken a look at my life. To have gone through the mechanics of putting the baby in the car, taking them over to this guy I didn't know I would have had to somehow go how did this happen? How do you get here? How do we get this isolated? You know and that's where we were by the time I got to AA on April 22nd 1985. See, I knew what the problem was the night my father died and I knew how to solve it The problem was needles and heroin and as long as I didnít put one in my arm, I was okay I just drank until I didn't want to be a drunk. I overcame my alcohol problem with marijuana. I'd like to welcome all the pot smokers here today. You remember wow, right? Wow. Wow. And right after wow usually came what? What? Wow, what, wow, what? Wow, watch the pot smoker is like watching a dog try to run on linoleum. There's a lot of activity, but no movement. They cannot get a claw in the carpet. They can't get their stuff moving forward. I triumphed over marijuana with pills. I was triumphant over pills with cocaine. Cocaine is an excellent drug. It's particularly good for sex if you enjoy sex from the Neolithic period. And then I kicked that gall darn cocaine with heroin. Heroin is a very dark, complicated, artistic drug. and you cross a line and become a vomiting pig. It's just a little hop, skip and a jump and then I drank until I didn't want to be a drunk and the night my father died I knew that if I never put a needle in my arm again I would never have to be the man I was the night that my dad died and you know what? The fact is I thought I was a free man making that free choice. I did whatever alcoholism told me to do. I did it for just as long as it told me to do it for and I did it every time and whenever it told me to do it. It owned me, I was driven by a hundred forms of fear, self-delusion, self-seeking and self-pity and I fancied myself a free man and the whole point of the big book of AA, nowhere in the big books of Alcoholics Anonymous does it say the road gets narrower and I understand what people are saying when they say that, I just don't subscribe to it. What the book says is life is going to get bigger, the road is going together, it says join us on the broad highway Become part of the great reality, the big idea. It talks about life getting bigger and bigger, more inclusive, not exclusive. It says join us on the firing line of life. Help us to pack things in the mainstream of life There's even instructions on how to go to parties. Think about it. Do you have a reason to be there? If you do, go. Reason over, go again, leave. You know, when Jonah got out of the belly of the whale, he didn't go back in to get his hat. He stayed out. I love when the newcomer says, Oh, it's okay. I'm around guys who use drugs, but I'm comfortable. It's illegal, you moron! Tell the police you're comfortable as they're arresting you. Remember the illegal part? And, um... When Michael was five years old, he came to me and he said, Dad, is there anything such as God? And I looked into the eyes of my perfect baby boy, my perfect, gorgeous little boy, and I said, Son, there is not. There is not, and I wish I could tell you different. And I thought I was giving him the straight stuff. I thought i was giving the straight existential deal so he wouldn't have to be played like one of those saps and suckers. I don't think there is a more abusive thing that you can do to a child. I mean, in essence, what I'm saying to the kid is, you know when it's dark and you're all alone and it's scary at night and you can't go to sleep? Tough, because that's all there is. I mean that's basically what you're telling them. What a lie. I mean on top of being just mean and abusive, it's a lie If you read the fourth chapter of our book, if you're new, it speaks to this much more eloquently than I would ever be able to it says that that is not the bravest it is the mushiest, weakest thinking you can possibly have that if you live in this world if you look at immutable law if you looks at the abundance around you that it is actually the most cowardly, weakest mushiest easiest thinking of all And it says you already have what is necessary for this thing. You have faith. You have faithfulness. You have money, power, and prestige. You have Faith in Alcohol. You have Faith in Drugs. You have Faith. And all we're going to do, we're not going to imbue you perhaps with a faith you don't have. We're going to give you some spiritual tools, not spiritual weapons, spiritual tools that will help you move your faith from something that has been killing you to something that is not. Something that is going to save your life. Anytime an alcoholic, You might have a different experience than me. But usually when men I sponsor call themselves lazy, I go, no, no. You're not lazy. I know lazy people. You'renot on the list. You're industrious. You'reindustrious in your misery. You ferociously protect your misery, but lazy, no? You'renot on the lazy list. You might be on the, you know, I've been on the moron list. I'vebeen on that list, but not on thelazy list. I have found alcoholics, it's like drug dealing. Drug dealing is the worst job in the world unless you're like, you know, own a country. If you break it down to an hourly wage, it sucks. You're working 24 hours a day. You're on call 24 hours of day. You can't get workman's comp. You can get any insurance. You know, this friend of mine's brother was out in the Bronx dealing drugs in the neighborhood And his family confronted him. They had a, you know, what do they call those things? Intervention. And he looked at his family and he said, Do you think I like being out there with these people? You know, I'm working, I'M working, I'M trying to make a living. So, by the way, if you're new and you're in a recovery institution right now or if you were in a halfway house, we'll be talking about the 12-step later tonight. I just want to tell you, I have no opinion on recovery places. I haveno opinion on halfway houses. I respect anything anybody's doing to get sober. The thing I do know for sure is that the minute that you have one penny and the work in the same place, it cannot be Alcoholics Anonymous. AlcoholicsAnonymous, when money becomes involved, evaporates. It disappears. It's like Clark Kent and Superman. They can't be in the same place at the same time. And I don't put these places down. I know plenty of people. Our book suggests a period of hospitalization to defog people, you know? And our family was just, by the time I got sober, Micah was six, Jesse was three. Micah would make involuntary clicking noises with his throat that he couldn't stop making. and he had tested in excess of 168 IQ, he could barely read or write. He had small motor skills that they called him kind of functionally retarded because his small motor schools were screwed up and there was nothing organically wrong with him. He just was scared all the time, and he was so distracted from being scared. And what a beautiful description of fear in our book when it applies to us and our inventory. It seems to cause more trouble than stealing. The fabric of our lives is shot through with it. It had crippled my son. Jesse was playing these war games. He was three, and he was playing these war Games. It was so great to see Morgan down there laughing. You know, she's three. And I know the shape that my son was in when he was that age. When he was at that age, he was just playing robot games that he couldn't stop playing because it was just too scary to be a person. It hurt too much to be made out of flesh, so he pretended that he was made out of steel all the time. He was playing these war Game that the people at his preschool were so alarmed with because not that he was planning them, That's fine. He couldn't get out of it. He couldn'T come back from it because it just was a better place to be. That's the condition that we were in by the time I got to AA. I had walked out with my wife and family and started living with a woman down in Texas, which was one of the last places I had directed a TV show at that time. Our family was destroyed. Infidelity, drunkenness, drug addiction. The kids were a wreck. Nancy was absolutely just, you know, at least I was drinking. She was just, you know, one of my, if you've never heard an Al-Anon speaker named Winnie Eddy, please, I urge you to pick up some of her tape. She's really one of My Favorite Speakers in the whole universe. And one of MY favorite stories that she tells is her husband gets locked up in jail. He gets a job in jail polishing the police cars at night. So during the day he's sunning himself. He's getting three meals a day, just healthy bronze. He gets out of jail like this and she's like this. She's just nuts. She hasn't eaten in a week. She hasn'T dressed. She hasn' t washed herself. If you took a picture of these two people, who's the drunk? She was psychotic. Also, she's got a great speaking story. She went to Germany with one of her nutty kids to visit another one of her nutTY kids. And she was in Germany, and Germany is, I guess it's not a big Al-Anon country. she couldn't find an Al-Anon but I judge no man couldn't finding an Al Anon meeting there and all she's hearing is her own head her kids are driving her nuts she finally finds an Al Al-Alan meeting five hour drive at a U.S. base all I'm hearing is my own head she's telling the story I'm just hearing my own hand I'm driving myself nuts but I get to the Al Al meeting I travel the five miles the five hours I walk in there and the secretary just as it started the secretary says well you know We hear speaker tapes once a month. He pushed it. She said it was a tape of her. And she said, not me, not me. All I'm hearing is me. And she say to herself, maybe I said something that will help me. And isn't that great? Just great. And then I love at the end of story. Her demonstration was, she demonstrated her humility to herself and she didn't tell anybody it was a tape of her at the meeting. So that's what she got out of the meeting was that demonstration, which I thought was great and probably something I would have been completely incapable of doing. So I didn't, when I started writing this inventory, these resentments against myself, I'm resentful at my father for dying. What a humiliating thing to have to write. What a pathetic... It was one of those things I wrote it and I didn't even know if I could read it to anybody. It just seemed so pathetic to me. I'm resentful at my father for lying. What does it affect? Self-esteem, pocketbook, ambition, personal relations, and sex. A five-bagger for sure. Now, what is it in me? What are the defects in me that if God would remove the resentment against It's my father for dying. What are the defects? I'm filled with self-pity. Self-pitty, if you could bottle it, would not crack off the market in two minutes. It's a better drug. It's more available. When I feel self-pitty, I get a little lump in my throat. I lean forward a little bit. I talk slow. It's good dope, that self- pity. I'm telling you. Filled with it. Filled With Self-Pity. Now, this is a disease of self, driven by a hundred forms of fear, self-delusion, selfishness, selfcenteredness. Now, selfish is wanting it all for me. Self-centered is thinking it's all about me. And self-seeking is trying to figure out what's in it for me, so they're the same, but they're different. They've got their own little English on the ball there. Then I've got self-pity, self delusion, and when I talk to God, when I have these conversations with him, I just like to be as specific as I can. Again, I don't think there's any right or wrong way to do this. I'm just sharing with you the way I do it. So I like to Be Real Specific about what the individual resentment incites in me. Resentful against my father for dying. I am filled with self-pity. I'm self-centered. This is not about me. He died. It happened to him. I'm an opportunist. I've used that as a weapon with other people to feel sorry for me. Boy, that emotional opportunism. What a dreadful thing. that has been for me in my life. I'm playing God. I'm deciding when people should die and when people shouldn't die. You know what? My dad died when I was 21. I was really lucky to have him for 21 years. A lot of people don't get that, you know? Ungrateful. I'm ungrateful for the 21 years that I had. So these are the defects that I said I had to write about that. With my wife, I had dozens and dozens of resentments against her. I resented just about everything around her. And I am telling you that that night that I saw her in that play, when I was – and I saw she was like, I saw that gorgeous girl in that theater, in that dimly lit theater. I looked at her and I went, oh man, isn't she just like the greatest thing you ever saw? And then I got to know her, and I just loved her more and more. I really loved her. And that love, some people change, and some people mutate. I had mutated. It was like a bad B movie called When Jews Collide. It was just, it had become this ugly, pathetic, diseased thing. And the root of it, what was underneath it all, was a real genuine love and excitement and acceptance of one another which was hardly discernible. I had to stop working on my marriage. My idea of working on a relationship is to talk to you until you change your mind. That's the Scott Redmond couples workshop right there. Talk to you till your eyes roll back in your head, you keel over, and on the way down you go, Oh, OK. Guess I won again. And I had these resentments against her for destroying my life, resentments against her, for withholding sex, resentment against her forgiving sex. But just to other people, resentment. But I'm not taking her inventory today. But, you know, it was a fun thing when I was new. And I just want to tell you, if you are new and you are sitting here taking my inventory or other people, that's good. You get some practice in. When you take your own, you'll just zip through the sucker. You're just in the spiritual.