The Twelve Steps of AA (4.5 Hrs) – Part 3 of 4 – 2017 – Sandy B.

Just, you know what I mean? Doing a little exercise. I had a resentment against my kids for being sick. And a resentment against Micah for being so ill that affects my self-esteem pocketbook ambition person. What are the defects? I'm ashamed. I'm self-centered. I'm making this about me. I'm not living in today and I'm impatient because I don't know what's going to happen. I'm a people pleaser and a mind reader. No, no, no. I need no psychic hotline. Thank you very much. I'm an alcoholic. A member of the greatest class of mind readers in the known universe. The amount of failed mind reading that I have done in my life. And you know when you're really mind reading? When that vein starts pumping like a garden hose on your forehead. When you really... I have predicated more pointless activity on what I think people are thinking than anything, anything, anything. and then when you finally tell them what they're thinking and they go, what are you talking about? And the other thing, self-fulfilling prophecy, I used to accuse people of thinking behind my back because that's the worst when they think behind their back. So much that eventually they are thinking about it. They're thinking if he accuses me of thinking beyond my back I'm going to kill him one more time. What are the defects I was resentful of my kids for being sick. You know, that people pleasing. How's it making me look? And I wrote it all down. Resentment against myself for being loaded the night my father died. How was that ever even going to go away? What are the defects? I'm a grudge holder. I've been holding this grudge against myself for 15 years. I'm ashamed. I'm playing God. And I am unwilling to accept the fact that Scott Redmond is another child of God who is spiritually sick. It says right there on page 66, I believe. We remember that these people, it says on the previous page in the discussion of resentment, if you're an alcoholic, you have been mentally and physically and spiritually sick God save me from being angry but I will be done not mine. This is a sick man. So part of my resentments against other people, one of the defects is I am unwilling to accept the fact that my wife, Nancy, is another child of God who could be spiritually sick like me. It's possible. I'm going to quit playing God, so I'll say could be, although I'm not sure who it is. Or the guy really is, or they really are. But I'm an exercise, exercise. Perhaps spiritually sick. The only person I can say for sure is spiritually sick is me. I was resentful at the kids. I was resentment myself for being a crappy father. You know, you guys told me when I came in here, I'm Not a Bad Guy Getting Good. I'm a sick guy getting well. What am I? Not being a bad guy, but I sure did a good imitation of a bad guy. And I really felt like a bad guy. Why? Because I kept doing bad stuff. So the notion, and I don't know if you hear it in Southern California many times, people say, you can do anything in sobriety as long as you're willing to pay the price. I don' t buy it. The assumption is that you'll be able to. how the hell do you know if you'll be able to pay that price once the strange mental twist starts once you get busy once that alcoholism gets busy so i understand the spirit of the thing you can do x y and z as long as you're able to accept responsibility but again how why would you possibly think that you could tell whether or not that was a price that you'd be able to pay. So when I got into AA and I started doing this fourth step work, I really gravitated to guys who were doing good stuff, who were acting in a respectful way, you know? And part of the thing that happened to me later in sobriety, which I, and it's when I had to change sponsors and change home group 10 years into my sobriery is I, in terms of my home group, what I was coming up against was I'll womanize, I'll gamble, you overeat, You do this, but it's okay. We're sober. And for me, what it became was, you know what? It ain't okay for me anymore because I don't know if I can do this. And I knew for me – and this is not true for other people – adultery equaled drinking. There was no buffer zone. That was just my deal. It was my – that's the way I acted out there. I could not act in a way that I felt guilty about without the anesthesia of drink. I couldn't. do it. So I knew in sobriety that I wouldn't be able to pull it off sober. Maybe had I known that, I would have been sick enough to try it. Bill talks about it in his story, that his fidelity was schooled by the fact that he was too loaded to do anything else. He doesn't really take credit for it. He talks aboutit in that realm. And that's the way it was for me, too. So, I did this list. The three columns and then the list of defects. And the way I do it is, I number those resentments. I'm resentful of my father for being dead. On a separate piece of paper, I go number one and do a separate defect list for each resentment so that when I go to guidance six and seven, I can lay the resentments aside and just take the defects and discuss those with my higher power. We're asked to write four times on the fourth step. There are three sections. The first section is on resentments. I'm asked to right the three columns and the list of defects. The second time I'm ask to write is on fears, and it's in a very interesting way. It talks about fear so beautifully on page 67 and 68. And it talks about our lives being shot through with it, of us being riddled with it. And it says something for me was just so true. Self-reliance. We asked ourselves why we had these fears. Wasn't it because self-reiliance failed us? Self-reliance was as good as far as it went, but it didn't go far enough. Some of us had great self-confidence, but it didn't fully solve the fear problem or any others. When it made us cocky, it was worse. And that's when I was at my worst. I'm not scared. Watch this. That's when i was absolutely down the toilet and i did it over and over again. And it says something on the top of page 68 which i found quite interesting and really molded this section of the inventory for me. It says we reviewed our fears thoroughly. We put them on paper even though we had no resentment in connection with them. Well, what does that mean? I'm scared of police, but I'm resentful at myself for robbing banks. So that's kind of a fear in connection with personal resentment. Fear is always in the future. There is no fear. I defy anybody to produce one fear that is either in yesterday or today. It's always inthe future. I'm not scared that you have just hit me. I''m scared that you're going to hit me again. When you're like this, I'm not scared of anything but that I might be about to get hit. I'm not scared of my father because he was mean to me in the past. I'm still scared now. For me, fear is always in the future and when I stay in fear, when I live in it, it's a real clear indication for me that I'm really blocking God out on some level. Not that I don't get scared. I get scared all the time. I also have found, and thank God it's not in the book, I have always found it to be a fallacious statement for me when people have said you can't be frightened and have faith at the same time. I have been frightened and I've had faith simultaneously many times. Sometimes I have faith that I'll stop being frightened. I don't find one to be exclusive of the other. I think that if I didn't have faith when I was scared, I don'T know that I would have stayed sober this amount of time. So it's an interesting thing to me. If you sit and you take a look at a pure fearless, not in connection with personal resentment, I've heard many of them. I've never heard 100 fears. I've read a lot, but not 100. Not even the 22-hour guy had 100 fears I'm frightened of living. I'm frightening of dying. I'm fighting to being alone. I'm fightin' to be with people. I'm frighten of success. I'm frightened of failure. I'm frightened. I don't think I've heard inventory in the last ten years that didn't have a fear of AIDS on it, just general fear. There's something heartbreaking about that litany of fears. You hear it and you write it and you must look at it at some point if you can and say, how could a person live like this? How can you live in this state of being just scared of everything, of being scared of one direction, of being scared if the other direction. Now you hear stuff about alcoholism and I heard a lot of stuff when I came into AA that I heard some of it worked for me and some of the didn't. You hear sometimes that alcoholics don't like change. I just don't want change I don't like but I you know but but I love change that I like but change I don't like, I really don't like. So I don't just dislike all change, but the change I don't like tends to piss me off. You hear sometimes that alcoholics are perfectionists. Not, I'm a pig. I like when you're a perfectionist if you're taking care of me. I'm not a perfectionist about your perfectionism. But I'm not a perfectionist about my perfectionism." Now some people are. These are general statements about alcoholism that work for some people and they don't work for others. I've never found any of them in the big book, which has been a relief for me. I have never found anything that has annoyed me at an AA meeting that I have found in the big book of AA. Now, if my sharing is annoying you today, I would like to just give you a couple of helpful hints on how to get through it. And there are helpful hints when I call my sponsor and go, you know what he said? And he'd say, look, he taught me three things about listening to sharing that drove me nuts in AA. He said, number one, everything at an AA meeting that is said needs to be said. It just, you might not be on the list of people who needed to hear it. But everything, there's somebody out there that needs to, how many times have I taken a newcomer to a meeting and gone, okay, this is the worst if they sat down and wrote the worst meeting, we just attended the worst meeting. And you go outside and the guy goes, oh man, that was great. That changed my life. You're going, what, what? You just never know how people are going to be affected. So he said, that is the first thing he said to me. The second thing he said to him was, they have to stop. It's going to end. Remember, it's going to end And they went, oh yeah They have to stop It's goingtoend So sometimes I'll be sitting there and go It'sgoingtoend And it's true, right? It's true It always ends It just doesn't feel that way when you're in the middle of it I hate when you talk about people throwing nooses over the beams That's really a drag And then the third thing, and this really annoyed the crap out of me. He asked me, and I'm glad he didn't ask me this today. I'm Glad he asked me when I was new. He said, are you willing to take the following chance with your life? I said, what? He said is there anybody in there, no matter what they're saying, who you're willing to get up to that podium, tap them on the shoulder and say, why don't you shut up and sit the hell down because I'm going to talk now. Now, would you be willing to gamble to throw those dice with your life? And at the time I said no. And boy, those have been three helpful things. So perhaps those will help you get through the rest of my talk. At any rate. So I wrote those fears down. The third section of the inventory, starting on page 69, what a sense of humor. The section on sex. And the instructions, in my estimation, are in the second paragraph on page 69. And it says, We reviewed our own conduct over the years past. Where had we been selfish, dishonest, or inconsiderate? Unjustifiably aroused jealousy, suspicion, or bitterness. Where were we at fault and what should we have done instead? Seven clear points to me. Selfish, dishonesty, inconsiderat, unjustifiably roused jealousy. Jealousy, suspicion and bitterness. What should I have done instead? Now, what could I have Done? I could have left when I realized they were dead. What should I have Don? I shouldn't have even been there. I shouldn' t have been in the state. I shouldn''t have even talked to them. What should I have not? Not what could I have because in the next two paragraphs it says in this way I try to shape a sound ideal for my future life. My ideal I actually get to write down what I want to be instead of what I've been acting like and then I ask God to help mold me and walk toward him. That's six and seven, that's for later on, but it's an extraordinary thing and it's set up here. So I had left Nancy and the kids for this other woman where I had been selfish. I wanted Nancy, and it says write it all down. We wrote this all down not a list. Now, so I've got to write the story of how I've done these six things and the seventh thing which I should have been doing. Now they don't care, they don'T want me to write a story they DON'T want to write, you know, it was a full moon, the Chablis had a blush on it They don't give a crap about that. They want to know what I did. I was selfish. I wanted the woman. I wanted my wife. I wanted it all for myself. I took advantage of a work situation to do this, and I write a little about it. Selfish. Dishonest. I lied to myself. I liedto the woman, I liedtomuywife, I lietomuyemployer, I lie to my employees. I tell a story about that . . . Selfish, dishonest, inconsiderate. I really wasn't considerate of anybody. I was so filled with self-pity and self-promotion that I just didn't consider anybody else rather than my own needs. I write about that, about the different situations of cheating people out of money to serve that need. Selfishness sounded inconsiderate, unjustifiably aroused. Jealousy, I created jealousy in my wife and the other woman, lying that I'd be with both at the same time. You know what? Ultimately, I became jealous of people who I thought were living a normal life. Even jealousy in myself. Jealousies, suspicion, I was suspicious. I created suspicions in my kids. Was I going to be there? In my employer, in my life or the other women. I tell a little story about that, what I did to get that moving. And I became suspicious of my own sanity. Jealousy, suspicion, bitterness created bitterness in everybody. I talked about how my, you know, I wrote a little bit about how my kids became even sicker in school, about how My wife just cut herself off from other people. She had this one friend, the only friend that she would talk to. I wrote about it. What should I have done instead? Now, the answer to what I should have done instead is not that I should've had missionary-style sex with one woman until the year 7089. That is not the answer. I want to have an exciting life. I want a love life. I want an exciting sex life. I want be in this world, man. I want the whole thing. The answer is what I would have done is that I either should have committed to this woman and told the truth and done it or committed to my family and developed that. That was the answer. That was an answer that when I wrote at the time, I could say, okay, I feel like I'm telling the truth here. But I never should have done both things at the same time. People get divorced. It happens. You know, my wife and I haven't. We're having a great time. We're Having a Great Romance Now. But just if you knew, I'm really being completely honest with you about how I had to endeavor to get involved in this work in a way where I really felt that I was going to be in a life that I wasn't really interested in being in. And then after I wrote that, I wrote a very involved inventory. The inventory I did took 11 hours to read and I'm sure my sponsor went, oh, 11 hours, oh my God. And just to show you how really sick I was, I thought I was gonna give it to him and he was going read it and then we would have a commentary and a discussion afterwards. And when I brought it over to his house and he went reading, the first thing I thought was, do you want me to read all this crap? Are you daft? And I mean, to have to go through it. And he insisted that every time I read a resentment, I said I'm resentful at. So I had to say I'm resentment at 300 times. And you know what? After you get through that, you know that you've been resentful. You've said it goes off like a gong over and over andover again. I think these guys knew when they wrote this. They didn't say, write a little, read a little. Write a little read a Little if you can sit down and write the whole thing down, even if it's an hour, if it is a half hour, I don't care, it doesn't matter about like, if you can tell somebody the whole mess, I'm resentful at them, I am resentful of me for resenting I'm resentful at them for watching me resent them and I've had sex with all of them now at the end of this process whether or not the newcomer knows it they have read and shared the whole point They have read and shared the spiritual, the odious spiritual disease that keeps alcoholics in the loop of spree and remorse. It is the thing that makes it impossible for doctors to treat us, psychologists to treat us, pills to treat us. It makes it impossible in some cases for the clergy to treat us. It makes it impossible in many cases for psychologists to treat us. If you sit down and you do this, you will actually have shared what I believe is really the disease of alcoholism. This third element, this wild card that has frustrated people about alcoholism since the first time that grapes were crushed. It is the sickness of the soul, the cancer of the soul that keeps alcoholics beyond human health. And I just love it. They're so kind to us in this book, in these chapters that are written to us. In the chapters that aren't written to us, they're not that kind. The chapters to the wives and family afterward and the employee. They're a little gruffer. But I love on the bottom of page 63, it says, next we launched out on a course of vigorous action, the first step of which is personal house cleaning, which many of us had never attempted. I love that. I've never sat down and given these instructions and had a guy go, wow, you guys do that too? Wow. Cool. Man, I've been doing this for years. This is great. I had one guy, one of my favorite fifth steps. I got a guy I sponsor and I'm telling you, I gave him the instructions like I give everybody else the instructions. And he came back to me. By the way, I hear one fifth step for every 10 times I give the instructions, I get about a 10% return on my dollar. And just about every guy I've ever told that to has said to me, and I am that guy. And they are One out of ten times. I had a guy come back to me and read me a fifth step, and he had two defected character lists on each resentment, one for him and one for the person that he was resentful of. And he had just turned that corner, and that's the way he wrote the whole inventory. And I said, I told him, and he went, and I'm like, I see the air go out of him. What? I'm taking it on the chin for this whole thing? Are you insane? I mean, and you know what? It was funny. And at the same time, I saw his heart break. And God bless him, he stayed sober and he stayed with it. He stayed with her. So, I did that inventory and then at nine months of sobriety, I went back to my sponsor and I read him my fifth step. It's a very interesting thing. All through the big book of AA, there are little spiritual hits. It says in the third step, you know, it says in the 12th step, we'll have that spiritual experience. But they're very good at keeping us coming back and throwing us kind of spiritual bones and keeping it interesting. In step three, it's just sometimes a great effect is felt at once. In step five, it is we will now really start to have a spiritual experience. In the middle of eight and nine, you know, it says we'll know a new peace and new freedom. We'll be able to deal with situations used to baffle us. We'll deal with fear of financial insecurity. We'll know all that stuff. And then in the tenth step it says, sanity will actually have been restored. The alcohol problem will be removed. Eleven says, the occasional hunch or inspiration will actually become a working part of the mind. Great news for pot smokers. That means, wow, stays. And then, in twelve it says having had a spiritual experience as a result of these steps. So, it's kind of interesting all through the whole process you're given these spiritual hits. And for me, Step 5 was a strange and a huge thing. I had to tell somebody the whole rotten mess. And my wife tells something about her sponsor, which I'll share with you, which I've always loved. Nancy was at her home group. She was going to one Al-Anon meeting a week and just, you know, staying nuts. And she heard a woman share that she was moving to Mexico that Monday. And Nancy asked her to be her sponsor. And shortly after that, she heard a woman share. You know how like we'll share many times you'll hear at meetings that, you know, I told my sponsor this and my sponsor said, oh, I did that and I did more. And it's a comforting thing. Well, she had read her sponsor who was sort of an older, very reserved woman. She had read out her inventory and the woman at the end was looking at her like this. She said, oh my God, I've never done anything like that. And then she put her arms around Ruby and gave her a big hug and kiss and said, I just love you to pieces. I just think you're the greatest thing, and I just love you. I guess some of it was sounding like one-upsmanship to Nancy. She was still very ill at that time. But she was so relieved to hear that from Ruby, and it really helped her to ask Ruby to be her sponsor. Ruby's our sponsor today. We just spent the weekend And around this time we used to go to their house and they'd have a troop of AAs and Al-Anons eating and hanging out. And their two kids were in great shape. And I'd sit and I'd look around that place and I go, this is great, but our boys are just too busted up. I really don't think that this is available to us, but I just think it's great. And we were real Nazis with our kids. my wife used to share this thing. She had this thing to have to eat health food. I'm sitting there while she's talking this, right? She says, so I'd eat health food and now go into the car with Dr. Death. You've eaten health food, now go die. But it's the disease. You know, you control what you can't control all this stuff so you'll pick a couple of areas that this was the way it'll be. So the boys were not allowed to watch TV. Who needed to watch tv in our house? It was like a psychological little theme park for God's sake. They weren't allowed to watch TV and they could only eat certain foods. So they go over to Ruby's house and Ruby had one refrigerator with just crap in it. And she'd say to the boys, have anything you want, it's yours. And my wife would be like this and she'd sit him down in front of the TV and turn on the love boat and say eat crap. Watch the love boat. And the boys would just go, oh, oh my God. And then, you know, and Ruby never argued with her. Nancy would call us and say, no, you don't know what they're doing. And Ruby would go, yeah, they're morons. Come on over. Come on over and she taught Nancy how to cook and come on over, we're cooking. We got the girls just come she never argued with yeah they're idiots come on over and um milton her husband who's now sober over 30 years called my sons over one day and bent down you'll excuse my language the book michael was seven at the time and he said boys your parents don't know shit. And Michael went, oh, I knew, I knew it. Oh my God. I knew something was wrong and I didn't know what it was. And they were like, you could see him just go, oh. And Ruby would say to them, boys, if you say thank you, you get more crap. And they just loved it. They loved hearing And somebody cursed. You weren't allowed to curse in our house. Just lay on the floor dying with a pan of eggs, but not curse. Boy, that mania for control. You know what I mean? Your life's out of control. It's turning head over heels. So you just pick these couple little areas. Language. We'll have good language here. Oh, man. and I had to admit all of this odious stuff to this guy about the infidelity about the brutalization of my children my son Michael was six months old and I never told anybody this I had never admitted it to another human being I was hungover, he was a little baby about six months it was on my watch he pushed off me you know how babies like that leg motion and he pushed of me dumped himself off the bed fell face first on a rotary phone, turned his head and the hook on the phone slid right underneath his eye and he almost lost his eye. And it happened on my watch. And I didn't tell anybody. And I pulled him off. It ripped his skin when I got here. They have general anesthetic at six months old. It's very dangerous. A kid can die. He had stitches under his eye, and I never told anybody. I never admitted it to anybody, and then I admitted it that day. and I told them everything and it says in our book many of us or some of us held certain facts about ourselves and there's such a beautiful thing in the description of step five it talks about something that I've never seen an alcoholic, any alcoholic that I know I've always seen it be I think it's one of the most important parts of the book, it talks specifically and directly about the double life that we lead it talks abut waking up having remorse and crushing it back down, it says this made for more drinking. It doesn't make for drinking because if that made for drinking, then I could go to therapy and solve the things I feel guilty about and drink properly. What makes for drinking is the threefold illness of alcoholism and there's no cure for that. It makes for more drink and it keeps me in the cycle of spree and remorse. And that made sense to me in the double life, what I present to my fellows and what I'm really living in my heart. And the stuff that I was living in in my own heart, the way my children had been harmed, what I had told them about God, the way they had been damaged physically, the way that they had wound up in school, cut off from the society of other children. And I want to tell you, if you've stopped drinking, I just can't tell you how much my heart goes out for you. I can't tell you how happy I am for you, and I just, I've never done anything this hard in my entire life. It's easy to stay sober now. I'm having a great time with it, but I will tell you to stop drinking and take the whooping. To stop drinking and deal with cravings and stopping treating your craving with a drink. Starting to accept your craving and become available to what's here, which is slower. If you're an intravenous drug user, you're probably a very impatient person because they're right now kind of people. But so is the drinker. It says in our book the feeling of peace and ease I would get immediately upon knowing that I was going to have a drink, let alone having the drink. So this is the stuff I had to come into it. At nine months of sobriety, I sat down and finally read it to another person. In Dr. Silkworth's opinion, another thing I love about the original draft of the big book is if you take a look in the first edition, Dr. silkworth did not sign his story. It says signed Dr. Anonymous. Yes, yes, he was hedging his bet. And I forget, I don't know what printing of the first edition that he finally started writing it on, but it was not the first one. I guess, you know, whatever he was concerned about jeopardizing the reputation of Town Hospital or whatever was going on, but it wasn't until a little further into the deal that he actually put his name to it. But at any rate, in The Doctor's Opinion, he talks about something that has been tremendously meaningful to me among many things. he talks about alcoholics whose problems pile up at a seemingly unsolvable rate they're crushed under the weight of them and they drink again how many times have we seen a newcomer say yeah but, yeah but yeah but but the money but her but this but the kids but this but this but this but this but this they can't they don't have any tools spiritual tools yet to encounter any other power that can get them out from underneath this heap because you know what and this is one of my favorite Al-Anon readings says, alcoholism is just too much for one person to deal with. You know what? My alcoholism is too much to deal me with. I can't deal with it. I cant deal with yours. I need God. I can do it. You cannot stack anything up in the face of alcoholism. Alcoholism wins. It's like fighting with an adolescent. The adolescent wins because they don't care. If they die, they don�t care. They are willing to die for what they believe in because they They're immortal. You cannot win in an argument with an adolescent. You lose, lose, loose, lose. If you have any life expectancy, you lose. My darling son Jesse, who just got 1540 on his SATs. And I want to tell you, I've been here hours and haven't announced that from the podium. That is self-control. He says to me last year, He says, Dad, can you help me with my homework? I said, sure, son. What would you like me to do? He said, get me something to eat. But before he laid me out, he took me all the way down the lane. Let me go, yeah. What could I do for you, son? Put more sixes in your math homework. I mean, I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I don' t understand what he's doing. And I believe that if you do this fifth step, and I didn't know this at the time. I just knew that I found reading the fifth step. I didnít have a burning bush experience. I didní feel like I had accomplished a great thing. I felt like I was in deep trouble. That I was looking in the face of something. What are you going to do about this? Say, ìIím sorry?î I donít think so. I'm sorry were the two most empty, useless words in my vocabulary. It was like a mouthful of ashes. I had said I'm surprised that, like, the sobriety police would even let me have them in my vocabulary. Just stop saying it. And so for me, the fifth step was a really debilitating thing. And I've got to tell you, I think that was really good for me. I was out of plans. If you're new here and you have a plan, God bless you. I hope you're out of plants. Because if you're new here and you have a plan, it's probably a beaut. Don't use your plan. Grab one of us after the meeting and tell us your plan, we want to know the plan. My favorite newcomer plan, which I'm sure is going to wind up on the soft literature rack eventually, is the one more dope deal to set myself up financially for sobriety plan. And I want to tell you one little story about my friend Howard, and we're going to take a five-minute break. You just never know where and when you're going to get the message of Alcoholics Anonymous. My friend Howard who I told you about before was a Skid Row bum he was a couple of years sober and he was asked to go down to a Skid Row hotel to kind of revisit his past do a 12-step call on this guy named Sullivan and he went down there and this guy Sullivan was in bed he went downstairs with another guy and they tried a 12 step this guy didn't listen the guy died from alcoholism 10 years later Howard was about 12 years sober he was at a meeting and a guy walked up to him and said I want to tell you you saved my life and Howard said I really don't know you but you're welcome the guy said well you remember a guy named Solomon Howard said yeah he said well the night He went to 12-step and I was hiding under the bed And I heard every word that he said And that guy never had another drink You know, I You just never know I have a brother-in-law who's an alcoholic And he came to visit us And I thought that he Was talking that night And I figured I'd bring him to hear me talk And he would of course never drink again After hearing me And I'd look pretty damn good to the family, right So I think he drank during my talk and about three years later I get a call from a guy this guy says my name's Bob you don't know me but three years ago I was released from a mental institution I stole a gun in a car and I was going to go to one more AA meeting before I blew my brains out it was that meeting that night he heard me talk and he never drank again so I asked God to help you know to get a guy sober I just never tell him the right guy you know The guy that's going to make me look good because I'm just, I ain't nothing. I ain'T nothing. I'mjustanotherdrunk. Ariel, let's take five now. We'll come on back and wrap up the afternoon. Thanks, folks. It's the homestretch, guys. Will you please join me in the serenity prayer? God. God, grant me the serentity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can't, and the wisdom to know their difference. Steps 6 and 7 have less written on them than any two steps in the Big Book of AA except for 1 and 2, which there is nothing specifically written about in the big book. There's one page written on both steps between the middle of page 75 to the middle page 76. There are the two, I believe, the two longest chapters on any two steps in the 12 and 12 or on 6 and 7. They seem to be the two steps that separate the raisins from the grapes and when I say, when I humbly ask God to remove these defects, humbly is not take them if you can, big guy. Humbly isn't take them, you miserable. HumbLY is Pop, I can't bear this anymore. Can you help me? I can't bear it. Can You please do this for me? Can You please enter my life and take this away? I'll do Your work. Please do my work. Please. And when I first did Steps 6 and 7, I went through all of my defects of character on that defect of character list. I went though each one individually. I said, Father, please remove this terrible self-centeredness. Father, please remove this terrible self-delusion. I asked for the removal and then I said that seven-step prayer. On page 76, it says in the section on fears, I ask him to remove my fear to turn my attention to what he would have me be. That's what it says on page 78. I asked him to move my fear, turn my intention to what you would have maybe. And it says when I humbly rely upon him, I immediately get a sense of freedom from fear. I immediately start to match calamity with serenity. So what that, and that's a suggested meditation. Remove my terrible fear of blank. Turn my attention to what you would have me be. God doesn't want me to be scared. God has no interest in me being scared. It blocks me from him. My plan, the Scott Redman program is to be frightened. God has an alternate plan on each fear. So if I'm saying to him, turn my attention to what he would have to do, what you wouldn't have me to do. And if you get a chance, take a look on 78 because it's laid out right there in the middle of the page. What do you want me to do instead of being scared? Father, I had a terrible fear of animals when I got sober. Father, please remove this terrible fear of animals. Turn my attention to what you would have me be. In other words, what do you wants me to instead of scared animals? My inner voice said, stay away from animals. Now there's this notion sometimes you hear it about meetings I've got to walk through my fear. Well, God doesn't always tell me to walk though my fear That's sort of an Arnold Schwarzenegger-ish kind of approach to sobriety. Sometimes he says, stay away from animals. It didn't say, go pet a puppy, go buy fish. It didn'T say that. It said, my inner voice said, stay the hell away from them. I did, and I'm not scared of animals anymore. I'm able to pet dogs. I'mable to do all of that stuff. I'm NOT scared of them because I needed to stay away from them for a while. Please turn my attention. Father, please remove this terrible fear of death. Turn my attention to what you would have me be. My inner voice, when I did my initial six and seven steps, said I would have you be a man who gets a physical examination once a year. Eventually it said I will have you be a men who doesn't smoke cigarettes. What does stopping smoking have to do with sobriety? Nothing, unless you have to. Absolutely nothing. Let me tell you my spiritual experience that allowed me to stop smoking in AA. I got sober. I stopped drinking for the first time in my life. I had never stopped drinking. I had ever stopped taking drugs. I heard people asking God things when I got in here that seemed completely crazy to me, asking God for jobs, to get relationships, asking God for parking spaces. Oh no, oh not the parking space God, not the parking space God. What if you don't get a space? And what I knew, I knew that it was astounding that I didn't drink. And my biggest fear is that I was going to start asking for stuff that wasn't going to happen. It would all crumble and I would drink. So I wanted to stop smoking because I was just scared all the time. I was scared of getting cancer. It just made me scared. I did not wear a seatbelt once in my life until the day I stopped smoking. I thought the accident would just save me chemotherapy bills. I mean, that's just the way I was. And this is what happened. I stay away from women in AA not because they are sick, but because I am sick. And I don't stay away form them like, stay away for me. I just make sure I'm not, you know, I work a program. Women think like I'm a nice guy. And if you're an opportunist, you could really, like, you can really. So I have always, because of who I am, never placed myself in a situation where I'm alone or, you know, I've just been very careful about that. Also, I need to make amends to my wife and make sure that I'm not in situations that could be detrimental to other people. At any rate, the reason why I'm saying this is after I talked to her to meet one night, a young lady asked to talk to me. She was in a lot of trouble, and I agreed to talk with her. I discussed something with her after the meeting. She subsequently said that I saved her life. At any rate, and I had a huge impact on her. I finally go to my first Smokers Anonymous meeting. I'm there, andI see this woman whose life I have saved taking a cake for a year off cigarettes, and she gets up to the podium, and she says in front of this group, people in AA who still smoke cigarettes work crappy programs. So my brain blows up. I immediately say to myself, oh, so I didn't save your life because I was smoking at the time. I work a crappy program. I'm a crappy member of AA because I smoke. So the dust settles. I go home and I write the 10th step about her because I wasn't a flatter. And what came out in the wash was, of course, she didn't know what she was talking about. I worked a perfectly fabulous program, smoking or not in AA. It had nothing to do with anything, and it went off. I said, oh, so I can ask God to stop the cigarettes because whether or not I smoke has nothing to deal with who I am in alcoholics' office. It won't affect anything. It won'T crumble anything. Boom, it came off me like a light, and I said hey, Pop, if you're keeping Saturday on its axis, if you could move it into your busy day, I'd also like to stop smoking. and what started happening is I took a service commitment and I committed to Smokers Anonymous and I stopped smoking but it had nothing to do with AA but I didn't get it and that's when I got it and for me it was a result of step 6 and 7 Father please remove this terrible fear of dying I would have you be a guy who doesn't smoke ok fine thanks a lot then I'd go smoke cigarettes and then I'd go back to him and ask again and finally the voice said I'd have you be a guy who goes to Smokers Anonymous I have heard I have a couple of guys one guy in particular our sponsor who is dead now my beautiful Jim Parkinson I'll say his whole name which he'd be fine with him and he's gone now and he would tell you this story just like I'm telling you this story. He suffered from a sexual problem that was getting him arrested and put in prison and it became so much trouble that I dropped him off at court one day where he was answering to a judge for this and he got arrested for the same thing on the way home. And he said to me, Scott, I'm going to die. What can I do? And I said, you must ask for help. Don't ask the judge to set you free don't i said go do what we do and he went to court and he said judge i did it you're right can you help me and the judge sent him to i don't know what the exact name sex and love anonymous or whatever that is he never spent another day in jail till the day he died he carried the message in alcoholics anonymous and stayed alive because he was leaving and i have attended meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, where people have made fun of these other programs from the podium. And I sit there and I think, what are you thinking? What is going through your mind? How can you misuse this podium to pass judgment on these other cities? This has nothing to do with what we're doing. Now, if there's cross-talk, if there's some supposition that AA can't deal with alcoholism, That would be one thing, but that's not what we're talking about. You know, I have had to ask for, and I don't call it outside help because all of this has been a direct result of my working the sixth and seventh step in AA. I went up to 300 pounds in sobriety. What does that have to do with sobriery? Nothing unless you're going through it. So I go to OA, and when I go in OA, I go, hey, I'm a circuit speaker. They said, yeah, and a very fat circuit speaker too. Want to speak? And they basically said to me, you can't spend your AA money here. Different currency. Oh, good. But for me, again, it wasn't outside help. any time I've had to do that stuff it's been a direct result of me working step 6 and 7 so that's the prayer meditation that I had to do on fears and in 6 and 8 in 6th and 7, the last two paragraphs on page 69 I take all of the statements I made about what should I be doing instead on my sexual inventories I never should have been with that person I should have told the truth I should be an honorable man who is trying to help people and not be an opportunist and take advantage of them what I should do instead I take all of those, I put them in one place, and in those last two paragraphs on page 69, I say, Father, how can I walk closer to this? I try to shape a sound ideal for my future sex life. I say life. I ask God to help me walk toward it. And in the last sentence on 69, it says, the right answers will come if we want them, not if we like them. Because sometimes I'll get an answer from God and I'll go, yeah. get your list out I didn't like that one sometimes when a guy is asking questions in his prayer meditation and he's not getting answers and he asks why, I say well maybe you don't want an answer yet that doesn't make you bad but let's just keep doing this work until you want one and maybe something more will be revealed I also really believe very strongly that I have never heard a complete fourth step, that I did not do a complete fourth step. I think if I remembered everything that day, my brain would have blown up. I would have looked like an outtake from scanners. I think my brain would have just blown up I'm really glad I didn't remember everything and I call them crystals shaken loose from the roof of the cavern where like a couple years into sobriety I'll go oh wow something will happen, a memory will come back and you go, whoa. You know those 30s films where the newspaper spins up? Scott Ritman's a moron, a moron. I sat down and it's really funny. A guy I sponsor just took on this other guy. He had done his inventory with another guy and he said, I want to work six and seven with the guy. He's already done his fourth and fifth step. And he and I talked about six and seventh. I talked all about the bells and whistles that I just discussed with you. He's all ready. He goes to the guy, he says, okay, take your defect list. The guy says, I burn it. Burn his inventory. It's hard to make an eight-step list from a burnt inventory. Some people can do it. Some people cannot. But at any rate, it says that once you start to do your eight-stepped list that you've already pretty much got it because you wrote it when you wrote down your inventory. So if you take your inventory, my sponsor told me that after I did my eight-step list, I was to get rid of my inventory because I might want to reread it. and I have sponsored many guys who have had their inventories read only on a couple of occasions has their mate actually gone to great lengths to read their inventory boy there's welcoming a little grief in your life it's just the wife of one guy a sponsor got to the inventory it wasn't laying around man, if you call laying around like in a vault. You know, I mean, she like got to the inventory. It's just it creates a lot of beauty in a relationship. And the best reading of The Eighth Step I've ever heard in my life happened years ago at my old home group. I try to share it any time I talk in AA. It was done by a guy named Nino. I have never seen this guy since then. This was many years ago I heard him do this. He was brand new in the program. He had never read Chapter 5 before. He was there with a hospital group. He had hospital plastic on his wrist, and he was reading chapter 5 for the first time in front of this group of men. And he reached step 8, and he read, made a list of all those we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all. Jesus Christ! And he looked out into the room as if to say, have you seen this? Do you know what's in here, man? It was so gorgeous because it was so pure because it wasn't the only thing I saw on the list. I didn't see anything on the lista, not those people, not that money. I would not have taken that much money if I knew I had to give it back. No way. Not the car. That guy whose car I had sold? When I called him and told him I sell that car, he said, you sold my car? I lent you my car. That's like house-sitting for someone, and they come back, and you're an escrow. When I called him back to make amends, his voice was exactly the same. He said, You're paying me back? So I had to do that eight-step list. I had put my wife and my kids down there and my pop. Just for me, just for me. And I ain't putting you down if you do it because I've got guys I sponsor who not only put themselves on their eight-step list, they put themselves at the top of their eight step list and I think there's people who need to do it. I needed to not be on my eight-stop list. I needed not to be anywhere near it. I had been making amends to Scott Redman at your expense my entire life. And again, please believe me, I'm not just paying lip service to this. I know that some people need to be on their own eight-stepped list. I know that as assuredly as I know that I had no business being on mine. And my sponsor, as a matter of fact, said, if you are on yours, be really low on the list. At any rate, the other thing I must tell you that I benefited from immensely was reading my... And, you know, the book, because the book was written at a time where they had no sense of real sponsorship in a way, they didn't really know who was going to be receiving the book in what situation. They talk about giving your inventory to a properly appointed person if you're a member of a religion. They say you can even read it to your wife as long as you don't, which I had about as much of a chance as taking the third step with her, I think, provided that we do not tell anything that will hurt them because we can't save our own skin at someone else's risk. I have had the most odious amends paid to me in AA than any other place in the world. I've had people in AA come up to me and say, geez, I really used to think you were a moron, but I don't anymore. News to me, but I hope you feel better. I have a friend named Kevin who anytime anybody in the program comes up to make amends to him, he always says, is this something I should know about? Man. At any rate, I really benefited from taking my fifth step with someone who became acquainted with my case and then stayed who i stayed with as i worked the amends i tell you it was a great thing for me who heard me admit that thing about my son and then saw what happened when i started showing up at flag football games for that kid when i showed up at little league games for that little boy the day that one of the men i sponsor showed up in my house with his two-year-old son so that me and jesse could take care of him so he could go to the hospital and be with his wife and his new baby. And Jesse, who I couldn't go and be with, took care of that little boy with me. So when I get to call those guys who know my case, what a great thing, what a splendid, gorgeous thing to celebrate in sobriety with those people who really know you, who know you and who have thrown their arms around you even if they didn't do anything that bad and say I love you too. I had been a limousine driver when I was drunk one night I had Steven Spielberg and Quincy Jones in the back of a limosine I had a bag of 100 quaaludes under the front seat and I was driving them to Barbara Streisand's house and I thought to myself I'll drive into StreisAND's house I'll crush her to death and we'll go up in a fireball and I'll be famous If they had just taken one little peek. Now, I'm sharing this in great part because the statute of limitations is over. And it was a great job for a drunk driving a bar around. So I got to Quaaludes. They're getting out of the car. I'm going in the back, powering down nine vodkas and jumping in the front seat. Taking all these drugs, I am in a snowstorm. Now, and this is night after night I'm doing this. Not just with those people and other people in the back too. Now, those cars have a center divider which is a one-way mirror. You bring it up, you can't see them, they can see you. It reflects what's ahead of you on the road. It's night. So it's showing you what's head on the row. So if you look into the rearview mirror, you see what's a head of you on the route. You're drunk, you have no short-term memory. So you look in to the rear view mirror and go, ah! and try to steer away from the mirror. So you go, ah! They roll down the window. You go, oh, sandstorm, terrible sandstorm. It's okay, everything's okay now. But you have no short-term memory, so you forget. They roll the window up. You go... of an evening. How am I going to make these amends? I really can't. I mean, I really can't start calling these people.