Why Rigorous Honesty Required a Second Step Five – Matt S.

Awesome job. Absolutely awesome job. You've been fantastic all day long. And over the last, I don't know, five or six years, I've with work been able to travel to different cities and I would go to Perth, what, three, four times a year for work. and my office happened to be, my office, the company I worked for had an office in Subiaco and I would visit the Subiacho Monday night, Monday night big book study. And I got to meet both Maddy and Andy. I see Andy's on there somewhere as well and got to make these two fine gents and I haven't got anything else to say, Matt, except it's really good to see your face and I love you to bits and I'm going to unmute you and let you run at it for half an hour. Over to you, my friend. Thank you, Darren. Awesome. Great intro. Thanks to Trisha who just shared and thanks, Darren, for asking me to speak. I'm gonna use my usual trick and straight away tell you guys that I'm very, very nervous. I don't know why but all I am is sitting here in my study talking to my computer, but it feels a little bit bigger than that. I had intended to get on quite early and listen to a couple of people from Sydney, but as life happens, I got busy. I've got a busy life these days. I'll get to all that. But yeah, all good stuff, but it just turned out that I only just caught the last 20 minutes of Trish, so thanks for that. Very different story, but definitely identified with a lot of the underlying character traits and the stuff that goes on with alcoholism. I think one of the reasons why I'm nervous is I've never done a 30-minute share before. I often wrap up shares thinking I could have talked for a lot longer, so we'll see how it goes. If I fall short, we'll have a plan B. But I guess I'll stick with the usual routine of telling you what it was like and what happened and what my life's like now. And I know that the topic is hope, and so I'm going to try and touch on that a bit, and I'm gonna try and touch on relationships in particular because that's, you know, the biggest gift I have from AA so far is the relationships I have in my life today. So I guess I will start by saying my home group is still the Subiaco Big Book Study. We've been on Zoom now for the last, it feels like a year and a half but it's been about three months. We are looking to get back face-to-face but we're a big group and we just can't all fit in the room right now so we're one of the few Perth groups that's still doing it tough on zoom um my sobriety date's 9th of january uh 2012 so i've been sober just over eight and a half years um yeah i i um i always do appreciate darren coming to visit our group i really like what him and how him and jody go about their recovery and to that end i'll try and emulate that a little bit and when i saw he was he created a bit of a sydney list for all the zoom meetings i thought shit perth needs one of them so i'll jump on that so i started creating this zoom meetings list not really knowing how long I'd have to do that for or whether I what was going to happen with it and so I tried to hand that service position back to area and CSO last month and no one wants it so I'm still compiling the Perth AA Zoom meeting list as my service position which is fantastic and one of my sponsors was asking me you know like he said one day look that's really cool like I'm really proud that you're doing that and I said look it was just a gut instinct to do some service i was like this shit is real like stuff's going i can't go to meetings i need a way to do som e service and i saw darren doing it i thought i'm just going to copy what he's doing and then um yeah it all went from there so but yeah i said i'd start with what it was like so i'm an i'm a first generation aussie to an irish father and an english mother both very neurotic people dad's a drinking alcoholic still to this day dad um tried ao when we were quite young. There's three kids. I've got an auntie and uncle that are sober members of A in Perth that have been sober for 40-plus years. I've GOT cousins in PerTH that are sober. I've Got, yeah, just that, an aunt and uncle and some cousins that are over in PerTh, but we've spread out a little bit. So I grew up with the understanding of what an alcoholic was, and that was my dad. So for me, an alcoholic had to be Irish, he had to being male, you had to over sort of 50, you had to have a beard and you had to have, this is the big one, chosen alcohol over your family because that was my understanding was that dad went to AA, dad stopped going to AA dad's not in our life anymore and so that was my understandings and you have to have lost your business you had too have lost you family, you had to have ticked off certain things to be an alcoholic I grew up in Al-Anon meeting playrooms, I grew in Alateen so I was listening well I don't know I was present in our teen meetings they were reading the steps they're reading the traditions I was at the weekend Al-Anon weekends down in Bunbury as a kid and to me 12 step Al-ANON and AA and stuff was just this culty sort of church thing that mum went to and it never really helped and I didn't really understand it at all um so that was me growing up I've got an older sister and a younger brother we're all alcoholic gratefully we're all sober alcoholics now and I had a drink of bourbon and coke when I was 12 my cousin one of the ones that is an alcoholic and therefore it doesn't need to be sober poured me a drink and from the moment I had that alcohol hit my bloodstream it just went like this and I just got all warm and tingly and it was just euphoric from my first drink it just absolutely clicked with my DNA. I loved it and what I remember from that first drink, and it's funny, I don't remember my first slice of pizza and I love pizza. I don'T remember my first ice cream and I love ice cream, but I remember my fist drink because it did more for me than just enjoying it. It changed the way that I felt. And I also had this really low self-esteem and this really like introverted, not even introverted but I don' t know, I just couldn't tell anyone what I wanted because I remember in that first drinking, wanting a second drink and not knowing how to ask for one and trying to manipulate the situation and going, hey, do you want another drink? Should I go get the bottle and pour you another drink and trying of get another bourbon in my glass. And my drinking from that day was pretty much just drink as much as I could as often as I Could. And as I said, I was 12, so it wasn't often at first. My mum was in Al-Anon. She knew what to look out for. I don't know if she quite thought I was going to start being a binge drinker at 12, but I remember walking into parties with little hip flasks tucked into my sock and pretending I'd had a limp to hurt myself at school or something like that. I was just any way to get alcohol, getting older people to buy it for me and as I said, every time I drank, I got drunk and I was the kid who was passed out at backyard parties. I was a kid getting kicked for fun. I was getting beaten up. I was throwing up. I was being thrown up on. I was juste the drunk from straight away as a teenager but it gave me my persona. And I wasn't the smartest kid in school. I wasn'T the best looking. I didn't do well with girls. I wasn' t confident. I couldn' t surf. I wasn''t particularly good at sports. I was a jack-of-all-trades for the master of none. But I could drink and I could drink more than anyone else. And it just, as I said, it clicked for me. So it became who I was. I was just a drinker. And that followed me through high school into university, travelled the world. it was alcohol was my best friend like my life revolved around it still not knowing what an alcoholic was just thinking i really like drinking not knowing um about alcoholism at all and i guess a long story short is my brother got sober so my younger brother had a gnarly car accident at 24 and he got sober and at that stage i'd finished uni i'm a teacher and i was working in country wa and um it was the january school holidays and i'll stay with him and he had this car accident and he was sitting on his couch. I got home with my girlfriend. We'd stayed somewhere else that night. It was 8 a.m. in the morning. He was sitting there sitting on the couch with a beer in his hand and my girlfriend took it off him and it was the first time I'd seen anyone take a beer off Luke and him not fight. So I thought, oh, something's different here and the words came out of my mouth, you need to go to AA and I don't know where they came from because I'd never thought about telling him to go into AA before. I'd Never thought it was a good idea. I just saw that sequence of events. He was broken on the couch drinking at 8.30 on a Friday morning and I said, you need to go to AA. And we kind of agreed. He agreed but we didn't know how to make that happen. So our cousins that lived in the same suburb as him in Wanneroo that went to AA, we had nothing to do with it. The first cousins lived in this suburb. I didn't have their phone number in my phone. I'm a 25-year-old adult and we didn' t communicate with them because they were sober, culty AA people. We didn't trust them. We didnít want anything to do with them. And I love these people today. I say this with a lot of love, but I knew where my cousin worked and I drove to her workplace and I walked into her workplace and I said, ìI need your husband. I need Frankís phone number. Luke needs to go to AA.î And in hindsight, looking back on that moment, she must have nearly fallen over. This relative that she never ever hears from just walks into a work and ask but you know credit to aa and just what i know what members are like today she couldn't do enough to help her she was like absolutely straight away um took the phone number home luke called it frank was there picked him up that night took him to a meeting i waited on the couch in anticipation he comes home he's got the little yellow starter pack and the little blue big book and i was like how was it what happened there like was their banners was their god like what like what all these memories flooding back of it from a kid and i'm i was so interested in And he was just like, yeah, man, it was really good and I'm going to go back. And that's his story. But I drank for another year. So I went back to where I was teaching, about 600km drive away, and I continued my alcoholism. And by this stage, the party was gone. I would drink Friday, Saturday, Sunday, wake up hungover, feeling like shit Monday morning, try to teach my phys ed teacher teaching in remote country town in february it's about 50 degrees and i'm hung over dehydrated with flies in my face and i'M like fuck off um trying to teach little little kids how to play sport um and i would just battle through monday battle through tuesday i'm not drinking this weekend i need a break i can't have another monday like that wednesday would come around i'd feel a little bit better thursday would come right and i'd start to get my spark back friday morning i'd get a littlebit excited when that siren went at 3 p.m on friday i was the most excited kid in that school because i knew i was about to get my solution someone was about to say hey matt you want a beer and i only have one answer for that question it was yes and we got good and it was like the weight of the world was off me again for another couple of days while i could just drink and that was the routine i would just drink the weekend and survive the weekdays and um if i was trying not to drink i would be running a lot um just running with my dog and i was calling my brother in weekly and monthly intervals just like what's happening now what's going on are you still going to those meetings and he was telling me all about it and I saw I saw this my younger brother completely turn his life around like from someone who I'd really thought was going to go to jail who's going to die on that day like he he was turning his life round um he was going into court he was facing up to things he was he was paying his mortgage he was just doing all these adult things and I was literally just surviving and um I googled AA it was the nearest meeting was in Geraldton we're going to hear from my friends in Geraldton soon um the nearest meeting was in Geraldtown it was 300 k's away and I thought oh that's impossible I was driving to Mullawar to play football which was 250 k's away but I couldn't possibly drive for 300 to an AA meeting um it was impossible and what happened was on the October school holidays I was back in Perth I was dry Lucas still didn't have a license from this car accident I was diving him to meetings I remember one night in particular I I dropped him at Subie Steps on a Thursday night and I drove straight to the casino and I got drunk and I wasn't even with anyone. I was on my own and I drank and drove home back to his house and he had this rule, like when you stay with me, don't drink at my house and my alcoholic said literally don't drinking alcohol in his house, still drinking and driving, coming home drunk, making heaps of noise, just being completely selfish and inconsiderate but just completely blind to it. and at the end of that school holiday my sister was also sober by now and the story's bigger than this I won't go too much into it but my sister's living in a house with her three kids she's left her husband who happens to be my boss the deputy principal it's a little country town I'm going back to and I'm absolutely rat shit hung over after 14 days of drinking straight my brother and my sister are sober in this house and I am leaving to go back to this almost impossible work situation where i've got to work for the guy who was cheating on my sister who's now getting sober in perth and i get in the car and i just didn't want to do it and i remember being 150 200 k's out of perth just so hungover so sick like having to pull over and dry reach and getting back in the cart and i wanted i didn't Want to be there and i was i was holding on to the steering wheel when i was looking at trees on the left and i Was looking at the road trains on the right and i was trying to decide which one it was going to be and i had my dog with me and that was literally the reason that it didn't happen that day was because i thought well what's going to happen to the dog i can't leave her and um so i continued driving as i said it's about a 600k drive i got 150ks out of town and i remembered that i'd left a six-pack in the fridge before i left and my spirit rose i didn't even have to drink and my Spirit would rise i was like fuck there's alcohol in the bridge there's a cold six-back in the ridge and i cranked the music and i put my foot down i'm doing 150 now and i'm singing and like my entire i had a psychic change by knowing i was driving towards alcohol and um so i got to mount magnet on that day cracked a beer before i even let the dog out of the car which her welfare was now secondary to me having a drink and um again glug glug drop the shoulders exhale and i am okay again half an hour later i am in the bar playing darts people are going how's your holidays man and i was like yeah great it was good couldn't tell us all how I really felt couldn't be honest I was okay because I had a pint in my hand and um I knew from that day that it had to change and Luke was getting well and I pretty much committed to coming to AA shortly after that I told him on the phone I was going to come and um obviously it took a series of events had to move back to Perth I moved in with him I went on a bit of a bender over east through Sydney and Melbourne um over that new years and And then I said I was having my last drink on the Saturday. Ended up having my first drink on Saturday. My last drink the next day on the plane. And then on the Monday, I was just again terribly, terribly hungover on my brother's couch. And he came home from work and he said, are you coming to a meeting? I said, no, I'm too sick. And he said okay. And then the next night he comes home for work and says, are you going to a meet? And I said oh, might have over exaggerated a little bit. It's not that bad. I'm feeling okay. I don't think I'll do it. And he said, if you're going to live here, you come into a meeting. And we went to a candlelight Tuesday night meeting in Bankshire Grove. And one of my cousins, another cousin was sitting in the chair. He read how it works. And when he read, if You Want What We've Got, whatever that bit about works goes. And I thought, that's a bit egotistical, don't you think, Terry? And that was my first meeting, January the 9th, 2012. And I haven't had a drink since. I've been a full-time member of AA since that day. I'm so lucky in hindsight looking back on it that I was living with my brother in that sober house and I kind of, again, I just did what he was doing. So he had a sponsor, he had an home group and he was a year sober by this stage and he wasn't quiet, he was just a couple of weeks short but he was during a meeting every day and his example to me was he didn't have a licence and he working in the city and living in Wanneroo so I know you guys probably don't know what that means but he's a tradie so he's starting work at something like six o'clock he's getting up at five to ride his pushy to the train rain howl shine to get to work and then he was doing a meeting every night so i'm a teacher who still had his license so i could drive work my seven hour day and get to a meeting every not um and within a couple of weeks i'd ask someone to be my sponsor and i picked a home group and i'm also really lucky in hindsight that it just clicked with me as well i just really it just it just clicked with me aa just people's honesty and what people were saying in the meetings and the fact that the factthat i am an alcoholic and when they started talking about being an alcoholic i was like far out that's what it is that all these things that i've been looking for to fill this hole in me this is what itis it was alcoholism and i didn't know what it was because i thought it was something else but this iswhatitis so So, so lucky that that was my entrance into AA. And I'm also so lucky because I listen to a lot of American speaker tapes and I know that AA is probably not the same all over the world. I've been to a Lotta Places and it seems pretty similar most places I go. But in Perth, in 2012 through to today, there's a lot of people that get sponsors, work steps, read Big Book. There's steps meetings and Big Book meetings and there's program. And I've just – that is the AA that I fell into. And I am very, very grateful for that. and so i started doing meetings every day and then all of a sudden like it wasn't even a chore like 1990 i'd get to friday night and i'd go to my little meeting in heathridge on a friday night i'd have my nandos for dinner was my little friday Night Treat and then the whole bloody weekend would sprawl out in front of me i'm like you know three months over four months sober how am i going to stay sober for the next two days um so it was just meetings two meetings a day three meetings a day that's all i did i caught up with all my old mates some of them just the once and i let them know what i was doing and and and that's cool like some of it was only once but i wasn't going to catch up with them in pubs and nightclubs and stuff and i realized that a lot of my old makes were drinking buddies and some of my oldmates stuck by me and they're still friends today and we just do different things and we've got real real friendships and real relationships but a lot of them fell away um i didn't i didn'y go hanging out in the old haunts drinking diet coke i was um i was either in aa or i was sitting in cafes with aa members um or i was doing other things like work and some charity work that i also got encouraged to do and um other things Like that and um that first year i worked the steps and i went through them i think I remember doing my fourth and fifth at about five months sober. And I'll talk about this because it was probably what the next, after that first meeting, it was Probably The Next Biggest Turning Point for me. And I'd written this inventory and I was a bit sluggish writing it. And then I finally got it done. And I was sort of hanging out with a girl in AA at the time a little bit. Like we were just sort of hangin' around each other. You know, we'd turn up at the same meetings, we'd stay late and be talking in the car park for two or three hours after each meeting that sort of thing you know we're only we're both only three or four months over and um I was writing you know all of my imagery fears resentments sex imagery and um a kiss this girl and she left the house and I finished writing my imagery and I put her name on the list and I realized that just like every other relationship I'd had I was um she liked me and I didn't like her but that was good enough for me um if someone liked me that was good enough to be in a relationship with them i would settle for anyone who was willing to be with me and um so i put her name on the list and obviously i had to be honest with her after that and i it was time to do i'd finally done it and it was trying to do my um my step five and i called my sponsor and it was mother's day the next day the sunday and so he was busy and i got really angry at him and i thought how selfish of him to not want to uh to not be available at no notice to here to block out a whole day on mother's day and hear my step five um but we both penciled in a mental health day on the tuesday that again i had this same thing of going to my first meeting i wanted to do it then when it came time to do what i didn't want to do and i was full of fear i went to our um our monastery meeting that we have day weekdays at 10 30 and i sat in the meeting and i Was crying again like i was crying in my first meeting and i was i just didn't want to do it i had a couple of a couple of really embarrassing sex things on my inventory and just a couple other things like i didn't really want to talk about stuff i really wanted to talk you know how hard i had it with this alcoholic father but there was some stuff i'd done to other people i really didn't want to talk about and um there's a there's an ai member in perth called brian he's very he's prolific um member of ai at the end of the meeting i shared about i got asked to share so i just told people how i was feeling and that's another thing that i've learned is It's just I bloody love meetings because I just can't lie when I'm speaking to you guys. I just tell the truth, I say what's going on and I get feedback and I don't get help. And so at the end of the meeting he picked up the big book for me and he turned to the Step 5 Promises about walking hand in hand with your higher power on the broad highway and he read that out to me. He just gave me that nudge. I went to my sponsor's house and I did my Step 5 and I told him the two big take-to-your-grave secrets, the showstoppers as he calls them, and we were there for probably six or seven hours and I drove back to the monastery on the Tuesday night. I had a Tuesday night meeting as well and I walked into that meeting and it was full house. There's probably 40 people there and at the end of the meeting, everyone stands up and we hold hands and do the serenity prayer and I felt this sort of vibration in the room and I feel everyone saying that prayer together. I just felt connected and part of something. I felt like I am a legitimate member of AA. If I'm willing to tell this relative stranger these things that I've done, then I really, really believe in this thing I really believe this is my solution and it's going to work. And so that was another massive turning point for me was that first step five. Ended up working with another sponsor after that. He went back to America. His name's Chuck. He's from Tennessee. So he went back from America and I've started, I've been working with my sponsor Tim for the past sort of six, six and a half, seven years and done the whole process again with him and gone a lot deeper in the step fives. In my second step five, I told, I had the resentments about kids bullying me in primary school and high school for being a ranger, for being an irish kid. My middle name is Porrick. I got a lot of shit and you know what? I didn't tell my first sponsor any of it. I was so ashamed and I just, it was unconscious shame. I didn'T even know that I'd left it off the list. So in my second step five, it came up and, you know, like that second time of going through the steps, I unraveled a whole lot more. I went a lot deeper in my relationship with my father as well and got a lot more out of it. And my second sponsor was big in the service as well, so he introduced me to ARIA. And I've served on ARIA for the past sort of four or five years, just rolled off it actually because it's got bigger stuff to do. But I continue to learn off different people in AA. So there's the sponsors, there's The Home Group members and there's, you know, the people like Darren, the people around the place that I just copy off as well. Like anyone who looks like is working, I just copy what they're doing, listen to a lot of speaker tapes and just copy the good, you know, take the good bits and leave the rest and copy what people are doing. And I said I'd talk about relationships. The reason I was late today is I was at one of my sponsee's houses. So he was having a big gathering and my wife and I went around there and other home group members and friends and it's just a really bloody, again, it's his story. I won't talk too much about his story but he's a couple of years sober and he's got this little kid and it'S just absolutely magic to be at a social event at somebody's house where his life was in disarray just like mine was and he's there with his little kid and he's hosting all these friends and there's sober people his cousin's now sober he's got it he's Got a guy there who's five weeks sober who works for one of his friends he's a 22 year old country boy and Chris is now like the sober guy in their community and so he got this call this kid needs to get sober he took him under his wing and this and I was just standing there having the normal newcomer conversation he's going oh I just can't do this you know i feel out of place i don't know what to say to anyone like just totally the newcomer conversation you have about socializing without a beer in your hand and it's just so awesome to see this ripple effect of all these people getting well um you know and it comes from bloody new york and akron 85 years ago and it rippled out all the way to perth it was here waiting for me when i had to go to my first meeting and it just continues rippling and i just absolutely love it and the other relationship i want to talk about obviously i rolled off my tongue but i took my wife to that event i was someone who never bloody thought i was ever going to get married i never had a relationship lasted longer than six months as i said before i was never in a relationship for the right reasons um and i could never keep them when it got hard i ran away um there was a girl that i was in a relationships with in my first year of teaching and i left that that town when i moved to mount magnet i got bored and lonely mount magnet and convinced her to come she was only she came to mount magnet within four weeks she was packing her boxes again crying in the spare room because she wasn't there but we went i just could not do it i had two years of two years completely off all dating after that experience that i told you about writing my step four and i wasn't with anyone for two years and then um i took a really long time to get to know who i was and what i wanted and wrote lists about the perfect partner and tried to be that person and did all the stuff. I did it. I threw everything at it. And, yeah, you know, three and a half, four years ago, I met someone who is just absolutely amazing and we got married in January and it's just so crazy that this is my life. It's just a normal... I'm a 35-year-old guy with a job who lives in a house with a wife that he loves and a dog that he likes and just a normal, normal life. You know, when COVID happened and everything was going crazy and I had to come home from work because my wife works in a hospital and there was going to be COVID patients in the hospital. And I thought, I don't want to bring that back to school without took some leave. It's like, it wasn't a big issue because I like where I live. I like who I live with. I have good relationships with almost everyone in my life. And I only say almost because the one with my father is still pretty hard. um you know my mum lives in the unit that i bought when i got sober because i stopped wasting all of my fucking money on drugs and alcohol and now she's had a really rough trot last couple years and she lives in in my unit she's got complete security where she lives um it's it's the life that i have is not what i deserve from from how i had how i played out the first 25 years of my life this is not What I Deserve um and i want to keep that front front of my head like i need to be of service I need to keep those ripples going I need to give it away I need to have the six sponsees and I need to be willing to say yes when the seventh asks I need to say yes to this stuff whenever it's offered I need to just say yes to anything that's offered to me in AA if it's reasonable and it's not clashing with something else because I'm never going to get I've got like I think Trish said after one year same as her I'd had it I've been paid back enough what I've got now after eight and a half this life is just beyond what they say it's beyond what i thought was possible um so i simply must keep doing it i've got to keep driving like i see jakes on the line we've gotto keep driving up to the prison it takes an hour there and an hour back and we don't get much respect often when we're there but like we say every time we drop we go should we go shall we not go that drive down the hill every single time we laugh and it's just cool but you just feel like yeah it's it's just what i'm meant to be doing and i've gotta head that tells me to stop doing this shit all the time you know every morning i've got to convince myself to do it again and every time i do it i feel better for having done it so i don't know the answer that bloody riddle i just you know my head just doesn't want me to do every time i do you know be a prayer meditation home group service zoom talking whatever just bloody do it just forget what my head's telling me do it um i think peter m says you live life forward you understand it backwards so i've just got to keep doing it and um look at that i could do it 30 minutes thanks fantastic matt