Why Steps 5 Through 7 Are Really About Smashing the Story You Made Up – Sandy B.
About This Speaker Tape
Sandy B., a beloved AA old-timer with 43 years of sobriety, speaks at the 18th Spring Conference in Cocoa Beach, Florida, offering a radically different perspective on Steps 5, 6, and 7. He frames the entire program through the lens of a Lakota Indian teaching he encountered at the Crazy Horse monument: that we are spiritual beings having a human experience. From this starting point, he argues that the purpose of the steps is not merely sobriety but spiritual awakening, and he works backward from that solution to redefine the problem as being spiritually asleep, trapped in a manufactured story of our own making.
Sandy uses vivid personal stories to illustrate how our self-created narratives cause all our suffering. He shares how he carried decades of shame from leaving Marine Corps aviation, believing his squadron despised him, only to learn 45 years later that he had been popular and admired. He describes the fifth step as the beginning of real humility, where a sponsor helps us see that our life story, the collection of all our manufactured problems, is largely wrong. The fears, resentments, and anger we carry were never real; they were reactions to a world we invented.
Moving into the sixth step, Sandy draws on the 12 and 12 to explore why we resist perfection. He uses a charming C.S. Lewis parable about a boy with a toothache who delays calling his mother for aspirin because he knows she will not stop at pain relief but will pursue perfect dental health. Similarly, we want 80% relief from our defects, not 100%, because total surrender means giving up control entirely. He notes that the only reason we received absolute release from alcohol was that it was killing us, but since gossip and greed are not fatal, we compromise.
Sandy closes with the seventh step and humility, explaining that every act of prayer, sponsorship, and meeting attendance is an act of humility because it acknowledges we cannot make it alone. He reframes pain as effort, like working out, and argues that the results of humility are magnificent. His final message inverts everything we were taught growing up: instead of making something of our lives through willpower, we should recognize it is Higher Power's life and let him make something wonderful out of us.
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