Audio
Transcript
Source: Unidentified Historical Recording – Fellowship Review Recording 862 – Date Unknown.mp3 File: chris-p-recovery-in-the-rockies-1992-09-25.mp3 Duration: 00:46:55
============================================================
My name's Chris, and I am a cocaine addict. How many people here got less than a year? Thanks for being here. How many of y'all got more than a year? Thanks. I do that because, uh, many places you hear people talk about the most important member at any meeting. And I want each and every one of you to know that for me, each of you is absolutely necessary to my recovery tonight. And wherever I go, each person in that room at that time is important to my recovery.
I say that because of some deaths that have occurred in my life in the last few years, actually the last 18 months, that have taken 36 years of sobriety and three of them out of my life. And there's some that were newcomers that they were gone, and they weren't there to remind me. So each one of those losses was very important to me. And I hope that each one of you keep coming back one day at a time, so you can give a gift of life to somebody.
I was a cocaine addict who could not breathe without cocaine. I slept with all my cocaine in my arms, either in my arm to this side, or if I had just enough to sit on a mirror, I set it on my chest, and I laid it there, and I laid in bed at night, and that's how I spent my last two years of my life, before I got to sobriety. I'm a disciplinarian in recovery. I need to be disciplined for myself, and I'm learning a little bit one day at a time to allow other people to find their path.
But for myself, I must have certain disciplines, because it was not very pretty at the end. I don't know where this is going. I'm very honored to be here. I want to thank those that asked me to be here. For those that are interested, you only got to pay a few hundred bucks if you ask. And… So I'll try to start out. What I've learned in the book, and I do study the various pieces of literature, the various books that are at our disposal, and there are some wonderful ones.
What I learned and how it works, and I was three and a half years sober when it dawned on me what I'm supposed to do up here. And it says my story should disclose in a general way what I was like, what happened, and what I was like now, or what I am like now. You know, I spent the first three and a half years telling you about how bad my parents were, telling you about how screwed up society was, talking about how fouled up my lovers were, talking about how bad a dealer I was, how big a thief I was, you know.
You know, I stand before you. I'm a recovering liar. I'm a recovering thief. I'm a recovering pervert. I drank too much. You know, I did whatever I needed to do, and before I sobered up, I had quit dealing dope. I had quit, I call it, misappropriating other people's property. Um… And there was a few other things I had to do, and if I keep doing those things one day at a time, I'll celebrate six years of 21st October.
Applause And that's a… That's a testimony to the people of this fellowship. That's a testimony of the power of God as He chooses to express Himself through each and every one of you in my life. And I'm eternally grateful for that. You know, I've never been grateful for much in my life. I heard a speaker one time, and she just about slapped me right out of my chair. I was in between my next-to-last relapse and hopefully what will have been my last one.
And she said… She came from a very wealthy family, I guess. She was an older woman that helped me along the way. She said, you know, I used to unwrap the presents when she talked about when she was three or four years old. She said, I'd look at those presents, and I'd think, is this all? And I remember no matter what I was doing throughout my life, starting at the earliest age, that's how I felt.
No matter what was given to me, no matter what happened in my life, I always wanted more. I was never satisfied. My first feelings, and what I'm going to talk about is what I've learned through the inventories that I've done. What I've learned from sharing with other people. What I've learned from hearing a few fist steps
[00:05:00]
that were mine to achieve from total strangers. What I found out is that I began my life being very jealous of people. Being very fearful. Being very resentful. I put a lot of unspoken contracts, a lot of unspoken demands on people, places, and things as I went around. You know, again, 449 didn't touch me, but 451 and 52 just about knocked me out of my chair when it talked about my level of serenity is inversely proportional to the expectations.
And I was going through life, starting as a young child, and I was expecting that if I maybe got to where I was a little faster, my father would love me more. Maybe that if I did something a little different, my mother wouldn't find it necessary to strike me. Maybe if I bought the right amount of bubble gum when I was a kid for my friends, they'd like me. And that's kind of how it started for me. And I started, and then I discovered sex.
And, you know, that was a relief for me. That was a relief, a solution that I found. You know, then there were some behavior patterns that I picked up that involved crude language. You know, acting out. And what I found was I could get attention. And as I started getting attention, that's what I liked, because I couldn't get anybody's attention in my life. And I was pissed off. I don't come from a broken home.
My parents are still together. Nobody else would put up with either one of them individually. You know? My brothers and sisters and I, none of us have been… None of us… I've been to jail one time to try to break somebody out. You know, it talks about our fine-tuned state of mind. I'll get to a little bit of that. But during that period of my fine-tuned state of mind, I went in unarmed with two other people and got all the way to the cell block before we were met with the people.
But none of us were armed, and we thought we were going to break this guy out. And thought it was very unreasonable that they weren't going to let us have him. And, you know, that's just typical of anybody in here. Any of us could stand up here and tell my story. You know, the common thread that we all have, the common thread I've found, no matter the age, no matter the number of years, we've got…
The common thread we have is the feelings. So I'm the oldest of five. You know, I tried controlling my brothers and sisters, and that didn't work out. So I tried beating them into control, and that didn't work out. And what I did was I took what other people did with me, and I just tried to put them into practice, you know. And that should have been a… You know, if you had any tools, I guess you'd notice the level of insanity that is.
It's not working with you, but you're doing it on somebody else. And that's what was going on from my childhood. You know, it was a few years later that I discovered love, which was sex with more than one person. And that really did become a solution for me. I really… You know, I got a lot of relief out of that, again. And at the same time, I discovered whiskey, J&B, scotch. And at that… Found smoking that night.
You know, I'll never forget… A friend of mine now in the program with two years, he was the first person I took a drink with. We sat on top of his parents' house and drank that quarter scotch. Smoked cigarettes, got spiritual, puked all over ourselves. And I continued that pattern for the next 18 years. You know, and I never stopped, and I never thought there was any problems, because the problems that I had were with me prior to that first drink.
And that first drink and everything that I took from there on out became a solution for me. A solution upon which I started seeking out people that would agree with me. And I continued to work through life and go in that way. I was… You know, they talk about wanting to be somebody else in life, and I grew up most of my life wanting to be black. And I did that because of the involvement that my family had in helping people.
You know, there were some really valuable things that went on in my family. But what I took it as was I became very jealous of the help that I was seeing total strangers get. You know, it's still a joke in my family. You can walk in the house. I walk in the house with some of my friends and sit down, and if I ask for the same thing that they ask for, they're going to get it. And that's just kind of the way it is, and it's taken me a long time to get to the point to understand that that's just how it was going to be.
And they were really doing the best they could. But for years and years, I hated the guts for it. You know, because I saw things going to other people,
[00:10:00]
and I jealously and resentfully pushed my parents to every limit I could. You know, my behaviors stayed with me. The patterns, I just pushed them a little bit underground. And I drank, and I used drugs, and I used sex, and then I began to use money, and I began to use whatever other form of power. I grew up thinking I was a small person, so I didn't realize that I was big and I could intimidate people and didn't understand why I intimidated people because I was raised around a lot of professional football players.
And I was small by their comparison, and I learned intimidation from them, and they intimidated me. And, you know, I went through life intimidated by my parents, so everybody ran around scared and mad in my circle. I, uh… I didn't have a clue I didn't have a clue that there was any problems. I didn't have a hint that maybe there was something wrong with me in any part of my being. You know, I knew I wanted to die, and, uh…
and I knew it was everybody else's fault that I felt that way, and nobody could change my thinking about that. So I decided that I would go and all the wisdom that we have at different times, I decided I'd go to a military school for junior college. And, uh… you know, they say defiance is one of our character assets sometimes, or maybe it's defective character, right? Well, I went to a military school and found out they gave you orders.
And, uh… about 20 years ago, they kicked me out of that school. I was kicked out of my family and everything, and, uh… I went to work, and that's the only reasonable thing I did prior to recovery. Because I went to work, and I kept my jobs from there on out. Because what I found was that if I was financially independent of anybody, I didn't have to put up with their garbage. And I went through life, and I was always in crowds of people and yandering around and talking to people, and, hi, how you doing, and all this, but nobody ever knew that I never met a person, including the woman I spent nine years with, on an intimate basis once.
You know, I interacted with a lot of people, but I never did it on an intimate basis one time, because I was incapable of that. What we were there for was the distribution of illicit substances, uh…partying, having a good time, getting the job done, but nobody got hurt too bad in the process. And that's how I lived. That's the only way I knew to live. And I found cocaine. I'll touch on my wife a little bit. I'd like…
I don't want to spend a lot of time on this. I've talked a lot about it. I don't mind talking about it. But my ex-wife and I, we have not figured out when I asked her to marry her. It seemed as though we were talking about it one time, because I had this ability to get vulnerable or make a request. We just ended up married. I don't have any idea how we ended up married. She doesn't have any idea how we ended up married. She said we just mentioned it, and boom, we were married.
She put a pattern for me. It began with my, uh… It began with my mother and held up for a few years in recovery, and that pattern was, uh…I managed to go out and find pissed-off women. And I'd keep them in my life, and they were prone to physical violence. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I was ever particularly hurt by one. What I can tell you is the pattern that it fed for me is I could sit there, and I would be…if they didn't punish me, I degraded the relationship to the point that they had to punish me.
I didn't know how to live a life that was free from turmoil, that was free from rage, that was free from terror, that was free from, you know, all the emotional turmoil that goes on throughout…that went on throughout my life from, it seems, my earliest memory. I did not know how to spend one minute doing that. So I stayed where it was comfortable. And, uh, I would go out and, you know, somebody told me I remember I had my first couple of relationships in recovery, you know, the hostage-taking ones where you take the Uzi and everybody holds up for a few weeks, and you find a higher power, and you walk away, and somebody gets loaded behind it.
Unfortunately, I got loaded the first couple times and I survived the last time. The last time
[00:15:03]
allowed me to find a power greater than myself. But, uh, that's what I arrived here with, that inability to live in peace. You know, when they say, can we have that moment of silence? Well, you know, just a moment of silence and memory. That's the only thing I know about a higher power today. I've read a lot of books, I study a lot of things, but that moment of peace represents something that I'd never found.
When I was carrying a cross around as an acolyte in a Piscatalian church, and I'd be carrying it around and I'd be looking down at the girl's dresses and I'd be hoping for the wine and I'd be hoping I'd be the last guy to serve the wine because then you got all the wine in the deal. And, uh, you know, and all I knew is that I wanted to get out of there and I never felt peace. You know, and I haven't found it necessary to go to a church. I'm not saying do or don't. I'm just saying for myself, this is what I found here is peace, happiness, a guttural laugh instead of one of those, how y'all doing? You know, for a long time, that's all I could do. It took them several months before they could even get to the point where they found out I was angry. I, uh, I found cocaine and off and on, but I found it with permanency in 1978. And it was something that my ex-wife and I could agree upon.
And, uh, and that was a rarity, believe me. And, you know, it was something initially, it was like all the rest of my solutions. It was like the sexual solution. It was like the solution where I began acting out and I got the attention. It was like the solution when I screwed a football helmet on my head. And they used to call me, I liked that badge. They put a badge on me that used to call me the animal because that's the one place I could take out on my anger.
And I was so full of it that when I did it, I did it very proficiently. But, you know, the thing about it is somebody's always hunting for the guy with the name. And that involves pain too. And I paid a price for that. Initially for my ex-wife and I, it worked. It opened up. And I would say a few years ago that it allowed us to be intimate. But what it was, was it was a cocaine induced, we pulled the windows down and we talked to each other. And that was as close to intimate as we were going to get.
You know, it drove me crazy. She could quit and I couldn't. And she would ask me to please stop. So we'd stop and the next day she'd ask me to get more and we'd get more. And that went on for a long time. And what happened was I began finding it necessary to relieve people of truckloads of equipment to take care of my habit. And I found it necessary to get involved at other levels of the disease and dealing and some things.
And I became more and more dishonest. And also I became more and more paranoid. And that part about not being able to differentiate the true from the false was with me from my earliest memory. And there was an incident when I was seven that occurred where I saw a bicyclist riding by a car I was in with my parents going by in this 10 speed khaki slacks, oxford shirt, no head. You know, and that was, that was, I kept it to myself. That's what I saw. This little seven year old boy. I kept that to myself.
And in writing two years in recovery, what came up for me from wherever it was, I'm not going to sit here and I do a lot of fun things spiritually, but it says find your path. What came up for me was the fear that was haunting me at the end, which was a cop, five foot 10 mustache. You know, the guys look out the windows and you can write, you can draw their portrait. That's what this guy was sitting out there and he waved at me. And that was the same level of fear that was with me when I was seven years old. And that was that pair of life that I lived that followed me around to chase me everywhere I went, no matter what it was. I've crawled out of trash cans and I've been on top of buildings and tuxedos at these huge functions. And I felt the same way, absolutely terrified.
[00:20:03]
Afraid to take a step, afraid to reach out a hand. You know, they'd say I was a snob, they'd say I was a hard ass, whatever it was. But the truth was, is I was scared to death. I didn't know how to function in life. So I got, you know, the cocaine gave us a few minutes of that. And then getting into the other things brought on the next few years of terror. And what that brought on in the last couple of years of it was the fact that I became so convinced that others were after me, as they always had been, beginning with my mother, that I would not do anything to go to sleep. So I spent the last couple of years basically not sleeping. I did what I call fast sleep. That's where you lay down about five o'clock in the morning or so, and you go, and then you wake up and you tell yourself how good you feel.
And you go out to life. And you eat vitamins, and you drink Gatorade, and I took ginseng, and I did all these things. And you know, and this was a few years, I'd had a heart attack at 28, going down the highway 70, you know, and didn't kill anybody, and everything worked out fine. And what I got out of that was the doctors told me you need to take better care of yourself. So I started taking vitamins, and I quit drinking hard whiskey.
And I tried to be sure that I had pure, pure drugs. And you know, I was bound to determine that it was my blood gases, and it was bad drugs. So I got rid of the alcohol. And so anyway, we're going, we hit 1985. And I like to remember this, because I have a real, I'm real into self righteousness and indignance. I just, you know, it's one of my favorite pastimes. You know, when you're sitting down, the manager of the universe is a tough job. And I'm recovering from that one day at a time, too. They, I tried to kill myself on May 11, of 1985. I remember it.
For those of us that have done that, we know it's the most single selfish act you can do, bar none. And I was bound and determined to do it. And you know, again, my fine tuned state of mind was right there with me, because after the little guy waved at me, and I saw the federal marshals coming across the street, I decided that's it. Kamikaze, here we come. My ex-wife was telling me I was crazy, and I didn't want to hear it. So I took a, what was left of a quarter ounce, about five grams. And I knew that Gatorade gets your system eight times faster than water.
So I dropped it in the glass. That stirred it up and downed it. And I was really angry when I came to. I wasn't supposed to be there. You know, when your plans don't work out, which none of mine had, and I figured it was time to check out, I owed a lot of money, a lot of people getting close, and I couldn't control anything anymore. You know, my control, I quit doing LSD because I didn't like what I was seeing. But I was seeing stuff on cocaine that I'd never seen before. Nobody ever told me about cocaine psychosis. I did not know anything about sleep deprivation. I didn't know, you know, I was convinced everywhere I went, and I covered a lot of this country, Colorado, you know, New Mexico, as I'm working around, they had people in every tree everywhere I turned, you know, and that's a lot of stress to work with. You know, you can't do your job. You can't do your job when you got ounces of cocaine strapped to you, you got it falling all out of you, and I'm putting it on. Yeah, I was obsessed with it.
Absolutely obsessed with it. I stuck it everywhere in my body. I can stick it any way I can stick it there. I'd put it in my food. I'd stick it in my coffee. I kept it everywhere I went. I would not be without it, and I did not know how to function without it, and I was a danger to everybody I was around. You know, I was responsible for people's lives, and I endangered them, and I still thought it was their fault that they were in danger. You know, it was about a year later I made recovery after three grand mal seizures, and I used to think that you could take, again, my fine-tuned state of mind told me that they put me on Dilantin after the first one, and nobody said that once you break that threshold, it gets easier to have them, and so what I would do if I knew I was going to get high is I'd take, I'd double up on the Dilantin, right, and I'd be sitting there eating a prescription of Dilantin a week, you know, for 30 days, and be having seizures. They'd be pounding on me trying to get me started again,
[00:25:03]
and nobody explained it to me, and finally, through a psychiatrist and some other people that said that's enough, I ended up in treatment, and that last time out on cocaine, I tried to kill my roommate. I saw the Wicked Witch of the North come out of my clothes drawer, and I saw the feet roll up and everything, and, you know, it's, and for those that don't think there are square or corners and round bottles, why did we spend so much time digging in them, you know? I mean, you're just like trying to clean the corner of a room, and that's how I spent, you know, that last year. I can't walk into treatment. What it did is it gave me a few extra days to live. It put some cracks in my walls, and it introduced me to a thing called 12 Steps, and I grabbed a hold of it after about a month, and after I told everybody that I came in contact with, I said, you know, I'd rather be dead than be like those people, and some friends of mine who sobered up together, I admire couples. They can do that, particularly if you actually sober up and recover together.
That's a very interesting challenge I'm not sure that I'd be willing to take, but this couple had 25 years, 26 years together, and they came to see me, and I was just vehement about the fact, you know, I look around, and I'd be in the rooms. We all know people like this who look around, and I know this guy over here is still running. He's 10 years sober. Well, we dealt drugs together three years ago, and I'm going, you know, and I'm looking around, and I can't get beyond the personalities. I'm looking for all the differences and none of the similarities, and I did. I told them I'd rather be dead, and they smiled, and they said, we understand, and you don't have to be like that. Well, they didn't tell me I was going to have to go to work because I really did not ever want to go to work. I never wanted to be responsible.
You know, one of the things I was told from the beginning is if you would do this, if you'd study, your tests show that you're a better than average student. If you would study, you would do this. If you would, if, if, if, if, if, and I never tried it. You know, they'd tell me to go work out and train for the summer and train for football, and what I did was I smoked cigarettes, I smoked dope. We'd go run a mile or two, we'd get a case of wine, and we'd disappear for three weeks, and that was our workout, and I wondered why they threw me off the team, you know, and I thought they made a mistake when they did it, you know.
I relapsed six times in the first eight months that I was exposed to recovery. I was going to, I averaged about 20 some meetings a week, and I wouldn't get a sponsor, and I certainly wasn't going to consider I was going to work the steps on my term, but I missed the second half of the first step that my life had become unmanageable, and for me, when I finally took it, it became the fact that my life was unmanageable, my thinking and my emotions. Days and 67 days and 47 days, and then I got on down, and I didn't talk to one of them. I'm going to tell you, there's something, there's nothing worse, there wasn't anything worse to me, and maybe some, maybe somebody here can do that, but I didn't get honest about one of my relapses. You know, I'd have read a shop the pope and carried that drill, and carried that, walking in the room, and sitting down with people, and sharing a power greater than ourselves together, knowing that I'd gotten loaded.
You know, I said the Lord's Prayer one time, thinking I was going to OD in the middle of it, you know, and they asked me to leave, and I'm sitting there, and they kept saying, what they kept telling me, keep coming back to us, and God finally stopped me, and you know, you can keep coming back to people until they die. That one time, I walked out the door, and he stopped me, and he put his arms around me, and he said, you know, you might want to be wary of the fact that you're beginning to live this program like a Catholic mafioso figure. You walk in on Sunday, make your amends, and walk out on Monday, and blow somebody up. He said, one of these days, you're going to come back not in the same shape, maybe going to be paralyzed. If I was lucky, if I am lucky on my next relapse, if I were to do that, I'll die. I tried to kill myself. I did it. I did the best I could, and I didn't die.
I know people that weren't even considering them that are dead. I know one thing about them, they're not suffering. I know some people, I know guys, there's an example in Sepulveda, Oklahoma, that for 23 years, he's laid in a bed in a nursing home, paralyzed from his neck down from his last party. They walk in and they flip him, to his tummy, to his side, to his back, to his other side. And that's how he's spent his last 23 years. And I'd like to suggest to you that death isn't going to keep me sober, and I don't know many people that's going to keep sober. But that's one vision that's helped me stay sober, is the understanding that maybe I'll go back to crawling out of trash cans, but worse yet, the vision that I
[00:30:24]
might have had an overdose and become paralyzed living with the person I was living with at that time. There's a thought. Now I say that and I want you all to know something. We are, we are very good friends today. We have a clear-cut understanding of why we're not together. We don't have a very good understanding of how we got together. That's the biggest problem, but you know, it's true, you know, that there are, you know, I know a beautiful man in Little Rock, Arkansas that I met, who on his last three laps out, and I'm talking a man that's 6'4 and probably 220, just a striking gentleman, very attractive man, who went out smoking, God took another hit, as he put it, I think he said, I just want that one bell ringer, that one bell ringer now when that guy walks in the room, he walks in like this, from that stroke, where his left arm is paralyzed and where he has to drag his leg behind him, you know, and I know that his life's good today, but I know that's a hell of a price to pay. Suffering is awesome. That's what I've learned in this effort. I do not have to suffer. I do not have to stay out there in the toilet any longer than I should, and I can reach out to somebody who's suffering, and I don't have, I'm not going to sit there and fight them and take a rag out of their arm. I'm not going to sit there and chase them down and beat them up on their dealer's front step, and I'm not going to go drag them out of jail and lex them and drag them to meetings, so I might walk out the door and say something that I know will make them jump out of their skin to me, and let them go hit the pipe again with that.
When I finally took the first step, I went to my first TA meeting in September 9th, 1986 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and I finally sobered up on the 21st of October. A little woman in that meeting sat there and she said, my name's Billy, and she didn't mind me doing it. My name's Billy D., and I'm an alcoholic. I don't know what cocaine is, but if I'd have found it, I'd have used it, and I thought, hmm, I like this guy. She had thirty-some years of sobriety, and she started talking to me about recovery, and she and some other people took me by my hand as I was crying as I was reading Who's a Cocaine Addict? I've never seen this thing before, folks. Let me tell you what, you hand this to a newcomer, whoop, whoop, you know, as they're reading down through it, and the spirit can reach them to despair, the spirit of despair that's in each of our lives before we walk into recovery can reach there and touch them at one moment.
I began driving 618 miles a week to those three meetings a week. That's when I finally accepted the full implications of the first test, and I understood that my insanity. That's what I started doing. I started talking in response, and I began working the test earnestly. Now, I had done two fourth tests prior to that time, but that second half, see, I'd wake up in the morning, and I'd say, okay, God, here's the list.
Here, you need this person to hit the bottom, this person do that, this person do that, and oh, by the way, I'm going to quit smoking today, and I'd go out, and I wasn't getting any better, and I didn't understand why, you know, and my sponsor at that time told me, and this is something I still do today, is when you pray because you're such a prick, you need to just ask God for love, mercy, and wisdom for yourself and all people that you come in contact with, and don't say anything else, because you don't know how to not try to direct it, so you just ask for love, mercy, and wisdom, and that's what I do every day, and you know what? Love, mercy, and wisdom, I don't know what that is, and he's proved that to me over and over again, because I've prayed for a car-loaded drunk child on a reservation in New Mexico that was driving too fast and ran me off the road, and my first instinct, that fast, and probably would be today, that I'm going to steal me a car-loaded drink, and I finally, what I did that night, so that evening is about dusk, is I prayed for him, just about the time I was about to catch up to him,
[00:35:02]
and I said, please bless him with all things I like, that I wish for, bless him with love, mercy, and wisdom, and that car-loading blew up right before my eyes, there's oil all over my windshield, they were harmless, they took his side of the road, you know, I don't think, you know, I don't believe there's that much control, but I kind of like what's happening. Now, I have tried to get a few other people out of my life, and they've become closer to me, so, you know, again, the love, mercy, and wisdom, I prayed for God, I wanted to cut his arm off over a small amount of money that he had, you know, owed me, and my sponsor taught me, again, I'm out in the mountains by myself, working, and that's a bad place, you know, I didn't sleep with the lights off for the first two years of my recovery, I had auditory and visual hallucinations on and off for the first couple years, you know, so I wasn't very sane, I'm out this far from him this big knife, and I'm thinking I'm gonna drive through town, and a guy keeps telling me he doesn't have any money, but I know he's got a Rolex, so the Rolex is worth about five thousand dollars at the shop, the arm will make up for the rest, and my sponsor shows up out of the blue, you know, what are you up to? I'm fixin' to go collect my money.
Well, I think we have talked about that, oh no, there's no talking about it, he owes me more money than I make in a year, I want justice, and so I want to explain something to you about justice, if there's justice to be served, you're gonna be the first bastard to cry in the finished entry. Okay, I understand, see I needed somebody that could, he was a lot cruder than that with me as a general rule, but I needed somebody that could explain that to me in that fashion, some of us need very loving, gentle sponsors, I needed one that was willing to stick a gun down my throat and say, you don't move for two days, you know, you don't do anything, because that's the only thing that I, you know, I respected by that time, so I was driving, he's my, you know, I prayed for the guy and sent him a letter of amends, you know, and he invited me to his wedding, and I didn't want to hurt him, so that's how it was, that's praying for people to work from there, weird stuff, but I get to the third step and I'm, you know, and I'm, you know, you take somebody and you go, how, what are you going to do with the steps, and I'd make it very simple, and the third step, and the third step prayer is to take away my difficulties, and I'm sitting there thinking my difficulties are the fact that I had a crazy woman in my life, which she was, by the way, for those, you know, I don't like, I will not direct a single person in recovery that I know has anything what to do in their relationship, and it's because of this one relationship, the first person I, second person I got involved with in recovery in her seventh year, and I was a newcomer, mind you, she was treated for multiple personality disorders, so that's what I knew about how to make healthy choices, you know, so I wasn't the one she tried to kill, but, you know, you look back, and in our rooms, we're sitting around, and we express a lot of opinions about things, and I'll share my experience, and my strength, and my hope that I try to be very mindful of not sharing an opinion that I had no experience, or not nothing whatsoever, except just some basic prejudice. I do think that'll kill people. My, in the third step, where I got, I was trying to figure out what my difficulties were, and my sponsor made it simple for me again. He said, your difficulty's fear. That's going to be the base of all your other difficulties, but that's what I needed to put in there, and every time I wrote, I would say the third step prayer, and I'd say, take away my fear, so I'd say, take away my jealousy. Recently, I had to ask him to remove my fear again, the fire greater than myself, because yesterday, the day before yesterday, before I came out here, I made my last amends. I sat down with a man, I sat down with a man that four years ago, I vowed I would, I would saw him to pieces, run him down the disposal, do whatever necessary, but that I would not sit with this man and apologize to him for any reason whatsoever, and we spent an hour and 15 minutes together, and we sat down, and we talked about things, and I said, I need to apologize to you, and you know what? I didn't throw up. I didn't, you know, I didn't lose it over it, and I genuinely meant it, and he told me that he didn't have any problems with me.
[00:40:05]
I'm a little amazed by that, but that fear was removed long enough for me to sit down with that man and take care of that problem, and today, I stand free of all the stuff I arrived here with. One day at a time, I continue to make other amends, amends that were started a long time ago, but all the stuff that I walked in here carrying, I have now sat down. Thank you all. What I learned in the fourth and fifth step, as we intuitively know, is I began to find out about myself, which gave birth to intuition within my life.
Johnny talked about it today. I never knew my, you know, it's funny. Each of us has survived something in the street. How did we survive? We had, I had intuition that let me know that somebody was fixing to shoot me a couple times, and I kept from being shot, you know. I had intuition another, you know, a couple other times that kept me alive. Most of the time, I didn't pay any attention to it. It was fear-driven, suspicion, but what the fourth and fifth step allowed me to do is get in and to develop an understanding about myself, and I've done a lot of that work. I've done a lot of it under the guise of a tense test and sat down and looked at me, and it finally came down to the point that I'm responsible for my whole life. There's a few things that have happened to me that were a little inappropriate, they were doing the best they could do, but I took charge of it from there on out and continued running it down the pipe. I was the one that made my life an absolute disaster drill from that point forward. In sixth, I finally took it in the third year, even though I'd taken it several times.
I picked up the 12 and 12, because there's not much on it in the big book, and I read the sixth step, and I read it every day for 30 days, and I began to understand about a perfect goal, the goal to aspire for of not living in life, or not living as a thief, or not living in total jealousy and rage, and that became a goal for me, and that's what the sixth, and I go to seven, and I read it for 30 days, and I found out in seven that I do not have to have my butt kicked three feet underground, and my head four feet below that, James, because before I get to that desk, I may pick up and decide to kill myself, or somebody else, or get loaded.
I do not any longer have to live as they put it, and just the unremitting suffering reached your humility. It became a goal to reach for daily. Eight, I did out of the 12 and 12, and again, another inventory came out of that, and I began to understand some more things, and when I got to nine, I found out that most of the stuff that had gone on in my life was all up here. I don't know whether my mother actually thanked me, thank me, would have understood, actually whipped me with a piece of rose bushes, of a rose bush. I was very young. If she chased me into the rose bushes, I was into escaping punishment, or if she slapped me in a cell but in my mind, up until that point, and until she and I talked about it, I had it made up that this woman took a piece of it and beat me with it. Now, I can't really just put that together, but that's what I lived. I believe the first seven steps equates to freedom, and we'll begin in the first one, and we'll find out what our problem is, and as we get to seven, we begin to set free from ourselves and understanding, and in eight and nine, we just solidified it's like walking out of the jailhouse. It's like stepping into the parking lot and getting in a car and driving off. In my quick relapses, I never thought about the worst thing that happened in my life. I never thought about any of the stuff that I did during my youth, so I began to believe what the big book was saying. We will usually shove even the thought of what is a day ago our last drink will easily be supplanted, but it won't hurt me this time. You know, that last time when I started to kill myself, I had no skin from here to here.
I cut an artery in my eye that went through both my cheeks and my tongue. I got to visit the police and all kinds of things, and I never once on any of those relapses remembered that thing. So I began to understand
[00:45:00]
deeper the level of insanity. As the more I worked the steps and the more I saw how I go back to what I don't remember sometimes when I think about going out with somebody else's wife. I've got about eight years without that. But, you know, that used to be the way I had intimacy with other people's women. And because it was safe for me. And I finally understood that it's not about right or wrong. What it's about is, it's something that I can't have. So if I love myself, why would I deny myself of that? That relationship?
I was part and allowed to be part of starting CA in Oklahoma. And it was really a lot of fun. It's kept me sober for the last five years. We've just celebrated five years. We've got 30 some meetings. I watched a lot of people come and go. I developed friends. And most of all, I stayed sober one day at a time. Throughout it all, through the 12 steps. And I've learned about the 12 traditions. For those that may be in relationships, I highly recommend the 12 traditions as a way of life. I put them to the test. And I heard it put very well here a couple months ago. That in the first tradition lies the problem. Unity or disunity. And 2 through 11 give us the solution. And 12 is the result of practicing them one day at a time. You all have given me more hope, and more faith, and more courage in a single day, or in a single minute of any day, than I'd ever had in my whole life 32 years prior to that. And for that, I'm eternally grateful. And thank you for tonight.