Audio
About this recording
- Topic
- Step Four Fear and Sex 20th Spring Conference
- Speaker
- Bob D
- Date
- 2010-05-06
Transcript
Source: Bob D – Step Four Fear and Sex 20th Spring Conference – 2010-05-06.mp3 File: bob-d-step-four-fear-and-sex-20th-spring-conference-2010-05-06.mp3 Duration: 01:16:10
============================================================
Never had that kind of introduction before. True story. My name is Bob Daryl. I'm an alcoholic, and only through the grace of a God that I was afraid to believe in, that I've access through the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, good sponsorship, and a persistent and consistent commitment to the primary purpose of helping other alcoholics, I haven't had a drink or any mind or emotion-altering substance since October 31st, 1978.
For that I owe you my life and my freedom. I am delighted to be here. This is—I want to thank Lee and John, especially John. There you are. John picked me up at the airport, Ralph and I, and brought us over here. We got to hear more about John in the car than we ever imagined we needed to know. And this has been a fantastic—I am here with all my heroes. I'm here. Dave, I love Dave. Dave has a sense of humor that is very ill, and I really like that.
That's like, I just gravitate to guys like Dave. And Polly is one of my dear friends. Polly and I have done a bunch of stuff together in AA over the years, and she is a bright light for women in AA. And Tom was—Tom almost wanted me—after every time I hear Tom, I just want to be a Catholic. I just want to sign up. I just—he makes Catholicism look really cool, I'll tell you. I, I went back to the church.
It's my church of my childhood. Actually, I went back, but they wouldn't let me share. I wish that wasn't a true story. Oh, God. And Sandy is one of my heroes. I could hear, I could listen to him endlessly. His talk, I've never, I've heard him probably 30 times, and it's never been, it's always completely different every time. I just love that, the spontaneity. There's something works through him, and that's AA at its best, is something works through us here, that we are just a vehicle at best, or a channel at best, but this is never us.
And Ralph this morning was fantastic. He had some new stuff I hadn't heard, and I love, you can hear guys a lot, and then when I hear them do new stuff, I know that their program is vital and alive, because there's something, they're still growing and changing, and it was wonderful to hear him. And this has been a fantastic weekend up to now. And I have no idea. I'm supposed to talk about fear, my experience with fear and with sex, the inventory of fear and sex. And it has me anxious just thinking about that.
I've been owned by fear most of my life and didn't know it. Dr. Silkworth says something that is so profound, and I think he intended it originally in the context of us when we were drinking. But man, I'll tell you, it's followed me through my whole sobriety, over 31 and a half years of sobriety. And he says that to us, our alcoholic life seems the only normal one. So whatever it is in this malady of alcoholism, whether it's resentments or fear or whatever, there's something in me that will just adjust to being that way, as if it's—and like try to dress it up as if it's normal. And I, God, the ego justifies itself.
I tell you, and that's really, our book says that's the root of our troubles, is selfishness, self-centeredness, which it equates at one point to ego when it says self-centered or egocentric, as people like to call it nowadays. This thing has a greater survival mechanism than I do, because
[00:05:05]
there have been times in my life where I put my life at risk. It doesn't matter I'm going to die, as long as after I'm dead you realize how wonderful and right I was. It has a tremendous survival mechanisms, and it's very devious, and it hides from me. It's the great trickster. And consequently, when I did my first, what I like to think of as really— In depth inventory, it was actually my third inventory. My first one I did just because I was tired of going to meetings where the subject was the fourth step and I felt guilty, so I just wrote, you know, stuff just so I don't have to.
I can be the me guy that can say he did the fourth step. And I did the first one. It was just 40 pages of everything I was ashamed of and all my secrets and all that kind of stuff. And I got to tell you, nothing had changed from that within me. I was still the same fear-driven, self-centered guy prone to depression, resentments, judgments. Nothing had changed within me. I brought no light into those dark crannies of my life, the things that were hidden. And my second one was out of the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions book where I answered the 30-some questions and wrote about a page on each of the seven deadly sins. And like the first one, nothing really changed.
And I was sober over four years when I finally did one out of the Big Book, and it changed me dramatically. And the part that changed me probably the most was the part that Ralph just covered. And it was odd that I did the resentment deal, and it just fell. It was easily, fell right out of me on the paper, and it was very simple. And then I got to the second section on fear. And now, try to keep in mind, I'm a guy that's going to probably two meetings a day.
I got a bunch of service commitments. I mean, I got a lot of them. I'm sponsoring a whole gaggle of guys, a whole bunch of guys. I pray every morning and every night. So I am, I'm enthralled with my own AA biography, kind of, right? And so I start to do the fear inventory, and I'm sitting at the kitchen table with a tablet with fear written across the top of it, and I'm drawing a blank. Now I know that when I got sober, I was wracked with fear of going to prison and all kinds of stuff.
But all that stuff, the people in AA directed me to take actions that put most of that stuff to rest. And I'm praying every day, and I thought to myself, well, now that I'm sober this while and I pray every day and everything, I just, I don't have any fears. I must not have any. I must be, me and God are good. I don't have any more fears. And I went to a meeting. Our intergroup used to have a monthly speaker meeting where they'd bring in speakers from out of town, and I went to that meeting Sunday night after trying to working on this inventory all weekend. And I end up going out to coffee with a bunch of guys after the meeting with the speaker and some of the other old-timers, and I found myself telling this guy that I was working an inventory, you know, that's great.
And I'd just done the resentment section. I'm on the fear section, and I'm really amazed that I don't have any fears. And he said, he looks at me, he says, Really? I said, Yeah, I don't have any fears. He said, Could I ask you some questions? I said, Yeah, sure. He said, Are you afraid of large, angry, barking dogs? Well, yeah, but everybody's— He says, We're not talking about everybody. We're talking about you. I said, Well, yeah, of course.
Okay, he says, You can put that down. Are you afraid of rattlesnakes? Well, everybody, if you're not… Oh, yeah, yeah. Are you afraid of black widow spiders? Yeah. Then he starts getting a little personal. He says, Are you afraid of what people think about you? All the time. That's a big piece of business in my mental life. What are you thinking about me? I will sit in meetings a certain way to affect how you think about me.
I mean, I dress a certain way to affect how you think about me. I work at a certain place because I like the pizzazz of telling you I'm a wine consultant in sobriety. I mean, it's kind of all…
[00:10:00]
Yeah, he says, Are you afraid you'll grow old alone? Yeah. Are you afraid no one will ever love you? Yeah. Are you afraid of women? Yeah. Are you afraid of rejection? Yeah. Are you afraid God's not going to really do for you what they're telling you? Yeah. Are you afraid of homosexuality? I spent time in jail. Yeah. Are you afraid of being broke? Yeah. Are you afraid of getting sick and not being able to take care of yourself?
Yeah. Are you afraid you'll never really make it right for all the stuff you did in your past? Yeah. And he goes on and on, and he finally says, So, is there anything you're not afraid of? And I—how do you—listen, if you're new and you really don't want to change, stay away from old-timers in AA. They got some kind of spiritual jujitsu. They always turn stuff around on you. I don't know how they do it. There's some kind of school somewhere.
They won't tell me where it is, but there's some kind of school, and they just do that stuff. And I started to realize that I'm exactly what the book talks about. On the bottom of page 67, it's talking about fear, and it says it's an evil and corroding thread. The fabric of our existence was shot through with it. I am sitting at that kitchen table looking for fear like you could be sitting in this room looking for air. I mean, it is just—it encompasses me.
And earlier in the book, it says that I'm driven by it, by a hundred forms of it. I don't even know that I knew that worry was a type of fear, or shame and guilt was a type of fear of consequences and retribution and karma. I didn't know that anxiety was a type of fear. Apprehension was a type of fear. And when—it's crazy that I adjust to a high level of anxiety and anxiousness in my life as if I delude myself to think that neurosis is normal, right?
And yet I wake up in the morning afraid most mornings. But I don't know. I adjust to it. I just think that's— That's just my job, is to worry about stuff. I'm continually solving problems that haven't occurred yet. I'm always trying to clear up the wreckage of my future. I'm just always doing that stuff because I'm obsessed with me. And I started to see how that this stuff owned me. As a matter of fact, I think it's the only thing that—it is the instrument of the ego to maintain its control.
See, if it can spook me, then I hold on tighter to my life. And it's very good at it. It's very good at it. It's very good to chatter at me about the things that it can imagine and seduce me into thinking could be problems that I need to grab on and control and be more proactive about. It's really very clever, the way it works within me. All the troubles of my life, all my resentments without—and I love the way Ralph touched on the fear aspect of—I've never had a resentment where something wasn't threatened.
Something. And it really is the driving force in my life. And it's sad that it's been that way for most of my life, and for a good portion of it I wasn't aware of it. I'm asleep. I'm asleep in my own life. And I think that 90% of this awakening that we talk about in Alcoholics Anonymous is I just pull my head out of my butt and show up and just get it. You know, you just get it. And it's not an easy thing to look at that I was that afraid. And I developed certain defense mechanisms as a little kid, and one of them was to get angry and even.
And one of them was to get angry and even get almost violent because
[00:15:03]
I'm afraid. I don't want you to know I'm afraid. One of the reasons that my ego doesn't want me to see it is that somewhere my ego sold me a bill of goods. And the bill of goods is that if, Bob, if you're afraid, there's something wrong with you. If you're afraid, you're weak. If you're afraid, you're less than a man. If you're afraid, people are going to roll over you and take advantage of you. And so I developed these knee-jerk emotional reactions.
You threaten me, I automatically get angry. I don't even experience a lot of my life the fear. It's just right there, right there. It's knee-jerk because I'm afraid of being afraid. And I don't even know I'm like that. And I started to do this process. There's a line in here that I think, when I started to really look at it, it touches on why sober, it doesn't matter if you're sober 50 years, why sober, a guy like me cannot manage my own life. And it's an odd line.
It's talking about fear, and it says it sets in motion trains of circumstances which brought us misfortune we felt we didn't deserve, but did not we ourselves, we, the great I, ourselves set the ball rolling. Well, what's that mean? That's a lot of words. Well, what it means is it's what psychologists refer to as self-fulfilling prophecies. This is, my ego wants to be right, and it makes a judgment about something, and then suddenly, without me being conscious of it, it starts maneuvering and incrementally shifting my actions and attitudes through my emotions until I eventually make the fear come true so I can be right. I'll give you a couple examples.
My first relationship I ever got into in sobriety, I'm not conscious of it, but the truth is I was scared because I was very vulnerable here. And what am I afraid of? I'm afraid she's going to dump me. I'm afraid of being rejected. So what happens? Incrementally, the fear starts consuming me and working on me until eventually I become the guy that drives by her apartment in the middle of the night, make sure no guy's cars are there.
It drives me to become the guy who's always watching her in meetings, you know, and she hugs some guy. It's like, hey, hey, you know, I'm pulling guys aside after the meeting. I'm on the muscle with them, you know, What are you hugging my girlfriend? People in AA are starting to look at me like I'm a little weird, right? I remember she left the room one time. I was looking through her purse to see if there's any guys' cards in there.
I mean, before cell phones, or I'd have been going through her cell phone. I know it, like a crazy person. And what happened? I literally drove her out of my life. I'm asleep at the wheel here. I don't even know I'm doing this. I don't even know that I'm— She said to me one time, she says, Every time I'm at a meeting, I don't like to go to meetings with you because when I'm at a meeting with you and I look up, you're looking at me. Yeah.
I mean, I don't get it. I mean, I don't get it. I can't see myself the way you see me. That's all. Isn't that always been the problem? That's why so many of us end up feeling like victims. If you could see yourself the way your boss saw you, you would know why he's firing you. I'm telling you, you'd get it. You'd go, Oh, well, of course. If you could see yourself the way your ex saw you, you'd know why they're gone.
I mean, you'd get it. I mean, but I can't see myself. So, I got this mechanism in me that the ego decides something. It can decide that these people at this job don't like me. Boy, when I make that come true, because what do you do if you're like me? You get on the muscle around those people. You get a little defensive. You ever have the experience of having someone in your home group that you think doesn't like you, so you don't like them first, right?
And they don't dislike you, but if you don't like them first long enough, they eventually
[00:20:00]
don't like you, because your body language, everything is like, you know, eventually you make it come true. It's a bizarre dynamic, but it's a lot of my life. The book says sometimes we think fear ought to be classed with stealing. It seems to cause more harm. Nothing has ever robbed me like fear. Nothing. Some of the great things in my life today that I cherish the most, at one time I kept them like this because I'm afraid.
I'm afraid that I—I'm a songwriter, and I sing in a band, and I was so afraid to do that that the fear for, unfortunately, a lot of years kept me from doing that. And I know ideally we learn to trust God here, but I'll tell you something: in some areas of my life, some guys like me, that takes a long time till I'm able to walk through some of this stuff. I got it. It's robbed me of so much. There's one of the key people in my life today who has helped me immensely for my first 12 years of sobriety.
I kept him like this because I didn't think that if I let him in, I thought they were going to not like me or I wouldn't measure up. And I've always been that guy. If I think that you don't like me, I'm going to not like you first, because it's a defense mechanism. And yet, when I started to heal inside and my spirit started to get healthier and I started to trust God more, then I'm able to start taking more risks because I know God's got my back.
But that didn't happen to me quickly or easily. It's been a slow process. It's very easy for a guy like me to come to meetings and talk about trusting God, but to go out there in the world and act like it is a big deal for a guy like me. Father Martin one time said that when intellect and emotion are in conflict with each other, emotion always wins. And that's always been true because it's persistent and it wears on you.
So what do we do? It says we reviewed our fears thoroughly. We put them on paper. There's six things I do in the fear inventory, and they all come right out of the book. And the first thing I do is I list them. I put them on paper, even though I had no resentment in connection with them. The second thing I do, it says we ask ourselves why we had them. I'll tell you, I think this is a very important question.
And the reason I think that's an important question is a little bit later on in the book, when you get to step eight, it says something kind of odd. It says we have a list of the amends, people we've harmed, and we already made it, didn't we, when we took inventory. And this question in the fear section is usually what will uncover the unfinished business between me. I'll give you an example. A guy comes up to you and a gal says, I don't like to go to that meeting. I get uptight in that meeting.
What makes you uptight in that meeting? Well, so-and-so is there. I don't really like them. Well, what's got you anxious about being around so-and-so? Oh, I don't know. And then they start to tell you, give pieces of that person's inventory, and you can say to them, Well… Could you be afraid of them because you've been talking crap about them behind their back now for some time, and you're afraid that someone might have told them?
Oh. I'm afraid of doing my taxes. Why? Because you're cheating on your taxes? I'm afraid of the guy won't really take care of me. Is there some of his kids you haven't made it right to yet? I'm afraid… And why? I had a guy come up to me at one of the halfway houses in Vegas. He was sober about five months, I guess. And he says, Can I talk to you? I said, Yeah. We went out on the porch and we're sitting there, and he said, I'm writing a
[00:25:01]
fear inventory and I'm stuck. I've tried to ask myself why I have certain fears and I don't have a clue. And I said, Can you give me an example? And he says, Well, let me think a second. He reaches in his pocket, he pulls out a cigarette, he lights it up, takes a hit, and goes, I got this fear of cancer. Oh, wait. I see. I started to chuckle, but then he goes to explain. He says, My parents didn't have cancer.
I was never traumatized by cancer as a kid. I don't know why. He's looking for some kind of Freudian explanation. I said to him, Could it be because you smoke? And he got this look like a deer in the headlights, like… We want to make complex stuff out of… and some of this stuff is real simple. I'm anxious about so-and-so. Why? Because I owe him money. Talk crap about it. So why do we have these fears?
The book says, is another question, wasn't it because self-reliance failed us? There's been a theme through the whole weekend of that one. The first guy I ever heard use it was my dear late friend Clint Hodges, who I was— Clint was a very important part of my sobriety, and Clint used to say that all the time, How's that working for you? How's that working for you? Wasn't it because self-reliance failed me?
If I could fix my own fears, if I had the power to keep them at bay or manage them away, I'm telling you, I'd have done that. I think we all would have done that, because I don't know about you guys, but it's not like I haven't thought about some of this stuff. I mean, I don't know about you, but I think about me all the time. I just, I wake up, I don't wake up worrying about you, I wake up worrying about me. I might, if I'm worrying about you, it's because you have to do with me, but it's really all about me.
And I don't know that anybody on the planet has ever put more energy, spent more money, given more time or obsessive focus on themselves and trying to make themselves okay as we have, and the end result is, Will you sponsor me? I mean, we're here, we're here, we're here. So did self-reliance fail you? How's all that working for you? Wasn't it because self-reliance? Self-reliance was good as far as it went, but it didn't go far enough.
Boy, it sure didn't. Some of us once had great self-confidence, but it didn't fully solve the fear problem or any other. It's—when I was younger, fear hadn't had its way with me yet, and I hadn't accumulated the pain and the destruction that a guy like me can reap over the years from running your life on self-centered fear. So you get this pump when you're a kid, you know, when you're in your twenties, like you're bulletproof. But I'll tell you, you run your life like that year after year, and eventually it just wears you out.
And you may have been able to maintain a cockiness, but it's hard after a while. I had this great experience years ago with a guy. He was the head of the—he'd just gotten out of prison, and he was all tatted up with prison tattoos. He'd been the head of the Aryan Brotherhood in the state penitentiary, and I got him in the car, and we're going to a meeting, and he's telling me about all the people that he's killed and beaten senseless and all this stuff, and he's all pumped up and everything. And I—sometimes God works through us, and I found these words coming out of my mouth, and I should—if I had been in my right mind, I would never said this to a guy like this.
But I said to him, I said, You must have been horribly afraid to have been that way. To have been driven to be that way, and it took his breath away. And he, to this day, he's still sober a lot of years, he'll tell you about that experience. He said, he said, nobody had ever said that to me. He said, nobody had ever seen through the gorilla outfit. And the times in my life that I looked the toughest and looked…
The toughest and the, look, the angriest and looked the hardest was the times
[00:30:00]
when I was probably the most afraid. And I didn't know it. I didn't know it. When it made us cocky, it was worse. Oh boy. You know, I think most of—I heard this years ago from an Al-Anon—I think that most of us respond to fear one of two ways, either as a turtle, and we pull our head into the shell and kind of hope that it goes away and waits for it to pass, or some of us, like a skunk, and spray everybody around us.
Of those two positions, the turtle position is a little better, and I'll tell you why. The turtle makes less amends. But neither position is really that great. Neither the turtle or the skunk is free. Not really. They're just driven by—it's just opposite sides of the same coin. The book says perhaps there is a better way. We think so, for we are now on a different basis. Remember Step Three. In the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, it says something interesting. It says that the effectiveness of the whole AA program rests on this decision.
Step Three, and it goes on to say, on a different basis, the basis of trusting and relying upon God, we trust infinite— God rather than our finite selves. I had an experience the last time my parents allowed me to be in their house prior to me getting sober, and I had burnt my life to the ground again. And this was, in one fell swoop, I lost my job, my girlfriend, my place to live. I was on the streets, and my parents felt sorry for me and let me stay back in their home again on the strong condition that I must not drink, right? Well, I get sober, and I get so—I don't even understand what's wrong with me, but I get so overwhelmed with fear that I get up early in the morning and I go out into the back of the house. There's a little den, and I sit in front of the TV set, and I sit there until the Star-Spangled Banner comes on at night and it goes off the air. And I can't go out in the world, and I can't tell you why I can't go out there, but I am locked up here.
And my dad loved me, and he couldn't—it was hard for him to see his son sit in front of a television set for 15 hours a day. And he started pushing on me lovingly but firmly to get out, to go out there, to look up some of my friends that I went to school with—not the bums, but the other good guys. Maybe go golfing or bowling or something, or go get a job, go see so-and-so. You can go down here, they're hiring. And he starts, he's like nudging me, nudging me, and I feel like the pressure is building up, and eventually I have a nervous breakdown.
And I got to tell you, which ended me up in a psychiatrist's office, and he gave me some medication. And there's a very thin line between nervous breakdown and surrender. And I got it preempted with medication, and it didn't really help. It gave me a little relief from the emotions. Eventually, I had to get a little… I really needed a little more relief than the medication would give me, so I ended up in the bar eventually. And what was going on?
We're trying to get our lives, turn them over to infinite God rather than our finite selves. If you're the center and you're responsible for your whole life, and it's all, everything is on your shoulders, I got to tell you something, it's too big. It's too big. This world is, there's a lot of stuff to worry about. It's full of people, and they're all thinking things, and you don't know what they're thinking, but you suspect it's about you.
I mean, don't you? And so you have to kind of be on top of it all the time. It's overwhelming. No wonder we drink, for God's sakes. Abstinence makes a guy like me go crazy after a while. Perhaps there is a better way.
[00:35:04]
Different basis, the basis of trusting and relying upon God. We trust infinite God rather than our finite selves. This is an interesting word. The word trust. You know, throughout history, and you can see evidence of this in William James's writings, you can see it throughout history, there has been cited incidences of alcoholics who turn in a moment of weakness and brokenness, turn towards God and have a transformation. But invariably, not always, but quite often, this transformation wears out after a while.
It's like the shine of the conversion wears out, and the ego reasserts itself and the guy returns to drinking again. I was at a workshop one time on Step Two, and it had about 80 people in the room, I suppose, and I just, on a fluke, I said, Can I see the show of hands of the people who had either been saved or had some kind of conversion experience or connected with God and then drank again after that?
And I was amazed. Between a third and a half of the room raised their hands. Because faith isn't enough for us. I mean, we have to have it. I'm not bad-rapping faith. It's very important. But I have to take it up another notch here, and I have to have trust. And I went to a retreat, early sobriety, and I was talking to this guy Ted, who's sober a long time. I think he's probably got 48 years now. No, actually, he's celebrating 50 years coming up in December.
And I was talking to Ted between the sessions, and I told him about the anxiety that I experience every day in my life and how I don't understand it because I get down physically on my knees in the morning and I say the Third Step Prayer and a bunch of other stuff, and I'll get off my knees and it won't even be five minutes and I'm in my head having conversations with people I might meet later that day. You know what I mean?
And there's an anxiety about that. Now I'm sober long enough to at least identify anxiety, rather than it just was all under some gray blanket of uncomfortable. Now I'm starting to define stuff a little bit more. And he says, he says, Well, you pray every day, and you have faith in God. And I said, Absolutely, I am now sober longer than I have ever been sober since I took my first drink as a kid. And I know that that's God. I know I failed for seven years trying to beat the bottle. And he said to me something I'd never heard.
He said, Guys like you and I, we can pray fervently and have all the faith in the world and still die of alcoholism. He said, What we must have is trust. And I must have looked at him like, What's the difference? And he says, Let me tell you the difference. He says, If you went to a circus and you sat in the audience and you watched a tightwire act, and you watched a guy come out to the edge of the wire on the platform pushing a wheelbarrow, you could sit in that audience and have all the faith in the world. This guy's a professional.
He could walk across that tightwire pushing that wheelbarrow. I bet he's done it a thousand times. Absolute faith he can do it. And then Ted says to me, But if you had trust, you'd go up and get in the wheelbarrow. And see, I know what he means. And I get this sinking feeling because I can't do it. He means that I have to let go of my life and conduct myself totally as if God's got me covered. I don't have to worry about nothing. The problem is I can't do it.
I like and appreciate the concept. I like going to meetings where we read about getting in the wheelbarrow. I like going out to coffee with people and philosophizing about getting in the wheelbarrow. I like going to discussion meetings where we discuss openly the merits of getting in the wheelbarrow. But I ain't getting in the wheelbarrow, you know what I mean? Because I'm too afraid. I'm afraid if I really would get that vulnerable and surrender that totally to God and stop defending and protecting and concerning myself with myself and actually found myself in the wheelbarrow, I'd get halfway out that wire and hear a voice going, Is that Bob?
Oh! You know what I mean? Oh! I could be right over the side. Because the truth is, intellectually I'm willing to trust God, but emotionally I can't. So what happens?
[00:40:03]
What do you do if you get it? I mean, you get it. I have to get in that wheelbarrow. I'm ruining myself here sober, trying to protect myself. And yet I got such a death grip on my life. What do you do? Well, on page 53, it talks about something that I think is unavoidable. I loved what Ralph said and a couple other people about God does not make hard terms with those who seek Him. It is often the pain and discomfort and tragedy and consequences of my own self-will that, in God's hands, bring me closer to God.
It's a funny dynamic. I was, page 53, it says, Crushed by self-imposed crisis, I could not postpone or evade. I had to fearlessly face the proposition that God is either everything or else He is nothing. God either is or isn't. What is our choice to be? I got sober with two years in a state penitentiary hanging over my head. And I was 2,000 miles away in a different state. This was in Pennsylvania, and I'm now in Nevada.
And I'm going to AA meetings, and I got a sponsor, and I'm praying for the first time on a regular basis in my life. I got service commitments. I'm doing very good, and there's a small little amount of hope that AA might work for me. But I am started to get haunted by this stuff that's hanging over my head back in Pennsylvania, and I start to worry a lot about it, and it's eating me alive. And I grabbed this old-timer one day, and I told him about it. No, I didn't tell him about it because I wanted to take any action. I just wanted to—thinking, I did a lot of therapy, thinking that I'll ventily, ventily, feel better, ventily.
And people in AA aren't so much into ventilating as they are into action. It's a funny deal here. And I start telling about that, and he corners me. He says, You have to turn yourself in and offer to go back there to Pennsylvania and do the two years, and any tack-on time they want to give you. And I'm going, What? No. I'm sober. I'm going to meetings. That's good. He says, You have to do this, kid, and he backs me into a corner. He says, You're not going to stay sober.
He says, How long are you going to go looking over your shoulder with that anxiety? How long are you going to go every time you see a cop car go down the street that your gut just cinches up because you don't know if he's got your picture on his dashboard? How long are you going to go until you will have to drink or at least take something for those emotions, kid? How long are you going to go? And I knew he was telling me the truth.
And he walked me through the process, and it was a—I had to write a letter, and I followed it up ten days later by a phone call to my PO back in Pennsylvania. And I remember the day I was scared to death. I remember when I took the letter to the mailbox and dropped it in, it was—I couldn't stop my arm from trying to go in after it and get it back. I mean, it was like—ten days I had to wait before I called my PO. Every day I wanted to leave town.
Every day, because I gave him the address of the halfway house. It was a bad deal. I can't sleep. I'm having these nightmares about whether I can adjust to being married to Bubba. I mean, just crazy stuff. And the tenth day came, and I am shaking inside. I got such a high level of anxiety, and I get on that phone, and this woman answers, and she says, He's waiting for your call, because it was exactly the day and time I said I would call. She puts me through, and he gets on the phone, and he says, I've talked to my supervisor.
We talked to the courts. You don't have to come back, but we're transferring your case to Nevada. And if you can do—he gave me a list of things to do. One of them was to send money. Another, I had to go to these classes. I had to give urine analysis on a regular basis and see this guy and do all this stuff. And if I did all that stuff, it would remain—it would not be ratcheted up to originally like it was going to be, a felony.
It would stay a misdemeanor, and time served, etc., and you're done. And everything they gave me to do, I could do easily. And it was the first time in my life, the first time that I ever put my The first time that I ever put myself at risk to follow someone else's directions. And I remember coming away from that telephone call
[00:45:03]
with a lightness, and I didn't know if I wanted to laugh or cry. I just was—it was an unbelievable feeling. And it was like a postcard from a God that, as of yet, I don't really know for sure is there. I mean, I'm hoping. And the postcard said, Dear Bob, we got your back. Love, God. And it was the first time that I ever got in the wheelbarrow. And I didn't get in the wheelbarrow because I thought it was a good idea.
I got in the wheelbarrow because I was crushed by a self-imposed crisis I could not postpone or evade. Let me tell you something: if I could have postponed that or evaded that, if there was any maneuver wiggle room in there, I would have taken it. But there was—and my sobriety has been filled with times where there's no—The last, you know, Ralph talked, and I've been through this with him, and now I'm—it's funny, I don't really—the truth is, right now, this very second in my life, everything's perfect.
Everything's really, really good. Now, if we visit this, this knows about a deteriorating economy. This can project into this—homeless. It's not just a matter of time. I can see it. The real estate market's going to go down a little further. The stock market's crashing. All my retirement's gone. I'm too old to get another job. I'm going to be homeless. And how should I stand with the will work for food sign?
Should I stand— Can I rent a wheelchair from somebody and maybe sit in it, you know, or have a dog? Maybe rent a dog and a kid and have them, right? But my mind goes there. It just does. And what I've tried over the years is to create a new default position. See, my default position was always me. And the new default position is that there has now been 31 and a half years of evidence. Evidence. Indisputable evidence that there is a God behind the fabric of this universe that is absolutely crazy about me.
And I'll tell you why I know that, because God has helped me when, in my way of thinking, I didn't deserve the help, because I put myself in a bad spot and I did it on selfishness and self-centeredness. And if I was God, I wouldn't have bailed him out. Just, we should all be very grateful Bob is not God. And God took care of me. And all I have to do is turn to Him and try to act like He's in charge. And that's really the hard part, is to take the actions.
You know, one of the ways you can tell, at least I believe, that you can tell if you have a good sponsor or not, a good sponsor doesn't care about how you feel. A good sponsor cares about what you're doing. Cares about the actions you take, because that's all that's real here. And what is it about self-obsessed, self-absorbed, self-focused, self-centered people like myself that have a tendency to judge how we're doing by how we feel?
And that's a bad way to do it. Because the truth is, there have been times in my sobriety, I went through a period between about 11 and 15 where, if you'd asked me, How you doing, Bob? I'd have said, Oh, I'm doing great. I got three $80,000 cars and two motorcycles, and I'm dating a couple different girls, and I'm rocking and rolling and making money, and I'm doing great. I feel great. Well, the house of cards hadn't imploded yet that I'd built on self.
The truth is, I was doing terrible. I was doing terrible. I was—the center of my life was me. There was another time in my life where I was going—my last divorce I went through, there were times in that, if you asked me how I was doing, I would have probably told you terrible. I would have probably said, I'm just hanging in there. You know, it's just a tough thing here. I don't really feel that great. If you'd asked my sponsor, he would have said, Bob's
[00:50:03]
doing good. He's got two commitments a week at the detox and one at the county jail. He's sponsoring guys. He's returning phone calls. He's calling me a couple times a week. He's trying to stay current with Alcoholics Anonymous and with God. If you'd have watched my feet through that, you would have seen a guy at times that maybe didn't look that happy, joyous, and free, but if you'd have watched my feet, I would have looked like a guy that was in the wheelbarrow.
And that's why a good sponsorship will always direct me not to tell me how I'm doing by what I'm doing, not by how I feel, because it's an illusion. It's smoke. It's smoke. So we trust and rely on Him. We never apologize to anyone for depending upon our Creator. We can laugh at those who think spirituality is the way of weakness. Paradoxically, it is the way of strength. The verdict of the ages is that faith means courage.
All men of faith have courage. They trust their God. They never apologize. Instead, they let Him demonstrate through us what He can do. There's something that you see in AA sometimes when you're new that's easily misinterpreted. And I had a woman come up to me years ago, and I was at a meeting and I was talking about, I don't know, something to do with trusting God, I think, or living this way, something, I don't know.
But anyway, she comes up to me after the meeting and she says to me, she says, Well, that's easy for you. You apparently have a lot of self-confidence, but some of us don't. I was speechless. I didn't know what to say to her. I went home. I'm driving home in my car, talking to myself in the car and talking to her in the car. And I'm thinking to myself, self-confidence? Now where would she get that from?
Self-confidence. Matter of fact, the longer I'm sober, the more I know I can't trust me. I mean, if anything I'm awakening to is not that I'm a guy that I should be able to trust and I should let manage my own life. I'm awakening more as the years go by to my inability to manage my own life. I can't trust me. Why would she think I have self-confidence? Are you kidding me? Why would she think that? And then all of a sudden I had one of those other-centered moments where I saw what she saw.
And it appeared, I suppose, like Bob has self-confidence. Oh my God, it's not that at all. It looks like it, I think. The confidence is not in self. It's that I was sober now long enough and it had enough times where I was forced into the wheelbarrow that I was—what she saw is a guy that was trusting God. She saw a guy that believed in you, a guy that trusted the process. And that's where the confidence really lies, is that I know God's got my back. And why do I know that?
Because He has every single time. And I know I can trust my sponsor. Is my sponsor infallible? No, absolutely not. Matter of fact, he does a terrible job with his own life at sometimes. But there is a covenant here. I don't trust the surgeon if I have to have surgery, but I'll trust the power behind the curtain. And the covenant is when two or more of us gather for the purpose of recovery, something will be in the midst.
I trust that. I've heard God speak through my sponsor to tell me things that he's not that bright. I have been present when the same things happened to me, where I've been the channel, where I've had some guy that I sponsor that's in a lot of distress, and he needs an answer, and I don't have one, and all of a sudden I'm hearing myself say something to him, and I have no idea where it's coming from.
I have no idea. And that ain't me. I ain't that smart. So we start to trust God, and that's where the confidence comes from. It's God confidence. The last thing, the last suggestion, it says, We ask Him to remove our fear and direct our attention to what He would have us
[00:55:01]
be. I think at one time I thought it said do. Have us be. Over the last many years, I've tried to encourage the guys I work with to try to get a vision of what's one of God's guys look like. What would you look like if you were living the decision in Step Three, a decision of self-abandonment and service? What would you look like in your own life, in circumstances, if you had really abandoned yourself of self and you existed to help God's kids, period?
What would you look like in this particular situation you're worried about? Because I get situations like that, they get situations, and I will guide them back to ask God to remove the fear and turn your attention to what He would have you be. And then that's the guy I got to be. And this is not easy for some of us. But it says that if, just to the extent that I do this, I will commence to outgrow fear. And this thing about outgrowing fear is, it was confusing to me.
I would go to discussion meetings and the subject would be fear, or sometimes resentment, sometimes other things, and it would seem to me that there were people in AA that had asked God to remove something and He removed it, never came back, and they were good to go. I remember listening to someone talk in a meeting say that since they took the third step, they were no longer self-centered. I remember I just wanted to sink down into my chair because I thought, Oh, there's something wrong with me. I'm the only guy here God doesn't like.
I mean, because I was very self-centered. But what happens over the years is that God gives me the courage to walk through life. I still, I have anxiety about the economy from time to time. I have, but here's the difference, is that I keep my hands off my life enough that I'm not taking whatever money I got left at some kind of casino because my head's, you know, or doing some kind of crazy thing to make it worse.
And my experience over the years is if I can back away from my life, God will work. See, I am always in the way. That's the problem. That's the—my task, it seems here, is not so much to access God; it's to get me out of the way, and God kind of shows up. My friend Mildred says that spiritual growth is a process never of addition but of subtraction, self-reduction. There's always—the problem had always been there's too much of me between me and you and too much of me between me and God.
And so we act. This is an action program. It's so important that I, with the help of a home group and sponsees and a sponsor, that I start acting like one of God's guys. Perfectly? No. There are days in my sobriety where I'm a pretty amazing example of AA, actually. I can kind of feel the statue being built at GSO, you know. And then there's some other days where I didn't drink. I just didn't drink. But no one among us has been able to maintain anything like perfect adherence.
Now the next thing I'm supposed to talk about for about 15, 20 minutes is, How about sex? I'm sorry, now about sex. You know, to my amazement, and I don't know if I was delighted or disappointed that the sexual inventory is not about sex. It's about selfish. It's about, once again— Manifestations of self that had defeated me. See, the root of my problem will manifest this obsession with self. This ego will manifest itself in a lot of different ways.
In the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, it talks about the three S's, the instincts that drive us: the instinct for sex, the instinct for both types of security, both emotional security. For both types of security, both emotional security and material security, and the instinct for society, that I want your approval and fit in with you is a big piece of business always in my life, what you think of me.
[01:00:03]
And in the sexual relationships arena is the one place more than anywhere else where all three of those can be threatened. And the greater the propensity for fear, the greater propensity for management. And so I cause a lot of problems in this area. A lot of people get hurt in this trying to make decisions based on self to fill these vacancies. And so we start to inventory this stuff, and it has twelve or nine things it asks us to do.
You can look at it one way as nine, and the other way you can look at it as twelve. It's actually nine questions in the first part of the inventory that it asks that we're to ask ourselves. I suspect three of the questions could be asked in two parts, but that's just my perspective. It says we reviewed our fears—I'm sorry—we reviewed our own conduct over the years past. So I suspect, even though that we're just like fears and resentments, I'm going to start making a list of all my sexual encounters.
Anywhere, even if there was not actual sex, if the sexual instinct, the instinct for a relationship or a partner or lust or whatever was in play, then I want to look at how squirmy self can be. When it's trying to get its own way. So, we reviewed our conduct, and then here's the questions. In each relationship, where had I been selfish? Well, you know, it's very easy to sit in a meeting or over coffee with someone and admit that you're selfish.
But when you look at every relationship in your life and look it square in the eye, it's like, oh my God, I'm a me-first person. I can be kind. I can be all the things, the attributes that it talks about with the actor trying to run the whole show. We can be kind, considerate, generous, et cetera, et cetera. But why am I like that? Isn't it really because I'm trying to get my own way? Isn't it really because I'm trying to establish the way you feel and think about me? I'm afraid that you're going to leave me.
I'm afraid you're not going to love me. I'm afraid for—it's all about me. And I'm a selfish person, and you can dress it up, but you know how you can tell? Push comes to shove, who comes first when you're afraid and threatened? And then the second question is, where had I been dishonest? And over the years, I've found with guys I sponsor and myself that there's more problems occur in dishonesty than any other place.
And it's amazing to me, I have lied a lot in my life, either by omission or commission. Or that kind of lying that's—it's not really lying. It's just having a little creative license with reality. You know what I mean? Just, it's not—I'm not really lying. I'm telling you about me, but it's like Bob on steroids version of Bob, right? And I discovered that I've never been a liar because I'm a liar. I'm a liar because I'm afraid.
I'm afraid you're not going to love me. I'm afraid you're not going to like me. I'm afraid you're not going to accept me. I'm afraid you're not going to be on my side. You're not going to approve of me. And this fear drives me into dishonesty. I know a couple that were in love, and they were—this is years ago—and they were going to be married. And before they got married, they had the money talk. Very important talk. If you're going to partner up with someone for the rest of your life, very important talk. And the guy says to the girl, he says, So, how's your financial situation?
How's your credit cards? Do you have any debt? Well, she had heard him on the phone to one of his sponsees, telling the sponsee how he should pay his credit cards off, and it's, You should never carry a balance. You shouldn't mortgage your future on credit cards. Don't spend money you haven't made yet, etc. She heard that, all that stuff. And so she says to him, Credit card debt?
[01:05:01]
Oh, I don't believe in carrying a balance on a credit card. I pay it all off as soon as I get it. Well, the truth is she's got three credit cards maxed out. She can't even make the minimum payments. He says, Have you ever had a bankruptcy? Oh, no, I don't believe in bankruptcy. She had heard him tell a sponsee about how we can't use illegal means in Alcoholics Anonymous to beat somebody out of something we owe them.
And she says, Oh, I don't believe in bankruptcy. Well, the truth is, she's had one, and if they don't get married, she's going to have another one. And what happens? Well, they get married, and this stuff comes to the surface. Of course it does, right? And it undermined the very foundation of the relationship. And here's the tragic, to me, the tragic sad part. I know this guy pretty well. She walked away from that marriage after he found out about all of that stuff, believing that that's what happens when people know about you.
They reject you. She was this close to learning a great truth, and the great truth is that there are people that will love you as is. I know this guy, and I am absolutely convinced that if she would have said to him, Sweetheart, I got three credit cards. They're maxed out. I've had a bankruptcy. I'm afraid right now, I think he would have been taken back, but I believe that he would have said, Okay, all right.
We'll dig our way out of this. I love you. We'll dig our way out of this. From now on, I'll handle the money, but we're going to dig our way out of this. And she never got to learn that. She never got to learn that, and she reinforced the old idea, which was the source of the dishonesty. The old idea. Dishonesty causes more harm. Our book uses a term, self-delusion. And what is that? It's like a psychotic wishful thinking.
It's like, I see this with guys I sponsor all the time. They get sober and they're so vacant and so lonely. And what is it about alcoholism that after you're sober a little while, this vacancy inside you looks like a relationship-shaped hole. Really looks like that to some guys. And so they meet someone who kind of likes them, and they're really just coming from a relation of a vacancy also. And these two fixer-uppers try to come together.
Well, the problem with that is that there's nowhere to go. The problem with that is that two incomplete people don't make a whole. A relationship is never designed to take the place of God. Never. You cannot fill an inside vacancy with outside stuff. You can't do it. And my God, if anybody knew that, we should know that. We've spent a lifetime trying to do that. And it doesn't work. And so what happens is you meet someone.
They're not really the person you want to be with, but you want to be with someone so desperately that you start imagining them to be the person that you need to be with, that you want to be with. Maybe the person you want to be with has ten characteristics. They have one of those ten characteristics, and it's usually the good sex part. And then you will imagine they have the other nine and get pissed at them when they don't. Now, who's the crazy person in that equation?
They're not doing anything except being who they are. Inconsiderate. Where was I? Inconsiderate. Well, self-centered people like me struggle with this. And here's the reason I struggle with it. It's unconscious inconsideration. I don't get it. I was at the Las Vegas Roundup one year with a girl that I was dating years ago, and Dick's sponsor, John, and Mary M. and a bunch of people from Atlanta came in.
It was a room about this size with two entrances, and I'm standing with my date, who's sober about five years, not as involved in AA as I am, and this is a big weekend for me. I'm a past chairman. I know a lot of people there. And I'm standing up there at the one door, and through the other door comes John and Mary M. and some other people from Atlanta, and I was very, very excited to see them.
[01:10:03]
John saved my life in my 11th year. I went down and stayed at his house in Lilburn, and just, he saved my life. And I ran down to give him a hug, and I was so jazzed to see him. Now, that is my reality. My date's reality is she just got left standing by herself in this hospitality room while her date ran off to be with his friends. I didn't even know I did that. I knew later. I knew more about it later than I ever could imagine I needed to know, I'm telling you. But it's not a conscious inconsideration.
I don't even get that I did that. The problem is, is self-centered people like myself at times can't see past myself. I don't even see that I did that. But I am responsible. My first sponsor told me, he says, You're not guilty for anything you've ever done, drunk or sober, but you are responsible. And I'm the guy who did that. Did I mean to do it? It doesn't have any bearing whether I meant to do it or not. Was someone hurt?
Yeah. And so it was my responsibility. Whom had I hurt? Did I unjustifiably arouse jealousy in myself or my partner, suspicion in myself or my partner, or bitterness in myself or my partner? Where was I at fault? And to me, this is the premier question: What should I have done instead? I think that's very important because if I'm going to build a vision for my future sex life, and I am going to do that because I'm going to ask God to do that, I need to learn on what not to be.
And I'll tell you, in the realm of the spirit, and our book talks about that, there is a tremendous amount of mercy and love, and we all get do-overs here. You know, your first couple relationships and marriages, you screwed it up. You're going to get a do-over, and when the do-over comes, you got to get a vision of what you don't want to do. Because why? If you don't, what's going to happen? It's like a wagon wheel falling back into the rut in the road every time.
When the emotions are on you, you'll end up being the same guy you were before. You won't be able to help it unless I can bring vision and grace together on who I want to be. And the power of moving me away from that rut is always God. There is no other power here. But my part is to get the vision of what I should have done instead, because I'm going to get a do-over. I've watched some amazing do-overs here.
People who have tremendous regret and pain and guilt over the kind of parents they were, and they get a do-over with their grandkids, and they're stellar grandparents. Stellar. We get—there's, oh my God, there's so—God wants us to balance the books. He wants us to make it right. It's inherent in His grace. But it's my job to get the vision of how, at least the roads I don't want to go. Sometimes the realm of the spirit is by elimination.
God's will sometimes is, for me, is just I just know what isn't God's will and what's left. So we ask God to mold our ideals and help us to live up to them. Remember always that our sex powers were God-given, therefore good, neither to be used lightly or selfishly, nor to be despised and loathed. Sex is not a means to get your own way. And it's not to be used lightly. There's a responsibility, because there's usually one of God's kids involved.
I know, I know some of you, you haven't got to that stage yet, but there's usually one of God's kids involved, and you can't do this stuff lightly or selfishly. And the last thing the book says, that if this turns to be troublesome, we throw ourselves the harder into helping others. It quiets the king urge, the imperious urge, unto ye olde mean heartache. When, in both of my divorces, when I was in a lot of pain and that was all on me and I couldn't get it off, what had saved…
on me and I couldn't get it off. What had saved me from myself was throwing myself in the harder into working with other alcoholics. See, I don't need information. I don't need pats on the back.
[01:15:01]
I don't need hugs when I'm self-obsessed. I need relief from the bondage of self. And if you're like me, and you're self-obsessed, and you've got yourself on yourself and it's eating you alive, you can sit on your couch and ask God to relieve you of the bondage of self endlessly and nothing happens until you get up off the couch and go help one of His kids. That's why that is our primary number one purpose in Alcoholics Anonymous. It is the only means a self-obsessed guy who got too much of himself between me and God can be relieved of the bondage of self, and that is through carrying out my primary number one purpose, forgetting myself and helping someone else.
Thank you for listening.