Carry This Message group in West Orange, NJ

And I'd like to do introduce our guest speaker for the night which is Cathy Elle, and she'll be speaking on her story and her experience with the steps. Hi, everybody. My name is Kathy Lawrence, and I am a grateful recovered alcoholic. My home group is to carry this message group here in West Orange. And my sobriety date is January 1, 1991.

That's what I was taught and told to to give. That I have a home group that I do have a sobriety date, and who I am. And one of the reasons I tend to give my full name is, in the rooms, the the the traditions talk about anonymity and it talks about anonymity, at the level of press radio and television. And I believe that. But in the rooms, I don't believe that we need to be quite so anonymous that we can't find each other.

And and I think that's important sometimes that we don't know who each other are. I've had the experience of going to the hospital to go visit somebody and it's like, can I meet? I don't know who they are. You know, I was lucky. The person I was going to meet, I knew her last initial and she had a Polish name that was about 7 feet long.

So they were able to find her, but I mean, I remember that happening and it was like, we're too anonymous sometimes I believe. Anyhow, that's why I give my full name. Not for any other reason, but so that I could be found. My story is not particularly interesting. It's kind of ordinary.

My first drink was about 6 months old. My mom used alcohol, as a, numbing agent when I was teething. And, her comment to me was you smiled an awful lot after that one. One should know that there's a problem coming. Alcoholism is not a big issue in my family.

I didn't grow up with it. My my parents weren't. There are some family members somewhere sprinkled in there that probably have had a problem here and there, but, I didn't grow up with it and I didn't really start drinking in any way that was out, you know, alcoholically until I really hit college. That doesn't mean that my behavior in my early life was sane and sober either. You know, it's like I I don't know.

I just never Brenda Brenda talked about not fitting in and I guess I felt a lot like that at times. I was the chameleon. You know, it's like I would make myself fit anything. And, I was proud of that. I thought that was an asset.

This is not a character defect. At that point in time, I thought it really was an asset that I could hang out with any of the groups and I was whatever you wanted me to be or whatever group I was with. Suffice it to say that I didn't find out who I was until I got in to AA for the most part. I mean, I was I was what everybody else wanted me to be or I tried to be. The one thing I knew I was was confused.

So I, I also had extremes. I mean, I didn't do anything, and I did I didn't play around in the middle. I went from one end to the other. I remember being in college, and I want to be a doctor. So I'm in a pre med course, and I'm taking all these pre med courses.

My degree is in theater arts. I go from one extreme to the other, you know, from the science all the way over to the to the, to the arts. It just in a lot of things, you know, it's like I always felt I was being picked on or I wasn't good enough into what we all tell. You know, I think almost all of us have gone through that to some extent or another. You know, I don't fit in, I don't, I'm not good enough if they only knew who I was.

And I carried that through for a long time. When I got into college, I found alcohol on a more than a medicinal basis. And because I did have alcohol through my life, you know, medicinally. My parents did to that. We were an alcoholic and that worked for for my mom and worked how she grew up.

And that seemed to be okay. And I was the good little girl. That's what I played. That was one of the roles that I played. I was the good little girl who got good grades.

I got to college and nobody's looking over my shoulder. I nearly flunked out my freshman year, because I was having fun. I mean, I didn't really get into all of that stuff until a little bit later, but, I just felt like nobody you know, I had a clean slate. Nobody knew who I was, so I can do anything I wanted. After my freshman year, I ended up, that's when I started doing moving into the theater arts.

I had met some people and I was doing that extracurricularly. And then I said, well, this is more fun. I don't have to go to class. I never learned how to study and studying I wasn't a good studier. I still am not.

I, I do but I don't sit down and learn from books well. So, when I got into the theater I thought, oh well I can go and design sets and I can design lights and I can act and I can stage manage and I can direct and I do all these things and I don't have to sit down with a book and take a test. And so that's one of the reasons why I ended up in the theater. In my college days, I did, you know, there were other substances but, after I left, it was like that was one of the things in my first step that I found out about. Like, am I a real alcoholic?

You know, what just where is my where am I powerless? What is it? How do I know that I'm an alcoholic? I know I'm an alcoholic. I surrendered a long time before I knew about this stuff.

But I know I'm an alcoholic because when I start drinking, I don't know when I'm gonna stop. And when I'm not drinking, that's all I think about. So I have both the mental obsession and the physical allergy. I didn't have that with the other substances I was playing with. You know, I mean, I got to a point where, gee, this this doesn't feel so good.

You know, this or this isn't so good for me. I like the way it made me feel. I thought it was terrific. But I didn't I knew somewhere in my head that it wasn't good for me. So I said, okay, I'll stop.

I was also cheap too. They cost more. But, you know, that really was it. It wasn't I mean, I don't think if if I'm a real addict, I would have kept going and, you know, the heck with the checkbook and everything else. I would have figured out a way to do it.

And that's how I know that that's how I know the difference. And I really am an alcoholic, and I am not a drug addict, because I I don't think about them. You know, I mean, when I think about it, it's sort of with some fond memories about the drugs that I did. You know, it's like, oh, there was that was fun while I did it, and I'm glad I don't do it anymore. But I never thought I never think of that with the alcohol.

Alcohol became my best friend. It was my only it wasn't my only friend at least back then, but I wanted to spend most of my time with it and, and I tried. I finished school and I went to, New York. Since I've got a theater degree in theater, I figured I probably, you know, Phillipsburg, New Jersey, which is where I'm from, wasn't the place to be. So, so I moved in the city.

And I discovered how hard it is to break into the theater. Did a lot of freebie stuff. You know, got a job in different places, did the mandatory waitressing, bartending. That got to be fun. But what what really where my alcohol took me was, I ended up designing lights in gay bars.

I had a female singer, and she was doing the gay bar circuit in terms of cabaret stuff. And so I started designing lights for her. And one of the things I discovered was hanging out in a gay bar was pretty cool because I had a bunch of big brothers that took real good care of me and it didn't matter how absolutely smashed, stinking, dumb. It didn't matter. You know, I just had a bunch of big brothers and they all took care of me.

And I had a lot of fun. I really did. Alcohol wasn't, it was beginning to be a problem, but it was a lot of fun while I was doing it. I still kept trying to do the same things and my life started to go down the tubes a lot. There was, the guys kicked me out because they kept saying you're you're complaining that you're you're lonely.

You're not meeting anybody. It's a little hard to meet somebody to meet a guy in a gay bar. So they kicked me out, and, I was living in the village at the time, and so I started hanging out in the the bars down there that weren't gay, but I was doing the same things. While I was safe in the uptown bars with the guys, I wasn't safe down here. And I ended up in a whole you know, this is where it's really starts spiraling down.

I ended up in a whole bunch of, less than nice situations. You know, I found myself in Brooklyn 1 night, found out Found myself in Jersey 1 night with somebody in a car who got stopped by the cops. And I'm I don't even remember what town I was in, But it was one one of the few nights that I wasn't drinking because I I had been sick, and I so I ended up not drinking. They put the guy that I was with in jail, and I they put me on a bus back to the city, and I'm trying to figure out what the heck I'm doing. This is like even not drinking, I am getting into the same kind of insane situations.

So it didn't really almost didn't matter that I was drinking or not. My behavior, my my attitude, the way I acted was just as crazy. Those were the fun days. I left the city at one point and now I'm into the isolation period where alcohol took me and and at this point now, alcohol became the only friend I had. I moved here into Essex County into I lived in North Newark.

I had a job down in Newark, and it was a pretty solitary job. I was working the box office at Symphony Hall, and, I didn't have to deal with people except when they came in to buy tickets and when they didn't have to have a lot of interaction with them. That was good for me or at least that's what I thought I wanted. I spent a lot of time to you know, I did that, came home, drank. Went to work, came home, drank.

And that's really all I did for about 3 years. I cut off everybody I knew in New York. I cut off my family to the best of my ability, they kept tracking me down. But, you know I didn't really spend much time with them. I didn't do anything but work and drink.

That was that was really painful. It was a painful period, because I I didn't know how to be with people at all. It's sort of like everything said, I can't do this anymore, But I didn't have enough. I wasn't capable of of trying to take myself out, but I couldn't be with people. So for about 3 years, I did that.

And, I always you know, there's there's a grace of god inside of me. I know there is and and I'm very grateful for it and I've done a lot to try to smother that little flame or or, you know, push that little seed of health, that little seed of God that I have in me, you know, cover it over but every once in a while it sprouts and it comes up. And, after about 3 years of my isolation, I decided that I needed to be around somebody. And, I went and I took a, a course in first aid. And I met this woman who became a friend of mine and then a roommate of mine.

She was working where she was working because she had her own problems with drugs. Had been a pharmacist who lost her license and therefore was working, in the Red Cross. She didn't know how to drink. She never drank. She she used drugs, but she didn't drink.

And, she wasn't using the drugs. She had no program. She had been arrested and, you know, got clean and but had no program. I didn't have a program at that point. I knew about AA, but I didn't have anything.

I wasn't doing anything. I didn't think I have a problem. 3 years of isolation but I don't have a problem. So we start drinking and she learned real fast. She learned real fast.

And in about, I guess, about 5 years, we did a lot of destructive things to hurt each other, I think. Not intentionally, but I worked nights, she worked days. I would come home at 11, 12 o'clock at night. I'd find her drunk. I'd be really really pissed, you know, burning something on the on the stove or having knocked something over and not cleaned it up.

Maybe really, really angry. So what do I do? I drink. So she got to get up at 7 o'clock in the morning and she found something that I did and she'd get she'd get really pissed. She'd go to work and then come home and drink.

You know, so we just kept doing that. We kept feeding the anger in each other and, and drinking. I tell a little bit of her story, because it's part of my story. As I think as alcoholics, drug addicts, whatever, we are very good at we're really good con artists. You know, we're we're really good actors.

And she had convinced the board of pharmacy that she was rehabilitated. So they gave her her license back and she immediately got a marvelous job in a hospital. Within a month or 2 after getting that job, I started finding stuff coming into the house that wasn't that, you know, that didn't have any prescription to it. And I knew it wasn't, you know, She said, oh, they're non narcotic painkillers. And it's like, well, yeah.

Okay. Then I started seeing stuff that had to have a syringe to come in the house. And in about a year and a half aft a little less than a year and a half after she got this job, she had died of an overdose of methadone. Because as soon as she got back into the her first love, it was she was gone. She she didn't have she didn't know where to go, you know.

She didn't have a program to go to. She searched and searched. She was a woman who searched and searched for spirituality in all different kinds of religion, but couldn't touch it, couldn't find it. I didn't learn from her. I continued drinking for another 3 years after she died.

It was about 3 yeah. It was about 3 more 3 or 4 more years afterwards. In the meantime, I had gotten involved with somebody really brilliantly. He's married. That helps a lot.

That really, you know, satisfies my loneliness. I I finally, you know, one New Year's Eve, my my my bottom for me, my surrender. As I said, I didn't know I was doing this at the time, but my surrender was not because I said I've had enough drinking. It just I had said I had enough of life and I needed to, I wanted to stop. And the only way I knew how to stop was to follow my roommates.

She didn't do it on purpose, but to follow her example and I but I did. I tried to I tried to take myself out. I knew that was probably gonna happen because all of the stuff that Jane had brought into the house, when she died, somehow I didn't wanna get rid of it. There was stuff, you know, little things here. Well, you never know and you're gonna need something.

You know, I'm not using it like that. And this night, I decided to take it everything. Everything I could find, I took along with about a half of a fifth of vodka. Three quarters of a 5th of vodka. I think that's all that was left.

It was New Year's Eve. And of course, my lover was supposed to come be with me, he said he was going to and he doesn't show, and so I'll show him I've had it. Wrote my very dramatic, wrote my let my my letters. Of course, I'm 3 sheets to the wind at this point. It was almost unreadable what I had written, but I had written a letter to my family and I'd written a letter to, I think I wrote a letter to Bob and I wrote a letter to to, this other woman that was staying at the house in case she because she was the one who was gonna come find me, of course.

She found me before I died, obviously. And, I'm at the hospital and I woke up somewhere around January 2nd, and the very very very first thought out of my head was you stupid idiot, you can't even kill yourself. I say it was my surrender and at some point it became my became my surrender. It was my bottom but I didn't hadn't yet become my surrender. I was I was tired.

I didn't care anymore. I mean, you know, obviously, I was not a success at killing myself. I sure certainly wasn't a success at living. So I just didn't care, and I just that probably was the closest tumbleweed. Wherever you send me to go, I'll go.

Whatever you need me to no. That's fine. I I just no mind. I just don't wanna have a mind anymore. You know, make it all go away.

So, of course, they put me in the psych ward. And, I was going to a there was people coming in bringing AA meetings in. And for this, I am very, very grateful for the 12th step and carrying the message and, and doing, you know, taking the work out, taking the the recovery. And it's not just my recovery, but giving it out and giving it away, which is what the 12 step so much of the 12 step is. I had heard a couple of them kind of in and out my ear, you know, I didn't really pay attention.

But this one night, there were like 3 or 4 guys that came in. I don't even remember where they came from. I've never seen them again. But what I remember, and these guys didn't have any particularly marvelous message. I have to tell you.

I mean, it was just the normal run of the mill. Let me tell you my story stuff. But what happened was one guy was talking and he kind of made real close eye contact with each one of us. And he said, you know what? The statistics say that probably none of you are gonna make it.

I'm an alcoholic. Tell me what I can't do and that's exactly what I'm going to do. And I just I got a fight back. I got something that said, the heck with you. Uh-uh.

No way. If you're gonna tell me I'm not gonna make it, I'm gonna make it just to prove you're wrong. I don't know. Again, I believe that's the grace of god that came. I don't think it had anything to do with this man.

I don't think it had anything to do with his message. I think it had to do with the grace of God and and my just being tired enough that there was a crack in my wall and it came in. And I, you know, there was enough of the crack in my wall for god to come into my life and let me listen. And, so I started asking where are the meetings and I got out at 5 o'clock on a Tuesday and I walked into my first meeting at 8 o'clock on a Tuesday at a mile down the street in South Orange. And, I think, you know, they surrounded me.

And the first person that I met at the door was standing at the door, greeting everybody. He was greeting everybody in 1991, and he was greeting them right up until when he died about 3 years ago. And he started, you know, hi. My name is Tony, this that and the other thing, and I'm going, I my brain is not functioning. I, you know, I just got out of rehab.

I'll never remember your name. So he proceeded to jump up and down and start screaming, my name is Tony, my name is Tony, my name is Tony. I said, okay, your name, I'll remember. I'll remember your name. And I did.

I I very became a very, very close friend of mine, and I still miss him today a lot. But he introduced me to the women and I found the fellowship of AA in those rooms. And for about 3 or 4 years, I was in those rooms, and that was my home group. And, I had a lot of fellowship and it was wonderful. There's nothing wrong with the fellowship of AA.

But after 3 or 4 years, I was having a bit of difficulty with my life because I hadn't changed that much. I had stopped drinking, but I hadn't really made any I hadn't worked on my spiritual life at all. All I had done was stop drinking and made some friends, which is really important, but I needed to do something else. And, this my first sponsor that I had, she was my temporary sponsor and then, I asked her to be my sponsor and she, you know, took me to a lot of meetings. She was a member of another fellowship, which she also took me to.

And, the 1st 3 or 4 months, I was going to both fellowships until I said, I gotta stop one of these because either I'm gonna drink or I'm gonna eat. And figured I'd eat instead of drink. And I told her I would I'll get back to it later. I need I couldn't do both of them at this point. It took me almost 13 years to get back to it.

But at any rate, she knew about meetings, and she knew about fellowship. She ended up getting sick and said I have to, you know, not be your sponsor anymore. I can't take on the responsibility. And I said, okay. She got me started.

I had a I had a network of people. The one thing that I am very grateful for her is she made me call people. I hate phone. To this day, I still don't like the telephone, but she made me call people. And I have a network of people.

I had a network of people. So I had friends, I had fellowship. I didn't have a sponsor though. And I'm floating around for a couple of years without a sponsor, without any real, excuse me, direction, except picnics and games and fun. This woman finally got a hold of me in one of the meetings, and she said, who's your sponsor?

And I said, well, I don't really have one. She goes, well, you do now. I'm going, oh, okay. She handed me some tapes, and they were the Joe and Charlie tapes. She said, I want you to listen to these.

Okay. So I listened to them. It sounded like a foreign language. I had no idea what they were talking about. I had never opened this book.

That's not true. I'm sorry. I did go to a big book meeting for a very short period of time while it existed because it folded, and we read the stories. But that's all I knew about the big book. I didn't know anything else.

So when she gives me these tapes and I'm listening to them, it's like wow, this is this is different. This is new. This is not what I I know about don't drink and go to meetings. 90 meetings in 90 days. You know, I'm hearing something entirely different.

So she takes me through the steps. And it wasn't, you know, and there wasn't any barn burning light thing, you know, you. It was it really was a pardon my French. It was really a half ass, you know, going through the steps, but it was enough. Again, I have the grace of God in my life.

I did just enough, so I didn't wanna kill myself anymore, or that I didn't wanna drink. As I said, my first step, I finally understood what an alcoholic was. An alcoholic is somebody who has a spirituality. My spirit was hurting. I think there's no coincidence in that alcohol is also called spirits as well as, you know, God.

Because they're both higher powers. They're both very much higher powers. And I found out that I have the spirituality and it manifests in both my body and my mind. And as I said earlier, I discovered that, you know, I'm an alcoholic not because I have a few family members. I'm an alcoholic not because, you know, I had problems in my life or things didn't go my way or that I wasn't happily I wasn't living happily ever after.

I found out I was an alcoholic because when I put alcohol into my body, the one thing I am 100 apps 100% absolutely sure of, is that I'm going to have more alcohol. How much more? I don't know, but I am going to have more. And and the mental part of it is I can't stop thinking about it when I'm when I'm not drinking it. I'd be at work when I was, you know, when I'm still drinking.

I'd be at work saying I'm not gonna drink today or I'm not gonna drink until I get home because I was a good drinker and driver. I couldn't make it from Woodbridge to to West Orange without stopping at a liquor store and getting my little 2 I had to get 2 of them, cocktails for 2. But I had to have 2 of them because it took me that long to drive home. And, of course, by the time I finished the 2 of them, I wasn't driving really well. I wasn't driving terribly, but I wasn't driving well.

You know, it's like I was definitely impaired. And that's all I needed to start drinking more. When I got home, I went through periods, I never was a drinker that I never was a daily drinker, But I was a daily thinker, and I thought about it daily even if I didn't drink it. I could go to a party. I could go to a wedding and not drink and not make a fool of myself.

As long as I knew that there was a bottle at home, I could control it. I'm sure that, you know, given enough more time, I would have not been able to do that too. But I came in at the point where I could go to a wedding, I could go to a party, I could have 1 or 2 drinks and not go any further. But I knew I had to have a bottle at home. So I've got the spiritual, you know, I've got the spiritual malady.

I've got the allergy because I don't know how much I'm gonna drink and I've got the mental obsession because I can't stop thinking about it. Oh, that was slammed home to me and I understood that. So once I, you know, once they basically tell me I'm screwed, it's sort of like, okay, now what? So she said, we go to step 2. And, I don't I always had a higher power in my life.

I always believed in God. I was raised as a Catholic. I went to Catholic school for 13 years. The nuns pounded it into my head. And my God basically still is a very Catholic God.

It's very traditional in some ways. I've tweaked it here and there. But, you know, it's it's pretty much I've always had a god in my life. My problem was not that I didn't believe in god, I didn't think god believed in me. I didn't think that he cared enough about me.

I wasn't important enough. I was just this tiny little speck. We had all these other important things to think about. I had to get past that. I had to get past the fact that, you know, I had to come in I had to come to believe that there is a God who is going to restore me.

Not just, you know, the general me, but the specific me, Kathy, to Sanity. It took me a little time. It took me a little bit of time, but, you know, I guess I I did come I already came with God in my life. I just had to believe that he believed in me. We did the 3rd step.

She had me get down on my knees, and we prayed the 3rd step together. I'm not sure I understood the entire implication of all of that at the time I did it. It's a good thing I didn't understand the implication of all of that at the time I did it. I'm turning my will and my life over. Since then and having listened to a lot of people and gone to a lot of studies and participate in a lot of studies, Lee didn't explain it this way to me, but I understand it this way now.

When I turn my will and my life over to the care of God, I'm turning my thoughts and my actions. It's a lot easier than my will in my life. You know, how do I think? How am I willing to think? You know, am I willing to bring my life along the along god's will?

That's turning my will in my life. It doesn't mean, you know, I turn it over and I take it back and I turn it over. I am willing today to turn my life over to the care of god as I understand him. Yes, my my own self will gets into it once in a while, but deep down inside of me, the core of me, I have made that commitment that god has my life today. And it's, you know, really it is much easier and when I can let it be that way, my life goes so much smoother.

You know, it's when I get into it and I have to go, oh, well, God, thanks a lot, but I think I'll take this one for a while, you know. And he lets me, he lets me. And then I get pained, you know, there's pain, there's, difficulty, there's uncomfortableness. And when there's enough of it and I kinda remember who's in charge and I let go of him. You know, and I just, you know, I I it's always there.

God is always there. But I just every once in a while, I take it over. And, you know, it's it's a lesson I need to learn over and over and over again, I guess. Lee had me do the 4th step. And we did it in the columns, and the first two columns were a lot of fun.

I enjoyed the first two columns. I even enjoyed the 3rd column. It wasn't half bad, you know. You know, who was I resentful at? At?

Mom, and she did this. Dad, and he did this. And my brother, and he did this. And my job, they did this. And, you know, it's like, that's not bad.

I can do this. And then we had to get to the, you know, and then the 3rd column is what did it affect? Well, you know, it affected my pocketbook and affected my personal, you know, security and all these things. And it's like, yeah, okay, fine. Then we get into the 3rd column.

Where am I at fault? Now how did I contribute to some of this? You know what? They found out that I contributed it. I contributed to every one of my resentments.

One way, shape, or form. It was either the way I thought, way I acted, what I did to start it, You know, having an expectation, They say the next expectation is a premeditated resentment. I had expectations that my mom is supposed to be my mom is supposed to be a certain way. My dad is supposed to be a certain way. I grew up with, I grew up with television with Father Knows Best and Donna Reed, you know, and we're supposed to solve all our problems in a half an hour, and we live happily ever after.

So why isn't my family like this? You know? And, you know, that's not life, but that's that's what was going through my head. You know, why isn't my job bowing down and telling me how wonderful I am? Because you're not that wonderful, Kathy.

I know you do a good job, but wonderful is pushing it. No, no. I just I had expectations of people that they were different than, you know, they weren't like I wanted them to be myself. You know, selfishness and self centeredness, that's the root of all my trouble. They weren't what I wanted them to be.

They weren't acting the way I wanted them to act, so I'm pissed. Once I started to see that I contribute to all of this, all of it, every one of them, I contribute something to. And I did need my sponsor because I couldn't see it necessarily, or I couldn't see the patterns, but which is where the 5th step comes in. But, you know, I just it it really was not that great an inventory. It was but it was as good as I could do.

It was the best one I could do. I did try to do an inventory, and about 2 months sober. And I started to write my life history, because that's what I heard in the rooms. And I got about a page and a half, and I'm going, I'm bored. I can't do this.

I'm bored. No idea what I was doing. So I stopped. And that was the extent of my trying to write a life history. Resentments weren't that, you know, I got them down.

The ones I had problems with is I had problems with my fears. And even to this day, I'm still having problems writing down my fears, doing a good, you know, I want I don't mean to judge, I don't mean by good, but, you know, one that that helps me get down to the core stuff. Because I have I have a lot of fear. And a lot of my the fear keeps me from writing the fear inventory. So, you know, or keeps me from being completely honest.

I mean, I I am as honest as I can be when I write it. I'm not saying that I'm, you know, I'm I'm shortcutting it or anything, but I know that it's not it's not everything that I need. So I need to keep doing it. And particularly for me with the fears, because I've done a number of inventories. And what I'm finding out today is, in all honesty, I really don't have any resentments.

Every time I have what I think is a resentment, it's a fear for me. You know, it's always a fear. You know, I'm not gonna get something or I'm gonna, you know, I'm not gonna get something I want or I'm gonna lose something I have. That's really what it comes down to. And then the third part of the inventory was the, the harms and and sex.

I needed to do some work there because there were some harms I did in terms of the sex stuff. I'm not going into it. Thank you very much. But there were harms, you know, there were harms I needed to look at and there were also harms that I needed that had nothing to do with sex. Sometimes there are harms that I find not often, but I that I miss or that are not part of a resentment or not part of a fear and not part of a sex inventory, but there's a harm there nonetheless than I may have committed.

So, you know, that's what that last section is for. And, I tried to do it to the best of my ability. It's gotten better with each time I've done and then, you know, done a 4th step. My 5th step, the first 5th step I did was terrified. Absolutely 100% terrified because there were things that I wasn't gonna tell anybody ever.

No way, no how, uh-uh. And, I did. I did. One of the tricks I learned today when I hear a 5th step is I usually ask them right off the top of the, you know, you know, we say our prayers, we start and I say, okay, now tell me the one thing you're not gonna tell me first. Usually that makes it a little bit easier.

But but bottom line, you know, Lee didn't ask me that. We didn't start that way. So I had all these things and there was that one piece that I wasn't going to tell and it was like, finally I get to it and, and, and then I well, yeah. And I get or, and and she goes, spit it out. Help me.

And so I just kind of closed my eyes and, you know, sort of like you jump into the deep end and I said, you know, I told her what it was and she goes, Oh, yeah. Okay. And, you know, she told me her experience and it's sort of like, Oh, all right. So maybe I'm not that weird. I still felt weird, but maybe I'm not that weird.

Now it's like my scale of weirdness. I just kind of got a little bit better, because now I think she's weird. Hers came down, mine went up. You know, we evened it out a little bit. I have since done other 5th steps, and I've done them in a number of ways.

I've done them, and I found value in all of them. I've done them multiple, where I've given my fist step to more than one person in the room. There were about 5 or 6 of us that were working through the steps. Oh, lord. It's gonna be about 7 years ago, I guess.

And, we had a group of us that were working together and, this night, we had gotten to the place where we were doing, you know, working on, on talking about 5. And there was one woman there who had never done it before, was really confused, wasn't sure what to do. The other people were there and I said, you know what? I hadn't done. I did it spur the moment.

I hadn't really thought about it, but I did pray ahead of time and, and I got the idea to, you know, go ahead and do it. So I just I gave my 5th step there to to those women and there were 4 of them there. I got a lot of feedback, I got a lot of good feedback. I've given my I've had a 5th step that I've done with a man. Different point of view, Not necessarily everything, I didn't do my sex inventory with him, but, I did most of the resentments and the fears, and yeah, it's like you you get a different mindset sometimes.

I've done multiple 5th steps with different people at different times and they've all had value. They've all had value somewhere along the line. And most of the time it's either I'm directed to do it or I'm I'm, you know, externally by somebody who says why don't you try doing or, you know, internally like the first time I did the multiple one with all the people. I don't suggest that's a good idea for the first time you ever do a 5th step. You know, because there's a lot of, there's a lot of trust that you have to have and I think, you know, you need to know that that trust is there before you go do it.

So I don't suggest doing that the first time, you know, you and the one person that you pick is a good idea. But make sure when you pick that you pick somebody that you do trust, that you are willing to tell them all and not hold back. Because otherwise, it's sort of, you know, I don't know, going to going to a feast with chopsticks. You know, you can't really dig in real well with the chopsticks. Maybe the Chinese can but I can.

So, you know, be aware of who you pick. That kind of ended my doing steps for a while. I didn't get much further with Lee. We sort of fizzled out after the 5th step. She didn't push me.

I didn't know where else to go. So one and what ended up happening was I kinda stopped there for a while and I pretty much got as sick as I was before I did that that 4th 5th step because everything came back. I didn't work on on looking at and getting rid of my character defects. I'm only on 5 minutes. Quarter off already.

Oh dear. I, I went to a meeting. I found a meeting on Monday nights up in Berkeley Heights that talked about it and did it and, you know, it it's called the the group itself is called Into Action and that's what they're about. They're about action and they're about solutions. And I learned so much up there.

I really did. I learned so much about the big book, about myself, about doing the work. And, I asked a woman up there to take me through and, she took me through all of it. I started again from the top and I finally did 6 and 7 this time. I looked at my own character defects, and I became willing, and that was hard.

For me, some of the character defects were hard to let go of because for me, my character defects were my coping mechanisms. Those were my friends, that's what kept me alive. So for me to say, I'm not gonna do this anymore, it's sort of like walking down Broadway, stark raving nude. And, it's scary, you know? But I, I had to become willing.

I had to become willing to do it. And so there were some prayer in there and, and then we finally did our our 7th step. And in the 7th step is we say here at the end of this meeting, I offer myself, you know, my creator, you know, I'm now willing that you should have all of me, good and bad. I am in total package. I offered myself back not only in the 3rd step when I didn't know what I was offering, but I'm offering it now in the 7th step to God, good and bad, warts and all.