The Florida State Convention in Palm Harbour, FL

Hi. I'm Bob Behzans, and I'm an alcoholic. Hi, Bob. For the grace of God and the power of AA, I've been having a drink since the 10th December 1967. And for that, I'm very grateful.

This has been, without question, an above average experience of conferences that I have attended around the United States. This is one of the best organized. I love the way we're dressed tonight. So many places we go, I think we're looking tacky. And I like, I like the feeling in the room, you know, when when everybody is dressed up.

I wanna thank the committee, Tommy and Ken and Beth and anybody else who had anything to do with my being here. I, for some reason, have been kind of dry lately and I'm about to dive back into some step work that I think I needed this week. And this has just been this has been terrific. Just all the speakers, I think, have blended together. It's, you know, there's, every place you go, there's kind of a collective consciousness and the collective consciousness of this room is very good.

Everybody, you know, just been been very cool. I've been with most of the speakers before. I because I played golf, I didn't hear everybody and I arrived after 1 or 2 of talk, but I really do think there's been a synergism of of what everybody has said and kind of a theme. It's kind of run together and it's been very cool. I especially like Larsene, this morning.

Larsene would be a good reason to start to urine test Al Anon's. I mean, I've been a little worried they talk about all the the level of energy in Southern California and I think June and Marcin are just a little flat and, what I like best about Lycene is, you know, the story that they've survived through, but they love each other. And I really think at their best, our stories are stories of love and I think Larsen's is that story and and I think that's cool. June's story to me is the story of Christmas. You know, it's just almost your head keeps saying that's not quite possible, it isn't quite and for me, there's always been 1 or 2 stories, maybe John Harris, maybe John Vaccar.

There are different people at different periods of time where I'm kind of, you know, I think too much. And I compare. And there were certain stories that if you hear them, you just could not think and you could not compare. They just take you in such a way that they, you know, kind of astound you. And June is one of that one of those stories for me.

So it's been nice. I enjoyed Keith and Julia this afternoon. I'd like to think your relationship is a very sweet relationship. I like that. Relationships are challenging.

And, I think that's good. So to be here with Dick and and that this is also a service conference. I mean, I've you know, you've got a couple of ex staff members from general service, you know, you've got Betty and Helen, and you've got enough ex delegates around here to cause serious damage if they ever got together and and started talking. And then the extraordinary amount of sobriety that's in this room, which is very cool. One of the things I've always liked is being around the the big people, you know, the people who have more sobriety, and I think the ones that are here like Liz and and Katie and the people who had, you know, 40 plus years I've never I don't know that I've ever been in a room where you had, you know, 20 5 people or 30 people with over 40 years of sobriety and a half a dozen people with over 50.

That is really cool. And for And for some time, I have been recommending when I go to conferences that the person who gets the book for the least sobriety give it to the person the following year. This is the first place I have ever been where the young woman who got it last year gave it to the young woman who got got it this year. That is just very cool. Most enjoyable was my time with Sandy.

I love Sandy and he's been one of my heroes. I think he's our, you know, one of the great communicators. His use of language is kind of poetic, but I like his program and I like who he is. And, so I enjoy my time with you very much. I started drinking when I was a freshman in high school, 13 years old.

I was, 4 foot 11, weighed £95, 2nd smallest kid in my class, mostly mouth. I went to a military school on a college campus. And we drank in high school like most people drink in college. We had fraternities. Of my 5 closest buddies in high school, 4 of us are in AA and one's in Al Anon.

And we and 4 of us were friends since we've been 9 years old, so we didn't pick each other, you know, because of our drinking sort of thing. In my high school class of a 115 guys, we have a dozen members of AA, so we had a lot of alcoholism and we had a lot of recovery. When I found alcohol, it was kind of like you've heard everybody talk about this weekend. It was just it was not just like an improvement. It was kind of like a sex change operation.

It was kind of transformational. Know, it took me from the fringes and put me in the middle. I was an uncomfortable kid. I mean, you know, you're the 2nd smallest kid in your class, you feel a little insecure. You know, to start with, and alcohol made me part of just solved all my problems.

It was a solution. I I loved it enough that I chased it. I went after it, almost died of alcohol poisoning a couple of times in high school. By the time I finished high school, my drinking problem was the largest subject of negative conversation in my home. I come from a great home.

In Saint Paul, we're kind of a Catholic town and, we have these Catholic kind of thongs or, you know, clans, you know, that everybody had, you know, somewhere between 5 and a dozen children. And it's so it's a small town. Of the twin cities, we're kind of the Fort Worth of the, you know, of the Saint Paul and Minneapolis. And, so families know each other. It's more like a village.

And I got kind of a reputation for drinking. I didn't, you know, seek that. I thought my problem with drinking was that I was underage and my father was too strict. You know, when you're underage, if you get caught, it doesn't matter, you know, how much you drink. It was just the fact that you were drinking or my father caught you, it didn't matter how much you were drinking.

And I thought when I had a chance to go away to school that that would be solved. And I went away and I didn't get solved. I drank my way out of the University of Notre Dame in the middle of my senior year. I mean, that's what my dad said. That was, you know, in the yearbook with my class ring, I but I was in civil engineering carrying 25 credits a semester going to school about one day every 2 weeks.

And it gets tough to bluff your way through a thermodynamics exam. I was a class drunk. I had 3 guys petitioned to have me removed from engineering school. They used my room as a study hall. Someone was talking about one of the favorite movies was Rudy.

You know, if you've seen that movie, he went there. I passed through. I mean, it was just I remember many years after, a few years after I was sober, maybe 15 or 20 years, that I got invited to give an AA talk at Notre Dame and I went down there and I had some amends that I wanted to make and it was really kind of an emotional reunion for me. And I went back there and I'm in the middle of my talk and I said, I've always had a deep sense of failure about this place. And I said, I think I just figured out why.

I think it's because I failed. I was diagnosed an alcoholic when I was 19. That seemed impossible and inaccurate to me. It didn't seem to I was always in trouble once or twice a year. I almost killed myself in a car accident or some other like event.

And, when he diagnosed me, I kept on pleading with him that I say I drank like my friends. And he said, well, maybe some of your friends are alcoholic, but he said, I think you drink differently than most of your friends. I think you drink with different people more often. And I think you'd get in more trouble than the average person did. I didn't buy that.

And, you know, when I walked out of Notre Dame and was due to be commissioned as an officer in the army, I had to get a medical release. The medical release I got was for alcoholism. It got me out of there and I went home and I finished school at a local university. And when I finished school, my dad asked me to leave the house. He said, we love you, but we can't, almost can't stand you right now.

You know, I'm one of 7 kids. I was the family problem, couldn't solve the rules, so I left home. I got a job at a liquor store. And, you have to use your gifts. And I'm drinking, I don't know, a quart a day.

This is the last year of my drinking. I'm stealing those. I'm absolutely a mess. I got fired from that job for going 80 miles an hour with a delivery truck and I get a job as a waiter. The last 4 months or 5 months of my life, I worked or my drinking, I worked as a waiter.

I'm living not on Skid Row, but $10 night rooms. I'm shacked up with different people that I work with. And, you know, doctor Seuss, the child author, those are actual photographs of people I lived with during the last year of my sobriety. And, I get up in the morning, you know, take a couple of drinks, drink a couple of beers, I go to work, I work from 11 to 2, and at 2 I'd go to a bar and I'd drink beer and at 5 I'd go buy a pint. And that was my life day in and day out.

I didn't want anybody to kind of know where I was. I was out of touch with my family for 4 or 5 months during that period of time. And then towards the end of that, I went to a party and I got my face kicked in and I got fired as a waiter. And I had no place to go. I was tapped.

And I went back home and I asked my dad if I could move back in the house and he said if I wouldn't drink, he'd allow me to move back in the house and I promised. I lied as it turned out because when I moved back in the house, I've been drinking a better part of a 5th a day for most days during that year and I started to go through withdrawals, so it was necessary that I drink. When I moved back in the house, I was so tired of being the family problem that it would be hard for I was so tired of being me that it would be hard for me to explain to you. And when I moved back in, I really wanted my life to change. And I started I thought if I could change the circumstances of my life.

So when I moved back in, I got I had just got back together with Linda. Now my wife is a 37 year member 38 year member of Al Anon and that's been a great partnership. And she's a lovely lady and she's mad at me that she's not here this weekend. We both made a decision not that she wasn't going to come, but when she heard it was on the program, she's a little upset that she did not come, so she wants it both ways. And I remember, we were talking the other night and I I just got my face kicked in.

We had broken up for the last year of my drinking and I'd call her about every month and a half, kind of like a low grade headache, just about the time she'd start to date someone. I'd call her and kind of bug her, just just, you know, just to let her know I was still there. And I went into this party that she's at. She's got a date. I walk into this party, my face is kicked in, I'm drunk.

And, I walked up to her and I asked her if we could get together the next day, she said yes. The next day, I got together with her and I said, I would like us to see if we could seriously look at marriage. At that time, she was a psychiatric nurse working on an alcohol ward and she said, yes. And not too long after that, we became engaged to be married. I got a job as executive training and a manufacturing concern about my first car and I thought, wow, it's finally gonna happen.

I'm finally gonna be an adult, only I couldn't shut my drinking down. I just now I'm the company drunk. I'm in a company of engineers. I'm in the research department. I'm falling asleep at my desk.

I used up my sick leave in the first four months of work. Kit. When I went back to make amends to my boss at that company, he said, you interviewed so well. And, I interview well. I just don't work well.

Isn't that interesting we can get in good school, we just often can't finish good school. You know, we we can do the extraordinary. It's the ordinary that we have trouble with. Doesn't that we are a room full of people who can do the extraordinary but have trouble with the average? And I worked at that job for 4 or 5 months.

I got in in some trouble. I left. I got a job as a salesman thinking to give me more flexibility. I worked as a salesman for 3 or 4 months. A buddy of mine got married or went out in about a 4 day drunk, called in the 1st couple of days, didn't call in the next 2, woke up a Thursday afternoon in August of 1967 or July of 1960 7.

I didn't know if I had a job, a fiancee or a place to live until I was married. And all of a sudden, the recommendation of my father and my psychiatrist that I look into AA didn't seem like such an impossibility and I called central office. We had an old timer on the line and he talked to me for about 15 minutes, called a couple of other guys and arranged an appointment and I met 2 guys at a cafe. And when I went there, you know, after I hung up the phone, I called work and found out I still was employed and found out I was still engaged and found out I still had a place to live and I thought, why the hell did you call AA? I, kind of an overreaction, but I wanted to go see what an alcoholic looked like.

So I went and I met these 2 guys. 1 guy had 6 years, 1 guy had 6 months. When you're young and in trouble, you get put in front of a lot of people for help, doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs, bishops, nuns, priests, psychiatrists. And you're always the subject of the conversation but not always a participant. And, usually there's recommendations after they meet with you And I thought that was gonna be kind of what this was.

I was 23 years old, but it wasn't what it was. These 2 guys said, We're from AA. We had a drinking problem. We found an answer in AA. We want to share it with you.

And they sat me down in the booth. They told me their stories. It was the first time in my life that I'd ever been tried to be helped by someone who had a drinking problem. I found myself identifying and sharing with them and that night, I went to my first meeting of Alcoholist Anonymous. We have many traditions in AA, one of the most wonderful ones of which is that we share our experience, strength and hope and not our ideology and philosophy.

There is something very powerful about sharing your life. Those 2 men and the sharing of their life with me changed me that night. There was something significant that happened. I went to my first meeting of AA And, it was an extraordinary experience. I thought, you know, I was 23.

Almost everybody else in the room, probably average age 45. They sat me down. I still have the same sponsor that I got that night in Alcoholics Anonymous. And he talks about he's got a sponsor for the last, you know, 42 years and I have the same sponsor that I have had for the last 38 or 9 years. He's 52 years old and he's 87 years old and he's still active member of AA.

And, not bad. I drank twice after walking in the front doors of AA, once on a business trip to the West Coast after 30 days of sobriety and once on our honeymoon. I think I had planned to drink on my honeymoon. It was kind of subconscious, but we honeymooned in Mexico. You know, where the divers dive off those cliffs in Mexico?

I dove off those cliffs on my last rung. I was in the audience watching the world's high diving contest. I said, god, that's not so tough. And I had a swimsuit on underneath my Bermudas. I dove off the public landing, climbed up the cliff, got up to about 90 feet.

I split my swimsuit. I cut my leg. My wife is going absolutely nuts and I'm stuck. I can't get up, I can't get down, I'm trying to decide whether to jump or dive, I'm watching the waves and finally I figured out, the hell was it. And I dove, God watches after fools and drunks because I made it.

And over the next 20 years, we went down there quite a bit with the kids. We vacationed down there, and on my 10th anniversary, Linda gave me a card with a picture of the cabs in the La Cebrada and it said there but for the grace of God. And we were watching the divers and I said, god, that's the dumbest thing I've ever done. And she said, Bob, it's not even in the top ten. I don't know how you can share a life and see it so differently.

When I got back on the airplane, I got home, I was embarrassed to go back to the group, but she told me to call Warren. I called Warren and I got back active in AA. And I can remember, I didn't think I was an alcoholic. I've been being told I was an alcoholic for some time. I thought alcohol was my answer, not my problem.

I thought if they knew about the other issues of my life, they wouldn't think I was just an alcoholic. They were telling me that bourbon was my problem. I quit drinking once or twice. Just before I went back to my senior year, I was beaten, robbed and rolled and shot at and ended up in tough shape and ended up in a psych ward after I got got patched up. And they were not gonna let me go back to my senior year, but they let me go back on the condition that I wouldn't drink.

And I went back and I didn't drink for 2 or 3 months and my life didn't get instantaneously better. I didn't all of a sudden become what I thought you were telling me I'd become if I just wouldn't drink. And I thought I proved that I could quit if I had to, and I thought I'd prove that alcohol wasn't my problem, that there was some other kind of built in failure mechanism that was operating in my life. I remember that Warren sat me down when I walked in the meeting and he said, Bob, alcoholism is a disease. It's a threefold disease.

It's physical, mental, and spiritual. Once you cross the line from problem drinking into alcoholism, your alcoholism affects you all the time when you're drinking and when you're not drinking. The idea that alcoholism could affect you when you were not drinking was a brand new idea. It was like rocket science. I had never heard anybody say that.

He said, what we're after in AA is not just abstinence, we're after sobriety. What we do in Alcoholics Anonymous is when we take our last drink on our last drug, we use the 12 steps to change, to find a different way to live, to deal with the spiritual and the emotional side of alcoholism, and if you don't change, you're not gonna stay. This is a program of change. And those were the truest that was collected to Gettysburg address of AA. And what I found in Minnesota, especially at that time, all the meetings were closed up discussion meetings.

All we did, we got in a room. If there were 30 or 40 or 50 of us, we some man or woman would get up, give the step for 5 or 10 minutes, we'd count off and we'd go into 2 or 3 different groups and we'd finish the meeting with a discussion about how the step operated in our life. The steps were and after the meeting, I mean, I'd come early, I'd stay late, and after the meeting all the guys would meet with their sponsors and they'd be talking about the different issues and I thought we'd be talking a lot about how not to drink, almost no conversations about how not to drink. They assumed that you didn't want to drink. The conversations were how to live, Fights you had with your wife, problems you had at work, making amends, making lists, it was a I pretty quickly got the idea that this was about living, not about not drinking.

And I got back and when I got I was always an active member of AA. My sponsor was the 12 step champion of our group and he was phenomenal. And, I said, okay, I'll buy it. I got the problem and if I got the problem and you've got the answer, I've got a half a dozen other things that are going on in my life, and if you've got the answer, those issues ought to be dealt with in AA. And hell, it might take a year.

Yes. My problems were horrible but ordinary. I, I had trouble getting up in the morning. I later found out that it had something to do with when I went to bed, but at the time I had there was no I I had some work issues. I had a little trouble getting to work, I had trouble staying at work, and I had a little trouble working when I was at work.

Other than that, I was a pretty good worker. I had money issues. I spent $300 more a month than I made in 1967 and, supporting most of that habit by gambling. And, it doesn't seem like much money now, but in 1967, that was a pretty good amount of money. And then we started to have kids and I had a great mom and dad but even great parents make mistakes and I wasn't gonna make the mistakes that my parents did and I didn't.

I made all the mistakes they made in a bunch they never thought of. I was loud, impatient, angry, immature and sometimes violent with my children. I'm not proud of that fact, but that's an accurate description of how I was. And I had a gambling issue. It was more of a hobby.

4 or 5 hours a day, 4 or 5 days a week. It wasn't a big deal. And, but I was making 5 or $10 a year playing backgammon and it was kind of like a second job. I had every one of those issues when I walked in the front door of AA. None of those issues were on my first inventory.

My first inventory was, you know, in hindsight not very insightful. It was the best I knew how to do at the time that I was 2 or 3 months sober. And, it was kind of a recitation of the things that I felt the most ashamed about and the things that I was trying to hide and bedeviled me the most and it was still a good process for me. It was a process that I felt a significant amount of forgiveness and an idea that I was going to take my life in a different direction and it proved an important, very important process for me. So I had these issues, and 1 by 1, they kind of came up.

During my 1st year, I had trouble identifying my defective character. It was kind of on a honeymoon. I liked everything about AA. It was one of the most pleasant times that I've ever had in my life. Isn't that funny that many of us, when we come in AA, that the 1st year's offense in many ways?

And I think because of the surrender that we have, we're you know, it was one of the most exciting, nicest times I've had in my life. And then in my 2nd year, which I found to be much less comfortable, 1 by 1, I started to take on the issues of my life. And 1 by 1, I would grab them and I would take them and I would try to deal with them and I'd make a little bit of progress, but mostly I wasn't making much progress. By the end of my 2nd year, I had a pretty good list of my defects of character. I worked on them pretty hard during year 2, 3, 4, and then in my 5th and 6th year, they started to bother the hell out of me and eat my lunch, and in my 7th 8th year, they were really grinding on me.

Now I'm an active guy. I'm sponsoring guys. I'm going out in 12 step work. I'm active in service. I'm starting to give AA talks.

And I'm trying to deal with the issues in my life and it's not working. And, felt pretty familiar. It's kinda like everything went in my life. I'm a great starter but I don't finish many things. I interview well.

I just don't work well. And now I am in AA and everybody's patting me on the head for the 1st year or the 1st 2 years and all of a sudden I'm in AA. You know, the first thing that happened to me when I came in Alcoholics Anonymous is I tore down the wall that I built up between you and me. I had a wall built up so you couldn't see the unattractive things that were going on in my life and the thinking that went on behind the wall said, you like me, but you only like what I let you see about me. If you could see everything about me, you'd hate me because I hate me and who knows more what allows the insufficient crumb I am than me.

I was walking around, as Cecil would say, comparing my outside, my inside with your outside in a very good way. But when I came in, I started to tear that wall down. I started to tear it down on that first 12 step call. I started to tear it down in conversation with my sponsor and I tore it all the way down when I took my 4th and 5th step, and I made a discovery. And the discovery was that I'm not unique.

Most of us come in with a profound sense of uniqueness. And if you do not drop some of that sense of uniqueness, we probably won't stay because we'll be looking for the differences rather than the similarities. And when I dropped that wall, I made the discoveries I'm not unique. My personality may be unique, but not my illness, not my behavior, not my experience, not my feelings, and I started to have a sense of hope that what worked for you would work for me. And that was why I was on that honeymoon.

That was the first place I had ever been where I felt like I was home and where I felt like someone understood me. But as I started to get sober, I'm 2 3 years sober and I'm one of the younger guys in the group, I started to have problems with sex or I started to have problems with money, I started to have problems with work. And when I started to have my those problems, I said, thank you very much for helping my drinking problem, but stay out of my work life, stay out of my gambling, stay out of my marriage, stay out of my parenting. And brick by brick, sober, going to 5 or 6 or 7 meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous a week, I broke my wall back up. When I came in A, what I wanted to find was someone who was so insightful that they could see through me and see the issues that I have and help me straighten my life up.

Up. I didn't find that. What happened to me as I came to AA, I made a surrender and I became an alcoholic and what I had was hundreds of people who could help me with recovery from alcoholism. And then as I started to get sober and move through, I started to look for an expert on Bob, not on alcoholism. And when I was 6 or 7 years sober, I was feeling pretty alone.

And I think the experience I'm about to describe to you is not an unusual experience in Alcoholics Anonymous. I think a lot of us, between 510 or 512 years of sobriety, your pants catch back on fire. I think we are surprisingly wonderful at dealing with the early issues of our sobriety. We come in with a list of things that we've got to take care of and we are amazingly successful in Alcoholics Anonymous with dealing with some of those issues in early sobriety, but there's a lot of things that we are not bright enough or insightful enough to put on that list. We wouldn't have put them on the list if you told us to put them on the list.

You know, and, that was the list that started to get me in trouble. And of 7 or 8 years of sobriety, I'm not thinking about drinking, but I'm thinking about suicide. I'm in the meeting, you know, a new guy comes in with a bushel basket full of manure that they have and I sit him down, they share it with me, and I say, hey, as bad as it is and as tough as it seems, you're in the right place. I'm really glad you're here. I know it seems hopeless for you, but if you come in here, you get a sponsor, you get in the book, you take the steps, you're going to be okay.

You do not have to do it perfectly. You just have to have a reasonable attitude, get into this stuff, and not drink and your life's gonna be okay. You see that guy over there? That guy over there I called on 24 years ago. I had a I was his sponsor in St.

Paul, Minnesota for quite a number of years. I said, You see that guy over there? His life was a mess and now he's hitting it out of the park. You're gonna be okay. And then I'd get in the car at 11 o'clock at night and I'd go home and I'd say, Bob, when's it gonna be okay for you?

You're 7 years sober. When are you gonna learn how to work? Everybody knows how to work. You don't know how to work. When are you gonna stop spending money you don't have to buy things don't need to impress people you don't like?

When are you gonna be gentle with your children and more loving with your wife? When are you going to quit gambling? And I didn't know it because I had been trying as hard as I knew how to try to get rid of those defects of character and I had failed. And by this time I knew what the answer was, the blessing that I had. I've always liked the old timer.

They had great examples. You know, I knew that what I had to find was something, you know, what God had to do with Wednesday is what I think I had to discover. As a Catholic, I had so many issues around religion that I that was a very uncomfortable subject. We talked a lot about spirituality and I was so uncomfortable with spirituality, The meeting got we had an upstairs and a downstairs, and if the meeting got too spiritual, I left the meeting and I got too spiritual and went to the downstairs, which is often a breakout meeting for a new guy. My blood pressure went up 15 points just going by a church, and I had a lot of unresolved and it was that way because it was important to me and I had a lot of unresolved issues around that, that I didn't know how to it was clearly explained to me the difference between religion and spirituality, but at that point in time in my recovery, I didn't understand the distinction.

And I knew what I had to do, but I had a problem. And the problem was, as I go knock on the door, God says, Who's there? I said, God, it's Bob. He said, What do you want? I said, I made yours over and my pants are on fire.

I'm dying. I need help. It seems to me that people who have a better relationship with you are doing better than I'm doing, and I wanna turn myself in. And God's gonna say, okay. And then I'm gonna say what every drunk wants to know, what do I do?

You have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what God's gonna tell you to do. Get up in the morning. Go to work. Stay at work. Work at work.

Get on a budget. I think that's an Al Anon word. I think that's a harsh I think it's a difficult it's a harsh word, I think. Stop gambling. Be more gentle with your children and be more loving with your wife.

And I'm starting to have trouble at home. I'm going to all these day, Amy, and my wife saw more of me when we were dating than when we were married. And, she's starting to wonder if one of the places that's supposed to practice a program is in our home. I thought, god, that's none of your business. You've got your program, you know, I've got my program, you know, I'm not supposed to take each other's inventory.

And, I was stuck in that place for 2 years And the problem was, is how do you go to God to develop a relationship if you can't fulfill the conditions of the relationship? I said, as soon as I clean my act up, I'm gonna develop a relationship with god, but right now I don't know how to do it. And then with a desperation that I guess I hadn't felt for some time, when I was about 7 years sober, I went back to the steps and for the 3rd time I started to formally go through the process of taking the steps. Step 1 was really easy. My life was powerless and I was unmanageable.

It was as clear as night and day. You know what I had lost? And it was unusual for me. I believed it for us, but not for me. I absolutely, without question, believed that god would restore us to sanity, but he wasn't gonna restore Bob to sanity.

I had lost belief in that because I'm 7 or 8 years sober and it looked like my life was going I was on the down escalator going up. I think when you're desperate, you get more or less active and out of desperation. I started to see people with bigger problems with smiles on their faces, walking through the walls that I was trying to walk around. And out of that observation, I started to believe that God would restore me to sanity. I took step 3 on my need with my sponsor in his office.

We didn't do that in those days, but I started to go to conferences and I started to hear people talk about doing that and I thought, I'm going to try that. And then I did my 3rd 4 step and I think that maybe was my best 4 step. And I did my 5th step with my sponsor, which we also didn't do in our group. We did it with clergy. And I told him, I said, be careful when I'm done because whatever you recommend that I that I do, I'm gonna do.

I said, I feel like I'm dying of thirst lying next to a lake. I said, you know, if you gave me the test, I could pass the test. I know what to do. I just can't do it. And I am so tired of not being able to do it.

So I did my 5th step with him and when he was done, one of the things he wanted me to do was go to a psychologist about work and money issues. He said, Bob, you've got a lot of I had a pretty successful dad and the idea was I'm never going to be as good as my father and I was had a lot of money problems and a lot of failure in my life. And, I did not want to go to a psychologist. But he lined me up with an industrial psychologist and I said, okay. And I called the guy up and he said, can you get your parents involved?

I said, no. He said, my parents have been over involved in my life and I don't think at this stage they need to mommy and daddy need to come with me. He said, we get your wife involved. I said, oh, crap. Well, they see it so differently.

Maybe more honestly. You know, I mean, it's tough, where you get your kids involved. And I said, they're pretty young. I didn't want my children involved. I was ashamed of, not only do we have a pattern of alcoholism in my family, we had a pattern of rage.

And I hope that as I've helped in my family, once you have the example of recovery, that becomes available to other members. And we have quite a few members of Linda and I have 3 sons that are in recovery. My father got in recovery, I have a brother in recovery and I have 2 I have a couple of nephews in recovery. But, I said, yeah, I'll bring the kids. I did not want I was ashamed of how I was.

And we had a pattern of rage in our family that's 2 or 3 generations old, near as I can tell. And I also hope I'm gonna be of help breaking that pattern in our family because there are, those old those are old ideas and those patterns do. So I go to the psychologist. Linda and I and Billy and Peter are there and we're having this discussion and he and he looks at me and he says, I'm I'm going broke. My company is going downhill.

I don't know why I'm busting my ass 2 or 3 hours a day and it it is times are tough. It's bad bad business times and, he looks at me and he said, why are you so afraid of failure? I wanted to punch him. I said, look, you don't understand. You're a doctor.

I said, if you go bankrupt, you know, you just take your little sign, walk down the hall, pound it on another door, and within 6 months you're making a 100 grand. I said, I'm about to lose everything I have. I said, nod your head up and down if you understand that. I said, I'm in the investment business and I'm going broke. I'm about to lose everything I have.

He looked over at my wife and he said, if Bob lost everything he had, would he lose you? And my wife said, nope, wouldn't lose me. He looked at the kids, asked them the same question, the kids said, no, wouldn't lose us. He said, you can't lose, you can't play. I'm the guy that if we were gonna have a marathon, I'd look and talk and act like a runner.

I'd have a great pair of running shoes and a nice outfit. I'd tell you I won some race in Minnesota and you'd expect me to be in the top 10 in the race. And for the 1st 3rd of the race, I'd be up front with the top 10. And somewhere between halfway and 60% of the race, I'd fall down, hurt hurt myself, and I wouldn't finish the race. When the race was done, someone would say, what happened to that guy from Minnesota?

I said, I don't know. A hell of a guy. He won some race. He must have pulled a hamstring. But if you would have followed me around in a helicopter in my life for the 10 years preceding that race, you could have guessed within 50 yards when I fell down because I don't finish anything.

And I'll tell you, it gets old. It gets old to have gifts you'd never get out of the box. You want a price for alcoholism? It's not having a life. You listen to a guy like Sandy, who didn't feel very good about himself in early sobriety, you look at the qualities that that man has and the accomplishments that he has and you wonder how could anybody not feel very good about themselves.

Well, most of us feel that way. I mean, we are this complex sort of thing where we have this love hate relationship. We can do great things, but we know that over a period of time, you know, that life isn't a sprint, it's a marathon. We don't do well in marathons. We're quick.

Not too long after that and what I discovered in that interaction with the psychologist was fear. Now I'd done 3 inventories. My fear inventory had to do with dogs, snakes and high buildings. It was as uninsightful with respect to fear as it could possibly be. And what I discovered in that meeting with psychologist is I was afraid of being married.

I was afraid of the responsibility of being a husband. I was afraid of the responsibility of being a father. I was afraid of failure. I was afraid of success, which was an interesting discovery. So I was the guy who was swimming in fear and Chamberlain used to talk about the 3 fishes in the ocean, where the 3 fishes said, isn't the ocean wonderful?

And the other fish looked over and said, what's the ocean? I'm swimming in fear and don't know what it was. 2 weeks after that meeting with the psychologist, I had one of the worst days I've had in sobriety. I got up late, went to work late, left early, got in the backgamma game, won $600, missed dinner, missed the AA meeting, came home, got in a fight with my wife and slapped 1 of the kids. One of those days you'd like to have videotaped and sent to the general service office to kind of show what 8 years of sobriety will do for you.