The Men Among Men Conference in Reykjavik, Iceland

Bill Cleveland, alcoholic. I'd like to thank Arnor for those beautiful words, but I I have no idea what he said. We've been starting each session with 3 minutes of silence, and I'm not going to do that to you. But I would like to have it a moment of silence, just a moment with no chimes or anything. And what I'd like you to do, if you would with me, is think about the people that were here when you got to Alcoholics Anonymous that were kind to you, that that cared about you, that listened to you when you spoke to them, that offered you a seat in the room, that got you a cup of coffee, that made you feel welcome.

Maybe the person that remembered your name when you came back to the meeting the next time, and how that made you feel. So let's just take just a moment and put those people close to our hearts. Thank you. There was a guy named Larry Larkin. He later became the manager of the Elano Club, and I came up there one night.

Larry took an interest in me, and we stood out in the parking lot of the Elano Club for 45 minutes, and he talked to me. And when I left there that night, I just felt like I was part of, because Larry knew everybody, and he took an interest in me. I later found out that Larry would talk to anybody that was standing in front of him. I'd like to thank Baldwin and Arnor for inviting us here. You have well, maybe you do, but you probably don't have any idea what a wonderful experience this is for us On several levels, it's just a great experience for all 3 of us and our wives to just be together.

I mean, it just doesn't happen, you know, for all 3 of us that care about each other so much, and we love each other's wives. We don't sleep with each other's wives, as far as I'm aware. But it's still early. But to just be able to travel here and have this grand adventure and see this beautiful country, You people live in a true power spot on the planet. We drove around a little Baldwin took us around and showed us, and it's just incredible.

Just the power of nature here. It's incredibly invigorating. And what a great opportunity just to see the place and to be together. And then on another level, to be able to share with you what we feel so strongly about. I don't know about you, but my life got saved.

Something happened to me, March of 1985, that I have no rational explanation for. On March 27, 1985, the obsession to drink and use drugs was lifted from me, and my life has never been the same. And for 22 years, I've been trying to get closer to whatever it is that saved my life. And come to find out that you're the vehicle for me to get closer to whatever that power is. So it's just really neat to be here.

It's really a treat, and, and I thank you for the opportunity. I was a surfer and a biker and a tough guy, and I never went to the beach. My motorcycle rarely ran and I was afraid to fight, but I looked really good. I had a chrome Nazi helmet for a hat and a primary chain for a belt and black greasy Levi's and big black boots with chains around them. I've got tattoos all over me, but I had a clip on earring because I didn't wanna hurt myself.

I was just a badass Viking. So I see there's some other phonies in the room. They don't laugh at that stuff down at the Kiwanis Club, you know, or the Chamber of Commerce. They don't get it, you know. And that's my story.

You know? I I was full of shit all my life. And, pretending to be something, trying to be something, isn't that what we do out there? I mean, this weekend, we've talked a lot about feeling disconnected that we never felt part of. We all have our own way of describing that.

One of the things that we part of. We all have our own way of describing that. One of the things that we all realize when we come to AA is when we hear people talking about that, the first realization is, my god, there's other people that feel that way. It's almost become cliche, but when you're new, that's probably the first time you've ever heard people talk about feline. I never felt part of my family.

Everybody looks at kids, you know. Today, I I walk around and be in a supermarket and you'll see some family with some little kids and I think to myself, I wonder if one of those kids wonders where his real parents are. You know, I mean, because that's kind of how all of us sort of feel that way, some more than others. And we get to AA and we start hearing people talk about that. And then we come to realize after a while that, my god, I was pretending to be stuff so that I could feel part of something.

And then as soon as I got close to it, I bailed out, you know, because I didn't want them to find out that I'm not really with them. So it's a self fulfilling thing. It just feeds on itself. By the time I was 17 years old, I was a bad drunk in high school. I was beyond redemption.

I was beyond help. I started drinking when I was 15, maybe 14, probably closer to 15 years old. And in 2 years, I was gone. In 2 years. First time I drank, a friend of mine's brother was in a college fraternity, and we helped him pull a practical joke on his fraternity brothers and he let us drink whatever we wanted.

Two glasses of whatever we wanted. And we got these big plastic 16 ounce glasses, poured everything we could think of in there. Because we'd all, you know, like when your kids you sip a little beer here and there, but I haven't really hammered. And I was looking forward to it, you know. And, so we choke this stuff down and got drunker than hell, and I caused some trouble at the party.

And, they loaded me in a car, drove me back to my parents house, and dumped me out on the front lawn. I crawled in the house, and crawled down the hallway and got back into the bedroom. And I'm laying on the bed with 1 foot on the floor trying to stop the spinning, you know. And, back in those days, back in the olden days, we had these big plastic things called records. I'm sure it's a big black plastic with a little hole in the middle.

And we played them on pieces of furniture called record players. And some of these pieces of furniture had a lid on it. So I puked in the record player. It was right next to the bed, you know, kind of head high. And and I crawled down the hallway, and I got into the bathroom, and I'm sitting on the toilet.

And I can't think of the the, the words that Matthew used, but it was coming out both ends. You know? And he's he's a better student than me. And And, and and I'm puking in the bucket and, you know, doing that. And the bathroom door opens up and I look up and the tears are running down my face.

And I my mother standing there with this aghast expression on her face, and my father standing behind her laughing hysterically. And each of them were saying in their own way, it begins. It was especially poignant in my house because when I was 16 66 years old, my dad got fired from a job. And rather than go to the bar, he came home, which was extraordinary. And, I'm pretty sure it was my mother that called AA.

And he went down to a meeting in Inglewood, California, and he came back from that meeting and he told my my mother, he says, you know, those people have got something down there, and I'm gonna go back and find out what it is. So the next night, she went with him in order to monitor the experience. So they go walking in this place, and my mother, if you ever saw my mother, the last thing that would come to your mind was alcoholic. She was very statuesque, beautiful woman, always well kept all the time no matter what happened. And, this woman came running up to her and said, what are you doing here?

And she says, well, I'm here to make sure he fills out the forms, signs the papers, you know, pays the dues and and for the intake program, you know, and and this woman took my mother into the other room. When my father died in 1999, he was 45 years sober. When my mother passed away in 2002, she was 48 years in Al Anon. So I grew up in one of those horrible, sober, alcoholic homes. You know?

I hear people talk about shit flying around the house and screaming and yelling. All I think of is freedom. And what was happening to me is I was living in a house with 2 people with clear eyes that knew exactly what was going on in my head. When you go around the corner to smoke 1 and they're waiting for you, you know, they where are you going? You know, because they they know where the corner is.

And, I grew up in a house where I would come home from school many times. There would be somebody laying on the back porch waiting for their sponsor to come home. We had weird uncles around the house all the time. Some of you may have experienced this. There's usually a few of us in the crowd, you know, that had these weird uncles.

We had one weird uncle named Harold, and Harold just couldn't get sober. And my my dad would give him jobs around the house. He was a carpenter and stuff, and Harold would fix and repair things. My dad would give him money, find some clothes for him, and take him to meetings. Harold had no car and he couldn't hold a job.

And after a while, Harold finally got sober. And pretty soon he was dressing nice, coming over the house. He had a car and he got a job, and he's going to meetings, my dad and him. And Harold's looking good. And he meets a girl on the AA campus, and and I went to the wedding when they got married.

And then he got drunk, then he got divorced. Then I went to his funeral when he burned himself up alive in a hotel room, drunk, smoking in bed. And I was probably 13 years old when he died, is best my recollection, but I I was very clear. I knew why he died. He died because he drank.

I knew it wasn't an accident. You know, I was real clear on that. I knew why this man died. One day I came home and there was a woman hiding in the garage. That was the Al Anon.

Don't make Al Anon jokes if you don't know what it is. But if you know what it is, you can make some great Al Anon jokes. Stop and think of the consciousness of an individual that would live with us on purpose. What are they thinking? You know?

Oh, this will be fun. Kinda like restoring an old car on the weekends or I don't know. And, I am living proof that self knowledge as a treatment for alcoholism is worthless. I grew up in one of those houses. I grew up, but this was before the hospitals had figured out how to make money out of us.

This was 1954, and this was in the fifties. And when you went on a 12 step call, you brought them home. There was nowhere else to take them. And I have many memories of my father going out on one of those midnight rides and bringing some guy back to the house, and they'd sit there and pound on the book and point at him, and tell him the same lame stuff we tell him today. You know, not much has changed, really.

There's a lot of stuff that has infiltrated into Alcoholics Anonymous, but the basic message of AA is the same. It's the same message as it always was. So at 17, I was gone. Last place I wanted to be was living with my parents. They're the 2 of the lamest people I'd ever met in my life, you know.

Any of you have teenagers, you ever reach that point where they finally look at you and you can see that look in their eye where they think you are the stupidest person they ever met in their life, You know, 3 weeks ago they were still playing catch with you out in the front yard, you know. But I I didn't like my parents. I hated my parents. I didn't have anger. I had rage.

And when I was 13 years old, my mother took me to my first psychiatrist. I would double up, fall on the floor, bile from my stomach would come up in my throat, veins throbbing in my neck, eyes bulging, pound my fist into the wall, my head into the wall. I was just pissed off at the injustice of it all. And I had no idea. I had no focus for it.

But the closest people that were handy was my parents. And the doctor's opinion, it tells us the alcoholic life seems like the only normal one. How do we make that happen? I mean, it takes a great intellect to construct a reality around you that makes it okay to sleep with the neighbor's wife and puke on your friends and do all the real cute stuff that we do, and kinda step back from it and say, oh, what the hell? You know?

It's not so bad. You know? It's like, you don't need any other proof that alcoholism is physiological other than that last 3 to 5 years that you and I stayed out there. What's that all about? You know, nobody would consciously do that to themselves.

There's no party. There's no party. What the hell? Wasn't the whole idea was to have a party? Wasn't that the idea behind the drinking thing?

When it first started, the idea was to have a couple of drinks and get out of the house and go out and have some adventures. Go to the party. Get lucky. Lucky, meet her, you know, do something, have a good time, feel part of, you know, the social lubricant. You know?

I don't know about you, but I ended up naked in my living room watching religious television taking notes. Party. You know? I mean, I'm having sex menager uno. There's no one else in the room.

You know? And they're not lining up at the door. Nobody's coming to the door. Can can Billy come out and play? You know?

The hell happened to the party? It's when the new guys come in now and they'll tell you stuff like, well, I was just a party kind of guy, you know, and they do and I go, describe the party to me. How many other people were at the party? Number 1. Well, there were 3 or 4.

Did you know any of them, or did you just walk in off the street? So I went to the shrink at 13, and he helped me. And the primary thing he did for me is he introduced me to my favorite subject, me. That lifelong pursuit of self, you know, trying to get in touch with me. Closer to me.

More understanding and compassionate of myself, more loving, more caring, bonding with me. I just and I love it. I do psychotherapy extremely well. You would love to have me in your group. I am really interactive, you know, and I can feign compassion and caring.

It's wonderful. You know? So at 17, I'm the bad drunk in high school. I had the slouch, I had the sneer, I had the foul mouth, I had the uniform, the outfit, the bad attitude, and I was irretrievable. And, at 18 years old, for some odd reason, for somehow, I found somebody to marry me.

I think she slept with me, so it seemed like we should get married. You know? You know? And, I'm scared to death of women. I'm scared to death of everything.

And I and I and I on 4th July in Bass Lake, California, the Hells Angels rode in that valley in 1966, and I found my career path. You know, I wanna be a gangster, an outlaw, gunslinger, a badass, you know, ride them Harleys and stuff. And I and she happened to be in the vicinity, so we went up to Oregon to grow our own and and, it was the sixties, man. You know, it was the sixties. You'll hear people say I wouldn't trade my worst day sober for my best day drunk.

I wouldn't trade 60 667 for anything, man. It was it was incredible. It was incredible. I'm pretty sure I had a really good time, you know. I mean, from all the reports, it was it was happening, you know.

And I've read about what happened since. There's been a lot of books have been written. I had no idea I was involved in that much stuff, you know. It was, like, really interesting. I graduated from high school in 65.

The road from Los Angeles to to San Francisco was the road to Nirvana. Golden Gate Park was the center of the universe. You know? They weren't eating hitchhikers yet, so it was safe to travel. And the young ladies were discovering their sexuality, and we were helping them as best we could.

So I went up there. We immediately had 2 children. You know, kids come from sex. You know? Who knew?

Boom. Boom. We should back off a little. You know? So I had 2 children.

I had bought a house. I was running with an outlaw motorcycle gang. I was sticking needles in my arm every day, and I wasn't coming home to that family, and they were on welfare. And I was out on highway 99 doing what we do, and and I lost that family, and I lost those children in divorce, and I lost the house, and I lost a couple of cars and several jobs. And by the time I was 22 years old, I was in the Oregon State Mental Institution.

I needed a rest. It's rough changing the world, you know? And, you know, the way you end up in a mental institution is not because you had a bad week. You have to build up a certain level of toxicity to qualify for the mental institution. And, anybody else here been in a mental institution?

I know Chuck has. You know Chuck was in a mental institution. He flew from Honolulu, Hawaii to Iceland in the winter. That's crazy. Some of you are probably thinking, well, it really wasn't an institution.

They were just observing me. You know? It's like, only those of us that have been in the mental institution know that it's not that bad. You have some sparkling conversations in the mental institution. It's a great place to look for a bride.

I'd like to introduce you to my wife, Karen. Stand up, dear. For the tape, I have to say I did not find her in the mental institution unless you count AA. So I'm in a mental institution. At 22, I started drinking at 15 years old.

Seriously started drinking at 15. And probably that 1st year, I wasn't drunk every weekend. By the time I was 17, I was getting hammered every weekend. And at 22, I'm in a mental institution. What the hell happened to the party?

You know? The party for most of us, it seems like it ends pretty quick. I'm one of those people that never crossed the line. I didn't know there was a line. You know?

I just I mean, truly, nothing happened in my life. Nothing happened. You know? Yeah. I got married and I did some stuff, but I I mean, I didn't go anywhere.

I didn't do anything. I didn't leave my mark on anything. I wasn't an exceptional nothing. You know, I started drinking and my life literally stopped. It just stopped.

And no advancement was made of any kind. I can't really tell you stories about the sixties because I'm not sure really what the truth is. I mean, I lied about it for so many years, I have convinced myself that some of that stuff actually happened. I'm pretty sure I did not live with Joan Baez, but I said I did. You know?

I made up all kinds of crap. You know? I mean, just I had to create a life because I had none. I had none. And it's been my experience that most of our stories are like that.

You know, thank god there's some people that actually did some shit, so we've got something to listen to. You know? I wish I could tell you I was a wheel man for the mob. You know? Or I was a jet plane.

Have you ever heard the guy read Abernathy talks about he was flying the x planes. You know, when he got up, he was supposed to next morning, he was supposed to fly the the special x plane break the speed of sound. And he wakes up in the morning, and he's late. Oh my god. And he rushes down to the landing strip, and there's the plane smoking on the ground.

He looks at the flight log, and he signed it. You know? That didn't happen to me. You know? I'm sorry, but it's a great story.

Flying night missions over North Korea, you know, with the bottle of whiskey down in your big fur boot, you know. That did not happen to me, you know. Nothing happened to me. I went to the mental institution, that happened to me. Then I went back a second time because I liked it there.

You know? I have to remember that the way I ended up in the mental institution is I called the police on myself. Now, in Alcoholics Anonymous, there's sometimes a controversy. There are no issues in AA, so we have to make up stuff and then recycle it every so often to give general service something to talk about. And one of the issues is is the alcoholic and the drug addict, are they the same?

Is there a difference? Is the recovery the same? What about the alcoholic addict and all of that stuff? Every anybody that's lived out on the street knows that there's a difference between alcoholics and drug addicts. And I'll give you an operational definition of that difference.

No self respecting drug addict would ever call the police on himself. But an alcoholic will do it and think it's a pretty good idea. There is a level of lameness in the alcoholic that simply does not exist in the hip contemporary rock and roll drug addict of today. All those in favor, I'll call New York. So I came back down to Los Angeles.

One of the requirements of being an alcoholic is you must hate your parents. It's a requirement. You know? Guys come in and tell me, I don't hate my parents. I go, see you later.

Get out there, work on that a little bit, and come back, call me later. You know? Because you just you just gotta hate them. They're the closest ones. You know, for the alcoholic life to seem like the only normal one, rule number 1, it must be someone else's fault.

I can never ever take responsibility for my own behavior because my behavior is unjustifiable. Therefore, the motivation for behaving that way has got to be you because you're infringing upon my fun, and you're an asshole. You know? And I've been sent by God to wreak vengeance on your life and make you it's kind of a religious sort of thing. And, so I hated my parents.

But when you need something, you can overlook certain things. So I came back down to Los Angeles, and and and I needed something. And my dad gave me a job in his machine shop in El Segundo, and he let me sleep in his garage. And, by this time, my my father had been sober a long time. And, my mother, when I went to that mental institution, she flew up to Oregon and drove me to that institution.

That must have been a real high point in her life. Her only son. You know? And that must have been a rough day for her. I have no recollection, really, of anything that she might have been feeling or said.

I just know I needed a ride. And, I was strung out really bad, and I was in bad shape. I was scared to death. I was running with people that were armed and dangerous, and I had no business being with those people and doing what I was doing. I have no idea how I ended up there, really, to be honest with you.

And, and she drove me there. So I came back down to California, and I tried to get normal. And, I I tried to clean up my act. And first thing you gotta do to get normal is you gotta quit shooting heroin because you can't find anybody to go along with the concept of social heroin use. It's pretty much a lifestyle.

You gotta quit taking LSD because you gotta talk to people, and, acid is not conducive to two way communication. You pretty much have to stop doing that. So what you do is you just drink on the weekends and smoke pot during the week because marijuana really isn't drugs. It's green and it's from God. It's biodegradable.

It's herbal. You know? And, marijuana is what you do in between getting really loaded. You know? It's just maintenance.

Because, see, there has to be some cushion between you and I. I can't I can't take you just on naked blood. The impact of your personality on me is devastating, and I need something to cushion the blow. You know? And and now for 20 years, there was always something in my system.

And so I tried the experiment of drinking on the weekends because normal people have jobs, and when I drink, I don't show up no matter what. Everything stops when I drink. Literally, everything stops. And, so I tried to control it. I tried to control it as best I could.

And as I'm sure your experiment failed, so did mine. By the time I was 37 years old, which was another 15 years after that mental institution, I crashed and burned. And there was no more hip dope. It was me in a gin bottle. Nothing else was left.

I couldn't smoke pot anymore because I started seeing God, and that was never the idea. You know? I don't know what the hell you people did to that stuff, but it was not the old Mexican dirtweed I was used to back in the sixties, you know. And so I had to quit doing that because it made me too paranoid. I just drank.

I just drank. I just drank. And I drank, and I drank, and I drank, and I drank my soul up. So when I was 37, on one of the last drunks so far, certainly wasn't the worst one. There was nothing monumental about it.

I came home in the morning and I was in the wrong place in the morning again. You know that feeling? When you when you're there and you know you're not gonna make it to work and everybody that was waiting for you is no longer waiting for you? And you and you you know it's gonna be another miserable, horrible, painful day. Another one on top of the 100 that came before it.

I'm not gonna feel good. It's just gonna be awful. I'm sticky and I'm sweaty and I itch everywhere. There's nothing left to drink. You know?

And like any good gangster, I called my mom. You ever notice You ever notice how many tough guys come to AA and you find out they're living with mine. And on top of that, they complain about the bitch. She doesn't understand me. Man, you're 45 years old.

God. Mom came and got me, and, she loaded me in the car before I changed my mind and took me to this place in Costa Mesa called Starting Point. Now first shrank at 13, two times in the mental institution. I spent 2 and a half years in group therapy at one time. I've been to a handful of other psychiatrists for one thing or another.

I've been gestalted and rolfed and primal screamed. I know more about myself than is safe to know. But it is my favorite subject, you know. So I could not imagine I could not imagine just coming to Alcoholics Anonymous and sitting in meetings and not drinking. Could you?

Could you? Every single one of us every one of us at some point in our drinking career has gotten up in the morning or whenever and looked in the mirror and looked yourself right in the eye and said, I got to cut this shit out. You know? Then the next thought is, I need a drink. You know?

Isn't that true? Every one of us. How many of you have sat in a bar with some alcoholic buddy of yours and discussed the level of your personal alcoholism with each other as you're ordering another round. Anybody done that? So yeah.

So we all know we all know what the problem is, but you can't imagine not drinking. I mean, I couldn't imagine it. Could you? I couldn't imagine it. Yeah.

I knew I needed to be locked up. I would I knew I was dying. I could feel death coming up behind me. I've got liver disease, and I had it really bad then, and I and I I was I could feel it when the end was near. So my mother brought me there, and she checked me in this place.

While I was in there, they made me wear a sign around my neck. I had to make the sign. We made it in crafts. It was a little rectangular piece of cardboard with a string that went through it that said, I am not a counselor. Because evidently, there was some confusion about that.

So then they let us out. They let us out. They let us out. Say go. Multiply.

Now, during the time I was trying to get normal, I found another volunteer that was willing to take care of me and got married. Because part of being a normal and alcoholic of my variety, I can never ever be alone. Matter of fact, it's a group effort getting me through life. You know, it takes a village. You know?

It's still like that today. You know, it's like not much has changed in that area. You know? I'm a high maintenance guy. You know?

And, so I had another wife. I had 2 more small children. And, my dad had had pretty much retired from the small business that we had, and and the reason you couldn't fire me from the job is because I was the boss. And and they let me out, and they send us to the world's aftercare program, AA. There are no referrals from Alcoholics Anonymous.

There's no place you go where you walk in and you say to them, I'm from AA. They sent me here. That place does not exist. This is it. This is the last house on the street.

It's linoleum floors and metal folding chairs for the rest of our natural lives. You know? Party. You know? God, I was happy to be here in my old man's club.

You know? That was a real thrill. And, and I showed up here. Now what are we like when we get here? What are the common themes that run through all of our stories?

Because my experience of 20 plus years of working with people and reading the book with people and working with them, We're all different. We we'd like to talk about how we're the same, and there are ways that we're the same, but there are significant differences too. Where we came from, what happened to us, some of us have scars that other ones don't have. Some of us have demons that others don't have. But there is a common theme.

One of the things that you'll hear in Alcoholics Anonymous is you hear the term alcoholic thinking, as if there really is such a thing. The rest of the world calls it what I think it really is, emotional immaturity. Right? And we hear that and we go, no. I have alcoholic thinking.

I have special thinking. It's unique. It's special thinking, and you need to consider that when you're dealing with me. I have alcoholic thinking. I'm a sick puppy and I hope I never get well.

You know? I have alcoholic thinking. And we hang on to that with a death grip, you know, because it it does it it if if we can have that special thinking, it answers a lot of very strange questions, you know, and odd behavior that we have, like being 40 years old and laying on the floor kicking and screaming and crying and yelling for mom. You know? What's that about?

You know? And all of us do that. Right? I believe truly. I I believe literally that this is true.

When I started drinking and using, therefore, you too, I stopped growing emotionally. I stopped, literally. Stopped. There I am. So now I'm 37 years old, and I'm a newcomer in AA.

And on a good day, I have the emotional development of a 16 year old. And this kid is not an honor student. He's the one with a bit of a problem with authority, you know. And he's still swaggering and walking around and acting the way he acts, you know, with his special thinking, you know, and his special bag of crap that he's brought back from the horrible childhood that he had. You know?

Here I am. You know? I'm ready for you. Let's work some steps. You know?

And and I it's not conducive to to healthy step working. The chances of me growing up in middle age and looking good are really slim. You know, this is not gonna be cute. You know? Have you ever had anybody say to you, he's not emotionally available for me?

You ever heard that one? Anybody ever heard that? Usually, it's in family group. You know? But they you you know what they mean by that?

What they mean by that is I've got something that they want, and I'm withholding it. And the truth is worse. I don't have it. And what's worse than that, I don't know that I don't have it. You've convinced me that I've got it, and I'm helping you look for it.

And this is gonna go on for a long time, you know. And now we are on the journey together. And remember the special thinking. So we're growing up. We're gonna grow up now.

This now comes the opinion part of the pitch. I wanna make it very clear that these are just my opinions, but they definitely should be yours as well. You know how you hear people say there are no experts in Alcoholics Anonymous? Bullshit. I'm an expert.

So let's get down to it now. If I'm gonna grow up, which we're all still waiting for, I should never do this in front of my sponsor. It's gonna be hell to pay for this. If I'm gonna grow up, if you want me to be there for you, if you would like me to be emotionally available for you, to really care for you, to take you into consideration when I'm making decisions on my life, To feel what you feel, not just to react to how you feel, but to really put myself in your shoes, to come to understand you at a deeper level, and allow you into me without being afraid, with no blockages, just openly to let you in, to have that kind of a relationship. If you would like that from me, it's gonna take about 10 years.

10 years. You ever watched a teenager? I have some. And the the second little bunch, I was available for, and I watched them. And at about 14 or 15 years old, they start growing up.

They start doing adult looking things, very awkwardly, and they make a series of horrible mistakes. And then they seem to learn from those mistakes. And by the time they're around 25 years old, you stand there one day and you look at them and you go, goddamn. She grew up. What?

I mean, you look at them, they got breasts and stuff, and they're like big people, you know? And for us alcoholics, have you ever had the experience that maybe they're a little bit well more well rounded than you? I've had that. I had a recent conversation with my 22 year old son and my 25 year old daughter around Christmas time. We had a party over at my house.

Karen's family was there, and the 3 of us kinda found ourselves together and we're talking, kinda going over the past, and and we all agreed that all 3 of us had grown up quite a bit. You know? And the 2 of them are looking at me smiling, and I'm smiling right back at them, you know. I've done pretty good kids, haven't I? You know, you're you're okay, dad.

You know? It's been a long time since you threw yourself down on the front lawn. You know? It's like you know. Haven't seen you cry at inappropriate times in several years now, you know.

I think you're really getting better, you know. But it takes them about 10 years. My son was 15 or 16 years old, And I went up to him and I said, what happened between you and Britney? And he said, well, you know how when you tell a girl that you don't love her so that you can see what her reaction is to find out whether she really loves you or not? You know how you do that?

And I lied and I went, oh, yeah. Yeah. And he says, well, I did that with Britney, and she just smiled and said, okay, and walked away. And I said and he looked at me and he goes, I'm never gonna do that again. There's a couple of really remarkable things about that conversation.

Number 1, he had that conversation with his father. I would have never had a conversation like that with my father. I wouldn't have even talked to him about anything. I never did. And the other thing is it seems as though he actually learned from the experience.

You know? Now my estimation is that you and I missed all of that. You know? We didn't that didn't happen to us. You know, we didn't learn from the mistakes.

We just got loaded instead, and we missed it all. And the only way that we're gonna be able to make up for that is to live through the experiences in order to learn from the mistakes and from the victories and grow up, and we get to do it now. And you can't speed it up, but you can definitely slow it down. You'll hear some lies in Alcoholics Anonymous that I think make this problem worse. You'll hear people say that there's a different program from every for everyone else in Alcoholics Anonymous.

There's a different program for each one of us. That was made up by an alcoholic that doesn't wanna work the program. There's only one. It's real clear what it is. We have a way out upon which we all agree.

We all agree what the way out is. We may not all do it, but we all agree what it is. It's stated very clearly. It's hanging on most of the walls that we go into. It's in chapter 5 in the book.

It's very clear. The book tells us we will tell you precisely how we recovered. It's up to me now to work your program, not mine. K? So don't give me that way out.

And whatever you do, don't tell me to take what I can use and leave the rest. I've lived my life that way my entire life. It's time for a change. I need a new life. I don't need to make with this finely tuned decision making instrument up here, decide what's gonna be good for me?

When have I ever known what was good for me ever in my life? I will never consciously put myself in an uncomfortable position, and recovery by its very nature is uncomfortable. The most spiritual thing said in Alcoholics Anonymous is get in the car. Where are we going? What do you care?

Get in the car. You know, who else is going? What do you care? Get in the car. I need a new experience.

I need to let you take me into your life. You've been your own worst enemy. Put yourself at the top of the amends list, please. I was not my own worst enemy. I was yours.

You know? Yes. But you were self destructive. Well, yeah. But I didn't know that.

You know? I'm not that bright. You know? I was making myself feel good at all costs. I was trying to avoid pain at any cost I could to the exclusion of you in my life.

So if I wanna make amends to myself, I'll put myself at the bottom of that list, and by the time I get there, I'll have some self esteem. I think that's how it works. Okay? So I come into AA. I need some help.

You know? If I walk if I get on my knees and I ask god for help, I shouldn't turn him away when he shows up. And the chances are he's not gonna look like I think he's gonna look. He's not gonna look like that guy on the cross, or he's not gonna look like Buddha. He's not gonna look like some sadhu, some religious guy with long robes and a stick and, you you know, with a sign he's carrying or something.

He's not gonna look like that. He's gonna look a lot like you. He's gonna send you to me. So what I need to do is let you in. You are the messenger.

You're the one that has the message for me. Sometimes maybe I have the message for you, but it's you. So the absolute very last thing I wanna do is control the experience of you in my life. And I will attempt to do that because you are inconvenient as hell. You know?

You you you are in my way. You are impinging upon my fun. You show up at the wrong times. You call all the time right in the middle of my favorite rerun of Law and Order, You know? I'm standing in my kitchen one day, and I I'm not gonna tell the story about Jay and I and working the steps.