The OA Big Book Study in Winnipeg, MB, Canada

Next, this is column two. We asked ourselves why we were angry. Why were they on our list? What are the reasons? And the big book on page 65 gives you examples of that. You got Mr. Brown in the first column and you've got the cause. And you see, and, and someone pointed out, I heard a big book study once point out that the most number of words in any of the sentences and column two is 19. And he said, I give my sponsees one extra word. They can't write more than 20

words in a point

and is all point form. And the beauty of this is only you are going to see this and therefore is only what it means to you. You can write shorthand to yourself. I for instance think back to a particular 24 hour period with an ex-girlfriend that I used to think about a lot and if someday I could write a book about it if anyone would read it. I don't think it's that interesting, but I could write a lot about my feelings and her feelings and what happened and what didn't happen and all that. All I put down that day.

So I put down. I knew what I was talking about,

you know. So let's say I put Hitler down.

I have put it down. I don't know exactly what I wrote down beside him at the time, but these days I might say spawn anti-Semitism responsible the deaths of millions of people, not just Jews, but millions of people. And it could happen again. So those would be the causes I would put down. Guy who cuts me off as I turn right, didn't see me, didn't see me. You know, there's two different could could cause accidents for others, could have killed me.

OK,

just four points. My wife. I'm going to use an imaginary wife here because I don't think it'd be fair to my wife to say anything about her. But you know, and this isn't my wife. It's not you, dear,

but, you know, spends too much money and not enough sex,

you know, Berates me, belittles me, You know, I can have a whole list of things, you know, keep pushing me to do things. Keeps, keeps, you know, makes me spend more time than I want to on things that I don't care about, you know? I mean, you can imagine these things, you know, and and and

you know, for husbands, you could have, you know, he's messy, doesn't put the the toilet seat down. It could be as petty as that and could be as as serious as relies on me for all emotional support, you know, isolates himself. I don't know too much sports, whatever. I mean, they can be some pretty deep things

for principals, you know, I'll never get, I'll never get thin. Well, why does this bother me? I want to be thin so I'll be attractive to others.

I want to be thin so I'll be healthy. 2 very different motives there. Hey, but those are both causes

I I want to be thin so I can be a star in OA, you know? You know what, I think so like different reasons there. Talk show hosts make people idiots into idiots,

speak to the lowest common denominator aren't really interested in my opinion, and are really just interested in controversy. OK,

particular politician, I won't go into any details, but you know, did this, did this, did this, didn't do this, didn't say this. Whatever

ex girlfriends used me, exploited me, dumped me,

you can imagine what to put down. Just point form

specific, but not a story. You don't write a story, you just write down the causes. How long can that take?

You're you're again, off the top of your head, you're just writing down reasons that bother you just

like that. It's not deep introspection, although you do learn something as you write them down. You begin to realize that your motives are kind, usually kind of mixed. My daughter, you know, like a long time ago, not doing well in school, worried about her future. I'm going to look stupid to the teacher, you know, she stands up to me. I kind of like it. I really don't like it, you know what I mean? Like, I like spunk and I don't like spunk, that kind of stuff. I mean, you begin to sort of just as you write things down, it becomes

interesting as you begin to understand really why these people are on your list, because sometimes they're on your list for really terrible and bad reasons and sometimes for really stupid reasons.

I remember being in my wonderful, loving sister-in-law was was dying of cancer and my wife is spending a lot of time with her helping her out. And I remember resenting my sister-in-law putting her on this list. And when I put down the 'cause it was she's sick

who she's taking more time away from my wife than I want to give.

Oh, you know, And I began to realize my reasons were progressively worse, that they were much more self interested than I thought I was in relation to her because I loved her, absolutely loved her. And yet I was resenting her for absolutely for mostly bad, very well, completely bad reasons. My grandmother, my grandmother in the last couple years of her life, she suffered a stroke and and she lost her ability to do the one thing she loved in the world, which was reading. She was already had difficulty with her eyes, she had

difficulties with walking, she couldn't hear very well. She was really isolated many ways, but reading was her life and she lost that. And she became a relatively

bitter person in in her later years, still very loving to me, but

it was hard for her. She was very, very sad. And I realized when I put her down on my list the first time that, I mean, I grew up with her and with her husband and my grandfather and my, and my parents, we lived in a house all together and, and they were, I mean, I was so close to them. And I realized that the last couple years of my life with my grandmother had almost obliterated my memory of the 1st

24 years with her, which were glorious years.

And as I work through this, I mean, suddenly I remembered the whole past and I, I realized my resentment against my grandmother was because she was sick. I mean, duh, right? She was sick. And just, it all went away. Just writing it out. It went away. It was that wonderful. Just using this form doesn't always happen. But I'm just saying that sometimes you just realize, oh, that's why it bothers me and it no longer bothers you. Sometimes just writing the name down, sometimes just writing the cause down doesn't.

But we're not finished, but we're writing down the cost. So that's the cost.

So again, we finished column one. You may make 50 copies of this form, and you may write down on 50 pages

a list in column one in each of the boxes.

And then you've got column two and you make you go beside each name, you write down the causes in point form about why they're there.

And then the big book goes on. It says we asked ourselves why we're angry. That's column two. And then column three. In most cases, it was found that our self esteem, how we feel about ourselves, our pocketbooks, money issues, our ambitions, our personal relationships, including sex were hurt or threatened. So we were sore, we were burned up

on our grudge list. We set opposite each name our injuries, right? And that's the,

that's the causes. And then we asked ourselves, was it our self esteem, our security, our ambitions, our personal or sex relations which had been interfered with? And if you look at the form, you'll see that there's places for you to put XS underneath these sub columns of self esteem, security, ambitions, personal relations, sex relations. And is any fear involved just put a check mark.

I I've in England they call it ticks, we call them checkmarks. And you do that beside each of the causes.

So for instance, beside Hitler

spawn anti-Semitism, did that affect myself esteem? Yes, it certainly affected myself esteem because as I grew up and suffered some anti-Semitism, not a great deal, but some of it, it affected how I felt about myself

response with the deaths of millions of people. Did that affect myself esteem? Actually no, didn't affect myself esteem. So I wouldn't put a check mark beside that cause the guy who cut me off didn't see me that didn't affect myself esteem didn't see me that affects my self esteem. OK, so my recommendation, you could do it either way, but my recommendation is that you go down each of the sub columns you do all the self esteem ones and all of the 10 or 20 or 30 pages of your forms

and check to see by each of the causes, not by the name in column one, but by the cause in column two, whether that has affected your self esteem. So your self esteem is how you feel about yourself. Has it affected it in any way? The second sub column is security or pocketbook. So security is your sense of safety related as well to to money, security of money. But it it's more than that. So spawn anti-Semitism effects my security. You're damn tuned. It does.

We sponsor the deaths of 1,000,000. No.

Could happen again. It sure does affect my sense of security. The guy who cut me off didn't see me. Affected my sense of security. Didn't see me, affected my sense of security. Could kill others. Effects my sense of security that night with my girlfriend. Affect myself esteem? Yeah. Affect my security? No.

OK so it just depends on the issue. But you put a check mark besides the ones that seem to fit

the next column. Is ambitions, what you want out of life. The chances are very, very good that you will always check this one because if it's on your resentment list, it's something that has happened that you didn't want to happen. And if ambition is is what you want to have happened, clearly it has affected your ambitions. So generally speaking, the chances are good you would fill that up.

Personal relations affected your personal relations spawn. anti-Semitism affected my personal relations with people who are anti-Semitic to me. Not many, but there were some

responsible deaths of millions. Didn't affect my personal relations

could happen again.

Effects my personal laces because I, I, I did at any rate, because I always worried that it could happen again and affected how I related to people

that night affected my personal relations. The guy who cut me off didn't affect my personal relations. OK, all right, You know, the, the various causes I had didn't affect them. So it just depends. You put checkmarks beside that sex relations, same thing. Check marks wherever it happens, wherever it does affect. And again, sex relations doesn't simply mean whether you had good sex or not. It means as it affects your relationship with

gender to which you're attracted. Does it affect it in some way, shape or form, either individually or in general?

Sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it doesn't.

I mean, let's not forget, I mean, there are people in this program who've been wildly abused by people of the of, of, by other people either physically, emotionally or, or or or sexually or, or, or all three at the same time. And when they put those people down

and they put down the causes, I mean, the causes may be very lengthy. There may be many of those causes. And you're, you can bet and rest self assured because I've talked to a lot of people who suffered that, that those checkmarks are all the way through effects, self esteem effects, security, effects, ambitions, effects personal relations, affect sexual relations. And there's fear involved too, that they've got that all down there. And for some people and for some of the causes I've had that all done there with my parents in the early days of the program, a lot of those things would have been there

because my whole being was and with my wife too, my whole being was intertwined with them. And so a lot of a lot of everything was, was checked off in there.

And, and, and you, there's a column is any fear there? Because you'll notice that in the example given on page 65, fear is, is in there as well. So there's a separate column for Fear.

That's the first filling out of the first three columns of the resentment form.

How much time can that take and how much thought does it require? I would suggest very little time and very little thought. It's just writing down what's on your mind. It's not hard work. I mean, it can be very deep at times. I mean, if you're writing down some things that are truly, truly difficult to write down, of course it's not emotionally just a snap to write them down. But then you're not being asked to write down more than what's on your mind.

OK, page 65, right at the bottom it says we went back through our lives. Nothing counted but thoroughness and honesty.

When we were finished, we considered it carefully. So at the at the end of filling out the three columns, we're looking at it carefully. The first thing apparent was that this world and its people were often quite wrong. To conclude that others were wrong was as far as most of us got the usual outcome was that people continued to wrong us. We stayed sore. Sometimes it was remorse. So we're writing also down things that that we may have done that bother us. Like I I I may have stolen and I write down the store I stole from and then I may write down,

you know, took money from them or took goods from them didn't pay them back. I feel guilty every time I walk into the store or something like that. I mean, that's the remorse. And then we were sort ourselves. But the more we fought and tried to have our own way, the worst matters got as in war, the victor only seemed to win are moments of triumph for short life. We're on page 66 now. It is plain that a life which includes deep resentment leads only to futility and unhappiness. I have a note here. Someone once said you take

and hope the other person dies.

To the precise extent that we permit these, do we squander the hours that might have been worthwhile. That's true for anyone. Anyone who spends time on hatred and worry just wastes time.

But with the alcoholic whose hope is the maintenance and growth of a spiritual experience, this business of recipes is infinitely grave. We found that it's fatal. For when harboring such feelings, we shut ourselves off from the sunlight of the spirit. The insanity of alcohol returns. We drink again. And with us to drink is to die. So if we shut ourselves off the sunlight of spirit, then we'll we'll start to eat again. And

the form with all of the check marks is graphically very powerful because when you look at column three

with all of those check works, you realize that the things that you put down on paper, that the people, the institutions and principles that you put down on paper are absolutely controlling major parts of you. How you feel about yourself, your self esteem, how safe you feel, your security, what you want out of life, your ambitions, your relationships with other people and your sexual relations. And that you're full of fear. All those check marks are just going to hit you in the eye and say

you're wasting your time.

The past is killing you. You can't feel good about yourself. You can't feel safe. You can't feel

satisfied because what you want isn't happening and you have lousy relationships.

So it's it's grave. It says if we were to live, we have to be free of anger. Now I think it's very important to understand that free of anger, not that we have to be had to feel no anger, but we have to be free of it. You can't stop being angry. But I heard Elizabeth Kubler Ross know the the, the person who wrote on death and dying, She came to Winnipeg years and years ago and she said the only real anger lasts 5 seconds. The rest is sickness.

If it lasts longer than that is sick as very insightful, I thought. I mean, I, I

once knew someone who would tell me stories about working in a place where there was a bully and the bully and I knew a lot of people who worked there and the bully, they said, just intimidated all of the people I knew and really liked. And sometimes I'd be invited to parties at that workplace and

I couldn't talk to that person who was the bully because I was so angry. And I was, I kept avoiding that person throughout that party. You know, if that person went somewhere, I'd move somewhere else. You know, who talked to that person? The person who told me about all these horrible things. So that person was sane. And that person got over the anger and it was no longer anger. You know, I told my I, I was angry at my friend. I told my friend the rafted end. I was angry at my foe. I told it not. The raft did grow,

you know.

Sane people talk about their anger and get rid of it and it's over. People like me, insane people who don't live in the sunlight of the spirit, who aren't sane, live with it and it gets worse and worse and worse and it ends up killing me. So if we were to live, we have to be free of anger. The grouch and the brainstorm were not for us. The grouch is the immediate anger. The brainstorm is the long term festering, gets worse and worse anger. We're not for us.

I don't get that from the dictionary, but Bill translates it in a book called this. Bill sees it, he quotes it, but gives it a different, different words. I love these words. They may be the dubious luxury of normal men, but for Alcoholics, these things are poisoned. So normal people have the dubious luxury of being angry and continuing to be angry and hating. But if I continue to be angry, if I continue to hate,

die. So I can't do it.

We turned back to the list, for it held the key to the future. We were prepared to look at it from an entirely different angle. We began to see that the world and its people really dominated us. In that state, the wrongdoing of others, fancied or real, had power to actually kill. How could we escape? We saw that these resentments must be mastered, but how? We couldn't wish them away any more than alcohol.

If you've ever had a situation where you have to leave the room because someone entered it, and I think most of us have had that at some time or another in our lives, then you know that that person controls you.

And even if it doesn't happen literally, if it happens even figuratively, that when that person comes in the room or when you think about that person, you can't think straight. You're being controlled. And the checkmarks will prove to you how much you're being controlled. And they should give you this sense of urgency. If I don't get rid of it, I'm never going to live. I'm going to continue to eat over it. That's the purpose of those checkmarks. They're very graphic

illustrations of how controlled you are by how you're reacting to life.

So the hardest are the people who have harmed you or others.

Those are the hardest. You know, if you've harmed someone else, OK, you can say, well, I realize how that harms me, but maybe I can deal with it if life goes on. Life goes on. But it's the cases where people have harmed other people, either you or other people that really kill you because you can't stand. You're angry. You wish it hadn't happened. You wish those people didn't exist. You, you know, and all. How do you deal with it? Here's their advice.

This was our course. We realized the people who wronged us, and I would say the people who wronged others as well

were perhaps spiritually sick,

that we did not like their symptoms and the way these disturbed us. That by the way is called two and called 3 symptoms, is called 2. The causes, the way these disturbed us is column three. All those check marks, the self esteem, they, like ourselves were sick too.

That's a tough proposition, but it's very important to understand. We ask God to and I'll get into that. We ask God to help us show them the same tolerance, pity and patience that we would cheerfully grant a sick friend. The manuscript, the draft used to say they would. We would cheerfully grant a friend who has cancer. And I, I, I like that. I sick friend is fine too, but I like that because I I use the example of a person who has a brain tumor.

People have brain tumor sometimes are affected by by the pressure of the tumor to say things or do things that are aberrant or sometimes quite hateful. People with Tourette's syndrome will say things that they don't mean to say.

People are in extreme pain, will say things that they don't mean.

Children will say I hate you daddy when they don't mean it

people. I mean I, I, I knew a guy once who who was really quite a grouch and I found out that he, he has scar tissue all over his body from a burn from burn that he suffered. He's always in pain. I'd be pretty grouchy if I were always in pain. When my wife, we were going to birthing classes and they told us about the transition time when there was a 20 minute period where your wife might blame you for all the pain that you have caused her.

She doesn't mean it. You know, she really loves you. It's just pain and hormones working at the same time. And if my wife had said that to me, I would have understood it. She didn't, but she if she had. So there were all kinds of times in our lives when we fully understand when people do things or say things that are hurtful.

You know, person has a heart attack in the middle of driving and kills, kills someone. What are we going to say about a person killed my killed my friend or something? It was a horrible accident. But how can you blame a person as a heart attack in the middle of something, right? So whatever it is, things happen. People do things and we understand them. Can we not understand people who are in spiritual pain?

Can we not understand because we are selves are in spiritual pain? We know we're distant from the God we want to be close to.

Can we not understand that those who do pain often are have have no other options? They don't what their choices are in life? That they have grown up in a spiritual vacuum? How many abusers were themselves abused?

You know, I mean, I, I don't know what the figures are, but I'll make you bet it's over 80% to 90%. How many people who are terrible, awful parents grew up with parents who didn't give them much of A sense of what kind of choices there are in parenting? How many parents can't you say if you had trouble with your parents, can't you? They tried their best

given the limited resources they had at their disposal.

How many people who? And when I looked at Hitler and when I looked at the common dolls of the of the concentration camps, I mean, I saw people who did horrible things, horrible, horrible, horrible things. But who themselves, every time they did something horrible became less and less of human beings. They, they weren't even animals. You wouldn't, you animals wouldn't do what they did. They became complete non human beings by what they did.

They, they, they were, every act they committed made them less and less able to become human again. I, I did criminal law for a number of years and I can tell you I hardly ever met a person who committed an offense, whether it was murder or whether it was, you know, just theft,

who didn't himself or herself have tremendous problems and themselves have issues such that I could say there but for the grace of God go I, I knew that very rarely did I meet anyone who was pure evil. And even those people were purely sick because pure evil people have no conscience, have no humanity. They simply do not know. They live in, they live a lie. They live in a completely different world from life. Most people though, suffer from delusions about the world.

I mean, I, I'm a mediator and, and, and these days and what I do is help people understand their misperceptions. And I can tell you misperceptions arise so easily in our lives that we can assume that someone says that someone says that we assume what that person means when in fact that person has an entirely different reason. I just did a mediation where a supervisor employee said to me individually he hates me and has no respect for me

and I have a lot of respect for him. Same words. Both of them have the impression that the other one had no respect

for the other and in fact they each had tremendous respect for each other. And I know when it happened,

I can even point to the time and I did. I was able to point them to the time. The supervisor had been a supervisor for many years and had was always a micromanager, had never really delegated authority to anyone. A new employee comes in to do a job and the supervisor is so impressed by this employee that he says the employee, you're in charge.

Now, anyone who knew the supervisor would say this is the greatest compliment that has ever been paid by this man to this other man, right? I mean, what an incredible compliment. To delegate authority in your micromanager, you must think this person is incredible, right? The person who took on the job had no idea of that and just said, well, of course I'm in charge, right? I mean, that's what I was hired to do.

So they start off from a complete disconnect. And then if the supervisor has some suggestions to the person who is working it, the supervisor starting from the position of I really think you're terrific, here are some suggestions to make even better. But the person who's receiving this is just hearing you're doing a lousy job here. You know, here's what you're doing wrong. Never hears the good stuff because the supervisor says well I've already complimented this person beyond anything I could possibly imagine.

Complete disconnect. So I know how how disagreements and misperceptions occur all through our lives,

how someone says to us, how are you? And we say, what the hell do you mean by that? You know? And yeah, it ever happened to you. Good morning. What do you mean by that? You know, and and yet sometimes good morning is just a good morning, right?

So because of that, because we're capable of doing that,

all kinds of people are living in a world of fear and paranoia where anyone even saying hello to them is actually out to get them and they, they lash out. So even the, even the person who's done the sickest things, when you look at it from that light, you can feel tremendous pity for them. At the least you can feel pity. You're not asked for the big book to forgive. You're only asked to feel compassion and pity.

You don't have to forgive a thing, only compact tolerance, compassion and pity. There but for God, the grace of God go I

and the big book on page 552. Many of you are aware of that passage gives you if you have trouble with that still gives you another way of dealing with resentments. It's the story of a woman who knew she would drink over her mother. She'd been sober for I think 20 years and she knew that if she didn't get rid of this resentment against her mother, she would drink. She didn't know what to do and she comes across a magazine article. No one's been able to tell me what that article is. I I looked at all this is a, a historians, but no one has yet been able to isolate that article.

But it's an article written by a clergyman who says if you have a resentment you can't get rid of, if you are so angry at a person you can't get rid of, then do this. Pray for that person to have everything you want out of life to happen to that person. Pray for that person, whether you mean it or not, for two weeks, day after day, and at the end of two weeks, you will have overcome your resentment. I had five people in my life when I first started this program whom I couldn't be in the same room with,

who I, whom I hated

and whom I resented for their existence. I won't go into details as to who they were, but

but they were five people.

One of them is a person who's who's dead now, who's a lawyer who had really wronged me, betrayed my trust and harmed a client of mine and done it in a really cavalier way without showing any concern or remorse for the effects of what he had done. And he was really loved by a bunch of other lawyers who didn't know this. And I couldn't talk about it. It was a private confidential matter. So it's nothing I could, nor did I want to gossip about it anyway. And I, I wanted to resist the revenge motive that I felt, you know, so I didn't want to talk about.

I had a case against him and I couldn't deal with him. It could be in the same room with him and at the same time

there was a case going on and I was completely screwing up the case because I was in this case and I was thinking, but I just want to get that guy, you know, I wasn't thinking about the case. I was thinking about dealing. So I took page 552. OK, Pray for him to have everything I want out of life. Well, what do I want out of life?

What do I really want out of life?

I want to be serene.

I want to be able to love. I don't want to be able to be loved.

I want to be useful. I mean, when you come down to what else do we want in our lives but something as basic as that? So I said, OK, I'm going to pray for X to hat, to be able to love and to be loved, to be serene and to be useful in life. And I suddenly was hit in the head. This guy had none of that. He was on to his fourth marriage. Children from the first two wouldn't talk to him because of how he had treated the first two his first two wives.

He was a superficial guy who was liked only by people who didn't really know him.

He was a drunk. He was taking all kinds of medication. Actually, he died at the age of 54 or something like that.

He was killing himself with all of the addictions and the torments that he was living through. He had nothing I wanted out of life, and I immediately felt sorry for him.

Sure, he had done something awful, but when he did something awful to me, he was doing something even worse to himself. He was losing part of the soul, if you will. Or you know, you know what I mean. I don't want to speak in any spiritual terms, but losing part of his humanity anyway. And I did the same with Hitler, who had no serenity, for whom there was no one he could trust, no nothing he could love. Completely unlovable man. Oh sure, people thought of him as incredible, but he knew the truth. I mean,

you know, he was looked up to as a God, but either he was either fooling himself and in his later years, I think he knew he was fooling others.

He did awful things. I don't forgive those things,

but as a man, I feel sorry for him.

I can tell you, and I don't speak from personal experience here, that the people I know in this program who use this method to deal with the horrible assaults and abuse that they have suffered in their lives have all been able to use this to tremendous effect. They are no longer enthralled. They are no longer in captivity to the people who did those things to them.

And because of that,

they, they have found this method just absolutely incredible.

So this is the way to overcome it and, and it's it's been amazing.

As you see, though, one important aspect of this is, is that the more they do harm to you or they do harm to others, the more they do harm to themselves. Now, this is going to become very important when it comes to immense because if if you have done something to me and I continue to allow that thing to be done to me, I am doing not just myself harm. I'm doing you harm

because you are continuing to do harm to yourself. And sometimes the greatest amend you can give to someone is to stop that person from doing harm to you. Yeah. You notice it's not a meant to yourself, it's meant to the person. Stop it. You know, in a very simple analogous situation, if I had a relationship with a person that was exploitative and was hurtful to me, emotionally abusive to,

and it's only an analogy, it certainly isn't anything like what's happened to people I know in this program.

So I don't want anyone to think that I'm equating that. I'm just giving an example

for me to say stop, this is wrong, don't do this anymore. This relationship has to end is the kindest thing I can do to that person as well as of course to myself. But the kind of thing I can do to that person is that person is no longer able to do that.

OK, the big book goes through all of this for one reason only at the moment, and that is to isolate our problems nicely where we've been at fault because we can't figure out where we've been at fault until we've dealt with them. And by the way, I because this is on a tape, I don't want to recommend non away literature. But if anyone wants to know about a particular book that really deals with this, I'd be happy to talk to them at another time. Give you the name of it. But but that's it's not only literature. So I don't want to recommend it on tape.

So the big book goes on. It says referring on page 67, referring to our list again,

Putting out of our minds the wrongs others have done, we resolutely looked for our own mistakes.

Now on this form you will see some dotted lines

and the big book says putting out of our minds that wrong the wrongs that others have done. If you fold the paper on these dotted lines, you will end up with column one right across from column four.

She got the two dotted lines. You fold there and you will find that column one and column four you will cross out. You will hide columns 1:00 and 4:00.

There are two ways of doing it. You'll figure it out. You can fold the paper at any rate, so the column one and column four are right next to each other because you want to put out of your minds the wrongs that others have done.

And now you've got the name and you've got the question, where had I been? Selfish, dishonest, self seeking and frightened. Now

what does selfish mean? Well, we found the definition of selfish in the discussion, the beginning of chapter to chapter how it works.

The definition of selfish is wanting my way. Period.

For whatever reasons wanting my way.

So if I put down Hitler, where am I selfish in relation to Hitler, wanting Hitler not to have existed?

I want my way now. My motives are absolutely pure there. I lost no one in the Holocaust. My family lost no one in the Holocaust. We had come over. My grandparents came over in the early 1900s from a, you know, so we lost no one.

So there's no, there's no dictionary definition of selfish there, but there sure is the big book definition of selfish there. I want the past not to have occurred.

I mean, it's just that simple. I want the Holocaust not to have occurred. Now when it comes down to an ex-girlfriend I may have had, my selfishness may be a combination. I wanted to show her how love could overcome her problems. I suppose that might be virtuous in some way. I want to show her how I could help her overcome her problems through love. Well, a little bit more mixed motives there

and I wanted to exhibit her to other people to show that I could be attractive to beautiful people.

Completely dictionary definition there. So those are three different selfishnesses in there where I want my way. So you can see there's a whole mixture of of reasons why when my daughter was on was was on the list when she was going through these difficult times, you know, I would come up selfishness, you know, I want her to do well. I want her to be different from who she was. And so many of my friends who grew up with difficult parents

wanted one or both would write down. I wanted my parents to be someone else's parents.

You know, I wanted or I wanted someone else's parents to have been my parents. That's probably a better definition. And I wanted something different.

So selfishness could be a whole gamut of things. And you'll discover different things as you go here. You're doing some thinking. This is the this is the only part where you're really doing some thinking.

What does dishonest mean? Well, there are three kinds of dishonesty. It seems to me at least one kind of dishonest is the kind we normally think of. You've stolen, you've lied, you've cheated. You know that the fraud, the falseness, the the active bits of dishonesty that we often do in our lives, that we've done in our lives.

The second kind of dishonesty is lying to ourselves. When I put down I want Hitler not to have existed

under dishonesty, I wrote down he died before you were born.

I mean, you have no power over that. What kind of a stupid wish is that? You're lying to yourself that somehow the world can change. The world that's already existed, that happened before you were born, should not have existed. There's a dishonesty there, or a dishonesty in relation to to girlfriends. You're living a lie. People will either be attracted to you or not because of yourself, not because of whom you got in your arm,

right?

So there's this assaultive line to yourself

or. Yeah, as if love could, could, could solve everything. It didn't you. I remember writing down about one of my girlfriends. You said to yourself, because I do remember saying this. She can give me all she's got and I'll show that love can triumph. And then she gave me all she had. Well, why am I mad at her for giving me all she had? I invited her to give me all she had. Believe me, love didn't triumph. But. But you know what I'm saying? Like, like, that's a dishonesty to myself. And then there's a third dishonesty that I think is extremely

important for Oars where people pleasers of which, as I said, many of us are, and that is that we don't tell the truth when the truth should be told,

that we lie back and don't tell the truth. And it can be as simple as not saying something that should be said when people are gossiping about someone or it might be as serious as saying stop this action, this is wrong. I won't accept this. I'm out of this relationship. I mean something as deep as that. Or it might be, as one of my friends discovered, I haven't, I haven't told the family about the sexual abuse I suffered when I was a kid by this uncle who still at this party is still being treated nicely by other people. And so other children might have suffered what?

I mean, that's, that's a dishonesty that my friend came to the conclusion that she had that she had committed for a very long time.

So dishonesty can sometimes be

something very, very deep and not just sort of being fraudulent to other people, but can be lying to yourself or not telling the truth to others. And I think that's a really, really important point.

I'll finish the definitions of self seeking and frightened and then it'll be a good time to break.

What is self seeking? That's the hardest question I've ever had to answer in my study of the big book because there isn't an easy answer. The best I can come up with is that self seeking, at the very least, is looking for other people to define you and how you feel about yourself. Sort of self seeking, seeking myself or my sense of self in other people, how they affect yourself,