Steps 6, 7, 8 and 9 at a Big Book study in Winston-Salem, NC

It's great to be here tonight. I have really enjoyed this, this commitment and, and the people in the Winston Salem area, the, the, this particular group, I've been to AA in a lot of different places and you know, this is good AA good, warm, friendly clubhouse type A A and I, I so appreciate it. I want to I want to start off tonight reading something from the pamphlet

Problems Other than Alcohol. This plant, this pamphlet was, was written by Bill W.

It's been changed over the years, but but he basically wrote this himself to address certain issues. But what I want to read is just a couple of sentences from it. This is on like page two of the pamphlet Problems Other than Alcohol

Sobriety. Freedom from alcohol through the teaching and practice of the 12 steps is the sole purpose of an AA group.

Groups have repeatedly tried other activities and they have always failed.

The teaching and practice of the 12 steps is the sole purpose of any AA group. This is probably an area where a lot of contemporary Alcoholics Anonymous groups fall short.

They're not teaching and they're not practicing the, the 12 steps the way, the way maybe some of the earlier members back in the day would have, would have done it. If, if to thoroughly follow the path allows us to rarely fail,

then teaching and practicing that path should be very, very important to us. Yet Alcoholics Anonymous, a lot of meetings that I've gone to, especially up around the Northeast, really fail to, you know, even use the recovery process as a topic sometimes. A lot of times the topics are things that are kind of irrelevant

to a solution to alcoholism.

And again, you know, when I showed up in North Carolina, I was really, really pleased. Practically every meeting I've gone to has been solution based. And, and I think you've got a higher degree of survivability if you're an alcoholic and you land at a meeting in North Carolina, then in a lot of other places, you know, I've been to, I've been to a A and many other countries. And there are countries that are actually hostile to the book, Alcoholics Anonymous, a few European

basically make the statement that the big book movement so prevalent in America is for our particular, our particular case outside the scope of RAA. You know, there's two, there's two countries that I know of that actually make that statement. And when you think about it, how do you how do you take the basic text out of

a society that's based on it? It doesn't make any sense. It would be like saying, you know, you can come into this calculus class, but don't be bringing your textbook with you.

You know, we don't want you to quoting any, any facts and figures. We just want your opinion on calculus, you know, wouldn't make any sense. And you know, so there are, there are some countries that really need to, need to gain a little bit of maturity to get to the point where they're going to be efficacious

for Alcoholics that show up. They're going to be a place where the Alcoholics can can really, really find a solution. Now, last week we went over, basically went over Step 5.

I'm going to pick it up down here on the bottom of page 75 into action returning home. This is what I stopped with. There's a, there's an exercise after you do the first step and it's called the returning home exercise. And that's basically where we, we, we find a place where we can be quiet for an hour and we do a guided meditation. And what that guided meditation is about is we need to ask ourselves,

are are we covering everything?

Are we being thorough with this recovery process? Did we leave anything out of step four? Step five? You know, did we really, do we really believe that we're an alcoholic? Do we really believe that there's a solution and that that there's a power greater than ourselves that we can hook into? Did we really make a decision

to go after the connection with that higher power? And

when I'm working the steps with somebody, what I'll usually do is I'll usually say, look,

if during your meditation, you come up with anything that, that you were, you know, you didn't put in your 4th step, you didn't tell me in the 5th step, there's anything that you have any questions with. I'll, I'll be available on the phone.

Because sometimes it's rare, but sometimes in the, in the quiet hour, some people will come up with something that, you know, they had left out or they'll, they'll get the courage to finally share the thing. You know, a lot of us have in our fifth step, the thing, you know, and that's, that's the thing that we just really are going to have a hard time admitting. And, you know, to get past that is really, really a good thing. I'm going to move on to page top of page 76.

If we can answer to our satisfaction that we've done the absolute best we can with the first five steps, we then look at step 6.

We have emphasized willingness as being indispensable is, in other words, in the third step, we really became willing to go to any lengths. We were shown what any lengths were by this book. One of the things that I, I, I have a problem with is before I knew what was going on, people were asking me, are you willing to go to any lengths? And I didn't know what any lengths looked like.

You know, I'm wondering, what does that mean? Am I going to have to sell flowers at the airport, You know? Well, what, what is that? Am I going to have to be celibate for the next 50 years? What exactly does that mean?

And again, a lot of times what we need to do is we need to offer our our prospects or the people that we're working with often the dignity of understanding what any lengths means. And that's, that's, that's covered in in the next chapter, which is basically working with others before we start taking people through the steps were to have them read this volume and then we can ask them, are you willing to go to any lengths? Because they're going to then know what any lakes looks like.

Are we now ready to let God remove from us all the things that which we have admitted are objectionable? This is a question. This is a step six question. Now it's pretty easy to say yes to this, especially when we've just gone through step four and Step 5 and step four, we live, we've lifted out every character defect, every problem, every issue that we have. We've we've, you know, filled that out in step four and then we've shared it in Step 5.

It's right in front of our face. These things that caused our failure at life, the things that were ashamed of, the things that we really wish we we, we hadn't done. They're all staring us right in the face because we've just done a step four and a Step 5. So when we ask ourselves are are we,

you know, are we ready to, to, to, to let God remove from us all the things which we have admitted are objectionable? It's easy to say yes, but like a lot of steps, we can only take it where we can take it now.

Can you now take them all? Everyone, If we still cling to something, we will not let go. We ask God to help us be willing. This is basically step 6. If we're hanging on to anything, that's okay. We can continue to move forward, but we need to start to ask God for the willingness to let that particular thing go. I want to tell a story that kind of illustrates, illustrates this

at at a certain level, we are, we are ready to let God remove defects of character from us.

OK, the, the things that cause us harm, we're ready to let go of. But there's some other things that we may not be completely willing to deal with right now. And I'm going to tell a story that kind of illustrates this little Joey, he's maybe about six years old, okay, He starts to get a toothache. Now he knows if he goes to his mother and says, mom, I've got a toothache, what will happen is he'll get the, he'll get the aspirin

brushed up. You know, he'll, he'll be given the aspirin, he'll be maybe put to bed early and the toothache will go away. He understands that,

but he doesn't go to his mother and tell his mother that he's got a toothache. What happens is he tries to keep it to himself. He tries to just, you know, hopefully it'll go away. And it's about 10:00 at night and he's in bed and he still can't sleep. And now he's finally got to go up and he's he's got to get out of bed and go tell his mother he's got a toothache

Hurts now. Why didn't he tell her right away? He knows that he would get the aspirin that would take away the toothache.

Well, the reason he didn't go to his mother right away, because he knows that, yes, the toothache will go away. But tomorrow morning there'll be a call made to Doctor Mengele of the dentist. And he's going to be shuffled off to the dentist and he's going to go in there. He's going to be strapped down in the seat. And you know, it's going to be drills and suction and and pokers and smoke and blood. And, you know, finally, after two or three hours, he's going to get out of that dentist chair and he's going to have perfect teeth,

OK? He knows he's going to have perfect teeth,

but that's why he doesn't tell his mother because he doesn't want perfect teeth. He just wants the toothache to go away. And a lot of times that's us. We don't want to be perfect people. We just don't want to have problems anymore,

you know what I mean?

So, so we can take this step at a certain level, yes, But we need to remember that the things that we're not willing to let go of, we need to pray for the willingness to let go of them.

Agnosticism. Agnosticism is basically this. AG means none and gnosis means knowledge. So basically agnosticism means we we just don't have any knowledge of

current agnosticism as it can be applied in Alcoholics Anonymous is basically not believing that God will work in this specific area of your life. God will not bring you to a better place in this specific area of your life. In other words, if I let God in and start to get, try to get direction from God about my job,

they'll step all over me because it's, you know, because it's a, it's a battlefield out there. I'm in sales. I can't be a wuss,

you know, I've got, I've got to be an animal out there, you know, So I'm not going to, I'm not going to follow spiritual principles at work.

You know, that's agnosticism, not believing that God is going to take you to a better place. How about your sex life? I don't know about you, but I wasn't real happy to say, okay, you know, God's going to now be in charge of my sex life. I was worried I'd never get laid again if God was God was going to be in charge of my sex life. You know, hold on a minute here.

Let's let's not go crazy with this stuff. You know what I mean?

But that's Kurt Ignost. This is so how, how do I know? You know what, what if I'm, if not, if I'm not willing to let God direct me in that area, how do I know? How do you know what you don't know? So if I'm not willing to let let God in on my work or, or my sex life or whatever your family life, whatever, then I need to be willing to ask to be willing. And that's really, that's really step 6.

When ready, we say something like this.

My Creator, I am now willing that you should have all of me good in bed. I pray that you now remove from me every single defective character which stands in the way of my usefulness to you and my fellows. Grant me strength as I go out from here to do your bidding. Amen. We have then completed step 7.

Understand we're moving through this stuff pretty quickly now. Now do you just go right through step six and seven and take about a minute and 1/2 with it and and never look back on it? I don't believe so. I believe step 6 and step seven are part of a lifetime process. I think I get put in front of my character defects. I get put in front of the, the selfishness and the self centeredness that I still have because it's not completely removed. I get put in front of that all the time.

So I am going to be facing these character defects. So I'm going to be facing becoming willing to have God remove them and then humbly asking God to remove them for quite, quite some time. But initially, as I go through the steps, I can move through these fairly quickly. A mistake I made early on,

a mistake I made when I was going through the steps the first time. And I just, I didn't have any clear guidance in my area that you, you just kind of, you winged it when it was when it was time for you to go through the steps, you just kind of kind of winged it because there really nobody knew what, what, what they were doing. AA in my area had devolved into a fellowship of sobriety and forgotten that it's actually a program of recovery. It just had

and so I decided after I did my first fist step that I would work on my character defects.

So anybody in here ever done that, worked on your character defects, had that workout for you? You know, I believe I'm powerless over my character defects just like I'm powerless over alcohol. If I could just decide to be unselfish, I would have probably tried it a long time ago. If I could have gotten rid of my anger or my anxiety or, or any other number of character defects or issues that I had. I

probably would have done so a long time ago. I'm not stupid. I knew that these character defects were causing me problems in my life, but I couldn't seem to get away from them, you know? Is anybody in here ever seen the game whack a mole? They take a mallet and a mole head will stick up and you'll, you'll try to whack that mold, but the moles drop down. Another one will pop over you go over. You're trying to. Another one's popping up over here.

That's that's what it was like with me trying to work on my character defects.

You know, one day I'd say I'm not going to be selfish to that, you know, and make it about an hour and a half until I got in front of somebody and then I'd be selfish. You know, well, I'm not going to do this. I'm not going to do that. And I was struggling to try to become better, become a better person. And it just didn't work. What I was doing was I was just whacking the mole

and my sponsor told me one time, Chris, if you keep whacking the mole, you could go blind.

So understand, understand that you don't have you don't have the power

to recreate yourself. This is not a self help program. This is a God help program. When you see this book in the self help section, you know that's the wrong place for it. Because if we can we, if we could have helped ourselves, we would have done so a whole lot longer ago than now. You know what I mean? What what this is is we, we lack the power. We don't lack the intelligence,

we don't lack the fortitude. You know, we don't lack, we don't, we don't lack the desire, we lack the power.

Lack of power is our dilemma. So we need that, we need to, we need to capture that power. We need to get close to that power. We need to align ourselves with that power so that the recreation of our life can start to take place. And if you, if you read the, if you read the 12 and 12, the 12 and 12 is very, very good with,

with step 6:00 and 7:00. There's a lot of expanded ideas in the 12:00 and 12:00. I still think it's, it's a very simple to take these steps, but I like what Bill writes in there. He writes a lot about humility. Humility really being defined for what what we see it as in Alcoholics Anonymous. Humility being an accurate self appraisal,

not not seeing yourself as less than what you are. Not seeing yourself as more than what you are. Inaccurate self appraisal.

Now my last drunk started somewhere around December 24th, 1989 and it lasted till somewhere around December 28th, 1989. It was like a five day drunken blackout and it was absolutely horrible. And what happened? What happened to me was when I was going through the DTSI got to a point where I couldn't live with alcohol

anymore. I couldn't live without it. I had to stop drinking. If you're alcoholic, you understand what I mean. There comes times when you just have to sober up. And I'm in the process of, of, of separating from alcohol and going through all the DTS and everything that, that involved. And I remember laying back on a couch and and you know, I'm hallucinating and I saw a demon come out of the ceiling.

This demon was coming down to eat my face.

It was like a big bullhead, you know, I could. I could see the snot coming out of its nose. I mean, this was real. You know,

I'm sitting there hallucinating and I screamed. I screamed. God help me. Like, you know, like, like just from the depths of my soul, you know, this, this, this movement, it scared me to death. I thought this thing was going to drag me off to hell.

I really did. And I screamed in utter desperation. God, please help me. And I haven't had a drink since then. You know that that was that was the last drink of alcohol I had was prior to prior to that experience. Now I believe God hears these prayers.

I believe that that there's a connection between our ability to move away and separate from something. I believe that there's a connection to our desperation and our humility and our honesty and

accessing the power that allows us to do so. Does that make any sense Now? I think in in the 12 and 12 Bill is kind of asking us to look at our character defects like we would look at our alcohol. Yes, God separated from us, us from alcohol, but can he separate us from some of these grosser handicaps? I believe is is kind of what it says in in in that book and I believe that we need to look at.

Separating from these character defects with the same kind of humility. We can't go into this thinking that we can do it. You know, it's, it's my job. I'm just going to be, I'm just going to do a better job. That's not humble. That's not from humility. Humility would basically be admitting our defeat. If, if we, if we could have done better with these things, wouldn't we have, you know, we're not stupid. We, we don't lack intelligence. We lack power,

so we're going to God, asking God for the power, you know, help me, help me with this stuff because I just can't seem, I can't seem to do it on my own. I can't seem to become a better person. I can't seem to grasp this spiritual living the way I should. I keep retreating back into selfishness and self centeredness. Help me now, there are many people in here who are parents, right? Everybody, everybody in here kind of understands what it what it, what it's like to be a parent.

If you don't, you understand what it's like to be a kid. Think for a minute. Let's say, let's say you had a, a young son, about 8 years old, and that young son came up to you and said something like this. Dad or mom. Listen, I know I haven't been a very good kid. I know that I could have done a better job.

You know, I should have done a better job with a lot of things. I know that I'm a little selfish and you know, I don't, you know, I don't do enough of the things that I need to do. Would you help me to be a better kid? Could I come to you for guidance and direction on what I should be doing and how I should be doing it? Can I rely upon you to help me become a better kid?

What wouldn't you do for a child that would come up to you and say something like that?

You know, it's probably unheard of stuff like that happening, but what what, what would you not do for your child if they came to you in that, with that kind of humility? Really honestly, wanting to just be a better kid. I think that's what it's like when we go to God with this stuff. God help us be a better, better person. When you look at the prayer for step seven, it's a selfless prayer.

We're asking that God remove the defects of character that stand in the way of our usefulness to God

and to our fellows, not the things that bother us.

It's a very selfless prayer. And I believe this stuff happens. My first exposure to Alcoholics Anonymous, I was terrified. I had social anxiety phobia like you wouldn't even believe. I sat in the meetings hoping nobody would call on me, scared to absolute death of raising my hand and sharing. And I actually started forcing myself to go to meetings where they went around the room because I knew I, I knew I had to learn to share. I knew

that was necessary, so I put myself in meetings where they would call on me because and then when I finally started raising my hand to share, it was something it was like, I mean, you know, my self esteem was just so shot. I was just so I had such anxiety about about talking in front of more than one or two people

now that all that almost got removed right away. Moving through this step work because it blocked me off from God and my fellow man. How am I going to be any good at all if I can't even talk? So that's one of the character defects that got removed.

But there were other character defects that I wanted to be removed and I was praying for them to be removed. But maybe it maybe I wasn't willing or maybe it wasn't quite time. You know, I don't think any of us become perfect in Alcoholics Anonymous. As a matter of fact, I'm kind of glad of that because I don't know about you, but I don't really like perfect people. You ever met somebody that's perfect?

It's horrible. You know, I mean, so seriously, a lot of times it's our imperfections that make us lovable.

So the defects of character that get removed are not always the ones that we want removed when we want them removed. We still have to participate in this process and let God decide, you know, what's going to change and what isn't. And what we have to do is we have to stay in the right spiritual atmosphere

for these changes, these defects of character to be removed.

And the best possible spiritual atmosphere to be in for the removal of your character defects is to become willing to make direct amends to the people and institutions where your character defects have caused harm, and then actually go out and make direct amends

to the people and institutions that your character defects have harmed. Now, you know, this isn't something that I was really looking forward to, you know, when I first came into a A and saw the steps up on the wall. I'm like, I'm like, you know, make direct amends to all those people. You have got to be kidding me.

How is that relevant? You know, it's relevant in a very, very

important and powerful way.

I want to tell the story of a guy I sponsor and I got a call from him today. I don't hear from him much anymore, but he's still doing great. He's working with other Alcoholics. He's the call was not about him. It was about, you know, this guy that I'm working with. How should I handle this? You know, he's just a, just a great, great AA. He's also, he's also an NA member and you know, he's also a really strong church member and his whole life is about, you know, helping people. And when I was first working with him,

I'm actually, I'm actually coming out of a store. We went into a store before a meeting and I saw him pocket something, you know, and when we get outside, I'm like, I'm like, what? You, you, you, you stole some, you put some in your pocket. And he's like, no, I'm like, you took, you took something, you took something from, from the 711 and put it in your pocket. What did you do? He goes, he goes, oh, that's just, that was the stuff in the front.

I'm like, what do you mean it's just stuff in the front? He goes, Oh yeah, you know, they put it there, they got budgets. They know you're going to take it.

I'm like, I'm like that. No, no, no, no, no.

You stole Fred, he goes. Oh, I've been doing that my whole life.

I'm like, I'm like, I want you to go home and I want you to think about what you were doing. And he comes back. He comes back. He's listening. He's a good AA. He's working through the steps with me. And he comes to the conclusion that, yes, it was stealing. You know, it was a mild form of stealing, but it was stealing. And,

and because he was willing to go to any lengths, he became willing to go and make amends to, to all of these stores that he had stolen from. So we got a list together of all the stores and he he made a value judgment. He's listen, this guys making a lot of money. It's like the biggest Mason in New Jersey, you know, so he's making a lot of money.

So we put together how much he probably stole from all these places and he went around and he started paying these places back. You know, I've been stealing for 20 years, you know, off your front counter. Here's somebody you know, and he went around and he made direct events to all these places. Now, let me ask, let me ask you a question. Do you think he still steals when he goes into seven Elevens?

No way this experience has changed him. The best possible spiritual atmosphere that you can be in for the removal of a character defect

is to become willing to make amends where that defect has caused harm and actually go out and make amends where that defect of character has caused harm. This shows God, you know, a level of humility that just by saying God, you know, keep me out of the jackpot does not. You know you're willing to, you're willing to take action,

and it's that action that enables you to recreate your life. Alright, let's start reading. Let's read a little bit about step 8 here.

Now we need more action without which we find that faith without works is dead. There's a transitional sentence or so in between every step and it's always pushing us forward. It's always next we launched or, or you know, you know, now or, or you know, right here it's, it's says we need more action or because faith without works is dead. In other words, just thinking about this stuff, we will die. We need to actually take action on this stuff.

Let's look at steps 8:00 and 9:00. We have listed all persons we have harmed and to whom we are willing to make amends. We made it when we took inventory

a lot of times back in the day where when I was getting sober, sponsors or people that you did fist that's with told you to burn the fist step when you were done with it. OK, soon as you do the fish step, you know, burn it and the ashes can go up to God. Well, you're kind of screwed when you get to step 8 if you burned your inventory because you're using, you're using a lot of the material off of it to put together your a step list.

Where, where does it come from? It comes from column four in the resentment inventory. Where were you selfish, dishonest, self seeking or frightened? It comes from. It comes from the fear inventory of basically who did you harm by having the fear. You need to look at all your fears to see who who was in the line of fire who suffered because you had those fears and then in the harms to others, the sex inventory answering those nine questions,

who did we hurt? You know what? How did we hurt them? We can we can take all of that information and turn it into an A step list. We subjected ourselves to a drastic self appraisal. Now we go out to our fellows and repair the damage done in the past. We at least attempt to repair the damage done in the past. We attempt to sweep away the debris which is accumulated out of our effort to live on self will and run the show ourselves.

If we haven't the will to do this, If we still have a little bit of trepidation, a little bit of anxiety about going back to old bosses, you know, old boyfriends or girlfriends going back to, you know, ex wives or ex husbands or going going back to friends that we screwed over or places that we stole from or robbed from or whatever. If we still have trepidation about that, if we haven't the will to do that, we ask until it comes. So if you're not willing to make complete amends to them

all, you're supposed to start a prayer regiment. You're supposed to every single day, probably twice a day,

ask God to become willing to make amends for these defects of character. Remember, it was agreed at the beginning that we would go to any lengths for victory over alcohol and sometimes these links are needed.

I Probably there are still some misgivings as we look over the list of business acquaintances and friends we have heard. We may feel different. We we, we may feel uncomfortable about going to some of them on a spiritual basis.

Let us be reassured to some people we need not and probably should not emphasize the spiritual feature on our first approach. We might prejudice them. At the moment we are trying to put our lives in order, but this is not an end in itself. Our real purpose is to fit ourselves to be of maximum service to God

and the people about us. Remember, we're trying to move away from a foundation built on selfishness and self centeredness to a foundation built on love and service. That's the only that's the only way for us to survive this unbelievably aggressive illness known as alcoholism that kills 90% of the people who have it by drinking themselves to death. OK, this is a serious illness and the only aggressive enough treatment is the steps,

and that means actually going out and making amends. One of the things that I ask people who aren't really willing to do these amends are is it possible? If you don't do these, immense alcohol can go back in your body. Is it possible? Sometimes I need to ask myself that. Sometimes it needs to be as black and white as this. Do the amends

die in alcoholic death? One or the other? Which one do I? Which one do I want to do?

You know, sometimes doing the amends is is, is, is is. Sometimes doing the immense is nothing compared to putting alcohol back in my body and seeing demons come out of the ceiling to eat my face. I'll go and I'll do the amends. But a lot of times we just kind of shy away from this stuff.

It is seldom wise to approach an individual who still smarts from our injustice to him and announce that we have gone religious.

In the early days of a when this book was written, all of the members were in the Oxford Group or just leaving the Oxford Group. The Oxford Group was a religious organization. It was very, very much a Christian organization. So a lot of the early examples of Immense were basically people going and saying, you know,

you know, I've had a conversion experience. I'm now a Christian and I'm trying to change my life.

Bill is kind of saying that maybe that's not maybe that's not the way to go. Maybe we need to be basically saying that we were wrong and we want to change our life and leave the religious stuff out of it. I think a lot of times people will be more apt to respect our approach if we're just trying to set right the wrong rather than we've had some conversion experience and you know, and we want to change. A lot of times they'll think we're a crackpot. But if we go back and we actually

know that we need to amend the way we have been living, we need to make

restitution, we need to try to set right the wrong

because that's very important to us now because we want to live in a different way. A lot of times people will respect this. It says in this book that nine times out of 10, the unusual, you know, the unexpected will happen

will be shown a very, very generous response. And I know that that's been my experience too.

So if we go there on a religious basis, it says in the prize ring this would be called leading with the Chen. Why lay ourselves open to being branded fanatics or religious bores? We may kill a future opportunity to carry a beneficial message. Now, I understand that sentence now from experience. I've made some amends that have later translated into

inability to help. I'll I'll tell the story of one of them right now. I had to make direct amends to a niece.

Uh, this is, this was somebody who would experience me drinking whenever she would visit with her mother over Christmas or Thanksgiving or whatever, you know, Chris would be drunk out of his mind. And there was something about her I didn't like. She reminded me of myself is really what it was, you know what I mean? And she had character defects that were like mine. And, and you know, there's nothing worse than having a mirror shoved up in your face. So I I would say things to this, to the to my niece

that an uncle just shouldn't say. I had an attitude toward her which was really unfair.

So as I'm, as I'm doing my four step, as I'm putting my A step list together, it becomes very apparent I need to make direct amends to my niece.

OK, I make direct amends one day. And basically what I do is I list out everything I'm clear on that I was wrong about the things that I did to her that were wrong.

And she just couldn't believe it. She couldn't even talk. She's like, you know, no one has ever done this to to me before. I, I don't even know what to say. She really was blown away because, you know, I had AI had a sense of humility about all this. Now about a month or two goes by and all of a sudden I get a phone call

and guess who it is? It's my niece. She's in a psychiatric hospital after trying to take her own life with a drug overdose. And who did she call? Did she call her mother? No. Did she call her father? No. She called me because she knew I would understand

that never would have happened if I didn't make amends to her.

And basically what happened was, you know, I told her you you need to seek, you need to seek professional help. And she had a very abusive father, a real sick father that she grew up with. He would try to scare her by by doing this. If you don't behave, I'm going to take you to the head shrinkers

and scared her to death by thinking that these, these psychiatrists who are gonna just torture her, you know, And so, so she, she, you know, she was balking at this and I was able to say no, no, no. Listen, you know, I've had counseling myself, you know, don't worry about it. You're, you're actually going to probably enjoy it if you get a counselor that you can relate to. And she started counseling and she was in counseling for years. And now she's, she's doing great. She moved away from

all of those things that were dragging her down

and that probably wouldn't have happened if I didn't make direct amends to her. So you know, when it says, when it says in here that we may kill a future opportunity to carry a beneficial message, We always need to remember to try to do these immense right and leave the leave the line of communication open.

Because a number of times when I've done immense, those people that I did immense to called me up later for help, whether it was for themselves or someone they knew.

They understood that there was somebody out there who is in the process of recovering from alcoholism who had an answer. And I became I became helpful. I became helpful. So you never know where these amends are going to go.

Our man is sure to be impressed with the sincere desire to set right the wrong.

He's going to be more interested in a demonstration of goodwill than our talk of spiritual discoveries. So a lot of times what we need to do is we need to keep this focused on setting right the wrong and, and not getting involved in, in a lot of the a lot of the other stuff.

We don't use this as an excuse for shying away from the subject of God when it will serve any good purpose. We are willing to announce our convictions with tact and common sense. The question of how, OK, so if somebody asks you, well, you know, what's going on, you can say I'm, you know, I'm trying to live a spiritual life.

And if they start asking you questions, you can get deeper and deeper into it as it's appropriate, as it's appropriate for each person that you're talking to with tact and common sense. Today I have, I have no problem telling people that I, I have certain disciplines, certain prayer and meditative disciplines that where I try to, I try to capture the will of God, whatever that might be, Whether, you know, I try to figure out what God

would be for me each day and then ask for the strength and direction to carry that out. That's how I try to live my life today. I'm not afraid to tell anybody that, but I'm not I'm not just going to go up to my boss, you know, and say, Oh, you know what I do, you know, they're they're going to, they're going to probably promote somebody else if I do that, you know,

so you need to use tact and common sense. Now there's a whole bunch of different type of immense.

Here's we're going to start with how to approach the man we hate. Okay, Looking back on our resentment inventories, there's going to be a number of people on our resentment inventories that we need to approach with amends. And here's what it says about that. The question of how to approach the man we hated will arise.

May be that he has done us more harm than we have done him, and though we may have acquired a better attitude toward him, we are still not too keen about admitting our faults. How how about this? I think we all have one of these. Usually when I sit somebody down and they come over and they're starting to put together an 8 step list,

what usually happens is there's people that they point out to me that I don't care what you say. I am never going to make amends to the son of a bitch. I don't even know why I put him on the list. I put him on the list just to be thorough, but I don't want to be giving you the impression that I'm ever

make amends to this son of a bitch. A lot of times we, we have these, all right? A lot of times we have these.

I want, I want to tell us, I want to tell a story. This is a this is my favorite sponsor. I do big book workshops all over the planet with this guy. Okay, he had one of these and when he's going through the steps with me, he did that He pointed this out. He goes,

you know what this guy did? This guy sexually molested my underage daughter. If you think I'm going to be making amends to him, you're wrong. I said. I said, OK, OK, let's do the amends you're willing to do now. He had about 60 amends. He does 59 of them

and he calls me up and he goes, God damn it. He goes, I got this one immense left, like

come over, I got to talk to you about this. I got to talk to you about this, and he comes over to my ass. He goes, what am I going to do? What am I going to do? I got to do this. He saw that by doing 59 amends, he saw what happened in his life and he also knew that hanging on to that one was going to corrode his spiritual condition.