The Christmas convention of the Serenity Group in Stockholm, Sweden

So when I rang my sponsor earlier to say if there was any advice he could give me, he said make sure your trousers are done up,

like sure your nose is clean and tell the truth. So obviously I rang someone else to see what they said and they said step three-step 11. That's all you need to know.

I have a few notes because generally don't talk for this long. So

hello, my name is Tariq and I'm an alcoholic

and definitely feeling like an alcoholic at the moment. What's the acronym? Fear, Face everything and recover or excuse my language, fuck everything and run.

And I do swear quite a lot, so I apologize. Now. That's been my story. Run, yeah. Run from my emotions, run from situation, run from anything. It's obviously very different. Today I'm going to just explain who I am, what I do. A bit like how it was,

how I got into this mess, how I got into recovery and what it's like now and what it's been like through recovery.

I am not a circuit speaker,

and obviously in the last few weeks I thought I'd better train to be one very quickly,

but I found a reading that said it all to me, which was never talked down to an alcoholic from any moral or spiritual hilltop. Simply layout the kit of spiritual tools for his inspection, show him how they worked with you, and offer him friendship and fellowship. Simple. And it's not about preaching. So I'm eight years sober. I have a sponsor, I have a Home group. In fact I have two sponsors

because I'm an alcoholic.

I have a Home group which is Soho Sober in London. There's a meeting there at 6:00 on a Tuesday night. I do service. I'm a secretary of a meeting straight after that one and I'm involved in a A quite strongly. Now that wasn't always the case. I have sponsees, some of them even ring me and that has been the making of me have passing the message on to others because that's when I knew I knew something about what I was talking about.

That's when I knew the program had settled in me, when I could pass that on and when I freely gave that information out or those feelings, I felt amazing. And I'm just a conduit. You know, I'm going to use the word God in this.

You know, talking today. I'm not entirely sure what God is. Actually. I don't really care anymore. I used to, but it's just fine. It's not me. It's something bigger than me. It's a higher power. So God's just an easy shorthand for me. And I believe it's that work just works through me and helps others. I'm just a conduit for that. Obviously I feel good

after I've done it and sometimes I even feel a bit proud, but something normally comes along and slaps me for that one.

I I believe I've been an alcoholic since day one. I call it disease, a condition of genetic. I don't really intellectualise that anymore. But ever since I can remember I've displayed the traits of being an alcoholic and obsessive. I've never felt comfortable in my own skin. I've never felt comfortable in the company of others.

I've always felt that hole around here, here or wherever it is, and it's something I've always needed to fill. And I've used many, many things to fill it. The thing that worked the best and the thing that nearly killed me was alcohol. I have been into drugs. I'm not going to go on about that today, but anything work, sugar, sex, you name it. Yeah. People pleasing as you've spoken about before. Anything to alter the way I feel. I've run away from things

of feeling

from my life. And I was sitting there with Tom and little Hugo and looking in Little Hugo and I have two children of my own. They're a bit bigger now. I felt like crying. I felt I really miss my kids. I'm only away for a night, but I really miss them. I really love them. That's obviously very easy to do when you're looking at a little baby and you think of your kids at home rather than telling you to go away or not going to bed. But I have feelings now and I'm really comfortable with them. And that is a direct result of

doing this program before I came into recovery and a while into recovery, I was AI was a brick wall. I didn't want to know or I was crying at the news. I didn't have emotions in the appropriate places. I was,

I was upside down. And if there's some new people in the room, forgive me for the next bit, but it will make sense. The 12 steps

I used to live the the opposite and my Swedish is so good I can read those. No, it's not. So

I lived the complete opposite of those steps. When I first came into the rooms, I looked at them and went, yeah, alcohol's not the problem, it's you lot.

My life is not unmanageable. It's everybody else.

There is nobody greater than me. I am pretty much God

I Step 3. There's no God, I told you so I'm not gonna hand my will over. Step four. Don't think about things too much, just act on instinct.

Step 5. Certainly don't tell anyone what you're up to.

Ever

step 6? Those character defects are assets. I'm a warrior,

not a warrior. Step 7 is irrelevant. Step eight, never apologize.

They're all idiots.

Step 10 again, act on instinct. Don't think about what you've done, just get to the next day and smash through it. Step 11 Sorry, I did talk about there was no God. Don't you remember? Don't pray and meditation's for hippies

and step 12 don't help anyone 'cause they're only out to get you.

And,

and that is towards the end of my drinking. Perhaps the last four or five years was exactly what I was training myself to think and feel because pain was too much to even approach anything that was spiritual or self developing. The truth is I was so scared and so broken and so frightened that that was a good way to live as far as I was concerned. In the last few years of my drinking, I was aggressive.

I was a daily drinker. I drank some form of blackout most of the time.

I held down a very, very successful job which kept going up. Believe it or not, but my mental state was going down in an equal measure. Was married to I still am married to the same woman. Quite how that's happened, I don't know. She's, she's as mental as I am. Or a St. or maybe both, I'm not sure.

And I had everything, I had money in the bank. But the do you want to know what bailiffs are? You know, the guys coming round to collect the money that I hadn't paid for tax, but I had money in the bank because I was too frightened to open the envelopes that came in the post.

Yeah,

people wouldn't talk to me anymore. My parents actually. Let's talk, not talk about my parents. People were actively avoiding me.

I was going out in the evenings trying to have a fight with guys in the street, I was going to bars and pubs occasionally trying to have affairs, thankfully failing abysmally. I'm really glad of that. But what woman in her right mind would want to go with some guy that's drunk and desperate?

Actually, maybe there's quite a few. Sorry,

but I was trying to mess up my life more than I'd had already. I didn't know what to do with myself anymore. I'm just going to rewind slightly. My first taste of alcohol was from my mother's and father's drinks cabinet, and I think I remember that being about the age of nine.

And that was it. I totally understood what this substance did for me. I totally understood that this was the path to go down because for the first time in those ten to nine years, I felt okay and I continued to do that. And my history is of, like I say, of drugs and alcohol. But alcohol always did that job

and then it stopped working. So the best friend turned into the enemy

and I'll just say none of what I say is very original. It's something things that I've learnt from many people in many meetings, from people who've been around longer than me or people who've been in a couple of days. This is not cleverness, this is just the absorption of being in a lot of meetings over the last eight years and listening, which is something that I've become fairly good at.

Alcohol stopped working and I just want to explain the process that I was in towards the end,

which was, and we'll take it from the start of the day and the start of the day was Waco come to, as they say, not wake up, just come to.

And the first thought it was either I've done it again or kill yourself, you piece of shit. And I used to have these rafters above my bed and they were great for a piece of rope, I thought. And one day I might just do it.

Then it's like, get yourself up and get to work. So I used to get to work and that's all I could do is drink and work. Really. I'd end up going right today. You're not going to drink. And this is five, 7-8 years of this thought process almost every single day,

right? You're not going to drink today, get to afternoon. Or you think, actually, I don't feel so bad. Maybe one, I work hard, I'm a good guy, I look after things, I earn loads of money, da, da, da, da. And wine is food, isn't it? Yes, it's a food group

and start warming up to the idea of going home and starting to drink again. And my drinking is very, very boring. Yeah, it is. The last few years we're at home on my own and I'm, please forgive me, a beautiful wife upstairs, waiting for me to come upstairs and me sitting down with my bottles and sometimes my drugs, not wanting to know about her or what she wants and just to sit in front of the TV

watching things I probably shouldn't watch. And that's all I wanted. And if you'd said that you could live the rest of your life with a good amount of money and you could, I could sit in a dark and flat with ATV and a box of pizzas and a load of wine and a lot of marijuana, I'd say that's a pretty good life.

And that is the truth. You know, that's what I wanted and that's how I operated. But something inside me kept getting me up and going to work and kept me going. I knew there was something wrong. But like I say, it wasn't alcohol. It was society, it was politics. It was somebody else. It was the fact that I was married, it was Warburg, it was the man, it was my upbringing. It was no, I didn't believe in God. Sorry. So it wasn't God

and I tried everything I and, and none of the things I mentioned from this point on I criticise, but for practising alcoholic and drug user, they're never really going to work. So I decided to become a Buddhist for a bit and then I tried kinesiology, which is where somebody presses your limbs to see that you need more potassium or something. And I didn't need more potassium, I just needed to stop drinking. I tried healers, I tried meditation, I tried yoga,

I tried a lot of things and they didn't work, funnily enough, because I basically was crazy and I drank maybe 3 bottles of wine every single night and maybe more at weekends. And I thought I never really believed it was the alcohol.

Never. I didn't want to believe it. And one of the things I used to say to people was if it all goes wrong, as long as I can afford a bottle of wine and a McDonald's, I'll be fine. You know, every day that's complete lie. You know, one bottle of wine, forget it. It needed it had to be three or four. And and that's as a 30 something year old man was where my mentality was, which was

is a prison, prison of my own making.

And that same process every single day, wake up, want to commit suicide or you hate yourself or how did I do that again? And I never really associated what I took and what I drank with my state of mind. I now know, of course, that alcoholism, I can be an alcoholic without a drink, but for that first process, that first part of recovery, I never made that connection.

And I'm going to just Fast forward a bit. I I ended up

having a breakdown and meeting a therapist who was 20 years sober who used to tell me for 10 months I used to go to see her every month every week. Sorry,

I used to pay money and she used to go. You don't need to pay me any money. You just need to go to a A and I'll go. Yeah, that's really interesting. But I've got a serious problem. And she went. Yes, you have. It's called alcoholism. And you need to go A to a A and you don't need to pay me. Yeah, but can we just go on to the thing about my parent? No. Why don't you just stop drinking first? Well, it's not really appropriate. You don't understand this, that and the other. And this woman was 20 years sober, bless her. And she,

she saved my life. Really.

Eventually I went just to shut her up

and that first meeting was in complete disaster. I was in a basement in a part of town where I live. A drunk guy fell down the stairs and nearly killed the greeter

and I didn't know what was going on. I was listening to people

and I was scared.

Some of the words were going in, some were bouncing off, but a couple of sentences just stayed with me.

And the ones were once I have one drink, I can't stop. And I was like, that's a bit like me.

Yeah, if I don't drink, I don't drink. But if I have one, then all bets are off. And that stayed in my head. And that sort of little gem just kept me going back once a week for the next couple of months. And I totally ignored all the suggestions. I didn't get a sponsor. I didn't speak to anyone. I was buying a bottle of wine on the way home. But then something happened. I did stop drinking.

I stopped drinking for three months, still with no sponsor, no program, nobody not speaking to anyone. I used to scuttle into meetings at last minute and then run out the next. And the one time I did speak to a guy. This

annoyingly good looking sort of athletic guy who said, yeah, I'm an alcoholic and a risk junkie and I went, why can't I be a risk junkie? That sounds far better,

but I sort of chose to ignore him

and I like I said, I stopped for a few months, but no program, no nothing. So it was an interesting period. It was like, wow, I can actually stop but I don't feel very good. And I went away on holiday, had one glass of wine with a meal and then was out for the next year and a half.

And for my,

my lesson in progressive illness and you mentioned it earlier is that it is a progressive illness because even that brief period that I stopped when I went back out, my drinking was to kind of ferocity that it hadn't had before. And it was bad before. It was like I couldn't get enough down my neck. I wasn't so much throw up a sort of leak and it was I would lie in bed with red wine sort of pouring out of me.

It's a strange thing to watch. And my wife was horrified.

And then my bright idea was that actually, and this is the last time I mentioned drugs, that heroin would be a cure for alcoholism.

That's amazing thinking, isn't it? That's right. Seriously intelligent thinking. Heroin as a cure for alcoholism. Thankfully, there was enough fear in me to not make that happen for too long. Yeah, it it was a it was a relatively short thought process. Thank God. Because actually, if I think I'd gone there fully, I wouldn't be standing here today. And the fact that I'm actually standing here today is a miracle in itself because in those days, I wouldn't fly. I wouldn't get on the subway,

I wouldn't get on a bus. I'd only travel by taxi. I was. So I didn't go to the theater, I didn't go to the cinema, I didn't go out unless there was a drink in it. And certainly I even going to parties was a

huge torment for me because actually I couldn't drink like I the way I wanted to drink and the way I wanted to drink was lying on a sofa till I passed out. Or like I say in that flat with the curtains down and the TV with some things I shouldn't watch and pizzas. And that's how I wanted, I want to be completely alone, completely cocooned and switched off anaesthetised.

So yeah, it is a miracle that I'm standing here today. I was in Italy last weekend, I'm here this weekend. I've travelled all over the world this year and in the last eight years life has opened up. But I'll come to that in a minute. So I ended up going to rehab, thankfully a 12 step program within the rehab. And then I came straight into the arms of a A after that. And I got my first sponsor at that first meeting that I came back to and that was Soho Sober where I, you know, I've been secretary and washer upper

and greeter and treasurer and a few other things.

And

through those years, I mean, it's not a long time compared with some of you in this room and it seems like an impossibly long time compared to others, I'm sure. But in those years it has been an amazing, wonderful journey. There have been me digging my heels in and totally refusing to do stuff or avoiding it in my case because I'm so much of A people pleased or I just sort of avoid the issue. There have been amazing revelations. There's been periods of intense pain but throughout the whole process I've been carried

by the people in a A and I look at my recovery in two ways meetings and the connection I have with the people in a A, the people that because it is a disease of perception. The people that tell me how I am looking at things. Yeah, because one part of my brain manufacturers bullshit and the other half buys it. Yeah. And so on at any given moment in any given day that transactions going on and I have no

of reality. So I ring up somebody, mainly my friend Andy in a A and go Andy, I'm thinking this and he goes yeah, you're an alcoholic. How about thinking of it like this and go oh, thanks mate. And that's how it is these days. It's just like checking.

I'm thinking this. Yeah. You're mad. Thanks. Thanks, mate. I know. Cheers,

I run most things by people in AAI have daily contact, I go to three to four meetings a week and I have a therapist still who I see once a month now. But she's 20. I don't know. She's 28 years clean and sober

and that is the framework that I have to live in

because no matter how long or short I've been clean and sober, it's still there for me.

Certain fundamental things have changed massively, but the fear and anxiety is still there. It's far smaller than it used to be. But, and we'll come on to this when I go through my version of the steps again, but my defects are still there and there's something I have to work on on a daily basis.

My perception is still altered at times, but that's getting better.

But if I don't go to a meeting for maybe three or four days,

I'm straight back, not fully, but enough. And my I say that the recovery is in two sort of parts for me is, is that daily contact with the people that keep me sane and that contact with the meetings and the message that reminds this alcoholic who has the brain of a goldfish who forgets on a daily basis what's good for him. You people remind me, The people in my Home group remind me. My friends remind me. My sponsor reminds me. Because no matter how many times I say it to myself,

next day, I seem to forget some of it.

And maybe that doesn't happen when you get into 2030 years, but certainly still happens for me. And the other part of my recovery is the steps which allow me to work and operate within the life on life, on life's terms. They provided the psychic change that allow me to, that allows me to stay sober on a daily basis. They have allowed me to grow up.

I was 36 when I came in and I think the last eight years have been

when this man has actually grown up. Yeah, when my ability and we were talking down, Tom and I were talking about it earlier, the tools to operate with life, operate in life have become available to me. And it's like that reading that I've actually learnt how to live life on life's terms. Still don't like it sometimes,

but, and that comes, as you know, we come back to 3:00 and 11:00 with those things.

I've jumped a few things, but I will go back and I'm sorry it's not a linear chair, but that's the way my mind works. I have to speak sort of from my gut and my heart. If it's really scripted, I don't feel it. And The thing is, in this program, every step of the way I've had to feel what's going on. My intellectors have been very little use to me in this program because intellectually I'm amazing,

I think.

And intellectually I got to the situation where heroin was a cure for alcoholism and that drinking 3 or 4 bottles of wine every night was a good thing. And so you see where I'm going with that,

and it's a huge amount of humility, that and humility in the good sense of the word that I've had to learn, which is,

I don't know a huge amount.

What I do know has been taught to me or I've picked up in some of these books. And then actually, that's a wonderful thing in itself because the burden of knowing everything when I was an active user was so hideous that of course I had to keep drinking. Yeah. The fact that I had finally admitted I didn't know what to do anymore. I finally admitted I needed help

and that I didn't have the power to deal with this alone was what we got me clean and sober. The fact that I could actually go. I don't know what to do. I'm

excuse my language, I'm fucked. I don't know where to go with this anymore. I've tried everything and nothing's working. I want to die,

so that's why I have to feel this, and that's why steps that some people talk about that worked immediately for me have taken months if not years to work. My amends didn't pay dividends for some time until I understood the process. I made the amends and then time later I came to peace.

That's my story. Some people get it straight away. I have actually changed sponsors in the time, and I think my new sponsor works in a slightly different way to my old one. But what I needed with my old sponsor was what I got, what I needed. I got a fast track into the program because frankly, if he hadn't been a bully and hadn't pushed me through it, I would have wandered off. Yeah, I would have decided that my attention, well my attention span was not long enough and I would have wandered off and had he not beat me over the head,

it, even though I didn't have a full understanding at times, I would have gone. So it was the right thing for me.

I've talked about the meetings and staying close to those. I'm lucky I live in London, there's 600 meetings a week. I have to try really hard to miss one,

still do occasionally,

and the fellowship of those has kept me on straight and narrow. And the service in particular, I've rejuvenated my recovery in the last couple of years by being very active in service because actually I want to stand just outside that door with one eye looking in. That's where I'm more comfortable and I don't want to have to look at anyone in the face

or actually get involved because

not 'cause I'm too good, just 'cause I'm frightened. And the familiarity of regular service in a A keeps me in the middle of the room and it keeps me interested. It keeps me in contact with people. And I've seen it time and time and time again over the years when people just start to distance themselves, they disappear. It happens too often and you can see it. You can. And I've done it when I start sitting

at the back and then I'm disappearing a little bit early and I don't go for coffee.

And I still to this day, get a little bit funny about going for coffee. Well, I've got too much to do. I'm a bit busy. I better go back to the office.

Kids haven't seen me today.

I need to go for coffee. I need to go to that second meeting. I need to go to that first meeting. Because everything I put in front of this tends to go wrong. Now, part of me hesitates to say that because I have an incredibly busy, successful life these days. But recently I've placed a little too much emphasis on the work.

Funny, I still go to my meetings, but this is on sometimes and I'm texting and I'm not really listening. And guess what happens? I start reacting from my defects. I don't take notice of the fellowship. I start responding to things like I used to do. And as Tom and I have had a my new best friend who I've known for how many hours

I've been in Stockholm, I was in Stockholm 5 minutes. We're walking around and we're already showing each other's intimate secrets.

Only in a A. It's amazing. But as we were discussing, anything you put in front just tends to go wrong. I'm very materialistic. I like my toys. Yeah, work's gone amazing. I'm earning loads of money.

That's not a way to live for me anymore.

It's I still like to have a good income, but anything I put before my spiritual journey, and I'm not Buddha by any stretch of the imagination,

anything I put goes wrong. That's and actually those things that are more important are my relationships with people.

Yeah, that's it.

Because as one of the previous speakers said, it's people have been the problem,

people I can and I, I was again, I was going to come to resentments towards the end, but

resentments,

I have lived on resentments all my life. There's always, it's always been your fault

and in my life would be perfect if it wasn't for that person over there.

And you make me feel bad. And it's a cliched saying, but why do I let people live rent free in my head? They I have an amazing life today, but my brother-in-law lives in my head and his four children and his wife and now his bloody dog.

He only got the dog last week. I already hate it. I haven't even met it

and I'm being slightly silly, but that's the way I can operate. Yeah, I can ruin my own life all on my own by having resentment because people, they've let me down or they frighten me or I'm jealous and it all comes down to that self esteem and fear for me. The fact that he once dented myself esteem, I've never let him forget it. Not that I've ever told him.

And so I have to pray for that situation to be lifted on a daily basis. And as far as I can tell, that's an ongoing process because I'm sure once that one's come to peace, I'll find another one. But this is a program of

action, and I put that action in. It's also progress, not perfection. And I ran my fifth year. I really decided that I'd got it nailed and I wasn't going to tell anyone when it was going wrong. And I've made a decision over the last couple of years. It doesn't matter how long I've been around and eight years is not long, but I'm going to tell in any meeting that I can when I don't feel right,

when I, when things aren't going right for me or I share it with my sponsor, whichever is more appropriate. If I have the solution to it, I tend to share it in a meeting, but if I don't, I share it with my sponsor or my friends in a, a Yeah, I don't tend to dump in meetings. I don't criticise anyone that does, but for me it's more appropriate because again, meetings are for the newcomers and if there's newcomers in here today,

share it good, bad or indifferent, get it out there because it's that stuff that keeps you sick. It, that's what kept me sick for a long time. And around my fifth year, deciding that actually I was a superhero of a A

for a bit made me very ill, made me very, very unhappy. And when I let go of that and we come back to 3:00 and 11:00, when I let go of that stuff, what amazing feeling. I'm perfectly imperfect. Yeah. I'm not going to say God is perfect because like I say, I don't have a concept of what that is. But what I do know is the program's perfect. It seems to work every time.

I'm not perfect. I used to say I fucked up or I got it really wrong. I just go. Some days I don't quite understand the process and I have to have some help. Yeah, I don't criticize myself for getting things wrong.

That's a lie. I do. But I'm gentler. Yeah,

God, I have a hobby. I

I'm gentler on myself. I had a very harsh upbringing that didn't make me an alcoholic but it certainly made me miserable. Decided to be gentle and my sponsor today. He's an ex priest of 25 years, clean and sober, is one of the gentlest most understanding men I have ever met and he takes me under his wing almost weekly and he gives me not a physical cuddle but a mental cuddle at times and that's what this alcoholic needs.

At the 1st I needed harsh. I needed to be told I needed to be slightly slapped into shape. These days I need a bit softness and understanding. I let my wife, who is in Al Anon,

sorry,

slapped me into shape these days.

And again, Tom and I have been discussing that living in recovery as a family.

God, I hated it at first when she got recovery, her own recovery. She's not an alcoholic, but she's in Al Anon. I'm so glad for that because it has saved our marriage, saved our relationship, and it makes my recovery stronger. The fact that somebody in my life

who I see every day knows, understands, understands what I'm going through, understand, I understand what she's going through and understand together that we're committed to a certain way of life that makes us feel better

and we both help others. Now, again, not because we're wonderful spiritual people, because it works. Yeah, we've been shown away that actually works for us. And the 12 steps are hugely important in our lives. And I'm just going to

go through how they've affected me.

Step one admitted we're powerless over alcohol and our lives have become unmanageable. That was a no brainer in the end.

Alcohol was constantly there and it stopped working. And the fear that that engendered in me when alcohol stopped working, when I could put no more physically in my body

and I still felt the fear and the anxiety and it didn't go away. And I did through the big book, The way to do it. I, I, I listed those events. I listed the ways my life become a manageable through through a sponsor I should say,

and I came to believe power, the greater than myself, ourselves could restore us to sanity. I struggled with this for a long time because of my natural atheism, but once I decided that it was something I shouldn't need to worry about and just accept that life was going to take its course and I would hand it over and see the outcome, it worked for me. I went through a religious period. Today it's not like that for me anymore, but it's still as special and as cherished.

Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. That was tricky

to turn my will. How do you do that? How do you actually physics how? I couldn't understand that for a long time. And my sponsor, bless him, just said you've just made a decision. You don't actually have to package up your will in your life and give it to somebody, he said. You just make a decision. This is a program of openness. This is a program of being willing to change, whereas I was not willing to change before.

And step three, I say the step three prayer every evening.

And it's the bit that always I wake up from when I'm doing it, like a parrot is

where my way of life would be a message to others.

And that's hugely important to me is. And I'll just go off slightly. I don't MIT to many people. I'm an alcoholic outside of these rooms. I tell plenty of people I don't drink. And the ones that just go, yeah, that's interesting and walk off. And then there's the other ones that go, really, how do you do that then? And that's my version of anonymity.

I'm here to pass the message on. I'm not here to expose myself in front of people who may use that against me.

I don't feel comfortable. Maybe 40 years down the line, I won't care. But at the point, this point in time, I do. But I'm open about not drinking and not using. And people go. You look well, you've changed. Yeah. I stopped drinking a few years ago. Oh, that's interesting. And it's amazing how many calls come back. You know, you said you stopped drinking. I've been thinking about that.

It happened twice last week. Two people. How, how, how does that, How does that work then? Oh, well, you know, stop for a bit. I I go to meetings, you go to a A Yeah. OK. I've been thinking about doing that for a while. Well, come with me. Here's my number. And that's as complicated as it needs to get. And it comes back to that reading, you know, just show people attraction, not promotion.

Made a searching of fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

For me

that was really easy. I was ready to beat myself up and criticise myself on paper.

And I actually, according to my sponsor, thought I was a lot worse than I actually was.

But it was painful enough.

And I'll be super honest with you, I didn't spend months on it. I did it like the day before. We were supposed to meet for step five really quickly. But in fairness, I had been thinking about that stuff for most of my life. You know, I was thinking about the time I rolled that person or that person did something to me thinking about that occasion. And those were things that kept washing around in my head, keeping me sick, making me

need alcohol, need an anesthetic. So step four was quite easy for me because it was a constant process in my head. Step 5 wasn't so much easy, wasn't so easy. However, once I had shared it with this human being and this higher power and admitted it to myself,

I worried all day about this man going and broadcasting it on the BBC

and he chose to remind me that nobody'd be interested

and I wasn't that important,

which was a bit of a shock.

But I do remember that day, which is 7/7 and 1/2 years and going to go very, very clearly. I remember finishing that step,

addressing step 6 and step 7 in city and kneeling and doing a prayer with him. And I remember feeling at that moment this enormous weight lifted from me, which descended back on me the next day. But it was the start of a freeing process. It was the start of a process of understanding how I looked at the world and how I judged and balanced things. It was understanding that actually I wasn't an evil person trying to be good. I was just a sick person trying to get better,

and that was a massive relief for me because I thought I'd become evil. I mean, that's a very strong word to use, but I thought there was I was beyond redemption. I thought that I was just a nasty piece of work and a lot of my actions reinforce that.

But in under the care of this sponsor. Yeah, thanks. Under the care of this sponsor, I realised that actually I was just sick. I had a condition called alcoholism which was affecting me mentally, spiritually and physically. And actually if I put alcohol into my body, it would kick off those things. It would be a chain reaction. And the fact that resentments came out of that and the fact that my anger came out of that, the Fang by anxiety came out of that place. The fact that my fear came out of that place.

And so

I remember that day super clearly. And I, it's one of the things that I love most about when I'm sponsoring is when we finished five and we sit and we talk and we go over six and seven. We pray and again, praying to what? Who cares? It's just a declaration of my intent. Quite often that's what prayer is for me. It's communicating and saying out loud what I would like to be what I need,

and it's not a new car

because it used to be.

And that's the piece I enjoy. I enjoy that enormously and I've been through it. I I don't know how many people have done it with the to this point, but every single time has been a hugely rewarding experience.

Very emotional for some. Some like me, felt it a bit later on, but it's been it's an incredible thing. Six. We're entirely ready to have God remove all of all about these defects character. Maybe not all,

and that's the truth. It's for years I've hang on to anger because it actually works for me. I think coming to this point in my life, it doesn't work for me. It makes me isolated

it with people withdraw from me, and I don't feel good about that.

So over the years, defects have come up and come down and gone, and the ones that have stayed has been anger, like I say, because it's the way I'm programmed to deal with life. I'm still a six year old stomping around in my dad's shoes. Yeah. And now I've got I've grown up a bit, got my own shoes and it feels better.

Humbly asked him to remove our shortcomings. I do not on a daily basis because sometimes,

I'll be honest with you, my head is just about catches on to Step 3, just about catches on to the serenity prayer. And my head's too full. And that's why we come to sort of Step 11 later is taking the time. But at that point in my step work, I did ask him to remove my shortcomings, or her, or it.

And then came the interesting stuff. Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all. So my list was this long, I wanted to say sorry to everybody.

And my sponsor cut it down and said, no, you only need to do it to these people. Those people don't care who you are. Yeah. They've forgotten about you again, You're not that important. And me having to realize that going off and saying sorry to the girl and the boy and this and the government and Arthur Scargill and other things was just not appropriate. Yeah. It was just not going to work. And it actually came down to, for me, a very small group of people,

the people that I least wanted to say sorry to.

Thanks.

Because I'd actually, I'd quite like to say sorry to the girl 20 years ago and that, but not to these people. And so like a lot of Alcoholics, that took time to get the courage. And obviously I wanted to have a firework display, some dancers, maybe an elephant and do the whole thing as a as a as a show. But