An Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book workshop in Plymouth, UK

Okay, welcome back. Thank you very much.

I'll take a reading from the big book, page 72, paragraph 1.

More than most people, the alcoholic leads a double life. He is very much the actor.

To the outer world, he presents his stage character. This is the one he likes his fellows to see.

He wants to enjoy a certain reputation, but knows in his heart he doesn't deserve it.

The inconsistency is made worse by the things he does on his sprees.

Coming to his senses, he is revolted at certain episodes he vaguely remembers.

These memories are a nightmare. He trembles to think someone might have observed him.

As fast as he can, he pushes these memories far inside himself.

He hopes they will never see the light of day.

He is under constant fear and tension, and that makes for more drinking.

I'll hand you back over to Tim.

Thanks. My name's Tim and I'm an alcoholic.

I think it's bad enough listening to my voice for a couple of hours.

I've been listening to this voice for 40 years.

It really starts to wear thin after a while, I'll tell you that for nothing.

What I was promised in AA was that I don't need to go and find God.

If I remove the blocks, God will show up, which is a relief.

Because I wouldn't know where to start looking for God.

And the blocks ain't out there. They're in here.

So if I remove those blocks, the little bit of God which is inside me will flood out.

People sometimes say you need to let God in.

It helps to know what the problem is.

If you think there's no God inside you, and God is out there,

and you're trying to get some God out there inside,

you're starting from the wrong starting point.

Because you don't know what the problem is.

The problem is God is within you already, but you can't see it.

Once you know what the problem is, then you can start to look for the right solution.

There's no point in running away from dogs,

if the reason why the dogs are biting you is because you're chasing girls.

You need to stop chasing girls for the dogs to stop biting you.

So the job of steps four to nine.

Sometimes people say, oh, recovery is painful.

And it is, but recovery is the first nine steps,

which is why you want to get through it as quickly as possible.

You get to choose how much pain you have.

Just know that.

If you take a gazillion years to do it, you'll be in pain for a gazillion years.

If you get through it quickly, the pain will be over quickly.

So four through nine removes the blocks.

If you go through life suffering,

it really looks like life is doing things to you the whole time.

That's what it would look like to a casual observer.

As they say, life doesn't stop happening just because you're sober.

If my problem is out there, if my problem is you,

I am stuffed.

Because I've spent my whole life trying to change you,

and it hasn't worked.

And every time you get a new one, and you think this one will be all right,

this one seems fine, this one doesn't have all the same problems

that the last 15 have had.

This one will be fine.

And you unwrap it, and a few weeks later,

bloody hell, it's the same old thing again.

And the problem looks as though it's out there.

And you know when you're six weeks into a relationship with someone,

and you want to get them under the Trades Descriptions Act,

because they are not the person that you paid good money for.

Step four is a way of finding the problem that is inside me.

If that problem can be removed, I'm going to be all right.

Whatever is happening on the outside.

My biggest problem, it talks in the 12 and 12,

about how pride heads the parade of character defects,

or words to that effect, and I think that's right.

And what pride is about, for me,

is my concern with what you think of me.

And when you think about it, it's a pretty strange thing

to have as your basis for living.

But it was my basis for living.

And because everybody is doing it,

you don't think there's anything wrong with it.

It seems perfectly normal.

I don't know if you know that advert for Xyvirax,

which treats cold sores.

And there's this very, very beautiful, slim, elegant woman,

with a perfect life, and she swims, and she does aerobics,

and so she must be successful, we conclude from this.

But there's one little problem.

She's got this almost invisible cold sore,

which from a distance could be a beauty mark of some sort,

but it's a cold sore.

So because of that, she has to go through her life

with a motorcycle helmet on her head.

Why? Because of what they will think.

And this is me,

my whole life entirely concerned

with what everybody else thinks about me.

And you do it for long enough, and you start to think

that other people's opinions are real, actual things.

But then you start to think,

well, this opinion that other people have of me,

where is it?

Well, it's located inside someone else's brain.

Where? I don't know, it's just there somewhere.

Have you ever seen it? No.

But you know it's there.

And I can be okay

if I think the thoughts I think you're having

about me are the right thoughts.

That I can be okay if you are thinking the right thing.

You may not think anything about me,

but if I think you're thinking something good about me,

I can be okay.

I could be totally deluded,

and no one's thinking about me at all,

but I'm convinced you love me,

so I'm all right.

So I've made up a story

about the story you have in your mind about me.

It's a story about a story,

and I base my entire life

on this story about a story.

Now the thing is, you're not thinking about me,

you're thinking about what I think about you.

This is where the whole thing breaks down.

You're obsessed with what I think about you.

I'm obsessed with what you think about me.

Someone's wrong here.

But it's like Northern Ireland or Serbia,

perhaps everyone's wrong.

You know it's not that some people are right,

no everyone is wrong.

And this is what pride is.

I don't think I'm a person anymore.

I think I'm an idea trapped inside someone else's head,

and I need to construct my actual life

in such a way that you are thinking

the right thoughts about me.

So I will work 70 hours a week

in a job that I hate

with people who make my skin crawl

in a position which is doomed to fail

because I'm surrounded by other egotistical cocaine addicts.

And I will do this, I will drag myself

out of bed in the morning

after a night of no sleep

because of the panic attacks.

Go through the day fighting,

desperately trying to make a success

so that some people who...

Who are these people whose opinion about me

is so important?

If I made a list of them, it starts to fall apart

so you can't even let yourself think about that.

But I would waste my actual life

to create this impression

in the minds of self-obsessed people

who aren't even thinking about me.

And there's a line in the big book,

we call this plain insanity.

And step four,

over time, because I'm not the kind of person

that went through the first nine golden steps once

and clipped the heels of my ruby slippers,

found myself back in Kansas

and everything has been fine since then.

Every day in every way, everything gets a little bit better.

You just need to know

that that's not been my experience

over the last 18 years.

There are lots of ways of selling the idea

that the steps need to be done several times,

like recurrently, every few whatevers,

every few months, every few years.

Just whip through them quickly, business-like fashion.

Don't dwell on them, but get through them.

The best explanation I heard was a few weeks ago.

He said, in principle,

you should be able to live in steps 10, 11, and 12.

You get up in the morning, you ask for God's will,

you go and do it, you debrief at the end of the day,

get some corrective measures, carry on the next morning,

turn your life over to God, stay close to God,

perform his work well, you'll be absolutely fine.

If I could do that for the rest of my life,

I wouldn't need the first nine steps.

But as the book says, no one among us

has been able to maintain anything

like perfect adherence to these principles.

So however good I am at 10, 11, and 12,

stuff's going to build up.

I don't know what your kitchen is like,

but however well I clean the kitchen,

every year you pull the cooker out,

and you're like, how did that get there?

And you suddenly realize what that weird smell was.

It's like, you know that smell in the kitchen

that's bothering you, and you change the bin,

and you put stuff down the drain,

and you open the window, and it's still there.

And then you pull the cooker out, and it's that.

And you have to clean it.

And you brush your teeth every day,

and you go and see the dental hygienist,

and she reels backwards when she looks inside your mouth.

And you have been, and she's like, whoa.

And you've been brushing your teeth every day.

I don't know anything that doesn't need a regular overhaul.

So I've needed to go through the first nine steps

on a regular basis.

And over time, what has become apparent

is that when I'm in self, I'm in delusion.

The purpose of step four,

I'm not going to do a great technical thing on step four.

There are websites, and downloads, and pamphlets,

and worksheets, and I'll give you the web addresses,

and you can go and look them up.

But I'm not going to do a technical thing on step four.

But what I'll say is this.

I thought for a long time it was about understanding myself

so that I wouldn't make the same mistakes again.

Now I know it's about understanding how I function

and know that left to my own devices,

I have no choice but to continue doing the same thing

even though I know it is totally insane and doesn't work.

Step three, the step three requirement

is that I be convinced that any life run on self-will

can hardly be a success.

And I think the purpose of steps four to five

is to have that go from information in my mind

where I say, yeah, that won't work,

to something at gut level where I go,

oh my God, this doesn't work.

When I take step five...

Oh, and another thing on step four,

there's this sort of macho thing sometimes in 12-step world

about the bigger your step four, the better it is.

And if it's not massive, you've got a problem.

You haven't been honest enough.

I'm not so sure there's a great line here.

Actually, a couple of things.

This is, I suppose, technical stuff.

We were usually as definite as this example

and his resentment against his wife.

My wife misunderstands and nags, likes Brown,

wants house put in her name.

Now, this imaginary guy has probably been married to this woman

for a number of years,

but all he puts down is misunderstands and nags,

likes Brown, wants house put in her name.

This probably sums it up.

There may be...

He doesn't need to write down every single time she's misunderstood him

and every time she's nagged,

and all the many ways in which she's done this

and all the many skills she's employed to do this.

It's just...

It says we were usually as definite as this example.

It doesn't say more definite.

And later on it says...

Where is it?

Oh, here it is.

If you have already made a decision, step 3,

and an inventory of your grosser handicaps, step 4,

you've already made a good beginning.

So a friend of mine, Kevin, says that step 5,

what you want to do is get the heavy luggage out of the way.

We'll deal with the hand luggage later on.

So what you want is, in step 5, a couple of hours,

twists of character, it says on page 75,

dark crannies of the past.

However twisted your character, if you're anything like me,

you don't have a thousand twists of character,

you have about four,

which repeat over and over and over again.

If I can't convey the twists of my character in an hour,

I haven't found them yet.

The facts can sometimes get in the way of the truth.

I've done those step 5s where I sit there and say,

I said this and she said that and I said...

And she turned around and I turned around

and everyone is turning around!

And I want to know what the truth is.

I'm a liar, I'm a thief, I'm a cheat.

I'm obsessed with what you think about me.

I will do anything to have you approve of me.

I want to be more prominent than anyone around me.

I want to be right.

If you disagree with me, we have to have a discussion

in which I demonstrate to you why I'm right.

And if you don't agree with me, you have to go away.

You are not allowed to stay in the same room.

If you must stay in the same room,

at least have the grace to look ashamed.

That is the exact nature of my wrong.

I will do good things for you as long as I get applause

and it's not too inconvenient.

You have an hour of that.

I mean, you can be done in 20 minutes.

If you nail it like that, you're done in 20 minutes.

And Dark Crown is the past.

No one has that many.

Again, we don't want the back story.

You know those bits in a step five when someone says,

before we get to this bit, I'm going to need to explain some stuff.

Like, just cut to it.

When I take step five,

it says a couple of interesting lines.

Chapter 74, rightly and naturally we think well

before we choose the person or persons

with whom to take this intimate and confidential step.

Oh, persons.

Then on 90 something, where is it?

He may rebel at the thought of a drastic house cleaning

which requires discussion with another person.

Oh, sorry, no.

Which requires discussion with other people.

You see, if you read the steps off the scrolls,

you might get the impression that step five

is about discussing it with one other person.

If you read the book, it says something else.

That doesn't even deal with one person.

That's great.

You tick the box if you deal with one person.

I did step five with one person in 1994.

I did another step five with someone in 1997, 1998,

somewhere in there.

One person 2002, one person 2004.

2009, three people.

2010, four people.

And then another step five, three people.

The experience of doing it with one person

and then doing it with a sequence of people

is like night and day.

Last year, I did a step five.

I did a step four and five.

And I had 73 resentments.

75 resentments.

73 were against people in AA.

I mean, I had some other petty things,

but I only bother with the really major resentments.

Everyone was getting it wrong.

No one was quite good enough.

Even the people in my home group were not up to scratch.

There were plenty of people around AA

who had the temerity to disagree with me

or say that my way was wrong.

There were people that talked rubbish in the meetings.

And then there was a bunch of people that were too hardline,

that talked too much about it.

Everyone was getting it wrong.

And each one of these resentments was a line

cutting between me and those people to separate me.

And you have a life and you draw 75 lines over your life

and you discover that you are the only person

in your tiny pocket of the universe.

You are the only person that you agree with 100%.

And then you're really on your own.

And the funny thing is, you're right about everything.

And that will get me drunk quicker than anything.

And having all of that stuff laid out

to person after person after person,

it blows it out of the water.

And a bloke said to me on the third Step 5

in the middle of last year,

he said,

so you believe that God's grace works through us in AA

who are carrying the message?

I said, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

And you believe that resentment blocks that,

creates a block between you and these people in AA

or anywhere?

I said, yeah.

And he said, if people need God's grace to even survive,

how many people have you killed because you disagree with them?

How many people have you blocked God's grace to

because you're more interested in being right

than being a channel for God's grace?

And he had me.

And the exact, in this Step 5,

I think I spoke for about five minutes.

He spoke for an hour.

I got there and he's pottering around

making these filthy toasted sandwiches.

Really, really bad cups of tea.

If you think the tea here is bad,

the tea here is lovely, by the way.

This man's tea was just...

And he spoke for an hour.

And then he said,

all right, what have you got?

What are you going to read me?

And I started reading and his face just started to drop.

And he just, he started shaking his head.

And there was that kind of sucking in of air through his teeth.

And then he started talking and he talked for two and a half hours.

He'd read me from those five minutes of crap

that I'd been talking about.

And in the course of two and a half hours,

he told me the exact nature of my wrongs.

Now, I wouldn't recommend trying this on any of your sponsees.

Just let them talk.

But occasionally this kind of weird stuff happens in AA.

And I wrote down everything he said.

And it was at a depth that I couldn't have reached myself

in my own inventory.

And it says on page 75,

we pocket our pride and go to it,

illuminating every twist of character,

every dark cranny of the past.

Once we have taken this step, withholding nothing,

he illuminated every twist of my character.

He withheld nothing because he talked about himself.

In my step five, he talked about himself.

And in that mirror, I saw myself more clearly

than I could have seen myself with any of these notebooks.

I'm resentful at blah, blah, blah.

This affects my pride. This affects my pride.

I saw stuff at a depth I couldn't have seen.

And when I hear other people's step fives,

I see myself at a depth that I could never, ever have seen

by my own...

It talks about a solitary self appraisal,

rarely being good enough.

So the step four is not where it's at.

It's something happens in step five.

If when you get to step six,

you want anything to do with your old life,

something has gone wrong.

In the process up to this point.

In step seven, basically there are two buttons.

You can keep your old life as you have been living it

on the basis that if I get everything I want, I'll be okay.

That's that delusion that I can wrest happiness

and satisfaction from this world if only I manage well.

I did not realize for the first 16 years of my recovery

that this was a delusion.

I thought if I manage well by using the steps, I'd be okay.

But any method of me managing my life is doomed to fail

because nothing is ever quite right.

I get to step six and I realize that no matter how much

I dance around my life trying to get it,

trying to get all the ducks lined up,

either I can't get the ducks lined up

or I get all the ducks lined up and the buggers won't quack.

What do you do then when you've got everything you wanted

and it still ain't working?

Then you're at the jumping off point.

So step six and seven, you've got two buttons.

Keep the old life, have a new one.

There's nothing in between.

If you want to make a decision to move from Plymouth to London

or London to Plymouth, you cannot take bits of the old city with you.

You can't take a street here and a shop there

and a nightclub there. You can't do it.

You have to leave.

That's what the decision steps six and seven is about.

And thank God, I do not have to know how to change myself.

I wouldn't know where to begin.

Which should be a relief.

Because by this time, me changing myself would be managing my own life.

So phew, step six and seven.

God is going to do all the business.

However, I have a part to play in this.

10, 11, 12 I'm going to come to.

But the part is this.

Number one.

I have to forgive everybody for everything that they have ever done to me

or anyone I love without condition, without reservation.

No exceptions.

And the way I do this is simple.

When I look at my own drinking, I'm either guilty or I'm powerless.

Can't be both.

If I'm powerless, I can't be guilty.

Because it wasn't my fault I was like that in the first place.

It's my responsibility to participate in something being done about it.

But I can't be guilty.

I would rather be guilty because that implies there is something I could have done

if only I tried harder.

And this is delusion.

This is true for me.

When I behave badly, I am in fear.

I am being driven by fear.

I'm in the passenger seat.

Fear is in the driving seat.

If that's true for me, that must be true for you.

You are either guilty or powerless.

If I hold all of you guilty, I'm hoisted by my own petard.

I'm guilty too.

If I don't let you go, I'm not let go of either.

And I will be held to account by my own court for everything I've ever done.

And I can rationalize about why I did what I did.

So while I've made amends, I still feel guilty because of what I've done to you.

And I still feel guilty because I haven't forgiven you.

So these two things, Sandy Beach says that if you've got a problem with anyone,

you either need to forgive or make amends.

And this is the release from the prison.

If I forgive you, I release you.

And then I discover I have been released for everything I have ever done.

And not because I've worked hard.

Not because I, in inverted commas, deserve it.

Because I've done good things.

I'm of infinite value because I exist and so are you.

And when I do things wrong, I'm in darkness and blindness.

And so are you.

So I release you and I'm released.

And then the amends.

I can't undo the harm that is done in you.

That is between you and God.

But what I do when I do something to harm you is I break the link between me and you.

And that's one fewer channel for God's grace to work in the world.

And making amends is not going in there and rummaging around inside your soul and making it right.

Which is why I don't need to get well or skillful or do any of those things to make amends.

What I need to do is restore the channel between me and you by admitting I was wrong and expressing goodwill.

Which is why you can make amends when you're six weeks sober.

You don't have to prove you're never going to be an arsehole again.

You're going to express the desire to do things differently.

Explain you're on a program where you're probably only ever going to get progress, not perfection.

And that when you are wrong in future, you're going to promptly admit it.

But this creation of goodwill, the funny thing is, I'm going to close on this one step nine story.

I was in a very abusive relationship when I was growing up with someone.

And this person, in objective terms, set the ball rolling and harmed me in awful, awful ways.

And then when I was 17, 18, I turned the tables and I exacted revenge.

And the revenge, I don't know where that stands in relation to what he did,

but I turned people against him and I tortured him mentally.

And everyone who I asked about amends for the first few years said,

you don't go back to someone like that because of what he did to you.

But it scratched and scratched and scratched in my mind.

Finally, 16, 15 years sober, I track him down and I make amends for what I did.

It's not to say that he wasn't wrong for what he did, he was.

As a friend of mine says, he should have been horse whipped for what he did.

But I did wrong and I needed to admit that and I did.

And funny things happen in amends which you don't predict, which you couldn't have foreseen.

And he said to me, we loved and hated each other in equal measure.

And I knew that I'd loved him and hated him.

I knew that he had hated me.

Never occurred to me for a moment that with all the stuff I did, he still loved me.

And what this taught me was that whether or not someone loves me is beyond their control.

That they are powerless over whether or not they love me.

I do not need to do anything or be anything to stop people from loving me.

To make people love me, I cannot do anything so bad it will stop people from loving me.

That is how I was able to harm people because they loved me even through the harm that I did

and they could not stop loving me through the harm that I did.

If I could be loved by someone like that despite what I did,

I don't need to do anything to deserve God's love.

And suddenly the basis of my life fell away.

Because the basis of my life had been, if I perform well enough, I will deserve your love.

And I realised it was a lie.

Now you could have told me that was a lie and I go, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I had to hear it from him.

I could not have heard that from anyone else.

And my life has not been the same since then.

So the recommendation is, forgive everyone, make amends to everyone

and then if there is anything left over we can talk again.

And I guess we ought to have lunch now. Thanks.