The topic of step 8 at a Sponsorship through the 12 steps workshop in London, UK

Thank you. To set the time for the meeting, I will read an extract from Chapter One Bill story, pages seven and eight of the Big Book.

They did not need to tell me. I knew an almost welcomed the idea. It was a devastating blow to my pride, who had thought so well of myself and my abilities, of my capacity to surmount obstacles, was cornered at last. Now I was to plunge into the dark, joining the endless possession of socks who had gone on before. I thought of my poor wife.

There had been much happiness after all. What? What would I not give to make amends?

But that was over now

and the topic of tonight's meeting is working Step 8 with the sponsee and Tim will share anything between 30 and 45 minutes on the topic, after which the floor will be opened for questions rather than the typical sharing. And with that, I will now hand over to Tim.

Hello, everyone, Tim and our colleague. So step 8, the book is slightly tricky here because when you get to when you get to step eight, it says, by the way, you've already got your list. Actually, little 8 appear in there. You're you've already, you've already got your list. It says you made it when you took step four. Well,

I mean, in the same sense that, you know,

well, if you want to write a letter, all the letter, all the letters are already in the alphabet. You just have to put them in the right order. It's a bit like I would step at, yeah, you've, you've done the list, but it's Step 4 covers an awful lot of other material as well.

So I think the best way to do this is to treat Step 8 as a completely new exercise. You can't, you can't do a step nine of the material in Step 4. You just can't do it

it it needs to be

all the extraneous material needs to be stripped out and you need to have a forensic analysis of just your behaviour. So obviously the work done in Step 4 is not wasted. It forms the basis for the work in step 8 as with Step 4. So when you're doing doing Step 4, you want to get the scope of the exercise clear 1st and I think it's the same with step 8. So it's interesting if you rebuild story, he talks about

approaching all of those to whom he who he had harmed or who he'd fallen out with basically. So what I get people to do, I think Step 4 is very, very internal usually, and people have a little bit of sketchy understanding of how they've been interacting with the world. This is where we want to do a proper forensic analysis.

Forensic being the adjective for with criminal

criminal law,

we want to do forensic analysis of all of the relationships. And so I think a very good place to begin with step A is to do a list of all relationships, present or past, who you

A, definitely owe amends to or have harmed in some way, or B, feel uncomfortable about. Because if you feel uncomfortable about, then, well, something's been missed. So far, you've had a good go at forgiving everyone in step four. You're still upset with Auntie Susan?

Well, we need to look at that. You can't just brush it under the carpet.

And this is all on the basis of the well, first of all, Bill's story. You want to look at two types of thing in step eight. You want to look at the people you've harmed. You want to look at the people with whom you have unresolved tension.

And Sandy Beach also will say that if you got trouble with another person, you need to either forgive them or make amends. And sometimes those are two very closely related projects, which is why putting them into one project is a very helpful,

very helpful exercise. Also, the step eight in the 12 and 12, I don't really use the 12:00 and 12:00, but there are some ideas in it that I borrow

in the 12 and 12. It will say that

about the most useful thing we can do is have a thorough examination of our human relationships because that is what has caused our failure and indeed our alcoholism. Now, I'm not going to stand in judgment as to how accurate that observation is, but safe to say I think it's important enough not to be completely disregarded. So Step 8 is where we just look at how we're interacting with other people.

So as with Step 4, you scope it out so you know the worst of it. There's nothing worse than wondering what else is in the woodwork that's going to come out. Get the name out now. Then you can walk around the whole thing and maybe you got 400 names, maybe you have 200.

Sometimes one of one of the things that people will say, and this is very, very common,

I'm going to start being naughty now.

People will come back with a step eight list with like 8 names on it or five names. I had a sponsee that was in his late 60s who I know from his step four had punched half a dozen people. And yet that's just punching like the only, you know, if we were just looking at people you punched, it would be more than five. And he had just five people. So I just don't believe it. I just don't believe it.

We're not looking just at sort of grave crimes, but we're looking at the whole of our conduct. So really anyone should be on there

where one hasn't behaved appropriately, where one hasn't acquitted oneself appropriately. Because otherwise, if the name is not on there, you're not gonna get to examine it. Now, there's gonna be an awful lot of repetition. So don't worry that putting a lot of names causes problems with having to write huge amounts. It isn't because lots of things repeat. So with sponsees, if you have 49 sponsees, you probably I'll treat them all in exactly the same way.

You know, there might be a few quirks here and there, but same with classmates or bosses or colleagues or customers.

So if even if there are lots of names, it doesn't mean there's necessarily lots of writing because most people have a limited playbook.

So you get your list of names and then the analysis starts.

Now I play this one of two ways. I either get people to do the whole of the step eight first

and then we go on to Step 9.

And unless someone has got some experience of the program, I won't do that specifically because when we start to go through the step eights together, we discover that the Step 8 is a dog's dinner. That's a technical term,

and so there's no point in people writing reams and reams and reams of stuff wrong only to have the whole thing sent back. You might as well get them to do a little bit

and

go through that and actually start to make some amends, because every time you make an amend, you're clearing some of the wreckage. You're making your own perception and interpretation clearer, which actually helps. The rest of the step eight try getting someone to trying to get someone to achieve clarity on all of their harms without having made a single amend is usually your honour.

You're on a hiding to nothing, frankly, because they won't be able to do it. People need to get some experience of amends to get a sense of how accurate their memory is. For one thing,

step 8 needs very careful calibration. Some people need to turn the dial up and look at things more honestly and carefully. Others need to turn the dial down and not accord themselves such weighty significance in the affairs of others.

And it's only by making amends that I find out whether I'm exaggerating my harm or actually in my case it was underestimating the harm. In in in almost every case I got it substantively wrong. So how I harmed people was wrong 9 times out of 10.

And I mostly I underestimated, sometimes I overestimated.

So the experience of making amends is probably the most useful

source of guidance for writing a Step 8. But you've got to start somewhere. So with most people, unless they're very clear minded, I will, in which case I get them to do the whole Step 8 and then we just bash through with someone. A few weeks ago we went through his whole step nine list in about two hours and it was just done. It's very rare, very rare that that's going to work out

because as the Big Book says, maybe your husband lives in that strange world of alcoholism where everything is distorted or exaggerated,

so the whole thing needs to be rewired. It's not going to happen overnight and you have to do it. It's painstaking, this. So

what I get people to do most of the time is, say, pick a name off the list,

or maybe five names off the list, and pick the ones you anticipate are going to be the most straightforward in terms of figuring out

what you did wrong. Now what most people hear is write about parents and siblings and ex spouses and current spouses. They pick the five most complicated relationships first.

Literally

9 out of 10 people do that. You say pick the simplest one, they pick their mother. You seriously think that's the simplest relationship in your life? I don't. I still, I still don't understand why people literally can't hear pick the simplest 1 to mean pick the simplest one but no one can so you have to. I literally have to say to people, not your mother, not your father, not siblings, not spouses, not children.

Got that. And then two out of three still come back with the spouse of the mother. It's it's psychotic, but there we go.

Anyway, so you find, you find some simple ones and you work on those first.

And what we're doing here

is trying to nail exactly what the conduct was

that possibly might have harmed someone. So you're 3 columns are column one. What did I do? What did I fail to do? What did I say? What did I fail to say? So concrete

I verb object or I verb complement where I did maybe negate. I didn't do this. I didn't do that.

I where it says in the 12 and 12 that a defective human relations are at the root of all of our problems, including our alcoholism. I think the reason for that is because most people, and it was true for me, I couldn't tell the difference between inside of me and outside of me. I couldn't tell the difference between the inside of you and the outside of you. I couldn't tell the difference between me and you,

so if I thought that you were thinking something, you had literally said it. So I would imagine you were thinking something about me and it would turn into you literally said that

one great example of where this. OK, so the first column, what did I do? And the variations, second column, what should I have done instead? We'll come to why that's relevant in a minute. And 3rd column, who's harmed and how?

Now with this first column, what did I do?

You tell people. You try and tell people. You say you can tell them, you can tell an alcoholic, but you can't tell them much.

You tell them. Keep it nice and concrete. No, And what I tell people, I explain what abstract language is and I explain what metaphorical language is. And I say don't use either of those we don't want because if you use imagery, the person has to guess what you mean. If you use abstract language, the person has to guess what you mean. Perfect example

someone I said what? So what did you do? It was with her mother, I think.

What did you do? She said. I created an atmosphere.

What do you do? What do you do with that? What you want to describe in the first column is what a CCTV camera plus an audio recording device would record. What would someone who is transcribing

describe? Or either transcribing the tape or describing what they can see on the C to CTV camera. What would they describe as going on?

So other ones. I gave him a hard time. Well, that could mean 100 things. I my favorite one this you you get bonus mark for this one. I didn't show her respect. What does that mean? You didn't open a door. You set fire to her hair. You stole her dog. What did you do? Well, I don't know.

That's the thing. I don't know. Well, you were there.

You get to use the faculty of memory.

You see the story that we tell ourselves about what happened get replaces the actual memory. So like the psychological narrative becomes the memory of what happened and you have to peel that back to literally what did you say or do

and sail do can include

more subtle things like tone of voice or volume of speaking. You know it doesn't. It can be the manner in which we do things as much as

as much as exactly what we do, and they're sometimes a little bit of figurative language work. So I stormed out of the room. Is pretty clear you're using a figurative term, but we all know there's there's no ambiguity there.

As opposed to I created an atmosphere footnote what creating an atmosphere turned out to be with scowling, sighing and pausing a long time before responding whilst staring intently at the person. OK, now that's clear.

Say it. What was it? You know, sighing, scowling, staring in silence. Now we've got a picture. You see you're smiling because you can imagine that you've got the scene now

it's clear and it's concrete

second column. What should I have done instead? Most cases it's well, I shouldn't have done it. The right thing to do is almost always self-evident where the second column is relevant. Sometimes you see people take as their basis for doing a step 8 what I feel guilty about. So it's very common if people have

broken up from a partner

of some description or broken off contact with a friend and they feel guilty about it and

you say, well, first column, what did I do? I And this is you got to be careful of language, which as they say, queers the pitch, the use of the language can obscure the truth. So you can you can actually accidentally include some moral condemnation

in the first column. I'll give you an example.

Someone might say I ghosted Albert. Now, ghosting is very, very specific. Was it almost psychological term for for for sort of disappearing inappropriately out of someone's life? Now, what you literally did would be I stopped returning phone calls. That's the fact. Now, whether that's ghosting or whether that's, let's say,

Albert, whenever you speak to them, they just moan for half an hour and don't get let you get a word in edgeways and then criticize you at the end of the call. Not returning phone calls is completely sane. That's what you do once you've spoken to your sponsor and gone to 700 Al Anon meetings,

you decide it's OK to not return the calls, even though you have to go and throw up because it makes you so tense, the idea of not returning the call. So we've got to know well, what was the right thing to have done. So I, you know, I broke up with I broke up with Kevin second column. What should I have done instead? Well, I should have broken up with Kevin. Kevin was a gambler in relapse with his gambling and he was spending money on my credit cards, in which case

breaking up with Kevin was a very, very good idea. Now, if what you did was right, IE the first column and the second column match, even if the other person was upset or hurt, I'm afraid hard luck. The reason being in step 9, what you're going to go and say later on is I'm sorry, I shouldn't have done that. It was wrong of me. And you can only say that if you shouldn't have done that and if it was wrong.

So the second column can help tease out, particularly with people who have a touch of codependency and feel guilty simply because someone else is upset.

A good one thing, a good example of how if you want to manipulate a codependent, you can say something like, and I know because I've tried it. You can say something like, you're just not hearing me. And then the codependent will think, Oh my God, I'm committing the terrible crime of not hearing you. I've done a terrible thing. I was talking to my other half about this phenomenon of not hearing the other day. And I said, what do you think people mean when they say that they haven't been hurt? He said they usually.

That their unreasonable demands haven't been met promptly.

So no, they've heard you, they just haven't obeyed you or they disagree with you. So if so, that's what I mean about you've got to be careful about the figurative language here because it can obscure the facts of what's going on. So this second column can help reveal particularly to people who feel inappropriate guilt.

It can help people realize that what they did was right. And therefore, even though the other person often a drinking or using addict or acting out addict of some description you have when you have to set a boundary, there are often furious, absolutely furious because you're no longer enabling them. And you know, writing them large checks and and so on.

It can help you see that actually you don't owe mends in all of these situations where you feel guilty simply because you have not given in someone else's manipulation.

So those are the first two columns, but honestly, with most people, in most cases, the second column is just it. It's fairly straightforward, and it's almost redundant really, because it's obvious that the action in the first column was inappropriate.

3rd column How did the other person suffer?

How is the other person harmed?

And I draw this very broadly

and, and it's very simple really.

And This is why I did right from the beginning of a A is I was asked to place myself in the other person's shoes and say, well, if I'd been treated like that, how would it have affected me? And it can affect people. The behaviour can affect people in all sorts of ways. It can be physical injury,

there can be taking someone's time, damaging their property, stealing their property, giving rise to inconvenience. Nuisance is a good general heading for all sorts of behaviours which which fall short of actual harm but are just incredibly annoying.

I've already so taking people's time being causing people to have to do extra work to work around you

and then the emotional ones. And if now here's the interesting. I think this is where it gets interesting.

Sometimes the emotional reaction is way out of proportion to what you did. But if what you did was wrong, you're responsible. Now, you're not responsible for the extent of the emotional reaction. In fact, they are responsible for their emotional reaction. And of course you're not really causing it. You're occasioning it somehow because they've got a pre-existing condition, as it were.

But if I'm wrong, then I need to apologize, even if the stink that it created was far greater than the actual crime. And there's a line and a Suzanne Vega song which absolutely captures this. A careless match in a very dry field. So lots of harms turn out to be careless matches in very dry fields that one didn't necessarily intend great harm. One was either careless or negligent or rash or something.

And and this, this horrible chain reaction started which dragged everyone under the bus,

even if the crime is small. And there was something where all I did in one of my more manipulative moments, I won't tell the whole story. I was in AI, was in a meeting about, I don't know, 15-16 years ago. And I was trying to work out whether the secretary who is like to or maybe GSR who is maybe two years sober, wet behind the ears,

whether or not he was aware that he was going to have to handle a contentious group conscience in a week's time. And if he wasn't, I was planning to kind of shoehorn myself into coach him on how to handle it without obviously being so I was positioning myself so that he would say, Oh my God, am I taking the group conscience? I don't know what to do.

Will you help me? That was the plan.

So I sidled up to him. I sat down. I asked him how his day was.

I asked him how his week was. Then I thought, now I'm going to go in for the kill.

Hey, have you, are you all prepared for the group to take the group conscience next week? I asked him, the casualist voice I could master. What do you mean take the group? And anyway, he promptly resigned as GSR. And I know, I know. I mean, it's ridiculous,

but I was bit. I mean, it was very clear. It was very clear I was being conniving and manipulative and sticking my

sticking my awe in to the situation. I was trying to interfere and people always know they don't not know. So he was reacting not to the comment, but to the obvious intent behind it, which was to muscle in

and it, oh God, it created the most awful stink. And then I didn't attend the group conference in question, and that was even worse because I was the one who called it and it was just a

I think that the profits call it a shit show. It was a shit show.

Now, the actual things that I did wrong were relatively minor in themselves, but I'd start, I'd set the ball rolling. You know, there's Guinness Book of World Records domino competitions where like 20,000 dominoes, all, you know, fan out in the shape of, you know, a map of Madrid or something. I'd hit the first domino and yeah, the whole thing was set up to it. The things are powder keg. That group was a powder keg, but

I let the match and throw it in. So I had to make amends. Like eight people, I think, and it was all ridiculous and everyone shouted at me. There we go. So

it does. Don't worry with the third column about you know whether the other person's response was reasonable or not.

If if you set the ball rolling, you have to. You have to.

You have to come clean and go and do your best. I'm friends with all those people, and as far as they're still alive, I'm friends with all of them now. You know the immense work, it was fine. Once they shouted at me, they were fine.

So there are three columns. First column, what did I do? Second column, what should I have done instead? Third column Who suffered and how

Now, sometimes I've seen a situation with a few people recently. The person won't have been harmed per Southeast,

Because

that then just not that touchy. You know they will you know, they were all they were older maybe or more mature. They were wearing their big girls pants that day. So you know the they won't have been harmed, but some kind of acknowledgement of wrong is necessary just as a matter of etiquette.

So I think those are captured as well. If so, sometimes it's simply a breach of etiquette. It it's the person hasn't been gravely harmed. Just because they haven't been gravely harmed doesn't mean etiquette hasn't been breached. And there doesn't need to be an apology,

particularly the case in professional situations

or in situations where people are people, you're not a professional, but they're dealing with you in a professional capacity, they can totally handle it. They've seen, I remember, I remember making amends to an HR human resources manager, an employer where I'd, I'd been,

I mean, I still think I was right in a sense of this contractual point. It was BS and everyone was furious about it. It was, it was horrible. The whole situation was horrible. So changing our contracts and we were essentially it was a pay cut for work. We were, we were which was being repackaged. But rather than just accepting this was an organization wide decision and

maybe there are reasons behind it and blah blah blah,

fine, rather than doing that, I, I, I became, hard as it is to believe, I became vexatious. I became I I was a gadfly,

pecking at the barely exposed rump of the HR manager for for over the course of several months with increasingly

shrill and expertly worded emails with full of little barbs and sarcasms. It was really unpleasant

sober, you know, not drunk, sober, whatever. Anyway, I made amends to Bernadette. I think everyone in HR at that point was called Bernadette.

You call up HR, so can I speak to Bernard? They say which one? I don't know.

Anyway, I made amends to Bernadette and I said, you know, part of the form was, do you want to say your side of it? You know how any of this affected you,

and I love HR because they can, that they know how to be completely damning in such a sort of gracious, graceful way, she said. Oh, I was fine.

I've dealt with people like you before,

so I didn't harm her, but it was, it was necessary. I, I, I made a nuisance of myself and I breached etiquette. It was part of her job to deal with stuff like that, but I breached the etiquette in terms of the way I did it. It was vexatious.

So don't be too pernicity about the third column. Sometimes, no, genuinely, no one is effective. And it's laughable. It's just as Tom says it's you haven't harmed anyone. It's just embarrassing,

but if there's a whiff of someone being harmed, then you go ahead with the amend. If it turns out they weren't, they'll tell you. And as one of my favorite stores, I'll finish on this as I went to a restaurant with some friends and Jonathan was supposed to come along. And this is one of my favorite Jonathan lines.

We Jonathan was, was, was at work. And so he came, he came to the restaurant about half an hour later than than the rest of us. And we'd ordered by then. And a couple of the people were panicked that, you know, they'd ordered and then he was arriving after they ordered this. Oh, we're so sorry. We ordered without you. You know, he's really rude of us. And he said the only insulting thing is the notion that I might be offended that you'd ordered without me because I was still at work. That's that's the only thing. So very often, if there was no,

they'll tell you and then, you know, the amend is mildly embarrassing, but it's over in 90 seconds anyway. So you, you in a normal immense procedure, you're not losing anything except possibly face by trying it out. So if there's a whiff that the amend is necessary, go and make it. And what I mean, we'll come on another occasion to cover to men's or there is such a thing as making an amendment covertly,

directly but covertly.

But but anyway, as far as step 8 is concerned, if there is a whiff of someone being harmed, you go and make amends. So that's all I've got on step 8. So Alistair, do you want to skip over into questions if there are any? Yes, thank you, Tim. Yeah, I will now open up the meeting for questions rather than the sharing. And that can be done by the raised hand function or you can message me in the chat

or just shout out wave your hand at the camera, Seamus.

That's cool, I didn't stick my hand up but I'll have to say something now.

So I'm just pressing 2 buttons here. OK,

got it now. Yes, I do not have a question actually, I wasn't going to ask it quite yet. I was going to wait until things have run dry. But so it seems to be implicit in what you said, Tim, that

or rather the situations you described seem to have a human agency. At both ends of them

there is a person and it reminds me of

what it says

in the 12 and 12. Again, sometimes useful to refer to. I think Bill described

harms as being the results of instincts in collision.

So there's sort of bruising, bruising going on there. What I'm what's going through my mind is a category of thing called

financial amends, which I've heard a lot about in, in meetings and never been terribly, never felt terribly enthusiastic about.

And I know of people who have itemized every bottle of Sherry that they've stolen from Marks and Spencer's and then gone to Marks and Spencer's and said, I want to see the manager. I need to pay for the pay for the Sherry

and it causes all manner of difficulties with the accounts department. They don't know where the credit is and all the rest of it. But

I suppose the underlying point is, is that there's a human being at one end of that, but at the other end of the transaction

you you've got a corporation, which

arguably is not

an entity that can have instincts that can be collided with.

And I suppose there's a wider question there about how important it is

to make amends to

Yeah, it's inanimate or possibly even malicious organizations. If you've stolen from the Mafia, for example. Under that scenario, do you

then attempt to to put that thing, you know, right and, and, and what is what is right?

So that's a bit of a rag bag of questions, but maybe if I just hone that down a bit,

what do you think about this, this category of financial amends? Is it real? Is it, is it significant or is it actually a distraction, a way of distracting ourselves from the from the real thing, which is where harm has been done to living, breathing human beings. OK, that, that's great. There are lots. There are actually lots of questions in there.

When I follow the three columns,

it actually takes care of that.

What did I do? I stole Sherry from somewhere. Should I have done it? No. There we go. So certainly those two columns are without doubt so financial, whether it's stealing

or, or, or so-called so-called borrowing

or damage

it as far as step 8 is concerned, I'm supposed to be looking up what behaviour of mine is wrong.

So it's irrelevant at the point of identifying whether it's wrong, whether it's a person at the other end, a corporation, the nation itself, the planet, or, you know, the Godfather himself. The, the, the, the action is wrong on its own merits. So that's the first thing. So, so all of the

wrongs must be on there and financial,

financial wrongs, whether it's stealing or fraud or any of those. Yeah, I absolutely I, I certainly did it in step 8. Otherwise I wouldn't have. I don't know. I would have completed step 8 if I hadn't written those down.

Now

those wrongs have to be set right, I think, one way or another. Because any place which reminds me of a of a wrong that I haven't righted it, it's as though there's a sort of pole that hangs over it. And I, I remember there was a particular employer where I'd left.

I I had an end date,

but I walked out about seven or eight working days before the actual leave date over

being what I thought was diddled out of a bonus. I'd been induced to stay several months after I'd given my notice on the basis that if I stayed, I'd get a particular bonus. Then the bonus day came and then I there was no bonus and they found a technicality for not paying me. And I was livid. And I,

I, my

the paycheck had cleared for that month.

I'd effectively tied up all the loose ends. I'd done all the handovers. So the only harm by leaving was denying the employer

work in respect of the money that I'd cashed.

Now I think they knew they'd be naughty at the time because when I stormed out in in high dungeon.

If I put the key fob inside an envelope, the key fob to get into the building I put it inside an envelope. This was on the day that everyone got the bonus letter except me.

I went into the finance director's office. He was having a meeting with some clients. So embarrassing situation.

And on the envelope I wrote quid pro quo question mark, no quid, no quote.

Now, they didn't come after me for those seven or eight days

that I didn't work that, but which they paid me for. And I think they recognized that the whole, the whole affair was, was sort of murky, frankly

on, on both their behaviour was murky and my response was murky. But I when I did make amends for that,

irrespective of their poor behavior towards me, none of my business. It's my behavior towards them which mattered. I realised that I had been avoiding that part of London in case I ran into anyone from there. And as soon as I made the amend, this cloud lifted from over that particular, from over Leadenhall St. and Leadenhall Market. I no longer needed to avoid Leadenhall St.

and the adjacent roads,

so something must be done. If I've done things wrong, something must be done with all of them.

Now you've got 3 situations I think, with apart from straightforward financial amends, you know, people you've stolen or borrowed from and not paid back, where it's a human being and there's clearly a relation, an ordinary human relation, which needs to be dealt with you. You've got three further, actually 4 further categories.

Was it three or four? Anyway, you've got corporations. How do you deal with corporations

and governments and local authorities and and so corporate entities or bodies of some description. Secondly, you've got well, do you? Do you make financial amends to the nefarious?

You know, whether that's your example of mafia, I've not come across that, but I have come across plenty of people owed money to, well, well, more sort of low, low grade East London organised crime or

drug dealers, things like that. Or indeed, I've met plenty of people that refuse to make amends to corporations or governments or local authorities on the grounds that they're all evil and bent anyway. So I don't we don't owe them anything.

These people are quite happy to walk along a street paid for by taxpayers, but nonetheless, you know, they don't hover above it for fear of touching the, the, the evil tarmac.

But that's an argument that people people use sometimes. And I deal with the and then you've got the question of

where the, there's the sort of victimless crimes, right? It's very difficult to identify who the amend is owed to. So now this does come into the third column, really, who suffered and how. And I think it's quite right with going to the local Sainsbury's, trying to sort of pay for the bottle of Sherry from 1974 is just going to cause problems.

But something needs to be done. Now. The third column actually solves this with the corporations. So the two big examples that you get an awful lot of and #1 shoplifting and all of those related things #2 benefit fraud,

Social Security. So if you're not in the UK, Social Security fraud or, or or or bending, bending the rules out now, although

the entity with which you've been interacting is faceless as it were, and that yes, there are people who are fronting it, but they're just representatives of the organization. They're not the organization itself. So the local

Washington 21 is not has not been harmed by what someone stole from that branch two years ago, probably not the same manager. They're not hasn't been personally harmed. But if stuff is stolen from a corporation, the shareholders of that corporation have suffered. And who are the shareholders

with lots of these corporations? It's people who've got their savings or their pensions or their insurance policies invested in large corporations.

So as people like my mother whose income depends on a very modest income, depends on the returns from investments, which in turn are made in Sainsbury's and Tescos and all these other all of these other big corporations. So there is someone who suffers at the end of it, but it's massively diluted

the so who suffered and how It's the, it's the shareholders of the corporation who suffered. How do you make amends the shareholders of the corporation? Rolf TuneIn next week for that. But the, the, the short version

is a very good way round this to actually get the money, at least in the right ballpark. It's very difficult. You can't really give large corporations money. But what you can do is you can help support the local community causes that they all now support through their, their, their corporate social responsibility so that your, your, as it were relieving the corporation's burden.

Whether or not that, you know, an aggregate has an effect on, on the shareholders, I don't know, but but, but that's the closest, I think that's the closest you can get. So there are ways of getting pretty close,

and it's a. It's a similar question with

where, who suffered and how with benefit fraud. Well, it's not the local benefit office. The people that work there have not suffered. The person who suffered is the taxpayer.

A friend of mine asked around, just as an experiment, asked a number of people if you've got, if there's a bloke in a A that's now sober who defrauded, it's usually housing benefit. That seems to be the one that people managed to, you know, get the authorities on.

If you've got so much defrauded the housing benefit people to the tune of £10,000, do you should they come clean, giving rise to prosecution and all of the costs associated with that

police time,

legal assistance money, the costs of the courts are lots and lots of costs associated with that. Not to mention the risk of your future unemployability or reduced employability because of a criminal record.

Or would you prefer that person to contribute to the public good to the tune of £10,000 plus interest? Every single one. Who are all taxpayers, who are the people who are ultimately harmed by the benefit fraud said no, I would want them to contribute that money to the public good and and several of them spontaneously suggested how about housing charities? If someone has defrauded the

GOT housing benefit, well, maybe they that's the way they can give back.

So there's a way of making it, there's a way of personalizing all of this. When I've, when I've done wrong, I do have a relationship. It may be a morphus. It may be difficult to pin down, but it's there and something needs to be done about it. And one very good example of this is with, and this is a very personal view. So this is not meant to be an instruction to anyone else because it's contentious matter.

But I started to get very feel very awkward about

carbon. So IA few years ago, I started to offset all my carbon and I, I didn't just work out what it was, I actually multiplied it by three and then offset that with forest planting projects. And that changed my attitude, that changed my emotional attitude towards environmental things. I still believe the same things. I still belong to the same party. I still give money to the same causes,

but

the funnily enough, the terror went out of it. An awful lot of projection outwards of anger and rage and hatred and condemnation comes from my own repressed guilt, which I can't get rid of because it's in me for my own conduct. Unless that conduct is amended one way or another, I'm going to continue to project out. Once the guilt is gone, the projection stops.

Last point with the

Nair do wells.

I think if I I I'm speculating here, I think if I owed the mafia, I'd probably pay them off first just not to get killed, but that will be at that. I mean that's that's pure speculation. People disagree with this on drug dealers.

I didn't have drug dealers on my list so I can't speak from experience here directly. All I've had lots of sponsors who have. I've had many sponses