vol 275. Growth or Death with Steve W.

SPEAKER_00 0:01 We believe that alcoholism is a disease, and that Alcoholics Anonymous is one solution to that disease. I'm here to bring you the voices of its members. Everyone that comes on the show, including myself, is an active member and has found recovery in the rooms of AA. As you listen, please take what works for you and leave the rest.

SPEAKER_02 0:25 Hi everybody, my name is Steve Williams, and I'm an alcoholic. My sobriety date is December the 1st, 2017. My home group is Kent Friday Night. I have a sponsor that I work actively through the steps with.

A little while after that, and I combined that with the feeling of intoxication and getting out of myself, and I was really on to something. And I drank like it was my job. I drank like I wanted to get a promotion at my job. I drank often, I drank heavily, I developed a tolerance, all my friends changed, and I actively pursued intoxication every chance that I got.

So I realized now it was my choices that drove me to crime, to violence, to alcoholism. It wasn't my environment. It was me. It was my choices, it was what I chose to do.

And after that, I became physically dependent on alcohol, and I showed signs of physical dependence as a teenager. I was waking up with shakes in the morning sometimes, and I also frequently had blackouts. In my senior year of high school in 1983, I got suspended because I was truant, which I always thought was really hilarious. Like, you're not going to come to school, so we're not going to let you come to school.

And I got a 10-day suspension in the spring of 1983, about a month before I was supposed to graduate. So to come back to school, they told me that I had to have a meeting with my assistant principal and my parents. And I showed up to it 45 minutes late because I was getting intoxicated. And instead of it being my parents and my assistant principal, they were there.

But there was also every single one of my teachers, the principal in my high school, and a guy from a treatment center that kept telling me that he loved me. You have to remember this was in 1983, and this was an intervention. Well, I'd never heard of an intervention before. You have a problem.

My problem is that you people won't leave me alone. And I could see everybody's faces kind of sink and they all just kind of look defeated, but everybody said their piece. And at the end of it, they told me that I could either go to have an assessment at a treatment center, or I wasn't welcome to return to the high school. And so I quit.

I just quit high school on the spot. And I a month before, and they guaranteed me I would graduate if I went and had that assessment. And I just walked away. But that planted a seed in me.

And I I know it got to me because I would joke around with my friends and I deflect a lot with humor. And I would joke around with my friends and I would say, I would say, Yeah, look at me, I'm an alcoholic. But in the back of my mind, I knew something wasn't right, I knew something was wrong. Well, fast forward to the end of July in 1983, and I got really, really drunk with a friend of mine, and I told him that I'd let him drive my car.

And then I didn't want to because we were too drunk. And he punched me in the face really hard. And after I got up and dusted myself off, in a rage, I went up on the porch of my house, and it was one of these old houses in an old neighborhood that sits up on an embankment. So there's like 14 steps coming down out of it.

And I went in that back porch of that house and I got a hatchet, and I was gonna come out and I was gonna finish the fight. And we're doing this at two or three o'clock in the morning in a quiet neighborhood. And so a big group of people was standing out there, and when I walked back off of that porch with that hatchet in my hand, I just saw all these people looking up at me with terror in their eyes, and I had a moment of clarity, and I realized that this is what my life has come to, this is what being powerless over alcohol looks like, because I'm just about to go after a friend of mine with a hatchet, and I dropped that hatchet and I started to cry. And I asked my mom, who was standing right there, you know, looking terrified, if she still had the number of that guy from the treatment center.

And of course she did. And and I told her, I think I need to get some help. Well, I woke up the next morning and I wasn't so convinced, but fortunately, my mom had been to some Al Anon, and she was very convinced that I was gonna go get some help. So I went to treatment the next day, and when I went to treatment, it did not go well for me.

I did not want to do what was suggested of me. I didn't want to listen to any of the rules because I was different. And I was in an adolescent unit, even though I was 18 years old, and they told me that I needed to do these certain things and I didn't want to do them. I kept pointing to the fact look, all these kids are sent here by their parents.

I came here on my own, I want to quit, so I'm gonna quit whatever way I want to, and that set the tone for that period of sobriety. I went into that treatment center on July 22nd, 1983, and that was my first sobriety date, the first time I got sober. And I did remain abstinent for over three years, almost four years. And after I got out of that treatment center, I went to a halfway house, they suggested.

And it was not as in your face and it wasn't as confrontational, and I did very well there. And I started to go to a lot of meetings and I met a bunch of friends, and I got in a really good habit of fellowship. And I went to a lot of meetings and I really didn't do anything else, and I managed to stay sober for all that time. And I want to tell you that my life got meteorically better during that time.

It was like somebody hit me with a magic wand. I got a good job, I went back to school, I just had all these wonderful things going on in my life, but I was really restless and I was really irritable and I was really discontented because I did not have any kind of a spiritual solution whatsoever. I never got a sponsor, I never worked on the steps, I didn't pray, I didn't do anything to establish a spiritual defense against the first drink. And somewhere in that time, I'm living in Akron, Ohio, and I decided you know what would make everything better if I moved to Florida.

And so I moved to Florida, and when I got to Florida, I never reconnected with AA. So that little flimsy reed of defense that I had against the first drink completely disappeared. And somebody one day offered me a drink and I took it without any thought of the consequences, without any thought of what would happen, and I picked up right where I had left off. I still had a really high tolerance, I drank like crazy, and I stayed in that relapse for the next eight years from the time I was 22 until I was 30.

And during that time, I crossed pretty much every yet that you can imagine in my life. I was homeless, I went to prison, I don't even have any idea how many times I got arrested. I know it was probably over 20 times that I've been arrested, and a bunch of them were during that eight years. I actually got in some real trouble, and I got a 66-count federal indictment for stealing money from casinos, and I was having to go to Las Vegas to face charges, and I got convicted of three federal felonies.

And when I got convicted of that, they told me I got probation, but they told me that I wasn't eligible to be on parole in uh Jacksonville, Florida, where I lived. So I had to move back to Ohio against my will and try to get on probation, or else I was gonna have to move to Las Vegas, which terrified me because I didn't know anybody in Las Vegas. And so I came back here to Akron and I just I could not get it under control enough to even meet the conditions of my probation, and I just ran. And I was a fugitive from justice for two years during that time, and then eventually I wound up in prison in 1992.

What I realized is that after two years of being a fugitive, when I got to prison, it was a huge improvement in my lifestyle, it was a step up for me, and that was a very humbling experience, and I remember that very clearly. And when I got out of prison, I remember just the that was the darkest, most miserable time of my life up to that point. I just didn't know how to live, I didn't know how to function. And I was in a halfway house in Jacksonville, Florida, and because I'm powerless over alcohol, I actually walked across the street without a pass, went to a grocery store and bought alcohol and brought it back into the facility, which is either two or three felonies that I'm committing that each could get me five years in prison because I'm powerless over alcohol.

Those are the kind of choices I make, those are the kind of decisions I make. When I walked out of prison, I had $100. I think they gave me $106 of gate money, and I owned one change of clothes. And it was everything I owned in the world, and I was 27 years old.

That's what drinking does for me. That's what happens when I'm actively drinking. And so I got out of prison, I got out of the halfway house, and I somehow managed to cobble a life together. I got a little apartment and I got a car, and I met a girl, and I fell in love.

And it was the first time I'd ever really fallen in love. She was a wonder, she I'm sure she still is. I haven't talked to her in 30 years, but she was a wonderful woman, and I really loved her. And after two years of being around me and and the decisions I was making, she left me.

It hurt, it really, really hurt. And I was 30 years old, this was in 1995, and I remember I couldn't drink enough to stop that pain. I couldn't do anything to stop that pain. It just hurt.

And so I went to a counselor, and for the first time in my life, and I've gone to a bunch of counseling over the years, but this was the first time in my life that I went to a counselor and I actually told them the whole truth about everything that was going on with me, about everything I was doing, about my past. I just spilled my guts to this guy for 10 or 15 minutes. And I could still remember his office that day. I could still remember it was a cool office, and there was plants and there was light coming in through the window by a bookshelf.

And when I got done with what I was saying, he said to me, He says, I'm gonna be honest with you, I don't think I can help you with your emotional or psychological problems because I think you're an alcoholic. And he asked me if I would be willing to go get some treatment, and I said, Yeah, I would. I was that broken down. And he uh called a couple places and looked around, and there wasn't anything I could get into, nobody had a bed for me, I didn't have any insurance, and so he hung up the phone and he looked at me kind of dejected, and he said, Let me ask you this have you ever heard the term white knuckle sobriety?

And when he said that to me, I could still remember the look on his face, and I remember how it felt to me because in that eight years that I was relapsed, the cunning, baffling, and powerful part of this disease showed me how powerful it is because I had never once occurred to me that maybe drinking was the problem again, and it never occurred to me how happy and how good my life had been during that three years that I had abstained from drinking, and a light went off, and I had a moment of clarity right there, and I went to a meeting that very afternoon. The meeting house was right by my my house in Jacksonville Beach, and I started going to meetings regularly. I met people, and I'm still friends with a lot of those people 30 years later, and I got a sponsor and I actually started to work in the steps, and I got a really powerful solution going in my life, and it was like somebody hit me with a magic wand again. My life got so much better that within a year I had a great job.

I had a new truck, I had a really wonderful girlfriend, and I let all those things take me away from that little bit of solution that I was starting to develop in that first year, and I stopped going to meetings as much, and I was hanging out with my girlfriend all the time, and I was working all the time, and so that little bit of a spiritual solution that I got it faded away. And once again, I was presented with an opportunity and I picked up without any thought of the consequence, and after two years of sobriety, I got drunk again, and that next six months was literally the lowest hell that I've ever felt in my entire life. And I remember that I would wake up in the morning, and the first thought in my head would be a very strong expletive because I had woken up again, because I just wanted to die. I didn't want to kill myself, but I didn't want to live either.

And after about six months of that, I finally called a friend of mine that I had made in the program, and I asked him if he would take me to a meeting. And he said no, he couldn't do it. He had tickets to go to see the jazz festival that night. There's a really big jazz festival every fall.

This was November the 13th of 1998. And he asked me to go to that, and I asked him if he'd take me to a meeting, and and and he said, No, I'm going with my wife to the jazz festival. I hear his wife in the background. I called her two cents because she would always be in the background saying, You tell him to go to a meeting, you tell him to quit chasing girls, she'd always be putting her two cents in in the background.

And so she grabbed the phone and she said, Stay where you are, I'm coming to get you. And she gave up her tickets to go to the jazz festival with her husband. And she came over and she cleaned out my apartment and threw everything that I had away and took me to a meeting that night. And I stayed sober for a really long time that time.

And I went through the the steps with that man that I called. He was my sponsor, and I got an actual spiritual solution working in my life. I got through all the steps. It was hard this time.

It wasn't that magic wand feeling, it wasn't that things just got rosy really fast. It was a grind, and I was really miserable for a long time, but I stuck with it and I knew I had to change some things. And again, I got that spiritual defense back and it felt really good. And I remember that time.

It was a very happy time in my life. I was in my early 30s, I felt really good. And I decided at that point that I wanted to move back to Akron, Ohio, because I wanted to start a family, and I didn't want to start a family away from my family because I have a very good family here. And so I moved back.

But the lesson I had learned was that I reconnected very quickly with AA when I got back to Akron, and I got a home group and I got a sponsor, and I started working the steps with that sponsor. And my life got really, really good. I lived a fairy tale life, really, because going from a guy that was in prison and penniless, I ended up being a homeowner, meeting a wonderful woman. We had a baby, and then we got married, and then we had another baby.

So I had two healthy children, I had a beautiful wife. We built a brand new home. We're going on vacations, on cruises, going all over. I had two brand new cars in the driveway.

I had a brand new home. And again, I let those things that was longer time, but after about seven or eight years, I started to drift away again. And I had this strange combination of pride and fear because my spiritual sickness will manifest itself if I'm not actively engaged in a spiritual solution. And so as I disengaged from AA, my spiritual sickness was able to blossom again.

And I remember being in the yard of that beautiful home, and my yard looked like the infield of a major league ballpark with the stripes on it, and you know, not a single weed anywhere to be found. And I'm out there, it's like 6:30 in the morning, and I'm standing out there, and it's just all beautiful and suburban and idyllic. And I remember standing there thinking to myself, and I'm 10 years sober at the time, and I remember thinking to myself, I was happier when I was in prison. And I remember that day, and I remember how miserable I was, and I remember I was too proud and too afraid to tell anybody, and I was too proud and too afraid at the same time, and that just is a bizarre feeling.

And I know there's a lot of people out there listening to this that can relate to that because I hear it over and over again, and I didn't tell anybody, and again, a little while after that, a situation came up where I was presented with an opportunity, and again, I was back down to the first half of the first step. I'd gone backwards through the steps, and once I'm at that first half of the first step, I don't have a spiritual defense against alcohol. And I picked up again and I lost everything. I lost my wife, I lost a relationship with my children, I lost both those homes that we owned.

I lost everything, and I was back to just sneaking around trying to see how much I could get away with drinking. And I came back into AA, and this is a hard one for me to talk about because I use this beautiful fellowship and all the love and All the charity that's available to us just for my own selfish purposes to try to get out of jackpots and to try to get out of trouble. And my ex-wife didn't want me around the kids if I was drinking, so I said, Oh, no problem, I'm sober. And I was going to meetings and I was sneaking around and drinking in between.

I was I was doing that and I was getting away with it for about six months, and then I got caught. And that was Thanksgiving of 2017. When I got caught, she told me in an atypical fashion for her, she told me in a very loving and caring way that she just was concerned for me and that she needed to know that her kids were safe, that our kids were safe when they're with me. And so I went back to AA again, and that was December the 1st of 2017, my current sobriety day.

And when I came back in, I had no intention of wanting to be sober. I had no intention of wanting to do anything except get out of that little bit of trouble and go back to sneaking around again. And about three or four days later, my son, who was the younger of my two children, was about 10 years old. He was 10 years old, and he got in some trouble at school.

So I had to go over to my old house. I went over there and I knew it was serious because we were sitting in the room that has the good furniture in it that you never sit in. And my son comes in and he's squirming and doesn't want to look at me. And I said, Okay, so what's going on?

And my ex-wife goes, Well, do you want to tell him or should I? And my son shakes his head, no, no, no, no, no, I'm not telling him. And so my ex-wife tells me, Your son told someone at school today that he wants to kill himself. And immediately denial kicks in on my part.

I'm like, Oh, you didn't say that. I said, You don't mean that, right? And he looked at me right in the eyes and he told me, I hate my life, and I wish I was dead. And I wish I could tell you that at that moment I saw it, but I didn't.

I thought, oh, he's just kidding. What does he know? And I go back to my extended stay hotel where I'm living my glorious life of alcoholism. And over the next couple days it started to sink in that this is where my life has come to.

That this child that I love so much and would do anything for, this is how I've abandoned him. I haven't abandoned him physically, I haven't abandoned him financially, but I have abandoned him emotionally, and I saw a little glimpse of how powerless I am. And I saw a little glimpse of this is the wreckage that I'm causing. And it gave me a willingness, it gave me a willingness to try again.

So let's do a little bit of math, okay? So from July 22nd of 1983 to December the 1st, 2017, that's 34 years that I've been coming in and out of AA. That's 34 years that I've tried to build up a spiritual solution and not been able to maintain it. And I really had some hard questions to ask myself at that point.

I had to ask myself, am I constitutionally incapable of being honest with myself? And I thought, no, I don't think I'm that delusional. I know I'm delusional, but I don't think I'm that delusional. And I had to ask myself, well, can I really get this?

What I realized was that I really just didn't care enough about myself to be able to want to do it for me. But I cared enough about my son and I cared enough about my daughter that I wanted to be present for them. And God used that willingness to open the door for me. And I started to really get honest.

And I started to understand that I really was gonna have to be willing to go to any lengths to get sober, that I was gonna have to be willing to try a little bit harder because my track record had shown that I have a propensity for going back to what doesn't work, and so I still had the same sponsor. I called and asked him if he would continue to work with me. He's been my sponsor for 24 years now, and I I started to really use him, and I had a lot of friends that I had known from the first time that I was sober in 1983 that were still sober and still active after 35 years. And I started to reach out to people and I started to get honest, and I started to get honest in a way that I never had before because I realized that my pride of wanting to say, Oh, I've been around so long, there were just things I just didn't get.

There were parts of the steps I just didn't understand. And the first thing I did was I called my sponsor. I said, and I told him, I said, Dave, I said, even with everything that I've been through, I really don't know if I'm powerless over alcohol or not. And I expected he was gonna tell me that I had to get out or you know, I wasn't welcome in AA or anything.

But all he told me was, that's okay. He says, you just keep talking about that. He says, you can talk to me about that, and he knows all of my friends, and he said, Maybe talk to so-and-so about this, maybe talk to this person about it. And I started to take advantage of that, and I started just asking people to share their experience with me because my hair was on fire, and I was having to do it out of necessity, and I was having to do it because the pain was just so great, and it was a really painful first year in sobriety this time, and I had a lot of soul searching to do, but it made me really willing, it made me really ready to try to look for the solution.

And the first thing I realized was that I have to really be honest. Honesty is the principle of the first step, and I had to get honest about things, and I had to start telling people the whole picture, and I had to start telling people what was really up with me, but I also had to do it in a way that was appropriate because I have a right to freedom of speech, but I don't have the right to yell fire in a crowded movie theater. So I want to use my freedom of speech in ways that are not harmful to other individuals and to let God guide that hand. The other problem I had was that I was a very hardcore atheist at this point, and I had been raised in a church and I had had some traumatic experiences with that church, and I really had a huge resentment against God and against religion.

And I I stumbled on a technicality that it says I should pray, but it doesn't say that I have to believe in what I'm praying in. So I just prayed, and I prayed like my life depended on it because I was very scared. But I prayed and I prayed all the time, and I knew I didn't believe in anything, and I didn't care. I just prayed and I kept on praying as an atheist, and I made jokes about you've got the prayers of an atheist going for you.

I would pray for other people, I would pray for God's will and love to be in their life, and I went through the steps that way, and the hope I found was in the fact that I knew all these other people had been sober, and the other hope I found was in the fact that I had been sober and been happy in sobriety. So it didn't matter what I believe. I'm a house painter who cares what I believe. I just need to find something outside of myself, a power greater than myself, that can restore me to sanity.

And that's where I found the hope in step two. That's where I found the hope that I needed to go on. And then the surrender became very easy at that point, and I became really willing to dive into the rest of the steps, and I did a good four step. And when I got done with that four step, I was very eager to do a fifth step with my sponsor.

But I realized that the promises after the fifth step in the big book are some of the most beautiful promises anywhere in the book. And the one I really like, and I'm gonna paraphrase it because I don't have a big book sitting in front of me, is that we may have had certain spiritual notions or concepts, but that once we have taken this vital step, we begin to have a spiritual experience. And I started to have that spiritual experience, and what I realize is that AA is an industry, and every industry needs two things. And every industry has to have two things.

It has to, first of all, have raw materials, which I was a very raw material at that time, but it also needs to have skilled craftsmen to shape that material, and so when I'm engaging in the fifth step, what I'm actually doing is that I'm enabling others to get to know me and to use their skills on me, and I'm helping them in that way, and I'm also helping myself, and I need to be willing to not only share, but listen and listen and share, and in that way, God's will and God's love can come into me. And I realize that step six isn't appropriate to be associated with step seven because I think it's much more heavily connected to the step, the five steps before it, because I need to have the honesty, I need to have the hope, I need to have the surrender, I need to have the courage, and then I need to have the integrity, and then the willingness comes, and that willingness opened up in the sixth step, which I had never understood before. I had never comprehended the sixth step, I had never got it, and I had to admit that to someone. I had to admit that after 35 years, I have no clue what the sixth step is, and I asked my sponsor about it, and he explained to me it's a second surrender that we're surrendering for a second time and we're surrendering all the rest of ourselves, and that made sense to me, and I became very willing, and I became very honest, and I became very open-minded.

It helped to open up those gifts of the program to me. So the sixth step and the seventh step were completed, and then when I got into the amends process, it was a piece of cake because I had a solid foundation of all the other steps, and the fears of what people were gonna think, the fears of how am I gonna relate to these people or how am I gonna make this right disappeared because what I realized is that the amends are not about fixing the past, they're about building a future, they're about me making a way to relate to other people through a spiritual lens, through the higher power that's in my life. And somewhere around this time, I went through the steps again with another friend of mine that's also sponsored by my sponsor. And I I came back to God and I came back to religion.

And I'm not saying anybody has to, I'm just saying that's what happened for me. And so when I came back to God like that, it really opened up even more, and I realized there were so many beautiful things in the religion of my childhood, and there was so much love, and those people were doing the best they could. Things happened, and I didn't like some of them, but I didn't need to throw out everything just because of that. And I made amends thoroughly, completely, because I wasn't making amends for myself and I wasn't making amends for the other person, I was making amends so that I can promote God's love and that I could promote God's will, and my selfishness and self-centered continue to be diminished because of that.

And when I got to the 10th step, what I realized about the 10th step was that I was trying to earn my salvation, I was trying to earn my sobriety, and I realized that's not at all what the 10th step is about. The 10th step is about simply being in touch with myself. And this quote is on page 90 of the 12 and 12, and it says, it's a spiritual axiom that anytime we are disturbed, there's something wrong with us, and the us is italicized. And what I realized about that is that's a call to action for me, so that anytime that I'm disturbed, and I've taken it and broadened it out to make it inclusive of not only bad disturbed, but good disturbed.

When I'm getting too happy, when I'm getting super elated, that's also a warning sign to me now. So anytime that I'm disturbed, I let that bounce me back to the first step. And I realize there's probably something I'm not being honest about. There's probably something that I'm not trusting my higher power about, there's probably something I'm not surrendered about.

And that's a good time for me to write something down, even if it's just a quick note on my phone, even if it's to send a text of my friend and say, I'm struggling with this. So the 10th step has gone from being something that I'm supposed to do every night or every morning to something that's a living, breathing part of me, something that's an active part of my imagination. And I'm always imagining ways I can get closer to God. I'm always imagining ways that I can grow in my my spiritual sobriety.

And it's done marvelous things for me because I'm not worried about if I forgot to do it because I was watching a good TV show and fell asleep. Now it's part of me, it's just part of my day-to-day. If I want to raise my voice at somebody, I realize I'm in trouble and I need to get back to a spiritual solution. And that's led me into a closer relationship with God.

And it's made it easier for me to pray, it's made it easier for me to meditate, and it's made it easier for me to go on to the 12th step and to do everything that I can to be of service to others in this beautiful program. And it's amazing because I went from somebody who was so hateful and contemptuous of AA at certain points in my career to someone that I absolutely love it, and I absolutely adore this program, and I've fallen in love with AA, and I've fallen in love with God, and I've fallen in love with myself. The healing and the spiritual healing that I'm feeling is just like the disease of alcoholism. The disease of alcoholism is family disease, and it radiates out from us, and it affects everyone that loves us and cares about us.

But in the same way, the spiritual healing of this program, when it's practiced, the way it's written out in the book and written out in the 12 and 12s, it actually radiates out from us in the very same way. And instead of spreading a sickness, we spread a healing. And I'm very grateful for that today. And I'm very grateful that I had a chance to tell you all my story.

And thank you for listening. SPEAKER_00 36:50 Thank you, Steve. Thank you, Tara. That was a lovely, lovely ending.

The spreading of healing instead of sickness. I really like that. Thank you. You have really struggled to get the uh seven, eight years of sobriety.

SPEAKER_02 37:11 Yeah. But you know what? Here's a here's a really funny one. I don't tell this story.

And I was just talking to this guy today. So I always used to talk about how long I used to be sober every time I'd talk at a meeting. And my one buddy, and he's really known for just calling you out in front of everybody, he took me off to the side and he says, Hey Steve, guess what? What?

Nobody gives a fuck how long you used to be sober. Shut the fuck up about it. And I was telling him that today, but you know what he realized is that I was holding it against myself and I was beating myself up about it. And until I until I move on, it doesn't matter.

All we have is today. I can't unring the bells. You know, I can't go back and change anything. All I can do is look at what I've done using this roadmap of where I should be going today.

So all those struggles, I love them. I embrace them. I'm so grateful for them. I'm so grateful that I can, you know, because people come in and they're like, oh, I've been at this forever.

I've you know, it's been 10 years I've been in and out. Oh, that's adorable. You know, but it gets their attention, you know, that I can I can tell people that and help them get over themselves the way other people help me get over myself. SPEAKER_00 38:26 So you're in Akron, Ohio.

Tell us what sponsoring and being a sponsee looks like from the founding place. SPEAKER_02 38:39 Akron has wonderful meetings, and it's very interesting to be around so much history. And there's a lot of people that are very knowledgeable about the history here, and it's it's nice. I think we have a certain sense of responsibility about being the ambassadors of the birthplace of AA, and I really enjoy that aspect of it.

And unfortunately, there are people that to me are a little overly attached to that, and there are some situations I've seen arise where pride and ego gets involved probably a little bit more than it should because of that. But you know, everything has its good and its bad side, but I'm I'm very happy to be from Akron and I really appreciate our heritage and our our chance to be ambassadors to people from all over. SPEAKER_00 39:29 And what about being there near Dr. Bob's house?

Do you go there? Do you go to Founders Day? SPEAKER_02 39:35 Do you Yeah, I love Dr. Bob's house, and I don't go anywhere near Dr.

Bob's house around Founders Day because it's a madhouse. And anybody listening, I would recommend if you want to see the sites, come at a time when it's not Founders Day and it's not so crowded because we're always happy. It's open year-round and we're always happy to show people around. And yeah, um I I actually painted Dr.

Bob's house back in 2005. I'm a house painter, and I got Sherman Williams to donate the paint. And some people from my home group came and helped me out. SPEAKER_00 40:08 Very cool.

SPEAKER_02 40:09 Yeah, it was it was a neat experience. I and I my daughter came by, she was two at the time, and my daughter came by and visited. And yeah, it it's it's really neat. And it's neat to go take a sponsee there and do the third step prayer in in the room where the what they call the surrender room, where that's where they took people upstairs there and and got on their knees and prayed the third step prayer.

Well, there wasn't even a third step prayer back then, but you know, they just got on their knees and surrendered. It's pretty cool. SPEAKER_00 40:39 That is really cool. That's pretty cool.

SPEAKER_02 40:41 I'm also a huge fan of Stan Hewitt and the Gate Lodge. It's uh it's a powerful place. I think you're standing in the exact same place where Bill actually met Bob for the first time. SPEAKER_00 40:52 I didn't know about that one.

SPEAKER_02 40:54 Yeah, the Gate Lodge, and they've done a great job. Akron, there's a really strong historical tradition. And the the Gate Lodge is where Henrietta Cyberline, who was a member of the Oxford group, and she was the daughter-in-law of the founder of Goodyear Tyre. That's where they met, was at the Gate Lodge at Stan Hewitt, and that's the Cyberline estate, which is a a public place now, and uh it's it's a gorgeous place.

SPEAKER_00 41:25 Well, very good commercial for Akron, Ohio. It makes me want to come. SPEAKER_02 41:30 And like I say, come anytime but Founders Day. Coming for Founders Day is awesome because it's great to have 10,000 people here to celebrate recovery, but trying to see the sites then it's a little bit of a cattle call.

SPEAKER_00 41:43 Oh, I bet. I bet. SPEAKER_02 41:44 Yeah. SPEAKER_00 41:46 You talked about how you need to take a call of action when you're disturbed around you know, in talking about step 10 on a larger scale.

And you said you need to do that when you're disturbed, happy or sad. So in what scenario would you be happy but disturbed and need to take action? And what does that look like? What's give me an example?

SPEAKER_02 42:13 Well, uh a lot of what I found that to be, and and it's an old saying that romances and finances are the things that get us the most off track. And I found that I can get just as distracted from my higher power and and focusing on spiritual growth when I'm in a heightened state of emotion either way. And so when I'm like too happy or kind of obsessed about something, that I'm just as far off as when I'm depressed. And I'm learning to level out, and that's where it comes up the most with me is that I get really excited, like when I get a big job and I get all excited, and I and you know, I can become a workaholic, I can become overly obsessed with romance, I can become overly obsessed with uh hobbies and things that I enjoy.

So, what I found is that it doesn't say that disturbed doesn't have to be a negative thing. It's just when I'm at a really heightened state of emotion, I found that's a good time for me to look at what's going on with me. And what I always find is that I'm not focusing on spirituality. I'm focusing on inevitably, it comes back to I I find that it's my self-will.

So when I find when I have that disturbance, I go back and I and I go back through the very basics of the steps. I I look at step one am I being honest? Am I really admitting, am I really being powerless here? Um am I having hope and trusting in a higher power?

And am I surrendered? And 99 times out of a hundred, when I'm in a heightened state of emotion, and and I'm not talking about that I just get happy for. Little bit, but when I'm finding myself in that either obsessed or depressed state of mind, that it's right there. And then that gives me a cue that I need to write about it.

And then once I write about it, I need to share that with another alcoholic. And then I need to get willing to look at how am I gonna surrender this to God? How am I really gonna turn this over? And where can I dig a little bit deeper and find a little bit more spirituality?

And it's really helped me to grow by opening up to the fact that it's not just when I'm experiencing a negative emotion. There's a gold mine in examining what I'm overly excited about in a good way, too. SPEAKER_00 44:41 That's really good. That makes so much sense in terms of it.

I mean, what it makes what it surfaces for me is my priorities. SPEAKER_02 44:50 When I get overly excited about something, that suddenly becomes uh it releases good good chemicals and then it feels good, and then I reprioritize and I start putting my energy towards and I can look back on my track record and see because I've done a lot of inventories and because I've had a lot of periods of of spiritual growth and then spiritual regression, I started to understand that pattern. And I think it it really helped me to understand that the limitations that I was placing on myself by not being willing to look at both sides of that coin. And and I think it's just natural that we don't want to discourage good feelings, and I don't want to discourage good feelings.

I enjoy I have a very joyous life, but I also don't want to be too attached to anything. SPEAKER_00 45:41 I think it sounds very healthy. Thank you. SPEAKER_02 45:44 Yeah, it's the middle path, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 45:48 Which I think alcoholics are known for not being really well balanced in all areas of our lives. SPEAKER_02 45:56 Well, it's really funny because I realize I don't mind being the best at something and I don't mind being the worst, but something really annoyed me about being average, and when I took a hard look at it, I'm an incredibly average human being. And I think most of us really are, but for some reason, I'm attracted to the extremes, and I don't think I'm at all unique in that. But when I realized that about myself, like if I grade my own paper, I don't mind getting an A or I don't mind getting an F.

But when I when I have a C, like that's that that's annoying to me. And I thought, wow, I'm I'm really off on this. And and thinking about it and and and opening my mind up to the fact that I really wasn't willing to to accept myself for what I actually am helped me to grow in that area and helped me to understand open up a little bit more and realize that, yeah, I need to be more willing to look at heightened emotions at any state. SPEAKER_00 46:56 The way you said that it sounds like not only is it difficult for us to be in the middle, but it actually is annoying and hard to be in the middle because we don't want to be in the middle.

Not that it's hard to be in the middle, it's like we don't I don't want to be here. This balancing is boring. All or nothing, man, black or white. SPEAKER_02 47:25 Yeah, and that's what I and that's what I realized, and that is that's like the center of the shrubbery maze that is my spiritual malady, that I don't want to just accept myself for what I really am, which is just a very garden variety person.

I mean, yeah, I'm not denigrating myself by saying that. I mean, I'm a wonderful person with a lot of wonderful qualities, but I'm a pretty average guy. And I I I had to really think, and I and I spent a lot of time meditating and talking to other people and praying about the fact that why does it bother me to be average? Almost everyone is very average in most ways.

That's why it's called the average. Exactly. And it's like, but why was I so attracted to the to the extremes? And that's what I realized because I don't accept myself.

And that's a big key to me is just learning to love and accept myself for who I actually am, is one of the hugest uh gifts that I've gotten from actively participating in the steps and actively seeking to make the steps a huge part of my life. Because I can see myself for what I really am, and I can really like myself for what I really am without having to be great, without having to be terrible, without having to be anything except myself. SPEAKER_00 48:50 That sounds so healthy. SPEAKER_02 48:52 I've done a lot of work in counseling and I've done a lot of work in other areas, and I I just I'm I'm just very lucky that I've had a lot of great people to teach me.

I'm very lucky too that I, you know, because I've been in and out of recovery for so long, I know a lot of people that just have, I probably know 15 people that have over 40 years of sobriety that I would count as my friends. And it's it's nice, and that are still active in recovery. There's a lot of long-term recovery in my circle of friends, and we learn lessons over that time. We learn lessons from living life on spiritual terms for decades.

And one of the things I had to realize is that, yeah, this isn't like a quick job. It's not like, you know, I go through the steps and then I dust my hands off, and then I'm good. I have to be willing to keep exploring, I have to be willing to keep looking for more because I stagnate. I look at my spirituality as a living, breathing thing.

And the first rule of biology is that uh is that an organism that's alive is either growing or it's dying. So if I'm not nurturing and feeding my spirituality, it will start to die the minute I don't feed it. And I I had to be stripped of that delusion that I can stay in one place. I had to be stripped of that delusion that I can simply rest.

And I I love the term rest on our laurels, and I can't. I have to really accept that and I have to really think about what does that mean in a day-to-day sense, and to bring it all the way back around. That's where the tenth step is such a vital part of my life because it's not something that I do once a day, it's something that I do every time that something's up with me. SPEAKER_00 50:49 Well said.

Thank you. All right. Well, I'm gonna give you a minute to pause and see if anything surfaces, if there's anything that you left out or anything that you're thinking of now that you would like to share. You can take your time.

SPEAKER_02 51:08 No, I think I'm good. Uh, and and it was lovely talking with you, Tara. I'm glad to be getting to know you a little bit too. And uh yeah, I just when I when I I don't I don't really don't ever rewrite my leads on the way home from the meeting.

No, just whatever I said is whatever I said, and it and it and it's helpful to me because and and I used to, I used to be terrible about it. But what I realized is that you know, I this I'm just trying to emanate God's love is coming into me very freely now because of the steps, and I want to just let that emanate through me, and so whatever comes out is what comes out, and I think it's exactly what I'm supposed to say at any time. SPEAKER_00 51:47 All right, I love it. Then we're down to the final question.

For the listener who is suffering, what message would you like to leave them with? SPEAKER_02 51:57 I'd like to let them know there's hope. There is always hope. And I think that's what we need more than anything when we're suffering, that we need to find hope.

And that that hope is always available, and we just have to be willing, honest, and open-minded, and we will find it. SPEAKER_00 52:16 For more information, read the first 164 pages of the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous or visit keepcomingback.net.