Carin S. Step 5 - Step Series at Twelve Step House - 8/12/2025

Carin S. Step 5, Step Series at the Tuesday Night Step Group, Twelve Step House, Fort Lauderdale, FL. 8/12/2025

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm Karen, and I'm an alcoholic Karen with an A,
A big A. It's good to be here tonight. You
look great, you do You look great? You look great
to me. You're who I need to be seeing tonight.
My sobriety date is September the eighth, nineteen eighty eight,

(00:22):
and that means in a couple of weeks, I will
celebrate thirty seven years of continuous sobriety. Yeah, it's like
looking to see who that is. It's a long time. Anyway,
We're gonna do the fifth step tonight. This is I

(00:44):
want to recap just two seconds, how many people have
been coming. This is the first step. Good, good, good,
So just to recap, you know, we're all living here tonight.
In the first step, we're a power over alcohol when
we drink it. And my life is unmanageable and I'm

(01:04):
not and I've had a full week of unmanageability while
I'm sober, so I absolutely understand the second half of
the first step. Second step tells us, you know, I
got to come to believe in something that's gonna get
me out of this because I can't figure out how
to do it myself. So it doesn't really matter what
it is. It doesn't tell you what it is. You
can believe in anything you want, but you better believe

(01:26):
in something other than yourself to take you through this thing.
And you get to the third step, which says you
make a decision, which is difficult for us because if
you're like me, I made a hundred decisions, I did nothing.
But in this particular step, you make a decision to
turn your will and your life over the care of
whatever it is that you decided to call this thing.

(01:47):
I don't know what it is, but I will tell
you that if you make a decision and you don't
do anything about that decision, I will see you. You
hear the following week while you pick up your next
white chip. So you make a decision and you do something,
and then, you know, last week we talked about making
a fearless and searching moral inventory of ourselves, which you

(02:07):
know turns out at the end, turns out to be
a very small step of freedom. And we begin to release,
and we begin to release on paper. You know, somewhere
I decided to go look for my fourth step. And
then when I've moved recently to Flora, so I don't
know where it is, but I know it's here somewhere anyway.
So the fourth step was painful, clearly painful, putting all

(02:27):
that stuff on paper, and it didn't feel good. And
the reason it didn't feel good is because it's not
supposed to feel good. It's supposed to feel bad. You're
putting things on a piece of paper that you don't
want that nobody knows about you. Nobody's ever heard you.
I mean, even the questions that I that I read
from Clancy, you know, pretty much tell you that this

(02:47):
is the time in your work of the steps that
you got to get all this stuff on paper. Doesn't
really matter. But nobody knows this about me, nobody. If
you're an alcoholic like me, and you probably are, I
don't know how to get out of pain except to
drink or use. So I'm finishing my fourth step and
on a great deal of pain. And you know, some
of the old timers said said, you know, when you

(03:08):
finish your fourth step, you're gonna feel great, You're gonna
feel relieved. I don't feel any of those things. I
felt bad. I felt bad enough that I thought that
I needed something to medicate my badness. And so my
sponsor said, yes, there's absolutely a medicine that you can
medicate with for your badness, and that means going to
do a fifth step immediately. You know, that's the step
of relief. It's an immediate fifth step. If you wait,

(03:29):
and I have to tell you our sponsored I don't know,
probably hundreds of people at this point, and anybody that
waits to do the fifth step after their fourth step
invariably lives in so much pain that they have to
figure out a way to medicate. I'm just saying, so
after your fourth step, don't even think about it, go
right into your fifth step. You know it's they're easy
to do, by the way, but you don't figure that

(03:49):
out until after you've done them. You know, while you're
doing them, they don't seem so easy, but when you're
done with them, you know like, oh, that wasn't so hard.
That was easy to do. And you have to remember
that because the goal of this is when you're don't
with the steps, is to go out there and do
the steps with somebody else. So when they look at
you with your fourth and fifth step and they think
they're going to die from putting on, you can say, nah,
it's not that bad. You know, I got through it.

(04:09):
It sound as bad as you think. So one thing
I want to say about step five is non negotiable.
You know when my twelve and twelve, I've made notes
through the years. You know, whatever step I was on,
I wrote things that meant something to me, and blah
blah blah. There's only one thing that I have written
in the entire fifth step in my twelve and twelve,
and that is it is non negotiable. So what does

(04:32):
that mean? That means for me, that meant if you
don't do it, you'll drink. There it is, by the way,
that's not my opinion. That's right in the Big Book.
You can go and look it up after the meeting.
It absolutely says those who skimp on this step and
don't do this step, and even long timers and old
timers that don't do a thorough job on their fifth step,
they will drink. So it's not my opinion, it's a

(04:53):
fact right in the Big Okay. So the other thing
about step five, which I just love, but I don't
understand it. I'm going to meet someone who's going to
explain this to me. Why. In the Big Book it
tells us from the fifth step, we find out what
our purpose is in AA. I don't know why they
stuck it in the fifth step, but they did. And
they said to me personally that the purpose of AA,

(05:16):
the purpose of being a sober alcoholic in AA, is
to fit myself to be of maximum service to God
and the fellows around me. So you know, that's why
we're here. We're not even here to get sober, by
the way, we're not here to be good people. We're
not here to do anything except to fit myself. And
that's a really interesting word, to make myself fit, to

(05:37):
do something like Fred at the gym. To get fit,
you have to do work to fit myself to be
of maximum service, not half measures, to be maximum service
to God. I really don't know how to do that
and to the fellows around me, and I really don't
know how to do that either, but that's what it
tells me, and they stick it in the fifth step.

(05:58):
And the third thing is is that I'm about to
expose myself to another human being, and I'm going to
expose things about myself that I thick by the way,
that nobody could possibly understand. It's probably the greatest gift
that we find out of alcoholics anonymous is that first

(06:18):
of all, my sponsor yawned, I seem to tell you,
and I had some really juicy bits in there. He
yawned throughout the whole thing, you know. And I have
a feeling that there was a sponsor school at that
point where they told all the sponsors just yawn in
the middle, so they don't think that they're all that.
But I spoke to him thinking that I was going
to tell him things about me that he couldn't possibly understand,

(06:41):
and of course that you know, she might wind up
judging me, And you know, if you're an alcoholic like me,
I did not have a single person in my life
who knew everything about me. And I knew a lot
of people. I had a lot of friends, that's in
air quotes friends, and each of these friends knew a
little bit about me, just a little bit, just enough
that I would let out so you would think we

(07:01):
were close, so you would think I was telling the truth.
My biggest fear is that somebody would throw me a
big party and invite all these people in one room,
and they would all start talking to each other, and
then they would realize they put this whole picture together
of what I was as a human being, and then
they're out the door. There's a big feared one. And
so what I was told is that don't worry about that.

(07:23):
There's nothing you can say toever you do this fit
step with. That's first of all, I'm a good one
to do the fifth step with because I don't remember anything.
I remember nothing. You know. You come to me the
next week and I want to add to it. I
don't remember what you said to begin with. I don't know.
And the other thing is is that I don't care.
And those are the two really important things when you
think about doing your fifth step. That the person who's

(07:45):
listening to you doesn't know, doesn't remember, and they don't care.
You know, you're taking up two or three hours of
their time. You know, if you slept with a lot
of people and you have all those people on there
and you're putting all this and maybe it's more than
two hours that you're sitting together. But the reality is
that I don't care. I really do care what you say.
I know that you have to say it. I know
that you have to do it, but the particulars of

(08:06):
what you say, I don't care. And that's not not caring,
that's love, because if I cared, you would think that
they mattered, you would think that they held more weight
than they do. And so that was really important to me.
So then the last thing that I was told, you know,
before I began my fifth step, was the worst. The

(08:26):
first thing my sponsor says is don't lie. Now I
come from the school my sponsor would say to me.
You know, when I was new inn AA, you know,
you don't have to do anything, but you know, don't
drink today. So I didn't drink for the day. And
then you know, a week later, you know, don't drink
and get to a meeting. So I didn't drink and
I get to a meeting, and then don't drink and
don't drug and get to a meeting. And I would
do that too. So maybe the fifth or sixth week,

(08:47):
he said, don't drink, don't drug, go to a meeting,
and don't lie. Oh it's over. Now, it's over. Now,
I'm not gonna be one of these alcoholics. You can
stay sober. I am constitutionally incapable of being honest with myself.
They wrote it right there and had mine name on it,
so don't lie. Here's a worse one. Don't hold back.
Don't hold back, don't omit anything, because anything that you

(09:10):
omit is going to fester and grow and eventually it's
going to take over. Because that's the nature of alcoholism.
You know. We create these problems, we think about them,
we water them, we weed them, we prune them until
they were absolutely enormous. Once you get rid of them,
they hold no weight at all. And here's the other
one on and I think you just said that because
I'm me. He said, don't embellish. You know, when we

(09:34):
do these awful, awful things out there when we were
drinking or when we were drinking, it's a lot of
fun to be able to embellish and tell a big
story about it. He said, do not embellish. So I
didn't embellish. So this is all about how you do
this step, which I really don't care about. You're going
to do the step. Everybody does it the way they're
going to do it. So I'm just want to I'm

(09:55):
want to get this stuff out really quickly, and then
I want to talk about the really important part of
the fifth step, which is not doing it. Who do
you share your step with, who do you do this with?
So you know, logic tells you your sponsor. I did
marm with my sponsor, I feel, and I still feel strongly,
and I'm sorry. I mean, I've systematically insulted over everybody

(10:16):
in this room by now. But the reality is that
if you can't do your fifth step with your sponsor,
get another sponsor. That's it. If you can't trust your sponsor,
because that's the first trustworthy relationship that you've created in
the rooms of AA, that's the first person you trust
is your sponsor. And if you can't do your step
with your sponsor, say thanks so much, good to know you.

(10:37):
I have to get somebody else and get another sponsor.
I have been called in plenty of times when somebody
needed to do a fifth step and they couldn't do
their sponsor and you couldn't use their sponsor, and I
would say, what's wrong with your sponsor? He doesn't understand.
Go use your sponsor. So that's how you do that.

Speaker 2 (10:56):
You talk to God, You tell God what you did,
tell yourself what you did if you wrote it down,
You tell a sponsor what you did.

Speaker 1 (11:03):
You hope all three of those stories match and there's
no difference, you know, between what you wrote and what
you told somebody else and what you told God. You know,
they all got to be the same, you know, whatever
it is that you're doing. And then you got to
sit there and you got to look at somebody you
know why you're doing this, which is huliating. You got
to look at them. So I was living in Manhattan
and we did, you know, our fifth steps. We would

(11:23):
do them in the aa room and find a corner somewhere,
and it worked really well. And then I moved out
of Manhattan and I moved into North Carolina, and Clancy said,
I have the best way for you to listen to
fifth steps. He said, how do you do it? He said,
You get in your car with a flashlight at night,
and you put the pigeon in the passenger seats so

(11:43):
they can't really read what they've written. They can't explain it.
They just have to read it. And then take a drive,
he says, and take a two hour drive. I cannot
tell you how many people, how many fifth steps I
have heard in the front seat of a car while
I'm driving down a country wrote that I don't know
where we're going. And this kid, woman man next to

(12:04):
me with a flashlight is reading me everything that's on
their page, and every few minutes I say, don't explain,
just read and very free. So that's how you do
the fifth Step. I don't get anybody's got any questions
about that. It's pretty clear in the book. But I
want to talk about now, not so much how I

(12:24):
did it or how I even sponsor other people to
do it, but I want to talk. I want to
talk more about what I see as a result in
me once I did it. That's a lot different than
focusing on how do you do a fifth step? You know,
after I did my fifth step, I was I did

(12:47):
all my steps on my first year of sobriety, so
talking about about six months into sobriety, and I couldn't
figure out what about me was different doing the fifth step?
What's different about me? You know? I wrote this stuff
down a piece of paper and I read it to
my sponsor and he never judged, and he didn't ask
a single question. And by the way, if you're a

(13:09):
sponsor and you're doing your fifth step, your job is
not to analyze what the person wrote on the page.
You know, we have to stay within what we know
which is the twelve steps and twelve traditions of alcoholics anonymous.
If you step out of that realm and you get
to psychoanalyze what your sponsor has written on there, you
better examine your motives. You know, a fifth step is
fairly easy to do. But what I noticed is that

(13:33):
as a result of doing the fifth step, only one
thing happened to me, one tangible thing that was scary
and beautiful. At the same time, I lost my armor.
I'm an alcoholic who wore armor my whole life. You
couldn't get to me. You can't get to me because
I have a full set of armor on and when
I wrote all of this stuff down and gave it

(13:55):
all the way to my sponsor, I lost my armor.
You know, if you're lucky in these programs, once you
lose your armor never comes back, never comes back. And
the way you ensure that it never comes back that
you work with other alcoholics, and you don't just work
with them and they are problems. You work the steps
with other alcoholics to ensure that your armor doesn't work.

(14:16):
You know, creep back and grow back, because once your
armor grows back, it not only protects you from the world,
it shields the world from you, and you've already had
enough sobriety to understand that I want the sweetness of
the world, I want the pain of the world, I
want all of that stuff. So I lost my armor.
Now what things look like now is different now that

(14:39):
I don't have my armor, and I haven't had my
armor for a lot of years. So it's well documented
and well talked about that alcoholism is a disease of perception.
So things look different to me than they do to you,
and things look different to me most of the time.
And so what happens now that I've lost my armor

(15:02):
and I've done this fifth step is that I know
how to humble myself and talk to somebody. When you
do your fifth step, it's the first time you're talking
to somebody about anything that's wrong with you. You know,
you're not telling about your assets. You're telling about these
bad things that you did. And so now you know
because my perception now is very different than it was,

(15:24):
you know, thirty years ago. And what I think has
changed so much over the years is how I look
at things. But the problem is is that I'm almost
thirty seven years sober, and I think I'm supposed to
know things, and I think that you think I'm supposed
to know things, and that's even worse because I don't
really know anything nothing. And what I have to do

(15:46):
is when I get to a place in my life
or I don't understand something or I'm disturbed about something,
I have to go and find somebody I trust to
talk to them. It's an immediate thing. It's an immediate thing,
and I don't hold back. And the reason I hold
back is that I am not going to be a
sober alcoholic who lives in pain. I'm not. I'm absolutely not.
So you know, August is usually a rough month for me.

(16:12):
We'll get into this later on in Step eleven. But
my husband was killed in September, a long time ago,
but September and on my sober anniversary, so it comes
up every September the eighth, and somewhere around August. I
begin to do this ritual with myself that says I

(16:32):
get to make a decision every September on my anniversary,
and I can spend the day he was the love
of my life. I can spend the day thinking about
him and how wonderful a life we had and how
unbelievably violent. He died violently. Or I can spend the

(16:54):
day celebrating the joy through the sorrow that I have
reached thirty seven years of continuous sobriety, with all the
shit that happened to me. You're gonna bleep that out right, Okay, good,
good guy, you know, with all the stuff that happened
to me, I can say. But what I do is
I give myself the respect of making that decision every year,

(17:18):
every year. And it starts in August, and I begin
to read, and I begin to pray differently, and I
talk to God differently, and I talk to people differently.
And some years August flies by and nothing happens, and
the next thing I know, my anniversary is here. And
I'm like, okay, I decided live the joy and live
the joy because it's absolutely perfect. That's not what's going

(17:41):
on this year. What's been going on this year? As
I wake up in the morning and I make my
coffee and I sit down, and I live over the water,
and I look at the water, and I open my
book to begin to read, and I can't stop crying.
And I don't know where it's coming from, but I
hear I hear his boy and I begin to think

(18:01):
of memories and I talked to God out loud, and
I say, you have to stop me from crying. I
can't keep doing this. I'm depleted and every day. So
you know what I didn't do. I didn't tell anybody.
I didn't confide in anybody. So I sought someone out

(18:22):
who is near to me. Finally, over the weekend, I
sought someone who was near to me, who I know
loves me and who I love and trust, but who
doesn't think anything like I think. That's the most important thing.
Don't find someone that's gonna, you know, commiserate with you,
find someone who thinks differently. And I said, why can't

(18:43):
I stop crying? And before I could say that, he said,
We're not here to find the answers. We're here to
sit in the process and that's it. And he said,
because I know you and whatever is going on is
emanating from God, so you can't force anything here. And
as he's talking to me, and as I'm talking to him,

(19:05):
I begin to feel this weight lift and I'm getting
lighter and lighter and lighter at the table. And I
woke up the scorning and in cry at all. So
don't tell me the fifth step doesn't work. It works
every time we do it anyway. By the way, if
you're you know, I'm just pretty much set straight in

(19:27):
this whole conversation. But if you're waiting for God to
set you straight, you'll be waiting a long time. It's
not gonna happen. God's not gonna jump out of a
you know, out of a garbage can and say, you know,
I'm gonna set you straight. It doesn't work that way.
And the reason it doesn't work that way is that
we think, the alcoholics, we think that every step that
we do has like a purpose for it after we've
done it, Like, you know, this is what's gonna happen.

(19:48):
If you do this step, you're gonna get that, you
know when they tell us in the twelfth step that
we're gonna get We have to work the principles, and
you do get a principle after each of the steps
that you work. But the problem is is that you
really don't get anything after each step because they're all
designed to do the same thing. They're just on this
path to get you all the way to the end
so that you have a spiritual wakening. That's the only
reason why they're there. They're not there individually. There's no

(20:09):
individual reward for doing the fourth step or the fifth step,
or six or seven or any of them. They're just
steps that you're going up and going up. So with
the end you have a spiritual awakening. And by the way,
it says, that's the only thing you get from doing
the steps. You don't get anything else. You just get
a spiritual awakening. That's it. That's the only result. And

(20:29):
so in step four, in step five rather what we
get as a principal a Step five is the most
bizarre and alien principle imaginable. It's integrity. Is there a
more bizarre word to give to an alcoholic than integrity?
I mean, I didn't know anything about it. I don't
even know if I wantn't even know what it was.
And so I had to do, you know, a lot

(20:51):
of work on this, and basically it said to me
that in step four I had to get honest with
myself and in step five I had to get honest
with you. Wow, And those are two completely different things.
You know. I didn't think I was capable of being
honest with myself, and I really didn't want to want
to be honest with another human being. And so I

(21:14):
started thinking about integrity and how we, you know, find
it and what we do with it, and how do
you tell the difference between integrity and honesty because they
sound alike, they sound like they're the same, but they're
really not. You know, everybody hear the expression rigorous honesty
is not the same as rigorous publicity. You know. We

(21:36):
can be very honest and we can be showmen at
the same time, and we can get up here. I'm
sure you've heard many many speakers get up and do
a whole show up here at a song and dance.
They make you laugh and all of that, and I'm
sure that it's honest, you know, But is it filled
with integrity? And so I had to do a lot
of work on this because they're telling me that I
get integrity as a principle after I do the fifth step?

(21:56):
Where is it? Where is it? Where do I find integrity? Oh?
The first place you find it is in the rooms
of AA Look around. You know, you have people that
you have hundreds of people in a room and nobody
knows anybody else. You pass the basket around, you put money, in.
That's not just honesty, that's integrity. And the difference is
is that when you have integrity, your motives are pure.

(22:21):
That is not the same thing as being honest. You
can be honest and have some pretty crappy motives, but
integrity you have to take a look at your motives.
So in the rooms of AA, so that's where you
find your piece of integrity. I think I was. I know,

(22:41):
I was four months sober in the rooms of AA
and firsting first in my home group. And one of
my largest character defects that believe me, it was on
my list, is that I always seem to sound like
I know what I'm talking about, and this four months
is sobriety, you know, four months and I'm raising my
hand and I'm talking like I've been there forty years
and they just love me. And so it's still the

(23:02):
largest group in Manhattan, not en Masks, but they have
sixteen meetings every morning and so they're all considered, you know,
first things first, and they have these large elections and
you get voted in and anyway, they voted me in
as the treasurer, and I thought that that was a
wonderful idea because I had bills to.

Speaker 3 (23:19):
Pay, and and so this is what I would do.

Speaker 1 (23:31):
I mean, you could make your own decisions about me,
but this is what I would do. The baskets would
go around, and I would get the money from all
the meetings, all the meetings, it's the wealthiest meeting in Manhattan.
I'd get all the money, and instead of going to
the bank to deposit, I went to the other bank,
the one with my name on it, and I deposited

(23:52):
it to that account. And then I would do my
month and pay my bills and be upstanding citizen. And
then somewhere around the third week of the month, I
would get paid for whatever work I was doing, and
I would take that money and then I would go
to the first bank and I would deposit it into
their bank account. I thought it was a great system.

(24:15):
I thought everybody was happy. I thought everybody was satisfied.
I thought that was the way to go. And then
I made one pivotal error. I told my sponsor what
I was doing, and he said to me, you know
that stealing, and I absolutely not. This is not stealing.
And you know, if you're an alcoholic like me, you

(24:36):
know how to rationalize this is not stealing. I didn't
spend the money. I replaced the money. He says, it's stealing.
He said, So this is what's going to do. What's
going to happen now, because in AA, this is where
you learn about integrity, and you have done your fifth step,
so there is no choice for you here. I want
you to go to the meeting tomorrow and I want

(24:58):
you to stand up and say, my name is Karen,
and I'm an alcoholic, and I stole your money. And
I said, I really don't think that's the truth, so
it's hard for me to say that. So the next
day I went to the meeting and I said, I
raised my hand and I said, my name is Karen,

(25:19):
I'm an alcoholic. I have to resign as your treasurer
because according to my sponsor, I stole money. And this
room you could hear a pin drop in the room.
And I said, all the money's in the bank. And
I started to explain it, and he stands up because
you've said enough. And I sat down and everyone's looking

(25:41):
at each other, and a guy in the back of
the room, you can't write this stuff. A guy in
the back of the room raised his hand and he goes,
my name is Patrick, and I was the treasurer before
Karen and I stole money. And so this is how,

(26:04):
this is how it has worked for me in alcoholics anonymous.
And so you know, they fired me as treasurer. And
you know something, this stuff, this stuff goes deep, very deep.
I not only have never been treasurer again, ever, that's
a long time not to be treasurer. I don't collect
the money. I don't touch the money. I throw my

(26:27):
dollar in the basket, so I'm not touching your money.
And that, you know. And then years later, of course,
it encouraged me that when Bill Wilson was writing the
promises in there that he talks about, you know, the
promises are fairly innocuous language. You know, we're gonna get better,
We're gonna feel better. Things are gonna slip away. You know,

(26:47):
you're gonna be more interested in other people, but money
will cease to be a game changer for you. And
then I realized that, you know, money is a game
changer for all alcoholics, all alcohol and there was plenty
of money in there on my fifth step, plenty of money.
Some of those amends. I was never at financial amends.

(27:08):
I was never able to make even people died and
things like that. But the reality is, what I know
now is that Karen and money don't mix in AA.
And it's funny because I grew up in a house
with a lot of money, a lot of money, and
my father used to say to me all the time,
if you have a problem in life, Karen, and it's money,

(27:29):
don't worry about it. That's the best problem you could have.
Just go out and make more money, he says. But
if you have other problems, real problems, then you have
real problems. So I have been skewed about money for
a very long time. And I'm seventy years old and
I'm still working, and I don't need to work, but
I do like that money coming in, you know, because

(27:50):
I am an alcoholic. You know, I'm much better with
money than I was when I did this, when I
did this Fifth Step. But it was in there so
a couple of other things that I want to blow
by talking about this fifth Step and how it changed
me after I did it. My son was on there.
He's thirty nine years old now. He was eighteen months

(28:11):
old when I came into alcoholics anonymous, and I was
drunk when I had him more succinctly. I was high
when I had him, and the things that happened to
him in his first eighteen years of his life with
a drunken high mommy and a drunken high daddy, they

(28:34):
were unspeakable. They were just unspeakable, and I didn't want
to put them down. And you want to write about that?
And my sponsor, Albert said to me, if you don't
write these things down, you will never learn to be
a good parent. The only way you can learn to
be a good parent is if you put these things
down on paper and you give them to me and

(28:56):
I throw them away and you just leave it alone.
You know, he told me right from the beginning. You know,
you have to take a look at your past when
you're doing your fourth and fifth step, but don't stare
at it. Don't stare at your past. And so I
wrote those things down. My son at eighteen months old
was my first resentment. He's the first one on the list,

(29:18):
because they told me that if you have a child,
that you can't be drinking and you can't be using,
and you can't be doing any of those things. And
I just didn't find that acceptable. And so when we
were in the hospital and I gave birth to him.
They knew I was already a high risk. I mean
they knew, the doctor knew about my using. And the

(29:39):
nurse came over and said, this is how you feed
a baby. I was not interested in what she was
telling me on how a mother feeds a baby, because
this line after that said, and you have to watch
what you ingest because anything you ingest is going to
go into the baby. And it didn't take me long
to realize what my options were here, and so I
chose plan B said here, you take him, and I

(30:02):
left the hospital. You know, my son doesn't remember that.
There's no memories of being left there. Here's no memories
of the doctors coming after us and returning the baby,
you know. And I thought that's time. I thought, why
would you ever give that child back to us? I mean,
they're just why would you do that? You know? But
eighteen months later I got sober and I got clean,

(30:23):
and his father didn't. His father did not and he
never did. But when I had to put those things
down on a fifth step, I put them down, not
as confession. I want to make that clear. I put
them down because I was told if I put them
down that I would be a better mother, and I
didn't know how to be a better mother. And Albert said,

(30:44):
this is how you start, you know. So in doing
the fifth step over and over again, I keep mentioning
this that it's not the actual act of doing the
fifth step, of telling in the human being. It's easy.
You might kill him afterwards. You can kill him afterwards,
it doesn't matter. They don't have to be alive after
you do your fifth step, you know. I mean, that's
really how I felt about. You know, I had forty
five in my pocket. Here's my fifth step boot. But

(31:08):
if I wanted to change who I was, if I
wanted to free myself from the things I had done
and the people I had run over, and the illegal
acts and the legal acts that I had done, I
had to give it away to someone. So that being said,
I want to tell you that twice in my life
I have heard a fifth step, both times from different women.

(31:31):
What they told me was so horrible that I couldn't
contain it, I couldn't accept it. And I'd say this
because I'm hoping that everybody had here will eventually be
working the steps with other people, and you're going to
hear these fifth steps, and you're not gonna yawn. And
I heard these two women on two separate occasions, and

(31:54):
you know, I said, I don't remember anything anybody says.
I remember what they said. I remember every single word
that came out of both of these women's mouth because
I didn't think it was possible for someone to say
what they were saying. And they left, you know, we
prayed and we did the whole thing, and they left,
and I went right over to see my sponsor and
I said, I have to give you something and I
can't hold on to you know, I had to give

(32:16):
it away to somebody else. So they did a fifth step,
and then I did a fifth step with whatever information
I was given. And the reason I did that is
what I know now is not the act of doing
an additional piece of a fifth step, but it was
an act that enabled me to be a better sponsor,
because as long as I was holding on to that
information about these two women, I would never be able

(32:39):
to sponsor them without judgment. I would never be able
to sponsor them without fear, without disgust, without all the
things that I've heard when they were talking. That's why
we do the fifth step. It's the result, it's not
the action. It's so easy. Pick any schmacgeggy and do
it with It doesn't really matter. It can be your sponsor,

(32:59):
it can be the guys sitting next to you. It
can be your priest or, your rabbi. And I probably
wouldn't tell a rabbi. I don't think they would get it.
But you know, it can be any of your clergy people.
You know that you want. But the reality is that's
not the point. And that's the point that I want
to put out here tonight, that that isn't the point.

(33:20):
So I find that, you know, they read this thing
in the book. I actually wrote this thing down. I
never really quote from the book, but this thing really
gets to me. You know. The fifth step is our
first conscious attempt to reach God, which is weird because
don't we don't maybe even call him God. Then we
don't know what we're on, who we're talking to. But
it's our first attempt. Because you're talking to somebody, you

(33:42):
don't know who they are. You know, I can tell,
you can tell your sponsor, and then you tell yourself
and the fifth step and then you got to tell
God or you got to tell somebody whatever that is,
and you wind up sitting in a room talking in
the air, you know, literally talking to the ceiling, talking
to the floor, whatever it is you want. You know,
I had long since come to understand that if I
was going to do this right, that God or whatever
I believed and was going to have to have my back.

(34:03):
I lean hard. I don't have little issues. I don't
have little problems. I need a strong, bulky thing that
I can lean on that who's in my corner. And
so wherever I was, and this is true to this
thing I said all the times that I've seen where
the ceiling hits the wall and there's a corner, and
that's where I talk to God all the time. Even

(34:25):
though I know God is living within me. That's where
I choose. I don't want to look like a looney
just be talking to myself all the time. So I
put it out there and I talk to God all
the time, you know, out there, because I don't know
what else to do. Because that's what they told me,
that there's some type of a thing that happens to you,
and the fifth step a thing that makes you a

(34:45):
believer or introduces you to a God and you have
these changes, and while I'm doing the fifth step, I'm
not getting any of that. I'm not getting that. At
the end, Albert said to me, are you done? I said,
I don't know what that means. You know, if you
used by the way, and I'm sure we have many
people here that are dually whatever. If you use the

(35:07):
way I used, if you drank the way I drank,
you remember fifty percent of what went on fifty percent,
and then you have the good luck of staying sober
for three decades and remembering everything else because it does
come back to you. And so when they talk about it,
we'll talk about this when we get to the ninth
step when it talks about that it's a lifelong process.

(35:28):
That's why it's a lifelong process because the longer you
go on, the more that you remember. So there's a
part of the book that says that you might feel God,
you might feel it, and you shouldn't be surprised provided
you hold back nothing and providing your sense of relief,
and you hold back nothing, your sense of relief will

(35:49):
mount from minute to minute. And I understood that. I
understood that when I came into AA, into my home
group and I think I've explained with this room all light,
but we have all these handmade signs everywhere on the walls,
and in a language I didn't understand. I didn't know
what halt was, who talks like that? I didn't know

(36:11):
what kiss was, I mean, speak English. I didn't know
what any of those things were. But there was one
sign in the back on the right. It's still there
when people go. I have a lot of sponsors that
go to New York just to do some New York
AA and they go to my home group and they
take a picture of that sign and they send it
to me, so I know they've been to first things first.
And it says simply, one day you will know a

(36:31):
piece that surpasses all understanding. And that's what I felt
when I finished writing all of these things down and
talking to somebody else about it, because he said the
two words to me that I never thought i'd hear.
He said, you're done. I thought, oh my god, I'm done.

(36:53):
Of course until I remember more, but I was done
for the moment. I think that this happens to everybody
who does this step. It's my opinion in some form,
you may not be as it's overwhelmed or smacked on
the head. You know, with a god brick, you may
just feel a little bit different. You may feel a

(37:14):
little lighter. You may be looking at somebody that you
can trust that you couldn't trust anybody beforehand. I think
everybody who does this step thoroughly and who doesn't lie,
and who doesn't hold back, and who doesn't embellish and
just seeks the truth is going to feel something afterwards.
And it's a good thing because you're about to be

(37:36):
catapulted into this place that the hell wants to go there.
When you go into your sixth and seventh step, your
entire world will change. So I want to close with
a few comments that I've been thinking about lately. You know,
in the Big Book, Top and twelve was written fifteen
years after the Big Book. I'm not sure. I mean,
if anybody does that kind of math, and you know,

(37:58):
I make things up when I don't know whether it's
with this and so making up what I think happens is.
I don't think Bill drank or anything, but I'm making
it up that he had some type of another white
light experience and said I didn't do such a good
job with the Big book, and now I want to
write the twelve and twelve so that you really can
do these steps. And if you notice, you know six
and seven, you know these teeny tiny paragraphs in the

(38:19):
Big Book, and then you get to, you know, the
twelve and twelve. And I don't even understand how they're written.
The way they're written. It's just like the same thing
over and over again with different words. But the truth
is is that in the Big Book when it was written,
they talk about progress. They talk about spiritual progress, not perfection.

(38:41):
It's all over the book, progress not perfection. And whatever
happened to Bill and I make it up because I
don't know, but whatever happened to Bill in those fifteen
years later that he went back and bote the twelve
and twelve and all they do is talk about profession.

Speaker 2 (39:00):
The beginning of the book until the end of the book,
that we are seeking perfection. And I don't know about you,
but if you're an alcoholic like me, that's scary. That's
scary because the alcoholic definition of perfection is not being perfect,
It is being painfully aware of our imperfections.

Speaker 1 (39:21):
And that's a big difference. So we're gonna close tonight.
And get ready for a rousing step six next week.
God but even scary your way.

Speaker 4 (39:33):
But see you next week. Why that's on tape. Okay,
thank you all. It's a great day to be so well.

Speaker 1 (39:43):
See you next week.