Carin S. Steps 8-9 - Step Series at Twelve Step House - 9/2/2025

Carin S. Steps 8-9, Step Series at the Tuesday Night Step Group, Twelve Step House, Fort Lauderdale, FL. 9/2/2025

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Karen, I'm alcoholic, and welcome back. How many people were here?
How many people have been coming? I know a lot
of you, but I see some special people here tonight
that I have not seen before. But I know a
long time, so it's good to see you here. So tonight,
like I told you last week, we're going to do
steps eight and nine together for a very cogitable reason. First,

(00:23):
I want to say, I'm Karen, I'm alcoholic. My sobriety
date is September the eighth, nineteen eighty eight, and that
means next Monday, I will celebrate thirty seven years of
continuous sobriety. And it's just weird. It's just weird. We
had this conversation. Some of you in the room were

(00:43):
in Canada with us when we're there for the International
you know, when you're here with a lot of alcoholics,
And I brought my whole New York crew with me,
and there was some Florida stragglers who you know, hung
on to our group, brave ones who hung on with
the New Yorkers. And we started talking about the fact
I was the youngest sobriety in the group, so you know,
I had the least amount of time in the group,

(01:04):
and we were talking about how bizarre it is that
when you come into AA, what you're here in the
rooms all the times is they say, you know, ninety
meetings in ninety days, they say, you know, get a sponsor.
And then we looked up one day and where they
we are now today. And I have no idea how
that happened, because I don't really know anything more than
what I came in. So anyway, one of the things

(01:24):
I want to get, you know, sort of clear here
if I can, is a lot of people have asked me,
a lot of people enough people have asked me why
I am doing the step series and why I'm not
showing you how to do the step. Well, the simple
answer for me is I don't really care how to
do the step. That's for me, I don't really care.
That's between you and your sponsor. You can figure that

(01:44):
out or by yourself. I am here to show you
identification like one alcoholic identifying with another alcoholic, And how
you do the step is of little consequence to me.
You know what happens in your life after you do
the step that means everything, means everything. It's not important

(02:08):
how you do your fourth step. It's not important how
you do your fifth step. It's important what happens to
you spiritually, what happens to you as a sober alcoholic
after you do those steps, because we change, you know,
and we change continuously, So we have a tendency, I
think is alcoholics to only see all problems. That's that's

(02:28):
who we are. And because we see them, you are
problem making eyes. That's we never have solution making eyes.
So I'm thinking, and this is how I thought about
doing this series. I'm thinking that if you hear what
happened to me, you might be going to be able
to see this stuff a little bit differently, only because
I had not just a low bottom alcoholically. But the

(02:51):
stories are here so that you can see that at
the end of the day everything was okay. Because here
I am. That's really important, you know. I didn't go down.
I didn't go down with the ship. I'm here. I'm here,
and I'm sober, and I am frankly, although some people would,
I guess this week disagree with it, I am living
the best life I have ever lived. So I am
the happiest I have ever been. I'm not quite sure

(03:14):
how this happened but I'm not arguing. I'm not arguing,
and I'm here, So that's what I'm trying to say.
It matters little how you do these steps. It matters
a great deal that you do them, that you do them.
I had another person that I know go out this week,
and I want to say something about that. And it's
not about relapse, by the way, because I don't know
anything about relapse. I just need to tell you I
never relapsed. I don't know anything about it. But I

(03:35):
will tell you this. I always want to be the alcoholic,
the sober alcoholic who's surprised when somebody goes out, because
I think this program works, and I think it works
to the point where I don't have to go out.
So I'm always surprised, and I always want to be surprised.
I never want to lose faith in the program of

(03:56):
Alcoholics Anonymous. So when someone says they go out, they oh, yeah,
that's an yellow videos out. I once lost a sponsor
who went out after twenty four years, and I didn't
understand it. I didn't understand it. You know, what was
better out there than what you were finding in here? Wow? Anyway,
So let's get on with the steps and step eight.
The reason we're doing step eight step nine together is

(04:18):
because I did step eight in a bar and I
was belligerent. I had a problem with authority. I couldn't
believe or asking me to do another list, like enough
with the lists already. I had done a fear list.
I don't resent the list. It was like enough with
the lists, you know, And I wanted to, you know,
once I was told that I didn't really have a

(04:39):
choice about it. And by the way, this whole theme
of if you don't do what we do, you will
come up here and get another white chip is what
was pounded into me. And I was terrified about getting
another white chip. So I wanted to keep the list
short because I cheated and looked ahead at the ninth
step and that was just a I had to make
amends to all those people. So I really wanted to

(05:00):
keep it very, very short. I didn't know what amends were.
But you know, my sponsor, Albert, and this is a
you know, this is a this is a vote for
a good sponsor. He said to me, don't worry about it.
Just read the step, read the black parts, and make
a list and just put everybody on the list, so
a big deal. Put everybody on the list, because I'm
going to take off the ones that don't belong there,

(05:22):
because you have a problem with perception. I want you
to put everybody on there, you know, and I want
you to do something else. I want you to find
a place for you that is welcoming and calm and
you're familiar with it and no one will bother you.
And he got halfway through that, I thought, I know
exactly where I'm going, and I picked up my purse
and I went to Pulses on seventy second Street in Broadway,

(05:43):
which was my bar, and I came went into the
back of the room. You know, I don't know about you.
I'm a bar drinker and I still love bars to
this day. That has never gone away. And so I
went to the bar and I sat down, and I
asked the bartender for a pen, and I asked the
waitress for some cocktail napkins. And I sat at the
back with a diet coke and my cocktail napkins, and
I started to put these names down on the list.

(06:04):
What I didn't know at the time is that the
bartender was an AA and the bouncers were an AA,
and the owner was in AA, and I lasted about
ten minutes before they called my sponsor and says, we
have one of your pigeons in here, and she appears
to be drinking a diet coke and writing some things
furiously at cocktail napkins. And Albert said, that's okay. She says,

(06:25):
they're doing her eight step you list. Let her do
what she needs to do. And I sat in there,
you know, all night, and I want to tell you
I didn't realize that Paulsons had changed so much. If
I had known everybody was an AA, it is not
the bar I would have gone to. I'm being like Dad,
I need to tell you, you know, because when I
was vowing to Paulson's the deal, the bartender was my dealer.
You know. He served double duty. He was by bartender
and my dealer, and he was good to me. I

(06:47):
used to sit down at the end of that bar
with a bottle of Jack Nails, not a drink. That
is not the kind of alcoholic I am. He put
the bottle of Jack Daniels in front of me and
the drink and the glass and he never looked at
me again. And I had mean nasty conversations with anybody
who was brave enough to sit next to me. They
didn't last long, you know, I'd berated them until they
left because I didn't want to talk to you. I

(07:08):
wasn't there for conversation. I was there to drink. And
so I go back and everybody's cleaned up, and it
was really parendous. Actually it was freendous. I've never gone
back by the way, you know. That was it for
me anyway. So that's the whole deal with the eighth step.
You could read the eighth step. It's going to tell

(07:29):
you the things to watch for the eighth step. But
I didn't watch for any of those things. I was.
I was put into this place with my sponsor who
dumbed it down so that I would do the step.
That's what I want to say. If you read the
eighth step, less a whole bless other things in there.
And there's a lot of people in this room that
can put me in my place about what else is
in that step. But what I'm talking about is if

(07:50):
you have a good sponsor, they will go to any
means necessary to get you to do this work. To
get you to do this work, and for me if
I had to do another step, I was, you know,
another list. You know, I was going to do other lists.
So I've talked a little bit about my twelve and twelve,
which I love. I'm in love with my twelve and
twelve because it's a wrong twelve and twelve. It's you know,
I'm clearly from New York and I got my twelve

(08:12):
and twelve at Role Services and they said, well, we
had some books that were printed where there was something
wrong with them, so we're pulling them back. And I
had already bought one, and I no, no know, I
want this one. So I want you to know that
in my twelve and twelve it says on step nine,
made direct amends to such people whenever possible, except one
to do so would injure them or others. So I

(08:33):
read it wrong. I mean I read it writ in
my book, but I read it wrong, and I didn't
understand that timing was everything in the ninth step everything.
But what they're talking about is wherever possible, And that
doesn't mean, by the way, you know, wherever you see
that guy on the street and you happen to run
into him, you know, or wherever you see that woman
that you stole her money from the way. No, what
it means is wherever you are spiritually, that's the bottom line.

(08:56):
And if you are nowhere spiritually, don't go after this step.
Do not attempt this step. You may have to be
catapulted back to the third step where you made that
decision to do this. But the reality is is if
you start your ninth step and you are not spiritually fit,
because this you're going after wherever you are spiritually, and
if you are not doing well spiritually, these amend are

(09:18):
going to be very, very painful for you. But if
you are there spiritually and God's got your back, you
can breeze through. Because this is the other thing nobody
told me. I have like a file loaded with things
that people didn't tell me, and one of the things
they didn't tell me was that you do this step
for the rest of your life. And the only reason
for me it was the rest of my life is

(09:40):
that not only am I an alcoholic, I'm drugatic and
I have terrible drug problem. And what that did was
erased lots and lots and lots of memory for me.
So the longer I stayed sober and the longer I
stayed clean, the more these memories would come up and
I would have to make amends. You're not good to
people that I thought maybe they were old enough and
they died, or maybe old enough and they just you know,
forgot about this stuff. But you know how that is.

(10:03):
There's no quincident. There's nobody died and nobody forgot. So
I had to go back and make a lot of
those events. So here's the problem is that we have
to look at this from wherever we are spiritually. But
what they tell us is that we have to live
one day at a time. So how do we live
one day at a time? Very difficult? If I'm carrying

(10:24):
around the crap that happened to me in nineteen ninety,
How am I living in twenty twenty five if I'm
still carrying this stuff from nineteen ninety. It is literally
physically impossible. And you know, the eleven step talks about
a little bit when they talk about the being a channel,
and we'll get into that in the eleventh step, But
the ninth step is just the beginning to clean up

(10:46):
most of our past. Most and I want to say
that most of our past because it says, you know,
not harming you know, other people. And I had a
habit of having relations with people I wasn't married to
and they were married to other people. And so I

(11:06):
was told, you know that I could not go to
the wives and you know, apologize for this terrible thing
that I had done. And there were a lot of
them out there, and so I didn't, you know, I didn't.
So when I say that, it doesn't say that you
clean up all of your pasts. Says clean up most
of your past. And the other thing is is that
there were people on this list, by the way, that

(11:29):
I had hurt dearly that turned out to have very
good lives without me in them. That's important to recognize.
And you know, when I was just the lowest of
my low and I was not. If you live in
New York, by the way, you never have to leave
your apartment. I want to make this clear. You can
live your entire life without living leaping your apartment. You

(11:51):
could order in whatever you need to have order in.
Everybody will come to visit you. You never have to leave,
you know. And I would paint the walls, you know,
I don't know, paint the walls every once in a while. Look,
had I moved, but I was still in the same place,
you know, and I had a guard department, which was,
you know, very desirable in Manhattan. And every once in
a while we would go out with spray paint and

(12:11):
we would spray all the leaves out there, you know,
all the the plants and the flowers. We would spray
them in a big pattern because we wanted the planes
that flew overhead to think that we were very cool
and we were saying hello to them. This is like
crazy stuff that we did. Anyway, one day I woke
up and you know, there was a guy living there
with me, which was not you know, strange, by the way,

(12:32):
not strange at all. His name was Kelly. I say
that because I'm not going to give you his real name,
but that's his rock and roll name. And he was
with Aerosmith and he was the tour guy, the tour manager,
you know. And I loved it because I loved getting
high with that band. It was great. Everybody got high,
threw up on each other. It was such a great night.
And we would go on the next day and we
would do the same thing, you know, and we didn't

(12:52):
do it during regular business hours. We used to leave Paulson's.
All of us left Paulson's. We went to this place
called the Game Room, which had no games, had one
broken in ball machine, but it was a shooting gallery.
It's where people went in. You know, you'd go there
and people in the in the big bands would be
there and recognize people until you you know, weren't conscious
anymore and didn't oricalize anybody. And many many times I
woke up in this place and had no idea what

(13:13):
I had done or how I had gotten there. So
when you have a life like that, and I did
this for years, over twenty years, I did this, I mean,
you have a life like this anyway. So you know,
Kelly was a good guy. He was very nice to me.
I was very very mean to him and very bad
to him, and eventually, you know, I just I took

(13:34):
everything out on him. And when it came to through
my length step, I was just talking to Jimmy and
during the meeting he said that Facebook helped him make
some of these nice step amends. And you know, Facebook
was new, you know, it's just new. And this was
years and years later, and I looked him up on
Facebook because I got this thing, you know, I remembered him.
First of all, I remembered his name. That took me
a long time. And I remembered his name, and I

(13:55):
remembered Aerosmith, and I had to go into the billboard,
you know, like Hall of Fame to find this guy.
And I found him and I look him up on
Facebook and he's just fine. He's married to a lovely
woman and she's a doctor and she has cancer and
he's been taking care of her for twenty five years.

(14:16):
And my sponsor says, he doesn't need your shit at
this moment. I suggest you put him on the list
of people that you might harm. So that's a different
kind of thing, and they don't really talk about that
a lot there. So I never made an amends to him.
And he lived this great life and she died and
you know, and he took care of her, and I

(14:37):
never got in touch with him anyway. So the other
thing is is that when it said that you made
these amends, you know, wherever possible, and I took thinking
it was whenever possible. I decided that what I would
do is call start calling people to make amends to them.
I don't know where I got this from, because if
you start to make your amends, and you don't confer

(14:57):
with your sponsor. All of those amens go down to
the toilets. I need to tell you, because what I
was looking at was not what he was looking at.
And so I decided to call my first husband. And
if you remember, this is the guy that we built
a wall and mild the apartment, and that you know,
we had cut everything up that we owned. The couch
was cut up, the TVs were cut up, the clothing
was cut up, everything was cut up. You know. It

(15:18):
was just terrible, terrible, terrible, and it was violent. It
was the most violent marriage I was in. I mean,
that never really happened to me again, but it happened
to me then. And there was a lot of drug
abuse and there was a lot of alcohol. And I
had a very strong memory of not a lot of memories.
By the way. I wound up in the hospital a
few times. We had a few broken bones a few times,

(15:38):
you know, But I do remember I had very very
long hair, long curly hair that he used to pull
and pull me out of the apartment on my back,
would pull me out of the apartment. I would wind
up in the hallway. Listen, I'm not a victim here.
I need to tell you because when I got up
and came back in, he was the one that was
on his back being pulled out into the hallway. So
I just need to let you know this was an
even score here anyway. So IP, I don't know why

(16:01):
I called him up. I was nowhere near ready to
make an amends, any kind of amends. There's a lot
of prayer that has to go into before you make
a single amend that I have to type that I
do it right, that I'm just that I don't have
self seeking motives at all of those things. So I
call them up and ask him to meet me for
a coup of coffee, which she does, And Okay, this
is what I figured out. This is a real aside.

(16:24):
You know, all of a sudden, you can go out
here and you know you're looking for love and you're
looking for security, and you're looking for the perfect partner
out there. And this is what I have figured out,
after like you know, thirty five years of bad picking,
is that normal people are not attracted to us. They
just aren't because we're not normal. You know, we're a

(16:47):
tad on the crazy side, So we attract people who
are a tad on the crazy side. And I want
you to know it's many many times it can happen
that it doesn't appear that way. But I'm telling you
that they're flying their freak flag. You haven't seen it yet,
but I know it's there. And so he appeared very normal,

(17:09):
nice Jewish doctor, you know, but he had he flew
that flag. Let me tell you bid time anyway. So
I call him up and we, you know, go to
the diner and then you know it's two crazy is there.
And I have my speech planned because I read about
it in the book and I haven't called Albert, and
I haven't told anybody I'm doing this. And I take
a look at him and I said, listen, you know, Ma,

(17:29):
I'm seeing you to tell you that I've been doing
a lot of thinking and I haven't been doing a
lot of drinking, and I don't use anymore. And I
just want to let you know that I don't think
I was a great wife. I think I could have
done better. I think I could have been less violent
to you. I think I could have loved you a
little bit better. And I just I wanted to apologize
for not being you know, the best wife I could
have been to you. Now. His response should have been,

(17:54):
I apologize too, because I was a terrible husband and
I beat the crap out of you and I did this.
But his response to me was, that's okay, I forgive you.

Speaker 2 (18:10):
And before I could figure out how it happened, I
had leapt across the table and my hands were around
his throats and I am shaky, but Jesus out.

Speaker 1 (18:21):
Of this man, and I realized I must have gone
about this the wrong way. So I left out of
there and went and called my sponsor. He said, you know,
had it work for you? Had it work for you anyway?
So there's a big part of the in the ninth step,
you know about how you can put these amends in columns.

(18:44):
That was not for me, literally not for me. I
was like, whatever hits me first is the one that
I'm going to do, and that's how I decided to
do it. But then I had to remember, and this
is really important. I even wrote this down that the
only way to get through this program is that I
have to go back to the first step over and
over and over again. And it tells me I'm powerless
over alcohol and I'm drinking it, and my life is

(19:06):
unmanageable when I'm not now, A manageable life does not
have me and a diner with my hands around the
throat of a guy I have been seen in years.
Nobody normal does that. So I figured out, as we
do in the second and third step, that I'm going
to need help so that I can figure out how
to make my life livable, manageable, and how to live

(19:32):
a life. If I said this one hundred times, how
to live life without having to have a drink to
stand it. That was important to me. So if you
remember some of us, some people with you know, grayish hair,
will remember when we first came in, they told us
about the story about the parachute. You know, a suggestion
about a parachute that we see, these are twelve suggested steps,

(19:54):
and it suggested that you do these steps, like it
suggested that when you jump out of a plane you
need to have a parachute. That's that kind of suggestion.
And so, you know, I thought, maybe it's time to
change my mind about the parachutes, because I don't want
to hit the ground and die. And I looked around
and there were a homeless of people who understood that

(20:16):
if you took the parachute, the parachute would open and
when you landed on the ground and be okay. And
for some reason I didn't understand that, you know, and
I kept hitting bottom after bottom after bottom, even sober,
even in AA. I want to make that really clear,
that I didn't come into AA and do the steps
and everything became you know, roses and rainbows. It wasn't

(20:37):
like that. I hit a bottom, sober bottom continuously until
I got to my eleventh step. I just need to
say this, and you all know that. You know, I
didn't find a real God in my life until I
was five years sober, you know, so I kept pushing
ahead and pushing ahead. So the other thing that they
tell us in here is that this is the beginning
of the end of our isolation from people and from God.
And you know, I didn't understand that. I'm just it's

(21:00):
in the book. I didn't understand my my isolation. I
love isolating. I didn't want it to end. You know, Alcoholics,
by the way, the only people in the world that
treat isolation, you know, loneliness with isolation. We like to
do that. We think it's going to cure something in there. Anyway,
here's the thing, you know. I looked at the list.

(21:21):
I gave Albert the list, and everything was on the list.
Financial institutions, people were on the list. Department stores are
on the list, animals are on the list. The government
was on the list. You know. There were no little
amends to make, no, you know, they were all big.
And then the list was really big. And so, because

(21:43):
I had been told to do what my sponsor says,
I made the list of put everybody on it. And
then I gave it to him and he took a
look at it and I said, this is yours. Now
you can take off the names that don't need to
be on here. And he said, looks good to me.
And he kept every single name on that list that
I had put on there. You know, and the list
was huge. But I want to tell you something, and

(22:04):
I know there's people that you're going to disagree with
me when I say this. There is nowhere in the
literature and it says to put yourself at the top
of the list. I know this is very unpopular. You
can throw things at me afterwards, but it never said
you won't find that in the literature. And the reason
that we don't put ourselves on the top of the list.
Is that and plenty people do that by the way,

(22:25):
they think that they have to make amends to themselves.
That's not what this step is about. This step is
about making or amends to other people, to people whose
lives you screwed up, to people who you did such
bad behavior with. They the only way that they can
react to you was do bad behavior themselves. This is
not about me. I've already figured out in the fourth

(22:45):
step and in the fifth step, I already know the
bad stuff that I did. I don't need to forgive myself.
This is about other people. And that's why you're not
gonna see it in the literature anywhere. But you go
to enough meetings and they who will tell you put
yourself on the list, make sure you're on the list.
I have this argument all the time with people. But
that's not what the nine step is about. It's about

(23:07):
making amends to others that we've harmed. Because I have
to tell you, I might have harmed myself in doing
what I was doing, but it sure is hell felt good.
You know. I had years and years of using and
drinking where it felt mighty good, and it also felt
good doing bad things. I need to get real with
that as well. So what I'm gonna learn here is

(23:27):
a hard lesson. Is that me through my own actions,
and I can't blame it, cannot blame it on drugs
and alcohol. This is me through my own actions. Really
screwed people up, you know, because these same people were
different when they were around other people, but when they
got around me, they were pretty bad. When they got

(23:50):
around other people, they seemed to be normal. But we
made people feel bad. And sometimes not all the time.
Sometimes we cause them to act bad because we made
them feel bad. And how would we make them feel bad?
That's the best question, because we kept them off balance
because we were absolutely unpredictable. And that's what the first

(24:13):
step tells us. We are unpredictable. And while I'm drinking
and around these people, they can't figure out what I'm
going to do next, and I've done things like steal
their peace of mind. You know, where is that They
used to talk about it in the old days, about
the black and blue marks on the inside. You know,
I had plenty of black and blue marks on the outside,
I'll tell you, But we were talking about the black

(24:35):
and blue marks on the inside, and so because I
was unpredictable. You know, I'm sure, I'm sure that my
parents were awful parents laughing, who knows, I have no idea,
But they couldn't figure out what their daughter was going
to do. So they couldn't figure out how to be

(24:55):
good parents because they spent their entire lives with me
twenty five years reacting to my drinking and my drugging.
You know, my dad was sick for a long time
before he died, and my parents used to travel a lot,
and I always seem to have a job and I
had one even today that allowed me to leave work

(25:17):
and go traveling, go do whatever I want to do.
You know, I don't know why, but that was I mean,
I was blessed with that for a long long time,
even now, even now. And so my mother would ask
me if I wanted to go traveling with her with
all these trips that they had planned. So I said, okay.
And I have a complicated relationship with my mother, and
I've touched on that several times, you know, if we've

(25:39):
been talking about these steps, and I thought, well, I can,
you know, go on these trips with her? And we did.
We went to China for a few months, and we
went to Santa Fe, and we went all over to
the United States, and we went to Budapeste, and you know,
we went. We went everywhere together. And I would talk
to my sponsor and I would say, I need to
ask the question. I have a question, and he would

(26:00):
say to me, you can ask any question you want,
but you better be prepared for the answer because it's
not going to be what you think. Anyway, we were
in we were in Santa Fe and sitting down and
I said to her, how about if we play a game.
I get to ask you one question I've always wanted
to ask you, and you get to ask me one
question you've always wanted to ask me. I do not

(26:21):
recommend this game. Not a good game to play with
the parents. And so she goes okay. I said, okay,
you go first, and she said, who was there anything
more that I could have done that would have stopped
you from drinking? Now if you want that knife in

(26:42):
your heart? So I said no. She said, why did
you drink? I said, I had no idea. It just
seemed to be what I needed to do. And so
it wasn't the best of answers. It was the worst
of questions and the best so I could give. And
she said, what is your question? And then I felt

(27:04):
kind of like healed. This was my big chance. And
I just turned around and I said to her, why
didn't you protect me? And there was a long silence,
and she finally looked up and she said, I don't know,
but I should have. And that was the end of it.
And I wish I could tell you that this big
cloud was lifted and everything was wonderful, but it wasn't,

(27:25):
you know, Just some of the crap got shoveled aside,
Just some of the crap was lifted. I get to
drop one more piece of luggage that had garbage in
it by having this conversation with her. So I want
to get back to our unpredictability, because we were not
great at this. When I got sober in September, and

(27:46):
the first holiday after that was Thanksgiving, and I remember
going to my parents' house. I think they were in
Queen's at the time, and I went to my parents'
house and they had used to have a big I
don't know if you have these big Thanksgivings where the
table would start in one room and there were so
many people coming. The table would run the hallway and
go into like several other rooms because there were a
lot of people there. And my dad would sit at

(28:09):
the front of the table because he's, you know, the king,
and he would see we had four kids, and he
would see two of us on either side of him,
so we were the two who were in favor. And
he used to put a cut glass glass in front
of me, and I still have a thing for it
and drink juice out of them. Actually, but it was
one of those really sort of rot glasses that were fabulous,
and he would pour Johnny Walker into his glass, and

(28:31):
he would pour Jack Daniels into my glass. And when
I got there on that first September and I sat down,
he poured it in and I said to him, Daddy,
I'm not drinking anymore. Well, that level of unpredictability, even
in sobriety was too much. So he got up, took
the glass, took my plate, my silverware, and my place mat,

(28:56):
and walked two rooms down and sat me with the
kiddies at the kids table. And I couldn't even see
my parents for the rest of the time. And he
took one of my other brothers or sisters and put
them up at the front of the table. Now did
he love me less? Know what he was reacting to
was my unpredictability. My unpredictability. When I finally got sober

(29:21):
in alcoholics Anonymous, there had been so much that had
gone down, but I couldn't face them or talk to
them for the first four years of my sobriety. I
don't recommend that either, but I couldn't figure out how
to be in the same room with them without having
to have a drink, because that's what I knew. So
it took me four years, and then it took me

(29:44):
three years to complete the amends with them. And my
amends with them, I want to tell you I'm when
I'm go into this little bit. My mens with them
in the beginning were to the both of them, and
really all I did was call them up. They were
in Tamarack, Florida at the time. They'd moved down to Florida,
and I flew down to Florida, showed up unannounced, recommend
that either showed up unannounced and asked them if they
wanted to go to breakfast with me. They spent the

(30:05):
entire time waiting for the other shooting drop. What is
she going to tell us that we're not going to
be able to handle? Now, you know, there's so many
details of your life that come into play when you're
making your amends. You know, they had just years and
decades of this unpredictable behavior from me. And while I'm
sitting there, you know, I remember Albert saying to me,

(30:27):
the best way you can make an amends, you call
a living men, you call whatever you want. He says,
the best way to make an amends is to is
to form some type of consistency with your behavior until
they stop being afraid. That's a that's a big thing
to swallow. What do you mean they're afraid? He said,

(30:49):
Listen to me. You just keep behaving as normally as
you can, and you follow the principles, the principles, not
the steps, the principles of this program until they stop
being afraid. And that took years, you know, years and years.

(31:10):
But here's the thing that we get in the ninth
step that I need to run step. In the middle
of the ninth step, we get the promises, and I'm
not going to go through the promises because that's a
whole other hour, somewhere else, but somewhere in the promises,
it occurs to me that all the promises are telling
me is that if I get to this path and
I'm halfway through the ninth step, I have become predictable.

(31:32):
My behavior is predictable, and the ninth step tells me
it's predictable and people can stop being afraid around because
I have a whole new set of things that I
can do and they're all laid out of the ninth
step in the promises, they're all right there. And so
that was a mind blower for me. So I want

(31:54):
to anyway, I don't know why I wrote this one.
I'm talking about it anyway. So this predictability, the nice
step and LA and I'm going on with my life,
and I want to tell you that somewhere this is
twenty twenty five, twenty five years ago, twenty years ago,
whatever it is. You know, I got into politics, and
I didn't get into politics like local. I was into
presidential politics, and I was working for a president at

(32:16):
the time. And in order to work for the president,
I guess, of any president, you have to go through
the Secret Service, and they have to do this background
check on you. And it's not to see like you know,
background checkmak for a job. This is an intense background check.
They found out every single piece of information on me.
They could possibly find out, if you want to talk

(32:38):
about unpredictability, what they got on their list. Anyway, So
I was standing at the president at the time, and
the Secret Service was there, and you know, you're not
allowed to have a phone and you're not allowed to
have any electronics on you, and everybody's nervous all the time,
security all the time. And the president's here, we're talking
to me. He literally has his arm around me talking
to me. And the Secret Service comes up and he says, come,
we shook to you for a minute. And I said,
excuse me, mister President, and I'm I went to see

(33:00):
the head of the Secret Service. He says to me,
very interesting past. And I said, do I still have
a job, and he said, oh, yeah, we're not letting
you go anyway. I want to get into this part
about the ninth Step about forgiveness in case nobody has

(33:20):
told you the ninth step be the actual reason why
we do the ninth steps, because it's the freedom step.
Doesn't say it anywhere, but it's the freedom step. It's
the step that sets you free from all the crap
and all the garbage and most of the things you
did in your past and the things that you remember.
You get to be set free, which is if somebody
would have told me that. And I think I told

(33:41):
you this that when I came into AA and they
had all those signs on the walls, you know, in
that weird language like halt and kiss and all of
that stuff. At the top right, there was a sign
that said, one day you shall know a peace that
surpasses all understanding. Us of the ninth step is so
what he gives you, because when you're done, you're done.
And I had some forgiveness to do. People had done

(34:02):
some pretty bad things to me, And I mean I
had done bad things to other people. But I used
to say this thing all the time when I had
the short list of people that had done horrendous things
to me, and that I had to learn to forgive them.
And by the way, forgiving them is silent. It's not
like I call them up and say I know what
you did to me, and I forgive you. It's a
silent conversation with God. I want to make that clear.

(34:24):
It is a silent conversation private with God, just the
two of you, know, nobody else needs to know, and
you talk about the person and this is what they did,
and you ask God to help you forgive them, and
that's it. And if it comes up again, because that's
who we are, and invariably you're going to be in

(34:45):
a situation maybe ten years later, when those same feelings
come up and you, oh, I remember why I felt
this way. You have to stop and we'll talk about
that in the tense step and you better pause to say, God,
I forgot about this again. You know, I need your help.
I need to forgive that for them. I forgive them
for me so that I can be set free because

(35:06):
I don't want them around me anymore. I don't want
their arms around my neck. I don't want them, you know,
wearing down on me. I don't want to carry that
piece of luggage with their name on it. I want
to drop it and I want to get rid of it.
So one of the people that I had to forgive
I have an older brother, you know the past, I
don't know, eight or nine years, and we'll talk about

(35:27):
my mom a minute, hang on a minute, So I
have an older brother, he said, two years older than me,
and he was my get high buddy. You know, we
were tight, tight, tight, and we dragged together. We used together,
we sold drugs together, we bought drugs together. We were
everywhere together. And I don't know how it happened. But
when I decided to come into alcohol asnonymous is because

(35:49):
I I know now so people heard. God, you know,
I didn't get a nudge and and I didn't, you know,
have that whatever that thing about that thing of desperation.
I never had that. It wasn't desperate. I heard a voice.
I heard a voice that said, get up, they're going
to die. And I got up and I went to
AA because I didn't nowhere else to go anywhere. I

(36:09):
called him up and I said, I need to tell
you I can't get hired you anymore because you know,
I'm going to AA because I heard a voice which
is not really what you should say. And I had
done I had done interventions on him when we were
both high. By the way, you know, this is a
this is a guy that you know showed up asked

(36:29):
me for lunch, and we were on Fifth Avenue somewhere,
and he asked you for lunch and sat down, and
she had envelopes with everybody's name in the family with
money in it, and gave me all the envelopes, and
I knew something was up, and he was saying goodbye,
you know, he was saying goodbye, and I knew we
had a girlfriend. And I said, you know, I call Lisa.
He says she won't answer the phone because he'd already
shot her, and so he can kill her. Just shot

(36:50):
her in the leg so she couldn't run away, because
that's what we do. By the way, we don't kill him.
We just mame him. And he had she was lying
in that apartment with her legs shot so she could
get the phone and call the police on what this
nutbag was doing. And he gives me all the money
and all the envelopes and he leaves, and so I
said where you're going. He said, I'm going back home.
And that's the end of it. He says, I want

(37:11):
to say goodbye and I love you, and blah blah
blah blah, and he leaves and this is how long
ago was. And we're your cell phones, no cell phones,
and I'm high, okay, no cell phones and I'm high.
And I got on the phone and I called my
parents on the pay phone and my mother pick pick
the phone and I said, this is what's going on,
and he's going to kill himself when we really need
to do something, and she says, what we really hate.
Wait a minute, let me put your father on. You

(37:32):
can tell him. So my father gets on the phone
and I tell him the exact same thing. I said,
this is what's going on, and you got to do something.
You gotta do something. And your sons on the phone,
this is what we do to people, by the way,
and he says to me, you're a liar. You've always
been a liar and you're lying. Now call somebody else

(37:55):
with this crap, somebody who believes you. This was not him,
this was me. This is twenty thirty thirty five years
of lying that he couldn't figure out that I had
finally told the truth, you know, So that's what this was. Anyway,
they saved to him, they dropped a ned on him,

(38:16):
and you know, and he turned out not okay, but
he didn't die. And when it came time to forgive
the people in my life, he had done something to
me that I had never forgotten. On my talk called
him and told him I was coming in AA and
he followed me around. He followed me in Manhattan, you know,
the only way, you know, in those days that used
to have these books, just the books. And in New York,

(38:39):
which I just loved. The book was thick, it was
it was almost an inch thick. And he had to
know what zip code you wanted to go to, and
if you're drunk, how do you know that? And so
I would go to different meetings and he would follow
me in the car for the different meetings. And I
don't know, maybe I was in my third or fourth
meeting and I had found this group on ninety six
Street Broadway, and he went into me after the meeting.

(39:00):
He said, you can continue doing this all you want,
but when they find out who you really are, they'll
blow you at And I know it's thirty seven years later,
I still remember that. And I never saw him again.
He disappeared. He didn't want to be here. He's alive,
he didn't want to be here, and he just took up,

(39:22):
took his wife, took his kid, and he disappeared. Now,
if you remember, you know, at that time, I was
working in politics, so I could find anybody, and you
just ask one of these guys, you know what the
shoots along from the thing in his ear, but find somebody,
And they found him consistently over the years, and bizarrely enough,
bizarrely enough, but not bizarrely enough. Where do you think
he is now? He's in Florida. He's in Florida. He's

(39:45):
in sack Sarasota, Saratoga, in Sarasota, he's in Sarasota, Florida,
wherever that is. And I haven't done anything, you know,
I haven't done anything because I forgave him. I forgave
him decades go for doing the best he could with
what he had at the time. And if you take
no other phrase away, that's the ninth step phrase, then

(40:08):
you forgive them for doing the best they could with
what they had at the time. Anyway, if we I
think that, if we are lucky enough and work this
step to the best of our ability, as the years
go on and we think we finished the step, we're
gonna find out that we haven't that we have. Things
will come up, old stuff will come up, things that

(40:29):
we you know, didn't remember will come up. And you
know I've been talking to you about my son. And
you know now that they're pregnant and there's no more
of aby, So we lost another one. And he called.
And when he called and he was talking to me,
I remember, you know, I couldn't really hear what he
was saying because I was praying, you know, praying, just

(40:51):
let me say the right thing, because this is a
guild ridden boy, this is a guild ridden guy. Everybody
thinks it's their fault. And I found the words to
say what I need to say, and I thank God
for allowing me to tell them that they needed to
forgive each other, that it was nobody's fault, that they
just needed to forgive each other. Anyway. The other thing

(41:15):
is I've had three of these big POWs this week.
It's been a really rough week. So the other thing
that happened is that, you know, Monday is my anniversary,
and that is also the anniversary of my husband's death,
you know, he and I'm going to I swear to God,
I'm going to tell you all about it in the
eleven step because that's where it longs. But the point
is that he jumped in front of a subway and
he died, and he killed himself and it was violent

(41:39):
and it was sudden, and it catapulted me into this
terrible place for many years of fear and PTSD and
you know a bunch of other things. And every year
at this time I had to take a few days
and forgive him for doing the best he could with

(42:01):
what he had at the time. He did the best
he could. And while I am forgiving him, you know,
I told you this last week, you know, I forgive
his lion. Asked mother as well, and she did the
best she could with what she had at the time.
So it was a bunch of that. Then the third

(42:23):
thing that happened this week, and this was a partner
was really good about this with me. He was good.
Is that my mother. You know, I put her in
this assisted living and since my older brother disappeared all
those years ago, I have been the one making the decisions.
I'm the power of attorney. I'm the middle kid. This
is not my job, you know, but it's been my

(42:44):
job for almost a decade taking care of her. And
I said to my brother, you understand that every paper
that I have signed for her has taken something else
away from her, hasn't given her anything, has taken something
away from her, whether it's her house or the kind
of care she was getting, or any decisions that she
was making. I took them all away. And that's my

(43:05):
job as her legal power of attorney. So now the
time goes on, and you know, she's in this assistant
living and now she doesn't recognize me. She doesn't know
who I am, and that makes it easier, makes it
much easier. Every once in a while, you know, I
will ask her if she knows who I am. She
says no, but I know that I should. You know

(43:25):
I know that I should. So this week they called
and said she can't stay here anymore. She has to
be moved to memory care because she's gotten much worse.
And you know, she's I definitely my mother's daughter. Because
she punched a few people and she had taken some
of the aims and ripped their necklaces off. You know,

(43:48):
she's angry. And then she forgot again, and of course,
you know, we make a joke about it. My younger
brother and I make a joke about it, and we say,
you know, it's good that she can't remember you, because
if she remembered you, she remembers she doesn't like you.
So that's kind of a good thing in any case.
So they told me I had to make this decision,
you know, to put her into memory care. It's a
big decision. I hate signing those papers, and I signed

(44:10):
them yesterday. I hate it. So now she is going
and actually saying really weird, really weird that happened. And
I'll say really quickly, I didn't know anything about the
Baker Act. Here really knows about the Baker Act of
pease old people yelled that they're going to kill themselves.
So the fire department called me yesterday asking for money,
and I said, how did you get my name? They said, well,
we threw your mother in the back of the fire

(44:31):
truck and we Baker acted her. In any case, So
I signed the papers and when I left out of
there was very sad and and I called my partner
and I said, you know, this is this is sad
for me. You know, I don't know why because it

(44:51):
was coming, but it's sad. And he said, this is
an opportunity. Have you completely finish yourmends to your mom?
Is there anything on the table? And man, you would
have thought that somebody had just like the wind had
blown me over. And so I took the rest of
the day by myself. That's what I do, and I

(45:12):
go to the sea. I go to the water because
I think the answers are in the sea. And I
sat there and I talked to God for a couple
of hours, and I left at her there and I said,
it's clean, it's good. I'm okay. I've done everything I
could possibly do. I have done the best I could
do with what I have at this time. And that

(45:35):
was the end of it. And then I do what
I always do because I have a good sponsor who said,
when you're done with these things, make sure that you
say where is God in all of this? Where is
God in all of this? And any pinpoint where is God?
You see where he is, you know, seeing where he's not.

(45:56):
And so when you pinpoint God, when you say this
is where he is, it's the end of our isolation. Sure,
just the end of our isolation, because then we're known
while we're alone. So I want to read you something
that is not AA. So I'm not going to quote
you where it's from. But it's one of my favorite
quotes and I don't really read anything, so bear with me.

(46:18):
The quote says God's love. Where is it? It's in
the people we love. The world is a violent and
unpredicted is. The world is violent and unpredictable, and we'll
have its way with here. We are only saved by
the love, love for each other, and the love we
pour into the things we are compelled to share, being

(46:40):
a parent, being a partner, being a painter, being a writer,
being sober, and yes, being drunk. We live in a
perpetually burning building and we must save from it all
the time. All the time is love. And I think
about that quote all the time. So I hope you

(47:04):
got what I got out of this. I hope you
got what I got out of this. Next week we're
going to talk about the faux maintenance steps ten, eleven,
and twelve. They're not at all the maintenance steps, and
well we'll figure out why that is. But it is
a great day to be sober. I'm telling you that.
Thanks for having me. Well,