When Willpower Finally Failed Me: AA Speaker – Stephen B. – Provo, UT – 2025
AA speaker Stephen B. from Louisiana shares his journey from blackout drinking at 14 to recovery through step work, resentments inventory, and making amends.
Stephen B. grew up on a Louisiana farm and became a blackout drinker within 100 days of his first beer at age 14. In this AA speaker meeting from Provo, Utah, he walks through his progression from seven car accidents by age 19 to treatment in 1987, then details his experience working the steps with a sponsor — particularly his 154 resentments inventory and the amends process that restored his relationships with family.
This AA speaker meeting features Stephen B. sharing his story of early-onset alcoholism starting at age 14 in rural Louisiana, leading to multiple car accidents and consequences before getting sober in 1987. Stephen walks through his detailed step work including a 154-item resentment inventory and the character defects work that became his foundation for recovery. He describes making amends to his family and how AA gave him back 30 years of relationship with his mother before she died, emphasizing the transformative power of thorough step work with a sponsor.
Episode Summary
Stephen B. opens with gratitude for Alcoholics Anonymous, crediting the program with everything worthwhile in his life. Speaking from Provo during a visit to see his son, this Louisiana native paints a vivid picture of his small-town roots in Marksville — a place where “everybody is somebody,” though Stephen jokes this wasn’t quite true for him.
Growing up on a farm with row crops and livestock, Stephen lived in what he describes as more of a clan than a nuclear family, with his grandmother in the big house and relatives nearby. Despite loving, social parents and a positive Catholic upbringing, Stephen’s life took a dramatic turn just before his 15th birthday when he had his first drink — two beers with cousins while listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd in a brand new Ford Bronco.
Within 100 days, Stephen became a blackout drinker. The progression was swift and devastating. By age 19, he’d been in seven car accidents, including wrapping his parents’ brand new car around a telephone pole and hitting an ambulance. The lowest point came when he crashed two vehicles in one day — first wrecking a car turning into a bar at noon, then taking his father’s truck that night and crashing it too. Stephen vividly describes coming home to see his mother’s face, describing it as beyond resignation or rage — she was simply done.
For the next 10-12 years, Stephen estimates he quit drinking 300 times, sometimes quitting in the morning but drinking again by nightfall. His longest stretch of sobriety was 33 days. Despite earning a university degree and becoming a CPA, his drinking made consistent work impossible. He’d developed a plan to work offshore on oil rigs — 30 days sober on the rig, 30 days drinking on shore — but the walls closed in before he could escape.
In 1987, mentioning treatment to his girlfriend led to her packing his bags within 30 minutes. She’d been in Al-Anon for six months and knew exactly where to take him. At Parkland Hospital’s treatment center in Baton Rouge, Stephen initially wanted to leave but was held due to his honest answers during intake. That weekend, reading the Big Book chapters “The Doctor’s Opinion,” Bill’s story, and “There Is a Solution” gave him his first real hope that recovery might be possible.
The bulk of Stephen’s share focuses on his thorough approach to step work with his sponsor. His Second Step work involved creating a personal definition of his Higher Power as “loving, kind, available, reliable, wise, giving, generous, fearless, forgiving, powerful, protective, patient, and present” — a mantra he still uses today when needing to quiet his mind.
AA speaker talks on step work and resentment inventory often focus on the mechanics, but Stephen brings the emotional reality to life. His Fourth Step resentment inventory contained 154 items, and his sponsor made him redo the entire thing when the selfishness column wasn’t specific enough. Stephen learned that resentments form when someone with power over him doesn’t do things the way he thinks they should be done “at that moment.” He came to realize he was wrong about half the time, getting resentments over things where he was actually in the wrong.
His Fifth Step created what Stephen calls “the most intimate relationship I’ve ever had with another human being.” He shared everything with his sponsor, including eight secrets written in code. Years later, when reviewing his notes while sponsoring someone else, he couldn’t remember what three of the codes meant — perhaps, he muses, God had removed them.
For Steps Six and Seven, Stephen used the framework of the seven deadly sins, but his sponsor required specific examples of how each manifested in his life, plus contrary actions for each defect. He typed up and laminated this list, using it as a guide when feeling uncomfortable but unable to drink. Key contrary actions included taking reasonable risks rather than always playing it safe, and learning assertive communication instead of his old pattern of being passive until exploding aggressively.
The amends process brought profound healing, particularly with family members who had suffered most during his drinking years. Jerry J.’s story about cleaning your side of the street echoes Stephen’s experience of how making amends can restore damaged relationships, even when the harm can never be fully undone.
Stephen’s father died when Stephen had four years of sobriety, and his grandmother passed at ten years. With his mother, however, he had 30 years to rebuild their relationship. By the time she died, Stephen had made approximately 1,500 weekly phone calls to her, learning about her early life and becoming a source of security rather than a threat. When difficult medical decisions needed to be made during her final days, Stephen drew on what AA had taught him about doing “the most loving thing” in any situation, including making the decision to remove life support when his religiously-minded brother couldn’t.
The day his mother died, Stephen also had to make the decision to put down her sick dog. That evening, he attended a meeting at a treatment center in Marksville — 25 guys in camouflage with an unusual format allowing multiple shares. When Stephen told them that AA had given his mother her son back for 30 years, one man said he’d felt God’s presence in that meeting for the first time in his 29 days of treatment.
Stephen maintains his recovery through regular meetings, ongoing contact with his sponsor every 10 days, and sponsoring others. He describes two “magical moments” in sponsorship work: being able to tell someone sharing their secrets that “this happens to everybody,” and hearing reports from sponsees who’ve successfully made amends to family members. Don P.’s talk about being changed rather than just getting sober reflects this same transformation Stephen found through working with others.
Stephen’s goal is simple: to be remembered as a loving father and trusted friend, with the gravestone inscription being so overwhelmingly true that visitors would say “they got that right.” He closes by referencing the final paragraph of the Twelfth Step in the Twelve and Twelve, quoting Emmet Fox’s definition of contemplation as when “the prayer and the prayer become one” — essentially when your life becomes a prayer. While acknowledging this as aspirational rather than achievable, it represents what Stephen strives toward through his continued participation in Alcoholics Anonymous.
Notable Quotes
Everything I have worth having, I owe to Alcoholics Anonymous.
Within a 100 days I’m a blackout drinker within a 100 days. Not because I had some deep reason to escape. I just had problems right out the gate.
I estimate 300 times. Some days I would quit when I woke up, but I would not be quit when it got dark.
My relationship with him is the most intimate relationship I’ve ever had with another human being. I told him everything, everything.
AA gave my mom her son back for 30 years, and if she was here, she’d be thanking AA.
Steps 8 & 9 – Making Amends
Sponsorship
Hitting Bottom
Steps 6 & 7 – Character Defects
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Full Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated and may contain minor errors. For the best experience, listen to the audio above.
>> My name is Steven. I'm an alcoholic.
>> I say I love Alcoholics Anonymous. Everything I have worth having, I owe to Alcoholics Anonymous. How it's extended my life and bettered my life in ways I could not have imagined when I first got here. I want to thank Neil for that generous introduction and for arranging my being here. I do live in Los Angeles and my son moved here about five years ago. I'm here three or four times a year to spend time with him. When I'm visiting him, he's often at work or doing other things and I have time to come to meetings. Often they're those noon meetings.
When I think of Neil and before I get started, I want to make this comment. Neil reminds me of one of those eco-tourists, you know, the people that go places and try to make them better. They take their free time and go places and try to make it better. I remember at the last new meeting that we were in together, he raised his hand with an announcement because he wanted us to try the coffee. He had put together a new custom blend and he wanted some feedback. I was just thinking, in LA we don't have custom blends, baby. [laughter] We don't have custom blends.
I think of Los Angeles—ten million people. I didn't grow up in Los Angeles. I grew up in Louisiana. The county that I grew up in had about forty thousand people. My hometown was a county seat. We call them parishes, but the county seat, Marksville, and it had maybe five to ten thousand people. And you know, it's that way today. There's a water tower in that small town and it says "Marksville where everybody is somebody." That's my first exposure to propaganda because I don't think it was true, man. I don't think it was true.
But it's one of those small towns where most days are just boring and drag on, but every now and again something happens. I'll name three or four just to give you a reference of how it's maybe a little different from everywhere else. There was a day in the nineteen-forties when it actually rained fishes in Marksville. That's a phenomenon. Hit ChatGPT after the meeting and you'll be able to find it. And if I don't know if some of you have seen that movie "12 Years a Slave," you know that character that Brad Pitt played was a carpenter for Marksville. The judge that released Solomon Northrup was at the courthouse in my hometown, one of my mom's great uncles or something like that. A point of pride for her that somebody she was connected with had something to do with releasing the guy.
Some of you, not all of you, are going to remember Johnny Carson. Part of his schtick sometimes was to read small town news. He caught us twice. Once when we elected our sheriff while he was doing time in his own jail. As just a side note, he went in a landslide. All my family voted for him. His motto was, "I'm not in jail for something I did. I'm in jail for something I didn't do." His job basically, but still.
And then the other time was not as funny. That same water tower, as it turns out, was built maybe one hundred, one hundred fifty feet off the corner of the Catholic cemetery. With the water tables and stuff like that and maybe not the best filtration, there were some problems with the water there for a while. [laughter] But they've corrected it decades ago. It did have a peculiar smell though, always.
So that gives you a flavor of a little small town. Every now and again something would happen and we'd make the news. Now I didn't live in town. I lived two or three miles out of town on what some people call a farm, some people would call it a ranch. We had hundreds of acres. We had row crops—cotton, soybeans, and corn. We also had livestock—horses, cows, and that whole list of things that you have on a farm. Like we had them all.
My grandmother lived in the big house and her two sons built on either side of her on the front of the property. We were back and forth to each other's house all the time. That's how it was. My parents desperately wanted to have children and they had my brother and me, and they centered their life around their kids. They were very social people.
There was no alcoholism in that generation that I grew up in. So they were good people. We were Catholic, and but the good kind. I hear a lot of stories in AA sometimes where people didn't have great experiences. I had a great experience. We had the kind of relationship with the priest where he'd come to my grandmother's house, he'd come to my great-grandmother's house, and he'd bring his girlfriend. She was a beautiful island girl. She was my first crush, I think.
My family spoke a lot of French. I learned later that part of the reason why they were at our house as much as they were is she spoke French. So they would get together, not too much different from what we do at a meeting, where they'd have some coffee and some snacks and sit down and talk French to each other.
When I was in the second grade, I became an altar boy. I think I'd still be an altar boy today if that outfit still fit. I just love being an altar boy.
I would say I was good at things. I had a period in the early part of maybe second grade when maybe a little self-consciousness started to develop, and a little anxiety, that sort of thing. And right about that same time, I was introduced to sports. Football, baseball, basketball, tetherball, hopscotch, whatever you got. Let's play. Let's play. That got me through. That got me through that next stage of my life. I wanted to go to school early. I wanted to stay late. I wanted to play whatever was organized or ad hoc. I wanted to do it. So it was good.
We're going to fast forward a little bit. So that was the beginning. You get to the point where I'm fourteen years old, just a few days before I'm fifteen. We just had the sports banquet and I had my Letterman jacket. I'd lettered as a freshman for football, and that was a big deal in my hometown. I was on the student council. I was a good student. I think at that point I had only been a source of pride to my family.
I had two of my cousins and we had a plan to do something mischievous on a Tuesday night. On our way to do this thing—it's not important what we were on our way to do—we decided to stop off at a gas station and get a six-pack of beer. It was a Biopps gas station. One of my cousins had just received, in anticipation of his birthday, a brand new Ford Bronco. Brand new, you know, like the smell, the whole thing. It was brand new and it was fully loaded. It even had a cassette player. It was nice.
We only had one cassette and it was Leonard Skynard. You know that song where there's a little riff and a dude would say, "Turn it up"? We'd go right after "turn it up," then we'd rewind it over and over and over again.
But anyway, we stopped off at a gas station and we got a six-pack of beer. We got two beers each, three form boys, and it was wonderful. Like it was wonderful. There was not a cloud on the horizon. I didn't know I was going to be ambushed. Within a hundred days I'm a blackout drinker. Within a hundred days. Not because I had some deep reason to escape. I just—I had problems right out of the gate. I started suffering consequences right out of the gate.
I'm going to focus on the car wrecks. By the time I was nineteen, I was in seven accidents before I was twenty. There are three particular days that stand out.
One was on a Monday or a Tuesday. My mom and dad had bought a brand new car—the only brand new car they ever bought before or after. On Friday night, I asked if I could borrow the car. By then I was fifteen and I could drive. It was a rainy night. On the way I'd been drinking. On the way back, it was raining. I lost control of the car, spun out, and wrapped it around a telephone pole. It wrapped on the passenger side and I didn't have a passenger.
Another one—I unfortunately hit an ambulance that had somebody in it, and we had to go to court on that one. That was a bad one. We had some shared negligence there, but you don't want to hit an ambulance.
And then maybe the worst of the worst. At about noon on this particular day, turning into a bar, I crashed the car. My dad came and got me. We did all the things that you do. That night I was uncomfortable and after they went to bed, I took my dad's truck. Before midnight that night, I crashed his truck. I crashed two cars in one day.
Thank God my kids have never done this to me. But when we got home, my dad had to come get me. When we got home, my mom—I don't know that I have the words to describe it. It wasn't resignation. It wasn't rage. It was—I don't know—done. And you know, I'd been a threat to their emotional security by then, their physical security, their reputation, their financial security. It was almost like I was a terrorist in their lives because it didn't happen every day, but it happened a lot.
That gives you a sense of how it was. Then for till my mid-twenties, so for about ten or twelve years, I was trying to stop drinking. I had good people behind me that were helping me. I did not want to be this. I did not want to be this. I quit, I estimate, three hundred times. That's my estimate.
Some days I would quit when I woke up but I would not be quit when it got dark. There were lots of those days. Now that quit forever, I didn't make it through the day. It's sad. It happened over and over. All those ten or twelve years of drinking. One time I made it all the way to thirty-three days on my own. Of course we got drunk that night, but that was my record. That was my all-time record.
While I was doing all this stuff, I got through a university. Then I got the worst job you could possibly get as an alcoholic. I became a CPA, and a bad behaving CPA. That wasn't a good match. My drinking was progressing. I felt like the things were closing in and I developed a plan. I can't do this job because I can't show up every day.
So my new plan was, I'm going to go work offshore on an oil rig. I'll work thirty days and then I'll be off thirty days. I can't drink on the rig and I'll just be off and I'll drink for thirty days and then that'll be my new life. But the walls closed in a little too quick before I could get there.
To save a job, I decided to mention to my girlfriend at the time like maybe I should try treatment. I didn't know about AA. This was in the nineteen-eighties, nineteen eighty-seven. I didn't know about AA. I should have, you know. There wasn't an app. There wasn't Google AA. There was none of that then.
I said, "What about a treatment center?" She, as it turns out, had been in Al-Anon for six months. Within thirty minutes her bag was packed and we were on our way to the treatment center. She had picked a good one. It was Parkland Hospital. Parkland Hospital had a treatment center in Baton Rouge and they did a lot of advertising. They had billboards and commercials where there'd be an attractive, mature couple and the woman would look lovingly at her husband and say, "Thanks, Parkland." [laughter] That's the one we picked. That's where we headed.
I got there and they do the check-in. I was horribly messed up, you know. They do the check-in and they ask a lot of questions and I answered them honestly. Then they maybe gave me a little medication or something because I woke up the next day and I wanted to leave. They said, "Well, you can't leave." I said, "Well, what—?" And then they brought out the questions and answers and what I had said. I said, "Oh my god, I can't believe."
That day they just detoxed me. That was a Friday. Then on Saturday there was no programming, so they gave me a big book and they said, "Go read something." I started with the doctor's opinion, then Bill's story and "There Is a Solution," those early chapters. Oh my god, it just blew me away, man. I related so much to how they described what was going on.
Then the next day was a Sunday and they brought in a speaker, kind of like what we're doing here today. The guy was a little bit older than me and he was sharing his story at a level of transparency that I had never heard anybody talk about. I really related to him.
I got to tell you, I went to the treatment center to try to keep my job. I didn't—by then I was convinced I would never, ever, ever be able to stop drinking. But after that first weekend, I had a little hope like maybe this could work for me. And as it turns out, I've never had another drink.
Right from the beginning, I've really loved going to meetings. Something magical happens at meetings. When I come to this room, I love this room. There have been times when I come to this room and I really need a meeting. Maybe it's the pine ceilings, I don't know, or what people say, or just a smile, a pat on the back, talking AA, the coffee, custom blends, and everything. Something magical happens. There are a lot of times I come here and I'm between storms and I'm just here and I just enjoy being here. I love seeing new people, young people, and people that have been here for a long time.
So I'm going to maybe switch over a little bit so you got a sense of what it was like and then what happened, and maybe move on to talking a little bit about the steps. I know some people—it can be horribly boring sometimes to hear people talk about the steps. I'm going to apologize in advance, but I want to talk about some of the experiences I've had and my impressions of it.
You've got a strong sense of my first step. Let me talk about the second step. For us in our reading, that's "We Agnostics." One of my favorite paragraphs in the book is that first paragraph in "We Agnostics" where I think it describes alcoholism in a very concise, efficient way. If when you really want to stop drinking you can't stay stopped, or if once you start drinking you can't control the amount you drink, it says, "Well, then if you have either one of those, you're probably an alcoholic. And if you're an alcoholic, you're going to need a spiritual experience to overcome alcoholism."
I want to maybe hold that thought and go back and summarize a little paragraph where Carl Young is talking to this guy Roland about alcoholism. They're summarizing this conversation with this preeminent physician and he's telling him, "You're an alcoholic. I don't have an answer for you. I've never seen a single case recover." This is only maybe three or four years before Bill and Bob met. I've never seen a single case recover.
Then Roland asked him, trying to get a little hope. It's described in that reading where he says he'd never seen it, but here and there once in a while over the course of human history, there have been people that have had these vital spiritual experiences that were able to overcome their alcoholism. But they were very, very rare. Very rare.
It kind of set rolling on this quest, and eventually it got to Bill. When I read one of the magical things about this step two is, and the steps that follow, is that you got to have a spiritual experience. But that experience—it's not like, well, let's go to Jerusalem or let's go pray until we can't. It's a series of actions that produce, in a predictable, reliable way, this spiritual experience.
So step two, I had to come up with a definition of God. I had this Catholic background and I had a warped relationship with God when I first got here. I blamed God. I didn't think it was fair what had happened to me. I didn't want to be like I was. That's how I got here.
My sponsor asked me to come up with a definition of a higher power. And that flexibility—to talk about higher power, or God, or even if we want to just use AA as our higher power in the beginning—that's something we're able to do. But he asked me to come up with a definition of God. I came up with a series of words that didn't conflict with my religious training but were somewhat different because I needed something different. I needed a new foundation.
When I think of my higher power, it's loving, kind, available, reliable, wise, giving, generous, fearless, forgiving, powerful, protective, patient, and present. That's my little mantra. When I'm really in a tough space and I need to quiet my mind, I go back to that mantra.
I think two things that may be related to this that are uniquely AA. One was allowing each individual to define their own conception of God rather than preach a conception of God. It didn't sound right at the beginning. It almost doesn't sound right, you know, that you can just think of your own. But I think that's uniquely AA and it lowers the threshold for a lot of people, enabling a lot of people to get in.
The other thing is the magic of one alcoholic talking to another, just like we're doing today.
Before I move off of this topic, I also want to maybe reference that "We Agnostics" section. I talked about that first paragraph, but there's also a list of resentments that a lot of you are going to be familiar with. I use that even today as sort of an early warning sign. Before I get thirsty, maybe I'm having some issues. Do I have problems with personal relations? Do I have problems with my emotional nature? Am I prey to misery and depression? Am I unhappy? Do I feel useless? Am I afraid? Am I unable to make a living? Am I unable to be of any real service to anybody? Those are the eight things.
Even today, there's the drinking definition, but there's insobriety too. When am I trending toward fragile? It's usually when something like that pops up.
So that gets us through two and three. You get to four. Resentments. When I first got here, the word resentment wasn't in my vocabulary. I heard somebody describe it as this looping negative thought—thinking a negative thought over and over and over about somebody else. I was thinking, well, that's kind of my hobby. [laughter] Driving around in the car with a six-pack and a pint or a half pint, thinking negative thoughts about my boss or my girlfriend or somebody.
So I had that. I really related. They made me write down all my resentments. I had one hundred fifty-four resentments. It's not a record, but it is a lot.
Then there's the second and third column that brings in more detail. In that fourth column, where had I been selfish, dishonest, self-seeking, or afraid? For each one of those one hundred fifty-four, I had to answer those four questions. I did that, and then it was time for the fifth step. I was sitting with my sponsor and we started with the first resentment. I got to how I'd been selfish and he didn't like what I wrote. He asked me to redo it all. I now have one hundred fifty-five resentments on my list.
He wanted me to write: he or she did not do it, whatever it is, the way I thought it should be done. If I'm going to have a resentment, it has to be somebody that has a little bit of power over me, or if you want to think of it that way, or I have to care about it. And they have to do something in a way that's not consistent with the way I think it should be done at that moment. Then I get a resentment. You're not doing it right, man. All right, I'm not pointing at you. I'm just saying in general. [laughter]
That's how I get a resentment. What I've learned before I get off this topic is I'm wrong about half the time. I'm getting resentments about things when I'm wrong, which caused me troubles over the years.
That's how we talked about selfishness. Maybe a little bit about dishonesty. My sponsor and I—there's variability about how people work the steps, but for dishonesty, there were three ways. You could actually lie. You could be passive—something someone could do and you not speak up, and get a resentment. And then the other one was a catchall. Particularly in my early life, some things happened and I just hadn't accepted it. It's hard to get over that resentment until you accept it.
So we did all that work and fear. You know, "evil and corroding thread." I love that the way that—caused more problems than stealing should be classed with stealing. I didn't recognize I was a big form boy that I was as afraid as I was. But I came to learn about that and the way I reacted when I got that way.
Then we get to maybe move on to the fifth step. My sponsor asked me to stop saying it this way, but I can't come up with a better way to say it. When we got together, I read my entire fourth step. You know, the resentment area, the fear, and the sex inventory. I thought the sex inventory would have taken more time than it did, but that's how it worked for me.
I let myself say it differently. I wish that was a joke. [laughter] But we shared all that—the mechanical piece. Then I had to get to my secrets. I had eight secrets. When I wrote them down in my book, I didn't just write them out. I wrote them in code. So when I talked to him it was fresh, and I knew what each code meant. I had eight of them, and a couple of years ago I went back to my work. I was taking somebody else through the steps and I looked at my eight secrets. There were three codes that I couldn't remember what they stood for. So maybe God's relieved me of them. Maybe they're gone.
My relationship with him is the most intimate relationship I've ever had with another human being. I told him everything. Everything. I was in so much pain when I was working through the steps that I was willing to share everything.
I still—every ten days or so—I either get together with my sponsor or I talk to him on the phone. We stay current. I need to stay current because what we learned is, if you're in a car or truck, there's a blind spot. I have blind spots.
A couple of them for me, and they're going to be different for everybody: One is my own physical health. One time I called him. I'd just gotten off a plane and I told him, "My face is swollen." He said, "Oh my god, how bad is it?" I said, "Well, you can't really see it." He said, "Well, if it's still swollen next Tuesday, we'll go to the doctor. If not, I'm being silly." But that actually happened. It's a blind spot, my own physical health. I get overly anxious about issues that come up.
The other is my kids. I have an overdeveloped response when my kids are having any kind of struggle. I'm all in. He's helped me many times just get right about things.
That relationship has been key. I've taken guys through the steps, a number of guys through the steps. When I'm taking a guy through the steps, there are like two magical moments that happen consistently. One is when a guy tells me his secrets and I'm able to say, "Well, man, that happens to everybody." [laughter] Or just bring it right size for him. That's one.
And then the other is when a guy comes back to me reporting after he's made amends to someone in his family. When we're able to bring families back together and back to health, I feel like a link in the chain. Like we're doing something here. Those have been magic moments for me when I'm working with guys.
When I get to step six and seven, I'll talk about them together. I use the framework that some people are going to be familiar with—the seven deadly sins: pride, anger, greed, gluttony, lust, envy, sloth. But he wouldn't let me just put those down. Under each one, I had to give examples of how that manifested itself in my life. Be specific. That was a common theme for him all the way through. Be specific.
Then I had to come up with a list of contrary actions for each one. For a lot of people, pride's a big issue. For me, pride was a big issue. Self-reliance. I can do this. But I can't. I need help.
When I finished six and seven with him, I had to write everything down. A week or so later I typed it up and I laminated it. These are my defects and these are my contrary actions. For a long time I would just go back to that to check, where am I at? Because if I can't drink and I'm uncomfortable, what am I going to do? Am I going to act out? There's lots of ways to act out. Or am I going to lean into the program?
Maybe a couple of other things on my contrary action list were like, take risks. Don't just play it safe. Take some risk, but after working with my sponsor and with people, be reasonable. But not always safe.
And then the other one was assertive communication. It's really come in handy for me over time, particularly with an ex-wife. My mode, because I'm a good old country boy, is just be passive, just take it, take it, take it till I can't take it anymore and go over the top aggressively. That was my mode.
What we've worked on for years now is assertive communication. If there's an issue, just say it. Take that risk before you have to feel a need to get aggressive. Before you need to raise your voice, you can just ask somebody, why did that hurt me? Why did you say that? It hurt my feelings. [laughter] I was going to say if you're sleeping in the front row, that would help. But nobody's doing that. So sorry, I get silly.
A lot came out of that work. Then you get to eight and nine. I had to make a list of people that I had harmed, and then I had to be specific about the harms that I'd done to each one on the list. I reviewed it with my sponsor and he felt there were some people he didn't want me to make amends to. He didn't feel a need for me to make amends to them. Then we adjusted the wording on some of the harms so it was clear. We set a priority and there was a script and I did it. I did all of them.
I talk about my family. Most of my harm was to my family of origin—my mom and dad and my grandmother. They're the ones that suffered the most with me. The thing with your family is, you can sit down and say it and they're already going to be rooting for you. If you just stop drinking, that was such a huge thing. But we wanted to do more. You don't know how much time you're going to have to make amends.
With my dad, he got cancer a few years after I got sober. He died when I was four years sober. We had gotten to a point where I wasn't drinking anymore and I was connecting with them, but I was only four years sober when he died. My grandmother died when I was ten years sober. A couple of years before she died, we had to move her into a nursing home.
I'll just share the story. I've never shared it before. I adored my grandmother. They moved her into a nursing home. By then, I was calling my family every week. I'd call my mom and dad and I'd call my grandmother. Those first few calls were really uncomfortable. I was already living in California. One time my dad asked me how my TV was doing because he had bought me a TV. But we evolved beyond that.
I had a phone put next to my grandmother's bed in the nursing home and I'd call her much more frequently than once a week. She had dementia. It was the kind of conversation where she'd forget. She'd ask me, "What did you have for lunch?" I'd say, "Chicken." Then a couple of minutes later, "What'd you have for lunch?" I'd say, "A hamburger." "What'd you have for lunch?" "A salad." Then at some point she'd catch herself and we'd have a laugh.
But she would open every one of those calls with, "I love you so much. I love you so much. I was sitting here waiting for you to call and thank you." And then when we'd get off the call, it was, "I love you so much. Call me back."
Did I fully heal what I did to them earlier? No. But did I put a dent in it? I feel like I did. Not only that, but I got something back.
My mom didn't pass away until I was thirty years sober. By then, and if you remember that setting, around the kitchen table that night that I wrecked two cars, we had come a long way. By then I was calling her every week. I'd probably had fifteen hundred calls with her. I'd learned so much about her early life. Then as she got older, rather than being a threat to her security, I'd become a source of security. Emotional security. Support. There were some financial things that I was able to do. Every time I went home, there'd be a punch list.
Did I ever make up for everything that I did to her? No. No. But did I put a dent in it as a result of Alcoholics Anonymous? I think so. I think so.
I remember the day she died. My brother called me to tell me. She had gone to work on a Tuesday and on Thursday she was in the hospital. My brother called me and said, "You need to come home." I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Mom was in the hospital and it was really bad." I didn't fully believe it, but I went home.
When I got home, just to check on her. Within a day or so, she dropped into a coma and she never came out of it. When I first got to the hospital, one of the things my brother said was, he was a very religious person, Pentecostal. He said, "You know, if we get to the point where we have to pull the plug, I can't do it. I can't. That's against my religion."
One of the things that I have from Alcoholics Anonymous is, no matter what it is, I can do the most loving thing there is to do. We got to a point over the next few days when it was time to take her off that equipment. The day before, I told my brother—because we were praying our ass off, he and his family too. I said, "If God restores her overnight, then we're good. But if not, we're going to pull the plug."
We did the next day, and it was done. That day, I had to get a suit. I had to go to the funeral home and make arrangements because none of that was in advance. A little bit stressful.
Then I went to a meeting and then I had to go check on her little dog. I had given her a dog and when they put her in the hospital, they put the dog in wherever that place is. I don't even know the name. They were holding the dog and I went to check on the dog. The lady told me the dog was riddled with cancer, was really sick. They weren't going to be able to find another home for the dog. She said, "What do you want to do?"
I said, "Is there nobody in our family able to do it?" I said, "Well, I guess we'll put the dog down." I did that really with the same sort of spirit. I can do the most loving thing that needs to be done in any situation, I believe, as a direct result of what I've learned here in AA and the support of my system here.
We did that, and you can imagine, that's been quite a day. It was about a seven o'clock meeting. We have a treatment center in Marksville now. I got to this meeting and it's Louisiana, and it's guys, maybe twenty-five guys, and everybody's in camouflage. It's like one hundred percent Louisiana camouflage. They had an odd sort of format. They'd read a paragraph and then you could share as many times as you wanted. Some of these guys were new in there, some were coming off meth and other things. Some of these guys were sharing like the impulse to share was over and over and over.
Maybe about forty-five minutes in, I was able to share that meeting. I told them what the day was like and that Alcoholics Anonymous had given my mom her son back for thirty years. If she was here, she'd be thanking AA.
One of those boys in that meeting said, "You know, I've been here for twenty-nine days. I'm getting out tomorrow." He said, "People have been talking about God every day," but he said, "I really felt like God was here today."
I think God comes to all the meetings. I think God comes to all the meetings.
That was part of my amends. I have like ongoing amends. I've just got a couple more minutes to wrap it up. I go to a lot of meetings. I've talked about my sponsor. I've got sponsees that I'm taking through the steps. My goal in life is to be a loving father and a trusted friend. That's what I want on my gravestone. Loving father. Trusted friend. I want it to be so true that when somebody comes to my grave, they don't say, "Oh my god." I want it to be so overwhelmingly true that they say, "Yeah, they got that right."
If it does happen, it'll be directly as a result of everything that I've experienced here in Alcoholics Anonymous.
Sometimes I close with something cheeky. I'm not going to do that tonight. For the newcomers, I was going to say something like, "AA: where everybody is somebody."