The 12 Steps Were Numbered for Screwballs Like Me - AA Speaker - Wesley P.

With 32 years sober, Wesley explains why AA’s Twelve Steps must become an everyday way of life—and how success, ego, and complacency can quietly lead an alcoholic back toward bondage.

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Wesley delivers a passionate and humorous Founders’ Day AA speaker talk about the difference between abstinence and genuinely living the Alcoholics Anonymous program. Sober since November 13, 1947, Wesley recalls spending his first four and a half years preaching the Steps to everyone else while continuing to lie, cheat, steal, and harm his family. A direct confrontation from his sponsor sends him back to the Twelve Steps in their numbered sequence and begins the spiritual transformation he had avoided. Wesley also describes how later success tempted him away from meetings and service, allowing self-importance to progress into complacency, apathy, and dependence on himself. Drawing from the Big Book, the Twelve Steps, the Twelve Traditions, AA history, and 32 years of experience, he explains why recovery requires continuing deflation, personal responsibility, unity, love, and service. His message is a powerful reminder that gratitude means giving something back—and that the program works in family life, business, community, and every other human relationship when its principles are practiced rather than merely discussed.

Wesley P. speaking at Founders’ Day in Akron, OH - 1979

Music: Deep by KaizanBlu