Happy Joyous & Free episode # 4 with Rob T.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:13)
Good day, everybody, and welcome to Happy Joyous & Free. In the spirit of attraction, we present this week's speaker and hope you find something in this message for your own recovery.
More information about us will be available after today's talk.

**Rob** (0:27)
Hi, everybody, my name is Rob, I'm an alcoholic. So, two things, one, first and foremost, congratulations to everybody for your anniversary. That's awesome, so congrats. Next, I'm not taking this, so I make sure I don't go, like, two hours and everybody start hating me. So this is, I'm just looking for my clock, so to make sure I don't talk too long.
So, my sobriety date is Christmas Day 2017 I wish that was my first one, but it's not, but hopefully it will be my last if all goes well.
So, one of the things that early on I learned was, and I heard somebody say, I shouldn't say I learned, was that giving a lead was awesome, because they got more out of it than anything else. And I was kind of like, well, that's a bunch of bull, that's crazy. How could that possibly be? And having done this a few times, it absolutely is, and most of it's the prep work for me, because it takes me back through the journey, and just helps with the gratitude, and remind me of the process to get here, which I'll share with you. Hopefully, somebody gets something out of it throughout the process. I do my best not to do drunkologues. We all have our stories and all those things. Share a little bit about my early life, kind of the journey along the way that contributed, and then try and spend a little bit more time on kind of what happened and what life's like now, and the miracles of the program. So first and foremost, everybody that is Die Hard Cincinnati Bengals fans, don't throw stuff at me. I was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri. So I knew it.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:57)
Here we go. It comes out every time.

**Rob** (2:00)
I will say this, I've lived here now as long as I've lived, that I lived there, and I've had season tickets to the Bengals and all that stuff, so somewhat of a truce piece. But anyway, growing up, it was weird. It was a weird dichotomy. My grandparents, my maternal grandparents were amazing. They were the grandparents that every kid would ever want to have. They lived next to a cemetery, which is weird as that is. It was a wonderful place to grow up. We had a creek to play in, rocks to climb. It was safe and all those things. And they were amazing. My house that I grew up in, we were provided for. We had those, but it was an abusive house.
Later in life, I learned my dad, you know, my grandpa, my dad's dad, my grandpa, was very abusive, beat my grandma on all of them, and this, that, the other. My dad always said, don't hit girls, but I was the only boy, so that was free game. Didn't matter how old I was. So the punishment never fit the crime. That plays a part in the development of who I became and who I am, right, and some of those things. I learned at a very young age to try to be a people pleaser. I learned at a very young age to lie and try and get out of something. If I could lie my way out of it, I didn't get beat. If I got caught lying, the beating wasn't that much worse and so it was worth a shot, right?
Hey, that carries through my adulthood too at times, you know.
So it does resurface.
There's a few points that I'll kind of bring up that are relevant because where parts of my soul died in the journey of life. And one was when I was five years old. It was my birthday party. And we were playing Pin the Tail on the donkey and all that stuff. And I wanted it to be my turn. And my dad wanted my guests to go. And then the second turn, one of them to go. I was five, it was my party, I threw a fit. And he spanked me until I wet my pants in front of everybody. That night when I went to bed, I prayed with everything I had for my dad to die and to be gone out of my life. Thank God that didn't happen, because I would have had to live with that and all that stuff. It didn't happen. But that was one of the first parts of that chapter. Life goes on.