This is an excerpt from my full-life memoir, Un Fn Myself — my real story of addiction, recovery, fatherhood, and everything in between from 1984 to 2026, including the parts most people would cut out.
I asked him to be my sponsor right after that. He was a big guy—overweight, but also solid and strong, unmistakably a construction worker, and an unlikely choice in every way. When I asked him if he would sponsor me, he shook my hand and said yes, and then he said something that immediately made me feel relieved: he told me he would call me every day. That mattered more than I realized at the time. Most sponsors expect you to call them. My first sponsor flipped it around. He showed me what it looked like to reach out by doing it himself. Every day, he would call and check on me. A lot of the time I didn’t answer. I’d be working, working out, or just not ready to talk. Sometimes he called early in the morning before I was up. Sometimes it felt random. He’d just leave a voicemail saying things like, “God loves you. Thinking of you. Looking forward to seeing you at the meeting later.” It wasn’t dramatic or heavy. It was consistent.
Because I was now going to five meetings a week, I saw my sponsor often. I saw everyone at AA more often. Familiar faces turned into actual connections. People stopped being anonymous bodies in folding chairs and started becoming part of my daily life. That’s when I actually started doing the steps instead of skimming around the edges of them. I had already written what amounted to a Fourth Step inventory—a roughly 10,000-word story of my life. Years later, I posted that story on my website because some people had read it as a series of blog posts and told me it was inspiring. In 2019, I even put it on the jerrybanfield.com homepage. What I didn’t think through was what would happen when parents from my daughter’s school friended me on Facebook, clicked through to my website, and started reading that story without any context. They stopped halfway through, never got to the part where things changed, and apparently decided I was some kind of dangerous lunatic. They called the police.
So one day in 2019, four police officers showed up at my house because of a Fourth Step inventory I had written in Alcoholics Anonymous and then foolishly published on my homepage. That story didn’t stay on my homepage after that. That experience taught me something important about containment. That’s one reason this material goes in books now. If you want to read this, you buy the book or someone hands you the book, and you read it in the context of a full narrative instead of stumbling across a fragment on the internet and inventing a nightmare around it.
That Fourth Step itself was incredibly revealing. What it showed me was that I was the creator of my life. Yes, other people had done things to me, but the one constant throughout every chapter was me. I did this, then I did that, then I made this choice, then I reacted that way. Seeing it laid out like that was grounding. It shifted me out of victim mode and into responsibility, which was uncomfortable but stabilizing.
I thought that by writing that Fourth Step, I had already covered the worst things I’d ever done. I included my darkest moments—things no one else had ever witnessed, with no police reports, no hospital records, no documentation. No one else was ever involved. Around that same time, I’d also had the thought that I should see a therapist. But when I looked at one therapist’s intake form, I knew immediately I wouldn’t be honest. There was no way I was going to put my darkest secrets down in writing on an official form. I wasn’t doing that. If it didn’t exist in writing or in some government system, then in my mind, it didn’t officially exist. Because of that, I didn’t go to therapy at the time. I only went to AA.
Ironically, I’ve done plenty of therapy since then. But in that early period, this was my thinking. Alcoholics Anonymous was the only place where I felt like I could tell the truth without creating a permanent paper trail that might come back to destroy my life.
My Fourth Step showed me something fundamental: when I write my life story out honestly—even the things nobody else knows about—it adds up into a coherent sense of self. I could see that I had created my life, that there were patterns, choices, and behaviors that kept repeating, and that I carried real guilt about some of them. That alone was stabilizing. Then one day in a meeting, something surfaced that I had buried so deeply it hadn’t even made it into that life story. It was a night I felt especially bad about. Nobody got hurt, but I was drunk and I had been a real danger that night. Thankfully, nothing happened. Still, I felt awful about that night because I knew how close I had been to hurting someone. When that memory came back, it hit me immediately: oh shit, this is what the Fifth Step is for.
Up to that point, I had talked openly in meetings about the worst of what I had done, but this was different. This was something I had never told anyone. The incident had happened around 2006, so by the time I remembered it, roughly eight years had passed, and I still felt sick thinking about it. I went to my sponsor and told him everything—where I went, what I was thinking, exactly what almost happened. I’m intentionally obscuring some of the details here because this is a book that anyone can read, but I told my sponsor the precise truth. The only reason I felt safe doing that was because of a twisted piece of rationalization: if he told anyone else, I could deny it. Plausible deniability felt airtight. In my head, I told myself that if this guy repeated it, I could just say he was crazy and made it up. That sounds awful, but that’s how my mind worked at the time. That belief gave me enough safety to finally tell the truth.
His response stunned me. He wasn’t shocked. He wasn’t horrified. He didn’t react with the kind of fear or disgust I had been carrying around for years. He just said, “God loves you,” and told me it was okay. That was it. And somehow, that was enough. I felt dramatically better afterward. I remember thinking, holy shit, that actually worked. The Fifth Step really worked. This isn’t just talk. This isn’t symbolic bullshit. It actually did something. That realization lit a fuse in me. If reading the book, getting a massage, and doing the Fifth Step worked this well, then what else did these people know that I didn’t? My curiosity exploded.
Not long after that, something similar happened in a meeting. My grand-sponsor—connected to both my first and second sponsors—shared something from the front. He has since passed away, and he would be perfectly fine with me telling this story. He died about ten years ago. In that meeting, he made an offhand sexual joke. Nobody laughed except me. I laughed loudly, almost uncontrollably, and I didn’t understand why I was laughing as it was coming out of me. The room stayed quiet. Then, as suddenly as the laughter came, memories slammed into my consciousness—memories of the abuse I had experienced in childhood.
These were things I hadn’t remembered in at least twenty years. Things I had been told never to talk about. Things that had been buried so deep they might as well have been sealed underground. All of them came rushing back at once. In that moment, I understood something terrifying and clarifying at the same time: the racing mind, the obsession, the constant noise I had lived with for years had been protecting me from these memories. This was one of those toxically buried wounds, locked so far down that my system had been running nonstop just to keep the door shut. Somehow, that stupid joke cracked it open.
As soon as those memories surfaced, the urge hit immediately. I thought, fuck, I need to drink right now. As soon as this meeting ends, I need to go straight to the liquor store. I need relief immediately. At the exact same time, another thought arrived just as clearly: you need to do your Fifth Step again with my grand-sponsor right now. Those were the only two options. There was no middle ground. I couldn’t just walk out of the meeting and pretend this hadn’t happened. Either I was going to be drinking within fifteen minutes, or I was going to sit down with him and tell the truth. One way or another, this was getting addressed.
At the time, he was dying of cancer, and he was having a particularly rough day, which he had shared about in the meeting. As soon as the meeting ended, I walked straight up to him. Other people were trying to talk to him, to offer support or small talk, and I interrupted them without hesitation. I stepped right in front of him and said, “I need to talk to you.” At first, he thought I was just trying to cheer him up, and he brushed it off, saying something like, “Oh no, no, I’m fine.” I cut him off and said, “I need to do a Fifth Step with you right now,” and I said it with urgency, the kind that doesn’t leave room for negotiation. He looked at me for a second and then said, “Okay, let’s go out back.”
We went behind the building and sat down in a couple of chairs, and I poured my life out to him like I had never poured it out to anyone before. I told him everything I could think of that I hated about myself and my behavior—the things I was most ashamed of, including the night I had already told my first sponsor about and what had happened to me in childhood. I didn’t minimize anything. I didn’t soften it. If anything, I tried to make myself look as bad and as responsible as possible. I wanted the whole thing out in the open. I cried while I talked, and I didn’t stop myself. I just kept going, dumping it all out for what felt like ten, twenty, maybe thirty minutes.
When I finally finished, he looked at me and said, “Do you want to hear about my life?” I said yes immediately. I was exhausted from talking about myself and more than ready to listen. What he told me shook me deeply. He had survived far worse than I had. His life had been brutal, and the suffering he described was beyond anything I could have imagined. He talked about the insane things he did afterward and how sobriety fit into all of it. Hearing his story bothered me for days afterward. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I remember thinking, this is a fucked up world where things like this can happen to a person. And yet, I had heard him hint at pieces of this in meetings before, just the tip of the iceberg, which is exactly why I had felt safe going to him in the first place.
After that conversation with my grand-sponsor, I felt an enormous sense of relief. When I look back at that period, I can see how all these things stacked together. I had done my Fourth Step. I had gotten a massage that finally quieted my mind. I had asked my first sponsor to work with me and started opening up to him. I had done a deeper, more complete Fifth Step with my grand-sponsor. Somewhere in the middle of all that, after a few months of sobriety, as August approached, something shifted. On a daily basis, I started to feel love for myself. I felt joy. I felt hope. It was like I was breaking a trance I had been stuck in for years, dismantling these internal knots that had kept me miserable for so long.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.