Compliance and Surrender – Long Island Big Book Workshop – Part 2 of 2 – Bill

Hi, everybody. I'm Bill Alcala. So how many in here have less than six months sobriety? Cool. I're glad you're here. So one of the things that I will tell you about me is when I came into AA, I felt like the world was a problem. Drugs and alcohol weren't. Everybody told me I had a problem, and I didn't believe it. Except for, I thought, you all were my problem. So I was 11 years old when I started drinking, and that sounds young by some people's standards, but I've been hearing some tales, you know. At 11 years ago, I discovered something that I had not had before, and that was freedom from fear, that relief. I felt like for the first time in my whole life, if my dad beat me, I didn't care. I felt that for the 1st time of my life, if I'm in trouble at school again, I don't care." It's really kind of that simple. The Doctor's Opinion talks about why I drink. You know when I went to a lot of treatment centers and had a lot of well-meaning therapists who would get into the groove of this, why do you drink? Let me tell you why you drink. really simple. I do it because I like the effect produced, period. I can weave all kinds of tales and you know being in enough therapy or nut wards or with all kinds of well-meaning therapists and ministers and priests who wanted to help me, I could tell you that I wanted to do better and I wanted to be better but I couldn't. There was something within me that just stopped me from being able to do better. And I would sit either in my parents' house or maybe in a juvie center or later on in some other institutions, and the repeating thought was, what is wrong with me? What is wrong mit me? And I had a lot of people trying to tell me. They all knew what was wrong with me in their way. And I even had some real alcoholics come and try to educate me in these different facilities to tell me what was wrong with the people. But what I heard was, you're bad, you're bad, you're bad, you're bad, you're bad, you've got to change and you man up. And I did hear that from my father as he was usually beating me. But that's not why I'm an alcoholic so I'm not going to get into all those details of all that stuff but trust me I drank because I loved the effect produced it got me out of right here right now into somewhere magical that just put me into ah it was that simple as I progressed in this illness or as it progressed on me the progression started to set in I wanted a little more and I wanted it a little more often, right? I got into a little more trouble and it started to happen a little bit more often I had people who loved me and I knew they loved me tell me they couldn't be around me anymore I had people that loved me that I could see my actions or inactions was causing them emotional pain. You know, I've heard this said by other people and this was also my experience. I can remember my mother sobbing and crying after I had like overdosed one more time. One more time out of treatment swearing I'm going to do good and there I am all messed up again. Crying, tears running down her cheeks saying can't you see what you're doing to us? and here's this crap that I've heard somewhere else. And I go, oh my, it hurt anybody but me. And I've since heard this from other people. This isn't just, you know, my form of selfishness. Apparently it runs a little rampant in people like me. So what happens is I get involved and committed to this alcoholic lifestyle and I start taking all kinds of other substances and one of the things that I heard that fit me so well was I backburned into Alcoholics Anonymous through a bunch of other substances and a 10 year run on some opiates and a bunch other craziness in criminal activities and a guy looked at me one time when I was going to NA and he says tell me about your experience with alcohol I said well I don't know it's not my big problem today I got a case and I got this and something about that and he said tell me about it And I said, oh man. I was 11 years old. I started drinking. I couldn't stop. When I was11 years old, I couldn' wait when I was stopped. And I was in jail at 12. I was my first treatment center. I had a lesson at the treatment center at 12 and by the time I was 12, I knew I was an alcoholic because of what they all told me but I didn't get it. I didn' know it. So I would comply. I would imply. They would say, you need to do this and you need that. Here's your packet, you know, the treatment-style packet. We're going to do your first step, and then we're going to do our second step. A lot of these people, again, were very well-meaning, but they didn't have this with me. And I needed, and I didn't know I needed it. I needed identification. I needed somebody that I could look at, that I Could say, that guy cleaned up pretty good. I'd never heard him talk before, but you know what? He was like me because I came in here feeling like I was so different, so unique. You know, like I said, if you had my problems, you would have to drink too, right? So I'm feeling this way like I'm the victim of the world and I hear these guys talk and I go, they were like me, they're not like that now, which got me to thinking what they do, right. So I started to listen for what they did. Now, I still wasn't ready to surrender because I'm in the compliance mode. And a lot of you will know that there's a big difference between compliance and surrender. And if you don't know and you stick around here long enough, you'll learn. Or you go out there and maybe you'll earn it. You'll learn if you stay alive. so as I started to comply and go to meetings the words that I heard at my first meetings I have no idea what I heard in the first meetings was the symphony of laughter, the acceptance the friendship, somebody telling me to come back people clustering around me after the fact I hardly knew I was new we know right they knew I wasn't new and they knew I needed comfort more than I needed mental stuff. As I got comforted and as I felt like I fit in and I could hear the symphony of the love and the mystery start to unveil, it caught my heart. It didn't catch my head. It caught my mind. It caught me by heart. And I'd love to tell you that I fell in love and stayed. Not my story. I came in, did the dance thanks, I got this I turned it into a mental exercise and thought I could fix me and off I went again and there are, you know, like in our book it talks about one more trip to the asylum it says for Jim but it could very well be for Bill and each time that I would go back out and do this stuff I would realize I thought I had this and I don't repeating that first step experience of me sitting on my bed going what is wrong with me I want to do better and I can't do better there's something wrong with me so as I start to as life as an alcoholic and a drug addict starts to pound on me I get to a place where I'm faced with a long prison sentence and all the ripple effects and all repercussions start to roll in, and the first step experience nails me. I can't do this alone. I don't know what to do. And from deep down within me, and it's been said by other speakers so I can relate, came this little voice that became very loud and vibrated through my whole being. It said, help. I need help. I can' t do this. And I'm not going to get into a fifth step, But I was, I put myself in a lot of deadly and death-defying situations. And for the first time it came out of me, deep down within, I need help and I don't want to die. Then some surrenders showed up. Said, I will do anything to not live that way, not feel this way again. You all were there. Maybe not individually, but AA was there. And it helped pick up the pieces of this guy that was so broken. I didn't know what was wrong with me, and I didn' t know what the help would look like. But I knew I needed it, and the help showed up. And I love AA, and we'll get into a whole bunch more stuff on guests tomorrow. But thank you all for being here. Thank you for inviting me to come. And thank you for the previous speakers who were much more eloquent than I am. And I'm grateful to be involved and committed to the process of recovery.