Chronic Alcoholism and the Ego – Big Book Study Weekend – Part 1 of 2 – Bob A.

Welcome to Sober Sunrise, a podcast bringing you AA speaker meetings with stories of experience, strength and hope from around the world. We bring you several new speakers weekly, so be sure to subscribe. Whether you join us in the morning or at night, there's nothing better than a sober sunrise. We hope that you enjoy today's speaker. Good morning. My name is Bob Darrell and I am alcoholic. And only through the grace of a God that I was afraid to believe in, that I've accessed and maintained in my life through the process in this book, good sponsorship and ability to remain sponsorable, in a persistent and consistent effort in this altruistic movement of our primary purpose to help others. I haven't had a drink or any mind or emotion, odor, and substance since October 31st, 1978. And that is the most important day of my life. The day that I stopped dying. I'm delighted to be here. I want to thank George and all the members of the committee for all their hard work. I've been on a lot of committees over the years. It's really a labor of love, and they've put a lot of energy into putting this weekend together. And I want to thank them for that. I'm curious, before we start, I'd like to open with a prayer. If you'd indulge me with a moment of silence. Lord, help me to set aside everything I think I know about you. everything I think I know about myself everything I think I knew about others and everything I think I new about this program of recovery all for a new experience in you Lord a new experience in myself a new experience in other people and a much needed new experience in this program of recovery Amen who's here that's what I'm curious about How many people here are in their first year of absolute abstinence? Don't be embarrassed. All right, great. Oh, I'm really glad you guys are here. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Anybody here in their first 30 days? Oh, welcome welcome. All right. Cool. Very cool. Anybody in their last 30 days? I always want to check, catch you on the way out. The people that are new, I hope you hear something here that will drive you to get with your sponsor. There's nothing going to occur this weekend that's going to change your life but there may be some things that occur this weekend that will lift a veil and you will see a path that you didn't see before. Maybe a fire will be put under you to drive you to do this thing that changes lives. One of the things, that prayer we opened with It's been an important part of my recovery for about 30 years now, I suppose. It's an extrapolation of a prayer I got from a guy in Colorado who's been dead for a few years. It was a dear friend named Don Pritz. And the reason it's such a great prayer for me is that my ego is that part of me that thinks it knows stuff, right? That blocks out learning anything new. It's that little part of you that feels the smug part. The part that you can't tell anything to. The part dat already knows. The part tat only can listen to see how people are wrong. That part. And that is the enemy. The Buddhists often teach by story. And one of their stories that depicts what they believe is enlightenment, when you get to the point where you know the most important thing you'd ever know is a story about an old Chinese farmer who exists on this meager piece of land with his son. And they're very, very poor. And they don't own the land. A lord owns the land and allows them to live there and work hard in the field. and they have to tithe most of their crop to the Lord. They get to make a meager living. They don't own the house. They don'T own the tools that they toil the fields with. They own only one thing. It's their whole estate, and that is a horse. And they're very proud to own this horse. One day, the horse runs off. And they virtually have lost everything they owned. And all their friends and neighbors and families come over to console them, to tell them how horrible this is. And this little old wise Chinese farmer just looks at them as they're telling him how terrible this is, he's lost everything. And he shrugs his shoulders and says, I don't know if it's terrible. Maybe it is and maybe it isn't. And they look at him like he's out of his mind. a couple days later the horse returns and it's runs right into the corral as the son stands there holding the gate with a leading a whole herd of wild horses and it all of a sudden this guy is the richest man in the valley he's hit the freaking horse lottery i mean like oh my god and now his friends and neighbors and family come over to celebrate to tell him how wonderful this is. And he says, I don't know if it's wonderful. Maybe it is and maybe it isn't. They think this guy must be smoking something. You just hit the horse lottery and you don't even think it's good? And he just goes, I Don't Know. Maybe it Is. Maybe it Isn't. About a week later his only son is trying to break one of the wild horses and he's thrown and he is crippled up pretty good and his leg is all mangled up and broken badly. And he can't walk and he can' t work. And of course his loved ones and his friends and his family come over to console him. To tell him how horrible this is. That his only son has been mangled up pretty badly. And he looks at them and he just shrugs his shoulders and says, I don' t know if it' s bad. Maybe it is and maybe it isn' t. And they look at him like he' s crazy. This is your only son? And he' S been crippled up and he's got a terribly badly broken leg and you don't even think that's bad? And he says, I don't know. Maybe it is and maybe it isn't. A week later the Chinese army came through the valley and they would force all the young men to go and fight in a battle where none of them could survive. And they couldn't take the son because of his leg. See the old man knew the most important thing he would ever, ever know. what true enlightenment is, is that he doesn't know. It is the ego that supposes. It is the ego that assumes. It is the ego that judges. It is the ego that is my enemy. And the worst thing I can carry into today's recovery is the stuff that has come from yesterday because it limits me here. and I think sometimes some of us puff ourselves up with how many years we have or our accomplishments in AA and it really blocks us from having legitimately new experience today and today's the only day I got I want to talk some, I know there's a lot of new people here so this is very important I want to talk some about what step one has been in my experience. I'm not an academic guy, even though we will talk about some things in the book, but I've discovered over the years that the most important thing that we have to give each other is our experience, not our opinions, not our beliefs, but our actual experience. You can argue with my opinions because you may not be your opinions, but you can't argue with my experience it may not be your experience but it's my experience it is what it is and you're going to get a lot of that today and the great thing in Alcoholics Anonymous is that we connect with each other through the genuineness of our experience and I know everybody in this room has had that experience, sitting in a room and someone is opening up and talking genuinely about themselves maybe some things are hard to talk about and you're sitting there and something is happening between you and that person. There's a resonating thing inside of you some of you may have also had the experience of sitting in a meeting and listening to a man or woman share something that intellectually you know you've never heard that and yet it hits you with such a rightness as if you always knew it, and you never heard it before. And that has always been the power of Alcoholics Anonymous. It's not in what we know, it's in our experience. I was baffled by step one. I think step one is the hardest thing we ever do. It is so difficult, it kills most alcoholics because they can't do it. When it says in the beginning of chapter three that most of us have been unwilling to admit We were real alcoholics. Oh my God, that is such a universal thing. I bet you there's people in this room that sitting here today know beyond a shadow of a doubt you're an alcoholic. Yet you can look back in your life to a point that you can see now you were alcoholic 10 years ago, but you didn't know it, did you? You would have bet anything you weren't alcoholic back then. We don't want to be alcoholic. I'd rather be a mental health case. I'd rather be a drug addict. I'd Rather Be Anything, But Not Enough. I don't know, what is that about alcohol? We don't want to be alcoholics. But I am. And they didn't know it. And very slowly, over years of failure, trying to control and enjoy my drinking, I started to get it down in here. in chapter 3 it talks about step 1 differently than than it does than it does here here it says we admitted we were powerless over alcohol that our lives had become unmanageable I could do that and not mean it and think I meant it you know I could you get me in a treatment center and a bunch of people looking at me in a group, I'll admit just about anything. Just, I don't want any problems here, you know? I don'T want conflict. I DON'T want the counselor jumping me after the meeting. Yeah, I'm alcoholic. But that doesn't mean that in my innermost self that I believe it. And that's what it says in chapter 3. It says we've learned, which implies that this is a little bit of a process than an evolution, a learning. That we learned that we had to fully concede, fully conceded, that's like complete, fully concedes to our innermost selves that we were alcoholics. This is the first step in recovery. There is a place in every single one of us, I believe, where you know stuff. It's not chatter up here. There's no conversation in your head debating about it. You just know it like you know you need your next breath, and that's where this stuff has to occur. My grand sponsor was a guy named Chuck Chamberlain, and he used to say that this is an inside job. And because of this place that we have to do this in here and the reason it has to happen in here, And I think it exemplifies the great failure of intellectual approaches to the treatment of alcoholism. Treatment centers will try in 30 days to give you the equivalent of a doctorate degree in alcoholism I watched, we have a big very fancy treatment center in the US called Betty Ford. And I would sit in meetings, and people who had just got out of Betty Ford, they're sober about six weeks, would come to meetings and announce that they just graduated from Betty Ford and they had the new information here. They said it as if they'd graduated from Harvard or Oxford or something, you know? I wanted to say, it's a detox. It's not some kind of... But they come out of there with a head full of information. And how often... That's a setup. And how Often those people drink again. Because it has to happen in here. Well, how do you do that I think there's a thing that happens it involves God's grace whether you believe in God or not there's something inside of us that has to happen and you can't manufacture it it's a coming together of our own bitter experience coupled with the experience of others and the information in this book where all of a sudden stuff moves from up here down into here down into the heart where you start to get stuff one of the great contributors to Alcoholics Anonymous and I don't think any of us would be here without him was a man by the name of William G. Silkworth and Dr. Silkorth was a psychiatrist who had devoted his life to us and he wasn't an alcoholic and he was a remarkable man and he made inroads and he had insights and intuitive insights into this disease that were remarkable that decades later have been proven absolutely scientifically accurate by research but he just came to these conclusions from observation over and over and over again of us And in the big book on page XXVIII, Silkworth starts to talk about these things that he's come to know. And this is important information for me if I'm going to understand at a gut level what it is to be powerless over alcohol. In the first full paragraph on that page, Silky says, we believe and suggested a few years ago that the action of alcohol on these chronic alcoholics is a manifestation of an allergy. That the phenomenon of craving is limited to this class, what class? Chronic alcoholics. Limited to this glass and never occurs in the average tempered drinker. Well, there's a whole bunch of stuff in those couple lines. The first thing he says that is meaningful to me is he's talking about a type of alcoholic, a chronic alcoholic. I am a chronic alcoholic. I have come to believe over the years through observation that there's also acute alcoholics. And it's a world of difference between the two positions. Yet when the acute alcoholic drinks and the chronic alcoholic drinks, we appear to be the same. If a chronic alcoholic that has been drinking and an acute alcoholic that's been drinking will end up in the office of a therapist or a doctor or a clergy member, that both of them will be easily diagnosed as alcoholic. But there is a very major difference between the two. and it is important to know which one you are because the whole course of your life depends upon knowing that and your whole recovery is different the recovery of a chronic alcoholic is different than the recovery of an acute alcoholic on page 20 and 21 of the book it talks about the two differences it talks about on the very bottom of page 20 It talks about what could be considered an acute alcoholic. They call him the hard drinker. I've heard therapists, I've hear doctors refer to it that are sober and AA's as the problem drinker and it says we have a certain type of hard drinkers. Now listen to the symptomology of this guy. He may have the habit badly enough to gradually impair him physically and mentally. This is not good. First of all, he's drinking habitually to the point of mental and physical impairment. Most people would diagnose this guy as an alcoholic. It says it may cause him to die a few years before his time. The longer he drinks, it's shaving years off his life. This is horrid. This is a life-threatening disease. and then here's the difference between him as an acute alcoholic and me as a chronic alcoholic and I bet you every chronic alcoholic in here has known people like this maybe you grew up with people like these maybe you went to church with people or worked with people it says if a sufficiently strong reason ill health The doctor says, hey, you've got some liver problems and some pancreas problems. You keep drinking, you're going to die a horrible death. Falling in love. You meet that perfect person and they don't want to put up with your drinking and they give you an ultimatum and you just, okay, and you stop. Change of environment, warning of a doctor, warning of a judge, warningof a boss. these things become operative this person who is drinking horridly can also stop or moderate although he may find it difficult and troublesome and may even need medical attention if he's been drinking every day he could even need detoxed He might even have a little bit of tremors when he stops drinking. But within him is the ability to do one of two things, and there's two types of acute alcoholics. There's the type that can stop, and there're the type they can stop and moderate. I bet you I've had the experience at least eight times where I'll be somewhere, maybe I'll on a plane sitting next to someone or I'll be in a restaurant. When I had my corporation, I used to put on a lot of social events and I'd meet people and they'd find out I was an AA and they said, oh, I usedと be an alcoholic. Really? Oh, yeah. When I was in the Navy, oh my God, I was In the Brig. It was terrible. But I see you're drinking a beer. Oh, I learned my lesson. I just have a couple once in a while. He don't have what I had. If I could do that, I'm telling you, I'd be doing it. I'm not sober because it's a moral issue here. You know, you kidding me? Or I grew up with a guy. He was the first guy I ever knew. I never even knew what DTs were. And he had DTs in high school. Ended up in a mental hospital in high school from drinking because he couldn't stop once he started and he had gotten in a lot of trouble he got a DUI he had his license taken away from him lost jobs and then he fell in love and this girl he fell in love with just said you know I'm not going to have it and he said he thought to himself man I don't want to lose her and he put the plug in the jug and 30 some years later he's still sober and he's happy and he is comfortable what happens to him when he quits drinking is his problem is solved but the chronic alcoholic like I am when I quit drinking my problem in a vague way I can't put my finger on right below the surface where I can not really see it My problem starts, and it's baffling to me. I'm not that guy. I used to want to be that guy because I had sightseeing guys that could make up their mind to quit drinking, and they did, and they were fine. There's people in AA like that that are sober 30 years with the benefit of step none, and they're happy, joyous, and free. I mean, their alcoholism ended when they quit drinking. And they come to AA because it fills the social gap that used to be filled by going to the pubs. AA to them is like the sober elks or something, you know? It's a social support group and that's all they need. And as long as they don't pick up the first drink, their alcoholism is over. But mine isn't. See, I'm the guy. I'm not like them. They're kind of cool people when they quit drinking. They're nice people. Friendly, able, kind. I'd like to be that way. But when I quit drinking, I just really see how stupid people are. You know, I just see it. I just say, I just want to see the idiots. I mean, it's a gift. It's a gifted. What can I say? I just think how stupid everybody is. I'm restless, Silkworth says, the bottom of the page, he says, when we get sober we're restless, we're irritable, and we're discontented. What does that look like? What do they mean by restless? Every chronic alcoholic, whoever's quit drinking knows what that means. that vague, undefinable feeling that wherever you are it's not really where you need to be now I don't know where I need to be, it's just not here you know did you ever watch a dog circle a living room looking for its spot to lay down, I'm a dog that can't find its spot, you know there's an aimlessness I spend my whole life running from one thing to another as if this is the thing and it's not the thing. She's the one and she's not the one. That's the job and it is not the job. I can't get settled anywhere, really. I'm restless. The next symptomology that Silkworth says to, and these are the things that make me so sick, sober, it drives me back to drinking. Restless and the second thing is irritable. And people rub me the wrong way. but see I don't know that what it looks like to me is now that my mind's clearing because I ain't drinking I can just see oh my god you are really messed up oh my god you know when I was drinking this was a nice place to work but now oh my god they're doing it wrong they're idiots And it's my ego puffing up. I don't know that what I really am is I'm an egomaniac with an inferiority complex. And what that means, it's not so much I'm a piece of whale crap, I'm very special piece of whale crap. i i don't i loathe myself i have no self-esteem and yet at the same time think i'm better and smarter than everybody else that's crazy it's almost a contradiction but i've always been that way when i get sober and and so constant consequently i i get angst up because life just seems to irritate me. And because people are doing it wrong, I can't forgive them until they're properly ashamed of themselves. So I keep score because nobody's really properly ashamed OF themselves. So I KEEP SCORE! Until I feel like I'm going to blow up. I'm overwhelmed with all these judgments and these conflicts inside of me until I'm just about insane. My sponsor says it best. He says he gets sober time and time again, and after a while, it was like some hideous force put a spring in the pit of his stomach, and life just started tightening up every day a little bit more, a little bit more. And the kids don't, why are they making so much noise? And you know, and the tax, look how much taxes I'm paying. And The Boss, he's such an idiot, and traffic has gotten worse and my god it's raining all week and just until you feel like your head's going to blow up so i'm restless and i'm irritable and then the last thing is goes goes deep down within me and discontented alcoholism is a disease of chronic malcontent and it's independent of reality do you know the same feelings of dissatisfaction and disillusionment occur in the alcoholics living in 10 million dollar homes just as much as in a couple hundred dollar a month flats because it's a misinterpreted yearning Carl Young, the great psychiatrist who was influential indirectly, he didn't realize it in the forming of Alcoholics Anonymous. He's the psychiatrist that talks about in our big book when it talks about the guy who went to Switzerland the rich businessman. He went to see Carl Young and he spent a year in treatment with Young. His name was Roland Hazard and Roland drank again and Carl told him the truth. Carl said I was hoping you weren't a real chronic alcoholic but you're a chronic alcoholic and there is no help anywhere on this planet for you and your only hope is to make some kind of spiritual conversion to have some kindof connection and he thought he could find it in church and Young said going to church may be nice but it hardly will provide the vital spiritual experience you need and Roland felt like the doors of hell were closed on him. And Young continued to work with alcoholics. He was fascinated by them. And in a letter in the early 60s to Bill Wilson, our co-founder, Young said something to Bill that is so right on to me. He said, after working with Roland and countless other alcoholics, he said, I came to the conclusion that the alcoholic's thirst for alcohol is not really a thirst for alcohol he says i believe it is a thirst of the alcoholic's being for unity for connectedness or if you're more religiously minded a union with god that something deep within me yearns for a homecoming yearns to connect to that from which i came But Jung also says that this is a misinterpreted yearning. And so consequently, the unaided in our culture and society, this misinterpretED yearning will take guys like me down constant roads to perdition, to hell. And yet I'm driven by the yearning and never knew it and never once was conscious of it. I have never been on my way to obtain any kind of self-gratification that later I'm going to regret, whether it's going to a bar, a liquor store, a drug dealer's house, going to have sex with someone I really don't even want to have lunch with, or go spend money I really can't afford to spend, or do anything self, self, where I'm clamoring for some kind of relief and gratification. on my way to the drug dealer's house or the bar or the pub, I never once have stopped and thought to myself, this is a misinterpreted yearning for God. Never comes on the radar for me. And yet when I read that, I thought, my God, I think that's it. I think you're right. I think I think, that's it. So Silky says, with this I always return to drinking, this chronic malcontent. And if you're like me, this vacancy drives me, unconsciously drives me. I don't know that driving me, but it's like I always got my antenna out. I always get my radar turned on looking for stuff that might make me feel better. If I'm in a relationship, immediately I start noticing better people. If I have a good job, I automatically see better jobs. I acquire things because I think I've been driven by some sort of delusion that I can fill my vacancies by acquisition. If I bring enough of the right stuff and people into my life, surely then my vacencies will be filled. And I spend my whole life going, oh yeah, oh come here. Oh no. No, no. Oh, oh, oh yeah. Oh, wrong again. You know, and there's a tremendous depression that settles in after every time. It's just this depression because I don't realize I was over 10 years sober and I'm talking to a guy I'm sponsoring and he said something and the light went on and I realized what the malcontent was. Is that I get sober and I'm vacant and I get the job. I get that job. I mean, the job to own a boat, buy a house and have a Harley Davidson kind of money job. I mean the job and I am not even at the job six weeks and it just sort of just starts to look bad. You know, it's just the shine wears off of it so quickly for me. I get the girl. Well, I remember there's this girl. I was infatuated with her for such a long time. I finally hooked up. She fell in love with me, which is not good because if you love me, you're automatically below my standards. I mean, I want someone who has taste. But when she finally had what I wanted and the shine just started wearing off on it, And this guy said something to me, and the light went on. And what I realized is unconsciously, now I was never conscious of this, but on an emotional level, unconsciously I would compare what it feels like to have that job to what it felt like to drink four shots of tequila and the job sucks. I'd compare what het feels like to be loved by her to what it felt like to drink a pint of whiskey and I don't like her anymore. Now nothing's changed with the job. Nothing's changed with her. The problem is within me. See alcohol spoils us. It ruins us really. Those of us normal drinkers never understand this because they never have had the spiritual experience from drinking that we had. They just get drunk, but it does something more for me than it does for them. And if you've ever watched a non-alcoholic drink, it's a baffling thing to watch. My sister is not an alcoholic. I've sat – my sister and I are very close. We have dinner together quite often, and my sister will have a drink or two. I don't think she's ever – I think she might have been drunk once in her life and doesn't ever want to do that again. But my sister, well, first of all, it takes her a half hour to drink one drink. I mean, the ice is melting. It's like this is alcohol abuse, if you know what I'm talking about. I mean it's evaporating right before my eyes. She forgets her drink is there. I remind her. Oh, do I? Hey, I paid for that. she'll order a second drink in the second half hour of the evening and drink about two thirds of it and then leave it on the table and if I ask her about it I say aren't you going to finish that you know what she'll say the weirdest thing no I'm starting to feel it yeah I mean you're quitting now you're five minutes from heaven what are you quitting now for But my sister, when she feels the effect of alcohol, when that feeling starts to come over her, she likes a little bit of that feeling. Just a little big. But she gets this sense, and it's really a sane sense, that if she drinks more, she's going to lose control. And so she goes, whoa. But there's something wrong with me that I get to the same point where my sister gets to where she's starting to feel the effect of alcohol and gets a sense that if she goes further, she's going to get drunk and lose control. I don't get that. I get a feeling like I'm about to get control. I get it. I get feeling like, oh, my God, come on, come one, come on. And I don' have the same reason. I don'' have the relationship. So when my sister and my parents and the women that I lived with and tried to love me, when they would see me build my life back up again sober and then tear it down one more time, they were baffled why I would do that. They were bafled why when I start to drink, I just can't get a little high. I have to get whacked. why I have to go so far if you ever drank with a non-alcoholic they'll say things to you don't you think it's time to stop don't You think you've had enough have you ever sat in a bar and thought no this is good never, I'm a chronic alcoholic now I may stop to prove a point or if I'm with you and you're on my back about my drinking and I'll show you. I'll quit, and then I'll sneak out somewhere later on. But I have a different relationship to alcohol than these people. And so what happens to me is I quit drinking, and it just starts to wear on me, this restlessness that I can't really put my finger on. I remember in the irritability and discontent, I had a counselor one time. Because I get depressed after I'm sober for a little while. I just sink into these depressions because my life pales. What I yearn for and what's so depressing is I'm not back to where I was when I was 18 years old and getting high like that. That's depressing. And this counselor said to me one time, because I looked like I was depressed. He later sent me to a psychiatrist to get medication. And he said to me, he says, Bob, what's wrong? And I remember sitting there and I thought, I don't know. I don' t know. I'd like to tell you. I really would like to know. By this time, I'd been to a dozen psychiatrists probably. I've been in and out of treatment centers. I'd talked to so many people. I don''t know. It's not that there's anything wrong. And that's the baffling part. It's just that nothing is right. It's just that there is something terribly missing here. And I don't know what it is. And I do today. The uplifting spiritual effect of alcohol was what was missing. I'd have given anything in my periods of abstinence if I could have drank and got the effect that I'd gotten when I was 18 years old. I'd given anything. So what happens, Silkworth says it best. He says we succumb to the desire again as so many of us do. We pick up a drink, hoping. And the phenomenon of craving develops. We pass through the well-known stages of a spree to end up somewhere swearing to myself again. I ain't ever going to do this again. Just to start the whole cycle of progressive, restless, irritable discontent until it's backed me into a corner, until I pick up a drink or maybe I switch to something else. And it starts the cycle over in the book. Silkworth says this is repeated over and over and over. And unless this person can experience an entire psychic change there's very little hope of his recovery this thing about relapse is so bad was so baffling to me how this could happen to me I remember I even I've always secretly believed that knowledge was power that if I could get enough information so I went and studied and took a lot of courses and seminars and stuff and I became when I was just a kid my early 20s, I became certified drug and alcohol abuse counselor. Because I believed that if I, my God, if I was working in that field and I had the information, I was a professional, surely then I'll beat this thing. And I was a great counselor right up to the day I lost my job for being drunk on the job. But it was baffling to me that the thing that happens to me in my mind that would drive me so insane that I'm the guy who knows. I know. And I've made up my mind, never touch it again and I keep going back to it. You know what it's like? Have you ever had a biology course where you work with live frogs? It's very if you've ever, if you can imagine trying to boil a frog that's alive, it's very hard to do. If you take a pot of boiling water about this deep and you throw a frog in there to boil him, his hind legs are very strong. He gets out of the pot. Now he'll get scalded like hell, but he'll Get out of The Pot. So what you have to do in order to boil the frog is you have to set him in a pot Of room temperature water. And he just settles in, Gets comfortable. And if you turn the heat up slowly enough, The frog never realizes what's happening, and he never jumps out of the pond. And he will sit there until he's dead. And alcoholism is very much like that. In my own emotional juices, it cooks me. And when you think about it, I'm just curious, how many people in here have ever gotten to a point where they seriously said to themselves, I'm never doing this again, and they did it after that. Anybody? Most of the room. Okay. If three days before you picked up the first drink that was going to end up in your demise where you're almost wishing you were dead, if three days before you kicked up the drink you knew you were about to burn your life to the ground, you would have jumped out of the pot. But you didn't know. Because alcoholism works us so slowly on the inside. It cooks us slowly in our own emotional juices, in my own restlessness, in my old emotions, in my only irritability, in my owned discontent, until it just drives me insane. Insane like running down the street with your hair on fire? No, it's a more hideous, smoldering, secret insanity. the insanity that just all of a sudden has me walking into a bar when I swore to myself and I understood I should never ever can ever do this again the insanity that has me walk into a liquor store and the day before I would have given you a lecture about how I'm never going to drink again how grateful I am the day before because my frog hadn't been cooked quite yet and this is repeated over and over and over again And so the real problem with alcoholism in this two-fold fork that I'm impaled on is not so much the phenomenon of craving. And the reason that that is not the business at hand is because there's nothing we can do to change that. there is no medical way there is nothing that you can do if you have alcoholism the litmus test is do you have the allergic reaction to alcohol there's a test in the book because a lot of people nowadays come here I work with a lot guys they're not so sure I actually probably did more drugs than alcohol well that's not the issue here we want to find out if you had this terminal illness that encompasses everything. This hideous disease called alcoholism. And Silkworth came up with the litmus test, the phenomenon of craving. And the book says here's how you can find out. Chapter 3, it says if you don't think you're an alcoholic, here, you can check it out. Go over to the nearest pub. Go in there and try some controlled drinking. Now, you may need to do this a couple days in a row to get a good view of it. Go in. Let's go in there, and you're going to have two drinks, two strong drinks if you want, and then you've got to shut her down and go home. Now, you can't drink nothing later. You can't smoke nothing. You can'T take nothing. No pills, nothing. Two drinks, that's it. Well, if you're like me, you have the mind I got, I'm going to go into the pub, and I'm gonna see if these AAs are full of crap. I don't think I'm alcoholic. I know I'm in trouble, but I don' t think I got that thing. I'm gonn a see. I'm going to have two drinks, I'm going to shut her down and go home. About halfway through that second drink it becomes very evident to me that this is not a good test day. I didn't realize that game was on TV. Oh my god that game's on. I can't leave now, not with that game on. Or she would walk into the bar. You know, she's always there. You don't know the girl. I mean, oh my god it's her. I gotta have a drink with her. She might be the one. Gotta have a drink with her. Joe would come in. Joe's got good stuff to smoke. I gotta have a Drink With Joe. Tomorrow would be a better test day. And then tomorrow, I'm going to take the test. And isn't it odd how this disease uses my own mind against me? Halfway through the second drink, as the feeling of the alcohol hits me, my mind starts shifting any way it has to to make me think that the next drink and the reason this isn't a good test day is my idea. And I never, ever once glimpsed what was driving the shift in my thinking which was an allergic reaction to alcohol that I have no power over at all. I never have. And sometimes it takes different forms. I, like a lot of people in my day and age, I had about a year and a half where I was having so much trouble from drinking that I switched to drugs. And I'll tell you, if you do enough heroin, you can beat an alcohol problem for a little while. But I always eventually went back to the drinking. And I got out of a treatment center, and I was in there. You could have put me in a lie detector. I'd have said, I'm not alcoholic. I'm a heroin addict. There was a little panache in being a heroin addict at that time. I mean, Lenny Bruce was a heroin addicted. Billie Holiday. And I came out of there and I would have sworn to you I'm not an alcoholic. I could have maybe if I would've been able to get on and tell you how I'd been an alcoholic at one time but I'm Not Anymore. I don't drink anymore. That's not my drug of choice. Whatever that means. and I got out of there and I wanted to I hadn't had sex in a long time and I was like and I'm freshly out of this treatment center I'm freshly out of here and there was a girl that I knew that hung out at this bar the Regency Hotel and I knew if I went down there and talked to her there's a good possibility she's going to invite me to her apartment and you know how you are when you're newly sober you've got this vacancy you're looking for something and you're looking for something to make you feel better, right? And I'm thinking, okay, I'm going to go down there and talk to her. Went in there, she's sitting there at the end of the bar. I went and sat down next to her, started talking. She says, can I buy you a drink? And I said, yeah, I don't know. I'm not really a drinker. The couple years I did drugs, we used to look down on the drinkers, which is about as pathetic as you can get, really. I'm Not Really a Drinker. But she said, oh, you do drugs. Are you doing drugs? No, I'm not doing anything. I just got out of treatment. Oh, do you have a problem with alcohol? No, I don't have a trouble with alcohol. I'mnot a drinker. She said, well, we're going to be here for a while. Let me buy you a drink. All right, give me a rum and coke. She gets me a Rum and Coke. Well, I drink quickly. I've always, I don' t know, I think evaporation is a childhood issue or something. Drink quickly. I killed that Rum and coke like that. She's still drinking the same one she had when I came in there. She said, let me buy you another one. I went into my spiel a little bit, a little not as fervent as I was before. You know, I'm not really a drinker. She says, well, we're going to be here. Let me buy one. All right, give me another one, and I kill that second when she's finished hers, and she says, let's go up to my apartment. The words I came in there to hear, and now the alcohols hit me, and I said, hold that thought, and I ran across town and banged on the guy's door because I had two drinks of alcohol and I had an allergic reaction to the alcohol that manifested in a phenomenon of craving for more. More what? Whatever is on the radar, it doesn't matter. Do you have the allergic reaction to alcohol? You know, we saw after, in the States after the Vietnam War, we had literally thousands and thousands and thousands of people coming back into the U.S. with these incredible heroin addictions. I mean incredible because they were getting stuff so cheap and so strong so easily over there that the VA hospitals were flooded with people to detox. And do you know that a large percentage of those guys who By every definition, there were drug addicts, no doubt. A lot of those people, 35 years later, now they've been detoxed, but they can go into a bar and have two beers and go home and they don't have to go do nothing. They're good. Their problem came in a substance. Mine comes within me. Alcoholism doesn't come in bags and bottles. It comes in people. It comes in me. There was a certain amount of those people that came back from Vietnam that had never had a problem with drugs until they went over there and they came back and 35 years later, they're drinking themselves in and out of Skid Row on cheap wine and they can't stop. They have the definitive characteristic that makes the one group alcoholic and the other group just having a problem with some drug or substance is the allergic reaction to alcohol. When Silkworth looked for years for the litmus test, that's what he found. And if you're an alcoholic, you can't safely, Silkworth says you can'T safely use it in any form at all. There's never been a case of a chronic alcoholic that can use cocaine, heroin, or pills socially. there's been hundreds and thousands of cases of people addicted to a certain substance that can stop that substance and drink and smoke a little pot but if you have alcohol alcohol encompasses everything because anything that will do something for me will do that thing to me where now it's set in motion something I can't stop if you're an alcoholic of my type and you pick up a drink it's like having sex with a gorilla you ain't done till the gorilla's done it's just the way it is you can dream all day long about how me and the gorilla are just going to have a dance tonight no, you're not and your experience should tell you the last time and the time before that how bad it was but the gorilla had such big brown eyes it looked lonely you ain't done until the gorilla's done and that is the crux of the problem how do you stop from starting let's take a short break morning tea time Thank you for listening to Sober Sunrise. 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