Act Right Regardless of What You Think and Feel Because Your Brain IS Your Disease – Don M.
About This Speaker Tape
Don Major, a lawyer from Louisville, Kentucky, shares his story of alcoholism and recovery with disarming honesty and sharp humor. Sober since April 9, 1981, he describes growing up on a farm in southwest Kentucky where he was an "egomaniac with an inferiority complex" who never felt comfortable in his own skin. He paints a vivid picture of discovering alcohol at age 12 or 13 and finding it was the only thing that filled the hole in his belly created by what he calls a "disorder of the ego." Before drinking, he had already fallen in love with the barroom culture at his local beer joints, romanticizing the dishonesty, unbridled ego, and self-will he saw in the men there.
Don built a successful criminal defense practice in Louisville from 1968 to 1978, but his drinking and drug use escalated relentlessly. A catastrophic car wreck at 130 miles per hour in February 1978 broke both legs, crushed both knees, severed his urethra, and separated his pelvis. Even lying in the hospital with tubes running in and out of his body, he had friends smuggle in booze and toasted his own destruction. He lost his law license, his law firm, his homes, his cars, and all his money. He stole his elderly father's social security checks and emotionally abused his crippled sister to keep drinking. He descended into drinking popoff vodka and Listerine and went to psychiatric hospitals and treatment centers 18 times.
The turning point came in April 1981 at the Hall of Fame Motor Inn in Nashville, where for the first time he had the thought "this is not working" — not that drinking would cost him something, but that it simply was not providing relief anymore. He credits a series of gifts from a Higher Power he had not asked for: a will to live, a first glimmer of teachability, and the people at the 202 Club in Nashville who told him to stop reading the Big Book as philosophy and start treating it as a simple instruction manual for action. His sponsor Cherry Coffman taught him that recovery is a doing process, not a learning process, and that the third step is a decision that requires concrete follow-through.
Don describes how working Steps Eight and Nine as a byproduct led to the restoration of his law license and the return of his daughter to his life. He speaks powerfully about learning after nine years of sobriety that the Seventh Step prayer does not ask Higher Power to remove all defects, only those that stand in the way of usefulness. He closes by affirming that the core of his sobriety is getting on his knees morning and night, doing the next right thing instead of the next thing he wants to do, and never complicating recovery beyond the twelve steps.
Discussion
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