Admitting Accepting and Approving — Three Phases of Acceptance From an 18-Year Physician – Paul O.

About This Speaker Tape

Dr. Paul, a physician speaker with 18 years sober, opens with his trademark self-deprecating humor — he's a 'basic, generic, garden variety, rather mild alcoholic' who didn't become an alcoholic until he got to AA. He traces his drinking from pharmacy and medical school, where a beer became his tool for sleep and better grades, through decades of hiding his drinking at home while practicing internal medicine. He drank for every occasion — hot weather, cold weather, funerals, weddings, loneliness, company — and every drink 'seemed like a good idea at the time.'

He describes landing in the nut ward of the hospital he was on staff at, still trying to run the world from inside by sending his wife Max home with daily lists of office instructions. He refused to make leather belts in occupational therapy until AA softened him up — then returned and made moccasins his Al-Anon wife eventually had bronzed for his seventh birthday. A psychiatrist asked him to talk to a man from AA, and after seven months of meetings he finally accepted that he had somehow caught someone else's disease by mistake.

The heart of the talk is acceptance and the committee of voices in his head. He distinguishes admitting, accepting, and approving — he admitted, then accepted (and stopped drinking the day he accepted), and today actually approves of being alcoholic. He describes his mind as a committee nobody told him he was chairing, and says the only way he knew to silence the voices used to be with chemicals. Now he finds a 'center of calm' inside where his Higher Power lives, and says communicating from that center to another alcoholic's center of calm is the real work.

He closes on the Big Book line 'we absolutely insist on enjoying life,' telling his signature story of the pre-admission interview with Higher Power — where the question isn't whether you were good or bad, but whether you enjoyed the life you were given. He is proud, proud, proud to be a sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Opens claiming he's a mild, garden-variety alcoholic who wasn't one until he started coming to AA
• 3:30 The show of hands bit — calls out Al-Anons and warns alcoholics trying to live with another alcoholic to look into Al-Anon
• 7:00 Body that can't drink and a brain that insists on drinking — 'that's called a dilemma'
• 9:30 Every reason he drank — hot weather, cold weather, weddings, funerals, alone, with people, because it was on the second shelf of the refrigerator
• 13:00 Church dinner dances — drinks to talk, drinks to dance, ends up paralyzed on the floor doing scientific observation
• 17:00 The nut ward — making lists for Max, refusing to make leather belts, later bronzed moccasins for his seventh AA birthday
• 22:00 Psychiatrist asks him to talk to a man from AA; first meeting, 'I'd have said I was a chimpanzee if it would have turned you on'
• 30:00 Sponsor Jack I. and the 'well, whatever' philosophy; nurturing problems like delicate plants
• 38:00 The committee in his head — nobody told him he was supposed to be chairman; silencing voices with chemicals
• 48:00 Closes with the pre-admission interview with Higher Power and 'we absolutely insist on enjoying life'