Alcohol Reduced the Crowd in His Head to One Voice, a Bad Voice, but One Voice – Clancy I.
About This Speaker Tape
Clancy I. delivers one of his most devastating and personal talks at the 47th Florida State Convention in Naples, 2003. He traces the disease back to a Norwegian Lutheran childhood in Wisconsin where guilt was the permanent weather — guilt for things done, guilt for things not done, a ball in the stomach that never left. At fifteen, he already believed he was damned. When the war started, he ran away to the Merchant Marine at sixteen, and the day before his birthday a drink finally stayed down. For the first time in his life, he felt the way men looked.
What followed was a decade of in-and-out AA, psychoanalysis, advertising success, and spectacular collapse. He describes the invisible spring that someone would sneak into his gut every time he stopped drinking — the restlessness, irritability, and discontentment that only a few drinks could cut. His most harrowing passage recounts promising his dead infant son at the casket that it would never happen again, then the spring tightening until he hooked a hose to his exhaust pipe in the garage while his wife took the children to church. A neighbor found him dead and they beat his chest until he came back. He was committed to the Texas state insane asylum as a schizophrenic with paranoid tendencies.
Clancy connects victimization therapy to the three most lethal emotions for alcoholics: resentment, self-pity, and feelings of difference. Each one justified every drink until death. The solution came not from insight or therapy but from finally letting the stupid AAs tell him what to do — the final indignity that saved his life. He washed their porcelain cups because he had nowhere else to go, and from that humiliation a life emerged.
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