Big Book – Chance for Change Workshop – Part 1 of 6 – 2008 – Myers R.

It's always a little uncomfortable when that happens, I can assure you. Can you quit this thing? It's already on. It is, thank you. We're talking through this one and taping through this one so that's the I think that's the plan. Hi everybody, my name is Myers R. and I am an alcoholic. My sobriety dates January 15th to 88 and my home group is the primary purpose group, a big old bunch of knucklehead, big book Thumpers in Dallas. God, it's so good to be here. I just arranged some great weather for it today and it's just perfect. It's perfect. The evil twin Chris, who some of you guys met last time, last year, sends his love and I'm the good seed. In case you guys don't know that, some of your guys at the end of the day will be scratching their head going Hey, I thought you were the good seed. I am honest, honest. And Chris has always been kind of the dark horse guy. Chris was always my go-to guy. If I drank like Chris or if I did other outside issues like Chris, I'd stop. And sure enough, it ended up just the same way. I do want to thank you guys for letting me come do this. And, you know, I get to do this a lot. And it's a funny thing. Sometimes there are big roundups and you've got a couple of thousand people and they're my least favorite things to do. It's my least favourite talk to do The things I really like to do are the stuff like this where we have a chance where I'll be here for a full day and we've got an opportunity to talk and there will be things that we talk about that you might not agree with and we'll have a change to talk it out. I'm not here as an expert in AA up here to fix you. It's not like that. It's not like that. It's just I'm an old guy in AA who's been around for a bit and who tends to be a real observer of what's going on around me, and I wasn't always like that for a whole lot of my AA experience. All I did was just sort of sit, and what happened happened. But I never questioned anything. I never really looked hard at anything. Is this what we need to be doing? Is this correct? Is this wrong? The funny part about it is that the more questions I ask in AA, the healthier I seem to get. the better I seem to feel about the whole thing. And I'm hoping to turn some of you guys into people who will question what's laid in front of you. Not so you can just be an arrogant contrarian, it's so that you can begin to learn that not everything out there in AA land is as it should be. And we want to talk a little bit about that stuff. I want to thank Dougie for calling me a year ago to come do this stuff and Billy on the ride I gotta tell you real quick if there's a such thing as reincarnation I don't want to come back as Dougie's tires or Doug's brakes or my underwear I'm telling you it's just God dang have you guys ever ridden with him? Don't if he says hey you want to go to a meeting just walk okay just just walk oh my god oh lord such a nice man too such a nice guy and uh i love doug the first time i talked to him on the telephone because we're talking about some stuff and he's just sounding you know sometimes you just know sometimes you know in a telephone call two years in advance before you do a talk that it's going to be a bloodbath that if they're just waiting for you You just kind of go, you hang up the phone and my wife sits across from me in work and she'll be looking at me and she will go, it was one of those calls, wasn't it? And I went, yeah, you don't know the half of it. It's just like, she just knows, just the look on my face. But I started talking to Doug and I knew going in this is what I wanted to do. Because there's a bunch of guys here that are already doing the deal. There's a lot of people out there that are doing the job. a bunch of guys here that are already in the trenches carrying messages and kicking butt and taking names in AA land. And it's just good to be with you. It's just good. And it's not like that everywhere, guys. It's, it's, I wish that it was. It was funny when we were driving back over the pass coming out of Seattle, I said hey who picked that topic of a common solution? And Doug laughed and goes you did. And I, it has been so long ago that he asked me, I forgot that I did it. But I was thinking, when I asked him I said so tell me again what it is that we're going to be talking about And he told me, and I went, oh, that's a great topic. That's one of my all-time faves. And it is. And you never hear it in workshop type stuff. As a general rule, you don't ever hear it. But it seems to be the key to why both we have trouble in AA sometimes and why great things happen in AA. It's all around this thing called the common solution. And being able to identify it, being able to see what it is and what it isn't, it's big stuff. We're going to talk some about the steps. We're going to talk some about sponsorship. We're gonna talk some about 12-step work, about the things that we may agree with or we may disagree with. Let me ask you a question. Do you remember those games? Remember those games we used to play when we were growing up and I don't remember the name of it. It was like post office or something like that where I'll whisper something in her ear and then she'll whisper something in Dougie's ears and then he whispers and by the time we get right about over here it begins to shift in its form. And by the time we get over here, it's not even close to the same deal. Well, there is an illustration of an oral tradition that has been key in Alcoholics Anonymous for many, many years. In theory, the ideal is this, that if we were passing a true set of dogma of what AA is, if we Were passing along the true point of that, it would be great. The problem is that in some areas, it may not be here, guys. I'm going to paint with a brush that's about this broad today, okay? And I have to do that for certain reasons which will become clear. But what I want you to understand before we even get off into this workshop stuff, before we ever get into it, I wantyou to understand I am not isolating any one of you or pointing a finger in judgment or condemnation at any of you. If you come from a group and it's all warm and fuzzy and you love it and you sit around and just talk about somebody baked bread yesterday and you want to take the whole meeting talking about that. Super! I'm glad that it works for you. I am. And I'm not judging it. I'm just saying here's a perfect example. I had this lady come up to me one time after a talk and she said I'll have you know I go to one meeting a week and it's a women's meeting on Saturday morning blah, blah, bla and we do this and I've been sober for 40 years. I said super. I'm delighted. You missed my point completely. Unfortunately, what works for one won't work for another. I know a lady that I promise you has never ever cracked a big book, she's never gotten a sponsor and she's been connected spiritually and she has been sober twenty-two years. She practices yoga every day and that's how she does it. My only problem with this lady is, is that what she shares in the meeting? I've never worked the steps, I never cracked this big book and I practice yoga every day and I've been sober for twenty years. time she has a chance to talk, that's exactly what she says. And my big question is, why do you come to AA then? Why do you call what you do AA? What I'm trying to do is get us all back in the same page so that we're on the same page in the book doing... You understand what I'm saying? I'm not trying to be offensive to anybody. It's just that the more you travel around and the more you see other areas of the world, you begin to see that not everything is groovy. Not everybody Everybody is warm and fuzzy in AA. Some of us got really sick sitting in these rooms doing crazy things. Is it AA's fault? Nope, nope. It's my fault. I have to shoulder the responsibility for what is and isn't. I have shoulder... My condition in AA is based squarely on my own shoulders. It would be easy for me to stand back at some distance and say, well you know AA screwed me over all those... You could do that I guess but don't because you're wrong. We sit there in silence and we let things happen and we watch things go down the toilet and we don't ever make any attempt to change anything and then we wonder why we get sick again. Why is it that I'm struggling to stay sober? Why is that I don't smile anymore in AA, that it's all just this big veil of tears? Why is tha? And these are the things that we want to address and we will specifically amongst some other stuff. We're also going to do a little stuff this morning and we're going to talk about some third and fourth step stuff And then we'll eat some grub. And then after lunch, we'll do a little piece of question and answer. I'm not sure. I always have real mixed emotions about this thing. I've done question and answers sessions all over the world. And sometimes it's fun and sometimes it is so painful that I go, I will never do it again. I will just promise I will not do it ever again. But there are enough new ideas that we are looking at today that it probably would be a good idea to spend a few minutes. We're not going to bog it down, and we're not going to talk about it a whole lot. But if you have some specific questions about things, then we'll give it a try, and we'll see if we can't make some progress in some of that. I'll also be here too if you feel shy and you don't want to ask the question. I'll be here, and you can ask me anything you want to ask me. I did not have sex with those animals. It's a vicious rumor, and it just... And Chris started it. I didn't do it. I'm a third generation drunk. I'm going to spend a few minutes talking about a little piece of story stuff because it's important that you understand where this stuff started and where this step came from because it colored a great deal about who I am and what I am in AA today was based on my experience coming here. You know, it's funny. You'd think with a dad like I had and a twin brother and my grandfather before my dad, they were all alcoholics. And you'd think that legacy that I'd look at it and go, uh-uh, staying away from that. How many of you guys have drunks in your family? Let the taping record show that 99% of this room is the same way. It's the truth, but it's a funny thing. As a kid standing there, I'm going, I'll never drink. And then there comes that magic night when somebody hands you a glass and you take a drink of it like this, and all of a sudden you sit back and you kind of smile at yourself and you went, now I see what the old man was after. You know? That feeling of restless, irritable, and discontent slips away. Golly. I was raised in the hill country in Texas and sports is key. I mean, sports is big stuff as it is in a lot of small rural towns. But in Texas, it takes its own little detour there And we were going to a basketball game one night, and it was freezing cold outside. It was ice on the roads, and this friend of mine had a brand-new Camaro Yellow, and it Was just a bitchin' car. And we Were going to drive over to Fredericksburg to watch this basketball game, and somebody way or another, we finagled this six-pack of beer. I'd never had anything to drink at all. We finagle this six pack of beer, and we go over there like this. we get about two miles from Fredericksburg our arch enemies and we're going to go in there and kick some butt and I drink one of these beers and he drinks one of those beers and then we take the other six pack and we tie a piece of rope onto it and we lowered it down into this river that ran across this little creek that we crossed over like this and it's freezing cold and we'll get them coming back right so we drive on to Fredericksberg park, get out and I'm walking like this and he's walking kind of fast like this and I said hey Pat can I have your keys And he said, what for? And I said, I want to go back up to the river there for just a minute. And he says, come on man, we're already here. There's girls in there and all this other... And I'm just going, yeah, but I'll be back. You guys know exactly what I was feeling. The allergic reaction had clicked into place and I already wanted another one. I needed desperately to continue what was happening inside me. All of a sudden, I wasn't worried about the girls in there. I wasn'T worried about this other kind of stuff. Guys, I'm the kind of guy that I couldn't get a date with a shotgun. I'm just, women terrify me, terrify Me. And I just, I don't mind approaching them. I just can't talk to them once I approach them. I just got to stand there like this and then I'll, oh crap, and turn around and walk off again. It's that kind of deal. And so I go back over there, he throws me the keys and I drink a couple more and one of his and I left him one. And I walk back over to the gymnasium and I walk in and I am a God. I am. I just, you know, my little bumps fell off my face, my greasy hair is gone and I just... I'm a God I walk into the room and there ain't a girl in there I can't approach and I can talk to them and I'm just like this You see what I'm saying? But this is the... And so I'm off to the races and you know what's really funny is that years later Many, many, many years later when this thing has all reversed itself and I can't function without booze. I can'T go anywhere without being loaded. I've gotten really physical. I can' t go to the store without getting in fights. I'm pushing my wife around. I'm terrorizing my kids. I'm just turned into an animal. It's a funny thing that given 24 hours away from booze, you know what my head thinks of? That night out there in that river pulling that coal six-pack up out of the river. Isn't that weird? I mean, it's just like... But it's the nature of the mental obsession that we're going to talk about here in just a little bit. It's the nurture of that mental obsession. I've got a head that tells me that the problem doesn't exist and my head always goes to a time when booze worked regardless of how bad it was, regardless of where the drama of booze took me. Crazy stuff. So, I get nutty as a fruitcake. Life begins to unravel. The only reason that I'm not on the street is that I have a wife that's brilliant and she's my business partner and she held it together while I did my stuff. Chris, the evil twin, lives with me. You can imagine how much fun this was. It's just like two nut job drunks who Chris introduced me to the joys of outside issues that sort of sped things up if you catch my drift and it's a nut job. I mean, it's just crazy. The whole life is just horrible. So my whole job, my whole one job of the day is to cook dinner. I can't function after about 1 o'clock in the afternoon. I've got to go home, and we get drunk. And I park my daughter, who's now 3 1⁄2, 4 years old, in front of a TV set to babysit her. And I go and cook dinner, and мы burn it every night. And Chris and I just get in there and get sloshed. And all of a sudden one day, Chris sobers up. He's starting to have blackouts, and he sobers upp. And one of the guys that worked for us at the shop was in AA, and he 12-stepped Chris and took him to a meeting and then Chris stayed sober. That was in November, December and in January I sobered up. So for three months, two and a half months I watched Chris change right in front of my eyes. I watched this little knife-wielding nut job of a guy sober up and it's the most amazing thing in the world to see how bad it was for him and how good it got. Amazing stuff. And so Chris 12-steps me. I finally, in the last six months there was a bunch of crap that went on But in the last six months, I got in numerous fights. I tend to be real... Look at me! I mean, dang, I just... I don't know why it is that the littlest guy in the room has always got to be the one that wants to mix it up with somebody. I guess I've got this loud mouth and I start... If we go someplace, I have to touch your date. I mean... Guys, you know it. You know me, don't you? I'm the guy that always has to talk to her, but I can't talk to her without touching her. And so I'm the one that always had his hand on her shoulder and this kind of... I'm that guy! And it's no wonder that after a while these guys get real tired of this. It gets tedious watching this happen. You see? And the drunker I get the louder I get. And finally they just says, you know, we got to deal with this. And they do. And so toward the end of this thing it just got goofy. I got arrested in this little town for trying to beat up a liquor store clerk. and I gave him a bad credit card. I mean, come on! Everybody in here has done that, right? I mean what's the big deal? I give him a credit card that's maxed out and won't work he calls my house and wants another credit card but he talks to my wife she doesn't know that all the credit cards are maxed out and so things got kind of ugly and so I was going to go up there and kick his rear. Yeah, right. I never want to fight in my whole life I don't know why I thought this one was going to be any different but I guess he could tell by the tone of my voice on the telephone that was all was not good and so they were waiting for me and they just arrested me and threw me over the hood of this police car and um oh yeah i forgot to tell you i'm also on the board of the directors uh board of directors of the chamber of commerce of this little town and they they think i'm wonderful they think I'm pretty special and it's just it was you get the picture okay i won't go into things got goofier but i won'T go into the details but And suffice to say that my life had just gone nuts. And so I went into my first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, and I absolutely fell in love with AA. I fell in Love with every piece of it. The coffee, the smoke, the stories, every part of it was great. Trick was, it was a big group too. We had a lot of people. But the trick was that there wasn't much step stuff going on. We had the steps on the wall. Not many of us had books, and it was kind of a weird sort of a we were all buddies. I love these guys, and they love me, and you know the deal. Somewhere in there we had a deal about we were talking about God too much in a meeting, and some people at a group conscience meeting one night said that maybe we ought not to talk about God in meetings. So we all collectively voted that perhaps we oughtn't to talk About God, and we didn't. We just took God completely out of the meeting. So picture this situation. We've got this crazy AA group that has 21 meetings a week. They're all discussion meetings, no book studies, 21 meetings a week and we can't talk about God. Super. And so what happens is that you ever see guys like this that come into AA and they run true for a little while and then life looms large and then they just start veering off to one side and you can see them sliding sideways but you can't. and the only thing that they could tell me was you just need to make some more meetings I'm going to six meetings a week as it is how many meetings does it take and that's the only things that people could say my sponsor kept saying well you know you may be one of those kind of guys that have to be in a meeting every day I said I'm almost in a meet every day the only time I'm not here is on Sunday well you might have to throw Sunday in there too that's only thing these men and women could offer me and so it's getting kind of goofy around the old old R. household again. It's a funny thing, it's seven years sober or seven years clear of the booze. I'm writing hot checks all over Denton County again. I can't keep my hands off other women. I just, I'm not crazy about you. I're not crazy about me. I hate my job. I hate my daughter. I hate my wife is a beast of a woman that I can stand to be around. You see what I'm saying? And it's just, booze is completely out of the picture. The illusion is that if I just don't drink, I'll be okay because booze was my problem, right? But nobody had ever told me that, wait a minute, there was a whole lot more than booze. There was a full lot more going on, but they didn't tell me about it. And so I'm sitting in these meetings and these guys are, the stories that used to be humorous for the first year I was there were the same stories and they were really, really tedious. Because we weren't talking solution, we were just talking war stories. and so I knew your war story better than I knew my own and it was just kind of it's no wonder, so anyway one night one night I start thinking about killing myself and I it's funny, I went all those years that I drank and did all that other crap and I never one time thought about killing oneself, not once and here I am seven years from my last drink and it's about my daily thought, I can't hardly get clear of it, I'm starting to get depressed again and I'm not talking about a little uncomfortable depressed, I'm talking about you know the depression. I heard this lady in a meeting one night she says oh I know all about being depressed one day I got up and I was so blue and I'm going no no stop lady you don't, stop I'm not talking comatose crap here guys, I can't get out of bed, I cant even get up to go to the bathroom, I am so comatosed that's the kind of depression that kicks my rear in and there is where I was at 7 years into this deal so Chris by now has gotten married to this little girl down in the hill country by hook or crook it all kind of worked out and he moved to the hill country and he got a big book sponsor down there the guy that's still his sponsor today and he'd been telling me for years get clear where you are and go find you a group where they study the literature so that you can know what the solution is and I said yeah but guys I'm telling you isn't it funny how we get real connected to the groups that we sobered up in and there's an allegiance there and there There's an alliance there and there's this kind of, we're just sort of spiritually connected up. And I don't even, I can't stand the thought that maybe we're doing it wrong. I can'T stand the idea that we are. But I finally got to a point where the pain was great enough that I couldn't evade the thought that something was not right. That I'm not making it. Nor were a lot of the friends that I sobered up with. Most of these guys had gotten loaded again. so Chris says I'm going to be in town and I'm going to introduce you to a guy and he did he came with Mark and they did a little deal there in Dallas and he called me the next day and he said I want you to go meet this guy, I met the coolest guy in the whole wide world and I want You to go meet him, he's real old and he's really crusty but he knows the book and I said great, super I'll get around to it and he said excuse me and I say I'll get around to it. And he said, let me see if I understand this right. You know, it hadn't been a week. You called me. You almost drank. You're thinking about committing suicide. Your family's falling apart. You'RE living in opposite ends of the house with the rest of your family and you're going to just... I don't understand. I'm telling you this is what the solution may be. Go see this guy. Okay, I'll go see him. And I did. I finally got off my lazy butt and went and saw this cat. and some of you guys have heard this story before and I won't bore you with all the details of the thing like this but suffice to say that when I met him I didn't want to be with him I didn' t want to he scared me real have you ever met a guy that scared you and at the same time interested you that he may have something that you wanted or certainly something that you needed and there's my experience with this old guy named Cliff is that he's old and he's crusty and I mean when he opened the door he looked at me like this and then he looked down and he said where's your big book and I kind of went I mean he didn't say hi my name is Cliff Bishop and I love you to death and welcome to AA and it just I mean I'm wanting warm and fuzzy thank you I don't and he has not given me warm and fizzy he has given me this where's you're big book crap and I'm going I don' t know where my big book is and he goes well here here's mine don't ever come back over here without it just like that And I'm thinking, do I really want to do this? You see, I've spent seven years looking down my nose at anybody that messed with the big book. We don't use them in our group, so why should I? This is classic contempt prior to investigation. I don't understand the book, but I'm going to be contemptuous of those that use the book. This is crazy. This is great. This is amazing. And so we sit down in his living room and he's got this little yap-yap dog that's just driving me crazy and I'm just like nuts. And he starts carrying me through the book. And guys, I'm telling you, it's like he starts asking me questions and he goes, he asks me the question and I answer him. And he goes nope. And he asks my another question and then I answer it and he says nope. And after about the fourth or fifth time I go whoa, whoa, stop. All of this, all my answers are wrong? He said yes. And I said oh, not doing too good, all right. and I said so why don't you just talk and I'll just listen and he says great I like that idea better anyway and he did he just starts carrying me through the deal like this and so for 35 or 40 minutes he read me the big book that was it he just took me places he took me to page 53 the bedevilments that they're in the book kind of like this and we start reading this thing prey to misery and depression blah blah blah and I'm reading through there and I go yeah that's me yeah that is me and I never saw it in the books before and I say that's all me right there and he said great He said, that's a perfect description of a man that's dying of an untreated disease called alcoholism. I said, Cliff, in case you missed it, my sobriety date is January 15th, 88. I've been sober seven years. And he said, you haven't been sober one day. He said you're dry, you've been clear of the booze, you're not detoxing anymore, but you're crazy. You're as insane as a man could get. No argument for me, Cliff. You nailed me on that one. And so I began to understand. But see, nobody had told me that this fellowship was about living life sober. Nobody had told Me that this thing was about being happy. I thought it was just about being clear of the booze. Because booze is My problem. Isn't it yours? If I get rid of the boos, I'll be okay. And nothing could have been further from the truth, and yet nobody ever told Me That. And so let me make a clarification there. There may have been many people that told MeThat. but I didn't hear it all I heard was meeting makers make it all I read was that if you'll come to enough meetings you'll get clear of this stuff and I'm not getting clear of it and it's a terrifying thing to know deep down inside I'm talking in the pit of your stomach to know that you desperately don't want to drink anymore but to know that the solution that they've laid out is not working is a really scary place to be because I don't know what else I'm going to do I'm gonna die drunk just like my dad did just like his dad did. That's exactly where I'm headed if I don't do this deal. So I had no choice except to kind of get into the deal and do what we do, and I got plugged in with those big book thumpers, and they started going through the work. Any of you guys ever come through the same deal that I did like this where you were introduced to the big book later on in sobriety? It's a funny thing. this is the reason why I can empathize with so many people that get irritated hearing me talk because it's like we're sitting in these meetings on Tuesday night and Thursday night we just have big book studies, there's no discussion meetings they're just big book study and we're sitting there and he goes somebody will say something about the work that I've never heard before and I'm so excited about it on one hand there's a part of me it's not like I'm two different guys in the same body there's apart of me that's just jumping up and down like a little kid because some of this stuff's starting to connect up. I'm starting to get excited about the program again, and there's another part of me born from pure arrogance that's sitting back with my arms crossed going, screw them. These guys don't know what they're talking about. Come on, come on. And I don't want to listen to what they are saying, and so there's this constant conflict in my head. They say something exciting, and I'm going, can I get excited? No, I can't get excited. I'm going to stay just where I am. And the stubbornness is just killing me. Just killing me! Finally, I had no choice. The more information that they give me, the overwhelming body of evidence that I had simply been MIA and AA for seven years was there in front of me. The body of evidence became so severe and so extreme that I Had no choice but just to simply look at it and understand. And one day I was sitting in this meeting and it was like I had this great epiphany you know what I really don't understand this literature and I really do not understand the program of Alcoholics Anonymous and I feel like a brand new kid in AA and I told Clifford that and Cliff said well kid come on let's get on with it my deal is that you got to start the time clock when you sober up there is where it starts and the reality is that is horse crap you start when you finally make the realization that the literature carries the key to the new baseline that we're trying to set in Alcoholics Anonymous. That the instruction is there. That there is a spiritual connection that can happen if you'll submit to the process. That was the deal. And it could start anywhere. And it Could start when you're 20 years sober or 30 years sober. The trick is, is that the longer you're sober, the harder it is to get the arrogance out of the way and see it. It's hard from a guy that these days sponsors more old guys than I do young guys. For many, many years, all I sponsored were Skid Row guys. For many years. All the guys I sponsored were right in off the street kind of guys. These days, most of the guys that I sponsor are guys that have 20 plus years of sobriety and they've either relapsed or are about to relapse NAA. And I probably have two dozen guys that I work with on a regular basis that are just like that. I got one guy that's 35 years sober and he's crazier than a crap house rat. He's the nuttiest guy you ever met in your whole life. And it's all because he has sat in meetings and just got real, real sick. He didn't do anything to do what we do in the work. And it has been an uphill battle. He is finally starting to see the truth about some of this stuff and trying to start understanding what is going on. So let's set a little piece of baseline here. Let's set a little bit of why we're doing it this way. Why we're going to talk about it thisway. The stuff that that guy read this morning about the common solution. And everybody in here has done that stuff. I want to re-read a little piece of this stuff so that we can see it again. If you've got a big book, look at the bottom of your page on 17. I've got to say guys, this morning when I was sitting here before you guys got here and I'm watching these guys walk in with these beat up big books and I'm just I can't tell you how cool it is to see these big books on these tables looking like they've been used it's it just does my old heart good golly and I guarantee I've been in rooms with 3,000 people and there wasn't a single big book in the room crazy crazy look at the very bottom of that deal you've all recognized this you've seen it a million times the feeling of having shared in the common peril is one element in the powerful cement which binds us period Hold that thought. Remember when you walked into a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous for the very first time and you know that you're in a room full of people that understand you? They're not judging you. They've been there. Is there any cooler feeling in the world than to know that you've finally gotten to a room where people are not wondering why you do the crazy things that you do? They understand why you doing the crazy thing. It is the coolest thing in the whole wide world. The fact that we're joined like that is one element in the powerful cement which binds us. but that in itself would never have held us together as we are now joined. Huh? He could have left that sentence out and it would have been fine with me. He's setting this thing up, he's getting ready to give us another piece of instruction. The tremendous fact for every one of us is that we have discovered a common solution, period. So let's look at the deal. If we have a common resolution that the basic text gave us, Before we get off into it, let me go to the foreword of the first edition. We'll read one little piece here. It's not in my book anymore. There it is. X-I-I if you have a fourth edition. I forget what it is in the third edition. Foreword of The First Edition. We of Alcoholics Anonymous are more than 100 men and women who have recovered. Period. It should be from a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body. To show other alcoholics precisely how we have recovered, that's twice in that paragraph they use, recovered, is the main purpose of this book. For them, we hope these pages will prove so convincing that no further authentication will be necessary. We think this account of our experiences will help everyone to better understand the alcoholic. They didn't say, we think that our account of Our Opinions, they're not sharing their opinions. That's the reason that the book stayed so powerful all these years. It was based on the experience of these men and women as they go through this stuff. Guys, the opinions are scary and if I share an opinion to you I'm going to tell you this is my opinion guys. I want you to understand that. Opinions kill people and our fellowship is full of people with great love for us but they share a lot of things that are simply opinions. They were not based on the experience that came out of this literature. So he just said it's just something you've got to pay attention to as you go through the deal. It's one of the little minefields that you've just got to pay attention too. what they're trying to tell us in the first paragraph of this precisely how we have recovered this is what these guys were trying to get us to understand whether you're the school that believes that you'll always be recovering or whether you are from the school that believes that you could recover from this deadly disease I don't want to get into a semantic thing we're not going to turn this into an intellectual exercise of one way or the other. I will mention that 14 times before we get out of the doctor's opinion before we gets into Bill's story 14 times they referred to us as recovered alcoholics. 14 times. It seems to me that if Bill thought we were always going to be recovering, he would have mentioned it that way. He didn't. Just a thought. I do find it interesting that people will get so wrapped up in that stuff that from that moment on they'll never listen to another thing. That's the reason that for years I used to introduce myself Hi, my name is Myers R. and I'm a recovered alcoholic. And do you know, it's a funny thing you could watch 20 or 30 people in the room look down at the floor and they never heard another word I said. The rest of the room could have been singing, thank you, could have be singing kumbaya and having a great time. We could have had one with the universe but they didn't hear another word because of one intellectual point that they want to make, that they wanna insist on. We'll always be recovering. It's not what my literature says. Make one more little point just in case you never look. Have you ever... You guys that have your books, turn over to page 90. You ever see this? Two-thirds of the way down the page on page 90, remember where we were in working with others. They're giving us a little illustration here like this. And then it says, this is almost the very end of the second or third paragraph down on that page, the third paragraph, Then his attention should be drawn to you as a person who has recovered. This is a declarative statement that is made giving us a direction in the book. You can argue with it all you want to if you wantto argue with what the book said, but the book says that we're supposed to introduce ourselves as a man who has recovered. Interesting. Okay. So looking at the common solution, I want to read something for you. This is a great illustration of why I think things have gotten crazy out there in AA. I'm going to read this to you, and I want you to see the contrast that we're talking about here. I'm gonna paint a picture for you here of... You'd love it if I could find it. There it is. 1976, there was a cat named Bob Bacon who was a delegate in Ohio, I believe. and he wrote this, what I have here is a publication of his transcript. It just gave what it was that he had done, what he talked about at this conference and one of the things that I thought was interesting, it says, this little paragraph, it's real short, it says we hear a lot of ridiculous things like there are no musts in AA. My book read different. Now this is Bob Bacon talking, this is the delegate guy talking. People say that it's an individual program and that we can take the steps any way we want to, Dr. Bob said and Dr. Bob said and I quote there is no such thing as an individual interpretation of the twelve steps huh if we are not honest with the new people and tell them how important each step is who will tell them some people seem to think that steps are a necessary evil instead of a life saving prescription for happiness but the interesting part of that thing is in the middle of that things where it says Dr. Rob said and I unquote there is not such thing as an individual interpretation of the 12 steps well if we took a straw poll right now and we went around this room and we asked how you work the steps, I guarantee you we'll have how many people we've got in here. Let's say we have 150 people in here, we'll have 150 different ways that people work the steps. There may be some similarities like this, but as a general rule in AA today, we all tend to walk different paths, which I find interesting. Now listen to this. This is the grapevine statement of purpose. And somebody sent this to me one day and I was just bowled over. I'd never seen it before. The awareness that every AA member has an individual way of working the program permeates the pages of The Grapevine, and throughout its history the magazine has been a forum for the varied and often divergent opinions of AA around the world. Listen, I don't know if this makes you feel uncomfortable, but it makes me feel real uncomfortable. I have an outside interest in The Gravevine which is in direct conflict with what one of the co-founders told us we were supposed to be doing. That's the reason why this topic has gotten so special for me over the years. Our experiences are going to be different with working the work, thankfully and coolly. I mean, how neat is that? We all have these different experiences as we work the work. But theoretically, we ought to be working them pretty much the same way. That's what Bob was trying to tell us when he was talking about this thing. This thing that we interpret the steps to be worked in particular ways and then anybody that's been around for any length of time, have you ever seen how divergent the opinions are around how people work the steps if you sponsor a bunch of guys you say well tell me how you work the steps and they'll tell you some weird whacked out thing that they did you know we did it around a campfire and then we burned all I mean it just goes on and on and on about all this stuff and I'm not here to judge it I'm just here to say couldn't we at least look at it and see if what we're doing is off the page from what the book told us or I mean if you ever came across something that worked better than what the original founders intended for us to do, why don't you tell us? You know, let us in on it. I mean, I'm not so sold on AA that I wouldn't say, hey screw AA, I'll go do what you're doing if you can show me that it works better than what they did. But when you look at the archival material and when you Look at the memoirs of all of these cats that came up through the program, doesn't it blow you away how many people came and got sober and stayed? Forward to the second edition talks about 50% right off the bat stayed. You see? 25% came back you know, you got 75 in the Midwest around Minnesota and back up in there they used to be great record keepers the Minaret group and all those guys used to Be Great Record Keepers about the number of people that came and stayed in AA and there were a lot of these places where 90% or better that came stayed sober members of Alcoholics Anonymous stayed and in my travels guys I'm telling you I know people I always want to argue about this stuff in my travel the people that I ask and the stuff that we talk about and our attempts in the Dallas-Fort Worth area to kind of corral some of this data so we could see what the deal was, we're barely batting 5%. Batting 5% of people coming and staying. 5%. Some people 10%, some areas I've seen 20%, but nobody's doing it the way the other guys were doing it, the way earlier guys weredoing it. And yet we want to sit in nonstop AA meetings hanging on to this old threadbare idea that meeting makers make it and nobody ever wants to ask the questions about why is it that we have so much trouble getting people to stay here once they're here. Guys, we have trouble getting people to stay hier when they're hier because you can't treat an internal condition which is alcoholism by sitting on your butt in a meeting. You can't do it. And the statistical data bears that out. My personal experience bears thatout. And I bet you for a lot of you your experience bearsthatout. Why is it we have some many rooms full of people that are just crazy and they think, just like I did for so many years, that just because we're in a room, we're okay. Everybody always reads this as me saying that don't go to meetings. I'm not saying that the meeting's not important, guys. I'm just saying that if the meeting was important, don't you think Bill Wilson would have done step 13, go to readings? I'm trying to be flippant, but didn't he ever think that? if the meeting I love meetings I do but to put all those eggs in that basket, to put all the eggs in a basket saying that all we got to do is just be in an AA meeting and we'll be alright hasn't proved to be successful it has not proved to work I mean that's like going to a PTA meeting and calling yourself a parent I mean isn't it? And it doesn't work that way. You might learn some parent lingo, you might learn that kind of stuff, but until you have a kid and you stayed up with the little bastard all night long because he's sick, I mean, you don't know! You don't what it's like, you see? To be hanging over a balcony with your kid ready to drop him off because he'd been crying all night. I mean you don' t know what it' s like to be a parent. I do! I've got to tell you, it's a purely outside topic and a 90-degree angle to what we're talking about. I promise you we'll get back into the deal. My hat's off to single moms. If you're a mom and you're single or you're in a situation where you're trying to raise those babies by yourself, God love you. God love your kids. God love them. And for those that want to stand at a distance and judge you, Screw you. Yeah, yeah. It's just because we haven't lived there. We haven't been there. I can tell you, having raised three daughters, I can't imagine what it would have been like to raise those daughters by myself. I can imagine what that would have felt like. What it would've been like. Amazing. That's an outside issue and I wasn't even going to get into that stuff. Picture this situation. Bill Wilson, Bill Wilson starts getting real freaked out. By the 60s, by the early 60s he's going nuts. You remember in those days there's no internet. Everything that happens in AA comes straight back through Bill through letters. He's getting the good, the bad, and the ugly. Hi this is Joe and we're in some group in so and so east you know where and this is what we're doing. And you know he gets good letters and he gets bad letters But what happened is over the early part and through the mid-60s, he's seeing this trend in AA to slide away from a step-based, spiritual-based fellowship, sliding more and more towards a therapy-based let's talk about our day kind of deal. The grapevine introduced the whole concept to us. This is the reason why I'm not a big fan of the grapevine because they introduced a bunch of stuff that we've accepted as doctrine that was never doctrine. It was never intended to be that way. And so I think that they've done a great service over the years but I also think that they've slid sideways and got off the page in certain areas. So here's this situation. They paint this picture of how fun the discussion meeting is. Some of us start coming up through therapy, and the discussion's certainly fun there. We carry it back into the meeting. Everybody seems to like it. People start coming. We get more people in our rooms. It seems to be a win-win situation for everybody, except nobody's willing to look at the idea and the concept that talking about your problem won't solve the problem. AA is not therapy. It is not. It may be therapeutic in nature to talk about it, but it's not therapy. If it is, go get a therapist. Why do you need to come to AA if you can solve your problem with therapy? I love therapy. I'll probably be the biggest fan in here of therapy. I love it. But it's no going to treat the internal condition, which is alcoholism. It's not. And there's the dilemma, guys. There's the problem. And so what was happening was we were seeing more and more of these guys coming in here. Everybody was having a big old time talking about their day. Sharing their feelings. And what we were doing at the same time we were doing this, we were just distancing ourselves from the program as it was laid out in the basic text. People began to set their books aside. People began To just develop their own ideas and their own opinions about how to work the work. And it all seems so innocent because there's no weird motive. Nobody came in and said screw these guys I'm going to change everything. It didn't happen like that. It happened when kind, generous wonderful men and women said, you know what? This sounds like a better idea. Maybe we can love these guys into the fellowship. Maybe we just hug them and love them enough that they'll come in and be okay. Maybe we can. And gradually, we all did it. I did it too. We all got into that whole deal. But it's a funny thing. It's like at the same time that we did it, we began putting these little blinders on and it became a situation like the emperor's clothes, you You know, goofy things are happening, but we're ignoring it because we have more butts in the seats. No time in AA through the 60s, 70s, and early 80s did we have more people come into AA. In Houston, Texas alone in one year, we had 40,000 people come in to AA in one year. 40, 000. You see? Today it's about 19,000 a year in that area. So you see, we had this old ground swell of people that were coming. the weird part about it was that nobody was paying any attention to how many people were staying what we had was this huge exodus of people that were leaving in one year in Houston they had 37,000 people come and a little less than 3,000 picked up one year chips I mean that's what is it 10% 10% but nobody wanted to look at it and address it as a question are we on track or not see what happened was is that the big book the big books set a baseline you smokers I'm going to do this for 12 more minutes and then we'll go smoke a butt okay these segments are set up in an hour like an hour and a half and an hour and a Half is too long to sit A if you smoke and B if your butt like mine it's just too long to sit so we'll fix this so what was happening And what was happening was is that the book set a baseline that we were supposed to follow. And day by day, week by week, year by year, we pulled away from the baseline that was set in the basic text and we started developing our own ideas about what was effective and what wasn't effective. And the result was fairly devastating. Some of us caught it and said, whoa, whoa stop. Some of Us Like Me didn't. We just embraced all the other stuff. And the results got kind of ugly as you might imagine. And Bill, in his attempt to bring this thing back around full circle again, wrote a letter and it was printed in a couple of different places. I have a copy of this here. This letter that he wrote in 1966. Listen to this. It's just three short paragraphs. An AA group, as such, cannot take on all the personal problems of its members, let alone those of non-alcoholics in the world around us. This is Bill's response to what he's getting from those letters that he's getting and those telephone calls that he're getting. The AA group is not, for an example, a mediator of domestic relations nor does it furnish personal financial aid to anyone. I wish I'd read that early on. I'm thousands lighter because I didn't read that. Though a member may sometimes be helped in such matters by his friends in AA, the primary responsibility for the solution of all of his problems of living and growing rests squarely upon the individual himself. Now should an AA group attempt this sort of help, its effectiveness and energies would be hopelessly dissipated. Here it is. Now this is why sobriety, freedom from alcohol through the teaching and practice of AA's 12 steps is the sole purpose of the group. If we don't stick to this cardinal principle, we shall almost certainly collapse. And if we collapse, we cannot help anyone. We have one purpose here, and that's to carry and demonstrate the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous to the newcomer that comes into our meeting. That's it. It's not to share. It's Not To Do. I think let me I want to make sure that everybody is crystal clear on something right now do I think that all God's children need a place to share yes and within the confines of our fellowship we developed the absolute best place I've ever heard of it being happening it's called a sponsor I think that you need to be willing to walk up to your sponsor and say you know what my boyfriend's a turd and I hate his guts I think you need to be able to walk up and say my kids are driving me to distraction and I'll kill my husband tonight if he doesn't learn to pick up his socks. We need to be able to do this stuff, that's important. But can you imagine the absolute absurdity of us collectively as a fellowship that sign off on the idea of us walking into a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous and we got us a little busted up coot like that guy right there sitting there and he comes walking in like this and he's been detoxing for two days and he is dying of untreated alcoholism. It's going to kill him if he doesn't get a message of recovery. And you know what? Every one of us have been in exactly that same kind of meeting. We walk in there like this, and the chairperson goes, You know what, we have this great topic today. We're going to talk about step one. We've got a couple of brand new buckaroos in here that are seemingly detoxing in our meeting. Let's see if we can't pull this guy with some vision and with some hope of what he can have as he recovers. But guess what? I'll paint this picture. I'm not trying to offend anybody, but I want you to see if this is not your own personal experience. The chairperson comes up with a great topic. He shares it. He sets it out there like this. The first person behind him shares, and it's dead nuts on. You see the brand-new little detoxing guy? He's kind of smiling for maybe the first time in a year he's smiling because he sees some hope about what that man just shared around step one, and he's getting a little bit excited. The next guy does the same thing, hits it out of the ballpark. It's perfect. You have 30 people in the room. Everyone's sliding forward in their chair. You can feel the power of a loving God move through the room. Everybody is having fun. Everybody's smiling because the room has some power in it. This guy's going to get well. And then the third person shares. And this little lady back there says, Well, I know the topic is step one, but I really need to share something. And it's like everybody's eyes get about this big around. And you kind of go, well, please, no, please. Well, you see, my mother-in-law is coming over tomorrow and I'm really afraid of her and I need to talk about this fear that I'm having around this mother-In-law coming like this. And you know what, guys? Thirty men and women collectively slide back in their chair. Everybody's back is touching the back of the seat and everybody's looking at the tabletop because the two men that were in the room that may die if they don't get a clear-cut message of recovery are not going to hear the clear- Cut message of Recovery because of this selfish woman that thinks it's her place to share. She had two hours before the meeting she could have shared this with her sponsor. She's got ten hours after she could've shared with every damn person in the group she couldve shared with them. but she didn't do it she chose the only time that those two men are going to be there to share that stuff and guys I'm telling you tell me just answer me one question whether you agree with me or disagree with me answer me one question where is it that her right to share non-AA stuff supersedes his right to hear a God given truth out of our spiritual set of principles Where? Guys, in the guise of love and tolerance, we've slid too far sideways. We need to. In the guises of love, what we should say is, sweetheart, hang on. Come see me right after the meeting. I know that's killing you. I know you want to talk about that. Right now, we're talking about step one. Let's get back on topic here. Come see my right after this. Come see right afterthe meeting, okay? And I'll smile at her and she'll say fine. And then we'll go ahead and try to help this guy get on track. Wouldn't it be better, you see? we'll pick up right after that afterwards and you guys stay I promise you it will get better and I won't harangue it much and we'll do that go smoke a butt and we will come right back