Buses Full of Newcomers with 30 Days and Bad Information — How Treatment Centers Changed AA Forever – Sandy R.

Thank you very much. A comment on our society. I think I tried to point out, as we were going along, that not only is the society of AA different than it was in the 60s, which is as far back as I can go, and the 50s because of history and being able to have known people, the people that got sober in the 50s. So the AA society is different and the society that we live in. And, of course, they're going to affect each other. I think I talked about the fact that AA got started right in the mix with a lot of other things. A lot of new age, new thought came kicking in. Unity Church being one example. And that science was becoming the new answer to questions about life as opposed to religions, which was the old way, this is what life is, etc. And we can explain it through a powerful, powerful God. And as science moved on, there, almost all the scientists I've studied, there's two or three that are believers, but a vast majority are atheists because they have felt so comfortable in their own studies with being able to explain everything. That we just, just don't need anything to account for life, the universe, and all this. However, I will point out that I try to read some of that stuff and I do recall when they were absolutely sure that it was in the probability of odds that life could exist in this universe of ours. But as they went on, they found out that it wasn't within the probability, that the odds were way too high for life to randomly appear in our universe. Statistically, it was impossible. Suddenly, there were a million universes which made it statistically possible to have life in our universe. And I found that like, wow, what a coincidence that we needed a million billion universes in order to have the statistics to allow life to exist in our universe. I'm not accusing them of making crap up, but that was quite a shocker to me that it occurred at roughly the same time. It gives me a lot of comfort that there seems to be part in human beings, there just seems to be a part in there that is drawn to the idea of having your own creator, that somehow there's something inside of you that is, connected in some way. And I know that I have my people I sponsor read C.S. Lewis the first 32 pages in Mere Christianity where he goes through the moral law that seems to exist inside of all of us that just is there. Nobody taught it to you, you're just there. And this moral law sort of pushes on us to behave in a certain way. And when we don't behave that way, we feel guilty. And we also expect other people to live up to that same law. And as you travel around all the different countries, it's the same damn law. That this is how one should live. And when he gets through explaining what's going on inside of you, it's as if he has access to our own brain and he just nails you when he finishes that. That this might be how a creator, who would set the stage to communicate with us by having this force, this moral law inside of us that we can't live up to, causing a great deal of frustration and eventually dawning on us that perhaps we're going to have to ask for help. And of course in our book it said many of us had moral philosophies galore, but we couldn't live up to them. And that's what we're going to have to do. We couldn't live up to them. That's the same thing that C.S. Lewis is talking about. But we couldn't live up to them. We just were falling short no matter how hard we applied ourselves. Leading us to eventually saying I can't do this and I need help. And of course that's the doorway into spirituality, is that, I need help. So anyway, this is all going on at the same time. It's amazing. And I look at AA, the AA that I recall when I came in, and at the time I saw it as a jewel in the rest of society. Because it was going to supply a steady amount of miracles that would constantly reprove the existence of God. And I just said maybe that was one of the roles that AA was supposed to have. Is to move us through this period of such change and supply a steady place where God could be proven. In other words, once somebody's transformed, you don't need to conduct any more experiments. And I'm sure that the most atheist scientist like Dawkins, if his sister-in-law is a raging alcoholic and been bothering him for 35 years, suddenly gets transformed, he's going to have a hell of a time explaining it to himself. Now he won't admit it, but I think he would have a hell of a time explaining it to himself. And he might just have to look over and go, well, maybe there's one or two exceptions. To the knowledge that I have. Much as William James did, where he saw these, throughout history, these desperate people who were able to surrender and be transformed beyond where they ever could have gotten on their own. And those people left an indelible mark an indelible impression on his mind. But as time has gone on, there's been, I guess in the last 20 years, my observation, these are just my own observations. We had a lot of changes in AA. Initially, it was, it looked like, boy, this is really great. When Senator Hughes, a recovered alcoholic and a U.S. Senator, was able to spearhead alcoholism as a disease, get more acceptance, the stigma's going down. And then, they pass another law to classify it as an illness that could be covered by insurance, like all other illnesses. And there was initially a great feeling like, this is great. We're really on the right track. And, boy, out of the woodwork, almost like, phew, came 12,000 treatment centers. Because suddenly, it was possible to make a profit off of the disease of alcoholism. And it didn't take a businessman too long to realize, there's a lot of freaking drunks in this country. Let's get in the business. And so, for the first time, AA groups were suddenly confronted with a bus arriving at their meeting, where up to that point, if a newcomer came, he generally came with his new sponsor, who introduced this person around the room. And it kept the energy in the AA group the same. But when the bus, when the door opens, and 20 people walk in, most of them young, and just sit down with each other, and, you know, who are you? What are you doing here? It creates an imbalance. At least it did until we got used to it. And we started talking to treatment centers and asking them to drop off three at this meeting, three at that meeting, three at that meeting, so that we could keep, sort of, the same energy that the meetings had. And I'm sure those of you who've been around a while, you may remember that, that it came in. And, also, we weren't getting our hands on the newcomer until they had 30 days. I mean, if you wanted to go over to the treatment center, you could, but a lot of cases, they came to AA and, looking for a sponsor, with 30 days sobriety and a great deal of knowledge that had to be undone by the sponsor. And, boy, that took a while to get comfortable with this. And the, and then, of course, as business started dropping, then we have to have the treatment center take care of multiple, multiple addictions, including credit card addiction. They've ground up a credit card, especially Visa. And it chemically has the same effect as opium. Which proves that all addictions are the same. And that AA ought to accept Visa addicts, as well as alcoholics. Which put a little test to primary purpose. And so you can see that these were forces that we hadn't really had to deal with in this magnitude. Especially the 30 days. That's the, that is really hard. Because, during your first month of sobriety, you are taking this stuff and, you know, it's in your head. And then you're coming over and they're going, no, don't, the treatment center's wrong on that. They're wrong on this. They're wrong on that. And it's very confusing. You know, here I come here. The next person says we're wrong. I'll probably move to another city and they're gonna say my sponsor was wrong. I mean, it just, a little harder for an orderly progression through our 12 steps. Then as the country, it starts, I mean, I remember Madeline Murray and she didn't want her son to listen to prayer in the schools. And then she won. And we went, holy cow. Because we said prayers in school all the time when I was little. And we all wondered, what's going on? Why is this lady able to change all these things? Little did we know where it was gonna go. And, pretty soon there was quite a force for removing, God, from the consciousness of the public. I'm not saying that it's totally done, but it is there. That's the society that started in the 50s and is continuing. So that you aren't as comfortable even saying the word God. You look around and go, I think it looks safe here, this bridge club, or whatever it is. I mean, I'm looking at all the people and then I go, well, by the grace of God, I just won that hand. And your opponent goes, I wish you wouldn't bring that up during the bridge game. I mean, that never existed. So you can see these are forces in our society. And, in that society, people who grew up in the society starting in the 70s and 80s, some of them are alcoholics and they're gonna come to AA. And they're gonna bring to us a lot of the ideas that they were given that I wasn't given when I came to AA. And, they're gonna wanna know why we can't get rid of this in AA. I think this ought to be gone and I think this ought to be gone. And there was much more attention paid to somebody who was new. I mean, I don't remember, correct me if I'm wrong, you old timers, but I don't remember being able to say to an AA group when I had six months, you know, what the crap you guys do at these meetings that I would like to see stopped. The response was gonna be, you know, overwhelming. Sit down and shut up. You don't know what you're talking about and anything like that. But there's a tendency to feel uncomfortable about shutting somebody down. Like you might get in trouble. You might have, especially if they use the word, offend. Boy, if I had known that word when I came in, it was, it was a lot of stuff that offended me. I didn't like the Lord's Prayer. I didn't like saying the word God. I didn't like the idea of doing a fourth step. I thought other people should make amends to me first. And, had I known that if I just attached, this all offends me, that they might have changed it for me. And had they done that, I would be dead. Because, when we come here, we're very self-centered and willful. And the way we save a self-centered alcoholic's life is by no longer allowing them to be willful and causing them to be willing. And so, when I was told to get used to the Lord's Prayer, that someday I would love it, I was being done a big favor. I continued to hum during the Lord's Prayer. No, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not saying this damn thing. I'm not going to say it. And after a couple of years, I sort of looked at all the people saying it with me and I started feeling that connection. And pretty soon, it was such a vital element of Alcoholics Anonymous that I realized they were right when they told me, someday, you're going to come to love this. And, in 1980 in New Orleans at the International Convention holding hands, saying that prayer, it was, you know, for people all over the world, it was this most unifying thing that if I had been given the choice, I would have missed. So I was pushed into being willing. If we're not pushed, we don't get the spiritual lesson. And it allows our willfulness and self-centeredness to continue. So in a very literal way, we're not doing anybody a favor when we capitulate and say, okay, well, we'll get rid of this, we'll get rid of that. There's a friend of mine from Brandon who's a member of an Al-Anon group over there. And when the church first accepted them in, the only room they had was a little dark room with no windows and all of this. And after about four years, they came and said, another group is leaving and if you want, you can have their room, which was much bigger, had windows, and the group was just so excited. But one member of the group didn't like all the crosses on the wall. So they went back to the dark room. They went back to the dark room. Now, it's almost like that story shouldn't exist. But it does. So there is a difference that goes on at a very small scale that to me, and this was just my own perspective, was changing the fundamental nature of Alcoholics Anonymous. And I overreacted and became quite active in putting out these brush fires. I've spent two months writing a long paper on the subject of preserving God and AA. And I found myself trying to find very simple solutions that could be this close to all of cocaine, something like that. Which yourself, did you know, doesn't hurt a person when you do this? Because it, it, can get really bad. like this was the exception where you could criticize AA because it was such a high-level thing not like other people who criticize over petty crap I was I was bound to determined to go after this thing that if we didn't go after it it might actually destroy AA so this is where my let's tell you that paper I wrote it and probably a month but it took me two months to take the anger out of it you know what I mean most of the angry yeah I had a critic along to help me someone told me that Jesus there was a group in New York that had changed the steps they had taken God out and I'm going that can't be true so I went online typed in New York in a group meetings there was all these atheist groups had changed the steps and taken God out and it said there that they were they all had general service representatives they belong to AA they sent money in so as an observer I'm assuming that this must have received somebody's approval and I kind of went how the hell did we get a policy like this without me ever hearing about it how could that have happened that they had a policy like this without me ever hearing about it how could that have happened that they had a vote somewhere in the there was never a vote it just happened just happened that this was okay I do a little more research and found that Chicago had their own little deal going why they and one of my friends from Akron went to the inner group and just casually asked the inner group manager, what's this quad A? And the response was, oh, we love them. They give so much more money than the Christian groups. It's an unusual response. So it fed my little, boy, I better redouble my efforts. This is going on faster than I realized. And then, geez, there was one group in Berkeley, and it was something like the Devil's Heathen group of Alcoholics Anonymous. And I felt that was a little over the edge in terms of choosing a name. And then Toronto came along, which, you know, boy, now we've got it in the newspapers and anonymity breaks, and the inner group is suddenly left with a decision. Are you going to list this group in your meeting list if it changes the steps? So I've got a whole. I've got a whole request, and I sent it off to our inner group. I said, you know, guys, you ought to pay attention to this. This just happened. What are you going to respond to when you get this letter, which is coming soon, trust me? They didn't answer my letter. They weren't excited about this at all. So I went over there, and I said, geez, did you get that letter I sent? Yeah, thanks, that was very interesting. Well, when would you like me to brief the board on the terrible threat that is racing through A.A.? No, we're OK. Thanks. We're glad you got the letter. So I just attribute it to ignorance. Our inner group here in Florida obviously is out of touch with the stuff I'm following. and there was a lot of people that I talked to that jumped on my side because they liked controversy oh yeah, what can I do pretty soon I found another guy he wrote a paper like mine it was better it was 50 pages instead of 38 but every so often I'd run into a guy who would say oh God will take care of this and I would go no, there's a clear signal that God wants us to take care of this so I guess what I'm doing here is I'm doing a fourth and fifth step you're not getting an amend I'm not getting an amend I'm not getting an amend I'm going to tell you that he just sat there taking cheap shots at conventions while I'm trying to protect us all and I didn't feel too grateful for that I don't like him to be right I don't like him to be right but there's a particular reason their wife of 50 years died and so the man just started drinking and if you observe him he looks like a regular alcoholic but it turns out after a certain amount of time he doesn't have to drink anymore and he's comforted and so on down and there's others where somebody has an illness but he recovers from it so there's that those classifications classifications are in our big book and with the what I call dumping into AA we started getting larger numbers of people with drinking problems who weren't real alcoholics but they liked AA so they would stay I mean they loved the company they loved the you know we go out we do things but they were constant reminders that it was possible to get sober and be happy without a spiritual awakening because we all assumed that they were real alcoholics so we had another confusion factor being dumped in here we would have people in our midst who were just saying I didn't need any of this I didn't need any of this I didn't need any of that I just came here and stopped drinking and I'm happy but I didn't have to dig into all the step work and that I like it and I've made some amends and I've done this but it was clear that there was no urgency in their case like there is for the real alcoholic so I'm just pointing out how confusing is it how confusing it can get the next thing was our official publications and I don't offer any explanation for this but there was a lot of stuff in the grapevine and in speeches by the chairman of our trustees that seemed to say that there was a that A.A. was scaring off a lot of potential customers with an over-emphasis on God scaring off a lot of potential customers with an over-emphasis on God and of course this fit right in to my little thing now I had a conspiracy theory that this chain of circumstances was going to this crowd was jumping on it in order to make A.A. grow remember one time that we were worried about our growth figures and we weren't growing and somewhere in the service manual Bill said we shouldn't be concerned about growth it's none of our business it's up to God I found that very comforting and so if you have a home group and it gets smaller and it gets bigger nobody's doing anything wrong this is just life it's the way it's happening and we've all seen it when very popular people that are the big force behind a dynamic group and they pass away and they try to keep the thing going in the same manner it can fall flat because that particular personality isn't there anymore and I know we talk about principles over personalities but let me tell you we've had some personalities that I'm so glad they were existed in A.A. a lot of them characters but boy Clarence Snyder I wish I had I could have known him because he came down here to Tampa area Orlando and continued to be very very active and ran men's retreats in this area and the interesting thing was that the first half of the retreat was A.A. and the second half was Jesus so if you didn't want to hear about Jesus you have to leave at half time and that's just who he was but I after reading the book about him I just think he was the most amazing guy I'll tell you one story he was like the champion 12 stepper he could go into bars and talk people into coming with him to go down to Akron and he came across a guy under a bridge who had alcoholic paralysis which is a condition where your body is paralyzed but you're conscious and you're you can hear perfect thing for a 12 step call the guy the guy can't leave but he can hear everything you're saying he has to stay there and Clarence starts talking to him you know but look you're under the bridge so he goes on and on and finally he says now if we can get you down there would you agree to go down to Dr. Bob's in Akron and he gets the yes or whatever and he said now it's $50 can you get $50 and the guy says no but my mother would give $50 to save me he says well where's your mother and he says well she lives in this house out in the country this is in Clarence's book so he takes off he had a car he was a car salesman and pretty soon the road wouldn't go any further so he had to go on foot and it was hunting season and he's hearing rifles going off all around him and finally he comes up to this farmhouse and he knocks on the door and this elderly woman comes he mentions the son's name and her eyes light up but she only speaks Polish so he thinks it's a lost cause until a young girl like a granddaughter comes up who's in an English school and she translates for her mother so and so is under a bridge and has an alcoholic and this man can take him down to treatment we just need $50 and she's so excited she runs back and comes out with all kinds of money he takes the money back and gets the guy to treatment and he went on 12 step calls like that all the time where nothing would stop him so I see personalities like that that are all over AA and I'm sure in your area you have two or three people who fit this category and you're really glad that they were there you really were glad so I'm just laying out my view of our society as I thought about it and I saw what I thought was going to reduce the spiritual power of something that I felt very dear about and that I didn't want to see it happen and so I started talking with other people there were various people around the country that were felt the same way and they would feed in stories that were going on and that one place a guy they're not even sure he was in AA but he just showed up in the town and went from group to group asking them to get rid of the Lord's prayer because it offended him and he really wanted to stay in this town and get sober and he was batting about 40% by just showing up at one meeting giving the tears I do want to stay sober but there's no way I could keep coming to the meeting if you do that and then move on to another town he just had a clear agenda of going around and getting rid of the Lord's prayer and then of course the international in San Antonio when there was no prayer after the final event and there was a lot of old timers who came back from San Antonio who were quite sad they really felt something was wrong that we're closing this great spiritual event with I am responsible I mean of all things it's not even we are responsible it's I and it was just this yeah I'll take care of it it was just almost the opposite of a prayer so I'm just giving you the stuff that I'm adding up in my little machine assessing my view of the problem that we have and what's going on in our society in the meantime there's many people who when I would talk to them never heard of any of it and when I got through they were all upset they wish I hadn't talked to them god damn I wish he hadn't come around I was pretty happy in AA everything's fine in our town I don't know what that Jesus Christ now I gotta think about that and he has all those years so I better listen it doesn't matter how many years you have you can make mistakes and feel that you're really on the right track that if somebody has to do this why not me so I would be writing things and I would read everything every grapevine article every general service conference report and I'd look in there and I'd go see this sentence there it is they're selling us out again this is a clear evidence Kevin knows that he used to get me those things and then he'd wait two days for my phone call Kevin have you seen page 17 he said yeah I thought you'd find that I thought you'd find that I thought you'd find that I thought you'd it's kind of funny now but it was very serious then I did feel sorry for Toronto God that was a tough one so at some point I started realizing that I wasn't changing anything that every effort I put into this thing was accomplishing zero and that there were certain people who didn't want to see me show up a lot of the New York office staff got tired of my phone calls so I said to myself you're you're very disturbed about this and I went yeah I am well you know twelve and twelve if something disturbs you no matter what the cause there's something wrong with you it doesn't apply here this is this is a much bigger issue than the freaking twelve and twelve is talking about this is this is the survival of alcoholics for the next hundred years we're talking about this isn't some little yeah but you're still disturbed yeah I understand that but being disturbed is where you get the energy to do the work I mean that's how it works and then I went no you've advocated that you've got to get rid of your your whole sobriety I can find where I was talking about that and I had about five years that's how powerful that axiom is something disturbs you there's something wrong with you so I said to myself what the hell's wrong with me and so I had to give the same answer I give to the people I sponsor you're disturbed that's what's wrong with you you have to get undisturbed in order to proceed and we jump ahead a paragraph or two and there's the four steps to getting undisturbed one is self restraint well I didn't have much of that I was reacting so I'm going to need some self restraint so that I can hear about Toronto not react until I'm undisturbed about it then I needed to get an honest analysis of what was going on and the only way to do that is to ask someone else to help you think this through and when I got through that there was just two things left either it's my fault I'm wrong and I have to make an amend or they're wrong and I have to forgive them I have to forgive all these people that are trying to screw up AA wow and that let me get a little calmer so that I could think about this some more and and it came to where I thought about what could be done to that would be the most effective force in preserving the fellowship the way I found it and if it's not complaining and writing papers and putting up defenses and all that what is it and I started thinking about William James and how this isolated few people transformed the way he thought about religion and God and that they their transformation became enough evidence and that if you're in a room and you have real alcoholic newcomers and non alcoholic newcomers what are you going to do tell the non alcoholics they can't come and they don't know any different how are you going to differentiate here what could be done and somewhere I saw the final paragraph in our book see to it that your relationship with him is right and great events will come to pass for you and countless others so could that be the answer get my relationship with my higher power on a stronger level than it is now and great events will come to pass and something led me to the first St. Francis I said all these wrong things are happening what am I supposed to do about it everybody knows the prayer where it's wrong we bring a spirit of forgiveness back to the damn forgiveness again keep showing up they're just doing what they're they're motivated to do and it's none of my business and I should forgive them so I decided that the greatest force to ensure the longevity of AA was something that I like to call a beacon and you know there are people in AA that you would refer to as a beacon they just transmit an energy that is unmistakable and if a real alcoholic encounters this energy they will recognize it immediately as the answer to what's they're seeking there will be that connection immediately and a non-alcoholic may see the energy and not be interested in it because they don't need it and so it's the energy itself solves the problem of the non heavy drinker and the real alcoholic and so the question is how do you ensure a steady supply of beacons I think something like this has contributed to that because it requires a decision on an individual's part to become a seeker and to be a seeker and to transform make a decision in your mind that you're going to move in this direction that your role is to develop spiritually as far as you can I remember telling Steve my goal is to see how close I can come to awakening whatever the hell that is it just seemed cool seemed like why not why not you know why not do that instead of dropping your golf handicap one stroke which would be a bigger accomplishment and it became appealing so I hope today that some of you that are here will take heed of that that this is a very confusing society right now very confusing and it needs some kind of steady influence to make sure it stays on course and if you're lost there's nothing like a beacon to make you feel comfortable again whether you're in an airplane or on a boat or walking across the land once you get a fix you're it offers great comfort and this is a fix that is selective in that its energy goes to the person who really needs it and prior to that we're not sure which what we got here we got 10 people it suddenly arrived and all this and they will be attracted and here we are all the way back to the fundamentals it's a program of attraction I had a lot of fun out there raising hell and secretly I'm glad I did it I'm going to let somebody else have the fun of doing that and I'm just going to focus on producing beacons and I hope there's some in this room and I hope you go back and spot people that you're sponsoring and you might see it in them and if we have these strategically placed it's going to ensure that we're anchored to our past that we talked about yesterday it'll just ensure that because boy they sure had some back then didn't they we had some real beacons and we still can feel their energy and their talks and I hope that I can put the fun stuff away and come up with ideas or methods of increasing the energy in beacons that's a rather interesting job isn't it and , beacon energy increaser that's my job description I think it's it feels right and it feels comfortable and it feels that there's no conflict when the energy meets the right person magic happens and we have someone who as Carl Young was talking about is missing the only thing that's missing in their lives is this conscious contact they don't realize it but they know that something's missing and they walk in the room and they feel their home just because of the energy and it transpires probably looks something like this if um lauder is the energy source at the end of the meeting some young man comes up and says could I talk to you a minute that's it could I talk to you a minute what did you mean when you said this could you help me for that I mean it is that simple and that's all that the basics of A.E.A. has been about since day one is one alcoholic not a heavy drinker one alcoholic talking to another alcoholic and if that other alcoholic has already been influenced positively by the energy or what was said the odds are this is going to be a tremendous success and that will just continue being one of the greatest societies that I think has ever been around and so I just was imagining and if you'll help me imagine what the what it would feel like to this new person who eagerly goes up to someone and says can I talk to you and when they finish talking things look different remember when they start looking different to you and so we've always closed in the same way if everybody would just close your eyes and imagine that you're being in the middle of this energy and you finish and you look around at the same world that you have been in for quite a while and this is what you see thanks for listening