Cass V. Discussing Dr. Silkworth and the Initial Pages of the Big Book

Hi, everyone. My name is Cass, and I'm an alcoholic. My sobriety date is May 6, 1990. I came into Alcoholics Anonymous in a small town upstate New York where women weren't getting sober. And the men were. Women weren't. The women did not have sponsorship that took them through the program of recovery. Women upstate New York, what they did was they did the A.A. Foxtrot. They did steps 1, 2, 3, and 12. That was it. And their idea of a fourth step was to sit down and tell somebody how miserable their life was. And making amends was, I'm sorry. But I'm Sorry doesn't walk the dog. It doesn't accomplish anything. And we've said that so often. I came into the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous just like every one of you. I walked in, I didn't know what I was facing, and I sure as hell wanted to know how the hell did I land here? I mean, this was not in my game plan at all. And you told me to get a sponsor, you told мне to read the book called AlcoholicsAnonymous, and you told me to go to meetings and not to drink. And I'm going to tell you a story about not drinking and then I'll go on with a little bit more about how I wove the steps into my life and I managed to stay sober, which was an absolute miracle. We had a guy in our home group who came from down south somewhere and this guy, you know, had a drinking story just like the rest of us. You know, long years, lots of times, lots of disaster. And he walked in and this is him telling the story. He walked into his first AA meeting and they told him don't drink and go to meetings. And she said yeah, okay, how? And they said it again. Don't drink and goto meetings. And he said it agian. Okay, how?" And finally someone said, what do you mean how? And he says, how do I stop drinking? And they said, just stop and go to meetings. And somebody else had overheard him and went over and tapped him on the shoulder and he said, come here, kid. And he took him aside and he says, you want to stay sober? He says, yeah, how? He says there's a program that we work and it's in this book called Alcoholics Anonymous. And that's actually one of the things that the preface in this book talks about. It talks about the plan of recovery, in the doctor's opinion, is described in this book, and it says it also in the preifice, that the recovery, the formula for staying sober is in here, and its in the first 164 pages. I managed to get sober because by the grace of God I found one of two women upstate New York who, and she had a male sponsor because the women didn't have programs and she needed somebody to show her what the program was and he was her sponsor and she was with him for two and a half years she had five years sobriety and her sponsor didn't have any answers for her so she went to a man and said what do you guys have that we women don't have And he took her through this book. And by the grace of God, I found her. She was one of two women in that area. And that had nothing to do with me. That was part of a design for living that, you know, I'm just a part of. It's a bigger plan and I don't know what it is. But I got sober because of that. And one of the first things this horrible woman who knew the program of Alcoholics Anonymous did to me was she gave me a book, Alcoholics Anonymous, and she told me to read it. And I'm new, and my life is a mess, and the last thing I wanted to do was read this book. First of all, it was pretty damn wordy, and I'm a writer, and I didn't like Bill Wilson's style. So I'm editing it while I'm reading it. and the part that I found the most difficult to get through was the beginning and I was told that this is a text this is not a novel where you pick it up and you turn to page one and you can start reading this is the text you read the preface you read everything that comes before and after you're finished with it you go back and you re-read it again because it's a text and it will say different things to you And so I started with it, and when I came in, it was the third edition of the big book, not the fourth. And I started mit that preface, well, I'm sorry, yeah, the foreword to the third edition. And in the foreward to the third edition, it didn't say very much to me. It just said there was a thing called 12 Steps, and it was summarizing the recovery. And as I read the rest of them, and I'm also going to bring in the preface to the fourth edition, basically what these forwards and prefaces do is they talk about the fact that we have never changed the first 164 pages of the big book. We did change one thing, however. In the original, in the first edition of the Big Book, The Doctor's Opinion, which I will be covering with you tonight was the first chapter. And there was a good reason for that. It was so astonishing that a hundred men, and as we know, Bill Fudge is that figure, a hundred Men Were Sober was unheard of. Because we are talking in the 1930s. We're talking 1934 when this book was written. We're talking, I'm sorry, when Bill and Bob got together, we're talking about that. We're taking a look at the book and we're taking about a time when people weren't getting sober. Alcoholics died of either alcohol-related illnesses or they died of alcoholism itself. They got wet-brained. They wound up in institutions where people had to take care of them because they had no control over their bodily function. Well, they were arrested and they died in prison. Alcoholics did not live. The chronic alcoholic was doomed. And 100 men were saying they weren't sober? Yes. This is to have a medical person make that statement was very important to alcoholics and artists. So they had Dr. Bob, I'm sorry, Dr. Silkworth write an introduction and he wrote the introduction and because it was 1939 when this book came out, he didn't sign it, but they still kept it in the front of the book because anyone reading it would know why the doctor didn't sign it. Nobody could get a drunk sober. There were a couple who got sober through finding God, and that was it. But this was an incredible statement. So the forwards and the prefaces, what they did pretty much was they mentioned things that you wouldn't expect. It talked about how Alcoholics Anonymous grew from a hundred men to millions today it spoke about the fact that this is a personal program that remains simple and personal that's in the third edition to the book and in the set in the forward it gave us It's a little history of Alcoholics Anonymous. And it talked about how Dr. Bob and Bill Wilson met, and it talked abut how Bill was the only one who stayed sober after he went into Towns Hospital and got sober under Dr. Silkworth's care. and then he met Dr. Bob six months later and two alcoholics working together were able to keep each other sober and that has been the foundation of this program and that's why the fellowship is so important we are normally people who would not mix you've heard that I'm sure and yet we do But we share a common bond, and it's something you can't explain. Why is it that I can connect with anyone who says they're an alcoholic? Or even sometimes I just sense something about them, and I can connect. And they can connect with me. We are different from our fellows. And I didn't like that when I came into this program. I didn' t want to be different. I wanted to be superior to my fellows, not different. And I had an ego that you needed a Mack truck to carry around. And, I wasn't about to buy into the mass-mindedness of any clique like Alcoholics Anonymous, and I honestly thought you were going to give me your secret formula for not drinking. I didn't think you were gonna tell me to read a stupid book. And this woman, who was my sponsor, wasn't very nice to me. And I didn't understand why I was hanging out with her. I wasn't that much of a people pleaser that I needed to be around this woman. She was damn right insulting. I mean, she told me she wasn't my friend. She told me she wasn'T my chauffeur. She wasn'Tmy marriage counselor. And she said, if you want a friend, go get a dog. She said, I'm your sponsor and we're in the business of your sobriety and that's our relationship lady, nothing else. Okay. I mean you don't say very much when somebody speaks to you like that. And she told me, she didn't tell me I had to go to 90 meetings in 90 days and she didn't tell me to worry about being hungry, angry, lonely and tired. And she didn' t tell me that I had to do very much other than call her on a regular basis and she said I do want you to go to as many meetings as you can and one a day would be nice because you need to get into the fellowship. You need to hear other people's stories. And I listened to her and I would call her when I was upset because that's when she told me to call her and that was, I was in the first 90 days of recovery. That was practically every day because I was going through mood swings and she would tell me as I complained about life on life's terms, she would tell me that everything that was happening in my life was a direct result of my drinking. And I had nobody to blame but myself. I let these people into my life. And it started to become very clear to me that this thing called sobriety was all about relationships. And it was about relationships with every person in my world and even the things in my world. It was about my relationship with my children, my relationship with other women who I didn't like my relationship with men who were my lifeline my relationship with my job my customers everything was a relationship and she told me that I had spent 27 years drinking and during those 27 years, the normal skills that are required by most people as they go through life and make mistakes and make good decisions and go, oh, this works. Oh, this doesn't. Don't do it anymore. Those kind of living skills went right over my head because I was drinking through every stage of my life. And so I missed these basic living skills. And she told me, I don't know my ass from my elbow about living. And that I needed her to guide me on how to think. Because I have a three-fold disease. If it were simply a disease, a body, be real simple. You go into a hospital, you go into detox, 72 hours later, alcohol is out of your system. Two weeks later, most drugs are out of your system, you come home, your family, your friends, your bosses all embrace you and say, welcome. Well, we've all tried that. Doesn't work. Because the person who comes out of the hospital, bodily, yes, there's no alcohol or substances in their system, but their mind has been skewed by alcohol. And the mind is where alcoholism lives. And unfortunately, there's no way that anyone knows in which you can get alcoholism out of the mind. It's always going to be there. Seems that every time I slack off on my program and I decide to coast, I coast downhill and my character defects just flare up. And it all has to do with not going to meetings, not working my program. And it amazes me every time. And most of the time I try to work a program but there are times when I'll just sit back and kick back. I need a day of rest or a month of rest or something like that. And I pay the price every time. I have a disease of thinking, and that disease will always take me back to alcohol. But the worst part of this malady is a disease of spirit because in my drinking career and as I got into and I perfected the alcoholism that I have, somehow I disassociated myself from the rest of mankind. I lost my conscience. There were things about me that I wasn't very proud of and it didn't have so much to do with my drinking as it did to do với my thinking. And one of the things that happened with me was alcohol took me to a place where I had two children who, when I came into the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, were 10 and 11 years old. And right before I came in, in the last year of my drinking, I had wished those two kids dead. I wanted to see my children dead because they interfered with the business I was running. I was renting a bed and breakfast in a restaurant in a castle upstate New York and they were interfering and I knew that there was something wrong with me And I thought I was insane. I thought that I was just the hardest bitch walking on the face of the earth. And I am so grateful that I had someone as a sponsor who was able to say to me, that's where your disease took you. And she told me to read the doctor's opinion. And she took me through this word by word, page by page. And in it I discovered that I didn't have a choice. And that has been the greatest comfort in the world to me. It's not a justification. It's a simple matter of that's what alcohol does to us. All of us have said when we sobered up that the things that we had done when we were drinking we never would have done. Sober. Never would have done that sober. That was the alcohol. What about our thinking, folks? It's not just actions. It's our thinking. I didn't screw up my marriage because I was, you know, because of anything I did. I just screwed it up because of my attitude. I didn't screw up the relationship with my kids because I beat them. I rarely, if ever, hit my children. I yelled at them a lot. But I destroyed the relationship with my children, these young children, because of the way alcohol played on my mind. And I didnít have a choice. There was a point when my daughter came and she was about 10 years old and she were standing in the doorway to the bar and she had tears streaming down her face and she said, Mommy I need to talk to you. And I looked at her and I looked at the clock and I said, Go away. The bar is about to open. And as I said it, I knew there was something wrong with what I was doing. But I couldn't think of another solution. I couldn' t think of anything else to do. I literally had no choice but to stand behind those words. And that's what I did. Alcohol was making decisions for me. I could not see the connection between the drink in my hand and the way I was thinking and treating the people in my life. Because I wasn't always drunk. I wasnít drunk when my daughter was standing in the doorway. I was cold sober. I was going to be drunk in a couple of hours. But I was sober. So what was happening in between drinks? That was the mind of the alcoholic. And when she took me, in the doctor's opinion, to Roman numeral 26, XXVI, the last paragraph, men and women drink essentially because they like the effect produced by alcohol the sensation is so elusive that while they admit it is injurious they cannot after a time differentiate the true from the false to them their alcoholic life seems the only normal one They are restless, irritable, and discontented until they can again experience the sense of ease and comfort which comes at once by taking a few drinks. I was in between drinks. I was restless. I was irritable. Anything that stood between me and that next drink had to disappear. And I would steamroll right over you. Because my mind was taking me to the drink and choice, free will. The thing that separates us from the animal kingdom. Alcohol takes away. Alcohol makes decisions for me. And that's one line here, there's no choice. if you go to the page the next page the last paragraph I do not hold with those who believe that alcoholism is entirely a problem in mental control I've had many men who have, for example worked a period of months on some problem or business deal which was to be settled on a certain date favorable to them. They took a drink the day or so prior to the date and then the phenomenon of craving at once became paramount to all other interests so that the important appointment was not met. These men were not drinking to escape, they were drinking to overcome a craving beyond their mental control. I have no choice. These people weren't avoiding an appointment that was going to bring success into their life. They had no choice. And this is the problem with the disease. And for me, I walked in, and I tell this story about my daughter. And I tell the story whenever I speak because so many women have come up to me afterwards and said, thank you. I thought that there was something wrong with me. And yeah, I severed the maternal bond with my drinking. There's no two ways about it. I had no maternal feelings for my children. And a few years earlier, I was a doting mother. And they were the most important people in my world. And this is the progression of the disease of alcohol in me. This is what it did to me. It doesn't do that to everybody. But in between drinks, I'm still thinking like a drunk. And that's why I still screw up. and that's why I have to live this lie that I'm okay my drinking really isn't a problem and I have go into denial about everything and for me it was why I had to be right oh God I had be right because if I were right then I wasn't a drunk and everybody had a like me that was the other thing my alcoholism took me to a place everybody had to like me. And if you didn't like me, it didn't matter if you were the checkout lady in ShopRite and you were mad at me, I had a problem. I mean, I needed you to like Ming. I've never seen this woman again. She was probably going to quit that night. But she was upset with Ming. And that posed a problem to me because I needed to be liked. I needed to maintain the facade of who I was. And that wasn't a drunk. And that allowed me to stay in denial for 27 years. There was a time, I was drinking I guess about 10 years when a colleague of mine wound up in Alcoholics Anonymous and he said I could go to an AA meeting with him because I was curious and I decided I wasn't going to go. And so I did have an opportunity a long time ago. I don't know, I guess I wasn't ready. But this program is so wonderful in that it doesn't matter how we got here and it doesn' t matter what path got us here or when. Sobriety begins the minute we say we want it, and we're willing to find a power greater than ourselves who will help us, first of all, to discover who we are. I sponsor a number of women, and one of the things that I found is whether you come into these rooms with a big ego or you come in where your ego has been crushed, self-esteem is a major problem especially with women. We are more sensitive than our male counterparts and building a woman's self- esteem is something that I have always viewed sponsorship as. That's my job, to make you realize that you are a child of God and it doesn't make any difference what you have done. You have value and you are loved and to get you to love yourself. We had a woman in my home group who could not forgive herself for something that had happened. And at the meeting, when she was crying and going that she could never forgive herself, somebody asked her, they said, do you think God has forgiven you? And she said yes. And so the guy who asked her the question looked at her and said, so your standards are higher than God's? Is that what we're dealing with here? and that's pretty much what it is. I am not so unique that I have done anything that makes me a standout. There's nothing, and I've told you pretty much the worst of it. There's something and there's nothing and I'd heard the stories from women because I've been sponsoring since I was 10 months sober. And I've heard the stories. And there's nothing that any of us has done that is so horrific as to make us less than who we are. Because who we Are are who we decide we are and that was an important thing for me to realize because the minute I accepted my alcoholism and said I was an alcoholic, I was able to start taking the solution that was available for alcoholics. I was ableto work steps. I wasable, and I found it was necessary to embody the steps in my life. The steps teach us about the things that we did wrong, behaviors that don't work for us. And what happens is in our sixth step, we make a list of all those character defects. And I know when I do a fourth step, a fourth, fifth step with the sponsee, what happens is that she's reading to me the resentments or the sexual inventory or the fears. I'll have her highlight certain behaviors. and then when she's done and she has to do her sixth step what I'll say to her is okay go back through your fourth step and all those highlighted phrases those behaviors that I had you highlight put them down in a list because those are your character defects and that's what you've got to be willing to give up and it's amazing some of the things and I know what my fourth step said A lot of times was, I stayed in the relationship too long. I should have left. And the best was, and the column that says, what should I have done instead? Never gotten involved in the first place. Every single guy. Because it wasn't, I didn't have any standards. I mean, well, I had standards at one point, but the more I drank, my standards kept falling away. I mean, there was a time when guys had to have jobs. At the end of my drinking, I didn't care. You know, if you were interested, I was interested. I mean there was no standards. There was need. And so among the things that I brought to the God of my understanding was this list of character defects and behaviors I no longer choose to engage in and ask him to remove them one and all in my seventh step. And in the seventh step, which is something that I needed to pay a lot of attention to, that's where I had to stop making excuses for myself now it was time to do the right thing because now I knew what didn't work for me and for each person it's different and what the doctor's opinion talks about is the solution is a spiritual solution and one of the things I didn't quite understand with spirituality has absolutely nothing to do with God and nothing to deal with prayer. Spirituality has to do with right action for me. Doing what is right for me because I've looked at my life, I've look at the type of person I was all those years. And I've chosen to be a different type of person. Well, that means my behavior has to be in line with the person I'm choosing to be. And that means I can't get involved with married men. That means I cannot be selfish and self-centered and self seeking. and that means I can't steal I can not pad my expense account I can put in for more hours than I am working for. I can do those things I mean my accountant left every April 15th because we come I give him all my statements and everything and I look at him and I say don't lie and most years I don't have to pay this year I'm going to have to pay I know that I made too much money which is not a bad thing you know but these were the decisions I had to make that's what spirituality is spirituality is living living a program of right action, living, taking the principles and making them part of your life. And that was really hard for me to do. And it started with me accepting the fact that I had this horrible disease that only a spiritual solution could cure. And the doctor's opinion says on Roman numeral 27. On the other hand, and strange as this may seem to those who do not understand, once a psychic change has occurred, the very same person who seemed doomed, who had so many problems he despaired of ever solving them, suddenly finds himself easily able to control his desire for alcohol, the only effort necessary being that require to follow a few simple rules. The few simple rules are the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. And that's the solution. It's about getting that psychic change and it's about finding a power that we can believe in. a friend of mine in this program is an atheist and he has a wonderful program and he's one of the most spiritual people I know and he cannot even get with the idea of a higher power the way he works it is he is a lower power and he says anything that is higher than I am at any given moment works for me. And this is the way he has his higher power. For me, it started off, it was a God of religion. I maintained the God for my Catholic religion for a long time in the program. And then I found because of the exclusiveness, I needed to walk away from that. I needed to be non-judgmental on many, many areas. I could not judge. And I needed practice that. And that's the place I'm in today. The place I am in today is a place where I observe but I try not to criticize. And it's really hard for me. But I need to to be there because I need my world to get bigger. Because every time I look and I criticize or I see something negative in you, I am cutting somebody out of my life. And I want my world to get big and not smaller. Alcoholics Anonymous has made my world larger than I could have ever imagined it would be with people and opportunities because I'm open to new experiences and I can enjoy a person for exactly the way they are, sometimes. And my world has gotten so big. And I found that I bring to myself exactly what I choose. Just like in the past, everything that was going on in my life was a direct result of the decisions I had made, same thing is happening today. Everything going on in my life today is a direct result of decisions I've made. But the decisions are different, and so my life is very different. And one of the things that happens, I'm supposed to take you through Bill's story also. Bill's Story is 16 pages, and this is a wonderful exercise in reading Bill's stories. I used to hate Bill's story. Really, I had judgments about everything. I mean, truly, I was rewriting the big book. Not only the first time I read it, but the second and third and fourth time. And you don't have to say it that way. The first eight pages, and I learned this here at Bernersville, the first eight stages of the book go through it and highlight everything you identify with. Everything you agree with. Everything that sounds right. That's good. I like that. Just highlight. Okay. And when you're done with the first eight pages, then take a different column highlighter and in the second eight pages highlight anything you disagree with that Bill did that he said that you think okay that happened to him but it's not going to happen to me go through it any kind of negative feelings you have about anything he's talking about or he did and do that what you highlight in those first eight pages and I've done this with sponsees and I did it for myself also These are the things that are going to take you out. These are the places where you're not on the AA beam. You're off in this area. And I've seen this happen with sponsors. I'm talking about also, I sponsor women also with time. And they would come in and they'd say, I want a new experience and they'll do Bill's story and they're go through and highlight the first eight pages and they're highlighting stuff, and I'm going, where's your higher power? What kind of relationship do you have with the higher power and this is pretty interesting to me and the second part of Bill's story, I'm sorry, the first part of Billy's story when you highlight things there, in that first part you're highlighting the points of identification as an alcoholic with an alcoholic. And when I had sponsees do that what they did was I'd find out they really weren't convinced they were alcoholics. And so instead of treating them like they had five or ten years sobriety we were going back to the first step and we were discussing the first step and we were exploring whether or not they truly were an alcoholic or believed they were an alcoholic. And that was really important. The second eight pages, the things you don't believe will work for you, the negative stuff that Bill did, that's the stuff that'll take you out. And I've seen that happen. it's something that most of you do here in Bernersville and it's a wonderful technique I've also found that with me that I will go through, I'll use a different book because this one is all marked up I'll using a different book and I'll go through the second part of Bill's story or go through Bill's story from beginning to end And if I start feeling I need to highlight stuff, I'm going, oh, we're in trouble here. Okay? And it's time for me to call my sponsor. You know, we need to start talking. Maybe I need a new experience. Maybe I needs to go to a workshop. Maybe I needed to start meditating a little longer. You know? Because this is a program of growth and we are constantly growing. And I'm going to stop here. Okay? Sure.