Clancy I. Spent His Life Tearing Off Small Strips for Incremental Surrender

My name is Clancy Emersland, and I am the last speaker of a very distinguished panel of authorities in the field of alcoholism. I don't know if you're familiar with carnival procedures. I once was in one of my incarnations. There are three aspects to a carnival presentation. One, the guy comes out, someone called a barker, and he, with pretty girls or music or something, talks. He's a talker, and he talks people to in front of the stand, and he entertains them and so on. Then, when they get a bunch of boobs standing there, they do what's called turning the tip. That is where they do something to make them buy that ticket. Get that ticket. Wonderful things inside. Don't miss it. Now, now, now, now. Yeah, okay. And when they get all done with that, and the show is over, they want to get rid of these boobs so they can make room for the next crowd. And they have some particularly turn-off guy do what is known as the blow-off, where you get rid of them. My job in this series is your blow-off man. Hopefully, when I'm done, you'll have had enough. But in looking over the program for this series, there have been a very, very, I've known a number of those people. Some I do not know, but they're bona fide, certainly are impressive. And I have known some of them and with a great deal of admiration. Dr. Persh, for example, who I've always felt was one of the very few non-alcoholics. Professional people who really understood alcoholism at a visceral level and can talk about it knowledgeably. And when he can't talk about it, he sends people where they can be talked to about it knowledgeably. If information on the subject were sufficient, we would not have the vast problem of alcoholism. Because in the last number of years, there's been a great deal of information made available and disseminated. Yeah. If that amount of information were made available on cancer, cancer patients would flock to get the data. Or friends of cancer patients, or relatives of cancer patients. If that amount of information was made on diabetes, even. There may be that much on diabetes, but if there were people with diabetics in their family, they would rush to find out about it. But the peculiar aspect of alcoholism is one of the borderline or... Negative illnesses in which your mind may tell you it is a physiologically conditioned illness, but your deep heart said, no, it isn't. It's people who don't care. It's people who don't give a damn. And you can think all you want. And this happens to people who have it. So it certainly must happen to people who surround people who have it. And that's why the... dismaying, lethal statistics in this field continue to go. Continue to diminish somewhat over the years, but not so much. It's an amazing thing. Most of you, I'm sure, are familiar with some of the self-help groups, perhaps. Some of you are familiar with AA or some of the others. I know that that is the posture of the National Council on Alcoholism to say, there are a number of self-help groups. And it's true that the National Council is connected with none of them formally. But I used to do, many years ago, a good degree of public information speaking for the National... for the Los Angeles Council on Alcoholism, years ago. And whenever we went out, it was necessary for the moderator... We talked all over other places. For the moderator to say, now, we have a representative here of one of the ways to stay sober. And there are many other ways to stay sober, but we have a representative here from one of the ways. The moderator must say that. And I went out about ten times. Like that, or maybe more. And I finally... I'm like a guy in a comic strip. One day, I was driving down the road, and a... and a cloud formed over my head, and a light bulb lit in it. And it said, IDEA. And, uh... The next day, the next day, the next day, the next day, the next day... The next time they asked me, I said, I feel that... I'm giving a one-sided picture to the recovery program from alcoholism. All these poor people are overhearing from is one... one of the ways to stay sober. Next time, why don't you bring representatives from all the ways to stay sober? And we can all talk. And when you get them together, let me know. And, uh... Somehow or other, I... I never got called back. True. But that's not putting anything down. I know that that is necessary, because it is true. There are people... There are people who are sober in other disciplines or self-help than AA. It's just sometimes hard to locate them. And I don't mean that derogatorily. I just mean it... I'm just implying derogatory... derogatory... I'm not really saying that it... But, the problem... What's amazing is that... And it has been said here, I'm sure, by every speaker who spoke here... That the great problem in alcoholism is lack of knowledge of what it really is. And with that lack of knowledge, the denial of the alcoholic to accept his own involvement in it. And the inability to treat people who don't feel they need to be treated. It really is a... And the... And the puzzlement of families who have one of... THEM. And everybody knows they're one of them, except them. And it really is a baffling thing. It's kind of funny for a while, but it isn't funny after a while. I... I'm in a position that probably hardly anybody in this room is in. Tonight. Or today. I have the experience almost every day of my life of seeing alcoholics die. Probably most of you don't have that opportunity. I have the opportunity intermittently of seeing cases of alcoholic insanity. Now... I've always thought, or thought for years, that alcoholic insanity was measured by people who act crazy. Now, if there's someone who's gone too far, they have alcoholic insanity. But that isn't really alcoholic insanity. That might be borderline... Psycho-neurotic behavior. Alcoholic insanity is something different. You know, they... They say that alcoholism is the second greatest cause of insanity. And you just imagine someone acting, running through halls, acting silly. But that isn't what it talks about at all. Alcoholic insanity is when sufficient alcohol has been in the bloodstream, and it varies from individual to individual, to desiccate enough brain cells so that you're no longer able to function. Alcoholic insanity is just like advanced syphilis. When enough brain cells are gone, you don't go around acting funny. As a rule, you wind up... As a rule, you wind up on a porch where someone comes along and changes your diapers, and feeds you three times a day, and takes you to bed, and back... And once that happens, you never recover. Alcoholic insanity is a... is a terminal thing. Because anything that affects brain cells is a terminal thing, because brain cells do not reconstitute themselves. There's no regeneration in brain cells. It's really singularly unfair to alcoholics, I've always felt. The liver and the brain are two of the major organs in the whole body that do not regenerate new cells. And that's what alcohol hits, the brain and the liver. It just... Some days you just can't make it at all. It's just everything you touch goes bad. But alcoholic insanity is a dreadful thing. Watching people die from alcoholism is a dreadful thing. You think of people dying from alcoholism, and the way they listen, of course. If they're... If they're dead, if we find them in the alley behind their building in the morning, of course that can be considered a death from alcoholism, although sometimes they call it exposure. But I see many deaths of alcoholism, and I don't... wouldn't... assume they list as a death from alcoholism. A man who is no longer able to walk and topples forward in front of a bus, and the bus runs over his head. That wouldn't be listed as a death of alcoholism, but it certainly is. But we see more and more in Skid Row now that never was there before, for the... because of the different character of the population. More and more knives. It's really sad to watch two old broken people having a knife fight, and one goes down and comes clutching in, and his stomach is cut out. Now, you think, that isn't really a death from alcoholism. But you say it is a death from alcoholism. But if you are like me, you might think, well, that's Skid Row. Sure, that's... Sure, they're dying on Skid Row. But I think the figures are something defective. Those deaths on Skid Row all over the world, all over the country, are maybe 3% of the deaths from alcoholism, or less. That leaves 97% or more in places like Santa Ana, and Anaheim, and Los Angeles, and Minneapolis, and Indianapolis, and Atlanta, and people like you and me who look almost indistinguishable from you and me, and who are... who you would think would not want to die a miserable death. It isn't even a quick death. That's one of the great recruiting lines that all of a sudden was absolutely innocuous, where they say, well, if you're an alcoholic, for you to drink is to die. God, I hope so. It would be much more realistic to say, for you to drink is to ensure continued misery, and pain, and anxiety. Not from the drinking, but from the emotions that go with it. Because to want nearly all of the... nearly all of the medical research that has gone into alcoholism, they found out all sorts of things. You can get all sorts of data. Over the years... over the years, medicine has made some rather significant advances. You know, for many years, medicine had no training in alcoholism, which is not... so it's not surprising they didn't know what the hell they were talking about when they talked about it. Unless they chose to look into it. Up until maybe 25 years ago, in medical school, you got the same amount of training in alcoholism that you got in dengue fever. One half of one day. And they hadn't been in a case of dengue fever in 50 years. And you get, you know, just in case this is alcoholism, this is what we think happened, and on and on. And so doctors were significantly ill-trained to deal with alcoholics. Because alcoholics, if anybody in the world looks like just another bunch of self-indulgent neurotic pukes, it's alcoholics. Which is why traditionally, for many years, the medical treatment of alcoholics was, here, take these as needed, and good luck. Because the doctor traditionally wanted to get these goofs out of his office so he could take care of people who are really sick, you know. How do you deal with someone who staggers innocence? They looked at me funny on the bus this morning. Here, take that. I've got a lady in here with a ruptured spleen. Who cares about how they looked at you, you dummy? And the first major study of alcoholism ever made, it wasn't even made of alcohol, it was made of alcoholics, was in the late 1950s at Yale University, Yale Institute of Alcoholic Studies. And they studied alcoholics that they're going to make a breakthrough and try to find out what the, what is it with these goofs, you know. And they had alcoholics of all backgrounds and all socio-economic profiles and all, they gave them psychological profile tests, they tested them against controlled groups of people they knew to be non-alcoholic, like they'd give them each two drinks and try to measure their reaction to see if they could identify this and on and on. I've often thought I would, I'm certainly glad that I, as a practicing alcoholic in those days, was not involved in that test. That must have really been, you know. Well, here's a drink. Drink it. Drink it. Here's another drink. Drink it. Okay. Now, that's all of our tests for today. Maybe all of your tests, Jim, but it's not all of mine. You want to see a real reaction, give me that goddamn bottle. But they examined all sorts of people. And they never really found anything that they all had in common except two things. They found two relatively similar things. One, for reasons they could not identify nor measure, nor can people really measure it today, alcoholics react differently to a given amount of alcoholics than non-alcoholics. It doesn't mean they go crazy or they act weird. They just seem to have an overreaction somehow, which later came down to be, they call it, a personality change, perhaps. But something, literally, you can watch an alteration. It's like, you know, it's not surprising that Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote Dr. Juggler, Mr. Hyde, suffered from alcoholism. I'm sure he was, much of that was autobiographical, just watching that personality change. Then the other thing that they all had in common was they all ranked very low and very, very high in perfectionism on the psychological profile. They were all perfectionists, although none of them, I'm sure, would have identified themselves as perfectionists. I never would have identified myself as a perfectionist. I do have a certain flair for if it isn't perfect, screw it, but I mean, I am out of perfection. And there was one other aspect which they did not measure, and I'm sure that if they would have measured it, they would have gotten unanimity on the subject. I am sure that if they could put a, found some way to put, insert the question or the information. Do you, deep in your heart, believe your case is different? You bet. You bet. And those are the characteristics. And then alcoholism became kind of a, with Yale, that study, it became a little more socially acceptable. And I remember I, I became sober in that study in 1958. Our moderator this morning made it sound as though I were very gracious in going, some years ago, leaving a, I left a marketing job in Beverly Hills about ten years ago to go down and run the Midnight Mission, which is a different situation. And when you get introductions, as our kindly Muriel did this morning, it makes it sound as though I were a dedicated, wonderful man. It isn't quite that way. One of the reasons I went back there is because in 1958, I was 86 out of the Midnight Mission. And I swore I'd go back and get him someday. And so I'm down there looking for that guy assiduously. He hasn't showed up yet, but he'll be along. But I got sober in 1958 through the, after that. And by the early 1960s, I was working again as a writer. For a long time, I just worked in non-writing jobs, such as furniture moving and washing dishes there. But I finally held a job and I was working in the medical corporation. I remember in 1961 or 62, seeing the first full-page ad I recall ever being in a medical journal about the treatment of alcoholics. And it said, for the fact you know, Doctors, now you can treat alcoholics without side effects, without negative effects. You can do something with them. You can reduce the anxiety and conflict and keep them smoking. And I remember thinking, isn't that, isn't that just the way it goes? I bought that damn alcohol for years and almost killed me. Wound up on Skid Row and if I could have held out three more years. And it even had a lovely name. It had a name that indicated freedom. It was called, this new product called Librium. And I thought, oh, if I only could have had them. Librium. And those old, you know, sometime after that, I began to see the first Librium survivors. And I don't drink as much anymore, but I don't get up out of my chair much anymore. And Valium and so on. And there were still in the mid-1960s and late-1960s agencies who could not, and there still are, but much cut down, who felt that the treatment of alcoholics is somehow withdrawing them. Or that they are basically people who don't want to drink, but they just don't realize what drinking does to them. In the late 1960s, there was a lot of press given to a doctor in New Mexico who had found a breakthrough to psychologically keep alcoholics from drinking. And that was, he took movies of them when they were drunk. And then, the next time they felt like drinking, they'd go by his office and he'd run a reel for them. They'd say, oh man, I don't want to be like that. Oh, thank you, doctor. And it really was tremendous. It got a lot of ink around the country. Except, unfortunately, of course, it got to a point where people didn't feel like going to a show before they had a drink. You would think intellectually that they would want to not drink, but that's the whole problem. And it's hard to understand that. They, near the end of that decade, beginning of this last decade, they had a great treatment out in Redlands at a big hospital. And that got two full pages, a page with a rough, a page with a run over for another page. And they, this was a religious hospital, very fine people, but they were going to find a way once and for all to get these goofy alcoholics shaped up. And they installed one of their wards and a bar. And these poor goops would come in there and they thought they were going to a religious hospital, there was going to be some sort of harangue from them. And they walk in, here's a bar. And some goof back there, they want a little drink, Slim. I'm sure their first sip was very tentative, you know. What is this? J&B Scotch. Say, you, you religious people know how to treat alcoholics. And it really was a great cure, I'll tell you. Sorry I missed that one too. In fact, I guess I always thought the booze was so good they had, they had the glasses wired right to the bar so they couldn't take them back to their sleeping room. And these guys would get along fine, they'd have a few drinks and do good. After a few days, they'd come in and have their drink in the morning and they'd shoot an electric wire through that, or electric shock through that wire. So the guy would just, happy days. No more ice next time, Fred. Now they'd give them a drink without the electric shock. Well, that's more like it. And after a while of this, you can imagine, you're just like a fawn in the forest. Now finally, these guys would come in, they'd say, you want a little drink? No, I don't think so. And another cure went on the book. Funny now, but they really thought they had cured them. And they did a follow-up sometime later, of course, and discovered that most of them hadn't got by the first place that had glasses without wires. There was a big hospital in Seattle in early 1972. I always had a hobby of seeing cures to see what I'd missed. That's why I look into these things. But they had a big hospital, and they were, and they're still there, but with a different format. But their theory was that alcoholism is caused by an enzyme imbalance. And if you can readjust your enzymes, you should be able to drink socially. This craving and so on will go away. And they had a, the director of their program, gave public addresses in which the most, he was a known bad alcoholic, and he was now sober, apparently, and he'd give a public address, and he had a staggering presentation. He'd say, some of these fanatic self-help groups tell you that abstinence is required. It may be for them, but not necessarily. With the program we have, something different can be done. And at the end of his talk, he would pick up a cocktail and drink it. Now, something like that, that's what you call your basic staggering presentation. A lot of people drifted by a 7-Eleven to see if they had any enzymes. And that was a very impressive, except unfortunately, the director, one day, his enzymes kicked up, I guess, and he wound up in a padded cell at that hospital. So they begrudgingly moved to abstinence as their product from then on. In the 1970s, most of you remember, I remember very well, our Santa Monica think tank coming out with a concept, the Rand Report. Alcoholics can drink again. And that, of course, there was a little disclaimer in small type, unless they are the ones who can't. But they said alcoholics can drink again. And they had evidence. They had hundreds of people who were out there drinking successfully. They didn't issue the report until they did. It wasn't until relatively recently that a massive follow-up was made and found that they were, nearly all of them, dead or dying. But, you know, I often wondered how could they, what kind of follow-up did they use? Why didn't they see this? And I found out later from a guy at the Rand Corporation how they made the mistake. They didn't understand alcoholics either. Do you know how they did their follow-up? They called them up. Yeah. In my worst day, I could pass that question. Still doing fine. It really is a... And it goes on and on. And, for instance, that deal in the hospital. And, like, so in the hospital. It all goes back, in a sense, to things that were pretty well set aside 50 years ago. The aversion treatment, the old Keely cure, which was, became a laughing stock after a while. Because the knowledge of... It's... I can project myself to that situation and just can understand the bafflement. Again, if anyone had anything that was destroying them and you got them away from it, you would be absolutely baffled if they went voluntarily back to it. You know, I know that this last year, a year ago, about, a guy I know very well, a lawyer, had advanced emphasis on the treatment of eczema. And he was dying from it, almost. He'd have to go to the hospital every once in a while and have oxygen stuck in his nose and down. And he'd come out and go home and fire up a cigarette. And I said, Joe, what the hell is this? How can you smoke on your lunges? And it was just... It was like watching a man commit suicide. And as I was going home from that, I thought to myself, that's just the way it's got to be. That's just the way it had to be for my family who loved me. Watching me, after being laboriously withdrawn, be hospitalized, be strapped down, be put into an insane asylum, all these things, to come back and one day hit it again. And never know, I couldn't explain to them because I didn't know why. I knew why going in, but by the time they asked me, I didn't know what it was. And that's what makes this problem so baffling. And that's what makes it so difficult to understand. Because it really gets down to this. How can anyone understand it when the person who has it won't accept it? How can anyone else accept it? And that's why alcoholism, at the current stage of understanding, pretty much universally among anyone who knows anything about it in the medical profession or psychiatric profession, not entirely, but among the people who know anything about it, they pretty well agree that abstinence is the only answer. There is no control left. Nobody knows why. There may be control for a little while, but as one of these self-help therapies say, there seem to be brief recoveries followed always by still worse relapse. And that's what makes alcoholism smack, of moral degeneracy. And that's what makes alcoholism smack of weak-willed, pathetic people who should know better. And that's why a real case, I suppose, can be made to call alcoholism a disease of perception. A disease of perception. Not how anyone views their drinking, but much more, much more complex. The one aspect that makes alcoholism cunning and baffling and powerful is that neither the treater or the treaty usually understands what's wrong. Really. They keep thinking that it's the alcohol. And if I can get the patient off alcohol, I'll be all right. And look what alcohol is doing to you. Why do you keep using it? And all of the research, all of the investigations into the metabolic differences of the alcoholic body, and all of the differences of the malfunctioning of the endocrine or ductless glands, or whatever the hell it might be, or reverse diabetes, hyperinsulinism, all the theories that have gone on to try to describe this, the only thing that they're unable to measure is the perception of the alcoholic. And the alcoholic doesn't know it, and they don't know it. And that's why formal clinical treatment has almost always been non-effective in the treatment of alcoholics. And so I want to, for a couple of minutes this morning, discuss, an odd coincidence, the title of my talk. I'm going to talk about alcoholism and the program. Alcoholism, a disease of perception. The, probably the number one mistake in the treatment of alcoholism, or in the identification of alcoholism, I'm certainly not accusing people of treating alcoholism wrong, I'm talking about the identification by the alcoholic or by the non-alcoholic, is as I said, that alcoholism is, that we're dealing with an alcohol problem. It is not an alcohol problem. It is not an alcohol problem. I would like to give you my opinion. I could give you only my opinion. I may secretly feel that I speak for the wisdom of the ages, but I'm required to say this is only my opinion. In my opinion, the great problem, I think it's borne out, is people thinking they have an alcohol problem. Now, if you have an alcohol problem, the treatment for an alcohol problem is relatively simple. You have the people not drink. That's all. That's how you do it. You may charge them a lot for the data, but that's what it is. Don't drink. But this is not an alcohol problem. I don't believe alcoholics have an alcohol problem. Now, that sounds upside down, but I want to say this slowly and clearly and distinctly, because it sounds like heresy, but I bet my life on it. If my problem is alcohol, I am not an alcoholic. Or conversely, if I am an alcoholic, my problem is not alcohol. Now, that sounds really crazy, doesn't it? But it really is literally true. Because if the problem is alcohol, the solution to it is not drinking. And that solution has been found 5,000 times. 5,000 years ago. This is nothing that was stumbled on in research recently. If you have a problem with alcohol, you don't drink alcohol. If you have a problem, if you are allergic to orange juice, and every time you take a glass of orange juice, it makes your nose fall off, you know, then finally, with the additional amount of help, you've come to the conclusion, I'm not going to drink that orange juice. You might give it one last shot just to make me feel better. I'm not going to be sure. I've lost my nose. How do I smell? Pretty bad, you know. But if that's the problem, if it's changed, and people like me, and I'm sure like many people like me, have tried that again and again. I have sworn off with and without oaths. I'll tell you, probably the most important single swear-off I ever made. There was a time, many years ago, my little boy died when I was in the hospital. When I was in jail. I was in jail, not in the hospital. And the judge was in there for drunken scuffling, and I was an executive. And he was, his little casket was about this big. And I felt so remorseful. And I vowed, this will never happen again. Ever, ever. Baby John, if it ever happens to me, I hope my arms wither and fall off. I had tears of absolute sincerity in my eyes. I would have given my life to keep that from happening. And about 29 days later, in another city, I was working, the feelings of remorse and pain began to relax me. Now, you try to explain that to anyone. And I remember my family saying, how, how could you after what happened to John, how could you get liked? And there's no answer. I have no answer. I don't know. I knew why going in, but I didn't remember why I was doing it. I knew I was going to be in prison for 30 days or do a cold turkey on the floor of a jail. The one thing is, you get withdrawn. But, that's how you beat an alcohol problem. Now, this funny, deadly, bewildering, baffling, the difference between an alcohol problem and alcoholism is that stopping drinking has no effect on alcoholism. In fact, it begins to make it worse. Stopping drinking moves you across the line from some degree of relief to unvarnished, gray, cold, remorse filled, anxiety filled reality to the point that alcoholism is the greatest evidence I know in my life that I was able to deny. But my problem is not alcohol. I have these other problems, real problems, problems I couldn't describe, problems that seem to me and apparently I feel different somehow and I don't want to feel different. This is a great feeling. I feel lonely more than other people. I feel, and the only way you have to measure how you feel compared to other people, of course, is you look at them and you fall into the trap that every human being falls into sometimes. Alcoholics fall into it a lot because you are different when you feel different. And you look around in a job situation, in a social situation, amongst people you know well, and you get answers. And the problem is the answer is always wrong but you never know it and you have no way to compare it. And the reason is because every human being must and they always make these comparisons when they feel bad. You don't ever compare when you feel good. You compare when you feel bad with other people's outside. I am comparing my raw meat against defense mechanisms they've spent 30 years building to conceal their raw meat. And I can tell anyone here, alcoholic or non-alcoholic, when you make comparisons and you feel bad, I think it's safe to tell you that you will never see anyone who looks as sensitive as you feel. You will never see anyone who looks as though they have any secret anxieties that bother you. You will never see anyone who looks as lonely or frustrated as you feel sometimes. And conversely, as they look at you, they will feel the same. These are comparatives when you are feeling negative. The very tools I have used to feel, to overcome my feelings of difference have made me more alienated to these metaphysical energy and these other mental states. I could turn my eyes into a mirror at any time and I will be able to measure something you can't measure. You know. You can measure alcohol, Alcoholism dies from it, one way or another, slowly or quickly. That's why relatively few people, really relatively few people, ever achieve reality very long. And some of those go back, because they keep falling back into that same trap. I no longer drink, therefore I am all right. And that is the lethal error in that equation. The curse of alcoholism is not that you can't get sober. If getting sober was the answer, detoxes would turn out winners. Hospitals would turn out winners, and they don't. Detoxes don't turn out winners. In fact, the classic American detox is not either a hospital or a detoxification center. The classic American detox, where most alcoholics get sober, is a toilet. You know, that works as effectively. It's a little less jarring, a little more jarring on your nerves. But there are few problem drinkers who haven't knelt in front of the old porcelain altar in the morning and just gazed in those shimmering waters waiting for an answer to surface down the... And you even can say your morning prayers, you could say. Oh, God. But the one thing that happens is you detox. One of the things that makes... Alcoholism is a little bewildering. I used to have the impression, because I used to hear people, real alcoholics, talk about they had stayed drunk around the clock for 20 years. Now, I think to myself, that's an alcoholic. Not a slick guy who's had a series of bad breaks and misunderstandings. But I found out something else. It is physically impossible for a human body to stay intoxicated 14 straight days and nights in laboratory condition. In laboratory condition. So you certainly can't... You can't in the real world. So you always get sober. And the curse of alcoholism is sobriety. And now that doesn't make you an alcoholic necessarily, having an unpleasant reality. But if one other factor is there, it will be. I think probably the study of this point that I want to make... I know I'm running short a little time, a little bit, so I know we have a coffee break. But what I was trying to do in this first few minutes was establish how bewildering this thing is. I think that to come to understand it, we would have to understand the perception of an alcoholic. To understand what makes an alcoholic an alcoholic, and therefore to get some understanding of how it can be beat. It cannot be beat with withdrawal. It cannot be beat with vows of chastity and obedience. It cannot be beat with swearing oaths. It cannot be beat with anything. It can be beat only in one way. And that way is impossible. You have to change the world around an alcoholic. But there's a way to do that. And I will take that up in the next hour. Thank you. Thank you very much, Clancy. Among themselves, I'm acting alcoholic-y. What is an alcoholic emotion? Is it something specific to alcoholics? I don't think so. I don't think there's... I don't think there's such a thing as an alcoholic emotion. Again, there have been no emotions discovered, new emotions in 5,000 years. When I get frustrated and cross, I get frustrated and cross just the way that the pharaoh of Egypt got frustrated and crossed. It's different stimuli, but it's always the same emotion. Alcoholic emotions can also be, I would suppose, be described as highly sensitive emotions. Or, another word that is really just terrible, and I would prefer never to hear it mentioned in my presence, because it's so true, childish emotions, childlike emotions, and it's almost impossible to evaluate them, because they're in a grown-up body, with a grown-up brain, with grown-up abilities, with grown-up skills, with grown-up abilities to rationalize and justify, with grown-up everything. And all of this at the intermittent beck and call of childhood. Childlike emotions, overreactive emotions, immature emotions, to handle and overreact badly to conflict. When the alcoholic gets over, little by little the conflict comes back, and he begins to react and overreact. He attempts to control it with his intellect, to get things in order. He attempts to control these growing, intense emotions. But there's one fact, I think, that is unquestioned in the study of the human psyche, and that is this. Intense, when the intense emotions and the intellect are in conflict, the emotions will always win. Always win. Sooner or later they will win. The intellect gets tired and takes a walk. And you can fight it and fight it and fight it. But the power of the intellect to... to subordinate the emotions by infecting its intellectual will over them. Another term for that, more easily, of course, is the power of the will, or willpower, to superimpose this. And that's why most people read inspirational literature, learn, try to find out data, anything to reinforce that intellect to hold those damn stinking emotions intact. And, sooner or later, it's never enough. And, sooner or later, it's never enough. And, sooner or later, it's never enough. And, sooner or later, it's never enough. The strong, neurotic emotions will always overtake and subordinate the intellect. The strong, neurotic emotions will always overtake and subordinate the intellect. The strong, neurotic emotions will always overtake and subordinate the intellect. The strong, neurotic emotions will always overtake and subordinate the intellect. That's what, again, makes it better. That's what, again, makes it better. The sober alcoholic gets into a situation where it's little by little not being known to him. The sober alcoholic gets into a situation where it's little by little not being known to him. He sees things. His perception of things are absolutely clear. He sees things. His perception of things are absolutely clear. These are the things that are happening, and so your reaction to them becomes real. your reaction to them becomes real and that's the only way they can be reacted to given the nature of these things and pretty soon you get to a point where life just begins to begin to gray down you just get gray and tense and anxious and you might be clenching your fists to do and people you're making these sacrifices for no longer seem to appreciate it and on and on and on and one day you get to a point where it just gets to be seems to be too damn much they joke about it sometimes they say why did you get drunk and you know a man getting up in the morning under pressure hates to go there face him again everything is going to hell what he's wanted out of life the dreams are obviously now frayed and dirty and the hopes are being destroyed by unfeeling hands and you put on those clothes you put them on you lean over and just can't stand it you're going to tie your shoe to go to work and the damn shoelace breaks and it's just this one thing you might say ah to hell with it and that's the end of that but sadly enough when you talk to the man later you say you were just getting back together with your family and you had your job back why did you get drunk and the man thinks well I I broke my shoe string because that's what you you know it sounds funny but it's tragic because a lot of people will die from little things like that just little things you cannot recreate human you cannot recreate emotional pain you can talk about it but you can't recreate it the human mind has been blessed or cursed with something called dynamic memory in other words the tendency to enhance pleasant memories and to diminish unpleasant memories that helps people stay sane of course there's a God that everyone in the room has memory that thank God nature has put a scab over or you wouldn't have been able to bear it but also you cannot really recreate what happened so there you are and you get to a point where it's untenable now even then that doesn't make you an alcoholic that is not exclusive to alcoholics there are millions of people who get just like this who are not alcoholic they are known medically as intense or acute neurotics they still see reality psychotics don't see reality correctly but they see reality correctly but they're reacting to it badly and emotionally and things get obsessive and it just gets terrible and unless something happens to help these people either diminish the concept or diminish their reaction to it some of them snap and they become what's known as psychotic and psychosis is when your brain ultra simply lowers a distorted glasses so you see reality differently but at least it resolves the context or much of it now it's a funny thing alcoholics rarely ever become psychotic hardly ever cases of alcoholic psychosis are just as rare as hen's teeth why? because when it gets that bad they will drink alcohol now the question is why don't these neurotics drink alcohol and relieve the pressure and there comes the most interesting facet of alcoholics because they do and it doesn't remove the pressure that's the difference between a neurotic and an alcoholic an alcoholic gets a special effect from alcoholics and that's the difference between a neurotic and an alcoholic that most people don't get that's why their drinking will not give them any relief an alcoholic he keeps every alcoholic and the people around him keep seeing what alcohol is doing to you but by that time it's way down the line so operational aspect of an alcoholic is what alcohol does for him or her and he doesn't know it does anything unusual for him and nobody else does but he can literally alter his perception of reality with alcohol he can alter I can literally alter my relationship to my environment I can literally almost instantly make myself bigger and more self-contained and then smaller and less threatening now I didn't know this was doing this to me I don't know where you'd ever find it out because that's an inside thing and you just assume it does that for other people too and if they don't drink that means they don't have the pressures you have that's why drinkers wind up running with drinkers nobody wants to be a drinker and wind up with some goof you know stop after work and say do you want a drink yeah thanks okay let's have another one oh no thanks I'm starting to feel it I want to be with people who understand a colorful environment when I'm in a bar at 11.30 at night I just hurry I don't want to hear voices saying yeah yeah I don't want to be around some little goof that says why I have to be to work at 9 what'll I tell Phyllis tell Phyllis to keep you home you sick little ton of a bitch I want to be with colorful people I've suffered enough from grayness it's time to have a little color Jim there's a lot of ways to measure alcoholics it feels kind of a joke way but it always strikes me as kind of funny the non-alcoholic personality and I've seen people do this and it just baffled me same at parties cocktail parties years ago I guess I had a little too much Betty I think you better drive home if I ever saw an alcoholic do that my heart would stop the correct answer for me is orange now baby but alcohol has a special effect for me and the only bad thing about that is I'll tell you if you are an alcoholic two martinis will make you feel better than six months of psychotherapy a bottle of good wine or bad will be better than years of metaphysical insights I've tried it both ways and I'll tell you the I think probably the best example of that is when I was about a year sober I had a little job working at a firm called Weinberg Advertising out in West LA I was wrapping packages which was kind of a come down for a man who had been an award winning writer I didn't have any front teeth either I thought I'd been scarred in a fire or something but one of our accounts was something called Kamchatka Vodka and for years and years you must have seen their boards it always says Vodka is pronounced Kamchatka now they've changed in the last couple of years but for years and years when I was there it was old that was 1959 and I thought I'm going to let these guys know that there's an award winning copywriter back here they think I'm just a package wrapper but why not let them know that I'm ready to make my move so one day they were laying out this board artists and copywriters and I came by with my packages and said hey, it's none of my business but instead of that same slogan you've been using for 10 years how about using something like Kamchatka Vodka because boo better than all vodkas anyway and they looked at me and I got the same look of disdain and they said why don't you goof and get out of here and one guy said if you don't like the way we do things why don't you wrap packages in some other advertising agency just move it along and I was just crazy I tried to give them an idea and because I looked bad they wouldn't listen and that night I was talking to my AA sponsor and I tried to tell him this story he explained I tried to be a man about it but I finally told him this whole hideous story they won't even listen to me can't you ever understand I've been trying to tell you this for a long time in those kind of situations they're not putting you down they don't know what the hell you're talking about to them Kamchatka Vodka doesn't go boom to them Kamchatka Vodka goes that's why you're in this damn meeting and they're not I thought about that many times a lot of times alcoholics wish they were non-alcoholics they don't want to be non-alcoholics they want to not get the bad effect but I don't know any alcoholic who would like to go through life have your back to the wall of the hounds of fate ripping at your throat oh god only about three three to seven percent of all drinkers will ever know what I have took for granted all my life when the hounds of fate are ripping at your throat it doesn't go it goes nothing changes it looks different now if it does that for you the one little negative thing happens the tools I have or have lost in dealing with conflict the ability to process conflict and difficulties atrophy a little bit more from non-use what's the sense of working out a painful situation for two weeks when I can change it in two minutes so by the time alcohol is doing something to you it's way down the line by the time it's doing something to you sustained reality is just about untenable piece by piece the curse of alcoholism is that reality has become untenable sustained reality and you can have every reason in the world and you can prove your reasons are right I watch as I say I watch men die and everyone can assure me they're not really alcoholics they had real problems so it appears that the that the insoluble unsolvable aspect of alcoholism is that somehow the world has got to change for this guy to make it or for this girl to make it and you can't change the world there you are that particular combination of alcohol the answer now becoming alcohol the problem together with a reality that sooner or later is so full of shock in sharp corners it's unbearable that is called alcoholism and the reason people die from it a lot of times is because they confuse it with an alcohol problem alcohol that's why very very few people who work in the field of alcoholism understand it unless they be alcoholics that's why many people who work in the field of alcoholism and teach it well and do not take care of their own perceptions get drunk again sad fact but true all the knowledge of the intellect doesn't help when the emotions start to surge you can be the smartest or the dumbest I watched the department head at Caltech and I watched ditch diggers die from the same exact reason now that is why it is almost imperative that sooner or later the alcoholic gains something besides knowledge of his illness because knowledge alone is not enough that is why for most alcoholics something in the nearly all alcoholics something addition must be added he must have something or some way to little by little take some strides towards altering his perceptions of reality now you cannot alter your emotion by thinking you can over a long period of time but that is like saying I am going to make up my mind I am not going to be hungry tonight you have no control over it there is that old hideous example they have used many times it just makes me sick of eating a bar a whole bar of X-flax and saying I am not going to go to the toilet today I am never going to look at another pretty girl I am never you can't control these are from the subconscious like saying I am not going to blink but a guy waves his hand by your eyes and you blink you don't think about it you just do it that is why things such as Alcoholics Anonymous is very effective but Alcoholics Anonymous is not effective much of the time because people go there and keep thinking if I learn what it is about there must be a motivation and a teacher that will enable people like me to act myself better I cannot control my emotions but I can control my actions much of the time I can literally superimpose action over my emotions the purpose of a sponsor or someone helping you is to superimpose objective perceptions over my subjective perceptions the best way to describe that is seeing things with an upset mind and things look different you are overreacting you don't see it you see it but you can't believe it is anything but that but it isn't that it is like this wall if when I was new my sponsor would have said to me something as effective fancy the wall is green nothing not the colors of wall because that is easy to be matched with the color chip we discovered we discussed perception colors such as I don't care how it looks to you don't quit that job I don't care how it looks to you you go over and apologize to her you acted badly and those perceptions were just as foreign to me as telling me that wall was green that wasn't the way it was she hurt me she said something terrible to me I am not going to work for that guy who is exploiting me on and on and on and on but that is in a sense of a sponsor to find someone who can give you objective perceptions when your perceptions are discolored because you will act on your discolored perceptions sooner or later they will create emotional problems that you will have to justify the function of acting to relieve conflict of walking through it of finding some way to say you do this and then you do it you get a certain security just by accepting the direction and doing it even though you disagree with it but the purpose of this sort of therapy is not to enhance the strength of your intellect it is to do something that I don't know of any other way to do it for people like me it relieves pressures on the emotions I get back control with my intellect not by strengthening my intellect but by weakening the pressures on the emotions and it has to go on and on because the world is full of stimuli I can know everything about how to stay well right now and if I don't take some sort of continuing therapeutic when I get out of whack I will think that is real again I have to have some benchmark to bring me back that is why knowledge will not keep people so far as a rule information will not keep people sober love will not keep people sober because love comes and goes a love of God will keep you sober perhaps I have been flown across the country a couple of times to talk to big groups of clergymen that are sent to this big home from all over the world and they love God but they can't stay sober and AA's teach them how to stay sober so they can go back and love God sober there has to be something more to deal with the intermittent spells of childish perception that is why we have to have a continuing therapeutic that is what makes alcoholism baffling that is why sometimes people who have been sober for many years get drunk they say I now know all about it I shouldn't have to keep doing that stuff now and they stay alright but the rest of the world gradually gets out of whack and their perceptions all start to go to hell again in fact to oversimplify the function in recovery of alcoholism is not even to change yourself it's just to make everybody else in the world shape up and if you stop doing it they find out and act bad that's why they say alcoholics don't get too hungry or angry or lonely or tired not because those are bad things they are perception distorters when you are hungry you have a tendency to become impatient and intolerant when you are angry that was justified but it's an obsessive emotion should you be angry? it presses every self pity button and every neurotic personality oh I guess they are probably all at a party tonight somewhere I'll be alright I like watching hooker and when you are tired you stay the same but people take advantage of you I don't know how they know total strangers I've noticed this a couple of times I get on the Santa Monica freeway and they want me to go to work and I'm tired I just want to get to work and I can just see some old lady up there see the boy in the blue thorn he's tired I'm going to cut that son of a bitch off it just makes you crazy that's why people like me have to sacrifice all the time I must sacrifice and take care of myself and keep taking remedial action I don't even do it for me I do it so all of you will stay okay that's a hard concept because all of my life I've been drained if I know it I can beat you and here knowing it isn't worth a pitcher a warm spit it isn't worth anything doing it doing the remedial action no matter how you feel at the moment I must not allow my life to be at the beck and call of childish emotions that even now occasionally creep up on me when I'm not taking care of myself that's what alcoholism is why it's so deadly and that's why it's so recoverable all I have to do is surrender the hardest single thing in the world and surrender to this concept I've used this analogy many times it's still true you make it sound as though you just throw in the towel and live happily ever after humans can't do that not like me I throw in the towel and I spend the rest of my life tearing off small strips and see if that'll satisfy the dirty vest just little by little incremental surrender I'm getting singing up if I didn't feel so good I'd cut out but that's what it's about I think it's a real case I know that you've heard many many fine speakers here much more knowledgeable than I much more experienced much finer people perhaps that's why we to people, some people alcoholism is not recoverable by any tool applied to any disease because alcoholism is basically the lethal aspect it's a disease of perception and the recovery has to be in conjunction with something that will alter the perception or the alcoholic must surely drink thank you we'll be glad to answer any questions you would like to ask please let me say this I'm very pleased that you gave me a halfway standing ovation but if you really want to show your sincerity go fill my car with gas are there any questions in any aspect of the things I talked about yes sir about the mission well I guess I've covered my primary subject perfectly now I have to go on to other subjects alright the midnight mission is one of the few major charities left in the world I suppose that still categorically declines in terms of funding federal, state, city we feed about 450,000 people a year we bed down about 50,000 people it is not an alcoholic treatment center it's way below that although we do have AA's come in put on meetings three nights a week and occasionally someone will get a spark out of that all of the employees of the mission are men who have come off the street at one time or another because we believe we believe there it is not an AA facility at all but I believe the same concept applies you work yourself back to self worth you do not think yourself back to self worth in case some guy will get out of there and do good again another guy will fall by the wayside we are not connected with any church it may be the only major mission in the world where you don't have to listen to a religious service to get fed or bed it down I'm not against religious services but in my experience there was a certain negativism that was applied to me only in my reaction to being sick with hunger and have a man hold food and say here's some dinner for you sit down over there for an hour and then I'll give it to you after I've preached to you for an hour that sometimes doesn't increase your spiritual growth I'm not against it it works for people we have some funny things we have the only state employment office located in a private institution in the state of California and we get hundreds of jobs out of there every month not executive jobs leaf raking, peddling hand belts but ways that guys can start working their way back to reality we distribute clothing and oddly enough this whole thing is run exclusively by public contribution that's unheard of in this day and age at Christmas and Easter we put on a formal campaign I try to get a little TV time if I can here and there to explain what we're doing to pay for it and we send letters out to anybody who might be interested we can't send it to everybody but we know about it and the contributions come in and people leave us little money in their estates here and there little things like that so we function well it is almost the opposite of what a mission should be like there was an old mission there for many years the midnight mission but it got knocked down in the earthquake in 1971 the directors and insurance money and so on it's a modern, airy, spacious, sunny thing time after time people I've known in show business will call up and say I understand it's your mission can we come down and use your mission we're shooting a TV show and we want to get a background of a mission and they come down with their cameras where's another mission the last time we had a guy come down to shoot some feature they wanted to make a police academy dining hall they used our dining room for that because it looked too clean for anything else they didn't like the idea of the police academy dining room that isn't up to my standards but that's what the mission is we have no fundraisers it really is almost a with the human fallibilities built in me and the other people there of course but it almost is a the type of ethic that you would want to see that's why it's very rewarding to me sometimes though I get very discouraged sometimes because I'm a human being sometimes my perception of that place is what am I doing a grimy grubby god damn place I want to be out there for a little more excitement and fun I've worked in radio and television in Los Angeles and Hollywood and I've been here and there and I've had big jobs this is really grubby just another succession of guys dying and never see anybody decent and other days I think when I go home from there at night I feel as enthralled as a crusader coming home from Acre you know just part of my own perception I've been there in a few months it'll be ten years and maybe at the end of ten years I may one day just decide and I may be there for the rest of my life I don't know I don't want to project into it although I'm getting a little too old to get into branch manager training for household finance so I may have to make my move pretty soon but that's about the bit that I've missed any other questions on any subject whatsoever can I tell you a few words about the Texas A&C they hurt me dreadfully there I was telling this Lois I was telling Lois earlier I was on the faculty of the University of Texas one year directing a grand opera Mephistophely, the original Italian nothing more fun than watching Texans sing Italian and through a series of bad breaks and misunderstandings later that year I was in the state of St. Salomon Big Spring, Texas not for drinking I'm happy to say I hadn't sunk to that it was just some erroneous perception that made me think I'd be better off dead than alive and they saw in my record that I had directed a grand opera so they had me direct the Christmas pageant it was not quite as complex as a grand opera it was just kind of second grade level so the whole student body could follow along the director's main job that I brought up beautifully I was able to keep the three Wisemen off the Virgin Mary until the curtain got up never got any appreciation for that either let me tell you something about the Phoenix Drunk Tank that's a bad place one day I was one year I was working at Tracy Lock Advertising in Dallas working on the Elsie and Elmer stuff for the Morton Company through a series of bad breaks and misunderstandings I woke up one morning and I was in the Phoenix Arizona Drunk Tank which is a thousand miles away which is an altered perception with a vengeance and some guy had just got done kicking all my front teeth out and I thank God I had intellectual knowledge to help me because I had spent several thousand dollars in psychoanalysis up to that time now once you've been in psychoanalysis you always have insights that have not been given to most of the little people laughter he accused me of vomiting on his bunk is the reason he gave her and I was so sick I could not move my head out of the way of this guy's shoe but I was almost instantly able to observe his problem remember thinking I thought this son of a bitch is overreacting laughter when you when you know things like that it restores your feelings of superiority and completeness I could tell you stories I think just tears rolled on your cheeks how I've been hurt I'm going to be brave and the funny thing is I eventually I went through the classic alcoholic syndrome you know I was a high bottom drunk and then a medium bottom drunk and then a low bottom drunk as I say I got banned out of the midnight mission I lost my family, my home, my occupation everything I had and at the last day I drank, the last drink I took if someone would have put a lie detector on my arm and said are you an alcoholic I would have said no and that needle would not flicker I had real problems but they weren't alcohols but not really that's one of the great pieces of it almost everything I have told you today I have learned long after I was sober I was sober unspect long before I started to understand why that's one of the great helps in being desperate you take the action before you understand why waiting to understand why it's like that old analogy I like to use it's like being on the deck of the Titanic and hitting an iceberg and everybody else rolls away as fast as they can and people like me say I'm not getting off until I understand why this happened and you may get the answer I now know why knowing why doesn't help you have to do something to get better I am I'm very glad to be here this morning I think it's been a lot better since all of the important people were in Houston just us little people gathered together here I appreciate being here and I want to thank Muriel and the group for inviting me it's been a nice experience and thank you very much