Conceding to the Innermost Self – FOTS Workshop – Part 2 of 2 – Ralph

and my name is ralph white and i am an alcoholic and um we are so grateful that you've invited us to spend this time with you this evening and hopefully you guys will find it um you'll find it's i don't want to say so rewarding that sounds a little pretentious but hopefully you'll get enough out of it that you'll take this trip with us for the next uh several weeks ali ask uh approached me with the opportunity to sit down with probably the clearest communicator i know in alcoholics anonymous my friend steve lee and i couldn't turn it down you know i get the chance to get carried along in his wake and so um god t well do i have to look at myself uh you know i i was talking the other night when that happened then they spotlighted me you know I'm at the age of a certain age and there's some people in the squares I'm looking at do you find yourself looking in the mirror and say who is that you know when did that guys who is that fat man in the mirror looking at me so you know look at me and i'm gonna quit playing because we're going to go through the 12 steps um experientially for the next i think ali has us in here for 12 weeks you guys and um to be honest with you we have no clue what's going to take place in these little these little fireside chats we're going to have but uh steve and i um have both been on this path for a number of years my sobriety date is october the 11th 1986 and uh i can think of nothing more exciting to me than to just have opportunity to sit down and let you guys eavesdrop on some conversations we'll have over the next few weeks and that's what we're going to do and we'll start it with uh talking about this first step trust me we are not experts on alcoholics anonymous we don't hold ourselves out to be experts on the steps the book the program alcoholics anonymous we're two guys who found something some years ago and it has been transformative and we like to talk about it and that's what we're going to do um and this first step and we're gonna stay with the steps that we're assigned this first steps the for me the biggest difficulty i have with step one you know because the steps you know obviously there are several components to it and i guess i should say what step one is admitted we were powerless over alcohol our lives have become unmanageable and i had tried this thing i came october 11th 86 but i originally came in august of 1985. and i a couple of feudal attempts you know real weak attempts subsequent to that to come back around alcoholics anonymous and there were a couple of things i never had a problem uh admitting i'm an alcoholic one it's the price of admission to talk at a meeting and i love talking at a meet so they said admit you alcohol yeah i admitted two when i went into my first treatment program it was also the price of admission that go in the treatment you have to say you were alcoholic but three i had never done the real first step and so that was one of my biggest struggles with this deal you know, because step one is not the first step in recovery. You know, when we read in the book, it says, we learned that we have to fully concede to our innermost self. This is the first, and I hadn't conceded to my innermOST self. You Know, I admitted I was an alcoholic. I came around and that idea of conceding to myself that something defeated me, that was the hardest thing in the world because I was a go-getter. I was to make something happen guy. I was a professional guy. I was an achiever and I was an accomplisher. And I also was hindered because I had a real extensive history with weed and cocaine. And so those reservations obscured my relationship with alcohol. And the interesting thing about that is, so why is that important? Because for me and And for us, this idea of entire abstinence, that was foreign to me. And that's the biggest reason why the reservations had to be discarded. And the other thing that was a problem for me early on in recovery and getting this deal was I don't have experience, and I've heard a lot of people share in their stories. We have some good friends and I know their stories. And a lot of you guys share that you had tried over and over and over to stop on your own, and you found out that you couldn't. Now the second part of our first step, which is finding out I couldn't quit on my own entirely, I had never tried to stop. I never tried totally stop getting loaded till I came to the rooms. So I didn't have the history. I didn't have a track record with that. I didn'T have anything to say that I had had countless vain attempts to prove we could drink like other people. I'd had countless vein attempts to prove that I could not spend all my money. I'd have countless vein attempt to prove that I can avoid a consequence. I've had countless vane attempts to proved that I could do this and stay in the house. I had all those, but I had never ever, ever, ever, ever tried from the time I discovered this magic potion in college. I took my first drink when I was 16 and I started drinking in earnest when I Was 18 living in the dorms. And from the time I started Drinking to the time, I got to you guys. I have never ever ever made a vow that I'm stopping entirely, you know? So those two things, one, because the first step is a, it's a conclusion I draw based on my experience. It's not learned. It'S not something that I come in here and decide. I decide, no, you don't. You know, it'S a conclusion. I draw, based on my experience, and so my experience with the physical part, yes, I knew that when I took one i couldn't stop spending all my money when i took one i could never make it home on payday that wasn't even in the in the cards when i looked one i couldn't tell you when i was going to come home so the physical part i had down but the idea of of this obsession you know it took me a while um when it talked about those account countless vain attempts to prove we could do it like other people that's the deal that hung me up and it took me a minute to get here uh in october 1986 and i'm wondering was there any particular problem looking back at your experience that you have with the first step or understanding in the first step. Well, for me it was and Ralph, let me introduce myself a little bit. And you know, my sobriety dates June 30 1989. And I'm so grateful. You know, Ollie played Ralph and I off each other by telling me that Ralph would do it if I would do It. And he told Ralph that that that I would do it if he would do it. So our vanity got us both here. And, and in what I hope we're doing, and Ralph talked about it, we only had one conversation for about 10 minutes before starting this. But what we hope to do is have a conversation with each other in with you guys. And that conversation will be at I hope uh us having a conversation about our application of the information which brought about the transformation and and really what we have is our experience laid over the information that the big book has and it may look and sound a little different each of our experience with the same thing may end up being a little bit different and that doesn't make either of us wrong i think that there's just a there's a lot of room to navigate in alcoholics anonymous but uh and to your to your question around that i have trouble with the first step well i'm like you i spent an awful long time trying to to control and enjoy my drinking you talk about you know countless vain attempts to drink like other people i was trying to drink like other people but i had identified a very specific group to try to drink like and uh so i was drinking like them but i wanted to try that the control and enjoy my drinking aspect when i read that in our book that rang that rang my bell a little bit because controlling enjoy to me does not mean not get drunk it means don't get too drunk it doesn't mean i want to feel different after i drink but but but what i was trying to do is spend a lot of time trying to not let that happen again you know i got six duis i never got one on purpose you know uh i never took my first drink and said if i do everything just right by the end of the night i'll have you know pissed my pants be handcuffed direct to my car in the back of a police car headed off to jail let's get this party started that was never my goal so i had countless vain attempts to try to drink and get everything alcohol did for me without suffering the pains of what it did to me but before i got to alcoholics anonymous i did not understand on me what powerlessness over alcohol meant or looked like in fact the first time i heard the the idea forwarded about being powerless over alcohol it that rang hollow with me that didn't sound true i didn't think in terms of being powerless you know there's a line back in uh a passage into the employer and i know that that we've got 305 now dedicated aa members or you wouldn't be here tonight but you got to be a full-on dedicated aa member to read all the way to the employer and uh it says back there that when dealing with an alcoholic there may be a natural annoyance that someone could be so weak stupid and irresponsible and it's talking about from the perspective of the employer that's not acquainted with alcoholism and I wasn't acquainted with alcoholicism as AA describes it before I got to AA so I spent a lot of time with other people because to the untrained eye alcoholism looks weak stupid and irresponsible it looks like if you if I loved my daughter I wouldn't do that if I cared about my job I wouldn't do that. If I loved my wife, I wouldn't do that if I want to stay out of jail, I wouldn't do that it looks like that there would be circumstances sufficient for me to be able to amend my behavior. But even when I tried to and I wasn't always trying to but even when idea it met with the limited effect. So yeah, Ralph, I was I was puzzled about that first step. I was puzzled about why sometimes I got drunk on purpose from the get-go. It's let's go, it's on. But there were other times I intended to do better and I didn't understand the concept of having an allergy to alcohol that Dr. Silkworth talks about until I got to AA. And when our book says the doctor's theory that we have an allergy interest us, It explains that for which we could not otherwise account. That fascinated me, that did interest me because it began to explain, it gave me a frame of reference of why when I meant to do better, I still couldn't do better. And so I absolutely was challenged by that. You know, Ralph, the book says uh uh that that the mind that the body of the alcoholic is quite as abnormal as his mind now i will tell you that i showed up here what what i had to discover was that my mind was quite as have normalized my body but i'd like you to pick up on on that mind-body aspect of our alcoholism and that mind body aspect of alcoholism is i think the hallmark a lot of times people come in and when we, and we'll talk about, you probably have heard it. And a lot of people in the squares might've heard themselves say it. I was an alcoholic before I took the first drink. I had this, I was now, and it's critical for me to know that a crucial component of alcoholism is drinking alcohol. That's a critical component. People, I think sometimes because we're storytellers, and it's the best way for us to see the transformation. So sometimes we start thinking that the circumstance and situation that's described in our stories is a description of alcoholism. And nothing could be further from the truth, because there are a bunch of people who suffer the pains of abandonment, rejection, feeling different and apart from, who sometimes have suffered various forms of abuse, who've never taken a drink. We might call them neurotic, some of them psychotic, Some of them regular people going through life, you know, going through it as best they can. But this idea of this physical abnormality, I think the reason that that is so important is that's the one thing we don't treat in Alcoholics synonymous. We don't treat the physical factor. In fact, Dr. Silkworth, in The Doctor's Opinion, which is where the first step really is spelled out the physical feature of it, starts in The Doctors' Opinions in our book. Dr. silkworth says the only thing he has to suggest when it comes to the allergy, which has to do with the body, is entire abstinence. That's where we get that from. There's nothing we can learn. There are no steps we can take. There nothing the only uh remedy for the physical is entire abstinence it's the second part of this disease this mental obsession that makes that seemingly untenable i keep picking it up but the physical feature one of the things that interests me or that confused me when i was new i don't know and i'm going to assume that of all the people that are here there are some people who are new. One of the things I've enjoyed the most in this Zoom world is that we've had people getting sober on Zoom in this environment, and so I'm not going to assume that we've got all, you know, veteran, died in the war, come out to hear me and see. I'm going to assume that we've also got some new members, and those new members may be like I was. There were some words that we use in Alcoholics Anonymous that didn't conform to my everyday vocabulary usage. Allergy was the first one. How the hell are you going to tell me I have an allergy to alcohol? As a kid for a time, I think I had an allergy. I can't remember now. Oranges or strawberries and I broke up in a rash. I did not rush to get them. I didn't hurry up to go seek them out. I stayed as far away from them as possible. And I tried with everything in me, not that, and I liked the taste, but it was not enough to make me want to suffer the consequences of it. So when you talked about this allergy, that was puzzling to me, baffling to me until I really got into the book. And so I have to look at the definition and an allergy is an abnormal reaction. And the normal reaction, you know, to drink an alcohol, I quench my thirst or get a warm tipsy feeling i get a buzz you may have seen some people say i'm feeling it i'm cool i'm good you know now there are some people too this is what alcohol does and when you're new if you're sitting here you also might get the idea that everybody that's drinking who gets drunk is alcoholic no the action of alcohol on people is if you drink too much you will get drunk but the action of alcohol on what is known in the book as these chronic alcoholics is and the doctor talks really crazy he says it's the manifestation of an allergy oh that's a mouthful right there the action alcohol on these chronic alcoholic the hell is a chronic alcoholic you know about diseases you know people who catch a cold and and get over a cold that's an acute disease get over it the mumps and the measles acute diseases get them one time get over it then you have chronic diseases the book the dictionary i'll say it's marked by frequent or continual use but a chronic disease in the in the medical sense of the physical heart disease that's a chronic disease you got it it ain't going nowhere you're not growing diabetes chronic disease alcoholism chronic disease once you pickle you're now going back to cucumber so the doctor says on these people who've now crossed this line the action of alcohol he says is the manifestation is the way an allergy shows up well how does an allergy show up on ralph white well analogy shows up on ralf like this when i drink i get thirsty oh wait a minute that is not the normal thing when i go to happy hour and i sit with my buddy at happy hour and he says to me i told my old lady i'm gonna be home at nine o'clock and i said i told my old ladies i'ma be home in nine o clock and they come around at about seven o' clock and say last call you know for happy hour and instead of me saying let me have one more because i gotta go i said bring me nine jim gimlet's and i'm there i don't get up i don t go home at last call in fact i don T go home at two o clock i m the one and i used to think that's because that's the way i get down that's the way me and my buddies get down we close places down now i don't look at all the times when i said i gotta be home at nine o'clock i don t look at the times when I said I don't have this money to spend you know each and every time I don t Look at the times I set out the time went on don't Look at the times i set out to get to look at the times that I set out to just go out and go to happy hour or just go out and spend twenty dollars i look at those times in my experience man steve told me something happens in me and what the doctor called this allergic reaction this reaction of when i take one he calls it the manifestation of an allergy and he says what he called this thing was he called it the phenomena of craving phenomena because we can't see it we can touch it we can't but we know it those of us who've experienced didn't know it now outsiders you just stupid you're just tripping you just trying to have a good time man don't bring me this but those of us who have experienced it you know this phenomenon craving and and that's the other thing that i had to get down with steve because in my vernacular craving comes before you take something so in alcoholics anonymous i had to learn the lay of the land i have to learn the language of recovery craving comes after i put one in me ladies when you get pregnant you know sit up usually at a late hour in the morning when when only 7-eleven is open daddy i got a craving for some black walnut ice cream would you go get it for me craving comes first daddy goes to the store brings it back you satisfy the craving bam an Alcoholics Anonymous, let's reverse the order. I take a drink, not a drink wants a drink. So craving, allergy, those terms were foreign to me. But like you, Steve, what got me was they'd explain things that had been... Now, I'm not a medical guy. So the doctor claims that it's something physically different. Okay, doc, I hear you. I'm really down with why you think that's the case but it explained things for which i could not otherwise account my old lady used to look at me and say damn ralph how come you can't make it home with a dime out of your paycheck now i will raise up and i get mad and i go behind this wall but behind the wall i'd be thinking how come i can't bring a dime home out of my paycheck and when i read that piece in the doctor's opinion that it's something physically different about me and that this monster I discovered is in charge of me and not me in charge of it. It explains some stuff that had been unaccountable for me, so I went to treatment, Steve, and I learned that piece. I learned there's something physically different around me. I learn that I get dominated by this thing that I discovered all those many years ago. I've matched it up against my experience, and it seems to me that there was a time when I was a cucumber, and there was a time that I was the pickle. And the thing about it, the book talks about there is a point at which every alcoholic passes into the region from which there's no return. I like those kind of adjectives. I don't know when it happened. It just because there's not warning signs. If you take this next one, you're now entering the region. It's like but looking back now that I'm sober, I used to think at the very end is when it happens. But in the mid 70s. In the mid 70s, when I was still going to parties and clubs and still thinking I was having a good time, I probably had already entered the region from which there was no return to human aid. Now the interesting thing about that so I go to treatment and I learned this physical part helped me with this one, knowing that I can't take the first one. Why the hell do I keep taking the first I can tell you in my case, Ralph, the thing that happened was, I'm like you, that I got to Alcoholics Anonymous and you guys gave voice to my alcoholism. You used language, you described things that a moment before I wouldn't have been able give voice to and then when you said it i knew what you were talking about and some of that language like you said ralph it's so uh uh you know the phenomenon of craving i mean this is pretty colorful did we got kind of a cool love vocabulary i was never out at the bar and after about my third drink nudged the guy next to me and said i don't know about you pal but that phenomenon of cravings kicking in on me you know whoa lack of power is my dilemma you know i did i just thought i changed my mind i didn't i didn's feel powerlessness at that point uh my wife's in the other room connie so many people on here know connie and she i used to call her and say i'll be home at seven baby and she would say you're gonna have to be more specific you know a.m or p.m and you know Monday or Tuesday and uh uh February or March and uh but but this language is really useful to me you gave me all of a sudden there was there was voice to this thing I had not been able to articulate you know you talked about the phenomenon of craving I want to say now that I'm sure we'll talk about it much later but the only other place that I know that Bill uses the term craving and our big book is all the way when we get over to page 164 and it says that he will show me how to create the fellowship I crave so we're in this journey we're here tonight headed all the through these steps to the 12th step where what has changed is what I was looking for in a drink I'm finding in this fellowship of the spirit. Yet on the front end of this, there's no way I can see that or comprehend that when I'm still trying to grapple with what I viewed as my relationship with alcohol. I didn't show up at Alcoholics Anonymous in my mind an alcoholic. I showed up with alcohol related problems. I had problems that I could connect the dots specifically to getting in trouble related to my drinking. I hurt people related to me drinking, I broke promises related to drinking.I did a lot of stuff because I was drunk and I can explain anything I ever did while i was drinking i was drunk when i'm drunk i do drunk stuff you know you pour a fifth alcohol in me and a fifth alcohol and a non-alcoholic we're both going to be drunk and we're all going to do drunk but i had no idea that i was out that that i had alcoholism even when i wasn't drinking i had not idea that this first step extended beyond the fact that i'm weak stupid and irresponsible in the way that i drink and that's when i began to hear and i came through treatment as well and i and i went to treatment as a result of trying to get the legal system off my back we ended up going to aa meetings and and uh and that'S where i heard you guys talk about yourselves doing just what our book says other alcoholics that we do with each other since if you're an alcoholic that wants to get over it you may already be asking what do i have to do and it says that's exactly what this book is about what we're going to talk that's Exactly what this book we're talking about is about but maybe the more important part of that is when it says and we will tell you what we have done and the many women in Alcoholics Anonymous told me what they had done it wasn't terribly appealing to me at first but it but uh but it was it seemed honest but i couldn't until i could grasp the fact that i had a problem i could not solve that that i that i cannot moderate my drinking now like ralph said my experience was i never tried i tried to quit for good and for all twice before i got to aa In 1980, I had a head-on collision going the wrong way down the interstate. I hit a car and two other cars hit us. It totaled all four cars. It sent people to the hospital. It sent me to the Cobb County Jail in Atlanta. I came to in that jail cell the next morning. I had urinated on myself and I vomited on myself. Or I hope I did because somebody did. and uh but regardless you i hope it's an indignity i inflicted on myself but in truth i had never been more afraid of the consequences that awaited me legally and personally and professionally i had ever been more ashamed of what i'd done and the harm i caused others i had Never been more humiliated to be sitting in that drunk tank in my own urine and my own vomit. And I had never been more certain I'll never drink again. I quit that morning, and I'm in it with no reservations. And 10 days later, I'm driving down the road smoking a joint drinking a bottled wine thinking I nearly overreacted to that. But see, I don't know that I've got alcoholism. And i don't understand that. But it and I don' know until I get to Alcoholics Anonymous and see on page 24 in our book where it talks about me it says a guy like me the alcoholic at certain times won't be able to bring to consciousness with sufficient force the memory of the suffering and humiliation of even a week or a month ago I'll be without defense against the dream so circumstances have proven insufficient sufficient to keep me sober. You can't scare me sober, you can't threaten me with jail and keep me sober you can love me sober ,you can entice me financially with jobs and raises and promotions. So far circumstances have never proven sufficient to give me sustained sobriety you can scare me sober for a few days sometime but I didn't understand that see when I was driving down that road 10 days later i didn't think i was powerless over alcohol i thought wait a minute i'm gonna try really hard i'm not gonna do that again i'm going to do better nine years eight years later in 1988 when i got my last dui i left the courthouse after doing a plea bargain agreement and they told me i was about to go to jail for a year if i had any other alcohol related offense i made a decision i wasn't going to drink for a year to avoid the consequences. And just a few days into that, I started drinking again a few weeks into that. I was going home one night. I drove off the side of the road. I passed out in the car. It hit the gravel side. It pushed me back up on the road it woke me up struck me sober I tried to get home because if I got arrested I was going to jail for a year I dropped me about 20 miles an hour at you know three in the morning on the interstate trying to get him home I pulled in my driveway and this is the first time I ever had this thought this was the first step in a way that I didn't understand it sitting in that driveway when I got home was the first time I ever thought to myself, I can't not drink. I will always drink. That thing that frightens me the most is insufficient. So I'm just going to drink and sometimes there's going to be hell to pay. And for the next six months, I drank unbridled without a governor on myself at all until I checked into that treatment facility just to do time. so arriving at that first step around my relationship with alcohol that's one thing but this ralph talked about it a minute ago but this unmanageability this fact that i've got alcoholism see when i'm not drinking i'm about to share with you my point of view it doesn't make it the point of view but here's how i view it what it feels like what i'm going to use the phrase point of vue a lot over the next few weeks because a point of vu is simply what it looks like from here and different people are looking from different points of view and see things differently. But I view the first half of the first step as the physical and mental aspects of alcoholism. I've got that physical component that Ralph talks so eloquently about, that physical allergy, that's what Silkworth brought to the table for us more than anything. You've got this physical allergy that when you drink, you're unpredictable and the mental obsession was harder for me to understand but I began to get it that I am then also doomed to drink even when I don't want to or even I can't understand so so I will mentally be unable to stop myself from drinking you know one example of the insanity you know when Jim pours the whiskey in his milk in the book and and of course that's not insane that's just really bad taste to put whiskey in your milk. The insane part, the insane part is just before that, when Jim says he knew one more drink than a loss of family lost a job and trip to the asylum. But why not a little whiskey in my milk? It's let's risk it. And, and what and right after that describes insanity in our book or the insanity that I have come to embrace it says, It says, whatever the precise definition may be, whatever the psychologist and psychiatrist may say insanity is, what can this lack of proportion and the ability to think straight be called but insanity? And I realized that I had this lackofproportion. I see things out of proportion. I respond disproportionately to the events I'm responding to. And so I've got this mental and physical component to my alcoholism. But the unmanageability, it is my belief that the unmanagability is the spiritual component to Alcoholics Anonymous. That is the spiritual malady. And as Ralph said, there are a lot of people what we call people, we say, Hey, we got family members, he doesn't drink, but he's an alcoholic? No, he's not. Unless he's drinking. We don't know. But see that first half of the first step that physical allergy is is common, it is exclusive to the alcohol. Silkware says the average temperate drinker never ever suffers this phenomenon of craving. So here's some news I know if you don't have the phenomenon of Craven, you're probably not alcoholic doesn't make you a bad person, you just not alcohol. But that second part of the first step, that unmanageability, it is common to the alcoholic but not exclusive to the alcohol. And there are over 200 other 12-step programs that have unmanagability as part of their first step. And this unmanigability I believe is an internal condition. It is not the chaos that my alcoholism, that my drinking causes. It's not my wife packing for me. It's getting arrested. It's being behind in the mortgage. It's doing all the stuff I do drunk. It is stone sober on a Tuesday afternoon with a wife that loves me and a kid that loves me and looks pretty good on the outside. Why do I feel the way I feel? and then you ask me how I feel and I go, I don't know. I just know it's different than I think you feel and it is that thing that keeps me separate from everyone else. It is what Chamberlain calls that conscious separation from man and God. I am consciously separate from you yet I don'T let you know it. You can't let the word get out on that. I don' t tell anybody how I feeL and i wouldn't have been able to articulate it again i just know it's different than i think you feel there's a wonderful little passage for me back in a vision for you and it's describing dr bob and it says he was painfully aware he was somehow abnormal for he did not yet fully understand what it meant to be alcoholic and see what i'm trying to get in that first step what we hope conversationally at least we all leave this week with is a better understanding of what it means to be alcoholic and it means more than i've got a drinking problem that's not unimportant alcohol is a pretty critical part of alcoholics anonymous or we would have a different root word apparently you got to do a little drinking to get here but it is not the sum total of my alcoholism and remarkably going through these these 12 steps these these spiritual principles added as a way of life treats that unmanageability which renders the drinking unnecessary for a guy like me ralph any of that make any sense to you I don't feel like talking now, Steve. Shit, I'm listening. Not everybody sees why I wanted to be on this deal with you. So that first step, 34 years later, what does it look like? Because you hear people saying all the time, I am manageable. I am powerless over people, places and things of politics over you know in bill's story bill talked about it in surrender and curiously uh that surrender did not bring about recovery from alcoholism that surrender meant he surrendered to drink not he surrendered the gets over he surrendered to drink because after he came out of that surrender when he said quicksand stressed out all around me alcohol was my master and he said the next day the courage to do battle was not there you know i'm done i'm cooked goose cook i'm i'm done and i think uh i really our book uh starts the first step with the doctor's opinion and we devote more time and pages to the first steps than we do any other step we go all the way from the doctor's opinion now bill's story is uh sharing what it used to be like what happened and what i'm like now all that's that's our version of sharing and it's in the front of the book then we have there is a solution which curiously is still really step one and then we are more about alcoholism so we've got all those chapters devoted to this first step so it must be something pretty important about it it must be something really important to know about ralph i don't care and in and we in uh and more about alcoholism it goes through a lot of the mental states that precede a relapse in the drinking ralp i don t care if you ve been sober 30 you can t pull out the carpet slippers you can't say I m cool you know one of the most interesting features about coming to the Alcoholics Anonymous, was the notion and the idea that my alcoholism is growing even when I'm sober. That alcoholism affects me when I am not drinking. A novel idea. My sponsor always talks about that. A noble idea. Did not know that. Didn't I know my alcohol was growing even while I'm sober? So this first step deal, I was starting out on this idea that I hear a lot of people share and again i'm in point of view too thank you steve because i i'm talking about me i hear a lot of people share you know uh it's a first step experience this idea of powerlessness i'm powerless over people places and things but the deal about alcohol is the powerlessness that we talk about in that first step is um while it is true that i'm dominated by people and places and maybe things. When we talk about this deal of alcoholism, when Bill talks about it being my master, I'm ruled by alcohol. I'm ruling by it because guess what? When I start getting loaded, people, places, they don't have power over me. They are not in my rear view mirror. They are not on the horizon. They're not a piece of business. When I'm sober, alcohol is still piece of business alcohol is still a threat alcohol is still viable and i can't touch it it is the other things um it while it's true that they have some influence that i i don't have the ability to influence them i can make you talk to me the way i want you to talk to me i can' t make you love me the way i want you to love me i can't make the job hire me if they don't want to hire me i can't make the job keep me if they don't want to keep me i can't make you talk to me in a respectful manner it's a whole lot of things i can do about but i can leave you alone i can divorce myself from you i can do all that but with this deal alcohol it rules me it shot caused by i can t leave it alone no matter how great the wish or the necessity this business of um what we working with in the first step. I got to you 33 years old and I was surrendered by the disease of alcoholism. I didn't surrender, I was surrounded. I was walking the streets three or four o'clock in the morning. I wasn't able to walk. I had no ability to walk anymore. I couldn't walk anymore in the morning, I would no longer employable. And I was a working guy. I came home one morning and i'm a guy that every thursday don't expect to see me home i don't even that when the book talks about common sense becoming uncommon sense that's one of the first things that jumped out at me because i was married and it didn't seem like uh anything out of the ordinary for my wife not to expect to See Me on Payday don't Expect To See Me On Payday there were many other days in week you don't see me too but don't even expect to see me on payday and so i came in um i got paid on thursday i came here on a sunday morning and uh i came out on a saturday morning i'm sorry i didn't make it to sunday that week and it was in about noon and my wife opened the door and when she opened the door standing behind her was my mom um and i couldn't believe she had told my mom i could not believe she had told my mom the way we were living because when i'm living in this disease that i suffer from you know i do a lot of um utilities being cut off borrowing money from my mom and from her mom landlord being dodged the first of every month keeping candles in the house because we never know when we're going to need them guys coming around demanding money on my behalf if you want to keep your husband i'm that guy and so i came home this particular sunday saturday morning and my wife took me. That afternoon, we agreed to go to church. That's always my mom's solution. It's always her solution. So we agreed the go to church and we agreed sit in front of this minister. And this minister, I'm giving him my best you guys i'm sincere uh i'm tearful i'm remorseful i am serious and i don't know what it was i know now we talk about what heart speaks hard hears and we also talk about game recognized game i didn't know at the time that that minister we were meeting with had been an alcoholic who who had recovered, who had gotten sober just going to church and by preaching. But I remember him telling my wife that at that meeting that Saturday afternoon, you're gonna have to leave him. And I was dumbfounded. Why would a man of the cloth sit up here in home rec? Why would he tell my wife, you're going to have to live with him? Why would He say that? Why would we undermine? We came in here for you to patch us up and you sitting up here breaking us up. I could not believe it. And I left that meeting with him and my wife, and that was probably in May or June of 1985. And I was put out of the house two months later. And I made my first foray to Alcoholics Aboluments in 1985. And that's when I got hit with the realization of what I was working with, that I couldn't, like Steve said, couldn't talk myself out of this one, Couldn't think myself out of this one. Couldn't will myself out of this room. Couldn't work my way out of the room. Couldn't get out of this one and from and that was August of 85. I made it 89 days and chapter three has a lot of scenarios about drinking one is Jim that Steve talked about already. One is also there are the times what about the real alcoholic and that was the time he talked about another definition of this insanity and that is that parallel with my sound reasoner ran the insanely trivial idea you know that i'll be able to take one and on christmas eve in 1985 you know i took a drink because i was lonely and i was angry and i Was frustrated and i felt rejected and i set out deliberately to do it. And just like it says then, even when we set out deliberately to do it, we found out that it was insanely insufficient in the light of what happened. And so I crawled back to you guys October 11th of 1986 with a full understanding of my condition. What I like about you guys is I caught alcoholism in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. Didn't I come in here thinking that I was alcoholic? But you guys have a way with me, people like me. You have a way of not putting your finger in my face, not telling me, dude, there's something wrong with you. Not telling me look at that pretty wife you got seemed like you would stop for her. You guys have a way of standing up and telling your stories and undressing yourself. And when you undress yourself in front of me, I started matching my inconsistency with your inconsistency. I started matching what I used to call my stupidity with your stupidity. I started matchin' my spree for your spree. I startin' matchin', my goin' the purse against your goin', the purse you gettin' fired against my gettin' fire, and pretty soon, I found myself doin' the magic that happens in the rooms. I starin' doin' a head-knock, because I'm a yeah butt guy, and if we got yeah butt guys on here, welcome to Alcoholics Anonymous. it took me a while my sponsor who was working with me at the time you know i was always one of those he said ralph we're going to work on a couple of things with you when we in this first step experience we're gonna work on calling some of the stuff out of your vocabulary we're gonna see if we can make it through one one sentence without a year but then we'll see if we could make it do a paragraph then we will see if can make through a whole conversation because i'm the year of that guy and um but i had that experience that it talked about crushed by a self-imposed crisis we can neither evade nor avoid you know i was crushed by the self-opposed crisis you know I'm one um that took it all the way to the end and then some i've got four brothers me and my brothers are all it's four of us in the program with you guys so one of the things that i like the most thing that you were talking about is i would match my drinking against the people i ran with and it seemed normal that's how everybody got down that I ran with. So this idea of, and I love when you said, so this idea of proving we could drink like other people. Yeah, but what other people? I was matching it up against the wrong people, you know, because everybody I got down with got down like that, including the people that were closest to me in the entire world. And so this business, and I'm so glad that we're going to go through this for the next 12 weeks, but that second piece, this idea of even when I want to, I found I couldn't quit on my own. Now that one, that idea had to get snuffed out through bitter experience, you know, after I tried this thing in 1985. I had never tried it before. I hadn't ever done the experiment of can I quit on my own. I had done the experiment of stopping some things, never, ever, ever stopping everything. I thought I'd be smoking weed in a rocking chair with my grandson. I look forward to that. You know, when I was in school, I looked forward to the time I'm going to be the cool granddaddy. You know I'm gonna have a snifter over here and a J over here. And so the idea that I couldn't stop on my own started getting snuffed out after i got introduced to you guys you know after you guys started sharing with me you know um the physical allergy and then uh four vain attempts to come back you know so my experience showed me that no matter how great the wish no matter how great their necessity no matter, how much my wife cried no matter. How much I cry no matter how much my mama put us in the circle and held hands with me and my brothers no matter how often the job told me if you can't come around here no better than that don't come around anymore i'm not a jail-going guy so i didn't have that threat over me but everything else in life you guys um i was a dreamer i was gold guy and uh alcohol stripped all of it from me and I am so grateful that it did what it is that it does in the way that it does. You know we're going to leave with a cliffhanger, we're gonna open it up for you guys you know to share and ask us questions about this first step and what we're really going to encourage you to do is we're not going to leave you hanging. Obviously something happened that Steve and I both, you know, somehow incorporated this first step sufficiently enough, but you got to come back next week to find out what I'm step one is the problem. And step one is a conclusion I draw based on my experience. You know, it's step one is The Problem. So we've all, we've wallowed in The Problem this week. We're going to wallow the problem a little bit longer, you guys, because we're going to open it up for questions from the floor. But I really encourage you to come back because nobody likes being in this hopeless, powerless place that is step one. But it is a vital and essential place we got to be because the old timer in my first home group used to say, if you don't know what the problem is, you know there is no solution. Steve, you want to say something before we open it up for questions oh before we open it up for questions uh you can use the raise hand feature in the uh participants tab or the reactions tab for us to recognize questions from the floor yeah thanks ralph and uh yeah i just we're we're racing toward uh five after the hour in a minute where we'll open up for questions but i wanna uh uh build on a couple of points that ralph made relative to me and you know and and that one is he talked about uh how what he heard from the men and women of aa that there wasn't finger pointing and finger wagging and and i will tell you that my experience has been that that that's the language of the heart and the information in alcoholics anonymous has been critical for me learning about the allergy was critical it was life-changing hearing about the mental obsession life changing but what really happened in my early meetings i would come home and and uh my wife connie as some of you know her sobriety dates 10 days after mine but she was four years from her last drink before coming to a.a and and she said she'd have gotten to a a lot quicker if i hadn't been so helpful to her but uh um i would uh come home and and i would be on fire you know because of what i've heard at these meetings and and and I'd be trying to say man you should have heard you know they got the speaker at the meeting tonight and she go you know what do you say and I go I don't know you know I don' t know but but I felt better for having heard it and maybe the nicest compliment i've ever received uh from a guy named dave b out in southern california ralph knows dave and and and but i had never met him before and after i'd spoken at a conference the next morning at breakfast he came by my breakfast table and he said steve i really enjoyed your talk last night he said i don't remember the words to the song but i sure did love the music And I think that that's what we've got. It's not the words, it's the music. It is that when we are speaking the language of the heart, when one alcoholic is speaking to another, it resonates in here. It is not academic. It isn't intellectual. It' s internal. Our job, frankly, and it's a sad one, our job is to leave you here tonight helpless and hopeless. us. Now we're going to go ahead and tell you that there is a solution. Unfortunately, the book says almost none of us like it. But there is A solution. So come back next week. And maybe you'll have some questions here. But the book makes the point it says, you know, in the in the 12 and 12, it says none of us likes to admit complete defeat, right? Complete defeat. And we'll read in a couple of weeks where it says our human resources as marshaled by the wheel failed utterly, not like we're not very good at it. We're utter failures. I cannot I cannot manage my alcoholism. I am completely and only in this one of us talk about hitting bottom the 12 and 12 says, why don't this talk about heating bottom? This is well, because Why would any of us do what AA suggests we do? You know, our book says that willingness is the key. And I was 18 years sober before I looked up the word willingness. And among other things, it said doing that which I would not do as a matter of course. There is nothing AA has asked me to do that I was just about to do before I got here. There's nothing in our 12 steps that we're going to be part of my plan for living. So when I admit complete defeat, but don't confuse the bottom with circumstances. The bottom is whatever point I am willing to let go of old ideas and grab hold of the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous unreservedly and then get what it has for me. So I'm it's been so much fun for me to be here with Ralph. I'm so grateful for that opportunity thank you guys for pretending to pay attention for a while and We look forward to some questions