Deal with Alcohol or It Will Deal with You — That Door Is Not Always Open – John T.
About This Speaker Tape
John T. from Los Gatos chairs the first annual conference of the Saturday Night Live AA group in Northern California, a group he helped found with just seven members that has grown to over thirty meetings a week. He recalls his hostile first AA meeting, where the first two people he met insulted him, but his friend kept calling and bringing him back until he fell in love with the fellowship. His life began changing almost immediately, and his marriage to Peg transformed from an endurance contest into something precious.
At four months sober, John experienced a profound moment of clarity while sitting in a place he shouldn't have been. For two and a half hours he went mad with the urge to drink and hurt people, and in that crisis the veil was stripped away. He finally understood what it meant to be powerless over alcohol, why his children had hidden from him, why his wife had become the ice queen, and why his marriage had deteriorated. He credits a teacher who told him that if you work the steps for sobriety, all the related disorders take care of themselves.
John tells a darkly funny story his wife shared at a meeting: during his drinking years, when he would pass out on the couch sick with bronchitis, she would open all the doors and windows, turn off the furnace, and go to sleep. He ended up hospitalized with pneumonia four or five times a year. Her reasoning was that he couldn't drink in the hospital. As she put it, who could ever be convicted of murder by pneumonia? John uses this to illustrate how cunning, baffling, and powerful alcoholism is, affecting everyone around the alcoholic.
The conference theme is we deal with alcohol, and John returns to this throughout. He warns about the locked door in the alcoholic's mind that doesn't always swing both ways, recounting the anguished phone calls from relapsed members who say they can't come back. Several other speakers follow in this speaker-discussion format, touching on singleness of purpose, the drug-versus-alcohol question, repeated relapses before surrender, and the joy of sober fellowship. The meeting closes with John reminding everyone they are making history and that sobriety is a celebration.
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