Didn’t Know If I Was Alcoholic or Just F**ked Up Until Step One Got Diagnosed from the Actual Text — Tim M.

An addict, a chap called Jim Willis, who was my sponsor's first sponsor, a guy that got sober in 1957 and is still alive and still sober, says that when you say I'm an alcoholic and I'm an addict, it's like saying, he's from Texas, it's like saying you're from Dallas and you're from Texas. If you're from Dallas, you are from Texas. If I'm an alcoholic, I am an addict. Something I want to read from Dr. Bob's Nightmare. About the time of the beer experiment, I was thrown in with a crowd of people who attracted me because of their seeming poise, health, and happiness. They spoke with great freedom from embarrassment, which I could never do. And they seemed very much at ease on all occasions and appeared very healthy. More than these attributes, they seemed to be happy. And I first joined Alcoholics Anonymous. I was in serious trouble. And I found this group of people who were just like this. Bob isn't talking about AA here, he's talking about the Oxford groups. But everyone was happy, everyone was jolly, everyone was smiling. Most of them were wearing suits at the meeting. They were holding out their hand to me. They were telling me, just get a sponsor, work the steps, everything's going to be fine. Call a couple of newcomers every day. Do something on the Just For Today card, you'll be absolutely fine. And my experience is a bit like Bob's here. Bob goes on to say, I was self-conscious and ill at ease most of the time. My health was at the breaking point and I was thoroughly miserable. I was in a state of shock. I was in a state of shock. I was in a state of shock. I was in a state of shock. So I was going to these meetings and I thought, if I do what you're telling me to do, I'll be all right. I did it and I wasn't. I thought, I'm not allowed to share anything negative here because it might disturb the newcomer. I'm thinking, I'm the newcomer. I'm actually really disturbed by how good a day you say you're having because I'm doing what you're doing and I'm not feeling any better. I sensed they had something I didn't... I did not have from which I might readily profit. Now, they seemed to be happy, but you kind of ask them, well, how are you doing it? And they'd say, get a sponsor, get a sponsor, do the steps. And they couldn't tell me what they actually did when they got up at seven in the morning and wanted to die. They couldn't tell me what to do. They just said, call someone. I'd call someone and get off the phone and think, I still want to die. I learned that it was something... Something of a spiritual nature, which did not appeal to me very much, but I thought it could do no harm. I gave the matter much time and study, study. So they gave me some AA literature to read and I read it until I was blue in the face. For the next two and a half years, but I still got tight every night nonetheless. I read everything I could find and talked to everyone who I thought knew anything about it. Uh, and I kept getting drunk and people said, you obviously don't want it enough. If you, if you, you know, we're all right. We're doing what we're told and we're not drinking. So obviously you're doing something wrong. Um, when Bob finally gets sober, he says this about his meeting with, um, uh, Bill and he said, he gave me information about the subject of alcoholism, which was undoubtedly helpful. Of far more importance was the fact that he was the first living human with whom I'd ever talked, who knew what he was talking about in regard to alcoholism from actual experience. In other words, he taught my language. Um, and there's another line on page 29. It says, we believe that... But it is only by fully disclosing ourselves and our problems that they will be persuaded to say, yes, I'm one of them too. I must have this thing. And then this group I joined, uh, you weren't really allowed to fully disclose yourself and your problems. That was between you and this thing called a sponsor. There was no room for it at the group. There was no room for it at coffee afterwards. It was just, I couldn't connect with these people. I just couldn't. I just couldn't. I just couldn't connect. And I started calling this bloke who had about 3,000 sponsees and I get to leave a message on his answer machine every day. And I needed to connect. Uh, my whole life before... I actually did get sober, which was on the 24th of July, 1993. Uh, people had noticed that I was in serious trouble. Drunk and sober. I was marginally worse sober. When I was drunk, I was passed out a lot of the time. I would just get drunk and go off and stop bothering people. Um, people noticed I was in trouble and they tried to reach me. When I was about 14, 15, I had a dramatic nervous breakdown. I think I made it more dramatic than it actually would have been because I wanted to create a stir. But it was dramatic and I was so nervous. I was so nervous. I was so nervous. I was so nervous. I was so nervous. I was sent to doctors and I was sent to teachers and I was sent to priests and none of them could reach me. Uh, and during my drinking, I saw doctors and I saw psychiatrists and none of them could reach me. Um, what got me into Alcoholics Anonymous was a couple of people who did reach me. Uh, one of them was a woman on television who I recognized from... So there was some... Um, uh, TV show where there were these, uh, uh, artists and they were talking. It was some sort of panel show and they were sort of funny and eccentric and outlandish. And this, this woman, who I later discovered was in Alcoholics Anonymous, uh, was, was, I knew her from that and she, she wore these sort of turban and these great caftans and she was this larger-than-life figure. And I'd always assumed that she was a drinker, like me, that you can just kind of tell, uh, that this is someone that doesn't fit into society. She's got to be a drinker. Um, and she was on Richard and Judy. This was around 1992. And she, she didn't break her anonymity, but what she did say was that she didn't drink anymore. And they said, what do you do now you don't drink? And she said, everything. And, uh, this resonated with me. Because, um, although I was edgy in the extreme and volatile and all sorts of difficult things before I ever drank, I had a life. There were some people in it. My relationships were crappy, but there were some people in my life. There was stuff I enjoyed doing. There was, there was, there were prospects for the future. There was some hope. And by the end of my drinking, I had totally lost any connection with another human being. Uh, I was alienated from everyone. I didn't understand anyone anymore. I thought I was the only person left in the world with any true feelings. You were just superficial. If you could cope, you were superficial. You did not feel things at the depth that I felt things. And I'd been a musician and I couldn't play anymore because I didn't relate to anything I was playing. Nothing meant anything anymore. And this gave me hope. Well, first of all, I realized that my drinking had stopped. Stopped me from living. I was just in this bubble of alcohol and the alcohol had stopped working by that point. And this gave me hope that if I stopped drinking, it will be possible to actually have a life. Because when I imagined not drinking, all I imagined was this gray landscape extending in all directions forever. That was it. There would be nothing on it. Just grayness. Um, and this, I think this was. This was an important, um, moment for me because it stuck in my mind. I, I, I'd never heard of Alcoholics Anonymous before I got here. Not formally. I'd know no one had ever mentioned it. Uh, just as an aside, there's a, there's a line in a Chuck Chamberlain book. Yeah. Um, Chuck was Clancy's sponsor. Clancy is Bob's sponsor. Bob is Joe's sponsor. Joe is my sponsor. And, uh, Chuck tells this. This story about this bloke who, um, is terrified of dogs, terrified of dogs, barking and biting him. And he goes back through his life and he discovers that in his childhood, this dog had bitten him. And he thought, that's why that, that, that will be why I'm scared of dogs. And, but this didn't satisfy him. So he went back further and he discovered that the reason the dog had bitten him on this occasion was they'd been chasing this girl and the dog bit him and his problem, his whole life was that he'd been chasing girls and getting bitten by dogs and he thought the problem was the dogs. So it really, really helps to know what the problem is. And this resonated a lot with me. And I've totally lost the track of why. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Looking back at these people who reached me, that was the first person that reached me was this woman that talked about not drinking. The second person that reached me was my brother. Uh, now the funny thing is, uh, people in AA sometimes say that everything has to be face to face. Everything has to be eyeballed. If you don't make your amends eyeball to eyeball, they don't count, is something that you'll hear. Um, that every contact has to be face to face. I was 12th stepped effectively by my brother. But it was in unusual circumstances. Um, this was about a month before I joined AA. I was, uh, staying with my parents. Uh, I'd had a Christmas day when I'd got up. Had some sheriffs. I'd had a Christmas party at about 10 o'clock, um, went and drank a quarter of a bottle of gin, drank over lunch, uh, left lunch halfway through because I had a migraine, whatever that was, uh, went and laid down upstairs, drank three quarters, uh, of a bottle of gin, passed out, woke up in the evening for about half an hour, uh, drank a quarter bottle of Cointreau, fell asleep, woke up at 11 o'clock the next day. Um. Um. A couple of days later, I'm rifling around, uh, looking, I don't know what I was looking for, but I found this file, um, containing notes that, from when my brother was at university. And interleaved with these notes were, uh, some letters. And this was odd in itself for a couple of reasons. Uh, he'd been dead 10 years by this point. And my mother is a burner. A burner of the past. If she finds something, she burns it. She does not keep things. If she's got a problem with something or someone, she, she destroys, she burns. Um, I remember these bonfires with, you know, all the family photos. And my father returning home and this, this picture of his mother kind of still smoldering, floating through the air. Um, this stuff shouldn't have been left over, but for some reason it was. And I started to look through, I started to look through these notes and I didn't understand them. So he, he was way ahead of me. Um, but there were some letters and, uh, there were letters that he'd written in the middle of the night and never sent. And I did that the whole time. I could only really be myself when I was drunk. I could let out what was inside when I was drunk and I would write these letters and by the end they'd sort of trail. Off. Off into just squiggly lines because I was too drunk to write and you'd wake up the next morning and you'd find these letters and you'd think, I cannot, thank God I didn't post this. I cannot send these letters and I read these letters one by one and, uh, they were in my own handwriting. Our handwriting was the same and he was talking about his alcoholism and he talked. I remember one particular image was that he felt like he was. He was sitting on top of a volcano, which could blow at any moment and when he had a drink, the volcano, it all calmed down again and everything was going to be fine and he'd get sober and the vault, he could feel the pressure building under the surface and the pressure more and more and more. He'd have a drink and the whole thing would calm down again and he wrote, I know I'm dying and, uh, he joined alcoholics. Anonymous in the late, he's a lot older than me, he joined alcoholics Anonymous in the late seventies, uh, and I was in an AA meeting in 1999 round then and there was a bloke there who said, my name's so and so, I'm from Bolton, I've been sober 35 years and I thought, I just wonder, we hadn't known at this point in 1999 that he'd even been in AA. We knew that he was an alcoholic. And he committed suicide. That's all we knew. Um, but I asked this bloke, I described my brother. He said, yeah, I know him. He was sober for a couple of years and he drank again and he committed suicide. So that was the truth of what happened to my brother. But all I knew at this point in 1992, 1993 was my brother was an alcoholic and that he was dying. And I knew that he'd committed suicide. Um, and he reached me, one alcoholic talking the truth about his alcoholism and not little, sometimes you hear people and their whole chair is this kind of daisy chain of quotations from the book, um, about their drinking life and about their sober life. And I'm like, I agree with every word you're saying, but who are you? I don't know who you are. You all sound the same to me. So it was my problem when I joined this group in 1993. I didn't know who any of these people were, but I knew my brother at that point and I knew he was like me. So I decided to stop drinking. It helps to know what the problem is. I thought drinking was my problem. If drinking was my problem, the solution is you stop drinking. So I stopped drinking. And, uh, I started approaching friends, all these people who tried to reach me and tell me what was wrong, wrong with me and tell me how I could change my life and none of them could ever reach me. I started to approach them and to apologize. I was making amends before I knew what amends were. Um, I was supposed to be at college. I started to try to get on back on track with my studies. I started running. I started eating. I hadn't eaten properly in a long time. Um, my life was at a triangle of, of home, the off license and the kebab shop. That was my life. I started to get things together and after a couple of weeks, I found myself drunk and I didn't know why. Um, a lot of other people have reached me over the years. Um, when I was 15 years old, I was a little bit of a drinker. Um, when I was 15 years old, I was a little bit of a drinker. Um, when I was 15 years old, I was a little bit of a drinker. Um, when I was 15 years old, I was a little bit of a drinker. Um, when I was 15 years old, I was sober. Um, when I was 15 years old, I was sober. Um, when I was 15 years old, I was sober. Um, when I was 15 years old, I was sober. Um, when I was 15 years old, I was sober. Um, when I was 15 years old, I was sober. Um, when I was 15 years old, I was sober. Um, when I was 15 years old, I was sober. Um, when I was 15 years old, I was sober. Um, when I was 15 years old, I was sober. Um, when I was 15 years old, I was sober. Um, when I was 15 years old, I was sober. Um, when I was 15 years old, I was sober. I was going to five or six meetings a week. My life on the outside looked pretty good. I had a good career, good home life, partner, money, a couple of foreign holidays a year. Everything was good, but I was a boy whistling in the dark. And at the meetings I went to, I heard a lot of things like, you've got to accept life on life's terms. There's a quotation from the book, it should be kosher. But life doesn't stop happening just because you're sober. And I thought I had to put up with life on life's terms. I thought I had to put up with a life that would constantly throw shit at me that I couldn't handle. I thought I had to put up with a relationship with my mother which was always, always going to be broken, and that it was vastly improved compared to when I was drinking, and vastly improved. And vastly improved compared to when I was a newcomer. But whenever I was with her, I was a 16-year-old boy again, and I couldn't stand being in her presence, and I had to put on this act. Whenever I was at work, I was terrified that I wouldn't get stuff done on time, that I wouldn't be good enough, that one day you would discover that I was a fraud. I looked at my sponsees, and none of them were sponsoring anyone. None of them were happy. We were happier than we had been, but we weren't where we needed to be. But we just had to accept life on life's terms. And I came across some tapes of some guys in AA that I'd never heard the like of before, who talked about what it's like to live at 5, at 10, at 15 years sober with untreated alcoholism, and not even know it, that this bloke said, life on life's terms. Life doesn't make terms. You're the one that's been making terms. You've got plan. Life ain't fulfilling your plan. That's your problem. They talked about having power, peace, happiness, and a sense of direction. They talked about having a life where they could be okay whatever happened, that what happened on the outside was not, did not determine how they felt on the inside. And these were just blokes on tape, so one of whom I discovered later on was dead. I seem to have a history of dead people talking to me. Isn't that funny that the people that reached me the most, one was in a letter, one was a dead man on a tape. So I don't think God is limited by the channel. I think if you're listening out for the voice, you'll hear it. Just an aside, I heard a story told by a chap called Billy Snowden about a woman who got sober in the early 40s. She was in her late 20s. She had a kid. She had a baby who was eight months old, and she was drinking around the clock, and she had this kid, and she was trying to look after this kid, and her husband had left, and he had left her. This always makes me crack up. And she was listening to the radio, and she heard this priest talking about Alcoholics Anonymous and how Alcoholics Anonymous had changed the lives of so many people in his parish. And she heard this, and she called up AA, and she started to... And she started to go to meetings. And a while later, she got sober straight away. She was struck sober at her first meeting. And a while later, she phoned up the radio station, but she wanted to trace this priest who had spoken about Alcoholics Anonymous, and she wanted to thank him. And she discovered that there hadn't been a radio program that day about Alcoholics Anonymous. There hadn't been a priest. But she had been reached somehow. And she had called Alcoholics Anonymous. And something happened to me in early February 1993 when I got up after a night which was no worse than any other night. I had a skinful. I'd gone to the pub. I continued. I had a second skinful at the pub. I didn't speak to anyone. I was not having fun. At this stage of my drinking. I was drinking because I had to. When I was sober, I wanted to be drunk. When I was drunk, I wanted to be sober. And I was standing in the corner of the pub, and this bloke came up to me to just talk some gibberish at about 10 to 11. You know when what you want to say is like totally clear in your mind? And then your mouth goes to say it. And you're like... And you're like... And you're like... And you're like... And you're like... And you're like... And you're like... This is weird because there's clearly something wrong with my mouth because it's clear in my mind. And, you know, he just kind of walked away. And eventually I ended up at home via the kebab shop. And I woke up at 5 to 10 in the morning on the Sunday morning. And on the way to the kitchen, I passed the telephone table. It was a... It was a... It was a telephone table with a telephone on it and yellow pages in the top drawer. And I didn't decide to stop drinking. I didn't plan to stop drinking. For some reason, I picked out the yellow pages and turned to A for alcohol. And there was a number, Alcoholics Anonymous, and it was a couple of minutes past 10 at this point, and I called the number. And in London, the telephone... The telephone office opens at 10 o'clock. And because someone had got up and got there on time to turn the telephones on at 10 o'clock to do their service, someone answered. And I said, Is there a meeting in London this week? Now, the funny thing is, I didn't know AA existed. I don't know how I knew how to ask that question. But I asked it. And there was a meeting up the road. And that... That day, all I needed to do was just sit tight, wait till 7.30, trot up the road. And I knew I was going to be looked after. I don't know how I knew I was going to be looked after, but I knew. And when you're ready, you know stuff that you don't know you knew. I can't explain that. But I know it's true. You suddenly start to know stuff when you give up. Knowing stuff. You suddenly know stuff that's buried below all the stuff you know. The best thing I've ever done in AA at any point is decide I don't know anything. Then you discover you know exactly what you need to know. And in that meeting, I went to Road to Recovery last night, and I had, by the end of the meeting, an electric feeling. It was amazing. It was totally different to my first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. I walk in. I was 21. I looked like a ghost, they said, afterwards. They initially tried to send me to Allotine because I kind of looked 15, 16. But I insisted I was an alcoholic, so they let me in and gave me half a cup of tea because I was shaking. They knew to give me half a cup of tea. Giving me half a cup of tea reached me more than telling me what to do because that made me trust you because you knew what I was going through. And the woman in the chair was not a woman you'd hear speaking at Road to Recovery. She was three months sober and talked for 15 minutes about her manic depression. And I didn't really know what manic depression was, but I was pretty sure I had it because it sounded bad. And I knew there was something wrong with me. And I learned two things from this. Number one, it's possible to stay sober for three months. This was news. I didn't know it was possible to stay sober for three months. I kind of understood that there were people in the room who were two years, five years, 20 years sober, but they were a different species. They were like the teacher in Charlie Brown. Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I just... But I understood her language. And the other thing that I learned from that chair was that you don't have to get sane or happy or well to stay sober. That she was being kept sober despite the fact she was still batshit crazy. This gave me hope because I knew in every cell of my being that I would never get well, but there was hope that I might be able to stay sober. And as a friend of mine, as a friend of mine says, if everyone in my first meeting had been serene, pleasant, vegetarian joggers, I never would have been able to stay sober. I never would have gone back to a second meeting. I'm much more... I'm much more convinced by people talking about their brokenness. That's what's going to reach me. Once we've got that sorted out, I might be willing to listen to a solution. I'm going to talk about... Can I have another 15 minutes on the first step before we have a break? Is that all right? Cool. Okay. Um... No. I'm going to talk about someone else who reached me. When I was eight years sober, I left AA, which I actually recommend to anyone who is unsure what happens if you leave a 12-step fellowship after a number of years. Because you'll find out pretty quickly. By eight years, I'd developed a big life thanks to AA. Career, family, friends, social life. Everything was glittery. And I would wake up at four o'clock in the morning with panic attacks. As a later sponsor put it, the whole thing, I got everything that I wanted and it was ashes in my mouth. It was a life that I designed when I was about six weeks sober by looking at the world, listening to every... having absorbed every advert on the TV I'd ever seen. Having watched too many American television shows about what life is supposed to be like. And I designed a life in accordance with this. I'd gone out and I'd got it. And I'd used AA to get it. And I didn't know what to do. Because no one around me had a solution to this. They said, just keep telling the truth. Just keep sharing. It didn't do any good. No one had a solution in the meetings I was going to. So I did the only logical thing which was to leave AA. And over the course of a couple of years I became a recluse. I'd walk along the street talking to myself the whole time. And no one, I didn't have any human contact at all. And I came back to AA at nine and a half years with my tail between my legs. Not that I would have shown you that. I had nine and a half years, don't you know? So I came in giving it large. But I didn't know that I was an alcoholic. Because my drinking story, I can trot out some traumatic stories. And they are true. I'm not making up the thing about throwing myself in front of a car. I'm not making up the thing about sitting on the edge of the tube platform with the train coming into the tunnel and people pulling me up to stop me being squished. I'm not making up the stuff about sitting on, well I was living in Scandinavia at one point during my drinking, sitting in the middle of the road, of an A road with these cars swerving around me. Trying to get killed. The arrests, the sickness, the taking an hour to crawl to a hospital which was ten minutes walk away. I'm not making that stuff up. But that wasn't the bread and butter of my drinking. The bread and butter of my drinking was, there's almost nothing to say. You get, you have the first drink, you sit at home with a bottle of gin, you watch the bill, you drink it, you pass out. Um, and I go to meeting after meeting with people pissing up the wall about their war stories. And I related to one story out of ten, one story out of twenty was a bullseye. And you say, finally I've heard someone that's told my story. But the other nineteen were like, nothing. And you've heard all the war stories after a while, there's nothing new anyone can tell you. And I thought, how do I know I'm an alcoholic? How do I know I wasn't just fucked up? No one could tell me. I said, what's unmanageability? And I went to my home group, which was a step group, and I asked a dozen people what unmanageability was. And everyone had a different answer. I thought, what's the truth? Do you pick the truth? Is the truth the one that you find most convenient? What's true? What is powerlessness? What is unmanageability? I didn't know who to believe. I really didn't. And I heard a tape of a bloke called Chris R. from Ingram, Texas. And it changed my life because I discovered what an alcoholic is. And it wasn't just his opinion. Because he was talking about the contents of this book. He was talking about how to diagnose yourself as an alcoholic based on the contents of this book. And in 1935, one bloke reaches another. And just in that room last night, there were as many people sober as there were people sober. As there were in Alcoholics Anonymous in 1939. When one person reaches another, that spiritual awakening that happened between Bill and Bob is still happening today between us in this room now. It didn't stop. It's like the Big Bang which started the universe. Apparently, it's still happening. The universe is still expanding at an infinite rate. It's still expanding. It's still expanding. It's still expanding. It's still expanding. It's still expanding. It's still expanding. And the same is happening in Alcoholics Anonymous. And in 1939, they wrote down what an alcoholic is, how to determine whether or not you're an alcoholic. And when I diagnose myself in accordance with that book, I know that I'm joining a fellowship of men and women who have exactly the same problem as me. And there's no more you pick the truth by the person who you like, the most. And that's something I can rely on. So, I'm going to suggest we have a break now and talk about step one properly in the next session. How does that sound? Cool. Yeah, thanks very much. There's tea and coffee at the back, 15, 20 minutes. Nice one. Thanks.