Ego and Intelligence as Barriers to Recognizing Alcoholism — A Ph.D. in Denial – Scott B.

Welcome back, my friends, to AA Recovery Interviews.
I'm your host, Howard L., and I'm an alcoholic,
sober since January 1st, 1988, one day at a time.
I'm grateful you've joined us.
AA Recovery Interviews is the podcast where Alcoholics Anonymous members
from around the world share their extraordinary stories of experience,
strength, and hope.
Today's show is an encore episode of my interview with Scott B.,
originally released as Episode 4 in January 2021.
My guest today is Scott B., a close friend and AA brother for over 30 years.
Scott's remarkable story is one that proves that
you can never be too smart nor too important to get sober in AA.
With his Ph.D. in neurobiology and an accelerating career in medical research,
Scott thought that his intelligence, ego, and iron will
could shield him.
But his journey into the dark regions of substance abuse brought him to his knees
as a ravaged and demoralized subject of King Alcohol and Lady Cocaine.
As increasing use quickened the downward spiral of his life and career,
intelligence and willpower alone were not enough to save him.
As he was heading towards the abyss, a single lifeline in the form of a crafty
intervention by his colleagues and friends was thrown to him.
Clinging on as only the hopeless can, he finally let that lifeline pull him into treatment
and ultimately into AA.
After nearly 33 years of sobriety, Scott reflects on that crucial turning point
that grew into a brilliant career, a fulfilling life, and daily service to others.
His wondrous story is one that needs to be told.
More importantly, it's one that needs to be heard by anyone, anywhere, who reaches out for help.
I'm thrilled to welcome my very good friend, Scott B., to AA Recovery Interviews.
My name is Scott, and I'm an alcoholic.
Hi, Scott. I'm so glad you joined us today here on AA Recovery Interviews.
You and I go back a long time.
We do, Howard. We're the class of 88, and I follow you by a couple months.
You're the dean of the class of 88, and I'm always, always proud to be two months behind you.
Well, I love it when you and I are in meetings together, and we kind of take stock of how many of the class of 88 are in the meeting with us.
And I think we've had as many as a total of seven of us in one meeting at a time, which is really amazing.
But I think we go to so many meetings, the same meetings together, that we see each other several times a week.
I think we first met, if I'm not mistaken, we first met at an AA retreat back in about 89 or 90.
Maybe 91, something along those lines.
You were going to retreats all the time, weren't you?
I was going to at least two a year, and I tried to go to the ones where Francis Yeager was at, and I was a member.
My home group at the time was the Alder Street Men's Group on Monday night.
Right, yeah. I remember that meeting.
I didn't go to it all that often, but I do remember it had some of the icons of our local AA in there.
For those listeners who may be not aware of or familiar with what an AA retreat is,
if you were telling somebody about it in a little elevator speech, what would you say what a retreat is about?
Well, Howard, it's a two-and-a-half-day gathering of the fellowship where 72 men come together in a beautiful location.
And the format is lots of fellowship, meals together, lots of time to talk.
With each other, there's space to do step work.
But the official format is covering each of the 12 steps.
On the Friday night, we cover 1, 2, and 3.
On Saturday morning, we cover 4, 5.
Saturday afternoon, 6 and 7, 8 and 9.
Then we finish 10 in the evening.
And then on Sunday morning, in a beautiful way,
we do the 12 steps.
And then on Sunday morning, we do the 12 steps.
And then on Sunday morning, we do 11 and 12.
That's right.
And, you know, I've been to a retreat virtually every single year since I've been sober.
So I've been to more than 30 of them over the years, not quite as many as you have.
But that Saturday is especially a good day because there's a break in between steps 4 and 5 and 6 and 7 of about three hours for people to work on their fourth and fifth steps.
And that's an important thing to do.
So I always.
I always recommend to guys I sponsor and other people that they go to a retreat.
It's a good way to get a lot of AA at one time.
It's a great way to kind of recharge a program that needs a little bit of recharging and is about as close, Scott, as living within Alcoholics Anonymous for 48 hours.
I've always fantasized about how great it would be if all of life felt like an AA meeting.
Well, when you're on a retreat.
It feels that way, doesn't it?
It does.
It does.
And I'll give a little add.
I believe the next men's retreat at Holy Name is February 3rd.
And I'm already signed up for it.
Yeah, that's a very popular one every year.
Start the year that way.
Right.
So you've been sober.
Your sobriety date is.
March 1st, 1988.
And that's March 1st because it was a February 29th of that year that you got actually sober.
How did that work?
Yeah, my intervention was on February.
February 29th, 1988, which is a leap year day.
And I had actually used the day before I was sober that morning.
And my intervention occurred a little after one o'clock on the 29th.
But after I got to treatment, I was resistant to even calling myself an alcoholic for a while.
So I didn't necessarily lean on a particular.
Sobriety date.
But after I was there a while and had gone to a lot of meetings where men announced their sobriety dates, I officially adopted March 1st so I could celebrate every year instead of every four years.
So one of the great things about having a birthday because mine is January 1st.
But one of the great things about having a birthday on the first of the month is that by the time the birthday meeting of the month rolls around, usually it's the last meeting of the month.
I've only got.
Eleven months to go until my next birthday.
It makes it makes for a very interesting calendar.
And if you have if you have an ego like mine, you get to if I go to four meetings a week times four weeks, I get to announce myself and hear applause 16 different times.
Yeah, I know what that's like, especially when you go to a club meeting and they're asking every day.
Does anybody have a birthday?
Yeah.
You get clapped for a lot.
So your sobriety date is March 1st of 88.
I always like to kind of to get a perspective to look at the back story a little bit.
What it was like for you just kind of briefly growing up and and and the trajectory towards drinking and other things.
And then the point at which the turning point.
For getting sober and the realization.
Could you kind of give us a picture of what that looks like for you?
I'd be glad to before I start.
Yeah, I have a tradition and I say, God, help me put my ego aside and be with you.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight.
Oh, Lord, my strength and my redeemer.
That's beautiful.
That's beautiful.
I would say amen to that.
Absolutely.
So I was born in 1943 in the middle of the war in a small town in Ohio.
I'm the grandson and the son of a physician.
My mother has a Ph.D. in sociology.
I should say had very shortly after I was born.
My father left and spent two years in the service in the Pacific as a medic.
Very traumatic experiences for him.
Traumatic for me as well because I had no father for two years.
During that period of time, my mother was depressed.
I think she surrogated me a bit.
I felt alone and lonely as a child.
I invented an imaginary friend called Bobby.
And when my father came home,
it wasn't like I felt like I was alone.
I was alienated to him. But he was an incredible man. He's my hero and will be forever and ever
and ever. Kindest man in the world. Great doctor. But he was not an emotional person. And I think
the war and what he saw in the Pacific, going from island to island to island, created a space
for him that he was a bit standoffish. So we never had issues until he died in 1970. But
I never felt particularly close to him. And so that distance from my father and then my mother
in her early depression started medicating her depression with both medicine and alcohol.
And by the time she died, she was a full-blown addict and alcoholic and just not available for
any kind of mother-son interaction.
Was your father aware of all that going on at the time?
Yes. And in the 50s, in the late 40s, there was, even though this was Elyria, Ohio,
it's about an hour from Akron, the home of AA.
Sure.
He was...
Sure.
He was treating my mother with medication. And we had a medicine chest that if you opened it up,
pill bottles literally spilled out. And these were pre-valium transqualizers. These were
opiates. And my mother did a lot of napping. Let's just put it that way.
And my father was an obstetrician-gynecologist. And he was out of the house by six in the morning
and rarely home before eight. And he played golf on the weekends and watched the sun set.
And he watched footballs on Sunday. So I just never felt close. And to jump ahead a little bit,
after I got sober, I was in a psychodrama group doing a piece of psychodrama and where I had
chosen someone to be my mother and chosen someone to be my father. And I was stuck during the middle
of the psychodrama. And the director said, Scott, what do you really want from your parents?
And I started crying.
And I said, I want both my mother and my father to come to me and get down on their knees and give
me a hug. And then I just slung snot all over the room.
Yeah, that's powerful stuff. I did psycho the same thing that you did. We did it a few years
apart. But that's powerful to get to that realization all those years later, but nonetheless.
So the result of this childhood,
I think, gave me a pretty intense fear of abandonment. And inventing an imaginary friend
was not a very adequate solution. So I began to adopt behaviors, wearing masks, being the good boy.
I got all A's through elementary school. Things at home with my mother were getting pretty dark.
And fortunately for me, my parents sent me to
private boarding school in Pennsylvania. That helped a lot. During vacations, I would often
not come home. I would go to somebody else's house. I really was avoiding what was going on
at home because the alcoholism in my mother was getting worse. And my father was deeply concerned,
but couldn't do much about it. In boarding school, I grew up a lot. I was around a lot of
older boys who introduced me to other substances introduced me to my first sexual experience
but it was a an incredibly important academic experience for me and it really set me up to be
successful in college and when I went to university Syracuse University I immediately
joined the SAE fraternity and I'm sure part part of my alcoholism sort of increased when I became a
an SAE in college and by the time I graduated college the it was the height of the Vietnam War
I had impregnated my pen mate who was a kappa alpha theta and I had we had gotten married
in 1970
1964 so I while you were still in college or still in college and we both actually finished
college and got advanced degrees and had a very successful marriage two great kids which I'm
still very close to but because of our our marriage and because of the fact that I went
on to graduate school to get a doctorate in in neurobiology
I was
exempt from the war so that was a wonderful time we did a lot of a lot of commitment to
social obligations I remember being coming home at night out of the laboratory and saying what
are we doing tonight are we marching for civil rights are we marching for for women's rights
or are we marching for anti-war and were you a hippie were you a hippie back then Scott no I
was pretty cleaned up I had been a preppy and I'm still a preppy it
Once you're a preppy, you're, you know, it's khakis and button-down Oxford Claw shirts and penny loafers.
Is it safe to say that you learned to drink at prep school and you perfected the art in college and graduate school?
Absolutely right on, Howard.
Correct.
And then when I finished my doctorate, I had the opportunity to do a postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA, and I took that opportunity and my whole family moved to Santa Monica where I really got serious about my career in medical research.
I had a wonderful four years there, and at the end of my fellowship, I was offered an opportunity to stay at UCLA.
I was recruited by a number of other institutions.
I chose Baylor College of Medicine because they offered me an opportunity to begin as a leader in forming a research group in the ophthalmology department.
And at the time, I was studying the retina of the eye, which is a slice of the central nervous system, essentially.
So I chose Baylor, and we all moved here in 1973.
And I was.
I was divorced shortly thereafter.
So that brought you to Houston.
Correct.
During the time that you were out at UCLA, it sounds like maybe the alcohol and whatever other things you were doing were put on hold, or were they toned down, or were they intruding on your daily life back then?
I was acting out rarely.
I would drink when we had lab parties.
I began philandering on my wife.
I was working very hard, very often, in by 7 a.m. and not home until 10 p.m.
I really was focused on my career, and I was fortunate enough to begin some work that gained national attention, which is why I got recruited to Baylor.
And then at Baylor, I got very serious and formed a lab and was gifted with getting a…
A number of grants, a big NIH grant, what's called a Career Development Fellowship.
Sure.
So by the end of the 70s, I was at the pinnacle of my career.
I was divorced by about two years, and I just had the strongest urge, Howard, to take a break, to celebrate.
Yeah.
So I began dating a hot little redhead, and I began…
And spending my afternoons not in the laboratory, but at live music happy hours.
And eventually, a year or so later, I was introduced to cocaine at a party of where I thought everybody was hip, slick, and cool.
And cocaine lines appeared on a mirror, and I was offered a straw, and I did my first line of cocaine in 1980.
And what I remember about that moment is…
I said, oh, my God, what is this?
Where can I get more?
And who brought this, and how can I make them my best friend?
Yeah, yeah, I get that.
That's a typical response to the first time.
During those years in which you weren't doing this, up to the point that you were,
I'm sure there are going to be people who hear this and think that maybe that commitment to school and to ambition and…
To establishing yourself in the world is sufficient to keep alcoholism or drug addiction at bay.
Would you say that that was what happened for you, or was it just a decision that you made, or you just hadn't warmed up to it yet?
No, the alcoholism and the addiction and the fear of abandonment and the people-pleasing and the mask-wearing was all going on.
It was going on in the background.
Yeah.
And…
But my hard work in the laboratory…
Yeah.
…and gaining some fame and fortune was merely an outside solution to medicate an inside job.
That's not a solution.
I didn't stop drinking.
I didn't stop philandering.
I just sort of toned them down, and I was actually very fulfilled by my success until I wasn't.
Did that success and all of the things you did academically and intellectually within you,
did they dispel the idea that…
Yeah.
…you had been lurking that this is something I probably shouldn't be doing, or this is something I'm going to be starting to have a problem with?
I actually never thought I had a problem with alcohol until the day of my intervention,
until they told me that not only did I have a cocaine problem, but I had an alcohol problem.
Were you too smart for it, or what?
What's going on there?
Well, it's ego.
I thought, you know, it's not really that bad.
And, you know, I'd been severely drunk, and as an SAE,
it was standard to find yourself in a cold shower on Sunday morning after a three-day alcohol binge.
So I was drinking like an alcoholic and just denying that it was a problem.
That's common, though.
I mean, I've noticed it over the years.
I'm sure you have, too, that one of the sayings is you're never too dumb for AA, but you might be too smart for it.
I know it was that way for me just because I thought,
I'm a bright guy.
I've got willpower.
I know what I'm doing, and what I'm doing is drugs and alcohols.
But at least I know I'm doing that, and the knowledge of the fact that I'm doing it
means that I will be able to use that same intellect to stop it if I need to.
And I had a huge ego because of my scientific success.
Sure.
And therefore, I was my own higher power, and I was in control of everything in my life.
So.
Hmm.
Hmm.
So you got into the cocaine at the end of the 70s to coincide with the divorce?
A couple years after the divorce.
Mm-hmm.
About 1980.
And I chased Lady Cocaine and increased my hedonistic behavior for the next eight years until I was deeply in debt.
Mm-hmm.
I was.
I had.
I had seven warrants for my arrest by the time of my intervention.
I had three banks were suing me for money I had borrowed on my signature, and I had put my house up my nose.
My house had been foreclosed a year earlier.
I've heard you say that over the years, and every now and then you'll say that out of context with the story,
and I can imagine what people are thinking when you're talking about putting your house up your nose.
Yeah.
Board by board, night by night.
And I had changed all my academic friends and all the couples I was friends with.
I traded them in for all my bar friends and my street urchin friends and my cocaine buddies.
Wow.
My house was a party house, and it got really, really, really bad.
So during this time of that really, really bad cocaine use, you were still drinking.
And, but you were, how did you manage to stay on top of your career and what you were doing in the eight to five job?
Well, I didn't manage very well.
I had been accorded tenure at the medical school, and that made me relax a little bit.
And if you followed my work ethic and my work hours and my work productivity,
from 1980 through the spring of 1988, it's a descending line.
And by 1986, I was, I actually did one of the great sins you can do as a professor.
I missed a lecture.
Oh, no.
And that, you know, you don't miss a lecture unless you're in a coffin someplace.
Yeah, yeah.
People around me began to notice.
I had a, we had a laboratory program.
I had a party at, in my lab, and I got extremely drunk, set a fire alarm off,
tried to take everybody in my laboratory home to where we could do cocaine and continue.
It was, I was certainly not hiding my addiction or my alcoholism.
Yeah, I've heard you refer to it over the years as hedonistic behavior,
and I think that that's a great, that's a great term for that kind of behavior.
It surely was.
I mean, I had no status.
I had no standards of moral and ethics at all.
Now, you mentioned earlier that you didn't realize that, or accept,
or your ego didn't allow to enter into the idea that you were an alcoholic,
or did you, were you starting to connect the problems that you were having in your job
and elsewhere with your use of cocaine and alcohol, or how did you reconcile that?
I, because of the cocaine and because I used it daily and because I ended up,
I can account for at least a quarter of a million dollars worth of using cocaine and alcohol
and other party favors, I ascribed it all to cocaine.
And in fact, when I was intervened into treatment, they said, you know,
tell us about your use of alcohol.
And I said, oh, that's no, alcohol's no problem.
I only drink beer and wine.
And of course, they smiled knowingly.
And we,
we went to a meeting every day and we had a meeting in the treatment center every day.
And I introduced myself as I said, I'm Scott, I'm a cocaine addict.
And it wasn't until day 17 that I finally said, Scott, I'm an alcoholic,
as I have done every day since.
So is it safe to say that, that as, as people will in an AA meeting,
just to kind of level the playing field, that you were using cocaine alcoholically?
Yes.
It,
the use of cocaine is, requires such focus and it's so intense that you don't realize
that you're doing it in the bathroom while you're spending four hours at the bar.
That you're sitting at your home with a bunch of party people and everybody's drinking,
but we're all fighting for the lines on the mirror.
And alcohol is always present.
It's just, it's, it's sort of taking second chair to the,
to the primary drug of choice.
So that allowed you to just pass it off as a secondary concern and let's take care of the cocaine and everything will be wonderful.
Exactly.
And many people who do cocaine to the level I was doing it would say, well, I really drank to level out.
Um, you know, I would get so intensely high on cocaine that alcohol would slow me down and allow me to do more cocaine.
I remember saying that a lot.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I, I had the dual addiction.
Two, although not the cocaine, because I always felt that the high on cocaine value wise was not as good for the price of the cocaine was not as good as other things.
So mine was an economic decision to use cocaine, but I had a lot of the same issues you had mentioned intervention.
And I want to kind of skip to that because I guess towards the end, you were saying people were recognizing that you were having a problem.
Oh, that's correct.
I probably about 1986.
There were subtle hints from my colleagues.
Um, they would say things like, are you okay?
Or, Hey man, I'm worried about you.
How are you doing?
Uh, I would be taking, I was taking trips to Washington as a government consultant four times a year.
And the people I was, um, traveling with were very concerned about my behavior.
And I was actually confronted on a couple occasions.
You know, why are you late?
You missed this yesterday.
And I, I was making up stories.
So one time I said, I had to literally, I got so financially just behind, I had to borrow money from one of my laboratory people.
And I said that my children were in jail and I needed to bail them out.
And, um, so I remember good friends, you know, constantly putting a little bit of pressure on me to clean up my act.
Did you find they were enabling you?
Um, I had a couple of people.
I had a couple of people who actually were asked to be part of my intervention and they were my best friends, but they were also my drinking buddies.
Now they didn't do cocaine.
They didn't party.
They weren't hypersexual like I was, but when they were asked to join the intervention team, they said they didn't feel they could do it because they drank so frequently with me.
Huh?
That's interesting.
So things were kind of spiraling downward towards, uh, towards the end.
I would say it was a very.
Rapid, very hard spiral.
Huh?
So what did the, uh, what did the intervention, uh, look like?
Well, my institution knew, um, cause I'd had a DWI in 1986 and sure on good Friday, it was exactly two years before I got sober and they went to the general council and they said, what are we going to do?
He's got tenure.
We can't just fire him.
We don't have proof of, you know, any felonies.
Um,
and the general council said, you know, we can go through a long legal battle to get rid of him, or we can just let him get rid of himself.
Meaning if we leave him alone, he will eventually self-destruct.
Well, one of my dear colleagues, uh, who was at the university of Texas next door said, I can't stand by and watch that happen.
So he asked permission of Baylor to do an intervention on me, but not one directed by Baylor college of medicine.
And I missed the first two.
I didn't show up.
So they, they flew, um, one of my major professors from UCLA in, he was advertised.
He's scientifically world famous professor.
Michael Hall is coming to Houston to give a seminar.
Um, I kept getting prompts from all my friends.
Oh, Scott, you got to be at the seminar.
Dr.
Hall's going to be here, et cetera, et cetera.
So,
he came into town and to secure me, they, um, what turned out to be my intervention team took me out to dinner was Monday night, the night before my intervention, just to make sure I was not going to escape.
And of course I had my, my current girlfriend with me and a pocket full of cocaine.
And I, I used cocaine throughout dinner, multiple trips to the bathroom and woke up the next morning at 10 AM.
The seminar was at noon.
I said, oh my God, I've got to be there.
And I threw on a pair of jeans and a sweater with a bunch of cigarette holes in it.
And as I got to the seminar room, um, it was a little bit before noon.
The room had about 450 seats.
The room was full.
The walls were lined with people.
There were 500 people in the room.
There was one seat left in the front row.
Mm-hmm.
And, um, everybody's, my friends were sitting around that seat and I said, Scott, Scott, come on.
We saved you a seat.
So I sat down, hung over, just feeling miserable and listened to my mentor, my UCLA mentor spend 55 minutes glorifying my, my research career.
At the end of that seminar, my mind said, you know, I've got to get out of here.
I've got to get home.
Now, this is when everybody is left.
The 400.
People have stood up and gone at this point.
Well, they're standing up at the end.
They're standing up.
Okay.
I get it.
And I'm trying to wheedle up my way out of there.
Well, at that point, this is how clever the interventionist was that I'll forever love him.
His name was Roger.
Not, uh, they had a administrator run up to me, waving a little green piece of paper and she ran up to me and she said, you have a very important phone call, very important phone call.
Uh-huh.
And I puffed up immediately.
And I said to.
My friends around me, I have a very important phone call.
And they said, well, Scott, that's great.
Come on.
We'll show you where you can take the phone call.
And they led me to the room.
I felt a hand on my back.
I was pushed into the room and my friends followed in.
They sat in four chairs.
Mr.
Not started the intervention and that was it.
Hmm.
You're not, is he still alive or I don't believe so.
But the four interventionists were Diana R, Michael H, uh, Vicki B and, uh, Robert M and Robert M I'll forever owe my life to.
So, so they, they do this intervention on you.
And then where did you end up?
Well, they said they were worried about my health and they wanted me to go to the hospital and be checked out.
Sure.
And I said what every person who's intervened on said, well, how long has I be there?
And they say, well, we don't know.
Depending on your health.
So I said, well, can I go to my lab and get my briefcase of thinking of escaping and they said, no, and the car was waiting and we went straight from the seminar room and the office to West Oak psychiatric hospital.
And I was offered the choice of either signing in voluntarily or signing in, uh, against my will.
And they explained the difference.
And I said, okay, I'll sign in voluntarily.
And I did.
And, um, I was put on the, on the alcohol recovery unit.
Um, the medical director came by shortly after and kicked me in the ankle.
Uh, he knew I was coming.
They'd told him my story and he said, why are you here?
And I said, well, I said, I guess I have a little problem with cocaine.
So we'll be right back, my friends, if you're enjoying AA recovery internet.
Yeah.
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And we're back.
Is it fair to say that your bottom was imposed on you as opposed to you coming to it on your own?
Absolutely.
That's interesting.
That that's not, that's not all that.
Well, I guess it's common with people who are in.
Intervened upon who finally get it, but it's most people hit a bottom somewhere before they try to get help, but your bottom was right adjacent to that help.
Wasn't it?
Well, the, the back story for that is about 1986 when the debts were mounting and I was in trouble with the bank and I was borrowing $50,000 just on my signature and all of that went up my nose or I borrowed money from my, my sister.
You know, I went to her in a green house and I had a checkbook and I didn't earn any money for a few days and they were claiming I owed the IRS money.
And, um, I knew I was in trouble, um, and I thought it was cocaine and I, I would do one evening that I talk about a lot.
I was just deeply, deeply afraid of continuing to use.
So I came home about seven o'clock from the lab and I decided I was not going to call my drug dealer.
So I took the phone.
It was an old cell phone.
It was $1.
an old desk set with the push buttons. And I taped it up with duct tape. So I couldn't use it.
And about an hour later, unfortunately, I went to the fridge and there was a little wine left.
And after a glass of wine or two, I decided that I needed to call my drug dealer. So I took a knife
and cut off all of the tape so I could use the telephone and call him. So there was some awareness
that I was in deep trouble. But cocaine addiction is, it is beyond my ability as someone who is a
who is a neuroscientist. It's beyond my ability to tell you how powerful that addiction is.
So here you are, this hotshot professor going to a psychiatric hospital for alcoholism and
cocaine addiction. What was that like? What was that?
How long were you there? And what was it like?
Horrible for 17 days. As I was in denial about the alcohol, I didn't like it.
My kind of people were not there. I didn't fit in. I was, they came up to me on day 16.
A wonderful counselor of mine, Joanne C, put her arm around me and said, Scott, we're really worried
about you. You're not doing very well. If things don't start to go better, if you don't get a
sponsor, then we're not going to be able to help you. And I said, well, I'm going to go to a
We're going to have to have you leave. And Baylor had put me under a two-year, very restrictive
contract that said if I left treatment early, I would be fired. And they had every right to do
that, tenure or not. So I went to a meeting that night, Thursday night, College Park Baptist
Church. And I went and I heard Miles S. tell his story. And I was literally struck with the idea of,
he told my story. I want him to be my sponsor. And at the end of the meeting, I walked up to him
with my knees shaking and said, will you be my sponsor? And he handed me a, gave me his phone
number. And so was that your, was that your very first AA meeting or was that the first meeting
that you actually listened in and took some action? The latter. We had been to a meeting in
the druggie buggy every single night. At West Oaks, you went to a meeting every evening, whether it
was in the cafeteria or in the living room. And I said, well, I want him to be my sponsor. And he
went to the cafeteria or whatever. And I remember coming in from the outside to go to some of those
cafeteria meetings early on. And did you have a period of detox or how did you make it physically
through the first two or three weeks? Well, cocaine doesn't require any significant detox.
So I took, I took vitamins for a couple of days, but the other significant part of the story is
a very higher powered moment. The moment that has really set the platform for my recovery. And
it was a very high powered moment. And I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember,
I was sitting in a meeting at the hospital and it was being led by a young man. And I was toxic. I was
angry. I was terrified. I was alone. I was alone at a table. And it was my 15th or 16th meeting. And
during the moment of silence, God entered me in some way. And I said the first prayer I had said
since age 14. I was 44 years old. And I said, I'm going to be a doctor. And I said, I'm going to be a
And I said, I'm going to be a doctor. And I said, I'm going to be a doctor. And I said, I'm going to be a
And I said, just spontaneously, I said, God, help the people at this meeting and help them help me.
And I, I remember waking up the next morning with a completely different attitude.
That's the evening I got my sponsor. The day after that, I presented my first step to the
group I was in. It was the third time I had presented it. I had finally owned up to all
my stuff. I passed it. I finished the second.
And third step in treatment. I was in treatment for six weeks. I had no house, they had foreclosed
my home and taken it away. So I went to a sober living home called the landing point in the
heights. Pat Myers, the late Pat Myers, ran that home. I was there for six weeks. And by this time,
I had been to 90 meetings in 90 days. And I had renewed my commitment to 90 and 90. And
I actually moved out of the halfway house,
moved in with my then girlfriend, which lasted two days. And she very rapidly moved me back out.
She and her real estate friend found me a house that was about 15 miles away from my house in
Montrose, the one I'd put up my nose. I moved into the lease house and Howard, I'm sitting in that
house today. I've been in that house every day. I've been sober and I'm coming up on 12,000 days.
Isn't that amazing? So,
when you were about ready to get out of West Oaks and you were going to your girlfriend's house,
what kind of feedback did you get on that from the people that you were leaving?
Well, you can imagine the advice they said, you know, no miles. My sponsor said no relationships
for a year. And I was completely dedicated to the program. I felt wonderful after being sober 90 days.
I was back at Baylor even as restrictive as my contract was. I was going to therapy. I was
going to meetings. I was having urine drug screens regularly, et cetera, et cetera. But I thought I
would try this girlfriend thing. And she literally didn't want anything to do with me. Cocaine addicts
who are 90 days sober are crazier than, you know, whatever.
During that time, while you were doing,
90 meetings in 90 days, were you in IOP as well?
Only at the halfway house.
Only at the halfway house.
Yeah, IOP hadn't hit Houston very much at the time. But between therapy and meetings and working
the steps with my sponsor, I had already signed up to do a retreat in the fall. I had an incredibly
emotional experience during an event while I was in Houston.
I was in treatment with my daughter. That is also the second level of the platform of my recovery. And
she literally busted me in front of about 60 people. So I was really committed to recovery
and moving into my own lease home was something I was willing to do. I didn't know how alone and
lonely I would be. But I filled the time by going to as many meetings as I could.
Being part of the Alder Street Monday Night Men's group was tremendously helpful.
So it sounds like you had quite a bit of ego shattering during that time. I was curious as to
how important sponsorship was to you in the early days, as well as that ego deflation that's so
necessary for us. Well, my ego deflation happened through the pathway of humiliation to humility.
And my daughter's actions during family week, the fact that I was in a home group where everybody
had a sponsor, you often came to the meeting with your sponsor. There was a line of men who,
my sponsor's sponsor was there, my sponsor's grand sponsor was there. I became friends with a man who
eventually became my sponsor after Miles moved to Austin. So I was surrounded by,
by men who had integrity, who believed in, in working the steps and really working the steps,
who believed in sharing from the heart and not hiding anything, dropping the mask.
I was gaining traction back at Baylor. I was showing up for work. My two children
were back in my life. So I was really on a pink cloud. I can imagine. Looking back
at that point while you were on that pink cloud, did you give it much thought that this was going
to be a long-term proposition or were you thinking like I thought early on, okay, I'll, I'll do this
for a period of time, but then I'll get to the point at which I won't have to do it. Did you
have that occur to you at all? Well, I was pretty willing not to ever do cocaine again. I, I, it had
been such a destroyer of soul and life that I was,
but I can't, I did have in my mind for probably the first nine months or so that
I would reach a point where I could have a drink and drink safely. And it was only through working
the steps and reviewing the fact that I started drinking at 12 and had a, I got thrown in jail
in Fort Lauderdale at age 14 for drinking and, and had some horrific experiences in prep school
and college. And I realized I was as destroyed by alcohol as I was by cocaine.
So were you identifying yourself early on in AA? Were you identifying yourself
as an alcoholic and a, or were you the cocaine addict who wouldn't talk about alcohol? How did
that look in the early days? After day 17 and every day since I just say, I'm Scott B and I'm
an alcoholic. I'm, you were never one of those and does. No, they're all, it's all an addiction.
It's all neurochemistry. And I don't see it. I, when people,
people say I'm an alcoholic and an addict, my ego says, you know, you ought to stop and tell
them that that's redundant. Yeah. Well, given the way you, given the trajectory from your
intervention into a treatment center, do you think you could have gotten sober in AA without
treatment? Do you think the AA would have been sufficient or did you need that treatment first
as a gateway into AA? Without the intervention, without 90 days of supervision, without a
two-year contract from Baylor College of Medicine, I'd be dead. Yeah. Okay. When early on in
treatment, when they said, you know, you were about to lose your house, I said, well, that's
all right. I'll get another one. I'll move in with my friends. I was fully prepared to couch surf
with my cocaine buddies. And so I was, I would have been on the street. Um, and the street was
not a very safe place in Montrose in the late eighties. So what were the early weeks and months
in AA?
Like for you having to go to these rooms with all of this, this cross section, this socioeconomic
and intellectual cross section of people, uh, this hotshot PhD expert on the brain who should
be able to handle all this without AA. How did you, what was AA like for you during that time?
Well, I, from day 17 on, I had a higher power. Um, interestingly, my first hour of power was
the statue of Abraham Lincoln, because I wanted
to be that kind of a father figure in my life. But I was pretty committed to being, um, as humble
as I could. I didn't advertise myself as, as a important medical person. Um, I went to retreat
the day I was six months sober and that retreat closed on Sunday. It was September 1st, 1988. And
I stood in the room with 72 men holding hands. And I looked around the room
and there were men there from age 18 to age 88. We were all shapes and sizes. Uh, some came in
Rolls Royces and some came on skateboards. And I realized I was just one of them.
That's an amazing realization. And it's one that I think if a man or a woman can come to that
realization early enough, you had that spiritual experience. You had that, I guess, that sudden
upheaval that Bill Wilson talks about in the, in the big book. And I think that's an amazing realization.
I think that's an amazing realization. And I think that's an amazing realization. I think that's an amazing
book versus the gradual awakening, which was more of the case for me. I would have liked to think I
got it all at once, the realization that God was working. But for me, I had to, I was just a
disbeliever until I believed. And that took the better part of a year and a half and working all
12 steps till I got to that point. But when I hear people, you know, having that immediate sense of
God working in their lives, that's a, that's an extraordinary thing and, uh, amazing to see.
It was, it all happened within 24 hours. It was helped a lot by the italics in the third step. I
could choose my own higher power, Abe Lincoln. And the word care turned my will in my life over
to the care. So I invented a, you know, a giant, a caring giant named Abe Lincoln as my higher power
to replace the father need that I had. And, uh, my higher power has evolved a bit since then.
That's really awesome and inspiring in a way, I think, for people who wonder, will they get to
that point if they stick around long enough? So this is the point at which in the telling of a
story, most people get, there's about five minutes left in the speaker meeting at this point. Okay.
Because the most exciting and interesting things, I think intuitively, we feel like we got going
is the how it was and the what happened part of our story. But you've been sober three plus decades.
And a lot's gone on since then. And I'd like to kind of turn to what sobriety had looked like in
the first five or 10 years, maybe into the next decade. What were milestones for you in the
recovery? Where were places that you hit roadblocks? Where you gained a realization that you might not
make it or that, yes, you would make it? Could you go into that a little bit?
Well, I don't know whether I'm proud to say this or I'm embarrassed to say this, but I've had a
truly blessed 32 plus years of recovery. I, in 1988, I was a drug addict at Baylor College of
Medicine. I became a senior dean in upper administration at Baylor in 1993. So I went
in five years, went from drug addict to dean. I began doing service. I took intervention training.
I was helping other people. I was the go-to person at Baylor College of Medicine. If
somebody had an alcohol or a drug problem, I loved being a dean. I got heavily involved in
service. I ran a ranch retreat for families whose children had cancer. I joined the board of the
council on alcohol and drugs. And I really felt like I was very effective in service.
So I had found, I had traded my medical research career in for,
a career of service based upon all of my academic training. It was a perfect marriage.
And in 19, in 2012, I was thinking of retiring from Baylor. And I was asked by some colleagues
in AA to, if I would consider founding the Hope and Healing Center at the St. Martin's Church. And
I prayed about that and took that job. And I'm very proud of, of founding that now highly
successful,
organization.
It's an incredible facility. I mean, I've, I've gotten to know the people over there.
I've gone to meetings there. It really is truly a, an exceptional facility for us
in the program and other people outside the program from the standpoint of mental health.
And my, I'm very close to both my children. They have both confronted me about what a
horrible father I was, and also are daily grateful that they have their father back.
Where do they confront you?
When, when did that, did that happen at different times? Or was that all part of
their work or your work? How did that come along?
Well, my daughter did it at about week four in treatment.
Okay.
And that's that platform story that really cemented my, my commitment to the program.
And my son came along very shortly after that. We're the best of buddies. We're sailing buddies.
And I've, I've renewed a friendship with actually both of my ex-wives. I've skipped
over the fact that I've been with them for a long time. And I've, I've been with them for a long time.
And I've, I've been with them for a long time. And I've, I've been with them for a long time.
And I've, I've been with them for a long time. And I've, I've been with them for a long time.
I got married in recovery and got divorced in recovery. And I've now retired from,
from the Hope and Healing Center and from Baylor College of Medicine.
I have a private consulting practice where I work with families and do interventions and
referral to treatment. And I'm, I'm actually winding that down. So I've had a really blessed
recovery.
So your AA work in the early days, even though you were already working in,
the field of teaching and research and that sort of thing, is it a, is it a fair statement to say
that your experience in AA led you to that where you might not have been led there otherwise?
Absolutely. Yeah. One of the gifts from my higher power is to be intensively trained in,
in the workings of the brain. I was the one who gave the lectures on the neurophysiology and
neurochemistry of addiction to the brain. And I was the one who gave the lectures on the neurophysiology
and the medical student.
While you were using and drinking yourself?
Yeah. There's, there's a tape of me lecturing while I'm high on cocaine.
And so to have that kind of background and to have, I mean, I, I have an intense research project
with one particular alcoholic over the course now of 77 years and that's myself.
Yeah. I get that. I get that. I was curious how, how,
working in the field and all these extracurricular things that you're doing,
how did they affect your AA program with regard to pride and ego and humility? How does,
how does your disease feel about all this other stuff that you're doing out there?
Well, I, my ego is still rampant. I'm, I'm still, one of the things I say frequently is
I like to present myself as the wizard of Oz. And what I really feel like is,
I'm a little guy behind the curtain. And the truth is I've come out from behind the curtain.
I'm an open and honest as I can be about my addiction and my recovery. But
there's always a little bit of a, of a judgment inside me about,
and do I really belong here? Are the people in this meeting, you know, do they live up to me? And
I've still got an ego that burns inside.
Is that something you've noticed burning all along or have you noticed it more in the later,
years of your sobriety?
Probably early on, it was worse. And now I've just, I mean, I love people helping people,
whether they're trust fund babies or whether they're living on the streets. And because I
recognize that after March 1st of 1988, without the intervention, I would have been on the streets
for the rest of that year.
I was curious if you could go back in time, let's say 35 years or more, what would you tell the
Scott at that point?
Based on what you know now that would make a difference to him?
Well, in hindsight, what that man needed was assurance that he was okay,
that he didn't have to wear masks, that he had not really been abandoned by his mother and father.
And I did a lot of therapy work. I did the John Bradshaw rescue your inner child
to the point where when my inner child saw me coming,
away and said, you know, stop, we've done this 10 times. I was intensive cognitive behavioral
therapy. I did two and a half years of weekly psychodrama. I have explored my relationships
with self, with my mother and my father, to the point where I feel just completely comfortable
about being who I am in my own skin.
And you project that. There's a kind of a quiet confidence to that, that I always see in you and
a gentleness that...
Can only come out of doing that kind of work. The thing I think that's important with you saying
that in this format that we're in today, talking about it, is that AA is but the beginning for
some of us in the self-revelatory process. And my story is very much like yours in the sense that
after I got sober, I was open to things like psychiatry for clinical depression that I had
resisted all along and drank and used drugs over. And I still have clinical depression,
but it's treatable and I can manage it. But all of the other work that I would have been
completely resistant to, AA opened me up to it. And there were a lot of people along the way,
Scott, maybe some of them did this with you, who said, you don't need to go do that. You know,
AA's got everything you need. You know, you don't have to go. You don't need to take
antidepressants because when you get depressed, just sing a happy song or, you know, write about,
or, you know, go out and run 20 miles or whatever, which isn't the way that you deal
with clinical depression. It's the way you deal with the blues. But there's a lot of advice in AA,
and I'm not impugning the integrity of the program. I'm just saying that some of the
most well-meaning people can take a look at what's going on with an individual and
kind of jump to a conclusion. Well, there's certainly a lot of people who poo-poo
meetings. In fact, they even poo-poo people who went to treatment. I'm a medical researcher at my
core. And therefore, I wanted to research every adjunct to my own recovery that I could,
including therapy, including retreats, including psychodrama, including, you know, virtually
everything. I took great pleasure in,
literally, finding something new to try, like psychodrama or like, let's go to another retreat or
let's go on a sober vacation and learn from the real gurus that are speakers at those meetings.
You were a regular at that, weren't you? Didn't you go on those sober vacations on a regular basis?
Yeah, I did about a dozen of them and formed a really deep, rich friendship for about 10 years
with Paul Oligar, the author of Dr. Addict and Alcoholics.
So there is life after.
Dr. A.A., as you and I both know, but one of the difficulties I think I find, and I want to get your
perspective on this, when I'm talking to people who are relatively new, whether they're young
and new or older and new, I almost feel like the fact that I've been sober as long as I have and
the fact that I know a lot of people and a lot of people know me, that it almost becomes a barrier
to people either wanting to approach me or if I approach them to them wanting,
to hear what I have to say, because, you know, man, I'm at two weeks and you're at 32 years.
How can you possibly identify? How do you feel about that?
Well, I'm always, I'm always really, really, really warmed when young men with two weeks reach
out to me. And I'm sure they see me as a father figure or as a grandfather figure. And they see
something in me that I don't see in me.
That's interesting.
They see someone who's kind and comfortable and warm. And I don't see that in me. I
still see myself as ego driven, selfish and self centered. But those young men
have come to me for help. And I love working with them early and then passing them on to a good
sponsor. So that's been very rewarding. And the love that I feel for my own children,
and now my grandchildren, my great grandchildren, has been very rewarding.
That's really, that's,
really wonderful. I, I wanted to ask you, if you could identify for our listeners,
a couple of times, a couple, maybe three times in your sobriety,
where sobriety and AA pulled you out of the fire or out of the away from the abyss?
Well, the early experiences, the realization that I was living in my own foreclosed home,
and having the miracle of my intervention. I mean, that was something that pulled me out of the
abyss. My daughter's, my daughter's literal pulling back of the curtain during family week
at four weeks at West Oaks was a major moment. I, being really grounded in my own higher power
early on, traveling on those sober vacations. For example, I first heard,
um,
I heard Susie R. tell her story. And I learned about the story I tell about
the addict holding onto the rope above the burning pit. And I was on a sober vacation in St. Louis,
or St. Lucia, the island of St. Lucia. And I heard the wheelbarrow story. And, um,
so there have been moments along the way, um, having a sponsor, um, whose name was,
William Perez. He's long gone, but who died with over 50 years sober, who I talked to every
single day of my recovery. So there were always moments, Howard, that wouldn't let me get to the
abyss. You were smack dab in the middle, the middle of the herd, and it's hard to get picked
off. I wondered for, for the listeners who may not know that story about the wheelbarrow,
would you mind recounting that so they can get a picture? I just love it. I think it's a great,
great story.
Well, Michael H. and Will K. tell it better than I do, but the original story goes
that there's an alcoholic who is going to a lot of meetings and he's proselytizing and he's
telling everybody how great God is. And he's an advocate for God. And I know God and God is good.
And people are just getting sick and tired of him proselytizing like he knows God personally. And
people are getting pretty sick of it. And
one time after a particularly obnoxious presentation of I know God and you don't,
all of a sudden he finds himself on the rim of the Grand Canyon, on the north rim of the Grand Canyon.
And it's getting dark and the wind is picking up and there's clearly a storm coming.
And God's voice appears and says, hey, alcoholic, I hear you've been talking about me. I hear you.
You're proselytizing on my behalf. You're my missionary.
I'm an apostle. I guess you just know everything about me.
And the alcoholic says, it's just stunned that he's under the voice of God.
And he says, oh, yes, yes, yes. I believe in you.
You are everything. I totally believe in you.
So the higher power then says, well, look over the rim of the Grand Canyon.
Do you see that big cable that stretched one mile all the way across the canyon above the
canyon?
That is one mile down. The higher, the alcoholic said, I see that cable.
Suddenly God appears holding a wheelbarrow, a little tiny wheelbarrow with a metal wheel on it.
And he says, do you believe in me enough to believe that I could put this wheelbarrow on that cable
and wheel it across all the way across to the south rim of the canyon?
And the alcoholic says, oh, my God, yes.
Of course I believe in that. You're the higher power.
There's a long pause and God looks at the alcoholic.
The only way that God can look into your soul.
And he says, if you really believe, get in.
And it's the moment of truth.
It is, you know, and it's always reminds me to get all the way in the wheelbarrow.
One foot out ain't going to work.
Half measures of ale, that's nothing.
So the final final question I want to just ask you now that you're coming up on 33 years,
could you come up with one statement about these past 33 years that would sum up
your experience in Alcoholics Anonymous?
I'm 77 years old. I've lived the richest possible life one could live.
But I will say that there is nothing, nothing more important to me.
There is no medical research accomplished.
There is no service accomplishment more important than getting sober, staying sober and getting and staying in recovery.
Yeah, that's a great that's a great way to end, too.
I really appreciate your doing this.
And I do it because I love it and I love the people in the program.
And I love you, Scott.
You've been an inspiration to me over all the years I've known you and we're we're compatriots.
But you've also you've you've helped me in some situations where I needed some good orderly direction, some some sounded way.
And I really appreciate your advice just on living life matters.
And I'll always, always be truly grateful to you for that.
And again, many thanks for being on the show today.
Howard, you're most welcome.
What a privilege and what an honor.
Thank you, Scott.
Well, my friends, that's a wrap for today's episode of A.A. Recovery Interviews.
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