Eighteen Years of Psychotherapy Is Showing Up at a Gunfight with a Knife Once a Week – Scott R.
About This Speaker Tape
Scott R. shares his story with a crowd in San Diego, roughly thirteen years and ten months sober. Raised in a chaotic Jewish family in the Bronx, he describes a childhood filled with mental illness, violence, and institutionalization, but insists none of it made him an alcoholic. He recounts eighteen years of psychotherapy that did nothing to stop his drinking and drugging, a progression from alcohol to marijuana to pills to cocaine to heroin, and the slow-motion destruction of his marriage and two young sons.
His wife Nancy became, in his words, completely insane from prolonged exposure to him. Their children were diagnosed as functionally retarded from living in constant fear. The family went from surrounded by friends when their first son was born to utterly alone two years and nine months later when the second arrived. He sold a friend's borrowed car for rent money, got prescribed knockout drops for high blood pressure and began slamming his arms into walls to stay awake long enough to enjoy them, and told his five-year-old son there was no Higher Power.
On April 20, 1985, he crossed his last line and put a needle in his arm. His therapist of eighteen years told him nothing more could be done and suggested AA or institutionalization. Scott dragged himself to a meeting he considered lamer than church and stayed only because he was out of plans. A sponsor walked him through the steps from the Big Book, and Scott began the slow, humiliating work of showing up for his family: cleaning the house, coaching Little League, giving his sons appropriate birthday gifts on the right day for thirteen straight years.
The talk builds toward two luminous moments: his son Jesse getting intentionally walked at a baseball game while Scott sat at his sobriety station, and learning years later that his sponsee Roland's nightly answering machine message had been tucking his terrified son Micah into bed. Scott weaves in stories of career humiliation on a catering truck, the show business Higher Power, and a stalker newcomer to drive home his central point: the Big Book promises life getting bigger, not smaller, and absolutely insists on enjoying life.
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