Frank M. – Emotional Sobriety – The Second Frontier of Emotional Sobriety – 1998

Hi, everybody. My name's Frank. I'm an alcoholic and happy to be in your company. And Mike did the great thing yesterday, pick us up at the airport during the height of the rush on Friday rush when everybody else was trying to get out of the city. So I think he's got a good grasp of the spiritual foundations we express in this program. You're a good looking crowd. I'll say that for you. I would have liked to have had a drink or two with each of you before I had to get up and kind of loosen me up here a little bit. At least the speaker, by the way, I've got the speaker's blazer on this morning that John and Carl had before me. The lady, we sometimes have to sit and face the audience while you're being introduced, which is really the most painful thing in the world. You know, my feet are just gnarled and totally absorbed in what I'm going to say and how I'm gonna say it. And a woman took pity on me in Tucson or Tulsa or something, and just before I spoke she put something in front of me, a little card that said the secret. And the secret had four parts to it. The first was begin where you are. Number two was do what you can gracefully. She underscored gracefully, sort of saw my spastic movements, I guess. The third was step out in faith. And the fourth was expect God to help. And it got me out of the way for a micro moment. Because as you know from going to AA and Al-Anon meetings, if any magic happens, it's because of the presence of God in the room. A little bit about myself. When Patty was reading how it works, when I came into AA and they read, There were those two with grave emotional and mental disorders, but my heart pounded. I was sure everybody in the room turned around and looked at me because I knew a good deal of my life, I had grave mental and emotional disorders. I was born in a mental hospital, Central Islip State Hospital, for those of you who have driven along the Long Island Expressway. My mother, manic depressive, and my father ran from that relationship before I was born. And I really see that that's my generic inheritance. I'm manic depressive, and I run from situations that are difficult. I've got other gifts too, you won't notice, but those are my principal inheritance. And of course, I think I was fine until about seven. I saw pictures of myself as a kid, and i looked like a terrific kid, somebody you'd like to know. After that, something happened. And I looked like an ad for a psychotropic drug. You know, I was enormously pained. And and I really believe a friend of mine when he speaks says my name is Willard. I'm an alcoholic. And if I hadn't become an alcoholic, I wouldn't have become anything at all. And my heart resonated with Willard because I started to drink when I was 13 and alcohol gave me hope, that I could change a personality I detested. I could go forward in life and say yes. Sober, I never would have had sex. I never Would Have Danced. I Never Would Have Sang. When I drank, I imitated Frankie Lane and Johnny Ray. I'm embarrassed to admit that. I've never done it sober, fortunately, since I'm in AA. But I mean, I went for the brass ring when was drinking. I never would have had that opportunity had I not been intoxicated. What I liked about alcoholism was there was no long training program necessary. You kind of got right at it. Of course, I got sick. I went through the projectile vomiting, all the cute little things that are attached to acute alcoholism. I had blackouts and my blackouts were progressions inside an overall progression. In the end, in the beginning, my blackouts would be maybe some of you would change positions, but I'd be in the same room with the same people and basically in the same conversation. In The End, there are vast gaps in my experience. I have no idea places on this planet I've been with other people, and I have no idea of being present. A lot of people think AA is about not drinking. If that were true, if we were sitting in here on a Saturday afternoon not drinking I would have hung myself. If I didn't walk into AA and see hope and laughter and that kind of thing, I could never have stayed. If I did not see in AA some mechanism for fundamentally changing my personality which I tried to eradicate most of my life, I would never have stayed. Anyone who watched me drink would have said that man wants unconscious time. He wants to smash his five senses as fast as he could. I never measured a drink in my life. I know we've all been to those homes where they have the jiggers with the white lines and they carefully pour it to the white line and then put a pint or two of fluid in it and then pull it out. And then put everything away. You've been there too. You know it's going to be a long night. And it was. I never went back. I loved it if you met me at the door with a vase full of anything, and you said, Frank, I'm making your first drink. After that, you helped yourself, and you had unopened bottles behind the open ones. I knew we cared about each other. We would be there a while. We would bond, you know. We would go out together. We would stay in the kitchens. Kitchens are holy places for me. You know, 2 and 3 in the morning where everybody who worried about American industry left and we were left there. Very close to it, whatever it was. Remember, one more drink and we'll wrap it up, whatever that. That's who I wanted to live. I wantedto live in that consciousness. Had I been able to titrate that my life, stay there, I would have been satisfied. That to me was happiness. Loss of self. I cared about you. I had passions I didn't know I owned until I started to drink. You know, I had opinions and I thought you wanted to hear them and hear them and hear the mean I'd get stuck places and people would say move on Frank, you know. I come from a family, I was raised by my mother's sisters and brothers and I hated them. I hated him because they didn't have it. You know, they sat around the kitchen having tea and worrying. You know? I hated that. I wanted access to a different personality. And what I did is alcohol gave me access to a different person. To a personality I didn't own, but I liked it. And I think when I first had that taste of a different personality, it was over. I don't think I had a choice after that. I don' t think there was any turning back. They say there are no known nutrients in alcohol. That wasn't my experience. Alcohol fed my personality, it fed my imagination. It gave me access to power I never would have had. I could raise an army and march when I was drinking. Sober, I was too frightened and afraid. And that was it. I describe myself as somebody, a personality with a foot on the brake and the accelerator in the same moment. I desperately want to go and get attention and win, and I'm afraid to move and make a mistake. Alcohol gave me some kind of way to get those two forces within me together. It diminished my fear and increased my sense of power and understanding and clarity. I don't know, this is probably not true. By the way, I'm always amused in AA they ask the alcoholic to tell their stories. I think a neighbor who looked through her curtain knows more specific details of my drinking than I do. If I thought I would be talking about my drinking so often or so much, I would have paid more attention. Alcoholism isn't paying attention. It's careening through life with a drink in your hand and doing it as long as you can. I've never heard a story in AA where anyone stopped the half hour before we had to. Most of us, if you're like me, have stopped a decade after we should have. We're the leftover ones. I was a drunken driver. You couldn't take the car keys away from me. I had places to go. I could not leave this drinking experience unless I had another one to go to and I need a traveler in between them. I have more glasses, unidentified glasses in my possession, you know, from other people's homes or from bars. I was a barroom drinker like John, and my bars were progressions. You know, right after work, I would go to P.J. Clark's or the Running Footman, kind of a classy place, and then the dissension would start. You know? I would automatically know sometime when it was working for me when I should leave and go to a bar where they weren't so demanding or you could be a little more out of control or louder whatever it was I basically would sense I better move on and then in New York I would move east and finally I'd end up in a bar where they had two furs or Columbus Avenue under the elevated where they didn't care and in the end I was thrown out of those bars the biggest uh thing about my alcoholism was was not what i experienced it was what people saw shame is my most powerful emotion because pride is my biggest sin i always knew how to package myself i always know how to how to uh dress and and and how to answer and how to look attentive. I was always dishonest in that sense. I was never authentic, unless I was under the influence of alcohol. Then I thought I was free. I didn't have to worry. What happened to me at the end of my drinking was I could no longer time. I was literally out of control. I could no longer time when that kind of stuff would happen you know the the uh the causal effect you know i didn't mind being drunk when i had massive amounts of alcohol and uh and getting into trouble you know you just say well i drank too much but sometimes i would be in big big trouble with what i considered marginal amounts of alchohol you know how could i have been so you know i had a thirst judy garland they when they asked her why do why she drunk why she was so drunk all the time said, I had a thirst. And boy, I identify with that. There were fires deep within me I couldn't get at. I couldn'T quench unless I had massive amounts of alcohol. You know, if there were three of us on a six-pack, I'd have four of them and try to suck on the other two. You know? Just an enormous thirst for alcohol. And never felt it. You You know, I know we've all traveled and been with people like our friend Carl who say things like I've had enough. Those words never came out of my mouth. People would scream it on my behalf. He's had enough! But I never felt it, you know? I would feel... I never feel it. I always thought I was shifting into second gear, you now? My whole life I was into packaging, you kno? I always knew how to package myself. As I said, I knew how to look attentive. I went to Catholic schools for 16 years and I knew how to look devout. I just never felt anything. I could use the vocabulary but I never had any belief behind it. I knew how to dress. I knew how to act or talk. All of that stuff I could do but I didn't know but I'd never felt authentic. I always felt that I was a counterfeit, not a real person. It's a tough place to live. And the surprising thing is, I got away with it for so long. I drank for 23 years, 13 of them on a daily basis. As I say, I never measured a drink in my life. And seven of those 13 years, I had unlimited access to pills, medication. I wound up in pharmaceutical advertising. I was director of advertising for a large drug company. So all I had to do was ask for a trade package of anything. I never wanted the little physician samples. I always wanted bottles of 100 or 500. I would say we needed them to take photographs of for trade advertising. So I would walk around like a little apothecary thing, you know, all these. I never met a pill I didn't like. I never said no to a drink. You know, I knew that if I got into gin it was going to be an early night. You know gin made me angry for some reason. But if you just had martinis, that was okay. I could take them. And what I did with the pills was medicate acute alcoholism. As I say, I didnít mind being a drunk. I just didn't want you or anybody else to know it. I took Orophia serpentina because my bed would vibrate. I thought I was going to have a stroke. I didn't even mind having a stroke, I just did not want to drool out of the corner of my mouth. Everything was cosmetic. I took natural retin, that was a diuretic because I was bloated. I was floated from acute alcoholism. So I took diuretics. I took the so-called minor tranquilizers because for some reason you take massive amounts of a known sedative alcohol and you become more nervous, a more nervous person. So I had to take, you know, take those pills and almost everything else. I even took a pill called Daprosil. It was when in the country you could mix three ingredients in one pill, Daprasil was made by Smith, Klein, and French. And the indication for it was premenstrual tension. I never had premenstrual tension when I took Daprasil, that I recall. But I knew this nurse very well, and she would say they're wonderful for hangovers. And I took one virtually every day to deal with my hangover. I read on a prescription once, take as needed. And I thought that was an enlightened way to deal with kilograms per body weight per hour. You know, you didn't have to do all those calculations. Just kind of anticipated what mood you wanted a half hour from now or whatever and go for it. You know? Go for it! I was protected by an ego that said the rules of life didn't apply to me. You know if you drank and took pills I'd say be careful. if you smoked in bed I'd say be careful I ignited myself all the time don't drink and drive I would tell you, and believe it, I'd say it with conviction as I would drink and drive. I was arrested for drunk and driving, you know putting your head out the window, one eye all those stuff we hear at AA meetings but automobiles were mobility you know, if somebody said don't drive I heard they were telling you stay home and I couldn't deal with staying home. I had to go out. Anyway, you get a sense of what I was like. As I say, I'm startled that I endured so long. I remember coming out of a blackout heading west on 14th Street. The dawn was coming up. I'd been to an after-hours place and the next thing I knew I was on the sidewalk facing east with four flat tires and a crowd of people around me. And they were asking me what happened. You know, they always ask the alcoholic. What happened? Like we know, you know. Or why do you do that? And you can't imagine what you did, you know, or who you did it to. Anyway, they were asking me, what happened? And I was smart. I kept my mouth shut, and somebody in the crowd said, well, what happened? This guy was going west across Second Avenue. Another car jumped the light and hit him in the back, and it pivoted around and landed in front of the bank on 14th Street. And I had my story. I was rescued like that all the time. We become very crafty, and we adapt to acute alcoholism as long as we can. As I said, nobody stops drinking 10 minutes before we have to. Alcohol is an accommodation to increase madness. Because I was born in a mental hospital, I was always frightened my whole life that I was insane. In those days, they said it was bad blood. If you had mental illness in your family, people watched you. And you watched back. And you became very careful. You didn't make any sudden movements. And what I had done with my drinking was I induced what I feared the most. And if you're an alcoholic and you drink, you'll become what you hate the most." It's just the nature of acute alcoholism. I was always incredibly careful of how I presented myself. And in the end, I was out of control. Urinating all over myself at the top of the Waldorf Astoria. Coming out of a blackout at the top of The Plaza Hotel where everybody in the room is important to your career. The industry Christmas party. I ran away with the elevator in The Plaza Hotels thinking I was cute. I always thought I was cutie when I was drunk. People didn't share that view, and I would be in and out of this blackout. I remember a table full of people looking with shock and disbelief at something I had uttered, and I had no idea what it was. And people would put me in the cab and send me home, and I'd go back and I go back, and that's alcoholism. You know, alcoholism isn't drinking when you want to drink. Everybody drinks when they want to drink. Alcoholism is every cell in your body is saying, for God's sakes, Frank, you've had enough or stop drinking here. Just don't do it here as you're out of control and you can't stop and you push them out of the way to get another drink and another drink and another one. And that's what we're talking about, Alcoholics Anonymous. We're not talking about marginal amounts of drinking. We are talking about vast amounts of self-destructive drinking. And that's what we have to remember. We're dealing with a force here within us that's enormously self-destructive. It didn't take marginal amounts of alcohol to keep me drunk, it took vast amounts of alcool to keep my drunk. And it takes massive amounts of a known spiritual program to keep you sober and happy and useful. I didn't drink an hour or two a week, I drank all the time. If I was conscious, the first thing in the morning was I need a drink and I did you know and as I say I never met a drink guy I didn't like I would I would finish drinks I was very thrifty about alcoholism you know I ordered it by the case to save the 90 cents delivery charge you know. And I would finished if I was leaving a restaurant a classy restaurant full of elegant people. I would finish not only my own drink and everybody else at my table, but drinks on the way out. You can imagine what an impression I made on people, you know. I finished drinks with cigarette butts in them. Talk about class. At least not whatnot, you know, sort of thing. Anyway, a friend of mine says every alcoholic stops drinking. It's nice to be alive when you stop. AA to me is what do you do with a life you never wanted to live? You know, anyone who watched me would have said that man wants to smash his five senses as fast as he can. You know suddenly you're yeah I was I believe I was flung into AA with the same violence that other alcoholics are flung into the fire homicides or suicides were littered all over the road. I smashed up all kinds of cars and walked away from them. And didn't, as far as I know, kill anybody. But I could have. I was in a blackout going at 90 miles an hour, fast as I could. Trying to catch a bar before it closed or get somewhere. That kind of drive, incredible, insane drive. Anyway, I was alive at the end of it. So A is what do you do with a life you never wanted to live? How do you restructure your whole personality so you're no longer self-destructive? Because I know how to spoil your day and mine without picking up a drink. I know that attitudes is our problem. I would have died from something else unless I had Alcoholics Anonymous. A lot of people think we sit in here in a chair and listen to stories all the time, and I must say that helped me in the beginning. You know, that people would take themselves lightly. I always overvalued myself. You know when Sylvia Plath died somebody wrote Sylvia overvaluated her own sorrows and that was true with me and my family too. I come from a family where we can talk about anything except if it's important. Then everybody shuts down. I don't pick at your sorrows and you don't pick at mine we avoid and so we sit there smoldering unable to get relief and that's what I drank I drank for that kind of relief just to feel safe just to be safe just to say I'm going to be okay anyway I loved AA from the beginning people would come in and tell their story. I could laugh at your sorrows. If you killed your mother, I'd say no big thing it's been done before. Shakespeare wrote about it. Just lighten up. But if I had a pimple, I was inconsolable. People would say, it's not a bad pimple. You can hardly see it. And I would say to myself, easy for them to say, it's on their face. Push away any kind of help, any kind of uh and i was very analyzed i was analyzed to death i spent a lot of time on couches in therapy and i think that's true for most alcoholics we don't lack for information what i lacked for there was the capacity to apply the information to myself in any useful way i've never heard a story in aa where people didn't have enough information about ourselves What we need was an environment to apply it. AA is very simple, but it's not easy. Otherwise the rooms would really be filled. We've sold over 18 million big books. We don't have 18 million people. That's just in this country. The big book is in 40 other languages. But we don'thave 18 millionpeople in AA. And yet the simple formula for getting and staying sober is contained in that volume, that textbook. And even they didn't invent it. It was known before that abstinence was the answer. I'm going to go get into that with part two a little bit. Alcoholics have been bothering people for a long time, you know, puzzling them. We're not the first of our kind. Thank God. Anyway, I would come to AA and hear this guy tell the story. You know, he took all the money, burned down the house, he ran over his wife in the driveway, left the baby on the bus, and everybody would say, terrific story, Fred. You really helped me. And I would feel enormous relief that they all were laughing at Fred's sorrows. And that was very helpful. I believe our recovery stops from our last drink. I don't think we have to train every cell in our body to reconstitute itself in the absence of a known poisonous substance in massive amounts. Every cell in your body, without any training, without any guidance, knows how to detoxify itself. You know, you spill liquor on an expensive antique table and you have a very, very costly repair job. You can imagine what it does to the internal organs of our body when you drink at the quantities and duration that I did. and it takes a long time to recover that's not my personality I want instant relief I'm the kind of personality I could put my hand in boiling water to get what I want but I want it to be there when I do it I don't want somebody to say well you have to come back tomorrow and do it again and again and again and that's what AA is about how do you survive 24 hours and come back the next day and the day after that. AA is not instant relief. I think we lose a lot of people because of that. Because, you know, they recover physically and don't recover spiritually or emotionally. The little theme of my talks are emotional sobriety. Physical sobrietry is easy and that's out of our hands. You know, that God does and biology does and all that other stuff. Whatever you want to consider, your body knows how to do that. A is about how do you change your enormously self for me? And this is all my opinion. How do you change your enormous self-destructive basic personality? I'm the kind of guy, I'll always find out what's wrong with that picture. I never imagine I'm going to win the lottery. I always imagine that bus is going to go out of control and run me over. You know, instantly negativity. When left to my own devices, I worry. I come from a family, I'm probably the ninth generation worrier, you know. And I hated that, and that's what I tried to change with alcohol. I didn't want to be like that. and what I induced with alcohol was I was like that at the end I was terrified of everything and we all know it or we wouldn't be here we all knows what the end of alcoholism is like it's horrendous and why I chose life I don't know because I have an ideation for suicide all the time I had that drinking and I have that in recovery As I say, I want a quick, easy fix. And if it doesn't come quick and easy, why bother? That kind of stuff. It isn't worth the bother. That's the way it was for me in early recovery. I came into AA in the mustard seed in New York. By the way, my home group is the Oxford group on West 84th Street. We meet on Monday and Wednesday at 730. And I hope I see you guys there. Not all together to eat the cookies, but a few at a time would be okay. But I got sober. My spiritual home is the mustard seed. I think wherever we enter AA is holy ground. At the end of my drinking, I would read in the Merck manual when I was drunk about alcoholism. I knew I was an alcoholic. I would find beer can stains all over the Merick manual on the chapter on alcoholism or any of this stuff. I had lots of that kind of stuff around. I thought alcoholism came like psoriasis you know mild moderate and severe and I had kind of a mild to moderate case nothing to worry about with an occasional flare-up flare-ups were arrest for drunken driving you know being asked to resign your job that kind of stuff that got my attention poverty I hadn't worked for almost a year before I came to AA poverty got my intention I'd run out of capacity to borrow money, and it was over. That's the only way I could describe the end of my drinking was, it was all over. And I knew it. I knew that route was over, I had thoroughly convinced myself that there was no more juice, no more relief in that road. And that's the frame of mind I entered AA. I don't know where it came into my mind to call Alcoholics Anonymous or the ability to act on it. Apparently, I went to a vinegar clinic in Black Outs, Payne-Whitney. People offered to send me, just get me off their desk. But if I was conscious, if you talked about my drinking, it was like fingernails on a blackboard. I couldn't stand it. I got rid of you or I got out of there. I just couldn't understand it. It was a wound I couldn�t address and anyway, on my last day, June 10th, 1970, I called Alcoholics Anonymous. I couldn't spell it in the phone book. I didn't know how many H's or L's. I'd done a lot of damage to my central nervous system. I could say what I wanted to say. I would start in the middle of a sentence. People wouldn't know what I was talking about. And you know how they are in AA. Oh, that's fine, Frank. Yeah. And I'd be... Of course, I was sober so I'd know I didn�t make sense and I'd I'd be like talking in tongues, so I'd humiliate myself. And so I had a call of information, and they gave me the telephone number for Intergroup in New York. I think Intergroups are holy places because that's where I entered AA. For some reason, I went down to Intergroup. I thought they said you had to go down there. That's what I heard. I talked to the people on the other end of the phone, and they didn't say that. They were going to give me meeting information, But I heard you had to go down there. And I went down there, and it was early in the morning. Of course, I was dressed like I was going to a job interview. I hadn't worked for a year. Sweating, June, New York, for an alcoholic. You know, I'd sweat in January. You can imagine how an alcoholic sweats in June. And hungover, really hungover. And what they sent out for, I just wanted a beer. You know, I thought if you were drinking beer, you were giving your liver a rest. You know? That beer was kind of in the food category, like wine. You know. I knew brandy was trouble. Or gin was trouble, but I didn't think beer, you know, was trouble." But anyway, they didn't send out for beers. They sent out for cigarettes for me. I was a four-pack-a-day smoker. The only thing that interrupted my drinking was my smoking and vice versa. and I've been in AA custody ever since. I've just stayed. I heard a woman when I got down there say to another woman what she thought was out of my hearing or I thought she thought it was out OF my hearing and she said he's going to make it. And I try to say that in the presence of every other newcomer that I meet, that they're going to make it because I believe that everybody who comes to AA has the capacity to make it if we stay everything to me is in the staying you know is showing up you know a is like the bakery you take a number and you have a seat and you wait and you wait for emotional sobriety and that's the key you know if you if we come back to AA after we get the physical sobriety, we come for emotional sobriete. Bill our co-founder wrote a wonderful essay on emotional sobriet,y the second frontier. He had been sober 15 years and he recognized it himself that he was still enormously self-destructive and so did I. In fact I think in a lot of ways I was more self- destructive sober than I was when I drank because I could have all faculties available to me, to be self-destructive. You know sometimes I was passed out behind your sofa under your piano out of harm's way but sober I can be you know crawling the streets at 2 and 3 in the morning looking for trouble and getting it you know and that's what I needed a vast treatment for my emotional disorders. The fact that I overvalued my sorrows that I I'm enormously left to my own devices alone. I can be just as destructive as I ever was when I drank. I could put other substances, other toxic substances or non-toxic substances to excess into my body and have. As I say, I smoked four packs of cigarettes a day when I came in AA. Nobody could take them off me. You know, I was convinced. I knew all about lung cancer. As I said, I, I wasn't a pharmaceutical industry medical profession, ancillary too. and I knew all the information on lung cancer. It didn't stop me from any more than information on acute alcoholism stopped me from drinking. That's what I need treatment for, and that's what AA is about. People think, as I said earlier, AA is not drinking. AA is how do you fundamentally reorder your life so drinking and other self-destructive things are are unnecessary. And that's the hard part, to fundamentally change. And that took me quite a bit of time. But I went to a lot of AA meetings in the beginning. I would go to two, three a day. You could do that in New York. As I say, the mustard seed was my spiritual home. There were 52 chairs, one lamp on in the room. Some of you may have been there, 37th street between park and lexington you walk down it's a pied-a-terre kind of thing and uh dark and uh we all had our chairs everybody had their chair you know if somebody was in jane's chair during the whole meeting i would think who's that in jayne's chair and where's jane i wouldn't hear a thing speaker said but that was important was very important to be known everybody's got to have a home group where you're noticed and recognized and you bring some component to that meeting and you're missed if you're not there, you're missing so you have some identity if you don't like yourself you're going very far in relationships after I'd done my inventory I noticed my relationships I came up this morning a little at breakfast. My relationships lasted 24 months, almost to the day. I first noticed it in my jobs. I changed jobs every 24 months almost tothe day. And I changed personal relationships. I changed where I lived. And often those things would also happen simultaneously. But I would live in New York or move around New York to a different area of the city, Manhattan. Or I'd move to California. I moved to Japan. You know, always running away for a fast start. I didn't know that. I thought I was going for opportunity I thought it was going from more money or better job title. But the reality was that I was running. I Didn't like me If you if you have disowned yourself at a very early level you're not bringing anything into any relationship And I had disowned myself at a really early level. I used alcohol to create a personality The counterfeit of personality I would lie about who I was at bars. You know, I'd change my name. I'd take some component of somebody I'd gone to college with where he lived in Albany or a latent place outside of Albany and somebody else's personality or someone else's name and synthesize a person. And that's who I'd fabricate at a bar. A little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of something else. It's a very difficult way to live, you know? You never have wholeness. You never have unity. You're always frightened that you're going to be exposed, you know, and AA has been my access to wholenesse. You know, whatever I am with all my character defects and pimples today, I'm at least, I have an identity, and I know where I can get relief for the pain that I feel when I feel it. I've had an enormous number of people who have helped me. I watched people succumb to AIDS in New York and do it with grace, you know, face death on a daily basis and do with grace. I never had role models like that in my life, you know. People who live with diminishments and do It With Grace. People live with poverty, in an affluent country, maybe a too affluent country. By any measurements we're the most gifted people on the planet and yet we're the most self-destructive. We have a higher ratio of people in prison than any other large country than any another industrialized country. We've more illness and drug addiction and all those things. So there's an enormous pervasive unhappiness that has to be treated certainly myself and I think in our environment and joyously that's what we have in AA we have a basis, a fundamental environment for changing who I am and what I am with the help of a formula that's contained in the big book and a body of people, a fellowship that can help me to do it And one of the people I'll talk a little bit about later, William James, you know, an American philosopher. He was a physician and a philosopher, as you know from a very gifted family in Boston. His brother was probably at the time the most famous novelist, Henry James. And he wrote that the biggest discovery of this century is that by changing the inner aspects of our minds, we change the outer aspects of ourselves. And that was true with me. The 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and the community, the fellowship of Alcoholic Anonymous have given me access to fundamentally changing the inner aspects of my mind. That's thunderous when you think about it because attitude is everything. When I came in, you often heard that AA stood for attitude adjustment. that I could see the glass as half-full rather than half-empty. Because I came from a family, we would automatically see the glasses half- empty. We would find out what's wrong with this picture. And that's my fundamental disease, and that's what I tried to treat with massive amounts of alcohol. And what I need is a portable spiritual program. I've always felt safe in AA meetings. First of all, I owed a lot of money when I came to AA, like most of us. And I felt my creditors would never look for me in an AA meeting. They'd look for a lot other places, but never in an AAA meeting. So I always felt safe. I think every AA meeting is a prayer. Everybody here this afternoon, whether we're conscious of it or not, has said at some level, I'm not enough by myself. I need something else. And for me, every AA meeting is a meditation. Something happens when we get together. I think my brainwave... These can all be demonstrated. My brainwave activity changes. If I ever get a chance to be still and get out of myself, it's in an AA meeting where I can get into the speaker's life or what the speakers say, even sometimes just for a micro-moment because I'm still bringing my stuff and the meeting's only an hour and I've got to get out of there. You know, all that racket that has always been in my head. And anyway, I really feel in my soul that if I can do it, anyone can do It. Because it was very, very difficult for me to accept direction. You know? I don't take direction easy. You know. I would always find out. I went to some of the best psychiatrists available to me in New York, and I would find something wrong with them. Sure, they're wearing brown shoes with black socks, something important that I could just disregard everything they said. Or they use the wrong word, or they slur, whatever. Something human that they did was enough for me to say, now how do I get out of here with this jerk? And, I think success is more corrosive to alcoholics than failure. Failure gets my attention. I was probably never more open to help than when I landed in AA. My alcoholism was violent enough to propel me into AA with enough violence and enough velocity that I've stuck. As I said, I came to AA in June, which is the best month to come to AA because you stick to those metal chairs in June and July and August, and it's hard to leave with a metal chair stuck to you and not be noticed because I was always worried about being noticed. Anyway, that's going to be a little break here, and then I'll get into, if some of you like to hear, some of our collective history. I think two things we have to own if we're to be emotionally sober. We have to earn our own recovery or we don't go anywhere, you know? And we have hear it again and again and again because I can take everything I've ever been given for granted. But when I hear my own story, I see that God has done for me what I could not have done for myself. I really believe the fundamental message of Alcoholics Anonymous is the ABCs, that I'm an alcoholic and I cannot manage my own life. That B, probably no human power could have relieved my alcoholism. I couldn't hire the right people to do it, and that's what I tried to do. I tried to get people to deal with my problems. Hire the right People, and then you don't have to address it yourself. And the third one, the C, is but God could and would if we were sought. My basic problem was my God wasn't big enough for my problems. I couldn't count on my God because I had all this other racket going. You know, I believed in money when I came in, even though I owed $57,000 when I became in. And my biggest shame was the money I owed, and I was driven to pay that back, but money was power. If somebody tried to give me advice, I'd be saying, well, how much to myself? How much do you earn? Where do you live? Who do you run with? All of that racket, all that disguise to conceal the fact that I've never really been comfortable in myself. When you're like that, you throw stuff at the world. You throw material goods. I never felt the love for my family so I would throw money at them. I put my mother in fine psychiatric homes. You know, I moved where my uncles lived. I always could intervene materially. I just could never be there emotionally. When I got sober, I didn't have a lot of money to intervene in people's lives so I had to be there and be there and be there. So I would have to have an activity. I remember being so drunk I'd put my mother in a mental hospital in New York, convenient to me even though it was enormously expensive but I could get there on my way doing my bars and I remember she on more than one occasion I would stop at a bar the watering hole right down the corner from where the mental hospital was and I would stop there until almost closing time almost till the visiting hours were over and I'd go and visit her and on more then one occasion she would just say Frank go home frank go home i wasn't bringing any kind of help or or message you know i could i could change the the outer aspects but i could never change the inner like william james said the inner aspects of my mind so i brought my own contamination everywhere i went you know a is about fundamentally changing so that i was able to be there for them when i when i visited my uncles i would have some activity because I would just be so nervous and uncomfortable around them that I'd have to have some activity. And so, I'd make a stew or I'd do something. I'd bake yogurt. And that helped me. As long as I had an activity, I could be there. And they were fascinated with this jerk who used to come out drunk all the time. Now he's making cakes and hurry curry and all kinds of stuff. I was fascinated with the personality that emerged too. Anyway, we're going to take a break and I hope you have a chance to come back and hear a little bit about our own history as alcoholics. Thanks.