Living Sober and the Design for Living That Fits the Individual – 1947 – Marty M.

Warren said it for me. I came out here, I had the opportunity to come out here on business and my business has to do with alcoholism. It has to do as a matter of fact with an estimated three million alcoholics who are not in the happy position that we are in it has to do with those alcoholics whom I call prisoners prisoners of their own condition prisoners of their own ignorance as to what is the matter with what this thing is that's getting them down. They're like so many of us were before we came into AA. We didn't know why we couldn't be like other people, we didn't know why he couldn't drink like other people and we kept on trying in the face of repeated failures. My job today is to try and reach those feet to try and teach them what their trouble is and that they can get well and I know that because of us I know that because there are over 30,000 of us in Alcoholics Anonymous who have got well. Well, my business is good in my private books because it gives me an opportunity to do something else than that. It gives me an opportunity to meet AA groups all over the country. I've not been anywhere and I've been to more than 50 cities where I haven't met the better part of of the aas in that city where i haven't been to their meetings and been to their clubhouses and sat down and talked to a lot of them and as an aa you perhaps can guess what that has meant to me that's the role in which i am here tonight i'm not here on business i'm here on pleasure i'm here in my private capacity and that is simply as an aaa member one of more than 30 000 men and women who have found their way out of their terrible dilemma through alcoholics anonymous it so happens that that is the thing of which i am the proudest in the world to be a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. I don't know of anything that I value higher. I don'T KNOW OF ANYTHING IN THE WORLD THAT COULD HAPPEN OR COULDE BE THAT I COULDER VALUE HIGHER. IT HAS BEEN FIRST IN MY LIFE FOR CLOSE TO EIGHT YEARS, EVER SINCE I FIRST HEARD OF IT IN MARCH 1939. it obviously was first in my life of necessity for quite a long time just as it has been in all of your lives because it was like without it I had been facing death without it i had twice attempted to find death more quickly because death to me was preferable to the way I was. And when I found AA, it really was life and the promise of life. It was hope and it was everything that was good. I've never had any reason to change that feeling. I hope I never will. I don't believe I ever will. I can't imagine feeling differently. So the thing that I am first is a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, and the thing that comes first to me is AA as a program and as a whole. I wanted to tell you something about what AA means to me because that's all I have to offer as another member of AA. You all know, as well as I do, that none of us has the monopoly on the only way of interpreting the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. A lot of that in my . I've learned quite a lot about that in my travels. In the last two years and two months, I have been going constantly from one city to another. And I've gone from the north to the south and from the east to the west of these United States. And in all those cities, I've noticed that the groups are inclined to do things differently and members of the group within the group do it differently. Some sections of the country have developed techniques of their own, approaches to this thing, ways of handling it, ways or organizing themselves and managing their affairs that are quite different from the way it's done in some other places. And like all of you I started in my own group and I was in it long enough to get very used to its ways and at first it was a little startling. It wasn't the way they did it in New York, so was it AA? You know how we all feel when we go somewhere else. That is inclined to be our first reaction. And I've seen it in some places so very different that I did wonder at first. But I've been fortunate enough in most cases to stay quite a bit in one place. Well not so very long, perhaps only four or five days, but in that time I've been able to talk to and get to know a lot of the members, to spend considerable time in many places at their clubhouses, to get beneath the surface of what I had seen first in the way of different approaches and different techniques. And I've discovered the same thing over and over again. That in spite of any surface differences one might find, in spite of any different methods of approach and different ways of working at this thing, when you got underneath a bit you found that the fundamentals were identical that the things that they believed in the things that they were striving for and their ways of talking about it and the conversations that were held on the whole business were as like as ball bearings fundamentally then all of us who are members of AA anywhere in the country and I guess by now I can say practically anywhere in world we're spreading far beyond the United States fundamentally were pretty much alike after all we're working on the same program they're the same 12 steps that we use no matter what accent we speak them with. And as long as we stick to those, we can't be so very different in fundamentals. But one of the wonderful things about those twelve steps to me has always been their extreme flexibility. They are capable of many interpretations. I believe really that if you sat down and talked, if you attempted to make a study of AA members everywhere, you'd probably find as many interpretations of the AA program as we have members. Everybody has their own private notion of just what the AA Program means. Overall we can agree on phrases. In New York we call it a design for living and I've heard that phrase said in many, many other places to describe it. But a design for living, if it's going to work for an individual, has to suit him or her. It has to be able to let him into it so to speak, to let him use it and if it's going to do that for so many different kinds of people as we have and as we are it's got to be flexible. That's one of its great strengths I think, that I can find what AA means for me and having found that I can make it work for me. And I can interpret it in a way that is good for me and that helps me to grow and so can you each and every one of you those interpretations are often not nearly as different as we think they are on the surface I think that fundamentally again if we got underneath them we find that they were not as different as they seem and yet in arguing and discussing the pros and cons of this way and that way of working AA we sometimes think we're poles apart. We're not. We interpret it according to our own needs at the time That gives us still greater variation, very different. The 12 steps mean something very different to me today than they meant to me the first time I ever read them in March 1939. In those days they had one significant application so far as I was concerned. I was a person who had had great difficulties with drinking. I wasn't what we call in New York a high-bottom baby, I was very definitely a low-bottle baby. Practically everything had happened to me and I had lost everything. When I arrived at the point of AA, I was in complete and utter despair. I had made every other effort I knew of. I had sought help. And after a long period of time in which I could find none, I had found help. But for me it wasn't enough. And in spite of that help, in spite of the fact that I was in a sanitarium and under intensive psychiatric treatment, every now and then, I'd go off the rails. I'd drink. And every time I drank, I fell flat on my face all over again. I got drunk. When that had happened a number of times, in spite all the effort I was making, I really was making an effort because that in my mind was my last hope. I really knew despair. It was at that point that my doctor gave me a manuscript copy of Alcoholics Anonymous to read. The first thing that happened to me in reading it was a clear explanation that I could accept, which was more important than it being a clear explanation, of what my trouble was. Like many of us, I had been laboring under the delusion that my primary trouble was mental. First, I thought I was having a nervous breakdown and when it went on and on and grew worse and worse I thought it was a serious mental collapse. And in the last few months of my drinking I was sure that I was hopelessly insane. I was bad in those last few moments. There were days on end when I couldn't get out of bed when I wouldn't even swallow the liquor that I needed in order to be able to get out of bed when I lay on that bed hour after hour and day after day and I didn't know whether it was night or day or Wednesday or Sunday or August or February and I went through those sweats that we all know and the cold chills and the horrors and I did not know whether these things had happened or whether I dreamed them I didn't dare ask and I lay with my eyes shut if anyone came in the room so they wouldn't say anything to me. That was plain unadulterated hell and in that period I was sure that I had lost what little vestiges of sanity there were left. Well we go back to the time over a year later from that last ghastly summer of 1937 when I was in a good sanitarium and getting good treatment and I still who held the theory that this was mental collapse. And that when I got those things straightened out in my thinking, when I'd got my mind all cleared up, I would of course be able to drink normally again. After all, I had been a normal drinker for 10 years before it began to catch up with me. I'd been a rather remarkably good drinker. I'd always been able to drink everybody else under the table in quantity and still walk and talk and get them all home and remember what happened. That lasted a good many years, that ability, before it begin to slip. And I remembered it very clearly. I'd be awfully proud of it. I wanted to be able to do that again. I wanted to beable to drink that way again and I couldn't see any reason in all that I had learned in psychiatry through my treatment why if I was straightening out a lot of the things that had apparently made me drink too much if I got those all cleared up and straightened out and had some real insight into my difficulties and was able to cope with them why i couldn't drink like that again i don't think i thought it out quite that clearly then but i think that's the basis of the delusion so many of us nurse that if we do something about all this long enough we'll be able to go back to normal drinking I think that is the reason why I had trouble even in the sanitarium I think that consciously or unconsciously I was going out and trying this thing to see if I'd made enough progress to have arrived there yet and when I found that I hadn't that taking a drink immediately led to another drunk then I lost all hope because I figured that nothing was happening so the first thing that meant a great deal to me in Alcoholics Anonymous was the definition I found there of just what was the matter with me there in that book I read for the first time alcoholism is a disease alcoholics are sick they have a very special kind of a disease it's both mental and physical there i read for the first time the definition which i think is so important alcoholism is an obsession of the mind coupled with an allergy of the body and there I saw explained to me that in AA or out of it or by any other means nothing could ever be done about that allergy of the body once that change had taken place it could never be changed back and that as long as I lived or any other alcoholic they would never be able to safely touch alcohol again i read there a comparison that made sense they said this is like diabetes when the diabetic finds that he is diabetic he also learns that he can't have any more sugar he's got to learn to live without sugar he've got to maintain a rigid diet he's got to take insulin fairly regularly well in AA we can't do anything about your allergy you've got to stay away from alcohol that's all you can do about that but we can do something about the obsession of the mind we can help you to overcome that in other words we can teach you how to maintain that rigid diet we can give you your insulin in the form of our program which will teach you to live without alcohol which will help you away from the first drink but you've got an obsession an obsession is a powerful thing it's not just a habit a habit can be broken without too much effort if alcoholism were merely a habit we wouldn't all be here we wouldn' have to. We could have found a dozen ways out. This is something ten thousand times more powerful than a habit, it's an obsession and an obsession needs something tremendous to help break its hold on the individual. Those are the things I saw in my very first reading of Alcoholics Anonymous. That's what it meant to me. It made sense. I was one of those who were simply delighted to find that I had a specific disease called alcoholism. In my case, that was infinitely better than what I had come to think I had. In that sanitarium where I had spent a year, There were many houses. It was a large plot of ground, and it had all kinds of cottages and buildings on it, called the Violent Golf Course. And off somewhere near the gate at the other end of a little golf course they had was a place we called the violent house. People were brought there sometimes in desperate pace. They were brought in restrained in straitjackets and strapped down with leather, screaming, completely mad and insane. And they were kept down there sometimes quite a while. And then there was a house that was sort of a miscellaneous house I guess where most of people that weren't in that bad condition or who were getting better mixed around with each other that's where i was then there was another house near the front gate and that didn't have as close supervision there wasn't a nurse at the head of the stairs that you couldn't get by for instance you could get in and out of there freely and we among ourselves call that the graduate house. That's where people usually spent the last few weeks before they went home. Well, during the year that I was there, I had actually seen people brought into the violent house screaming mad. And in a while, they'd moved up to the house where I was. And while they weren't completely well, and absolutely normal when they first came, they gradually became so before my very eyes. And after a period of time, it might be several months, they moved into the graduate house. And a little later, they went home, but I stayed. I didn't move up any further. and after I'd seen this happen a number of times I did some pretty deep thinking I didn't know what it was that ailed me then but I figured it must be pretty grim if people that came in obviously insane could get well and go out and I who had walked in there sober under my own steam was still there likely to be there indefinitely as far as I could see if they keep me. I had come to the conclusion that my trouble was something very desperately serious and so when I read that it was a thing called alcoholism which was a disease, that it was like diabetes which required certain specific treatment and certain specific effort on my part and in that case I could get well and there were at that time nearly a hundred people who had got well boy that seemed like a lot of people to me then I thought that was wonderful I felt marvelous about it I was tickled to death to be an alcoholic of course that's always made it a little hard for me to really work understandingly with those people that find it so difficult to admit that they're alcoholics and I know most people do well when I first discovered that and was glad to admit but I was an alcoholic I was interested in the AA program for one thing and one thing only. I wanted to learn how to stay away from the first drink. The highest goal in my life, my highest idea, was to learn how to say sober. All I wanted was not to drink too much. I'd wanted that before, now I knew that meant that all I wanted was not to drink, period. And I accepted that. That was a high goal and it wasn't always easy. I'm not one of those that came into AA and never touched another drink, I wish I were. But I had some difficulty in the first year and a half. I had three slips as we call it. It wasn't easy for me and therefore that goal seemed to me very, very high. It was my sole purpose in coming into Alcoholics Anonymous and I believe that it is the sole purpose of almost everyone who comes to us. they come to us to learn how to get sober and stay sober period well as time went on and I began to feel a little more certain perhaps that that might be accomplished I became aware that I had a higher goal. I realized that I wanted to do more than just stay sober. We had a woman in the New York group at that time the quality who had a phrase she used whenever she spoke. She said, it's the quality of your sobriety that counts, not the length of time. It happened that she'd been sober for nearly five years before she knew about AA. And then she had been drunk for two or three in between. but she'd had a long stretch of sobriety and in describing it she often said to us that it hadn't amounted to very much it wasn't very good surprise if it had been good sobriete she would still have had it she wouldn't have lost it and so she used to harp on that and i learned a great deal from listening to her I think that's a good thing to remember that it's the quality of your sobriety that counts my goal began to get higher my goal now had to do with the quality of my sobriete rather than with just having or even with just keeping I began to learn why it was that we had 12 steps. I'm going to skip over here rather than being logical and talk about some phrases that I learned last year in Texas that explained a lot to me, and they're rather fun too. When I was there last year at one of the groups where I spent quite some time and was around the club a lot, I heard them talking and kidding and needling people calling them one-steppers and two-stepper. And I didn't know what they meant by that and I asked them and they said well it seems to us that we get quite a lot of people in here who take the first step. They admit that they're alcoholics and that their lives have become unmanageable, and they stop drinking. And then they sit down and take it pretty easy. They don't do very much about AA. Oh, they come around. They like to see what's going on. They're rather like armchair strategists during the war. They talk a wonderful game. They can tell everybody else what's wrong with the group and what's wrong with them and how it could and should be done better, but they don't do a damn thing about it themselves. They sit and supervise and get other people to do it. We call them one separate and then they said we have another group of people that come in and they take that first step and they stop drinking and then they take a flying leap from 1 to 12 they get terribly busy working with other alcoholics they run all over town all day and all night they gather them in in droves and it's true they do a lot they do good they bring in a lot of people but you know a funny thing happened they bring those people in and then you never see them together anymore the people they bring you move on and get somebody else to learn about AA from because that guy doesn't know what to tell him All he is, is a signpost. He has directed them into the door. Once they get in, they don't need the signpost anymore. It doesn't tell them any more than where AA is. It doesn' t tell them what it is or how it works or how they can work it. And those are the people we call two-steppers. The only ones they can work with are the brand new ones because the brand-new ones know nothing, so they know a little bit more than that. But they have completely forgotten that there are ten steps in between one and twelve, two through eleven. haven't done any work on themselves. That's what those little steps are. Those middle steps are the tools that we are given, with which we can fashion a better her self. Once, use me, be willed. If, we'll use me. I didn't learn that all at once, but I began to learn it bit by bit the hard way. Each time I had difficulty, I learned a little more and I wouldn't recommend it as a way of learning. I wouldn' t wish it on my worst enemy. Plenty of people are able to learn those lessons without beating their brains out against that same old stone wall. I wasn't. Well, I was very interested in those two phrases. I discovered what they were doing about it in that Texas group. They coined those two. They made them not too derogatory, but a little bit. And they laughed about it and they joked about it and they needled each other about were you a one-stepper or a two-stecker or maybe a three or a four-stepping. They carried it all the way through. They had a lot of fun with it. And boy, they had a good group. I didn't actually see many one-steppers or two-stepers in that group. I don't think anybody could have had the nerve to stay that way, the way they handled it. They laughed them out of it. They ridiculed them out it in the most friendly and affectionate manner. I thought that was awfully healthy. And it explained something to me that I had sort of felt but hadn't really known how to say for a long time in the light of that i began looking back at my own struggles they're still going on i can assure you i learned in the beginning you never graduate from a.a and there was never a truer word spoken go on struggling with it all the time i don't mean struggling with a desire to take a drink all the time that you do leave behind but this is really a mouthful we've bitten off this aa program and if you really get your teeth into it and begin to chew i think you're going to keep right on doing it till you die i know i am I began to work as time went on at some of the other steps besides the first and the twelfth, and to gain a little more insight into myself through that. And I found that they were learning steps for me. I found that as time went along, if I really worked at them, I did learn. I learned enough so that my goals began to change. That first goal of sobriety began to look like a fairly easy goal. I was approaching it, approaching some confidence that I might maintain it, but I might have found a real way to maintain it. And I saw that that wasn't my goal. My goal was still way up there. It was a goal about certain things in myself that I wanted to have different. I heard a man in New York describe it one night. He was from Jersey but he was speaking in the Bronx and he was talking about what had happened to him and about a year and a after he got in AA. He'd been a real bum for a number of years before that he'd been a man of consequence and he suffered from being a bum and he'd been that way long enough sleeping on park benches and in flop houses so that he had robbed pretty much of the newness and glamour and excitement off of life And he didn't find it again, he said, when he first stayed sober. But after about a year and a half, he said something began to happen to him. He felt reawakening in him the ideals of his boyhood. He remembered some of the things he had wanted to do and to be as a person. and those ideals emerged in him again as bright and shining as they had been when he was 17 or 18 and he saw that at last he had found a way in which he might conceivably achieve some of them and at the age of 45 or 46 he began really working toward the ideals he'd had when he was a boy of 17, about himself. About what kind of a man he'd be. What kind of a human being he'd see. What kinds of a citizen he would be. He's been working at it five or six years and he's a pretty swell guy. And he says he still works. Well those are the kind of goals that I began to discover. I didn't describe them that way I don't know that I described them at all but they were goals about myself and I suppose if I look back I find that it was pretty much the same as as that man I was telling you about. I began to rediscover the things I had once dreamed of being. I began to rediscovery them as ideals I still wanted for mine. And I began to reach toward those goals and they were simple things at first. They seemed pretty unattainable and pretty unreachable, but they were a simple and they were simple enough so that I began to approach a little bit toward them and every time I got fairly near a goal I discovered that there was another one behind it. that to me is growth and growth is my personal interpretation of aa that is why for me it is such an exciting thing it's just as exciting to me today as it was the first day i discovered it And if I keep on feeling that way about it, and if I keep on struggling to grow, I don't see how it can ever become less exciting. Growth is an exciting process. It's never the same. It isn't even. It involves a great deal of striving, and a great deal effort, and the great deal of struggle. But it also involves a sense of achievement as you begin to see a little bit of result here and there. And that sense of achievement is a very fine satisfaction. And also, as you begin to grow, you find that you are able to give. You're able to share some of the excitement that you're finding and growing with other people who are trying to do the same thing we often say we talk the same language it's easy to find people in any group who are struggling along the same road you are you're thinking the same thoughts almost you can finish each other's sentences Of course, that was the first thing I found in AA itself, not the book, but in the group that meant so much to me. I'd always been one of those people that felt a stranger in groups and in crowds. I never felt I belonged. All my life, I'd had that problem. I always was on the outside looking in. solved that problem for me to a certain extent it made me feel a part of the group it may be able to participate and to feel at ease but when I didn't have it or when I was using too much of it it didn't work of course and the result was that when I first read the book in AA I wasn't a bit anxious to go and meet the people I didn't want to get into this group of people I was afraid that once again I'd be on the outside looking in well finally my doctor forced me down there not at the end of a whip but his methods were good enough I got there and I walked into a room full of people it seemed to me there were an awful lot probably all of 40. It looked like a mob to me and I ducked upstairs to leave my coat and didn't come down so somebody came up and got me. And I went down shaking in my boots and in the first few minutes about six people had fired the same question at me, when'd you have your last drink? To my amazement I told them the truth, without even thinking twice about it. I'd never done that before. And then I found myself talking to them. They were all men, all the AAs. There weren't any women there. There wasn't any woman in the group for me to talk to. And I found in a very few minutes just that thing I said before they could finish my sentences they knew exactly what I was thinking and how I was sinking and why and that had never happened to me before in my whole life not with any group of people and I suddenly realized that I'd come home I belong these were my people they talked my language they understood me and I understood them and I think that was one of the most wonderful feelings I have ever had in my life incidentally I've never lost it I get it again whenever I go into a new group because I can go into a town not knowing a soul and very often some of the AAs meet me at station and by the time we get to the nearest coffee counter we've been friends for 20 years you know how it is for the time, we've had three coffee three cups of coffee we were practically born twins I love that to me that's terribly important at meetings there was a man up at the sanitarium that i passed the book on to and he had accepted it with less argument than I had, incidentally. I fought it for a month. And when I was made to go to this meeting I wanted company. What I wanted was moral support and I tried to persuade him to go with me but he wouldn't. He said, you go see what it's like and if it's all right, I'll go next week. Well, we didn't have the same doctor and his doctor didn't force him so I had to go alone. But he was so curious that he called me very early the next morning from the sanitarium and he said how was it what was it like and i was at a loss to describe it and i could only say a few words i said granny we're not alone anymore that was the first big meaning that i found the first tremendous help and relief and relief and happiness that I found through AA. That is a very important part of AA. That is our fellowship. That is the strength we give each other, the understanding and the friendship and the kindness and the sympathy that we give to each other especially when we're new and struggling. the welcome that a new person usually gets when they come in the being made to feel wanted and unequal with everyone in there I heard somebody describe that wonderfully he was talking to a new prospect who was drinking and the man who was thinking looked at the AA you can imagine the difference in their appearance And he said, oh I could never be like you And the AA looked at him and he said Listen brother There's only one difference between us And it's one drink If you don't take it You'll be like me If I do take it I'll be right Like you He missed that That makes for a feeling Of great equality between new people and older people. We don't have grades or hierarchies in AA. Because somebody's been sober four years, he doesn't refuse to talk to a guy that's only been sober for a day. That isn't our way. And that feeling is terribly important to new people because for a long while they haven't been the equal of anything, not even a snake. and suddenly they're the equal of other human beings who look quite well, who are fairly well-dressed and prosperous looking, not derelicts and bums as they've been made to feel they ought to be even if they aren't. I don't want to minimize that fellowship at all. I think it is vital. I think it is a vitally important part of the whole thing that we have. But I don't think it's AA. This is my interpretation, remember. I don' t think the fellowship is AA. I don''t think individuals, I don ''t care who they are, are AA. I don't think clubs are AA. Not buildings, nor rooms, nor societies that run clubs. All of those are parts of AA. But AA would go on without any of them. For me, AA is a way of thinking. A way of living. And believing that, I also believe, and I know it's happened, that any one of us could go anywhere into the middle of the Gobi Desert where there wasn't a human being around and we still have AA because it's in here. it doesn't depend on individuals or a clubhouse or me important as those may be they are important they're particularly important on the way in when we're still trying to learn this design for living this way of thinking this new attitude toward life if you like. Without all those things we might never achieve it, although we have all over the country AA members who started all by themselves with a book and got sober and stayed sober long enough to get a group started. And some of them, I've met some men who were sober all alone for, well, I know two, 11 months each of them. One in Montreal, one in Shreveport, Louisiana. And with the aid of the book and an effort to help other people, which didn't come to anything during those 11 months those men stayed sober they didn't have a fellowship they didn' t have a club they didn''t have meetings to go to but they had AA in here and they stayed sober and they grew all by themselves that I think is terribly important it means that although we might get stranded in some town where we couldn't find an AA group or we might be someplace where there isn't one though I don't think there are many such in the United States anymore that even though that might happen we still have it with us or we can have if we want to because that's what AA can be to us. I'm not saying it always is. We don't all get it in that sense right away, and some of us don't get it for a long while. But if we don't getting it right now, if we get it that way sooner or later, we sure haven't got value for our money. we've been handed a package full of goodies and we've taken out one little cheap penny candy let the rest of the package go by because all of that is there in the program if we'll take it but we've got to take it we used to have a description of aa a good many years ago. I haven't heard it used in a long while. We used to call it a cafeteria. And we said that the counter of that cafeteria was absolutely loaded with the most wonderful food in the world. But it was strictly self-service. You could starve in that restaurant if you waited for somebody else to serve you. You could starve in the midst of plenty And that's precisely what happens to those of us who don't make use of what we've been freely given, our 12 steps in AA. I don't know how anyone can miss that because I'm quite sure that if AA could have been set up in two steps it would have been done. I don't think anybody wanted to spin it out into 12 just to see more writing on a piece of paper I think 12 steps were put down because each and every one of them was vitally important And I think if we use each and everyone of them we'll grow And growth is both happiness and intense satisfaction. And not only that, growth makes us increasingly useful people. And I believe that most alcoholics have always wanted to be useful people I think maybe one of their troubles in the past was that they couldn't find a way to be youthful that was right for them or suitable for them. They didn't know how, and they were frustrated in that. And when they got into AA, they suddenly discovered they were extremely useful people. We have something we can give that most people haven't got. And there are nearly 3 million people looking for it, waiting for it. Needing it desperately. I sometimes say that while we're laymen, most of us, and not technically trained in some senses, that actually we are graduates of the most difficult school of training that anybody's ever gone through. And furthermore, most have our master's degree in it. we worked darn hard to get it, too. We suffered to get it. On that subject, we know plenty. We don't know everything. Other people know other angles of it better than we do but we know plenty we know enough to be very useful we know to help other people and there isn't anything more useful in the world well those are the things growth and growing youthfulness that for me have meant satisfaction and happiness. That's what most people are looking for. Most people don't seem to find it. I've heard many people say in AA, and I echo it heartily, I'm glad I'm an alcoholic. Since I found Alcoholics Anonymous, I wouldn't have been glad otherwise. and quite frankly I happen to have met a great many people who got well by other methods can happen you know alcoholics who stopped drinking I wouldn't trade places with any of them I don't believe they got the satisfaction out of their lives that most of us are getting or at least can get if we want to i don't mean they're all miserable and unhappy like one guy i might tell you about they're not some of them are perfectly contented and leading very comfortable normal lives but for my money i like my way best our way I was going to tell you about this guy he told a story at a meeting he was the son of a doctor and a terrific alcoholic and his father had sent him for treatment to a very well known place it was good treatment and it worked he stayed sober for 18 months but he said the only difference between himself sober and himself drunk during those 18 months was that his wife knew where he was he was just as irritable as he'd ever been he was just as arrogant as he had ever been just as self-centered and just as hard to get along with and in short, he was perfectly miserable and at the end of 18 months he took a good look at the balance sheet and he said I don't see the profit in it and he went out and got drunk well that time he stayed drunk two or three years and then A.A. came to town and the man that came to that town to start A.I. didn't know how to begin and he called on a couple of doctors and one of them was this boy's father well that doctor was deeply interested in helping AA get started, and he did. They consider him practically one of the founders now. He tried to get the boy to go to some of these meetings in the early days, and the boy was reluctant. He said he'd tried it once, and didn't see much percentage in it, and why should he try some other way? That might work. He'd been miserable while it did but anyway the father did succeed in persuading him and he finally went and after he had been to two or three meetings the first was enough to make him want to go again he said he realized there was something very different in this than in the kind of sobriety he'd had before because these people he could see were getting something out of it that he hadn't had. They seemed to be enjoying themselves, for one thing, which he couldn't understand. They seem to be happy. I suppose if he thought of it, he didn't. He might have said some of them seem to have a serenity that he likes the look of. That's a pretty good answer in my mind to the difference between some ways of getting sober and our way of getting sober. Well, why do you suppose that difference is? Maybe this isn't the answer but it's what I think the answer is. It's because AA is not just a means of getting sober at all. All that sobriety is for us is the door by which we enter the AA way of life. I don't believe anybody could successfully follow those 12 steps while drinking. Not any alcoholics, anyway. And essential to working out those 12 steps is to be sober. So we've got to be sober if we're going to even attempt to work AA. But if we walked in the door and didn't do anything about the 12 steps, what would we have? Sobriety? Of a sort, yes. If we could keep it, yes I don't think it'd be worth very much It isn't the thing I'm looking for I don' t think it's the thing that most of us are looking for We're looking for a lot more than that out of life and we can get it. It's right here for us. We've been handed the tools with which we can get it, if we'll pick them up and use them. We've been told in a sort of condensation of those steps that we've got to have honesty, self-honesty, that we're going to have humility. That's a hard nut for most of us to crack it was awfully hard for me and i'm still struggling we've got to have tolerance and that means real tolerance honestly thinking of the other fellow first and trying not to do anything to hurt him honestly granting the other fella the right to his own opinion even if you don't agree with honestly granting to any other fellow or girl of any type or description the same chance to get well that you have honestly looking at each other all in different stages of growth in different phases of getting well with tolerance and giving ourselves the little too we often don't I expect a lot of you out here have read Peace of Mind it's gone through AA like a dose of salt back east everybody's read it there's a good deal of talk in there about forgiving yourself and I thought it was very apt because if you forgive yourself it's a lot easier to forgive other people well that's part of our program that's part of tolerance honesty, humility and love that's where I slipped up I didn't know it but I had all my life I had sat up and figured that if people gave me so much I'd dole out just that much not a speck more I wasn't going to be caught short and I didn't realize that but after I had had my first slip and it was a Lulu it was the real one Lois Wilson, Bill's wife came in to me late one night when I couldn't sleep I was still awfully sick took me a long while to come out of it and she put her arms around me and she had tears in her eyes And she said, oh, Marty, I wish you could get a little love in your heart. And I couldn't understand what she was talking about. Good Lord, me get love in my heart? I needed it from other people. And I was so beaten up and such a sad sack that I didn't know why they shouldn't give it to me at that point. My self-pity was colossal. and I puzzled over that all the rest of the night and for many days afterwards and it was the beginning of a little illumination in a very dark corner of my mind and heart and I suddenly realized what I had been doing as far back as I could look I had begun measuring out my love for other people with coffee spoons little drops in exact proportion as to what I thought they were giving me counting my returns before I handed any out and it suddenly occurred to me that that was all backwards but one of the things that goes through and through the New Testament and goes through and through our 12 steps was the idea that you gave freely regardless of what you got back, that it was indeed more blessed to give than to receive, and that the greatest satisfaction you could get was from giving, not from getting it back. and I decided to trust in other words to trust well it began to work right away my amazing people seem to like me a lot better than they had wasn't that funny I got along with them better I made more friends and I was infinitely happy well can take all those four things of which our program is made up honesty humility tolerance love they all require faith that doesn't even need mention you can't do any of them without faith and it looks to me like we've got one of the finest philosophies of living ever devised for men it's pretty good those of us who have been trying to live by it and incidentally that's about as far I guess as you ever get nearly eight years that's as far as I've got I'm trying to lift by it I don't always succeed by a long shot and no one knows it better than I and I have to keep trying and retrying on the same things over and over again we don't learn easily and I don't think that's just us I think that people but curiously enough trying seems to do a tremendous amount someone else I heard say after more than two years of sobriety that he still thought those 12 sets to the largest order that anybody had ever been given and he didn't expect he'd ever be able to fill that order but he stayed sober better than two years just trying well I think that's what we do mostly we keep trying we keep attempting and it goes better sometimes and worse others there's something that bothered me in the beginning, and I know it's bothered a lot of other people. And I've talked about it, and people have said it helped. That's the learning graph. So I thought I might mention it tonight. In teaching, it has been found that people learn in certain ways pretty regularly. children do and adults too when they're taking up something new when they first approach something new they learn very fast for a short time and the graph goes right up like that very sharp quite high and then they hit a flat plate they call it a plateau and that flat plate is kind of difficult especially for us we're so impatient you know we've got to do it all right away now and on that flat place a lot of us get discouraged we think nothing's happening we're not going anywhere what's this all about anyway and i think some people have difficulty over that they have flips they get so discouraged well on the learning graph that plateau is described as a period of consolidation of gain you've gone too fast on that upward spurt really you couldn't possibly assimilate all that you've taken in it's on the surface and you need time in which that can all be sorted out and put away inside of you so that you can use it and the flat space is when that's all happening you're consolidating your game and once that's been done you start up again it's never quite as sharp and never quite a high at the first time more gradually but it's up then you hit another flat place and that's the way learning goes always that's has been a big help to me because when I hit flat places I'm thoroughly discouraged usually. I'm very impatient. That first meeting I went to when most of the others went home, a few of us stayed and I was firing questions a mile a minute. I'd read the book about ten times and knew whole pages by heart and I had a million questions. Most new people do. And I was firing them at Bill as fast as I could and he was answering them at great length But by about 3 30 in the morning, he was getting a little tired. I think I was still full of questions I'd have gone on for days So finally he looked over at me and he said very quietly, you know Marty you don't have to do it all by Thursday That's always helped me too This was Tuesday night and I certainly was trying to do it all by Thursday. Well, I still have that tendency. I want to do everything by Thursday I want the three million alcoholics well by Thursday, too. Never will succeed at that because more are cropping up all the time. We'll never run out of prospects either, don't you worry about that. But those things about us our impatience and our fears and our worries that maybe this isn't doing enough for us we've got to learn to understand those as a living we don't need to be impatient if we understand what those flat, apparently flat periods are we'll come through them with flying colors because there's one thing sure nothing really stands still we're moving along on that flat place it's just not the excitement of shooting up but we're going to do it we're all moving along and that's something to bear in mind about growth too if we're not growing if we'RE NOT MOVING FORWARD WE'RE GOING TO GO BACKWARDS because nothing in nature stands still, including man. And I think it's pretty wise for us to keep on trying to go forward in view of what we know about what happens to us when we go another direction. We know what happens to us, when we stop trying. We now what happens to us if we don't stick to our program. We're very fortunate people. We have red flags that pop up when we get off the track, the red flag of getting near to taking a drink or even taken. We've got something that keeps us going, that prevents our dropping this thing and deciding it isn't all worth it anyway. We can't do that with impunity. I don't mean for a minute that we all have to remain as active as we are when we first come in. That wouldn't be natural life. What happens to us in AA is not so difficult to understand if you really think of it as an illness, and that's what our book tells us it is, and the scientists agree that it is. We make a mistake, a lot of us I think. I made it too. We forget how long it took us to get that sick. Very few of us arrived at the point where we wanted AA after our first night of drinking. We spent a good many years getting to that point and we all know that this is progressive, that we got worse and worse and worst as time went on. And by the time most of us arrived here, we were pretty sick. We had a very serious illness in Bill's terms which he uses frequently, a mortal disease. And yet some of us expect having spent years arriving at that point that we'll just walk in a door with two A's on it and bingo, we're perfectly well. Absolutely normal people again, just like anybody else. It isn't like that. If it were like that, we wouldn't need 12 steps. All we'd need is the knowledge that we were sick and we have to stop drinking. We'd do it and that would be that. we need our program in whole because we were so sick and because having been that sick it's going to take us a long time to get well think back to that definition in our big book that i mentioned earlier an obsession of the mind coupled with an allergy of the body all we're dealing with in here is the obsession ofthe mind we don't do any medical work we wouldn't know what to do if we did they don't nobody knows what that allergy is if allergy is the right word as many people think it isn't but it's descriptive enough for us to serve this purpose but think about an obsession that powerful thing called an obsession you don't throw that off like an old coat. You have to work to get rid of it. And what is it really that we do? In most cases, we substitute another obsession for the destructive one. We have an obsession to drink. In order to overcome that, we constitute an obsession for AA. Pretty healthy substitution because A.A. is constructive and the other's destructive. But it drives some families crazy. They don't understand why that's so necessary. They share the general belief that if we stop drinking, bingo, we're perfectly well. That you just flip your fingers at an obsession and it's gone. Obviously, it's not so. Our experience shows it. When we come in, we are just as obsessed with AA for quite some time as we were with drinking. Almost all of us. But very few exceptions. We dive into it head first, those of us I'm talking about that really want it and really work at it and make a success of it, stay with it. And we're up to our neck in it and up to out ears in it. And it is replacing the obsession for drinking. But as time goes by, a year, two, three, we get over that first intense need. The obsession is beginning to be broken and we don't have to bury ourselves quite so completely. We're perhaps a little more thoughtful of our families, stay home once in a while instead of always being out on an AA call every night in the week. I'm thinking now of what some husbands and wives have griped to me about when I've been around. You know, when you travel around in this business, you're just a walking complaint bureau. Everybody wants to tell you all of the problems and difficulties and troubles. It's a wonder that I don't get discouraged and think the whole of AA is falling apart. I know better. But what I hear are very often the problems and the difficulties, and I've heard an awful lot in the last year or so from the families who think that it's just dreadful that their husband or their wife, as the case may be, is spending so much time on AA after having neglected the family for so many years. What good is this doing? They're still neglecting the family. And I've tried to describe it to them in terms of tuberculosis, Largely because I had tuberculosis I had to live out here in Southern California For four years getting over it When I was a kid Well, I spent some time In the beginning in a sanitarium Because I had quite a bad case of it And during that time I was on the most rigid regime Had to eat every hour And had to be fed I couldn't even lift my arm Oh, the worst But after some months of that I began to show some improvement, and I was allowed to go home. I had a trained nurse. But I was in the recuperative stage. I could get up a few hours in the afternoon. Still spent most of my time in bed for another year. And then I'd improved again, and as time went on, the time up lengthened. And in my second year, I was up most of the time and just had to go to bed two or three hours every afternoon. Well I was a kid, I was 14 when this began and it's hard for a kid of that age to stick to anything as disciplined and regular as that and if it hadn't been for the fact that my family understood perfectly well what had to be done and saw that I did it, kept me to that regime, I might not have made it. I might not have gotten well. But they didn't have any difficulty understanding that it was a long-term proposition, and that I was going to have to do certain things about it at different stages of the game, and then eventually I would arrive at a point where I could do almost everything I'd ever done before, but as long as I lived, I would be an arrested case of tuberculosis. and as long as I lived I would have to take certain precautions certain things that I ought to watch out for and be careful about they understood that better than I did they thought to it that I followed them and I learned it too as time went on they've got to be taught the same things about us and we've got understand them too we've got to understand that we don't get well one, two, three by walking into AA that it's a long term continuing process and no one need be discouraged by that because it's fun all along the way and I think we've got to learn now that we're growing older and all of our groups are getting older we have many groups in the country now that are five and six and seven years old and this is one of them but among our older members many of them will not be quite as active as they once were and it's natural they won't lose touch altogether i hope if they do then we can worry about it but they won't be in there with both sleeves rolled up working on new people and right in the middle all the time and always around and always available and they shouldn't be anywhere because that kind of thing is terribly good for new people they need it and the older members don't need it so much always in every group will find that there are a few who do it that way always because they want and that's their privilege but i don't think we need to worry so much nobody's asked me about this here but i've been asked it practically every place else i've been so i'm answering it first we don't need to worry too much about the older members who are not right in the middle of things every minute the way they used to be that's part of recovery in the early days in new york when i first came in we used to stress a great deal the fact that this was a program that was going to fit us for normal living was going to put us back in the world as normal useful productive citizens and i still think that's what it's meant to be but i don't think it does just that i think it's a program to make us better human beings better men and women Better citizens than most other people ever get a chance to be. Thank you.