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

About This Speaker Tape

1937 was a summer of unadulterated hell. Marty M. lay in a sanitarium bed, sweating through cold chills and horrors, unable to tell if it was Wednesday or August. He had been a "low-bottom baby," a man who had lost everything and twice tried to find death more quickly. He describes the delusion of the "normal drinker," believing that once his mind was cleared by psychiatry, he could return to the days when he could drink everyone under the table.

He found a different answer in a manuscript: the definition of alcoholism as an obsession of the mind coupled with an allergy of the body. To Marty, the program is a "design for living" and a "cafeteria" of self-service tools. He warns against being a "one-stepper" or a "two-stepper"—those who stop drinking or act as mere signposts without doing the middle work. For Marty, sobriety is just the door; the real goal is growth and the pursuit of the ideals he held at seventeen, guided by a Higher Power.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Marty M. opens by discussing his 'business' reaching alcoholics who are prisoners of their own ignorance.
• 5:15 Discussion on the flexibility of the 12 Steps and how they are interpreted differently across the country.
• 10:40 Marty M. describes the 'unadulterated hell' of his final drinking days and his time in the sanitarium.
• 15:20 The 'Aha!' moment: reading the Big Book's definition of alcoholism as a mental obsession and physical allergy.
• 22:10 Laughter: The 'one-steppers' and 'two-steppers' of the Texas groups.
• 30:45 Marty M. shares a story about a man who stayed sober for 18 months but remained a miserable, arrogant person.
• 38:10 Emotional moment: Lois W. tells Marty M. he needs to get some love in his heart.
• 44:20 The 'learning graph' and Bill W.'s advice that Marty M. didn't have to do it all by Thursday.
• 52:15 Comparing the long-term recovery process to his childhood experience with tuberculosis.