Paid Half a Million Dollars for a Big Book After Twenty-Eight Trips Through Treatment 🫠 – Adam T.

About This Speaker Tape

Adam T. opens this 2008 Soberstock Roundup talk in Aberdeen by welcoming newcomers and admitting he stood up as one for 17 years, racking up enough key tags to play poker with them. He ran through 28 treatment centers — half a million dollars, as his sponsor put it, for a Big Book — before an H&I woman told him she wouldn't give him the gift of recovery because she wouldn't rob him of the journey. He came to meetings drunk with a 7-Eleven Big Gulp spiked with liquor, did the walk of shame over and over, and kept chasing the magic he once found in a bottle.

The heart of the talk is the difference between compliance and surrender, drawn from Dr. Harry Thiebaut. Adam held a court card for five years and was in compliance with AA for sober living, the judicial system, parole, and family services — but never laid the rifle down the way a surrendering soldier does. His unmanageability wasn't drinking; it was what happened when he wasn't drinking: prey to misery, full of fear, chasing drivers four exits past his own, counting items in the checkout line, separate, different, and alone. Alcohol had been his artificial means to a spiritual experience; without a real one, he was a dead man.

He frames the 12 Steps as the bridge from Step 2 to Step 11 — from faith to trust, which he illustrates with the wheelbarrow on the high wire: faith thinks the guy will make it across, trust gets in the wheelbarrow. For him that wheelbarrow was Steps 4 through 9. He leans on Chuck C.'s teaching that the real problem is conscious separation from a Higher Power, and on Michelangelo chipping away everything that wasn't David to describe how the Steps removed old ideas.

The talk closes with the banquet-table parable — in hell the strapped-in diners starve with four-foot silverware; in heaven they feed each other — and the little boy who puts a torn map of the world back together by assembling the picture of a man on the back. Today Adam takes panels into the VA, prisons, and detoxes, and says his life is so good there should be background music. Staying in Steps 10, 11, and 12 gave him a quiet mind and a loving heart — the opposite of the mind that wakes him at 3 a.m. calling him a loser.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Adam welcomes newcomers, admits he stood up as one for 17 years with enough key tags to play poker
• 6:30 Big Gulp cup from 7-Eleven filled with liquor and a splash of Coke — doing his best sharing at late-night meetings
• 10:00 28 treatment centers and the sponsor line: you paid half a million dollars for a Big Book
• 14:30 H&I woman in the detox circle tells him she wouldn't give him recovery because she wouldn't rob him of the journey
• 22:00 Soldier surrender illustration at the VA panel — rifle laid down, waiting for orders, no looking back at the gun
• 31:00 Dr. Harry Thiebaut on compliance versus surrender; Adam's five-year court card and compliance with sober living, parole, and family services
• 44:00 The longest bridge he ever crossed — the little hyphen between the first and second half of Step 1, understanding what unmanageability really is
• 52:00 Chuck C. on conscious separation from a Higher Power, and the wheelbarrow-on-the-high-wire test of trust — getting in is Steps 4 through 9
• 62:00 Michelangelo chipping away everything that wasn't David — the Steps as a way to be rid of old ideas
• 68:00 Banquet-table parable of heaven and hell, and the torn map of the world with the picture of a man on the back