Powerlessness and Unmanageability – D. and Chris S. – Big Book Workshop – Austin, TX – Part 1 of 10 – Bob D,Tom I

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Because it's the best thing you can do as an alcoholic to learn this one. One alcoholic genuinely and legitimately shares these experiences, his connections are made. And that's the strongest thing we have at Alcoholics Anonymous is the gratification. So my part this weekend is not going to be academic, it's going to to be experienced with. I have to say it the way I like. I connect the way that I was able to connect with this process. Before we start, we're going to go a lot of times later, step one. Before We start into step one, Chris is going to kick us off with a little bit of a history of Alcoholics Anonymous. And before we start that, I'd like to open with the prayer, to get indulged in a moment of silence. Lord, help me set aside everything I think I know about you, everything I think I do about myself, everything I do about others, and everything I know about my own recovery, all for a new experience in you, Lord, a new experience in myself, are no experience in my fellows and a much needed little experience in our recovery. Amen. Good evening everybody, my name is Chris and I am an alcoholic. On or around December 28th, 1989 I had a separate experience from alcohol. Many of us have had these experiences. You can't stay drunk all the time and there's times when you just have to spin yourself dry. But there was something different about this particular time. I was at a point Bob was talking about earlier, that jumping off point, and that translated into a willingness that was really born of desperation. And I had been in AA. I hadn't been doing AA, but I'd been going to the fellowship. And I went back with a renewed vigor, and I put everything I had into alcoholics. I was going there following suggestions, and I believe I got granted access to the power that can keep us safe and protected through my participation in the loving grace of a God. And I'm here tonight. I'm really excited to be doing this with Bob. I've been following his work for many years now. He's one of the best out there, believe me. And Charlie and Katie, great friends of mine, thank you so much for asking me to come down. And I've got some of the starvation station in his hair, and I'm just really pleased. This is going to be a fun weekend for me. Alcoholics and non-alcoholics, where did it come from? How did they develop this? For thousands of years, alcoholics almost invariably died drunk. We're going to be talking about the first step tonight, and we're goingto be explaining what powerlessness looks like, how it manifests in the alcoholic. And if you're new or you're just coming back, please pay special attention to that because that's really the key that's going to open up willingness to participate in this thing called Alcoholics Anonymous. I don't know about anybody else, but I was overjoyed to be relegated to the ranks of AlcoholicsAnonymous. I thought to myself, I can't believe this. I have to go sit in church basements during crimes on TV and talk about God the rest of my life, which is a really, really bad thing. But the fact of the matter is it was a really good thing. I was able to move away from an absolutely awful existence. There's really very few things as sorry as the chronically ill alcoholic. But I want to talk a little bit about the recovery process. Where did it start? How did they figure this out? Now, there's two different people who play a large role in this. One is Bob Smith out of Packard, Ohio. The other is Bill Wilson in New York City, New York. And these guys are what would be described in the book Alcoholics Anonymous, hopeless, low-bottom, powerless alcoholics. And what that means is, it means these people were desperate to separate from alcohol. They saw how much problems alcoholism was causing them, yet they couldn't move away from it no matter how hard they tried, them and how many promises they made to their loved ones, they would invariably end up drunk again. But these two were desperate to separate from alcohol. Now, Phil Wilson is in New York, and I think we've all heard about the 12-step call that Eddie Thatcher paid on him in New Jersey. Eddie had gotten involved in a group called the Oxford Group. And around the turn of the 60s, there were many very, you know, they were basically evangelical religious organizations that got together for the purpose of growing spiritually. They wanted more than going to church for an hour on Sunday. They wanted that deep experience that you get with the contact with the divine. And there was the Emanuel group, the Jacobi Club, the Oscar, there was a buzz of these. And the interesting thing was when alcoholics would stumble into these groups and participate at a serious level, they could get sober. And what happened was that a handful of these people in the Calvary Church mentioned in New York City who were alcoholics and who had gotten sober. And they were really involved with oxygen processes. And one of them was just a cat, and he shows up at Bill Wilson's house one day. They noticed how he called on Bill to see if he could reach out to him. And he communicated a couple of things to Bill. Now, Bill had been in and out of Towns Hospital. It was basically a detox treatment process, very—you know, we look back on the type of treatment that they were offering people in the 20s and 30s, and it was pretty barbaric, but it was the best they had at that time. And Bill was going in and having his doctorate group, and he was making pledges to his wife as well as to the Bible. I mean, he was really serious about really trying to figure out how to not drink. Now, Eddie shows up, and Bill perceives the message that he's hearing as a very religious one. Now, Bill understood that he was in real trouble, but he also didn't think, right away, he didn't believe that the answer that was being presented to him had a lot of merit. He didn't really, like a lot us, when we get to alcohol science, when we look up at the stairs on the wall, there's 12 steps and there's 13 steps. The first thing we think is, well, that's all well and right, but that ain't going to work for me. I've got real problems. You know, that just is typical of the alcoholic. So Bill, but Bill thought about some of these things that Eddie said. And one point in time, when they were arguing back and forth about God, Bill was seeing the religious perspective of God that he'd been indoctrinated into, you know, in his hometown. And he was like a lot of us here, a lot afraid to do this, and he didn't really think that there was a serious answer in religion, especially for him. But at one point, Eddie gets upset, and, you now, I've heard both sides of this. I've had Eddie tell the story, and I've read Bill's story on stage, and that's two different stories, you know. You have to figure that everyone's a sober one. And, you know, so I'm kind of figuring that you probably have this right. He basically said that Bill got really mad at him and finally he just said, look, Bill, you know, conceive of whatever type of guy you have. Make up your own concept. God doesn't have to be you know it doesn't has to be something that you have real resences to. And that's what stuck in Dole's head. Now, here There are two more episodes with alcohol. At Dallas Hospital, there was a wonderful doctor, Dr. William B. Spilforth, who took special attention with Bill, I think, and shared a lot of information with him. In the hospital, Dr., Spilorth shared with him his theory of the manifestation of alcoholism. And in his theory, he basically talked to Bill about the obsession of the mind and the allergy of the body. Now, Bob Smith is going to be covering that in an incidental detail later. But what it was, it was a vision of the problem. What is the problem? The problem is I try to stay away from alcohol, and I can't. And when I start drinking it, I can' t control that. You know, it takes me on a ride. That really is a problem, and so forth is sharing this with Bill Wilson. So Bill Wilson is starting to understand what his problem is. But there was a case where you read some of the documents, it basically says that there is a type of alcoholic that the medical community can't really help. It's the type who is powerless. So low-bottom chronic alcoholics, we in the medical community can't really seem to be of much help to these individuals. And pretty much our perspective is they are doomed. You know, it's not a real good thing when somebody comes up to you and tells you, well, you're doomed. It's like getting a prognosis of terminal stage four cancer or something. You know? You're not going to make it. But Snookworth was, you know, was sharing this information with Phil. So Bill wasn't sure of the problem. Now, heavy shows up with an answer that Phil's not completely buying into, but his plans hadn't been working real well. So he starts to go off with Eddie to the oxygen room. Eddie starts to drag him off to the ocean room. And on a couple occasions, Phil's drunk out of his mind, like forcing him way up to the stage to share. That was, you know, one of my nightmares is in a blackout doing something like that in front of crowds of people. But after a certain amount of time, Bill started to see some validity in this fellowship of the Oxford group and in the spiritual exercise or spiritual principles that they were all following. And he started to get busy doing them. He achieved about six months of sobriety. He wants to take over a tire company or some crazy thing, so he's still a Wall Street guy. Bill was basically, they say a failed stockbroker in the book, but really probably closer to what he was doing was he was a speculator. He would try to give him money so he could invest it in certain stocks and then he would take a percentage of the profits you know so and he also became one of the first stock analysts really you know such an interesting career he had but he was killed because he was breaking himself out of jobs so over six months he puts together this proxy battle with a tire company and goes out to Akron Ohio to try to take over this tire company it was not well thought out they didn't have all their jobs in a row and the whole thing blew up and the people that went out with Bill were pissed, okay? They had been going all the way to Akron to see him blow up, and they kind of left him in town with very little money. Now, one of the things that Bill was doing in the Oscar group that was kind of unique was, most of the Oscar groups was just about let's get all the sinners, let's give everybody we can into this Oscar group because it's a wonderful project. Bill was specifically targeting alcoholics because he was seeing that there was an answer for alcoholism in this doctor group. So, he gets down to Akron. He's at the Mayflower Hotel. His whole deal is blown up. He's feeling like drinking now. He's standing there and he's looking to the left and there's a telephone with a search directory and he looks to the right and there is a bar and there are a lot of people in there drinking and having fun And, you know, folks were here by seconds and inches. I don't know what I would have done in that particular situation. But Phil went over to the folks, got chains of dollars, got a bunch of nickels, and started making phone calls to different reverends, to different religious leaders in the African community. And he basically called up and said something like this. My name is Bill Wilson. I'm a runner from New York. I've got huge desires, but I'm running. and all of a sudden you would hear a click until he calls up this guy named Walter Tungst. Walter had been involved with the Oscar group because of a man named Bud Firestone. Anybody in here ever seen the movie Arthur? Remember that? Arthur's a drunk, he's an illiterate drunk who barrages his family but it was made out of him what was happening with Bud Fireestone and the Firestone family. And then Firestone, you know, he shoots him off and he actually got sober in the Oscar group. The family was so appreciative of this that they invited the whole New York Oscar group out to Akron, Ohio, and they came and met us, and they filled up the curtains, and they all witnessed this amazing process of spiritual renewal that was available in the Oscars group. And Walter Thompson is one of the people who was involved in witnessing this, And he knew a woman named Henrietta Stryber Lane who knew Ann and Bob Smith, and they had talked about this Bob Smith drinking problem and how he needed some help. So Walter Tufts understood what Bill was saying, which is another second in the Second Corinthians book. They make arrangements. Bill goes over to visit Dr. Bob Dupp. Dr. Bob really doesn't want any part of these hungover like crazy, but he, you know, to pacify everybody. He goes, okay, okay I'll listen to this bird, you now, but get me out of there, 20 minutes coming and saying there's an emergency at the hospital or something. You don't get me outta there. Well he ended up staying for hours talking with Bill Wilson. Bill Wilson was sharing with Dr. Vaughn for the first time the real problem of alcoholism. how alcoholism manifests. So it feels bad for her who's telling a doctor what the clinical definition or spherical definition of alcoholism is. It's another bizarre thing. And then he starts to tell Dr. Bob about this crucial solution, and I've tried that. I've been going to the officer group for years now, and that didn't really help me. Now, as AA members, please pay attention to this part. Bill Wilson was going early to the Oscar group, he was staying late and he was asking, is there anything else I can do? He's bringing people in, he's working with newcomers, he is involved in the Oscar Group and he is sober. Dr. Bob was coming late, he would leave it early and he wasn't sharing or getting involved. He was taken to Oxford to apply for his cancer and royal treatment, as little as possible. And he was drunk. He stayed drunk. After Bill shared this with Dr. Bob, Dr. Bob got a little bit of enthusiasm going on, and they set to work, basically. That's one more relapse with Dr., Bob, going to the medical convention. anybody in your sponsor table and you just start working with them and they come up with something like you know, Cameron will work with you next week. I'm going on tour with the Dex. And you're like, well that may not be a very great idea for you to be going on a tour with a rock band with a weak sober. Well I always tour with the dex. You know, and this is basically what Dr. Bob was saying. I always go to the Navy City. You know, there's newer evidence that's coming around. He didn't even make it to the lab, so he was stuck on the train. So after that one-way relapse, Bill came back. Dr. Bob came back, and he had his operation. Now, Dr. Rob was a proxecologist, okay? And he had enough now. He wasn't doing real good with this proxology stuff. He was running out of proxies to work on. There was a couple of problems he had. One of them is he had really big hands, all right? And the other one was they looked like a lady. So if you're in the stirrups and then comes Dr. Bob getting ready to go after your doctor, you know, the first thing you're doing is asking for a second opinion, you know what I mean? So he was running out of business. You know, he was about to lose his house. so but he had this operation and he came back and he's still he's going through the DTs he's making so Bill Wilson gives him a couple of beers and a couple of downers a couple of sedatives and says okay Bob you're ready go in there and do it you know I've always thought that Dr. Bob's story is called Dr. Rob's Nightmare more appropriately it was Dr. Pop's Patience Nightmare you know I would not have wanted him working on me in that case anyway After that, he made a firm resolution to buy into this thing 100%. You know, that's the mistake so many of us make in Alcoholics Anonymous is to take what we want and leave the rest. When really it's not a program of suggestions, it's a suggested program. And if you want to get the results from AlcoholicsAnonymous, you need to do the AlcoholicsAnalyst program. him. I mean, it's pretty simple. So Dr. Bob at that moment decided, okay, I'm all in. I did not want to make amends. That was his big thing. He was afraid that if he went out one side of the street and down the other making amends for all the problems he screwed up, he'd never work again. You know, but he did that and he disappeared after the operation and everybody thought he was drinking. But no, he was out making amens. He never drank again, Alcoholics Anonymous started. Basically, they beat the beginning of Alcoholics Anonymous to the thing Dr. Bob was first over. And then they started working with others. There was a flying blind period that they talk about in our literature where they were trying a lot of stuff and some stuff worked and some self didn't. By the time the book Alcoholics Anonymous was published, a number of members really understood what spiritual exercises, what principles work for the maintenance of sobriety and the achievement of recovery. And they started to put together the book AlcoholicsAnonymous. And I've got to say, I work around, I'm involved with and work around the treatment industry. Every day I'm on the phone with somebody that owns some treatment center somewhere and, you know, I'm interviewing them. I'm doing a lot of stuff for my job. And, you now, I have to tell you that there are many, many people out there who have looked for a better process than the one that's in the book, How Core is Diamond. There's a lot books that have been written. There's lot of programs that have just started. started, there's a lot of GPD symptoms, you know, there is a lot pills that they had to go peddle for alcoholism and alcoholism, but nothing, nothing has shown the results anywhere near the amount of successes as the process that's laid out in the book Alcoholics Anonymous. When we look back on the very, very imperfect new you that all of this stuff was being created in this dysfunctional cauldron of alcoholics all fighting with each other and everything, for this book to come out the way it is and to be as significant as it is, is really something that I'm unbelievably grateful for. In this first phase, another thing I want to share, and then I'm going to turn it over to Bob. In the early days of Alcoholics Anonymous, this is what it looked like. They would get together maybe one day a week and see alcoholics. So let's say that was their Sunday night. Monday they'd be off looking for other alcoholics to work with, to work with, looking for prospects to take through the steps to engage in this after group, groups, plant, alcohol, and so on, is possible. That's what they were doing. Two days later, I was going to say, it's perfect. So we're towards the middle of the week. They have some prospects in the hospital, and then they would start the 12-step march into the hospital. One after another of these sober alcoholics would go in and tell their story. And by the time they were done telling their story to this person, there was a really good chance that they would be willing to join with these people to try to do what they're doing to get the results that they're getting. Alcoholics Anonymous was a program of recovery with a support fellowship. In many areas today, that's split. It's a fellowship of sobriety with a sometimes support program. If you're a relapser, if you've been in multiple student centers, if you really try, you have probably been the victim of the delusion that by going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, you can recover from alcoholism. There's a bigger picture. There's more that really has to be done. In zero case, 2021, hopeless alcoholic is more engagement that you're going to need to participate in in your life. I work with a lot of relapsers, and I understand how they think that, you know, what they were doing with AA and AA didn't work, AA failed for them. But they hadn't done the steps they had done in e-service work. They hadn't sponsored. All they had done was go to meetings, and by studying the first, say, 15 years of Alcoholics Anonymous, you can get a really good picture of what the recovery process was like, what these early AA members did to get their success. In the first 15 years, AlcoholicsAnonymous went from two people to, I don't know, tens of thousands. And it was, the success rates were very high. And, you know, today alcoholics members have been dropping. You know, the ball has been dropped in many, many ways out there in the fellowship. So, you're here if you're in trouble with alcoholism, if it's really done some damage in your life, we're going to be talking this weekend about what the recovery process is. And I'm really excited to be here. Thanks Chris. If you're new to Mud Soil going, if you are new I hope you appreciate how much we want it. in a country where a very small window of opportunity was open. Just a little bit over 75 years. And according to human history, 75 years is a little different. There have been completely documented cases of people dying of alcoholism for thousands and thousands of years. 75 years is just a state. And in all those thousands and thousands of years, there's been very little substantial people like myself. Most alcoholics in my entire life have been suicidal. They do. And the reason that you hear suicide is... When I was just drinking or something like that, it took me a long time. It's like when you get to death by rabbits, It just goes on and on and more and more. And that's what it's about. What does the doctor mean? I don't know. And we have a woman who I'm going to drag in, and there's a child in treatment of alcoholism or drug addiction throughout the ages. There are some horrific things we've done to us. Do you know they used to torture us to death thinking we were possessed by demons? They used to burn us at the stake, they used to drill holes in our skulls to let the demons out. Over in Bermuda, in a town square, they had a thing for men, broke men, and a thing for broken women, and broke men on the foot in the middle of the town square in this wooden thing with their heads in their hands, you know? And then people would come out and hit you in your face. You didn't have any more fun than your peace pods in the guy's face. If you don't know what scotch is, it's a straight thing up. It's a great thing for the feet. And so, if I don't reach there and put the wind in it, it would at least put a long arm out over the harbor and then submerge me underneath the water and hold me there. But sometimes they bring up maybe netting, sometimes they're bringing up maybe such-and-such air. I do that to a couple times thinking that That's a fear that is still reality. I know in Russia, well over a year ago, over a period of time ago, at that time alcoholics are only 20 years old there. So we've had AA here for 75 or almost 76 years. And they only have it for 20, almost 21 now. And I read a diary reading, and it blew my mind. He could go into the record store and interpret what he was saying. And what he's saying is that Soviets have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to oppose him. One of the worst problems as a country. We need two states, so it's horrific over there. And one of the last huge efforts before the collapse you're so immune, they become substances and develop a gene out of it. And when the chicken or the mussels get in the middle of your back, if you want to fart at the bench, and you give your warnings and you've been gone to rehab, and you're still getting drunk, they put the chimp in there. And then if you try, the chink will be in touch with you. It'll release this toxic poison to your ginseng. If you're too sick for about two days, the chances are he'll kill you Or could he kill you? And this guy isn't telling me that, or the interpreter told me, it's turned out to tell me that some ugly scar in his back went after about a year of abstinence. But he couldn't take it anymore. He made his buddy to take a kitchen and cut his hip out of him saying he gets some relief. Now some of you think that's crazy. I bet people in I've actually had people in these rooms that have had everything at risk and taken a shot. It's easy to release so fastly and quickly, put your face on the line. Put your job on the lines. Put your health on the ones. Put your three hours on the one. It's because you're needing to relieve. That's it. alcoholism is a disease, and we're very much in the way for us to get through. And I'm going to start talking a little bit about step one, and I want to talk about a couple of things that I think doctors have painted. And if you're approaching it out of a one-diction vision, it's a more popular one now than I just threw at you before, And then during the fourth edition, there's our page S-S-B-R-I-G-H-A-L-D-E-N-C-T-O-M-P-A L-O.C-H.O.L-I.C. T-U-N.E. S-L.O-R.I.G-E. And now to children. These are a couple of points that are very important. The two accessions and things that kill you. We can start off with talking about the person. On the first paragraph, it says, we, these, had suggested a few years ago that the action of alcohol on the chronic alcoholics, and I'm talking about expensive alcoholics. On chronic alcohols in America, they do the same thing. That's a phenomenon of cravings when it's a bit less or less chronic than alcohols. And never occurs in the average test for three times. can ever make me eat alcohol in any form at all. And he doesn't want that. Let's go down that side of alcohol. I've tried alcohol before. If you know anything about disease, dementia, and illnesses, there are orange ones and there are sweet ones. They're both very deadly. A good example of a cure for this is pneumonia. You get pneumonia and it's for a certain country, But if you're a macho, they'll load you up on antibodies and they'll knock that hormone out once and for all. And the physical stabilization of your condition is going to be the problem. And you're good to go. No need to slow down. You're over the hormones. So if you have a chronic illness such as diabetes, such as chronic alpha hominids, etc., size of heart disease, the physical stable remainder of the condition is what it became. You know, once we're in regular recovery. I said this, you know, they went backwards through and treatment centers were very awkward a hundred percent of the time because they would get the lumps off your back. The problem was the surface was so soft. And so it's not even about the price of alcohol, it's the quality of alcohol. You see, if I drink alcohol, the action of alcohol on me is a manifestation of an ailment. Well, some people have a lot of allergies and they're allergic to small birds, and they struggle to trade on cards. They'll play down their slides for me and test out all their radials And my soul would refer to the Phenomenic Rift as a phenomenon because it only occurs in a very small, mighty part of our population. We are in my heart, even though we don't taste it. In the action of alcohol on us, we break out in an unseemly journey of slavery for more of what we just experienced in the first grade. Now, I remember sitting in the treatment center in the mid-early, early mid-70s, and in many cases I'd hear two more alcoholics or other such counselors talking about the allergic reaction to alcohol is not on the critical care. I mean, I get out of trouble. I get, I go too far a lot for this reason. And I can't see it, but the odd thing about a craving you don't realize you have is that you can't satisfy it. And everyone you move right in circles is in front of a craving that you're not aware of. And that's the craving to breathe air. You think they're satisfying you. So if someone were to sneak up behind you and clap your back and put it over your head, You instantly realize you have a craving to re-empt. You should be just satisfied. And one of the reasons it's so difficult for me to identify the phenomenon of craving is I need to do anything. Avoid situations where I was only going to be able to get two or three drinks, and then couldn't go after any more. Don't look at me like I'm trying to take out alcohol. It just seems so right to them. I remember in junior high school, One of my partners is terrified of himself, so he invited me and another guy over. And here they spend the whole day in a bunch of ball games and decent stuff. And it was sunny, all the buildings closed. And we had one city back here for us. Two people. All with their back up in their ass. Right? Because I know who the fuck they're quitting when they're 70. They have no way to get three years out of that. And I don't say that because I think I'm an alcoholic. It's like, what's the point? You know, you've got food chains to your own, for example. And I can see that. Because I think i'm an alcoholic, I just try to respond easily. So, I get to alcoholics, and I was in and out for the years, you know. And then suddenly, when I hear people talk about this, I think that And then I'm sitting in a meeting of alcoholics and I was like, you know that, it happens. It always happens here. So I'm listening to some woman tell a story about herself. And I started to see myself in her story. I tried to make up anything I could imagine. I just talked about dinner parties she'd gone to. And all of a sudden I remembered when I was 18 years old, I was dating this girl. and she invited me over to her house for dinner. I couldn't stay the whole evening at her family's. You know, I already know when I was 18 years old, you couldn't put me on a line, because there were so many bugs there. She weighed in worlds. You would be an alcoholic. I wouldn't say an alcoholic, you know what I'm saying? But it was so strong fruit. Of course, you might better lose some territory facing by alcoholism, right? But alcoholism doesn't care if you're on drugs. Alcoholism doesn' care if You don't think they're alcoholics? No, of course you're alcohols when you think they're not alcoholics. I don't know. They just don't take it. They're even connected as girl parents. They bring up all the war. Not because they follow the war and you and I are divided. But I'm really with you on going to the ball and not out of that. It's a poor fall in the life. My life just quickly is an evaporation. Sometimes it leads to a dream or suffering. And I did quickly, and like quickly, I took two of them through glass down that long way, the one side, and they were still sitting on the first line. Now, obviously you don't know how long it's been going on, right? It's been about more than a year. I was sitting there, and the conversation ended, and I knew this was good enough to start becoming your institution. You know, I mean, it's not to be mundane, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. There are a lot of people that say, well, that's just my choice. That's the point. So it's more than that. I don't think they know. In fact, it talks about some forms of being an artist. I've seen that. Yeah. You talk to somebody or dance to them a little. And I think you can do the other thing. I mean... Speaking in my day, like 24 hours a night, doing life and fever. I've been telling you this for a long time, and you know what I'm talking about. And yes, in this fact, I've tried to come up with any words that I could probably have said, but there's no answer. It seems like it's a warning that people will leave for me. Did I find a feed like one else in the bathroom? She walked the door like a crazy person went through her checklist. I found a bottle of cough medicine, and she showed me 5% alcohol, and totally determined that it was really just a floss. And I was walking up to that car, and I stopped at the bottom of the car, and I see an X3 in front of me. And I just went, oh my gosh. And I think, oh yes. And this guy came up and stormed the back of the X3. I told him about this thing I forgot about, but I had to take care of it. It was very late in the night. I woke up in my car, drove down the street, like between feet. Speed went 45, 100 miles an hour. But I turned around that corner and drove like a paparazzi person, probably 78 or else younger. We came to my friend Brad's house. We ran out of bar and basement and had some reefer. And I threw something out the door, two glasses of wine, that I couldn't realize had been in it. I have always had that. I have ALWAYS had that allergic reaction to alcohol. You know, some of your people spend a good part of your life on both days and half-hours and often that's actually more than what it can apply except for three weeks. And something happens when you've got to be out helping them. Smokeless said there's six in all and it's crazy. Never experience any kind of restrictions or shivers. So the next thing is to not restrict yourself by asking your mom questions. When your question gets included in a couple different marriages, Well, don't you know the choice? I just do things. Wow. What is that? I mean, who knows, right? I think I've heard it before. It's pretty wonderful. You didn't know you'd still have a role model in that department. I'm told they're still working on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what? It's not too bad for me. It leads to one question. Yes? What happens to you when you drink a couple drinks of alcohol people that came from the alcohol nation seem to break out in the irresistible during the hard days of their lives. Or, are you a non-alcoholic? Are you the person that goes into a bar and has two or three drinks, and then the bartender says, would you like another one? And you No, thank you. This is just about right. I've never had that experience. Never. It's all one more of one more and one more. Have you ever sat and watched a non-alcoholic drink? No. Yeah. I've seen her, you know. My teacher's in one of the homes. My daughter's in another home. And me and my friend are together in one thing or other home. And these people when they say, you have to go back, hurt my face about half an hour and drink one drink. I mean, I sit there and watch them. I can smell that alcohol all over the boots if you ask me about it. They know he's a crazy player and they'll do drinks. They'll look inside and they will say, I don't want any more. the more I'm starting to feel it. Yeah. I mean, at this point, I mean look, I think that's not true. If they were public, I mean my god, they're six inches from them and they're going home! I'm sorry! But you know, just the reaction to that I see to myself a lot You know, it lights something up inside of me that just goes, oh yeah. You know it's feeling like I'm getting these things. It's a feeling like they're losing control. I get a feeling, a little through the turn, like on the next day, that I am going to be complete. And all those squirmy little empty spaces inside of you are going to fill up. And all that I've talked for in this scene, I've always seemed to walk in witness to the questions that have fallen far off of me. That I didn't become whole. That no alcoholist can ever get enough of my time. They got grab an alcohol where I got them to burn their heads to the ground willingly every time they drank. But they don't take what I take. They just don't react like I do. They're very, very true to them. And so far it's said that these allergic types can never take any of his alcohol or anything at all. Anything that lights me up and does that for me will do that to me. Anything that does that for you will do to you. Even if I shouldn't care enough. And sometimes, I'll find a trick better for me. I think I'll remember to drink alcohol, and I'm going to watch it for more. I've never even drank at all in my whole life. It doesn't make me feel like I was in line. I never, never, ever have. But yeah, I can put on that changes for my own to emotional and mental to once I discover is a slower What it does is it seems to give you a reason, so many reasons for what is oppressing you emotionally. But the problem, by my very nature, is a little bit of relief has never, ever, ever been enough for me. All you do is you just tease your nature. You're just teasing. and eventually I'd start to be dirty for a woman. That's why I don't smoke, I just smoke chronic drugs. Marijuana is what I'm gonna do. I've always wanted the accusation of being stupid because there ain't no technical release for a spiritual reality. So, like I said then, it's like having formed a house and found a God made home You don't want your self-confidence to rely upon things you know. The problems follow, but then they become astonishingly difficult to solve. That is so true that it's almost mutually impossible for some of us to see what's yours. We can't see past the consequences of our alcoholism, and we never can. On the third day, when the sun and the moon are in the sky at the same time, and it goes on, the moon actually has a greater full effect on Earth. It has a great effect on the tides because it's an average culture, but it basically has a bigger effect on people. I had a friend who worked at a metal factory, so there were no real white people around him. They didn't know this was true. But when the sun and the moon were in the sky at the same time, even though the moon wasn't there, I didn't see the moon because the sun is so glare-less. And I couldn't see what was being shown to me because the crisis of my attention was too glaring. And we were like, I shouldn't get out of here for a couple years. And he said things to me like, your father's just crazy. You don't drink. And you come to do what we do. He goes, but you're not drunk. I mean, I didn't say that. I mean. No, I got a lot of drinks. And I got police pumps. I got most of the problems. I got mental problems. Oh my God. Even the reason why I'm drunk. Oh my gosh. This is super funny. You're walking around. I've got employment problems, but they don't work very well. I can't see the worst of them, but it never feels right. And I need to tell them what's going on. I have all these other problems. I have family problems. I have a drug problem. I have police problems. What do you mean by that? Yeah, excuse me. But it's really the alcoholism that's creating all the other stuff. It's a lot more sober. Alcoholism should instill you through these things. It drives some of us unbattered, unstructured in any kind of spiritual structure to destroy ourselves and run our own lives with a grain of silver. And I look at them and they're like, I think the guy is so crazy, you know, doing his thing, he's worried they're going to touch him and drive him back to his body. If alcoholism was limited to the phenomenon of craving, then in a sense it could be a human addiction. And I believe that there are alcoholics, or people who, there are not alcoholics in one type, But there are people that, by using these diagnoses, have had an alcoholism. They've been following it for a long time. But it's not mostly diagnosed in any way though. There's over 30 years of the dose is just at zero. And then they're like, oh, mid-alcoholic? It means I'm going to bother him. I'm not that guy. But alcoholism, for all practical purposes, starts when you take away the risk. That's when my alcoholism starts to wear off, and then it starts to incrementally dip from there where it needs to. From the bottom of HSS, VRI and so forth starts to talk about this, this insidiousness of this disease. And really what he's saying here is it's the first time that I start to see this. I'm going to treat what's on the curtain here a little bit. So I'm starting to look at the link and see what's really behind this, this destructiveness in my life. And you know what? I think since how many people in here besides myself have ever changed or come to a place where they knew that you cannot drink again, and these words are so amazing that you were never going to touch that subject, anxiety and attachment. He's like, are you here to slice me? Right. Well, what's wrong with that? Are you going to cut me or cut a place? I made that flexer flex. You're a knucklehead. If you do that flexing thing, there's something really wrong with you. And here's what Smokewell said. You can cut into women drinking, especially because they like the effect produced by alcohol. I think that's too impressive work. My sister, watching that, she likes a little bit of it. But with me, it's more than liking the effects. I think somewhere in the core of who I am, I need the effects, I'm scared of the effects Carl Knopf, in a letter to Phil Wilson in 2006, he says something that I heard from my reddit and I knew him either way. And as a result of working with Warren Heather and other alcoholics, they believe that the alcohol is burning for alcohol. What do you mean it doesn't burn for alcohol? Youngstown believes that it is the effect of the alcohol as a key to wholeness, unity, unity or if you're a religious minded person living with God. There's something inside of you that holds a great connectedness. And the early days of my drinking with alcohol was such that I knew it was active in the leaves, medicine for my real sickness and alcoholism. It was really nice. Every alcohol I've ever talked to had experience in the early day of your drinking. We go apart, we're a dance, we go apart. And you can't even talk to me about it. You're so locked up inside you and your anxiety and anxiousness about people and Clarence said, Grace, will you come home for me? Clarency said, Grinch, you should always come. You're the only person. Clarenced said, Trace, you can't be here. Clarencing said, he played as hard as any gardener playing some simple gardener's game. He was on and off and on and says, I get your amazing experience because when we talk to someone, I mean, you're sober and you're still in 10 days, you couldn't even say a word to him. You know in depth that the words are coming out perfect. It's like you're strangling some kind of person or something. In fact, I don't know why he's pretty sober. I wouldn't say there's no real variance. That's why I'm here. I could not... Not if I didn't talk to him! I couldn't! I must! If you make me wait for it till September. I just talked to her, and it's like long for her from afar, you know what I mean? And she kind of blew up right there. And by the time someone came running over to the parking lot, and they actually made that guess, I had gone off right after her and started talking to her. And I had an out-of-body experience. I remember hearing the words, and I was like, and getting so excited, I think, Oh my God, this is going to work! Well, you know what? I'm dealing with somebody, and they're religious people to me. So I'm doing an easy effect. But the temptation is so ancient that while, after a while, you admit centuries... You know, I've heard that for years about the three things that I'll tell you. There's the funny thing, and it's mostly that there's the fun and the problem things. Remember the problem thing? When you're desperately looking for fun and you can't seem to hook it up no more. And for guys like me, that's such an elusive thing What I needed to explain was the problem that is hiding what admits you out of what admits in me. It doesn't make a lot of sense. If you see it twice in a natural time, I think it's a great way to turn from the fall. Caldwell's name talks about the illusion. It's pretty similar to something called the giraffe. I suspect if I could get down the giraffe, it would be the energy form. I've got a couple words here that I have, and it's just like a psychotic, unique feeling of tension. All ethics and modernity is for the party to turn on me, it's killing me, it's burning my life to the ground, and its not even any fun anymore, but my god! I wanted to be fine like the boys when I was 15 years old, so disastrous that I will imagine that there's a party there where there isn't a party at all. That's why they run for it. I always wanted to pick up a drink when I was a kid, but one day I didn't want to be someone who would have prisoned for two years, and I picked up the drink. And so, you know, I picked it up and drank it, but the bad thing wasn't that it wasn't even any fun. I picked my drink and went into a self-pity shag. And, uh, that is why I'm crying right now. Um, I'll talk to you about one of these young beasts that I know of. And it's a creature kind of an easy-going, worried beast. When he's mad, he looks at the gunner like he's asking, Well, I don't know where is it? What do I do? And I can pick from the paper. I'm retreating to my end... for help. And what happens? They decide to put me out and sell me real good. The saddest part is I'm crying. It tells you that there's a fight. It tells me how much fun you're gonna have. It tells how you're going to meet her. It tells when you're not going to come out of there alive and warm. It tells all that stuff. It tells the things like money cards while leaving through a six-month jail. Even moving out to the trees. Even washing the dishes. Even wanting us to use their clothes. She keeps it up there and puts four outs in there. Not a weekend pass, and one night of fun with a heart for five days. And you know, it's so important to tell me that when I pick up the drink, it starts, You want us to subscribe. You should lose six months of life. You need your evening. You can't be ready when it comes out. It will explain it to them and protect me from this stuff. It's a continuous, simple sense. To them, our alcohol is very, very normal and... Oh my God! My great secret, my secret is I always see no matter how many times I get drunk, I need something more normal, made up that I've never felt before, and I wouldn't do that. And that's the thing that doesn't really sense more for what I'm trying to do. And the sense of being a racist is still a little bit pathetic, unless I can get it through and start to sense it. Yes, I can be super helpful. But if I want that hair, child is thinking he should dress in which I sleep under I remember this. Do you ever notice when you're not drinking, how people are going to have fun with an acronym that you've never done before? What does that mean? Well, this is the first time in this reality of experience that some life is terrible. This is why I want to tell you something nice. You need to experience the same thing. You don't have to do it all over again. You just need to get used to it. You know what I'm saying? Well, this is the first time that this reality of experience is so life-changing. You see, when I was listening to something like this movie, it's very scary. And I told me, you really put your finger on it. But I did watch this and it's a great restlessness. It's something that can't really stay in your pocket. But you don't know why we're wrestling. There's just a big sense of unsettledness. You know, a feeling like whatever you are is not where you really need to be and I don't know where you need to get it. It's just not here. I'm like a dog in a circle of living room looking for a spot to lay down and can't find its spot. I do it. Now, I know I've told you that I'm a weirdo, but I don't like weirdo people. And it's not that I feel weird, but it's just that I think you're crazy at all times. If I just seem so twiddly, how stupid you could all be. I don-I don't know what you're talking about! I don' t know what I'm talking about. Well, you can see I'm so much more. I've been to the grocery store. When people are 15 hours in a line, I'm like, what? I can't drive. I can do nothing at all. It's 50 days. I've got no sleep. I've seen everything. And you've got your lessons. You need to tell those people about it, because I have to know the business. And I've just been here, and I've finally known the business, and there's something wrong with me. No matter what is written into my life, that I am so thankful and so believe it's going to make a difference. It might fill up some of the squirmy empty spaces in me. Whatever I bring into my mind, no matter how wonderful it is, is not a result of quickness or need. I can get the best job I've ever had, the best motorcycle I've never had, It's the best role play I've ever had in meeting those guys at all, which it seems to enable me. And you know, I'm still going to want to tell you 15 years before I can measure disaster in real life is unconsciously what I would ever realize is that what I did after a while was to control what it felt like like looking at a steel mill making that big money, to what it felt like to have five bucks be doing. Well, now it is to try and steal them. After a while, I could tell what it felt like because this relationship with the field had lost me to what I felt like during the time of 1-51-1, but now it's just bad for me. And I don't even know why I'm doing that, but somewhere I'm covering it right as an easy coverage young I have a deep old position, and it is so in my opinion that some of the members of staff when I was in my teens or in the 5th or 6th grade generations come alive. And He can be restless, curable, and His can catch water. And it's rare for me, no matter how tremendous my resolve is to start to drink, day in and day out, we can't reach our truth. Rare for me. And so, it wears me right down into my hateful position. And then what happens? I didn't accept the drink. The recognition, for me, it started as the acceptance and the journey which is right now. It's just a drop down. The yearning to get free. I'm just not tired. I am just tired of the moment. I'm tired of aloneness. I just want to get prisoned right behind that incident right now I mean, I don't find it such a blessing to kill the ones that are sick and free. And the problem is, you know, we didn't need no alternative here. You can say, it's pretty insidious of you. You feel like they're going to pay the cost of a game too, right? Yeah. Although he's got to slow me down. He's got Chuckie's ball behind him. Let me tell you, I feel like it's a lot easier to guide than I can put in more than my heart and energy to set first. My entire journey going into real life, to see this, I can't see without mirroring. So, I get to that mirror and I'm standing close. All I can see is past the cold. I'm using cold for breathing. Past the cold for reading. And so I've been on the green, I've gone on the free, and we could burn my way to the ground and end up somewhere else. Swear to myself that any minute I'm never going to come straight again. We'll start the whole cycle again. Let's take you in. It's good to meet you and thank you so much for having us right now. Hey Chris, I'm an alcoholic. Hey Chris! You know, we're talking a lot tonight about the problem. But we're also going to be talking a line this weekend about the solution to the problem I think it's imperative that we get to our own street as far as alcoholism is concerned I believe in the scale of alcoholism And it's often the mindset promises, no matter how far down the scale we have gone, we can find in our experience that it's others. And then there's some other references in the book, like your ability to quit drinking on a non-spiritual basis will depend upon how much control you have lost against drink. A lot of these statements lead me to the conclusion that some are thicker than others. And I happened to be very, very ill when I staggered my way up into Alcoholics Anonymous. I was in real trouble. And, you know, I ended up in some North Jersey groups in AlcoholicsAnonymous where, you know, the low-bottom alcoholic really wasn't the standard member of the group. And I had a tough six months, a tough year and a half trying to find my way to an understanding of what the real solution was. And it was touch-and-go for a while because I was trying to recover from alcoholism through meeting attendance. And what I was able to do is maintain a very tentative sobriety by going to like 12 meetings a week. But my life wasn't getting any better. Bob's talked a lot about that unmanageability. And what I want to do is I want to share the first step from my own personal experience here. And I want to start with the unmanagability. There's infinite debt in the first step. We admitted we were out going dead, but our lives had become unmanangeable. Now for a long time in AA, I believe that the unmanageability was cranked in the cars. I thought it was losing the jobs. I thought I was getting a DUI. I thought there was a family leaving. I thought of all the externals. And I do believe that there is external unmanagability in our lives. But that's not really the main problem, the main unmanagemability in the alcoholic. I'm going to start by talking about my unmanageability. I was doing an inventory one time, and the interview pool that I was doing a peer inventory with said, what I want you to do in this peer inventory is I want to go back to the earliest manifestation of the fear. Try to remember the first time you had any of these specific fears. And I was going over a fear of people. And I thought back, when was the first time I ever had a fear or an anxiety in a stressful situation? And what I came up with was this one day I'm about five years old and my mother comes in and says, It's Rhett. Today is the first day of kindergarten. I'm taking you off to kindergarten. And I'm thinking, Kindergarten? Okay, so I get you. I do what I'm told. I go out to the garden. He drives me across town, opens up the door, lets me out, points at the building and says, there's your kindergarten. You know, I'll be back later this afternoon. Now, standing up on a hill looking down at this kindergarten, and it's before it starts, you see the kids outside running around and playing kickball and playing tag. They're already friends. All these people, and I'm standing up on a hill feeling like an idiot. I have so much anxiety. I am worried about what if they don't like me? What are they going to think of me? What if I do something stupid? The whole kindergarten thing is a big mistake. Who put this whole thing together? I was doing fine hanging around the house with one woman. It's exciting! And you've got to throw this in some days. But I understood, I understood inside that I needed to go do this. It would have been worse to run home. So I walked down and acted as if everything was okay inside of me. I'm in emotional turmoil and I act as if everything is okay. And I went down there and I did the kindergarten thing. You know what would've been a great thing for me that day? A pint of whiskey. And if I could have just gotten one T to do that kindergarten thing, I'd have been the kindergarten kid. You know? But there was a problem. We were 35-year-olds at that time. And so I started my school career and, you know, I'm going to school every day. Every day I feel like this. You know, if there's more than one or two people who aren't my friends, I am unbelievably uncomfortable with myself, and I'm uncomfortable with my environment. And I said, don't want to be there doing that with those people I want to meet somewhere else. I always felt that way. And what happened was, is one day, we started this press school, and me and a couple of my friends figured we're going to go get drunk. And this sounded like a really cool thing, so that's what we did. We cut school off in seventh grade. And we go back to my house, and I pull down a bottle of Four Roses whiskey, and I start drinking it. And I pour out three big water glasses by two buddies who never became alcoholic, had about two-thirds of their glass, and they've had enough. You ever heard of people that have enough on you? You know, is that unbelievable? He's had enough, enough disease, and that's not even a concept that confuses with me, enough. But they sat back and they watched the show, because I finished my drink, I finished their drink, I finished most of the rest of the bottle, and I went into a blackout. I'm 13 years old, 413 years old when I go into my first blackout, it's the first time I drank. Now, I became unbelievably ill. Do you remember that first time you ever got drunk how ill you were? I mean, you had to be horizontal for a couple of days. You know, if any other food or beverage would have made me that ill, I would have stayed away from it like the plague. Because something made me not ill. But here's what alcohol did for me. That scared kindergartner that was inside of me, he was released. The fear was released, I no longer had that social anxiety, I felt larger than life. It didn't matter to me one bit what you thought about me. And it was the first time in my life that that was true. And I felt like I thought all of you felt all the time. And I recognized alcohol as a solution to the current problem. And this came from an emotional, spiritual unmanageability that I had from childhood. Now, there's other ways to look at the benefits of that state of unmanageability. In the book, there are many references for it. We're restless, irritable, and discontent. And let's just go once again experience the ease and comfort that comes from a future experience. Other things that he, you know, gave away without being punished for. But that restlessness, that irritability, that discontents, who in here has felt that way sober? I mean, you know, let the records show all 2,000 people. Yeah, it's a great thing. You can't start getting back to my home group. Again, you don't get what... I'm not saying normal people don't feel restless or over-discontented, but we make a job out of it. You know what I mean? It's like our occupation is feeling that way. Then it talks later in the book about suffering from misery, depression, anxiety, self-centered fear. All, you know, you can go on and on. Guilt and remorse and all of this emotional bondage that we are attached to as sober alcoholics. We're, you know, we're not in control of our emotional nature at all. And it runs us around and it causes an incredible amount of pain and suffering and our quality of life is directly proportional to this unmanaged chivalry. And then it talks in the later chapters in the book about the Hittites' four horsemen terror, frustration, delusion, and despair. How about this one? Has anybody in here ever felt painful and incomprehensible demoralization? You know, I've had people that have been there understand what Bob was talking about earlier about committing suicide. I saw a statistic one time. The alcoholic is 60 times more likely to take their own life than the non-alcoholic. So when you're filling out this stuff for your life insurance policy, important warning, okay? And if you're checking the box of vodka, I drink two quarts of whiskey a day. Then you're a bad bet, you know? And it's because we get to that point where emotionally we just can't take the turmoil anymore. We don't want to feel that bad anymore. And what I didn't understand was I didn' t understand that is an aspect of alcoholism. Those feelings are part of how alcoholism shows up in our lives. Do other people have those emotional things? Does that happen to them? Yeah. But does it drag them off to suicide like it does us? Very rarely. You know, we're much more likely to have that stuff just the bondage of self that's lost about in this book. And part of what activated my perception of the mind a lot of times was the manifestation of that unmanageability. I just couldn't take it anymore. You know what I mean? And so, the process of recovery is really in reaction to the unmanangeability. When you look at the steps, they're designed to teach us the spiritual principles. They're designed for us to relieve us of this emotional bondage to self the horrible feelings that we go through on a day-to-day basis as a regular operational process. So when we look at the recovery process, it attacks that unmanageability. It's not really directly related to the drinking. It's more directed toward our spiritual condition, the maintenance of our spiritual...