Recovering and Recovered – Bb Workshop – Part 8 of 10 – Local AA Speakers

My name is Chris. I am an alcoholic. It is great to be here. This has been a really, really fun weekend. You know, I met Katie and Charlie down in Austin when I was down there. And we just, you know, every once in a while you meet people and you just immediately, you're going to be like friends forever. There's just like a connection. I'm down there and I have like the afternoon off on this Saturday. And I'm figuring I'm just going to hang out at the center and maybe talk to some newcomers or whatever instead of driving back to the hotel. And they kind of kidnapped me. And they drove me into Austin, and they took me to this really great barbecue place. I'm a barbecue fanatic. And it was just a marvelous, marvelous day. And usually you don't get that kind of stuff. So it's really great being there with him. You know, I love Ron. We got a little piece of Ron with some of the meditation stuff. And that was really good. Dave, you're in for a treat tonight with Dave. He's not going to be able to walk back and forth with the microphone, but he's still going to be good. You're going to hook him up? Yeah, put a lapel mic on him or something so they can run up and down the rows. Anyway, my topic tonight is what is recovery? And we hear all kinds, isn't it what is what is recovery really okay what is recovery really i mean i mean you can you can ask 10 different alcoholics and you're going to get 10 different answers you just are this is a term that we throw around in the rooms uh so often and and so many of us just don't really understand uh or we don't understand what someone else means when they say it one of the great things that um that i used to hear all the time when i was new was i'm harry i'm a slowly recovering alcoholic now i know why someone would say that it's because they're taking into account that this is like a life process. You know, it's a journey. It's not really a destination. I understand all that. But remember we talked on some of the real fundamentals that are laid out in the book Alcoholics Anonymous. Our thoughts must constantly go with others, with new alcoholics. We need to continuously be fitting ourselves to be of maximum service to these people. What type of a message are you giving somebody if you've been in the rooms for 20 years and you're still slowly recovering? Is that really a good message? I understand that, you know, we want to have some humility and we don't want to be like a big shot or a know-it-all. But you have to understand that that's not a really good message to give somebody. Think about what recovery means medically, okay? If you're slowly recovering from something, what does that mean? That means you're still in pain. You're still at the hospital. The nurses are still attending. You're wearing that gown with your ass hanging out the back. You know what I mean? You're slowly recovery. Recovery is even sometimes used wrong. And I'm one of the people that uses it wrong. I always say, you know, I'm in recovery. What does that mean? That's almost the same thing, you know, that's almost the same thing. If you're in the recovery room at a hospital, you know, you're better from the operation. You're not in the ICU anymore, but you're still flat on your back. You're still flat on your back, you still really, really hurt, you know, you're still really in a lot of trouble. Now, what does recovered mean with an ed the first promise that we find in the book alcoholics anonymous is we were 100 men and women who seemingly recovered from a hopeless state of mind and body that's like on the title page recovered within ed now when i first started hearing people say you know my name is harry i'm a recovered alcoholic i thought how arrogant You know, how arrogant. Don't you know you're not cured from this? You're given a daily reprieve. But then it was pointed out to me that recovered is in the book like six times, something like that, the term recovered. How many? Like 17 times. How many times is recovering used? I think once. Once. And that has something to do with the family and they never recover anyway, you know. So, you know, that was a typo, you know. Anyway, of course I'm just kidding. Of course I'm just kidding and only talking about my family. Anyway. Anyway so recovered is used as a standard term throughout our text recovered, recovered, recovered. Now the best way I've heard this, the best why I've heard this explained is you're not cured of alcoholism. That is absolutely correct. You're not cured, but you can be recovered. What is the difference? All right. Let's say, let's say you have cancer. Let'S say if you have something, you know, a medical condition and you're cured of that medical condition, that means the illness has been removed. It's gone. You don't have it anymore. That's really what a cure is. You're cured, you're good forever. But if you're recovered from an illness, that means the symptoms of the illness have been removed. Still inside there's that core illness and you can relapse. It can spring back up again. Okay, so the difference between cured and recovered is cured is the illness is removed. Recovered is the symptoms of the illnesses are removed. now that's the best we're ever going to get the symptoms to be removed and that's really good news that is a statement of hope actually because it's the symptoms that cause us the pain once we're in a state uh where we're recovered we're no longer suffering from the things that alcoholism you know manifests now what does that look like let me talk a little bit you know from uh from my own experience uh came into Alcoholics Anonymous ran around I was I was the fellowship you know I was a fellowship mogul I mean I was just fellowshipping I you know I was meeting and you know greeting and you know I would say I if somebody you know if if the idiot coffee maker was out drinking in the place was locked I'd break in a third story window to get us into that meeting you You know, I mean, I was a meeting maker and I was making some meetings. And I was still literally out of my mind, you know, like I would go home and I'd have a fit because something wasn't right, you know, something's not right. and you know so yes I was not drinking now drinking is a symptom of alcoholism it's a pretty serious symptom of it it can put you into the chronic stages of alcohol but it's only a symptom it says in our book bottles were only a symbol we had to get to causes and conditions causes and condition of our alcohol So I wasn't drinking, but I was still manifesting, here is a good day. Restless, irritable, discontented, okay? It's a good Day. A regular day is prey to misery, depression, guilt, remorse, shame, anxiety, self-centered fear. How you doing, Chris? Great! and and just like i used to describe myself in my first year as being like a garage door spring you know it's got like 5 000 pounds of like repressed tension and it's just in there have you ever seen one of those break and like go through a car hood you know that's what i was like i was just and every once in a while i'd break and i'd freak out But my current sponsor, this is how I met my current sponsor and started to trust him. And this will show you how sick I really was. And I was sober a couple of years at this point in time. I'm in a meeting and there's some commotion going on outside. And i ask somebody what's going on? And he goes well these two people, there was a new guy and there wasa new girl in the meeting. And you know You know, boy meets girl on AA campus and trouble soon follows. I mean, both of these people had less than a month. I mean it's a beautiful case of two ding-a-lings trying to make a bell. And the girl was out of the women's shelter. She was out at the domestic abuse shelter. So she – you know, it was just really – it really wasn't a good idea for them to be dating. But what happened, I guess she said, you know, the abuse shelter doesn't really want me seeing you. And she like broke up with this guy and he freaks out and was chasing her around the church outside trying to catch her. And she's running and he's chasing her. And I hear about this, right? And I get pissed. I'm on my way up the stairs and this guy who's my new sponsor grabs me and goes, Chris, where are you going? You look upset. I go, guys upstairs, he's chasing a new girl. I'm going to go kill him! And he turns me around and he says, Chris, we don't kill people in AA. You know? We don't killed people in AAA. It's not something we do. And it was, you know, oh, we don't? OK. And meanwhile, you know, she'd gotten away or something and it had calmed down. But this is like me. This is how I react. It's a fight or flight. Like, okay, I'll take it. Okay, I'm going to kill you! It's just like, I go from zero to a thousand. You know, there's no one to a hundred. There's no two to a million to a 1,000. And this is my normal state of mind. And I'm gone to a lot of meetings. Now, a really bad day, this is what a really bad day would look like. Pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization. Okay, just thoughts of I just can't go on like this anymore. I can't face it. You know, that anxiety can be social anxiety, you know, just the hideous four horsemen, you Know, just bewildered and in Terror and frustration and just despair. You know, look at my life. And this is going to a ton of meetings. Now, it took me a long time, and I've talked about it a lot this weekend. This weekend really is about the difference between sobriety and being recovered. And we're trying to show you what you need to do to go from one to the other and again it's very very difficult to understand what recovery is until it happens to you because it's an experience it's not a theory or a set of uh of pieces of knowledge it's something that you can learn it's it's a it's experience now what happens so often in Alcoholics Anonymous is people misunderstand what recovery is, what recovered is, what sobriety is. And they settle for a low grade of relief. They settle for, well, it's not as bad as it used to be. And there's so much more out there. There's so many things that we can do. So much more available in Alcoholic Anonymous. If you're new or you're in your first 90 days or you have not been through the steps yet, I know two things that you don't. One of them is you're In way more trouble than you think you are. The other is there's much deeper answers in Alcoholics Anonymous than you're giving AlcoholicsAnonymous credit for because you just don't know. You don't have the experience of it. because a has changed i talked about the the abraham maslow theory you know there's a lot of other things that i believe have have influenced alcoholics anonymous over the course of time and i don't necessarily think they're all bad things i think that the the traditions opened the door to a lot of people that normally wouldn't have gotten in back in the early days I think that the 12 and 12 took a lot of emphasis off of the big book for our meeting literature, our main meeting literature. And it took us away from the big books. You know, and I'm not going to debate that these are bad things or these are good things. They're just things that have happened in our fellowship that have moved us a little bit away from our primary purpose and our primary recovery program. What's happened today in Alcoholics Anonymous is, well, I'll explain it like this. Let's say you want to do calculus and you go into a calculus classroom and you sit in the classroom and you read a little bit about the book, you share about the books, you go around the room and talk about calculus and what it might be like to take calculus. I like calculus, and I'm grateful for calculus. But you never open the book and actually do the problems. You never follow the instructions, so you never solve the calculus problems, but you like hanging out in the calculus class, sharing with the other calculus people. I mean, you know, I've got five years of calculus, you know. Well, have you ever solved any problems? Well, no. I'm a slowly recovering calculus person. So the same thing happens in Alcoholics Anonymous, unfortunately. We come in and we don't open the textbook and we don't do the exercises and we do not solve the problems. So, the problems regenerate and the problems are cyclical and you can go to meetings and you ca hear the same problems from the same people month after year after decade. Another way to describe it is to go to the airport and sit in the terminal and talk about flying. you know talk about the airplanes there's a 727 out there going by you know that's a butte i hear to fly and you never get on a plane and you ever fly but you you like to go to the terminal and talk about flying you know one of the things that the the big book movement is really helpful with is to get on the plane it's telling you just get on the plane you know you want to experience flying get out of the terminal and actually get on the plane you wantto know how beneficial calculus is why don't you learn how to solve some of the calculus problems in the book and then you'll be able to apply that to your life and that's the basic thing that we're talking about here this weekend let's learn how to apply these spiritual principles as a recovery program in our life so that we can stop shooting ourselves in the foot and we can get ourselves to a place where we're safe and protected placed in a position of neutrality safe and protective from the first drink we definitely need to be safe and protect from the 1st drink but with that We also have to start to heal spiritually. Now, I got exposed to some of the big book stuff and I am not going to sit up here and tell you I did a really great bang-up job on my first inventory or, you know, or I did an amazing job with my first set of amends. I did about the best you can do with no guidance at all. You know, I didn't really have any guidance at al in this. I just kind of did what I thought the book and the Joe and Charlie tapes were asking me to do. And, you know, I went out there and I took some concrete actions. And it wasn't from a sense of virtue. It wasn't From A Place In Virtue like I'm going to do this and, you know, I'm gonna be a great AA member or anything. It was from a place of desperation. I was suffering so much emotionally going to meetings and, And, you know, hanging out with the... Going to sober dances. You ever go to a sober dance like in your first year? Oh! Now, I've got like trauma in my life. And I want to talk a little bit about my trauma issues. Alright, I was in 6th grade or 7th grade. Anybody remember square dancing in school? they don't know what they're doing to the alcoholics. Now picture a gymnasium a huge gymnasum and they line the boys up on one side of the gym and they align the girls up on the other side of the room and you're facing them and they blow a whistle and you've got to run across the gym and grab somebody as a dance partner I still wake up in cold sweats after one of my talks a woman comes up to me and goes how do you think we felt I can imagine I remember like running across I learned how to cut school because of this Okay, now, you know, and they're saying, Chris, you've got to go to the sober dances. And I'm like, oh man, how in the world do you dance without like a pint of booze in you? That doesn't work for me. You know, I was like, I wasn't a wallflower. I was outside the building flower, you Know, but you get like a, a pint of whiskey in me and I'll, I'll be dance. I'll dance with the guys. I don't even care. I'll just be dancing. But I, you know, I had this like repressed anxiety all the time. Now I start to do some of these exercises that were laid out for me. And I, you know I started to heal. I started to heal spiritually I got to the I got to the fourth step and I got through the resentment inventory now I don't know about anybody else in here but I had problems with people okay you know people were really falling short as far as I was concerned and I was unbelievably unbelievably attuned to people's character defects I could I could write I could write a character description of you in four seconds if i met you back when i was okay he's not to be trusted you know and he said you know i mean i could uh i could never shine the light on me but you know i knew what you were doing wrong i knew that you weredoing it to me i knew your motives i knew what your motives were and i would just i would be angry at everybody i'd be angry there'd be nobody in my life that you know would escape my resentment at one period of time or the other now a life filled with deep resentment what we heard about this earlier you know it's it's a waste of a life we're given a certain amount of time on this planet and i think that we need to put it to good use. And by sitting there plotting revenge on somebody, I don't really think that's a good way to exist. You're in a lot of pain. Now I get through the resentment inventory and I move through the steps on that. And all of a sudden I'm starting to see that these resentments, A lot of them are fancied. A lot OF them didn't even happen, but more often than not, I was perceiving myself as under attack and it was a misperception. You know, nobody was attacking me. Nobody was out to get me. They were operating how they were going to operate and every once in a while, I would get in the way. I would step on the toes of my fellows and they would retaliate. You know? I was setting myself up. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. You know, I started to see that I co-created every single bad problem in any relationship I had. I was a co-creator of it. Now, all of a sudden, I'm not hating the way I used to hate. I don't have this deep resentment in my life. And that feels good. Now, I had a lot of fear. I didn't see it as cowardly fear. I saw it as anxiety. I just don't feel comfortable doing that. You know, I would never admit that I was scared, you know, of something happening. I wouldn't admit that. I just, I don't do that. I don'T write, I DON'T fill out forms. I DONT stand in lines. You know? I mean, there's things that I wouldn'T do you WOULDN'T even believe. I just didn'T do it because I had anxiety about it. I don't go into big stores with fluorescent lights. You know? I don'T drive into the city. And there's a million things I didn't do because I had some anxiety about it. Now, I start to look at the fear work, the fear inventory. And I start to see that aren't my fears directly proportional to the lack of faith and dependence I have on God. This conclusion came to me one day, and it was like one of those oh-my-God moments. One of those Zen moments where you just figure something out. And here's what I figured out. I make a decision in the third step to turn my will and my life over to the care of God so God can have a care for me. And my part in the deal is I'm going to fit myself to be of maximum service to the rest of his children. I'm gonna now be playing on his team and not Chris's team, right? That's my part of the deal. His part ofthe deal is he'll make sure that everything I need is gonna be provided for me now if I truly have made that decision and I really mean it what is God going to let get through to me that's not really in my own best interest see a lot of bad things happened to me but in hindsight a lot times the absolute worst things that happened to be ended up being very very valuable that last experience where I almost killed my family that propelled me into a very, very scary but very, very valuable recovery process. I started to get involved in Alcoholics Anonymous out of desperation. So that very horrible event that I had so much shame and remorse over really was the catalyst that began my spiritual life. So again, sometimes I don't know what's good and what's bad. sometimes i'm going to misunderstand results of situations but if i've truly made from a very very deep level that decision to turn my will and and my life over the care of god what is god gonna let get through to me that's not in my best interest or in the best interest of his other children now an understanding like that takes away a lot of fear now all of a sudden you know you're not afraid of everything or anybody or situations or driving into the city or whatever. You don't have that type of fear anymore because you start to have some faith. And this is part of the recovery process that leads to one becoming recovered. Guilt, shame and remorse, like, oh my God, I can't believe I did that. You know, oh, there were some things that I had done in the 70s that, you know, Or it's the 60s that, you know, I never wanted anybody to know about. I mean, it's just me thinking that I was capable of that just made me feel so small. And a lot of times I acted really inappropriately with people who I really cared about. You know,I would just do stupid things. You get enough booze in me and I'm going to do something inappropriate. you know i mean i'll give i'll give you a couple of for instances that you know I remember these people invited me over to their house and they said as long as you promise not to drink I promise I'm not going to drink they knew I had a drinking problem they were trying to help me and they take me out to their brand new home that they just bought in Pennsylvania they're so proud of it and you know, I'm walking down the hall into the bathroom and I open up the wrong door and it's a closet and I find their booze mustache. Okay, I grab a bottle of whiskey. So I go from like zero to drunk out of my mind in about five minutes. And I end up you know, like laying that you know they knew I found laying down on the couch. And you remember hazy recollections? They talk about that in the book hazy, you kind of just barely remember it out of a cloud of haze. I remember you know as a heavy smoker and I was oh, he's really ill and really alcoholic. I remember going like, in like a drunken blackout, and I go, and they've got a brand new carpet, and I just spit out this huge lunger, and it just lands on their carpet. And they're like, ew, ew, ow! And you know, I pass out, and I come to a little bit again, and they're down there with wire brushes and stuff, and wet vacs and I'm like that kind of stuff just shames you they're looking at you like you're some kind of pig I mean, I didn't even know where I was and I was so drunk and you know just crazy, crazy stuff like that that was always, always happening I had DUIs I always was walking I don't have a license, you know. They were out to get me. I mean, I'll tell you this one story. This is my last DUI, okay? Supposedly, I crossed the WL. You know how they are when they pull you over. So they pull me over. I'm only about four blocks from my house, so I'm real indignant that they didn't like follow me home or something like they would in the 70s. And, you know, the cop comes to the car. He knocks on the door. I roll down a window and he goes, License, registration, insurance card. So I... And I reach over and they're in the glove compartment and I'm fumbling in the gloves compartment and I'M FUMBLING AND I'M FUMBLING AND I'm FUMBLEIN And finally I just give up. And I grab everything in the gloved compartment and I hand it to the cop. There's like hairbrushes and, you know, boxes of tissues and maps and stuff, you know. I go, here. And he wasn't going for that. He goes, out of the car! Out of the cars! You know, so I don't remember much of this, but then the next thing I remember I'm like up at the police station, okay? And they're sitting me down and they're gonna video me doing a sobriety test. Now, I just kind of remember this, and here's what I remember. I remember that I nailed the ABCs, okay? I nailed them! It has nothing to do with I was made to memorize them when I was three, but I remember I nailed them. Now, that's kind of all I remember, and so, you know, I come to the next day with the summons in my pocket, oh, I'm going to get a lawyer, I mean, I I'm going to fight this. This is unfair. I remember I did really well with the ABCs. And I also refused the breathalyzer, which is not too smart, you know, when you've got multiple DUIs. So I hire a lawyer. We're going to find out what's going on. We're not going to have to fight it. And this guy's like $1,500. This is like 1983 or something. And he's $1.500. And we get up there, we get up there to the police station and we're going to, me and my lawyer, he's a three-piece suit, you know, real respectable. We're going to watch the video. That's the first thing you do is watch the drunk video. Has anybody in here ever seen their drunk video? Whoa! Anyway, the first bad sign is that the cop that handed us the video from the evidence room, as he hands it to my lawyer he sniggers. He's like like this right that was a bad sign my lawyer puts it puts it in the VCR and punches the button and I see myself I'm horrified I am absolutely out of my mind drunk I did remember that I did get the ABC's right I did them like this A, B, can I have a cigarette? C. And there's sections of this where I'm actually holding on to the wall and they're going, sir, could you please take your hands off the wall while you're walking the line? And I'm like, I mean, you know, the whole time, the attorney is like, you know, he's taking notes and stuff. He's $1,500. Well, at the end, the cop goes, do you have anything? We're about to turn off the video. Do you have any money? Anything that you'd like to add? and i go no and i look over at the video camera and i go like this right i mean i am so drunk my tongue is slapping back i mean i was i was like oh the lawyer the lawyer breaks into hysterics he's going blah, he goes, 20 years I've never seen anything like this, blah, any small chance you had, any tiny chance you hadn't getting off, you just blew it, oh man, now I had stuff like this to deal with I mean you don't forget something like this you know very easily you're you're like you what you're walking down the road oh you know I mean you think about it you know now I got involved I got involved in and and and you know looking at the harms I had caused out there and I moved through from four to nine and I actually went back and I made amends I I did the absolute best I could. The cop that I absolutely hated, you know, I faced. And being able to do these things, being ableto actually go out and do the absolutebest you can with the people that you've hurt and the relationships that youve blown up and, youknow, the peoplethat youve mistreated, all of a sudden, I went out there and I didthe best Icould and later on in additional inventories and additional amends lists, I did an even better job. And what happened was that guilt, that shame, and that remorse, that feeling of just being a scumbag. You think you're a scambag. You're like a special scumbaga. You're not like some run-of-the-mill scumbago, but you're definitely a scombag, and very special scambaga with unique characteristics for a scmbag. But a very intuitive scumbag. But anyway, you start to think, okay, I'm not really that bad. I'm Not Really That Bad. And you start the move from sobriety into recovery toward recovered. And a lot of that unbelievably intense emotional anguish and disturbance in yourself, a lot that starts to heal. and you don't constantly worry about things. You're not constantly ashamed. You're Not Constantly Afraid and you're not Constantly Pissed. It happens every once in a while in an appropriate way and you learn how to deal with it and then you move on and you do get to a point where you understand the word serenity and you are happy, joyous and free. And that's where I am today. Happy, joyless and free And I believe that's what being recovered is. If you're not happy, joyous and free, if you have relationships that are all screwed up, if there's people that are All Pissed Off and you're pissed off at people and you don't want to go here and you can't do that and you just can't this, sometimes I can't get out of bed and you got all this stuff going on, you've got work to do in Alcoholics Anonymous Because the symptoms of alcoholism are a lot of those things. A lot of that emotional, psychic trauma that you feel. You know, the steps don't fix everything. I mean, there's additional help for people with additional problems. But I found, I was very, very lucky. I found that I was just an alcoholic. I would have loved to have been something else too. You know? And be different. You know. I want to be different! but I found out that I was just a textbook alcoholic I was a big book page 25 textbook alcoholic and the treatment for alcoholism which is spiritual living worked with me and I gotta tell you I have an absolutely great life today if you haven't experienced the state of recovered do the work I mean, there's nothing in your lives that would be more important than that. Because quality of life is really everything we have here. Everything we have hier. We want to improve our quality of live by filling it with things and doing this and doing that and having this and having that. And that never, never works. It's always got to be spiritual fulfillment for it to be long-lasting and healthy. You know, it's a really, really great treat for me tonight. One of my favorite people on this planet is about to get up here and speak. Dave Kay from Dover, New Jersey. There are fewer people around that do more work with other alcoholics. There are few people around who've put more of recovery and AA in their life than Dave. It's going to be a real treat. Come on up, Dave. Thank you.