Scored 17 Out of 20 on the Addiction Test, Lied on Two, and the One Honest Answer Was Have You Ever Drank While Pregnant 🤣 – Scott H.

I'm Scott and I'm an alcoholic and I'm happy to be here and I'm happy to be sober and I
say that often because it reminds me of the difference between the person that I am now
and the person I was when I got here.
When I got here I was never particularly happy to be sober, but I really wasn't happy to
be where I was most of the time.
I had this idea that someone with my gifts and talents ought to have been somewhere more
interesting with more interesting people doing more interesting things than wherever I was
and what a treat to be able to live where I am and I really enjoyed that last panel
because that's exactly what they were talking about is the joy in being right here where
I am now and that's such a difference from how I lived my life before I got to Alcoholics.
Anonymous.
I want to do what I should do which is to say thank you to Dean and the committee and
a particular thank you to Harvey who's been my point of contact and the person who invited
me to be here with you this weekend.
I've very much enjoyed myself and it's a special treat for me to be here in Buffalo where I
have so many friends.
There are people in Alcoholics Anonymous in Buffalo who have just been...
My heroes in Alcoholics Anonymous, they've showed me how to live life as a sober man
and I just want to acknowledge my friends Harvey and Dave P. and Chuck B. and David N.
and Hank and Sue and Joanne and I'm sure I'm forgetting some people but they've just
shown me the way.
They've shown me how to live with joy in my life.
And that's just so different from what it was like before.
Before I get to telling you a little of my story, I want to read something out of something
called the Alcoholics Anonymous 25th World Service Meeting Report.
And it's just a little parable that I think speaks to what we do here.
And it's a...
It's a...
It's a...
It's a...
It's a story.
It's a tale that goes back to the days of old.
The days of kings and queens and kingdoms and palaces.
There was a particular king who gathered all his subjects together and told them that he
was building a road to his castle and that whoever traveled the road the best on a certain
day would receive a bag of gold.
On the actual day, which was declared a public holiday, all of the subjects came to try and
get the bag of gold.
Some came in their finest clothes, others came with picnic baskets, some decided to
run and get there first, yet others rode on horseback.
All had their own idea how to win the gold.
When the subjects reached the castle, the king asked each of them what they had thought
of the road.
One by one, they said that the road was lovely, apart from a clump of rocks near the end that
were in the middle of the road and had forced them to go.
Finally, a man came walking along and he had a bag in his hand.
He said to the king,
Your Majesty, I found this bag of gold in a clump of rocks that were in the middle of
the road and which I moved to make the journey easier for those yet to come.
To which the king replied,
My man, the gold is yours, because the person who travels the road the best is he or she
who makes the journey easier for those yet to come.
And that's what I hope I'll get to talk about today.
I'm one of those alcoholics who gets distracted.
I'm on this path and then I see something shiny over there and away I go.
Sort of part crow or something.
While I'm saying thank you, I want to say thank you to Anne.
Thank you, Anthony, for kicking us off on Friday night.
I was listening to him share and I thought, I've never dressed like a peacock.
And to Alan and John for their talks and for Teresa for that powerful message last night.
It's funny, I do what we're supposed to do in Alcoholics Anonymous.
I sit and I listen to people who share their stories.
Or for how I'm the same.
And my life couldn't have been more different.
The circumstances of my life, at least, couldn't have been more different from Teresa's.
As she relayed last night, I grew up in a home.
My parents have been married for over 58 years.
They're still in love.
There's no alcoholism in my home.
I grew up in a place where I was encouraged.
I was told that I was loved.
I was told things like you could do anything you put your mind to.
And I was given examples of kindness.
And yet, here I am.
Anthony spoke about enjoying hearing these fabulous drunkologues with adventure and action.
And that's not what my story is.
I spoke in an event like this a year or so ago.
And the guy who spoke...
I spoke on Friday night.
You know, he'd...
The end of his story involved...
He worked in an airport.
And he decided that he was going to be an entrepreneur while he worked in the airport.
And he began this import business.
And so his story ended with, like, the DEA kicking down his door and guns and things like that.
I thought, oh, my goodness.
Like, how do you survive something like that?
You know, my life...
Like, the PTA wasn't even after me.
You know, I didn't suffer a lot of consequences that people suffer in order to find their way to Alcoholics Anonymous.
You know, the consequences in my life were just the small, sad ways that I hurt and pushed away the people who were trying to love me in my life.
You know, even at the end of my drinking, I was surrounded by people who loved me and cared for me.
I was just doing everything I could to shut them out.
You know, that's the story in my life.
You know, I've never been arrested, never been in any kind of jail, never been in the back of a police car except when I was 10 and I was a Cub Scout and we got a tour.
And it's not like I didn't deserve those things.
Those things just never happened to me.
You know, Alan used a phrase that I use all the time.
You know, I tended to fall up.
You know, when I should have suffered consequences, I didn't.
But I ended up here.
You know, I always had this feeling that there was something wrong with me that wasn't wrong with other people.
And I didn't know what it was.
I couldn't identify it.
What I did know, though, was that it was really important that no one ever find out about it.
And as a result of that, I was one of those people who became...
I became something of an achiever in my life.
That was one of the ways that I covered up that feeling of not being enough.
You know, and so I ended up being that kid who was, you know, always the captain of the team and who played volleyball and basketball and tennis and badminton in high school.
And I was, you know, the president of the student body and the valedictorian.
And I was popular and I had lots of friends and lots of girlfriends.
And, you know, I was on the honor roll all the time and I was on the debate team and all of those things.
You know, I have a friend who's sober in AA and he came to visit me in Kamloops not that long ago.
And his brother-in-law was a teacher of mine in high school.
And he stopped and he was visiting with his brother-in-law.
And he said, well, I've got to go.
I'm meeting my friend Scott for coffee.
And this fellow says, Scott who?
And he told him my last name, which I...
Which I would tell you, except this is being recorded.
And he goes, I taught him.
And my friend said, oh, yeah.
And he said, and he's in AA?
And my friend said, yeah.
And he said, you know, I taught for 45 years.
And if I ever had one student that I would have identified as the golden child, it would have been Scott.
And here I am.
And so what that tells me is that the circumstances of my life don't have a lot to do with whether I'm...
alcoholic or suffer from alcoholism or not.
You know, I had this feeling that there was something wrong with me.
And achieving worked for quite a while.
But it was always a temporary fix.
And then when I was about 13 years old, I had a friend who had an older brother who was going to the liquor store.
And said, you know, my brother's going to the liquor store.
He's old enough now.
He's going to get us all some booze.
What do you want?
I mean, I have no idea.
I mean, my parents aren't...
aren't drinkers.
I mean, aren't drinkers the way we think of drinkers.
They're social drinkers, right?
You know, they have a drink or split a beer on a hot day.
You know, they're beautiful people, right?
And I didn't really know.
And so they said, oh, you'll love Southern Comfort.
Well, it turns out I did.
And I had my first real drunk.
And as you would expect from drinking a whole bunch of Southern Comfort, I was sick.
I would have died in the night,
except that my mother heard me throwing up when I was in bed and rolled me out.
And I felt awful the next day.
But what I remembered was just how free I felt when I got that drink in me.
And that was a pattern that repeated itself in my life.
And there's a fellow who's a lawyer out of Chicago
who tells a story about being at a beginner's.
And it's not a beginner's meeting where they're talking about the first three steps.
It's a beginner's meeting where they've got a whiteboard
and they're talking about the disease of alcoholism.
And they're trying to help people understand what they're dealing with.
And he said in this one particular session,
he got to the whiteboard and he drew a picture of a beaker,
you know, like from high school science class.
And he said, if we were in a chemistry class
and we were trying to recreate alcoholism in a lab,
what would we put in the beaker?
And he said, to begin, you know, there was just silence in the room
because all these people are new and no one wants to look stupid, right?
And he says, eventually somebody sticks up their hand and they say fear.
And somebody else, helplessness, hopelessness, bewilderment, terror, regret, guilt, shame, remorse.
And these things keep coming and he keeps writing them in the beaker.
And he says,
it surprised him for a moment that nobody stuck up their hand and said alcohol.
And he said, after he thought about it for a moment, he recognized why not.
And he said, because we know what happens when all of those feelings are in this beaker
and we pour alcohol in there, all of those things just dissolve.
And that's what alcohol did for me until it stopped working.
You know, I would have all of those feelings that I was different or not enough.
And alcohol would dissolve those things.
You know, I could go into a room full of people
and it wasn't like anyone said or did anything.
I just had this gift for knowing what you were thinking.
A gift I try not to exercise as much as I used to.
But I could just look at you and I knew that you weren't really all that happy that I was there.
And by the time I got two or three drinks in me,
I knew you could hardly...
You could hardly wait to talk to me.
I knew you were just excited someone as interesting as me was with you.
And you could hardly wait to hear my stories.
And I could talk to people and I could tell funny stories
and I could do all of those things that I just felt so uncomfortable doing
without a few drinks in me.
And that's what alcohol did for me for a long time until it stopped working.
And it's only since I became sober that I've been able to look back
and see that alcohol took things away from me in my life.
Because as I said, I couldn't see immediate consequences for so long in my life.
In high school, I'd go out with my friends and we'd have a few drinks
and we'd go to the high school dance
and they'd get kicked out of the dance for showing up drunk.
And they'd say,
they'd ask me to stand by the door and watch for people who might cause trouble.
That's just what my life was like.
We'd go get drunk the night before an exam
and they'd get D's and I'd get A's.
That's just how it was.
I didn't suffer those consequences.
I thought it made me the life of the party.
I thought it brought out my true personality.
And I came to discover in Alcoholics Anonymous that that was true.
It just wasn't as good a thing as I thought it was.
Because that true personality wasn't something that really needed to be brought out anywhere.
And I drifted through high school.
And by the time I got to the end of high school,
you know, those people who were close friends of mine,
they knew there was something wrong with how I drank.
You know, and it took me until I was 36 years old to find that out for myself.
And I can see now the things that it took away from me.
I was athletic.
In high school, and I was recruited to come play basketball at the local college.
And I couldn't go do that because they practiced in the afternoon
and they played at weekends.
And I was busy in the afternoon.
And I was busy on weekends.
And I had no time for playing basketball.
And so that's just one of the things that it took away from me.
You know, and I know that I didn't do as well in school as I could have if I didn't drink.
And that took some opportunities for me.
Not that I didn't fall up.
You know, I got to a place in university where I was finishing my first degree.
And from the time I'd been 13 years old, I wanted to go to law school.
And to go to law school, you have to write this thing called the LSAT,
which is a test of aptitude, I guess, for how you think
and whether that makes you likely to succeed in law school.
And I signed up to take this test.
And lots of people seemed to take courses to help them, you know, do well on this test.
And I, of course, didn't do that.
I was busy.
But I did buy a book to write a practice exam.
And I did that.
And I found this one part that, you know, I hadn't done particularly well on.
And I meant the night before the exam to go home and practice that
because going to law school had been something I'd wanted to do since I was 13 years old.
You know?
Because I'm headed off campus, you know, at about 11.30 on Friday morning.
Somebody asked me that question that I only knew one answer to.
And that was, Scott, do you want to go for a drink?
And my answer was, sure.
But I can only go for two because I've got this really important thing that I have to do tomorrow.
You know?
And the only thing close to two in that evening was what time I left the bar.
You know?
And I went home.
I slept for a little bit.
And I got up and I went to write this LSAT.
And it was just a miserable experience, you know, where you're sort of clammy and sweaty.
And the temperature in the room, they keep running it up and running it down.
And I finish this exam and I go home and I start to make plans for what I'm going to do
that doesn't involve going to law school because somehow I've done this incredibly stupid thing
and blown the opportunity to do something I wanted to do all my life.
And I, you know, and two weeks later I get the results and I scored above the 98th percentile.
You know, I fell up.
You know, and that's the way my life continued.
You know, I said I never got an impaired driving charge.
And that's not because I didn't deserve one.
It's just because that's not what happened.
You know, I was driving home.
The one time that I sort of came close to getting an impaired driving charge, I was driving home late in the evening.
And I was driving this little MG Midget, a little tiny car with a top down.
And I came around a corner kind of fast in a residential neighborhood.
And the police pulled me over and I pulled off into this gas station parking lot.
And the police officer is wagging his finger at me telling me, you know, that I'm driving way too fast through a residential neighborhood.
And he's kind of looking in my car because it's open.
And he's sort of doing this.
And I got a dust cover behind the seat.
And underneath the dust cover are two half full bottles of vodka.
You know, the 40 ounce size.
And he's just about to find one of those.
And I can just feel my world closing.
And all of a sudden this young woman comes running out of the gas station shouting, we've been robbed.
We've been robbed.
The police officer wags his finger at me and tells me to go straight home.
I don't know what it's like here.
I live in a town where a gas station gets robbed about once a year.
Perfectly timed that year.
You know, and that's just what kept happening, right?
You know, those friends who knew that there was something wrong with my drinking, they thought, well, you know what he needs.
I mean, you know what they thought I needed because we've all done this.
He needs to find the right woman.
You know, and they pointed this lovely woman at me who I am still married to.
And, you know, and those things got me sober.
You know, I said I was an achiever.
And I kept trying that all my life.
You know, I would set my goals to get something and that would make me feel better for it seemed like about eight minutes, right?
You know, find the right woman.
I felt good and my life was good and I was content for about eight minutes.
You know, go to law school and get the right job.
And those things made me feel better for about eight minutes.
You know, we had a son.
And that made me feel better.
That made me feel better for about eight minutes.
We had a daughter.
That made me feel better for about eight minutes.
You know, I was hanging around with these people who drank kind of like I drank.
We moved to a different city.
You know, that worked for about eight minutes, you know.
Then I found people who drank like I drank.
And it didn't work so much anymore.
And life continued like that.
And I got to a place where I just wasn't enjoying anything I was doing.
I was just, I'm not a pessimistic guy.
I'm not a negative guy.
But I'd wake up in the morning and I just didn't want to get out of bed.
And, you know, it always felt like the other shoe was going to drop.
Something was going to catch up to me that I'd done.
And about that time, you know, these guys at this place that I was working at in Kamloops started talking to me about how much I was drinking.
And I don't know what you're like with people who start talking to you about your drinking.
I was making plans to go to a different place to work.
That's what I was doing.
I mean, how dare you talk to me about my drinking.
It's the glue that's holding me together it feels like, right?
And I started to make plans to go out on my own.
And I applied for some insurance because I wanted to make sure I had some insurance in place if I was going to be on my own.
And I got this note back from my friend who was the insurance officer.
He was the insurance guy.
And he said there was some sort of problem with your test.
It says to go see your doctor.
And I go see my doctor.
And my doctor says, yeah, it's your liver enzyme scores.
He said this one test, is that a hum from this?
I don't know what to do about that.
Talk louder.
He says this one test, he says,
We consider 70 to be high.
50 is normal.
We consider 70 to be high.
And you are 748.
And he says, what I'd like you to do is make an appointment for two weeks from now.
And don't drink anything between now and then.
And come back and we'll redo the test and see what happens.
And so I left there planning to not drink for two weeks.
And I found that I couldn't do that.
I found that the only day I managed to not drink was on the day of my appointment,
which was at 9 o'clock in the morning.
And he took some more blood.
And I went back to see him with the tests.
And, of course, my scores hadn't really changed.
And he said, I don't know what's going on with your drinking because I'm still dressed like this.
I'm showing up at work every day.
My life on the outside looks like I'm holding it together.
Inside, I'm dying.
You know?
My life, you know, in the home, you know, it's dying.
And he says, I don't know what's going on with your drinking,
but if you continue to drink that way, you'll be dead within a year.
And you'll suffer brain damage before that.
And I left his office and I thought, what does he know?
I mean, doctors, I mean, what is that really?
Like, this far from throwing chicken bones out of a teacup.
Like, it's just voodoo.
He didn't get any 98th percentile on the LSAT.
Like, I mean, what does he know?
I mean, how do you live being a guy like that?
Uncomfortably, all the time.
And I kept drinking.
And those people at work, they kept talking to me about how I was drinking.
They were concerned about me.
And they'd been exposed to some information about Alcoholics Anonymous
and the Lawyers Assistance Program.
And they got in touch with somebody who came to see me who was an alcoholic.
And that guy did something that no one had ever done with me up to that point
when they came to talk to me about my drinking.
He didn't talk to me about my drinking.
All of those people up to that point, when they were talking to me about my drinking,
it felt like they were doing this to me, right?
Right.
And this guy didn't do that.
He just talked to me about his drinking.
And I wasn't struck sober.
I thought, well, you know what?
I'm sorry for you that when it got hard, you had to quit.
I'm not a quitter.
You know, but this guy was patiently persistent.
You know, he didn't tell me what I needed to do.
He just said, you know, when I'm next in town, I'll come back
and I'll have another chat with you if that's okay.
And he was just so nice.
I said, sure, that'd be fine.
And meanwhile, these guys from work are continuing to talk to me about my drinking.
And now they want me to go for something called an assessment.
They want me to go see an addiction specialist, you know, for an assessment.
And I put that off as long as I can.
And I'm probably, you know, 10 months into that year.
And in that time period, I'd gone to a little bit of an AA meeting.
I'd gone to a noon meeting.
They're about 12, 27.
And somebody had just finished talking.
And then they were passing a basket around collecting money,
talking about people's birthdays, which is what we call them where I live.
You call them, I think, anniversaries.
They were talking about people's birthdays and collecting money.
And I thought, how is this going to help me?
And I laughed.
Lots of investigation there.
And so I end up going to see this addictions guy.
And, you know, my appointment's not until 10.30.
And it's in Vancouver, which is about a three and a half hour drive.
And I go to Vancouver and I stay overnight with a friend.
And I get up the next morning and I head out and I'm headed to this appointment.
And I don't know what you're like with those kinds of pressure situations.
But I found that I got great relief from that feeling of pressure by having a few drinks.
So just before I go see the addiction specialist, I've got half of a 40 of vodka in me.
And he takes some blood, which I know is not going to, this is just not going to end well for me.
And he gives me this test.
And I've always been pretty good at tests.
And I got 17 out of 20 on this one.
I lied on two.
Otherwise I'd have got 19 out of 20.
I've seen the test since then.
The test that I've seen since then doesn't have this question.
But the one question that I will to this day swear I told the truth on on that first test was,
have you ever drank while pregnant?
No.
And this guy comes back and he says, well, it's my assessment that you suffer from alcoholism.
And my recommendation is going to be that you attend AA meetings.
That you join something called a step group.
And that you join an accountability group.
And you join a big book study.
And I have no idea really what he's talking about.
But this is only 10 months into that year that that first guy talked about it.
And I'm thinking, the other guy said a year.
But the pressure's on, right?
Like the guys I work with have got this report now.
And they're expecting me to go to AA.
And I start to go to AA.
And I find something there.
You know, and I went in and I started to listen to what people were talking about.
And they were talking about things where I thought I'd been the only one.
Like I thought I was the only person ever who had to have a few drinks before he went to the grocery store.
Because going to the grocery store sober was just overwhelming.
I mean, I know now that it's terrifying.
But it seemed overwhelming.
I didn't have a word to describe it because I didn't think I had fear or anything like that.
And they talked about having a few drinks before they went to a party, you know, in case there wasn't enough.
And I thought, oh, you know, I have so done that.
And they talked about, you know, when they would take their kids out for lunch.
Like they didn't go to McDonald's or fast food restaurants.
I thought, well, I don't either.
I mean, that's unhealthy.
We go to real restaurants, you know, with liquor licenses.
And they were talking about those things.
And I thought, wow.
Wow.
Maybe I'm not the only one.
And I started to buy into this a little bit.
And I felt healthier.
And I got sober.
And I read those steps on the things on the wall.
And I nodded my head in agreement.
I nodded my head in agreement.
And I didn't do anything.
You know, I got a sponsor.
And I never phoned that guy once.
And I started to feel really healthy.
And what I knew was that I had been physically addicted to alcohol.
And now that I wasn't physically addicted to alcohol anymore, I was good.
And I started to notice that a lot of the things that had happened in these people's lives hadn't happened in my life, you know.
Just what I mentioned before.
I'd never gotten an impaired driving charge.
Never been fired from a job for being drunk.
Never gotten divorced because of an alcohol problem.
Never been in jail.
And I started to notice the differences.
And I tell you, when I look for differences, I will find them.
And when I find those differences, what happens for me is I know that the solution won't work for me because it's just really not my problem.
I don't need to do that.
And the consequence of that was I got drunk.
And it's only a 10-month period from the time that I went to that first meeting after seeing that addiction specialist and the time that I came to Alcoholics Anonymous the last time.
But I was drunk and then sober and then drunk and then sober or drunk and not drinking at least a number of times in there.
I went to two treatment centers and then a detox center in that order.
Not the order that everybody does it but the order that worked for me.
And what happened when I got back the last time was that I was prepared even though this step stuff sounded kind of stupid and unrelated to what was going on in my life.
I was hurting enough that I was prepared to try that.
And again, it's not because anything really consequential had happened in my life, you know.
I hadn't been divorced while I was away at treatment.
I hadn't lost my job while I was away at treatment.
I didn't realize how close I was to all of those things.
But they hadn't quite happened.
You know, what it was was I just couldn't stand living with me anymore.
You know, Teresa talked about it last night, you know, when she said she looked in that mirror and she said, who is this?
You know, I couldn't even look at that person in the mirror anymore.
You know, I was long past the days where I would look at that person in the mirror and say, you're disgusting.
You're not going to drink today.
You are not going to drink today.
You know, and sometimes I managed until 5 o'clock at night.
Sometimes I managed until noon.
And sometimes I just managed until I got to the bottom of the stairs in my house.
I always drank that day.
You know, I was a guy who drank every day.
You know, and I was long past the time when I was going out with my wife.
You know, I was a guy who drank every day.
You know, and I was long past the time when I was going out places to drink because I couldn't stand for people to see how I drank.
You know, I was the life of the party at home by myself on the couch.
And when I got back to Alcoholics Anonymous the last time, I was prepared to do something different.
But the real miracle for me happened when this guy walked up to me and he said, Scott, we've been watching you.
And we got a group of guys and we're going to go through the steps together.
And we want you to join us.
And I explained to him that I have this really busy life and I play soccer on that night and I'm committed.
And he said, that's terrific.
Dave will pick you up at 7.30.
And their simply not taking no for an answer saved my life.
What I know now from having been through that process is as desperate as I felt when I got back to Alcoholics Anonymous the last time,
What I know now from having been through that process is as desperate as I felt when I got back to Alcoholics Anonymous the last time,
I was going to drink again.
Because the reason I drank, what I discovered in the course of doing that four-step inventory,
the reason I drank is I could only stand being around me for so long before I needed some relief from that.
I could only stand being the kind of person I was, doing the kinds of things that I was doing,
for so long before I needed to drink to escape.
It wasn't the outside circumstances that were getting me.
You know, it was the person I was that I couldn't stand living with.
And that's what alcohol did in my life.
And those guys helped me through the steps and I would listen to those guys and I would work with those guys
and then I'd go talk to my sponsor to try to figure out what they were talking about.
You know, to try to figure out what I was reading in the book.
You know, I said this yesterday, I got a couple of university degrees, English is my only language,
and I had a hard time understanding what was in here.
Imagine trying to do it in another language.
And thank God we worked so hard to translate our literature into other languages
so that we can make this life-saving message available to people no matter what language they got drunk in.
You know, and I wasn't an easy guy to work with.
You know, I think I'm smart, I think I know stuff, I think I'm insightful.
You know, I was one of those guys, I mean, I know the room is full of them,
you know, where I would take a drink and I would say,
I'll tell you that I just felt the pain of the world more intensely than other people.
Like I'm just like that, right?
Like I'm just so self-absorbed.
You know, and I got to that second step and these people are talking about the word God
and every time I hear that in an AA meeting, like I just want to jump up and leave.
You know, and I'll tell you, and I don't mean to offend anybody who's religious,
but this is my first big book.
And when I got to Alcoholics Anonymous, I was still driving that little MG Midget.
And when I took my big book with me to go to a meeting,
because sometimes they read out of the book in a meeting and I wanted to follow along,
I'd stop at a convenience store to get a soda because I don't drink coffee.
I'd go inside the convenience store and if I had my big book with me,
I always left it face up on the seat because anybody who went by that car,
it was the only car like it in town, would know it was my car.
And if they looked in my car, I didn't care so much who saw that I had this book
called Alcoholics Anonymous, I didn't want anybody thinking I had a Bible.
Because that's what I thought it looked like upside down.
So that's where I start, right, with this whole prejudice against that idea of God.
And I said to my sponsor, you know, Mark, I don't think that this God idea is going to work for me.
And he said, well, that's too bad, Scott, you're probably going to die then.
.
Which I know he must have meant in a kind way.
.
He was just such a gentle man, he is such a gentle man.
And he was full of kindness because he followed that up immediately with,
what about that idea won't work for you?
And I told him about these ideas that I had and how I couldn't believe in the kind of God
that I saw on TV on Sunday morning and he said, who's asking you to?
.
And I said, well, AA is.
I mean, I can read, capital G, God.
And he said, Scott, you know, for such a smart guy or guy at least who thinks he's so smart,
you don't read that well, do you?
And I said, no, I read pretty well.
And he said, read the third step to me.
And so I read the third step to him and he said, you hear that part that says, as we understood him?
And I said, yeah, I mean, that's just like code for like AA brand of God, right?
You know, it's still capital G, God.
You guys put some sort of mild little twist on it.
But it's still the same thing.
And he says, no, no, no, no.
He says, when I use the word God, the first thing you need to understand is I don't mean what you think I mean.
He says, I have a personal understanding of that word here.
And he says, and I don't need to use that word.
I could use higher power.
I could use creator of the universe.
I could use spirit of the universe.
I could use any of a number of other words.
He said, my mouth just gets tired when I use those other words.
I just say God.
And it means what it means to me.
And I didn't know that.
And I didn't understand what he meant.
And he said, let's try this exercise.
And he gave me this piece of paper.
And he said, why don't you write down some of the characteristics that this power would have to have in order for that to work in your life?
And I wrote down some things that were just completely opposite to the ideas that I had had all my life.
I wrote down things like nonjudgmental, having nothing but my best interests at heart, forgiving.
And I went to show him the piece of paper.
And he said, not interested.
I do not have to understand, agree, or approve of your concept of a higher power here.
He said, that's what we mean when we say as we understood him.
And what I understand now that I didn't understand then is that he was telling me I could change my mind.
I don't know how many times I read some of us tried to hold on to our old ideas and the result was nil until we let go absolutely.
Until I understood that meant I can change my mind.
And that's exactly what my sponsor did for me.
You know, he allowed me to find my own conception.
And I read that part in the book, you know, where it talks about deep down in every man, woman, and child is the fundamental idea of God.
And how it may be obscured by pomp, calamity, and worship of worldly things or something just about like that.
And I thought, well, that fits for me because there's always been a piece of me that's known the right thing to do.
I just haven't been able to listen to that piece because I got this stuff going on in my head.
You know, Scott, don't do that.
You won't get the job.
Scott, don't do that.
You won't get the girl.
Scott, don't do that.
They'll think you're wrong.
They'll think you're stupid.
You know, and I just couldn't listen to that piece.
And I thought, well, if that piece is inside of me, that piece must be inside of you.
And no wonder I felt so alone at the end of my drinking when I was doing everything I could to push those people who cared about me away.
Because what I was really doing was pushing that list.
What I was really doing was pushing that little piece of God that was in them away.
And no wonder I don't feel alone now because you guys have provided me with the steps, the ability to repair those relationships and draw people near and help people and bring people close to me.
And if that little piece of God is in you, comes closer to me, no wonder I don't feel alone.
No wonder I feel so different than I did.
You know, and this guy helped me with the rest of the steps.
And the guys, they showed me how to do a four-step out of the big book.
And I'd heard people say things like, just wait until you get to the four-step.
As though it was some sort of rite of passage.
And I will express this opinion again.
I think the only people who ever say things like that are people who haven't done one.
Because the way I did a four-step, the way it's laid out in the big book, it's like one of those picture books I had when I was a kid.
That had a whole bunch of details.
And there were dots with numbers on them.
And I put my pencil on dot number one.
And I went to dot number two.
And I went to dot number three.
And when I got to the last dot, I had a picture of something.
And that's what happened for me in the four-step.
Is I connected all the dots the way the book tells me to.
And I had a picture of the kind of guy that I really was.
And it looked a little bit like what some of those people close to me had been telling me for a while.
And it was uncomfortable.
And so I wanted to change.
And so I set about doing the things that they tell us to do to change.
I took steps to set right those wrongs that I caused others.
And there were some significant wrongs.
And I stayed close to that sponsor.
And I checked things out with my sponsor before I went to do them.
In that amends process, I made up my own little list of who I was going to go make amends to first.
And my sponsor said,
Oh, no, no, no, no.
That's not who you're going to first.
And he knew what I was up to.
And he knew that it really wasn't great for me to make my own decisions all the time without checking them out.
My sponsor once said to me,
He said, Scott, whenever you get a good idea, I want you to phone me.
And I said, surely you don't mean when I get a good idea.
You mean when I get a bad idea.
And he said, no, no, no.
I mean when you get a good idea.
I said, well, why?
And he said, how many times in your life have you ever explained what you just did by saying,
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
And so I did that.
In the beginning, it was, Mark, I have a good idea.
No.
Click.
Mark, I have a good idea.
OK.
What is it?
No.
Click.
And he helped me understand that my thinking wasn't great.
Because I couldn't see that.
I mean, he, at this point, never heard this one story.
That I'll share with you.
That I always share.
That shows the flaws in my thinking.
Where I live in, where I used to live in Kamloops.
We lived along the river.
And it's a river where salmon migrate in the fall.
And we've got fruit trees in our yard.
And, you know, bears will come along and they'll eat salmon in the river.
And then they'll get tired of salmon.
And they'll come up in our yard.
And they'll come and eat the fruit.
And I come home from work one day.
And I drive into my house.
And I can hear this good-looking dog that I bought.
You know, because I knew that a good-looking dog would help me get sober.
This good-looking dog that I bought barking in the backyard.
And I go around and I can see up in a tree that he's treated this mama bear and these two cubs.
And so I phone my wife.
And I say, no, it's safe for you and the kids to come home just yet.
I'll give you a call when it's safe.
And I settled in to have a little peaceful drinking time.
This is between my first trip.
This is between my first treatment center and my second treatment center, by the way.
And so I'm having some peaceful drinking time.
Except, of course, that I can hear this dog at the bottom of the tree.
And he's barking at this mama bear and these two cubs.
And I think, ah, this just isn't as peaceful as I thought it was going to be.
And I go outside and I bring the dog inside.
And I think that's going to solve the problem.
And it doesn't really.
The barking dog is now inside, not outside.
And I think, ah, I know what to do.
I'm going to lower the blinds so the dog doesn't know that the mama bear and the two cubs are there.
And, of course, the dog is actually smarter than that.
And he's pawing at the blinds.
And I think I'm going to get into all this trouble with my wife when she gets home.
And I decided I need to take a little action to resolve this problem.
And I go out on my driveway.
I pour myself a drink.
And I go out on my driveway in my sock feet.
This is October.
And I go to my driveway.
And I don't know if you can see this bad boy.
But I pick up about six rocks like this.
And I go around to the bottom of the tree.
And I'll tell you, nobody gets hurt in this.
I go around to the bottom of this tree because my plan is to throw rocks at this mama bear and annoy her enough to come down and go away.
That's my plan, right?
So I throw my six rocks.
I throw my six rocks.
And I start to see that there are some flaws in my plan.
You may have seen some flaws in my plan, too.
But here's the order in which they occur to me.
I only brought one drink.
These rocks are far too small to throw with any kind of accuracy.
So I go back into my house to pour myself another drink when the third flaw occurs to me.
And that is, that mama bear ain't coming down and going peacefully away.
I mean, the mama bear is not coming down.
I mean, I stayed inside.
The mama bear eventually went away.
But, like, I'm just unable to see how flawed my thinking is on my own.
And so I stay in touch with a sponsor.
You know, I don't know if this has happened to you where you're sitting in a meeting, you know, and I've got this brilliant idea, you know, that I've been thinking about as I come down the steps into the church basement.
And somebody shares at the meeting.
And they share my idea.
And I go, oh, my God, that is stupid.
But it made perfect sense to me.
It made perfect sense to me a little while ago.
And I need to check these things out.
And I'm running out of time.
I want to talk a little bit about my sobriety hasn't been completely smooth.
I have continued to fall up all my life.
The only problem I've ever had in my sobriety is that occasionally I've gotten what I want.
And for those of you who have been sober for a while, you know that getting what you want, not wanting to get what you want, not wanting to get what you want.
Not always a great thing in Alcoholics Anonymous.
You know, I get it.
And I go, oh, that's just not at all what I thought I was going to get.
And I've discovered the secret to a happy life in sobriety.
And that is quit trying to get what I want and help someone else.
That's the entire secret.
You know, that's what I read in Bill's story.
You know, he has this white light experience.
But that's not what keeps him sober.
I am so glad I never had a white light experience.
Because I had a thought that that was what was going to keep me sober.
What kept Bill sober was that thought, that next thought that he had was that there may be others who would be happy to have what had been so freely given to him.
They in turn might help others.
That's the spiritual experience.
That's what saved Bill Wilson's life.
When six months after he has the white light experience, he's walking around the lobby of the Mayflower thinking about going in the bar.
Until he phones someone who might need some help.
And he finds someone who needs some help.
And that's been the magic in my life.
You know, I've been an occasional idiot.
I was about two years sober.
And no offense to anybody who's two years sober.
When I was two years sober, I was a spiritual giant.
I knew absolutely everything.
And we were having this challenge in my house where my wife was having a hard time getting the top on the orange juice.
And I'd take the orange juice out of the fridge and I'd shake it.
And the top would come off.
And orange juice would go everywhere.
And I would grump at her and say,
Well, you know, what's wrong with you that you can't get the top on the orange juice?
And being a spiritual giant, I'd demonstrate the art of putting a top on orange juice.
I'd be invited to sleep on the couch.
And this goes on for a couple of weeks.
And no improvement in my wife.
None.
And I finally do.
I'm driven to the desperation of calling my sponsor.
And I call my sponsor.
And I explain the situation to him.
And I said, I have no idea what to do.
And he says, Ah, I know exactly what you should do.
He says, When you take the orange juice out of the fridge, tighten the lid yourself before you shake it.
I swear to God, that never would have occurred to me.
I don't know what you're like, but the problems in my life are never here.
They're always there.
You know, and it's a demonstration of that.
But the real magic in my life has been about...
Forgetting about what's going on in my life.
Just what we heard in this last panel.
Forgetting about what's going on in my life and reaching out my hand to help others.
You know, I got involved in service.
I got involved kind of accidentally.
And I found myself going to that first service event thinking, Oh my God, Scott, what is wrong with you?
Why do you stick up your hand when people ask for these things?
And I got to that assembly and something happened.
I saw this person at the podium on the dais.
And somebody on the floor was just kind of giving it to her.
And it was just sort of washing right past her.
Wouldn't it be nice to be like that?
You know, and I started hanging around with these people.
And I thought, these people are a lot more interested to do the right thing than to be right.
And if you'd seen my inventory, there was a whole lot of needing to be right.
And so I started to hang around these people.
And I learned a little bit about our traditions.
And I saw how being in a place, you know, in a service assembly, on a service committee, you know, putting on an event like this,
being involved in a situation where I actually have to put those traditions to practice in my life could help me so much.
Because I don't know what you were like when you got here, but I had a hard time getting along in groups of people.
I mean, it's really hard when you're the guy that has the right answer and everybody else just won't listen.
You know?
And I didn't change a lot from that when I first got to Alcoholics Anonymous.
And I got a chance in these service assemblies and these other events to see how that didn't work.
You know, to see how that didn't work.
And when I was kind of like that with these people, they didn't invite me to sleep on the couch.
You know, they just said, keep coming.
You know, and I got to a place where I'm still a guy that's full of opinions and ideas.
And when I think I need to, I will express them.
But when I hear what the majority of us say, I can accept that.
I am wrong a lot.
I had a friend who uses a baseball analogy, and it fits perfectly for me.
He says, I have been wrong so many times, once more won't hurt my average.
You know, and I need to remember that.
You know?
That my life just gets better by reaching out my hand to help somebody.
And I'm at the end of my time.
And I want to close with something that, like the thing that I began with, I think perfectly explains what goes on here.
And it's the way that a couple of people that had a profound effect in my sobriety used to close their talks.
And it's out of a pamphlet.
It's a pamphlet that we have.
And for those who may not like to hear things that sound a little bit religious, I apologize for that.
But I'm just going to read what's in the pamphlet.
What it says is,
This coming Sunday, in the churches of many of us, there will be read that portion of the Gospel of Matthew,
which recounts the time when John the Baptist was languishing in the prison of Herod.
And hearing the works of his cousin Jesus, he sent two of his disciples to say to him,
Art thou he who is to come, or shall we look for another?
And Christ did, as he so often did.
He did not answer them directly, but wanted John to decide for himself.
And so he said to the disciples,
Go and report to John what you have heard and what you have seen.
The blind see, the lame walk, the blind see.
The blind see, the lame walk, the blind see.
The lame walk, the lepers are cleansed.
The deaf hear, the dead rise.
The poor have the Gospel preached to them.
Back in my childhood catechism days,
I was taught that the poor in this instance
did not mean only the poor in a material sense,
but also meant the poor in spirit.
Those who burned with an inner hunger and an inner thirst,
and that the word Gospel meant quite literally the good news.
More than sixteen years ago,
four men, my boss, my physician, my pastor,
and the one friend I had left,
working singly and together,
maneuvered me into AA.
Tonight, if they were to ask me,
Tell us, what did you find?
I would say to them what I now say to you.
I can only tell you what I have heard and seen.
It seems the blind do see,
the lame do walk,
the lepers are cleansed,
the deaf hear,
the dead rise,
and over and over again,
in the middle of the longest day or the darkest night,
the poor in spirit have the good news told to them.
God grant that it may always be so.
I thank you for my life.
Thank you.