Sean A. Found the Payoff of Alcohol Ended in a Total Loss of Will

hi guys my name is Sean and I'm an alcoholic yeah isn't this your worst sober nightmare I mean you know you get stuck for a weekend with 90 guys nothing to drink no women I mean the worst if my sponsor had told me that when I first got sober that I'd be doing this kind of thing I just said pass you know I'm really honored to be here thank you were asking me. I live in Vancouver, British Columbia now. I used to live in California, so I've added A to my vocabulary now that I live up there. A dude. I was born in Victoria, British Columbia, in a normal alcoholic home. My father was an alcoholic, my mother was a saint, and my father was a drunken sailor. He was at sea both literally and figuratively all the time the earliest memories i have of my father drinking too much or are my mother trying to shame him into sobriety she used to send me down uh when i was six seven years old with the bail money to jail you know and uh and and then i watched the old man come out you know and he just crushed seeing his kid you know with the bail money but one of the things that i did observe about my father was my father attended my father wasn't scottish he was born in glasgow and he was uh he was kind of dark and brooding and kind of quiet and charming he was a terrific guy but what i did notice about him was when he drank he relaxed and he opened up and he sang and he he had a real personality change and i stashed that information away our house got pretty crazy as it does in an alcoholic house we had a lot of financial insecurity and uh and we also had a lot new beginnings i mean i'm standing here tonight up to my ass and new beginnings one of the things we decided to do when i was about 14 years old my mother decided my mother had this incredible capacity for optimism she just knew that somehow somewhere it was going to be better so we uprooted the family moved to california i went back to victorian completed high school and that's when i started drinking i started getting drunk when i was 14 years old and i don't know about you but i remember the first thing i remember it was in somebody's house i remember i was down in their bar it had dark panel walls it had red leather seats it had a plaid carpet i remember absolutely everything about it because i had been uncomfortable all my life i've been shy and and uh and hypersensitive and i didn't fit in i was tall i was fat i had thick glasses and crooked teeth and i was weird you know and uh and that night i found comfort southern comfort is what i found and i loved it i mean it was like taking a bite out of a thunderstorm man you know it just crackled all the way down and at the bottom there was this deep roll of thunder and i understood at a deep level why my father was willing to go to jail so much i mean it was sensational for me i could talk to you i could dance with you i do not god knows what with you and i did from then on and the thing about alcoholism for me is that i have i've heard people stand at podiums and say it stopped working for them and i have never understood that statement i have ever understood that statement because the reason i did it was it worked every time for me every time i drank there was a moment four or five or six or seven or eight drinks in where it all came together man when it all come together and i was tall and good looking and witty and charming and tough but tender you know all that crap it all i was fred astaire and sean connery and i mean it just was sensational for that five to eight minutes you know and then it all went to hell in a handbag but by god that was wonderful and what happened to me was that i kept paying a higher and higher and higher price for those moments and i didn't know it until i was well into paying a price that was totally unacceptable to me but from the first night that i drank to the last night that I drank, I had that moment. And that was the toughest thing for me to give up in sobriety. That was the toughest thing for all of us in sobpriety. And I don't care how much anybody in this room drank. I don'T care what the circumstances were, where we did it, how we did it or anything else. All of us had that payoff. And THAT was the TOUGHEST thing in sobriete for me, was that I mourned the fact that I would NEVER, EVER feel like that again. When I was 17 years old, my mother became concerned that I was working too hard during exam time. I got to tell you, I've never worked too hard during any time in my life, but she gave me one of her diet pills. God bless that woman. And I discovered the wonderful world of chemistry. Up until that point, I'd been a lousy drunk. Up Until that point I got very drunk, very fast and very little. But when I dropped those amphetamines, man, I could stay up all night. I could drink a lot. It was great. And i loved it and i added that to my diet now i'm a child of the 60s i graduated from high school in 1960 and all hell broke loose in 1960. and we're the generation that made drug abuse middle class we took it out of the snatched it from the jaws of black musicians and brought it into the family rooms of america man we discovered medicine cabinet and here's some of the old-timers talk we screwed up a perfectly respectable little disease but i don't know i i just wonder if they had the same opportunities and the same peer group pressure that we had if they said no no no you know i prefer to kill myself on cheap vodka i doubt it i've never met a drunk who wasn't a pig and if they'd have the opportunities that we did we had done exactly the same thing by the time i was 17 years old i've been well by the top i was 18 i'd been drinking for four years and i've been taking drugs for a year and uh and i was in trouble with the chemicals and i declared myself an alcoholic and i didn't know that i'd done it but i said the phrase that only an alcoholic says and if if some of you are not sure that you're in the right place if you've ever said this phrase you're the right place if you ever heard anybody say it you're listening to a drunk and the phrase is i can control my drinking only an alcoholic says i can control my drink social drinkers never deal with the concept social drinkings if they do something stupid or humiliating whilst drinking They stopped drinking. Have you ever noticed that? Isn't that weird? God. I had done a lot of stupid and humiliating things by the time I was 18 years old, and I was in trouble with the chemicals. But the idea of living without them was terrifying to me by then because they worked for me. They were making it possible for me to be who I needed to be. They were sensational. They were wonderful. I was addicted to them, and I didn't know it. And I started on the great obsession of every abnormal drinker that the big book talks about, and that was to control and enjoy my drinking. Now, I don't know if any of you ever got that together, but I never did Because when I was controlling my drinking, I was not enjoying it. I mean, I think, I still got this kind of sadistic streak in me. And there's a wonderful suggestion they, you know, the old-timers taught me when I first got sober, if some guy isn't sure that he's an alcoholic, tell him to drink two drinks a night for the next 90 days. Yeah, I feel like that's the most horrible thing you can tell anybody in the world. I mean can you imagine drinking two drinks? Why would anybody do that? If you can't drink half a pint, why bother? So when I'm controlling it, I wasn't enjoying it And the only way I enjoy anything is wildly out of control, man. I mean, that's the kind of drunk I was. I came tearing through the world with all of it flying, just roaring through. That's the way I drink. I'm an out-of-control drinker. That's what I like to do. So control and enjoy never went together for me. By that time, I was 18, and it's interesting. By that Time, I'd lost a little weight when you're chewing a lot of amphetamines. Who wants to shut up long enough to eat lunch? and i uh i decided the insides were never going to get any better i mean there was stuff that i knew was seriously wrong with me and there was nothing you know it wasn't going to get fixed i knew that so i decided to work on the outsides and i lost a lot of weight and i got myself a pair of contact lenses and i got my teeth capped in shazam i was good looking and i liked that i like that a lot people started noticing me they also started noticing that that after i'd had a couple of belts i was capable of doing anything so i stand before you tonight with no fantasy unlived i have done everything that has ever occurred to me to do i'm deeply grateful there's some things that i never thought of but uh but there are many man i'll tell you i mean you know the cost of batteries was getting tough toward the end there yeah but it's uh it was nuts it was crazy and i just was tearing through life i decided that i had a talent that the world couldn't live without and i went to new york i was 21 years old i didn't know anybody i arrived with 50 bucks in my pocket and i looked at the skyline of manhattan and i said in five years you're gonna know my name and in five years a lot of people didn't know my for a lot of the wrong reasons but um within the first two months i had my first broadway show and that's more than a fat ugly kid with thick glasses and crooked teeth from victoria british columbia ever dreamed of doing her being and there i was by the time i was 24 years old i'd had several broadway shows i was going to all the right parties i was running around a limousine i was balling all the white people i was living a life that most people read in books i was also drinking a quart of scotch a day and i picked up a little non-habit forming marijuana habit unlike your president i did inhale i rarely exhaled it was a problem um and i was in trouble i was in trouble i was uh i was standing every night on alone on the stage of the winter garden theater which is one of the largest broadway theaters in new york with a spotlight on my face and a 40 piece orchestra played a song and i sang it every night in a sold-out house applauded and that should fix anybody that's fantasy time I should fix anybody and every night I got drunk and I couldn't understand why and so I started looking around for solutions I went to a shrink and entertained him for eight months he helped me he got me down to a fifth of scotch a day and he gave me a prescription for Valium and another one for second all god bless that man yeah now I don't put down psychiatrist it's just that psychiatrists are incapable of helping practicing alcoholics because we're incapable of telling the truth I told that psychiatrist exactly what I I told the last arresting officer, two beers. Anybody in authority ever asked me how much I drank? It was two beers! My wife is not an alcoholic. She's been an Al-Anon as long as I've been in AA. And she claims that if anybody admits to three beers, they're not an alcohol. So I started looking into Eastern religions and self health books and vitamins and jogging. And oh God, was I in shape and drunk every night. decided that what i needed was a good woman and i found her in an elevator um good place we were both going to rehearse the show and i spotted in the elevator gosh she was cute and then i saw that sarah about a half hour later in rehearsal she had this little leotard on she was one of the dancers in the show when she had blonde hair and dimples god she was as cute as hell and i looked at her and i thought god if i ever get involved with that one i'll never get uninvolved i mean there's just something about it she looked at me and i mean it just kind of locked and what it was i didn't realize later was it was it the look that happened is something that happens when it what an Al-Anon recognizes potential Jesus I mean once that happened you're dead meat I mean you got you don't have a chance yeah so our neuroses locked we became friends and one of the things that we noticed was that I could do things that she couldn't do and she could do thing that I couldn't and what we became was like two crippled children trying to make one decent adult out of the two of us and we started our dance of death, and we finally ended up tangoing into A.A. and Al-Anon, but we went around the floor a lot. We lived in New York. Our friends called us the Campbell Soup Kids. They said we were the cutest couple on the block. We had this cute little apartment. We were in the theater, and there was partying all the time, and there's drinking all the Time, and she was a great-looking blonde who drank. It was sensational. I got to tell you, you know, alcoholics don't marry teetotalers. I didn't know anybody who didn't drink. I wasn't going to marry anybody who didn't drink and she drank god could she drink drink for drink it was sensational we did a we did a geographic which is called the national tour in actors parlance and ended up in los angeles and uh there we were in los angeles so uh so we got married and she settled down and one day we were uh we were having cocktails as we like to call it and she took two sips of her drink and said this is boring and she put it down on the coffee table and she didn't drink again she'd go through withdrawals nothing i mean she's not an alcoholic it's just she just stopped drinking. And then she noticed that I drank. And all hell broke loose. All hell broke lose. Because what had happened was that I had discovered a way to solve my problems, to kill the pain, to do everything when I was 14 years old. And I was an emotional cripple. My friends went through something called puberty. It looked horrible to me so skipped it you know I mean it looked like he had to grow up and learn ethics and be moral and make decisions and all that stuff and kind of look like a drag to me so I partied I mean I was I was constantly in search of relationships yeah I love I got guys that I sponsored then we talked about relationship I love relationship yeah I was out there looking for the ideal alcoholic relationship is somebody with no last name who's willing to unspeakable things till 3 o'clock in the morning and then turn into a pizza. Let me tell you, I came to a lot of mornings that it looked like that is exactly what had happened. You know those mornings when you come to and you're lying next to it and you don't know who it is or what it is or what you've done with it or what your promise did. You don't if you're at its place or your place and you got to get out of there without waking it up. This is tough with a white hangover on a hot morning, let me tell you. And then one morning you come to and it's awake. And it's looking at you. And you look into its eyes and you realize that you've become its it. And that's what they call pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization, you know? And that is an amusing way to put it, as amusing as I can figure out. But what it tells me and what it talks about and what I want to let you know about me was that I was willing to compromise everything that I believed in for a moment of contact with another human being, which is something that I wasn't capable of doing on any kind of level other than superficial. I mean, I lived beyond, outside of my own moral boundaries for years and years and years. And when I came to Alcoholics Anonymous, I felt guilty, and it was real simple why. I was guilty. I had been living a life that I did not approve of for years, and years, and years, and try to make it okay. Try to stretch my values, try to stretch who I was, to make me look like I was alright with what I was doing, and I wasn't. I wasnít. And I would come to on those mornings, and those are the mornings that you get drunk a little earlier. You know? You just pave it over, man. You donít deal with it. You got yourself into one of those things again, you just get the hell out of there as fast as you can. You donít look back, and you keep moving, and thatís what you do. You just get on with your goddamn life. and I did that day after day after I knew about one day at a time a hell of a long time before I got here just don't look back and understand that a moving target is harder to hit especially when you're shooting it yourself you know and so there I was with this woman who now wanted to be married who now wants to be with me who now want to act like a grown up couple and that was terrific and I wanted that too I just didn't know how I didn't have a clue I didn't know how you do that and then it started to get scary it really started to gets Gary I had been a blackout drinker from the beginning of my drinking until the end of my drinking I never even bothered to ask about it about that to anybody I mean I just assumed that everybody drank didn't remember parts of it I thought that's what happened I was amazed to find out the people didn't black out when they drank amazing I found out that information in Alcoholics Anonymous but what it happened by the time she put down that drink and said this is boring I don't want to do this anymore. It was no longer a luxury for me. It was now a necessity. I was no longer bragging about my drinking, I was lying about it. It was medicinal. I knew that if I didn't drink, I'd explode. I know that if I didn�t drink, I'd go to pieces and I didn �t want to do that. I didn t think I was going to climb a tower and blow away 35 people with an automatic rifle or any of that. I just knew that what would happen is the pressure of my life would just cave my life in on me and they'd find me sitting on a park bench somewhere smiling into the sun and they take me someplace and they never bring back and i didn't want to do that the thing that was keeping me glued together was a little of the sauce i started making up some rules for myself and keep it under control you understand one of the roles that i made up that i two of them that i followed faithfully into the doors of alcoholics anonymous was that i never drank before five o'clock in the afternoon except on sundays and holidays and the reason was is that if i had a drink at noon i didn t get back to work i didn d get you know i was always amazed at those guys who would say let's have a beer after work and they'd have a beer and then they go home i don't know how you do that i don' t know how to do that i used to call home three days later and say the reason i didn't get home is i stopped off for a beer on thursday i couldn't do that so i decided not to drink before five o'clock in the afternoon and the other rule that was very important to me was that i always drank from a glass now my father when we were kids we used to find wine bottles wrapped in brown paper bags and i knew if you drank like that you were drunk so no matter what i drank i poured it into a glass i mean i unscrewed the tops on on the fine wines and poured them into a glass you know we do what we can to keep to avoid coming to places like this i mean i was never shooting for mackenzie bridge were you yeah god i decided that hard booze was a problem so i became a wine connoisseur That's a wino with a checkbook. I have guzzled some of the finest French wines. I mean, hostesses would look on in horror as I picked up a wine. Mmm, wonderful color. Fine bouquet. Ah! Yeah! Oh, God. The reason I'm an alcoholic is not because my father's an alcoholic. I'm alcoholic because I drank like a pig. I'd love to pin it on the old man, but I can't. an alcoholic marriage is a is like a carefully choreographed dance and i don't know how how each party knows the rules i mean but we just did we never discussed it but we knew it and you know just how far to push before you back off you know and she pushes and then backs off and you do that dance around and around you know there's stuff that you can't say because it'll all blow up and about six months before i got to this fellowship we had a vicious fight now i have never been a physically violent alcoholic i'm an emotionally violent alcoholic if you hurt my feelings three weeks from now you'll lose your job um i have done incredible damage to people uh and i i i got a shark infested mouth i mean it's it's vicious when i'm when i'M CORNERED it'S MAINLY BECAUSE I'M A CARD-CARRYING COWARD i MEAN YOU KNOW i i um i'D BEEN IN A COUPLE OF FIGHTS AND i DON'T LIKE THEM uh i'd my idea of fun when i when i was drinking in new york was was find a bar and you case out a bar and you figure out there's usually a couple of guys who clearly don't like each other. You know, they've got little kind of groups, you know? And what you do is you work over to one of them and you tell them that the other guy said something about him and you watch them kill each other I thought that was great fun, you now? And occasionally what would happen though is they would talk to each other and find out what had happened and then they'd all turn on me. And I'm the kind of drunk that dies from alcoholism and it doesn't look like alcoholism, you kno? I knew that alcoholism killed people a long time before I got here, and I knew it was a lethal disease because I had people who were dying around me. My best friend in high school hanged himself as a freshman in college because he couldn't kick a drug and alcohol happened. That's alcoholism, you know? My best friends in New York was one of the cutest chorus boys on Broadway. I was the other one. He was a diabetic, and he drank like I did. By the time he was in his mid-20s, he was blind, and senile, and didn't want to live anymore, so he pulled a plug on his kidney machine, and that's how he died. that's alcoholism another friend of mine used to do suicide attempts but that remember suicide attempt they were so hard to time weren't they God you know the timing when you're a little loaded gets off yeah and Terry was he was a brilliant English actor and he kept trying to kill himself and it was a joke between all I thought we'd call each other say up Terry's killed himself again then we go over and kick his apartment door in you know and then we make him throw up and then we walk around Central Park all night while we pulled on a bottle of vodka and yeah one night Terry got very drunk and he took a a whole lot of pills, and he made a phone call to the paramedics, and the paramec showed up in time, but they gave him just a little too much oxygen to bring him around. And they didn't bring him round. He's been a vegetable in a VA hospital now for over 30 years. He doesn't have any parents, so they can't turn him off. The last time I saw him, which was about 15 years ago, he weighed about 40 pounds. He was in a full fetal position, and the only thing you can hear in his room are the machines. We don't always die from alcoholism, you know? And it doesn't always look like alcoholism. We trip in front of buses, we fall out of windows, we forget to turn off the gas, we lose count of how many second oil we've had with how much scotch, we hit bridge pilings at 90 miles an hour, or we make decisions while we're loaded that we can't get out of, and you find people like me beaten to death in alleys. And that's the kind of guy I am. And the fact that I'm here is a miracle to me. It's a miracle for me. Six months before we got to the program, we had this fight. God, it was awful. The only problem with that fight is I don't remember anything about it to this day But I came to the next morning and she was very very strange She was very, very strange And what had happened was she had suddenly realized That she was living with a man and had lived with him for almost five years And there were great gaps of it that I didn't remember And she suddenly realized that my drinking had nothing to do with her Now let me tell you, I had made it very clear that it had to do With her because when you need to drink and I needed to drink You've got to make the people around you a little responsible for it so what I did was I kept her backpedaling emotionally all the time I'd keep her kind of backing off from me so she couldn't crowd me too bad you know I yeah I would uh I would help her help her become a better human being the problem with our relationship is it's never been a question of love we've always loved each other we've always wanted the best for each other the only problem is that I needed to drink and so I'd help her I'd say things like oh you're gonna wear that dress you know I've always liked your hair the other way I don't think you should have said that at dinner darling I think you upset the host I mean real helpful stuff and the clear-cut message in it was that if she was taller if she was shorter if she wasn't so bright if she was a redhead if she worked if she stayed home if she cooked if she mowed the lawn she painted she wrote poetry if she was somehow different I wouldn't need to drink I never said it in those words I just indicated to them and the sad thing about people who love alcoholics is she bought that and i waited for the day when she would say hold it wait a minute wait a minute the problem is because you drink but of course she never did that because the effects of alcohol shrivels the people around us we are maniacs to live with and she started to believe it and i watched this kind of feisty attractive smart little dancer shrival in front of my eyes and by the time we got to the program if you looked at us as a couple you'd know that she was the crazy one. She never got her hair done. She wore her hair in kerchiefs. She wouldn't buy any new clothes. Her nails were bitten to the quick. She didn't wear makeup, and her lips were disappearing. It happens to women who marry to alcoholics. Their lips disappear. And I was always just fine, man. I was all just kind of mellow. Any time she was uptight, my solution was for God's sake have a glass of wine and a Valium chill out but that morning she realized that she was dealing with something other than and just she wasn't up to it and things started to change and I started praying for the first time in a long time and the prayer was dear God let this stop dear God let this stuff any erasure quite nicely a couple of months later on April 23rd 1974 I was arrested by the West by the west hollywood vice squad on a particularly sleazy little charge i was taken down and fingerprinted and photographed and released on my own recognizance with the front of my pants from the waistband to the knees soaked in my own urine and i went home and a wonderful thing happened she wasn't there she was down taking care of somebody who didn't need to be taken care of that's what those alanons do and she was not there because if she had been she'd have helped me figure out that it was somehow their fault. She would have mitigated the effects of my actions. She'd have made it somehow okay. She had protected me from what I had done, and she wasn't there, and I was forced to look at it. I was forged to look at it, so I did of course what I did. I poured myself a tumbler full of straight vodka, and I sat down, and believe I had a spiritual awakening because I didn't finish that drink. and what i saw very clearly was a series of revelations about myself and i think it happens to everybody and every alcoholic there's a moment when you see it you see it absolutely clearly crystal clear the problem with that moment is that if it is not acted on the curtains close and sometimes they'll open again but a lot of times they won't if that moment isn't acted on a lot of times there isn't another opportunity but i saw it very clearly that there was an enormous this gap between who I was and who I wanted to be. I knew the kind of man I wanted it to be, I'd been taught values, I've been taught ethics, I had been taught morals, I knew what was right and wrong. I mean, an alcoholic has this incredibly intense sense of right or wrong. You scratch the surface of any drunk you'll find a prude. We are the most pursed lips, judgmental, self-flagellating bunch of human beings I've ever met. I mean, God, we could run the Inquisition, this gang. So I knew what was right and wrong. I knew who I was supposed to be. I knew the kind of guy that I wanted to be I could see it, but I just couldn't. There was just this terrible gap between who I wasn't and who I wanted to be, and I couldn't see any way to bridge that gap. I also saw that somewhere along the line I had committed suicide of the soul, that my pilot light had gone out, and that I also understood at a very deep level that my life was over and I was not going to die I never want to feel like that again as long as I live and I said, I wonder if I'm an alcoholic that's the incredible thing about us drunks is our unbelievable ability to overlook overwhelming evidence I mean anybody who had had drinks with me would know that I was an alcoholic I'm like, yeah, I wonder if I'm an alcoholic. Because I had done everything that I could to avoid coming to that, you know? I'd been to psychiatrists, I'd have been to groups, I've been to priests, I've bee to nuns, I've be to gurus, I read literature, I had married above my station, I had a house in the Hollywood Hills, I drove a Mercedes Benz, I had spiffy wardrobe, I had pedigree dog, I had pretty wife, I had everything that keeps you from being a drunk. You know? And if I wasn't an alcoholic, then there wasn't any help for me. because I had done everything that I could think of to solve my problems. So I came to Alcoholics Anonymous hoping to God that this is where I belonged and embarrassed that I did belong here. One of the things that I did was I said I demanded something of God that night, I said I want to vanish man, I want out of here I don't want to be here in the morning and I came too in the moring of course I was livid that my prayers hadn't been answered I didn't want To commit suicide because I couldn't do it to that woman if she had come home two days later and found my dead body in the house she'd have gone over the edge because he was so crazy by that point and I just couldn't do that to her so the next time I came to I was selling real estate at that time I was an actor in selling real estate I was in sales I love sales no bosses right your own time you know all that crap in other words I didn't work so we said we used to go on caravans to go to go look at all the houses that were listed you know in the area and we would all kind of jump it into a car and off we go well that day it was my turn to drive and even my car jumped a woman named Suzanne who had six years of sobriety and Alcoholics Anonymous a woman name Mary who was 70 years old who is this little irish lady who had drank all her life never had a problem with it she just liked to party a little and a woman named chris who was having trouble with her drinking and we went and looked at houses and for three hours they talked about drinking they talked about situational drinking they talked about alcoholism they talked about partying they talked about and in the meantime the vodka is coming out of my pores you know so about 11 o'clock in the morning i took suzanne aside now i've been watching Suzanne for a year she had six years of sobriety she was having a hell of a good time I mean she had good days and bad days but she seemed to be able to handle stuff that was just a little beyond me then I've been watching her and I learned a great lesson from that later later on when I thought back on that you know is because I don't know who's watching me right you know and you don't always watch a news so if I'm gonna be sober today I'm going to be the best sober I can be sometimes it really stinks but I don t drink you know because I watched her I just watched how she was with the fact that she used to drink she didn't drink now and 11 o'clock in the morning on April 24th 1974 I said the last phrase I took her aside I said I'm an alcoholic and I got 20 minutes before I go to pieces and I thank God for people in Alcoholics Anonymous who have a little time because she could hear the screaming she could hear the scream she knew that I lived every day of my life with a ball of screaming in my chest and on the good days it sat right there in the middle of my chest you know on the bad days it slips up behind your vocal cords and those are the days that if you get a flat tire or a broken shoelace it'll slip past your vocal cords and you'll scream and you're screaming you'll screaming they'll take you someplace they'll never bring you back and she knew that and she stopped everything that day she canceled all her appointments and she 12-step me we don't get an opportunity to do a lot of 12-stepping lately. A lot of people don't believe you can get sober without insurance, you know? She bought me a sandwich. She took me to her apartment. She sat me down at her dining room table. She 12-stepped me. And what a 12-stop call in case she'd never been on one. It's not driving somebody to a treatment center. That's being a cab driver. The 12-stuff calls when one drunk sit down and tells his story to another drunk. it explains what Alcoholics Anonymous is and that there's a way to get sober and that's what she did she told me her story now my story was sleazy but hers was disgusting and the first miracle happened I thought my god she's done those things and she's sober she had the big book on her dining room table she read chapter 3 chapter 5 and the 12 traditions I thought oh my god that woman is going to read this entire book to me she gave me something that I can still taste now she said it'll calm your nerves down it was a great big huge glass of orange juice and kira syrup and i gulped that she gave me three glasses of it i'd never get that as long as she told me about alcoholics anonymous this stuff worked by the way uh she told you about alcoholic synonymous she looked over at me and she said now this this was dazzling to me i'll never forget this she said sean she toldme a couple of things that day she said shauna if you will stay sober and you will work the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous it'll be possible for you to make a hundred and eighty degree turn as a human being well I hated every square inch of myself I hated what I become I hated my prospects I hated everything about me the idea of the possibility of becoming another human being was so incredible to me it was like dangling a carrot in front of a donkey you know she just used that to to lead me in alcoholics anonymous I mean you know God what an incredible idea yeah what she failed to tell me was that I was required to make 180 degree turn as a human being one of these you'll find if you're new in this program is that the old-timers the old timers talk about rigorous honesty and then they lie like rugs and then and the way they get away with it is they say when you catch him on it you know they say more will be revealed yeah she also explained to me in in Southern California at that time it was 18 and a half years ago good guy what I had felt that I wanted to do was that I realized the drinking was the problem and I was I was perfectly ready not to drink you know but what I felt that the best way to get sober was is to kind of descend into sobriety on a little pink cloud of valium you know just kind of touched down lightly into this thing because I knew that withdrawal would be you know probably life-threatening in my case and and she explained to me 18 and a half years ago that they defined sobriety in Southern California as clean and sober and I was I said what what does that mean and she said that means we don't drink and we don t use any self-administered mind altering chemicals anything that affects us from the neck up I was real disappointed that news but I'm really glad she she laid that on me because I was one of those ones if somebody hadn't said that I'd have kept on going and I've seen the ones that have done that who can get sober yeah and if your experience is the same as mine if you've come from from from the places that I've come I there you know they cut the quote pure alcoholics these days represent about 5% of the people that are coming to Alcoholics Anonymous most of us come into this you know after trying to turn ourselves into toxic chemical waste dumps and and have a lot of you know a lot of drug and alcohol issues and and if you're in that situation I got to tell you you know if you if you not if you hear it you're not drinking but you're smoking a little grass or you're doing the on tune of coke or you pop in the odd valium or take a little sleeping pill little Darvon little second all a little two-and-all, a little anything-and all, a little designer heroine, a little NyQuil. Oh, I love that NyQuill shit. A little uppers, downers, anything to kind of get you through. Keep coming back. We just love visitors. But do not for a second think that you're sober because you're not. And I want to make that real clear because I've buried some very nice people in the last 18 and a half years who have said things like there's nothing about marijuana in the big book. And that's absolutely true. There is nothing about marijuana in the big book. There's also nothing about nuclear submarines or electric pencil sharpeners in the big book either. The people who wrote the big book had enough humility to realize that they know only a little. And over the last 55, 6, 7, 8 years we have found out a great deal about alcoholism. And since the 60s a bunch of us have changed the nature of the disease. And when we get sober we've got to be a little more stringent about sobriety than some of the people who came in before us. and it may be alright for some of those people who came in before us and if you're one of those people and you don't understand what I'm talking about and you come up against somebody who has the problems that I have, please refer them to me or people like me and we will teach them what we have to teach them because it's important that we stay sober too and I want to make that real clear to the new ones it's a real divisive issue in Alcoholics Anonymous in some areas I don't understand why, but sometimes it is. Treatment centers have found that Alcoholics Anonymous is successful, and a lot of them are not entirely sure why, so they kind of dump their patients on us. In order to fill beds, a lot treatment centers have expanded their alcoholism programs to include all kinds of other issues. I smoked a few outside issues. Anyway, what we're doing is we're getting people into Alcoholics Aanonymous who purport not to be alcoholics. My favorite ones are addicts. I love addicts and alcoholics. Nobody wants to be a real alcoholic. The big book talks about that, you know? And the best way not to be an alcoholic these days is to be an addict. First of all, it's got a lot more class, you know? It's kind of rock-and-roll, spiffy, show-busy, you know, to be addict, you know? It's kinda cool, you know? And I just love those ones who get up and say, I'm an addict! That's terrific! You're an addict, sit down, shut up, listen, come to our open meetings and listen to the talk, you know? Just listen to talk. What you'll find out is we don't talk a hell of a lot about how we got here. talk more about how we stay here and if people don't get nervous and throw them out of meetings I mean if you're not an alcoholic you can't come to closed meetings that that's you know you've declared yourself out but you can certainly come to open meetings and listen an amazing thing happens if everybody does what we do around here which is basically be open and kind of tolerant and non-judgmental which we're all trying to be in I hope you're more successful at it than I am what happens is these addicts sit there and listen you know and they start identify and what happens is eventually usually within a couple of months the identify as addict alcoholics hey just declared themselves an alcoholic they get to read chapter 5 get to participate you know get to participate get to make coffee mm-hmm get to mop up wash cups all that fun stuff you know and what happened is when they start to participate they pick up a sponsor man you know start working the 12 steps and start getting into this kind of thing and then eventually what will happen isn't it yeah you know they work the steps and they become alcoholic addicts hey you know and then at a business meeting they may get up and go to the John and get elected GSR you know and they get to get involved with the traditions yeah and understand how this thing works and they becoming alcoholics because eventually what they find out is what the principle in this thing is, is the principle of anonymity. And anonymity is humility. And it is real humility at work. And what the Principle of Humility is is that I give up my need to distinguish myself either within this fellowship or out there. That need not to call attention to myself. And what happens, that need gets diminished to step up at a podium and tell you my name and then give you a definition of my disease that makes you subtly understand that my case is slightly different than yours and that's what's happened a lot you know i did that when i first got here i i wanted you to know that i was an alcoholic addict so that you knew that i wasn't quite the same as some of those old farts who were falling asleep in the back of the room you know I wanted you know that I had a kind of hyper kind of case of alcoholics and alcoholism a kind twist on it you know something kind of interesting a new tack on this disease you know the only problem with that is is that the only resource for sobriety is those old farts who are falling asleep in the back of the room because that's the only thing that counts in alcoholics and others we don't care about religious dogma or psychological you know facts and figures or approaches or any of that kind of thing the only thing that makes any sense here the only thing that that aids recovery is sober experience how in god's name do you find a job sober how do you make love to your wife sober you know how do ya how do you go to a christmas party sober how do you do that stuff well what you do is you find the ones in the back of the room been doing it for years and years and years and they tell you this is what i did now if i'm going going to stand up at a podium and let them know that I'm different than they are they're gonna say fine you know because there's a whole lot of people over here they're the same as I am and there's always lots of people to work with so if you're doing that kind of thing stop doing it because you're excluding yourself from the resource that we all need which is sober experience I dropped it real fast and you know what happened I suddenly tapped into what exactly I needed in these rooms this for the old guys you know if If we're the kind of guys that scare you, relax. Just relax. We're probably more scared than you ever were. You know? And I must remind everybody in this room of our obligation, which is the twelfth step. We cannot withhold our sober experience because we don't approve of how somebody got here. We cannot withhold our sobre experience because we do not approve of how someone got here and I have to do that every day my life so she took me to my first meeting I was clean and sober for the first day of my entire life I had never quit drinking I knew that that was stupid I decided that I was going to drink until I couldn't drink anymore than I do something about it my last drink was on April 23rd 1974 at 1115 at night and that's the last ring I'm one of those ones that drank until I came to alcoholics and others and I haven't had a drink since and I don't why that happened but i'll tell you something i'm real grateful for it so she took me to my first meeting it was exactly as i was afraid it was going to be it was in a church basement that gray walls had a low ceiling it was filled with smoke and all those people i never would have drank with were there and she proceeded to introduce me to every goddamn one of them and we have huge meetings in hollywood the first meeting that i went to had 400 people in it and she entered it was like being dropped into a shark tank i'd never seen so many teeth coming at me in my life ha they were real happy to see a new cover and i thought oh my god oh my gosh and they all shook my hand they wouldn't let go you notice that they hang onto your hand they won't let it go and they pull you into them and they get real close and they look you right in the face and they say weird stuff like easy does it easy does I said, I had fingerprint ink on my fingers for God's sake. Keep coming back. Keep coming back to this. All that nonsense, all that stuff. I sat next to two people. There was one guy on this side and one guy in that side. And the first day a murder happened in my life. I sat next to a little black guy named Jimmy. We were talking about him today as we were driving down. And Jimmy was a little black guy and he had been sober for 20 odd years but he had problems other than alcoholism and he loved to talk to the speakers. So the speakers would say something that he agreed with, and Jimmy would say, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now this is my first meeting. I'm sitting there in my blazer. I mean, I've got to tell you how I arrived in my Alcoholics Anonymous. Because it was like going, as far as I was concerned, it was Like Going to a Firing Squad, so I was going to look good. I came to my first Alcoholics... If you're here to get your act together, let me tell you where I came from. Let me tell ya how I arrive. I drove through my Mercedes, my classic Mercedes. I like to call it a classic Mercedes, it was an old Mercedes is what it was. and I had on a $250 sports jacket from Saks Fifth Avenue this was in 1974 French gabardine slacks Italian loafers and a designer tie I've been paid about 300 bucks for a day's work as a model about four or five days before I got the alcoholics and honors I looked fabulous at my first AA meeting I gotta tell you I was a dream I walked in and everybody knew that I was a drunk there are a couple of things that were going on that I wasn't aware aware of a couple of things that it kind of slipped through one of them was that I had been drinking straight vodka the night before and it was April 24 there was a rather warm night and I had on a lot of lemon-lime cologne and I smelled like a giblet forgot about that stuff and the other thing that I had that the other thing I had was newcomer eyes now the only other place I've ever seen eyes like that other than on a newcomer in alcoholics anonymous are on a dog loose on a freeway I was absolutely terrified I I was so terrified that I totally shut down not a thing shine hi hi hi you know just wild I was so scared and so this guy next to me is going yeah yeah yeah and singing if we sing happy birthday that was a thrilling thing that I found out the first night that I got to say, happy birthday to you. Oh, God. And Jimmy loved to sing happy birthday and they ain't all born with it, let me tell you. I've never heard a happy birthday song like that. And then on the other side was sitting this little guy with these big round soft blue eyes and he started talking to me. Now this is the AIM Oracle. There were 400 people there and I sat next to a guy who started telling me his story and his story was exactly the same as mine. I found the guy my twin. I mean, he had three years of sobriety. He'd done everything that I'd done and was telling me about it. It was a miracle. It's amazing. More will be revealed. One of the things that happened during the afternoon when I was telling Suzanne my story was she was jumping up and running out of the room, and I thought she was one of those ones with kidney damage. What I found out three years into sobriete was that she was not going to the john. As I was talking her my story, she was going to her bedroom, and she was phoning Jack telling him my story the reason this little guy jack had a story that was exactly the same as mine is he knew mine more will be revealed right so he became my sponsor and he started teaching me the 12 steps he also told me that first night to fold my chair and pick up my ashtray he got me into service the first night that i was sober and i've been doing stuff like that ever since in alcoholics anonymous i've always had to be someplace at least once a week for the entire 18 and a half years that i'm sober i have always had a job in alcoholic synonymous um and i've had a lot of the jobs in alcoholic synonyms that are in there and they teach you love and tolerance and all kinds of great stuff one of the things that i wanted to do was uh i had i had some wonderful discussions with my sponsor when i first got sober i explained to him that i was a very sophisticated man that we frequently ate out and that i preferred french food and a lot of french food was prepared with wine and he said you either drink or you don't drink and i said what he said you don t drink it you don s sniff it you d n t swallow it you do n t chew it you didn t do anything i said but but you don d understand he said i do understand don t order anything that's cooked with wine i haven t for 18 and a half years and you know what i haven't missed a meal i explained to him that what i wanted to do i felt that the most loving thing that i could do would be divorce my wife there'd been entirely too much damage um she had just gone to al-anon she had found al-anan and and i felt like that would be the best thing for me to do was we separate and go our separate ways and he said you're not going to make any emotional decisions in your first year of sobriety and i said what the hell does that mean and he says that means you're going to change jobs you're gonna move you're never gonna repaint you're not gonna lose 35 pounds you're not gonna quit smoking you're not gonna start jogging 26 miles a week you're gonna leave your wife you're not gonna fall in love with anybody else you're going to put your entire life on hold you're work the 12 steps and you're gonna get sober and it takes about a year and I said but you don't understand I'm not sure that I love her and he said I don't give a damn about love work on good manners so I was stuck with this crazy lady for a year And I had to say please and thank you. We're still married. We're Still Married, and she's a dynamite lady. If I'd have done what I wanted to do when I first got sober, I'd Have Blown My Life Apart. One of the reasons we tell newcomers not to make a list of all the things you want is because we're afraid that's all you'll get. My vision of what was good for me was so limited by my own fear that I would have sold myself so incredibly short. He told me to hang around with the winners, and so what I would do, and I do it to this day, is I would kind of sidle up next to the old-timers. Hope they didn't notice me. They'd be over getting coffee. Listen to them. And I learned, man. I learned. I watched them. I imitated them. I had an imitation program for a long time. I imimated those people. And it worked. It worked. First year went roaring by, the first year of sobriety is, how many of you are in your first year sobriete? God, that's insane. How do you like it so far? Right? One of the reasons I stay sober and there are an enormous number of reasons why I stay sober, there's tons of reasons I stayed sober today but one of the reason I stay sober today is I never want to have to get sober again as long as I live. It was the worst experience of my adult life and if you're new and in your first year You only got to do this once, man. The thing about the first year of sobriety is it's unsurvivable, but the nice thing about the first years of sobrietty is the thing that keeps you from getting to Alcoholics Anonymous for so long is still working in the first couple of years, and that's denial. I didn't know how terrible the first-year of sobretty was until I was about three years sober and looked back on it and went, ugh! And my first year was just wild. I mean, oh, God. What had happened was when you took alcohol and drugs away from me, everything that I did automatically became a decision. I would stand at a street corner and the sign would say, walk, don't walk, and I'd have to call my sponsor. Well, I'd get up in the morning and look at the pair of brown shoes and the pair black shoes and stand there for 15 minutes and go figure out which ones to put on. My life was insane. I was up and down. I mean, you know, one of the reasons why it is impossible for psychiatrists to double diagnose an alcoholic in their first year of sobriety is we manifest every psychological disorder known to man in our first year. I mean, I was clearly manic-depressive. I was either or contemplating suicide somewhere. I was a social psychopath. I mean I was totally paranoid. I knew there were large groups of people in AA meetings talking about me. I was nuts, absolutely nuts. And what they told me was just go to meetings. Just go to meetings, talk to your sponsor. Don't do anything without checking with them. Stick with the winners, keep it real simple because I was crazy. Four months sober. Oh God. did was they assigned me a new best friend now I don't know if I had this sponsor and and I got this new best for now I had a new business is the reason I have this new bespray that he was my new best man because I had a car and he didn't and he couldn't talk and I couldn't shut up so we would drive to meetings we were drive to meetings and and rich would sit in the passenger seat like this and I would strive longer so we were perfect then we hung out together and he had he had been sober forever he had six months so he could say anything he wanted to me but anything that I said to him he would say don't take my inventory so it was a perfect relationship I loved rich I loved him I loved him very much great great friend of me let me see my first year sobriety four months sober four months over I became impotent the last thing that did really well called my sponsor he said oh hi Sean what's up I said nothing explained to my terrible problem too he said don't worry it happens to most guys in there four to six months sober he goes away anybody years, four to six months sober. It goes away. Six months sober, six months over I was crazier than I'd ever been in my entire life. Absolutely bonkers. All this stuff was out of my system. I was going to meetings every day. I was, I was talking to my sponsor. I Was working the 12 steps. I was about halfway through the 12 step. I, uh, was taking rich to meetings. I was driving newcomers. I going to work. I trying to make my relationship work. And a lot of, a lot times you see me driving up and down the Hollywood freeway in my Mercedes a three-piece suit screaming at the top of my lungs because it was the only thing that would kill the pain and uh and then i tried as best i could to sleep through my entire first year of sobriety i don't know about you but 24 hours of reality is more than i could handle and if i couldn't get loaded i was going to get out somehow i was a functioning alcoholic i had a wife who worked and uhand so i took a lot of naps lots and lots of nabs because i i i couldn't figure any other way to handle a lot of the stuff that was going on with me um and i was just nuts i was absolutely nuts and uh and the neat thing was anything was that i was hanging around with enough people who understood the programs and the dynamics of sobriety that they were they were they would crowd in around me and kind of walk me through a lot of stuff when i was nine months sober i got my first 12-step call rich got a call and he called me and said we're going you know and i called my sponsor and i said i'm going on this 12-stop call there's a guy really needs help and my sponsor explained that there was a difference between between carrying the message and spreading the disease. And so I went to that 12-step call, and I did what I do to this day. While somebody carries the message to the poor guy, I wash the dishes, and I vacuum the floors, and I change the sheets and clean up the apartment because that's also a 12-stepped call and drive people to me. I miss 12-steps calls because they just slam you back into reality. One of the things that happens is after you get sober while you a lot of nice stuff happens you know you start accumulating stuff and one of the things that happens was I got to indulge enough in it in a hobby of mine which is which is buying and restoring antique and special-interest cars and and I was about five years sober and I had a I had I had restored a 1949 Cadillac sedan and it was it was a stunning automobile it was uh it was the first v8 the cadillac ever made and it had the first fins and it was big wide white wall tires it was jet black you could eat off of it the chrome just looked like jewelry and the inside of it was all redone in exactly the the correct material it was pale gray broad cloth uh it was an absolutely beautiful car and i was driving it one day because my regular car was being serviced i didn't drive it much but i was trying to get and i got a call from central office that i had a 12-step call, and that the guy was down at the corner of Hollywood and Brunson, which is not the former site of the Garden of Eden. And would I pick him up and take him out to detox in Santa Monica? And I said, sure. So here I am in my three-piece suit in this Cadillac, and I drive down, and he's waiting. I got about a block away from where he was supposed to be standing, and there were two people at a bus stop, and I looked, and I really prayed. I said, dear God, make it be the other one. I knew it wasn't. And I drove up, and this guy probably had not had a bath in a year and a half, and he had a big bottle of red wine, you know, the kind that stains concrete, you know? And I drove up in his Cadillac. Well, his eyes got like saucers, you know yeah you know i'm looking like mr squeaky clean in my suit you know on this big gorgeous car to open the door i said hi you fred and he said yeah i said gillian so he gets it so we and this bottle of red wine and this pale gray broadcloth oh you know five thousand dollars for the work and i said you know we started driving along and he started talking you know and i started talking and he was droning on about some stuff. And I said, okay, God, you know, if you want the upholstery, it's yours. You know, let's just get this guy where he needs to go. And we talked and we got to Santa Monica and I'd forgotten, you know, I've been sober long enough that I had forgotten about those little things. He didn't spill a drop. He sucked that sucker dry, man. I mean, yeah, yeah. I mean, I never spilled a drop either. I'd forgotten that one, you know? Sorry, my first 12 step call was, and my 12 step calls have always been like that. When I was 11 months sober, I got real panicked, really panicked because I've been sober for 11 months and it was clear that it was working. There were some changes in the house. There was changes at work. There was changes going on and it Was clear that this thing was working and I thought, Oh my god i'm committed to this thing now i'm a great starter i'm terrific at starting something a project you know but i mean anything with a long haul i'll pass on i mean if they had told me i was going to be sober 18 and a half years i said thank you very much but they didn't they said all we want you to do is not drink today but i had 11 months under my belt and i thought whoa this thing works and i think i understand what they're talking about this one day at a time the rest of your life. And then I was a year sober. I was a year so over my little sponsor gave me this terrible looking cake. I mean, God was awful with a candle on it and everybody's saying happy birthday terribly. And I blew out the cake and it felt like the most important day of my life because it was. It was the first clear cut, honest victory of my entire life. There was no fraud. I had done exactly what was required to earn that cake. I had not drunk or used drugs for 365 days And that's impossible. I had done it. You know, my first thought was, I'd look at that cake. I must have screwed up. I must've had a drink and forgotten about it this year. You know? I can't believe that I did this, you know? And there I was. And there it was. And it was an incredible day. It was an incredibly good day. And then I was 13 months sober. And they expected me to give it back. They expected me to be a part of this thing. They expected мне to become a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. You dropped me like a hot potato and went running after all those newcomers who were thrown up on your shoes. I mean, I couldn't believe it. I was furious. 13 to 15 months sober. I was pissed, man, because what I had to be was an adult in Alcoholics Anonymous. They said you've been working the 12 steps. You know how things work around here. Get a job. Be a secretary. Be a treasurer. Do the stuff that's required around here and be part of this thing. You know, I didn't like that. I like special treatment. I like being a newcomer, you know? I like he's in his first year, and we're really hoping for him, you Know? And after that, they said, oh, he's going to run away, you Now? And so I had to grow up. When I was four years sober, three years sober... Well, the second year was kind of getting in with the thing. Three years sober. Three years over, I looked around and I was not making as much progress as I thought I should be making. I still had character defects and shortcomings and stuff that wouldn't go away. I mean, some of them just wouldn't goes away, man. And I was furious. And I started... I was bashing up against that stuff that I was going to have to change. You know? And you see people them their third year sobriety start doing that they start adding 12-step programs you know they start going to Allen on a learn release or you know all these kind of stuff it's really amazing because what I have found is when the disease has stopped in its forward motion when you stop drinking and it stopped you know you're not indulging that it starts making lateral moves and you start seeing the alcoholism the ism start coming out in in you know a little dangerous behavior a little self-destructive sex you know little a a little penny ante gambling some you know stealing on the side you know a little sleazy stuff here and there you know it starts acting out in other ways and when you get three years sober you can't rise above it anymore and you see people start you know going to talk to shrinks or or the best thing to do i noticed that my sponsor was human about this point so i felt that what i needed was a new sponsor you know because my sponsor was tired of talking about this stuff i would call him and tell him my problems i wanted somebody to call and tell my problem he said really you know my sponsor was saying oh really we've talked about this for three years sean what are you going to get off your ass and do something about it you know i wanted somebody who was excited about my problems you know and that wasn't happening and it was tough for me it was tough to me and i wanted i wanted to run but but what i've been taught was that i had to work the 12 steps of my problems here first and if they didn't work out that way then i could add other things so i had to go back and do it when i was four years sober i was probably the biggest card-carrying asshole that came down the pike in Alcoholics Anonymous because at that point I was starting to get kind of a psychological overview of the program kind of an intellectual slant on it I could see the ramifications and the results the causes and effects unbelievable when I was five years sober I blew my life apart what I've what I did and I didn't know it and all these insights that I'm sharing with you are all hindsight's because I have never known what was going on at the time but what I did was i um i decided to test the fence lines of my sobriety what i decided was that i was sober enough to look into some old ideas and to see just how far i could go without getting loaded and what happened is i blew up my life and i ended up getting busted by the vice squad again getting fingerprinted and photographed and going to jail again and let me tell you it isn't as much fun when you got five and a half years of sobriete and uh and i ripped it all up i ripped my life up and threw it away didn't dream didn't use and what happened was my wife came home from her Al-Anon meeting and looked at me and said, My God, what's happened? And I told her. Instead of screaming and hollering and saying, What are you doing to our lives and why are you destroying our marriage and all those things that she used to do, her Al Anon program had taught her some stuff about her own life and it taught her compassion. And she reached across the table to me and she put her hand on my face and she said, Oh Sean, I'm so sorry you have to hurt yourself so badly. and then later on she said you know Sean if we're going to stay married I need two things from you I need you to be faithful and I need you to be supportive if you can be those things I'll stay married to you because I love you if you can't be those two things I gotta leave you because I love you and we started putting back our marriage and six years over was a year of really really repairing going back to basics going back to the basics of the 12 steps and dealing with some of those really big character defect issues that I had to deal with. And that went on for six and seven and in my eighth year of sobriety is when my daughter was born and my life started turning around. It was also the point where I went broke. The sponsor that I loved and trusted so much, I had lent $35,000 to. By the time I refinanced my house a couple of times in order to pay off that debt, it was up to $47,000 and he hasn't paid any money back on it to this day. I have had to take some legal action lately, which has been a tough thing for me to do. It's been a very difficult thing for me to deal with. Because I had given him, I thought that he had saved my life. And I felt a great deal of loyalty to him. I loved him very, very much. And I trusted him very much and I couldn't believe that this breach of trust had happened. I denied that it had happened for a very long time. And finally I couldn' t do it because I found out that he was doing it to a lot of people and uh and that if i condoned it i did not say something about it i was condoning the action so i've had to do that kind of stuff and it's been very very hard for me but we went dead broke eight years of sobriety brand new baby and it was really tough i scrambled and did everything that i could to work and i worked between eight and ten years sober i mean it was the worst economic thing in in my life you know it was just really incredibly tough and during that time i started writing which eventually led to uh to a business that I started with my brother. And there was a real struggle until I was, oh God, let me see, 14 years summer. And when I was about that time, the business that my brother and I started to take off and I got a chance to move to Vancouver. It was interesting about moving to Vancouver because it was a huge move for us. And, and when we got there, I was very busy with the project, with the business that I had started, and I was very, very active and got hooked into AA and all that kind of stuff. And my wife and child came up, and it was in August, and my daughter hit the wall first. She was five years old, and she didn't know anybody, and she just hated it, just hated it, you know? And the wonderful thing about children is their emotions are just right there. And she goes, blah! You know, she just was really upset, and we got her through that. And then Bonnie, you know, Bonnie couldn't work for a year because we had immigrated, and And she'd put all the furniture away, and there wasn't anything to do. And an Al-Anon with nothing to do is, you know, whoa. I mean, you're not going to be able to get out of here. You know, it's like living in a bad neighborhood. You shouldn't go in there alone, you Know? And she hit the wall, and we had a real tough time. And I was busy, man. I was just going like a madman, you Now? And one day, we were standing in our bathroom, and Bonnie said, We've got to talk. And I said, Talk about what? And she went over and locked the bathroom door and said, you're not getting out of here until we have a conversation. And we ended up sitting on the bathroom floor and I ended up, I crashed, you know, and I said, I'm moving so fast because I'm afraid that I've made the biggest mistake of my life. I'm scared that I'm going to die. I'm worried that I ripped this family up and brought them up to a foreign country and we're in this strange place and we don't know anybody and that I have made this enormous mistake. And if you hate it as much as you say you do, you're worth more than this stuff so let's pack and go back. And she said, I don't need to pack and go back, I just need to have you say that. And then she said I've got to tell you something, Sean I've been sleeping in the same bed with you for over 20 years and 15 of those years you've been sober and I've heard you talk to the guys you sponsor and what you tell them is that if they make a decision and the decision doesn't work out they get to make another decision and I had forgotten that. You see I can't keep me sober i can't teach me the program i can pass on my experience strength and hope to you but i can t pass it on to me i need to come to you to get it i need a sponsor i got one i got a new sponsor you know okay a lot of people that i talk to on that kind of basis what's happened is that business has grown into you know i gotta tell you you hear those you hear those stories in alcoholics and honest when you knew you know i came out of jail i had to borrow money for my for my attorney i had fingerprint ink on me at my first AA meeting, and now I'm a partner in a $100 million industry, a $1 million business in the film industry. Well, that's true. That's my story. That is what I do these days. I am a partner of a $ 100 million business in Vancouver that is involved in the film industry . I mean, I'm talking deals with people that I read about in books, you know? It's just crazy! And that's what I do. I show up every day and I do that kind of stuff. I suit up and I show it and my life goes how it goes and the fact is is in my life is none of my goddamn business what is my business is to suit up and show off how it does is none in my business and some days it goes great some days it goes lousy but i don't drink and i don t use on a daily basis because that's what you've taught me and what i do is i keep coming back to the source of the only people who have ever been able to tell me anything and the only ppl who've ever been abl e to tell me anything are in these rooms i went to moral superiors all my life for help i went t doctors and i went to priests and i went to teachers and i would have christian brothers and i went to nuns and i want them on seniors and i went to psychiatrists and sociologists and i went to therapists and groups and gurus i i went through policemen and lawyers and judges and i explained my problem and some of them were really earnestly interested in people like me and what they did was they consulted their books and they checked it out or they had learned it and they had diplomas and they said this is what you should do about your problem somebody points a finger at me and says, this is what you should do about your problem. I bite it off at the knuckle. I cannot learn from anybody. And there's nothing wrong with them. There's something terribly wrong with me. But I came to Alcoholics Anonymous and you said, this is what I've done about my problems. Take what you could use. I can hear that. And then when I got up enough courage, I would tell you what was going on with me, and you said the magic phrase that made the learning possible for me. And this is what makes you miracle workers. What you said to me is, I know how you feel. And I've been looking all my life for somebody to say, I Know How You Feel. I never found anybody. I confused, confounded everybody that I'd ever met until I got to Alcoholics Anonymous. And you said, I Now How You Feel, and as soon as you said that, I could learn. And i've been learning ever since. I've got a successful marriage, I'm a successful parent, I am a successful business man, I am a success member of the community. You look at me walking down the street and nobody thinks I'm drunk. That's the miracle in my life. And the reason that I keep coming back to Alcoholics Anonymous is that I come back to my teachers. I'm not stupid, I've got a ton of stuff to learn. So to be asked to lead a retreat for a group of my teachers He's an incredible honor for me, and I am really grateful. God bless you. Keep coming back. Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. And we'll turn it over to Sean. hi my name is Sean and I'm an alcoholic good morning gentlemen now I understand some of you in the back we're having trouble hearing me last night and I got a real simple solution if you're in the background up to the front what I want to talk about is recovery and recovery for me has been the fact that I've been active in Alcoholics Anonymous from the beginning of my sobriety until the present time and plan on staying that way I've done a lot of work I've worked at 12 Steps and work them over and over and they were jammed down my throat when I first got here and I'm real grateful for that. I was a blackout drinker, we were talking about that today at breakfast. I was blackout driver as a matter of fact, I used to drive long distances and not remember how I got from point A to point B and one of the morning rituals that I did and I was thinking about that this morning that I have done this in 18 years, I use to get up every morning and I didn't realize that I do this until I was five years sober. Five years sober I was standing outside my house in the pouring rain looking for the paper at seven o'clock in the morning and i said what the hell am i doing here i don't care that much about the news and wham it hit me it was a ritual for my drinking and what i used to do is no matter how hungover i was no matter how terminal it it felt i got up every morning and put my bathrobe on and went out to the front of the house picked up the paper walked back up the driveway and made one quick turn around the car to see if there are any blood stains or dents i did that every morning of my life and the thing that's horrifying about that is what we start to accept as practicing alcoholics as simply a way of life. The fact is that our lives as practicing alcoholics start diminishing down to these really kind of horrible rituals. We start eliminating healthy people from our lives, people who notice that we drink. And what we do is we find ourselves by the time we get here, at least by the times I got here, with a real small group of people who not only accepted but endorsed my insanity. And there weren't very many of them left. And then I had these kind of rituals, you know, the things that you did in the morning. You know, I was doing things like I would wake up in the morning and have a glass of water and be drunk again. And, you know, that kind of nonsense. And I mean, if sobriety just freed you from that, it would be worth it to me. And it has. And I'm really grateful for it. What I'm going to talk about this morning in this session is the first four steps and how I work them and how I've come to work them all that kind of stuff the first one of course is that we admitted we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable and uh powerless is a real tough tough one uh i was i was lucky i was whipped i was beaten i was out of ideas i came to alcoholics anonymous hoping that it would work because i didn't i couldn't figure out any other way to make my life work so i i had that advantage but the idea of absolutely powerlessness is a difficult one particularly for guys i mean what we're taught to do is compete we're We're taught to win. We're told all kinds of stuff. We are taught that if we're strong enough, if we have enough balls, if we haven't a backbone, if we had enough stuff, we can overcome any obstacle and to be whipped by, by something that had been socially acceptable and had enhanced my personality and had been a friend for a long time is a tough one to do. But what I had to admit was that I, there were a couple of components to get to that powerless over alcohol was the fact that I can no longer predict what would happen when I drank it. And, And I had to admit that that was true for a very long time. By the last couple of years of my drinking, I could have half a glass of wine and be loaded. Or I could drink a pint of scotch and nothing would happen. Or I would do that thing of getting up in the morning and have a glass OF water and be drunk again. What I knew was that once I had a drink, I could not predict what was going to happen to me. Those guys who could have a beer after work or have one drink at lunch absolutely amazed me and they still do. They still absolutely amaze me. I don't know how people do that. Because what it was for me when I had it, drinking for me was like, I was this pool of gasoline, man, and a drink was a match. You just dropped it in and it just burned itself out. That's how it was with me. That's who I drank. And so the predictability of the thing was, or the lack of predictability of the things was the thing that enabled me to take the first part of the first step was that I just had, I couldn't predict it. And that my life had become unmanageable. Now, I told you I had just enough toys accumulated to protect myself from that decision. I had enough stuff to make it appear to you and also make it appear to me that I wasn't as bad as other people. And that's a real trap. I mean, it's a real trap, but the clear-cut fact is that my life was in chaos. My life was dribbling down my sleeve. And the reason it was in chaos was that every one of my decision-making processes were based on fear. The reason I had all that stuff was that I had figured out a long, long time ago that I was so inadequate that if I got enough stuff together you wouldn't notice. If I had the right car, the right woman, the house, the job, the clothes, this and that, wouldn't notice that I was totally incompetent totally inadequate and a seriously flawed human being and I proceeded to do that I proceeded to accumulate that kind of stuff and what it became was it became a wall that protected me from you because I don't know when it happened that I found out that I wasn't war with you but it happened very early now when you build a wall to protect yourself it becomes a prison you build the wall to keep people out, it keeps you in. And I became my own prisoner and my own jailer. There was a dialogue going on with me all my life that was saying, you got to let somebody know you're in trouble, Sean. And then this other voice would say, don't you dare let on, man, because if they find out, they'll throw you away. And so that was the conflict I lived with all the time. I was my own prison and my jailer, my life had become unmanageable for a couple of reasons. and one of them was my perception I went to a retreat retreat a couple of months ago and a couple years ago and the guy who was leading it said something that absolutely crystallized what my problem was and and and what what what the thing in the first step is and he was talking about and that is it is not what's going on around me that makes me feel the way that I feel it's what I think is going on around me that makes me feel the way that I feel in other words there's a three-part process with me that the first step addresses what I do is there was an event that something happens in my life and then the second this is the end of tape number one please go to tape number two to continue the message thank you