Step 1 and Powerlessness – Big Book Workshop – Part 1 of 2 – Peter M.

Good morning, everybody. My name is Chris. I am an alcoholic. I want to thank everybody that had anything to do with putting this together. You know these things don't happen very easily. There's a lot of work that needs to be done so I appreciate all the effort. I want thank Dustin for tracking me down and asking me to do this. Dustin's one of those very enthusiastic people. If you could bottle his enthusiasm and sell it on the market, you'd put crack out of business. You know what I mean? It's very true. And enthusiasm really is a quality that if you have it, it makes recovery so much easier. Becoming enthusiastic about the recovery process, becoming enthusiastic about Alcoholics Anonymous or whatever fellowship you choose to join is going to improve your chances of surviving pretty much a fatal illness. The statistics on alcoholism or drug addiction are not really promising. Many more people die from it than recover from it. So, you know, if you like life, if You Like Survival, pay attention and try to get enthusiastic. What I'm going to be talking about this morning, we're going to break for lunch around noon, but what I'm going to be talking about this morning is the first two steps. I believe that I speak from the book Alcoholics Anonymous. My experience really comes directly from the books Alcoholics Anonymous, and I know that there are other experiences out there. There are a lot of things that you hear in the fellowships around the country these days. Basically, I come from the text Alcoholics anonymous. So that's where I found my experience of recovery. So when I'm sharing my experience today, it's going to be based on having a recovery program from this book and the experience that has led me to. And some of my understanding of the process and some of the philosophy I've developed basically explaining that process and explaining my experience. Now, I believe that step one is probably the most misunderstood step in recovery today. At a guess, I would believe that 80% of the people in AA or 80% of the People in NA don't even really know what the first step is. it took me a long time to get an understanding of the first step in the very beginning I thought the first Step was I you know I really drink a lot that means I'm an alcoholic or I thought you know the first is I just can't drink no matter what I just need to not take a drink and and I learned uh I learned through experience and some of that experience was based on relapse and some of that experience was based on a recovery process, but I learned that that's not step one at all. Step one is a very, very deep understanding of your own truth as far as your experience with alcohol or your experience mit drugs. And it's about power. Step one has to do with power. the grace of God separated me from alcohol somewhere around December 28, 1989. I had been to treatment. I was engaged in an outpatient process. I was going to AA meetings. I really thought that I was participating in whatever process you need to participate in to get sober. My problem was that I wasn't alcoholic. And there's levels of alcoholism, there's levels of drug addiction. And the levels are not necessarily based on the consequences or how much you drank or how much you used or the trouble it caused, how many times you've been in treatment, how many cars you've crashed. All of those things are really results of using. And there are a lot of heavy drinkers out there that had consequences that were similar to mine. But what I needed to look at was I needed to look back and look at my lack of power. Today, in Alcoholics Anonymous, I'm mainly an AA member. I do some things in other fellowships, but I'm mainly an NAA member. And NAA, I see quite often people coming into the fellowship and relapsing. You know, they'll stay around a while. There will be a period of separation from alcohol, and then they'll relapse and they'll go out and drink again. And, you know, my understanding of it is different than it used to be. I was basically taught early on that the people who drink are the people that are not being honest with themselves. Or the people that drink just wanted to drink more than they wanted to stay sober. They didn't want it enough. A number of statements like that were passed around early in AA, and I started to believe a lot of them. Now, I would ask anyone in here today to, if there's any concepts that disturb you that Peter and I talk about. And that happens quite often, by the way. But if there are any concepts which disturb you, just take them into consideration. I'm personally not saying I'm right or wrong about anything. I'm in a growing process right now myself. I hope to know a lot more about all this stuff and to have a deeper experience with recovery this time next year than I have now. It truly is a growing process for me, but if there is any concepts that we bring up today, take them into consideration. So much of recovery has to do with consideration. You know, don't believe everything you hear. Don't believe anything you hear in the fellowship that you go to. Our book asks us to ask us what these spiritual principles mean to us. And through a lot of work, a lot step work, a lot inventory, a lots of amends, a lof working with others, I've gone through a lots this stuff and I've asked myself those questions. What does it mean to me? And I really believe the things that can be backed up by my own experience and by the experience I get working with others. Those are the things I believe that are true, I don't automatically believe the things that are said in AA meetings today because there's a lot of things that are said that are wrong, they're just not true. They're coming from people who may be heavy drinkers, They're coming from people who may have had very well-meaning people teaching them things about addiction. And a lot of times they're just not, I just don't see them as valid. But I believe that step one is so misunderstood. The book Alcoholics Anonymous has a lot OF information on step one. You have the doctor's opinion. You've got a good deal of Bill's story discusses it. Then you have the chapter more about alcoholism. There is a solution. There's even a lot of step one material in We Agnostics. There's many, many pages of material that they cover to convince us of our own truth, whether or not we're alcoholic. I love the paragraph, the first paragraph in We Gnostics In the preceding chapters, you have learned something of alcoholism. We hope we have made clear the distinction between the alcoholic and the non-alcoholic. Now, it's very, very important to understand the distinction between the alcoholic and the not alcoholic. This is something that gets lost in Alcoholics Anonymous today. This is something that I have a lot of experience working with treatment centers, and this is something that's not really, there's not enough attention paid to this. Now, the alcoholic and the non-alcoholic, AA meetings today are filled with heavy drinkers, people who are really not alcoholic. There are so many of them in our midst, and that's nicht necessarily ein schlechtes Ding. But when this book was written, it was written from a perspective of the low-bottom alcoholic, the person who had lost all control in drink. No amount of willpower, no amount of knowledge, no amountof any kind of human help was sufficient to keep these people from putting alcohol in their bodies. They were without defense against the first drink. Now, I'm drinking between 1985 and 1990. My alcoholism increased a huge amount. Here's a typical day for me somewhere between 1985 and 1990, I would come to in the morning, wearing the clothes I had the night before. And I would feel like I was going to die. You know those toxic hangovers that you have where you're poisoned, and you're beyond a headache. You're shattered. You just can't deal. I mean, normal people feeling half that bad would be on the way to the emergency room. But it became normal. It became normal for me because I was a daily blackout drinker. Now, I would come to in the clothes I was wearing the night before. And I would just be like, you know, I'd have to be at work at 8 o'clock. I'd wake up around 730 or something. And I had a job as an electrician. I somehow maneuvered my way into the trades because alcoholism was, you know, it was you didn't get fired for being an alcoholic. Like, you got fired for, like, not showing up to the job. So as long as you could make it there, you know, you usually were okay. It didn't matter if you could see, you Know, as long As long as, as you can take things out of the truck when the boss was looking or something. But anyway, so I would come to and listen, I would swear to God I'm never gonna do this again. My hangover was so bad that I would say, today is the day. I am not drinking anymore. I've got to give this up. This is killing me. I can't live like this. This is killin' me. Now, if you would have hooked me up to a lie detector test that morning and asked me, Chris, are you going to drink again? I would have said no, and I would has passed that lie detector tests. I was absolutely serious. I was not gonna drink anymore. I was killing myself. I was drinking way too much, and I knew I had no control over the amount I drank. Once I started drinking, I knew I would get tongue-chewing, knee-walking, not able to operate my own pants zipper drunk. You know what I mean? You know how you get? You're like... I mean, that happened every single time, so I swore to God that I would never drink again, and I would make it to work, and it was always a bad scene because, you know, my boss would tell me like four or five things to do and I'd get in the truck and I drive off and I make it to the end of the driveway and I say, what did he tell me to do? You know, I couldn't remember. So I have to go back, you now, yell at me, tell me, I told you to write things down and he'd yell at made. You know I'd make it off to work. Now all, the whole morning, I would just be just trying to exist, you know just feeling absolutely horrible And lunch would come, and I'd send out one of the guys for sandwiches. I'd get like half a sandwich down. You know how you have to drink like a half a gallon of liquid to rehydrate? I'd be rehydrated, and then I'd have a half of sandwich down and, you know, I'm looking at the clock. It's almost 2 o'clock. I'm going to be able to go home soon. And I start to think, you Know that decision you made this morning about never ever drinking again? That's a pretty serious decision. You might have to modify that somewhat because that might be an overreaction, you know, to never ever drink again. And a little bit later I'd be, you know I'm going to modify that decision so that I'm going to stop at the liquor store on the way home. And I would stop at the liquor story and I would buy a quart of vodka or a quart bourbon or whatever I was drinking at that time. And the minute I got home I'd crack the top and I just, you know, cracked the top of the bottle. I was like, ah! You know, I knew that booze was going to be in my system soon and, you Know, things were going to get better. Things were going be a little bit brighter. And I didn't think far enough ahead to know that I would be a vomiting pig in about two hours. But that's what would happen. And I would start drinking and I'd go into a blackout and I'D fall on the floor and Iíd pass out. Sometime around 8 o'clock at night Iíd be unconscious And this was day after day after day this happened. Day after day after day. Now, how I can use my own experience to qualify myself as an alcoholic is to look at that decision not to drink and then look at what happened. Alright? I made a decision not to drinking but something happened. I changed my mind. Now the ego, your sense of self is a tricky thing, and alcoholism is a tricky thing. It describes in this book that there are subtle forms of insanity that precede the first drink. Strange mental blank spots, it calls it, that suddenly is a concept that they talk about in this books. Suddenly, the thought crossed my mind that I could stop at the liquor store and get another bottle, you know, not Not thinking it all the way through. Now, what I believe this book has taught me is about powerlessness. The distinction between the alcoholic and the non-alcoholic is one of powerlessness Now, think about this. You hear a lot of things in AA and in the recovery fellowships like, just don't use, you know, and you're going to be fine. Never pick up the first drink. The first drink gets you drunk. I'm not saying that those are not good concepts. They're good concepts in theory, and they work for the heavy drinkers. They're not going to work for alcoholics. They're going for the alcoholic. Because what happens is, the insanity that they talk about in step two comes over us, And we're not even there when we buy the booze and put it back into our body. It's not us. It comes from an unconscious place. We're not conscious. We're Not Fully Sane. We're NOT Fully Conscious. We Don't Understand the Gravity of Our Error. That can't be something that we're awake to, to go back and do it again. for any alcoholic to put alcohol in your body is an insane act it's an insane act now knowing what you know about what drugs and alcohol do to you think about this consider this isn't it nuts to ever do that again oh I think you know I think I'll go back into the hospital for a month you know and lose all my money and you know you know I might get divorced and, you know, be homeless without a job. I think, oh, you Know, that's not what we think. We don't even think. It's a form of insanity. I'm going to just read a couple of, I'm not going to do a lot of reading today, but I'm gonna read a few passages and I'ma read a coupla passages out of here that back up my experience. But with the actual or potential alcoholic, real alcoholic, with hardly an exception will be absolutely unable to stop drinking on the basis of self-knowledge. So it doesn't matter what you know about alcoholism. That's not going to protect you from putting alcohol back in your body. So that's not really good news. There's another section in here. That was on page 39. There is another section in there on page 43 at the bottom. Once more, the alcoholic at certain times has no effective mental defense against the first drink. Except in a few rare cases, neither he nor any other human being can provide such a defense. His defense must come from a higher power. Now, think for a minute about powerlessness. If you're going to concede to your innermost self that you're an alcoholic, The step on the wall says we admitted we were powerless over alcohol. Now think for a minute about the term powerless. If you're powerless over alcoholic, if you're powerless over drink, and you have any defense on your own unaided will that can prevent you from putting alcohol back in your body, why don't you just do that? Then you're not powerless. Then you don't even need to admit to step one. If when drinking you can decide to just have two and you just have two, or you can decided to have four and just have four, you can moderate. You're in control of how much you take. The next time you drink, why don't you just half one? But the problem is our experience shows us that it doesn't work. We somehow mysteriously change our mind. And we end up shutting down the bar. We end up sleeping in the car. Any car sleepers in here? It's a lot of them. I was not alone. Oh, man. I used to buy big cars, you know, the big $100 pieces of crap, as I could really lay out in the back seat. Now, so think about this. If there's anything you can do to prevent alcohol from going into your body, can you even admit to powerlessness? Can you even take the first step? No. If you can control the amount that you drink, can you really admit to powellessness? No. Let's say you never get that mental obsession. Let's says mentally you can prepare yourself to never drink again and that works. Let's see it doesn't work. Let's say that you have the mental obsession. You can't help picking up that first drink. It's not something that you're, you have any defense against. But you can control the amount you take. Well, the next time you drink, why don't you just have one? Again, try to think about this from your own experience. My experience was I desperately, desperately wanted to separate from alcohol for good and for all. Absolutely. I was always so ill from alcohol. And I ended up starting to do crazy things. I was becoming violent. I was unpredictable. I would do things in blackouts. Any blackout drinkers in here? Yeah, there's some hands. That's disconcerting, isn't it, being a blackout Drinker? You don't even know if you have any I-nevers if you're a black out Drinker. Could have done anything. I used to show up in places you know, I'd come out of a blackout and I'd be somewhere what am I doing here? you know Topeka with one shoe wondering, you know Topeka then you have to kind of pretend you want to be in Topeka because you don't want to look stupid it was difficult but no, I was a black-out drinker and people were alerting me to my behavior, you know, the next morning. You know what you did? And it got to the point where, no, don't tell me. So I desperately wanted to separate from alcohol and I couldn't, I couldn'T. Listen, I'm telling you, this is how serious I was. I signed myself into a 28-day program. There was no pressure on me to do that. I said, I've gotta go to treatment and I went to treatment. 95% of the people in treatment You know, we're there for DWIs or, you know, pressure from outside forces or to keep from going to jail or whatever. I signed myself in because I needed to separate from alcohol. I did it from a place of sanity. And then when I got out of the 28-day program, I was going back to outpatient. I was paying like $60 a night to sit around in a group, you know, where people were talking about all their stuff and, you know,, the counselor was going on and on. And I didn't want to be there. And I'm going to AA meetings. I'm in outpatient, I've just done treatment. I've told everybody I've quit drinking and I'm an Alcoholics Anonymous. Listen, if you're new or just coming back, don't tell people you're in Alcoholics Anonymous, please. Because here's what happened to me. On the way to an AA meeting, the thought crossed my mind that if I bought a gallon of vodka and went home and drank it, it would improve my sobriety. Okay? Now, here's what I thought. I thought to myself, you know, it's been almost 90 days since I got drunk. I'm not even really remembering what it was like to be drunk. And somebody in a meeting said if you can't remember your last drunk, you haven't had it. So, and now I'm also thinking, you know I'm going to AA but I'm doing all this stuff that I should be doing. I was shy. I had that self-centered fear. I was sitting in the back hoping nobody would talk to me. And, you know, I thought that maybe if I got drunk again, you know it would help my AA stuff. So I drank a gallon of vodka to improve my sobriety. Now in drink number three I realized the enormity of my mistake. All of a sudden all of a suddenly the physical craving that allergy to alcohol kicked in. And all of a sudden, you know, I realized, oh my God, I'm back on the treadmill. I don't know where this is going to take me. And for six or seven months, I was drunk most of the time. And, you Know, I was caught back up in that cycle and it was absolute hell. But, you Now, think about the insanity of that. I signed myself into treatment. I'm going to outpatient. I'm go into AA meetings. I'm telling everybody in my world that I'm now a sober guy, and I get drunk. What is that? That's powerlessness. That's what it is. That's no human power can relieve me of my alcoholism, okay? Treatment, human power. Outpatient, humanpower. AA meetings, humanpower. Okay, no humanpower can relieve you of your obsession to drink. Now, I didn't know this at the time, but when I got off of that relapse, I understood that the only option on the horizon was Alcoholics Anonymous. I didnít have much hope that it would work, but I crawled back into AA meetings with a willingness that was born of desperation. I truly was beaten. I truly thought that Iím going to end up drinking myself to death because, you know, I would have to be medically detoxed. I'd go into the DTs. It was just an ugly scene. So I went back into AA with a willingness born of desperation, not really having a lot of hope because I had tried it. Didn't I try it before? Didn'tI go to treatment? Didn't l do the outpatient? Wasn't I going to meetings? But I had no other place to go. You know, l was kind of being drawn there. And, you Know, l see it today as the grace of God was pointing me in the right direction because I was desperate. I was absolutely desperate. And I went back into Alcoholics Anonymous willing to do absolutely everything I could possibly do. I got a sponsor right away. I started going to meetings every single night. In a very short period of time, I was going out to the diner with everybody. I was just getting really, really involved with AlcoholicsAnonymous And when you have an incredibly serious amount of participation in AA, that can grant you a finite period of sobriety. And I'm looking back on it today and I'm seeing that there was a grace period that had been offered me for me to learn where the power needs to come from for me to be relieved of this alcoholism. And what I was doing was I was doing fellowshipping. Now, one of the things that annoys me a little bit in AA today is when somebody shares, when I came into the program, you hear that a lot back in New Jersey. Practically every meeting I go to, somebody will say that. And you don't come in to the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. You take the steps of the program, but you come into the fellowship. And I didn't understand the difference between the program and the fellowship in Alcoholics Anonymous for a long time. I thought that I was working a program by going to a meeting every night, getting a sponsor, being the secretary over here, being a treasurer over there, driving people from my old treatment center to the meetings. I really thought that that was working a program, and you know what happened to me was I got exposed to a series of recovery tapes. Some people were doing a big book workshop, and this book Alcoholics Anonymous was not really a very popular text in AA where I was going at that period of time. There was step meetings galore. I remember I was going to four-step meetings a week. There was a big book meeting, but it was only the last Monday of every month. And normally what they would do is they would read the stories in the back and everybody would identify because it's fun to identify. Oh, my life is screwed up too. Let me tell you all about my screwed up life. And that was kind of the way it was going. So I hadn't really been exposed to this. And I got exposed to the process of recovery through these tapes. And in the tapes, they explained a little bit about the powerlessness. They explained the difference between the alcoholic and the non-alcoholic. And it also made very, very clear how much trouble I was in. If you're new, just coming back, in a treatment process or haven't gone through the steps, I'm going to tell you two truths that you are really not awake to. The first truth is you are in way more trouble than you think you are, okay? You are minimizing like a son of a gun. It is however bad you think it is, multiply that by 50 and you'll be getting close to how really bad it is. Alcoholism is an aggressive illness, drug addiction is an aggressive illness. It's fatal, it's progressive, and the worst part about it is when it's time for you to check out, when you die from it, you're at the lowest point in your life. The people that still want anything at all to do with you either resent you or pity you. Even cancer at least allows you the dignity of putting your affairs in order before you check out. When you check out from alcoholism or drug addiction, it's at the absolute bottom, bottom of your life. You don't have any more kind of disgrace to experience than the disgrace of an alcoholic or a drug addicted death. That's alcoholism and that's drug addiction. It's aggressive and it's fatal. And inherent in the illness, alcoholism, or drug addition is an almost utter inability to to be able to accurately perceive how much trouble you're in, all right? I remember being in treatment. I got to get out of here, you know. These guys are crazy. These guys were fanatics. Trust me. Trust me, they were not. They were minimizing my treatment process, you Know. In the early days of Alcoholics Anonymous, if you had a job, this is like in the first 10, 15 years of AA, if you were lucky enough to have a job when you became somebody's prospect, they would ask you to take a leave of absence from your job because they wanted nothing in the way of your participation in the recovery process. Not the fellowship, but the recovery progress. What's happened at Alcoholics Anonymous today is we went from being a program with a support fellowship to being a fellowship with a sport program. It's the transition that happened sometime in the 1950s. All of a sudden, it's more about meetings. Meetings, meetings, meetings. In the early days, they wouldn't even bring you to a meeting if you weren't somewhere smack in the middle of the steps because these guys were low-bottom alcoholics. They were people who nothing, nothing, there was nothing that would work for them except a vital, vital spiritual experience. An absolutely revolutionary personality changing at depth spiritual awakening was the only hope for these people. Now, as I started to learn a little bit about the first step, I startedto learn that I was in a lot of trouble and that I needed to start to get busy about the business of recovery because if I'm powerless, unless I've had a spiritual awakening as the result of 12 steps, I am not at all involved in the decision to put alcohol back in my body. The time and the place is going to come, it's going to go back in my body, I'm not involved in that. You can tell me whatever you want to tell me, just don't do it, Chris. Or double up on your meetings or get a coffee commitment. I can be making coffee till the grinds are coming out of my ears. And if I haven't had a spiritual awakening, the time and the place could come, who knows when, and alcohol could go back in my body. Look at the relapse rate in Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous. Look at their relapse rates. Pay attention to celebration meetings. Okay? Pay attention for how many 90-day chips your group gives out every year. And then pay attention to how many 15-year chips your groups gives out. Then pay attention for 30-year chip your group give out. You're going to notice something very, very quickly. It's awful hard to stay around. It's not the easiest thing in the world to walk in and say, I'm brand new, I've got one day. But it must be a lot easier to do that than to say, I have 15 years. You know what I mean? So there is a huge amount of relapse. There is a large amount of recidivism with people in AA today. And I believe it's because they haven't recognized the truth in their own alcoholism. That they're not involved in the decision to put alcohol back in their body. Their ego wants them to think they are. It's going to look like you've changed your mind, you've weighed all the options and it looks like the drink is going to win out. But that makes no sense when you look at it as an insane decision. The term insanity really is more of a legal term than a medical one And if you follow its definition back many, many years You're going to see that the term insanity Really comes from when they developed the insanity defense Back in Europe 400 years ago There would be town fools There would Be Town Idiots and they would do something illegal and they'd bring him in front of the court. Well, so-and-so stole an apple and it's like five years in prison for stealing an apple and they look at this guy and they say, this guy didn't know he did anything wrong. This guy doesn't know the truth from the false. He doesn't knows right from wrong. It would be cruel to put him in jail for five years. He didn't, he didn't have the right to do that. He didn' t know what he was doing. So they developed the insanity defense, okay? Well, the insanity that they talk about in step two think about that you know we're i'm not saying you don't take responsibility for your recovery i'm saying that until you've had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps if alcohol goes back in your body it's you know you're admitting to powerlessness If you haven't got the power, if the power hasn't been delivered unto you, what's going on? So these early guys, Bill Wilson and these early boys recognized this fact. They were all people who desperately wanted to separate from alcohol and couldn't. And the best doctor at that time was Dr. Silkworth, and you can read his letter in this book. the doctor's opinion. Think about this, he is the clinical director per se of Towns Hospital. Towns hospital was one of the most prestigious treatment facilities for drug and alcohol addiction back in the 20s and 30s. I mean that's where you would go it was expensive but that's that's where you could go if you had that option and they were up to date on on everything they could be up to date on at that time. And there was a classification of people that Dr. Silkworth would call the chronic, the hopeless, the doomed alcoholic. The people who were not going to make it. And this is what he would say. He would say, you know, you're hopeless. You're not goingto make it unless somebody locks you up, you're going to die or go insane. Here's your bill. you know and this is the absolute best that they had and these are the people who came back and said hey doc we're working this this pro we're work in this program of recovery and we've you know we've we've recovered look at our lives our lives were and he's looking at these people like those were people I had diagnosed as hopeless or doomed and all of a sudden they're sober you know what's going on and he started to pay attention to this recovery process uh that that bill and the guys were going through in the early days and although he didn't understand it because it's a spiritual process it's not a medical one or a psychiatric one he didn'T understand it but he knew that something was going on whatever you guys are doing keep doing it because you know i don'T know i DON'T know what you're doing i DONT know why it'S working but just keep doing it, because I had you written off. I had told your wives and family that they had maybe a year, and you were going to be dead. So those were the type of hopeless alcoholics that were being worked with in the early days. So this program works. It works on people that are much more alcoholic than I am, and that's saying something. Anyway, there's a dash after where it says that we admitted we were powerless over alcohol, dashed, that our lives have become unmanageable. Again, in the early days of AA, I looked on that unmanagability as the car crashes. I totaled nine cars. All in drunken blackouts. I had three DWIs. I was in a car crash. I couldn't, you know, all these things that I thought were the external consequences of my drinking. And I looked at the steps up on the wall, and I thought, okay, that's my unmanageability. My unmanangeability is all the trouble that I get into when I drink. Then I started to read this book, started to study this book much more thoroughly. And I've come to the conclusion today that yes, there is an external unmanagability that follows a lot of us around. But that's the same type of unmanigeability that a heavy drinker will have. That's the same type of unmanageability that, you know, a periodic heavy drink will have, you know? We're the type of people who don't go out on New Year's and drive around because that's amateur night, you now? There could be a lot of amateurs out there having a lot bad... You know, it happens all the time. You get a couple of DWIs and they'll put a stamp on your head, A, for alcoholic, because of some of the consequences of drinking. That means nothing about whether you're an alcoholic or not, whether you've had DWIs. But what I started to recognize was the internal unmanageability. It talks in this book so well about some of the emotional, psychic, spiritual, mental anguish that we go through. We go through... It's bondage of self, but it takes on many, many disguises, and here are some of them. At best, we're restless, irritable, or discontented. Anybody in here ever feel restless, irritable and discontent? Anybody in treatment feeling that way right now? Okay, all right. Welcome, okay. That's at best being restless, irritable discontended. But also you can, you know that 100% of alcoholics getting sober have depression and anxiety, okay? That's 100% of us still. So it takes the form of depression, anxiety, self-centered fear. You know that just feeling uncomfortable? You just don't feel right. You're not at the right place at the correct time with the right people. You don't want to do that because that's going to be uncomfortable or I don't want to have to go there. I don' t feel like going to a traffic court. You are just uncomfortable with yourself or in your environment. You just, so many of us isolate because of that self-centered fear. It looks like that. It looked like guilt and remorse and shame over the things that you've done in the past. Anybody in here feel those? You know, you're always thinking about, oh my God, I can't believe I did that. You're stuck in the pass. The pass keeps rerunning in your mind, okay? That's part of the unmanageability. And the self- centered fear, you're always worried about and anxious about the future. You know, so many of us end up in hospitals with anxiety attacks. We think, oh, I'm having the big one! And you get there, and they hook you up to all the machines, and they're like, there's nothing wrong with you! That happens to us all the time. This is like huge amounts of anxiety. Huge amounts of depression. Just our quality, our emotional quality of life is in the pits so often. Now, I think that ties in a lot to our alcoholism because it's a dash. It doesn't say end. It says that we're powerless over alcohol. Dash, that our lives have become unmanageable. I believe that that unmanagability is alcoholism. That unmanigability is what we treat. Obviously, we want you all to not drink. But, you know, so many of us get separated from booze. We don't have really an alcohol problem. We have a manageability problem. Our lives are unmanageable. There's no quality to it. Sobriety becomes untenable to us. Just being sober gets to the point where, you know, all of this emotional and spiritual and mental torture, just gets to be too much for us. The obsession of the mind comes in and we drink or we use again. This unmanageability, if you look at the promises, the step nine promises that I'm sure Peter will cover some of the step 9 stuff this afternoon, you'll see that they're almost a reaction to the unmanageability. In other words, there's a promise that covers practically everything on page 52, the bedevilments. The bedevillments are a really good indicator of what kind of recovery you have at the current time. I'm going to read a couple of them. 52. We were having trouble with our personal relationships. You don't have to raise your hand. Just say to yourself yes or no. You know, just affirm to yourself whether or not you're suffering from these things currently. We're having problems with our personal relationships. We couldn't control our emotional natures. We can't be happy if we want to be happy. We canít rid ourselves of depression. We canít get rid of that self-centered fear or that guilt and that shame. We were prey to misery and depression. We couldnít make a living. I tend to look at this like we canít make equality of life. We canís develop the quality of life that we want. Our quality of life sucks. And, you know, we know that and we don't want that, but we've been almost powerless to be able to change it. And a lot of times it looks like it just keeps getting worse. We had a feeling of uselessness. We were full of fear. We were unhappy. We couldn't seem to be of real help to other people. Those are some of the bedevilments. That's one of the ways that our unmanageability shows up. I would say, I would stand my ground on this. If you suffer from these things, you have step work to do. Okay? That's alcoholism more than drinking is. That's alcoholic. I don't believe alcohol causes alcoholism. I believe that spiritual malady causes alcohol. I think it makes us predestined to try to find some outside source to put into us to make us feel good because we just don't feel good. We never feel good, so we're always looking for that outside stuff. A lot of people that come into AA that don't get really busy with the steps but stay sober find other obsessive compulsive ways of trying to make themselves feel good— Sex, food, buying more toys, working really hard, trying to make more money. We're looking for outside things to put into us to make us feel better. But the problem is it's an inside job. It's an outside job. We need to find that peace and that serenity and that recovery from inside. It's a God job, and we're trying to do it ourselves. and alcoholism is much too aggressive an illness for us to be able to play around and do a lot of stupid stuff and read self-help books anybody in here read a bunch of self-Help books trying to figure out what the hell's wrong with you all those self- Help books The Joy of Resentment I'm Okay and You're a Horse's Ass there's a lot of them out there And, you know, I came into AA and I had probably 70 self-help books. And my sponsor said to me one time, he goes, what is this? He goes, where's your section for helping others? You know, and I'm like, well, I don't have one of those. He goes that's your problem. You know selfishness and self-centeredness, that we think is the root of our problem. So anyway, here's what goes on with the alcoholic. Once you're painted into a corner, once you have nowhere else to go, the book Alcoholics Anonymous tells you God, the spiritual solution. Spiritual living is really going to be the answer to this solution. And they have a series of exercises in here. Where these exercises came from is when Bill and Dr. Bob were getting sober, they both independently of each other got involved in the Oxford group. The Oxford Group was kind of an evangelical, Protestant, satellite type of a fellowship, but it was about behavior. So much of religion is about belief. This was about behaviour. This guy Frank Buckman decided that he would make part of being an Oxford Group member. inherent in being an Oxford Group member would be that you would follow certain ways of behavior. You would pray and meditate. You would make restitution to the people that you had harmed. You would witness. You would try to help other people. You would admit that of yourself, you're nothing. You need God's help. You would share your sins with another person in confession. You would ask God to remove these defects of character. This was all part of the process of the Oxford Group, and Bill Wilson recognized that there was a lot of drunks, a lot or real drunks that were getting sober in the Oxford Group. And what he found out was that spiritual living, not spiritual belief, but spiritual living actually taking these actions and living a spiritual life in behavior was able to help a lot of these people get sober and start to recover from alcoholism. So through his relationship with the people in the Oxford group and then Dr. Bob and Akron, through his relationships with the folks in the hospital and through his friendship with the People in the Oxford Group and the many influences that came to them from that process, they learned this fact that by following these simple spiritual rules, they were able to stay separated from alcohol. The power that they didn't have on their own would come into them or would become manifest in them. And the power would come in and it would help them revitalize their lives. It talks a lot of terminology in here about being reborn, about, you know, being the spiritual awakening, about having a sixth sense rocketed into a new dimension. There's a lot of terminology in this book that goes to show what happens when you start living a spiritual life. So really, the way I look at step two is, step one is a concession to my innermost self that I'm alcoholic, that my life has become unmanageable. I'm powerless over alcohol. Step two is that a power greater than myself can restore me to sanity. There is a solution. There is a process whereby we can be rebuilt. Our lives can be transformed into something better than they ever were. That's my experience in my life. Prior to my drinking, I was a messed up pre-alcoholic. I still had all the unmanageability. I was still restless, irritable and discontented and shy and scared and nervous and depressed before I picked up a drink. Well, practicing these spiritual principles has brought me to a way of life that I can't even believe. It's brought me to a recovery not only from drinking but from that spiritual malady the mental and emotional trauma that I was suffering from. so in step two we believe that there is a process that will allow us to recover at the heart of this process is the power of god the we can we need to start to believe that there's some type of interventionary process that can happen to us we can make ourselves available to that interventionary process we can put ourselves in this in the spiritual atmosphere for recovery to take place but this power needs to come in and it's a power greater than ourselves and it talks it talks in the chapter of the agnostic that we find this power deep down within us and it becomes alive in us through practicing the spiritual principles now the lessons that that bill and dr bob learned from the Oxford group, are put into this book. They made it non-denominational. They made spiritual rather than religious. I'm grateful for that because if you would have told me the day I walked into AA that I would have had to find Jesus to recover, I would've said, thank you for the information, I'm in the wrong place. And I wouldve left because I wouldave known that Jesus was not gonna help me. Now I would have been wrong, I could have been wrong but I would have known that because that was a preconceived concept. So by turning it into a spiritual process it makes this whole thing available to anyone doesn't matter what your faith your denomination whether you're an atheist an agnostic you know you could be a Bolivian faith healer it just doesn't matter what type of what your belief is, because these are just spiritual principles. But we need to come to believe that by placing ourselves in the atmosphere, by working these spiritual principles, by asking God to help us work them, sometimes it's a tough process to do this stuff, and we need even ask for divine help to be able to get through this stuff. But by engaging in this process, we can be restored to sanity. We can be restored to a place where that strange mental blank spot, that subtle form of insanity is not going to happen. We're not going to put alcohol back in our body. We are going to be transformed to a whole new level of existence and spirituality. And there are even promises in this book that our other problems will be solved. So step two also is coming to believe that spiritual living is going to solve all of my problems. I believe this stuff through experience. You have to understand, I was a skeptic. People that knew me in high school and talk to me these days are like, you are the most sarcastic, skeptical bastard I ever met. What happened to you? And Listen, I didn't take a lot of this stuff on faith. I engaged in it because of a desperation to survive. Maybe it would work. Maybe it wouldn't work. I came to believe that maybe, maybe this crazy thing will work for me. And it actually did. So I stand up here today speaking with an awakened spirit speaking from experience and telling you that if you are a real alcoholic, if you're a real drug addict, if your experience is that you have periods of time when there seems to be a complete lack of judgment on your part about engaging in drinking or drugging, start to believe that there's a process you know i'm begging you start to believe that this is a process that can restore you to sanity it did it for me and there's millions of people in alcoholics anonymous today who've had the same similar experience get about the work of recovery of spiritual living the work of recovery and spiritual living happens when you walk out of these doors. It's in our behavior, it's in how we try to live life, and it's in seeking God, however that makes sense to you, however that becomes comfortable to you. It is in seeking that experience experience of the divine, that power that comes from God that can restore us to sanity and solve our problems, that can allow us to become reborn and start living a life that we deserve. All right, that's all I have. I think lunch is going to be served pretty soon, right? All right. Thank you.