Step 2 Hit When He Learned the Mechanism of the Disease – Chris M.

And with that, I'd like to introduce our 10-minute speaker, Chris. Hello, my name is Chris Marr, and I'm an alcoholic. Hi, Chris! And the only reason for you new people that I'm using my last name is because everybody here mispronounces it. And I figured that I would say it out loud so that maybe it would catch on. Let's see, I was thinking about giving Maureen a 10 minute introduction but I think she's nervous enough already. I might as well start back when this whole thing all started and the first time I remember liking alcohol was when I was about seven or eight years old. My grandparents used to make me and my sister a kind of like a dessert drink, and I was, I was but seven or eight and I remember after one of them I snuck into the kitchen got some more creme de menthe and because I liked the warm feeling and so that right from the start I loved alcohol and I'm sure it was even younger than that I know that when I was teething my mother used bourbon on my gums so it probably goes back that far but all along I kind of did alcohol and drugs hand in hand and as time went on the the alcohol became my drug choice but when when I was 12 years old I was sniffing glue right after that I started smoking pot 14 I was taking acid it was you know the drugs were always there the drugs were fun they were new exciting and they got old uh but the alcohol was always there and i i think too a lot of it was when i was in high school it was easier for me to get drugs than it was to get alcohol you know everybody had marijuana and everybody had acid but getting a bottle of whiskey was a big deal and it's kind of twisted but but that's the way it was so um When I got to college, by that time I had more or less tired of marijuana. I got bored with LSD and I discovered cocaine. And for about the next ten years it was cocaine off and on and alcohol every day. And the alcohol was, in the beginning it was kind of like, you know, in college everybody drinks. And I made sure that I hung around with people who did drugs and drank. And there was, in my freshman year, they changed the drinking age in Massachusetts to 18. So as soon as they did that, they opened up a pub right inside the Student Union. And I was in that pub virtually every day for seven years. And I would get there at 11 o'clock when it opened up. and they used to sell 32 ounce beers and just drink them all day long I'd cut classes I was once a teaching assistant and I held a class in the pub because I didn't want to leave I mean yeah it was like my home and it had the same type of neighborhood bar mentality it was just a different type of action there was a lot of drug dealing that went on right at the tables and things like that. And, you know, so it was fun. It was exciting. And I, at that time, I had more fun than problems. Although the problems were developing. I was cutting classes. I was getting Fs. And I was having a hell of a lot of problems staying in school. When I finally got out, it was time to get a job and by that time I was a daily drinker and I continued to drink every day at lunch I'd drink and I got jobs where they more or less accepted the fact that they were going to be smelling alcohol on me and that went on for for the rest of my drinking you know, I would this is about the time when I started saying well, you know I've got to start controlling this a little bit and I found out that I couldn't. And so I convinced myself that, yeah, someday I'm going to have to stop. And I more or less knew at that time that I was an alcoholic. When I was about 22, I had my first attack of alcoholic hepatitis. I was very ill. I turned yellow and went to a doctor, and he told me, you drink too much. That's what your problem is. And I convinced myself that I had hepatitis. And it wasn't, it was the alcohol. But that recurred like once every year or two, all the way through and it started getting more and more frequent. And it was extremely uncomfortable and I generally lost about 20, 25 pounds and there were times when I just, towards the end I wasn't gaining that back. So I knew pretty early on that I was an alcoholic but I convinced myself that, yeah, I can deal with this later. You know, I said, I can always stop when I want to. And the people my age, we still had time to go for it. And, you know, this went on and it began to get old with all the people around me. I was ruining relationships. My friends were getting really upset and I was losing friends. My family was here on the West Coast while I was in the East, but they really didn't want to hear from me all that much. And it was beginning to get lonely, but at the same time as this was going on, my only friend became alcohol because it was there. It was there to relieve the emotional pain of just day-to-day living. And what I didn't see is that it was creating it. You know, I was using alcohol to relieve the emotional suffering that the alcohol was creating. And I was unwilling to look at that part of the vicious circle. So this went on and on and I made a geographic out here to California and I figured, well, you know, it's a new star, I'll start all over again. Same thing that's happened with everybody who pulled the geographic. it didn't work. My drinking got worse, and it had finally reached the point where I lost a job because of my drinking. And I went on unemployment, and that was great for me because I didn't have to work, I could sell drugs, and I could drink. And that's all I wanted to do. And, that's what I did for about a year and a half. By the time I finally went to a treatment center up in Sacramento. I was drinking a fifth of rum every day, and it was the type of thing where I would wake up in the middle of the night, and I'd reach under my bed and grab a bottle of rum and just drink until I passed out again, and it was like this around the clock. So I would drink until i passed out, and then when I came to, I'd drink some more. It was like there was no day, there was no night it was just kind of a constant blur and I had blackouts that would last for days you know when people started talking about blackouts in AA I didn't know what the big deal was because I had them from the gate I thought it came with drinking so it was when I finally got to treatment center they had to get through a lot of denial. You know, I didn't think I had that bad a problem. And then I started hearing other people talking. I was going, Jesus Christ, you know, I'm lucky I'm alive. And it's true, actually. I am lucky. I did a pretty good job of damaging myself. And when I finally got there, I was ready to listen for the first time. I've got a mother and father in the program, and they had tried to get me into AA before, and I found excuses why it wouldn't work for me, you know, one of them being the concept of a higher power. I refused to have anything to do with that, you know. Great for everybody else, but not me, thank you. And so that kept me out, and when I finally got up there, I was willing to listen. And when they started explaining the mechanism of what was going on when they explained that I had a disease it all of a sudden began to make sense to me, I looked at the alcoholism in a different way when when they explained that what was happening was I was triggering off an obsession by putting the alcohol in my body all of the sudden I had lived for years with the constant obsession that I knew I couldn't do anything with. And, you know, it was the type of thing that would make me drink in the middle of the night when I woke up or go into a total panic. And that's what I was afraid of living with. And all of a sudden it was, all I had to do was not drink one drink and that would go away. And it was that simple. And for me, the trade-off was easy. All I had to do was not drink one drink. And I wouldn't have to live with that obsession anymore. And once that obsession was gone, all those feelings that got distorted by the alcohol started settling down a little bit. You know, it took...it's still continuing. But within months, most of the distorted feelings that I had began to have some sort of basis in reality again. And you know, I realized that a lot of the fears I had were reactions from the way I used to live. And that I didn't have to live that way anymore. So I I was willing from the beginning to do what I had to do to stay sober. and when I got out of treatment my second meeting was here in this room and I've been a member of this group ever since and God for you newcomers there's a lot of you here tonight and a lot of the ACU people too yeah particularly the teenagers You've got a chance to do something now that I wish I had had the intelligence and the information to do when I was a teenager. Because it was affecting me then, the alcoholism was making my life unmanageable. Not to the extent it would, but it was making it noticeably unmanegeable. and I don't know what would have happened if somebody had explained the way they explained to me in Sacramento how this disease worked but I do know that if you stick around here and you remain willing to listen then eventually the only decision that will make sense is to keep coming back here and that's why people push you to do 90 meetings in 90 days so that they can get through all that distorted bullshit so you can see that the only sane decision you have is to come here and to stay sober. So, try and just make that one commitment to yourself that you'll give it a fair shot, that you're going to do it right. That you'll listen with an open mind and give it chance to work. Don't dismiss it out of hand because you aren't an alcoholic. Listen to what some of the other people say and you'll find out that you're probably here for a very good reason. Thank you.