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

About This Speaker Tape

Bourbon on the gums as a teething baby the trajectory was set early. Chris M. describes a youth spent chasing the warm feeling of creme de menthe and a college career spent virtually living in a student union pub where he once held a class as a teaching assistant just to avoid leaving the bar.

The wreckage includes repeated bouts of alcoholic hepatitis that turned him yellow a failed geographic cure in California and a period of unemployment spent selling drugs and drinking a fifth of rum a day. He describes a cycle of waking up in the middle of the night to drink from a bottle under the bed until passing out again. The turning point arrives in a Sacramento treatment center where the disease concept and the mechanism of obsession finally broke through his denial offering a simple trade-off: one drink for a life without the panic of obsession.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Introduction and the joke about his last name.
• 0:45 Early childhood memories of creme de menthe and bourbon on the gums.
• 2:15 College years spent in the student union pub and the teaching assistant story.
• 4:10 First attack of alcoholic hepatitis and the denial of the cause.
• 5:30 The vicious circle of drinking to relieve emotional pain.
• 6:15 The failed geographic cure in California and selling drugs on unemployment.
• 7:30 Drinking a fifth of rum under the bed and the blur of blackouts.
• 8:45 Initial resistance to the concept of a Higher Power.
• 9:30 The disease concept and the mechanism of obsession.
• 11:00 Advice to newcomers and teenagers on the unmanageability of the disease.