Step 4 Without the Fourth Column — Eight Years of Pointing Out What Everyone Else Did Wrong – Marshall S.

About This Speaker Tape

Marshall S. shares his story at the Monday night Blue Chip Speakers meeting at the Nava Club, recounting 35 years of sobriety dating from August 7, 1986. He grew up in Greenville, South Carolina in a family steeped in cocktail-party drinking culture. He started drinking at 12 after stealing his father's Johnny Walker Red, and immediately experienced the alcoholic phenomenon -- all his fear and self-consciousness vanished. He chased that feeling through prep school, Princeton, a semester in Colombia (where he survived his first intervention), and stints as a community organizer in Detroit, always managing to keep up appearances until his drinking destroyed his short-term memory and academic performance. He failed to complete his senior thesis and returned to Greenville without graduating.

After bouncing between California, Al-Anon, and nine months of slipping in and out of AA, Marshall finally surrendered at a hospital treatment program in San Francisco. He spent time in a halfway house, rebuilt his computer career, married, and had two children -- but spent his first eight and a half years sober essentially dry rather than recovered. He had a devastating domestic violence incident that led to his arrest, and this crisis drove him to finally work the steps out of the Big Book with a farmer named Jim in Bakersfield who taught him to shut up and listen to the black-and-white print.

Marshall describes the painful unraveling of his marriage, his wife taking the kids to Atlanta, the loneliest drives of his life on the road between Charleston and Atlanta, and eventually rebuilding as a single dad. He was written out of his father's will three weeks before his father died and is currently in a lawsuit with his brothers over the estate. Through it all, he credits his sponsors with teaching him everything he knows about being an adult and a parent.

He closes with hard-won wisdom about emotional sobriety -- that other people do not care about his emotions, they care about how he treats them -- and that sharing rather than giving advice has transformed his relationships. His daughter recently married and his son just got engaged, and Marshall expresses deep gratitude for a life he never could have imagined.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Introduction by Lisa at the Blue Chip Speakers meeting at the Nava Club
• 3:00 Marshall introduces himself -- sober since August 7, 1986, 35 years, home group at St. Luke's Saturday men's group
• 7:00 Growing up in Greenville -- father's heavy hand, parents' cocktail-party lifestyle, mixing Dad's Johnny Walker Red strong to make him nicer
• 11:00 First drink at 12 with stolen whiskey, the moment of wonderfulness, and 14 years chasing that feeling
• 17:00 Princeton, Washington DC internship disaster, semester in Colombia with cocaine and first intervention
• 24:00 Failed to graduate, dedicated 5 o'clock drinker, moved to California, proposed at a Grateful Dead show on mushrooms
• 30:00 Nine months of slipping in AA, Gene Duffy's drying-out farm, surrender at Marshall Hill Hospital when the nurse searched his belongings
• 37:00 Henry Olaf halfway house, fresh start in San Francisco AA, first years of dry sobriety without real step work
• 43:00 Domestic violence arrest at 8.5 years sober, discovering the steps are in the Big Book through Marianne, working with Jim in Bakersfield
• 52:00 Divorce, single parenting, family of origin wreckage, written out of father's will, lessons about emotional sobriety and sharing vs. advising