Step One and the Mental Obsession – 12 Steps/12 Traditions Workshop – Part 7 of 7 – Chris R.

And now to get a start on the steps and traditions, I'll turn the floor back over to Chris R. For step one, Chris, floor is yours for the next 45 minutes. Thank you. Thanks, Billy. It's go back to something I just said real quick. um it's uh i it's not a day goes by that i don't get a call from somebody usually a family member or uh you know somebody that i've known in aa for years and then it's relapsed and you know everybody wants to go back to the same topic you know it's like well you know i know this works for some people but it's Not it won't work for me and then you talk to them a little bit and find out that they're not doing what we have been asked to do and in defense of so many people out there, a lot of these people have not been asked to do anything but come to meetings. You know, I'm not going to beat it to death, but I'm just saying, folks, it's like I owe my life to those old geezers that put their dinner off for a few minutes and sit with me and show me how to get well and get me on the path once I saw what it was and you couldn't stop me. And it was pretty special, guys. Did the work, had a completed fourth step. I'm sitting on the tailgate of my truck haven't even done a fifth step yet and dawns on me the obsession is lifted all those years later guys two weeks in i had this spiritual experience and uh you know i can't tell you how many people i've watched have the same thing so i want to talk about uh there's a guy in town who always talks about there's no one step more important than the others you know and i know that they're all important they are but if you look at the table of contents it'll throw you off a little bit because some of the chapters have multiple, you know, steps listed. Again, I can send you this little deal I did. It's a little index of where the steps actually are in the big book and I can sent it to you. It'll tell you exactly where the stamps are. So if you look at the first hundred pages, give or take a page there, you're talking about all 12 steps. 60 of those pages are about the first step. The next 40 pages cover the next 11 steps. I think Bill Wilson was pretty clear, guys. Without a basis to go on, if you're not really convinced you're one of us, you're going to do this work. Everybody says they will. Are you willing to go to any length? Everybody says that. I've never had anybody that said no. They say they will. Right up to the point you ask them to do something that they don't want to do, and then they start crumbling. But if they're convinced they've got a fatal progressive illness called alcoholism, they'll do it. I sat in Alcoholics Anonymous for seven years. I called myself an alcoholic and didn't anymore believe it than the man in the moon because my stories are not as bad as your stories. I can't possibly be like you. When those guys started showing me the symptoms, my life started changing and i'll be more than glad to see you when those little indexes i should get tired of watching a whole bunch of people relapse only to find out that they've just been you know they've never had a clear picture about what this thing was really about and if you look in the forward to the second edition up in the front of the book guys a lot of y'all know where that is uh it talks about a success rate of 75 i was on a zoom last night i was talking about membership surveys it was pretty fascinating these stats right there guys as close as we can get with a few uh in and out guys people were staying sober 75 success rate 1955 when that book went into its second credit right now if you look at chip sales which is not scientific but you look at the membership survey we don't have anything like that it's like we took something that absolutely worked and then we have allowed it to all be watered down. I'm going to give you a real quick analogy, and I'll go quick. It's like an ugly pill. You know, the pharmaceutical companies come up with a pill for ugly. Some of you out here would qualify for that pill. And it's just, it's a nasty pill and it tastes bad, but it really helps people that are ugly. But they're not selling too many because actually there's not that many ugly people out there. There's some homely people okay but nobody the homely people are not going to take the pill because it's too strong and it's got all these side effects so they watered it down and they started selling a good billion of these and it worked great for the homily people oh too bad but it didn't work for the ugly people anymore i think it's a perfect analogy that's what we've done in alcoholics anonymous we've watered watered down easy does it think think think take your time it's on another rate and all the little one-liners and it just drives me crazy how many people come in and don't don't even know the symptoms of alcoholism had you known the symptoms to ask you could have diagnosed me at 18 years old with alcoholism but nobody was asking me those questions they're asking how many drug driving charges do we have or how many blah blah blah it's um i don't know my bottom was not listening to your story my bottom guys i've never had any i've been doing this for years i've never had an email or a phone call from anybody says chris i remember you on the talk and talking about eating out of a dumpster in houston texas and i and i stopped drinking that day and i've never touched never had one i've had thousands of emails from people that finally understood what first step was about and got sober for the rest of their life pretty cool once you know the symptoms because at the end of the day guys let's look around i'm talking first step stuff you look around this gathering we got a bunch of people in here we got 550 so people i want to tell you guys we have people from all crosses all walks of life here we've got old geezers we got young people good looking people ugly people i know god dang it got some yankees on here and billy's here we got come on guys all walks with life the only thing that ties us together is not the color or sexuality or gender none of that what ties it together is that we're all experiencing the same symptoms of the disease and why in the living daylights would we not want that newcomer to understand that to see that just speechless our chief responsibility bill read it earlier is an adequate presentation of the program an adequate representation of the problem is what we need in order to uh work the steps it's up to the newcomer whether they decide to do that or not but at least have we given them everything that they need to do like this i go back to you know if all we're doing is telling them to keep coming back you know we're not doing that's not much of an adequate presentation of the program somebody has to sit down with me and show me how to do this and that qualified took to like 20 minutes this is going to take 45 minutes to explain this to you guys come on if you can stay in touch with me holler and i'll help you with any way you want but we need to be working on it this is like in sales like an elevator speech you know what we're talking about where you can promote yeah that's what we need have with our first step this doesn't have to be long drawn out and god help us if we're going to start on the title we're gonna read no the book never says let's have the new cover read says handing the book and asking to read it okay and then we're showing what one looks like and see if they can identify with this. Man, I mean, it can happen in a setting. It's actually, yeah, pretty amazing. In 155, Bill Wilson's talking about Dr. Bob, he says he didn't fully understand what it really understand what het meant to be alcoholic. Again, I've called myself an alcoholic, but I couldn't have told you what it was to be an alcoholic because I always want to connect it to the drama and it's not. One thing I want to mention in here before I get into this, there's three little parts to this illness, symptoms that we can look at. Bill Wilson talked specifically most about the first two symptoms, and I'm going to touch base on it, but understand that there's a little thing, and Bill Wilson refers to it several places. I'm not going to take time to go to it, but he talks about the progression of progressive illness. alcoholism is progressive folks and it is but it progresses in different people in different rates so i've worked with one of the worst alcoholics i ever worked with was a little 19 year old young man and uh he uh had drank twice blacked out both times had a drunk driving charge i mean he was in-state alcoholic at 19 and i've work with a sea of old geezers that drank successfully for 30 or 40 years and it was only towards the end of their life that all the wheels started coming off and really started affecting their life on the outside. But you could have diagnosed all of these people if you'd have known the symptoms and talked about that. And I just think if we understand that, we can help. Those old-timers used to talk about waiting. You haven't lost enough yet. Guys, you can lose it all. You can't scare an alcoholic into recovery. Stop. You don't want this to happen to you, do you? Nobody thinks that they're going to be a loser like you ever. You can't scare us, but show us the symptoms that we can identify. It's a self-diagnosed, you know, we got people come into treatment all the time. A doctor thinks they need to be there. They wouldn't be there as a lot of them have lawyers that think they need to be there. A lot of women have family members. All of them had family members think they need to Be there. The only person I care about is do they think they need to? Because at the end of the day, we're the ones that have got to do the work. It's a disease, folks. I guarantee you we've got this many people on here. There's a bunch of you in here that still don't believe this is a disease. You still believe this as a behavioral problem. It's not. Dr. Silkworth did some real good writing about it, guys. This stuff about alcoholic personality is rubbish. I'm sorry. We're all a little bit different in that, guys, y'all. But he said he wanted to paint this picture clear as he could possibly be, guys. From the doctor's opinion up in the front, Dr. Silkworth wrote Dr. Silkworth and up to page 23, Bill Wilson talks about the physical raving. What happens when I put alcohol in my system? It separates me from other people. From 23 to 43, we talk about the mental obsession. the next the 20 pages that's where those great stories that bill talked about fred and jim there's five stories in there uh all of them based on true individuals except the jaywalker which is perfectly applicable to us and um uh they're really great stories i'll mention a little bit about that just a second but uh and the only time i'm going to mention this i'm gonna stay really close through what the big book's talking about of course because that's what i believe we're here to do but uh i can give you information out there about the genetic nature of this the doctors are out there folks the jury's in and uh by 1961 the american medical association had got off dead center and stopped calling it an illness uh it's a disease and because the symptoms are the same for that little 18 year old girl and this old crusty guy with one eye you know it's they're the same and uh yeah but the genetics of this place such a huge part in this illness so most of the people i can talk to they can look up their family tree and give it a good kick little alcoholics drop out of the top like pecans on windy day so i'm just saying you know not everybody you can see you can jump generations but it's it's there it's not causal i'm not going to say before i get into this i want to make sure y'all all get clear i'm Not saying my external world didn't affect my drinking because it did. It just, it is. Drama, drama, grief, lots of things that goes on in our lives can affect or the word is exacerbate our alcoholism. It didn't cause it. So stick with us and I can send you this stuff. I just, there's so many people out there that've got a trump card they want to throw down every time things get tough. You know, well, you don't understand. I was hurt. You're right. i don't understand and i do know that good therapy can help you with all that i'm a huge fan of therapy i'm just saying if you work the steps your life's going to change it just absolutely will my bottom was not eaten out of a dumpster in houston texas which i did one time my bottom was understanding what my problem was in 1987 after a suicide attempt and those old guys showed me and i went damn i'm i'm this is this i didn't have all these psychiatric disorders guys i was on seven psych meds a day when I try to commit suicide. I have legitimate psychiatric disorders. Y'all need to understand that. I'm not doctor shopping like a bunch of you losers. Y'ALL NEED TO HEAR THIS, YOU KNOW? It was so cool to find out that I didn't have all of those illnesses. What I had was, and there was nobody out there trying to hurt me, but I didn'T have those illnesses what I had was untreated alcoholism. Fact. Dr. Silkworth was a chief neurologist at Towns Hospital for 16 years, I think it was. Towns hospital is not there anymore. The building is. I think Billy can tell you. It's right down on Central Park. You can go by. I've walked by it. You could see it. And Dr. silkworth was wonderful guy. He actually treated Bill Wilson the first three times and then on the fourth time when Abby took him back he treated him the last time. Bill stayed the whole time because Abby was sitting on him and made sure that he got an idea of this spiritual solution. This is where it came, and Bill started pursuing this right then and there, and that's when he had his spiritual experience sitting in treatment, and I got to tell you folks, there'll be people that'll disagree. I have watched thousands of people sit in treatment and have spiritual experiences. This absolute nonsense that you have to be sober years before that spiritual experience will take place is ridiculous. It happens soon after you get off your butt and start doing this work. I've never seen it fail, so feel pretty strong about that, do you, Chris? Yes. Silkworth was amazing. Let me tell you real quick. He started seeing similarities between all of the people that were coming to treatment. It's not like today when we have specialty treatment centers on every corner. They were bringing English royalty would come to this treatment Center in Towns Hospital. And he started seeing the same similarities. Once these folks started using, there was this phenomenal craving that kicked in that at certain times, the book said, they would lose control and drink more than they intended. It paints a picture in the front that it was every time guys, but I know people in the progression of the illness that drank successfully for periods of time. Every time I drank, I didn't turn into a zombie. But there were times that I drank that I did not want to turn into a zombie and I turned into a zombie. Y'all follow? Sometimes the craving can be satisfied with smaller quantities of alcohol, but as the illness progresses, and I can't tell you if that's six months from now or, I mean, it can go really fast in some people, really slow at others, but at a certain point your tolerance levels will start changing and it means you start putting that stuff in your system. This is why we have a lot of people that relapse around substances they're putting in their body that trigger that craving most of you alcoholics end up relapse around prescription medication over-the-counter medication it has alcohol in it you can't put alcohol in your system without triggering that craving one of the things that bill wilson i can't tell you how many people i've watched relapse on non-alcoholic beer there is alcohol init it's it's to a low enough level that the food drug folks will allow them to label it non-alcoholic but there's enough in it food that has alcohol in it don't i don't care if it's been flamed or not there's nothing in it that can trigger that craving and you'll be off the races watch so many people a lot of people don't understand it that the uh that phenomenon craving i mean detox centers crank out 100 successes we can get you detoxed off the alcohol The problem is we can't keep you detoxed. That's what drives me crazy when I hear people in meetings, just don't drink no matter what. But I'm going to drink no mater what, you know? Don't drink even if your butt falls off. My butt, I'm almost 70 years old. My butt has fallen off. Trust me. If I could stop myself, I would. And I want to show you. Bill Wilson in the front. I got to read this real quick. on the bottom page 20, 20 and 21. These are good pages because Bill wants us to discuss this. He wants usto see it. There's three places in the book that he talks about different types of drinkers. Modern drinkers have little trouble in giving up liquor entirely if they have good reason for it. They can take it or leave it alone. Then we have a certain type of hard drinker. He may have the habit badly enough to gradually impair himself physically and mentally, may cause him to die a few years before his time. But if a sufficient strong reason comes along, ill health, falling in love, change of environment, warning from a doctor or a PO. If any of this becomes operative, this man or woman can stop or moderate, although you may find it difficult and troublesome, and may even need medical attention. Hard drinkers. A lot of hard drinkers in AA, folks. But given sufficient reason, they were able to stop. But what about the real alcoholic? He may start off as a moderate drinker, he may or may not become a continuous hard drinker but at some stage of their drinking career they begin to lose all control over consumption once they start. That's me. I used to have a t-shirt. We did a t- shirt that says, I'm the person on page 21. It's funny if you wear it to an AA conference, how many people don't know what that is, but they'll ask, yeah, don't wear it to Walmart because everybody in the place is going to ask you, what's on page21? I am the real alcoholic. I got to say it real quick, guys. If y'all want to stir up a hornet's nest, I mean, really, go to your AA meeting. I'm sure it's a wonderful meeting. Introduce yourself as a real alcoholic and watch somebody make a comment. Oh, you think you're special? Yes. In AA, you are. Thank you for being here. We need you. That's for a fact. Looking at these symptoms, guys, real quick, I'm going to mention because Bill Wilson, three places in how it works, he talks about the ability to be honest if you can be honest you can get this deal the only prerequisite he gives us in this book does that you don't have to be particularly bright or smart wherever if you have the ability of the honest with yourself you can give this what is your truth based on your experience not what somebody tells you but but what you've experienced and you ever got to a little place when you were drinking alcohol but you ended up drinking more than you intended. You know, you show your butt, you come back the next day, nasty hangover said, I'm never going to do that again. And then you do it again. That's, that's the phenomenal craving best. At that point, it's like being allergic to a food. If you got, you know, you've got a food allergy, then don't eat that food. Who knew? Yeah. Okay. But if you keep going back and eating that food we have a psych unit waiting for you people go what are you crazy yes that's the same thing with the alcohol folks nobody wants to use that word but the truth of the matter is we're we're insane bill wilson uses the term over and over most everybody i've ever come across understands the mental upset excuse me the physical allergy you alcoholics once you start to drink you can't stop okay Oprah Winfrey understands that y'all understand that every doctor out there understands that alcoholics okay got that but where we lose them and so many people in AA is that they don't understand the mental obsession I'll say it again from 23 to 43 guys these 20 pages Bill Wilson does a masterful job in those stories I don't have time to read them but uh the stories that Billy mentioned again Jim the car salesman that uh suddenly the thought crossed my mind i could put an ounce of whiskey in the milk yeah y'all bought it and it wouldn't hurt me on a full stomach yeah the simple fact that an adult's drinking milk anyway freaks me out that was probably psychiatric on his part i'm just saying this own personal opinion but i mean this idea and then this guy has like eight glasses of milk you know in the next 30 minutes it's like oh my god it's just uh-uh uh-huh the things that we do Harry Thiebaud Bill Wilson shrink for a billion years he said and I'm going to paraphrase it real quick he says we can hit a thousand bottoms but unless we surrender at one of those bottoms we're just going to keep hitting bottoms how many of y'all in there just to show our hands the ones I've got their cameras on right there how many you guys have gotten to a little spot you close the bathroom you're sitting there looking at yourself in a medicine cabinet window or that big fancy mirror and you got tears in your eyes banging on a counter saying i cannot keep doing this let the let the recorded record shows all the hands are up y'all thought we yeah that's beautiful you should see it oh my god yeah at what point does i change my mind qualify for insanity you didn't change your mind this is what drives me crazy i'll give you this bill wilson excuse me william james uh one of my favorite authors he's a tough reading i gotta tell you but beautiful one of bill wilсон's favorite authors in there he says your bottom is at the point of which you can no longer tolerate the misery which means guys you wake up one day and you're tired of this relapse stuff you can stop you don't have to go to jail or rob a liquor store i'm gonna say it I said it the other day, talking to some people. I got a guy right here that's got nothing going on except he's drinking too much. I got this guy over here and he's got a bunch of legal problems and he has a liver that is fixing to come out of his side and he is in all kinds of trouble and his wife is leaving him and he gets fired. Which one of these guys is going to get sober? Everybody goes, well, the guy that has all the bad shit happening to him. Wrong. Right? It's the guy that gets off their butt and actually does this work. If I could remember the consequences of a week or a month ago, I would stop. Look on page 24. It's only page, other page real quick. Bill Wilson's pretty good. This is the secret handshake. When I'm sponsoring somebody, we're talking about the steps and stuff and I'll always end up like, Hey buddy, let me look at your book real quick and I'm going to look over there because they just got out of trademark or whatever. And I'm gonna look over and if they don't have this little italicized page marked i'm gonna i'm going to eat them we're going to have a conversation that means i'm going to talk and they're going listen guys if there's one paragraph in the book that that i would take any newcomer to it's this paragraph right here so you guys get busy mark it top of page 24 italicized writing bill wilson and those squiggly lines y'all know the fact is most alcoholics bill's trying to be very diplomatic it's all alcoholics for reasons yet obscure have lost the power of choice in drink our so-called willpower becomes practically non-existent we were unable at certain times to bring into our consciousness with sufficient force and memory and suffering of humiliation that even a week or a month ago we are without defense against the first drink y'all get it i mean i got people all the time i hear maybe i got up this morning and chose not to drink did you how cool for you oh bless your heart that's what we say in texas when We want to say something else. Y'all, I did not. I've recovered. The obsession's gone. I didn't have to make a choice whether I'm going to drink or not. When the obsession comes back, you're going to use. That's the insanity of alcoholism. Guys, everybody's waiting for it to get bad enough for you to come up and say, God dang, I didn'T know. I'll stop. But you can't remember the consequences of a week or a month ago. And Bill Wilson is pretty absolutely clear on that. I got to tell you one real quick story out of experience, guys. I was treating this nice lady from town. We were at the place and I went there visiting with a little room full of them talking about some of this work. And I watched this lady and she'd struggled in AA before. But anyway, she had gotten in trouble with the law. She picked up a couple of her little kids at a school function and she's been drinking and she got nasty with them. and the cops got called, and the Child Protective Service got the kids. And it was just – it was nasty. Anyway, this little lady came to treatment, and she was a sweetheart. She comes up after treatment – excuse me, after we were talking about this, and she's got Polaroid pictures of her little kids, and she throws them in my face, and he says, you see these pictures? These are my little kids. I said, I know. I met them before. They're cute as could be, you know, as far as little kids go. And I don't have any little kids I don' t know. They're old people. But when she said, he said, you need to understand I'm going to put these pictures on my refrigerator and I'm gonna look at these faces every time I go in that kitchen and I've never going to touch another drop because if I drink again, I can lose these baby. And I said yes man you go for it. But in the meantime, you might want to look at the work to maybe the 12th. Anyway, she leaves and a week and a half later she drinks. she couldn't remember the consequences of even a week or a month ago the thought crossed her mind to drink she thought she could drink a couple the craving kicked in she they took her kids again she got them back y'all follow this time she was sitting on the front row of the aa meeting with a big book open and a highlighter in her hand ready to do some work you know she was she was convinced everybody out there thinks that they could quit i'm on liver transplant list god dang it if i drink they're gonna i'm gonna die everybody in this gathering is going to die or go to jail if we keep drinking but nobody believes they're really going to do that that's why i'm saying it's a waste of time to try to scare anybody into recovery show them the symptoms physical craving control mental obsession now follow is is that is that that mental blank spot that the book talks about that tells us that we're gonna yeah that we'll we're gonna we're going to drink if we drink we're gonna die if we drank again it's it's mind-blowing how many people you talk to that flat don't understand that you need to understand the most insane you thing you ever did was not why you were drunk and some of y'all did some insane things the most insane thing you never did was cold stone sober you picked up a drink again after spending all that money for treatment or after all that legal stuff and you picked it up anyway and your families don't understand it it's tough enough to get alcoholics to understand it I guarantee you, your families don't know what you're talking about I get people call me all the time talking about their daughter what is she crazy? yes hold that thought yes the book says around that we are strangely insane when they started showing me this guys, I got to tell you I got the, there's some hope in me because I finally realized what was wrong with me. I asked the old guy, I said, buddy, when you get sober, will that obsession come back? I said but if you're doing the work and things you're supposed to be doing, that obsession will go. I haven't thought about taking a drink in 35 years folks. And there were seven years in AA where I didn't ever stop thinking about it. Real quick, I want to mention this guys. I can stop drinking for short periods of time. And I want all of y'all to hear that because I don't want to paint this picture that every time I drank, I blacked out and robbed liquor stores because I didn't. So sometimes I could drink a little bit and get away with it. But as the illness progressed, it was less and less likely to happen. But I've quit a thousand times. But what takes me back a lot of times, folks, is this internal discomfort. And it's not always the mental obsession. It's this internal discomfort Bill Wilson talks about. When I do two and three in a little bit, we're going to talk specifically about those bedevilments, this internal discomfort that comes back to us when we stop drinking. Those old timers that drive me crazy sometimes just don't drink. Okay. But you see, if you're a real alcoholic and you just don'T drink, you'RE not going to get better. You'RE going to GET WORSE. Pretend this is alcohol, guys. when I set this down, this is the solution. Remember I was telling you about that story about me drinking at 17 years old and I was just a little skinny, just uncomfortable in my skin kid. And I drank that bottle of Boone's Farm Apple Wine and all of a sudden started feeling okay. I wasn't drunk. I'm going to kick the world in the butt. I was juste comfortable in my skin for the first time ever. Alcohol is not the problem. Alcoholism is the problem. Come on, stay with it 10 seconds, guys. Alcohol's not the problem. It's the solution. You take alcohol away from a real alcoholic, we don't get better. We get worse. That's why detox centers crank out 100% failures we can get you past the detox we can get you pass the physical piece but when this internal discomfort that irritable restless discontent now the book talks about the low self-esteem the feeling of uselessness that that boredom the anxiety starts to come back i've done it a thousand times friends so have you i'll put the plug in the jug and i'll be going to some meetings about two weeks in i'm a two-week wonder guys i can stop for two weeks bro I've stopped for two weeks just to piss somebody off. I can stop for two weeks for an ugly woman. You know, I can do that. I can't stay stopped. The further away I get, all of a sudden that internal stuff. Two weeks sober, I'm not working the steps. I'm driving around traffic in Dallas flipping people off, cutting people off. Y'all understand? Mad at the world. Yelling at the radio station. I'm just a mess. pull into a 7-Eleven walk into that I've done this a thousand times 7-11 walk into that store go back to the cooler won't get me a Dr. Pepper something got to knock the edge off here and I grab a Dr Pepper and I hear this little voice in my head you could probably drink one beer no man uh-uh that's how it always starts No, no. What are you, a wussy? Open the cooler, put the beer back. Let's get Dr. Pepper back. Open the other cooler, grab a beer. Stand there for a few minutes. Put the beer back. Open the other cooler. Grab a quart. If it's going to be a beer, it's going to be a big beer. High five. I grab that big walk up to the front. I'm fixing to pay for it. Guys, some of y'all have heard me talk about this before. I'm sitting there looking at that line up there in the front, and there's like 15 people standing in line. There's one little cashier up there working his butt off, and there'S a little old lady, and she's come in and she'S bought a stack of scratch-off tickets about four feet tall, and sheS standing up there at the counter. She bought the tickets. Now she'S going to stand there atthe counter, and she' S little old Lady. She'S goingto scratch off them tickets. Y'all follow? 15 people in line and i'm sitting back there with a quart of beer haven't even got it my system yet dripping on the floor and i've said they're flirting with the lady oh baby you go lady god dang save me son man i hope i get me one of them scratch off ticket y'all follow everything's just fine haven't Even got it in my system all the irritable restless and discontent is just gone if i'd have got a dr pepper in my hand i'd had to walk up there and whip that lady that's it that's all there is to it 15 people hey some of us have got to go to work what are you doing? Alcohol is my solution. That's why so many of us fight tooth and nail. The last thing we want to do is come to AA when we're going to have to stop doing it, but we don't realize that we're getting worse when we stop drinking. That is why the steps are so important. That is why Bill Wilson never could stay sober. He could get detoxed, but he couldn't stay that way. The unmanageability on page 52 that they talk about, guys, is absolutely true. This book, when it's talking about the unmanagability, is not talking about my external world. It's talking to me. It's not talking to you. It talks to you about what's going on internally. That's the stuff. It doesn't matter how much money you got in the bank or what kind of trophy wife you got or whatever. It does make any difference. I am not a happy pampered when I don't have alcohol in my system. you look on the bottom page 64 real quick for those that think this is two-part i just wanted to show you real quick so you won't send me a nasty email later bottom of page 20 uh 64 and they're talking about resentments resentment's the number one offender it destroys more alcoholics than anything else from its stem all forms of spiritual disease where we have not only been mentally and physically ill we have been spiritually sick when the spiritual malady is overcome we straighten out mentally and physically bill wilson wants to paint this picture pretty clear guys he's not offering us in the writing of the big book he's not offering a solution where every day we're going to have to hang on for dear life and i've heard people in aa present it that way every day is a struggle so it's not The book talks about cease fighting anything or anyone, including alcohol. That's what we're going for. But that is a direct result of actually working the steps. I mentioned this real quick. I've got about five minutes left with you on this one. A lot of times what I'll end up doing when I'm talking to the little newcomers, I take this in and I know Bill Wilson alludes to it specifically, though I watch so many people out there. if they lay the booze down okay what happens to a lot of us is if we're not working the steps we're going to look for something to treat that internal discomfort like i said again most alcoholics i've watched out there i can't tell you how many of them go into the doctor and tell them um i'm i'm not drinking one day at a time but i'm miserable and the doctor will give them a bonaparte you know or you know benzodiazepines for anxiety okay they're trying to help but that'll immediately trigger the craving and send them back into the you know the the alcoholism the the act of drinking but a lot of us won't go with the pills we'll go to and that's why so many people out there are smoking pot now you know well i'm not going to drink but i'm still going to smoke pot well i'M NOT GOING TO DRINK BUT I'M GOING To EAT you know food becomes a real problem for some of us that stop drinking it did for me all of a sudden you start you just eating to make yourself feel better it's like there's a cherry fried pie called tasty cake fried pie it's made in philadelphia out there by the airport and i'm when i die my ashes are going to be sprinkled on that plant uh tasty cake with a k guys you got to get one okay they are the best fried pie you'll ever get okay jesus is eating a tasty cake fired pie this morning i guarantee you OK, but there's like six hundred and eighty five calories, something like that. One tasty cake, fried pie. OK, so you can watch me as a competitive cyclist. If I'm out there eating one of those, guarantee you there's something going on inside. And I'm trying to treat that with food. Y'all just got to all be careful. I'm not saying don't eat. Pay attention to what you're doing. Watch a lot, a sea full of little guys that I sponsor who end up picking up Internet porn, internet gambling they get in there never had a problem with any of that before but now they're not drinking they're all looking to treat what's going on inside if i don't work the steps and i'm just dry i will look for something to feel to fix that you'll start skipping around and all of a sudden i've watched a lot of people that lost a lot more gambling a lotmoresex addiction a lot more you know a lotof other things caused them a lotmore problem than the drinking ever did all because it's they found something to try to treat that in terms you can't the point i'm making is you can'T live in that internal discomfort you've got to get to a place where you can get to a peace and comfort the book talks about a sense of ease and comfort that we used to get from taking a drink that's what we're looking for and that'll happen as a result of working the steps and i gotta tell you for me i hadn't finished the steps i was not even halfway through and that sense of ease and comfort started to come in. And that's some of the stuff that we're going to talk about in the next sessions that we get a chance to talk to you all about. A lot of times when I'm sitting there, the first thing I do is after I explain these symptoms to the newcomer, I'm going to ask them to turn to page 44. I'm gonna ask you to do the same thing. It's at the top paragraph on a chapter called We Agnostics. There again, that's why you need this little index because it is confusing uh i'm not an agnostic so you won't read it but these are the sum of summation questions of the of the last 40 pages in the preceding chapters you have learned something of alcoholism we hope we've made clear the distinction between the alcoholic and the non-alcoholic if when you honestly want to you find you cannot quit entirely power of choice or if when drinking you have little control over the amount you take you're probably alcoholic if that's the case if this is the case you may be suffering from an illness which only a spiritual experience will conquer one of the best paragraphs in the book y'all follow guys it's asking two questions choice and control that's how we qualify and i'm going to end with this because every time i do this i get an email from one of you that'll say i'm an alcoholic if i say i don't call it you're a member of alcoholics anonymous if you say you're an alcoholic but there's a lot of people sitting around that don't understand what this illness is that's why they're not doing the work that's Why I so grateful for the old timers in that first group that I ended up, whoever they slowed down to qualify me. Guys, with anybody y'all are sponsoring out there, the first thing we need to do is qualify. I don't need to hear about their drunk driving charges. I will need to Hear about their, their situations, their drunks, I need to hear all the sort of detail. I need To hear about the two words choice and control. That's the qualifier for first step. I'll see y'all in a little bit. Thank you so very much, Chris. Up next, please allow me to present Billy N on Tradition One. Billy, the floor is yours for the next 45 minutes. Thanks, Billy Alcoholic. Thanks Chris, good to be here. I am going to be watching my screen closely because my iPad was not charging for a while but so let's get going a couple of things I think I started off and I'll start there off as what could be more disunifying in Alcoholics Anonymous than talking about a different recovery program than we have I mean we always seem to talk about rules and a lot of other things but when you say that A.A. is something other than what it is, how disunifying is that, especially for the newcomer? I want to read the long form of Tradition 1. Each member of Alcoholics Anonymous is but a small part of a great whole. A. A. must continue to live or most of us will surely die. Hence our common welfare comes first, but individual welfare follows closely afterward. Now, I want to take that statement. AA must continue to live or most of us will surely die. So when we say things like, well, I don't care about the rest of AA because I'll always have my group. Or we don't need to do this or do that. The book is telling us that most of US will die if we don' t have AA. Like, yes, if you're overseas in a war and in a foxhole and can't get to a meeting for a year, you can stay sober. There is no doubt about it. And yes, if you are an astronaut on the space station and happen to be sober, you can say that you're not sober. You can stay silver. But that doesn't mean it's the preferred method. That's like saying if you got shot, you want somebody to take you to a dentist. I mean, I think if you get shot, you want someone to take you to a trauma center. And it's so important that we keep AA, AA. Now, there are a lot of paradoxes in here and I want to talk about a few of them. I have my notes for Tradition One. But the first is individual freedom because people love that line in Tradition one. But before we get to it, I just want to read the first line. The unity of Alcoholics Anonymous is the most cherished quality our society has. And then a paragraph down, it says this. Does this mean some will anxiously ask that in AA the individual doesn't count for much? Is he to be dominated by his group and swallowed up in it? We may certainly answer this question with a loud no we believe there isn't a fellowship on earth which lavishes more devoted care upon its individual members surely there is none much more jealously guards the individual's right to think talk and act as he wishes now especially in this era of zoom when we have a lot of people out there who are creating their own fellowship and creating theirownrulesandtheirownguidelines and their own interpretations there's a lot I'm going to talk about especially in relation to traditions 4, 6 and 10 regarding individual freedom unity is for sure most important no doubt about it and your individual freedom is important there's no doubt about that this is where we come into contact with the difference between rules and traditions, and then specifically traditions and customs. We don't have rules. We have traditions. I don't even like the saying little t tradition because I can't. What does that mean? Sounds just like a custom. We have 12 traditions. that means some of our groups might tell you how you have to dress to speak but that's a custom if you as an individual don't like dressing that way you don't have to at all now thank god this is aa and the ego usually overrides uh everything else so even though you get asked to speak and even though they don't want to tell you what to do like to tell you how to dress and even though you don't like that my experience is most people usually speak anyway their their ego will have them caved but this if you have um i'm going to talk about a couple things in the group pamphlet but i can't stress enough especially since we haven't talked about the traditions at all yet today please read aa comes of age you don'T even have to read it all at the same time i'm not telling you to stop what you're doing for the weekend um i see where people are from i'm aware of what football games are on this weekend not telling people to drop what you do and go read okay i'm just saying for most of us that are here today i just want to give an example of what chris said if if you ran into a person a newcomer and you know there's usually two kinds of newcomers we run into there's those that have never been to aa before and the person that's been in and out a million times we know those two people very well we meet them often and so if you're talking to someone outside who's been in and out many times and in your conversation talking to them they tell you they've done everything except AA everything else they've done they have a home group but they don't want a home group they don'T have a sponsor they'VE NEVER BEEN THROUGH THE BIG BOOK THEY'VE never done an inventory BUT THEY DON'T KNOW WHY THEY CAN'T STAY SOBER I mean, that is not uncommon. And I'm guessing for a lot of us here, in a polite and compassionate way, we would share with them that if they wanted to try AA, we Would Be Glad to do AA with them. And if they would like to start at the front of the book and go through it, We Would Be glad to do that. because for most of us here, and I can't speak for everybody, for most of us, it would be hard for us to understand how AA could work for somebody if they haven't gone through the big book. And I'm not putting down the 12 and 12 here, and use the 12 and 12 as an extra piece of AA literature. It would be hard for me to understand that. It's hard for us to understand that, like, how do you do that? It's the same way with the traditions. it's kind of impossible to really embrace them without knowing where they come from and without knowing what caused them. I have my comes of age here, it's pretty beat up. But you know, the mistake that's often made is sometimes we talk about this like it's a success story. The big book is the treasure map. to the treasure. This is not a success story. This is how a bunch of people tried to destroy AA between mother's day, 1935 and right around 1946. That's what this book is. This book is all the crazy ways our fool ego has gotten our way and almost AA didn't exist anymore. And you know, for anyone that's, especially, you know the new person on fire, maybe you're not that new anymore but you're recently on fire you're on fire with all three legacies you know I run into some really good and we'll probably mention some names this weekend that will constantly come up Don P will probably be a name that Chris or I might interchange and throw that name out every once in a while but you know he said something a long time ago that really catches my attention as a lover of the big book he said while he loved the big book revolution he was very concerned about too many one legacy only aa members in the future too many members who just were set on fire with their lives being saved as a result of spiritual experience in the bigbook but never went on to grasp and understand the traditions and what i would tell you is what i tell people and i think a lot of people have some version of this that when someone asks you to take them through the book the question we have to ask them is are they willing to go to any lengths because if they're not why waste your time now if you knew don you know what any lens meant for those poor people that lived in denver it meant going to his house at like six in the morning you know his home group met at 6 a.m but any lens to me today means that you agree to go through the traditions after we're done going through the big book because what happens when you take someone through the big book we all know what happens you send some lunatic out into the aa wild who is now so entrenched with the big book that they can't help but tell everybody else everything they know about aa and maybe even tell those people that they go to aa light and if they really wanted real aa they would go to their home group we've all been through that kind of charismatic stage of membership it happens to a lot of us not everybody but a lot of us i don't want to send someone unarmed out there without the facts i don'T WANT SOMEBODY GOING THROUGH THE BIG BOOK AND THEN GOING OUT THERE WITH NO KNOWLEDGE OR EXPERIENCE WITH THE TRADITIONS AND YOU KNOW I RUN INTO SOME REALLY GOOD MEMBERS WHO WILL TELL ME there's no need for the traditions and the only thing I can tell you that I've come up with to ask them is a question that I need to ask myself and maybe their answer is different but the question is as follows if AA didn't exist the last time I got sober this time would my life still be where it is today if there was no AA? The last time I returned to AA to have day one, if there was no such thing as Alcoholics Anonymous, do I believe that I would have found another way to have a spiritual experience to get in touch with the higher power and my life would be like it is today? For me, that answer is very simple. it's an overwhelming no I don't know if I'd still be alive but my life definitely wouldn't be like it is now and that's what tradition one has given us you know sometimes we get our view of AA the longer we stay here sometimes I say it's described best as too many years and not enough days we forget what it's like when you come to AA what it is what it looks like to be new why is unity so important why is it so important that this thing called Alcoholics Anonymous exists forever because what we see if we are out in a parking lot or in a meeting room we see somebody walk in we might be able to tell they're new there are signs of that but for the most part we see somebody walk in but that's a one-dimensional look at the newcomer to Alcoholics Anonymous what we're really witnessing I know there's some people my age and older here and they probably grew up watching a show called mash because what we're really witnessing is a helicopter with a red cross on the side of it landing in that church parking lot or that clubhouse parking lot or synagogue parking lot or community center parking lot with a stretcher on the site of it with two people carrying that person who is dying into your meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. That's who gets delivered to us. Every newcomer we meet, there might as well be a doctor behind them with two paddles in their hands getting ready to start their heart at a moment's notice. They might not appear that dead or close to death, but they are. That's how fatal alcoholism is. And so it is our unity that has allowed us to be here now one of the things in the traditions illustrated um the traditions illustrated my current version does not have page numbers but it's the second page in the first section of tradition one you know it talks about each of the other 11 traditions explains one specific way to protect the unity of the fellowship and the aa group so in other words we might be able to say we have one tradition unity the other 11 are a way to keep it and maintain it and not let it get destroyed also while i'm here um you know it says this we owe to a's future to keep our common to place our common welfare first to keep our fellowship united for an a unity depends our lives and the lives of those to come once you're on this side of god's window you've been blessed i know we love to say in meetings don't quit before the miracle well my point of view if you're sitting there with one day of sobriety or more uh don't quit after the miracle something miraculous has happened to you people like us are not supposed to have a day sober do not quit after that miracle but that's what we owe to the newcomer that's why unity is so important If you have an AA group pamphlet in front of you, if you go to page 10, it says the AA group, the final voice of the fellowship. And one, two, three paragraphs down, it's as the entire structure of AA depends upon the participation and conscience of the individual groups and how each of these groups conducts its affairs has a ripple effect on AA everywhere. Thus, we are individually conscious of our responsibility for our own sobriety and as a group for carrying the AA message to the suffering alcoholic who reaches out to us for help. Not carrying some other message. Carrying the AA messages is our individual responsibility. Um, also in the AA group pamphlet, if you go to page 40, it says more questions and answers about AA. What are the three legacies of AA? Recovery, unity, and service. These are derived from the accumulated experience of AA's earliest members that has been passed on and shared with us. The suggestion for recovery are the 12 steps. The suggestions for achieving unity are the 12 traditions and AA service is described in the AA service manual, 12 concepts, world service and Alcoholics Anonymous comes of age. AA is a strange organization. I think we can all admit that you can't be thrown out of AA. I don't know of any other organization you can be thrown at us except for other 12 step programs. You cannot be thrown Out of AA now. Now, how does that affect unity? They can throw you out of a meeting all they want. All they want, you know why? Because their sobriety is more important than you being an idiot. You don't get to disrupt meetings. You don'T get to maybe do things. I know we're very into safety these days And we have the yellow safety card and we have The safety piece, but truthfully The original safety program of Alcoholics Anonymous Is our 12 traditions If you're interfering with newcomers If you are preying on people And I know the kind of Predatory behavior we tend to talk about is sexual There's all kinds out there there's financial there's people who use AA as a place to find employees to pay people who are down on their luck less money than they should get paid to take advantage of them there's all kinds of things that go on and none of that goes along with AA unity if your group has those things going on and you take actions to take care of them including removing someone from your group or meeting that's perfectly in line with tradition one as long as it's a group conscience the unity of alcoholics anonymous is affected you know some people say billy why are you so why do you believe aa literature only believe belongs in meetings well for me it's because sometimes when we talk about traditions and other things we always think we're talking to someone with a couple of years who understands who has basic AA knowledge a lot of times that's not true we spend a lot of time blaming the outside world for AA's problems and really I'll tell you if you don't like something a newcomer says in a meeting i will tell you my experience is more often than not they did not hear it in the treatment center they heard it in another aa meeting and it sounded good and people laughed and so they thought oh i'm gonna put this in my pocket i'm going to put this in like note that i put in the back of my head of things that are witty to say in meetings yeah when we do anything that affects a newcomer's view of Alcoholics Anonymous we affect the unity of AA as a whole and sponsorship is very involved here about our AA unity I love that we're talking about the steps and traditions together because sometimes I think the biggest problem is that they're talked about separately so many times your job as a sponsor, if you embrace AA unity, is to help newcomers understand what AA is and what AA isn't. Do you know what I mean? Newcomers don't know what AA ist and what AAA isn't, and for most of us who've been around here a while, it's kind of more important to let them know what we don't do rather than what we do because there's so many bad examples of what we don't do and it affects our unity having a home group that's connected is super important having a GSR having an intergroup rep because what else affects our unity well Well, people that just talk trash but are not willing to be involved in the solution. The last couple of years, there's been a lot of decisions made by the General Service Conference that some of our fellowship has not been happy with. It's amazing to me how many people I talk to. by the way i'm going to just give you a little something that i've learned the question when talking to somebody like that is not does your group have a gsr because aas love angles and love loopholes and it's easy for them to say of course now the question to ask them is who is your gsR right now my experience is that most people who complain to me about these things they cannot tell me who the GSR of their group is but if you're not attending your business meetings and you don't know who your GSR is and your GSAR is in name only and not attending district meetings and not attending assemblies and if you are not giving them time to report back and tell you what's going on how is that contributing to the unity of alcoholics anonymous it's just not and the other thing is the group conscience and i know listen i'll just turn one page right i could cheat the ultimate authority as he may express himself in our group conscience but how much a tradition two is such an important part of tradition one If I don't accept the group conscience, am I then not really a supporter of AA unity? And by the way, there's a double-edged sword here. I'm going to give you a little example. So I'm at a retreat. There's a lot of very active AA members there. I'm up on the podium well, I'm on the dais to speak the chairperson is at the podium the chair person says and so-and-so is going to read the preamble so-in-so read the preample when he started he said, Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of people at that time like 50 people screamed out loud men and women okay because they don't like the group conscience they don'T LIKE THE CURRENT AA GROUP CONSCIENCE TO CHANGE THE PREAMBLE I CAN RESPECT THEM DISAGREEING BUT HERE'S THE PROBLEM WITH WHAT THEY'RE DOING BY THEM SAYING THAT THEY GET TO CHANCE THE LITERATURE THEY'RE GIVING ANYONE ELSE permission to change the literature? What right do they have to complain if somebody else changes something else in the literature. They only have the power to change the literature those 50 people that's especially appointed a you know purification committee that gets to decide what we like and don't like because I'm going to tell you those same people if they went to their home group two weeks later and someone changed how it works, they're not going to like that. That's why it is so important. And for literature with newcomers in AA unity, I don't want a newcomer to be confused about what's AA's message and what's not. And I know that I, listen, I came into my first AA meeting in 1981 as a teenager. I know that daily reflections has not been around a long time. I know that some groups use the 24-hour-a-day book forever. I'm not debating that. I'm NOT arguing it. In any group that I'm part of, my vote is to always use of daily reflections, but I'm not saying or putting down groups that do that. But when we start reading other literature and AA meetings, what's the slippery slope? Who then decides what's in and what's out? Now you can go to my coffee table or my night table. I have tons of books that I love. I do. tons of books about spirituality even books about alcoholism that are not AA but that's in my personal private life at an AA meeting I don't want a newcomer leaving thinking oh they used that book in AA oh that book is AA I was even talking to someone recently and it reminded me how much why i have respect for the podium so i can't say a certain word but um there are some parts of the country that have meetings called ftl meetings obviously i can'T tell you what the f stands for the t and the l stand for the lamination so it's ftl the lamination and what that means is those groups don't want newcomers to think that the promises are just on a piece of white paper that somebody reads at a meeting instead of knowing that they're the nine-step promises in the big book and reading them out of the big books they don't wants people thinking that how it works is just something that gets, you know, copied and thrown in the literature cabinet and handed out to someone to read. How much better is it for the newcomer to see how it works read out of an actual big book so the newcomor knows where it's coming from? I'm even one to say that there's some really good books that have been written about recovery from alcoholism. But AA doesn't endorse any of them and our unity we need tradition six to keep our unity together that we're not endorsing any of those books and a lot of the current books just my experience because i read a lot they don't believe in the stuff that chris just said they don'T believe in THE DOCTOR'S OPINION hold on while i switch can you hear me now you guys can hear me good they don't believe in the doctor's opinion they don'T believe in certain things that'S why we need our literature to keep our unity um inside if you do have a traditions illustrated um i love this first little like bubble our individuals to sobriety depends on the group the group depends on us we soon learn that unless we curb our individual desires and ambitions we can damage the group yes we all have ambitions and desires um we have to put them aside the group has to come first it has to um the last thing i want to talk about is the minority opinion which sometimes doesn't get talked about regarding unity but if you read our history unity is the whole reason for the minority opinion the whole reason the minority opinion isn't just so i'm just going to use myself as an example that i can tell everybody else they're wrong and they can applaud and tell me how right i am the minority opinio n isn't uh there it's not there you know we talk about it like it's this magic thing that someone's going to give this eloquent speech and everyone's going to vote a different way. That rarely happens, maybe one or two percent of the time. The minority opinion is there for unity. It is there to show the person, even if the vote is 20 to 1, the minority opinion is there to show that one person that unity is so important to us that we want to hear what you have to say we don't need to have the last word that's what the minority opinion is about that's why I'm here that's when Bill W. wanted everyone to understand yes, we talk about tyranny of the majority and tyranny of the minority and that stuff is all good and I've seen the minority opinion change but what we don't want is people leaving like what they have to say is not important or believing that just because they think different it's not important and sometimes that's a hard lesson to learn regarding unity the preamble is a perfect example I don't think we need to point fingers that you're wrong. You want to destroy AA or you're wrong. You're stuck in the 1920s and thirties and you're some old dinosaur. Why do we need, why do we have to go down those roads? Why can't we just embrace that God spoke through the group conscience and unity is more important and yes maybe it's one of those rare things that the service manual calls a grave issue that should be appealed and we've had some famous ones and thank God but the hardest thing to accept about unity is when is not when the vote goes my way it's when the vote doesn't go my way am I going to embrace it and I'll get more into this in tradition too but unity is affected here and you know I want to talk about online a little bit I travel a lot for work a lot I get up early I don't like to but I've just been trained to by my occupation. I tend to go to a lot of morning meetings. I can't believe looking at the meeting guide app and looking at local meeting directories, especially meetings between 7 and 8 a.m. in most places where there used to be one group, there is now two. Sometimes they have the same name. It's the in-person version and the online version that was created during the pandemic. And I wonder, I'm a big proponent of technology, but I wonder how good is that for our unity? And this is my own experience. I've met plenty of newcomers who got sober online during the epidemic, and that is awesome. I just saw one celebrate the other day, one year sobriety. It's awesome. but for the most part, most of the meetings I go to, the online version has more of the members with time than new right now in this day and age post pandemic. And I wonder have all these duplication of meetings really helped our unity or have they whittled it down a little bit? And those are individual group decisions to be made, But I think it's kind of telling when every morning group, it seems, everywhere around is now split in two. They have not backed together as the one group that they were. I also want to talk about meeting format. Having a good meeting format is good for AA unity. Having guidelines for your group or bylaws is really good for AAA unity. that way everybody knows the group decided these things not me not you not the person who's been here for 50 years so that's it that's all i have have a great day thank you very much billy we will now be taking a lunch break and meeting back here in one hour