Surrender and Compliance – Bb Workshop – Part 4 of 10 – Local AA Speakers

Good morning everybody. Chris, alcoholic. It's absolutely great to be here. This is a this is really a fun weekend for me. I'm hearing a lot of wonderful stuff. You know you'll you'll hear that thing and you know it'll shift your perspective a little bit on on something in recovery and it's you know I'm having a great experience. My topic this morning is surrender and compliance. I want to talk for a second about a book. I don't know if anyone has heard of this book, it's kind of obscure, but I think it's very, very important for us to understand the concept, the basic concept in this book. The book is by Abraham Maslow, and the book was Religion, Value, and Peak Experiences. I don't even think it's in print anymore, but I want to talk just a little bit about the premise or the topic of this book, Maslow studied a lot of the religions, a lot the philosophical traditions, a lot movements that have come up, and he found out that there was a lot of things in common usually these religious movements were started by a mystic someone really really in touch with uh spirituality and god consciousness i mean they were awakened enlightened masters and a lot people would hover around them and this is happening today even with with some of the spiritual masters people would wrap around them And as time went on, succeeding generations of people would try to keep this really spiritual atmosphere and movement going. But over the course of succeeding generations, what would happen is they would get further and further away from that core spiritual experience that the whole thing was built on. and it would become watered down over succeeding generations. And this is common in religious traditions, it's common in a lot of the spirituality. We seem to move on to other things. Other things become more important than the core spiritual transformation, the fundamental premise that these things were built on. Now, I came into Alcoholics Anonymous in early 89. I finally ended up getting sober in December 89. I was going to meetings fanatically. You have to understand that my last drunk really consisted of me threatening my family in a multi-day blackout. I threatened the lives of my family and I found this out, you know, when I came out of the blackout and started to wonder where everybody was. Now, you have to understand, I suffered from guilt, shame, remorse, you know, all that's like it was on me like a wet blanket. I couldn't believe how awful I had acted. I never wanted to act awful. you want to talk about Jekyll and Hyde that's what I was when I drank I'd be hey that's great I have a cup of drinks I'm going to kill you you said something to me I mean I was just insane and I never wanted to be like that and I would be horrified when people would tell me about it the next day so the act of, you know, threatening to kill my family, I understood how easy it would be for me in a blackout to actually do something like that. You know, prisons are, there's a whole population in the prisons of people who do not remember the act that caused them to be put in prison. They don't remember it. It's like if you knew what the percentage was, you'd be really surprised. you know it's high so that got my attention and for a long period of time we can run on determination you know i am determined to to to do something about this this is horrible so i came in and i became um i became the aa guy i mean to the best of my ability I was going to quite possibly, you know, anywhere from 7 to 13 meetings a week. I was meeting with my sponsor and if he told me to do something even if I thought it was stupid and it wouldn't work for me because I have a unique, you now, type of situation, I would do it because I had a desperation. I did not want to kill my family. I didn't want to feel really horrible every single morning. You know, I couldn't possibly face the future with this type of drinking in it. Do you know there's a really high statistic in alcoholism that the alcoholic is many times, I think it's 60 times more likely to take their own life than a non-alcoholic in suicide that's an important statistic so many of us get to that place of pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization we just don't know where to go there's nowhere to go and we can't live like this anymore and we check out so I was very close to that point and I probably would have done it if it wasn't for my daughter My daughter was about six or eight years old when I was struggling my way sober. And I just couldn't go out in that kind of disgrace. I couldn't leave that kindof legacy behind. You know, and that was another motivation for me struggling into Alcoholics Anonymous. Now, I had an unbelievable desire to not drink. I mean, and it showed in my actions. It really, really did show in my action. my meeting attendance was priority. I remember going up to my boss and saying, like, you know, I'm not recommending this if you're new or coming back. But I went up to our boss and I basically said, look, if you have overtime and it's mandatory and it gets in the way of my meetings, you might as well terminate me now because my meetings come before you. Okay? I'm never going to do that. I'm just not recommending you do that, but I did it. That's how desperate I was. You know, that's what kind of a priority Alcoholics Anonymous was for me. You know so often Alcoholics Anonymous is our 12th priority. You know Susie has a piano lesson. I'm just going to have to meet home group. And we don't think that through. We don't thing that through. Sometimes what we need to do is die an alcoholic death get Susie to the piano practice or live along spiritual lines. We don' t think about it clearly like that we just think suzy needs to get to her piano lesson you know anyway here i am i'm going to an absolute ton of meetings i'm working with a sponsor and when people are saying you know would you help us out here at aa i was saying yes saying yes would you be the coffee maker yeah you know i burn the coffee you know make like espresso you know it's the nine o'clock meeting on Tuesday by accident. I mean, you know, cause I couldn't deal, but I do it. And, uh, and I was the, I was the secretary at this meeting and, you Know, I went back to the treatment center I was in and I would take, you Now I pick people up in my car and drive them to the meeting, you know real proud that i'm drunk you know and i really really thought that i was doing aa i really did and so did most everybody else that i Was with because i was getting padded on the head chris man you're doing great you're Doing great and there's a there's an answer i Would give everybody when they ask me how are you doing i'd say great great you know everything's going wonderful. Fine, I'm fine. How are you? If I were to be rigorously honest, I would have to say something like this while I'm restless, irritable, discontent, I've got these shame issues, depression, I really want to kill people, I am constantly thinking about suicide. And, you know, how are you? Because, you know, I was trying to treat alcoholism with activity. There's a difference between activity and action. There is a big difference between activity and action. Now, how did I, you know, get exposed to a recovery process. And, you know, I want to tell you, like almost anybody, I was very resistant to this because what happens when somebody throws a bit of truth at you or lets you know that there's work that needs to be done that you're not doing, what happens is the ego throws up a defense because the ego cannot be made small you know and it's a wall that goes up like well and there is resistance to this kind of a truth and this is how it happened with me I had a friend Radio Shack Mike who I was nicknaming everybody just because I was so untreated there was bummed out Bob and Radio Shck Mike all these people they are still called that today You've got to be very, very careful how you kid. But anyway, he had given me some tapes. And he was a guy who would go to a lot of the bookstores, the New Age bookstoles and the spiritual places, and he'd get the catalogs. And he wasn't involved in anything and everything about how to quite possibly heal, because as many of us, he was very, really damaged individual. And he gave me, the first set of tapes he gave me were affirmation tapes. And you have to understand that I had just walked away from an unbelievable wreckage of life from alcoholism. I'm like seven months screaming spin dry cycle sober. You know? Just nuts. And how are you doing? Oh boy! Well here here you go here's some tapes and listen I'm willing to explore because of the desperation normally I have preconceived notions about everything I already know you know I mean when I was drinking I'd be at the bar and if there was a brain surgeon there I'd go so what kind of scalpel do you use you know what do you use that for I mean I knew everything and even if I knew nothing about it I really had great opinions on it all anyway he gives me these tapes and what you're supposed to do is you're suppose to go and you're suposed to play them and they give you instructions to say go to the mirror and 50 times or until you believe it say Chris you're a wonderful guy so I'm like Chris you're wonderful guy Chris you're one of a kind Chris you're right I am not I'm a scumbag you know I mean and so I threw the tapes out the window and, you know, didn't even give them back to him. I recognize, you recognize so much in hindsight. I mean, until you have a recovery experience, you don't know anything really because you have to learn, you have view everything in hindsight practically with this experience because it's an experience, it's not a theory. And I look back on it and I see that trying to treat alcoholism, untreated alcoholism with affirmations you know you got the wrong tool you know you're trying to stop a semi with a cobweb you know what I mean if you're trying to do that and um and and so many times we we uh we give uh we give people cobwebs to stop their semi but um so about a month later he gives me another set of tapes and these are a set of tapes by there's there's some examples of them back there on the table. These are a couple of guys from Arkansas who were doing a big book study. Now, in and around 1978, a couple of guys named Joe and Charlie basically started the big book renaissance that is really sweeping not only the country but the world today. And I want to get back to this in a minute, But here's my experience with those tapes. Remember I talked about the ego throwing up the defense? I listened to them, and the basic message I got was that I was wrong. Everything I had been doing was wrong, now that's not what they were saying, but here's how I took it, here's the message I get, Chris, you know, you're the fellowship pope, But you have no program. You know, if you're not working a program of action out of the book Alcoholics Anonymous, you don't have an AA program because that is exactly what an AA problem is. So when you go back out, please don't tell anybody that AA didn't work for you because you were fellowshipping. You know, there's the circle and the triangle. Meeting, step, service. Unity, recovery, fellowship. Chris, you're fellowshipping like crazy, but you're on a one-legged stool. You're going to fall on your butt. And this is the message that I got. Now, this made me wrong. Everybody was telling me I was doing really great in AA and everything. So, you know, first thing I do is I resent everybody from Arkansas. You know what I mean? And I take the tapes and I throw them away. That's not how we do it in New Jersey. Now, here's the thing, though. The truths that they talked about in these tapes haunted me because I'm really alcoholic. And they talked to me about my condition. They talked about my conditions. And they brought up the sections of the big book that spoke directly to me. and then they talked about what I really need to do to experience recovery and you know, I was mad about it but I had to internalize those truths I had come to terms with them and some things happened in my life the perfect storm, that's a beautiful way to put it you know I had met Mrs. Wright in AA, God's will for me and that went down like the Hindenburg in Lakewood you know there were some problems with my daughter there were problems at work and all these things just rolled in on me and you know with my complete lack of dealage I was shot I ended up showing up over my sponsor's house and this is what I did I knocked on the door and he came to the door and I went i couldn't even talk and uh and he and he brings me he brings me in the house he sits me down he gives me he gives me some suggestions you know the suggestions that we've been taught for 40 years around here to give people you know pray get to a meeting help another alcoholic and and i and i to the best of my ability i would do those things but what happened was the emotional pain this was another level of pain for me This was, anybody in here have a sober bottom? I mean, you know what I'm talking about? Where you're just in the barrel and you have three choices. Kill yourself, drink, or get some real serious help that's actually going to work. You know, those are your three choices, so I had these tapes that I had thrown in the corner really resentfully, and I brought them back out, and said, I'm going to give this a shot. I'm going to give this a shot I didn't know whether I probably thought it wouldn't work more than I thought it would work but I started listening to the tapes, I opened up the big book that I had been given in rehab that I'd never opened and the only thing I would look at is the inscriptions from the other rehab people you know they sign your big book in rehab and it would say like, Chris you're the craziest bastard I ever saw, you're never going to make it love Harry, you know I mean that's what was in my book so So I open up the book and I start doing this. And, you know, when it got to an instruction, these tapes said when it gets to an instruction, do the instruction, stop. You know, read it like it's the Da Vinci Code. Stop when there's an instruction and move forward. Now, you know, we come from a fellowship that, like maslow says has grown so far away from the original transformational experience and this happens this isn't just a it happens with every single spiritual fellowship every single religious tradition it happens it's normal what's what happened was when alcoholics anonymous was started because of bill wilson's mystical experience and his his idea that i can carry this mystical experience, the spiritual condition to other alcoholics, what happened was back then Alcoholics Anonymous was a program with a support fellowship. In other words, it was all about getting people in touch with recovery through the practice of the steps. Now when the book was written they basically laid out the steps, prior to that what they were, were they were processes that the Oxford group had found very, very beneficial. There were a lot of alcoholics recovering prior to the book Alcoholics Anonymous or AA being formed. There was the Oxford Group. There was Emmanuel Movement. There was The Jacoby Club. Earlier than that, there was the Washingtonians. And what they all had in common was basically a type of spiritual transformation. you know, of spiritual rebirth. It was more on the religious plane until Alcoholics Anonymous than the spiritual. But these concepts had been around a long time. Now what happened was a program with a support fellowship slowly over succeeding generations became a fellowship with a sport program. And somewhere along the line it became absolutely okay to go into an AA meetings, sit in the back and not be held accountable for working a recovery program. You know, not be helped accountable. In the first 10 or 15 years of AA, if you came in and you weren't willing to work the steps, they'd say, don't let the door hit you in the ass. I mean, you know, you're not willing to recover from alcoholism. You have no business here and we we we open the door so wide over succeeding generations that we'll we'll let anyone in who has a desire to stop drinking and there's a huge difference between a desire to stop drink and a willingness to recover now there's two different kinds of knowledge I believe there's intellectual knowledge and there's experiential knowledge now what's tricky about this is sometimes we have to have faith in certain people that they're telling the truth because if we don't have experience with it we don'T really know whether it's going to work for us or not I'll give you for instance the the Joe and Charlie tapes I had to somehow on some level just have some kind of belief that they maybe knew more than me, and what they're talking about may work for me. Now without actual experience in recovery, that's the best I could do, just thinking that maybe this is going to work. Now the difference between experiential knowledge and intellectual knowledge. I had a lot of intellectual knowledge my first year and a half in AA. Because I went to so many meetings, I went to four 12-in-12 meetings a week. And that means I probably would have gone through the 12-In-12 a couple of hundred times in a year and a half. So you go through the 12-IN-12 a couple hundred times, you're going to give good share. You know what I mean? You're going to share like a fool. this all came from The intellectual knowledge I got from sitting in 12-in-12 meetings, okay? Now, experiential knowledge is different. I'll do it very, very simply with kind of an example here. All right, your plumbing has just like exploded in your house. It's totally, totally screwed up. And you have a brother who's going to Votek for plumbing. He's taken all the courses, he's in the classroom every day learning about plumbing for like two or three years. But your other brother is actually a plumber. Every single day he goes around and he's actually fixing plumbing. Who would you call to fix the pipes at your house? Somebody that has the intellectual knowledge, can write out all the diagrams or everything? Or would you get somebody who actually does the work? Well, the same thing is true in Alcoholics Anonymous. Now, you know, there's a lot of things that people don't like to hear. The ego jumps up. There's a Lot of Resistance. But in the statement in Step 12, having had a spiritual experience as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other alcoholics. Now, if you haven't had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, you can't carry that message to anybody. What you can do is you can send them to the 12 and 12 meetings or you can talk about it, but you canít carry an experiential understanding to them. So I think itís very, very important for us to understand the difference between experiential knowledge and intellectual knowledge. I love intellectual knowledge. Anybody that's been over to my house has seen my books. I've got so many spiritual books you wouldn't believe. The Joy of Resentment, you know. I mean, I'm okay, you're a moron. I mean I've, you know, I've got them all. Every single one. My sponsor shows up at my house, this is like 1992, and I go look at my spiritual library. And he goes, Chris I see about 200 self-help books here. I go yeah! And he goes, I see no books about helping anybody else. I'm like, oh, you know, did I miss that? And then when I got to that point, selfishness and self-centeredness is the root of our troubles. I first read that in rehab. I thought, you Know, this is absolutely right for my roommate over here. You know, sometimes we just can't see that deeply. You know sometimes God is merciful and doesn't allow us to see just how awful we are. It comes like an onion, you know, you peel back a layer at a time because if you see what kind of horse's ass you are on day one, you're just like, oh, and you just kill yourself. So, you Know, God is sometimes merciful. surrender surrender in alcoholics and out ok I'll go to meetings alright I'll call my sponsor ok I will make the coffee you know that is all really really good it gets us in the door I don't know about you but I discovered recovery in the fellowship so if it wasn't for the fellowship you know I would have been doomed So don't ever, ever think that I'm knocking the fellowship. I'll tell you what, there's promises in the book that a lot of people miss. One of the promises is frequent contact with newcomers will be the highlight of your life. You know, I thought like going to the Dallas Cowboys game would be the highlight of my life. No, frequent contact with newcomer's is going to be the highlight of your life another promise that gets missed a lot is the best days of your life are ahead of you you know that's a statement of hope right there and this all this was birthed through the fellowship without the fellowship uh i would be doomed but i thought surrender was surrendering myself to the fellowship it's much deeper than that it's it's a much deeper surrender the japanese decide to bomb pearl harbor okay they just they take out all of our planes i mean It was just the day of infamy, you know, they call it. They bombed Pearl Harbor. Well, we get involved in the war and we're doing some stuff at Los Alamos and we've got great scientists. And we finally end up figuring out, you Know, because they're way on the other side of the Pacific. It's real inconvenient for us to like fight them because it just takes so much coordination. So, you Now, we come up with this thing called the atom bomb. And the decision is made, you know, I'm not going to make a moral justification of this, but the decision was made to drop the bomb, drop two bombs on Japan. Those bombs go off and all of a sudden there's a call. We surrender. And what Douglas MacArthur does is he says, we'll accept your surrender as long as it's unconditional. unconditional okay unconditional surrender you know we surrender and the hostilities stop the hostivities immediately stop and the rebuilding process begins in alcoholism you know what happens in what happens to us is we say okay okay i surrender i'm going to quit drinking and if you have a good sponsor the good sponsor is going to come up and say are you willing to go to any lengths this is an unconditional surrender and you'll you'll mouth it you'll say yes but you don't really mean it you know you know well why do I have to do this and you know what am I going to get from this and here's what you start doing you start putting conditions on your surrender now what would have happened to Japan if they would have if they were broken the conditions that we put on they're surrendered you know all hell would have broken loose again it would have been a bad move right well what happens to us in aa you know if we don't do enough of the recovery process all hell breaks loose again i mean you see them coming in all the time i just got back from my 50 detox you know you know i'm coming back again you know well Well, you know, there's a surrender that you're obviously, you either don't understand or you're not willing to do. You know, one or the other. Now, I didn't understand the level of surrender. And I didn' t understand compliance. What do I need to comply with in the early days? Because I just, you now, it was a fellowship based, again, as Maslow said, we had been six generations away from the spiritual experience itself. And there was so many other things that became important in AA besides going through the steps and having a spiritual awakening that I just misunderstood what compliance was. I didn't know what it was. And Joe and Charlie started to tell me what it Was. And I didnít want to hear that. Not that. You mean I've got to go pay back the money? I've gotta go to the man I hate and admit my wrongs? You know, pray and meditate? Am I gonna be selling flowers in the airport with a shaved head and a piggy tail? I mean, you know, what am I gonna do and what does this mean? um but i needed to get to i don't think i would have survived my alcoholism there's a scale in alcoholism um and where i get this from is the chapter to wives the four heavy drinkers alcoholics uh the examples in the doctor's opinion uh the statement that no matter how far down the scale we have gone we'll find that our experience can benefit others and there's another statement it in the book. Your ability to quit on a non-spiritual basis will depend upon the amount of control you've lost in drink. So I believe that there's a scale, and we need to find out where we are on this scale because if we're really down the scale, we needto jump into this for our survival's sake fast. You know, Charlie and Katie talked about getting people into the work fast because a lot of times we don't know where they are on the scale. We don't know how long their grace period is going to be until they get a conscious connection with God. They may be way up here and they may be the last 20 years just, you know, going to AA dances and joining the sober bowling league that that may be fine for them. And listen, there's nothing wrong with that. You know, you're not a better alcoholic because you're sicker. That doesn't make any sense. You crash eight cars. I crash 13. You know we like reverse brag but you know I'm much stupider than you you know. I should have much more status than you. The thing is is the thing is we need to know kind of where we are because it's going to make a difference in our survival. Where we are on that scale is going to mean how much we needと comply and how quickly. It's always best to just do everything that you know everything that's laid out, you know, that's the safe bet. But depending on and listen, the weird thing about alcoholism is, again, you Know, we get the war stories like crazy in the speaker meetings and the discussion meetings. Where you are on that scale of alcoholism doesn't depend on how much you drank, how long you drank or how many cars you crashed or how many times you were in jail that's that's consequences of drinking the scale is in lack of power choice and control your relationship with alcohol how dependent were you on alcohol to get through the day you know or get through events and you you need to you need to figure out you know you need To figure out in the first step what your truth is about alcoholism And that makes the surrender a little bit more reasonable and a little bit more connected to your survival. I just never could understand that, you know, whether I go to, you know, five AA meetings a week or two AA meetings, we could mean the difference in my survival. I never put it that way. I never thought that deeply about it. You know, die an alcoholic death, live along spiritual lines. And when I'm helping sponsees comply with some of these spiritual instructions, sometimes they'll be like, well, you know, I'm not willing to make that amends. Not going to do it. And I'll say, okay, meditate on this at least every single day or twice a day. make the amends die an alcoholic death there's no middle ground there's door number C meditate on that is it possible that you would die an alcoholic death or make that amends sometimes we just don't think that deeply about compliance as far as Alcoholics Anonymous is concerned um what have i what have I learned about this uh over the years uh with sponsees um over the year's i've you know i i don't i've completely lost count but i'll make a guess that i've sponsored hundreds of people and when you look at the workshops and they're coming over to my house and going through the steps many many hundreds maybe a thousand people i've helped take them through the steps. So I have some experience with moving people through the step process, getting them into service, keeping them consistent in meetings. I know a little bit about that through working with others. And here's something that I've learned. The people who complied, who did the fourth step, did the fifth step actually actually is a great word to put in front of every step folks actually became willing to make amends and actually made direct amends who actually prayed and meditated and actually tried to carry the message of the steps to other alcoholics I can't think of one of them that's not in AA today recovered working with other people and their life is is out the roof the quality of life is out there so i can't think of one of them you know there's probably some that have you know moved away or you know There's even been people who've relapsed who've you know gone through the steps started to do service you know and and but they've made it back in but they're all card-carrying members in good standing, still sober, still working with other people. Now the people who lacked compliance somewhere in this, who didn't do a fifth step or refused to do amends or would sponsor jump, you know, like as soon as I put them up against the wall they'd decide that it was an overreaction and get Chris. You know, and they'd get somebody else. uh those those people um most of them most of them are gone i'm not going to tell you that they drank i'm going to telling you that they didn't put enough into the recovery process to get enough back from aa to be able to stay they couldn't stay slowly their meetings just deteriorated slowly their spiritual condition deteriorated solely their service work deteriorated and they found other things to do and it happens slowly. It happens imperceptibly. You don't go from being happy, joyous and free to miserable and discontented in a day. It could take five years. It can take ten years. But there's a slow decline and there's just not enough for these people to stay. And I'd say probably most of them drink and the other ones probably should. Some of them. But But, like, think about that, though. Think about that. Like, rarely have we seen a person fail. Almost always we see somebody fail who doesn't. Rarely have we see a person failed that does. And it's like the least thing that we talk about in AA today is the. You know, do what? Because we don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. We don't wanna make anybody feel small by talking about, well I actually did all my amends you know I want to be humble we've grown so far away from the original mystical spiritual experience that was carried to us by Bill Wilson that we're not talking about it anymore we're now talking about how to generate the spiritual atmosphere where you can have a spiritual awakening, we'll talk about anything but But, you know, I was in a meeting many, many states away from here. And I do it when I visit different places. I like to, you now, go to some of the local meetings. It's just, I'm disciplined to go to meetings, you kno. And I go to this one meeting. And the guy, like, takes over. There's one, the leader takes over the meeting. and he wants to share about how his daughter got on the local TV show. She's like four years old and she did like a dance number. And he shares 15 minutes on this and then around the room everybody shared, well that's just great about Josephine and her dancing, you know. We're so proud of you. And they go all the way around the world and the meeting's over. Tell somebody who cares about your daughter and her Dancing Thing. I'm dying of alcohol. You know, I'm powerless over alcohol. You know what I mean? Like, oh my God! Has our primary purpose been so obscured, you know, that we're free to talk about just anything? You know? You know. I don't know. There's a very, very strong renaissance going on right now. I'll give Joe and Charlie the credit, then Joe and Mark came along, and then there's Chris R., and there's just a whole series of people that are out there on the firing line talking about this stuff. And it doesn't always make them the most popular person in the room. Sometimes they're like men crying in the wilderness and getting shot at. but there's a renaissance starting where people I guess we've gotten so far away from that spiritual mystical experience that transformational recovery experience that we're heading back toward it and there's pockets of enthusiasm there's big book groups there's workshops like this and there are people who are going to get up and say there's more There's more for you. There's more for you here. You want to really experience the joy of living, which is the theme of the 12th step. Get yourself a spiritual experience, spiritual awakening, and then carry it around to people. And you know what? Then frequent contact with newcomers is going to be the highlight of your life. And the best years of your life are going to be ahead of you. That's all I got.