Taking Everyone’s Moral Inventory but My Own Was My Version of Step 4 – GuestSpeakerDon

About This Speaker Tape

Don shares his story at the Melbourne AA Steps Weekend in 2006, tracing his alcoholism from its start at age fourteen after winning a bike race in Wagga Wagga, Australia. What began with buying his mates a beer quickly escalated — he moved from beer to spirits, was drinking methylated spirits by nineteen, and made a half-hearted suicide attempt with a shotgun in his mouth. He stopped only because he realized pulling the trigger meant having his last drink. His stepfather, a recovered alcoholic and AA member who had been treated at Hydebrae Hospital by psychiatrist Dr Sylvester Minogue, never preached to him but modeled sobriety. Don attended AA meetings to "keep an eye on" his stepfather, hiding bottles of McWilliams Cream Sherry in the geraniums outside the meeting hall.

Don's drinking led to increasingly serious consequences — he hit a twelve-year-old boy on a pushbike while drunk driving, was jailed multiple times, and was eventually told by his stepfather that he could not work at the family business if he drank. After only eight years of drinking, he entered Hydebrae Hospital as the second youngest patient ever admitted there. Dr Minogue told him plainly he was an alcoholic, but Don dismissed it, claiming he only "sounded alcoholic" because he mixed with AA people.

When Don finally put down the drink around age twenty-three, he discovered the real work was just beginning. Without alcohol as an anaesthetic, he had to face his character defects — crushing low self-esteem masked by a massive ego, a violent temper, an inability to tolerate imperfection in himself or others, and the emotional development of a fourteen-year-old. He describes walking three miles toward town at three in the morning to get drunk, only to turn around in the cold rain and come back. Gradually, through working the steps and finding a higher power on his own terms, he began to grow up.

Don's sobriety brought extraordinary gifts he never imagined — a forty-four-year marriage to his wife Jen, three children, four grandchildren, and in the year 2000, the Order of Australia. He speaks with deep humility about his treatable illness, contrasting his life with a spastic man named Geoff who dragged himself on crutches for five miles to raise money for disabled people overseas. He tells the audience he guarantees that if they stay sober and work the program, doors will open in their lives that they never knew existed.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Don introduces himself with self-deprecating humor about his height
• 2:00 First drink at 14 after winning third place in a bike race from Wagga Wagga to Lockhart
• 5:00 Suicide attempt at 19 with shotgun and brandy — stops because it would mean his last drink
• 8:00 Stepfather, a recovering alcoholic and AA member, marries his mother; Don attends meetings to keep an eye on him
• 12:00 Hides sherry in geraniums outside AA meetings; buys a ute with stepfather and discovers the spare tyre compartment
• 16:00 Hits a 12-year-old boy while drunk driving across the Murrumbidgee bridge
• 20:00 Enters Hydebrae Hospital as second youngest patient; Dr Sylvester Minogue tells him he is an alcoholic
• 26:00 Sobriety reveals character defects — low self-esteem, big ego, emotional age of fourteen; walks toward town at 3 AM to drink but turns back
• 35:00 Story of Geoff, the spastic twin who dragged himself five miles on crutches to raise money for disabled people
• 42:00 Receives Order of Australia in 2000; guarantees that doors will open in sobriety you never knew existed