The Daily Reprieve and the Default Position of the Ego – Don M.

Welcome to Sober Sunrise, a podcast bringing you AA speaker meetings with stories of experience, strength and hope from around the world. We bring you several new speakers weekly, so be sure to subscribe. Whether you join us in the morning or at night, there's nothing better than a sober sunrise. We hope that you enjoy today's speaker. Good evening, everyone. My name is Michael Dolly. I'm an alcoholic and just really going to make this very brief, but it is extremely heartfelt gentleman that I'm about to introduce as my sponsor. He has touched my heart and my life for many years. And over the last, I don't know, two years, we've gotten a lot closer. I guess I asked to meet my sponsor a little about a year and a half ago I guess and I am humbled that I get to learn from him and I feel very graced that God put us together I appreciate our friendship god bless you Don come on up thank you Thank you, Michael. Hi, everybody. My name is Don Major and I'm an alcoholic. You all have been putting up with me all weekend, but this is the last time. We've needed some divine intervention ever since I got up here for the first time, but we're really going to need some over the next little bit here. Probably you all are going to needs it more than I do. And the first place we're going to needed is something has got to get me out of the way, and it's not going to be me. My sobriety date is April 9th of 1981, and I'm not a bit more capable of getting me out the way tonight than I was in April 1981. It's just way too big a job for me. I've got to have what I call divine intervention. And I'll probably mention divine intervention several times. And if any of the newer folks are anything like I was when I got here and are intellectually offended by some old fool up here talking about divine intervention, not only do I understand you in my old seat, and I've got a suggestion for you when I talk about divine intervention just substitute the magic from the steps and it will get you to the same place and it won't offend your sensitive intellect so terribly but at any rate we need it to get me out of the way and then we also need it because I'm going to try to follow directions and believe me I've got a long and sad history with the directions. They have never applied to me, they've never meant what they say because with my extraordinary understanding of things you see I've always understood who is in charge of the directions and it's always just really conservative nerds just square jobs, anal retentives who are usually being advised by insurance lawyers who are worse than they are. And I've always understood the target audience of the directions, it's morons, just stone idiots. So these conservative nerds are overstating everything to manipulate idiots into doing things. And in my special case, it's always been necessary, I guess you'd say, to extrapolate, to figure out what the directions might really mean, because they clearly don't mean what they say. And I assure you, if I haven't done the work I need to do today on Saturday, because if I've learned anything in my time around here, I've learn that I don't get much divine intervention on Saturday based on what I did on Friday. And if I have not done what I need do today, I'll go back to my default position. decision. And if, for instance, I were to see or hear some directions that say, do not exceed six in 24 hours, my brain is very apt to really register that as meaning something like do not exceed 36. So I need the help with the directions and I want to follow the simple directions that we hear every time we hear how it works, a little bit about what I was like and what happened and what I'm like now. And there's another set of directions in the book that we don't talk about nearly as much, but it's just absolutely critical for me. It says words to the effect that our personal stories tell in our own language and from our own point of view how we've been able to form a relationship with our creator. And I really hope my story carries that because because the first 37 years of my life, I had no openness to God whatsoever. I grew up on a tobacco farm down in southwestern Kentucky, and I remember at four years old sitting in the Baptist church about a half mile or so down the road from the farm, and it was Christmas time. And I remember specifically still believing in Santa Claus and not buying one word that preacher was saying. Just not a word. And I have no idea where that came from. But I spent the first 37 years of my life as an evangelical agnostic, I guess you'd call me. It was clear to me that believers were weak-minded and weak-willed and it was my mission to dispel them of their superstition. And believe me, that's where I was coming from. So up until I got sober at the age of 37, I had never asked a God for anything or even acknowledged a God that had anything to do with my life. I mean, I was okay with intellectual theories about a creative intelligence somewhere, but certainly not with anything that had any thing to do with my wife. life. In April of 1981, a loving God that I had never acknowledged or asked for anything, and I believe, I think it was Michael that mentioned it today, I believe it was prayers of others that caused this miracle to happen for me. That loving God gave me the most lifesaving and life-changing gift that I've ever had. And that same gift saves and changes my life today. And what it was, it wasn't a change of anything in my thoughts, feelings or beliefs. And I wasn't aware that there was any change in anything. I only recognized it in the rear view mirror and that's true of the way life is. As my sponsor, Bob B., says that life is lived forward but understood, if at all, backwards. And what the gift is and was is that for the first time in my life, I began to voluntarily follow some suggestions about how to run my life. Even though I didn't understand those directions, I didn' t agree with them, I didn't think they would work and I certainly did not want to do them and folks that gift is the only reason on earth that I'm here at this great, great little roundup that's got such a neat spirit and personality to it and I hope it thrives and grows through the years the only thing the only way I'm up here with you sweet folks tonight instead of having been rotting in a pauper's grave for something over 38 years, is that guilt. So I hope my story carries that. My early life on that farm, probably the most informative thing I can tell you is that it wasn't a thing like I thought it was. My capacity for self-delusion is astounding. And if I haven't done the work I need to do today today to get my help, it's fully intact. And up until I got sober, I had the most interesting and romantic saga, it was way past a mere story, about my early struggles and my subsequent rise to power. And of course it was all about how by my Aaron Will and my sterling intellect I had pulled myself up by the bootstraps from the depths of poverty to these staggering heights I'd reached in life. And I believed that crap so sincerely, I'd have us both crying before I got halfway done telling it. And honestly don't think I was sober a week until I realized man what a load of baloney we weren't even poor! We weren't anywhere close to poor. We were middle-class farming people that had everything we needed and most of the things we wanted. In fact, we were better off than anybody else in the whole farming community. And those staggering heights I thought I'd reached were a great deal more staggering than they were high. And what was really going on the first 12 or 13 years of my life wasn't any of that stuff at all. What was really gone on was the selfishness and self-centeredness that the big book tells us is at the root of our alcoholism And the way I've described that forever is that I've got an ego disorder. Had it all my life. And that ego disorder has been front and center, I mean right stuck to my nose every day of my life, drunk and sober for 75 years. And on account of that ego disordered with that divine intervention, I'm so obsessed with myself. self. I'm so obsessed with how I believe I stack up against other people in the world. I'm also obsessed with my feeling that for many years I boiled the bedrock of my alcoholism down to one sentence, and I believe this is where it really starts for me. I think the physical allergy and the mental obsession kicked in much later. But where it starts hearts, I believe, is here. Without divine intervention, I will always wind up letting how I feel be the most important thing in the world. Now without divine intervention I can give some lip service to something being more important than how I feel. And I might be able to act out something for just a little while, but when the chips get down, if I haven't done what I need to do today to maintain my spiritual condition and get my daily reprieve, I'll go right back to my default position. And my default decision is to let how I feel be the most important thing. And all that obsession with myself has always had the only results that I think they can really have on a human being. It's always created so much pain and emptiness and apartness and difference down inside me that I've never been able to stand the way I feel inside without either just running as hard as I can and or stuffing something in there and try to make me feel good enough that I could stand it. Now thank my God for the last 38 years and some months it's been the 12 steps that are the only program of Alcoholics Anonymous and you sweet folks folks who are the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous, who fill up that hole, who ease that pain, who take away that apartness and that difference. But I didn't know there was anything to do it until I got drunk the first time when I was 12 or 13. And what was really going on for that first part of my life was a totally self-obsessed kid desperately trying trying to stay a half a step ahead of a screaming fit. And by the way, I don't know whether we were born alcoholic or not and I haven't cared for decades because as long as I know what's wrong with me and I know the solution, I'm not all that interested in figuring out where it might have came from. But something was wrong. I already told you about sitting in the church when I was four. The first day of the second grade, I was six years old. I'd started school when I was five. I went into the office of the principal, Miss Fanny Wallace, and I said, Miss Fany, I have been in a car wreck over the summer and have brain damage, and I can't be expected to do nearly as well this year as I did last year. I knew I'd set the bar too high, and I was trying to make Miss Faney laugh about that the rest of her life, but looking back on it, And I'm not sure it was real funny for a kid that young to be thinking that way. But at any rate, that obsession with myself makes me an egomaniac with an inferiority complex. And what I mean by that is that without divine intervention, I'm perfectly capable of feeling too good for something or somebody and at the same instant knowing I'm Not Nearly Good Enough, or that same person or that same thing. All my life I've known that I could do anything at the same time I've known I couldn't really do anything and that's been bouncing around in my head for all these years and you see without divine intervention or the things that I've tried to use I've never had any peers I can't be on anybody's level without the divine intervention intervention. I can be above you, I can below you, and insanely I can both at the same time. But I cannot be a fellow among fellows unless I have done what the work I need to do to get my help. And that's the mess I brought to my first drunk. And that first drunk I got in an awful lot of trouble, I puked, I blacked out and I passed out. And I woke up the next morning and I had a terrible hangover and I swore all those Baptists around there were right about that one single thing, booze, and that I would never touch that crap again. And not only was I sincere, it was actually fairly effective because it was nearly a week until I got drunk the second time and that was a near miracle over the next 25 years for me to go a week without getting drunk and after that pain and misery, I woke up that first morning with that horrible horrible hangover and the terrible four horsemen already gathered around me, every one of them and I didn't wake up and think, wow, that was great I can't wait to do that again again. That was magic. All I knew was that for a few minutes on my way to all that puking and trouble, I had passed through a right pleasant neighborhood. But since I've been sober, I've known that what really happened was the magic happened for me. Because for the first time in my life when I got enough of that booze in me, I was okay inside myself. I felt good enough inside myself that I could stand the way I felt inside without running, without trying to stuff anything in there. I was a fellow among fellows. I had loads of peers. I had people that I was okay with and I was Okay With Me. So what it did for the first time in my life, I found something that made me feel good enough inside that I couldn't stand it. it. So as far as I'm concerned, there's no mystery about why I got drunk that second time and there's not mystery about the other thousands of times over the next quarter of a century after that. It was because of the magic that I didn't recognize as magic. Because for the next twenty-five years, I didn�t know there was anything other than the booze and in the latter years of my drinking the things like it that could do that trick for me. So there's no mystery to me about my powerlessness over alcohol and the thingslikeit, because since I didn't know there was anything else that could make me feel the way I wanted to feel, and the wayI feel is the most important thing in the world, the bottom line was really simple. When I wantedto change the wayi felt, felt it didn't matter what it cost and it didn' t matter who it cost. You know, I said this at the core of my alcoholism, and I may have mentioned this answering a question, I don't know, but I'm absolutely convinced that after we know we are an alcoholic or an addict, we know what we are, and we put that first one in us, I am absolutely convinced that that is the most self-centered act on the face of this earth, short of suicide. Because what I'm doing when I do that, I'm making a decision that the way I feel in this instant and my desire to change it is more important than my child, it's more important than my profession, it is more important that all of my responsibilities, it it's more important than any relationship I might have with God that I'm making how I feel the most important thing in this universe. But I didn't know any of that. And I had a drinking career 25 years that I am not going to dwell on, but I'll let you know enough to know that I didn' t come in here because it gave me the hiccups and I woke up one day and decided, gee, I'd like to get some spiritual enlightenment. I literally stumbled uphill for 20 years. I was born with a lot of academic gifts, and a kid that drank and acted the way I did from the first time I got drunk in today's world would find his young butt in an asylum before his 14th birthday. Day. But in the 1950s in Trigg County, Kentucky, if you were cute enough and smart enough and had the right last name, you could practically get away with murder, and I practically did. I left there as an early bird because it was time for me to get out on account of my drinking. I left and went 200 miles up to Louisville by myself on a Greyhound bus, and i wound up taking taking a bunch of tests and they let me in the University of Louisville as an early admission student, I never graduated from high school, with an academic scholarship. And my reaction to that was I stayed so drunk the first semester that I'd literally lost all concept of day and night. It was just a matter of passing out and coming to. Of course it blew the scholarship. And then for the next seven-and-a-half years I worked full time, drank full time went to school full-time and somehow got through undergraduate and law school with good grades, and I have no idea how that happened. When I look back on that whole eight years, I don't have a handful of clear memories that I could sit down with you and say, let me tell you some details about what happened during that eight years. It's just a swirling gray mass of alcoholic insanity. Spring in 1968, I graduated from law school, passed the bar that summer, and my daughter Dana was born that spring. And Dana, if you're doing the math, that makes Dana 51. And when your child is middle-aged, You're just old. Forget it. You don't have any excuses left. But Dana was my only child for over 20 years. I have a wonderful 30-year-old son now, but Dana, she was 21 when Keaton, my son, was born. I practiced law for about 10 years in Louisville, Kentucky, which is the city of our metropolitan area. It's about a million. with a good deal of material success. I've always been a criminal defense lawyer. From the time that I began practicing law, I quit my job as soon as I passed the bar and I've never had a boss. I've also been a self-employed private criminal defense lawyer. And things got worse over the next 10 years than they were the time preceding that. and I just told you how crazy that was. And I was pretty darn materially successful, not nearly as much as I used to think I had been. That's the peculiarity about staying sober a while is we get a better focus on the past. You know, they tell us out here in the world you can't change the past? Don't you believe that crap? We do it in here every day in several different ways and some of them positive. But, at any rate, I always had a knack for getting involved in some cases that had some money in, publicity in them, and that's what I'd stick in your face when you suggested that the way I was living was not just exactly right. During that 10 years, the whole 25 years that I drank, drink. I know that sometime in at least 80 percent of the 24-hour periods, I was drunk. I had no idea that I was drank that often because the only standard I ever had for drunk was whether or not I blacked out. If I remembered it, that discussion was over. I was not drunk. drunk. And during that first ten years of practicing law, my honest best estimate is at least a third of the nights I did not take off my clothes like a normal human being and go to bed. I either passed out in some other situation or I just changed the combination of what I was putting in my body and tried to fly on through the day. When you stuck stuck that in my face, I would stick my material success back in yours. Things got worse because I no longer had a boss looking over my shoulder. I had some money to escalate things with and alcoholism simply progresses in everybody that's ever had it. Alcoholism is like being pregnant. It does not stand still. There's nothing you can do to make it stand still, Again, with the pregnancy analogy, you don't look or feel the same way when you're 20 minutes pregnant. You do it eight and a half months, but just hang on and see what happens. It'll progress. And during the latter part of that ten years – by the way, another analogy, man, which which is even worse than that one, but it helped me so much to finally get sober when somebody told me that, you know, Don, intelligence and willpower are really, really good things. And there are a lot of things in this world that intelligence and Willpower do a really good job on. But two things that they don't have any impact on are alcoholism and diarrhea. diarrhea, and for some reason that caused a penny to drop in my head, to realize that truly that my brain and willpower was just as useless against alcoholism as it was then. But at any rate, during the latter part of that ten years I used a world of things other than the booze, and I used a world of them. But now before you get your singleness of purpose knickers all in a knot, let me explain that to you. I'm going to take it out of my story as soon as they take it out of Bill and Bob's. Just as soon they do, I'm gonna do that. My story is just like Bill and Bobs'. I use different things than they did and certainly more of it, I'm sure. But it's still the same story. Everything else that I used was a sideshow and the booze was the big tent. Everything else was something to somehow change the effect of the boozes. Maybe increase it, maybe decrease it. Maybe help me try to function on the hangovers. But it always went back to the boozed of the the Big Ten. February 10th of 1978, I had been practicing law right at ten years, and I got full of scotch vodka and four separate outside issues. And I drove a Corvette off the road at over 120 miles an hour, and it did really horrible things to my body. It It crushed both knees, it tore out a good deal of the artery in my lower leg and they had to do a bypass in the upper leg and take out a vein and graft it in to replace that artery. And just informationally, I'm supposed to be in the hospital right tonight having a vein pulled somewhere else out of my body to replace that 41-year-old graft, but I talked my surgeon into letting me put that off until the first week in December. That wreck separated my pelvis and it pulled my internal plumbing in too, so that I didn't have a urinary function for over a year. I had what they call a suprapubic catheter, which is simply a plastic tube with a flange on it where they bore a hole in your abdomen, pop it into your bladder to carry your urine out to a bag. I was in hospitals for more than six months of the year following that wreck, and I had had a half dozen major surgeries. The night of the wreck, I was closer to Nashville, Tennessee than I was to my home in Louisville. So they took me to Vanderbilt. Probably took me an hour and a half, took them an hour and half to get me from the scene of that wreck to Vanderbilst Hospital in Nashville. When I got there, I still had a blood alcohol of over .40 with all the other things I had in my system. And I woke up two or three times during the emergency surgery because they were terrified to give me enough anesthesia to keep me under. I stayed there in Vanderbilt seven or eight weeks, but they didn't know who I was there and didn't treat me with nearly the appropriate deference. And as soon as I got out of the operating room, the recovery room, and intensive care long enough to get moved by ambulance because I wasn't stood upright for the first time until almost three months after that wreck. I got moved, against medical advice, back to Louisville where folks knew who I was. And the prognosis, by the way, was that I would never walk without at least a brace on one of my legs and that we had never found a surgeon who would even attempt to try to put my plumbing back together so that I could ever have a urinary function. the doctors were wrong and it had nothing to do as we know with me following directions. It was purely the grace of God. I've been sober 38 years and I haven't owned a brace for over 39 and about a year after that wreck, the head of urology at Duke University did put my plumbing back together and restore my urinary function but I didn't know that was going to happen. After I got moved back to Louisville, I laid in the hospitals in Louisville for months. And after I got back there, to the best of my recollection and the best recollection of the couple of friends who survived from that era, there are not many of them, and those two, of course, are in recovery. I'm one of their sponsors. Every day that I was laying in that hospital with that prognosis flat on my back, they would come in and bring me booze and more dope than the doctors were giving me and I would lie in that hospital bed and say really intelligent things I would say things like you know fellas anybody can stop drinking when the going gets a little tough but it takes a man to lay in there with it when the bills start coming in and then I would explain to them that a man ought not be out there doing the crime time if he's not prepared to do the time. So just because we'd hit a bump in the road, they weren't going to hear me whining. Give me another drink and let's go on with it. Of course, that's insanity. That's powerlessness. And when you really think about it, it's letting the way I felt in that instant be more important than my child, more important than my profession, more importante than whether I ever walked, more More important than whether I ever peed. More important than whether I lived or died. Letting the way I felt and my desire to change it be the most important thing in this universe. I wound up not practicing law for a total of five years after that wreck. I lost literally everything I'd had a young lady with me when I had that wreck who was not my daughter's mother and at the time of the wreck I was remarried to my daughter's mother and I'm not proud of any of the pain that I caused people in that area of my life. I've had to do a lot of amends and I live a lot of the amends on it today but I'm NOT gonna fail to laugh at myself where I've been ridiculous and I'll share one sociological observation please feel free to ignore it, it's not in the big book. But over the last 38 years I've I've just kind of looked around and observed, and I've come to the conclusion that the fact that I was remarried to the same woman probably establishes my alcoholism without further authentication. I just don't believe a normie would do it. I think if it even crossed their mind to jump right back in a frying pan they just got out of, they'd tear the dough off an asylum them getting in and trying to protect themselves. But we do it just willy-nilly, drunk and sober, you know, Joe and Sue are divorced, but they're dating. They'll probably get back together. And it works for us sometimes. It's not necessarily bad. It' s just really different from ordinary folks. But obviously I got a brand new divorce right after that wreck, and I wound up pretty quickly married to the young lady who had been with me. She She had on a seat belt, of all things, so she was hurt terribly, but not nearly as badly as I was. And during the ensuing period of time, she had to leave me on account of my insanity, and she was staying with some girlfriends and died in an accident. I was in what I call asylums. About half of them were psychiatric hospitals. about half of them were jitter joints or treatment centers of some kind, the kind they had back then. But Bill used the word asylum and my mama used that word. When I was a kid, people didn't have substance abuse and alcohol problems and go to treatment, nor did they have emotional problems and go into the hospital. They went crazy and were put in asylums. And that's a whole lot more descriptive of what kept happening to me, I'll assure you. So I was in them 18 times in two and a half years. I last laid eyes on my only child, Dana, in January of 1980. I didn't see or have any contact with her until February of 1983, over three years. lawyers. My partners and I had built an office building in downtown Louisville, a little law firm of nine or ten lawyers had built up around this other guy and myself, and the Internal Revenue took my portion of that and a couple of other things, and mortgage companies took the homes the ex-wives were in. The guys had to kick me out of the law firm. I'd found it on account of the social and legal pressure that my behavior was bringing on them, and I'm really grateful for that because I don't know that I would ever have hit bottom had it not been for that. And for anybody that's new or struggling in any way, if I had my choice of only one thing out of my talk that you could remember, I believe I would ask that it be this. Please don't wait for bottom to to happen to you. I've seen hundreds of people die, waiting for bottom to happen to them. I don't believe bottom happens to us. I believe bottom's a decision over which we have a great deal of control. And I wasn't going to make that decision as long as I had a Timex watch. I certainly wasn't gonna do it as long as I'd had a law firm. Right after the guys kicked me out of the firm, the state of Kentucky jerked my law license. For almost a year I lived without an address on what I called the street and an expired Blue Cross Blue Shield card. I did not sleep under the bridge but the only reason on earth I didn't was I could always get somebody to take me in and it was frequently strangers. I had no home, I had had no car, I had no clothes, my teeth were rotting out of my head. Fall of 1980, I wound up back in Nashville, Tennessee at Asylum No. 17, the next to last one so far. And they kept me in there a little over a month and it was time to boot me out and I had no place to go, no way to get there. I wouldn't have gone back to Louisville if you'd given me the choice between chopping off my right arm or not going back to Louisville, I would let you chop off my arm because of the terror of going back there. I wouldn't have opened a box of mail from Louisville and I've been destitute for a couple years and I wouldn�t have opened the box of mailbox from Louisville for $50,000 just because of terror. And I'll tell you that from this stage of sobriety, I still don't believe there was any paranoia in that. I believe the crap I'd done in human terms I had no business ever showing my face back there I believe a loving God poured oil on the troubled waters of my past to keep the worst of my chickens from coming home to roost on me but at any rate I had a roommate in that asylum number 17 and he was a young guy of course I was ancient I would have been 36 at that time but Matt was 21 and his sweet family lived there in Nashville and they felt sorry for me and said Don why don't you come stay with us a few days and let's try to figure out what to do with you well I went and lived with them a year and the first six months I didn't stay straight but I got better and I had to get better before I could grasp recovery or anything else just as an example and I was ashamed to tell this for the first 30 years I was giving talks When I was sixty days sober, I had still not regained the ability to use a knife and fork on food, not just properly, effectively. And I was just embarrassed to ask anybody, would you give me a few hints on how to use these things? I seemed to have lost it somewhere. somewhere. So we'd go to meetings at a clubhouse in Nashville that we called the 202 Club, and after the meeting we'd down to a Shawnee's restaurant down the street, and I would sit there with my knife and fork under the table trying to mimic what my friends were doing so I could regain the skill of using a knife and a fork. So I had to get better, and did get better during that six months from getting out of of that asylum in the fall of 80, and getting sober in April of 81. I went to a world of AA meetings, almost all of them at that 202 club during that six months. I got to where sometimes I could go up to two, and I think one time even three weeks without getting ripped, and that was a world record for me since the first time I ever got drunk. And they only put me back in an asylum one single time in that entire six-month period. And the rate I'd been going twice a year in the asylum looked like the picture of mental health. Well, late March of 81, I got on my most recent drunk and it was another one of my pop-off vodka slash Listerine drunks. And I have honestly drunk buckets of both those things, and this is not a joke. I have better memories of the Listerine. I can stand to smell Listerin today, but I can't stand to smell that old hot cheap vodka. But on this most recent drunk, I was drinking and taking everything I could get my hands on by the time April the 8th of 81 rolled around, the most recent day that I drank. I'd been drunk ten days or two weeks, and I was sitting on the edge of a bed in a motel in Nashville, and I know now that my loving God started giving me that beautiful gift that I've talked about. I certainly didn't know I had any gift then. I still had the same insane combination of insane ego and pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization for a couple, three years being intensely exposed to AA and all these treatment centers and asylums. One second, one of you folks would tell me how AA has saved your life and changed your life and my brain would go yeah I know I know it works for you but you don't really understand the width and depth of my intellect and my specialty and my uniqueness and I was apt to get teary-eyed that it worked for the simple-minded but alas I was just my soul was too big for my body and I I was was wounded by my own understanding, so it couldn't possibly work for me. And here's the nightmare. The very next instant one of you would tell me the same thing, how AA had saved your life and changed your life, and that same brain would go, yeah, I know it works for you guys, and I'm glad it does, but you don't know how bad I am. You don't about the parts of me that are just missing and always have been. You don't know that I've never really been able to be consistently responsible about one single thing in my life. Anything in my wife that looked like it was even okay, much less good, is some kind of pack of lies and a house of cards. And you guys don't what I've done. That first 10 years I practiced law, I represented some genuinely multi-statewide bad and successful people. And the things that I'd done when I got so bad, I really believed, and I think, again, I don't think it was paranoia, that if I did manage to not drink for a while, it might be just be blown into by a sawed-off shotgun gun or maybe spend the rest of my life locked up somewhere I didn't want to be locked up. So it wouldn't work for me because I'm so terrible. And then the very next instant he'd be back telling me it wouldn't work for him because I was so special and great and intelligent. You see, my alcoholism is the perfect sociopath. It has no reason for existing except to get itself that next drink. and it has absolutely no compunction about who it damages or kills, me or you or both of us, in order to get me to take that next drink. It'll tell me totally inconsistent lies, you know, inconsistent with one another, back to back, just slams it all up against the wall and hopes some of it will stick. And the rest of the nightmare is that on account of the disorder of my perception, without divine intervention, on some day or the other I'll believe one of those lies. And I'll pick up that first drink and I'll trigger that god-awful physical allergy and I will feel that phenomenon of craving again. And the last two or three years I drank withdrawal from ethyl alcohol. alcohol. Each one of the last couple hundred times I had to do it was more painful than any of the 14 or 15 major surgeries I've had in my life, most horrible experience I've ever gone through. It reached a point where once I got physical alcohol in my body I just had physically lost the ability to stop. The need was so bad and the physical addiction was so badly something had to intervene and prize me loose from it. And when it did that that it took three or four days for me to be physically able to do something like set up in a chair. Well, I didn't know why I was doing it, but I shook out that most recent drunk and when I was able to stumble, I was still badly crippled from the wreck when I I got sober, had braces on both my legs. I made my way back to the 202 Club and I didn't think they would let me in. And again today they would not have because I had passed out in their AA meetings and had to be bodily carried out. They had caught me in their men's rooms with illegal outside issues and they had warned the people they sponsored to stay away from me that I was a loser and I was going to die about two months before I got sober I was walking through that clubhouse with a big old boy who's been dead many years Joe Wall and Joe was taller than Mike or anybody here Joe was about 6'5 and he walked up and looked way down at me and said Don I'm beginning to think you really are too intelligent for this program. And I thought he was giving me a compliment. My knee-jerk reaction was, thank God they finally figured out who they're dealing with. But Joe went on and it may have saved my life. And he said, that's a shame, Don, because we've never had anybody too dumb for this deal and we bury you buttholes all the time. And that felt like an icy hand closing over something inside me and thank God that icy hand has never completely gone away. You let me get a couple of stitches off the pattern on my recovery and so far when I feel the tips of those fingers it's jerked me right back onto the path and I hope those fingers never go away. They did let me in, I remember what was said and who said it. They said come on in Don you are keeping us sober and I And I said, will you tell me one more time what I need to do if I want to live? And they said, sure. Don't drink, don't take dope, go to meetings. By the grace of God, the first 60 days I went to over 150 meetings. I had no idea why I was doing it. To the best of my recollection, I did not want to go to one of them. Oh, I expect after I got feeling better, I was hoping I'd run back into some woman or something, but as far as going to any of them for a legitimate reason, I didn't go to any one of the women for a legit reason. reason. It was still perfectly clear to me that you all were religious fanatics, and my brain was still assuring me what we need to do is get our head out of the scan, quit food, and with this cop-out little thing of this myth of higher power and head in the sand group therapy, get my butt back to Louisville, get some money, get a law license back, a good-looking woman, a big car, be somebody for God's sake. But I'd been given this beautiful gift I didn't know I had of turning around in my brain and saying, yeah, no, you're right. But we had options. We just had options so even though these silly meetings can't possibly solve our terrible and unique problems we're just going to keep going because there's nothing else to do. See I've been given that gift of following the directions even though I didn't understand it, didn't agree with it, didn't think it worked, didn' t want to do it. And thank God I had the same thing backwards about that, that without divine intervention I've had backwards every day of my life. I make it all about what I think, feel and believe. That's the ultimate reality. You see in nature if I don't feel like doing the right thing it doesn't occur to me to go ahead and do the right things. I want to get me fixed so I feel like doing right so I can do the correct thing. You see all my life I was absolutely convinced, I mean so convinced I didn't even think about it, that the difference between good people and me was they felt like doing right. And if we could just get me fixed so I felt like doing right, I could be good people too. Well I've known for several decades now those good people, and they were good people. They may have been resentful as as heck about what they were doing. They may have been cussing under their breath. They mayhave had less than stellar motives for what they're doing, but they did right and that made them good people. And despite all my rationalizations and my grand intentions, I did not do right and that mad me bad people. See, we were asked a question about turning point the other night and there's no turning point in my life bigger than this one. was understanding that all those thoughts, feelings, and beliefs that I think are at the center of the universe have never one time left a footprint on reality. Not once. Now if I abdicate my behavior to them and say yeah, you know, I'm going to behave however you tell me to behave that behavior leaves a great big boot print on reality reality. But the thoughts, feelings, and beliefs are really just a will-o'-the-wisp in my head. They have never had any impact on reality. You see, I thought in order for AA to work that first I had to believe it would work. And then I thought it had to feel like it was working while it was walking. And I think I also thought that I had be able to see the causal relationship relationship of A causing B. Turned out none of that had anything to do with it. At that time, I just needed to get my raggedy butt to meeting after meeting and let my old sick brain and soul get dragged in there kicking and screaming behind the raggedly butt. And then they told me if I wanted to live, I was going to have to read the big book. And I mentioned that I'd read it a few times, and they said that they knew that, that I had had been quoting it to them while I had been dying. They said the first thing I needed to get straight is that that book is not a philosophy book, that there's nothing in there that I can learn that's going to keep me sober for a heartbeat. In fact they said Don you better get this silly notion about recovery being a learning process out of your brain. They said you got to learn about that much and they said in your case Don you've had enough information about AA and recovery for over two years to stay sober a day at a time the rest of your life without learning one single new piece of information." They said, what's killing you dummy isn't what you know and don't know it's what you're doing and not doing. And they said what this book is is a simple instruction manual for your actions. And this said if you want to live you better to say that set-aside prayer and try to set aside everything you think you know about yourself, about your alcoholism, about recovery, about the big book, about God or in your case your belief of the lack of one and start at the front cover of that book and go through it line for line reading only the black part not interpreting, distinguishing or arguing with or memorizing anything. Not looking for anything to learn but looking for what it says to do. And then they said, if you want to live, you better do it. It was about then that they explained to me that the 12 steps are the prescription for alcoholism. They work on alcoholism exactly like penicillin works on an infection. If I've got an infection that's going to kill me if it's not treated, but will respond to peniccillin, I don't need to understand the origin and the nature of my infection. infection. And I don't need to aggravate the people around me in the medical profession whining about that. The truth is, I could learn every piece of information there is to know about that infection and if I don�t take the stupid pills, I'm dead meat. What difference does it make what I know about it? I don �t need to understand a single thing about how penicillin works in the human body. I don t need to believe that that little a bottle of pills will take care of all these terrible things wrong with wonderful me. And probably the most important one they told me to me is I don't need to want to take the pills. Whether or not I want to the pills couldn't be more irrelevant. If I take the pills as directed, I'll do just fine, thank you. And they promised me that if I would take the action that is the first nine steps of as set out in the big book, to reach a state of recovery and then immediately begin doing the action a day at a time that is steps 10, 11, and 12 in order to maintain my spiritual condition and get my daily reprieve, that that action would work on my alcoholism exactly like penicillin works on an infection. And the fact that I am here instead of in that pauper's grave is testimony that they they were right. And I've been so blessed in seeing that same miracle happen in hundreds of other lives over the years. Then you told me if I wanted to live, I was going to have to get on my knees every morning and every night and ask and thank a power greater than myself. Well, the little part of me that wanted to live, there wasn't a big one, but there was a little part that wanted wanted to live, had known for a couple of years that the only outside chance I had of living was to somehow try to get this thing that you had. And I believed with all my heart that in order to get it, I had to somehow make myself start thinking, feeling and believing more like it looked like to me you thought, felt and believed. And I had tried every way I could in the condition I was in, and I hadn't been able to change a thing, not a hair. So I remember sitting there in that clubhouse with tears running down my cheeks, looking up at the steps on the wall and explaining to them that I couldn't do the praying because of that. And it finally hurt them when they said, oh Don, you've got that that backwards too. We have never suggested that you think, feel, or believe anything. And my mouth probably fell open because as far as I was concerned, that was the center of the whole ballgame. And they said, well no. Said we wouldn't do that. Said in the first place, you are far too ill to have any valid thoughts, feelings, or beliefs. They said in the second Second place, the issue of whether you live or die is going to be determined solely by what you do. What's going through the old crazy picture showing the back of your head won't have anything to do with it. So they said if you want to live, regardless of what's going on in your head, you get down on your knees and start saying those words. And I tearfully nodded at them and thought to myself, in a pig's eyes, craziest thing I've ever heard, I won't do any such a thing. In the latter part of that month, April of 81, to my great surprise, over my brain's loud veto, I found myself getting down on my knees every morning and every night, embarrassed even though I was by myself. And as far as I was concerned, talking to the volume, asking something I didn't believe was there to do something I did not believe could be done. done, and I kept on doing it. And I could count the mornings or nights that I've missed since then on my fingers. And, I don't know any other way to stay sober other than getting on my knees every morning and every night. Now, I'm not a dictatorial sponsor as I think Michael can tell you, but I told him like I've told everybody ever sponsored. The book doesn't say you've got to get on your knees, and I'm not telling you to. But I am telling you this. Don't ask me for any hints on how to stay sober without getting on your knees every morning and every night, because I have no experience with it. I've been unable to stay sober other than getting on my knees every moment and every night. And the twin miracles, the second step happened. I think I mentioned that in and I ask it basket question. The first one was, when I began behaving like a person who believed, I began getting all the benefits of being a believer. And the second part of that twin miracle was that by taking the action consistent with belief and faith, I came to believe, and I developed faith. If I had kept insisting that my thoughts, feelings, and beliefs get changed changed before i took the action because god knows i didn't want to be a hypocrite if i'd kept insisting on that i'd have been in that pauper's grave but at any rate they led me through the first nine steps in nashville i lived there 21 months so after i got sober unemployed unemployable happier than i'd ever been in my life My original sponsor, Cherry Carpenter, finally convinced me that the third step is not a great process and it's not a process at all. It's the first action step. And the book tells me exactly how to do it since they're understanding people everywhere for us today. I've either gone in a room with an understanding person and intended for that to be the watershed moment where I commit to do the rest of the steps and try to do that next right thing when what my brain wants to do conflicts with it or haven't. And if I haven't done that, I haven'T done the third step. They got it through my head that third step doesn't turn a thing over to God. It's not supposed to. It's simply a decision to get on a track that will turn my will in life over to God. They led me through four and five, and I formed a picture of what a spiritual dialogue ought to look like. And I went back to my attic. I'd moved out from the folks I was living with to have my very own attic. I followed directions exactly except the book says take the book down from the shelf and spend an hour going over the first five steps. And I didn't have a shelf, so I laid it up on the bed and pulled it back down off the bed. and I looked at my timex and got me a timex by then and I timed it for an hour I reviewed steps 1 through 5 looks like I've done alright so the big book gives us less than half a page on steps 6 and 7 the top 40% of page 75 76, what's wrong with me looks like to me I've been okay you know good enough on steps 1-5 I got on my knees said seventh step prayer and believed that was where, with God's help, I went to work on me to make me into what I had decided a spiritual don ought to be. And I proceeded in good faith on that until I was nine years sober. When I was 21 months sober, well, my law license had gotten put back in order when I was a year-and-a-half sober as a total byproduct of Steps 8 and 9. time. I'm convinced if it had been my objective to get a law license back, which I really didn't want because I didn't think I could stay sober with the law license, I would never have gotten it back. But when I really and truly became willing to behave like a person would behave, if they were really just trying to set the past straight without looking for any benefit out of it. As a byproduct, it was put back in order. January of 1983, 21 months sober, I went back to Louisville because I could not get a minimum wage job in Nashville. I told you about my terror of going back. If I could have found a job at the 7-Eleven, I would not have gone back to Louisville to practice law. But all sorts of miracles started happening. The second month I I was in town February of 83. They stuck me up in front of 2,000 people to tell my story. And I thought it was terrible. As my judgment of events in my life usually is, I had it 180 degrees off. It wound up being the beginning of the rest of my life. That was about 36 1⁄2 years ago. And in the last 36 1ᄏ years, years, I've spent considerably more time on A.A., traveling, speaking, and more important than anything, sitting down one-on-one with individuals and looking them in the eye and going through the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous with them. Everybody who asks me to be their sponsor, whether they've been sober 24 hours or whether they're been sober 40 years, and I've got them in both categories I suggest let's take a trip through those steps together let's go through there and every time we go through it I get to see the light light up a lot of times in the other people's eyes but a light lights up in me too we were talking about that today on the altruism there's nothing like Nothing like sharing the magic and the joy of this program with somebody and showing them what we did in order to get out of the humanly hopeless dilemma that they are in and that we were in. We share that with them, that we're in a humanly helpless dilemma that could only be alleviated by our power. power but at any rate that same month I saw my daughter Dana for the first time in over three years and two months later she moved in with me and lived with me throughout her high school years and we are dear friends today she's been in Al-Anon 34 years now and occasionally she's the the Al-Anon speaker at a conference where I'm an AA speaker and it's just marvelous and we text every day. All those things were going great but the first nine years I was sober, relationships with ladies and financial chaos liked to kill me and something happened in May of 1990 that caused me to look back at six and seven a different way and for every day of my sobriety since then for the last 29 and a half years six and seven have been the most important steps in my life I told you what I thought they were and it turned out that what they are is nothing like that the seventh step prayer doesn't ask God to remove all my defects of character and it certainly doesn't asked God to remove the ones that I think need to be gone to make me spiritual how arrogant of me to think that I would know what God wants me to be You know, my God does shine a light on my path. But my God doesn't use a floodlight. My God uses a pin light and just lights it one step or one stitch at a time. And you know, we get all confused about what's God's will. Truth is, I'm never going to get a glimpse of God's Will except in the right now for my own next action. and when I accept that and accept that the only power I'm ever going to have in this world is over that next action there's usually not any confusion about what the next right thing is. I get confused if I want to jump half a dozen or 220 steps down the road but if I come into the only reality and that's the right now that spark of the divine is always there and shows me where to take the next stitch and i've been stumbling that way since then um and real quickly i will tell you that the miracles that have happened are unbelievable if i'd made a list of the best that i thought i could have in may of 1990 when i was nine years sober and i'd been speaking all over the country for years and was sponsoring somewhere between 50 and 100 men and my law practice was going really really really well, and if I'd made a list of the best I thought I could have in every area of my life – spiritual, material, in AA, my law practice with my children, with my relationship, house I live in, car drive – and God had given me that, I would have shortchanged myself in every single area. When I'm willing to truly let go and come like a little child to my God and say, Mom, Dad, I don't know where we are, how we got here, or where we're supposed to go. And I can't begin to understand how to untangle this thing or understand the patterns of my life. But I'm at least going to behave like, because I can control this brain, but I can't control my behavior. And i'm going to at least behave like a person would behave if it it was their objective to do your will by taking one stitch at a time as directed by you. And when I do that, where God leaves me is unbelievable. My sweet Sharon and I have been married, it'll be 29 years in December, and we've never argued, not once. And I've asked some guys who are counselors and a couple of psychologists and they tell me that's not healthy and I tell them they're welcome to their healthy relationships, thank you I'm going to wallow in my illness on that one and also if you caught me arguing in the last 30 years somebody was paying me I will not argue with you for nothing because God has relieved me of that awful need to be right who cares who's right it's always subjective anyway way and it changes with the wind. And what's right for you is not right for me. And I have enough trouble knowing what's write for me, how will I ever know what's right for YOU? One of the handiest phrases in the world is, gee, you might be right. And just let it go with that. And that's from a guy, when I was drinking one night, I drove 200 miles in the middle of the night to prove that a room was green instead of blue. So it's a great change. And then my professional life and my life in AA since May of 1990. The Bar Association has honored me until it's truly embarrassing. And remember, here's a guy that had been in asylum 18 times. And when I lost my license, it wasn't whatever happened to Don Major. It was on the front page of the Louisville paper. And I brought the bar into terrible disrepute. The vote of letting me back in with the Board of Governors was by one vote. But the miracle of it was that the way it shook out when I borrowed my back dues from my lifelong best friend, they reinstated me retroactively. So if you check my record with the State Bar of Kentucky, I've been a bar member for 51 years with no disciplinary action against me. I like to starve to death without a law license, but God healed the record for me. But at any rate, they have called me and said, we want you to come down and be on this committee that interviews people that wants to be judges judges and passes on whether they're qualified, and then they said, Don, a few years later we want you to be chair of that committee. We want to put your name in the paper as the guy that's running this passing on judicial qualifications. And then they come and said, Don, we want to you to master at the end of court just the most important lawyers and judges in Kentucky, and one little tongue-chewing drunken criminal defense lawyer that's been been in the asylum 18 times. And then they called me and they said, be sure to come to the bar dinner. We're giving you the pro bono lawyer of the year award. That's doing good for nothing. The first 10 years I practiced, nobody thought about me and that in the same breath. Then they called and said, come back to the bar this year because we're giving giving you the most coveted award at the bar. We're giving you the award for professionality and civility." And God has got such a sense of humor. When I was about 14, 15 years ago, I was sitting in the barber chair and my cell phone rung and it was the president of the state bar. And he said, Don, we've got a vacancy on the ethics committee. The first 10 years I practice law, the only people on earth I was more afraid of than the ethics committee were the IRS and the FBI. And they put me on the ethics hotline so if a lawyer in Kentucky had an ethical dilemma, they could call me and ask me what to do. And if they did what I told them to do, they were 100% insulated from disciplinary action even if I was dead wrong. That's a lot of trust to put in a guy that's been in the asylum 18 times. The point I'm getting at is two points. Number one, the forgiveness of non-alcoholics for us when we finally try to do the right thing passes all understanding. And the other thing is there's no human way to get from where I was in April of 1981 to what I just described. it's just humanly impossible but when we start trying to do the right thing and we quit trying to live our lives by being an ant floating down the river on a log thinking he's steering the log and I live so much my life being exactly that going just like an ant driving himself crazy I gotta steer this log man this log's not going the right place I've got to steer it. What if he'd just be still and pay attention to the little ant crap that's right in front of him that he can do? The log's going where it's going anyway and the ant would be a whole lot better off. And when I'm willing to accept that I don't want to be the ant on the log and I can't figure out the patterns in my life and that I can do this for me, what I've gotta do is let God take care of me me. And I've got to love, comfort and understand and take care of my fellows. I've got to try to help God's kids, as Chuck C said, do what they need to have done. And when I do that, God's so much better lawyer than I, God so much better sponsor than I. God is so much much better husband, father, friend, everything. Then when I try to script my conversations, figure out what I want to say. And by the way, scripting conversations would be good if the other people ever got their lines right. But they never do. But at any rate, thank you all for letting me go five minutes over here and I love you all. Thank you Nolan and Ryan and Kelvin and every one of you and thank you Terry for those wonderful brownies and thank you Michael it's been such a joy to do it with you and Derek and Kelvin and everybody involved it's just been a great weekend I love you and good night applause applause Thank you for listening to Sober Sunrise If you enjoyed today's episode please give it a thumbs up as it will help share the message Until next time Until next time, have a great day.