The Higher Power Found in the Results – Sandy B.

I want to thank the group for asking me back. Is this working now? Oh, that's amazing. I want to thank the group for asking me back again this year. I'm absolutely delighted and look forward to this. It's a very special event to come down to Atlanta. And before I get started on my talk, I just want to bring you up to speed on a couple of things in my personal life. Then I can get on and do a little sharing about the program. But first thing, if I don't take a drink for another five or six days, I'll have 20 years in Alcoholics Anonymous And I just want to thank you all for that. And since I was coming up on that amount of sobriety, that constitutes an old-timer in Alcoholics Anonymous. So I decided to grow a mustache to go along with being an old timer. And if you are new in the program and you're wondering how you get to be an old time or an AA, don't drink, don't die. and I want to thank Clancy Eye from Los Angeles, California for that joke and we give him credit for it and some of you remember last year meeting Nancy who was down here with me and that's the big event of the year was two months ago we got married and she's here tonight and I just couldn't be happier so I just wanted to share that And her mother, Bea, was in town attending a convention up the street in another hotel. And she's here tonight. And I couldn't be happier to be sharing with the family and just having everybody here tonight and I'm very, very grateful about all that. I came into Alcoholics Anonymous on Pearl Harbor Day in 1964 in Manassas, Virginia and I haven't been drunk since that first meeting and I owe it all to not drinking. That's it in a nutshell. If there's anybody new to AA, that is how you not get drunk is do 100% to not drink. But the miracle of Alcoholics Anonymous as far as I'm concerned is getting happy with not drinking This is another level of sobriety Getting up in the morning, an alcoholic whose whole life depended on drinking, waking up inthe morning just thrilled to death that he or she isn't going to drink that day is a state of mind that I thought would never, never come to me. And as a result, when I was new, I said, you didn't understand. And I was sure you didn' t understand because you kept saying things like, just go to meetings, don't drink, everything will be all right. and I knew you couldn't feel my insides or you would never make statements like that. But these years have gone by and you were right and reluctantly I admitted that I was wrong. I think that admitting that you're wrong is at the heart of sobriety and when alcoholics admit they're wrong, at least the ones in this room that I've met, when they change their mind about something It's very similar to the Queen Mary doing a 180 in the Atlantic Ocean. They like to send out press releases to most of the local newspapers to announce that, you know, I'll be changing my mind Saturday night and I'd like everyone there because it doesn't happen very often. Is this working? No, I can tell there isn't. Well, let me shout out and see if I can... Oh, it's back on? Okay. Anyway, I was sharing about this sponsor who came to my house And he was a huge Marine He was about 6'2", he filled the entire door frame And I had made a telephone call on that particular weekend Because I couldn't get a drink to stay down And I knew that I was in serious trouble I had to go back to work on the following Monday And I know that people were going to be looking at me real closely and I wanted an excuse for having gotten drunk. And my plan, to show you how the alcoholic mind works, was to join AA over the weekend and blame it on AA and say I was trying to do something about my problem and look what happened. I followed your advice and I joined AA but I didn't reckon on this man who came into my life. And he walked into the room and he said, My name is Bill. This is a 12-step call. I talk, you listen. And I had an uneasy feeling about this. And I started to tell him a little bit about how my drinking really wasn't that big a problem when my family joined in and shared in great detail what a horrible problem it was. And he bundled me into a car with the admonition to get in the car. I remember this. Because all I remember about him being there was his insistence that I get in his car. And I expressed a great deal of reluctance, and he sort of had me by the neck, and he says, Get in that car. You know, it's that very basic. And for a long time, I thought that was A.A.'s first step. Get in the car. Just get in the cars. Because when he would pull up, and I would give him all of this story about, He'd go, Get into the car, and then we'd be at another meeting. And he kept it very simple. We'd get to the meeting, he'd point to the front row, and say, sit there and I'd sit there and he goes listen to these speakers and I would listen and on the way to the meeting he talked about going to a meeting every night for ten years I think was his basic plan as sort of an introduction into AA and all I wanted was some literature I wanted to read about AA because I wasn't sure if I had a problem. I was still evaluating my own alcoholism. I had an alcoholism problem, but I didn't have what I would call a long-term problem. And he started talking about this meeting every night, and I didn' t realize at the time that he was about the only Marine in the AA group down at Quantico, Virginia. There were two other people, but they were drunk all the time, and he was the only one who was there on a regular basis making coffee. and he needed company desperately. He was driving around all these meetings alone, and I was his salvation, so there was no way that I was going to get away from that man. But on the way home in the car, I made my attempt, and I think this is where my sobriety stems from this instance. On the way back home, on the day I got home in a car, I knew, even though I'd only been sober at that point in time 12 hours, I knew that if I didn't get rid of this man, I might never get rid OF him. You know what I mean? Did you ever have that premonition about something? And I said, if I don't get rid of this guy, this could be permanent trouble. And so I just put all of my efforts and all of My thinking into My game plan, which was to explain to him why I would not be able to go tomorrow night. It was My oldest son's birthday, and I wanted to become a responsible father and be there. And then I started thinking, I had six kids, so I'd just switch their birthdays around a little bit, And the next night was the next kid's birthday, and the next night, and then my wife's birthday, the wedding anniversary. My parents were coming down. It was their birthday, their wedding anniversary, and so on down. I had around 26 days accounted for that no rational human being would dare put A.A. ahead of. And I practiced this speech as we drove up to my house and I got out of the car and walked around and put my face in the window and he knew I wanted to tell him something and I started pointing with my finger and if you've been sober about 12 and a half hours and you've recently had a convulsion, you remember how your brain gets screwed up and I don't remember exactly what happens but you think up a lot of things in your head and they start to go to your mouth and they go down into your feet and they go around in the arms and they get lost for a period of time. And I was standing there trying to start my story to him. And he looked at me like, you know, this dumb look for 15 or 20 seconds. And then he just said, I'll be back tomorrow night at 7.30 and don't you drink. He was gone out of sight. And the taillights were just disappearing and I started my little story that I won't be going to that meeting tomorrow night because it's my son's birthday. And I know that my family was looking out the front door very hopeful that A.A. would be the answer and saw me standing on the street alone carrying on a conversation like... So I don't think their expectations were too high, but I had a serious problem. I had this huge guy who was going to come back the next night And that represented an equal threat to not drinking. I thought I might have another seizure, but the fear of this man outweighed the pain of not drinking, and I didn't drink that day. And I look back, and I stayed sober out of fear of sponsor. It was that simple. It was just a very basic human relationship, one of solid fear. And so he was back, and we went off to a meeting, and now here it is almost 20 years later, and I just found out, this is really almost like an anniversary present, that he's going to take over a treatment program where I've been doing some steps and this and that and we're going to be working together. At least I'll be able to do it a little bit at a time and he'll be there running it and it'll really be like in the old days because we hadn't been able to see each other that much. So I'm real excited about that. At any rate, he started me down a journey in 1964 that has taken me to places that I never would have found had I not been an alcoholic. I'm one of the people, and if there's anybody new here tonight, I say like my friend Hal, I'm grateful that I'm an alcoholic, not only that I got into AA, but I'm thankful that I am an alcoholic because when I look back to when I started drinking, which was about age 19, I was a skinny, nervous teenager who had no idea what was going on. I just looked around and wondered, you know, I'd go over and ask people, what's going on, you know? And they said, we're not going to tell you. And so I just never... I knew they knew, but I didn't. And, you now, I was just afraid of my own shadow. I had been brought up in the Catholic Church and I had an advanced degree in guilt. Somebody asked me to explain guilt one time and this was almost 15 years ago. I remember sitting down and I brought this tonight just for the Catholics in the audience I don't remember this myself but it will help you refresh your memory I must have done something wrong before I was born to upset God or he wouldn't have forced me to be born you remember this kind of thinking my original sin was self-induced I feel very guilty about whatever I did and I feel guilty about feeling guilty I feel guilt about the things I'm going to do in the future my birth itself makes me feel guilty somehow I should have been able to spare my mother the pains of childbirth. I feel guilty about not fulfilling the potential that my parents and teachers said I had. I felt guilty about having the potential. And guilty about knowing what the potential was for. I felt guilt for not having the courage to do certain wrong things that others enjoy doing. Then I could feel some real guilt. I feel guilt because I'm always doing the things that God doesn't want me to do, And that's because I don't know what God does want me to do. Which makes me feel guilty about not knowing what God wants me to. Therefore, I feel guilty about having done whatever caused God to not let me know what he wants me do. As a result, I feel guilt that this can never be changed unless God lets it be changed. And he won't until I stop feeling guilty. Which causes me to feel guilty about feeling guilty But I feel guilty about wanting to get rid of the guilt. Because I know I'm supposed to have this guilt. I'm forced to have this guilt because I'm really guilty. Guilty of what? Guilty for all the things that make me feel guilty. Why do you ask? And that was, I remember writing that and it was just as clear as a bell that that was my dilemma. And, you know, I don't know when guilt went away. It was probably about eight years ago and all of a sudden I wasn't guilty anymore. But those were the great problems that this teenager was dealing with, you know, sitting around. And I had learned early on to never ask for help, even as a youngster. Just handle it yourself. You're from New England and you have that great stoical attitude about life and you can certainly pull yourself up by your bootstrap and you just don't need any of these people to help you. That's what a real man is all about. A real man just takes his pride and finds a way to deal with this. And so I, you know, when you do that, you just don't have any friends. And you don't share, but you have pride. And you also have a lot of confusion and you have no answers and you wonder what the hell is going on a lot at the time. And when alcohol came into my life, it was not as it was to the other people at the university way of having fun. Alcohol was the answer to every single one of these questions and every single One of These Problems. I look back on it, and we should have had the 14 Promises of Vodka read up here because it was an identical thing that happens in the AA program. I poured vodka into my system, and fear of financial insecurity left me. I intuitively knew how to handle situations that used to baffle me. It was just fear of the future disappeared. Remorse over the past disappeared. I was finally able to live in the present. I knew howto start conversations with people. I knew what they wanted to discuss. And when the alcohol went out of my system, I was left back with no answers and with no power to do anything. I was almost like a computer walking around that wasn't plugged in. And alcohol is what turned the machinery on. As soon as I poured that in, the entire system fired up and I was able to function. And so I had great faith right off the bat in alcohol. In many ways, alcohol to me was a higher power. It was as much of a higher Power as I now have found in the program. The difference is, this higher power loves me and alcohol is neutral. It was so much that I had faith in it. And I think a lot of us alcoholics have faith in alcohol. We have put all of our eggs in one basket. We have made a decision early on, whether we know it or not, that whatever problem faces us in life, drinking somehow will disclose the answer to it and will give us the ability to make decisions, to overcome fear, and to somehow manage life. And therefore, I can remember having faith in the alcohol that was in the glove compartment of my car. I could look out the window of the office building I was working in and see my car still parked there and get calmed down. You know what I mean? I didn't even have to drink it to have it work on me or I could reach in my wallet and look, and I still had a $50 bill. And I said, hell, if it really gets bad, I can leave here, ride the elevator down, get in the car, be at the package store. In other words, you're only three minutes away from the answer. So why be nervous? It's when you look in there and the $50 Bill is gone, and you don't know where it is, and you Don't know how you're going to get that drink, and now this stuff is wearing out of the system that real panic sets in. And so there was a very definite faith in the chemical alcohol in my life. And it was something that I relied on, and I suppose in a way, in a very limited way, it gave me the appearance of working. It felt like I was getting answers and I was gettign a chemical view of how life should work. The problem was when it was taken away, I was back to age 16 or 15 as far as my emotional growth and being able to solve the real problems of the world. And that is why it's so threatening for us to come into Alcoholics Anonymous and find out that one of the deals in AA is no drinking. That is a terrible threat. It scares you to death when you find out that sobriety consists of not drinking. It's like taking away the entire vocabulary of someone and asking them to continue to convert, which is why I think the program offers us not a normal answer to life's problems that we were used to but a spiritual answer. My drinking very quickly took me through the Marine Corps I was a pilot in the Marine Corp flew for them for about 12 years got in such bad shape near the end that I couldn't fly airplanes anymore I started to have withdrawal symptoms in the airplanes and loss of vision and heart palpitations and I started feeling that I didn't trust the pilot of the plane I was in, which was me. And that my life was too valuable to go up with someone who couldn't get his car started or, you know, just would drive down to the wrong squadron in the morning on his way to work. And I turned myself in, I think I've told this story here before, to a special board of flight surgeons and this is back in 1960, I guess. Yeah. And they examined me and I had high blood pressure. My hands trembled so much I couldn't sign my name. I told them about these stories in the airplanes, the loss of vision and the sweats and the shakes and all of this and I was diagnosed as childhood fear of airplanes and was retrained as an air traffic controller and I spent my last two years of drinking bringing the planes in in bad weather when they couldn't see the runway and I could barely see the radar scope and fortunately there wasn't any horror stories. I don't have any bad incidents or anything like that so I feel very grateful but it was in that setting that I was sent to a career school in Quantico, Virginia to become a general in the Marine Corps. I had a regular commission. I was one of these guys, you know, that was zooming right up the ladder. And I had an agronomical seizure in this school during one of the classes. And several people in the class just sort of wrote my name off of the list and moved up past me in the chain to become general. And after they got my tongue out of my throat, I was put on a stretcher and taken up to Bethesda Naval Hospital To see what caused the convulsion And about two days later I went into the DTs Which let the cat out of the bag As to what had caused the convolution And got into a straitjacket And went back into the nut ward Where I stayed for six months While we tried to figure out What was wrong And I spent a lot of time in group therapy Captain Not captain, Navy Lieutenant Joe Kirsch was on the nut board in charge of figuring out what was wrong with all of us, and this is before any of us knew anything about alcoholism. And very often we would just sit in and there was all the other people with all the others and all the problems that were around there. Every so often we Would discuss the drunks. Normally it was the manic depressors or the anxiety neuroses or the various schizophrenics. But once in a while We would discuss the drunk that were on the nut ward much to the chagrin of the other patients. Funny thing is, when you're locked up in a nut ward and you are drunk, you are the low man on the nut ward. You are looked down on by people with legitimate illnesses as, you know, real strange that you are in there. And when they would discuss alcoholism, you knew why they were locked up. That was the first time I ever heard someone say, you ought to stop drinking was one of those people that was locked up in there when they were asked what do you think the alcoholics ought to do with their problem and their response was you ought simply stop drinking and I knew when I heard that that they didn't understand the problem I knew that they didn't understand the problem or they never would come up with such a simplistic solution as stopping drinking so it was out of that nut ward after being locked up for six months and coming out that I started drinking again and made that telephone call that allowed this sponsor to show up. And it was under those conditions that I was evaluating whether I had a drinking problem. My sponsor's suggestion was that as long as I was wearing a wristband from a nut ward, that I ought to think perhaps I had some kind of a problem. that this was... And if there's any new people here, you will find that Alcoholics Anonymous is very pragmatic. They don't get into discussing theory that much. Bandit thing. They will point out little subtle nuances in life, like, you have no current driver's license. We do. You don't know where your car is. We do, You can't go home. We can. Our theory is better than yours. You see how that works? In order to win that argument, you have to become a success. And this is our dilemma. We knew we had all the right answers. We just had a lot of bad breaks. You remember that? There's one speaker I always liked. He talked about an endless series of false arrests. you know, that just came into his life. And that was the dilemma, was just a one bad break, one misunderstanding. It was always the answer to my problem was straightening out something out there. And the program of Alcoholics Anonymous shifts the focus inward. It shifts the focused inside so that I can fix what is going on in there. And I think that's the major thrust of treatment programs is to begin this. And I was thinking about the granddaddy of all treatment programs. It really isn't Hazleton. It wasn't even in Minnesota. It was Carl Young back in the 30s when Roland went over to see, you remember in the AA history and we talk about Roland went over to See Dr. Young in Austria. And Dr. Young had a 28-second program. This was his long way before we had the 28-day program. and his 28-second program consisted of this. He said, I am the world's greatest psychiatrist and there's nothing I can do for you. Now, the wonderful thing that did, it ended Roland's search and he said, I have heard of people who have had spiritual changes in their lives and that seems to be the only thing that can do anything with this illness. So I suggest you go find one of those programs. And we've expanded that into a rather large business, but it is a very similar activity that when you synthesize it all the way down to its essence, we have taken people from all walks of life who never would have been sent towards a group of spiritual principles, and whether we realize it or not, we're pushing them in those doors of Alcoholics Anonymous where an endless series of miracles just seem to come out. If you're new in Alcoholics Anonymous, I'll tell you one thing that I believe from the bottom of my heart. If you are in Alcoholic Anonymous and you're not happy, you're doing it wrong. You're doing the program wrong. And I don't have to back off on that one bit. I believe that from the top of my head. From the bottom my heart, that's exactly what the problem is. I'm doing it right. I'm not doing it because there's enough power here. There are enough tools here. It's all here that can give me everything that I need in my life, it would be exactly the same as if someone came up and said, you know, I've been drinking and I can't get drunk. You wouldn't say, well, gee, you must be one of those people that alcohol doesn't work on. You would probably say, I don't think you're drinking enough. You know what I'm saying? You'd say, hey, I'm not drinking enough, but I think you are. I don' t believe that. I think your'e not drinking enoug. And I believe that about AA, that if you're in and you're trying it and it doesn't seem to be working. You just haven't tried it enough. You just haven' t tried it enoug. This is good news. I think this is tremendously good news for anybody who is new to Alcoholics Anonymous. What is in store for you is quite a wonderful journey. All you have to do is realize that where you were going before, under your own guidance and your own better judgment under your own willpower was producing some of the worst results, was producing things you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy. And what's available here is an entirely different way of looking at life. What is suggested is that whatever your previous opinion about a higher power may have been or is right now, that you reconsider. To me, that's the whole A.A. in a nutshell, is to reconsider your relationship with a higher power. Most of us, when we come into Alcoholics Anonymous, are agnostic, at best. At best, I'd say we're agnestic. We just don't want to deal with that. That's just too much to deal với. And we come in here and it's suggested that this is the very thing that we deal with. And I like to think of the first step of Alcoholics Anonymous as the opportunity to deal with that in the proper frame of mind. Our first step talks about this being a fatal illness, what it means to be powerless over alcohol. And what we are simply saying is you have an illness that there is no known human cure for and unless there's a higher power, you are in for a rather horrible ending. It is very similar to taking someone and throwing them off the top of a ten-story building and about eight feet from the ground have a big hand come out and grab them before they smash on the sidewalk and stop the person and go, excuse me sir, we're conducting a little survey. Do you believe in God? this is the only time to ask somebody is right then not on a bar stool not in the library not anywhere like that it's right there and what the first step does is put us exactly in that position where we realize that we have this very simple choice it's a choice that I like to use my Jack Benny analogy on remember the Jack Benny radio show Jack Benny was so famous for being tight with a dollar and one of the funniest radio shows that ever came along was the time he was walking down the hallway you could hear his footsteps and all of a sudden a voice stepped out and said you're out of your life and then the silence began and Benny said nothing and the studio audience started laughing and then they started laughing louder and finally the gunman said again well and Benny says I'm thinking you know what I mean and we all laughed at a human being who would still be thinking when the two choices were this and we come into Alcoholics Anonymous and we read in our big book one of the great funny lines that Bill ever wrote and it says to die an alcoholic death or to live by spiritual principles is not always an easy choice to make and there we are let's see Well, how horrible is an alcoholic? Yes, I think I'll go check that out first. Don't want to go down that path unless I have to. Certainly wouldn't want to voluntarily go down and do inventories, get into character building, prayer and meditation, making amends and all that kind of stuff unless you had to. And kicking and screaming with sponsors and groups and so on down. We are forced down a path that none of us ever would have gone on our own. I mean, I just haven't met too many of us that was into that as a way of life. And so then when we get down there, you know what we do? We take credit for it. Have you ever noticed that? Speakers get up here and they go, yeah, right, I remember around, say, eight months I took a fourth step. But they really, if you're new, let me translate that for you so you understand when a speaker says I took A Fourth Step, this is what that means. At about eight months, my sponsor said I'll break both knees if you don't take a fourth steps and then I took a fourth step. So you see there's a little bit of translation problems. Let me just wrap this up by saying to those of you that are in your first week or two in Alcoholics Anonymous, the biggest thing you can do is not get in the way. You are going to constantly, it's almost like a mosquito lands on your face. You can't stop slapping it. You're going to hear ideas. You're gonna hear suggestions. You're growing to be guided towards one of the greatest futures that you can imagine. All of this is gonna be a free gift that's gonna be offered to you. And all along the way, you're going reject it or resist it because it's gonna suggest that they could do this and your first reaction is gonna be, well, in my judgment, And I think, and if I could just suggest one thing, just take your judgment and set it aside for a while. Just set it beside and be guided along by the people who came before you in this program and you be the judge of how well it's working. You just reserve your judgment for that. Just look and see every couple of months, how's everything turning out? It's a result-oriented program. I think we come to understand our own higher power by the results that come into our lives. That's our definition. My definition of God is the 1,000 wonderful things that have come into my life by simply asking for them. That is what is in store for you. I don't think you should take anything less. The help that's available in AA is perfect help. it is something that is there for any human being who is willing to try and get the things in us that attempt to block that out. I hope you have a good trip. I hope you just stay even when you don't feel like staying, and I look forward to the day when I'm sitting out there and you're sharing what came into your life as a result of this wonderful program. Thank you very much. Thanks for watching!