The Illusion of Being Unique and the Path to Connectedness – Bob D.

Our main speaker tonight is Bob from Las Vegas. My name is Bob Darrell, and I am an alcoholic. Hi, Bob! I'll tell you, I've been to some great lengths to get to a meeting, but never like this. and the people involved in getting me here and the expense and the trouble some of them are somewhere out in the middle of nowhere right now lost all for a guy who has been convinced lately nobody even cares about him wrong again I'd like to welcome anybody that's new I'm not here to tell you about my trip up here I'm here to talk about the disease of alcoholism and the recovery from it I want to welcome anybody that is new and tonight Calvin is celebrating 10 years and I want you to know something. No matter how self-centered you are, no matter how sick you are no matter what you're going through no matter however hopeless you feel seeing him stay sober for 10 years must surely give you hope. I'm in love with Alcoholics Anonymous. How can you not be? If it does anything close for you, what it's done for me and the people I've come to care about, you can't help but fall in love with AA. And what it has done for my parents, both went to their grave knowing their son was okay. Something they never knew before. My sister has a brother today. My daughter has a father who's always been there for her. She's 19 years old, and she's never seen me drink. And Alcoholics Anonymous has created all of that. If you would have seen what I did with my life prior to getting here, you would know that. I want to tell you, I think I've always had the disease of alcoholism. I think i had it before I ever picked up a drink. There was, before I ever drank, there was something that was a little peculiar about me. I didn't seem to feel like other people looked. I had an awkwardness about me and so I became a pretend kind of person. The guy that just pretends like he fits but has this gnawing anxiety about being found out. And I was driven and I was that way before I even picked up a drink. I think I was like a freeze-dried alcoholic waiting for alcohol. And when I took my first drink, I was 12 years old. I didn't know anything about it. All I wanted to do was fit with a bunch of older kids, and I'd have done just about anything for their approval. And something happened to me that day that would change the course of my life. And I didn' t know it. You could have asked me in the middle of it, and I wouldn' t have known that it was anything that dramatic. but what really happened is that when I drank for the first time it made me feel so good that the way I would be on the natch without that effect from that moment on would never be enough again for me and I lived for it but when you're 12, 13, 14 years old you can't get drunk every day but I got drunk every chance I could get I'm 15 years old almost 16 and I'm standing before a juvenile court judge for the third time and I'm standing before this judge basically because there's something wrong with me that I don't understand. But every time I go out with my friends to party and we start to drink, I have an inability to shut it down when you're supposed to. I always go too far. I always take it to the wall. I always get whacked. And some of the guys I partied with, they like to party a lot, but they'd go right to the edge and stop. There ain't no stopping for me because once I start, I can't stop. I don't know that I have this disease called alcoholism. I do not know that I have an allergic reaction that defines alcoholism that in this allergic reaction is when I drink alcohol I break out this phenomenon of craving and what that really is is as the buzz, as the glow starts to hit me In my wiring, which is 100% alcoholic, comes a yearning and a craving for more of that feeling. More of that effect. And I can't get enough. I have never once... On the way to the airport this morning, this new guy I'm starting to work with, we were talking about the doctor's opinion and I asked him, I said, was there ever one moment in your whole drinking history where you'd been drinking for a half hour or so and you're starting to get lit up, were you ever actually sat there and honestly thought to yourself, I don't think I want any more. This is just right. And he looked at me like, no. I said, you know, only alcoholics are like that. Normal people, they can drink enough. They can drink to the point where that's enough now. Not alcohol. I'm the guy. I've drank myself till I'm laying on the ground. I'm so drunk, I can't get up. But if you'd bring me a drink, I'd have, you know. I'm the guy, if I'm still conscious, I ain't done drinking. And that's been the story, that was the story of my whole drinking career. So I'm almost 16 years old and I'm in front of this juvenile court judge because I'm going to I'm getting in trouble because every time I start I get whacked. I get in trouble a lot. And I got sent someplace And it was a compromise. My parents were at the, God bless them, they tried to help me. I eventually beat that out of them. And they tried To keep me from being locked up at this really bad place. And there was a Compromise and I had to go live in a different place. And I'm not at this place that I'm sent to more than a week, I don't even think. I'm Not there very long. And a guy, an older kid's there. And he comes up to me and we start talking. and I'm telling him about how the trouble I got in and everything that happened. I mean, he said to me, he says, well, he goes, oh, you like to party, don't you? I said, yeah, I do. Yeah, I go. He says, but you drink that liquor. That'd make you stupid. I said oh, I don't know, man. I like that liquor I like the time I was drinking 151 rum was my favorite at the time. He said, what if I told you that I could give you something and make you feel about as good as that, maybe even better can't smell it on your breath will not make you slur your words you will not stagger and you keep a whole week supply in your shirt pocket when you're high most people won't even know it what would you say to that sign me up and he introduced me to drugs and I am an alcoholic and I got to tell you something alcoholics should not do drugs we are pigs and I did drugs alcoholically i mean i just oh man everything i picked up i just took it to the wall and took it tothe wall and burnt my life down with it every single thing i ever picked up in no time at all i'm doing methamphetamines to the point where we're speed freaks who would have been doing speed for 10 years were saying hey you better cool it you know i i i'm the guy that if you left me alone in your car to go in to get a pack of cigarettes by the time you've come out i've taken your radio apart looking for microphones from the fbi i mean right i've like whacked myself with this stuff i can't even get to a point where i couldn't put two sentences together it would be wow look at that tree in the sky where's the bicycle i just crazy i just like i was i was spinning in my head it was like a whirlwind and i'm nuts and a guy came along it said, try some of this. And when the throwing up stopped, man, my whole being just went, and I could think straight. And the spinning slowed down. He introduced me to heroin, but I'm an alcoholic. I'll tell you what, we shouldn't do drugs. And I took that to the wall and methadone maintenance. And my dance with drugs was several years to come full circle back to alcohol. I think I did drugs for the same reason that Dr. Bob did drugs in his story. Dr. Rob was an alcoholic of my type. Every time he drank, he couldn't stop. He'd get so whacked. I mean, when he, the day he, Bill tried to meet with him, it was Mother's Day and he went out to have a couple drinks. And the end result, he's taking a nap under the dining room table. I mean you gotta love a guy who takes a nap unter a dinning room table because that's the kind of drunk i am so dr bob started doing sedatives high barbiturates and high-powered sedatives and he did them for 17 years of his life every day because it enabled him to buy himself periods of abstinence because he got in so much trouble when he started to drink and that's my whole dance of death with drugs was for that and plus there was the facade of the you know being a hippie and head and all that stuff. But I came full circle back to alcohol because I am the guy who needs the effect. Dr. Carl Young, in a letter to Bill Wilson in the early 1960s, said something to Bill in this letter. He said that he was afraid to tell Roland Hazard. He always suspected that this was true of alcoholics, that their thirst for alcohol was a low-level thirst of their being for unity, for connectedness, for wholeness, or as expressed in medieval terms or religious terms, a union with God. And I drank because I thirsted for the effect. Not for the alcohol, but for the affect. because see alcohol was a magic thing for me and a guy who on the natch doesn't fit very well anywhere I'm the guy that I walk into a party and I can't seem to talk to people the way other people seem to Talk to each other I have an inability and an awkwardness around me a difficulty integrating myself into groups of people a lot of my life when I'm sober in groups of people, I have a feeling like it's all of you. And then there's me as if there's some invisible yet impenetrable barrier between me and every in the rest of life that I can't seem to surmount. And when it says in our book that the alcoholic will know loneliness such as few do, they're not kidding 1978 i stood on a bridge on my last drunk trying to take my own life i didn't think i was dying of alcoholism felt like i was dying of loneliness because the one thing the magic effect that i had once found from partying had turned on me and i can't get it back and i spent the last three years of my drinking frantically futilely trying to recapture a magic that i could not recapture, and those were the worst, worst years of my life. There was a time in my early drinking when it was so magical. In the last three years, most of the time I would hole up somewhere with a half gallon of vodka and just seek oblivion. The glory days of being the guy that's dancing with the girls at the bar and shooting pool and laughing with the guys those days are over. I can't recapture them, and I'm dying here, and I don't know what's wrong with me, and I started going to psychiatrists. I went to some of the great psychiatricks in the country. I was therapy with Albert Ellis, for God's sake. My dad got me hooked up with that. Another one of the contemporaries of Fritz Perl is one of the founders of Gestalt Therapy. I did all that stuff. I primal screamed for God's sakes. I mean, laying on the ground, hitting my hands and feet going, Mommy, Daddy, Mommy, Danny. I mean... I mean I tried some wacko stuff. I haven't tried it. I hadn't tried everything. That thing in chapter three about all the crazy stuff we tried to control. Imagine if they wrote that today. I mean you could do chapters on that stuff The weirdest one I heard was a couple of years ago, a guy was talking about coffee enemas. I thought, oh man. Is that with cream and sugar? I hope it's not whole bean, oh my God. But I don't know what's wrong with me and all I really want is, I don' t want much, I want one thing. I want to be happy. I want something more than I want anything and it's the one thing I can't have. I want to be able to party like I partied when I was 18 years old again and I will do anything to do that and I canít do it and Iím killing myself chasing this illusion. The book talks about self-delusion that weíre driven by it and if you donít know what self- delusion is, itís psychotic, wishful thinking. It's all the reality and the evidence is that the party's over and has been over and you can't recapture it. That's reality. But this wishful thinking, this self-delusion is that I don't want that to be true. I want the party to be still going and I want it so desperately that I will start to imagine that I can drink again like I drank when I was 18 years old when the evidence and the reality is overwhelming that the party's over. I think a lot of us die and drink ourselves to death because we think we can. We drink again because we think we kan. Over the last 28 years I've seen a lot people relapse. I've see guys go through the steps and do a really good job and relapse, and they do it for one or two reasons. Either they never really smash the two delusions it talks about in the beginning of chapter 3. The idea that somehow, someday, someway we'll control and enjoy it. And I'll jumpstart the party and be able to get away with it. And as long as I had that, I was in and out of AA. Because I'm not going to be in here 100%. Not really. I can look like, because for your approval, I can looks like I'm in here 100%, but I'm not. In my innermost self where I really live, I'm no in here a hundred percent because I don't have to be because I got a back door that if life ever gets painful enough, boring enough, lonely enough, frustrating enough, depressing enough, I'll go get high because I think I can. and I think I can in the face of overwhelming evidence that I can't. You know what it was? Here's what my drinking was like the last couple years. I would hole up somewhere, I would drink, I would go on crying jags. I would feel sorry for myself. I don't bathe anymore because I don' t care. This is not a party, this is pathetic. I am the whiny, crybaby, depressed, drunk that I couldn't even stand. Nobody even wants to drink with me anymore. You drink with Me once or twice and that's it. Because you don't know what I'm going to do. I might be in a good mood. Or I might put My fist through a plate glass window and sever an artery and you're going to spend the rest of your night in the emergency room with Me. or i might just start whining about my father and mother and how much i hurt them or i'm you don't know what i'm gonna do right but it ain't good this i'm a party buster man i'm up it's pathetic that's why i like to just hole up somewhere and get as out of it as i can just trying to blot it all out. In 1978, I was sober quite a while. And I was sober quite awhile because a judge had sentenced me to two years in a state penitentiary and cut me a break and told me if I went into this place to live that's called the Ark House on the north side of Pittsburgh, and if I could stay in there a year and get good UAs and good PO report and make the restitution that I wouldn't have to do the two years. So, I'm in there and I'm toughing it out. And I'm not drinking day in and day out and week in and week out. I ain't taking no medications because I've done all that and I know it always eventually sets me off to go back to drinking. I didn't even smoke in any pot because I've tried that too and that always brought me back to drinking. I've trying it all and I'm just not drinking and it's bleak. And I don't understand something that makes this a deadly disease. If you're a real alcoholic, and I am not talking about a problem drinker. If you are a real alcoholic, your alcoholism really starts where the bottle and the bag ends. It's in abstinence that a guy like me suffers from depression, feelings of restlessness, irritability, chronic, chronic malcontent. Nothing really satisfies me. Whatever I can bring into my life, the shine of it wears off so quickly. And it's as if there's some huge vacancy right in the center of who I am. And I frantically try to fill it up. I try to filled it up with sex and jobs and money and motorcycles and everything I can. No matter what I bring to me, it ain't it. Now I don't know what it is, it just ain't this. and what it really is is an effect that I had once found in drinking when I was about 16 years old where I could go to a high school dance and a guy who couldn't dance or talk to anybody or talk the girls or be a part of could drink a half bottle of rum and I could come out and play and I would laugh and I can talk to the girls and I was a part of. I could play guitar and sit in with bands and sing, and man, I was the guy I always yearned to be. At the end of my drinking, I was the Guy I Hated. I hated myself. That's why I'm standing on a bridge trying to take my own life. I can't fit anywhere, and I can' t endure this loneliness anymore. And I I came out of that arc house on this last run, tried to take my own life and couldn't. At the last second when it came time to jump, I couldn't jump and cursed myself for being a coward and little did I know that I would end up about 10 days, 7 to 10 days later, I'm not sure exactly how many days, it was so foggy then, in a hospital detox in Las Vegas, Nevada. Little did I know that I was about to enter into the only really good life of any value I've ever had. Little did i know that i was finally going to get to a place where i was willing to buy the whole package of Alcoholics Anonymous. A program i had been around for seven and a half years as a slipper but i never bought the whole package. I would buy whatever was convenient or whatever I felt like doing. I still narcissistically was at the helm of my own ship running my life on what I felt like doing and what made sense to me. Now, the crazy thing about that is if you're anything like me, whoever's watched you the last year of your drinking is going to easily come to the conclusion whoever's making decisions for this person is out to kill them but yet in here in this psychotic wishful thinking it all makes sense i never intended to do that to my parents i never attended to end up in jail i never intended to break her heart. I never intended to do that to my kid sister. I never intended it to lose this incredible job opportunity. All I ever intended to was to feel good, or at least to feel a little better. But in this process of trying to fix myself, I burnt my life to the ground over and over and over again. And I'm not even talking of... This isn't all when drinking. I did some of this in periods of abstinence. In 1978, I came off this drunk in this hospital and I was so demoralized. You know, I guess I was finally ready for AA because you know, when you can't drink, whenyou can't jumpstart the party and drinking is terrible and abstinance is depressing and vacant and bleak and you can't even kill yourself. What the hell's left except AA, really? I mean, there's no fraternal organization trying to recruit people like me. I mean there's nowhere else to go. I mean this is it. They call it the last house on the block. The book, it says we get to a place where there was nothing left. Nothing left. No more plans, no more good ideas, No more hope. No more hope. I was finally an alcoholic of the hopeless variety. I wasn't a trap. I could not spring and I couldn't get out. And I'm sick, sober, and I'm sick, drunk, and I'm ill. I'm sick, medicated, and I can't change any of it. And I was finally ready for Alcoholics Anonymous. And the Buddhists say when the student's ready, the teachers appear and i was sat in that detox in 1978 members of alcoholics anonymous came in there and i don't know anything about a really even though i'd gone to hundreds of meetings i didn't know that always in every city in the world it's the cream of the crop in aa that goes into those institutions because it'sthe people the only people that goes that will give of their time and go into these, deal with these hopeless people are the people who buy the primary purpose. That understand that that's why they're alive. That their purpose is to try to help other alcoholics. I didn't know I was hooking up with the cream of the crop of AA in Las Vegas. I just was desperate and I met these guys and I started hanging around with them and I got this guy to be my sponsor and I, I started calling him every day and I started doing peculiar things I would have never done the people in Alcoholics Anonymous took advantage of my weakness and brokenness and got me to do some things if I was in my right self I'd have never been able to do what I had never done and I will owe them my life for that forever and they started to introduce me to a process and a fellowship ship that i never thought i could be a part of and i i never thought two things that i was wrong about one is i never thought i would fit anywhere with people and be a part of sober because i never could i had the only time i ever felt a partof anything or be connected to people was in the early days of my drinking when i was half lit up i had just resided and myself to a life of that kind of separation loneliness and I lived in my head a lot, and I just was that way, and that's the way it was going to be. But the people in Alcoholics Anonymous didn't care about that. And they also, I resolved myself to the person that if I do find a way not to drink, it's not going to go away. It's not gonna be good. To me, AA had good news and bad news. The good news that maybe if I went to thousands of these stupid meetings, I'll stay sober the rest of my life. And the bad news, I'm gonna live a long time because I can't imagine life like this because I feel like I'm doing time. Abstinence feels like I am doing time I feel a mule in a hailstorm I just hunker down and take it until I can not take it no more and I can believe that I could ever be a part of and I cannot believe I could ever be comfortable sober but the funny thing about the actions and the fellowship and the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous is that they don't care, the actions don't care about your opinion of what you're going to do. And the actions of Alcoholics Anonymous work regardless. Matter of fact, I think they work better if you don't believe they're going to work. It's a lot like, you know, not so much today because we live in a world economy today and things have changed, but I remember as a little kid seeing things on TV about these guys, these aborigines in New Zealand who grew up their whole lifetime and they never knew anything about technology or modern conveniences. And you could bring a guy like that into this room with all the lights off, dark, and show him the light switches and you could tell him, you push those buttons, this room will light up like daylight. You know, he's not going to believe you. He's not gonna believe you and you know something, it doesn't matter whether he believes you or not because if he pushes the buttons, the same thing's going to happen for the guy who believes it's going to work. Because the cause and effect in the realm of the spirit is independent of anybody's opinion or judgment. It just is what it is. Alcoholics Anonymous is not some kind of ethereal mystic thing. It's like spiritual physics. You do certain things, you get certain results, and you get them every time. we don't know what happens to guys like me i can tell you today that that i have a relationship in my life with a power greater than myself a power that i call god because for basically because i haven't found a better word but i don't think that i'm going to be able to do that i don' t know that my experience with that is the same as yours and we don't an alcoholic synonymous isn't going to tell you that you're going to have the same experience i have all we're going to tell you is we're going to promise you something. We're going to promise what I believe is the single most important promise of all alcoholics and there's a couple hundred promises in that book. But the single most important is that something's going to wake up inside of you. Something's going to come alive that's never been alive before. And maybe for some of us, we had a glimpse of it being alive when you were 15 years old and you got lit up for the first or second time and something woke up inside you, a vitality, an essence of somebody that you've always wanted to be. And I think that what happens in Alcoholics Anonymous is that we have an awakening. Something wakes up inside us. And with that awakening comes a lot of responsibility and a lot OF awareness. Because one of the things that started happening to me as a result of the steps and as a result of joining the fellowship and being a greeter and a coffee maker and a secretary and all the things we do in AA is that I started waking up to the fact that there were other people here. Now, that sounds weird but I think for my first six months of sobriety, I didn't even realize there was anybody else here. I mean, you were like cardboard cutouts for my entertainment or something. And then I started realizing there's actually people here and some of them are a lot like me and some of them have feelings like me, and some of them are struggling. And my consciousness was awakening. You know, when I wake up in the morning, the phone will ring, and I'll open my eyes and answer the phone. I'm kind of a little awake. And then five minutes later, I might be going to the bathroom. I're a little more awake. Another five minutes later,I'm getting a cup of tea. I'M a little MORE awake. And I'm in the process of awakening. And that's really been the last 28 years of my life has been a process of awakening awakening to God's grace in my life to how much like you I am I've been privileged to sponsor a lot of guys and work with a lot of newcomers over the years and take a lot of guys through the steps and listen to a lot of fifth steps not all of them were as bizarre as Calvin's but But you know what, those of you who sponsor people and have listened to Fifth Steps will understand exactly what I'm talking about. And those that haven't done this and are still locked into being unique will not. But after a while of listening to Fifth Steps, you start to get a truth that is overwhelming and very comforting. And the truth is it's the same person. It's the sane person. It's sane person It's the same person. I haven't heard anything new in a fifth step in 27 years. I'd like to hear something new. You know, a chunky peanut butter and a vibrating lawn rake or something. I mean, something interesting. But it's never anything like that. It's always the same vacant, insecure, self-centered guy, full of fear, driven, and he steps on the toes of everybody around him in the process of just trying to make myself a little better. It's the same pathetic story over and over and over and again. Over and over again. And maybe what Einstein said was right. Maybe the great illusion of mankind is that there's more than one of us here because it's the sameness of the same guy. And I'll tell you why that's a comforting thing for a guy who always suspected and believed he was unique and separate and apart from. Is that the sense of myself and the sense of you that I got, especially through that fourth step in doing that. This was our course. I started to awaken to a sense of community. I am a part of. I can walk in. I just came from meetings in a couple other countries. I can walk into a meeting in any place in the world and have a sense of connectedness because the people I'm listening to in the meeting are me. Now, some of them are me on a really bad day. But they're me. And there is no difference. And the separation is an illusion. If you're new, I want to welcome you to Alcoholics Anonymous. There's a lot of work to do here. But if you're real lucky, you don't have anywhere to go. You don't know where to go anywhere. And you can think, and all our newcomers think, they think they can go out again and like they're going to find a new life. They always, they're either dead or they end up back here. So if you go out, if you get out again, just remember, everybody that you've, you're just going to be in the room again raising your hand. Because there's nowhere else to go. You're goingto end up back here if you're an alcoholic or you're goingt end up dead. So if youre real lucky and you know that and you have nowhere else to go dig in get a sponsor follow this process in this book ignore all the psychobabble and all the crap that tries to come in here from treatment centers and everywhere else just ignore it do the fundamentals of alcoholics anonymous by your primary purpose that you are alive not to gratify yourself but you're alive for one reason one reason only because your pain and suffering has divinely crafted you to help a guy that's going to come through those doors that's just like you, maybe six months down the road. Realize that in God's hands, even the worst things about you will become vital and useful tools. And claim your sense of community and your inheritance. and we will see each other on the road to happy destiny because you're going to be an example of something and I would like to be an example of Alcoholics Anonymous thank you for my life Thank you, Bob.