The Illusion of the Functioning Alcoholic – Sandy B.

Good evening, everybody. My name is Sandy Beach and I'm an alcoholic. How y'all doing? Well, it's good to be back. It's good to see a lot of familiar faces and those of you that are new to AA, I'm looking forward to meeting you. the reason I get a special kick out of coming out to the Manassas group is that the Manessas meeting was my first AA meeting and it was on, it wasn't in this room it was in the Odd Fellows Hall and it was on Pearl Harbor Day in 1964 and it Was a real cold and rainy night and I remember Pete and Pinky and Speedy and all the characters were there that night. And boy, they're still around. It's just amazing. I had been sober about six hours when I got to Manassas. And when you haven't had a drink in six hours, you're not feeling too good and it was the group anniversary and they were having a big to-do over there they had all this country food and ham and turkey and baked beans and coleslaw and all this stuff and the big meeting and people were celebrating anniversaries and then they cleared all the food out and started a square dance or something with speedy and his band and all This stuff going and it's about 1130 before that meeting got over. And by that time, I'd been sober in nine hours and was not feeling good at all. All I wanted to do was to get back and get rid of this guy that had given me a ride to the meeting and get a drink because I was starting to shake real bad and I remember going back in the car. I was in the Marine Corps at that time down in Quantico and this sponsor, he's still my sponsor, but I didn't know he was going to become my sponsor. But he had come to my house after I'd made this desperation phone call. And my problem was I was an outpatient from a nut ward and I had to go back on Monday morning. And I had had a few drinks over the weekend and I knew I was goingto be in deep trouble and I couldn't get booze to stay down. And so I thought I had a drinking problem and I called intergroup and they sent this guy over. And before he got there, I got a drink to stay down, so I didn't need him anymore. But there was no way to call him off. He was on his way, if you know what I mean. So that's why I got here with only six hours sobriety. And I could tell from this guy that he was a fanatic. I mean, we're in the car just driving out here and he's going, well, this is Monday night we'll be going to Wellington and Tuesday night we'll go to Woodlawn and Wednesday night we're going here and Fredericksburg we'll Be going down there and he covered every night of the week. And I was just going, you know, I just wanted some literature. I was not ready for this kind of stuff And then I come to the meeting out here and Speedy was celebrating five years. And I don't know what, Pete and all those people, they had all this tremendous amount of sobriety. And so I just saw I was getting into something that you better get out of now or you may never get out of it. That was sort of how I felt about this. So on the way back in the car from Manassas down to Quantico, I started plotting my escape from Alcoholics Anonymous. And, uh, I was thinking to myself what I could tell this guy and what would be acceptable for getting out of all these meetings. And I came up with the plan that the next night was my wife's birthday. So we wouldn't be able, that would cancel out the next nine. And then the night after that was my oldest son's birthday and the night after that was my oldest daughter's birthday and the night after that was my second oldest son's birthday and then my second oldest daughter and then my third oldest son and my third oldest daughter and then mine and then our anniversary. So I figured if I hit him with all of those they really weren't in that order but all those people existed and how is he going to know when their birthdays are? So I'm practicing this speech in the car on the way back from Quantico, from here to Quantico. And I'm just sort of saying to myself, Bill, tomorrow night is this. And I was just sort OF getting it all together. And we got to my place down there and I don't know how you were, but when I had 10 hours of sobriety after having DTs and convulsions and a few things like that, my brain was not in the best shape and I got out of the car went around to the driver's side and he rolled his window down and I put my finger like this and I remember my brain said just started this whole spiel I won't be going there but it wasn't getting to my mouth I remember the thoughts left I remember they just it was clear as a bell I said all this and then it just never arrived at my mouth. And I remember, I think I was making some choking noises. I was just going... And so he kind of looked at me for a couple of seconds there like I was kind of goofy and he said, listen you, don't you take a damn drink or I'll get you and I'm picking you up tomorrow night. Bam! Drives off. and the taillights are just disappearing when my speech started. And I went, I won't be able to go to the meeting tomorrow night because it's my birthday and my... I think my family looked out and saw me standing out in front of the house talking to no one, pointing, and they just assumed that it was business as usual and here he comes home drunk And little did I know that here it is over 25 years later and I had had my last drink and didn't realize it. It certainly wasn't my plan because as I went in that house, I had some vodka hidden. I had carefully stashed it in one of the very unusual hiding place. You know, a lot of people have hidden booze in toilets and so on down. I took a bottle of vodka. I remember thinking this up. No one was stealing my booze, but I was worried that someone might show up and start stealing it. And that it had to be carefully hidden, you know, when that paranoia sets in. And there must have been about a hundred empty Coke bottles on the back porch, a screened porch just all sitting out there waiting to be taken back for deposit. And I noticed one time there was rainwater that had collected in the bottoms of some of these bottles, It's just about a quarter of an inch. And I said, hey, who would ever notice if you put a quarter of inch of vodka in the bottom of all of those bottles, it would look like rainwater. So I had a bottle of vodka spread out amongst 100 Coke bottles out there and it looked like rain water. And that was my secret supply. And so I was going out to start feeling better because I started to shake and really hurt again. And I remember thinking about this guy who said, don't you drink. And there was behind that voice was or I will hurt you. That was what I heard from him. There was just a and it's sort of a real big guy. And he had come over to my house and knocked on the door and said, hello, my name is Bill. This is a 12 step call. I talk, you listen. and it was just a very fundamental approach to hey get in the car now there wasn't any discussion or anything he was the guy you know if i if i want you to have an opinion i'll issue you one you know is that and i did you know but bill but bill that was my favorite words but bill I don't want to hear from you. I don' t need to hear from you, you're an outpatient from a nut ward. We don' t need to hear from you sit down shut up get in the front row bam there was no discussion of anything there was just this unilateral sponsor who was and so this had me a little terrified that if he found out I was drinking it might be worse than the pain I was experiencing from withdrawal so I didn' t drink until the next night and we went off to a meeting and it was the same thing we came back and don't drink, I'll pick you up tomorrow night and off it was and pretty soon God all of a sudden I had a month, all of the sudden I had two months little did I know it but I was on my way into the AA journey and this wonderful adventure called sobriety and so when I come out here it's certainly fun and nostalgic to think about how lucky we are to get started in Alcoholics Anonymous us to find AA in the first place and to end up with all that wonderful memories of sobriety here, none of which I deserve or any of us deserve. It's just somehow through the grace of God we're chosen to come in here. Those of you that have been chosen recently may not have looked upon it as a wonderful spiritual event, when that big cop pulled you over and said, breathe in here. I'm sure you didn't look upon him as a messenger of God. But it's really funny, a few months later you look back and you realize, man, if that guy hadn't pulled me over, I'd still be out there. And we realized that we were being singled out for something incredibly wonderful, which at the time looked like we were getting nailed. You know what I mean? We're getting picked on again. And so we get here through default and through no credit of our own. We get this wonderful program, this wonderful way of life. And it is one of the greatest gifts I think that's given to human beings and so for this particular alcoholic you know a lot of times you hear speakers say well I'm so grateful I'm in AA and I'm one of the ones that'll go a little further say I'm really grateful that I'm an alcoholic in the first place and the reason I say that is I remember many years ago I sat down one time and I speculated did you ever do this you sort of sit down and imagine what would have happened to me if I never had a drink of alcohol in the 1st place and I came to the conclusion that if I never had a drink of alcohol in the first place I would be an old skinny nervous teenager wondering what the hell was going on that's what I figured out because that's where I was when I started drinking I was 19, I had grown up in New England I was maybe a typical teenager spent most of my time wondering what's going on. You know what I mean? Can anybody tell me what's goin' on? I mean, that's what... And then I looked around and I said, I don't like this. I don'T know what's goin'on, but I can tell from lookin' at all the other people, they DO know what's doin'on. Well, I don''t want anybody to know that I DON''T KNOW WHAT'S GOIN'ON, so I'm gonna act like I KNOW WHAT'S GONN''ON. Turns out none of us knew what was goin' on. And so I was trying to figure out, what the hell's going on? But you don't want to ask anybody. Because then they know you don' t know what's going on. So you have to sort of figure it out for yourself. And you get little clues. You read books. You go to church. You go here. You listen to some grown-ups. And they give you a whole bunch of ideas. I got a lot of ideas off of bathroom walls. A great deal of insight into what's going on has been written down on bathroom walls and you sit there and you go, I didn't know that. But you can't ask anybody about it because then they'll know you don't know what's going on or you wouldn't be asking. So you just sort of internalize a lot of this information and it becomes factual and you have a whole bunch of stuff and you're trying to put it all together. What is life? Who am I? You know, What's the purpose of all of this? Who are all these people? And all the fundamental questions and problems. And how come I'm not as good as the next person? Why do I feel so inadequate? And why am I uncomfortable in crowds? And why is it so hard to ask a girl out? And why Is it so Hard to Ask Her to Dance? And jeez, I'm nobody. And I'm Not Getting Good Enough Grades. And How Do You Fit Into Society? So I thought I was engaged in some huge problem. problem, and it turns out I was simply attempting to grow up. That was basically what was going on, that as a teenager, those are the most difficult years, the transition years into starting out to become probably the purpose in life, which is to become a grown-up. My parents often ask me that today. What are you going to be when you grow up? I've got an answer now. It's grown-ups. I'd like to be a grown-up. I've decided that that's not a bad thing to try and accomplish to be. But I remember just being sort of frustrated typically like everybody else. What is all this going on? And who am I? And so on down. And all those feelings that were inside of just not being adequate, of just not fitting in and seeing how different I was from everybody else. From my inside where I was watching this world Everything looked confusing, found myself very anxious and just uptight a lot. And I ended up in the university of my hometown in Connecticut and went there and had fairly good grades to get in there. But as soon as I got there, I suddenly met all these people from all over the country and they were very sophisticated and they all seemed wealthy. They all seemed to know what was going on. And it was very depressing. It was just sort of that feeling like man I don't think I'm gonna make it through here, but I hadn't been drinking there hadn't had a drink not drink one Something I had heard about in the church. I was going to there was a place called purgatory And I didn't know what it was but I knew it was bad and That if you did certain things then you were going to spend a lot of time there And I had added up, in the back of my mind, just rough calculations. By the time I was 16, I had around 200,000 years to do there. And by the timeI was 19, it was up near a half a million years in that place. So there was some deal, if you didn't drink until you were 21, you got a whole bunch of time off. So I was working on that and not drinking. but everybody that I grew up with had started drinking and so there was a lot of peer pressure. You better drink, you better drink and finally this one night I was at an event and I've talked about this many times it was my first drink and it shows you the difference between us and non-alcoholics and at this particular event there was maybe 50 guys they were all these sophisticated people from all over the country and I didn't belong anywhere and I went around and it was in a room like this where you were supposed to meet everybody. You know, these mixing things. Everybody meet each other, talk, and get acquainted. When they would tell me that's what I had to do, I would panic. Go get acquainted? Jesus, I hate that. I hate the get acquainted part. Just hate that! And I'd go in there and go, okay, I'll get acquainted, and everybody would already be talking. There wasn't anybody who was free. So you'd walk over to a group, you know, and go, I think I'll get acquainted here. And people would stare at you. And you could see them shaking their head going, not this group. Sorry about that. Probably this group over here. I'll go over here and you go over there and lurk stand on the edges for a little while and nobody looks up. Nobody pays any attention. They don't even care if you're there. So you move over to the next group and the next group and suddenly realize no one in the room cares just like the rest of the world the world doesn't care i exist so you circle the whole room and nobody wants to meet you so you leave that was sort of how i handled life it was a very if the anxiety got too high you take a hike and on this particular night i remember sizing up the room and deciding that this was the meanest crowd of people i'd ever been asked to meet and they were passing drinks around and so I said well tonight's the night this is like an emergency I'm not gonna I'm making any progress here I don't want to leave so I'll have a drink because my roommate said if you drink you feel good makes you feel wonderful so I got a whiskey and something and drank it down and stood there waiting and nothing happens I got another one called the guy always give me another one of those things and drank down I'm sort of waiting for this stuff to work and I'm starting to feel maybe this stuff is broken. Nothing's really happening. So I got a third drink, and it was in the middle of the third drink as I stood there waiting for something to happen that I glanced back at the room and I noticed an incredible phenomenon had taken place while I was occupied with waiting for these drinks to do something. Those 50 mean guys left, and in their places were 50 of the Nicest guys you have ever seen. They were all looking over towards me going, hi, hi, boy. Please come join our group. Oh, please choose us over that other group. And I remember looking back at the whole room just going, you will have to wait your turns. i can only spread myself so thin and i remember just walking into the crowd going god are they lucky they're about to meet me and i just went from group to group telling jokes and and just went around there and you talk about the 14 promises of vodka we will intuitively know how to handle situations that used to baffle us and I just boom it was a piece of cake it was just marvelous and there I'd only been drinking for 20 minutes and I found that alcohol had the power to change the world that I lived in see it didn't change me it changed them it just made the world a wonderful place to be it was magic it was absolutely incredible what alcohol would do for this particular person and in this sense I really agree with my old buddy Clancy when he distinguishes us from the non-alcoholics and goes out of his way to point out a very interesting observation that it really isn't so much what alcohol does to us, like giving us high blood pressure and convulsions and DTs and puking in jails and all of that. That isn't what makes us alcoholic. What makes us alcoholic is what it does for us that it doesn't do for other people. See, alcohol changed my world. Alcohol fixed a problem that I had before I put alcohol in my system. And as the years went by and I was drinking all the time, and then after I got into Alcoholics Anonymous, I suddenly realized when I cut through it all, my problem wasn't so much alcohol and what happened when I was drinkin', my problem, the real fundamental problem, was sobriety. Every time I was sober, I hated it. I wanted to get un-sober you know what I'm talking about I'd be walking around and go man I got this terrible problem today what's my problem I know what it is I'm sober that's what my problem is sober is bad sober is painful sober is the world is terrible when you're sober and so all that alcohol did was solve my sobriety problem follow what i'm talking about it fixed this fundamental problem that i had it was my secret higher power that enabled me to become a grown-up chemically and so when they talk about us stop growing after we start drinking i really relate to that it just stops our growth because we never go through the pain of growing up after we start drinking and we just use alcohol as the means to adjust to all of the problems in life and so alcohol really was an answer rather than a problem now as the years went on it started becoming it started creating problems that it was answering but the fundamental relationship between me and alcohol was alcohol did something for me. So there was something wrong in the very beginning, which is why just stopping drinking doesn't do any good. You know what I mean? That's why when people go on the wagon, nothing gets straightened out. We just have a sober, anxious person who's all upset and resentful and can hardly stand it, and the clock is running, and we know that it's just a question of time that they're going to need relief from all the pressure of sobriety. So it's a very interesting thing to think about the dynamics of how this alcohol worked. And I often think about if drinking was my only problem, then I wouldn't need AA. I mean, if that's all it was that I was allergic to alcohol, I certainly wouldn't need Alcoholics Anonymous. I would just go to the doctor and I'd say, Doctor, I'm having all these problems, what is it? And he'd say oh you're allergic to alcohol, don't drink anymore. And I would not drink. It would be just like I'd go to a doctor and say geez doctor, I am eating something and I get all these hives all over me. They do some tests and they say you are allergic to strawberries, don't eat any more strawberries. And you know what? I wouldn't eat anymore strawberries. I'd go over to somebody's house, they give me a nice meal and they'd say hey we're having strawberry shortcake tonight? And I'd say, no thanks. Not for me. I wouldn't have to hang around with other people who can't eat strawberries. Have little groups and meetings. What do you do when they bring strawberry shortcake out? Well, I... I wouldn't have a big resentment that everybody else can eat strawberries, and I can't, and why is this so unfair? So if my only problem was that when I drink, I get all screwed up, I would just not drink. That would be the end of it. But that isn't the endof it, is it? Because we're really powerless over alcohol when we're sober. That's what makes us need Alcoholics Anonymous. When we are operating at 100% with our brain working, you know how we are. Sometimes we get sobered up a few times along the way before we get to AA. You know how that is. You get under a lot of pressure, and they say, okay, okay. I won't drink. I won'T drink. And so now you're not drinking. Your health comes back a little bit. You're back in the big bed. They're talking to you down at work. You know what I mean? And your color returns, and your hands stop shaking. And boy, they're talking about promoting you, and your kids are speaking to you. all these things are coming back and you say to yourself my goodness isn't this wonderful that all this life is returning and i know if i take another drink if i ever drink it's all gone i'll probably get arrested and we know that and we're just and we tell ourselves that and talking with some friends one night and we just are sitting there we're going you know if i were to take another drank i'd just blow all this it would be all good crap budweiser please thank you you know if I take this it could be all gone i mean knowing that it's going to happen we part right in and we tell ourselves well maybe maybe it'll be different it'd be like the guy with the strawberries and he's allergic every time he goes oh i'll get another quart of strawberries maybe tonight it'll be different and you eat them all you'd say this guy is crazy and that's us we're in that there's no defense against that first drink and so when I say I'm powerless over alcohol it's I'm powerless when I'm sober when I don't when I am out there with all my faculties working I don t have a defense someday at some point without a spiritual program I would return to drinking and when I do that I would turn to insanity and all the things that happen so in my case drinking seemed like a lot of fun oh boy I had fun in school and so on down I almost didn t graduate The grades went way down. I ended up in the Marine Corps, became a fighter pilot, flew airplanes for the Marine Corps, and that was a lot of fun, a lot of drinking. Boy, I'll tell you, this just happened to me two weeks ago. In 1955 and 56, I was flying in a fighter squadron with this guy. We're both young lieutenants. I hadn't seen him now in 35 years, and I was doing some lobbying, and the senator from Mississippi knew this guy, and and I asked him where he was, and he told me the hometown. So I called him up a week ago Sunday, two weeks ago Sunday. And Hardy, hey, and his wife answered the phone. She said, who's calling? I said, tell him Sandy Beach, an old friend of his. And he went, Sandy Beach. So he got on the phone, and he said, I can't believe it. I was with a bunch of guys at a reunion about two years ago, and we were talking about you, and we all agreed that you died drunk. And he said, when I heard that, I felt so bad because you were such a nice guy and you were smart and you were fun, but it was just a tragedy to watch the way you were drinking. And I'm sitting here going, watch the way I was drinking. You should have seen the way you were drinkin'. What the hell are you talkin' about? And this is his memories of back when I'd only been drinkin' for four years. and he remembered me as an out of control drinker and I thought we were just two hell raising guys over in Japan just having a ball and even there he saw a difference between their getting drunk all the time and my way of drinking and so later that day I got phone calls from two other guys in different parts of the country that he called and they were calling up to hear my voice they didn't believe I was still alive So anyway, I ended up just, you know, going through it. I got married, had six kids, got in the Marine Corps. On the outside, you would say, wow, this guy is moving along. He seems to be having a nice career. But on the inside, the disease of alcoholism was really taking its toll. It became harder and harder to pretend that everything was all right. I mean, that's a classic thing that alcoholics have to do is to pretend because if it isn't all right, people are going to get in your business and they're going to come inside and start shaking the cage and saying, well, if it's not all right we're goingto have to fix it. And so it became imperative to just somehow keep showing up. And as the years went by, you all know how difficult it is to get up out of bed and hang over and puking and you got beat up or whatever it is and you're just, and boy, you say an alcoholic doesn't have any willpower. Some of the mornings that all of us have pulled it together in order to get down there to work and put in another day is absolutely staggering. I can tell you in the years that I've been sober, when I feel one-tenth as bad as I did when I had a hangover, I stay home. I just call in and I go, I'm not coming and feeling this bad. But an alcoholic can't do that, you know what I mean? We've got to keep trying to show up because we feel that bad every day. And so it's a very painful existence, a real struggle to carry on with this drinking. And I feel very grateful that as the ending came and it came after a rather few years of drinking, I only ended up drinking about 13 or 14 years. And I ended up becoming a daily drinker. I was no longer flying airplanes. I had started to have withdrawals in these fighter planes. And I'd lose my vision and I'd start getting heart palpitations and sweating. And I started distrusting the pilot of the plane I was in, which was me. And I'm just going, we have a fundamental problem here. I know what bad shape this guy is in, and I have to go up with him. You know what I mean? So there was like two of me, and after some bad episodes, I went to see a flight surgeon, and they agreed we had a terrible problem, so I went through this long physical examination back in the early 60s down in Pensacola, Florida, and this is back in The Dark Ages of the military and alcoholism, and they had no diagnosis on the books for alcoholism. So in the Navy, you couldn't have it. There was no such thing as an alcoholic. You had to be diagnosed as something else. And so when they got through looking at me for a two-week period and they found I had high blood pressure, my hands trembled, I sweat all the time, my eyes were all bloodshot and I reeked of alcohol a good bit of the time and they physically couldn't find anything so they left it up to the psychiatrist and the psychiatrist wrote it up as a childhood fear of flying which somehow manifested itself after flying for 12 years so I was taken off of flight status you know rip your wings away it was just a terrible humiliating experience and I came back to Cherry Point, North Carolina and wait for orders from headquarters Marine Corps. And I always like to tell this story because it just shows you that I wasn't the only one that had a drinking problem or a problem with alcohol because the headquarters Marine Corp studied this jacket of this pilot who could no longer fly, shaky hands, all of this write-up. And I got orders to become an air traffic controller. and somehow I made it through that school and now I am bringing planes in in bad weather when they can't see the runway and I'm sure there may be some air traffic controllers in here, I don't know if you ever had to do this but did you ever have to cover one eye so you could just see one plane on the screen in any event there isn't any horror stories I don't have to tell you that somebody got killed or anything I just got through that training and then I became the officer in charge and so I didn't do any more controlling and when I got sent overseas and started daily drinking it turned out my main job was to try and find our radar site every morning. It wasn't moving, I just couldn't find it. And during that last year drinking back in 1963 and 64, drinking around the clock, the daily drinking, I stopped eating, food wouldn't stay down, I'm just doing maintenance drinking, vodka, get up in the morning and lost about 40 pounds that year malnutrition just terrible physical shape and was sent back to Quantico to go to a career school to become a general in the Marine Corps and while at that school in the middle of a classroom my body stood up just stood up I wasn't even in charge of it and just had a grand mal seizure right there you know You bite your tongue and the body goes rigid and bam, down. And there was no way to ignore this problem any longer. And the rescue squad and so on down, I ended up in the Bethesda Naval Hospital under observation. What could have caused this poor man to have a convulsion? and I was up in the tower at Bethesda for four days under observation to see what caused the convulsion and without any alcohol for four days, I went into the DTs and freaked out and just saw all kinds of weird things and started screaming and ranting and raving so I got put in a straitjacket and locked up in the nut ward and was left there for six months because they didn't have an alcohol program. You just went into the nut ward and stayed there and that was an interesting experience being back in there i like to tell this one story i remember when we first came to probably two days back in going through withdrawal or whatever it is and i came to in a bed with sides on it like a crib and someone had wet the bed that i was in which happened a lot and it kind of stunk back there and there was another guy in a crib next to me and he was just coming too and then there was the third guy like a Navy commander and he's a Navy soldier and he is about 15 feet out of range from us over in his crib and it was all this moaning and people you know, coming to and every three or four hours a corpsman would come back into this maximum security area with a match and you could light your cigarette. And because they wouldn't let you have any razor blades or belt buckles or sharp objects, you know, this type of thing. And so we'd get our cigarettes going and we'd sit there smoking our cigarettes and after a while you'd get real tired and you're gonna go out like that and the cigarette would go out and then you'd have to wait for the corpsman to come back. Well, two guys, myself and this other guy being close to each other we started working a deal that one guy would smoke while the other guy slept and then when he'd wake up then we could get a light off of his cigarette and so between the two of us we could keep a cigarette going and the commander couldn't and i remember sitting there in a locked nut ward in a mangy old bathrobe and this guy next to me had gone to sleep and i had a cigarette and i had it going and i was smoking a cigarette and this guys was looking at me real jealous and envious you know like i wish i had cigarette and remember looking at him going Now there's a guy whose life is unmanageable. You know what I mean? Even there, I wasn't willing to accept the reality that I had had this terrible problem. And fortunately, after two or three months in there, the Navy finally allowed an AA meeting to come back into Bethesda. And that, I got to an institution meeting before I got to Manassas. We were marched down there. A corpsman came in, all drunks fall in, left face. They were at an AA meeting. But I didn't buy it. I listened to the guy and I said, oh God, I don't want to hear this stuff. I just didn't go back. The next week it was voluntary, no I don'T need to do that. And so there came a time at the end of about four or five months that I was an outpatient i could come home and that's when as soon as i got out of there i decided to have a drink and one drink led to another and i was smuggling vodka back into the nut ward as an outpatient and i knew i was going to get caught and i had this weekend and that is how i got to the manassas group is when i called up bill and now all these years have gone by and a lot of wonderful things have happened a lot amazing things have happen i ended up getting thrown out of the Marine Corps in spite of going to meeting every night for two years and I didn't get promoted. And all of a sudden, I'm out. And I remember having a big resentment about that. That doesn't seem fair. I'm sure some of you in sobriety have had things that you don't think were fair. No, I went to a meeting every tonight and didn't get promoted." I went to a meet every night and she left me. I went to a media, you know what I'm saying? And sort of we are expecting that things are going to turn out certain ways and that's not the way the deal goes. Things aren't going to turn out certain ways, we're going to turn out certain waves. And we turn out to be able to handle all these things whether they're going up or down. And that's the deal that we get in AA is the ability and the power and the flexibility to roll with life and to have some sort of stability no matter what's going on in life around us. Well I didn't understand that that was the deal. I thought it was going to guarantee that things would turn out the way I want them. And you know as the years have gone by I've noticed that I can classify all of my problems into one. I've thought about this, and I've done inventories, and I've concluded that I only have ever had one problem. Now maybe you've had more than one, but I've only had one problema. Things not going my way. And I come into this program, and you told me, yeah, that's the basic problem that all human beings have, is things aren't going their way. And when they aren't, we get all upset. So in order, when I looked at that and I'm saying, well, that's true. If that's the given reality here in life, what's the answer to that? And the answer was, you're going to have to control the way things are going, right? That's my alcoholic answer. And that's what I was trying to do. And I think that's What a lot of us human beings are trying to Do. I'm trying to get things to turn out the way I want them to turn Out. And I came in here to AA, and they said, well, there's a flip side to that. You don't have to solve the equation just on the side of causing things to turn out the way you want them. And I said, what's that? And they said don't-have-a-way. I said don' t-have a way? Yeah, because if you don't ha ve a way, then nothing can go against it. I said this sounds like double talk. I mean how could you not have a way. And you know, I've thought about that over the years here. And when you think about our third step, and you think about this surrender and this spiritual program, that's really what's happening is that we aren't causing things to turn out a certain way. We are simply reducing the demand that they have to turn out a certain way, and then they can just turn out the way they're going to turn now, and it's still okay with me. And so it's been a marvelous revelation to come into a spiritual program and find out that this thing doesn't work exactly as the material world did. Solutions in here are quite a bit different than the ones I was used to. Just think about our alcohol problem as the classic example of the difference between a spiritual program and a material answer. When I came in here, I wanted to figure out why I was an alcoholic because I knew if you could figure out why you were an alcoholic, you could fix it. You could do something about it. So I was obsessed with why am I an alcoholic? You know something? I've never found out. I've not found out I've ever figured out why I'm an alcoholic. I don't know any more about alcoholism, I don' t think, than when I got here. I mean, I know a lot of alcoholics and I've seen it but I don''t really understand it and how it comes about or why some people are alcoholics and other people aren't. And so my alcohol problem never did get figured out. And yet, it's not bothering me today. So the difference between this program and before I got here, in a spiritual program, problems don't get figured out, they get removed. They just get lifted away. Totally unfigured out. And we're left free from alcohol. free from this obsession to think about drinking all the time. A lot of times, if you're new, you don't recognize one of the most spiritual things that happens to you. Think about this. You're an alcoholic and your life has just been centered around alcohol. You're in AA for two or three months and one day you're sitting at home and you go, you know something? I forgot to worry about drinking last week. You forgot to worried about drinking last week how did you forget to worry about drinking last week i mean you're an alcoholic how the hell could you forget for a whole week about drinking and you just think about it i don't know i've been going these stupid meetings i've Been saying these stupid prayers reading this serenity prayer i've Been doing all these things that i know have no relevance in my life and these steps don't have anything to do with me i read all those steps there's nothing in They're about getting a $2,000 loan. And that was clearly the answer to my problems and I didn't see it in those steps anywhere so how the hell are the steps going to help me? But I'm doing them and I forgot to worry about drinking last week. Well, if you haven't taken stock of that that's the closest thing to a miracle that you're going to have in early sobriety. You forgot to hurry about drinking. That is called freedom from alcohol. It was lifted, it just gets lifted up in our ninth step that talks about that. We have a daily reprieve contingent on our spiritual condition. Our tenth step talks about then. And that's really what happens. We just follow the directions in here that make no sense whatsoever according to our judgment. This program makes no sense. It's not relevant to my problems. I'm unique, I'm different from you all, but I'm going to humor you as long as I'm here and I'll follow the suggestions that are being made to me and we do and we get results that we never dreamed could happen from these stupid steps and these stupid meetings and these Stupid Sponsors that we all end up with. And that's the beginning of the AA miracle. We suddenly realized it is possible to have problems, character defects, whatever you want to call them, Removed rather than figured out and so we start working mom resentments. We start working them on anger. We started just Applying these principles in all of our Character defects and shortcomings and so on down and we watch the relief that we get from being driven by these Instinctual character defects freedom from all of that anger and fear and so on down and it never does get figured out it just is sort of a gift we keep coming here one foot in front of the other following the suggestions of the people that came before us and we suddenly realize things are being lifted from us there is just a freedom from all of the oppression that our old ideas imposed on us and chapter five talks about the old ideas availing us nothing what are all those old ideas they're the ones i always got off the bathroom wall they're the ones I got from the other guys. They're the ones I, it's the real me. It's all those things that we put together that constitutes my philosophy and my outlook on life and we come in here and we find out that what we're going to have to do is probably get rid of all of that and start over again and that involves one of the major things in sobriety and I'd like to close with this because I think this is what sobriery over the years has consisted of is an endless chain of changing my mind. Now, for an alcoholic to change his or her mind in the beginning, it's like turning the Queen Mary around in the Potomac. It is a major event. When a new alcoholic is getting ready to change their mind, they want to call a press conference. Hello, everybody. I'm about to change my mind on a... We can't believe that we're going to do this and I'm going to stand up and change my mind. And look what we do on whether we're an alcoholic. You remember that? Are you an alcoholic? No, no, no. Our denial is just there. And then finally when you change your mind say yeah, I'm an alcoholic and I've been one for 36 years. You know, two hours earlier you weren't an alcoholic It's just amazing when we change our mind and then we're free from that wrong idea. Bill uses the word stupid in the AA literature very often. I don't know if you've seen that but if you start reading our literature you'll see he has little phrases we're especially stupid in this area it's not a complex Freudian thing it's just raw stupidity hey I'm just drinking his booze and puking every morning looks pretty stupid to me I guess it is stupid I don't know why I keep doing this stuff but and so we get rid of ideas and you know that's what frees us up it's like a balloon that wants to rise just keep throwing ballast away and as we inventory, inventory getting rid of stupid ideas and we want to cling to those ideas because we thought them up. It's the real me. That's where that drop the rock came from. This is my rock. I know it's your rock but you're drowning because of it. I know but it's mine. You're going to go under with this thing but you don't want to let go of it Hey, it's fine. I know what you are Let it go, let it go but it is the real me. Who gives a damn? Let go of him man, you're going to die. And we don't want to part with that. It's our real identity. And when you stand on the side, and after you do it, you go, you know, I was real stupid going around with that rock when I really was. And so that's it. That's how, and those of you, you may be stuck on the most important area you're going to change your mind on is in that second step about a higher power. And if you're powerless over alcohol, the only thing you can answer that is a higher power. And if you don't believe in a higher power and you're powerless over alcohol you have a very big problem. It's called dying. And the only thing that stands between this problem and the answer is you changing your mind. My sponsor had a way of putting it he said become a former agnostic. Oh, become a former agnostic. Yes. In other words, change your mind. But Bill, I mean, I've had this position for a long time. What about all the religions in the world? They've killed a lot of people. I mean you know and I'd like to see this higher power. He says unless there's a higher power you're dead. Why don't you see the stupidity in your position? You are clinging to the idea that there isn't one and unless there's one, you die. Why not take a gamble? Why not take a chance that you're wrong? And I'm going but I don't want to be wrong. Would you rather be wrong or dead? Well, that's a tough question. And then later on we go what a stupid position I took there. Do I want to be wrong or dead and i'm sitting here worrying about this let's see which would be worse wrong or dead this is tough us alcoholics are in these tough situations all the time these tough choices wrong or did wow why i mean it's just incredible after we change our mind and we look back and laugh at how stupid it was to have held on to those old ideas so long but that's the power of pride and so on down so anyway if you're new let me leave you with one last thought. Change your mind. Thank you very much.