The Progressive Nature of the Illness and the Lack of Mental Defense – Karen N.

Hi, everybody. My name is Karen Nord. I'm an alcoholic. I'm from Minneapolis, Minnesota, and by the grace of a loving God, through working the steps, I haven't found it necessary to take a drink or anything else since December 17th, 1988. And for that, I'm very grateful. and I'm very glad to be here thank you for having us oh thanks thank you for having us it's been such a pleasure we've met so many nice people we didn't get in a fight last night I want to clarify that but we saw we saw a great fight so you know we can take that take that memory back along with all the other stuff, and you've all just been wonderful. And the talk last night by Doug was great. Everything's been great right up until now. So we'll see how things go. My job this morning is to talk about Steps 1, 2, and 3. I'm also sharing my experience tomorrow morning, so I'm going to try this morning to keep to the subject at hand. But the only experience I really have to share on anything in Alcoholics Anonymous is my own. So you'll hear quite a bit about me too, and I hope it's helpful. I hope this is helpful to someone out there. First of all, let's talk about powerlessness and unmanageability. Is there anyone here who is powerless over alcohol and whose life is unmanable? A show of hands? Okay, well that takes care of step one. I have to give Doug credit for that joke. We were talking about that earlier today. So anyway, to start out, step one reads we admitted we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable. I'm going to kind of leap immediately into some information about myself. I started drinking when I was 12, 12 or 13. And I was in treatment for most of the next 16 years. You know, I was 13 treatment centers in 16 years and I had so much information given to me by very good professional people and by very sincere and hardworking members of Alcoholics Anonymous. You know, I was the benefactor of a ton of information about Alcoholics Anonymous and about alcoholism. And I couldn't get sober. I wasn't sober. The longest I was ever... I was usually only sober for as long as I was locked up someplace. And sometimes not even then. But usually. I usually managed to stay sober while I was institutionalized. So, yes, I was proud, proud for my family and for everybody who knew me. They were proud. But I could not stay sober. And I finally did get sober when I was 29 in 1988. And in looking back at my experience, it seems to me that the central, other than the fact that I think everyone has their time and your time is your time and you're bottom is your bottom and that's all there is to it. The central difference with that last experience is that I was finally able to truly grasp the concept of powerlessness, which I thought I had understood for years. People would talk about powerlessness in these treatment centers and they'd talk about powerfulness at these endless AA meetings that I went to. I mean, they talk about powerlessness endlessly at these endless AA meetings. And I thought I understood. I would think, you know, yeah, I'm powerless. When I drink, funny things happen. I often cannot predict what will happen. And my drinking seems to have strange consequences that are peculiar to me you know, and don't occur to the average person when they're drinking. You know, normal people don't wake up in different states than they went to bed in. They don't drive, actually drive through McDonald's when they drive through it. You know, these things are not things that are explainable under normal circumstances. And they happen to me all the time. All the time, it wasn't just occasionally, that was my life. So I thought, that's powerless, that is powerlessness, I understand that. Sure, I am powerless, when I start drinking, who knows what is going to happen and my life seems to have dreadful consequences. And that was my thinking. And unfortunately, that always seemed to leave me with room for another attempt at working things out. Because if powerlessness was the consequences of my drinking, then all I needed to do was, you know, make a few minor adjustments to change those consequences. You know, a little more Coke, a little heroin, which, you know, can cut down on your drinking. You know? I mean, just kind of mix it up a little bit and maybe those consequences will change. And they sometimes did. The circumstances sometimes changed, the end result was usually the same. So that's what I understood and as a result I could never really buy into the idea that I had to change everything in my life in order to get sober because I didn't understand that the powerlessness that I was experiencing went much deeper than the consequences of my actions. You know, it was a much more profound issue. So, and for some reason, like I said, because I think sometimes we're just ready, I was finally ready to hear that, finally beaten up enough, finally tired enough, finally hopeless enough. I finally had lost my arrogance to the degree that I could hear, finally in my last, beginning of my last treatment and you know, finally from my sponsor what powerlessness really was. And what she directed me to was the doctor's opinion in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous which explained powerless to me in a way that was much, that was accurate. So I'm just going to spend a couple of minutes on this chapter. And And before I do that, I want to talk a little bit about Dr. Silkworth and Bill Wilson. And some of you may know this story, so feel free to just tune me out if you haven't already. And the reason I wantto talk about this is because I know that I can tell, obviously, The AA is really important to all of you. And this is clearly a growing and vibrant AA community. And what my observation has been in the places I've been fortunate enough to travel is that the story of Alcoholics Anonymous is one that kind of plays itself out over and over and over again. And it's often the story of amazing coincidences, of people meeting when they're supposed to meet and finding each other when they are supposed to find each other and having these opportunities that just kind of fall upon us from a loving God. And that's how AA started too. It was a story of Amazing Coincidences and one of the Amazing Coincedences was that Bill met Dr. Silkworth. Now, Dr. Silkworth was a neurologist and he had a very healthy practice in the 1920s and he has no interest or desire to work with alcoholics. He didn't come out of medical school and say I want to go work with drunks nobody did actually that wasn't there weren't people working with us there were probably a dozen people around the globe who were truly interested in the plight of the alcoholic other than the folks involved in the temperance movement there wasn't a study around it there werenít psychologists who were looking into it There weren't therapists hanging out signs on every corner. There weren'T hospitals treating us other than sanitariums. You know, we were considered to be hopeless. So anyway, and Dr. Silkworth, you know, for whatever thought he gave it, kind of shared that opinion of the day. So he has very healthy practice. No thought of alcoholics in his mind at all. The stock market in the United States crashed in 1929. He lost everything, everything. Lost his practice, lost his clients. He was just like many other professional people out on the street, you know. And the only place he could get a job in the medical profession was from a gentleman named Charles Towns who owned a hospital called the Towns Hospital that was one of the six or seven places in the U.S. that treated alcoholics and drug addicts. And he went to work there, reluctantly, you know. And the reason Townes hired him is because he was a neurologist. And like I said, there really weren't very many psychologists. There was Carl Jung in Switzerland. There was this Freud guy running around over in Europe, in Germany or Austria, and that was about it. There wasn't a lot of attention given to that field then. So neurology being a study of the brain and the nervous system was thought to be closely related to psychology and psychiatry, which is a study of the mind. So Townes said brain, mind, closely related and hired him. And Silkworth went to work for Townes and he kind of slowly, from his own story, pretty reluctantly began to develop a sympathy and then an empathy and then certain very specific ideas about alcoholism. Because he watched all of these men and they were all, it was all men. You know, men didn't get treated for alcoholism often. Women didn't getting treated for alcoholism period. And you know they got locked up in the attic or shipped off some place by their family or it wasn't a good situation. But he watched these men come into towns successful people everything in the world going for them sincere desire to change their lives doctor doctor I'm ready to do anything he would dry him up with you know the methodology of the day which was a formaldehyde little belladonna you know nothing too dangerous and then you know try to practice what they thought of then as moral psychology which is kind of more or less from what I understand, like some pep talks, you know, to get them back up on their feet. And then they'd go, they'd leave with, you know, their heads held high and head out in the world. And three, four weeks later, they would be right back in, just as wrecked, if not more so than before. And towns or silkworms watch this, you know, over, not just occasionally, but over and over and ever again. Again, you know, this place had a rotating clientele like many treatment centers do today. You know,this is a phenomenon any therapist could tell you about today. And he thought this cannot be a moral issue. This cannot be problem of the will. These are not people who don't have enough discipline in their lives to correct this with discipline. These are not people who don't have anything to live for. These are intelligent, well-brought-up individuals. And there's got to be something to this other than just a failure of the will or a maladjustment to life. So he started putting together certain ideas, as I said. And what he came to, kind of entirely through observation, was the idea that alcoholics are different from the average person. And that there's a physical manifestation of that difference. We're different in our bodies and we're different on our minds. And as unlikely as that seemed, based on the evidence that he had before him, it was true in every instance. And basically that's what he talks about in The Doctor's Opinion. There are, and in the English version of the big book, there are 16 references to the phenomenon of craving. Now this was another point when I was out doing my own field work on this subject before I got sober, I thought that the phenomenon of craving was that thing that happened to me after not having a drink for about three or four days where I would start to think, you know, a drink would be in order right now. I really, I need a drink. I'm not going to, you know. And the preoccupation with drinking would start to become a part of my daily life again. Any length of sobriety, you know, towards the end of my drinking, a couple of hours of sobrietty would bring on that sort of mental obsession. And I thought when people talked about the phenomenon of craving that that's what they were talking about. They were talking About that I need to drink, I need to have a drink, I need to have something, and that's what that was. And what Silkworth tells me is that that's not what that is at all. The phenomenon of craving is that physical aspect of alcoholism that as yet not completely defined set of consequences that we have physically where when we have a drink, the drink tells our bodies that we need to have another drink. And I didn't understand. For some reason, I never got that. And that was my experience. You know, for probably the last six or seven years of my drinking, I wanted to stop drinking. you know most of the time anyway and I couldn't and I definitely there were many times when I was drinking already that I wanted to stop drinking and couldn't. I don't know an alcoholic who hasn't had the experience of actually being physically unable to move and still wanting to have another drink of being completely paralyzed and knowing that there is no way for you to get any drunker than you possibly are, and to still have your body telling you, but another one would be nice. And you know, that's the phenomenon of craving, that whole set of physical actions that takes place in the body of an alcoholic that sets up this desire for more alcohol. And there's a whole bunch of people, and I'm not one of them, that can explain to you exactly what that's all about. And it's pretty interesting. There's also, as it turns out, some similar things that happen at the brain chemistry level, which was discovered much later, which I think is very interesting, You know, that Silkworth did all of this work using the old diagnostic methods of just observing patients. Well, now they can do a CAT scan and do slices of your brain and slices of your body and show that this really does happen at the brain chemistry level and at the physical level. And, you know, everything that's been discovered since 1937, when the doctor's opinion was written, has kind of supported this thinking. So anyway, so that is the phenomenon of craving. And like I said, it's just written over and over in the style of the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous. Obviously written for me because, like I sad, they mention it here 16 times. I read it for 16 years without seeing it. And every chapter has one or two central ideas like that. And they are written over and over and over and we can't see them. We're pretty special people. Anyway, so that's the phenomenon of craving. And then the mental obsession is that thing that I always described as craving. That whole thing that says, if I had a drink it would be better. And not even in that clear of a voice. It's more of this constant kind of bing, bing you know, in the back of my head that says drink, you need to drink. You can't function this way. You are restless, irritable and discontented unless you can experience once again the ease and comfort that comes from having a few drinks. And that's the mental obsession. That's the other half of the story, and it's the one that Silkworth was completely baffled about how to address. And this is where Bill comes in. So Silkworth has this answer, and he's got nothing to do with it. You know, he knows what the problem is, but how do you combat a mental obsession that overrides all good thinking? What do you bring to that? Moral psychology is not enough. You can't keep them locked up forever. You need, and Silkworth actually identified this, a psychic change of a fairly high order of magnitude. There has to be something to interrupt that cycle. and it can't be interrupted just before the first drink because then we haven't dealt with the mental obsession and I think we all know people like that that their entire sobriety is by the edge of their fingertips and Silkworth knew that was no way to live so what he said is you can't give the alcoholic a new body we have to find a way to give them a new mind because the mind is the problem if the mind isn't obsessed the body never takes the first drink the phenomenon of craving becomes a non-issue I still have the phenomenon of craving if I took a drink right now we'd probably see another fight you know and who knows it's been quite a while So it could be much worse than that. But I have a new mind, so the fact that I also have a body that's different from normal people is not an issue for me. So, anyway, Bill met Silkworth in 1931. And in the normal fashion of your average town's hospital patient, he met him again in 1932 and again in 1933 and then again in 1944. So, and Silkworth and Bill had a real affinity for each other. They just hit it off right away. and they actually became friends and this was a particularly painful experience for Silkworth of course because he knew Bill was going to die there was no question and the last visit to Towns Hospital that Bill made was after his friend Ebi Thatcher came to see him in 1934 and Ebi handed Bill the keys to the kingdom you know, he told him that he had had a spiritual experience and that Bill could find his own concept of God and have one as well. And Ebi had no idea what he was talking about. He was so in over his head it was unbelievable, you know. But for whatever reason it worked and Bill believed him because he had drank with him and he could see that Ebi was different. So when Ebi said he had found a God of his understanding and Bill could find one too, Bill saw that Ebby's roots had grasped new soil and it was enough to get him back to Towns Hospital and he explained this experience with Ebby to Dr. Silkworth and Dr. silkworth began to get an inkling of what might happen And then Bill had, through working the first five steps with Ebby, which they also didn't really know they were doing at the time. Have you noticed everything that we do is kind of by accident? All of the good things that we accomplish, we're way in over our head and out of comfortable water and kind of just making it up as we go. Anyway, so they did the first five steps and Bill had his clean wind on a mountaintop, white light, spiritual experience. Silkworth said, boy, you got me, but you're certainly better off than you were yesterday. And that was it. And the puzzle pieces started to come together. So, just a little AA history. There were a number of other incredible coincidences that followed, but I won't go into all of them. I think probably the most amazing thing about that story is that Silkworth as a medical man was willing to put aside the beliefs of his entire peer community and trust in the spiritual experience of a man who was a hopeless alcoholic. And he staked his professional reputation on it. But for him to put this in our book, that's a pretty big deal. The depression wasn't over really yet. He was still struggling financially. He still hadn't regained his own practice, but yet he was willing to put himself out on a limb for us. And thank goodness. I also think it's interesting that the last word in this chapter, at least in the English version, is pray. He says, though perhaps I earnestly advise every alcoholic to read this book through and though perhaps he came to scoff, he may remain to pray. Again, I think he really set the stage for medical doctors all over the world finally beginning to see that there was a bridge between what they could do to help alcoholics and the work that we needed to do for ourselves. So anyway, so that's pretty much all I'm going to say about step one. I think one of, oh no, that's not true. I'm gonna say one other thing. When I didn't, once I was beaten down enough to understand this concept of powerlessness and the fact that working the steps was worth it because the alternative was an alcoholic death. And there was no, you know, I wasn't going to be able to win this battle any other way. It was a fixed fight. The train had left the station. It was done deal. Nothing about my condition was ever going to change. Once I understood that, And, you know, between that and kind of being faced with a lifetime of consequences, I was able to finally see, you now, maybe taking the steps isn't the radical solution that I thought it was. Maybe it's not as outlandish as it seemed to me all these years. Maybe these people are not as crazy as they seem, you know, given this choice. And I think every alcoholic has to make that choice. And there was a time when I wouldn't have to be doomed to an alcoholic death or to live life on a spiritual basis. You know, as Doug said last night, hmm, hmm, I don't know. So, spiritual, very uncool. Very, yeah, I don't know. It doesn't really fit with my image of myself. So, yeah. Anyway, and the other thing I'll say is that later in sobriety, I've been sober for almost 15 years. There have been a few times in my sobrietry when I have been really faced with difficulties or walked into areas of growth that were much, much more difficult than I expected. I've had wonderful, wonderful times being sober and I've Had some times when I've just thought, you know, I don't know what I'm doing. I don' t know what to do next. I'm up against something I don't understand. The light has gone out of this program for me. You know, I've had some dark times. And I think, you know, you have a lifetime commitment to something, you're going to have some tough times. And, you Know, I didn't get here because I was really all that put together. So the fact that I'm going to run into some issues that really bring me to my knees occasionally is not a surprise. But one of the things that I've discovered is as I've tried to work out my solution to these other issues, I generally need to go back to step one. My inclination is to go back to maybe step six. You know? because I'm a fairly advanced sober person at this point. You know, I like to think I'm fairly advanced, so there's no reason for me to go all the way back to step one. And my problems very rarely involve wanting to drink. And step one seems to be pretty locked in around the idea of drinking, you know, even more so than any of the other steps. So I make this mistake every few years, and my sponsor delights in reminding me that I've been down this road before every few years. But what I've found with step one, or with going back through the steps, is it's best to start at step one. And if I can't get past the language if I'm having trouble relating to all of the references about drinking then I substitute something that I am quite familiar with like selfishness for example which is no longer my constant companion but which I can still identify in my life certainly selfishness is a current problem of mine so is self-centeredness so is dishonesty so if If I can't get through the text and relate to the text, then I just start crossing out drinking and replacing it with thinking or selfishness or self-centeredness or whatever. And somehow it all just falls right back into place again. So anyway, step two. You know, I used to think that the chapter that was on step two in the big book was We Agnostics. And, you know, it obviously is. And it's a great chapter. In my opinion, some of the best, the most compelling argument towards living a spiritual life that's probably ever been written. It's just beautifully put together. So, probably the best argument for the book being divinely inspired too because I don't think Bill was really quite there yet. at this time, but it's a great chapter and there are again in the English version 19 references to being willing to be willing to believe. And as it happened for me, this was important because I came to Alcoholics Anonymous an atheist. I had been an atheist, well, I started saying I was an atheist when I was six, when I first heard about atheism. And I thought, that sounds cool. That sounds very artistic and intellectual and I am both an artist and an intellectual and I'm going to embrace this as a lifestyle. But I really grew into an attitude that there was no God and it was very hard for me when I got to Alcoholics Anonymous to get past that. Not because I wasn't willing to believe at that point, I just thought that it was too late. You know, I could not change a lifetime of thinking and if there was a God, this would certainly be a great opportunity for him to really show me who was boss by saying, ha-ha, you know, 29 years? All right, let's check in on another 29. Maybe I'll... Yeah, so I just figured it wasn't going to happen for me. And I thought at the time that I got sober, when I finally did really want to, that I was going to have to be one of those people who just hung on in AA because I could see that other people were having these spiritual experiences and I knew that that would never happen for me. So, for me, step two was a real process and I think it is for many people. You know, I came to meetings and I saw that there was at least a belief among many of the people at the meetings that they had had a spiritual experience. Whether they were right or not, you know, that's questions kind of up for grabs at this point, but I knew they thought so. So there's a door. I mean, that for me, that was an incredibly open-minded way of looking, you know, because before that, I thought you guys were just making the whole thing up. So then I kept going to meetings. I got a sponsor and I got to know my sponsor and I understood that she felt she had a relationship with a higher power. And at some point, I crossed over to realizing that she did. So now I actually know somebody who I believe has a relationship with the God of their understanding. Again, it doesn't sound like much, but for me, an enormous breakthrough. And then I started to believe that if it were possible for my sponsor to have that, that it was possible, just barely possible, that it might happen for me someday. And from there, it's an amazingly short walk to a relationship with God. And this is what we agnostics really, this is the challenge that I'm given in the chapter We Agnostics, is be willing to be willing. If you can't be willing, be willing to be willing. You know? And that's how it started for me. And again, I think the important thing is that today, with all of the experience that I have and all of the evidence that's before me, I still have to sometimes be willing to be willing. Not on the fundamental belief in God, but on certain issues of what God may or may not be interested in about my life, or what God May or May not be able to accomplish. You know, I still have to be willing to be willy. It is my inclination to be very risk adverse and to limit what what my experience can be and we agnostics step two really is the beginning of changing that thinking of beginning to think of life as something where as a place where anything can really happen you know and like I said we agnostic is the chapter that kind of wraps this all up nicely. But again, the big book knows alcoholics well. Most of There is a Solution and more about alcoholism are devoted to building this case. And they build a pretty airtight case for sobriety. And one of the things I like to do with the women I sponsor is challenge them to find me the central ideas in each of those chapters. And it's amazing how often they can't, you know, and I would think that was, I can laugh at that because it was amazing how long it took me, you know, we don't come to this stuff really easily. and there is a solution the entire chapter is about the reader making a choice to continue reading the book you know they put this case out there they tell you right up front there's a solution and here are all the reasons that that you that you should continue to read this and what and okay you know decide you don't need to go on that's fine it's all good we love you anyway, but the whole chapter is basically provides you with enough information to decide if you want to continue. More about alcoholism the whole charter is on the progressive nature of the illness and the fact that left to our own devices, we have no mental defense. There's nothing I can erect that is strong enough left to my own devices to combat this. And, you know, again, this just runs through it so strongly. And I was lucky enough when I was new to be sponsored by someone who took me through this book a page at a time and explained to me from her own experience how she had had this happen for her. And it's something I hope that you all have a chance to experience if you haven't already. And it was so organic at that time. It was so much a part of my early sobriety that I didn't really even realize what she was doing or how powerful and compelling the material was, You know, how strong of a voice it's spoken. But later on in sobriety, as I had to go back to the book and work through the steps to get through difficult periods in my life, I could see that. You know? I could feel the walls coming down and I could tell how impacted I was by what I had read and how clearly written for us this material is and what it's kind of designed to do. Now, most of us experience this in meetings or with our sponsor. We don't really experience it by reading the book. The book kind of supports it, you know. But we see it in meetings. You know, the people make the case for us in meetings We hear about through people's stories about the fact that the illness is progressive and that there's no mental defense. We understand how people come to a relationship with the God of their understanding, you know, through a series of decisions to believe a little more and a little more and we get all of that through the experience of meetings. But it's all here in the book and that's pretty amazing. Okay, step three. When I got sober, I'm going to skip all this tomorrow, and I always forget to talk about it anyway, so it's probably a good thing because it's important. When I first got sober like I said, I'd been in and out of meetings and AA for half my life at that time. More than half my live. I knew more about Alcoholics Anonymous than pretty much anybody I knew. You know, I just, I knew every slogan. I knew wherever a meeting was. I knew a ton of people. I could tell you at any given moment precisely what the right thing to say was in response to an AA, you know, joke. I knew everything about AA except for how it really worked and how to get sober, so. So I, you know, and I just, I had more, I had too much knowledge in many ways. And I had been interrupted too many times on my way to the bottom. But anyway, so I'm sitting in AA. I'm finally ready to get sober and I've been institutionalized for four or five months. I'm finalized. I'm really out released into the care of the community, And I'm staying sober for the first time. And two weeks go by, three weeks go by. I'm running around with this group of women who were also institutionalized in the same place I was last and they start dropping like flies, left and right. None of us have sponsors because we're sponsoring each other. Who better to understand my experience than somebody who has had exactly the same amount of experience you know so made sense to us and um it seemed like a real good plan until every single one of those women ended up drinking and one day the last one called me up and said I get drunk last night and I just um felt the I felt the hammer kind of this far You know, it was just like I was standing under one of those things that cartoon characters end up standing under. A piano or something, you know. And it was going to fall any minute and there I would be. You know I knew I was going get drunk. I knew it. I was crazy. I was stark raving sober. And I knew that too. I didn't know what the solution was really. and I went to this meeting and it was this meeting I'd heard a lot about and had been warned about it was full of very serious people who really just were obsessed with the steps that's all they ever taught they were just like you know and dragged newcomers in off the street and made people stay late and it was just one of those places you definitely want to avoid if you're trying to live a comfortable existence. So I went because I was desperate and that's what they were like and that became my first home group and I met my sponsor there and I meet her on the first night I was there and she, I was in a group and it was a third step discussion and there were about seven or eight people around the circle. We broke into small groups. It was a big meeting but we broke into little tables and people were talking about the third step and it came to my turn and I thought, you know, here's something I know just a little bit about. So, because I had been studying the will of God for a good six months at that time, since I'd gotten sober. I was actually, I had a book about the will of God. You know, I hadn't studied. I was, and my thinking was, you know, the third step says, you made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of a loving God as we understood him And I thought, okay, well, I will find out what God's will is. And then I will turn my life over to it. And the challenge was kind of finding out what God's Will was, you know, that was and it was, it turned out to be much harder than I thought. You know, I had to do a lot of reading and I had a whole shelf full of books and, but I knew a little bit about this. So I was telling this group of people about this experience, and they were all like, interesting. And this one woman, this much older woman next to me, just started to giggle, kind of like Carl does. And not in a mean way. She sounded very sweet, but she could clearly just, was, this was really amusing to her so much that she couldn't stop laughing. She kept trying to and she couldn t. And then when I was finished, she said, you just keep coming back. Things are going to get a lot better. And I thought, you know, that's nice. That's so nice. And I asked her to be my sponsor. And you know the reason I asked was first she said that and then secondly when she was laughing I realized at some level of how ridiculous what I was saying was you know I thought this is ridiculous you know this is ridiculous this isn't going to work I don't know what's going to works but this certainly isn't going to worked and so after the meeting I asked her to be my sponsor she was my sponsor for 10 years, and she was wonderful. And she took me to her house the next night, and for many nights thereafter, and the first thing that she had me do was start a fourth step. And I'm not going to talk about step four, because that's Doug's job. But the point of that was, and I didn't realize this for quite some time, but I thought she's just, you know, she's, I'm going right past step three. You know, She's taken me right to step four. She either, she recognizes my quality, which is, I am always willing to believe for some reason, you now, I always willing to believe that somebody recognizes something truly special about me. Or she's doing, you know she's got some radical new approach to this that is, you You know, but it was better, it was more direction than anybody had offered me till then. And it was the first time I'd had a sponsor. So I just figured you had to do everything that they said. Having made this monumental leap in my life, I felt I was obligated. So, you know, Esther misused that mercilessly over the next couple of years. I was at her house every night, stamping envelopes, calling people for events, driving her to Rochester because she said she was too old to drive herself, which was just not true at all. She just misused me mercifully. Thank goodness, because I had absolutely nothing else to do at all, and anyway, so I get over there my first night, And she says, we're going to talk about step four. I'm like, well, it's step three, you know. She said, you will understand this more as you work on your fourth step. And she was right. And again, I'm not going to talking about the fourth step, but her point was that I had done everything up to that, I had down everything except for make a decision. And the only way I was ever going to be able to demonstrate that a decision had been made was by working on my fourth step. That's the only demonstration that I could make. I was convinced, you know, the big book says and how it works, there's this nice little summation at the end of the steps where it says, the ABCs, that we were an alcoholic and could not manage our own lives, that probably no human power could have relieved our alcoholism and that God couldn't would if he were sought. And then right away, that's the end of how it worked in America at least And everybody's like, oh, that's so nice. God, I just love it when people read that. And they forget that the next sentence starts out by saying, being convinced we were at step three, one of the most important sentences in this whole process and unfortunately happens to be right after a section of the book that so many of us are so familiar with that we just kind of go down a few paragraphs and start reading again. And the next couple paragraphs are also very interesting, so it's easy to get kind of lost in there. But that's a very important statement. Everything to this point has been this argument about, for us, this proposition that's been put in front of us that we were alcoholics and couldn't manage our own lives, that probably no human power could and that God couldn't win if he were shot, you know. And then what the book is really saying at that point is are you convinced? You know, if you're not convinced and this is actually what it used to say go back and read it again, you now because you need to be convinced and if you are not because there's a bunch of work coming up here and if your not convinced there's no point in doing it and then, you kno, we get into step three And step three really deals with the whole question of unmanageability. Probably any more better, the text in here, than any place else in the book. So, you know, it talks about my life and it being lived on self-propulsion. And it does not in any way say that this knowledge that I have now is going to solve my problem. It's just supposed to provide me with enough of an incentive to move forward, you know. And then, you Know, I get to pray, which I'm actually quite glad my sponsor didn't ask me to do that day because I think that would have probably been too much for me. And then I start my fourth step. And the reason that it's so immediate, that we so immediately move into the fourth step is that I've got to follow up that decision. I'm an alcoholic. I can't manage my own life. Probably no human power can. And God can and will if he saw it with some action. And that's been true all through my life. I think there's a very valuable lesson in there for alcoholics, certainly for this alcoholic. And I think normal people get this maybe a little bit better than we do. I can make all the decisions in the world. If I don't act on them, that's all they are. They're good. It's good. It says in here, this is a vital and necessary thing all in itself. But it doesn't really mean much unless it's followed up by action. I've got to act on this stuff. And the only demonstration that I can make at that time is by following through with the process that's been placed in front of me, which is working the rest of the steps. And that's as true today for me as it was back then. I mean, I recognize myself in the discussion of the actor and the director now more than I did when I was new. I know, I still want to run the staging and the lights and write the play and be all the main characters and then I want to do the reviews too. I want it all, you know? And I still struggle with that especially when I'm not on very certain ground, you You know, I recognize that now. And my process is the same now. Every day I have to wake up and dedicate myself to this process. And there is always some demonstration that I can make of my willingness to follow through on my conviction, you know, that I'm an alcoholic and I can't manage my own life and that probably no human power can and that God can and will if he saw it. There's always something. There's usually something I can do before breakfast, but it's not going to get very long into the day before I get an opportunity to demonstrate my conviction. And that's my job, you know. And that is to a large degree why I think we have the meetings so that those of us who have that conviction have a place to demonstrate it and those of Us who need to find it can find it. That's why I sponsor people. That's Why I do the work I do. That's, you know, that's Why i try to practice these principles in all my affairs so that I can keep demonstrating that conviction. And that's really all I can say. Thanks so much for listening. Thank you.