The Scared Kindergartner Was Still Inside Him Until the Steps Knocked Down the Wall – Chris S.
About This Speaker Tape
Chris S. from New Jersey shares his full story at a Philadelphia meeting in 2009 with the kind of raw humor and honesty that fills a room. He opens with his last DWI — hiring a fifteen-hundred-dollar lawyer, going to view the video, and discovering he was tongue-chewing, knee-walking drunk when he thought he had nailed the sobriety test. His closing gesture to the camera killed any chance of beating the charge.
Chris traces his alcoholism to a spiritual illness that showed up at age five, standing on a hill looking down at kindergarten, overwhelmed with self-centered fear before he ever took a drink. From eighth grade on, Four Roses whiskey became the antidote to his spiritual malady — the fear disappeared, he felt larger than life, and dancing lessons appeared in the bottle. What followed was decades of blackout drinking, Quaaludes, LSD, and the progressive insanity of the disease.
His bottom came during a brutal detox when he threatened to kill his family in a blackout. A man named Jorge found him on the stoop outside his first AA meeting, refused to let him leave, and made him raise his hand in the middle of the meeting to announce he was coming back. That wall of fear cracked just enough. He got a sponsor and a home group the next day. Chris is honest about the gap between sobriety and recovery — for a year and a half he went to fourteen meetings a week but had not engaged in the step work. The scared kindergartner was still running his life. It was a Joe and Charlie Big Book workshop on cassette that finally opened the door to real recovery and transformed him from someone who could only work and sleep into a man with friends across the world and a marriage of thirteen years.
Discussion
Be the first to share your thoughts on this tape.