The Secret of Changing Your Mind – Sandy B.

This is the point in time we've all been waiting for. I've been waiting this for a long time, and it's just a great pleasure to introduce Sandy Beach from Washington, D.C. Well, good evening, everybody. My name is Sandy Beach, and I'm an alcoholic. How are you all doing? I am delighted to be here tonight, and I do thank the committee and all of you for asking Tina and I out here. We're having a ball. And I can see why everybody's so excited to live out here and to belong to Alcoholics Anonymous. And I'll put it on my list of places when we finish working back there and come out here and just enjoy it. I was delighted to see so many people standing up attending their first conference I could not believe my first conference it practically blew my mind to see so many people dressed up sober smiling and jumping up and down and it ruined all of my arguments that there was no fun in Alcoholics Anonymous and I really believe that that's essentially one way to look at AEA it's a great huge show and tell operation and we just bring the doubters in and we say look and then we just keep standing up and there we are, visual proof rather than a theory that this thing might work. And I just think it's marvelous to have these kind of functions that break down denial in its most advanced stage. It's awful hard to deny this room. So anyway, I do always, in order to make myself feel more comfortable, I always talk to somebody who's in their first week. That way I have a sense from here that I may know more about the program than the person I'm talking to does. And I get real relaxed and enjoy myself, so I'll assume there's somebody out there and I'll tell you a little bit about myself and then I'll say what I think some of the things in the program are and somewhere around 50 minutes from now with any luck I'll put the wheels down and sit down and I hope that's how it ends up. Most talk should end that way. But I did come into Alcoholics Anonymous on Pearl Harbor Day in 1964. It's a good anniversary day as any. and I've been to literally hundreds and hundreds and thousands of meetings since that time. I've listened to people from all over the country and all overthe world and I have not been drunk since that first meeting and I owe it all to not drinking. That is... That is the heart of not getting drunk, is not drinking. Doesn't have anything to do with getting happy or peace of mind, but bare bones, not getting drink is due 100% to not drinking, so if you have been coming around a while and you're having problem with that part of the program, Just for the hell of it, check your drinking Maybe you're still drinking You know, there isn't a step that says no drinking Have you noticed that? There's not even a sign on the wall that says No drinking So I suppose that we could make a case it would be possible to be around here and not know that not drinking was part of this thing. And we could get into some sort of a thinking process that would lead us to hope that we Could go through the steps and have a spiritual awakening, at which point it would Be very easy to stop drinking. However, I would point out it's probably very difficult to have a spiritual awakening and the dry heaves. It would be an easier, softer way, but I haven't met anybody who's been successful at that, so you're going to have to bite the bullet and stop that damn drinking if anybody's doing that. For some or other reason, and this has nothing to do with my talk, but does anybody watch 60 Minutes? And there's a guy named Andy Rooney that comes on at the end of that show. And I can imagine him up here at an AA meeting saying something like this. Did you ever notice that your drinks keep coming up? Did you never notice that you keep waking up in the wrong room? Did you every notice your own dog keeps biting you? I'll have to use that again That's not too bad It doesn't really do with my talk I just The guy upsets me quite frankly And I was I'm just working off a resentment At your expense One other thing I want to say before I get into my talk, because I write these things down and I never get to say them. I've always wanted to give a talk on the chapter to the agnostic in the big book. And I'll tell you some thoughts I had about that. I don't know about you all, but I was around a while and owned a big book but hadn't read it. Some of us know what's in there without reading it. we also know the steps won't work without taking them. We have a secret gift that enables us to know ahead of time how things are going to turn out. I think in one of the stories in the back of the big book, they call it contempt prior to investigation. And I remember that chapter was in there, the chapter to the agnostic. And I'll tell you how I used that. I said, isn't that nice? There's a chapter in the big book for the people who are agnostics and are working the program well. It's nice to know that the program works well for agnostcs. And I went along with this rumor for a number of years until I read it. So, you know, if there's somebody out there who has the same situation that I do, let me tell you what that chapter says. Hey, change your mind! That's what that chapter says. And if there's anything I'm going to talk about tonight, it is, hey, change your mind. That, to me, is one of the great secrets of life, is to change your mine, you know? Does this thing upset you? Hey, change you mind. Get un-upset. I never thought of that option. I never recognized that as a valid, legitimate course of action or a choice. Well, of course, I never realized that. I never recognize a lot of things growing up. I come from New England and it's ironic. Here we are on the beautiful coast of California enjoying immensely a fantastic program that was started by a couple of guys from Vermont. I can't believe that this all started in Vermont. Has anybody here ever been to Vermont and seen Vermont? I can'T believe they drink in Vermont, it's just... I came from Connecticut, and I thought, Vermont, my God, look how cold and north that is. And I'm from Connecticut. So you can see what a reputation Vermont had. But here it is, these guys, and it's just amazing how this has just traveled around the world and we have this same joy no matter where we go. But I didn't have joy when it started out. I wanted to talk a little bit about ideas that I got growing up. I suppose they're kind of universal. The ideas that we get when we're growing up are childish. And most people pass on from that. the rest of us arrived here. And we got a lot of catching up to do with the rest of the world. Did you ever notice how you come into AA and you run down to your office and start pointing out to people who've been there for 30 years that you showed up every day for a month? And you wonder why they're not applauding and they go, we've been showing up here for years. What the hell? Why is that a big deal? And they don't understand. We've never tried it. But I suppose all of us come here, I did, with what might be called the philosophy of life. Some sort of a value system, some sort of feeling about the people around us, the world, principles and so on down. And I know I did, and it was something that was put together by me. Therefore, it had a great value. The value was in its authorship. And that's why those old ideas are so hard to get rid of is that I thought them up. And it just, you know, you mean I'm wrong about that too? And this process of being wrong is so painful, but I suppose if we look at when we put together a lot of our ideas about the world, we'll recognize that a vast majority of them may have been put together before we were ten. And here we come marching in here at 30, 40, 50 years of age defending these ideas, still holding on to them for some fear that changing my mind about something I read on the little boy's room wall at age seven is going to look wishy-washy if I back off on that, you know. Well, the guy's always changing his mind. He doesn't have any convictions. And we come in here and we get taught to have an open mind, which I suppose gets us off the hook a little bit along those lines. So I suppose I was a typical young kid trying to figure out what life was all about and what the deal was. And I suppose early on, I compared my insides to everybody else's outsides, and they all looked like they knew what was going on. Did you all have that? You know, I'd look around the classroom in the second grade and everybody seemed to know what was doing on, and I didn't. And, uh, I was afraid to ask, and I just sort of said, maybe it'll come to me next year, or I'll figure this out. And I felt funny about not knowing what was going on. And somewhere in that early age, I got a great clue as to what was doing on, and they sat me down and said, welcome little boy, you're in trouble. And they explained the great pain that I was going to experience due to guilt. And I got wrapped up in that whole thing and developed early on sort of a fear for a higher power. Now this is probably not what was taught to me but that's what I heard. I used to try and lay some blame on various things growing up, and I have no idea what was really said. I just know what I felt and how I took all this in. And so I developed early on not a real support system for a higher power, and yet when I came to AA and you suggested a higher Power, I was arrogant enough to say, I tried that once and it didn't work. Tried that once and it did not work. We do that a lot with prayer. Tried one prayer and it was not working. It did not worked, so I stopped it. Can you imagine if we did that with drinking? Hey, I am trying to get drunk. Well, if you had a drink, I had one, it did NOT work. Well, drink more. And we come in here and we hear the same advice. Well, pray more. And they both come true. Anyway, this process that I had, I look at myself as a person who is very grateful that I'm an alcoholic, which is one step beyond being grateful that you're an AA member. The first time I heard that, I felt like getting sick. It just came across, you know, this guy's going too far. You know, grateful that he's an alcoholic. Well, the reason that I say it, I don't know why other speakers might say it but I am one of these guys who was a primary alcoholic. I drank socially 10 or 15 minutes and crossed the line and everything went out of control and then I eventually ended up in Alcoholics Anonymous and what I'm saying is I didn't have anything going for me before I started drinking and so if I make a pure conjecture as to where I might be if I had never had a drink. I would say rather, you know, that I started drinking as a nervous skinny teenager, I would now be an old nervous skinny guy looking around, essentially going home and going, I wonder what the hell is going on? You know, I would be a little lost soul but sober. And what AA has given me is answers. It has givenme solutions. It hasgiven me the great source of power that is the very secret of life, and I don't think that I ever would have found it had I not been driven to it because I was not attracted to that way of life. I was in for excitement. I was, as Jackie Vernon likes to call himself, Mr. Excitement. I liked agitation. I like things stirred up. I like something going on. And I used to think that was because it was so much fun to be around people and I liked all this activity. But, you know, the more I inventory that and the more i think about it, I'll tell you what I think the real deal was. If you could keep things parked up and keep the excitement level real high and the squad cars arriving and an emergency all the way up there on the front burner at all times, there was no time for thinking. And there was not time for let's have a long talk. Did anybody ever say to you let's Have a Long Talk? There was no time for any of that. We had to deal with today's emergency. Then we could settle down and deal with who's going to pay all these bills? Why don't you grow up? You know, what is life all about? Why am I nobody? Why am i so frightened? All of these things can be put on the back burner till we deal with getting out of jail. Then we'll get on. I know they're all there. I know those are all those things I ought to do and that all grown-up people are supposed to file income tax returns and you're supposed to have a license placed on your car and you've got a driver's license. You're supposed of have a job and you are supposed to go to work and you supposed to money. Right, I know that. But I've got the damn emergency going on and I can't... So I think, well, I really think we seek out emergencies. Keep them going. If there is an emergency, there's a party. you can't go in the middle of a party and get a driver's license. I'll go after the party. Unfortunately, after the party, I'm in jail. No, I can't go to the, uh... So we do have a strange way of avoiding and one way is to have emergencies and have all of this drama that seems to center around us alcoholics. It's just incredible, I look back on that. Never used to think that, never recognized that, but I really believe it now and I've had a chance to look at it. Anyway, so one of these times I'm going to get to my first drink. I'm having a hell of a problem getting going here tonight. Anyway, because I always like to talk about that because that got me to be an alcoholic. I was an alcoholic that very first night, and I did not have my first drink until I was in college. And I went to the local university in my hometown, and it's a very good university, and people came from all around the United States, very sophisticated, and all of them knew what was going on. And I still didn't. But I was pretending like I knew what Was going on, and that I was afraid that somebody would find out one of these days. You know, when you're pretending and you have a lot of secrets, it's very natural for paranoia to set in. And you know that somebody's going to find out and let the cat out of the bag. And it was going to happen at some social event. Some guy was going go, Hey, I see we have a guy in our midst who doesn't know what's going on. Get up here. And there it would be. Oh, God. And so I was dreading that day. One way to avoid that was to leave, leave social functions, leave situations as they got uptight. But sometimes you just have to hang in there. And I remember this particular night I hung in there and stayed at this particular social event. And these people were very mean looking and there was all those glances over there, what are you doing here? and all that hostility that this world is so well known for. All the hostile looks in people's eyes and it's a dog-eat-dog world. You know, all that stuff that's on the walls of the toilets. And I believed all that. I said, it is rough and it is going to be lucky if I survive this, etc., etc. And a tray of drinks went by And my roommates had been talking about drinking and saying, we're in college now, you should be drinking. And I was really behind a little bit, so I had a drink and I was waiting for this great feeling that everybody said you would have when you drank. It'd make you feel good. And I remember feeling nothing. I just was greatly disappointed. It was greatly overrated, this whiskey. And I had several drinks and I had to wait. had a couple of drinks and I was waiting and waiting for this great feeling that was going to take place. And nothing happened to me, but you should have seen what happened to all the people in the room. I'm sitting over there trying to get this whiskey to work and they took out all the crowds that had been in there earlier and brought in the nicest bunch of folks you have ever seen. These people could hardly wait for me to join them. They were like, get over here. Get over here! Where have you been? We love you. Tell us a joke. Get in our midst, and I was in harmony with the world around me. I knew peace. I knew this sense of belonging. The promises of whiskey were being fulfilled sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly. I intuitively knew how to handle situations that used to baffle me. A pair of financial insecurity left, and I bought a round for 50 people. And I had found a higher power. I had found a way of changing the world that I lived in from a hostile environment to one where it was just marvelous. And I was an alcoholic. I had placed alcohol in a great position in my life compared to the rest of the guys, or most of the rest OF the guys who had a drink that same night probably said, boy, this is fun. I'm going to be doing this on weekends and it'll be great. and I said, this is the answer to the rest of my life. The answer to all of my problems will somehow be found in drinking. I didn't know I said that, but it became that important right on. It solved so many of the problems that I had at that moment. I mean all of life's problems. All those little things you sit on your bed late at night and you think about and it drives you crazy and your little fears and all your worries about the future and what other people think about you. All of those problems were solved by simply drinking. I said, my God, what a wonderful secret this is. It's a shame I didn't know about this sooner. I've been through very unnecessary pain up until this day. And from that day forward, I tried to solve everything that came along by drinking. It was a truth as far as I was concerned that somewhere just keep tinkering around with drinking and I just, it was a question of fine-tuning it. You know what I'm talking about. You sit there and you go, John, if I just had quit at about quarter of one instead of one, they wouldn't have had that speed trap up and I would have been home on time. Or if I had just started with some milk and then maybe a warm beer and then some soup, I think then it's safe to go ahead and chug-a-lug a fifth of vodka or whatever the deal was. I was always looking for the answer to these problems somehow lay in fixing the drinking. Fixing the drinking because this was as essential to my life as breathing and eating was, was drinking. It just was that crucial. And it's no small wonder when we come into Alcoholics Anonymous and somebody suggests not drinking, it scares the hell out of us. I mean, our whole system goes into shock. It's as if they're suggesting, well, let's all hold our breath a week and see how things look. You've got to be kidding. To not drink for a whole hour, a whole half day, a whole day, just the concept of it was so overpowering. is something I don't think any of us could have done alone. It is that is why when we get in the advanced stages, we need each other so desperately because our bodies are telling us you're going to die, you're gonna have this and you can just feel all these signals coming up from the system that is threatening all kinds of things and we need to be careful and we should need each others reassurance it's going to be alright what a great sentence the old hand on the back of the neck and somebody's voice saying it's going to be all right. That's the greatest therapy in the world, that feeling of somebody touching you and telling you it's gonna be all right. And I thought, yeah, all right, I'll buy that. It was that great feeling and I enjoy getting that here in AA and I think that's the great function we serve for each other is when our day isn't going right to get somebody who can tell us it's gonna be alright. It's a great healing power that's found here in the fellowship. anyway that got me to be an alcoholic and that's really my story just goes on until I get to AA by way of background music I earned my drinking money in the Marine Corps I became a pilot and I flew jets in the Marines for about 12 years very exciting I understand and traveling around the world and I was married and had six children. I look like, you know, this guy's putting a life together. He's got a family. He's Got This. He's That. But mostly he had an illness. And being an alcoholic was a full-time job. Being self-centered is time-consuming. Trust. Keeping track of the injustices that are done to us on a daily basis takes most of the day. There's very little time for anything else. I can't tell you how many things went wrong today. You want to hear? Let me tell you. Just the retelling takes 10 or 12 hours. So being self-centered, certainly one of the most painful experiences there is. And I didn't know that I was self-centred. I didn'T know anything. All I knew was the pain that I WAS experiencing as life continued and I went farther off the beam. You know, the problem with being a human being is that we're born with some kind of a spark of the divine power within us. We're born without a soul. We're not born with our conscience, our soul, whatever word is appropriate in your vocabulary. But we'reborn with that something in there that just won't die. And if that wasn't there, there wouldn't have been any conflict. You know what I'm talking about? I would have just gone out ripping up things and go to bed and just go, Big deal. So what? But there was part of me that was going, You're not supposed to be ripping those things up. You're supposed to beat your children's birthday. You're opposed to be a good parent. And I was going would you shut up in there? Because I knew I couldn't change. I knew it was powerless to become a good parents. Eventually you quit. you start realizing that tomorrow I'm not going to change and you stop telling that dream anymore and you sort of accept the fatal nature of your rottenness and you decide to make the best of it. And the bestofit could be a hell of a lot better if you could get that little voice to shut up. Then at least you'd just be wallowing around in your misery where you wouldn't be giving yourself a hard time about it. And so I suppose what I was trying to do with the drinking in the later stages was to kill the God that was in me and just shut it up so that I could be, as they used to say in the Catholic Church, I was tryng to learn how to sin guilt-free. And the only way to do it was to pass out. Just drink right to passout, and then when you get up, start drinking again. And then that leaves no time for thinking. And thinking is very painful. You know, that's why it's one of our mottos and we have it up there with easy does it and live and let live and so on. Now, there it sits. Think. And I've come to think that's oneof the great words sitting up there is that think. Because that's exactly what I never did. Never did I want to do that. It's too painful to think. take inventories, think about the day at the end of the day. All of those things. I did not want to do that and drinking was a way to avoid it. But anyway, the years went on and the illness progressed and there came a time when flying airplanes was becoming a rather significant problem. Getting in the car was becoming a problem, and planes are much harder to handle and manage than cars, and I'm down there, and just all kinds of things are happening. Physical symptoms, withdrawal, the shakes, the sweats, the loss of vision, and all these things creates a tension of a certain sense of nervousness that there was part of me that was the human being that felt its life was too valuable to go up with me, the pilot. And there was this fear of death that most alcoholics have. It's that terrible, I'm going to die. And I've noticed that's diminished quite markedly since I have been in AA and the sobriety keeps going on and on and I learn from you all about life and I realize that for me that terrible fear of death was really a fear of never having lived. That it was going to be over and I wouldn't have figured it out. They'd say, well, they're saying the last rites here, and I'd be going, I still don't know what's going on, you know. And now I know what's going on. So it's all right. I finally found out what's going on and I found out what life is about and what all the joy of living is and what the spiritual principles and values and all the great messages that we get in AA, so that fear has been diminished quite remarkably. But at that moment in time it was absolute panicsville and it got so bad that I went to the doctors and told them of all these problems and they agreed it was serious because those planes were expensive. And I was after being observed for two weeks by all the specialists and I lied about the various things that were going on with the drinking So back in those days, in the early 60s, the Navy did not have an alcohol program. They didn't have any doctors who were really... had any experience with alcoholics. So the diagnosis for what was wrong with me was left to the psychiatrists and I was diagnosed as a childhood fear of airplanes. And that all these things that were going on in the airplane were strictly psychological, deep-seated fears and everything. And I didn't tell them the same thing was going on in cars and in the bathroom and everywhere else. I was too afraid to tell anybody anything. And so the end of my great macho life came about. They took away my wings, and now you're not a big shot anymore, and you're nobody. And and I was nobody with wings, so what the hell. They didn't help at all. I remember saying, God, if I just get a pair of wings, I'll be somebody. Everybody ever do that? And you get them, and you go, that don't work. I'm still nobody. But anyway, the Marine Corps now had a shaky, drunken pilot on his hands who could not find his way to work, and they had to retrain him. I was a regular officer, and I had certain retention rights which were later removed. and I was retrained as an air traffic controller, which is... So... Now I spent the last year and a half of my drinking bringing planes in in bad weather. and I'm so grateful there aren't any horror stories there weren't any crashes or close calls or things like that and I think it's because eventually I became in charge of the operation overseas and you know the guy in charge didn't know what's going on anyway he just filling out the paperwork and trying to find his way to work on a bicycle I have a lot of stories Take a guy in that stage Over in Japan, you know They have monsoon seasons over there And you get out with a poncho An umbrella And your aching body on a bicycle And try and negotiate that Going to work When you've just spent about an hour Trying to get dressed Anyway, at that point in time I could get into daily drinking and things really accelerated. I started drinking around the clock, I was no longer flying so there wasn't any reason to hold off during the working hours and boy it really accelerated, I lost about 30 pounds that year due to malnutrition, I just practically wasn't eating anything, absolute terrified, just a whole year with one great fear of just sitting in there worrying about letters, phone calls, knocks on the door, all of these things and trying to show up. It was a terrible exercise in pain and fear and all along trying to pretend like nothing was wrong. If there's anything hard to do about being an alcoholic is to go through all that stuff and try and act cool. And you say to yourself, you know, I think I have about 11 minutes to live. That's what you say. And then somebody comes by. Hey, Sandy, how are you doing? Fine. Doing great. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah, be right there. Get that whole thing. Because if you didn't do that, somebody's going to go something wrong and then they'll be in your life. They'll be messin' around, asking questions, looking, probing and they may find out you're not there you know as we become absolute shells of human beings one of the reasons I wore sunglasses you know they issue sunglasses to aviators the big ones and I wore them all the time at night inside outside everywhere and it was so that people couldn't look at my eyeballs. I didn't want anybody to be able to look in there. I heard that the eyes were the mirror to the soul or the window to the sole and I knew there were some people in this world somewhere who could look in eyes and see that there was nobody in there and I never liked to make eye contact and I've noticed sometimes some of us that are new in AA we're not making eye contact We're shifting around, looking over here, there. But we don't look anybody right eyeball to eyeball because they're afraid they're going to look right in there and go, Hey, you're gone. Where are you? A little voice comes out, it breathes the hell out of me. I don't know where I am. But I know one thing, I don' t want to be there. That was the only thing I knew. It didn' t matter where I was, I knew I didn' d want to b e there. This was wrong, too. I never belonged anyplace. Never belonged. Always on the run. Keep moving. Keep moving! A moving target is hard to hit. That whole philosophy. And it was nice to settle down. But I didn't settle down voluntarily. If any of you are new here tonight and you did not come of your own free will to your first AA meeting, welcome to the club. I don't think many of us really sat around our living room after a few years of drinking and saying to ourselves, you know, my drinking could get out of control someday. I think I'll join AA early before trouble sets in. If you think all the people in the room, they look all dressed up and you think they just strolled in day A and went through the steps voluntarily. Don't you believe them? They were kicking and screaming and all of that. We just got here because somebody got a hold of us and stuck us here. And it may have been a doctor who told you not to buy any long playing records. because he was about to explain liver damage. Or it may have been a boss who said, you got a moment? I want you to meet your replacement. Or you come home and your family's going on vacation and you aren't. And more recently we're getting the judges in the act and I think that's great. They get us up there in front of their bench. And they're finally wised up as to what really works and they get this guy up there who's shaking and hurting and he goes, My friend, I see you're up here for being drunk. It's the fourth time you've been up here this year. I'm going to have to get real tough. Either you go to an AA meeting or it's a year in jail. Guy stands out there about 30 minutes trying to make his mind up. As he heard, you might get a drink in jail. But the word is out about Alcoholics Anonymous. People from the bar go to AA and we never see them again. They go to jail and they come back. There's something final about Alcoholic Anonymous And you don't go there except it's a last resort. And so we come here kicking and screaming, and I was no exception. I finally had a convulsion and DTs and all these good things. I ended up in the nut ward at the Bethesda Naval Hospital, and they kept me there for six months just trying to figure out what was wrong and all the diagnosis. At that time, they didn't have the alcoholics all in one spot. They mixed us all together. Everybody who didn't know what was going on was in the same ward and we sat around in a little circle and the psychiatrists sat there and sometimes there'd be a topic and sometimes they would just sit there. And I would sit there and go, God, would somebody say something? I can't stand all this silence and people looking and this and that and sometimes они бы поговорили с алкоголиками Not too often, because this was not a very popular disease. It had no class. Schizophrenics, depressives, manic depressives. Paranoids. They all had something with some dignity. And the alcoholics, there was four of us at the time. Were the low men in the nut ward. even there the other people that were locked up looked down on the alcoholics as having you know like that's not even a disease and I'll never forget one day they discussed alcoholism with all these sickies and they all had their day at saying what they thought about our illness and I will never forget some of this stinking thinking I'll ever forget this one guy looks at us with some sort of a scornful look on his face and he says, you guys ought to stop drinking. God! You can see why he was locked up. Stop drinking? Geez, if that's all it was, I would have thought of that myself. Well, you know how bad I'm going to look if that's the answer? Why? Couldn't be that simple. If you think it's that simple, I haven't explained the problem correctly. It's not just the drinking, it's the Marine Corps. And it's six kids, and it's my wife, and it' s my father, who never loved me. And it' S the Catholic Church, and it'S New England. It' S cold. And it'S being skinny and nervous and afraid. It' s not drinking. It' Is not drinking anyway. I did get out of there at the end of six months, but not before a rather unfortunate event took place. A corpsman came in one night and said all drunks fall in. Bright face, forward march, and I was in an AA meeting. I did not want to be at the meeting. I was not particularly impressed with this. Here were these characters from the Bethesda area standing up there talking openly about their drinking, allegedly trying to convey a certain degree of happiness. And I went up afterwards in some sort of an arrogance and told this little red-headed guy that I was really impressed with what he had to say. I thought it was a wonderful organization. If I ever ran into a guy with a drinking problem, I'd be glad to send him around. And it was at that moment in time I got my first little taste of real Alcoholics Anonymous. Because he turned to me and he looked me right in the eye. You notice how they do that? And they're right in your eye. Right in the eyes. And he starts poking me on the chest. And he goes, Hey buddy, let me ask you something. which one of us is going to go out and get in his car and drive on home to his family like a real grown-up and which one of us is going to put his little blue bathrobe on and go over there and get locked up and I started a resentment for that guy that just, I was in a state of shock. I had never been talked to like that, which was part of my problem. I had Never Been Talked To Like That. And boy, do we need it. And when I was let out at the end of this time, one last drunk in me, I got even with him and called Intergroup all on the same day. And Intergroup sent over a huge Marine who was to become my sponsor named Bill T. And he walked in the front door of my house down at Quantico, Virginia, the Marine base. And he said, my name is Bill. This is a 12-step call. I talk, you listen. And he says, now this is Alcoholics Anonymous and we're going to go to a meeting and we got this and we are going to be doing that and where's your wife? I'm going to talk to her. He's just going on, never stopping. He just took over. And so I'm saying, I've got to get rid of this guy. And this is, he's a fanatic. Whatever he does, he'S a fanatIc. I knew that in just a few minutes that he's there. So I started in about, oh, I just noticed my schedule here. I've got all these things. You know, I'm outpatient from a nut ward and I've gotta... I'm getting my social schedule out to show him I won't be able to go to all these meetings. He's talking about meetings, meetings, meeting. So I got my notes out and I'm going like that And he said, get in the car. And I'm going, well, and he says, get in that car. And he was a little big in his neck muscles. And so I got in the car and I went to AA. I like to take credit for that. I went to A.A. And we went through that night after night. I'd get the social schedule out, and he'd say, Get in the car! And I suppose for the longest time, I thought that's what A.D.'s first step was. Get in that car. and then the second step was sit in the front row sit down here in an incurable row and there I was and that's it this guy just kept me going to meetings and I was afraid to drink when he was around and he was always around and pretty soon I had built up some sobriety and my life in AA had begun and like all of us we have one guy or somebody that we remember as coming over and being the one who overcame that initial last fight that we put up and I still see Bill he's been overseas and back a couple times but he's back in the Virginia area and it's real fun to have him close by and still in the program and it's kind of fun to call up and have him tell me something you know like how many meetings are you going to or whatever I hear you're talking all over the country well you better watch out and it feels good I like that I like the that concern and that sense that there's somebody that I'll listen to that's the most important part of the sponsor is that somebody that I will listen to because it's so necessary. And life has been good. I've had a lot of things happen that I'm not going to go into. I mean, sobriety has offered a few challenges. I had two years of sobrieting and got thrown out of the Marine Corps. I had eight years of sobiety and got divorced. I had 12 years of subriety and got divorce again. Had about 12 jobs during all this time. I had these bill collectors. It was a great shortage of money. One of my problems up until about five years ago, I always needed a small loan just as a carryover from the drinking days. It seemed like that was never going to get straightened out and there came a time when I don't know, I guess I just finally got enough of these things hammered into me that the program started really taking hold and life has certainly been remarkable over the last five years or so. And being married to Tina now, coming up on four years, is one of the most delightful experiences. It's just a joy to stand up here and to say I am madly in love with my wife and what a nice feeling that is to just share things with her and be so happy about things. I never thought I was going to be able to do that. I just assumed that was something that just wasn't going to happen to me. I heard about all of you and how happy you were in your marriages and jobs, and I said, well, I'll just have to get along. I guess that's never going to happen, and it did, and it's nice, and I look at it as a direct result of finally working to the best of my ability the principles of this program, and I suppose the heart of these principles, a couple of them I want to talk about in the last few minutes here that have been helpful to me or that are current on my mind. And I suppose that one I was talking about earlier, change your mind. God, is that the answer to so many things? I came in here with ideas that I had had so long I just assumed they were true. And I'm sure if you're new, you've got a lot of them. And we hold on to them with a death grip. I held on to ideas like I'm no good. There is no God. All the rest of the people are out to get me. People in general aren't good. There are no such thing as principles. Nobody lives by principles. This is a dog-eat-dog world. What are you doing telling me about principles? I know better than that, etc., etc. I saw the whole world through those ideas and all you did was get me to change my mind about me, about God, about you, about principles, about people, about the world, and the whole world changed. As soon as I changed my mind, the problem was changing my mind was a very painful experience. And it continues to be a painful experience, but I had to go through with it and I think we started with drinking. We started right off the bat with it. Now, I'm not an alcoholic. Change your mind. Say you are an alcoholic and you'll be free. And you go, you've got to be kidding. I'm going to say I'm an alcoholic and I'm gonna be free of all this? I want to not be an alcoholic. That's what I want. No, you just admit you're an alcoholic go ahead surrender the fact you're not an alcoholic you'll be out of there you'll feel great. I don't believe it try it. And finally after six more jails two more convulsions you go what did you tell me to do? I forgot about that. What was that? What was dat? I mean we don't do this easily. It's kicking and screaming and finally we go okay, okay I'm an alcoholic yeah that feels good it feels good because it's the truth And the truth always feels good. It really feels good to get the truth out. You can just sense it. And you can't always do that alone, you know. Did you ever try to look in the mirror and tell the truth? Okay, this is the real truth. That guy, my boss is rotten. Then you look in a mirror and those eyes are looking back and there's all that hatred coming out of there and you go, I'm not sure that's the truth. If in order to get to the truth, I've got to go get somebody else. Take it down. If it's so true and I'm so convinced that it's true, then it'll fly in my home group. All I have to do is take it down there and lay it out. And everybody in the room, if it's the truth, they'll be going like this. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. But I knew damn well they wouldn't do that. So I wouldn't take it done. Take it right down there. But if you ever want to check something out, that's the way to do it. Just bring it down and say, this is what I'm thinking of doing, and I am sure you all think it's a good idea. Thinking of leaving my family and going to Hawaii. And we try it around the group, and we find that they don't think it's that good an idea. It's amazing. So this process of changing my mind has been a painful one, but I'm starting to enjoy it now. It's not such a big deal to be wrong. God, it used to be absolutely humiliating to be right. To be wrong about something. And I realize now that it's such a nice thing to just find out, well, what is it? Because it's going to be to my benefit. It's going to operate so much better. And one of the things that has been immensely helpful to me in this whole process of discovery or whatever you want to talk about it, has been the eighth step. It's a funny little step. It sits in there and talks about making a list of all the people I had harmed in becoming willing to make amends to them all. And I used to call it my hit list because I found out that if I was having trouble getting started on that list that somebody told me a long time ago, just make a list of all the people that harmed you and that'll probably be your list. You just haven't seen it right yet. And it was an interesting step because it had to do with interpersonal relations and that was a problem area of mine. Some people have problems with trees and cars and all that, but mine essentially was problems with people. And I came up on this thing, made a list of all people I had harmed. I remember the first time I looked at that and I was going, this is going to be painful. That was my first assessment of the eighth step. I didn't need any instruction on it. I saw that this was going to be very painful and I also saw that it was connected to the ninth step and I Was going to have to go out and see these people and that was a marvelous reason for not doing anything. Don't rush into it. We have some groups back there years ago that used to say don't rush into these things. I don't know how they got it started but it really caught on. And groups of people not rushing into things together, you know, lends a mutual support. No growth, but it was very exciting. But anyway, now that I've had a chance to look at that, let me just share a couple things that I have found with it. It offers the opportunity, as Bill writes in the 12 and 12, to live in harmony with the people around us. And I love that way of describing life. Living in harmony with the world around us with the peepo around us What a tremendous challenge and what a school that we have here in Alcoholics Anonymous where we can practice screw it up People will tell us that we screwed it up, and they'll show us how we might do it better, and it's a safe environment, and we get a little better at it, and then we're out there trying it. And it's fun. And I think it's one of the great challenges that we have. I look back on it, and I realize that for this particular alcoholic trying to live in harmony with the people around me, I had the dilemma that I remember a song that was out right around World War II, and it was called Poor Johnny One Note. I don't know if anybody in here remembers that. It's a real song. Poor Johnny one note and the damn guy could only play one note on the saxophone and he was having a hell of a job getting a job in a band because all he could play was one note and you know, that was all I could do. I look back on it, no matter where I was, here's the note I played. Whee! You know what I'm saying? That was my note. People would be discussing all kinds of issues and this and that, and I'd be going, What's in it for me? And that's all I knew was how to be self-centered, just go, Me, me, me. And I never could see how I could change to fit into the situation. And the eighth step asked me to take a look at this and see if that wasn't true, that I was a Johnny One Note out in the orchestra of life and that there was a score, a musical score that was written. There was a musical school or a score that human beings can follow and live in absolute harmony with each other if they learn how to read it. And I think this entire program gives us that score and it's the will of our higher power and we're given the steps so that we can eventually hear the still small voice inside of us that will tell us what note to play so that we'll be in harmony with the people around us. And that's what we wanted all along, only we wanted then to change. We wanted then to start playing notes that were in harmony with me. And when they did and came across with a small loan, we were in harmony. But I didn't think I was capable of change until I came here into AA. And it's that power that you've given me to change that enables me to try to find out what this score is and what this harmony is and what the eighth step is. And the beginning of that step, as Bill has suggested, involves one of the great challenges in the program and that's forgiveness. It is suggested that in order to become willing to make amends to all those people on that list that I forgive everybody in the world. And you know, I heard that and I said that's one of the greatest principles I've ever heard. I think that is great, except for these two guys. Because there are some things that are not forgivable. There are some thing that ought not to be forgiven. There are justifiable anger, justifiable resentments, and there are these things where I draw the line. And of course none of the rewards of a step can come through until I can find out what it is to completely forgive. And when I do, the whole world changes. Because the world now consists of people who can forgive totally because I just did. And I've always been my own reference as to what the hell you all are doing. And if I couldn't forgive you, you couldn't Forgive me because I'm better than you are. And that made the nice stuff impossible. I'm not going to go out there and get yelled at. I'm Not going to get stomped on by everybody. And so the very beginning came with my ability to forgive and to just let everybody off the hook and start developing the practice of letting people be wrong. I have a friend, Ed C., back in Washington. And he said, one of the secrets of my daily program is I let five people be wrong every day. Right off the hook, just let them be wrong out there. And so it goes on with this step. The beginning with the forgiveness and then I start looking for another way to avoid it and I come up with another obstacle and it's called, wait a minute. It's called I'm not the kind of an alcoholic who did that much harm. I've heard stories in AA about people beat up their family, punched out their wives and children. Well, I was not a violent drunk. I was sort of a quiet guy, stayed away from home most of the time. So I fit into the category of those that didn't harm anybody but himself. Didn't do any harm. And then we're sort of given an idea of what harm really is. And that was one of the most devastating things I discovered because it made me squirm as it was explained to me what human beings can do to harm each other. I think some of us alcoholics are born with one of rare talents in the world. We have the ability to bring out the very worst in the people around us. We can visit family reunions and start fist fights. We go in there, people have always loved each other and when we leave, they're sending threatening letters and small communities erupt just from a one-night stand that we were just passing through a very peaceful town and it's a ghost town now. Everybody left. We just have this secret ability to find out what other people's hot button is and then push it. Push it, push it, pushing it. and then we sit back and go boy look at this world it's terrible and I didn't find that out until I got sober and then my sister came in the program she got sober and we were discussing some uncle who comes to these family reunions and I was discussing his terrible behavior and she said he only does that when you're around and I found out the common denominator in all these horrible situations that I found myself in was me. I was always present during these very awful experiences. And maybe I was contributing to these things, and maybe if I inventoried this and got wise, I could go around and not have that happen anymore. That I could be a part of it. That I would go there and be in harmony with even Uncle Joe. And it was a great revelation to find out what harm was. Pouting, self-pity, debating. Does anybody like to press a point all the way? Start an argument at noon and call the guy up at midnight and say, and furthermore, let me tell you this. Or sitting down in the office. How about this kind of harm? My basic philosophy was if I'm hurting, everybody hurts. And you see a couple people over there laughing, glare at them. Stop that. Just exude self-pity, gossip. Don't be generous with money. Never laugh. Don't allow laughter near you. Just inflict that on the people around us. The harm that we were capable of had nothing to do with physical harm. It was this harm of causing people to be off balance of not never knowing what was going to happen. Unreliable, don't pay the bills, don't do this. We just were like a tornado that went through life causing this stuff and I never looked at it. I never saw it from that perspective. And when I did, it was painful, but it was also hopeful. All I had to do was change my mind. Don't do that anymore. Go home and pray to get the power to not do that anymore. I have to remember the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous are power tools. They're tools, but they're power tools, I cannot generate forgiveness on my own, I can't generate this sense of harmony, I'm like a guy who bought one of those electric carving knives that has two or three blades and they all jiggle around and he says, how are we plugging it in? And the meat's going all over the place and the He was saying, those are power tools. You have to use a higher power that doesn't work right. And I have to bring God into these steps. And when I ask Him to help me forgive, when I asked Him to be in harmony, I get the results. I'm unable to do any of these things alone. And it's one of the great secrets is to find out that the power is available here. In closing, I would like to say to anybody who is new that it's my opinion that your adventure here in Alcoholics Anonymous is going to be beyond your wildest dreams. I hope that this convention and the excitement of being with all these people will cause you to keep coming back because what you're going to find out is what a marvelous person you are. You've had a glimpse of the great love that can come from within you and you're gonna be given the instructions and the assistance and the direction to develop that part of you until you know it very well. And that is what you're going to share. It's your great gift to reach out and touch the next suffering alcoholic with the great news of what's available here in AA. And it's your responsibility to develop that so that what you share with the next person is the AA message. It's the great joy of living and being part of this fellowship. That's what it's our responsibility to share. Not to dilute it, not to change it, but to simply go on with the pure message of a higher power and pure love. Thank you all very much.