The Sobriety Problem – Bb Workshop – Part 1 of 10 – Local AA Speakers

Good evening, everybody. My name is Chris. I am an alcoholic. I want to thank Karen so much for tracking me down and asking me to do this. Glenn and Jane have been friends for many, many years, and it's always really great to have them around, too. They have my back, usually. Also, Charlie and Katie coming all the way from Austin, Texas. Wait till you hear them. They are really special. We're in for a treat this weekend, and my friend Ron. who I always seem to drag into things like this, and you know, I like to have him around too. But anyway, the topic that I want to start with is called Aspects of the Illness. Why I came up with this topic is basically because of this. My drinking had become progressively, outstandingly problematic in my life. I mean, you know, the first time I ever drank, I went into a blackout. And, you know, it got worse from there. It was absolutely amazing how drunk I would get and how many problems would follow and DUIs and crashing the cars and losing families and getting thrown out of parties and having friends never speak to me again and not knowing why and calling people up on the phone in blackouts and, you know, making a complete fool out of myself. All those things were progressively getting really, really bad. And I saw my alcoholism as a drinking problem. This is the way I saw it. It gets my attention to the point where I become willing to do something about it. And what I became willing to doing was sign myself into a 28-day treatment center. The 28-day treatment center convinced me that I needed to attend some Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. That really was the extent of it. And I was serious enough about just trying to keep the problems down, trying not to feel so bad the next morning with those nuclear hangovers that I started to do this. And I was looking at this whole thing like it's a drinking problem. If I can just stop drinking, the rest of my life is going to fall into place. There's nothing really wrong with me. It's just I've got a really serious drinking problem now. That's the way I looked at it. And I think that's the way a lot of people look at it who are new or who are getting to a point where they think they need to address their alcoholism. But after being in AA, after experiencing some of the recovery processes, after learning and participating and doing the things that you get asked to do in Alcoholics Anonymous for a number of years, I really started to see that back when I was addressing my drinking problem, I was in way more trouble than I thought I was. alcoholism is an illness of minimization that it's almost you're almost unable to accurately assess how much damage is being done because of alcoholism we can we can see the wreckage from the drinking but so often we don't see the wreckage from the alcoholism now um i take a lot of uh a lot of what i uh how i view alcoholism i take a lot of it out of the big book i take a lot of it out of my own personal experience i take some of it out of the 12 and 12 but it's it's basically um a personal philosophy that's been built up built up through you know um the materials that you get in alcoholics anonymous and my own personal experience. There are some places in the book that talk about the unmanageability, but they don't spell it out. So much of Bill's writing was brilliant and insightful and right on the money. But for an alcoholic who has an almost inability to assess their own situation, it's sometimes hard to really grasp the concepts that he put out in that book to a deep enough level to really get an understanding of it. The first place in the book where it talks about unmanageability, I think, is in the doctor's opinion. Dr. Silkworth is basically explaining that the alcoholic becomes restless, irritable and discontented and is driven through an obsession of the mind to take a drink of alcohol because by taking a drink of alcohol they'll feel a sense of ease and comfort now does anybody remember ease and discomfort you know when you crack open the bottle I don't know about you but if I was going into the bar I'd be like bartender over here, over here two whiskeys why are you ordering two because it might take you too long to get back here. You know, I'm sober. This is horrible. You know hurry it up. Because I was restless. I was irritable. I was discontented. I knew that the alcohol you know before I even drank it just smelling it and having it in my hand having the security of that bourbon right in my head I knew that I would you know whatever anxiety or, you know, whatever problems I had. I knew that I was quick on a way to the solution to them. Now this is my experience. It's the experience of many alcoholics. What then really is the problem? Is the problem drinking? The problem is more about sobriety. I've got a sobriery problem. I can't stand it. Sobriety is untenable, okay? I just don't want to be sober. I rush into the liquor store. Hurry up, you know, give me a big bottle of vodka and then tear home and pour out big glasses. I mean, I've got a sobriety problem. Now, when I was addressing my drinking problem, I was looking at it like I have a drinking problem. I drink too much. If I can only just not drink too mucho. But that's not the problem. The problem is sobriete. Why isn't it any good? Why don't I like myself? Why am I restless, irritable, discontented? Why do I have lack of self-esteem and a big ego? Why do i have dysfunctional relationships? Why can't i just you know why can't I build up a real good quality of life for myself? What why you know Why doI need to check out on an almost regular basis by getting drunk? Just so that I can shut down for a little while You know, that really is what alcoholism is. Basically an inability to be sober comfortably. Okay? And there's many, many ways that it... There's many many symptoms and there's many aspects and attributes of alcoholism and I'm just going to be talking about some of them up here tonight. But what I'm hoping to do is to try to broaden your... Open your mind a little bit to how alcoholism really was showing up in your life. Because the more we see how alcoholics affects us, the more motivation we have to do the work we need to do to get to a place where we can recover. If you don't think you're sick, you're not going to participate in the recovery. So it's very, very important, I think, to understand how alcohol is and shows up in Your Life. Page 52. Page 52, it talks about the bedevilments. And what I think that is, what I think that paragraph is, is I think it's a very distinct example of unmanageability. We admitted we were alcoholic dash, that our lives had become unmanable. Here again, here's what I thought they meant about the unmanagability. I crashed a lot of cars. I got a lot to do. I got in trouble with the cops. My wife left me. You know, I've lost my family. I never can hold on to a job. I'm living at home with mom and I'm 32. Okay, yeah, my life is unmanageable. But that's all external situations and circumstances. I think the concept of unmanagability is deeper than that. What they talk about in the paragraph on page 52 is, are you in control of your emotional nature? It says we were not in control of our emotional nature. Can you say yes to that? Because the fact of the matter is I was not in controlled by my emotional nature I would get resentments I'd hold on to them for 10 years I'd get you and I had anxiety and self-centered fear I couldn't deal with lines and authority and I couldn't go back to college because I don't want to sit in the chair and, you know, I can't fix the car because, you Know, I got to go drink and, You know, I don' t want to spend the money on that. And, You Know, I couldn' t be in control of any of my emotional nature. I was being swept along by my alcoholic emotional nature and if my alcoholism wanted me to be depressed, I was depressed. If it wanted me to be anxious and have tons of anxiety, I would have tons of anxiety. I started having panic attacks. Anybody in here ever get the panic attacks? You know, where you think you're having a heart attack? You're like freaking out! You know? I mean, that is being swept up in not being in any kind of control of your emotional nature. We were prey to misery and depression. I don't know about you, but I'd crack the bottle and I'd put on the sad songs. You know, and I'd sit there and I cry. And I'd think about the wife that left me when I needed her most, you know, and I would think about all those old times. Where have all those Old Times gone? You know misery and depression and sometimes sometimes I just wanted to pull the covers over my head and I was not going to get up. You know I don't want to face it. I don' t want to do it. I'm taking the day off, and I would take the day off like five days a week. So misery and depression, I was not in control of any of it. We couldn't seem to be of real help to people. You know, I believe that alcoholics are good natured, they just do bad things, and they're relatively intelligent. The Al-Anons might disagree with that, but I think they're relatively intelligent and they do stupid things. I think we're caught up in a whirlpool that's just way more powerful than we are, and it doesn't allow us to really see this. But I always wanted to be of real help to people. I always want to be like I wanted you to be able to count on me. I wanted to be the type of friend who showed up, but I never did. I never did. If a family member would die, the first thing I would think is The son of a gun died on me. You know, this is going to be inconvenient. It was just a selfish, self-centered worldview that I had, and I couldn't really be there. And if I did show up, you know, I would expect something in return because I always wanted something in returned. So I couldn'T really be of any real help to other people. It says in the book that we couldn'T make a living. Now, I expand that past the point of making an economic living. You know, there's a lot of us who the last thing we lose is our ability to work and earn money. That's just the last things we're going to let go of because we really need that to finance our drinking so it's protected. It's in the protected class over here. But the fact of the matter is, let's expand that concept into we couldn't construct a quality of life for ourselves. The type of life that we would want. We couldn't build that up when we were suffering from untreated alcoholism. It kept eluding us. It kept slipping out of our hands. We'd be good starters. We'd start to do something. You know, we'd start to rebuild the house or we'd start to go back to college or we would start to do something, right? And somewhere along the line what would happen, you know, however important you think that thing was you've kind of changed your mind about how important that is. I mean, I was a great starter. You have no idea how many things I started. I started taking guitar lessons. I took two lessons. I joined the wrestling team. I went to one practice. I jointed the Boy Scouts. I went to one camp out. You know, I would take Wednesdays off in high school just because five days in a row was onerous. You know? I mean, I just, I went through college. I'm going to college. I went down to the University of South Florida. And I spent three and a half years going to collage and got six credits. Now, you know, I'm not a stupid guy. What would happen is alcoholism would happen. And alcoholism would sweep in and whatever is in the way of what I had to do would get pushed aside. And you don't think of it this way. You don't say, well, I'm becoming preoccupied with alcohol. If I keep on like this, if I keep going the way I'm going, my grades will slip and I may not get into the college of my choice. You don'T think that. You think, who cares? shut up and leave me alone. It's none of your business. I do what I want to do. I'm my own person, you know, and meanwhile, you're shooting yourself in the foot. Now, the unmanageability of alcoholism goes into very, very deeply into fears and resentments. It goes very, Very deeply into shame, guilt and remorse. What happens to us is we behave in very, very poor ways sometimes, especially if we're really heavy drinkers. If we drink a lot for a long period of time, what happens is our behavior becomes more and more antisocial, sometimes more violent, unpredictable, Jekyll and Hyde-ish. And what happens ist we're tortured sometimes by the things that we've done or the things we haven't done. You know, we didn't show up for our kids' graduation or we missed this or we were drunk and missed the whole part. There's just a hundred things that happen to us like that and each one of them chips away at us and we just start to feel really lousy, guilt, shame, remorse. There's places in town we don't want to go because certain people might be there and see us. and all this stuff all this stuff weighs down on us all of this is alcoholism it's not just drinking all of this emotional psychic spiritual mental turbulence that's caused in our life all of it is alcoholism and the only reason I know that is because from my own personal experience and my experience working with other people that if the recovery process is diligently followed, those things heal. Your emotional nature heals. Your ability to have relationships heals. You're self-esteem heals. All those things feel. So if the treatment for alcoholism cures those things, treats those things. I have to believe that those things are alcoholism. I just do. They're aspects of our illness. Now, in the last chapter of the book, A Vision for You, it talks about an alcoholic vision, you know, the last days of someone's drinking. And then it talks a little bit about a vision of recovery. And in that, it talks about the hideous four horsemen. Terror, frustration, bewilderment, despair. As our alcoholism progresses, it goes from restless, irritable and discontent to terror, frustration bewildering and despair. It just depends on how far along the alcoholic continuum we want to travel or were driven to travel. Now, the end of my drinking, the last year of my drinking, let me tell you what it was like. I would come to in the morning I'd be wearing the clothes that I fell asleep in the night before I would struggle up, you know, the alarm would be going off It would be 7.30 and I'd have to be at work at 8. I'd stagger up, I'd go into the bathroom I'd do vomiting calisthenics and throw some water on my face. And, you know, I was always sticking my head underneath the faucet trying to rehydrate. You ever have to rehydrate? You know, drinking like a gallon of water. And then, you Know, I'd go downstairs, I get into my car and I'd head off, head off to work, just shattered. Now, I'm sober, but there's so much alcohol coming out of my pores. I just reeked of vodka or bourbon, whatever I was drinking. That if I would have gotten pulled over, I would've blown a 4-0 or something on the breathalyzer. Yet I was stone cold sober because I hadn't had a drink in about 10 hours because I had a whole night's sleep. But I had just put so much alcohol in my body, my liver couldn't process it all. So here I am shattered and just feeling horrible and saying to myself, saying to my self, this is it. today is the day that I never ever drink again I never want to feel like this again has anybody said that think about this have you said that and did it really mean anything usually because I would say I am never ever going to drink again today is a good day and I'm telling you if there was a polygraph expert there and they hooked me up to the lie detector to the polygraph guy and say hey you know what this guy's never drinking again 100% he's telling the truth because I meant it at 8.30 in the morning when I wanted to kill myself and my boss was trying to explain 14 things for me to do and I'm like I can't even remember where I'm supposed to go the day would move the day Would move on you know I'd get a half a gallon of something down I'd maybe get a half a sandwich in me just a little bit of food. So I wasn't eating much at this point in time. I'd get a little but of food and somewhere around one or two o'clock I'd start to think, you know that decision this morning to never ever drink again? That's a pretty strong decision. I think that might be kind of an overreaction. I might have to modify that. And by four o' clock I've modified that decision to go right to the liquor store because sobriety had become worse than feeling sick. It doesn't, people who see us, family members that are not alcoholic, bosses, friends, they look at us like you're crazy. Every time you drink something terrible happens and look, you feel like hell. Why do you keep doing it? And, you know, it's very, very difficult for us to answer questions like that. We'll deflect them and we'll never speak to the person who asked that to us again. I mean, we'll do all kinds of avoidance stuff to not have to really look at that because it's hard for us to look at because sometimes we don't know. We're caught up in something that is just rolling us along and we can't just not drink because there's too much turbulence going on inside of us. Now, I come into Alcoholics Anonymous sometime in the early 89 and I decide I'm going to do some meetings. I'm gonna go to some meetings, that's what they want me to do. I'm goin' to outpatient very dutifully every Tuesday and Thursday or whatever it was And I honestly want, because I've been detoxed and had a 28-day program behind my belt, I recognize the fact that I feel a lot better now physically. Okay? But I'm still a mess. I'm Still a Mess. I'm just like short fuse. You know, I'd walk in the house and I'd go, There's no ice in the ice cube tray. Don't you know I need ice? You know, like, you know, I mean, I was just nuts. And I was riding right up on you. If you had the temerity to do 30 in a 35, you know, I was going to scare you to death by being like a foot off your bumper because you're wasting my time. I got to be somewhere. And, you know, I got to get to the meeting. There's a serenity meeting. You know? I couldn't, I had a complete lack of dealage. Like if a whole bunch of stuff would just hit me, you know, like my ex-wife would want something, my daughter would want some, my boss would want someone, you know my family needs somebody, and I'd be like, ah, not today! You know, and I just like shut the door. I just couldn't deal. And I'm staying sober like this. And I have no idea really what's going on with my alcoholism. I had been emotionally and spiritually ill like this for so long. It felt like my life. It felt normal because it had been normal for so Long. You're so sick, you don't even know you're sick. The only way to find out how sick you are is to actually heal. and you know this it's a very very unorthodox stillness alcoholism and the treatment is is is unorthodocked too so many of us uh so many of us you know come into aa and just sit in there just sit there you know every once in a while share or whatever and and meanwhile the alcoholism is raging through you and you you don't see it because you just don't know any different. I mean, once you've achieved recovery, you know, once you've gotten to the point where you've had the spiritual awakening and you know a new freedom and a new happiness and you understand the word serenity and, you know, personal relationships start to become healthier and all the good things that can happen in recovery. Once that happens, then you can look back and say, man, I was sick. But you can't do that until you recover because you have no reference point. The barometer is obscured. So we lose a lot of people. We lose a lot of because they don't understand they need to do certain things in alcoholics anonymous and we lose them because they just, they just don't understand. And it's, it's a very, very sad thing as a, as a sponsor. One of the most difficult tasks I have is to try to sit someone down and go through the first step with them and really try to get as deep as I can into their truth, as far as their alcoholism is concerned. And sometimes we can get to a really, really deep level of truth and they walk out of there, you know, not real happy. And that's a good experience, I think, you knowing that it's a progressively fatal illness and you haven't done enough to put it in remission. You haven't run out of time. You haven' t done enough to put in remition. You may not be drinking but your alcoholism is getting worse. Your spiritual condition is deteriorating. Your personal relationships are deteriorating your resentments are just getting worse and worse and worse your self-centered fear the anxiety you know the inability to build up a quality of life it's getting worse and worse and sometimes I can connect with the people on that level Sometimes they'll get it, and sometimes they won't. You know, this is a very, very cunning, baffling, and powerful illness. And the people that don't get it rarely generate enough enthusiasm to do the stuff that we need to do to recover. They just don't do it. There's a lack of enthusiasm for recovery. You know, I'm telling you, if you went to a doctor and the doctor said you have a progressively fatal illness, it's a kidney disease, you know, I don't know when you're going to die but it's probably going to be sometime in the next five years and it's going to be a slow death. You know things are going to get worse and worse and then you're going to die. That's really what an alcoholic prognosis is. And you said, doc, doc you know isn't there anything? Isn't there anything well he'll say well there's a clinical trial in seattle uh you know it's a 12 stage process and you know what the the results are coming back in that everybody that's gone through all 12 of those stages has recovered and there's no more symptoms of that liver ailment what wouldn't you do to get to seattle what wouldn't You'd sell the house give the family away quit the job. I'm going to Seattle because it's your life. But what happens to us in AA? You know, we sit down with a sponsor and the sponsor says, well, I want you to have five meetings a week. You know what? You're over my house once a month. We're going to do some step work and I want you to get a coffee commitment. Oh, wow, man. You know? I don't know. That seems like really be serious. I mean, it's a completely different reaction, you know? It's a different reaction. It's like alcoholism is an illness of minimization. We don't want to know. We don't what to do. You know, just leave me alone. It's really not that bad. I I mean, anybody that works with newcomers, you see tragedies. Tragedies. And, you know, you try to engage them in the process of recovery and they don't engage. They can't manifest that enthusiasm. They want to hang on to their old ideas. You know, in the book, Alcoholics Anonymous, it says, we beg of you to, they basically beg you to let go of your old ideas they don't say let go of your bad old ideas they say let go of you're old ideas everything, let go of it, you need to start looking at this with a whole new pair of glasses because if you're alcoholic and you've been drinking yourself to death, you don't get it and there's got to be such a fundamental shift in consciousness and perception for recovery to happen, that we beg of you to let go of your old ideas. Even the good ones. Most of those may have looked good, but usually weren't. Alcoholism is the only illness I know of that kills people that don't even have it. Think about the people out there that have been killed by drunk drivers. By house fires. Anybody in here like the house on fire accent? Just me? Twice. You know, it affects our whole family because the emotional, spiritual turmoil that goes on with us, that comes out of us has a real tendency to make anyone that's close to us ill too. If you have a real negative, real resentful, real problematic attitude, that's going to brush off on practically anybody that's close to you. So our alcoholism has a tendency to make other people ill too, that's an aspect of alcoholism. You know all these things uh all these things being said this is probably one of the most devastating illnesses i think today addictive illness and i mean drug addiction and alcoholism the whole bowl of wax i think it's the biggest health problem in america today more people suffer from it than from cancer from heart disease from diabetes anything it blows them all away statistically there is more suffering going on today with addictive illness than any other illness yet you know what we do with it we we don't want to look at it we don'T WANT TO LOOK AT IT THE INSURANCE COMPANIES DON'T WANNA PAY FOR IT YOU KNOW WE DON'T WE AS PEOPLE THAT SUFFER FROM IT DON'T EVEN WANTTO GO TO TREATMENT YOU KNOW WERE DYING OF IT AND THEY'RE SUGGESTING A REHAB We're fighting. They'll do anything not to go in there. They're going to lock the doors. There will be no booze. Tell me what to do. I'll have to make my bed. Just do anything to stay away from that. So the people that suffer from it don't even really want treatment. But even when they want treatment, it's hard to get. And it's the number one devastating illness in America today. They've discovered that for every dollar spent on treatment, somewhere between $8 and $16 comes back to society in all kinds of myriad ways, all kinds of different benefits. If for every dollar spent on treatment, there's going to be fewer dollars spent on incarceration, fewer dollars spent on insurance claims for chronic alcoholic deterioration, fewer dollars spend, you know, for police and DUI checks. I mean, you add up all the money and you'll see that that's the best buy in the book, throwing a dollar down for treatment. But nobody wants to do it. They don't want to do it because they don't understand addictive illness. They think we're doing it to ourselves. They think we want to be able to do this. Now, I don't know about you, but it might have been my choice to pick up that first drink. There might have Been some peer pressure. There Might Have Been Some Stuff Going On That, You Know, It Was a bad choice. Okay, I'll take that. But the first time I ever drank, I got absolutely drunk out of my mind and I was violently sick for two days. Now why in the world would I have ever put it back into my body? I put it Back Into My Body because it helped my sobriety problem. And now I get caught up in a lifelong struggle with alcoholism. Who in their right mind would jump into the ring for a lifelong struggle with alcoholism nobody we are caught up in this but that's not the perspective that most of the people out there in the world have they think we're drunks or we're weak or we are stupid or we just want to be total screw ups I don't think that's true at all I know too many alcoholics today to believe that. I believe that we're caught up in something that is much more powerful than we are, much more powerfully than we can imagine. Hence, if lack of power is really our problem, what would be the solution? The solution would be to find a power greater than the power that we have right now. And that's what we need to look at. Now, the statistics on alcoholic survival are really, really bad. The American Medical Association describes alcoholism as a chronically relapsing condition. That's in the description for alcoholism. It's also in the subscription for drug addiction. Chronically relapse in condition. We're viewed by the medical establishment as, you know, you're alcoholic. Oh, then you've got a chronically relapsing condition. You're going to be relapsed in drinking, getting sober, drinking and sober the rest of your life. I mean, chronically re relapses in condition. There's not enough of us that have recovered and have long term sobriety to get their attention and let them know that you don't have to chronically relax. You can have long-term recovery. You can Have long-Term recovery charlie and katie have you know almost 50 years between them You can, have long term recovery But there's a price that needs to be paid there's, a serious price that, needs to, be paid You can't just go and sit there and expect to get it from osmosis There's a lifetime of work ahead of you. There's an entire life ahead of us. There's also a lifetime of participating in the spiritual life. If you're not willing to participate in the spirit of your life and you are alcoholic, you're either going to be chronically relapsing or maybe quite possibly sober but a real pain in the ass. You know what I mean? You're going to become one of those cranky son of a bitches that nobody wants to have any part of. You know, you can see him at some meetings. You know every once in a while you'll see an old time kid. You know they're out there. OK. Other aspects of of the illness alcoholism involve personal relationships, intimate relationships. I've seen patterns in this. alcoholism is built on a foundation of selfishness and self-centeredness that is the root of our problems says this in the book the root of our promise it's an illness of selfish and self centeredness for one reason or another we're born that way maybe it happens through you know family of origin I don't even know and I don'T even care I just know that when you find the alcoholic at their core, the thing that holds up their life is selfishness and self-centeredness. Now, all of a sudden we want to get into an intimate relationship with somebody. You know, what's going to happen? How are we going to operate? We're going to cooperate from a place of selfishness. Or if we get a job, if we start working at a company, how are we gonna operate? We're gonna operate from a position of self-seeking. You know, what's in this for me? And we start to manipulate and we start to move into all of these relationships from a faulty platform. And some of us can get very, very good at it. Some of us become very, very successful this way. We put a lot of work into it sometimes. But the fact of the matter is there's going to be something profoundly, profoundly unsatisfying with these things. It's just not going to be what we want and we're going to end up blowing up a lot of relationships. We're going to fall short. People are going to fall shortly and we are going end up with the longer we stay alcoholic, the smaller our world is going to get, the fewer the people in it. Our world is going to shrink and get smaller and smaller and just more pathetic this is really how we handle relationships you know coming from that place of selfishness and self-centeredness I believe at the heart of the alcoholic the heart of the alcoholic is a spirit hole there's something that's not in us that we continue to look for we continue to seek with alcohol with drugs, with sex with gambling, with buying more toys you know with whatever we're trying to take outside things and circumstances and people and bring them into us so that we can feel whole we just don't feel whole there's something deeply missing in us that's why we run up to the bartender and push everybody out of the way to get a drink because there's Something Deeply Not Happening In Us We're Not Comfortable With Ourselves We're not comfortable with our environment so we're trying to do we're trying to buy things that'll make us happy get people that'll make us happy. And this hole, this hole that's within us is a spiritual hole. The only thing that's going to fill it up with any kind of permanent satisfaction is a relationship with the power greater than ourselves. That's the only thing that's gonna be significant enough to make us feel whole, to heal us. You know, we are damaged spiritually. You can, you know, I don't know whether it was the cart or the horse that came first, whether it Was the booze that did it or the alcoholism that did It. Personally, I don' t think drinking caused my alcoholism. I think alcoholism caused my drinking. That's really what I think. I think the alcoholismo was there from the get-go. You know, my first experience, the first thing I remember is being a five-year-old being dropped off at kindergarten. You know? Being tossed out of the car. There's the kindergarten. See you later. And standing there on the hill and looking at all these kindergartners playing tag and kickball and just thinking, I can't go down there. I can'T go down THERE! You know. Somebody's made a really big mistake here! This can'T be right! You know, and I had to just everything I could do to get up the courage to walk down there and be a kindergartner because I was terrified. You know? I think that was my alcoholism because a pint of whiskey, I would have run down there and been a kinderggartner. You know what I mean? So, you know, I'm sure that Charlie and Katie are going to cover a lot of this in even more detail than I have, but I want to give you a perspective on some of the things that I see from my own personal experience about alcoholism. Alcoholism is a much bigger problem than almost any of us give it credit for being. It affects every area of our life, every relationship, every feeling, every behavior it affects. So do you think it would be an important thing to learn about what the recovery process is? Could you think of a more important thing in your life than to get personal experience with the recovery process? I don't, I personally don't think so. That's all I have. Are we going to take five now? We'll take five minutes and we're back with Charlie and Katie. Thank you.