The Solution First, Then the Problem – Sandy B.

I'm the charter group of Alcoholics Anonymous. Let's open this meeting with a few moments of silent meditation, followed by the serenity prayer. Serenity Prayer. God, grant me the serENITY to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. I'm very grateful for covering an alcoholic named Joe Nelson. Good night, everybody. It's delightful to see so many people here at this meeting that it has sort of become a tradition with the charter group to move once a year from our regular meeting at Beechford Hospital down to either downtown or near the airport as it happens to be at this time. If you have a problem with alcohol and are seeking a way out, Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength, and hope with each other that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from alcoholism. The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking. There are no dues or fees for AA membership. We are self-supporting through our own contributions. AA is not allied with any organization or institution, does not wish to engage in any controversy, neither endorses nor opposes any causes. Our primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety. Tonight, we have asked Red M. to read how it works. Thank you, Joe. I'm Red Moyle, and I'm an alcoholic. This is how this program works. Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program. Usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. There are such unfortunates. They're not at fault, they seem to have been born that way. They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty. Their chances are less than average. There are those too who suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders, but many of them do recover if they have the capacity to be honest. Our stories disclose in a general way what we used to be like, what happened, and what we're like now. If you've decided you want what we have and are willing to go to any length to get it, then you're ready to take certain steps. At some of these we balked. We thought we could find an easier, softer way, but we could not. With all the earnestness at our command, we beg of you to be fearless and thorough from the very start. Some of us have tried to hold on to our old ideas and the result was nil until we let go, absolutely. Remember that we deal with alcohol, cunning, baffling, powerful. Without help it's too much for us. But there is one who has all power, that one is God. May you find him now. Half measures availed us nothing. We stood at the turning point. We asked his protection and care with complete abandon. Here are the steps we took which are suggested as a program of recovery. One, we admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable. Two, came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. Three, made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him. Four, made it searching in fearless moral inventory of ourselves. Five, admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. Six, we're entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. Seven, humbly ask him to remove our shortcomings. Eight, made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all. Nine, made direct amends for the sins of others. Ten, made amends with such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. Ten, continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it. Eleven, sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood him, praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry that out. Twelve, having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs. Many of us explained what an order I can't go through with it. Do not be discouraged. No one among us has been able to maintain anything like perfect adherence to these principles. We're not saints. The point is that we are willing to grow along spiritual lines. The principles we have set down are guides to progress. We claim spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection. Our description of the alcoholic, the chapter to the agnostic, and our personal adventures before and after make clear three pertinent ideas. A, that we were alcoholic and could not manage our own lives. B, that probably no human power could have relieved our alcoholism. C, that God could and would if he were so. Thank you, Red. We have asked Mary Lou S. to read the traditions. I'm Mary Lou and I'm an alcoholic. and these are the 12 traditions one our common welfare should come first personal recovery depends upon aa unity two for our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority a loving god as he may express himself in our group conscience our leaders are but trusted servants they do not govern. Three, the only requirement for AA membership is a desire to stop drinking. Four, each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or AA as a whole. Five, each group has but one primary purpose, to carry its message to the alcoholic who still suffers. Six, an AA group ought never endorse, finance, or lend the AA name to any related facility or outside enterprise, lest problems of money, property, and prestige divert us from our primary purpose. Seven, every AA group should be a member of the AA group. Eight, every group ought to be fully self-supporting, declining outside contributions. Eight, Alcoholics Anonymous should remain forever nonprofessional, but our service centers may employ special workers. Nine, AA as such ought never be organized, but we may create service boards or committees directly responsible to those they serve. Ten, ALCA has no opinion on outside issues, hence the AA name ought never be drawn into public controversy. Eleven, our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion. We need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio, and film. Twelve, anonymity is the spiritual foundation of our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities. Thank you, Mary Lou. We've asked Sarah Dee to read the promises. Thank you, Diane. I'm an alcoholic. These are our beautiful promises that are found on page 83 and 84 of the Big Book. If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are halfway through. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity, and we will know peace. No matter how far down it can benefit others, that feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellow man. Self-seeking will slip away. Our whole fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. we will suddenly realize that God is doing for us. Thank you, Sarah. We have no dues or fees, but we do have expenses. And for those of you who are not familiar with the charter group, we are separate from Peachford Hospital. We operate exactly the same as any other aid. We do meet at the hospital, but мы плачем. We pay rent, we pay for contributions to General Service Office in New York, to our intergroup office here in Atlanta, and to our state assembly and our prepaid convention. Introduce our speaker who most of you know and or at least know of. He is a great individual. I have a very grateful psoas in Washington, D.C., who is my helper, offers me all my help that reminded me this evening that Sandy B. would be in some 48 hours entering his 18th year of sobriety. I'm not going to take but one second, maybe too to tell you something about him that I heard this that I think says it all about him I was speaking with a chap who Sandy happens to sponsor and he said I did not know that Sandy was his sponsor and he affirmed me and loved me in all my brokenness that is the type man, the type program that he has. Let's give a nice charter group welcome to Sandy B. from Washington, D.C. Thank you very much. There we go. Good evening, everybody. My name is Sandy Beach and I'm an alcoholic. How are you all doing? I am indeed grateful to be here tonight and to be sober and to be at another AA meeting. It's my favorite place to be is at these meetings, and I do enjoy them immensely. And I thank Conway for asking me down. I'm always delighted to be part of this. And if we have any guests who are at their first AA meeting or anybody who is new to the fellowship, This is a typical Alcoholics Anonymous meeting that we're having. Due to the fantastic success of all the treatment centers in the country, we're getting into the program before we even lose our tuxedo. You talk about early intervention. I think it's John. jealousy. I think I probably want to be one, you know. But as I heard in a good line this afternoon, you know, there's a lot of doctors who are also alcoholics and they're being sponsored by other doctors. And you really hear some great advice being passed out when you mix those two. And this one was a particular sponsor was sponsoring a surgeon. And he'd only been sober about two weeks, and he said, now listen, I'm going to give you one piece of advice. No, do not make a major incision for one year. He was shaking his head yes, and so I guess it's going to work. Anyway, it is customary at an AA meeting to share a little bit about how we got here and what the illness was like for us, and then a littlebit about the AA program, and I just could talk and talk about Alcoholics Anonymous. I cannot properly put it into words how I feel about it. It's just the most remarkable fellowship that I could imagine in my mind, and yet when I think back during my childhood and growing up and my drinking years, it's the last place I ever would have wanted to be. If you had described it to me, I would have said wonderful, but I sure don't want to hope I don't end up there. I mean, that was the feeling. No matter how well you describe it, it's not the kind of place you would actively seek out as an alternative to some other lifestyle until the other lifestyle becomes vomiting. Then, maybe I'll check it out, is one of these strange things that the best deal of all is the last resort. It's really strange, but that's the way it is with spiritual programs, I'm beginning to realize. as they are disclosed to us, and they are through religions and various philosophies and so on down. They sound interesting, and они действительно звучат как они будут работать, но они не выглядят как бы они были веселыми. And I can remember hearing about that as a little kid. You know, I'm in church, and I'm hearing about spiritual principles. I suppose we were all taught some of them growing up, and I heard about them, and thought it would be a damn good deal later. Because as I analyzed them in my own personal life, they were going to cramp my style severely. I mean, I don't know about the God that you were taught about, but the one I was taught about I don' t think would have approved of most of my life. And so if I had gotten into that, I would have had to change. And the people who were not out carousing and drinking looked like they were dulling away. Buck D up in Washington just says that. You know, the sobriety looked like people just sort of wasting away over there sitting on a couch, sort of just with dust collecting on their head. They weren't getting in trouble, but on the other hand, it wasn't a very attractive lifestyle. There was just sort of nothing happening. And so I think I heard a lot of the principles that are found here in Alcoholics Anonymous, but as the Bible says, they were falling on deaf ears. There wasn't much interest in what there was to offer there because, like every other little kid, I had the feeling that I could figure it out better and I could probably put a little English on it and come out with a better product in the long run. And so I was searching out for my own identity, for myownway. I had picked up certain ideas about life. I don't know where all of you put together your philosophy of life or your game plan for living as you were rolling into age 12 or 13 or wherever we put a cast in concrete, our plan for the rest of our life. I think a lot of it gets formed there. I learned several of the major truths that I stuck with off of the little boy's bathroom walls was where I picked up a lotof the real insights into the real world. I don't know who put them there, but I was very grateful. Was that right? I didn't know that. Tucked that one away, you know. I said, geez, you know, same truths are still being written out there. I guess there must be something about it. But I put these things away and I never checked them out with anybody because I had developed a non-sharing philosophy. I had this early on New England upbringing where I essentially saw the world as a dog-eat-dog place. And what we were essentially about as a human race was competition. And the name of the game was to win and to get past the other people, to get higher grades, to get on the teams. And there was winners, and then there was everybody else. And if you weren't a winner, then you were just somebody else out there. And I had that awful feeling that I would just end up being somebody else, you know, the one of my friends. And I remember these things, so I would try harder to either study or go out for sports. And I just got this deeply ingrained that a man should be able somehow through his own resources to accomplish anything. And that any failure along the way was strictly due to not digging deep enough within or not trying hard enough. And as life went along, and I eventually did have, and I always kind of mention this because there's generally a few people in the audience that relate to it. And that is my earliest introduction to my higher power was in the Catholic Church up in New England. And my only memory as a little six-year-old boy, and I say this almost every meeting was, a nun came out and said, welcome little boy, you're in trouble. And let me explain. Mostly, I remember having purgatory explained to me. And boy, this is really a bad place you're going to end up. And how many years and all of these things. And I took it literally. I took everything. I have a very open mind on these things, I'm a real sucker for things, you know? But that's why this program's working so well. I just go, hey, right! I just hang around in these smoky basements and everything will be all right? Are you sure? Yes. Okay. So don't knock it. This is the only way to live. Otherwise, you go around and be absolutely neurotic that a bomb is going to go off in your briefcase and it's much better to just be trusting and you get taken once in a while but the stress is much less over the long haul. Much better to be this way. Just believe everything and come on in. But But the early experiences, which I took quite literally, did create some sort of a distorted perspective of self-centeredness and guilt and so on down and caused me to really feel unique and isolated. And this is a common occurrence I'm finding in talking to other alcoholics and other human beings. When I got, we're really talking about human dilemmas that just happened to end up being displayed by somebody getting very drunk. But I really relate more to being a human being than anything else. And this is just the nature of growing up and the anxieties and of maturing and so on down and problems that are just faced by everybody. And they became acute, maybe in my case, the nervousness and the sweating and not being able to fit in with people and just wondering how does this get straightened out. And I was always looking in the wrong place for the answer. As I look back on it now, I was almost looking outside for the answers. I was looking for a signal from you. I was working for somebody to raise their hand and say, You belong at this table over here, over here. I was going for directions from somewhere, never realizing that all of it lay within me if I ever would take the time to search. Somehow, I had dismissed that at an early age, that there was any valid information to be found inside. That just didn't make sense. I couldn't see it. And I was looking for fixing whatever this pain is. I don't know. I use this. I'm just searching for words whenever I'm trying to describe these process of growing up. I just connected that there was just a lot of pain and anxiety and there was something missing. Something wasn't quite right inside, whatever that is. And as life goes on, it seems like a girl will fix that. I remember that was the first idea that occurred to me. You know, if a girl would fix whatever this problem is. Then later on, I had the idea that money appears to me to be the real solution to this pain, whatever it is. And then maybe prestige. The more I think about it, prestige is what will do it. And I was always looking over the next fence because whenever you get a little bit of the money and you finally get a girlfriend, you still have these feelings. What's wrong with this girl? Doesn't she know how to fix these problems? What's the matter with this money? I thought once you got it, I'm still nervous. I'm afraid they'll take it away from me. what does fix this problem, whatever we're describing here. Most of us know what I'm talking about, just the whole problem of being alive, the whole question of who am I, why am I alive, where am I going, what is all this really about? And if it's possible, one way to solve all of those common human dilemmas is to not think about them. Boy, that's a real good way to resolve that problem, become a workaholic. And so I'm too busy to think about those. I've got a job, responsibilities. I'm down here 24 hours a day and just totally absorbed in that. And then there comes a crisis at age 50 or something. You know, I haven't figured out why I'm here. I'm important, but I don't know why. You know? And boom, that hits. And so, I think I'm just describing, so far, sort of a skinny, neurotic teenager wandering around with typical teenage problems, bouncing here and there with a lot of guilt and not hacking it too well in church. But, you know, getting grades, no particular big family problems, reasonable background, just sort of there it sits. So I don't know if I look upon anything particularly uniquely different at this stage of the game until alcohol arrived on the scene. Then I find that I did part company from some of my classmates because the alcohol came along at a rather late age. Now that I've been in AA a while, I findthat I was a late bloomer at age 19. We've got kids up in Washington, I'm sure you do down here, who by the time they're 19 are celebrating five years sobriety, and they're sponsoring people. And you see one of those kids, and they go, who's that, your father? He says, no, my pigeon. Boy, I'll tell you. AA is changing daily as you look around, and that's great. That speaks well for the fellowship, that we are capable of this kind of expansion and change and so on down, but still maintain our basic principles. It's one of the amazing parts of the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. But at any rate, the day came when drinking was appropriate behavior. It certainly was. Other people my age and peer group had been drinking for a year or two. So I think it was kind of unusual that I was holding out. But if I recall, there was some ground rule within the church that if you didn't drink until you were 21, you got a half million years off from purgatory. And I vaguely remember sort of shooting for that. But there came emergency situations that obviously were more important than purgatory. It's amazing how the daily things and the way we balance things out. You ever notice when we lose our perspective and you just go, no, no. No, this one more drink is more important to my family and my job. Down it goes. Strange way you think. But anyway, I did have a drink during a social event where I was particularly nervous. there were people all around, and I drank the whiskey down and had the feeling that it didn't work. And I sat there sort of panic-stricken. I had been guaranteed certain results from drinking whiskey by my roommates. One of them was you would feel good. And I'll tell you, I really wanted to feel good! That had not been something a close friend, I had not being feeling good in a long time. And I really felt for the longest, the first five or six minutes, that I was going to be left out of the effects of alcohol. But as I like to say, about ten minutes went down, went by with a couple of drinks down, and I sat there puzzling about why alcohol wasn't doing anything to me when I looked up and saw that all of the people in the room had been changed by the alcohol. and they were all smiling and waving at me and saying, Hello you over there. You haven't joined any groups yet. Come over with us. We like you intensely. Really? I've never been around people who like me this much. Let me join in. I was overwhelmed with love. I drank and people loved me and you say it's just amazing how wrong that is. We're just incredibly lovable from our side. I just saw love in your eyes and you wanted me over there and I came over and bored you with 12 jokes. You just loved it and I just sat there and found in about 10 minutes, as far as I was concerned, was the secret of life. Period. It just went right in and I said something. I already was thinking ahead. If this works here, it'll work in bathroom situations, It'll work in traffic jams. It'll working family reunions. It'll worked at funerals, weddings, recitals, plays, movies, football games. I mean, I saw the universality of alcohol in the first 10 minutes right there. That's I mean it was not a casual acquaintance that took place right there this was a monumental friendship that was developed in the 15 minutes I went on And this is going to be very important to me to keep close relationship with alcohol. I just suddenly, the fear of the future was gone. I had no fear ofthe future at all. It was just like as long as they keep producingalcohol, who could worry? What situation could be out there that alcohol couldn't calm down, that alcoholcouldn't smooth out? I just saw it as the universal power. You just took it and you applied it to whatever situation came up Within a week or so, I had absolute faith in it. I knew where to get it, how to handle it. I had gotten over throwing up and dry heaves and all that. I got that out of the way right away and was on my way with a special power. And it gave me a great deal of confidence. You know, it's a funny thing about how our faith in this chemical carries over. You don't even have to be drinking it to have this faith. Just knowing it's out in the car. You know what I mean? you're in a real tough situation like your boss comes in and said, how do you spell your last name? And you're going, God, I knew he'd ask a tricky one. He wants to really catch me up here. You know one of those things when you're shaking and trembling in the later stages and you go, God, I've got to get through this. And then you just go, our compartment is vodka. If it really gets bad, I can go out and get it. And just knowing that I could go out and get it, just knowing that it was there would bring a little smile on my face. And I'd look at him, I'd go, you almost had me there for a minute, you know. Fortunately, I tied into my power in the glove compartment, and we're not nervous anymore. Just knowing that It was there. And then I found that some of us, when we get into Alcoholics Anonymous, go home as one fellow did. I remember hearing this story many, many years ago. He came to his first AA meeting and heard one speaker, And he was so overpowered by the entire force of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous that he rushed into his house, told his family, get out of the way, get outoftheway. And he went in and cleaned out the linen closet, the liquor closet, behind the bathtub, under the toilet, all of the places where the booze was, and poured every drop of booze in the house down the toilet. Seven hours later, he flushed it. and it was at that point that he accepted his illness. Up until then, it was still an option. You go back and look in there. But anyway, we have such faith in this that when we get sober, very often, we don't have any alcohol in the house, but we might have a $50 bill in a secret compartment in our wallet, which we're not telling our sponsors about or anybody else. for that matter, and it's just sort of there just in case. All this stuff we're hearing here is wrong. You know what I mean? They've got those 12 steps up there, and they've got these traditions, and they get these wonderful promises, but, well, you know, how do I know that's going to happen to me? I can see that it does happen to other people, but I am different, unique, and all of that background comes in. And a guy has to protect himself after all. You have to be practical about this. It's possible God could not like me, could have singled me out. I was real mean to my sister growing up. And you've got to look out for yourself. So I would have that and just knowing the money was there would produce this same and that same sort of security just in case, boom, I'm gone, I'm in the car, I've got the money, I know the address of the package store, all is well. And it's very difficult to get the program working when we haven't cut all the bonds with our previous higher power, which for me was vodka. It started out being classier stuff, but I found out in the end that a real, solid, consistent, friendly, reliable, or out of the bottle, either one, but it just had, it was there. There wasn't any showbiz about it. It's just boom, boom, right down. Just like the postman. And it went to its appointed rounds, down to the feet, out to the hands, up to the brain, all around. Calm, peace, calm, right, yeah, okay, phew, hi. You know, and what do you got, world? What do you get out here? What do we got for me today? We are ready. And I really relate to that. I think it was Sammy Davis Jr., somebody was telling Dean Martin he's going to go out and sing sober. And Dean Martin said, you're going out there alone? Go in front of that crowd alone. And I really related to that. You don't want to be alone in this world. It's too rough being out there alone. And, of course, that's where I felt I was because I didn't share. I didn' t fit in. I was not part of a group because at age 19 I took a detour in the growing up process. I stopped, and I found that most of us who end up relying on some other alternative power base do stop maturing. We continue to ripen and age, but the maturing process seems to stop. And therefore, our relationships with other people cease, and we're just not part of our peer group anymore. We're just distant. And it's a very strange feeling. It's just one person against the world. And you see people relating, you understand that they believe they're relating, and you start developing emotions like a monkey does. Oh, I see, you should smile. Good, I will feel that way. And it doesn't come from inside. It isn't real. And you're trying to show it like you see the neighbor showing love to his children. Oh yes, I See hugged, kissed, do all those kind of things. But you don't mean it. and you know you don't mean it and you hope they don't know that you don' t mean it and you are terrified they are going to find out that you do not mean it so you don´t do it anymore because it is better that way they can be in doubt and it is a very painful existence much better served by drinking more so that you dont think about these kinds of situations and there were a lot of painful ones just by way of background music I ended up in the Marine Corps and flew airplanes for 12 or 13 years, and that's how I got my drinking money, was flying around. And that was my source of income. All drinkers need to get income or a gun, one or the other. Because you must have alcohol. It's an absolute essential in this whole deal. It just won't work without it. And so my life story goes through being a pilot and flying around is very exciting, but it doesn't have anything to do with alcoholism. It was just an inner, that's sort of like what part of the country are you from? And so I'm from Marine Corps New England. And it doesn'T add anything to the story, but some people keep track of things like that. And they go, I wonder where that guy is from. I don't want to go to that part of their country. But I did do that drinking in the Marine Corps. A lot of fun, a lot of excitement and so on down. But deep down inside, I knew something was wrong. I knew something was getting worse every year. I didn't know what it was. Naturally, I tried to search the world out there. I would look. I would go, well, I don't have too many kids. There are six kids around. I don' t have any money left over. There's no place at the table to sit down. It's crowded around the house. Maybe this is so noisy. Everybody's yelling in the window. That's probably causing it. Then I'm being transferred every year and never have roots. You know, I do not have a house. Then I am flying dangerous airplanes. That must be it. And then the Marine Corps is mean, you know, that kind of stuff. Maybe that's why I don't feel good and don't fit in. But there was this sense of going nowhere. You know what I mean? Every time I got to some goal that I had set, the goal became worthless because I had achieved it. And I remember finally becoming a captain and a pilot and being in this big fighter squadron, and I felt like this is nothing. I'm here, and it has no value. There's no meaning to my life to be here. Maybe it's next week I'm going to find out something. And one way to deal with all of these problems is to keep a party going all the time. Just keep it going, you know, with people telling jokes and all that. And then maybe if you just stay stimulated all the Time, you wouldn't sit back and contemplate suicide or whatever was going on in our brain. Just stay involved. Just keep busy drinking, partying, this kind of stuff. but that you can't do that. As a human being, there comes a time no matter how hard you try when you turn around and there you are. Boom! Oh God, I'm here! And then it starts. And that damn brain starts in and it goes, oh, I am glad to see you. It is, you know, like it hasn't seen me in a while. I have been busy. And my conscience corners me in the bedroom or something and says, where have you been? What about 1953? What about 1957? What about your mother-in-law? What about this thing here? What about the money you owe? If you're a commanding officer, all of these true facts and all these things I had never done. I had never taken out insurance policies. I didn't have health plans. I didn't have this. I never went to the dentist. All of the normal things that are just stockpiling up, the bills, all of the things undone are just there and I'm going, I hate all those things and I hated them because I hadn't done any of And they were always there. Life was going by me, and I had never lived it. And I had a tremendous fear of death. Oh, it was just awful. And I realize now, for me, the fear of death is really the fear of never having lived. That it was going to be all over, and I was goingto miss it. And it wasn't where I was going, it's that I missed this. And I knew that. I knew that something was fundamentally wrong. And I was quite grateful now in retrospect that a convulsion came along followed by the DTs and the hospitalization and the nut wards and so on down to stop this particular situation in its tracks and end me up in 1964 in the Bethesda Naval Hospital nut ward in Bethesда, Maryland where I was introduced to Alcoholics Anonymous. I had become a daily drinker. I won't go through all of these things but I had suffered malnutrition, I lost about 50 pounds in my last year of drinking. I could just barely eat. It was just one of those things where you're just going right down. And I just had a seizure, and that's how I got in there. And that got me to Alcoholics Anonymous. I was brought into AA like most of us are. Corman came into the nut ward and said, All drunks fall in. bright face and forward march and I was at an AA meeting and there I was and I didn't want to be there I was embarrassed this guy he's from the outside now he knew that I was in AA who else would he tell? anybody new here you're worried about you know people are going to find out you're in AA are you worried about that? is that a legitimate worry? are you really concerned your neighbors may find out you're an Alcoholics Anonymous? Well, I'm going to tell you something. They are going to find out here in Alcoholics Anonymous. You know how? They're going to notice you no longer sleep on the hood of your car. And they're going put two and two together and they're gonna say he probably got an AA. Good for him. That's wonderful. But anyway, I did get in here and that's how most of us get in there, ordered in. And had a great sponsor, real tough guy in the Marine Corps. And we hit it off pretty well. Hit it off meaning get in the car. And it was a very strong relationship. He just grabbed my arm and sat me down. And I just didn't drink. And now the years have gone by. And it's been a marvelous sobriety. It has been a great growing up experience. It's been very painful. There's been all of these things that had never been done before. and I'm kicking and screaming. I've been forced into them, pushed into them by other people in the group. They're going, well, you haven't done this yet. You're going to have to do that. When does it end? I thought you could just stop drinking. Isn't that all? Oh, no. That doesn't have anything to do with sobriety. I'm going, what the hell are you talking about? I thought not drinking was the name of the game. Oh, that's just our ad. Once we get you in these smoky basements, then we give you our suggestions. What a word! Our twelve suggestions. Hi, you want to stay alive? Try this. And so it's been that. And I don't know how, it's almost like trying to describe a miracle. It's very difficult. It's Very Difficult Sometimes to Call it a Miracle. Miracles in Alcoholics Anonymous occur so routinely that we come to expect them. I mean, I've noticed over these years, this is adding up to a number of years now, and here comes somebody in, he's shaking and hurting, and his life is a mess, his family is crying, there's blah, this whole mess. And we say, well, will you agree to go to a meeting every night for six weeks? Oh, okay, I'll agree. And then we all walk out and we go, isn't that great? His whole life's going to straighten out. And we come back about two months later. Right, yeah, that's right. That's around here. What the hell do you think we have these meetings for? You know, what's the problem? We just saw a miracle. We just thought something that is very difficult to explain. We just saw something fundamentally change in this person. He isn't walking around missing a drink and resenting a sacrifice that he has made. His life has suddenly been filled with joy from somewhere. Where does joy come from? It used to come from vodka. This isn't just bare white-knuckle sobriety. We're talking about a guy who thinks life is a good deal. You talk about it. Well, I haven't got my job back yet. My health is a little borderline. But it's great. And you're going, you've got to be kidding. Are you on something? Yeah. I don't know what it is, but I'm on something. I'm onto something. I don' t know. I just keep going to these smoky basements. And things are getting better. And so something is happening. Something is... The magnificence of Alcoholics Anonymous is just incredible. And I realize what we're saying is that the magnificence of God is incredible. The magnificENCE of a spiritual power is absolutely amazing and it's wonderful to behold and to label it correctly and to look at someone and say your spiritual being has finally been ignited you were trying to kill it all those years with vodka and it has suddenly been nursed back to life and is being developed and nourished in alcoholics anonymous and we are watching the results and we all sit around and are the results and we tell a new person, we don't tell them the theory of Alcoholics Anonymous. We say, hey, you throw off a lot. Look at those people. Look at them. Do they look pretty good? And he looks at the results of this way of life and is attracted to those results. We are our ad. We are out in the front. We're the marquee. We're to drunk. We're standing up there and we go, see this? What do you think? He looks and he goes, not bad. Not bad. That's what I thought. I saw these people in these meetings and they're smiling and they were talking and they've got jobs and suits and cars and they're doing things. They're going on vacation, they're going to Florida, they're coming here and I'm going, not bad, not bad. What's the deal? Don't drink, go down to the basement and we'll tell you down there. Okay. What's going on down here? And finally it became obvious that we were going to eventually talk about God and we were gonna talk about prayer and I didn't like that. I had tried it once, it didn't work and that settled that and they said oh, that's too bad you're going to die well, maybe I'll try it one more time one more thing I'm your basic open-minded guy especially when I find that death part hmm you bring that in okay on that condition I will and that's what is a wonderful thing this is a fatal illness if it wasn't oh boy would we have trouble if this was only semi-fatal we'd be semi-spiritual, which produces semi-honesty and semi-sobriety, which is not worth anything. So we have this thing. And, you know, I am at a loss to explain how I feel about it. And so as a way of getting around to it and wrapping this up, I will share with you a fictional illness that has developed in New England. There's three or four cases up there. And as some of my friends in California told me, There's 10 or 12 cases down there, and it's called sober-holism. I know you haven't heard of sober- holism. It's not an epidemic proportion yet, but it is sneaking around. Sober-holicism, a sober-holic is a person who wants to get drunk but can't. Now, you may not think that serious. You may not think that this is a problem, but to the person with it, it's very frustrating. What they do, they drink one drink and quit and then complain that they're not drunk and aren't getting the results and all of the bennies that they've heard about from drinking. A lot of us tell them to drink more and they reject it. Said their parents only had one drink and they can tell from this one that more aren't going to work so they're nicht going to drink anymore and it presents an interesting situation to try and convince the guy that if he would just drink more, he would indeed get drunk. But he's absolutely convinced no. That's where he goes with his problem. Can you imagine a guy walking into your house and he's saying, You know the problem I've got? I have one drink and I can't get drunk." What would you tell him? You'd say, You can't gets drunk on one drink. You've got to drink like ten or twelve. He said, No, I can tell after the first one that if I did take the 10, I wouldn't end up there. And you'd look upon this person as a rather obstinate person with other problems than sober-allism. One of them being a closed mind, some other demented problem. And you say, the truth is so obvious, I can't believe this guy is standing here looking me square in the eye with the proposition that he doesn't believe if he drinks enough, he can get drunk. I mean, it's absolutely preposterous. And we would sit there, and he would go from one end of the country to the other and never hear anything else. Everywhere he went, he'd get the same damn message. Drink more. Drink more, man. That's your problem. You're not drinking enough if that's what you want is to get drunk. And so we come in to AA, and, you know, you might not see any similarity in here, but I sure do. We come in here and we get a guy, and He's saying, Oh, I've got problems. Boy, have I got problems! And I'll give you a couple of examples. A guy will come in and he'll say, well, I just lost my job and I'm not sure I'm going to find another one. And you told me this was a sharing group. You told me Alcoholics Anonymous was a place to share your problems. So I'm gonna dump it out on the table. What do you do about unemployment? So we start around the table and the first dummy says, have you tried the serenity prayer? And the guy says, the serentity prayer, I don't have a job. I'll pray when I get the job. I'm, geez, who's next over there, please? Serenity prayer. Next guy said, have you turned your life over to the care of a higher power yet? And the guy's looking at him going, you don't understand, I have unemployment. My family's going to starve to death. And he goes all the way around the room and they're talking about, how is your spiritual condition? Have you taken an inventory yet? And he goes all the away around back and hears nothing but a broken record at the meeting. So he does what anybody would do. He changes groups. Goes to another AA group. He says, I don't think I explained the damn problem right. Or they wouldn't have been coming up with answers like that. I probably didn't emphasize the real problem, which is I don'T HAVE A DAMN JOB. It was a serenity prayer. And he goes way out in the southern part of Georgia somewhere and brings it up way in the woods there. These people understand. Starts in with this thing about the no money and the job and right off the bat, you tried that serenety prayer yet? He's got a sponsor. What is this? People don't hear? People don' t hear that I'm walking around with these problems? And you know, it's almost like the drinking was. I look back on the drinking and I went like this. When all else fails, drink. That was the early stages. Then my philosophy as life went along was right before everything almost fails, drink. Then I got into advanced drinking And I said, drink first And then look how everything looks And it didn't look bad So I didn't complain It was like an answer And we come into AA And we use prayer as a last resort When all else fails, pray When all others fail, resort to a higher power when your whole life is about to collapse, then call upon this higher power in emergency. And we come around and we say to somebody, what is your problem? Oh, I'm just so uptight. I'm so nervous. Have you tried prayer? Oh, yes. Well, pray more. Oh, no. I can tell from the first two that if I did 80 more, it wouldn't do any good. well you're wrong the answer is more and he goes I'm going to go to another group and he's just like the guy who can't get drunk he's going around and he is hearing the truth everywhere he goes and if you ask him what he is doing he says I'm looking for the truth I'm searching the world to find the truth and he hears it every single place he goes he hears from his friends boom it's like a broken record more more more what we have in my opinion is a solution we have the solution i believe that we have a power that's capable of doing anything i believe this power that can get an alcoholic who is so negative and in a matter of a week put a spark of life in there that is infectious put a spark alive into a human being that was about to commit suicide that's now running around saving the world is a rather powerful power. And to resort to that only as a last resort is to have our priorities wrong. And I think in AA, we came up with a slogan that says first things first. Go to the higher power first and then come back and let's look at the problem. And the funny thing about that approach to life, rather than zeroing in on the problems, analyzing, figuring out what the hell they are, we go to the solution first. Always go to solution. AA is a solution. There was a Beatles song that says there are no problems. There's only solution. And what we have here is the solution, and what a solution. And we don't solve any problems in Alcoholics Anonymous. Alcoholism for us has never been solved. It's been removed. It went away. I don't know where the hell it went. I have no idea why I'm an alcoholic, any of those dynamics. All I know is I don' t think about it anymore. It went somewhere. It w en away. It wen off like some my childhood went away, and I'm thinking about different things. I'm at a different level. I have a different higher power. I have a way of growing. I am part of something that is moving ever upward and I have to move with it or go away, and I don't want to go away. And if you are new, I don t want you to go way because you can't get to this place alone where we can get together. That is the message that's here you can't get there alone that's why we stay together and where we get it is incredible and if you are new you stick your hand out we're going to grab it and then next year i'm going to be sitting out there hearing where you are and i'm gonna enjoy immensely where you are because i'll be part of it and it'll be a part of my joy too sharing where you are. All of you that are here tonight, I love you desperately. You're just a wonderful crowd and thanks a lot. Thank you so much, Sandy, for coming and sharing. Earlier this week I heard an alcoholic is described by one little boy to another boy as being a happy person who didn't drink. I think that fits Sandy right well. Tonight we've asked Ralph E. to give out our chips. Ralph Edgar My name is Ralph Edgar and I'm an alcoholic. Hi everybody. It's good of you to share with us, Sandy. We love you here, and your dedication and work in this beautiful fellowship is truly an inspiration to us. And here at the Charter Group we have the CHIP system. The chips are merely a symbol of our progress in our program. They mean different things to each of us. To me, I like to think of the chips as the freedom chip. Until I joined you, I had no freedom of choice and today I have a freedom of choice. And I like the think of my chips as a freedom chip and if you have a desire to stop drinking we will give you the white chip. And after 30 days, if you're like I was, you begin to hear what the people are telling you in the program and we will give you this silver chip. And after three months it will be the red chip. This is a danger signal for us because after three month I was feeling good and I felt that maybe I could do it again. But don't do it. Let's go on for the golden chip, the six-munch chip, a piece of gold. And things are getting much better for us now. And then we have the nine-much chip, which is the green chip, the green for gold for the 365 days. And after 365 days, we have The Blue Chip. And what a beautiful way of life. Do we have anyone tonight that would like to try our way and take a white chip? This may be the most important thing that you have ever done in your life. Anyone for a white tip? Anyone for 30 days, the silver chip Come on about 90 days in the red chip anyone with 90 days six months for the gold. That's the added benefit you get if you're giving out the chips. How about the green? Nine months. Any stickers for a year? All right. My name is Patty Weaver, and I'm an alcoholic. Hi, Patty. Hi. i am sober through the grace of god and this program of alcoholics anonymous this is i'm celebrating two anniversaries this day without the first i'm celebrating my ninth year in alcoholics today and also i'm celebrating i've been married one month today, and I'd like for you to meet my husband, Bill Weaver. Good night, Bill. This, uh, I had always before picked up my chip in our group. I'm from Warner Robins, Georgia, and had picked up this chip. We have, give the birthday chips just once a month, you see, and I had never picked up my chip before on the exact date, and when I heard you were speaking here tonight, Sandy, I met you through my husband. He had your tape, and I fell in love with you then, loved yours, and I'm so glad that I could be here and share this with you all. Thank you. This has been a fantastic night, and this is, I believe, the sixth year that our... All right. I wasn't planning on this. My name is John. I'm an alcoholic. Hi, John. I heard a speaker, an alcoholic, not long ago talk about the typical alcoholic. If you give him a choice of two shirts in the morning, it'll take him a couple hours to make up his mind. The reason it took me a while to get up here is because it's not been exactly one year. It's been about 14 or 15 months. Thank you. I'm glad to be here. This has been a special thrill for me tonight. It is our sixth year to have the conference here on drugs and alcohol. This is a tremendous thing for our city here, and all of the great people that give of their time and the dedication that they make to this program really thrills me very much. I love you very much, and let's remember the beautiful promises. We're going to know a new freedom and a new happiness, and you have given me this and as I go down the road I love you very much thank you our trust tradition reminds us that anonymity is a spiritual foundation of all our traditions ever reminding us place principles before personalities it's all right for me to say that i'm an alcoholic and attended this meeting it's not all right me to stay that you're an alcoholic or that i saw you here i'm going to ask lec if he would come up and lead us in the lord's prayer those of you that will join us please stand and join him hi i'm ellie cato and i'm a grateful alcoholic and it's a pleasure to be here tonight and i cannot think of a better way for us to close a beautiful program such as we've had here today and crystallize that in our memory as by saying the lord's prayer so if you'll join me at this time we will have the lord our father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil for thine is the kingdom the power and the glory forever and ever amen