The Stinking Thinking That Leads to the Drinking – Dottie S.

About This Speaker Tape

1950, North Hollywood. Dottie S. is a "baby alcoholic" weighing 82 pounds, lips splitting and bleeding from malnutrition, walking into a room of people who accept her exactly as she is. She describes the disease as a three-pronged attack: an allergy of the body, an obsession of the mind, and a spiritual illness. She warns against "stinking thinking," the mental wreckage that precedes the drink.

Dottie details the danger of the "ego turned in"—an inferiority complex that swings violently toward egocentrism. She recalls the vanity of her first year of sobriety, playing the circuit speaker and reciting the Big Book with a photographic memory while failing to actually work the steps. She built her house on sand, treating sobriety as a performance. After a relapse fueled by "justifiable anger," she describes the grit of the bottom: hiding bourbon in vinegar bottles and slurping from ice cubes. She credits her Higher Power and the "agape love" of the group for ripping off the dirty banda...

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Dottie S. opens with her connection to Reno and the 'X-factor' of biochemical imbalance.
• 12:15 Discussion of the 'obsession of the mind' and the spiritual illness.
• 22:40 The 'vinegar bottle' trick and the struggle with the stigma of being called an alcoholic.
• 31:10 The horror of seeing her sister Evelyn S.'s physical decline from cirrhosis.
• 42:20 Laughter: Dottie S. describes her first meeting and her 'baby alcoholic' status at 82 pounds.
• 55:10 The 'ego deflation' period and her time as a circuit speaker.
• 1:12:00 The near-death experience: vomiting blood and being resuscitated by an alcoholic doctor.
• 1:28:30 The story of her daughter's addiction and the 'miracle' of the gas being turned off in Mexico.
• 1:45:00 Reflections on her 'Daddy Higher Power' and the transition to becoming a private counselor.