The Symptoms of Untreated Alcoholism – Paul M.

I'm going to bring forth the gentleman we've all been eagerly awaiting. I met this man Friday afternoon, and Rita and I have spent considerable time with him. He's a gentleman of enormous wit, some of it a little flaky, but he promised to wear his toupee if I'd have known I was going to get the glare off his head, I'd have brought my sunglasses. But we have spent the weekend kidding each other. He's a fine gentleman. He's professional. He's an artist. And I read one article of his, and it was truly well written. As I say, he is a kind, gentle man. And I don't know what I'm rather known about when you can be listening to him. So it is with a great deal of pleasure that I present our speaker for this morning, Mr. Paul Martin from Riverside, Illinois. Paul? Thank you, Lou. Good morning. My name is Paul Martin, and I'm a shy, sensitive alcoholic. I didn't realize you were going to have television or I would have worn a hat. But we've come to that part of the program and now we really feel that you can take it. I wanted to come here in the worst way, so I flew over on Air Wisconsin. The first time I ever took a trip where the pilot showed his home movies. I asked the waitress for a hot chocolate and she brought me a Hershey bar and a match. I said, what time do we get to Akron? She said, I don't know, we've never made it yet. I came into AA, well, if I'm still sober this coming August Incidentally, my mother died four and a half years ago She'd been sober 88 years If I'm still sober in August, I'll be sober 38 years. I mention that only because I'm bragging I was 25 when I sobered up. I was 63 last month. I'm getting to be too old to take yes for an answer. When I came into AA, I couldn't find anybody any younger. Now I can't find anybody any older. As you probably know, we look for help in a lot of strange places as we're seeking answers. Before Lou sobered up, he went to a psychiatrist and on his first visit he said, I've got this problem and I don't know what to do. And the psychiatrist said, well, I'd never seen you before. Tell me about yourself. Start at the beginning. And Lou said, in the beginning I created the heavens and the earth. He probably heard about the lady who went to the psychiatrist for five years. Finally she said, doctor, tell me the truth. What's wrong with me? He said, madam, you are crazy. You are nuts. You're insane. He said, I think I want a second opinion. He said. All right, you're ugly too. I am very grateful to be here at the 50th Founders Day. I was talking with Bob before the meeting started about how much we owe to those two gentlemen who started AA in 1935. I can remember my first meeting when I had run out of all answers and my excessive intellectual stupidity had beaten into some quiet and submission i went to that meeting and i can i can remember how i felt when i went and i could remember how it felt when I came out and I didn't think anything had happened but I haven't had a drink since that was August 1947 and it all started with these two guys in 1935 I believed in nothing when I camed to AA I came into AA with what I always considered two major handicaps. Too much religious education. I come from a long line of Lutheran ministers, and in spite of that fact, I believe in God today. The time I came to AA, I was a fallen away atheist. I didn't believe in anything. The other handicap was too much secular education. I got educated way beyond my intelligence, and that didn't take too much education to do it. But I came into AA believing in nothing, and today I believe en God, and I guess those words, God as we understand him, are the words that open the door. Because the way I've been brought up, they said if you don't believe this way, you're going to be part of an eternal marshmallow roast and you're liable to be one of the marshmallows. And when I would say how come, they'd say that's because God loves you. And I figured I can live better with less cosmic affection. And for a number of years I tried doing it on my own and that didn't work very well either. The AA message is a message from one amateur to another amateur. When I came into AA, you told me that we try to help another drunk because that's the means of our own salvation. And that's still the means for our own salvation. Dr. Bob was the original one-hatter. Dr Bob was a proctologist which gave him a keen insight into the alcoholic's intelligence. Can you imagine the trouble we'd have been in if he'd been a psychiatrist? In his last talk, he said, let's keep it simple. He said, let's not louse this up with Freudian psychology and things which may be interesting to the scientific mind but have nothing to do with our AA work. and that's where it's at as far as i can see the message from one alcoholic to another alcoholic we have all kinds of things the farther you go in time from the experience of the founders of spiritual movement the farther they tend to go from what they were talking about and what was read here and how it works is how it worked it took me a little while to figure that out. This hair didn't fall out, it was beaten out. I did run across a hair grower a while back. I used it for six months. I only grew one hair, but it weighed eight pounds. You hear it sometimes said that alcoholics are smarter than other people. I don't know where that comes from. It certainly was not invented by anybody in Al-Anon. So one of the things that AA has given me is the willingness to fail. In my life, many times I would never try anything because I was afraid I'd be lousy at it. And I spent some time as a journalism student before I went into service in World War II. And I came out and I did a number of different things. And I never would try writing for a living. i spent a couple of years on construction and i spent three years as a professional wrestler when wrestling was new around chicago in 50 51 52 and i sent seven years working on construction up in northern greenland iceland alaska went up with labor on a rigging crew in 1952 when i drank everybody told me i was a smart young fellow and if i'd sober up i'd go far and i believed them when i've been sober five years i found myself working as a laborer in northern Greenland, which is a lot farther than I had intended to go. But a lot of my AA came out of the big book in those years. We had a guy up in Greenland or Alaska, Nick, whose father was Jewish and whose mother was Eskimo, and he said to his knowledge he was AA's only juskimo. To my knowledge that was correct but finally in 1959 at the age of 37 I went to work for a trade association and I began writing their house organ and promotional material and so forth and finally I got thrown into with the age of 37 doing what I had wanted to do for many many years and was always afraid to do because I would rather say that I never tried it than have to say that tried it and I was lousy at it. And so through the years, I worked for them and a couple of other outfits. And eventually in 1966, I started my own public relations business with $200 and no clients. And today, many years later, I still have $200 and no client. But I also decided I'd start trying to sell a few magazine articles here and there. And I failed many times. I had a lot of people insult my articles and I had a lot of people and sell the letters I wrote them. But in the process, I probably sold 400 articles by now to magazines like Science Digest and Parade and many, many others. And I failed many times, but only with the failure was I able to gradually do those things that I really wanted to do. And that was the courage that I got from you people that I guess started that first day in 1947 when a bunch of strangers reached out their hand and they said, how can we help? aaa's message is a tremendously powerful message it's a message that will transform any alcoholic i believe at any stage of sobriety who will work and rework the 12 steps join the meetings and not drinking do not treat my alcoholism working the 12 step treats my alcoholism if all i do is go to meetings and that drink eventually i suffer from untreated alcoholism and that comes out as depression anxiety fear apathy boredom hostility and in some cases with our sober a's suicide and if i suffer from those symptoms the answer is not to try to find a therapist somewhere the answer just use the solution that was there all the time it's called how it works and it's in the big book working and reworking the 12 steps will treat my alcoholism at any stage of sobriety and i've seen that work over and over and over and I go to a step group and it's not a philosophizing step group it's, not a reading step group, it's not a conversational step group. It's a group which is committed to work and rework every one of the 12 steps on a continuing repetitive basis. The first 16 years I was sober I believed that you worked the first nine steps once and then worked the last three the rest of your life and i tried that for those years because i did not know any different and when i was sober 16 years i ran across somebody who said there would be great benefit in continuing to rework all of the 12 steps and i said well there's only one way you can find this out and that's to try it and i began to do this and i wrote a new inventory which was quite a bit different from the one i'd taken when i would sober a year and i begin to see other things that needed to be done and as i continued to do This I began to see that there was immense benefit and tremendous power. The 12 steps are deceptively simple, but they have immense power to change you and me wherever we are in sobriety. As I continued to do this, I began to see that this would work for me and it would work for anybody else. If an alcoholic cannot stay sober or if an alcoholic is sober and suffers from untreated alcoholism, he needs a sponsor, not a therapist. He needs a sponsor who works as carefully with him as Dr. Bob worked with Earl Treat from Chicago in the late 30s. Earl came down and Dr. Bob, in the first few weeks he was sober, took him through the first, what amounts to now the first eight steps of the AA program. And Earl went back to Chicago and started Alcoholics Anonymous. If an alcoholic suffers from these symptoms, his answers remain here in AlcoholicsAnonymous. We have all kinds of things that clutter up and confuse the landscape these days. I think one of the problems with the people in the treatment industry is not that they don't know anything, but that they know so many things that are not true. The answers are here and the answers will remain here. We had a man come to us. We have a lot of people show up at our group from other parts of the United States and Canada suffering from untreated alcoholism. These are people sober many, many years who were in lousy shape who have run the gamut of therapists and everything else, and they've gotten everything except what they needed, which is the message in Alcoholics Anonymous. We had a man come see us in March of last year from Toronto, sober at that time 24 years. Now, as I say, in our step group, we work and rework the steps. We take one step each week, and we talk about what we're doing with that step. We don't philosophize on what we've read in the last week. We talk specifically about experience because the AA message is a message of experience. This man came to see us in terrible condition with 24 years of sobriety, many meetings. He had confused activity with action and he went endlessly to meetings and he had terrible problems with depression, terrible fear, and terrible hostility. He spent a weekend with us and one of the things we came to understand, some years ago I ran into a psychologist at the University of Illinois, Dr. Holbert Maurer, who had a great understanding of the AA program, though Dr. Maurer was not a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, and it was from Dr. Mauro that I got the idea there was benefit in doing more and more of these steps, including opening up not with just one person in the fifth step, but with many, many people. Because when I came to AA, I had carried this act around that I wanted you to think who I, me to be. If you don't know who you are, you have to invent somebody, and this is what I invented. And I gradually, by opening up with many many people and telling them the truth, everything about me, which turned out to be surprisingly easy and surprisingly dull for most listeners i didn't have to hide anything from anybody and as a consequence with no secrets i was free in a way that i never had been before so this man came from toronto and we've had people from all over the country in canada do this through the years and on a weekend he swapped nine fifth steps at something else we believe in our group that if somebody comes to me to take a fifth step with him if i expect him to be completely honest about himself i have an an obligation to be equally honest about myself. So when somebody comes to me to take a fifth step with me, I take a complete fifth step with him at that time, and when we get done, we're even. In our group also, we believe that men should take fifth steps with men and women should take fifth steps. We find that working on that basis, there is less tendency to generate new material that requires additional fourth and fifth steps. So this man, at the end of a weekend, had dropped nine fifth steps, he went back in much, much better condition than when he arrived, he had a new list of people to make amends to, he started making amends to these people there, and he started meditating, he meditates an hour a day now, none of these things was he doing before. What happened to his symptoms of untreated alcoholism? No longer depressed, no longer hostile, and no longer afraid. I saw him and his wife in the Toronto airport three weeks ago, and he's doing remarkably well as a result of following the message in the AA program. I know a guy from Cincinnati who showed up to see us two years ago. He was sober 11 years, and he had gone to a psychiatrist a while back who had put him on Valium because he felt so badly, and he had gone to a counselor who was helping him he still wanted to kill himself but the counselor was helping them he had the classical symptoms of depression anxiety fear hostility he came up and in a weekend again swapped nine fifth steps with nine people from our group all of whom took theirs with him at that time he had a new list of people to make amends to when he went back which he did and he started praying and meditating as a result of it one of the things i found out after i'd been sober a couple of years and i'd made some critical amends was that i was able to meditate i had never been able to imitate until i had done a decent job with the first nine steps of the program he went back and he's in remarkably good condition in fact he stopped visiting his he got a psychiatrist to wean him off the pills and he talked to his counselor and said that he really didn't think he needed to go see the counselor anymore and the counselor said well you know i think you're right i haven't been able to help you and he said i'm kind of depressed myself what should i do it's kind of like the indian that was drunk on the reservation for years and they finally ran him off and six years later the chief was standing at the gate and the same indian came galloping up on a beautiful horse with a custom tailored buckskin outfit a Rolex on his wrist, Gucci moccasins on his feet. And as he came up to the gate, the chief raised his hand. He said, how? And the Indian said, chapter five. You know, if you drink, you've got two things to worry about. You're either an alcoholic or you're not an alcoholic. If you're Not an alcoholic, you don't have anything to worry about. But if you're an alcoholic, you've got two things to worry about. You'll either continue to drink or you'll stop. If you stop drinking, you don't have anything to worry about. But if you continue to drink, you'll have two things to worry about. You'll either die or you'll go insane. If you go insane, you don't have anything to worry about. But if you die, you've got two things to worry about. You either go to heaven or you go to hell. If you go to heaven, you don't have anything to You go to hell, you've got one thing to worry about. Where in hell can you get another drink? How soon can a person start to work the 12 steps? Well, how soon did they do it when AA started? Abby took Bill through the equivalent of the first eight steps within the first week Bill was sober. And that's what was done at that time. As time passed, we started hearing these things that do it at your own pace or if you don't like it, don't do it. Take what you like and throw what you don'T like out the window. And a lot of people have gone out the windows with it. I think you can start to do this very, very quickly. And that's the message that I perceive in Alcoholics Anonymous. Got another guy in our group. In our group, people start working the steps right away. We don't get in touch with our feelings or anybody else's feelings. We work the steps. We had a guy come in with flopping depression. He'd been depressed for years, and he was only sober a month or two. And he'd gone through one of our expensive treatment centers who wanted to sign him up for expensive therapy. And he's sponsored by a guy in our group who's sober 25 1⁄2 years who said all you need to do is work the steps. So he helped him. They took the third step aloud, like it says on page 63 in the big book. This man helped him write an inventory, swapped the fifth step with him. The man took some other fifth steps, and he started to make amends and he worked for a company from whom he had stolen. He was a very unusual alcoholic, he'd been dishonest and he had stolen some musical instruments from this company and also he had borrowed $2,500 from the president of the company to buy a car and then the president had conveniently died with no record of the transaction and so he went to the, he finally said I've got to do something and he said even if I lose my job i've got to do something so he went to see the present president of the company and he told him what he was trying to do now this is a man who was sober at that time i would say two months and he had made other important amends but he knew he had to do this one because he still could not get completely free from his depression and he talked to the president and told him what he had done and he apologized then the president talked with him for perhaps 45 minutes he did not lose his job. And the president said, well, we'll let you pay back the money for those instruments at wholesale, not retail. And he said, as far as the $2,500 for the automobile, that's between you and the president's widow because I don't know anything about that. So he talked to her. What happened to his depression? Well, you know what happened to his depression. He lost it. And that's the message in the AA program. When I was sober less than a year, I heard Paul Stanley talk in Chicago. Stanley was from Cleveland and the number five AA, or perhaps Akron. And he said over and over in his talk, he said, AA is of itself sufficient. Again and again, Stanley said, AAA is of itself sufficient, and I didn't quite believe it. It seemed to me that some of us probably needed some of this advanced help because we were so smart. As the years have passed, I've come to realize that AA is self-sufficient. It says in the 12 and 12, AA's 12 steps are a group of principles spiritual in their nature which is practiced as a way of life and able the sufferer to become happily and usefully whole and expel the obsession to drink health means wholeness and that's what we talk about in Alcoholics Anonymous a spiritual awakening means a whole human being the words that let me into AlcoholicsAnonymous were those words God as we understand them I believe in God today my initial belief in God was extremely simple and as time passed and I came to believe it became increasingly complicated because I knew that some of us in Alcoholics Anonymous were destined for greater spiritual progress than others and while I didn't say this to any of my friends I knew I was one of these so destined so I read all of these books that would enable me to leap into the spiritual stratosphere and I could talk about Zen and the yoga aphorisms of Patanjali and Christian mysticism and so forth, and frequently did whether I was asked to or not. And as time passed, I once again saw that paragraph in one of the stories that says, I get everything I need in Alcoholics Anonymous. Everything I need, I get, and invariably when I get what I need it turns out to be just what I wanted all the time. And this is what I have discovered. Everything is here. I learned it from you when I'm here today because I have to stick with you or I will not remember it. It says on page 77 in the big book, we feel a man is unthinking when he says that sobriety is enough. And it says on Page 82, our real purpose is to fit ourselves to be of maximum service to God and the people about us. We go to conferences and we see many, many pamphlets and books and booklets from treatment centers and so forth, and seem to forget that AA started with something called the book Alcoholics Anonymous. If you want to hide something from an AA member, oftentimes the best place to put it is in the big book. That's where it is. Sobriety is the beginning. And the message is that if I get sober, I can get better. And if I gets better, I could help another alcoholic. And the only thing I can do to carry a message is to work with another alcoholic step by step by step. I spent a lot of time in AA trying to be a guru or looking for a guru and then trying to convince people I had already become a guru. I'm strictly one beggar trying to show another beggar where there's some bread because what I've learned, I've earned from you. Without your help, I would certainly forget it. When Dr. Vincent Dole, a non-alcoholic trustee, retired from the General Service Board a few years ago, he said that my concern for the future of AA is that money and professionalism may erode its principle of personal service, which is certainly a valid concern. AA works. If it's working, don't fix it. The message from one amateur to another amateur, and it remains that at any stage of sobriety, I really was a long time beginning to understand that the 12 steps, if we work them, will work for us wherever we are. And the answers are here, and sponsorship means helping somebody else to do what I have done. Now, I can't give away what I haven't got. You probably heard about the cowboy and as I say, this stuff's been pounded into my head. You probably heard about these gentlemen who was having a few drinks in a saloon and there was a Marine next to him and he jumped up and whacked him with a karate chop and let out a shout and he stood over and he said, I'm a United States Marine and that's karate from Japan. Little guy backed back up and started to drink again and suddenly the Marine whacked him again and let out a shout and he said, I'm a United States Marine and that's karate from Japan. The little man wandered out and about half an hour later the bartender looked up for mixing drinks and the same little old man was shuffling in but the barteller was busy and did not pay attention. Suddenly he heard a thud and he turned around and the Marine was unconscious on the floor. The little male wandered off and the bartenger said so long and the little man said when that so-and-so comes through you tell him that was a hammer from Sears and Roebuck. Which is certainly the way I have learned whatever I know. You know, AA didn't start. AA began 50 years ago, and let's look at history 50 years ago. AA was not one of many ways to enable drunks to stay sober. A.A. started because there was nothing else that worked for alcoholics and today there is still nothing else that works for alcoholists except Alcoholics Anonymous You may have heard about the folks who had the tomcat who was on the back fence night after night hollering and squalling and screaming and he made so much noise and the neighbors complained so vociferously that they took him away to the vets to be altered. And he came back two days later and the first night he was home, he was back on the same fence making as much noise as ever and his buddies listened for a little while and finally they said, how come you're making all this noise? Weren't you taken away tothe vets? He said, yeah, that's right. They said, why are you back onthe fence making so much noisenow? He said well now I'm a therapist. I grew up in a little town down in South Georgia. I didn't start out to be an alcoholic, but the town was so dull that if you took LSD, you'd have had visions of Lawrence Welk. And when I was quite young, I discovered that alcohol did something to change my life for the better. I was a shy, kind of backward young man. i didn't start out growing up down in south georgia i started up out growing up in oak park illinois which is a chicago suburb and my father was a lutheran minister who was an alcoholic and a very badly behaved alcoholic my mother my mother's father was the lutherian minister and in those days nobody got divorced but nobody ever knew when my father was going to throw somebody against the wall which does create a certain amount of uneasiness in a household and so when i was 12 she decided to get of separation and my father took off for south georgia where he had a sister and that fall when i was 12 coming home from the seventh grade one day he picked me up and drove almost non-stop down to south geurgia and i found myself transported from this community near chicago to this farming community down near the florida line and my mother came down next summer and tried to get custody and was unable to and i was there and my whole life turned upside down almost overnight i'd been a very good student in the schools in oak park and suddenly i found myself almost unable to learn anything and whatever energy and ambition i had went into sports looking back i can see tremendous self-pity and tremendous resentment and just tremendous confusion because i was suddenly in a world where i could make no sense out of anything years later i went back down to that town and I met some friends that I had known through those years. And I realized what a tremendous help these very good people had been to me through those years when I could, I had no reference point for anything. But very, very young I discovered that alcohol did something within me that enabled me to live in a world that I couldn't handle otherwise. When I was 12, I used to pick the lock on my aunt's liquor closet and I'd take a drink out of the whiskey bottle and then put a little water in there so she wouldn't miss it. I guess that came from a previous alcoholic incarnation. And when I was 14, I got drunk for the first time. It was New Year's Eve and suddenly everything was changed. I was changed, the people around me were changed, and suddenly I belonged. Suddenly I fit in a world that I only seemed to belong to if I was out playing some sport. My favorite sport was boxing. I wanted to be middleweight champion of the world and I would have been except I had a bad handicap up I couldn't whip anybody. But drinking was great, great fun. You know, you look at an alcoholic shuffling around when he's over the hill and you say, why does he drink? You and I drank when we shouldn't have finally because we remembered what it was like when it was good. And that was the only thing I had that would glue my life together. The trouble with trouble is it starts out like fun. And I was the trouble with the trouble in my life and i drank my way through well a year and a half of a college near atlanta after i finished high school i was doing increasingly badly in school and when i was 19 i came back to park where my mother was world war ii had come around and i had decided to be a pilot i was boxing for the madison athletic club on the west side of chicago and going to college and it was part of that act and i've had a lot of trouble separating from whatever act i'm in at the moment But the act was the sophisticate and the drinker and the lover, and now there's going to be the pilot. I never did and still don't believe that God meant man to fly. It's kind of like Joan Rivers. She said if God wanted a woman to cook, he'd made them born with aluminum hands. And I still feel that way about airplanes, but I was going to become a pilot in the Navy, and I started off, and while I was a cadet, I could only get drunk on weekends. And when I got commissioned, I could get drunk whenever I wanted to, which was most of the time. And I only got one decoration in World War II. It was a linoleum rug I won on a radio quiz show. I flew single-engine seaplanes that were catapulted off cruises and battleships. You went from zero to 60 miles an hour in a space of about 40 feet. It wouldn't cure a hangover, but it really took your mind off of it for a little bit. I destroyed two aircraft in World War II, both of which belonged to the United States Navy. A friend of mine observed that if I'd gotten three more, I would have been a Japanese ace. So I drank and various strange things began to happen to me. I was blacking out at strange times. I began to eat food that threw up easy so I wouldn't hurt myself. I'd get up in the morning and I'd take my gagging exercises and then I would shuffle over to the flight line and try to fly and I would bounce into the air and then come back. And I would swear when I got up inthe morning gagging and heaving, remember how nice that was? You really miss that. You know they say there's a lot of repetition in AA and there really is. but there is nothing more repetitious than that morning vomit and i don't miss it but i would go down and fly and i'd get through the day and i swear in the morning i wasn't going to drink and that night i'd be drunk he talked about a short memory i was like that guy that never could remember names till he took that dale carmichael course so various strange things were going on and in the summer of 1945 I was 23 and I was drunk I'd get drunk 9 out of 10 nights generally, I could drink 9 nights in a row and then the 10th I'd go to bed about 6 o'clock get up at 6 and then I'd be good for another 9 nights but in the Summer of 1945 something went wrong with my health program and I ended up in a Navy hospital with pneumonia which went into DTs i did figure a smart young man like me would have known there was some connection i didn't i got drunk before i got out of the hospital and i continued to drink and i ended up at the naval air station at norfolk and i some friends of mine had been there ahead of me and they got me a blind date and in her honor i got blind and as we were taking her home We had to stop the car so I could get out and throw up. Then we got to her home, and I had to go behind the bush and throw-up. And then I was very hurt because she wouldn't kiss me goodnight. So when you told me I was a sensitive human being, I knew exactly what you were talking about. Well, I had arrived there, and I'd had enough points to get out, and the personnel officer said, Do you want to sign up for another six months? Do you wanna get out? I said, I'd like to think it over for a day or two. So two and a half weeks later, they found me and they said, I think you ought to get out. I said I think I oughta get out so in December of 1945, I got separated from the service at Great Lakes, Illinois and I traveled for three days and three nights and got home to Oak Park where I was living about 50 miles away and I thought maybe I should do something about my drinking so over New Year's I started out for Cincinnati and I ended up in Milwaukee drunk for three days I had been born in Milwaukee and I guess I was trying to find out where I had taken the wrong path but I drank myself sober on New Year morning and I came back on the train and I thought I really have to do something about this I had ended up with what had to be the worst looking woman in the Middle West she frightened me into six weeks of sobriety She looked like a million dollars, and I only say that because I've never seen a million dollars and she looked like something I never saw before. Which I guess proves that beauty is only skin deep but ugly goes right to the bone. So I stayed sober for six weeks and then a friend of mine and I went up to the air station and it blended you to fly, and it snowed, and we got drunk, and we get lost, and I get bitten by a dog. And I took rabies shots for two weeks. Then all kinds of things were going wrong with my life. When I worked, if I took more than half an hour for lunch, they had to retrain me. I can remember one night we were having a party at one of the hotels downtown, and we ran out of booze, and we were up about the 12th floor, and they sent me out to get some more, and this hotel has a sunken lobby, and I got lost in the lobby. And I went up on the mezzanine to reconnoiter, and I went in the men's room. And there was a sign that said exit, and I went out in the fire escape, which was one story above the sidewalk. And I want down this swinging ladder. And I got to the end of the ladder, and I was still ten feet above the side walk. And I was not too alert, but I knew that would be very bad to jump. And I walked back up the ladder and the door to the men room had locked behind me. So I beat on the door and kicked and screamed and hollered, and somebody finally let me in, but I was talking in tongues years before anybody ever heard of the Pentecostal movement. I always like to drink in sophisticated places, and one night a friend of mine and I were in a sophisticated place on Wilton Avenue in Chicago. It's a lot of Chicago sophisticates here, I can tell. Well, entertainment at the backstage bar is provided by ladies who dance on the bar, and they remove various articles of clothing while performing a variety of stimulating movements. And if you're worthy, they will drink with you. And my friend and I were worthy and then we ran out of money and they ran out because we were no longer worthy. But I realized from that and some other experiences that the lady who dances with no clothes on sits with you, drinks with you and says she loves you, beware she might not be sincere. but i began to make an endless endless array of experiments and i began to read all those books that tell you how to straighten out your life and i read one at that time that was very popular by rabbi liedman called peace of mind and i was very very impressed by peace of mind i thought this is inspiring and it's going to transform my life and then i learned that rabbi lieben committed suicide and i thought that's more change than i need at the moment and i read dorothea brandy's wake up and live and she said act as if it's impossible to fail you ever try that with a dry heave and i red link and think and you name it i read it and they all had one thing in common yeah i think those books are great i think all the books that we see now are great i thinkall the therapies that come and go with the seasons like primal scream and and I'm okay, you're okay, and how to be your own best friend, all of those things. I think they're marvelous unless you really need help. And if you really need help and you're an A.A., Al-Anon, or Alateen, the help is in how it works. Don't throw away the book. Just do what it says. If I were in a plane flying at 30,000 feet and somebody came up to me and it caught on fire, somebody came off with a parachute and said, put this on, go through that escape hatch, pull the ripcord and save your life. What do you think I would say? Would I say, let's get in touch with our feelings? Or would I say nobody's going to tell me what to do? Or would i go through the hatch without a chute hollering, this is an individual program? i would follow instructions because as they used to say in the paratroopers it don't mean a thing if you don't pull that string so anyhow i made all of those various experiments and funny things happen the last two years i drank nothing was funny i was a mess i was frightened all the time and i didn't really know what to do about anything i was shaking sometimes so badly when i was sober a week i had to sign my name with both hands it's like the one-armed man that went in for a shave from the barber who had such a bad hangover he was shaking so badly he cut the man on the nose and on the chin and on The Year and he stepped back and he said haven't I shaved you before the man said no I lost this arm in a sawmill accident you probably heard about lou back when he was drinking and went to las vegas and he was sitting at the bar and this lovely blonde next to him said would you like to will buy me a drink? He said, well, I'm no John D. Rockefeller, but I'll buy you a drink. She said, would you like to dance? And he says, well I'm not Fred Astaire, but i'll dance with you. A little while later she said, Would you like go home with me? He says, Well, I am no Don Juan, but I'll go home, home with you." Several hours passed and as he was getting ready to leave, she said," How about the money?" He said,"Well, I ain't no gigolo, but, I'll take it." Thank you. i had the world's finest education on alcoholism and i know that as i drank i knew what happened to my father when he drank i knew it happened to us when he drank i could remember two or three serious automobile wrecks i was in with him when he drunk and was drunk so when i drank, I always said, if I get in trouble, I'll quit. Or I would always say, I'm going to drink, but I'm not going to drank like he did. And as I drank like he did, I apparently didn't know what was going on. I think if you can say alcoholics have many traits and we're brave, kind, compassionate, lovable and charming and so forth. We're also pretty dumb a lot of the time. Pretty stupid. Regardless of how much education we may have, were pretty dumb somebody has said that the ego is like a baby it has a tremendous appetite on one end and no sense of responsibility on the other and that certainly speaks of my ego because i continued to do these dumb things and i would not look i only looked in those areas that appealed to my if you'll pardon the expression mind and in 1947 in august i got drunk again and i've been drunker and I've been sicker, and I was not in trouble. I got a gift which was maybe the biggest gift I have ever gotten in my life. It was the gift of honesty. I could no longer lie about what was happening to me. I can no longer lie about all these troubles I was in. It wasn't funny and it hadn't been for a couple of years. You know I can laugh about a lot of things now about losing my car. I was always losing my car you know there's nothing more beautiful than an alcoholic who is reunited with his lost automobile. I would wander around around and I'd say there it is and I would cry a little bit and drive off and run into something well you better believe none of this was funny when it was happening but I got I got the gift of honesty and I kept during that week I was sober I kept trying to lie to myself and I couldn't I couldn'T say I'm going to make it on my own anymore I couldnT say next time it'll be different all I knew was that I was in terrible trouble and I didn't have any answers and I knew I was an alcoholic I had figured that out early that year and I thought that was sufficient And I'd stayed sober three months from January to April of 1947, and then I got drunk. And I learned the other half of the lesson. The other halfof the lesson is that it's important that I know I'm an alcoholic, but it'simportant that I also understand that that knowledge by itself is inadequate. If I were to stay sober, I needed help outside of myself. And I called AA on a Saturday in 1947, and I went to a meeting the next day at that Austin YMCA. and I walked out of that meeting and a bunch of people I've never seen stretched out their hands and they said how can we help and you people have helped me every day of my life since then whether I've been with you or not because I think there's a I think There's a circulation in AA I think this is a circulation of power and love wherever we are we are part of it nobody can throw me out of Alcoholics Anonymous but me and I can do that by living so dishonestly and so secretly and so selfishly that I myself no longer feel that I am a member. But you people, that first day, opened up your hearts and your hands. And I've come back day after day, sometimes in good shape and sometimes in bad shape, but always here. I've been able to stay sober because only through your help was I able to find those things that would enable me to change my life and become what I wanted to be. Probably most of you have read those books which tell you to hold the thought and decide what you want and what you're going to be Well, that's great, except I never knew what I was supposed to be. If I will just work the steps, your help and the help of God will gradually take me where I belong. I went to a lot of meetings. I didn't work the stops because nobody told me to, and I didn'T know I was SUPPOSED TO. And I ran to countless meetings, more and more meetings, and I got in worse and worse condition. I was kind of like the farmer who came to see the doctor, and he said, I have a kind of embarrassing problem. And the doctor said, well, what is it? And he said, well, it's truly kind of embarrassing. But he said my wife and I are having some problems in our sex life. He said I'm too tired at night and she's too sleepy in the morning and I don't know what to do. And the doctor said, Well, when are you most in the mood? And the man said, Actually, 1030 in the evening. In the morning when the sun is up and I'm plowing in the tractor, he said I feel so good. He said several times I have run home but by then I'm exhausted. And the doc said, Why don't you take your shotgun with you and at that time fire the shotgun and your wife can run out to the tractor. and two weeks later he went to see the doctor and the farmer said that was magnificent advice he said we've never gotten along better in our whole lives thank you very much and a year later the doctor ran into the farmer in town, he said well how's everything how's your wife, and the former said I guess you didn't hear she died and the doctor said I'm sorry to hear that, what happened and the foreigner said she ran herself to death during hunting season Well, during that first year of sobriety, I just about ran myself to death trying to find some ease by going to endless numbers of meetings because I didn't know you were supposed to work the 12 steps. When I was sober a year, I got in a lot of trouble from some very dishonest business activities. And it looked like I might go to jail and I ran over to some friends. I said, I think I missed something in the program. They said, son, you missed the whole program. I said I see. He said, you kept such an open mind that the whole plan and the program just blew right through. So I read chapter 5 and I wrote an inventory and it was a very honest inventory and then I found somebody and I took a fifth step and it Was the most honest fifth step I could possibly take at that time because fear has always increased my zest for spiritual growth and at that time something changed within me that never would have changed otherwise the steps that i have found i think each step is equally important but the steps that i found that will most dramatically change people are four and five and eight and nine and i went on and i began to work the rest of the steps and i made some amends and i started to meditate and went up and worked out of the country for those years And then I came back around Chicago in 1959, and I entered my leadership phase. I saw that a number of people were running things at AA around Chicago, and I got my own clique and ran it for a while. And I was amazed at how a lot of people did not appreciate God's will when you explained it to them. And I ended up with some really rotten relationships with people in AA, and it ended up I had to go around and make a number of amends to people in aaa now i harm these people not because i'm an alcoholic or because i have a disease i think the idea of the disease concept is helpful but i think when you say that morality or ethics has nothing to do with alcoholism because you've got a disease it completely overlooks the only thing that works to make the alcoholic well which is a program based on rigorous honesty which has to do mit turning our wills and lives over to god making restitution admitting to god and others and ourselves our defects praying and meditating, all of these things. To say that ethics and morality have nothing to do with the AA recovery is to deny the guts and the core of the AA Recovery Program. Because I got into trouble. I was sober 21 years when I went around and made amends to these people in Chicago. And you better believe I didn't want to do that. It goes contrary to my nature. And some of them didn't take it with the spirituality I thought they should. A couple of guys said I was no good, never had been any good, and never would be any good. Which didn't bother me because i didn't really believe them but i had been sober for a number of years at that time and my father i heard had gotten sober on his own down in south georgia i used to call him up and suggest that we get together and he always said no because i knew and i could make and i think still an honest case that 99 percent of the harm in that relationship was from his end but i knew that if there's an important relationship in my life and it's sick i'm never going to get well until i can do i do everything i can to make that healthy so i used to call him up and in 1968 in october i had a business some business in miami so i stopped in south georgia on the way back and i went to see him unannounced i had not seen him for 27 years i rang the doorbell and he came to the door i made the men to him and then i told him who i was i went in and we talked for 25 minutes and in march of 1969 i again went to see him unannounced for 25 Minutes everything is connected to everything else if i do something in the program over here that's positive i'll get better over here and if i lie cheat and steal over here i'm going to get sick over there and what i discovered was that making those 12 amends around chicago brought something to bear that i it just worked out that i saw my father After that second visit, I was having a quiet time at home. And somehow tied up in that visit, it pulled off a layer of my life and I saw another ten names that went on my list of people I had harmed. Two weeks after that second visite, he died and I went to his funeral very grateful that I had been to see him when the opportunity was there. If anybody here has anything like that in your life, all I can say is do it now because next week or next month the opportunity may be gone forever. the message i understand is work and rework all of these 12 steps and help somebody else to do it too and it's all here willpower can help me to go to meetings i can use willpower to go to bed early enough at night so i've got time to meditate in the morning a lot of things that willpower will not do i can only use my strength to cooperate with god's process and what i have seen through my experiences that god's practice speaks to me through you and through working and reworking every one of these 12 steps. I don't have to go anywhere else. I don't need to hire anybody, I don t have to read anything else, I don't pay anybody. The A-A message is a message from one amateur to another amateur. All I have to do is stay with the people who are doing the work. You probably heard about the lady who was chiding her husband because of his lack of willpower and she said look at you. She said you don't any willpower. She says Goldberg has willpower he smoked three packs of cigarettes a day for 30 years. Five years ago he said I quit he hasn't smoked since she said that's willpower she said ginsburg has willpower he was drunk every year of his life for six years now he hasnít had a drink for 14 months thatís willpower husband went into a rage he said iíll show you what willpower is he says Iím going to move to the guest bedroom and Iím going stay there forever six months later he was awakened at 3.30 one morning by his wife shaking the bed and he said what do you want she said goldberg is smoking so in our group when we work when we sponsor with some sponsor somebody we sponsor somebody on the basis of the 12 steps and there we believe that men should sponsor men and women should sponsor women otherwise we find that oftentimes they end up talking about God in some very strange places. And we work on the inventory quite quickly and we don't use the Hazelden guide. If I tried to use that, the rest of my hair would go plunging to the floor. There was a very good guide in an obscure volume called Alcoholics Anonymous. And we use headings like resentment, dishonesty, sex, selfishness, self-pity, look to see where we're at fault. And We encourage the people we work with to take fifth steps and if they take them with somebody in our group they swap them at that time we encourage them to write the list of people they've harmed and make direct amends to these people and what i have seen for example a guy i know who was around a drunk for 15 years in january of 1972 now 15 years he had gone to endless meetings meetings are important but they certainly are not the answer he'd gone to endless meetings this time he sobered up once again after being around AA drunk for 15 years. He started to work the steps, he started going to our meeting and he began to stay sober and he's been sober ever since. A guy I know who was sober 10 years in terrible condition. He had gone to a psychiatrist for a year, he had gone into recovery for ayear, he had tried everything but the 12 steps. He had go to Lutheran General in Park Ridge and talked to Dr. Rossi who had given him the MMPI and said he needed shock treatment. Well fortunately Dennis found the AA program and he now refers to Rossi as Dr. Electrode. But what happened to Dennis was that when he worked the steps, he lost all these symptoms of untreated alcoholism. He began to work and function as a sane, useful human being. I think that the steps will give me what I need. I thinkthat I can only pray and meditate if I have done a continuing job with all of the steps and am continuing to try to live an honest life. I've had a lot of trouble with honesty in my life because I have great problems with greed and I have a great problem with self-centeredness. A great problem and this is a surprise to everybody in trying to be important. But I believe that prayer and meditation is tremendously important. I think that if I really believe this, then I'm going to work at it. AA is the most important thing that happened in my life. Now if I believe it, then I am going to spend some time at it One of the things I try to do is spend an hour and a half every day in prayer and meditation asking for absolutely nothing. Meister Eckhart, who certainly knew something about the spiritual life, said that when I pray for something, I do not pray. When I pray für nothing, I really pray. I spent a number of times, a number of years reading all that literature after I sobered up as a retarded mystic. I came to the realization that what had happened was I had developed a metaphysical hernia and strained myself spiritually. My prayer and meditation are very simple. I ask for nothing for you or for me because I don't think I'm smart enough to know what you should have. I spent quite a bit of time where God was a cosmic candy machine who would give me what I wanted if I had the right collection of affirmations and prayers. I don'T think I'M SMART ENOUGH IN MOST CASES TO KNOW WHAT'S GOOD FOR YOU OR ME. GOD'S WILL WILL BRING YOU AND ME WHAT WE SHOULD HAVE AND I SPEND AN HOUR AND A HALF EVERY MORNING, MORE IF I CAN DO IT, TRYING TO TURN MY WILL AND MY LIFE OVER TO GOD SO THAT THROUGH THAT DAY i do what i'm supposed to do and become what i am supposed to supposed to be all i know about sponsorship is that we try to help another alcoholic experience god in his life and i don't think there's room for god if i haven't cleaned myself out with the steps that come before step 12 and i think that if i will work the steps i will have a spiritual awakening and i thank you as a spiritually awakened person i live in it in a different saner way and go where i am supposed to be the message i understand is summed up by a couple of people i know in aa once over 11 years and he lives in nashville and he's done a he's got several children and one of them is in high school it's a boy and he has had a lot of trouble with him no matter what he tried to do making amends and so forth he simply had difficulty with the boy doing badly in school and with the boy not learning and a behavior problem about a year ago he swapped some more fifth steps brian from nashville did and went back and again made an amend to this young man and this time something happened and the boy started to do better in school i talked to brian a month ago and he said you know i came home from the business trip and this is a kid that flunked a lot he said the boy said dad can you stand a surprise and he said sure and he says well i made the honor roll that's the message i understand the message i understand is summed up by another man i've known for many years in aa who was around aa drunk for a long long time and in january of 1971 he came back again and this time he began to work the steps he started going to our group he had several boys and the youngest was eight at that time and was in a class for retarded children because his father was a very badly behaved alcoholic and the boy could not learn and he was a behavior problem and they put him in a class for kids and the father quit drinking in januar of 71 and he began the work the 12 steps and he began to stay sober and change and his boy began to change and the boy went from the class for retarded children to a regular class doing average work and as the father continued to work the program the boy continued to get better the boy graduated from high school several years ago and I had lunch with the father I said how did your son do in high school and the father said he made the honor roll every grade period but one he said he was a varsity football player the father says he wasn't retarded, I was retarded the father said none of this would have happened if all i had done is stay sober and not work the 12 steps and that's the message i understand that you and i have to share an experience in aa that if you and I work these steps on a continuing best basis we will be changed and that change will be reflected in the lives of everybody with whom we come in contact i've learned it from you and im here because without your help i could never remember it thank you very much Thank you.