Three Frogs on a Log and the Third Step Is Still Just a Decision – Don M.

About This Speaker Tape

Don M. tells his story at the 1990 West Central Indiana Mini Conference with the raw honesty and dark humor of a man who went through 18 trips to the asylum before getting sober. A criminal defense lawyer from Louisville, Kentucky, Don built a law firm, a three-story office building, and a reputation — then lost his law license, his daughter, his marriage, and every material thing he owned to alcoholism and narcotics addiction. He describes growing up on a Kentucky farm with what he calls "a hole in my belly that the wind blew through" and traces his fear-driven ego from childhood through a near-fatal car wreck at 130 mph that crushed both legs and severed his urethra.

The heart of this tape is Don's Big Book fundamentalism and his sponsor Cherry's teaching. Cherry walked him through the steps with devastating simplicity — the three frogs on a log illustration for Step 3, the insistence that recovery is "a doing process, not a learning process," and the instruction to read the Big Book as "purely an instruction manual for your actions." Don describes how his disease was not alcohol itself but the inability to be comfortable inside himself, and how his ego gave birth to fear, which gave birth to every character defect he ever had.

At nine years sober, Don reports that his law license was restored as a pure side effect of working Steps 8 and 9, his daughter moved back in and now has four years in Al-Anon, and his financial condition took three and a half years of sobriety just to work up to being able to file bankruptcy. His teaching is direct: being crazy is harmless, acting crazy will kill you, and the only valid comparison is to compare today to the last day you drank. One of the funniest and most quotable tapes in the archive.

Topics

Timestamps

• 00:01:00 Don introduces himself and says his brain tries to take over every AA talk he gives
• 00:04:00 Big Book fundamentalist — reading 'what we were like' vs 'what it was like' and why the difference matters
• 00:08:00 The hole in my belly that the wind blew through — fear, ego, and the disease underneath alcoholism
• 00:13:00 Growing up in dry county Kentucky — beer joints, Hank Williams jukeboxes, and falling in love with the drunks
• 00:18:00 First drunk at 12 or 13 — puking, blackout, and four or five days before drinking again
• 00:25:00 Criminal defense career in Louisville, losing teeth, four new Corvettes in 1976 that never got washed
• 00:32:00 Car wreck at 130 mph — broken legs, crushed knees, lost artery, holding a drink in the hospital bed
• 00:38:00 Eighteen trips to the asylum and the recreation hall named Major Hall after him
• 00:45:00 The brownout, the blonde, the pimp speech, and getting rolled — the moment it stopped working
• 00:52:00 Joe W. says 'We bury you A**holes all the time' — Don gets teachable for the first time
• 00:58:00 Sponsor Cherry C. and the three frogs on a log — Step 3 is a decision, not an arrival
• 01:05:00 Recovery is a doing process not a learning process — read the Big Book as an instruction manual
• 01:10:00 They don't put you in the asylum for being crazy, they put you in for acting crazy — Cherry's final teaching