Workshop – Part 279 – John

We believe that alcoholism is a disease and that Alcoholics Anonymous is one solution to that disease. I'm here to bring you the voices of its members. Everyone that comes on the show, including myself, is an active member and has found recovery in the rooms of AA. As you listen, please take what works for you and leave the rest. my name is john and i'm an alcoholic thanks tara for setting this up this is a very incredibly helpful and large reaching yet unique format especially from where i'm sitting my sobriety date is april the 17th of 2017 so i have been sober a little over eight years it is not my first sobriety date, my second sobrieta date, and on and on. And I certainly hope it's my last. The last time I got loaded was at the parking lot of a federal prison about 10 minutes prior to turning myself in and sure, the last of a night here sentence. So I grew up in an alcoholic home. It wasn't extremely abusive or violent for that matter. My father was more of he would come home from work and close the curtains and drink about seven and a half beers during the weekend more on the weekend at a time of stand i mean i thought that was kind of normal i remember when they had drunk driving education when i was a little kid in school and i came running home from school and i told my dad like i was sharing breaking news that drinking while driving was illegal because I remember my dad just drinking with a beer between his legs, driving with a beer between its legs. It was just kind of normal. So the first thing I can remember being addicted to was other people's approval. And I chased that long into adulthood. Just the approval or the love or acceptance of other people, the attention. I didn't really care how it came, as long as it came. and I was willing to do a lot of things to compromise whatever morals I was born with to get that attention and that approval. The first time I drank, I was probably 11 or 12. I don't know. I wish I knew it was going to be important I would have wrote down the date but I do remember the first time I got drunk it was definitely that missing piece. It was kind of like I had been short of breath for my whole life and I could finally breathe deeply Being that I was very young, it obviously didn't become something that I did on a daily basis. But I did it every chance I could. When I got into high school, it became a lot easier. There was a lot of just access. And from time to time, or a lot times actually, it was easier for me to get drugs than it was for me to get alcohol. So I very aggressively did drugs as well. it was alcohol and drinking during high school i was one of those alcoholics that was born with a tremendous amount of potential you know i could get almost straight A's easily A's and B's without even studying so people would have problems with my behavior but i would say look at my grades doesn't really matter i don't need to do your projects i need to be a homework i don' t need to study and you know that was the way i kind of lived my life you know my life was always lived with my best interests at heart. I never took into account the welfare of others unless it affected what they thought of me. And if it affected what they saw in me, then I would do the song and dance and manipulate and act like I cared what was going on with them. But once I received the approval or the attention that I was looking for, I immediately returned to self and I lived my life that way continuously for decades. somehow i barely snuck out of high school by that time i grew up in in huntington east california where it's kind of required as a right of passage that you do methamphetamine for six months so i did that and was just awful and psychotic and i was able to kind of get over that but i always returned to the drinking the drinking was always involved and around that time I was introduced to opiates and heroin. And so the next two years was an unbelievable alcohol and opiate addiction. And then when I was about 20 years old, I had just some failed suicide attempt and ended up going to rehab. Now, God has a very interesting way of explaining Jill's thoughts. When I was 12 or 13 years old in 1987, my dad got sick. he went to rehab and then he went to these weird meetings and he would take me sometimes and I thought they were funny I really liked the secret meetings because little did I know that when I was 11 or 12 years old, I was already identifying with what was being shared in meetings of alcoholics and non-lives so when I was 20 years old I went to rehab and dann I went to alcoholics non-live or actually I went to rehab and my dad gave me some old dude's number that was in Alcoholics Anonymous and said, hey, this guy wants to talk to you. And I kind of knew the song and dance by that time and I wasn't really excited about talking to anybody about anything but I was also out of options and I think that's a very important place to get as an alcoholic. And so I called this old man up. He met me at this meeting. Actually my dad took me to the meeting and met this guy and it was a speaker meeting and And I stood up and they asked for newcomers and I wasn't planning on it, but I just stood up and I said, I'm out of the hall. And it was just kind of, it felt normal. It felt like I was finally not home where I just kindof loved everybody, but I felt like it just kindoff flowed off the tip of my tongue like I've been waiting to say it my whole life. And life is in session. I immediately became really attracted to the fellowship about Autonomous and this was in 1996 and I was 20 years old I was also really attracted to these old timers they told me the things that my parents told me for years but because it was my parents I just never listened to them I ended up following these old timer's around somehow I had been accepted into a university so I started going to school and that was a huge kind of adjustment from being sober, newly sober, going to school, four-year university, and just the life that happens. And I didn't realize that Alcoholics Anonymous is a program that is to be practiced in all of our daily affairs. So when I was going to School, I would come up with this sort of sissy, weak kind of approach and say, you know, I just can't do school today. I need a meeting. And I can't doing this. I needed a meeting And I just, I wasn't meeting my responsibilities because I was using this cop-out that I need a meeting. And as a result, my first semester in college, they almost failed me out. And I had to go through this re-approval process and all these things. And subsequently, I was able to continue. And I went to one of these old-timers and he said, look, you were at the meeting last night. What time did you get there? I said, I got there at 630, so I made coffee. And he said what time did the meeting start? I said it started at 8 o'clock. He said, have you ever thought about doing your school that way? I just said, no. He said get to your class early. Stay late. Sit up front. Get involved in what you're doing there. And he really showed me that the program at Alcoholics Anonymous is not necessarily the hour that I go to meetings. It's for the 23 other hours that I have outside the meetings. And lo and behold, two and a half years later, I graduate from that school. Doing nothing more than what they taught me in Alcoholics Anecdotes. And I had two, three years at Brighton. You know, I graduated and I had a really good job in real estate. And about, oh, it must have been three years after that, I met a lady now called Synonymous. And life was good, you know. I look back and I realize that I didn't really, I never took the steps. I could talk about them. I could read about them, but I never really took the step. I treated Alcoholics Anonymous kind of like all-I-could-eat buffet where I would do a lot of fellowship, a lot of service, a lot of commitments, not a lot of step work, almost no spirituality. And looking back, I can see that there's a reason why the steps weren't working. And married this lady about nine months to 10 minutes later, we had our first son. A couple years later, we had our second son. And life was good. I worked in real estate, so that was when things were going wild in a good way and all of the gifts of alcoholics anonymous were coming true and at that time my vision of the gift for all tantrum it was stuff it was money property and prestige but if anybody could have looked into my chest they would have seen that i was just a messed up stress box and around 2006 2007 the real estate market started to turn in a bad way and people i knew Both of us knew that I was in real estate and the economy was just in almost a historically bad spot. They asked me how I was doing. Now, the truth of how I wasn't doing was I was a mess. I was stressed out, afraid, fearful, but my ego and pride had grown to such heights that I said, we're going to be fine. It's all good. My boss would ask me, hey, what's going on? This has got to be bad. I said we're gonna be fine, it's all cool. And then I started to get creative with the way that we were doing business. And what I thought was creative, come to find out that the federal government calls mortgage fraud. About a year and a half, two years after the market started to crash, I was contacted by the Secret Service. Now, about a year before that, when the market was crashing, I had had a couple of surgeries on my shoulder. and I had to go get it checked for it was some sort of irregularity that can get arthritis or I don't remember what it was, but I had the sex rays. And I went from one of them and he said, hey, it looks like you're getting a lot of this kind of growth right here. Does that hurt? I'd been sober for nine years and my alcoholic brain came right back. I knew exactly where he was going and I knew exact where I wanted to go. And as a massive manipulator that I am, I said, only at 90. And he looked at my chart. He said, hey, it looks like we used to prescribe you Norco's. And I just kind of shrugged my shoulders. But inside, I was happier than hell. He gave me that prescription. And this was probably in 2007, no, 2000. Yeah, probably 2007, 2008. And I went and filled that prescription, and I took those pills as prescribed for about 10 minutes. and that began just i have a mastery of of making small problems into mass problems in doing unbelievable making unbelievably bad students the further and further i go and it's kind of like i dig this hole and rather than stop digging i keep digging and digging and digging because in my life i always thought that i could either outsmart or talk my way out of any problem and when dealing with the united states secret service and the federal government i come to find out that's one entity that i cannot they couldn't cannot talk my way out of so i started taking all these pills and my kids were growing i had the wife that was just had no idea what's happening and then in 2010 it just got too bad i had been getting low off and on for three years of going to Alcoholics Anonymous three or four times a week. I had chief commitments. I was secretary of one meeting, I mean, coffee at another because AlcoholicsAnonymous wasn't my life. But I had this stress and these feelings and I had such a huge ego. I could not go to anybody and say, this is what's happening. So in 2010, I was, you know, like normal, I was sitting at my house on a Tuesday morning at nine o'clock when most men with families and kids should be at work and in the door starts coming all of the people that are in my circle one by one one one of my buddies another buddy his wife my mom my bro now i gotta tell you that if you're ever sitting somewhere and you start to see a group of people that you know that normally would not mix at an awkward time there is an intervention coming and that's exactly what happens they did this intervention where everybody talked and read and did these things and by that time i was so just kind of i was done i was lost i wasn't suicidal but i i wasn'T really excited about it but i so an intervention is kind of like a surprise party without the cake followed by a vacation but i didn't realize that the vacation was optional so after that i went to rehab and i went to the detox way in the middle of nowhere i had no idea where it was i had no idea how i got there really my new activity but and i was able to kind of wash out and while i was there i was contacted by the secret service that there was an active criminal investigation and to me and my companies, it was just a very bad thing. And that process was not a fast process. You know, when I left that rehab, I went to a sober living. The manager of the sober living was a guy I held in soul. And in the sober leaving, this is kind of the way God placed Christ on me. They had a bunch of speaker CDs kind of sitting in their living room that guys have listened to or taken, whatever. And there was this little house dog. And one day I came home to the super living and the house dog had chewed up one of those CDs and it was a CD of me. And it was pretty apropos for the time because everything that I was about was basically just false. I felt like a phony probably because I was. And the whole time, I have these two kids that just need a dad. They have a fantastic mother and she's sober and working the program and they need a dad. You know, it was going to be some year before I was able to kind of stand up and do my part as a father. The Secret Service and the federal reviewer's attorneys offered me kind of, I had a bunch of criminal cases. I had two cases in two different counties and a federal case without getting too detailed. I was eventually signed a plea agreement for nine years in prison and I ended up serving about four. Four and a half. And I had never spent the night in jail before in my life. And I started, you know, I went to L.A. County Jail and L. A. County jails was about as bad as any prison that you could be in. From there I went to California State Prison and then from there I ended it up going and finishing my time in federal prison. And until I got to federal prison I was alone the whole time. The last time I got loaded, like I said, was at the parking lot of a federal prison before I turned myself in. My mom had taken me to that prison. That prison was in the state of Oregon. And that comes back a little later on in my story. And I got there and I had been to meetings in prison and it just all were—it wasn't the same. It was more kind of these guys that just were looking for research talk and there was not a lot of recovery. and I'd seen a sign in the prison that there was a meeting there and I just kind of said oh that's great and this new guy showed up a few weeks later after I was there and now remember I had to detox in prison for about three weeks which is about the worst place I've ever been to detox. I've detoxed in a lot of places but a federal prison was pretty horrible. About three weeks into my time there this other guy showedup and he was just trying to walk around and he asked me do you know where they're meeting meeting i thought it was on saturday and we were seeing that stupid sign and i said yeah i know where it is and i walked in and i immediately never heard so it's over for all three weeks by that time and i sat in there and ended up getting my first meeting you know during this this variety that i have now and i ended up going to get back to that meeting every saturday you know oregon is it's beautiful sometimes but it rains a lot of the time and when i'll have me walking around the yard and it wasn't much to do because it's all wet. And I saw these guys kind of sitting in the chapel, and it wasn't big on spirituality or anything for that matter. But the inside of the chapel was dry. It was warm and they had padded chairs in there. So I went in there and just sat down. And yeah, it was a bunch of Christian guys and there's nothing more annoying to me than a convict who goes to prison and comes out with the Bible. That's my story. and so i ended up being in oregon for a little while and and then i ended up crawling back by my house my home was southern california and federal prison is weird when they released you they just take you to the airport and say hey you gotta get this address by this time and put you on a plane or bus and that's it was very awkward because i could have literally just flown to mexico but i didn't i remember sitting there in oregon getting on that plane and flying out in about an hour into that flight. I said, you know, I'm pretty sure we're in California by now and I will never come back to the state of Oregon. And I got to the halfway house. I had to be there for four or six months, something like that. But I was able to start to reconnect with my kids. And it was a slow process because I had watched those kids grow up in pictures from when they were 10, 11, 12 years old 13 years old and those were critical years for the boys and I can remember when I reconnected with them they were both playing sports and I started to get these passes and I was able to go to the sporting events and I started looking for work with my history one Google search was for me disqualified and that's what happened over and over and finally I called one of my old sponsors And he says, hey, call so-and-so. He'll hire anybody. And I was just – it was almost like my life was just beginning from zero. And it was another kind of kick in the face. But, you know, a man is always loyal to his options. So I called this guy and I started to work for him. And, you Know, little by little, I started making these little strides, you know. And I kind of made the decision that, you know, I'm going to do the steps this time. i'm gonna at least do this little experiment with your little program and see if what you guys really talk about works and so i got this sponsor i still had and have a lot of grandiosity kind of know-it-allism so like asking someone to sponsor you it's kind of like asking somebody to go out or whatever just you know for your thoughts on this and that some steps and a big book. And he said, look, we are just going to read the big book and when it says it's do something, we're going to do it. And that sounded like such a novel concept. I went with it. And he started, when we get to something and it says we're gonna pray, we're gotta pray. If it says we have to write a little bit, we're not writing stuff. If it said you got to go meet with people, we're in the middle of people. If it's essentially we got to help, we're to go help people. He just took it very literally. And I realized from my past time in Alcoholics Anonymous that my way didn't work. This whole, like, egomaniac know-it-allism, like sound good but act like shit, was not the way for any kind of life that I wanted to have. And so I did. We started meeting on Zoom. Every Sunday morning, I would read a chapter and then read an X chapter. and I knew that they looked well enough we're getting close to the fourth step part so we get to the four step part you know I wrote the fourth set the following week we did the fifth set and then we had to do like the sixth and seventh and I didn't know like what every small work could be like I never made hardly any in the past and I started to and I realized that there is so much power in in the immense for me i remember this old timer used to stay like it's where this is the step that separates the men from the boys and i truly believe that that's been my true experience that i never had the beautiful experience of sitting across from somebody and really owning my shit right in front of them and listening to them say their piece and walking away from it regardless This was the outcome of how kind of the conversation went, feeling like freedom when you live in America. So we kind of have this idea of freedom, which is pretty cool if anybody's been to other countries. And then there's kind of a freedom that I experienced was being let out of prison, which is an incredible feeling. And I didn't realize there's this sort of disturbed freedom that is me getting out of my own way and being kind of liberated from these things. But it really took me being a counter-holder and looking these people right in the eye. And for the most part, my amends was like rolled down was, hey, I want you to know that I screwed you over. You probably know I screwed two over, but let me tell you how I screwed over and you let me know what I missed. But that sort of interaction and, you know, I had to do that quite a few times and was incredible. and i can tell you that the one amends that that i made probably had the most profound effect on me was i had these kind of this group of small group of investors and they obviously lost all their money i went to meet with this husband and wife and i was sitting across from them and my sponsor told me what i go to meet them i bring the first payment you've got to know that i make monthly payments and if i make more money then this this will go up you know per month and so i met with them and i told them kind of everything and they were really gracious and you know at least appeared forgiving and then you know i started to say you know here's what i can you're going to propose if it's okay with you i'd like to start getting payments monthly and they said well well you don't know and i said well i don't know what they said for some reason john you have really good insurance these sort of like errors and omissions corporate insurance and we weren't able all of us were able to recoup all of our investments plus 10 percent interest and i gotta tell you like i was able to maintain my composure but when i left that and i got a men's in that coffee shop and i went got to my car i cried like i haven't cried in a long time and you know the entire process really is me kind of putting off the amends to this couple for probably the better part of six months, one of those things that I think about every single day. And finally, I did it. And then the meeting took about 15, 20 minutes. And I had postponed that for six months that freedom that I got from that conversation and wandering around my head all because of either procrastination or fear, which procrastination probably comes from fear as opposed to So I'm not completely done with my amends, but way further down the road than I ever have with the program. And making amends to my kids as well was incredibly difficult, walking through that. And then I used to always kind of couch everything by saying, hey, I make a living amends. I'm doing living amens. Well, a living amend would be great. However, if I've really done somebody wrong, I cannot just change my behavior and make a living aments and never address it. That, I think, is the antithesis of what we're doing at Alcoholics Anonymous or what the whole mindset is. I experienced a tremendous amount of humbling by meeting with those people, all of them, and owning my park-sized street and did making the living immense. My oldest son graduated high school a few years ago. He had pretty good grades, and he had applied to a bunch of colleges. and once again God played another trick on me and my oldest son ultimately chose to go to college at the University of Oregon which has proven to be just an unbelievable gift. A year ago, a year and a half ago, my youngest son had graduated college and he only had a 4.3 GPA so he had trouble getting into some schools and after a while he said dad i'm going to university of oregon so now the state that i got paroled from instead i'm never going back to that state both of my kids go to university at oregon as i sit here now i'm wearing a university of Oregon t-shirt and i end up going to the state of oregon three four or five times a year i'm going there next month life has a way of of working itself out i've truly experienced that when i get out of my own weight when i take other people's direction enough now if we're grading on taking people's direction i'd probably get about a c plus but that's good enough for me and i could definitely to do better. But my life is nothing but a blessing, whether I deserve it or not. I don't really get into those sort of word games with God. I know that this is where I'm at, a little over eight years to bring. Extremely grateful, extremely blessed, and I do my best to give it back every time I can. Thank you. Thank You, John. Oof, that sounds like that would have been a rough time in federal prison with white collar crime yeah the state prison was definitely hard but yeah i don't recommend it if you're going to be crime be federal right okay because the prisons are a lot more good note to self all right so you talked about your previous sobrieties and having not done the steps and you've done them this time you also talked about spirituality lacking do you want to talk about step three or step 11 in your in your sobriety uh since april 2017 yeah definitely my sponsor you know we as we go through this one of the steps you know we did step three and you know obviously step 11 it's kind of you know that conscious contact you know when he explains to me that conscious means awake that means that when i'm when we wake up to meet and be connected. And, you know, he kept telling me that he had done this sort of transcendental meditation thing that helped him a lot. And I was very just apprehensive to anything. You know, I came away from prison in my time there, you know with a very good spiritual connection but I just never really meditated or anything like that. And he said, what would you do around a meeting if somebody were doing a step study and someone said, and we're doing the fifth step and someone says, well, you don't really do the fifth set but we say, I don't want to meditate like with impunity and he said i don't think that's really good so i went to this sort of transcendental meditation workshop and i gotta tell you that it has helped kind of comb my head down to more or less the roar and the spirituality actually we that god first shows himself through other people like utero or anybody else and the spirituality allows me to not have to rely on what I want to do. Like sometimes, you know, the right thing is not my thing and they don't have to be the same thing, but I can do the right things and that's how I stay connected spiritually. What does that look like in any given week? I meditate in the morning and at night for about 10 minutes and Transcendental Meditation is more of a mantra meditation. I'm one of those people that I'm able to pray for sure every night and almost every morning. The morning is, what do you got for me today? And at night is more or less just thank you. And I try to keep it real simple. And, you know, I do believe that there's a lot of value in not praying for myself unless it can benefit other peoples. What about the rest of your program eight years in? How many meetings do you have sponsees? Do you work with your sponsor? Definitely. Between you and me, well, I guess not between you and me, I really detest the word fauncee, but I've been blessed with quite a few men that have invited me into their lives and I actively work with probably half a dozen. I go to about three meetings a week plus probably three and a half meetings a year because I'll do a Zoom meeting probably every other week. I might have a panel once a month at a juvenile detention center and then I'll go on other people's panels from time to time as well. Why do you detest the term sponsee? Because sponsees means that they are something to me, and it's more my thing. I don't ever tell anybody that really. My whole life, I had a hard time connecting with humans on a level basis. I either felt incredibly inferior to them or superior to them. And the sponsee-sponsor kind of thing is like employer-employee. I know for me, I'd have to have a sponsor. I need you, aka an employer. Our literature talks about that. However, as a member of Alcoa's Nanos, I don't need sponsees or employees. It's 100% personal. I know a lot of people that use the word with impunity and it doesn't seem... But for me I'm very ego conscious and I know that this massive evil can get out of hand real fast. This makes good sense to me. I am aligning with what you're saying, and I like it, but I'm wondering how that looks for your people that you work with. Do they call you their sponsor? Yes, they do. Okay. And that's completely okay with me because that's them. I don't know if it's either my experience or whatever happened this time around, but I've learned to mind my own business pretty damn well. And if you want to call me your sponsor, awesome. If you don't, awesome, it's your choice and I don'T mind either way because my job is to be a friend and to share my experience, strength, and hope. So, you know, the word sponsor, we all know it's not really in the book, but it does fill itself in the 12 out of 12. So we can have a debate on that analogy. Yeah. Yeah. I align with everything you're saying. I love it. I'm going to have to ponder more about your stronger stance on it than my musings. Like, I too need a sponsor, but I don't like the idea of sponsees. yeah i just i never really liked the word i don't it's like these little minions that run around and but there's some people that are so well balanced and and whatnot that it's nothing but if i do anything like i gotta watch out for like a lot of things but one of them is attention seeking behavior or any sort of uh like pedestal setting myself up on putting myself on my pedestal so if Mine is the word sponsee. Just by default, I am putting some sort of like level difference, you know? Now, Terry, you might have more time than me or less time, but you might have a lot more experience in some area and I'm not going to put you on pencil, but here's my go-to for that. But when I just kind of do this straight kind of carte blanche font for sponsees, kind of thing, yeah, I got these font scenes. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. You mentioned the attention-seeking behavior. Early on in your story, you talked about your first addiction being the other people's approval and attention- Seeking. Obviously, this is an example of you being careful not to go down that path. Can you talk about that area a little bit? That is attention-Seeking and approval-Seaking? yeah I can say what I've learned and what I've learned is our literature now called synonymous talks a lot especially when we're in the tense step onward about going through something or an experience that must be discussed with someone else at once they might use the word another at once which means hey if I did some shady things in sobriety which I have done a lot If I hurt somebody in sobriety, which I have done all of these things, I have to discuss with someone else at once. Those are kind of the negatives. Those are when bad things happen. If I get a bonus at work or anything like that, or an employee of the month, nowhere in our literature does it say, hey, good stuff happens. Take it back to your meeting and tell them all about it. So I feel like I need to live my life the same way. by doing that I get to share my dirt with you guys and I get to stay with the good so if I get employee of the month I don't need to go home brag about it or tell anybody about it I get to stay without but if I hurt somebody customarily off call my boss a jerk whatever I call Tara and tell her about it now I'm just left with the goods and I never realized that because my whole equilibrium was based upon what you thought it was. And as a result, in a lot of cases, I learned a lot about what it was too. Okay. Is there anything that you left out of your story or that you're thinking of now that you would like to share? I'm pretty much the least favorite thing to talk about when it comes to myself. So what's there is there, and what's not? Okay. You did mention your boys and that you've gone up to Oregon. So I imagine you have mended that relationship well. We're extremely close. The three of us, we're extremely closer. Being the father of boys versus my friends that are fathers of girls, it's a lot different. And boys, especially when they're 19 and 21, they need cash, food, and Wi-Fi. That's about it. So our relationship, we're in constant communication with each individual. The three of us have a group chat. And I got to tell you, it's the highlight of my life just watching them. My oldest will graduate next June from college. That's very exciting. Good job, Dad. Good job. Good job mom. Takes a village to raise a child, that's for sure. Doesn't it? All right. Well, we have come down to the final question for the listener who is suffering with or without sobriety. What message would you like to leave them with? That you're not broken and you don't need to be fixed. that alcoholism and addiction is a disease just like cancer or diabetes. There is a treatment plan. It may not be the best, much like chemotherapy or daily insulin injection for a diabetic, but it does work. And it is eventually amazing. For more information, read the first 164 pages of The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous or visit keepcomingback.net.