The topic of "Emotional Sobriety" at Carry This Message group's Day of sharing

Introduce our opening speaker for this morning, Chris S from Pottersville, NJ.

Thanks, Jameson. Hi everybody. My name is Chris. I'm an alcoholic,

you know, being up here in the pulpit has kind of inspired me. And I've, I've learned to follow my intuition on these things. So instead of talking for an hour about emotional sobriety, I'm going to read some stories from this Bible for children.

Well, maybe not. OK,

let me think. Emotional, Emotional sobriety.

I got to go way back in my experience

to to be able to really paint a decent picture of this.

Some of my earliest recollections were recollections of self-centered fear. As a child, I seemed to be anxious, nervous and high strung

a little bit more than than normally you would expect from a child. I remember the time that my mother packed me into a car and drove me Uptown to go to kindergarten. You know, it was my first exposure, being thrust into a group of a group of people my age for one reason or another. And I remember,

I remember her letting me out of the car and I'm standing up on a hill and I'm looking down

at these kids. And they're down there right outside the kindergarten, and they're running around and they're playing and they're kicking ball and they're playing tag and they're laughing and they're already friends, you know? And I'm standing up on the hill looking down, feeling like a Dick, you know what I mean? I'm looking down and I'm saying to myself, I am never, ever going to be able to go down there

and integrate with these kids, you know? I mean, what if they don't like me? What if I say something stupid? What if I do something embarrassing? You know,

what if I cry and act like, I mean, it was just traumatic for me just to be able to go down there and be be with with the other kids, right? At that point in time, I could have used a double shot of whiskey. If you would have given me a double shot of whiskey, I would have been able to move right in there. You know what I mean? I would have felt comfortable with myself.

I I wouldn't have been afraid or intimidated by the any of the other kids.

But my problem was, was I was not exposed to any whiskey for a while. I think it was going to be about 12 more years or so, not 12, about 10 more years, about eight more years until until I discovered alcohol as a solution for that internal condition. That made it very, very difficult for me to feel right about myself, right with myself and right with my environment.

One of the things that I discovered,

umm, as a kid, I think I was about six years old or so, was the the five gallon Jerry can, army Jerry can of gasoline down in the basement. Has anybody in here ever sniffed gasoline? Well, I got to tell you that's, that's an experience, especially if you're six. Well, what I would do is I would open up the top of this Jerry cannon. I'd stick my mouth over and I would breathe directly, breathe the fumes from this gas can

until time got distorted. You know, I mean, I'd, I'd get to the point where I didn't hear things like this. I mean, I would be blown out of my mind and I would wander upstairs, you know, banging off the walls. And nobody knew really what was going on. They just thought that I was acting like a kid. I was stoned out of my mind at six years old. And one of the things that I learned from from that experience was

there are ways to escape

your emotions. There are ways to escape from that

that uncomfortable

existence that I had. You know, I'm not saying that I was always an unhappy kid. I'm saying that there were just times when I didn't feel right.

Move ahead a little bit to I'm thirteen years old and I decide that I'm going to cut school with a couple of my buddies and we're going to go back to my house and we're going to drink some booze.

Going to steal a bottle of booze from my mother and and get drunk. You know,

none of us had ever been drunk before and it sounded like a cool thing to do, you know, for a little little pre delinquent like myself. So that's what we did. We went back to we cut school, we went to my mother's house and I pulled down a bottle of Four Roses whiskey. Now I had no idea how to drink. You know, I didn't know that you iced the thing down or you waited for it to breathe or you you found just the right mixer for just the right alcohol. I knew nothing about that.

The only exposure I'd had to drinking was the John Wayne movies. You remember, he'd bust through the saloon doors, He'd walk in, he'd walk up to the bar and he'd go bartender whiskey. And the bartender would grab a bottle and, you know, pour out a big water glass of whiskey. And John Wayne had grabbed that glass and he'd shoot it back. And then he'd grab the bottle and he'd walk over to the table and sit down, you know, acting real mean. So I thought, well, that's what you do, you know. So I poured out these three water glasses, filled

this nasty 4 Roses whiskey and I passed them out to my friends and I started drinking. Now the one thing that the first thing I noticed was this stuff tastes awful. But you know, I mean, this is you have to drink it. Everybody's looking at you and you made this whole big deal up. So I started drinking this stuff and the two guys I was with started drinking it. Now, looking back on this experience, which is how you really learn a lot of things in Alcoholics Anonymous, is you have to, you have to

go through them and then you learn from the experience is that the two guys that were drinking with me, they never became alcoholic. To the best of my knowledge, they never became problem drinkers.

Alcohol became a non event in their life after this. They drank about half of their water glass, maybe a little bit more, and they'd had enough. They didn't need any more. They'd had enough.

Me on the other hand, I finished my glass, I finished what they had and I finished what was in the bottle

and I went into a blackout.

I trashed the house and I came to out in the field later with that law, that first experience of lost time, which is the blackout, which is a whole stretch of time where you can't remember. And that's, that's really scary to be a blackout drinker because you do some really weird things a lot of times in blackouts and you come, you come out of a blackout and people are saying things like, do you know what you did?

And I got to a point in him, I drink where I said, don't tell me, OK, It's just easier for me if I don't know. So, so anyway, I come to in the field and I, I've got a nuclear hangover, one of those hangovers where you just have to be horizontal for a couple of days. I mean, there is no getting up and moving around. You're just sick as a dog.

If I, if I had eaten cabbage and that would have happened. There's something I mean, I there's no way

ever would have gone near this stuff again because it made me So I'll the problem is, is that you know that repressed teenager, you know that that I was, I'm sorry, a kindergartner that I was talking about the self-centered fear kid that just can't feel OK. Well, the alcohol cured that only for a brief period of time until I went into the blackout. But I'd say after I finished my first glass of whiskey,

I was a different person. I was changed. I now felt the way I thought everybody else felt normally.

I really thought that this alcohol gave me what people would normally had, which was courage and and serenity and just just being able to feel good about myself and any kind of social situations. You know, there was a lot in that glass of whiskey. There was self-confidence. There was hell. There's like dancing lessons in in whiskey for me. I mean, you know, there there's all kinds of things that I want, wanted and wanted to be able to

do was afforded me by by this whiskey. So I became preoccupied with alcohol from that point forward. Yes, I understood that it made me deathly ill and I would have to remain separated from 4 Roses whiskey for the rest of my life, which I actually did.

But what I did was I started to experiment with different kinds of alcohol, with wine, with beer. I didn't seem to get his his deathly ill as quickly with those things. And I started to become preoccupied with where I was going to get the alcohol, who was going to buy it, where I was going to drink it, where I was going to get the money, you know, who's going to be around. I just started to become preoccupied with all this stuff. I started to

schedule my day around partying.

I also come from a period of time when I started drinking. It was like in the late 60s and there was a lot of other substances that you could get your hands on back then. And I, I was a non discrimination type of person. If I, if you had it, I would try it. So I'm doing a lot of drinking and I'm doing a lot of, a lot of drug use at that time. And I just became preoccupied with and

it kind of captured

a lot of my time and a lot of my energy and things like school work and stuff like that just was, I was just not interested anymore. I come from a family where my brother and sister, both college professor PhDs, my mother and father were both Phi Beta Kappa masters programs. And you know, they're all educators and brilliant people. You know, they read like Scientific American instead of People magazine type of people. And so I come from a very, very smart

Well, I graduated second stupidest person in my graduating class in high school,

you know, and, and that, that took a lot of doing to get that, that kind of a low D minus and still actually pass really took a lot of work. So anyway, you know, alcohol really started to started to affect the way I was living and more and more I needed alcohol for the social situations. I, I couldn't imagine asking a girl out on a date if I didn't have a really good buzz on, You know

what would happen if she said no? I would like crumble emotionally. I wouldn't be able to survive it. So I would get drunk and do it drunk. And then if she said no, I'd say, well, don't be begging me later or something. I mean, I'd have like a complete different change of attitude after, after some alcohol. So again, I started, I started using this stuff and

the alcohol consumption tended to

exacerbate

the problems I had with my spiritual condition, with my emotional condition. Things were not really comfortable in the beginning, at age 1314 and 15. But as I began to use drugs and alcohol to cope, my ability to cope sober became less and less and less and, and I needed to, I needed to use the drugs and alcohol more and more and more. And somewhere along the line, I somewhere I crossed the line from being

occupied with alcohol to becoming obsessed with it. And they talk in the book Alcoholics Anonymous about that. When that happens, there's no going back through your own unaided human will.

Your your committed to alcoholism, and unless you can find a a spiritual solution, you're usually doomed to die. Now, I don't know when I cross that line. It was probably at a very young age because you cross that line a lot

sooner than you cross the line of desperation to try to try to get away from alcohol. And that's what that's what traps so many of us, because by the time we want to quit, we can't.

I drive for 20 years. It got to a point in my drinking where

my life was, was becoming more and more unmanageable both internally and externally.

I really got to a point where it was difficult for me to deal with anything. Now when I was in high school, I had some fun, you know, with, with the, with the drugs and the alcohol. I just remember these high school parties where, you know, you'd get, you'd get a little bit drunk before you go there and everybody be having a good time And the music could be playing and there'd be fist fights and you'd like molest the women and you know, they'd be OK with it. And, you know, and you know, you, you you'd be talking about all the things that happened

at school the next day at the party. And, you know, that was probably the last time I really enjoyed, you know, joy drinking or, or any of the drug use was in high school. And for years I tried to capture recapture that that experience

I got out of high school and I took a year off and I used to say to find myself. But I really, that's the last thing I was looking for was me.

I took a year off and I just partied full time. And it got to a point where I was, I was hanging out with younger and younger people because, because the people my age were going to college or they were getting a job. Some of them were even, you know, falling in love and getting married and starting families. And, you know, I'm still trying to live that live that irresponsible high school type life without, you know, getting jobs or anything like that, just being able to do whatever. I

do whenever I wanted to do it. And it slowly dawned on me that that really wasn't working. So, so I decided to go to college and you know, I took a real light college, college loads and continued to party and, and you can do that. You know, you can, you can pass college courses and live, live that decadent type of lifestyle if you, if you want to. And, and I did for a while

and then I ended up moving down to,

down to Florida to go to college down there. And I had hooked up with this, this marvelous codependent that came from a came from an alcoholic family. She was, I was like perfect for her. You know, she, I mean, she was used to the turmoil and the uncertainty and, and the, you know, the lunatic Jekyll and Hyde type of behavior. So going out with me was like going home.

And, you know, she ended up hooking up with me and we, we went down to Florida

and ended up getting married and I ended up dropping out of college so that I could work. And I pretended or made an effort to try to become a responsible human being. And that didn't work real well because I just didn't have it in me. I mean, you know, I do OK for a day or two and then I'd go out drinking with my buddies and come back at like 4:00 in the morning. And I mean, I, I, I had no consistency in my life. I, I couldn't stay consistent with any one

man. I would always shoot myself in the foot and mess it up. Well, it got to the point where, you know, it was just so dysfunctional, this, this lifestyle that, that she couldn't even take it anymore. And, and she was a, she was a black belt codependent, you know, and she couldn't even take it anymore. She ended up leaving and, and taking the kid and the dog in the car and the money and I ended up,

I ended up doing a year on my own in Florida with,

with two of the worst drinkers you could ever imagine. They're both dead a long time ago from liver disease. So I mean, that's, that's the type of people I was, I was hanging out with. And again, this, this whole time my, my emotional condition is deteriorating. I would do really tragic, crazy things while drinking and then suffer the consequences the next day. I'll give you a couple of for instances, this one, France

used to have parties at our house and we would be, you know, the houses were really close together down there. And we'd have we'd have the stereo up to 10 and, you know, windows would be getting broken and there'd be fights in the front yard. And this one neighbor next door, this, this, this woman was came there to live with her mother because her mother was ill and wasn't going to make it very long. Her mother had cancer or whatever. So she's staying with her mother basically to help her mother die. And it's one in the morning and

house is like shaking on the foundations and they decide to call the police. So the police come and break up our party. Now I'm drunk out of my mind and I'm upset that the cops have been called. So I take my buddy's sword off shotgun, my roommate sawed off shotgun. I take it outside after the cops leave and I blow her satellite dish off of her roof while I'm screaming. Are you going to call the cops now? Are you going to call the cops Now?

You know,

now this is this is bad enough, OK, but I'm going to black out. I'm walking down to get a ride to work the next morning, walking right by all these neighbors, you know, and it, I remember what I did. And I go, Oh my God, you ever get those, those memories like, Oh my God, you remember what you did? And I and and so the whole day I'm just suffering. My head is about to explode with the remorse and the fear.

You know, I've got to get to a drink. I mean, this is the, this is the way I'm living. I just did the craziest things. Well, Florida's getting a little bit too, too, too crazy. I mean, I've got the cops after me because I didn't, didn't pay fines and do community service. I've got, you know, the ambulance companies are looking for money. The landlord's ready to kick us out because one day we ripped all the doors off of the house inside and outside, and built a bonfire in the backyard,

you know, just drug out of our minds. I mean, so we're in trouble with the landlord and now he can just walk right in, you know, So, so I mean, I'm driving on a revoke license, you know, my, my boss hates me. I've got no money.

Just absolutely insane. What do you do when something like that happens? You start to think that mom might need a little help around the house, right? So I decided, you know, I'm, I call her and I tell her I'm coming back to give you a hand. And so I, I moved back there for like 6 years

of the worst of my drank and I lived at home with my mother. She just didn't have what it took to throw me out on the street. She just didn't have that, which is kind of a shame. But here I am. I'm, I'm living at my house now.

I'm emotionally, I am a pathetic, tragic type of figure. When when I'm drinking, I'm what I, you know, there's some, there's some types of Alcoholics who sit at the same bar stool every night. You know, they're very predictable. They never do anything really outrageous. Every once in a while they'll get pulled over and they'll get a DW. I I think we all know that that type, you know, they can handle their liquor or whatever.

I was never like that. I could never handle my liquor. I was a tragic, pathetic alcoholic. I, you know, I would do things like this. I would get on the phone in a blackout and start calling people. I'll call like Mary Lou Mcgillicuddy from 4th grade. Yeah, I know. I haven't talked with you 15 years ago. I love the area.

I do think she's like ridiculously just embarrassing, horrible things. OK, so it got to the point where here's what I would do. I would start drinking and I know I'm going to get on the phone, right? I'd throw my phone numbers away. I'd do everything I could do. Finally, it got to the point where I started cutting the phone line. So I go down in the basement and I cut the phone line because I knew once I started drinking, I'd pick up the phone. Well, I'm an electrician at this point in time, right? So I'd repair the wire when I'm drunk and then get on the phone.

So it got to the point where I, I try to cut the line like right near a hole in the wall so it would be hard to pack. I'd rip the wall open and I'd patch it together drunk. It got to the point where I was throwing a ladder up on the side of the house and cutting the wire as high as I could reach on the outside of the house, the phone wire. But I'd put, I'd get drunk and I'd put the ladder up on some boxes and get up high enough to, to splice it back in. Well, it got to the point where there was so much static on this phone, you couldn't even hear yourself.

So we had to call the phone company. And the phone company guy comes and he looks it over and he goes, what the hell? It looks like somebody just chopped this phone line in about 30 places and Scotch tapped it back together. And I go, yeah, the house came that way. That's what I thought it was too. I mean, it was just the things that I, the things that I would do were, were just unbelievable.

And you know, the, the emotional, I had like self esteem problems. I, I remember, I remember doing this, this, this pen pal thing with this female prisoner in Texas. And you know, if you're new or just coming back, I don't recommend this.

You know, somebody I knew was in prison and said, oh, you'd really like this girl Shelly. Well, so I started writing her. Well, she moved in with me and mom and I found out she was, she was a Harley hell Angel old lady from the Oakland chapter. OK, I'm telling you, she she had it all. She had the the front piece that she could pop out. She had the tattoos and, and wanted to always carry the guns and, and she had

absolutely no, no moral

compunctions at all. She had absolutely no moral compass. If it if it was illegal, it would not faze her to do it. And again, you know, this is like my last girlfriend before I got sober, this violent, psychotic criminal

and, and you know, and that relationship just destroyed me. And you know, she, she ended up leaving me, you know, Can you imagine

and going back to, to, to prison or what? I think she's still in every once in a while, I still get a letter, you know, Mary Beth goes, what the hell is this? And she's trying to get money from me or something from prison anyway. So I'm really not, I'm really not able to handle a lot. I, I mean, I'm a bad electrician.

I've got like, I've got like a 19 year old kid who's in charge of me. I'm like 32. I'm a bad electrician. I would do, I would do crazy things like I'd drill down into people's closets by mistake and drag their suit coats up into the, up into the attic, you know, and they'd be all mad at me. And you know, I wired a house to the wrong wrong meter one time and the whole kitchen would come on at 8:00 at night and go off at 6:00 in the morning.

It was on a timer meter.

I just was always doing crazy stupid things. And again, I'm trapped inside myself. Well, the day comes that alcohol has got my attention so bad. And listen, I've lost my driver's license three times. I've I've totaled 9 cars in drunken blackouts by this time. I've lost my family. I've lost 10 jobs

or 15 jobs in like 10 years.

All of my friends have deserted me. I've got nothing except the bottle and the room in my mother's house. And you know what it was that got my attention? What got my attention was I was at work this one day and I was trying to put a screw in a ceiling fixture, a ground screw, and I had to, I had it on the end of the screwdriver and I was shaking so badly that I couldn't do it. I kept dropping the screw and this 19 year old kid I told you about was looking at me and he was looking at me like you. Pathetic

sorry ask good for nothing no account you make me sick I mean and that's what he was thinking I'm sure because I could tell you can tell what you know if you're alcoholic, you can hear people thinking at you so I couldn't take that so I decided I'm going to sign myself into rehab. I'd been through CAI outpatient earlier because of multiple DW is so I knew I went there drunk, but I, I knew like, if you, if you really wanted to stop drinking, you know, there's,

there's some help for you. So I saw myself up to, into this rehab and I felt very, very superior. Now think about this. I felt superior because I was the only person in rehab who signed myself up without people pushing me. Everybody else that was in there was in there to try to not go to jail for 1/3 DWI or because their bosses intervened and made them seek some help. So I was better than they were because I was sicker than they were.

You know what I mean?

So I had this air of superiority. I signed myself in. It's like, you know, I, I recognized I needed the booby hatch, you know, all of you were pushed in here. So. So anyway, I'm in CI and now the receiver. The receiver can always be wrong. The transmitter I'm sure was doing a much better job. But this is what I heard in rehab,

when you get out of rehab, if you go to Samaya meetings

and you go to the outpatient that we ask you to and, and if you continue to to not want to drink, everything is going to be fine. That's what I heard. OK? So when I got out of rehab, I went to two AA meetings a week, two outpatient meetings a week. What more do you want from me? My God. And I certainly wanted to stay away from alcohol. I wanted to remain separated from alcohol with the best of them. OK,

there was never a person in an AA meeting who wanted to stay away from alcohol more than I did. I can swear to that because it near killed me in 100 different ways. Well one day I'm on my way to an A a meeting and the thought crosses my mind that it would be a good idea to put a gallon of vodka in my stomach. And that's what I did. Everything was not OK. Going to a couple of meetings and going to outpatient rehab and wanting to stay away from booze

was not enough. Everything was not OK. I did about six months worth of relapse

that ended up me threatening my entire family over Christmas. I'm going to kill all of you, you know, my mother, my brother, sister, nieces, nephews, cats, everybody. I'm going to kill all you. And everything was not all right. God damn it,

I wake up, I wake up and I have never been so emotionally crippled. Is that particular day. I was shattered. I made some phone calls. I thought I was, thought I was going to die because I went into the DTS and I was hallucinating and I was, I was violently having convulsions

and it was just really not good. You know, you ever see those old films with the guy fish flopping on the bed, all, all restrained and everything? Well, that was me. Only I wasn't in a hospital and I wasn't restrained. I was in, I was in the house over Christmas when everybody left. So I, I get through this somehow. I, I cry out to God, Please help me. I get through this

and I struggle off to an A a meaning now I had I had an alcoholic car at this time. Anybody ever have the alcoholic car?

It was a 1976 Ford Granada. It had white walls. All the quarter panels were damaged. It had no clutch. It had no emergency brake. It had no muffler. It had no heater core because I was busy.

You know, how am I going to have time to fix this thing? So you turn on the heat. This is the middle of winter. You turn on the heat and it squirts antifreeze on the inside of the window. I mean, this was a real, this is a real wonder card. Well, because it didn't have a clutch, I had to find a meeting that was flat.

So I had to look through the meeting book and find a flat meaning. And I find this meaning it's the church, the Redeemer, meaning 6:00 Sunday Morristown, it's flat. It's all 287. I get there. Now. The most embarrassing thing in the world is when people think at you, right? I mean, as an alcoholic, is that the worst? When people think like badly of you, you know, they're gonna you know, they are. I mean, that's like, that's like that kills you.

Well, here I am. I have to pull into this church and there's 700 alcoholic standing out on the church steps having cigarettes,

and I've got to go up a little hill to get into the parking lot. And because there's no clutch, I've got to Rev the crap out of this thing.

So it's got no muffler. It sounds like an outboard motor and I have to Rev it. So I drive past 700 people having a cigarette like this

and they're all like looking at me like, you know, I'm like, I have to park the thing against a tree because there's no clutch, no emergency brake, it'll roll. So I park it against a tree and I walk in. Now I'm already embarrassed, right? I walk into the meeting and I sit down and they somebody hands me a step book and they're reading the step. You know the step meanings where everybody reads a paragraph and then when you're done,

it's open to sharing. Well, that's why was what this was like. And and they're coming down the row at me before I could figured out what the hell was going on, they're coming down the row at me and I'm going to have to read a paragraph. No way. I can't even hold the book. I'm still shaking, I'm still detoxing and I go, I can't read a paragraph. So I get up and I walk out of the meeting and I'm standing out on the steps having a cigarette. And it's one of those one of those points in time where I'm either going to leave and probably go drink and kill

or there's got to be some kind of divine intervention. I mean, it's it's one of those points in time. We all have them. And this guy comes walking out. I'll never forget his name is Jorge comes out and he starts talking with me and he goes, what's your deal? I said there's a relapse. It's horrible. And, and he goes, well, why don't you, why don't you come on back into the meeting and, and sit down and we'll, we'll finish the meeting together. I go, well, there's a meeting tomorrow night and passing around this meeting tomorrow is up the street from Miami. He goes, he know, he he knew

tomorrow man for an alcoholic goes no come on in and sit down and he grabs me by the arm and he drags me and we sit down right in the 2nd row. Now, thank God, by this time they're not reading from the paragraphs anymore. And I'm sitting there like this

and, you know, listening to people share their stuff, not even understanding a bit of it. And he, he turns to me and he goes, now raise your hand and tell everybody you're coming back. And I go, well, there's a meeting tomorrow. There's a meeting tomorrow. They asked you if you're new in this meeting, I'll, you know, raise my head when they ask me. He goes, raise your hand and tell everybody you're coming back. Now he's getting loud

and what happens when somebody's getting loud at you, people are going to start to look at you, right? It's only a few seconds away from them. They're going to be thinking at you. So I got to do something. So I shoot my hand up finally, because this he's not going to shut up. I shoot my hand up right in the middle of somebody, Sharon and the leader like looks like, like, like this and and and cuts the person off who's talking. It's beautiful and claws on me. And I say something like, oh,

drinking as horrible.

Thank you. And everybody, there's a there's a there's a couple of second pause and then everybody goes, yeah. And they're all clapping like, yeah, like you are the most pathetic thing we've seen for weeks. You've just cheered all this up with the absolute utter misery of your life. Thank you so much. You know, and

so

right at that moment in time, my emotional condition up to that point in time was not strong enough for me to get back into a A and to do what I needed to do. I, I couldn't have faced it. After doing that, the wall of fear started to crumble a little bit, that wall of anxiety that was keeping me from going where I needed to go to survive. And

you know, from that time, I haven't, I haven't had a, a drink or a drug.

And that was that was at the very end of 1989 and between Christmas and New Year's. And that's, that's when I celebrate. Now I started to get sober. You got to understand an alcoholic of my type, it's stark raving sobriety for a while for somebody like me, I had been used to for the last 20 years, I had been used to completely anesthetizing myself with alcohol, just just shutting down

whatever feelings that were coming to the surface. I need to shut him down with alcohol. So, so all of a sudden I've got no alcohol, I've got no drugs. I'm like, you know, I am wide awake and I am raving lunatic sober and I start going to meetings out of desperation. I'm going to anywhere between 7 and 13 meetings a week and I hook up with a sponsor and

I get involved in all this, the fellowship activity.

Now

inside, when I was at kindergartner, I had to make a decision to act as if everything was OK. I had to do that to be able to face kindergarten and school all through school, I, every day I walked through those doors. I had to act as if I wasn't afraid and I, and I, I had to act as if I wasn't anxious about it all and uncomfortable about it all. Well, that's what I'm doing now in a, a, I'm going to a lot of meetings and I'm acting as if everything's OK. Hey, Chris, How you doing?

OK. Everything fine? Yeah, everything's going good. Everything's fine. You know what? What? I if I was to be completely honest, I would I would say something like I'm absolutely homicidal lunatic in my mind, you know, if I don't want to kill you, you know, I want to just shoot myself. I can't, you know, I can't take it. And I'm pretending everything's OK. How are you? Is what I would say to somebody if I was honest.

You know, I remember a counselor in in rehab asked me one time, I was like raving about something, you know, some resentment. You know, it was some unfair practice at this rehab. You know, somebody can do this and somebody can't do that. It's unfair.

And this, this counselor looks at me and goes,

can you tell me about your feelings? Are you happy, mad, sad or glad? You know, don't ever say that to like a raving alcoholic because they don't know every single negative emotion in the world is like thrown into a blender and turned on 10. And, you know, whatever pops out the top is what pops out the top. You know, we can't really distinguish between them. So here I am sober and I'm really, really not happy. I would do things like I had this friend RadioShack Mike,

and he used to be the brave soul that would go to meetings with me. You know, we'd drive the meetings together and then we'd drive to the diner and then we'd drive home. And the whole time I'd be complaining about so and so in that meeting. That hypocrite, that so that lying bastard, you know, I can't believe it. Do you believe if so and so shares again, I'm just going to kill myself or I'll kill them. I can't take it anymore. I can't. I can't listen to that guy anymore. I mean, I was like vomiting

resentment and and I'm like two or three months sober and this RadioShack bike would he was a lunatic anyway. He'd be driving. He'd be like,

you know, I'd be making him grateful, you know, with I made a lot of people grateful in those early days.

Well, he actually was was a piece of the puzzle that aimed me toward emotional recovery because he had a set of tapes and he goes, Chris, you're hardcore, you'd like listen to that. Now, he had given me tapes before. He gave me some of these Louise Hay affirmation tapes. I mean, he just listening, here I am. I'm a raving alcoholic and he gives me these tapes and you're supposed to stand in front of the mirror and go, I'm a wonderful guy. I'm a wonderful guy. Like 35 times or until you actually believe it.

Can you imagine I'm standing in front of mirror? I'm a wonderful guy, you know, it just doesn't work. It's like trying to stop a semi with a cobweb, you know, trying to work on my alcoholism with Louise Hay tapes. Anyway,

somebody had given him a set of Joe and Charlie tapes and he go, he couldn't deal with them, you know, and and he goes, he goes here Chris, you're hardcore. You'll probably like these guys. And he was wrong about that because I hated people from Arkansas and these guys are from Arkansas, right? I hate Arkansas ends. I'm not real partial to Oklahomans either. You know what I mean? When what is somebody from Arkansas going to teach me? How does how to place the straw Twix my teeth?

You know what I mean? What what am I going to learn from these guys? But I've got a long ride to work. So. So I put them in and I start listening and to boil down the message. This is the message that finally emerged from these tapes. Chris, you have no program. You are all you're doing is all you're doing is circling around and through the fellowship. If you don't, open the book Alcoholics Anonymous and take the Spiritual exercises found.

In you will not have a program and you will probably die if you're really alcoholic. Now, I, I, the meetings I used to go to in the old days, you never heard anything like that. You didn't hear about the steps. There was always a cranky old timer in the meetings. I went to somebody who had like, like cranky old timer status, you know what I mean? Like, like, like Horatio Gerbil Feather, you know, Oh, Horatio Gerbil Feather says. And they would always have these little one liner

wisdom teachings, like a couple of, you know, they were a dying breed when I got sober, thank God. But anyway, when one of them had come up and they'd say something like kid underneath every skirts a slip and I'd go whoa. And they would say things like, kid, if you never drink, you won't get drunk. And, you know, I mean, if you're like me, burdened with a mind, you know, like, like, like,

like, like nursery school philosophy, like that is just hard to deal with. I'm thinking, well, if I never juggle chainsaws, I won't cut my kneecap off either. I mean, you know, what difference does it make? That's not my problem. And and sometimes they get cranky these these old timers. I remember this one guy was parading around telling everybody, kid, you're too stupid to do a four step.

I mean, and that's, this is what he would tell people. Come to find out he never did a four step, so he didn't think you needed to.

And there was just there was, there was these guys and there was not a lot of people really talking about recovery. And I found it on the tapes. I found it on the tapes. And I am not going to say I did a good job going through the steps the first time I did an adequate job. I opened up the book, I did the four column inventory. I would listen to the Joe and Charlie tapes, you know, and, and I, I showed up at my sponsor's house with, with an inventory and he goes, what's that list thing? Where's your story? You know,

You know, So it was a long time ago. And what happened was I began to heal emotionally. Addressing the steps was the beginning of emotional recovery, emotional sobriety for me. The the fellowship was not addressing that aspect of it. What the fellowship was doing was all that fellowship activity was keeping me away from the booze, which is important. Please,