Workshop on their personal experience with working the steps in Minneapolis, MN

Good morning everybody. My name is Chris. I am an alcoholic.

I want to thank everybody that had anything to do with putting this together. You know, these things don't happen very easily. There's a lot of work that needs to be done, so I appreciate all the effort. I want to thank Dustin for tracking me down and asking me to do this. Dustin's one of those very enthusiastic people. If, if you could bottle his enthusiasm, sell it on the market, you'd put crack out of business. You know what I mean?

It it is. It's very true,

and enthusiasm really is a quality that if you have it, it makes recovery so much easier. Becoming enthusiastic about the recovery process, becoming enthusiastic about Alcoholics Anonymous or whatever fellowship you choose to join is going to improve your chances of surviving pretty much a fatal illness. The statistics on alcoholism or drug addiction

are not really promising.

More, many more people die from it than recover from it. So you know, if you, if you like life, if you like survival, pay attention and try try to get enthusiastic. What I'm going to be talking about this morning, we're going to break for lunch around noon. But what I'm going to be talking about this morning is the 1st 2 steps. I believe that

I speak from, I speak from the book Alcoholics Anonymous. My experience really comes directly from the book Alcoholics Anonymous.

I know that there are other, that there are other experiences out there. There are a lot of things that you hear

in the fellowships around the country these days. Basically, I come from the text Alcoholics Anonymous. So that's where I found my experience of recovery. So when I'm sharing my experience today,

it's going to be based on having

having a recovery program from this book and the experience that that has led me to and some of my understanding of the process and some of the some some of the philosophy I've developed basically explaining that process and explaining my experience. Now, I believe that step one is probably the most misunderstood step

in recovery today.

Uh, at a guess I would believe that 80% of the people in AA or 80% of the people in NA don't even really know what the first step is.

It it, it took me a long time to get an understanding of the first step. In the very beginning, I thought the first step was I, you know, I really drink a lot of that means I'm an alcoholic. Or I thought, you know, the first step is I just can't drink no matter what. I just need to not take a drink.

And I learned, I learned through experience. And some of that experience was based on relapse and some of that experience was based on a recovery process. But I learned that that's not step one at all. Step one is is a is a very, very deep understanding of your own truth as far as

your experience with alcohol or your experience with drugs,

and it's about power.

Step one is about power.

The grace of God separated me from alcohol somewhere around December 28th, 1989.

I had been, I had been to treatment. I was, I was engaged in an outpatient process. I was going to a, a meetings. I really thought that I was participating in whatever process you need to participate in to get sober. My problem was, was that I was an alcoholic

and

there's there's levels of alcoholism, there's levels of drug addiction. And the levels are not necessarily based on the consequences or how much you drank or how much you used or the trouble it caused, how many times you've been in treatment, how many cars you've crashed. All of those things are really

results of using

and there are a lot of heavy drinkers out there that had consequences that were that were similar to mine. But what I needed to look at was I needed to look at my lack of power.

Um, today in, in, in Alcoholics Anonymous, I'm mainly an, a, a member. I, I do some things and other fellowships, but I'm mainly an, a member. And Naa, I see quite often people coming into the fellowship and relapsing, You know, they'll, they'll stay around a while, they'll be a period of separation from alcohol and then they'll, they'll relapse and they'll go out and, and drink again.

And

my understanding of it is different than it used to be. I was basically taught early on that the people who drink are the people that are not being honest with themselves or the people that drink are just, you know, wanted to drink more than they wanted to stay sober. They didn't want it enough or, or a number of a number of statements like that were were passed around early in a A and you know, I started to believe a lot of them. Now

I would, I would ask anyone in here today

to if there's any concepts that, that disturb you, that Peter and I talk about and that that happens quite often by the way.

But if there's any, if there's any concepts that that disturb you to just take them into consideration. I'm personally not saying I'm right or or wrong about anything. I'm in a growing process right now myself. I hope to know a lot more about all this stuff and to have a deeper experience with recovery this time next year than I have now.

It's, you know, it truly is a growing process for me. But if there is any, any concepts that we, that we bring up today, take them into consideration. So much of recovery has to do with consideration. You know, don't believe any everything you hear. Don't believe everything you hear in the, in the, in the fellowship that you go to

our book asks us to ask us what, what these spiritual principles mean to us.

And through, through a lot of work, a lot of step work, a lot of inventory, a lot of amends, a lot of working with others. I've, I've gone through a lot of this stuff and, and I've asked myself those questions. What does it mean to me? And I really believe the things that can be backed up by my own experience and by the experience I get working with others.

Those are the those are the things that I believe that are true. I don't, I don't automatically believe the things that are say it said

in AAA meetings today, because there's a lot of things that are said that are wrong. They're just, they're just not true. They're coming from people who may be heavy drinkers. They're coming from people who may have had very well meaning people teaching them things about addiction and, and, and, and a lot of times they're just, they're just not. I just don't see them as valid. But

I believe that step one is

so misunderstood.

The book Alcoholics Anonymous has a lot of information on step one. You have the doctor's opinion. You've got a good deal of Bill story discusses it. Then you have the chapter more about alcoholism. There is a solution. There's even a lot of step one material and we agnostics, there's many, many pages of material that they cover to convince us

of our own truth, whether or not we're alcoholic.

I love the paragraph, the first paragraph, and we agnostics

in the preceding chapters. You have learned something. We you have learned something of alcoholism. We hope we have made clear the distinction between the alcoholic and the non alcoholic. Now, it's very, very important to understand the distinction between the alcoholic and the non, non alcoholic.

This is something that gets lost in, in Alcoholics Anonymous today. This is something that I have a lot of experience working with treatment centers and, and, and this is something that's, that's not really, there's not enough attention paid to this. Now the alcoholic and the non alcoholic A a meetings today are filled with heavy drinkers, people who are really not alcoholic.

There are so many of them in our midst, and that's not necessarily

a bad thing. But when this book was written, it was written from a perspective of the low bottom alcoholic, the person who had lost all control in drink.

No amount of willpower, no amount of willpower, no amount of knowledge,

no amount of any kind of human help was sufficient to keep these people from putting alcohol in their bodies. They were. They were without defense against the first drink. Now

I'm,

I'm drinking between 1985 and 1990, my, my alcoholism increased a huge amount. Here's, here's a typical day for me, somewhere between 1985 and 1990. I would come to in the morning wearing the clothes I had the night before and I would, I would feel like I was going to die. You know, those, those

those toxic hangovers that you have where

you're poisoned, you know, and you're beyond a headache, you know, you're shattered. You just can't, you can't deal. And I mean, normal people feeling half that bad would be on the way to the emergency room, you know, but but it became normal. It became normal for me because I was a daily blackout drinker now. I would come to in the clothes I was wearing the night before and I would just be like,

you know, I'd have to be at work at 8:00. I'd wake up around 7:30 or something. And

I had a job as an electrician. I somehow maneuvered my way into the into the trades because alcoholism was, you know, it was, you didn't get fired for being an alcoholic. You got fired for like not showing up to the job. So as long as you could make it there, you know, you usually were, usually were OK. It didn't matter if you could see, you know, as long as

as long as you could, you know, take things out of the truck when the boss was looking or something.

But anyway, so I would come to and listen, I would swear to God I'm never gonna do this again. My hangover was so bad that I would say I am Today is the day I am not drinking anymore. I'm I've got to give this up. This is killing me. I can't live like this. This is killing me. Now, if you would have hooked me up to a lie detector test that morning and asked me, Chris, are you going to drink again, I would have said no and I would have passed that

test. I was absolutely serious. I was not gonna drink anymore. This was, I was killing myself. I was drinking way too much and I knew I had no control over the amount I drank. Once I started drinking, I knew I would get tongue chewing, knee walking, not able to operate my own pants, zipper drunk, you know what I mean?

Now you get, you're like, I mean, that happens every single time. So,

so I swore to God that I would never drink again and I would make it to work. And, you know, it was really, it was always a bad scene because, you know, my boss would tell me like four or five things to do. And I'd get in the truck and I'd drive off and I'd make it to the end of the driveway and I'd say, what did he tell me to do? You know, I couldn't remember. So I have to go back, you know, yell at me and tell me I told you to write things down and he'd yell at me.

You know, I'd make it off to work now

all the whole morning. I would just be just trying to exist, you know, just feeling absolutely horrible.

And lunch would come and, you know, I'd send out one of the guys for sandwiches. I'd get like half a sandwich down. You know how you have to drink like 1/2 a gallon of liquid to rehydrate? You know, I'd be rehydrated and I'd have a half a sandwich down. And you know, I'm looking at looking at the clock, it's, you know, almost 2:00. I'm going to be able to go home soon. And I start to think, you know, that decision you made this morning about never ever drinking again,

you know, that's pretty serious decision. Wait, you might have to modify that somewhat

because that might be an overreaction, you know, to never ever drink again. And a little bit later, I'd be, you know, I'm going to modify that decision so that I'm going to stop at the liquor store on the way home. And I would stop at the liquor store on the way home And I would buy, I would buy a, a, you know, a quart of vodka or quart of bourbon or, you know, whatever I was drinking at that time. And the minute I got home, I cracked the top and I just, I, you know, cracked the top of the bottle. And I was like,

you know, I knew

that I knew that booze was going to be in my system soon. And, you know, things were going to be a little bit brighter. And I, I didn't, I didn't think far enough. I had to know that I would be a vomiting pig in about two hours. But but that's what happened. And I would start drinking and I'd go into a blackout and I'd fall on the floor and I'd pass out sometime around 8:00 at night. I'd be unconscious, you know, and this was day after day after day. This happened day after day after day. Now,

how I can use my own experience to qualify myself as an alcoholic is to look at

look at that decision not to drink and then look at what happened. All right, I made a decision not to drink, but something happened. I changed my mind. Now the ego, your, your, your sense of self is, is a tricky thing. And, and alcoholism is a tricky thing. It describes in this book that there are subtle forms of insanity that precede the first drink. Strange mental blank spots, it calls it.

That suddenly is a concept that they talk about in this book. Suddenly the thought crossed my mind that I could stop at the liquor store and get another bottle. You know, not not thinking it all the way through now.

Now what I believe this book has taught me is about powerlessness. OK, if if you're the distinction between the alcoholic and the non alcoholic is one of powerlessness.

Now think about this. You hear a lot of things in AAA and in the recovery fellowships like like just don't use, you know, and you're gonna be fine. Never pick up the first drink. The first drink gets you drunk. I'm not saying that those are not good concepts. They're good concepts in theory. And they work for the heavy drinkers. They're not gonna work for the alcoholic because what happens is

of the the insanity that they talk about in Step 2

comes over us and we're not even there. When we buy the booze and put it back into our body, it's not us. It comes from an unconscious place. We're not conscious. We're not fully sane. We're not fully conscious. We don't understand the gravity of our error. We that that, that, that can't be something that we're awake to. To go back and do it again.

For any alcoholic to put alcohol in your body is an insane act.

It's an insane act now knowing what you know about what drugs and alcohol do to you.

Think about this, consider this. Isn't it nuts to ever do that again? Oh, I think, you know, I think I'll go back into the hospital for a month, you know, and lose all my money and, you know, you know, I get divorced and, you know, be homeless without a job. I think I'll you know, that's not what we think.

We don't even think it's, it's a form of insanity.

It I'm going to just read a couple of I'm not going to do a lot of reading today, but I'm going to read a couple of passages out of here that back up my experience,

but with the actual or potential alcoholic. Real alcoholic, with hardly an exception, will be absolutely unable to stop drinking on the basis of self knowledge.

So it doesn't matter what you know about alcoholism, that's not going to protect you from putting alcohol back in your body. So that's not really good news. There's another section in here that was on page 39. There's another section in here on page 43 at the bottom. Once more, the alcoholic at certain times has no mental no effective mental defense against the first string, except in a few rare cases. Neither

he nor any other human being can provide such a defense. His defense must come from a higher power.

Now think for a minute about powerlessness.

If you're going to, if you're going to concede to your innermost self that you're alcoholic,

the step on the wall says we admitted we were powerless over alcohol. Now think. Think for a minute about the term powerless.

If you're powerless over alcohol, if you're powerless over drink and you have, if you have any defense on your own unaided will that can prevent you from putting alcohol back in your body, why don't you just do that? Then you're not powerless. Then you don't. Then you don't even need to to admit to step one. OK, if, if when drinking, you can decide to just have two and you just have two, or you can decide to have four and just have 4. You can moderate.

You're in control of how much you take. The next time you drink. Why don't you just have one?

But the problem is our experience shows us that it doesn't work. We somehow mysteriously change our mind and we end up shutting down the bar. We we end up sleeping in the car. Any car sleepers in here?

It's a lot of them. I was not alone.

Oh man, I used to buy big cars. You know, the big $100 pieces of crap. You know, it's like really layout in the backseat.

Now, so think about this, if there's anything you can do to prevent alcohol from going into your body, can you even admit to powerlessness? Can you even take the first step?

No. No.

If you can control the amount that you drink, can you really admit to powerlessness?

No, let's say. You never get that mental obsession. Let's say

mentally, you can prepare yourself to never drink again and that works. OK, let's say it doesn't work. Let's say that you have the mental obsession. You can't help picking up that first drink. It's not something that you're you have any defense against, but you can control the amount you take. Well, the next time you drink, why don't you just have one again?

Try to think about this from your own experience. My experience was I desperately,

desperately wanted to separate from alcohol for good and for all. Absolutely. I was always so I'll from alcohol and I started, I ended up starting to do crazy things. I was, you know, I was becoming violent.

I was unpredictable. I would do things in blackouts. Any blackout drinkers in here? And there's some hands. That's disconcerting, isn't it? Being a blackout drinker,

you don't even know if you have any. I never's if you're a blackout drinker. Could have done anything.

Oh, I used to. I used to show up in places, you know, I'd come out of a blackout and I'd, I'd be somewhere. What am I doing here? You know, Topeka with one shoe wondering, you know, Topeka. Then you have to kind of pretend you want to be in Topeka because you don't want to look stupid. You know,

was it was difficult, but no, I was a blackout drinker and people were alerting me to my behavior. You know, the next one, you know what you did? It got to a point, no, don't tell me. So I, I desperately, I desperately wanted to separate from alcohol and I couldn't, I couldn't listen, I'm telling you, this is how serious I was. I signed myself into a 28 day program. There was no pressure on me to do that. I, I said I've got to go to treatment and I went, I went to treatment.

95% of the people in treatment were there for DWI or, you know, pressure from outside forces or to keep from going to jail or whatever. I really, I sign myself in because I needed to separate from alcohol. I did it, I did it from a place of sanity. And then when I got out of the 28th day program, I was going back to outpatient. I was paying like $60.00 a night to sit to, to sit around in a group, you know, where people were talking about all their stuff and you know, the counselor was going on and on. And I didn't want to be there.

I didn't want to. And, and I'm going to AAA meetings. I'm going to AAA meetings and I'm an outpatient. I've just done treatment. I've told everybody I've quit drinking and I'm in Alcoholics Anonymous. Listen, if you're new or just coming back, don't tell people you're an Alcoholics Anonymous, please. Because here's what happened to me on the way to an, a, a meeting. The thought crossed my mind that if I went, if I bought a gallon of vodka and went home and drank it,

it would improve my sobriety. OK, now here's what I thought. I thought. I thought to myself, you know, it's been almost 90 days since I got drunk. I'm, I'm not even really remembering what it was like to be drunk. And somebody in meeting said if you can't remember your last drunk, you haven't had it. So,

so and now, and I'm also thinking, you know, I'm going to AAA, but I'm not doing all this, doing all the stuff that I should be doing. I was shy. I was like, I had that self-centered fear sitting in the back hoping nobody would talk to me. And you know, I thought that maybe if I got drunk again, you know, it would help my a a stuff. So I drank a gallon of vodka to improve my sobriety.

Now in drink #3 I realize the enormity of my mistake. All of a sudden,

all of a sudden, the physical craving that, that, that, that allergy to alcohol kicked in. And all of a sudden, I, you know, I realized, Oh my God, I'm back on the treadmill. I don't know where this is going to take me. And it for, for seven months, six or seven months, I was drunk most of the time. And, you know, I was caught back up in that cycle and it was absolute hell. But but, you know, think about the insanity of that. I signed myself into treatment. I'm going to outpatient,

I'm going to a meetings. I'm telling everybody in my world that I'm now a sober guy and I get drunk.

What is that? That's powerlessness. That's what it is. That's that's no human power can relieve me of my alcoholism. OK. Treatment, human power. Outpatient human power. A a meetings. Human power. OK. No human power can relieve you of your obsession to dream. Now, I didn't know this at the time, but when I got off of that relapse,

I understood that the only option on the horizon was Alcoholics Anonymous. I didn't have much hope that it would work, but I crawled back into, to AA meetings with a willingness that was born of desperation. I, I truly was, I truly was beaten. I truly was beaten. I really thought that I'm going to end up drinking myself to death because I, you know, I would have to be medically detoxed. I'd, I'd go into the DTS. It was just it was an ugly scene.

So I went back into AAA with a willingness born in desperation, not really having a lot of hope because I had tried it. Didn't I try it before? Didn't I go to treatment? Didn't I do the outpatient? Wasn't I going to meetings? But I had no other no other place to go was, you know, I was kind of being drawn there and I, you know, I see it today as as the grace of God was was pointing me in the right direction because I was desperate. I was absolutely desperate and I went back into

to Alcoholics Anonymous willing to do absolutely everything I could possibly do. I got a sponsor right away. I started going to meetings every single night in a very short period of time. I was going out to the diner with everybody. I was just getting really, really involved with with Alcoholics Anonymous. And when you, when you have an incredibly serious amount of participation in a, a that can, that can grant you a finite

period of sobriety. And I'm looking back on it today. I'm seeing that, that there was a grace period that had been offered me for me to, for me to learn where the power needs to come from for me to be relieved of this alcoholism. And what I was doing was I was doing fellowshipping. Now one of the things that that annoys me a little bit

in a a today is when somebody shares, when I came into the program,

you hear that a lot back in New Jersey. Practically every meeting I go, somebody will say that

and the you don't come in to the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. You take the steps of the program,

but you come into the fellowship. And I didn't understand the difference between the program and the fellowship in Alcoholics arms. For a long time I thought that I was working a program by going to a meeting every night, getting a sponsor, you know, being the secretary over here, being a treasurer over there, you know, driving people from from my old treatment center to the meetings. I really thought that that was working a program.

And

you know, what happened to me was I got exposed to a series of recovery tapes. Some people were doing a big book workshop and this book, Alcoholics Anonymous, was not really a very popular text in, in a, a where I was going at that period of time. There was step meetings galore. I remember I was going to four step meetings a week. There was a, a big book meeting, but it was only the last Monday of every month. And normally what they would do is they would read the stories

back and everybody would identify because it's fun to identify. Oh, my life is screwed up too. Let me tell you all about my screwed up life. And you know, that was kind of the way it was going.

So I wasn't, I hadn't really been exposed to this. And I got exposed to the process of recovery through these tapes. And in the tapes they explained a little bit of about the powerlessness. They explained the difference between the alcoholic and the non alcoholic

and it also made clear, made very, very clear how much trouble I was in. If you're new, just coming back in a treatment process or haven't gone through the steps, I'm going to tell you 2 truths that you are really not awake to. The first truth is you were in way more trouble than you think you are.

OK, You are minimizing like a son of a gun.

It is. However bad you think it is. Multiply that by 50 and you'll be getting close to how really bad it is. Alcoholism is an aggressive illness. Drug addiction is an aggressive illness. It's fatal, it's progressive. And the worst part about it is, is when it's time for you to check out. When you die from it, you're at the lowest point in your life. The people, the people that still want anything at all to do with you either resent you or

even cancer at least allows you the dignity of putting your affairs in order before you check out. When you check out from alcoholism or drug addiction, it's the absolute bottom, bottom of your life. You don't have any more kind of disgrace to experience than the disgrace of an alcoholic or a drug addicted death.

That's alcoholism and that's drug addiction. It's aggressive and it's fatal,

and inherent in the illness, alcoholism or drug addiction is an almost utter inability to be able to accurately perceive how much trouble you're in. All right. I remember, I remember being in treatment. I, I got to get out of here. You know, these guys are crazy. These guys are fanatics.

Trust me. Trust me, They were not they they were minimizing my treatment process. You know,

in in the early days

of Alcoholics Anonymous, if you had a job, this is like in the 5th, 1st 1015 years of AA. If you were lucky enough to have a job when you became somebody'd prospect, they would ask you to take a leave of absence from your job because they wanted nothing in the way of your participation in the recovery process. Not the fellowship, but the recovery process. What's happened in Alcoholics Anonymous today is we went from being

a program with a support fellowship

to being a fellowship with a support program. It's the transition that happens sometime in the 1950s. All of a sudden it's more about meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings. Well, in the early days, they wouldn't even bring you to a meeting if you weren't somewhere smacking the middle of the steps because these guys were low bottom Alcoholics. They were. They were people who nothing, nothing.

There was nothing that would work for them

except a vital, vital spiritual experience, an absolutely revolutionary personality changing at depth. Spiritual awakening

was the only hope for these people. Now,

as I started to learn a little bit about the first step, I started to learn that I was in a lot of trouble. And then I needed to start to get busy about the business of recovery. Because if if I'm powerless, unless I've had a spiritual awakening as the result of 12 steps, I am not at all involved in the decision to put alcohol back in my body.

The time and the place is going to come. It's going to go back in my body. I'm not involved in that.

You can tell me whatever you want to tell me. Just don't do it, Chris. Or double up on your meetings or get a coffee commitment. I I can be making coffee till the grinds are coming out of my ears. And if I haven't had a spiritual awakening, the time and the place could come, who knows when, and alcohol could go back in my body. Look at the relapse rate in Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous. Look at the relapse rate.

Pay attention to celebration meetings.

Yeah, OK. Pay attention to how many 90 day chips your group gives out every year. And then pay attention to how many 15 year chips your group gives out. And then pay attention to how many 30 year chips your group gives out. You're going to notice something very, very quickly. It's awful hard to stay around.

It's awful hard to stay around. It's not the easiest thing the world, world to walk in and say I'm brand new, I've got one day. But but it must be a lot easier to do that than to say I've got 15 years, you know what I mean? So there's a, there's a huge amount of relapse, there's a huge amount of recidivism with, with, with people in NAA today. And I believe, I believe it's because they haven't recognized the truth in their own alcoholism

that they're not involved in the decision to put alcohol back in their body. Their ego wants them to think they are.

It's going to look like you've changed your mind. You've you've weighed all the options and it looks like the drink is going to win out. But that makes no sense when you look at it as an insane decision.

Um, the term insanity

really is more of a legal term than a medical one. And if you follow its definition back many, many years, you're going to see the determined sanity really, really comes from when they develop the insanity defense. You know, back in Europe, you know, 400 years ago, there would be town fools that there would, there would be town idiots and and they would do something illegal

and they'd bring him in front of the court. Well, so and so, you know, stole an apple and, and, you know, it's like five years in prison for stealing an apple. And they look at this guy and they say this guy, this guy didn't know he did anything wrong. This guy doesn't know the truth from the false. He doesn't know right from wrong. It would be cruel to put him in jail for five years. He didn't he didn't know what he was doing. So they developed the insanity defense. OK, well, the insanity that they talk about in Step 2, think about that. You know, we're,

I'm not saying you don't take responsibility for your recovery. I'm saying that until you've had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, if alcohol goes back in your body, it's, you know, you're admitting to powerlessness. If you haven't got the power, if the power hasn't been delivered unto you,

you know what, what's going on?

So these early guys, Bill Wilson and these early guys recognized this fact. They were all people who desperately wanted to separate from alcohol and couldn't. And the best doctor at that time was Doctor Silkworth. And you can read his his his letter in this book, The Doctor's Opinion.

Think about this. He is the clinical director per Southeast of Towns Hospital. Towns Hospital was one of the most prestigious treatment facilities for drug and alcohol addiction back in the 20s and 30s. I mean, that's where you would go. It was expensive, but that's that's where you would go if you had that option. And they were up to date on everything they could be up to date on at that time. And there was a classification of people

that Doctor Silk Silkworth would call the chronic, the hopeless, the doomed alcoholic, the people who were not going to make it. And this is what he would say. He would say, you know, you're, you're, you're hopeless. You're not going to make it unless you get unless somebody locks you up, you're going to die or go insane. Here's your bill,

you know, And this is the absolute best that they had. And these are the people

who came back and said, Hey, doc, we're working this, this program that we're working this program of recovery. And we've, you know, we've, we've recovered every look at our lives, our lives we're. And he's looking at these people like, those were people I had

diagnosed as hopeless or doomed. And all of a sudden, they're sober.

You know what's going on. And he started to pay attention to this recovery process

that Bill and the guys were going through in the early days. And although he didn't understand it because it's a spiritual process, it's not a medical one or a psychiatric one, he didn't understand it, but he knew that something was going on. Whatever you guys are doing, keep doing it because, you know, I don't know. I don't know what you're doing. I don't know why it's working, but just keep doing it because I had you written off. I had told your wives and family that they had maybe a year,

you know, and you were going to be dead. So those were the type of hopeless Alcoholics that were being worked with in the early days. So this program works. It works on people that are much more alcoholic than I am and, and that's saying something anyway,

there's a dash after

where it says that we admitted we were powerless over alcohol, dash that our lives have become unmanageable

again. In the early days of AA, I looked on that unmanageability as the car crashes. I totaled 9 cars. I, you know, all in drunken black outside, three DWI. I had like 12 jobs in 10 years. You know, I, I couldn't, you know, all these things that I thought were, they were the external consequences of my drinking. And I, I looked at the steps up on the wall and I thought, OK, that's my unmanageability. My unmanageability is all the trouble that I get into when I drink.

Started to read this book, started to study this book much more thoroughly. And I've come to the conclusion today that yes, there is an external unmanageability that follows a lot of us around. But that's the same type of unmanageability that a heavy drinker will have. That's the same type of unmanageability that, you know, a periodic heavy drink will have. You know, we're, we're the type of people who don't go out on New Year's and drive around because that's amateur night, you know?

There could be a, there could be a lot of amateurs out there having a lot of bad, you know, it happens all the time. You get a couple of DWI's and, and they'll put a stamp on your head a for alcoholic because of some of the consequences of drinking that that means nothing about whether you're an alcoholic or not, whether you've had DWI. But what I started to recognize was the internal unmanageability. It talks in this book so well about some of the emotional,

psychic, spiritual, mental anguish that we go through,

we go through, we go through. It's bondage of self, but it takes on many, many disguises and here are some of them. At best, we're restless, irritable, or discontented. Anybody in here ever, ever feel restless, irritable and discontented?

Anybody in treatment feeling that way right now? OK, all right, welcome. OK, that's at that's at best being restless, irritable, discontented. But also you can, you know that 100% of of, of, of Alcoholics getting sober have depression and anxiety, OK? That's 100% of us too. So it takes the form of depression, anxiety, self-centered fear. You know that just feeling uncomfortable, you just don't. You just don't,

right? You know, you, you're not at the right place at the right time with the right people. You know, you don't, you don't want to, you don't want to do that because that's going to be uncomfortable or, you know, I don't want to have to go there or I don't feel like going to traffic court. You just you're just uncomfortable with yourself or in your environment. You just so many of us isolate because of that self-centered fear. It it, it looks like that. It looks like guilt and remorse and shame over the things that you've done in the past.

Anybody in here feel those you know, you're always thinking about? Oh my God, I can't believe I did that. You're stuck,

stuck in the past. The past keeps rerunning in your mind. OK, that's part of the unmanageability and the self-centered fear. You're always worried about an anxious about the future. You know, so many of us, so many of us end up in hospitals with anxiety attacks. You know, we think, oh, I'm having the big one, you know, and you and you get there and they hook you up to all the machines and they're like, there's nothing wrong with you. You know, I mean, that happens to us all the time. This is like

huge amounts of anxiety,

huge amounts of depression, just our quality, our emotional quality of life is in the pits so often now. I think that ties in a lot to our alcoholism because it's a dash. It doesn't say end says it were powerless over alcohol dash that our lives have become unmanageable. I believe that that unmanageability is is alcoholism. That unmanageability is what we treat.

Obviously we want you all to not drink, but you know, so many of us get separated from booze. We don't, we don't have really an alcohol problem. We, we have a we have an, we have a manageability problem. Our lives are unmanageable. There's no quality to it. We

sobriety becomes untenable to us. Just being sober gets to the point where, you know, all of this emotional and spiritual and mental

torture just gets to be too much for us. The obsession of the mind comes in and we drink or we use again

this unmanageability. If you look at the promises, the Step 9 promises that I'm sure Peter will cover some of the Step 9 stuff this afternoon, you'll see that they're almost a reaction to the unmanageability. In other words, there's a promise that covers practically every everything on page 52 of the bedevilments. The bedevilments are a really good indicator of what kind of recovery you have at the current time.

I'm going to read a couple of them.

52

We were having trouble with our personal relationships. You don't have to raise your hand. Just say to yourself yes or no, you know, just affirm to yourself whether or not you're suffering from these things. Currently we're having problems with our personal relationships. We couldn't control our emotional natures. We can't be happy. If we want to be happy, we can't, we can't rid ourselves of depression. We can't get rid of that self-centered fear or that guilt and that shame. We were afraid of misery and depression. We couldn't make a living.

I tend to look at this like we can't make a quality of life. We can't develop the quality of life that we want. Our quality of life sucks. And you know, we, we know that and, and we don't want that, but we just, we have, we've been almost powerless to be able to change it. And a lot of times it looks like it just keeps getting worse.

We had a feeling of uselessness. We were full of fear. We were unhappy. We couldn't seem to be of real help to other people. OK, those are some of the bedevilments. That's one of the ways that our unmanageability shows up. I would say