The Spiritual Awakenings group in Bernardsville, NJ

Joining us this week for the first time. This is a workshop that's going to be going on for the next several months.

And it's a workshop, which is a repeat workshop from a workshop that Chris and Peter M did up in Vermont at the Wilson House.

And last week we started off with Peter M.

And this week we are fortunate enough to have Chris. So I'll turn the meeting over to Chris.

Good evening, everybody. My name's Chris. I'm an alcoholic. It's really nice to be here.

Thank you.

Thank you all for coming.

Thank you, Bill, for doing the taping and the sound.

It's near impossible to hear in this room without some type of sound system.

The acoustics are just bizarrely whacked out.

So we really do appreciate it when he comes in with his sound.

I want to thank Peter, who's not here tonight, for agreeing to do this, both at the Wilson House.

And here in Bernersville, I had a lot of fun at that workshop.

The topic tonight is my experience, finding recovery in the fellowship, as probably so many times with workshops like this, you end up preaching to the choir.

The people that need to hear this stuff are usually not the ones that are in the rooms.

But sobriety and recovery are really two different things.

Okay.

The way I define it is sobriety is staying away from alcohol, staying separated from alcohol.

But if you're anything like me, just staying separated from alcohol becomes untenable after a period of time.

My emotional state can't take sobriety for long periods of time without some type of recovery.

Let me start at the beginning with my story.

I was doing an inventory.

several years ago and one of the instructions in that inventory with the person that I was going through with the steps with at the time

asked me to in my fear inventory to go back to the earliest recollection of every single fear I inventoryed.

And I remember going back my fear of people

One of the promises is fear of people will disappear, and it has for me, which is a great thing.

But I used to be completely repressed by crowds or having to do any kind of public speaking.

It was crippling for me.

It was so emotionally painful.

But anyway, my first and earliest recollection was being dropped off for kindergarten as a kid.

I hadn't gotten out much.

on my own at this period of time, you know, so...

I wasn't really used to being tossed out of the car.

And I remember my mother opening the door and saying, you know, there's the building, there's your class, see you later.

And I remember standing up on the hill looking down and there's kids running around playing tag and kickball.

And they're already having a blast together.

You know, they've already integrated.

And I remember standing up on the hill looking at just feeling like a moron, you know, feeling like...

How am I going to do this?

How am I going to go down there and be friends with all these people?

What if they don't like me?

What if I get in the fight?

What if I do something stupid and they mock me out the rest of my life?

What if I get ostracized?

I'm thinking like all this stuff.

I'm five.

And I know right away that there's something wrong with me because all these kids are having a blast.

They obviously don't have that same self-centered fear that I have.

And I remember from that moment on I had to start acting as if everything was okay.

Does anybody in here remember acting as if everything's okay?

And inside you're just falling apart.

So I began my educational experience, pretending I wasn't flipped out,

and trying to do the things that I thought I needed to do to get along

and to not be made an outcast.

My problem at that time was, well, let me tell you what the solution for that kindergartner would have been.

A couple of shots of whiskey, and I would have been the kindergarten kid.

You know what I'm saying?

I'd have been able to step out.

And the thing was, is they weren't serving five-year-old's whiskey in kindergarten in those days.

I don't know if they've become more progressive.

But they certainly weren't doing it when I was there.

That would have been a solution.

It might not have been a functional solution, but it would have been a solution for me.

Because here's what happened for the next...

I guess it was seven years.

I had to act as if I was okay.

And I wasn't suffering from anxiety and everything else.

And one day, a couple of my friends and I decided to cut school, go home to my house, take a bottle of whiskey down and get drunk.

You know, we had, none of us had ever gotten drunk before.

It was, it sounded like a cool thing to do.

It was better than, you know, rolling hub caps down the road or whatever you did at like 12 years old.

So we went down, we went to my house, and I remember pulling a bottle of four roses whiskey out of the closet.

Now, I don't come from an alcoholic family.

I certainly feel for the people in this room that come from those halacious, dysfunctional alcoholic family.

I grew up in a Cape Cod house in Basking Ridge, a mother of father, a sister or brother, you know, like...

Like, everything was calm, you know, there was no arguments.

Everything was, it was just like typical boring suburbia.

So where did my alcoholism come from?

I don't even, I don't even really care about that answer today.

But I will tell you that after I blew the dust off of that bottle...

and brought it out.

I didn't know anything about drinking at that time,

except for what I'd seen in John Wayne movies.

You remember the John Wayne movies where he'd busts through the saloon door,

he'd go up and he'd go, bartender, whiskey.

And the bartender would get like a dirty water glass and a bottle of whiskey and fill it up.

And John would just shoot that whole glass down, grab the bottle and go back to the table to play cards or whatever.

So I guess that's how you drink.

So I filled up these three water glasses with warm Four Roses Canadian whiskey.

Oh my God.

I mean, I didn't know anything about ice or mixers or letting it breathe.

So I started drinking and my buddies started drinking.

Now...

We had two completely different reactions to alcohol.

Here's what happened to them.

They had about two-thirds of their glass, and they'd had enough.

You ever drink with people that have enough?

Is that the most obnoxious thing in the world?

Sorry I've had two.

Going home to the wife.

You know, got to have dinner.

Are you crazy?

Let's go to the city!

You know, I mean, that's how I drank.

I always wanted more from alcohol.

I mean, going home.

You know?

So, but,

but that's really what they did.

They had two-thirds of the glass, and they'd had enough.

I drank my glass, what was left of their glass,

and as much of the rest of the bottle as I could,

and I went into a blackout.

Um,

was my first experience with a blackout.

Those are fun, aren't they?

A whole section of time disappears on you

where you don't know what you did or, you know,

and you can do some crazy things in blackouts, like travel.

You know, you ever wake up like in Topeka with one shoe,

you know, wondering what the hell you're doing there?

And, of course, you've got to act like you wanted to be there

because you can't look stupid.

But anyway, I had a blackout, and I trashed the house.

I made a complete fool of myself, and I passed out in the field.

I remember waking up in a field and having one of those just nuclear hangovers,

you know, where you have to stay horizontal for like two days, you know,

like you're just poisoned, you know what I mean?

And here I am, I'm 12 or 13, and it made me unbelievably ill,

but I slowly started to forget how ill alcohol made me,

and I started to remember what it did for me.

Somewhere into, somewhere down toward the bottom of that first glass of whiskey,

that scared kindergartner that was, I was trapped with that,

in bondage to that scared kindergartner, well, that disappeared.

This alcohol freed me from that.

All of a sudden, all the fear, all the anxiety,

all the self-esteem issues, all that stuff disappeared.

And I was larger than life.

I was the funniest guy.

I was worth being around.

Hell, there were dancing lessons in that Four Roses Whiskey.

You know what I mean?

I was, now I felt like I thought all of you felt all the time.

You know, when you were running around playing tag and kickball.

I mean, I thought I had found a solution.

to my social problems that I was having, my assimilation problems.

So I didn't start drinking every single day,

but I started to become preoccupied with alcohol.

I started to think about where I was going to get it, who I was going to drink it with.

I was like 13 and the drinking age was 21, so there was some logistical things that had to be surmounted.

But, you know, the alcoholic is very resourceful, and I managed to always get alcohol when I wanted it.

And I come from a very smart family.

My brother and sister are both Ph.D. college professors.

You know, my mother and father were both Phi Beta Kappa educators and just way overeducated beyond their intelligence.

And as I start drinking, as I start drinking, my academics start to slip.

You know what I mean?

It's just not that important to get good grades.

I'm worried about where I'm going to go and who I'm going to be drinking with and all that stuff.

So I ended up graduating high school, the second stupidest kid in the graduating class.

You got to work for that.

That's like a D-minus minus.

You've got to be careful, not to slip too low.

But I got out of there.

And the whole time that somewhere along the line, my drinking went from preoccupation,

which was I was interested in doing it and I was planning on doing it.

And I was beer and wine instead of the Four Roses and every once in a while vodka.

And, you know, it started to become a part of my life.

And it talks in the book Alcoholics Anonymous about crossing a line.

And it says a lot of times you cross a line, you cross the line before you really want to stop.

And what the line is, is the line, I believe,

is the difference between being preoccupied

and being obsessed with alcohol.

And I slipped into the obsession of the mind.

And really what that is, is now I'm hooked so deep into alcohol.

My own unaided will is not enough to overcome it.

I can manage short periods of sobriety, but I always put alcohol back in my body.

And somewhere I crossed that line, and that's where I became seriously, actively alcoholic.

I believe it was somewhere in high school, but I don't know.

Anyway, here I am, I'm an alcoholic, and as we all know, alcoholism is progressive.

It gets worse over any given period of time, and it did for me.

It did. It's slowly, though.

I mean, if it would have happened overnight, it would have caught my attention, but it's slow, and it's almost imperceptible.

You get worse and worse as the years go by, and you hardly notice it because that's the way you're used to living.

And in the beginning, I didn't, you know, I had a lot of fun with drinking.

I mean, you remember the high school parties where, you know, the rock and roll is on, and, you know, there's fights and people drinking and, you know, people crashing cars, and, you know, you're just having a good time.

I mean, I don't know about it.

I don't know about anybody in here, but I come from a period of time where friends let friends drive drunk, you know?

And those were the early 70s, and that's just the way it was.

I totaled nine cars in drunken blackouts.

Could you imagine doing that today?

You'd be in like maximum security or something.

You know, they'd say, let me go.

Oh, it's just Crash Schroeder again, you know.

But...

you know, I was always the final owner of every vehicle I ever had.

I got sober and it was time to sell a car.

I didn't even know how to do it, you know?

What's a, you know, you mean I got to sign a title?

What is that?

You know, I mean, it didn't know.

But, because they always were, the cops had them towed away every time.

But anyway, you know, I wasn't really paying a big price.

I was having a lot of fun.

And slowly I had some fun and then I started to pay some prices.

Okay.

One of the car accidents I got killed in, actually.

I went through a telephone pole, and when the police got there,

they had to bring me back with CPR and the shock paddles, you know, clear.

And I went out again in the ambulance and...

This is so alcoholic.

Listen to this.

I mean, I have just been killed and brought back to life from drinking and driving.

Guess what I did the day I got released from the hospital.

With bandages on my head, my ribs taped up.

I went to the liquor store, got two six packs of beer,

drove down to the park and started drinking, waiting for everybody to show up.

I mean, it didn't even cross my mind that there was a pathological problem, you know?

I was very much caught in.

And as alcoholics, you know, we all know, we'll do anything to protect our alcohol consumption.

We lose families that we love very, very much.

to protect our alcohol consumption.

It truly is a type of insanity.

Now, I'll skip ahead to get to the topic,

but I will tell you about my last drunk.

I mean, I'd gotten worse and worse and worse,

and I'd started a family, had a child, lost that family.

I'd lost about 10 or so jobs.

I became near-unemployable,

really just living a pathetic life.

Okay.

I was living in a room in my mother's house and she just didn't have it in her to throw me out on the streets like she should have.

You know what I mean?

And here I was.

I was up in that room having a relationship with the bottle.

You ever talk to the bottle?

You know, it's just you and me, kid, you know?

Nobody, you know, nobody understands us.

We're just too special for this world, you know, and just having that relationship with the bottle.

And meanwhile, you know, my life has just gotten more and more and more pathetic.

I wasn't really allowed to see my daughter, you know, it just, it got really bad.

And the final straw was...

Final straw was I was an electrician. I became an electrician somewhere in this mix. Can you imagine? You know, me showing up after drinking like a quart of whiskey. I'm here to wire your house, you know. Oh my God, who's that? His hair is sticking straight up, you know? Where'd you get this guy?

I did stuff like, I did stuff like drilled down from the attic into people's closets

and pulled their, part of their suits up into the ceiling, you know.

I mean, one time I wired a kitchen addition to the wrong panel,

and it was a timer panel for the hot water heater,

so the kitchen would come on.

At 8 o'clock at night and go off at 6 in the morning, you know,

people called up my boss and said, listen, we eat at 6.

This is unacceptable.

Okay.

I mean, you know, I could go on and on and on.

I was a menace.

And I'm looking at Bob here.

I wired half of his house.

And he's like, he's wondering when he caught me in my career, you know.

But anyway, anyway, I mean, my life had gotten very, very, very pathetic.

And this one day, I remember this kid, Tony was my boss.

He was 19 years old.

I'm 33.

Yeah.

And the boss puts Tony, the 19-year-old kid, in charge of me at work.

I mean, that's how much confidence he had in me, you know.

It was a good day if I didn't lose the van or something, you know?

So anyway, this one day I'm putting a ground screw in a ceiling fixture box,

and I'm shaking so bad from the night before, I keep dropping the screw,

and I've got the screwdriver, and I keep dropping the screw,

and I look over, and he's looking at me.

He's looking at me like, and when you're alcoholic and you're detoxing, you can hear people think at you.

You know what I'm saying?

No.

And I knew exactly what he was thinking.

He was thinking, you pathetic, good for nothing.

Sorry, yes, no account.

And I couldn't take that.

I mean, I'd lost a family.

I'd gone through the front window of a car, the passenger window in the car.

I got thrown out of the back window of a car one time.

Got back in and tried to drive home.

I had three flat tires.

The car was bent like a boomerang.

There was no windows left in the car.

It could go about a mile and a half an hour.

And I'm going home.

I'm in.

I'm in Pitts Town. I've only got 27 miles to go.

You know, the cops get me.

Where are you going? Home! Where was the accident?

What accident? I've got glass sticking out of my head.

There's no accident.

Have you been drinking? I had two. Two beers, just two.

I'll tell you what, if you admit to more than two beers, you're not an alcoholic.

That's...

That's not in the big book, but it should be.

It should be right there in the chapter to wives.

You know what I mean?

Does your husband admit to only drinking two beers?

Check him in.

Okay.

Anyway, so he's looking at me, and I just can't take it.

I mean, I feel such shame.

So that night I get drunk, and I call up, and I sign myself into a rehab.

It's a rehab that's kind of defunct so I can talk bad about it.

It was the one down there in Marstown, and I signed myself in for the 28 days.

Okay.

And what was unusual about me being in there was I really was the only person that wasn't remanded in there.

I mean, I was not in there because of a DWI.

I was not in there because of an intervention.

I wasn't in there because of a judge.

And I really was the only person in there that, like, volunteered to go in.

And you know how alcoholics are?

I thought I was better than you.

Because I, you know, I admitted I was sick or something.

You know, right?

You know how we are.

Like we can think that because we're worse, we're better.

You know, well, I crash 10 cars, you know.

So, so anyway, I had the alcoholic ego going on.

But I go in, I go in there and they start to do their thing as rehabs will.

And I can remember some of it, not a lot of it.

I remember getting a big book and reading it kind of like a novel.

And the only experience I had with it reading it like it was the Da Vinci Code or something

was that every once in a while I'd go, ooh, you know, that happens to me.

And that was my first exposure and experience to the book.

I had a little bit of identification going on.

But basically they had a lot of strange ways of helping you, of treating your alcoholism.

I remember group.

Anybody in here ever go to group, like in rehab or aftercare anything?

You sit around in a circle and you talk about your stuff and they're calling on people or they're going around the circle.

And you know what?

You're thinking to yourself, why doesn't that somebody?

Shut up!

I want to talk.

You know, he's hogging the time.

And I would just think that, why don't you drink?

You know, I'd think it for these people.

And finally they would get to me and I could talk about my stuff.

And today I understand why there's really bad discussion meetings and where that comes from.

You know what I'm saying?

Let me tell you about Aunt Fannie and Uncle Fudd and, you know, the uppity tennis pro.

You know, I mean?

Where that stuff, that stuff never ever helped me.

I've got to tell you, it just kind of separated me because it gave me a lot of stuff to say, I am not like you, you know.

So anyway, there was some other things that they did.

I remember wallet making class.

That was special.

Yeah.

I think I still have that wallet.

The stitches are a little off.

You know what I mean?

I remember they asked me to write my life story.

I got to do a life story.

And then I got to present it in front of my group sitting on the hot seat.

You might as well put a dunce cap on me.

You know what I mean?

And I remember reading my life story.

Now, the thing is, I pulled it out.

I pulled it out not too long ago.

I was throwing away some stuff and I found it.

I had about 40 pages of stuff on like one page.

My writing was like an eighth of an inch.

I mean, I crammed all this stuff.

It was so, I mean, I must have been so mentally ill at this time.

And they want me to do a life story.

So, you know, oh, God.

I couldn't read it, you know, but all of these things really had little or nothing to do with any kind of recovery.

I found out later.

Okay.

But I went through it.

What it did was it separated me from the booze for 28 days, and it gave me some knowledge about alcoholism.

And I got to watch the Father Martin movies, which I got to tell you, my first inventory,

Inventment Number One, Father Martin, you know.

Good God, I had to watch so many of those chalk talk movies.

I wanted to just jump through the projector and strangle that guy.

I was a long way from serenity and peace of mind at that time, Dave.

Anyway, get out of rehab.

And listen, I am serious about this separating from alcohol stuff.

I'm really, really serious.

I sign myself into a rehab.

Okay, after the rehab, they suggested aftercare.

So I'm going and I'm paying like $65 a night, two nights a week,

to listen to the mutton heads talk about their stuff in a group,

waiting for my turn to share.

Okay.

You know, I mean, that's how serious I was about separating from alcohol.

I thought that's what I was supposed to do, and that's how I was supposed to do this thing.

And they suggested two AA meetings.

And I went to two Basking Ridge meetings, a Monday and a Wednesday night, Basking Ridge meeting.

But I've got to tell you, I...

I thought going there and sitting in the chair was going to do the trick.

Here's what I thought Alcoholics Anonymous was like, and here's what I thought alcoholism was.

I thought alcoholism was forgetting how bad alcohol is treating you.

And if you could only remember how bad alcohol treats you, you won't drink it anymore and you'll be fine.

And what I thought AA was, I thought AA was a pep rally.

Yeah, yay, we don't drink today.

And I thought that when we were holding our hands saying the Lord's Prayer,

it was like a football huddle, you know?

All right, everybody, you know, we're going to get one day at a time.

We're going to keep it simple.

First things first.

Okay, see you tomorrow.

Break.

You know, I mean, see you back here tomorrow.

And that's what I thought AA was.

And one day, one day I was on my way to an AA meeting.

And the thought crossed my mind that...

It had been almost 90 days since I'd been drunk.

I don't even really remember what it's like to be drunk.

And, you know, they're saying some things.

I'm not really fitting into this AA subculture.

You know what I should probably do?

I should probably drink...

I should buy a gallon of vodka, drink it, and it'll solve two problems that I have.

One of them is remembering what it's like to be drunk, and the other is I'll feel so bad,

I'll push back into AA, and I'll do everything that I need to do.

So, in effect, I drank a gallon of vodka to improve my sobriety.

Now, I didn't have a sponsor at that time.

Now, imagine passing that one by a sponsor.

You know, here's...

You know, I got a plan.

Anybody in here sponsor?

And, you know, you've got the sponsories coming up to you and going, hey, I've got a plan.

You know, like, okay, hold it right there.

Tell us your plan.

We need to know the plan.

Okay, because you know as a sponsor that it's the worst plan in the world.

And you're going to help them to modify that plan as a sponsor.

Okay.

So anyway, I got really drunk.

And instead of rushing back to AA, as was my plan, I found it very, very difficult.

As a matter of fact, I drank nonstop for five months.

And my last drink was where it was Christmas at the Schroeder's 1989.

Uh, my mother was there, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uh, cats, you know, the whole thing.

Uh, it was Christmas, so the stockings were hung by the chimney with care.

And, uh, the, the, the Christmas tree was up and there was candles and mistletoe and

yule tidings and everything.

And I go into a drunken, raging blackout where I threaten all their lives.

I'm going to kill all you.

Gonna kill you.

This is all your fault.

And, um...

That wasn't really the festive type of atmosphere that they were all looking for.

So, you know, and they really didn't want to see me drink myself to death because this was a bad one.

This was a bad tear.

And so they picked up and they moved their Christmas to upstate New York.

Thank you.

I come out of this blackout.

I come out of this blackout and...

And there's a pile of vodka bottles in the sink.

I don't even remember buying.

I mean, I must have been staggering because I used to buy a bottle at a time.

Any smokers in here buy one pack at a time because you're going to quit tomorrow?

You know, that was me with the booze.

I should have been buying it by the tandem load, you know, to save money.

But I'd always buy one bottle at a time.

So I must have staggered uptown, you know, 30 times buying these bottles.

That must have been a pretty sight.

But anyway, I come out of this blackout, and it's the jumping off point that it talks about in this book.

I couldn't imagine living life without alcohol, but I couldn't imagine continuing to put it in my body.

And I wished for the end. I remember saying a prayer, God either kill me or allow me to get sober.

I can't live like this one more day. I can't. This is more than a human being should be forced to endure.

And after saying that prayer, that was the last, last drink, really.

So I am certainly one that believes in prayer.

Now, I started going to AA meetings.

I would switch groups a lot because I would get a resentment against a person or persons.

Anybody in here ever do that at a meeting?

You ever say to yourself, that horse's ass is going to share.

He's got his hand up.

God damn it, I'm going to have to listen to that hypocritical bastard.

You know, I can't believe it.

And I guess nobody else in here has ever done that.

Certainly unique.

But anyway, I would have to change groups because I would resent myself out of a group.

Because I had no tools. I hadn't been exposed to the steps yet.

What I was doing was I was meeting dependent.

And I'm not critical of that.

I'm just saying, you know, some of us are meeting dependent before we can experience recovery.

And that's a good thing.

The bad thing is, is if you're stuck in meeting dependency and you're not exposed to recovery.

you can suffer.

You can suffer in these rooms.

You can go insane in these rooms going to a meeting a day for eight years.

I mean, it happens.

We chirp like squirrels without recovery if we're just trying to do it by not drinking.

Anyway, so here I am.

I'm in the groups.

I'm going to, well, I shouldn't name the group, should I, if I'm going to be critical of them.

No.

Myersville Millington, you know, places like that.

And, uh,

They're really more about sharing, you know, sharing.

Let's share.

Which, again, you get a lot of wisdom teaching.

You get a lot of good information.

And there are really, really good people, and there's really, really good sobrieties in those meetings.

The problem is, if you're a sick alcoholic, it's going to be very difficult to pick out the good from the bad.

You know, I listen to a lot of people who...

you know, who really didn't have a clue early on.

And luckily, I had a decent sponsor.

He would pull me out of the ditch quite often.

But the fact of the matter is,

is I didn't really, I wasn't really being exposed to the steps.

Back at this period of time, it was...

It was, you could experience something like this.

I remember asking in a meeting, in a step meeting,

well, how exactly do you do the four-step?

Because I couldn't figure it out from the stepbook.

I was just going to step meetings.

I wasn't going to any big book meetings.

I remember going, how exactly do you set about actually doing the four-step?

And I remember a guy going, kid, you do a four-step with a pencil.

I'm like, well, thank you for that.

I learned later on that he didn't have any idea how to do a four-step

or else he wouldn't have said something like that.

So I got my pencil, and I opened up this stepbook,

and somebody mentioned something about a big book and a big book.

I opened that up, and I tried to do a four-step

because it was being suggested to me by a sponsor.

That particular sponsor wasn't showing me how to do it.

He was suggesting that I do it.

So I put together this hodgepodge of stuff.

What it was was it was another attempt at putting together a life story.

It was a list of dirty, rotten things that I had done that I had never told anybody.

And it was a list of character defects that I had recognized in myself.

Can you imagine a really sick alcoholic deciding all those things for himself?

And I put it all together in this thing that I hid underneath the spare tire in the trunk of my car

for like three months, you know, until I got a chance to do a fifth step.

And I went and I did a fifth step.

And, you know, I got a whole lot of relief.

I got the relief from that exercise.

It was confessional.

It was not a four-step.

It was confessional.

And I got...

the relief that you get from something that's confessional.

And it gave me a shot in the arm.

Now, I'm struggling.

I've got to tell you, you know that scared kindergartner?

He's all over me.

I'm in AA.

I'm going to anywhere from seven to 12 meetings a week

because I had times in between jobs.

You know how that is when you're in early sobriety?

You have those times between jobs.

and you're going to noon meetings and night meetings.

Well, I was doing that a little bit here and a little bit there.

So I was going a lot of meetings.

Now, I was a secretary at this meeting.

I was making coffee over there.

I was a no-show GSR over here.

Anybody take the no-show GSR position for a while?

No.

I said that at a group one time, and this, this, this, this, this, this DCM came up and just ream me out.

Oh, man.

But that's, I'm in District 18.

What can I tell you?

No show GSI.

So, uh, so anyway, uh, we've got something like 93 home groups and there's like two GSM or something when I was there.

Anyway, not that we judge.

Um,

But I'm doing all these things.