Steps 1-3 at the Primary Purpose Group in Seaford, NY – February 5th 2011

OK, Hi, my name is Damon. I'm an alcoholic.

OK, First off, I want to thank and he's not here for me to thank, but I want to thank Derek for asking me to speak. I always make sure to to recognize that when I start off because I love to get to speak for Alcoholics Anonymous. You know,

I was given a life that I had absolutely no idea was possible by what I found through this, through this fellowship and the program of this fellowship. And I love any opportunity that I can get to give back. And I always say, you know, the more that I give back, the more they end up getting from this. And so it keeps me in a, in a loop. You know, I get more and I want to give more and I get more and I get more and I just keep going.

I

had a moment sitting here, you know, every once in a while before a meeting. I just have I have a different kind of a connection in the moment to like really the fact that I'm here right now

with all of you, you know, I mean, it's a Saturday night and I made the decision

to and there were a lot of things that happened in my life that weren't decisions before, you know, I was a prisoner of the wind, you know, but

I actually made a decision to come here to spend Saturday night with all of you. And that's not something the guy that I used to be ever would have done, you know, unless he unless he would get something. So I love that moment of connection to the fact that I am not the human being that I used to be.

I started off, you know, I was, I was pretty sick from right out the gate. You know, Now I don't based on my understanding of what alcoholism is, I didn't start out alcoholic, but I certainly started out really spiritually sick.

And, you know, you can see evidence of that all through my childhood. And there were a lot of people in my in my life that I knew or people in the world that I could see then or see now that have a spiritual sickness. And I tried to reach out in lots of different ways to address that spiritual sickness, you know? And if food had clicked for me, then I might have become addicted to the food.

If sex was my thing, that I might have become addicted to sex. Or if it was gambling, then, you know,

I've reached out for different things. Some of them felt good and I held on to them for a little while. And some of them didn't really work. And so I didn't go by them. And again, when I realized what alcohol could do for me, I was off to the races. You know,

it was not like that from my very first drink, but it was like that as soon as I made that connection, as soon as I realized, Oh my God, that knot that I have inside of me has just loosened up. And this is the reason why. And I'm having a fantastic night tonight. I'm not in fear. I'm not in, you know, all these different things, like I'm actually enjoying myself and people are able to enjoy me. I'm not that shy, scared, awkward geek in the corner.

You know, when I made that connection, I was off to the races. I was in a car with a handful of friends, pilot passing a bottle of vodka around and it went to each person and they took a swig and it went to me. And I just held the thing up and guzzled. And I remember the the physical sensation of it bursting out all through my system. But what I really remember is brand the bottle down and looking around at my friend's faces and seeing their jaws hanging open just a little bit and their eyes just a little bit wide at at at the amount that I

poured into me. And I fell in love with that. That's how people should look at me all the time.

So,

you know, I said this is it like this is this is my thing. And, and from that point on, it was 6-7 nights a week, blacking out most of those nights, throwing up most of those nights.

It wasn't so much about falling asleep anymore as it was about passing out.

I loved blackouts. I I was very spiritually sick and I looked around at this world and I said, I'm not interested in this. I'm really not. I don't understand what you have to offer me that's worthwhile at all. And it seems like this planet and its people are asking a lot more from me that I seem to be getting not interested. I'm looking for the first bus off of this planet.

But I actually said that when I was younger. And so I didn't want to live, but I didn't want to die, either because I was afraid to die, or I thought it might be painful, or I was too stubborn to say that I had given in. You know,

blackouts were door #3 blackouts were at the end of the night or at the end of a weekend. It was like a day or a couple of days just went by and I was neither dead nor was I really alive.

They're just gone. And that's what I wanted for the rest of my life. I wanted to be able to just have the rest of it just be gone without me having to die. Don't want to be a part of this, you know? And so I chase that

I had lots of consequences come up in my life, you know, but

a lot of those same consequences were already present before I kicked off with the with the boots, you know, the, the, the ruined relationships, the parents constantly upset with me, the failing out of classes, the wrecking cars, the losing jobs. I was doing all that stuff before the booze, you know. So one of the things, I mean, in terms of the first step, when I had to look at

what's actually going on here, what's my problem,

One of the things that I was able to understand from the very beginning is booze is clearly not the source of the trouble because this stuff was all already going on. And so one of the things that actually helped me when I got to AA was knowing that if all I did was put the booze down, my life was still going to be miserable. I was just going to go back to the misery that my life was before I started the drinking to begin with, you know. So

like I said, there were lots of consequences along the along the line. But, you know, I drank through them.

And eventually I came to a place where, you know, I had been stuffing the feelings down and stuffing them down and stuffing them down and there was no place left for them to go. And they were starting to burst out the sides. You know, I didn't look at my life one day and decide I want something more than this. You know,

it stopped working really. I would wake up in the morning looking forward to like, when's the stuff going to get in me? Because I don't want to be a part of this day waiting for that moment to come. And what happened was I reached a point in my life where that moment would come and get it in my system.

I feel physical sensation sometimes. I'd still, you know, slur my words. I'd still some stumble, I'd still throw up, you know, all these things. But I wasn't numbing out anymore. I was still really painfully aware of how much I hated myself and how much I certainly hated all of you. And my door #3 was gone.

So now I was back to don't want to live, don't want to die. And there's really no answer,

you know, in this place of like, absolutely having no idea what to do and then doing the same thing over and over again because what else is there? This is the only thing I know. You know, I had a sense though, from the very beginning that something was wrong in the whole picture.

Because when I would go out and be this different guy, when I would go out and start walk out the door as a nervous, scared, angry, shy person and get the stuff in me and become the life of the party. Something in me said, wait a minute, alcohol couldn't have created the things that I said tonight. It didn't create those actions and create those words like affect me somewhere in there.

So how come I can only get to this me that I like

when the stuff is in my system? And so I knew that something was wrong from like the very beginning, but I didn't care because I didn't know the answer. And there was Boo still available. So I just kept putting it in my system. And what happened was now towards the end, it's not working. And I start asking more and more questions and I'm saying like something's really wrong with this life.

I started to

I used to like to to rent movies. You know, I was often out of work and I just go home and rent movies. And I do, you know, alcohol let me to other substances. And I like to just get a little obliterated,

sit in front of a movie and just be in, you know, a different world. And what happened though, towards the end is I'd be in the video store and I'd see clean and sober

and something in me would come up like,

Oh my God, you know, my name is Bill W 28 days. Like all these different things. And I go and I rent the movie and I go home and I get drunk and high and watch this movie and fall

and fall my eyes out, you know, desperately, desperately hoping that like that this was going to do it, that this was going to make me stop, you know? And, and it just, and I was just in more pain

and more and like, what's wrong with me? Like why can't I stop? I want to be done.

And I was just in utter anguish. And there was a night, well, no, not a night. There was a period when I started to, like I said, it's bursting out the sides. And I started to feel like I'm going to snap wound up in a ball. And I would lay in bed at night curled up in the fetal position. Like I got to fall asleep. I got to fall asleep because I'm going to snap any minute and I'm going to hurt myself or I'm going to hurt somebody else. And I was living with mommy and Daddy 'cause I couldn't survive out in the real world, you know, And I was afraid I was going to go off on my

sincerely hurt one of them, You know, I did not trust my own mind anymore. And I started to get this twitch. And it wasn't this, it wasn't withdraw, it wasn't the shapes like this. It was I'd just be sitting around and my body would do one of these. I get this little jerk. And I was like, Oh my God, what is that like? He scared me to death. I'm losing control of my mind and my body. I was petrified, but I did not know what else to do. It scared me enough to get everything out of my system

for like a week or two. And then I felt a little bit better and I went right back again.

I found a, there was a, an old friend of mine, an old ex-girlfriend who had five years clean in the fellowship. And I started asking her lots of questions, you know, and, and getting in the conversation about that stuff. And I said, all right, I'm going to give this thing a shot.

You know, now I'm spending more time than I'd like to on the details of the using because I personally feel very clear. None of that is my first step.

Everything that I've been describing was my need to take a first step. That's not my first step.

You know, my first step was having a different perspective on that stuff, was seeing it differently and understanding that I actually had no power any longer, that I had crossed the line where I wasn't making choices and it wasn't a matter of why aren't I strong enough to do this. I didn't understand that it wasn't about personal strength anymore, you know? So now, when I was starting to be exposed to the fellowship, that was the first opportunity I had to begin to take a first step

on the shades. It says, you know, we admitted we were powerless over alcohol. Well, anybody can form an opinion about whether they think that they're powerless over alcohol. But in our book, they say we learned we had to fully concede to our innermost selves that we were Alcoholics. This is the first step in recovery. And that, I would argue today I cannot do

until someone has explained to me the definition of alcoholism.

I can't admit whether I'm an alcoholic or not until somebody tells me what an alcoholic is. Otherwise I'm walking around with my own ideas. And of course, conveniently, I didn't fit the picture. You know, I have created a definition that didn't apply to me, you know,

so, so I was coming to meetings. I did not think that I was an alcoholic again, because I had my own definition that I didn't fit. But I looked at the steps and I said that's got to work better than what I'm doing. I knew. The one thing I knew for sure is that I didn't know well, I didn't know how to live life. And what I thought was going on is I'm a screw up. It causes me pain. I drink to take the pain away,

and as long as I can drink and take the pain away, there's no reason for me to change. And so that's where the problem is.

So I need to put the stuff down for a little while, learn how to live life, and then I'll be able to go back to drinking

and taking jobs. You know, that's what was going on in my head,

but that realizing that I had no idea how to live my life

ended up saving my life because it caused me to pay attention to people when they were talking about the steps. And it came to Alcoholics Anonymous. And I'll tell you, I almost walked right back out again because I knew that putting down the drink was not going to solve my problems. And there were people that I heard chair. I've got five 10/15/2020 five years without a drink. They put their hand up and they sounded miserable,

scared, angry, lonely,

hateful. And I was like, if that's what I have to look forward to, I want a bottle or a gum. I need one of the two. I cannot live life that way. If I could, I never would have gone down this road to begin with. That's the whole reason I'm here is I can't live like that, you know, so

it's tricky for me to talk about the steps a little bit because when I came around, I had, you know, what I referred to today is sort of like a fellowship sobriety. I had somebody who said, I'll be your sponsor. And he was taking me through steps. And we looked a little bit at the book alcohol astronomist and a little bit at the 12 steps and 12 traditions and a little bit of living sober. And there was a lot of I heard a guy say, who heard a guy say, who heard a guy say, you know, and, and you know what?

I didn't drink,

you know, and I was going, I was a meeting maker. I was going 234 meetings a day because I could not hold down a job. You know, I went from meeting to meeting to meeting. I was doing lots of service. My hand was up at every meeting because I'm like, I know something needs to take place here. And I heard people saying only one in so many Alcoholics makes it to a A and only one in so many makes it to 90 days. And only one out of them makes it to a year and only one out of them makes it to five. And I look around a room like this and I,

what in God's name makes me think that I'm the one who's going to make it? What am I doing differently than everybody else? And so I said I got to kick it into high gear. Like I had my running buddies that were my friends, but they weren't the person. They weren't the people that I took sobriety advice from, you know what I mean? Like I wanted to hear the people that had every once in a while I see a light on in somebody's eyes. And so I chased them, you know, so

I was going through steps with this guy and I went through

nine steps, you know, but all along I would hear things that just didn't seem like they could be reconciled with my understanding when I would hear stuff out of this book. And and I heard a guy who was like a handful of timeshare who was on fire. He was one of those guys that would like pound the table when he told, when he talked, you know, and, and, but he scared a lot of people and angered a lot of people. I loved it because

this guy was talking about having to do a lot more

than we usually talk about having to do. And people didn't like hearing that. But I knew that I could not go on the way that I was. I was three years without a drink or a drug in my system, and I still hated myself and all of you somewhere in the back of my head, you know, he talked about having to do a lot more, but he talked about getting a lot more. And so I went to him and I said, what are you doing? Like I need for you to show me what you do. And that's when I really began to learn about the steps.

And So what I found out in that process is there were a lot of things that I would say and oh, well, you know, I'm an alcoholic. So this or this in my life is my alcoholism. And I got to find out there's a lot of stuff that I was saying that simply wasn't true. You know, there were two things that I was suffering from that were my alcoholism. One was a seemingly hopeless condition of my body. I had an abnormal physical reaction to alcohol that when I put alcohol in my system, I could not

predict what was going to happen. Usually it meant I couldn't stop once I started. One of the things that confused me, though, was every once in a while, I'd have a couple of drinks and I'd stop. And so I'd say, oh, well, see, I didn't have a craving every single time I picked up a drink. I must not be an alcoholic. You know, there was one of those loopholes that I found, but when I got to realize is what was abnormal about my reaction is I couldn't tell you which nights were going to be which.

When I set out some nice to have two or some nights to go, all along I had no idea what kind of a night it was going to be. And that is not the experience of most people when booze enters their system. So I saw, yes, booze affects me abnormally. And because I can't predict ahead of time what it's going to look like, it will never be safe for me to put it in my system. And that was as much as I really understood about alcoholism before that. I'm an alcoholic. I can't drink safely.

That's what I thought the first step was. I can't drink safely.

And what I came to find out was, you know, that's really not that dangerous a problem if I can't drink safely. There's a really, really, really simple solution. Idiot. Don't drink.

If that was my only problem, you would tell me don't drink, I would not drink. And I go on about my life. I tried not to drink and I found that I didn't have the ability to do that. And when I look through our book, I saw this group of people all talking about, you know, what

we've been where you are. We've had that same experience. As much as we threw our will at it, as much as you could hook us up to a lie detector. And we're saying, I don't want to be doing this right now, even in the moment that I'm doing it. As much as that's true, I have no ability to stop myself. And that's the dangerous part of the alcoholism. And that's the thing that I hadn't really understood, you know? So that's how I started to have that first.

Experience to be able to look at the evidence of my life, to step back and think about times in my life where I was writing down, you know, journal every once in a while and like, I get to stop doing this. I got to chill out for a little while or something, you know, And then I go and I look at it and like two days later would say, oh, I drank today, you know, like constantly. Like I had all these battles that I was going through to try to have it look different.

And the evidence overwhelmingly was I had no say in the matter,

you know? So

what I found, what I came to understand through that is that nobody has been able to figure out a way around that. And it was true when they wrote this book, when it came out in 39 and they said, you know, nobody's figured out an answer for that physical craving, for that phenomenon of craving still true. And that inability to see the true from the false when it comes to booze, that form of insanity that I suffer from, that the insanity is not the crazy stuff that I did when I

I was out there drinking. The insanity isn't that I think you're all talking about me. The insanity isn't that I think every girl wants me. The insanity isn't that I think my boss isn't going to notice that I'm stealing. None of that is the insanity that they're talking about in here. The insanity is I look at this glass of what to me is poison,

and I think it's going to do the same thing to me that it does to other people in the world.

I look at this thing and no matter how many hundreds or thousands of experiences I've had, that tells me all hell is going to break loose if I start to drink that. I look at it and I say it's going to be different this time, or is it? Or the thought never even crosses my mind. I just reach out and pick it up as I'm doing something else. You know, that's the insanity.

And you know what? To this day they still haven't figured out an easy answer for that one. And so here I am on Walking Dead Man

and now comes the real difficulty as I get to deal with the God stuff. And I want to know parts of that. That was the thing, you know, I, I looked at the shades and like I said, I said, well, this has to work better than what? Than what I'm doing. But I also saw the word God all over the place and I was like, I've fallen in with the Jesus people. This is a bad scene, you know, because there was an attempt made to raise me religiously and it did not take, you know, And so I said, like, this is it like

thing that was going to just like when the booze turned on me, it was like, here's the one thing that I thought was going to be an answer. And now I'm screwed all over again, you know, And I remember being on the phone with the guy that took me through this book. One day. I was in Union Square and in Manhattan and I'm walking around my cell phone and I'm pacing and I'm and I'm like screaming on the phone with this guy, you know, And I made it really clear to him when I would scream about stuff, I'd say, listen, I'm I'm going to fight right now,

but I don't want to win. I need for you to I need for you to know before I start, I'm not trying to win this. I need to let you know what my objections are so that you can help me get past them. The last thing I want is to win in this conversation. Help me, you know, so I'm screaming all the stuff that bothers me so much, you know, and I'm saying, you know, I don't believe in this thing, but I know that there's times I go to do something and I feel this claw like grab me and like yank me back like,

no, that's not your truth, you know, and it, God burned me up for that. And he said you experienced that thing as a claw because you're resisting it. If you were to give yourself over to it, you'd find that it's trying to lead you to an experience better than you'd imagine, you know, and that started to turn a few gears and I started to see that there were people all over a a that were getting results regardless of what they believed, you know, that it, that it wasn't one particular

religious tradition that we're getting the results because God liked their answers, you know, God liked their riches and things like that, you know, and what happened for me is I looked around and I said, okay, because I was one of those, I was a thinker, you know, and I actually for a big part of drinking for me was, and I consciously said this like I got to shut my brain off. I'm thinking too much. This was just always going, you know, and so

see, and now it's failed me because I lost my train of thought.

Can I play the tape back?

Sorry. Yeah,

I was

turning gears. OK, thank you.

I'm looking at the God stuff and this is this was my analysis of it, right? I'm saying, OK, I know there's no God,

but there's all these people who believe that there is a God and they're getting results. And so I figured it out. It must be that there's something to face

that solves the problem, but there's a power in faith even though there's no God. And so I was like, I got it. I figured it out. Now all I have to do is figure out how to have faith when I don't actually believe in anything, you know? And so now it became these like mental gymnastics of like, how am I possibly going to do that, you know? And at some point, you know, suffering is. I used to try to avoid suffering at all costs. And now

I have such an appreciation for software

because suffering leads me to be open to things that I wasn't open to before. And what happened is I said I can't keep going the way that I am. And so something in me said, you know what? Let me take all this brainpower that I'm putting into picking this apart and trying to figure out why it won't work

and instead put it into, you know what, there's people that are getting results. How could that be? Let me put all my brainpower into trying to explain how it is that there's all of these people that are getting results from this thing. And so I just, I just decided to take a different shift. And it was that willingness. And one of the things, you know, I already talked about a difference between our first step in the book and the first step up on the shades. I call this the Cliffs Notes version. You know, it's we've got over

164 pages boiled down to this little tiny thing. Stuff's going to get missed. And one of the things is I looked at Step 2 and it says came to believe.

So it looks like in order for me to take the third step, I've got to already believe.

When I was taken through the chapter we agnostics, I saw that all over the place. There's these three wonderful words. As soon as I love words like that as somebody that became an alcoholic, as soon as you know, they say as soon as the person can say that they believe or are even willing to believe, we assure them they're on their way. As soon as we believe, we are even willing to believe, we begin to get results. As soon as we admit not the existence of God. As soon as

admit the possible existence of God, all I had to do was say it's possible. I didn't have to believe anything. And if I'm saying that it's possible, then that means that if I don't have any answers for the thing that I'm suffering from and there's a possible answer,

I should probably decide to go down that road. And so that's what led me the third step. And you know, I've seen a lot of confusion around, and I had a lot of confusion the first time I tried to take the third step around. I thought that step three was turning my will and my life over to God.

And so I go and I take step three. And then I'd see myself behaving selfishly. We're still rejecting what I knew God wanted for me. And I'd say, oh look, I must have failed in the third step. You know, I was missing the whole point. I don't turn my will in my life over to God in the third step. If that were the case, then this would only need to be a three-step program,

right? If God's now in charge of my life, what else needs to happen? You know, all I was doing was making a decision that that's what I want.

And what they go on to say is lack of power is our problem, right? We can have moral and philosophical convictions galore and can't live up to them on our own power. And so that's the problem. I'm deciding that I want to live my life by this power, but I can't do it. I try to do unselfish things. I try to be honest. I try to be helpful. And I keep finding myself failing consistently, just like picking up the drink and saying I don't want to be doing this. I'm lying to somebody

saying that's not cool. And I know that I'm not supposed to be doing this right now, but unable to stop myself. And so the decision was what I like to think of now. I think of it like a vow, just like, you know, we have wedding vows, right? When we when someone makes a decision to love, honor, cherish, obey through sickness and health, good times and a bad, you know it's a decision

doesn't mean we make good on it.

My wifes here she will testify to you. I do not make good on that decision. You know, on a, on a, on a consistent regular basis. You know, that does not mean I'm no longer married. That does not mean that that I did not mean it when I said it.

You know, what it means is I've made a decision that this is what I want to have happen. And I may see evidence in my life that that's not what I'm actually doing. And so now I need to step back and say, OK, So what needs to change? And what I was shown is, you know, they say after we make this decision, we say this prayer, we tell God, God I'm yours now. I want you to I want you to save me, relieve me of the bondage of cells, right? And that's why I'm not turning my will and my life over. I'm

I can't turn anything over. I'm in bondage. So I'm saying to God help me out. And now they say the next thing we do is we launch into this course of vigorous actions,

four through nine. I've got to do some things to clear out a channel between me and this power so that

power can flow into me, to allow me to be the loving person, the honest person, the fearless person, you know, all these things. Stuff's got to change before that can happen. So

I'm really looking forward to the rest of this month. I'm so excited. I've really enjoyed this. I'm really looking forward to hearing from all of you because I consistently need to learn more and more and more. Thank you, Derek, again, for this experience. Thank you for God for this experience. And that's it for me.