Steps one and two at the Stateline Retreat in Primm, NV

I thank

my name is Marian. I am an alcoholic.

My dry day is the 10th of August 1984. My group is a Markham Village group in Markham, ON. I have a sponsor and I sponsor and I'm an active member of Alcoholics Anonymous. I'd like to thank the committee so very much for having me here. It's such an honor and a privilege to come here. And I just, I just don't have the words to to say how grateful I am for all the work that goes into something like this. I mean, really is an amazing weekend. I mean,

of the speakers that we've heard so far. And do you not think it's just a wonderful job they've done here?

Our daughter would like to thank Alexa, who came to pick me up at the airport. And, you know, she did. She was so gracious and she's so beautiful and she was so young and willing, you know, and I just wanted to destroy her in an instant with her.

I

but thank you Alexa, you, you're just a delight and really lovely.

So that's my spoons are showing at me. And so tonight I'm, I'm going to do steps one and two. You know, step one, we admitted we're powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable.

When I came into Alcoholics Anonymous, I was 40 years old. It was Edmonton, AB

I had nothing left.

I thought that nobody in the world ever drank away all the stuff that I drank away because my alcoholism. There were certainly other Alcoholics where I used to be, but there certainly wasn't a fellowship. There certainly wasn't a camaraderie

when you got to my stage of chronic alcoholism.

There was nothing left but loneliness, and you did not want to share that with anybody because there was no way to let anybody in. But I thought to myself also, what? Why did it take me so long to get here? Why did I not get here before?

And an old timer said to me, you get it when you get it. And I said, yeah, but I've lost everything. Why did it? Why was this not? And he said to me, there's no answer to that question. Just be here and eventually things will happen for you

to admit. I'm Polish over alcohol in that my life is unmanageable.

If I thought back about that,

you see, alcohol is what gave me power.

Alcohol was what made my life manageable

because from I was very young,

life was not manageable for me. Long before I ever took a drink. Life was very difficult,

you know, very much like Bill Wilson. When I read his wonderful essay This Matter of Fear, Bill describes in there all the things I felt when I was young.

He talks about the horrendous fear that kept him separated from people and how eventually that fear became aggression.

She talks about the panic attacks he had when Bertha died, which I experienced at age 13.

He talks about his fear of death and his obsession with death. I had all of that.

I mean, I, you know, I was just, I was, you know, I always knew there was something seriously wrong with me because people were always saying to me, there's something seriously wrong with you.

Because I was always looking for understanding everywhere I went. And there was no understanding. I did not know that my solution would be a glass of alcohol. I did not know that alcohol would give me what Doctor Silk was promised in the big book. He said when men and women drink, they get a sense of ease and comfort. You see, that was what I needed all my life,

but I didn't want to drink because you see, well,

ancestry.com just told me recently that I am

98% Irish and Scottish

and 2% English,

which means, you know, it's like, you know, there's the, the Irish and the Scottish were always wanting to drink and the English part was always trying to lecture them. And it was just one part of me sitting in judgment and the arrest of them just going crazy. My old grandfather drank, but he drank on weekends. And I remember when he had these horrendous hangovers

and I used to say to him, I used to hear him quote Shakespeare. He used to say, You know, when in disgrace with fortune, and when's eyes I all alone bewep my outcast date, and trouble death heaven with my bootless cries, and look upon myself

and curse my feet. And I used to say to him, What does that mean? He says it's talking about a man who had secrets,

talking about a man who did things he didn't want anybody to know about. Don't ever, ever get there. But I was to get there

when I drank at age 25. I was living in Jamaica

and the situation all around me. I tried everything in my life up into age 25. I had tried careers, I had tried moving around the UK, I tried getting married,

having a baby. I tried all these things

and at age 25 my life was dropping apart. I was dropping apart from the inside

and somebody gave me a glass of rum.

151 proof rum

is there anyone here has had that magical experience?

Said Bob.

That's all I can describe it as magical. Magical. It was transformational, you know? I did not drink to get high. That's if it had made me. I didn't need to get any higher, you know? I was born on high alert, you know,

I just needed a little bit of shash.

I just needed something that would remove the barriers from the rest of the world that I had been walking around with for 25 years. Let me be long,

Let me in. Let me get out of my head. My head's killing me. I never stop thinking

I'm going mad.

I was going mad and I had a few drinks.

That's the solution. So how can something that produced that turn against me?

No, I don't know. It's turning against me because from I had my first drink at 25, I drank every day because I had found my solution to living in a reality where I didn't fit.

Alcohol changed my interaction with the rest of the world. It made everything OK. I never liked people. Now I was afraid of people. Unlike Bill when I was young, that fear turned to aggression. You know, I, I don't look like it now, but I was a fighter

and,

and if you didn't smile at me, I'd hit you and,

and I just didn't. I mean, even I remember my first sexual, well, it wasn't sex for me. He was trying to have sex and I wasn't interested because I was too busy thinking about myself.

And I remember saying to him

at the height of his passion. So what do you think about death?

And he said to me, I think you should go home now.

So alcohol somehow dissolved the barriers. I I wish I could replicate for you the transformation that came about in me because now I love people, now I love interactions, now I love parties, Now I am free,

Now I feel just like you look to me.

But as it says in our book,

this great gift that we have that women go down the road quicker than men,

and after about four years,

I was

over that invisible line.

I think that's what you call it, because that's when I noticed I had my first shakes. I remember it vividly, sitting in a restaurant in Jamaica with some friends of mine,

about to pick up a glass of wine and my hands shaking and I can't pick it up. And I wonder now how I'm going to get this liquor done, because I need it. I need it.

I hadn't had a drink before I went to meet them and I need it.

And from there it just got worse.

And I remember,

I remember 1 morning waking up beside my husband

in Kingston, Jamaica. And I woke up in the morning and there was a half glass of rum on my chest. None of it spilled.

I'm sleeping with this half glass of rum on my chest and he said to me, Do you think you're drinking too much?

I said to him, What's too much?

Because I didn't know and nobody knew. All people knew is that I was beginning to change. The change that was coming about now was a reverting back to my old ways, a reverting back to being hostile with people, to not liken being in crowds, to just wanting to be alone a little bit. And then the morality slipped

and I started doing things I shouldn't have been doing

and causing a lot of trouble and a lot of pain. And I have two little boys now. That is the great conundrum for me. I have two little boys that I love more than anything in the world and yet I can't stop drinking.

And eventually I don't know if this is just a mantra that plays inside the alcoholic mind.

Umm, but I thought if I get a divorce and leave this husband and go to another country, it's going to be different.

But you see I was to found out that we keep changing people, places and things, but the thing that has to change is us. And I did not know that. So I left the island and my boys and you know I did, I did everything. I I married another man, he took me to Canada. I thought this is wonderful being here. Drink Canada dry here I come. You know,

this time it's going to be different

and it only got worse. I don't know if there's anyone here from Alberta.

Thank you guys.

All in my life, but we're back in the day, my territory was southern Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Columbia, and I was a blackout drinker on the road.

That was a nightmare,

an absolute nightmare.

I'm drinking. I've got 2 little boys because I've sent that second husband away because that's what I do. I use people. He's telling me about my drinking. He has to go

and I've got these two little boys that I want to keep fed, I want to keep dressed. I want them to get the football clothes. I want them to get everything the other kids are getting because they don't have anybody in the family in in Canada but me. I'm a hopeless drunk.

The nightmare of that time in my life when I'm trying to do all the right things as a mother, all the right things as an employee, and I'm leaving one place and waking up in Grand Prairie or someplace else, Red Deer, AB, wherever. And I don't know how I got there.

And I know I'm going to have to head back home because I forget where I've left my boys. Who did I leave my children with? I can't remember,

but I have to get a bottle of vodka to drive back

and when I drive back I don't know where I am

and I don't know where my children are.

And the horror of alcoholism that Billy spoke about so beautifully. You see, when Bill spoke, I identified with every bit of his journey,

every bit of it, because this is a horrendous illness and we forget about that.

You know,

this step one that we have here,

we owe it to the people who are coming into Alcoholics Anonymous today to qualify them to make sure that they be alcoholic,

to make sure, because there are people and even in Alcoholics Anonymous that are trying to redefine the word alcoholism, the illness, alcoholism.

I spoke to somebody the other day who said to me

she was an A

and she said, well I never liked alcohol. I took my alcohol and powder form.

That poor girl isn't a wrong fellowship.

We kill people. Bill Wilson said that we cannot be all things to all people.

That is why too. This is the only thing that has ever worked for us. That is why we have a singleness of purpose. It is so important we don't do that, to be unkind and to be cruel. When I come into Alcoholics Anonymous, I was very fortunate, and I'll tell you about that in a minute. I'll just finish you on a journey with the worst thing in the world that's still today. I don't think anybody understands.

That was eventually going back to Jamaica, losing my children, having suicide attempts, ending up with alcoholic poisoning, having been in detox, having D TS. They're fun.

Watch them walking around in the wall wherever they are

and hearing beautiful music when there's no nothing where it's coming from. Auditory hallucinations.

I won't go into my life down and bought him a Lincoln Rd. on Miami Beach because it was.

It was the dark night of the soul.

Humiliation, the degradation, the despair,

the loss of my femininity, the loss of my humanity,

the loss of everything of value in my life. And I don't even have any words to to describe to you

the agony I felt

knowing

that I'm there because I can't stop drinking.

Because there's no solution for me. Because if I stop drinking then I'm going to go mad. Because alcohol is what stopped me from going mad in the 1st place. So I'm between a rock and a hard place and there's nothing else for me to do but drink myself to death. That's it, That's the one. There's no other solution for me.

And my old dance came

through this wonderful

God. And some coincidences, you know, we see any coincidences, guys, we are staying anonymous.

And I went back to Canada

and couldn't stop drinking. Got married again. No, I love getting married.

I just don't have any follow through,

you know? I love the Ding a Ling a Ling,

the magic.

He thinks I'm exciting

till I try and kill him.

Not my fault.

I

and there was a wonderful psychiatrist called Doctor Milliken

in Edmonton

and he treated me for four years. He treated me as a manic depressive

and he treated me on lithium.

Lithium and another thing called, I can't remember what it was, but not at all Hunt and I love being institutionalised. You know, they called me a retread,

you know, because Alcoholics of my type,

that's eventually where we end up.

We end up in the asylums, the psychiatric wards,

and I love being in there because I get oblivion compliments to the government and I get all the Yum yums, the lithium delivery on the Valium, the Yum Yum, Yum, Yum.

One day

I went down there drunk

to visit my psychiatrist.

And gave him some. I wouldn't even tell you. It's too embarrassing to think I was that crazy.

I gave him some story about I was buying the hospital

and if he ever needed help to come to me. No matter,

he had missed me and classified me on the spot and

and he began to get an idea of my true diagnosis.

And the last time I was taken in there, I was taken by the police. And I won't get into it as a long police report. I don't know how much you can trust that.

They found me under A5 car pileup

and they had to get the jaws of death to get me up. But of course, I'm so drunk. I don't want nothing happens to me. I remember coming too in in the emergency room at the hospital and I'll look under the curtain and I see police feet. Now I know police feet. I can spot police feet.

So I crawl alone and I get old

and I hit the road.

I don't remember any of this, but apparently I got a taxi driver. I told him my husband had just been killed. That's on the police report.

He took me for a bottle of whiskey because I was very nervous

and I was sitting drinking it when the police came to re arrest me

and they immediately took me who admitted me one more time.

And that's when it all came together for me.

Because when I was in that time

he said to me, you're a chronic alcoholic.

You certainly have some other things wrong with you.

You have an abnormal personality,

you know, you certainly suffer from depression, he says. But you are primarily a chronic alcoholic, he said. Now we'll keep admitting you here, I will keep. But one day you're either going to get wet brain.

Are you going to kill somebody

if you don't go to a A?

No. They used to bring a A meetings into the institution, but I never heard anything because I was so full of drugs. But the A A members told me later that they said to me, do you have hope?

And I used to say to them, I have no hope and I had no hope. I had no hope. I was hopeless.

I knew that I was going to go in and out that sideboard on that institution for the rest of my life.

And what happened is one night I was a,

I've been to court, I've done all of that. And the judge called me a tragic social circumstance.

And I was a tragic social circumstance until I came to you

one night. I was drinking myself sober. Has anybody ever been there?

What a nightmare

drinking myself sober

and I picked up the phone in a fond A

and a man called Stan Kim who had 28 years sobriety. He was a Metie, which means he is Native American French,

and he was a very spiritual man. And he came to me at 3:00 in the morning and he told me his story. And for the first time in my life, here's me at 40 years old, coming from Glasgow, Scotland, listen to an Aboriginal French talk about the things that I had been thinking and feeling all my life.

I got something that for the first time in my life

I never knew was available to me and it was called identification.

I got identification and I got understanding

and he said tell me a bit about you, Marie. And I told him and he said, I think you're one of us.

I think you're one of us.

I mean as well share it, because I always do. Because he made me laugh,

I said to him, Stan, I know I'm an alcoholic, but I'm also nuts. I have this psychiatric report that says I'm nuts. He says, Marie, the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous is like 12 adjustable wrenches. They fit any nut that comes through the door.

He made me laugh

and I got into a A,

I got into a A

and I remember

at my first meeting,

umm, seeing that on the wall,

we admitted we were called this over alcohol. You see, I never had the verbiage, I never had the language to explain to you that first step

and to see it written

had a profound effect on me,

and it hugged me. Want to stay here

because all I have to do is admit something that's been destroying me and I thought nobody could ever understand. So when Stan said to me, Mary, do you admit your policy over alcohol? Yes, I do. Do you also admit your life's unmanageable when you're drinking and when you're not drinking? Yes, I do. Yes, I do,

he said. Well,

get yourself a sponsor.

I had

my greatest, apart from Bill Bob in the ratings. My greatest teacher,

the one that has struck my soul most profoundly about this illness of alcoholism, about the illness of alcoholism, is Clancy.

Somebody gave me way back in the day, Clancy said something. He said

if your problem is alcohol, you're not an alcoholic. And conversely, if you're an alcoholic, your problem is not and cannot be alcohol. Because if your problem is alcohol, you put the plug in the jug and everything would be beautiful. But if you're suffering what I'm suffering from, then your problem is alcoholism.

And that is, I'm opened it up for me that all of this stuff I had gone through all my life

could be fixed by working through these 12 steps.

Step two, came to believe there are power greater than myself could restore me to sanity.

When I got into AA in Edmonton it was a tough old crowd I got into. God gives you what you need

and when I got in they said to me

90 meetings and 90 days. And if you don't like what you hear, we'll gladly refund you your misery. Get a big book, get a sponsor, get active.

You can't talk for a year

because you don't know nothing.

Just sit and listen,

resigned from the debating society.

Seek help,

don't keep anything to yourself.

I remembered I was sitting in a meeting about six months sober and I heard something that I thought could

possibly have another slant put to it. And I said excuse me, I think. And this old timer said shut up.

Who told you to think?

Look, we're thinking, God, you

try saying that to somebody today.

So

it says here, if when you honestly want to, you find you cannot quit entirely or if when drinking, you have little control over the amount you take, you're probably alcoholic,

Probably alcoholic. You know, in my search for a solution to this thing before I found a A, I had picked up a book by a man called Jelly Neck. I don't know if you've ever heard about him, Jelly Neck. And he talks about the Jelly Neck arc of recovery and how when people get really, really down and somebody goes and they get some knowledge about why they drink, then they'll start on the upswing.

I could never make that upswing. I don't know what happened,

but what you're giving me here,

what you're beginning to give me here, is answering my innermost problems. Because you see, I lack power.

And it tells me in here that lack of power is my dilemma.

I can't get power from alcohol anymore because it's not working for me.

And how am I going to talks in here about we're going to have to talk about God.

Who am I going to?

I was born Roman Catholic

into a good Roman Catholic family.

My father was a Franciscan monk. He left the monastery for some theological debate. My mother was president of the Union of Catholic Mothers.

I didn't believe in God. I don't know. From age 10, I had a hard time with God. I had my own funny, mystical thinking about everything. I remember when I was at school, they used to comment way back in the day when I when I was young at school, they used to come and give us vaccinations

for various diseases that were going around at the time. And they wanted to to give me in my left arm. They wanted to give me a vaccination. I said to them, you can't vaccinate me there because that's where my soul is,

he said. Just always not in your arm. I said, yes, it is. So they brought the priest

and the priest said to me, you're soul is not in your arm. I said where is it? He says I don't know, but it's not in your arm. I said, well, you don't know either.

I don't know when I began growing away from God

on this great mystical sea that used to be my mind

roaring away from God

when I used to go to island every year

and and Droheda where my family live. Some in my family

there's a beautiful old cathedral

and inside that cathedral they have the head of a martyr, St. He was martyred 300 years ago. His name is Saint Oliver Plunkett and all they have is his head. It was burnt by the English, but so it's a blackened head, but he still has teeth.

That fascinated me.

You know, in my country, teeth are a rare commodity, you know,

and my family used to sit me down in the front row

to look at this poor martyred St. that has sacrificed his life for God and for what he believed in and for which I had no reverence for.

And my family used to say to me, now I want you to sit down and study

Saint Oliver Plunkett

because he really loved God.

And I'm sitting thinking

if he really loved God and that's what happened to him. I want something more than that. Thank you very much.

But you know, they told me that I'll come to, I'll come to and I'll come to believe that you come, you come to and you come to believe some is keeping me sober. What is it? I don't have any idea what it is.

I was reading William James one day, The Varieties of Religious Experience, because I that's what I used to do. I read everything because I couldn't sleep.

And in there William James had said that a doctor told him once that the the radical cure for dipsomania is religion mania.

And I believe that was probably Carl Jung who told him that. Because Jung wrote a letter in 1948 talking about having a 2 hour discussion with William James in 19109 when he came to Clark University. And they said what they discuss, what they discussed was religious experiences.

And I thought religion mania.

Well, it tells me it's not a religion, but it's certainly spiritual.

So I went about finding a God of my understanding,

and what I began to see and believe

is that what was keeping all of you sober?

What was giving you the ability to communicate with me on a soul level about the soul disease that had destroyed my life

that had just I wasn't even sober when my two, when my parents died,

they never knew if I drew a sober breath. I wasn't even there to go and comfort my one little brother.

I wasn't there for my children.

How am I gonna live with that

without being unconscious?

The only way I'm going to live with that is who can enter this power

that's going to give me the ability to do everything I'm asked to do. And walking through the rest of the steps,

because my life had been just

it, it, it, it looked like a wasteland after the locusts have come through.

That was the image I had. Who am I going to fix this?

But what I had and what I believe was God-given without me even no one was. I had a desire

through agony. Despair

had grown a desire within me.

I believe that it is the complete and utter despair and agony,

the Terra bewilderment, frustration and despair that is act of alcoholism, that is chronic alcoholism,

that if we're lucky we get this desire.

But you can't just get it from anywhere. There's no spiritual Viagra.

Last year July

in Holland, a 44 year old man

alcoholic, was granted euthanasia by the Dutch government.

He passed all of their criteria

for unbearable suffering

with no hope of getting better. He was euthanized as an alcoholic.

I think to myself,

would I have taken that option if I'd never heard about Alcoholics Anonymous?

And on the other hand, I think to myself, how I wish that that poor man who apparently had gone to 21 treatment centres, you can look it up on, you can Google it. Alcoholic, euthanized and had eight years of help.

Just phoned. Life too much. And maybe there is a place beyond which we go without

the power that we find here.

Maybe there is a place beyond which we go where we can never come back again. Because when the pain of being sober is greater than the pain of being drunk,

then we will drink again.

But in order to keep the level of pain down, we have to do the steps until it goes, until we do the 6th and 7th to 4th and 5th, until we get all that stuff out.

But I will never understand God

because God is anything the intellect is not.

If I was to understand God, God wouldn't be greater than me.

But I do come. I came to believe that a power greater than myself could restore me society.

You see, that had much more meaning for me than just the insanity of the alcohol

drinking. The alcohol

that that I considered myself insane before I drank and a lot of people thought

that I was not writing ahead

because they told me you're not right in the head.

On page 49 it talks about

where are contentions true? That we didn't need a universe. We believe this universe needs no God to explain it. Where our contentions true, it would follow that life originated out of nothing, means nothing and proceeds nowhere.

That concept of nothingness,

which to me is a lack of God, is how I had my first panic attack and I've never told this from the podium.

I was sitting listening

to something,

and certainly I got an idea,

and into my head came the idea that when I die, because I was obsessed with death,

I'm going to be in a state of nothingness, conscious for eternity,

a state of nothingness in consciousness for eternity.

That was a thought I had at 13

and it created great panic in me.

And who can you go and talk about that to?

I certainly didn't.

I believe know. It tells me in this book that word is there. Nothingness. Oh my God. So if I believe and do this, then then I'll never feel that way. My madness, my madness and my craziness. I bought all that will go away

and it did

everything that's told me and here has come true.

I could not believe. I mean, this was, this was such a gift to me, such a gift when I read this book

to me, Step 2 is the moment between trapezius.

You know that moment between trapezius? There's two trapezes and he lets go of one and he's going to catch the other one.

You can come in and do the first step,

but then you got it going. You got to catch onto the 2nd

and you got to go to the third and you got to go to the 4th.

There's some people today.

Well, let me just talk about me

my my favorite subject.

That's why I was married four times but have no idea about communal sex

'cause I was always thinking about myself.

I don't know what it is to share.

I got married and my husband had a massive stroke and he was long time in in care and then he was in a behavioral centre. He has severe global aphasia, which meant he could not talk, he couldn't understand the spoken word.

The psychiatrists in the hospital, he was in the behavioral unit. They called me down and they said, Mary, we know that Alcoholics think differently, that they are extremely sensitive, that they have a different perception of the world than we do. And we were wondering if you would take some little psychiatric tests so that we could get some understanding of the alcoholic mind

and how it works.

I met your sober.

I'm well

bring it on,

bring it on.

So they give me 3 little books with yes no answers

that was placed to write all this stuff in and very small books and I give them back.

He said to me. OK well when we have the results we'll let you know. This will be very helpful.

So the next day I got a call asking me to come down.

I went into the room and there's three psychiatrists sitting behind a desk

with a tape recorder

and as soon as I walk in and they tell me to sit down,

their first question to me was,

so who's looking after, you know?

I said my sponsor,

he said to me, So what medication are you on? I said I haven't been on medication since I got sober the 10th of August 1984. They said, well according to these results, you should be.

So my advice, don't take any psychiatric tests.

The other great thing that you know, and we agnostics

reagnostics is a great promise about what this power we will find in the second step can do for us. It talks about the bedevilments, you know, having trouble with personal relationships, couldn't control your emotional nature, praise and misery and depression. All of that feeling a usefulness, feeling a fear, unhappy, couldn't be a help to other people,

it says in here. When we saw others solve their problems by simple reliance upon the spirit of the universe,

we had to stop doubting the power of God. Our ideas didn't work, but the God idea did.

As desperate as I was,

this was mana from heaven for me

because only somebody who was suffering from what I was suffering from

could write this stuff because he knew what I needed to live. If I wasn't a drink, I never knew any of this stuff would help me.

I've been told I'm hopeless. I've been told I'm going to be a retreat in psychiatric care for the rest of my life. I'm told I'm a chronic alcoholic

with an abnormal personality.

The only thing that keeps me together if I'm not drinking is about 5 medications and that's not for long either until I have to look for another drink. This is alcoholism.

The problem of the alcoholic centres in the mind, not the body. The mind is not the brain.

You can put the brain under a stethoscope and look at it. You can't put the mind under the brain.

The ancient people used to say that the mind was soul,

so it's a problem with the alcoholic centers and the mind centers in my soul.

And yes, I do need soul surgery. I do need a sole solution,

but how do you ever think that if you get back to when you think about what drinking used to do for you, you don't think about soul surgery, you don't think about the solution is God. You don't think about the solution is, you know, making amends, clearing up, admitting your your wrongs to people.

The second step is an amazing step,

but how many times when I've been working with it, some of the women I'll work with thank and I thank God for them because they helped me. They helped me so much,

even when I don't feel like picking up the phone. I pick up the phone because I need them more than they need me.

For some of the younger ones I've had who keep going out, when I eventually get to work with them, I realize that they don't have a firm grip on step one.

So the Step 2 has never ever given them what it gave me. Who did us all? Who got the base? The bedrock with that is step one.

It doesn't matter if you're

pole is overstock other stuff,

I can only help you and Alcoholics Anonymous if you're powerless over alcohol. That is the only solution I have. I have a solution to the embodiment of a solution that was destroying your life.

When Carl Jung said to

wrote to Bill Wilson that in his opinion, the formula for the alcoholic in Latin

is Spiritus contraspiritum,

that is spirit against spirit,

we suffer from a spiritual illness,

which is body, mind, spirit, soul,

mind, all-encompassing, nothing to do with what we're drinking.

Once that's gone, once that's gone, once we stop drinking, then we come face to face with the nature of the problem, which is a lack of God, a lack of morals. Like Doctor Silkwith said when he said they thought for a while that Alcoholics needed some kind of a moral psychology, but they didn't know how to apply it.

A lack of living skill.

We lack so much.

And if you be like me, my natural habitat is La La land.

And I'm a liar, you know, I came from such a good family

and I was born with some kind of a criminal mindset.

I don't know why

I was not born with good moral values, so it was very easy to go off on the road I went.

So it comes down to this, doesn't it?

When we became alcohol, it's crushed by a self-imposed, self-imposed crisis we could not postpone or evade. We had to fearlessly face a proposition that either God is everything or else he is nothing. God either is or he isn't. What is your choice to be?

What is your choice to be? Do you want to come here and live the life that we have today?

My life today is beyond my wildest dreams

simply because somebody took the time who suffered from what I was suffering from called alcoholism, and showed me that there was a way to live

and I had been living a life without faith.

And that because I was so inadequate, I needed something to believe in. And because I had so many mental problems, I needed something that I truly believed in and that you would give me the solution to all of that. Not just my drinking, but to my insanity.