Big Book Walking

I was at a one year medallion the other day for my best friend Jon. He was at my very first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous and had three years at the time. I spoke to him at my second meeting asking him where the "meeting after the meeting" was being held and he told me what that actually meant. Since that first piece of info Jon would pass on to me his experience, strength and hope and to this day I have passed it on to others. He passed on to me what those who came before him passed on to him and I feel it has made me a better member of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Jon's first year medallion was his third one and, Higher Power willing, will be his last. He no longer lives in the area where I sobered up having moved to a different city. As I heard people talk about Jon and his journey I remembered reading about how Bill Wilson (co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous) had written a letter to someone who was having a hard time staying sober, telling that person that every person has a different journey some harder than others. One attendee at the medallion called Jon a Big Book Walking. Which got me to thinking that without the Big Book and Alcoholics Anonymous I would be a dead man walking. For that is what I felt like walking into that first meeting where I met Jon (and many others who are good friends of mine to this day). Alcohol and drugs had eaten away at my very soul and by the time I entered the rooms I was just existing rather than living.

My journey began at that meeting and I would soon get myself a home group, a sponsor and begin working the steps and doing service work. I began service work before I even got to Step 12 by helping set up chairs, sharing how I was staying sober to people with less time than me, etc. Within six months I completed the Steps and had become right with my Higher Power, myself and my fellow humans. I know today that I have a lot of relapses in me but I'm pretty sure I don't have another recovery in me so I must ensure I work on my spirituality every day for that daily reprieve.

Some AAers say we may be the only Big Book someone reads. I say better a Big Book walking than a dead man walking.
Dave the Dude

Getting Right With The Big Three

Alcoholism is a peculiar disease. It’s the only disease that tells you don’t have it and that’s why it’s so, “cunning, baffling and powerful” (Alcoholics Anonymous, 1939). The reason it’s so powerful is that it acts as an artificial filler of that hole in an Alcoholic’s soul. I drank for 19 years and for 15 of those years alcohol did for me what I could not do for myself.

Alcohol gave me a new freedom and a new happiness. Alcohol allowed me to not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. Alcohol allowed me to comprehend the word serenity. Alcohol allowed me to know peace. No matter how far down the scale we I had gone, alcohol allowed me to see how my experience could benefit others. With alcohol those feelings of uselessness and self-pity disappeared. I lost interest in selfish things and gained interest in my fellows. Self-seeking slipped away. With alcohol my whole attitude and outlook on life changed. Fear of people and economic insecurity left me.  With alcohol I intuitively knew how to handle situations which used to baffle me.

That’s why it was so hard to give up alcohol. It was my solution to life’s problems. A false solution which eventually turned against me but the only solution I had. Once I started drinking I felt right with myself and the world. Then it started to cause problems and I was told to give it up. Once I gave it up there was a vacuum and nature abhors a vacuum. At my first treatment centre I was told to replace alcohol with a hobby. I decided to buy a model train, set it up and design a whole town. Once I completed setting it up I got drunk and watched the train go around and around and around. You see, a hobby could not replace the role that alcohol had played in my life. It could not fill that hole in my soul nor give me that ease and comfort I had sought my whole life.

It wasn’t until I suffered enough emotional and spiritual pain that I was able to give up the idea that alcohol was my solution and be willing to find a different one. I found that solution through the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. I recently heard a speaker say that the steps don’t work whether you need them or want them – they only work if you do them. The saying is - it works if you work it not it works if you want/need it. I had to devote as much energy into working those 12 Steps as I put into my addiction. My addiction became my whole life and for recovery to work it had to become my whole life.

Steps One through Three made me right with my Higher Power. Steps Four through Seven made me right with myself and Steps Eight and Nine made me right with my fellows. The rest of the steps I use to maintain my recovery and for personal growth. Without growth I remain stagnant and that leads to stinking thinking. All of these Steps are crucial. The action begins in Step Four. In my experience, I see a lot of people who don’t want to do the crucial house-keeping Steps. The same speaker I previously mentioned used a great metaphor that makes the reasoning for the house-keeping Steps crystal clear. If I ask a little kid to clean his room he probably would do a half-ass job. However, if I tell the same kid that if he throws out all of his old stuff I’ll get him new stuff he’ll probably have the job done in no time flat. When doing Steps Four through Nine I had to get rid of my old stuff that was weighing me down. In exchange I started receiving a lot better stuff:

We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity. We will know peace. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others. The feelings of uselessness and self-pity will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self-seeking will slip away. Our whole attitude and outlook on life will change. Fear of people and economic insecurity will leave us. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves. (Alcoholics Anonymous, 1939).

Today I have a true solution that won’t turn on me if I continue to work at it. I must work at it in all aspects of my life. It’s easy to work the principles of the Steps for an hour at a meeting amongst fellow alcoholics but it’s much more of a challenge to work them once I leave that meeting. But work them I must or I risk faltering and returning to the life I once led. A life where I couldn’t live without drinking nor live while drinking. That type of life I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy

Dave the Dude

Is it the end of the Human Race?

I was on my daily commute to work today, Eastbound on Highway 401. As is common, especially during summer, there was construction going on. At one juncture the lanes were reduced to just one and the majority of drivers, myself included, got over to the open lane in an orderly fashion. However, there’s always the asshole, self-centred, motorists who think they are above everyone who rush to the very end of the closed lane and try to squeeze into the open lane at the last second. It’s these putzes who cause traffic jams galore. So as this was happening I began my usual diatribe (to myself and my Higher Power) about the end of human race when all of the sudden the transport truck in front of me began to weave in between the closing lane and the lane that was open. My diatribe stopped mid-sentence as I tried to figure out what the hell he was trying to do. I thought he’d gone insane. Suddenly, I realized he was blocking the ignorant drivers who were trying to rush to the end of the closed lane. Eventually he got his truck fully into the closing lane and I was able to move forward with a huge smile on my face. I guess there is hope for humanity yet.

Dave the Dude

Immediate Gratification is Part of My Disease

They say that you should go with your first instinct when taking a multiple-choice test. Well, life isn’t multiple-choice and you need to give it some thought. I used to act on my first thought and would constantly get into trouble. Today I wait for that second thought to come and act on that instead. I am a person in need of immediate gratification. When I was actively drinking I drank for the effect. I drank as much as I could as fast as I could to get that buzz as soon as possible. I have the same need for immediate gratification when it comes to my feelings. I feel angry and my first instinct is to blow up and starting yelling. I tried this in sobriety for my first few years and never got the desired outcome I was looking for. Yet I tried it over and over again. I did the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. That is what I did when I drank. I woke up every day and said today I’m only going to drink a few and that was never the case. Yet I continued to try.

I began self-medicating regularly through alcohol and drugs at the age of 16. As a result I was unable to learn from my mistakes and grow emotionally. Sobering up at the age of 35 I handled everything the way that 16-year-old would. This did not cause too many problems in my first year of recovery as I things were going smoothly and I was on the “pink cloud” of sobriety. However, in my second year of recovery I entered into a relationship. That relationship brought a whole new set of emotions and issues with it. My 16-year-old self had a hell of a hard time dealing with it. My girlfriend didn’t start drinking alcoholically until her early 30s so she was acting as a 30-year-old when we argued (most of the time). She could not understand my immature handling of our disagreements and other challenges our relationship brought.

It took a few years for me to change and I had to work a lot to change my behaviours and my thinking when it came to reacting in a healthy manner to my emotions. Again I wanted immediate gratification in my recovery but it doesn’t work that way. I get one day of sobriety in one day, not a year. The alcoholic/addict in me wants immediate gratification – translation: immediate recovery. But it doesn’t work that way. I learned that I had to be (and continue to be) ever vigilant when working on changing my behaviours and gaining some serenity in my life. I can lose that serenity easily. My serenity and sobriety comes to me through a, “daily reprieve based on my spiritual maintenance” (Alcoholics Anonymous, 1939).

Dave the Dude

Happy 80th Birthday Alcoholics Anonymous

Alcoholics Anonymous has been called the greatest spiritual movement of the 20^th Century. Today it turned 80-years-old. On June 10, 1935 a stock speculator and long-time suffering alcoholic named Bill Wilson found himself in Akron, Ohio. Bill had been struggling with alcoholism for years. The term alcoholism wasn’t even used back then as this addiction was not thought of as a disease. Instead people who could not stop drinking were thought to be of an immoral nature with a lack of will power. It wasn’t until Bill found himself in Towns Hospital under the care of Dr. William Silkworth that he first heard his malady described as a disease. Silkworth had been treating alcoholics for decades and came to the conclusion that certain people had a physical reaction, call it an allergy, when they took a drink. Once a drink was taken that individual could not stop drinking under their own will power. He would drink until he passed out, was hand-cuffed, ran out of money, etc. That would start Bill’s journey in seeking out a way to put this, “hopeless condition of mind and body” (Alcoholics Anonymous, 1939) into remission.

Bill having been unable to remain sober through self-knowledge alone would run into an old friend of his named Ebby Thatcher. Ebby had been a long-time drinking partner of Bill’s but had found a way to remain sober. One night Ebby showed up to Bill’s house and upon declining a drink began to tell Bill how he had found God through an organization called The Oxford Group. Bill was skeptical of the whole “God” thing until Ebby told Bill to find a God (Higher Power if you will) of his own understanding. During Bill’s last stint at Towns Hospital he had a spiritual awakening that allowed him to have the obsession of alcohol removed from him. Bill learned that he would have to maintain a type of “spiritual maintenance” (Alcoholics Anonymous, 1939), by helping others suffering from the same malady, to keep his sobriety. Bill began to try to help those he deemed doomed to a life of alcoholism by preaching to them about his spiritual awakening. Although he didn’t get anyone sober he found he remained sober. Bill would later come to realize that preaching to people wasn’t the way to share. He found that if he told about his experience with alcohol and how it almost killed him that sufferers of the disease would listen. This was the catalyst of the story telling feature of AA. Telling other alcoholics our experience, strength and hope would become integral to remaining sober. Through our experience we would gain strength and through our strength we would gain hope.

So there is Bill in 1935 in Akron, Ohio. Having gained back the trust of a few businessmen he was down there doing a deal. The deal fell apart and Bill found himself craving a drink. He realized he had to talk to another drunk. After a series of phone calls asking for a drunk to talk to he was directed to the home of Dr. Bob Smith.

Dr. Bob was a notorious drunk in the area and a member of the Oxford Group. He had tried everything to get sober and only agreed to talk to Bill to placate his wife. He told his wife Anne that he would give Bill 20 minutes at most. When Bill was introduced to Dr. Bob he noticed Bob shaking badly and suggested Bob have a drink. This came as quite the surprise to Bob. Bill proceeded not to preach to Dr. Bob but too relate to him his story. A meeting that was to last 20 minutes stretched on into the night. Bill would remain in Akron, staying at Dr. Bob and Anne Smith’s house, for months. Bill and Dr. Bob began to work on a strategy to help the still suffering alcoholic. Bob would have one relapse taking his last drink on June 10 thus setting the official date of the forming of Alcoholics Anonymous.

This movement did not have a name until the book Alcoholics Anonymous was published in 1939. Today this book is commonly referred to as the Big Book. The Big Book was a basic text outlining how the first 100 members of Alcoholics Anonymous became sober. The Fellowship of AA would take six steps from the Oxford Group and turn them into 12. Dr. Bob simplified these steps into three lines:

Trust God

Clean House

Help Others

Today Alcoholics Anonymous has a membership numbering in the millions. The story is much more detailed and whole books have been written about it.

I am grateful to Alcoholics Anonymous for saving my life. I came into the rooms of AA in a state of, “pitiful, incomprehensible, demoralization” (Alcoholics Anonymous, 1939) not wanting to live while drinking but not being able to live without it. I left my first AA meeting with a spark of hope that there was a better life to be had. By following in the footsteps of Bill and Bob, and those who came after, I have found that life, but for the grace of God.

Dave the Dude

Higher Power: Star Trek Inspiration

I've got a great analogy for how we all are interconnected through our Higher Power. It's like we're the Borg Collective. Our connection to one another is the Higher Power thus creating a collective of love and tolerance. 

Recovery - Resistance is Futile

Lawsuits: Hindrance or Helpful to Recovery

A recent court ruling in the Province of Quebec awarded $15 billion to Quebec smokers who contracted diseases due to their tobacco use. I don’t begrudge anyone money that would help them and/or their families deal with a devastating disease. However, I would question the merits such lawsuits have on helping someone recover from an addiction.

A huge part of addiction recovery has to do with taking responsibility for treating one’s disease and for the actions one carried out in the midst of the addiction. I’m not saying we are responsible for contracting the disease of addiction but we are responsible for dealing with the affliction no matter how we contracted it.

Denial was a huge part in keeping me active in my alcohol and drug addictions. Part of that denial was blaming others for my use. I would blame my work, my family, my intimate relationships (or lack of them), etc. This blame allowed me to stay in the role of victim. By remaining a victim I was able to run roughshod over anyone or anything that got in the way of my self-medicating without any concern for recourse. It was always someone or something else’s fault. It wasn’t until I suffered grave emotional and spiritual pain that I was able to lift the veil of denial and realize that I was the common denominator in all of my problems whether related to my addiction or otherwise.

Every time I hear about lawsuits against tobacco companies, liquor/beer companies or casinos I cringe as I know the people involved are not going to recover from their disease via this route. Suing someone is another form of blaming and it will not work. The beer/liquor companies did not pour the booze down my mouth – I did. Sure they advertised but 90 per cent of the population who saw those ads did not become alcoholics.

If someone has diabetes and continues to eat chocolate bars regardless of his condition is it fair to blame the chocolate bar manufacturer? When it comes to addictions 99 per cent of us who suffer from one were seeing negative consequences (warning signs) long before our lives became unmanageable. Hell, I was being told by family and friends that I had an issue long before I surrendered to recovery.

I sobered up from drugs and alcohol on January 7, 2015 but it was not until a little over two years ago that I quit cigarettes. I’m a pretty smart guy and knew that smoking was bad for me. I knew smoking was unhealthy when I was a little kid yet I chose to pick up that first cigarette and continued to smoke knowing that there was help out to stop. I chose to smoke. I chose to ignore help when it was offered. After finding out there was help for me to end my drinking/drugging I chose to continue on until the pain became too great and I hit my own rock bottom. If I had decided to blame someone and sue them rather than get help I might have gotten a lot of money but my addiction would be still be there and I would have ended up losing the money in maintaining that addiction anyways.

Dave the Dude