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Sober Talk SA - Father Tom · Sober Talk SA

• 0:00
  Welcome to Sober Talk. I'm Dennis and I'm an alcoholic.
• 0:04
  Soap dear. Thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous.
• 0:08
  If you or anyone you know is struggling with alcohol, please
• 0:11
  call Alcoholics Anonymous on 1300 double 22222.
• 0:17
  I'll visit their website ata.org dot AU.
• 0:24
  I'll just run through the preamble of Alcoholics
• 0:27
  Anonymous. Alcoholics Anonymous is a
• 0:29
  fellowship of people who share the experience, strengthened
• 0:33
  hope with each other that they may solve their common problems
• 0:37
  and help with us to recover from alcoholism.
• 0:40
  The only requirement for membership is the desire to stop
• 0:43
  drinking and no dues of fees. Fair membership.
• 0:46
  We are self supporting through our own contributions.
• 0:50
  He is not alive with any sect, denomination, politics,
• 0:54
  organization or institution, does not wish to engage in any
• 0:58
  controversy, neither endorses or oppose any causes.
• 1:03
  Our primary purpose is to stay sober and help other Alcoholics
• 1:07
  are chief sobriety. That works, he said.
• 1:10
  And with that, I would like to introduce by the Toms that guest
• 1:13
  speakers tonight. Goodness.
• 1:21
  And I, I think I have 3 hours of presentation and a PowerPoint.
• 1:29
  I'm, I'm very glad to be here. Thanks for coming.
• 1:36
  I, I hope I say something that's helpful.
• 1:39
  And, and if it's not, you get to practice tolerance and patience,
• 1:43
  which are two things I do not like practicing.
• 1:45
  I assure you, an 11th step meeting and meditation meeting.
• 1:54
  Who I, I'm pretty much a high school teacher.
• 2:01
  That's, that was going to be my profession in my career forever
• 2:05
  and ever. And I'm a member of the Jesuit
• 2:08
  community and we're, a lot of us are teachers.
• 2:11
  I think there's a community in Melbourne.
• 2:13
  I, I haven't met any of the folks over there yet, but I, I
• 2:16
  know in the States we have some universities and some high
• 2:20
  schools and I went to a Jesuit high school in San Jose and I
• 2:25
  really like my teachers. They were bright and interesting
• 2:28
  and, and paid attention to me. And a lot of, a lot of other
• 2:30
  people were. And so I wanted the kind of grow
• 2:34
  up and join them. That was my, my, I was, it was
• 2:37
  an attraction, not a promotion, that's for sure.
• 2:41
  And I've been in the order about 6060 years.
• 2:44
  You'd think I'd be a better person by now, but they sure
• 2:47
  throw us into prayer and meditation right away.
• 2:49
  It was astonishing. I was 18 years old and I knew
• 2:53
  everything. I'd been drunk, I'd been in
• 2:55
  love. What more is there?
• 2:56
  I'm 18 and I entered this community.
• 3:01
  There were like 30 in my class and we it, we entered the
• 3:06
  monastery and it was like living in 14109.
• 3:12
  It was electricity was barely a rumor.
• 3:15
  I mean, it was so long ago and bells would ring all day long.
• 3:18
  And, and the first was at 5:00 AM and at 5:30, you were to be
• 3:23
  washed and shaved and showered and at your desk.
• 3:27
  And they'd ring another bell and you 15 minutes of meditation,
• 3:33
  stand up, standing, kneeling, standing, sitting, now kneeling,
• 3:38
  standing, sitting, every 15 minutes they'd ring another
• 3:42
  bell. And then they'd ring another
• 3:44
  bell. And you went to the, the Chapel
• 3:46
  for Mass. So, and, and you had books.
• 3:48
  And I mean, it's, it's like, how do you learn to swim?
• 3:51
  You know, you jump in the pool, the shallow end, you jump in the
• 3:55
  shallow end. And, and then you learn things
• 3:58
  and it, you learn by doing. And years later, I, I remember
• 4:04
  asking why, you know, the kneeling, the standing, the
• 4:08
  sitting bells ringing every 15 minutes.
• 4:11
  And the response was to keep you awake, which seems so practical.
• 4:16
  And it never eyes a deep significance is just to keep you
• 4:19
  awake. So I've been off and on with
• 4:23
  prayer and meditation for a very, very long time.
• 4:27
  And alcoholism can flourish in situations like that.
• 4:30
  I want you to know and, and when the bottle takes over and when
• 4:36
  the day starts revolving around the bottle, you know you're very
• 4:40
  out of balance. But I got out of the monastery
• 4:42
  and went to school and spent time in college and did a
• 4:45
  million things and then began teaching myself 1971 to 74 in
• 4:53
  Los Angeles. And I come into recovery because
• 4:59
  I'm intervened on and I put in treatment and I'm introduced to
• 5:04
  Alcoholics Anonymous. And during those years before I
• 5:10
  got sober, a lot of my spiritual practice was shame,
• 5:16
  embarrassment, frenzy, secrets. Don't tell anyone, keep it
• 5:20
  hidden. Don't talk, don't talk.
• 5:26
  One of the men I've loved in in the recovery is a physician much
• 5:32
  older than me. His name was Doctor Gil Ayotte.
• 5:34
  He's been dead now 10 plus years.
• 5:37
  He was from French Canada and he grew up on the other side of the
• 5:42
  American border during prohibition in the states.
• 5:45
  And all the Americans would go to Canada to buy booze or get
• 5:48
  drunk or get in fights. So he, he went through medical
• 5:53
  school and moved to San Francisco, began his medical
• 5:56
  practice and his alcoholism came along with him and he, he gets
• 6:01
  sober early 1960s, something like that.
• 6:06
  And then he spends years and years and years helping people
• 6:12
  get well. And he became a very, he was an
• 6:16
  old man when I met him and, and he was eloquent with a French
• 6:20
  accent, which is even more eloquent, you know, and he
• 6:27
  vision went, you know, hearing and eyes.
• 6:32
  So there were a couple of us who drove him around a lot the last
• 6:35
  few years. And I was one of his drivers
• 6:39
  like #7 on the list. But he was going to be giving a
• 6:42
  talk to medical people on alcoholism.
• 6:47
  Medical people are tough to talk to.
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  Like if you ever talk to a room full of doctors or nurses, it's
• 6:52
  a pretty intimidating bunch because they know everything,
• 6:56
  especially the nurses, and it's kind of like talking to church
• 7:01
  people. They know everything you know,
• 7:03
  and they're just waiting for you to say something stupid or
• 7:05
  wrong. So I drove him there and he gave
• 7:08
  a whole presentation. He talked about symptoms and he
• 7:12
  talked about progression, and he talked about blackouts and he
• 7:15
  talked about tolerance, all kinds of stuff for about half an
• 7:21
  hour, 40 minutes. And then he opened up for
• 7:23
  questions, and one of the people raised her hand and she said,
• 7:27
  doctor, you really think this is a disease which he'd been
• 7:31
  talking about for 40 minutes? But she had a question.
• 7:35
  And he said, yes, it's a disease, It gets worse and then
• 7:38
  it kills you. So it counts as a disease plus
• 7:41
  symptoms. And she said, well, doctor, if
• 7:44
  someone's showing early signs of the disease, can you sit them
• 7:51
  down and say, listen, you're showing early signs of the
• 7:56
  disease, knock it off, Silence. And he said, it's such a nice
• 8:06
  idea, but that doesn't work. And the reason it doesn't work
• 8:13
  is that alcoholism is a disease that has three distinct phases
• 8:18
  or three distinct stages. Stage 1 is the fun phase.
• 8:23
  This is when it's really, really fun.
• 8:27
  And if you're having fun, you're not going to stop.
• 8:30
  I mean, I remember as a kid, drinking was wonderful.
• 8:33
  I felt smarter and alive and I could dance and I could talk to
• 8:37
  girls. It was, it was magical stuff.
• 8:40
  And I, I also love drinking and driving, which is a whole other
• 8:43
  series of psychosis. But the fun of drinking was a
• 8:48
  big thing for me as a high school kid.
• 8:52
  That's stage 1. Stage 2 is called fun plus
• 8:55
  problems. It's, it's still fun, but you
• 8:59
  start to have problems. You know, you get the
• 9:02
  unfortunate tattoo. You, you, you throw up on your
• 9:07
  date, you forget your dates there.
• 9:11
  I mean, all those things happen. You show up at work drunk.
• 9:16
  I mean, I, I remember, I, I never drank in the morning.
• 9:19
  And this is as a teacher now, I, I never drink in the morning,
• 9:21
  but I sure showed up very hungover sometimes.
• 9:25
  And more than once I showed up very unprepared because the
• 9:31
  evening gets away from you. Anyway, Fun, fun plus problems.
• 9:37
  Stage 3 alcoholism is just called problems.
• 9:42
  The good times are gone. Never again could we recapture
• 9:49
  the great moments of the past. But it's an addiction.
• 9:53
  I'm a normal person. If a normal person gets into
• 9:58
  some trouble with their drinking, they stop drinking or
• 10:00
  they change their pattern somehow.
• 10:04
  Alcoholics, we just get secret and sneaky.
• 10:08
  We hide. We first drunk, drunk.
• 10:11
  I never had a drunk driving thing in my life, but I drove
• 10:14
  drunk a lot. But you know, you, you, you
• 10:16
  it's, you're unlucky, you have bad luck.
• 10:18
  You get into trouble. You shouldn't have said that.
• 10:20
  You shouldn't have been there. All that stuff.
• 10:23
  And so my last part of drinking, I'm in Graduate School and I'm
• 10:31
  pretty sneaky. I had a drinking dream.
• 10:36
  Sigmund Freud writes about dreams.
• 10:40
  What's the title of his essay on the On the Interpretation of
• 10:44
  Dreams by Sigmund Freud? It's it's have it on your desk.
• 10:47
  People will think you're really smart and and Carl Jung writes
• 10:55
  about dreams and and there's others.
• 10:57
  Anyway, I was having drinking dreams and what, what does that
• 11:02
  mean? Because they're very scary.
• 11:05
  I remember I was 10 years sober and I had a dream so vivid I
• 11:10
  woke up knowing I'd lost 10 years and I live in a three
• 11:14
  story house. Walked downstairs, got a cup of
• 11:16
  coffee, walked back to my room, looked around.
• 11:19
  No broken glass, no vomit. I didn't go out last night.
• 11:23
  Whoa. So I called my sponsor.
• 11:29
  It takes a while to break in your sponsor.
• 11:36
  You, you don't want to give him too much information.
• 11:39
  You know, you got to play him and manipulate him.
• 11:43
  And so I'd, I and I wasn't. What did drinking dreams mean?
• 11:47
  Are they a prophecy that I'm going to drink?
• 11:50
  Is it, does that mean I have to work a more rigorous program?
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  I'm having drinking dreams. I have to write the big book out
• 11:57
  in longhand. I mean, what does this mean?
• 12:00
  So I asked him, what does it mean if a person in a different
• 12:06
  state is having drinking dreams? And he said, have you had the 1
• 12:14
  yet? And then he described this
• 12:16
  horrific dream. And I hadn't had that one yet.
• 12:19
  I was appalled by it. It's so disgusting.
• 12:22
  But then I had that one six months later.
• 12:23
  So, So here's here's what he said to me about drinking
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  dreams. Three things #1A drinking dream
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  reminds us that our drinking was a nightmare #2 drinking dreams
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  remind us of who we used to be. And #3 People who have drinking
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  dreams don't get drunk, you said.
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  Did you ever have one when you were drinking?
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  No, only sober people get them. It's very weird.
• 13:00
  So in the last couple years, the dream is I'm flying somewhere.
• 13:06
  I'm on planes a lot. Middle seat.
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  There are no empty seats. No one's looking at me.
• 13:12
  That's very important. Flight attendants not looking at
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  me. On the floor by my right foot.
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  I have a glass of white wine, not my drink there.
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  And I reach down and I pick it up and I take a mouthful and I
• 13:24
  put it down. I'm very sneaky and hidden and
• 13:29
  secretive and, and I do it a couple of times and I wake up
• 13:34
  feeling sneaky. And I wrote it down a little
• 13:38
  bit. I wanted to remember this part
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  of my disease is to hide and be ashamed and be secretive and no
• 13:49
  one can hear the whole story. And that's really important for
• 13:52
  me to remember. And I had fun for a long time
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  and then fun plus problems. And then it was just awful.
• 14:03
  And I was driving with my parents somewhere and I told
• 14:12
  them I was going to meetings. Not right away.
• 14:17
  I'd been sober a couple years. We had issues, me and my
• 14:20
  parents, and we're driving. I'm driving.
• 14:24
  My mom's in the car, my dad's in the back seat and my mom turns
• 14:28
  to me and with no warning, she said.
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  How bad was it? And I could have played what how
• 14:39
  bad was what mom? But I know what she was talking
• 14:42
  about because this is how we communicated in my family.
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  A subject could come up and then not be talked about for five
• 14:49
  years. Then it's back again on the so
• 14:51
  you had to be be attentive, be attentive.
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  So I by this time I had enough sobriety.
• 15:03
  I do not want to do a fifth step with my parents.
• 15:08
  There's a lot they do not need to know.
• 15:11
  So I'm driving and I simply told her well it was bad enough so
• 15:17
  that I never want to drink again.
• 15:21
  No comment, no comment at all. Few years pass, we're driving,
• 15:28
  I'm behind the wheel and my mom turned to me and she said, why
• 15:35
  didn't you come to us? I almost pulled the car into
• 15:44
  oncoming traffic. I was such an let's end the
• 15:47
  comedy right now because but how I have a by this time I had a
• 15:54
  perfect nylon program, so I'm not reacting to crazy.
• 15:57
  And I I paused, I breathed. And then I said to her neutral
• 16:03
  voice, not screaming, not accusing, what could you have
• 16:07
  done? And she said, I don't know.
• 16:13
  And I said exactly. I had to go somewhere where they
• 16:17
  knew what to do. And that was Alcoholics
• 16:20
  Anonymous. And that's the last time we ever
• 16:22
  discussed it. We aren't big on talking about
• 16:24
  things in my family. Oh, my goodness, One of the
• 16:31
  women I've loved, I mean, Gil, Gil was a splendid person.
• 16:38
  And we just lost another one of the great souls, woman named
• 16:42
  Peggy Zuk. And she was 97.
• 16:44
  She was my sponsor the last two years.
• 16:49
  Peggy got sober and over 50 years and was a mom and a
• 16:55
  housewife and a drunk. And every New Year's Eve we do a
• 17:02
  retreat for people in recovery at the Jesuit Retreat House in
• 17:06
  Los Altos, which is near San Jose, near San Francisco.
• 17:10
  And New Year's Eve itself, we have a meeting and we ask three
• 17:14
  different people to share experience, strength and hope.
• 17:18
  And Peggy shared, it's amazing how much information you can
• 17:23
  share in 20 minutes. And Peggy talked about leaving
• 17:28
  her hometown and coming to California, to the big school.
• 17:33
  And she was there and she was a country girl.
• 17:35
  And there's all these sophisticated city people at
• 17:38
  school. And there was a guy named Joe,
• 17:40
  and he really liked her. And she didn't like him that
• 17:43
  much. But they got married.
• 17:44
  That happens more than you'd think.
• 17:47
  And he introduced her to a sophisticated world.
• 17:52
  And she didn't like alcohol, but she's such she fell in love with
• 17:57
  the gin martini. It was the glass, It was the
• 18:02
  olive, It was the vermouth. It was shaken, not stirred.
• 18:05
  I mean, it was the whole preparation of the gin martini.
• 18:10
  And so she talked about that a little bit.
• 18:13
  And then she said, and then a few years passed and I found out
• 18:19
  I didn't need the olive. And then a few years passed and
• 18:25
  I found out I didn't need the vermouth.
• 18:29
  And then a few years passed and I found out I didn't need the
• 18:32
  glass. That's that's almost haiku, you
• 18:35
  know, it's just very clean. I asked Peggy once if she ever
• 18:41
  drank vodka, and she said only when I went to a A, because the
• 18:46
  theory is you can't smell vodka, but you can.
• 18:49
  You can smell vodka. Anyway, Peggy Z what a great
• 18:52
  person. And she did vast amounts of work
• 18:57
  with lots of people over her many years in recovery.
• 19:00
  She had a couple of kids. They had a couple of kids.
• 19:03
  And then there was a pause and there were some more kids.
• 19:07
  And when Peggy was making amends, making restitution, she
• 19:11
  talked to her older kids and she said, you know, alcoholism,
• 19:15
  disease. And they said, oh, mom, with us,
• 19:19
  you were really fun. You danced and sang.
• 19:21
  We had a great time with you. Pause.
• 19:25
  You want to talk to the younger kids?
• 19:30
  And she hits bottom. It's her son Michael's 10th
• 19:35
  birthday, and she and her husband start an argument.
• 19:39
  There's a cake and they're going to have a thingy and a singing
• 19:42
  and a kitchen. But they start screaming and
• 19:46
  yelling and they're all drunken. Peggy comes to the next morning,
• 19:51
  very hungover, goes down to the kitchen and the cake is still
• 19:56
  there, uncut. Where's Michael?
• 20:04
  Well, they look around and find him hiding in his closet.
• 20:10
  And he says to her, you and Daddy are crazy.
• 20:14
  For her, that was bought and then it takes a long time to
• 20:17
  sort it out, but she knew she was done it.
• 20:24
  It's good to know when you're done.
• 20:29
  This is this is from the book Chapter 11.
• 20:43
  For most normal folks, drinking means conviviality,
• 20:48
  companionship, and colorful imagination.
• 20:52
  It means release from care, boredom and worry.
• 20:57
  It is joyous intimacy with friends and the feeling that
• 21:01
  life is good. We do not think it's evil.
• 21:03
  We do not think it's demon rum. We do not think this is a sin.
• 21:07
  We it's for a lot of people it, it's just lovely.
• 21:11
  I, I live in the Jesuit community in Oakland and we have
• 21:14
  5 men in the house, three of us sober in the program, and the
• 21:16
  other two are embarrassingly normal to a point of boredom
• 21:21
  normal. And one of them with whom I've
• 21:24
  lived for 40 years, he's 87 years old and every night about
• 21:29
  5:00, he has 1 double Scotch. One just that alone I think is
• 21:40
  hilarious. So about 5:00 for years I've
• 21:43
  said John, have a drink. I, I noticed in the last year or
• 21:48
  two or three he was, we were watching the news.
• 21:50
  It's 5:00. He's not drinking and I said
• 21:53
  John have a drink and he says no, no, no.
• 21:55
  I took an ibuprofen an hour ago when I don't want to mix.
• 22:01
  Who are you? I screamed at him.
• 22:05
  Anyway, during quarantine we're on top of each other and what I
• 22:09
  notice he uses a shot glass. I mean, if he had flown to the
• 22:17
  ceiling. I could not have been more
• 22:18
  surprised. I had no words.
• 22:20
  Took a couple of days, I calmed down and I said to him, John,
• 22:24
  why do you use a shot glass? And he said you don't want too
• 22:33
  much. Again, this is just you read
• 22:40
  about this in in the horror stories.
• 22:44
  But for most normal folks and the other fellow who's acquired
• 22:49
  his dad was a bad drunk. But this other John is not a
• 22:51
  drunk. But he'll leave half a beer on
• 22:53
  the table, half a beer on the table.
• 22:56
  And we know he's in the house because they'll be half a beer
• 22:58
  in the refrigerator. He'll finish it later in like
• 23:01
  next week. Makes my blood run backwards.
• 23:08
  But not so with us in those last days of heavy drinking.
• 23:13
  The old pleasures were gone. They were, but memories.
• 23:18
  Never could we recapture the great moments of the past.
• 23:22
  There was an insistent yearning to enjoy life as we once did,
• 23:28
  and a heartbreaking obsession that some new miracle of control
• 23:34
  would enable us to do it. There was always one more
• 23:40
  attempt and one more failure. And that's exactly how I drank.
• 23:45
  Fun, fun, plus problems, problems.
• 23:54
  The less people tolerated us, the more we withdrew from
• 23:59
  society, from life itself. As we became subjects of King
• 24:05
  Alcohol, shivering denizens of his mad realm, the chilling
• 24:13
  vapor that is loneliness settled down.
• 24:16
  It thickened, ever becoming blacker.
• 24:20
  Some of us sought out sordid places, hoping to find
• 24:25
  understanding, companionship and approval.
• 24:29
  I thought I was the only one that did that.
• 24:35
  I heard my sponsor talk about this once.
• 24:37
  He was a priest in Los Angeles, a sober Monsignor.
• 24:40
  They're very rare. And he would talk about being
• 24:46
  out with some people and they're drinking, they're having a few
• 24:51
  drinks, but you're drinking and the party's over and they're
• 24:56
  going home, but you're not done and you have to go and get done.
• 25:05
  And that happened to me over and over and over again.
• 25:09
  And in Los Angeles, there were a zillion places where you could
• 25:12
  go and get done. I remember with one of the other
• 25:16
  teachers I get, I was out and doing who knows what.
• 25:19
  And we ended up in one of these nightclubs and Judy Garland was
• 25:23
  singing and Barbra Streisand was singing.
• 25:25
  And I just thought it was fascinating.
• 25:27
  And it was a, a female impersonator club with wonderful
• 25:32
  alcohol. And I was there for an hour
• 25:34
  before it occurred to me that really isn't Judy Garland and
• 25:37
  that really isn't Barbra Streisand.
• 25:39
  You know, I'm, I'm a little slow on the uptake.
• 25:42
  Anyway, the next morning I, I'm hungover and and I go to John
• 25:47
  and I say, boy, thanks for driving home last night, John.
• 25:51
  And he said, you drove. Oh yeah, I knew that.
• 25:58
  I knew that momentarily. We did.
• 26:06
  Then would come oblivion and the awful awakening to face the
• 26:10
  hideous 4 horsemen. Terror, bewilderment,
• 26:15
  frustration, despair. Unhappy drinkers who read this
• 26:21
  page will understand now. I was I went to a lot of
• 26:26
  meetings early in recovery and we would regularly read chapter
• 26:32
  5 regularly and chapter 3 more about alcoholism and regularly.
• 26:38
  This chapter got read and I was 3456 months sober and I heard
• 26:43
  this chapter read and I remember asking what page that was on.
• 26:51
  Unhappy drinkers who read this page will understand.
• 26:55
  I was not sure if I was an alcoholic but I was sure an
• 27:00
  unhappy drinker. This is the first page of the
• 27:04
  book I identified with and it's not the first.
• 27:10
  War fever ran high in the New England town.
• 27:13
  Who cares, but this is talking to me now and then.
• 27:24
  A serious drinker, being dry at the moment, says I don't miss it
• 27:30
  at all. Feel better, work better, having
• 27:32
  a better time. As ex problem drinkers we smile
• 27:38
  at such a Sally. Such a Sally.
• 27:40
  That's the last time that word has been used since 1939.
• 27:45
  It means an attempt or an effort.
• 27:47
  A Sally. Ridiculous, we know.
• 27:52
  Our friend is like a boy whistling in the dark.
• 27:55
  To keep up his spirits. He fools himself inwardly.
• 28:01
  He would give anything to take half a dozen drinks and get away
• 28:05
  with them. He will presently try the old
• 28:09
  game again, for he isn't happy about his sobriety.
• 28:13
  He cannot picture life without alcohol.
• 28:16
  Someday he will be unable to imagine life either with alcohol
• 28:21
  or without it. Then he will know loneliness,
• 28:25
  such as few do. He will be at the jumping off
• 28:30
  place. He'll wish for the and now where
• 28:33
  I live, we always the jumping off place is the Golden Gate
• 28:36
  Bridge. That's what we all that's our
• 28:38
  preferred bridge. If you're going to be jumping
• 28:44
  and then Bill writes 9 words that when I, he simply writes,
• 28:53
  we have shown how we got out from under and that's what
• 28:59
  happens. I'm I, I'm not here to tell you
• 29:05
  what to do. I can tell you what happened to
• 29:08
  me. And in the in the book, we
• 29:15
  present 42 completely different stories, figuring that you might
• 29:22
  hear one of them because we know you're unique, special and
• 29:27
  different. But one of them might
• 29:30
  breakthrough. For years my sponsor his his
• 29:36
  mantra for me was identify, don't compare, identify, don't
• 29:42
  compare, identify, don't compare because it's true identification
• 29:53
  that we find hope and recovery. He he was a an I back Irish
• 29:59
  background and and got sober in 1971 and he was a terrible
• 30:06
  drunk. The the last 10 or so stories in
• 30:10
  the big book are stories of people who thought they were
• 30:15
  hopeless. Not I've got a tiny problem.
• 30:19
  They thought they were hopeless. Well worth reading when you feel
• 30:27
  a little isolated, and some of them are.
• 30:30
  I'm now sober two years. I'm now sober four years.
• 30:34
  Thought I was hopeless. Terry grew up.
• 30:37
  His father died when he was five years old of alcoholism, and
• 30:42
  Terry read the Big Book in high school and did a book report on
• 30:45
  the Big Book. He also promised to not have a
• 30:48
  drink till he was 21, which is kind of a version of the Irish
• 30:52
  pioneer thing. You know, you'd, I'm never going
• 30:54
  to drink. But the American version is
• 30:57
  don't drink till you're 21. And I remember this had to be
• 31:01
  talked about when I was in school, but I don't remember it.
• 31:05
  I mean, I was a distracted kid and I, you know, I was bored out
• 31:08
  of my mind a lot in school. And I would count the, the, the
• 31:11
  holes on the ceiling over and over and over again because I
• 31:14
  didn't know what they were talking about.
• 31:16
  South, the pledge may have come up, but I'm anyway, suddenly I'm
• 31:21
  with the pastor pledge. And I said I don't want to take
• 31:28
  the pledge. And he said, why not?
• 31:30
  And I said I really enjoy champagne.
• 31:32
  I think I was 12. And when you're 12, champagne
• 31:36
  really is as nice as it can get. And I, we've been to some
• 31:40
  weddings and it was fun. And oh, how I love this.
• 31:43
  And he said to me, you have expensive tastes.
• 31:45
  And then I was dismissed from the imperial present.
• 31:49
  I don't know if you sign something or, you know, cut
• 31:52
  blood. I don't know what you do.
• 31:54
  But anyway. But Terry took the pledge and
• 31:58
  kept it. Old man Joe Kennedy of the
• 32:02
  Boston Kennedy family told his kids if you don't have a drink
• 32:07
  till you're 21, I'll give you $1,000,000.
• 32:10
  There was a little tiny drinking problem in the Kennedy family.
• 32:14
  Anyway, I Terry didn't have a drink until his 21st birthday
• 32:21
  and he researched it. The Parade magazine had a little
• 32:25
  booklet called America's Favorite Cocktails.
• 32:28
  He researched it because he wanted the first drink to be the
• 32:33
  special drink. I think it was a Manhattan or a
• 32:36
  Rob Roy or one of these mixed things with toothpick and fruit,
• 32:40
  you know, very complicated. And it's noon on his 21st
• 32:45
  birthday, and he has a mouthful of alcohol.
• 32:49
  And the way he tells the story, he discovered America all of a
• 32:56
  sudden. It was wow, you mean they sell
• 33:00
  this in stores because he was a very uptight kid.
• 33:05
  I mean, lots of rules and regulations and he was a very,
• 33:09
  very, very good boy. So all of a sudden he has
• 33:13
  alcohol and it's this is what I've been missing.
• 33:16
  So while I discovered America, they sell this in stores.
• 33:21
  The next thought, don't tell anyone how good this gets.
• 33:27
  So keep it secret. And he was in the seminary, he
• 33:30
  didn't have a lot of access to alcohol, but what he did, he
• 33:33
  would get drunk and fall down and throw up.
• 33:36
  He's ordained in Latin and more access to alcohol.
• 33:44
  And he, he's a bad drunk and he got fired from his first parish
• 33:52
  because he kept he show up at 10:00 for the 8:00 Mass fired.
• 33:59
  There was a second parish fired from he's 27 years old fired.
• 34:05
  They send him to a parish in Santa Barbara and they throw a
• 34:10
  nice party for the new young priest.
• 34:12
  And one of the parish ladies came up to him and said, oh,
• 34:15
  it's so nice to see a young priest.
• 34:18
  They usually only send us the Alcoholics.
• 34:25
  And he would go to treatment and he would go to treatment and,
• 34:30
  and at the time, the the Archbishop of Los Angeles
• 34:35
  thought that a A was Protestant priests were not allowed to go
• 34:40
  to a A and no Catholic churches held a A meetings needs to say
• 34:46
  the Archbishop was an idiot, but he was still in charge.
• 34:49
  That doesn't stop you from being Archbishop, I assure you.
• 34:54
  And so he finally left and said, but anyway, Terry, rather than
• 34:57
  being sent to a a, they've sent him to a version treatment and
• 35:03
  and it was a three-week program. It's it's Monday to Friday.
• 35:08
  What's your favorite drink? And then they give you a little
• 35:11
  tiny chemical and then you drink your favorite drink and you
• 35:14
  vomit so quickly. You have no, not even 2 seconds
• 35:18
  of relief or fun. It just, and also you poop
• 35:21
  yourself, so your whole body explodes as soon as alcohol
• 35:25
  enters in. So that's day one day.
• 35:28
  There's five days of that and then you pause the weekend,
• 35:31
  weekends off and then you do another week of that and another
• 35:35
  week of that and you're cured because the reason you drink is
• 35:40
  you're enjoying it and you don't enjoy it anymore, do you?
• 35:43
  Because you're vomiting and pooping yourself.
• 35:47
  So he went back to Los Angeles and stayed sober a little bit.
• 35:50
  But then he started drinking and they send him back for another
• 35:56
  three-week series of treatments. He doesn't stay sober.
• 36:02
  They send him back. And after his third aversion
• 36:07
  treatment series, the staff asked him to not come back
• 36:12
  because he was a morale problem for the staff.
• 36:18
  He had 7 rehabs and he would say by the time you're in your 4th
• 36:25
  or 5th rehab, no one thinks you're going to live to be 35.
• 36:32
  Hopeless. He knew there were two kinds of
• 36:37
  Alcoholics. He had uncles who were
• 36:40
  Alcoholics. His dad died of the disease.
• 36:42
  He was at a somewhere giving a talk at an A a thing and an old
• 36:46
  man came up them and said, are you this family from this part
• 36:49
  of town? Oh, yeah, Terry said, those are
• 36:51
  my people. And the old man said, I knew
• 36:54
  your grandfather. He was the oldest of six boys.
• 36:58
  He was the only one that did not die of alcoholism.
• 37:01
  He had one son, Terry's father, who died of alcoholism.
• 37:05
  So it's in the family. And Terry knew there were two
• 37:09
  kinds of Alcoholics, the good kind and the bad kind.
• 37:14
  The good kind gets into trouble and is a fool and acts like an
• 37:18
  ass. You sit them down day at a time.
• 37:23
  First things first, allergy, the body obsession of the mind.
• 37:25
  Don't drink. Go to meetings and they never
• 37:27
  drink again. That's the good alcoholic.
• 37:34
  And then there's the bad alcoholic.
• 37:37
  All that stuff happens. And you sit him down and you
• 37:40
  explain it and they get drunk again.
• 37:42
  And then you sit him down and explain it again, and they get
• 37:46
  drunk again. And so you use smaller words and
• 37:49
  go more slowly, and they get drunk again, and they get drunk
• 37:53
  again and they get drunk again. So finally it's 1971.
• 38:02
  He's 30 years old. He knows he is the kind of
• 38:10
  alcoholic who gets drunk again. Ego deflation in depth.
• 38:16
  And they sent him back from Los Angeles to New Jersey on the
• 38:21
  East Coast, to a recovery place for priests who were reluctant
• 38:28
  to recover, which means jerks, losers.
• 38:32
  These are guys in their 40s and 50s and 60s, and they're
• 38:35
  unemployable. And there he was.
• 38:38
  And and he he was so sure that he was the bad kind of alcoholic
• 38:46
  that he had no resistance whatsoever.
• 38:48
  He just sat there knowing it was hopeless.
• 38:50
  And they'd go to meetings in New York and they all had to wear
• 38:53
  Roman collars and go to meetings in New York every day.
• 38:57
  And he went to meetings because he liked the guys who were going
• 39:01
  to meetings. And all of a sudden he had six
• 39:05
  months sober and and it wasn't a fight, it wasn't a struggle.
• 39:11
  And he, he talks about being there hopeless, you know, and
• 39:17
  he's at a meeting and this young guy is getting some kind of
• 39:23
  acknowledgement for six months sober.
• 39:28
  And the young guy says a few things.
• 39:30
  He says I get to be sober, you get to be sober.
• 39:35
  This is such a good thing. And Terry's response to him was
• 39:43
  joy. And looking back years later, he
• 39:49
  said when you respond with joy to another person getting well,
• 39:59
  it's a real spiritual experience because you're just not so self
• 40:06
  obsessed into your own internal weirdness and isolation.
• 40:10
  You're acknowledging someone else's coming back to life.
• 40:18
  Step 2 for me is all about hope. And it can take a long time.
• 40:22
  It's it's not so much an idea as a process.
• 40:25
  And and I was pretty sure that. I was hopeless, not as bad as
• 40:31
  Terry, but hopeless enough. And then I noticed one day that
• 40:45
  I was in the room and anyone in the room could get well, could
• 40:48
  stay well, and this was shocking to me.
• 40:50
  Oh my goodness, I'm part of a group and I know some of these
• 40:55
  people and I'm glad to see them. And when they walk and the door
• 40:57
  sober, it's a it's a joyful thing.
• 41:00
  It's another Friday night and we're alive.
• 41:13
  If I if I get too hungry and too angry and too lonely and too
• 41:19
  tired. One of the symptoms of that is I
• 41:27
  have no hope. It's come up a couple times over
• 41:32
  the years when I just know that I've run out of chances.
• 41:39
  I'm never going to get well. It's really awful.
• 41:42
  Everything hurts and then I need a little bit of, a little bit of
• 41:48
  hope. I, I don't need a lot of hope.
• 41:50
  I'm not, I mean, half Irish, half Swedish.
• 41:52
  We're not hopeful people. I, I just need enough hope.
• 42:01
  So in college I read all the existentialists, of course,
• 42:05
  Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre.
• 42:07
  And there was a Franz Kafka who, German speaking, Jewish, Czech,
• 42:15
  1920s, what could go wrong? And, and he, he wrote about one
• 42:21
  of his short stories. He, he turns into this huge
• 42:24
  cockroach and he can't get out of his room and the family
• 42:28
  doesn't know what to do. And of course at the end of the
• 42:30
  short story, they kill him. It's a happy family story.
• 42:34
  And, and in one of his lines somewhere, he says there is
• 42:38
  infinite hope, but not for us. And when I heard, I just burst
• 42:43
  into laughter at that. That might be the Irish.
• 42:46
  I just, oh, God, that's exactly it.
• 42:48
  There is just no. But then there's just enough
• 42:50
  hope to get to a meeting, to return the phone call, to brush
• 42:58
  my teeth, to make my make my bed.
• 43:02
  My sponsor believed that if he made his bed, he'd stay sober
• 43:06
  all day. So whenever I made my bed, I
• 43:09
  would call him. And I've made my bed.
• 43:11
  Didn't happen a lot, but the idea was there.
• 43:14
  I'm better at it now, but getting a little bit of hope and
• 43:19
  perspective, learning how to work again, learning how to love
• 43:25
  again, learning how to play again, which I think life is all
• 43:28
  about those things. And then Step 3.
• 43:37
  There's a third step prayer which I've never been able to
• 43:42
  memorize. I know there's I have no secrets
• 43:45
  from you. I it's too much King James and
• 43:47
  semicolons and I just, I just can't get through it.
• 43:53
  But it does talk about relieve me of the bondage of self.
• 43:58
  Is that three? Yeah.
• 43:59
  OK that could be 7 till I get them mixed up.
• 44:03
  The bondage of self in Narcotics Anonymous.
• 44:09
  The words they use for that are take my will in my life, guide
• 44:16
  me in my recovery, show me how to live.
• 44:20
  I like that, but but pragmatically for me, what Step
• 44:25
  3 has been show up, pay attention, tell the truth and
• 44:40
  let go of the results. And, and I find when I show up,
• 44:44
  I pay attention, I tell the truth and I let go of the
• 44:49
  results. Things seem to flow and connect.
• 44:54
  A practical thing of Step 3 for me.
• 44:57
  And I think it's a statement of policy.
• 44:59
  I think it's, I think Step 3 happens all the time.
• 45:04
  I think CS Lewis said relying on God has to begin all over again
• 45:16
  every day as if nothing had yet been done.
• 45:21
  And I believe that to today's fresh, I mean, the fact that the
• 45:25
  higher power and I were getting along real well last year is
• 45:28
  historically interesting, but it will not keep me focused here
• 45:33
  today. And to ask for help and to ask
• 45:36
  for help and to breathe and, and meditation practice for me.
• 45:40
  I, I mean, there's things I read and there's books and stuff.
• 45:43
  The, the breathing is really important and being in my body
• 45:46
  is really, really important. I read a book last year on
• 45:50
  breath and they said, you know, if if you breathe 678 times a
• 45:58
  minute and 60 minutes in an hour and 24 hours in a day, that
• 46:07
  means you're breathing like 22,000 times a day or 26,000
• 46:13
  times a day, which to me just seems impossible.
• 46:17
  How is that possible? Well, there's the math, but the
• 46:20
  breathing and the participation in the breath and the life and
• 46:24
  the process and being in the meeting and sharing the air and
• 46:28
  all living things breathe and it helps in my focus and everything
• 46:34
  else. And, and I guess the Hebrew word
• 46:38
  for, for spirit and wind and air is all the same word.
• 46:43
  And So what I, you know, how do you make conscious contact with
• 46:46
  your higher power? Breathe in.
• 46:48
  And it's, Oh my goodness, I'm alive.
• 46:52
  I'm alive and that's what it's about.
• 46:58
  And some days I really enjoy, and some days are very long, and
• 47:03
  some days I really like the fellowship, and some days I
• 47:06
  don't. And some days I get overrun with
• 47:10
  anxiety and fear, and that's when I have to make sure I sit
• 47:16
  next to people who have enough hope to share.
• 47:20
  So I don't want to have the secrets that isolate me.
• 47:26
  Daily reprieve. I think that's everything I
• 47:30
  know. Thank you.
• 47:42
  Thank you A A has more than two million recovering Alcoholics
• 47:46
  throughout the world. In Australia there are about
• 47:49
  18,000 members. They're made in over 2000 local
• 47:55
  meetings spread around the country.
• 47:57
  Meetings range in size from a handful in some areas to
• 48:02
  hundreds or more in larger communities.
• 48:05
  And once again, if anyone you know is struggling with alcohol
• 48:09
  issues, please call Alcoholics Announcing 1300 Double 00000 or
• 48:16
  visit their website on aa.org dot AU.