Audio
Transcript
Source: Marty M – Speaker Talk – Date Unknown.mp3 File: marty-m-speaker-talk-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 01:18:37
============================================================
And now, a bit of Jericho for anyone who feels he or she has tired blood. In introducing the speaker of this evening, I might mention her contribution to AA and to the entire problem of alcoholism may be indicated in a few of her responsibilities and accomplishments. And I am going to skip through these rapidly because they are numerous. Mrs. Marty M., a fellow, American Public Health Association, Society of Public Health Educators, an honorary fellow, American Psychiatric Association, a fellow, the Royal Society of Health, England, honorary scientific member, Society for the Study of Addiction to Alcohol and Other Drugs, England.
Trained at the Yale School of Alcohol Studies, Mrs. M. founded the National Council on Alcoholism in 1944 and became its executive director, working closely with such scientists as Dr. Haggard and Dr. E. M. Jelinek of Yale University. The National Council on Alcoholism, at first sponsored by the Yale Plan on Alcoholism, became independent in 1949. Mrs. M. is an author. Her book, New Primer on Alcoholism, has become a classic in the field.
She has written extensively for both professional journals and popular publications. She is a lecturer and a consultant. Mrs. M. gives over 200 lectures every year through medical, psychiatric, educational, religious, social, and other groups, and lectures at schools of alcohol studies and universities throughout the country. She has acted as consultant to state alcoholism programs, state and city health departments, and the United States Public Health Service.
Mrs. M. has addressed joint sessions of state legislatures in South Carolina, Michigan, Tennessee, and Utah, and has given a series of lectures at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas. At the request of the United States State Department, she was an official United States delegate to the 23rd International Congress on Alcoholism in Lucerne, Switzerland. Invited by the government of South Africa through its Minister of Health and Social Welfare, Mrs. M. gave a key address at their first national conference on alcoholism.
She lectured throughout the country, reporting back to the government with recommendations for action. In 1956, she participated in the Third Congress of the International Union for Health Education of the Public in Rome, Italy. In 1961, she was the guest of national alcoholism organizations in Australia and New Zealand to lecture and advise on programs. In 1963, Mrs. M. was given the Elizabeth Blackwell Award for Outstanding Service to Mankind by Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
In 1964, she was invited to England by the British NCA, to Belfast by the North Island Mental Health Association, and to Dublin by the Board of Governors of St. Patrick's Hospital, giving talks and consultations. If she is qualified in any other endeavors, I am sure we will be able to identify them as she speaks to us tonight. We consider it a real honor to have her with us tonight and to share this occasion.
From New York, our very good friend, Margie M.. All that you have just heard is the result of being a drunk. My name is Margie M. and I am an alcoholic, and I have earned the right to talk to this group. I paid that initiation fee that we all know is the highest of any society in the world. I always have another way of putting it when I'm introduced in my public role at an AA meeting. But to tell the truth, I'm a schizophrenic. I'm two distinct and separate people.
One is Margie, the alcoholic who got interested in this problem the same way all of you did, because she had it and didn't know what to do about it, who found the way out through AA, and having done so, had to find something to do with her life,
[00:05:04]
well, that would express the gratitude she felt for being alive and well, that would express the feeling she had for all alcoholics who were suffering as she had suffered, and to find a reason for living that would make life something more than just a day-to-day business. Those are some of the reasons why I went on to work in this field and to become the person about whom Bob read. I wouldn't be in this kind of work, I wouldn't be doing this kind of thing, if I hadn't been an alcoholic.
I think everything that I do today is a direct outgrowth of my own personal experience. You see, I began to drink like most young people do, because everybody I knew was beginning to drink. Because everybody I knew was beginning to drink at that point. It was the accepted thing to do. It's important to remember that drinking is an accepted social custom in this country. Of course, I grew up during Prohibition, so it was illegal, but that didn't mean that everybody wasn't doing it.
As a matter of fact, I think more young people began to drink at an earlier age during Prohibition than ever had before. If you didn't drink at that point when I was in my teens, you just didn't get asked out, you didn't belong, you weren't accepted, you didn't have any fun, you were an outcast practically. But I don't mean that this forced me into it, I didn't have to be forced into it. Because like many of us, although without any knowledge of it, the very first drink I took, I discovered it was magic for me.
Like many adolescents, I was 17, I suffered from shyness, I was afraid of meeting new people, I was terrified that I'd be a wallflower, wouldn't be popular, wouldn't be asked out, I had great difficulty in talking to other people, to young people, and these were major problems for me at that point. But I discovered that one or two drinks solved those problems. I no longer was tongue-tied, I no longer was shy.
I lost all my inhibitions, I could be the life of the party. I discovered something else at the same time. One or two drinks didn't do it. I needed three or four. The first drink or two had very little effect. The third and fourth really produced the result I wanted, which was to have this wonderful feeling of being in instead of on the outside looking in, and of belonging instead of feeling, well, not just that I didn't belong, but I shouldn't be there anyway.
And so being a very bright girl, I did something that I assumed, I didn't discuss this with anyone, that anyone with any intelligence, and I had of course more than most, would be doing the same thing. My father had laid in a very good cellar before the coming of Prohibition, there was plenty of liquor in my home. So I was always perfectly able to, and did, take two or three drinks before my date arrived, or before leaving for the party where I was going, so that there wouldn't be any awkward gap until I felt this magic effect and sort of came out of my shell.
Nobody had ever told me that that was dangerous or a sign of anything. Not very long after, something else occurred. It didn't occur, it had just been there all the time, but it became noticeable. I was able to out-drink everyone else. I became known as Hollow Legs. I became known as Hollow Legs. I boasted about it, other people boasted about me for being able to drink more than anybody else. I was always the one that could drive the car home and see that everybody got where they belonged, and remember everything that had happened,
[00:10:03]
and never show any signs whatsoever of being drunk, I didn't have rubber legs, I didn't get thick speech. Well, this was a matter of pride. You know, I'd been in AA some years before it dawned on me that if I had the reputation of being able to drink more than anybody else, then I must have been drinking more than anybody else, all the time. Now, here were three warning signs that appeared as soon as I began to drink.
The magic of alcohol, it meant more to me and did more for me than it did for other people. The use of that magic, drinking for a purpose, having a few drinks before I went to the social occasion where others would be drinking. And three, an abnormally high tolerance for alcohol. Abnormally high. And four, the fact that I always utilized that tolerance, I drank more than anybody else. Well, I had grown up, it so happened, in a very well-off family, I'd been sent to the best schools, I had traveled a great deal and traveled abroad, and gone school abroad.
My family had done everything they thought that was necessary to prepare me for life. I really was very widely informed in a great many areas. They thought they'd done a job. But there was one word I had never, never heard. That word was alcoholism. That word was alcoholism. It was a word that was never used, not by professional people nor by lady, in those years. Oh, I knew there were drunks, drunkards, socks, mushers, souses, they were all men for one thing.
You never heard of a woman drunkard, or a woman lush. I knew something else, I came from Chicago, that's where I was brought up, they were all down on West Madison Street. That was our ballot. That's where they lived. I saw them once in a while because they'd have walked into some of the better streets, begging for a dime for a cup of coffee, and you gave it to them like this, hoping they wouldn't come near you.
And knowing that they were going to get a drink with it, things changed in a different world. If they'd ever had a chance, if they'd come out of any kind of decent home, which you didn't imagine they had, well, water finds its own level, there was something missing, something wrong in them, so they had descended to the level where they belonged, but probably they came from slums, they never had had a chance, and they never would.
That's about all the thought most people gave to them. They were some kind of separate waste, almost. They were the drunken bums. And this was what it meant to be a Brumford or a Lush or a Sus. Well, that kind of thing didn't happen to the kind of people I was brought up with. It didn't happen to people in my social and economic world. None of them ever got down to West Madison Street, but I knew of or had ever heard of.
Oh, you heard of romantic cases of men whose hearts were broken and went to another city to drink themselves to death, or went out to the South Seas to become a beachcomber. But these were more fictional than they were real. And that really was about the sum total of educated knowledge on this subject in the twenties. Twenties, mind you. It's not so awfully long ago. No doctor ever used the word alcoholism or alcoholic.
If they saw people who were afflicted with this illness, they didn't call it an illness. They told them to pull up their socks and be a man. Or they were drinking too much. Why didn't they cut back and just have two? Where was their willpower? Where was their strength? What was their willpower? What was their strength of character? Didn't they love their family? How could they do this to their family? Even doctors talked that way. And they never used the word alcoholism or the word alcohol.
[00:15:15]
So it isn't very surprising that despite the fact that I had such a good preparation for life, the best my family could find for me, that there was a gap in my knowledge. Maybe it wasn't such a big gap, but it was a life or death gap for me, because not having that knowledge, I didn't know enough to recognize those signs I described to you. And as time went on, and I was married and divorced and went to live in New York and then went to live abroad in England, my drinking remained pretty much as I've described it.
I drank a great deal. I drank constantly. I drank more than anybody else, and I got away with it. By that I mean I didn't have hangovers to speak of, nothing much. I never misbehaved in public or did anything I shouldn't do. In fact, my escorts, my bowls, my close friends were proud of the way I drank. I was such a good drinker. I handled it so well, and I was proud of it too. Nothing then prepared me for the year that came, inevitably, and in the average time, about ten years after I had begun to drink, when during the course of the year I passed a few more milestones, a few more signs and symptoms appeared.
I didn't know it. I didn't know what they were. I didn't know what they meant. The first one was blackouts. Well, the first time I had a blackout, I thought it was the result of a concussion. I'd had a fall, banged my head. So I went to the doctor, and he said, yes, you've had a concussion. It isn't very serious. It'll pass, and that's exactly why you lost your memory the other night. But you'll get over it. Don't worry about it. There's nothing to worry about. So I went back, and oddly enough, I had another one. And then not very long after that, I had another one.
And instead of getting over it, these periods where I remembered nothing, from, let's say, ten o'clock in the evening to whenever I got home, grew more frequent. And they began a little earlier in the evening, and they were frightening. Total loss of memory of what had happened beyond a certain point the night before. Where had I been? What had I done? What had I said? How had I got home? I was scared. About this same time, I started having the kind of hangovers we all know as hangovers. They're different from what most people call hangovers. Ours are epic.
And I discovered that I couldn't get up. I couldn't begin the day. I couldn't function without a drink. And so I began trying to keep it in my room so that it would be there in the morning so I could plant my feet on the ground and have them stay there. Also so that I could make up my face and get the lipstick here and not here. And then I ran into another problem. I'd make sure that I had the bottle so that I'd be all right in the morning. I'd wake up in the morning and the damn bottle would be empty.
I don't remember drinking it, but I had. I had drunk it in the night because already I had begun to find happening to me another terrifying symptom of alcoholism. You go to sleep or you pass out. Anyway, you're unconscious. And you only sleep a few hours. And about three o'clock in the morning you wake up. And you're clear. You can think. And you can feel. And a whole life passes before you and you know what's happening. And you're terrified out of your wits and you don't know what it is and you don't know what to do and you can't face it. So what do you do? You find any liquor there is in the house and you drink it to blot out that sober look at what is happening to you.
[00:20:07]
These things happened to me quite rapidly in the course of the year. So that at the end of that year when I was twenty-seven, I was hooked. I was drinking around the clock. I was beginning to show the signs, the rubber legs. I never did get the thick speech to the very end. No matter how drunk I was, I could speak perfectly clearly. But I'd be sitting talking and nobody would realize how drunk I was. And as long as I stayed sitting, they still didn't know and I'd stand up and fall flat on my face. My legs didn't work.
So that my friends began talking to me about why didn't I drink the way I used to. I was becoming a drunk. Why didn't I just have a few and then stop? I wasn't so pleasant when I drank anymore as I used to be. Well, I couldn't take that because I didn't know why. I didn't know the answers to any of these things. All I knew was that I would make up my mind to myself over and over again. Tonight I'm not going to have too much. Tonight I'm going to have five and then stop.
And I never knew what happened, but I'd have fifteen or twenty-five and it would be the same old story again. I couldn't keep the promises I made to myself. Now this really was scary because in my whole life I had never failed to do something I'd made up my mind to do. And here was an area where I made up my mind and it didn't seem to do any good. So I decided that something had gone wrong in my head. And I began going to see the doctors that take care of things that go wrong in your head. Psychiatrists.
I saw several of them in London. Not a single one of them mentioned the word alcoholism. Not a single one of them attributed my troubles to my drinking. They all said, well, you're burning the candle at both ends. You're working too hard and playing too hard. You ought to drink less and get more sleep. One of them said, I think you're on the verge of a nervous breakdown and you ought to go away for about six weeks. Get out of this rat race in London. What I'm trying to show you is that in the twenties and the thirties, in England as well as in the United States, there was total and abysmal ignorance about alcoholism everywhere.
When I say everywhere, I mean all kinds of people, in all kinds of jobs, in every segment of society, and most particularly in the areas where people go for help. Doctors. Psychiatrists. They didn't know anything about it and never used the words. Things got pretty bad with me. It arrived at a point where I couldn't work anymore. I was drunk all the time. I went away from London as had been advised. I stayed with some friends up in the north of Scotland.
In the library up there, I found a book. It was a book called Asylum by a writer named William Seabrook. All the years that I lived abroad, I used to go with a group of my friends to the Riviera every summer. One of the people I had met and come to know very well, the place where we all went, was William Seabrook and his wife. I spent a good deal of time with them. And really drank about the way I did. And I remember one night in his apartment, he had a beautiful apartment in a loft building overlooking the water, the harbor. He got wild, or cert drunk, trying to jump out the window, and he was an immense man.
And just in time, his wife caught one leg and I caught the other, and here we were trying to hold this 200-odd pound man by his feet as he dangled out the window, screaming for help and nobody there at that hour of the month. Well, we hung on and somebody came and we pulled Willie back in. But I realized that Willie drank the way I did and had the difficulties I did. So I wrote this book. Well, it seemed that Willie had come back to the United States and he'd gone to a doctor who had put him in a private institution, known in those days as Bloomingdale's in Westchester, the New York Division, Westchester Division of New York Hospital, Psychiatric Hospital.
[00:25:15]
And he described in detail what they'd done to him and the treatment he had undergone. And at the end of the book, he never mentioned the word alcoholism or the word alcoholic, but at the end of the book he said, and after all this, he had discovered his problems and now he could drink normally. Well, I was in England, but I began getting a great longing to go back to the United States and find Willie's e-book and go wherever he went. So I managed to get back. I couldn't find Willie. He wasn't in the phone book in New York City.
I called his publisher because I was drunk all the time. The publisher wouldn't give me any information. Then I'd forget about it for a while. And then I'd go back trying to find Willie. He had indicated really in that book that this had been a form of insanity that had gripped him, but that there was a treatment for it and that when you took the treatment you'd be all right. I spent a year in New York calling on psychiatrists whose names I'd got from friends, asking if I couldn't go where Willie'd gone and get what he'd got and get well from whatever it was that was wrong.
I was very naive. I didn't know enough to conceal anything about my drinking. I always explained to them that it was what had happened to my drinking and what the drinking made me like that convinced me that I was insane. I just happened to go to a series of very honest, very good men with integrity. Not one of them had the faintest idea what to do for me and none of them would take me on. They did say, however, when I would say, well, you can't turn me out. I've got to go somewhere. I'm afraid. I don't know what I'm going to do or what's going to happen.
They'd say, well, you can commit yourself to a state institution. I had no money, incidentally. I was broke. And I would say for how long and they would tell me. Then I knew that I was right in my deepest fear that I was hopelessly insane and that they were merely being kind and not telling me just what it was. And what they were telling me was, you'll end your life locked up in an insane asylum. This was in the mid-thirties. People still used that unpleasant phrase, insane asylum, and people still thought of it, as I did, as a snake pit.
A place where once you entered, you never left. And God knows what they did to you in there. And I couldn't afford to go to the private place Willie was on. It was very expensive. Well, every time I went through one of these interviews, I'd head to the nearest bar and I'd order double martinis lined up in front of me for as much money as I had and drink them as fast as I could to forget what the doctor had said.
And this went on for a year. Then a friend of mine, who knew that I was trying and I was desperate and I wanted to get well, asked me to see a doctor who had taken care of many members of her family who had had all kinds of troubles, some like mine, she said. And would I accept as a Christmas present a visit to this doctor? He was beyond my reach financially. So I accepted it and I went to see him. And he listened to me. And he asked me a lot of questions.
And finally he said, you know, in my experience, people like you have one chance in a hundred. One chance in a hundred. But you want to get well. So genuinely and so deeply that I think maybe you're that one. I'll take you up. And he did. I had no money. And he was the head of the Neurological Division at Bellevue Hospital in New York and that's where he put me, in the Neurological Board. And I stayed there.
And that's where he put me, in the neurological ward, and I stayed there seven months.
[00:30:00]
But I wasn't getting any psychiatric help for my insanity, which he claimed I didn't have, but which he couldn't convince me I didn't have. I still believed I was insane. He also never used the word alcoholism, or the word alcoholic. But he did tell me that I was the kind of person who shouldn't drink. But I told him it was more than that, that I had to have psychiatric help, I knew it. And eventually, he arranged for me to go into a private sanitarium in Greenwich, Connecticut.
And I was assigned to the director of that sanitarium, whose name was Harry Teba. And this was the second episode in a series of things that occurred in my life that I no longer believe were coincidences, because Teba was a wonderful man. Once again, in the 15 months that I spent there, well, let's say in the first nine or ten months, he never used the word alcoholism or alcoholic. He never described what this was that ailed me.
But like the first doctor, Dr. Kennedy, he said, you are the kind of person that can't drink. You should never touch it. I'd say, why? Well, he couldn't answer that. He couldn't give me any reason that I could believe. Now, in this private sanitarium, which wasn't too big, there were all kinds of sicknesses there. But there were also a group who got together instantly like that, who'd had a problem with drinking.
And naturally, we were close friends. And they all had different doctors. They didn't have Dr. Teba, and their doctors were teaching them how to drink again. So I thought I was in tough luck. I got the wrong doctor, you know. I got this old blue-nose who didn't believe in drinking because he didn't like it himself. I found that out right away. And I just couldn't believe what he said. All the others were being taught that as their personality difficulties got smoothed out with their treatment, naturally, they were going to return to normal drinking.
Now, this is what Willie's book had said. And this made sense to me. Why was Teba telling me I could never drink again? This was something I couldn't face. I'd never liked teetotals. You know, those deadly dull people with two white teeth, pale skins, never went anywhere, never did anything. Those weren't my kind of people. And how could I be among my friends who all drank if I couldn't drink? Sticking out like a sore thumb, feeling uncomfortable, making them feel uncomfortable.
What kind of a life could I have? I couldn't visualize it. So I couldn't afford to accept this dictum that I could never drink. And I didn't accept it. Well, I'd made quite a lot of progress in my psychiatric treatment. I was overcoming a lot of things. I was learning a lot of things about myself. I was working hard at it. I really was. And I could go into New York every now and then to the dentist or to go to a show, to see a friend.
I'd go in eight or nine times and come back perfectly all right. The tenth time I'd come back drunk. I never really knew why. I had never intended to do this. But in thinking about it, I realized that I was testing out how much progress had I made in this road back to normal drinking that I assumed I was on, even though the doctor said I wasn't. Well, then a couple of occasions came up where I got drunk right on the place with some of the other alcoholic patients who'd been sneaking the liquor in.
And people said to me, you know, I don't think I can help you. The next time this happens, you might as well go because I've given you all I can and I know you've responded and cooperated. And clearly, this isn't doing what you need. Well, that scared me to death because this was my last hope. Well, any normal person would not have dared try it out again. But I still drank when I went into New York.
I just took greater care not to be caught when I got back. Even with this hanging over my head, this excommunication,
[00:35:01]
this being thrown out of my last resort, my last hazel. One day I had a call from Dr. Thiebaud. He was home with a cold. And he asked if I would come to his home. Well, I was scared. I thought this is it. Doctors didn't take rescue to their homes when they were out sick. So I went down there in fear and trembling. And he was waving a book at me. It wasn't a book in covers. It was the size of ordinary typewritten pages and it had red cardboard covers on it.
And he said, I've just been reading this. It's about a group of people like you. And they seem to have found an answer. And I think maybe this can help you and I want you to take it back and read it. And I looked at it and the title of this manuscript, because that's what it was, typed, was Alcoholics Anonymous. And I took it back to the sanitarium and I started to read it. First I was terribly excited.
Unlike many people who come into AA, the word alcoholism and the word alcoholic were sweet to my ears. You have no idea what a relief it was to know that what was wrong with me had a name. Well, start to think. I'd been living in this institution for nine or ten months by then. It was a big 500-acre place. It had many buildings on it. But there was one pattern that everybody followed. When you first came in, you were in the sort of entry house where the real sick ones were.
Then you moved to a middle house, which was quite heavily watched, with a nurse at every stair, head of every stairway. As you got ready to leave, you moved to the house down by the gates, which was pretty open and free where the doctor's offices were. And then you went home. And then you'd see people come in in straitjackets, screaming. They weren't even in that initial entry house. They were in one way over there somewhere where it was said to have a pad itself.
Pretty soon they came up to the middle house where I was, and they moved to the big house by the gate, and then they went home. Me, I stayed. I wasn't going anywhere. I wasn't moving up or down or sideways. All these people that came in so sick had a name for what was wrong with them. You know, they were schizophrenics or they were paranoid. I didn't have a name. I had the nameless illness. That's scary.
So all of a sudden in this book I find I have a condition that has a name. The name is alcoholism. People like me are called alcoholics, and there are lots of them. But this was the biggest relief I'd ever had. Then I went on to read about some of these people, and I found another thing. There was a description of alcoholism in that book. And for the first time I saw why I shouldn't drink again or couldn't drink again.
It said, alcoholism is an allergy of the body coupled with an obsession of the mind. Now the word allergy was not literally meant. It wasn't a physical allergy. It was simply some difference in the body. Nobody knew what it was. Therefore, nobody knew what to do about it. Therefore, once it took place, you were stuck with it. It went on to explain that there was no way of restoring your body, reversing it back to where it had been.
The only thing you could do was to stay away from alcohol, and that meant you had to deal with the obsession of the mind that drove you to it even when you didn't want it. And this they felt they had found a way to do. Now this satisfied my logical mind. It gave me an acceptable, to me, reason why I could never drink again. My body had become, or originally was, or something different. It would no longer take alcohol without terrible damage to me.
But I could learn how not to start. I could learn how to stay away from the first drink. Well, I got awfully excited about this book, but it had a problem for me. There were too many capital letters in it. Most of those capital letters were G. I didn't like the word God. I didn't like the idea of God.
[00:40:01]
I had outgrown God when I was 17. I didn't need him. I didn't want him. He was opium. He was self-hypnosis. I had an intellectual pride that couldn't accept it. So I told Dr. Teagle, this is just a self-hypnotic method. This is allowing your emotions to run your life. I can't do that. You've taught me I can't do that. So he said, well, I think you better read a little more in the book. I would read just enough to have an argument ready for him, and then I'd tell him how lousy it was.
And I fought my way slowly through that book over, oh, about a seven, six, seven week period. And then something happened. And again, I no longer think it's a coincidence. It says in the book that the alcoholic needs a crisis in order to admit his condition and to seek help. Well, a lot of people would think it is a crisis to be in a mental institution where I was, but I'd been there so long it was home.
There's no crisis to me. I loved it. But a crisis did occur. Something happened to a member of my family for which I felt responsible because of where I was and about which I was totally helpless. And it made me so angry. I wasn't just frustrated. I was in a rage, a rage such as I have never known before or since. We've all read this phrase. You see red. I saw red. It's true. I was in my room, and I was in a little tiny attic room up in the top of this building with a tiny little window under the eaves, a room which I resented, and I resented being there.
And on my bed was this damn book that Thiebaud was making me read. And I was raging, and there was one particular person I wanted to kill, and if I had run into him at that point, I believe I would have killed him. But finding the opportunity to do that in my rage, I was thinking to myself, I know what I'll do. I'll walk down to Costco, but I'll get two bottles, and I'll come back here, and I'll get drunker than I've ever been, and I'll bust this goddamn place up.
Because what I was doing was showing that superior intelligence we all have, you know. When we get good and angry at somebody else, we pick up a hammer and bash in our own heads. Right. Very intelligent. Before I got to my feet to walk down to Costco and get the bottles, my eye fell sideways on this manuscript that was lying open on my bed. It was just a blur of the pages, and I wasn't really looking at them.
Suddenly, in the middle of one of the pages appeared a line that was not a blur. It stood out as if it was in high-block letters, and it went, We cannot live with anger. And that was the key. That was the battering ram that demolished my resistance to God. Because the next thing I knew, I was on my knees beside that bed. I must have been there quite a while, because the bedspread had a big wet spot in it from my tears.
I suppose I'd been praying, although I don't know if I had, because I haven't prayed since I was 17, and I wouldn't have known how. But I lifted my head to a sensation of freedom such as I had never felt before. Freedom, security, rightness. For me, at that moment, God was right there. So overwhelmingly so, and I was so completely in his hands that I knew I could walk out of that third-story window and keep right on walking.
I would not fall. And I had a great urge to do just that. And I had a great urge to do just that. And then a thought struck me. Well, now you're really insane. You better go tell Dr. Thiebaud.
[00:45:03]
This was in the middle of the day. He was in his office on the ground floor, and I ran down the stairs and beat on his door with no appointment. I just banged, and he came to the door and took one look at my face and hastily put his patient out the other door and said, Come in, tell me what happened. And I told him. He asked me many questions. And when I finished, he said, and I told him, I said, Do you think am I insane now? He said, I can walk out of that third story window and I won't fall. I keep walking. No, he said, I don't think you're insane.
I believe we've had an authentic spiritual experience. Many people have had this. They're described in writing, Get William James Varieties of Religious Experience. You'll find descriptions such as you've just given me. God knows he said it's better than what you've had. Now go back upstairs and read that book. So I went back upstairs and I started the book from the beginning. And it was exactly as if someone had substituted a different book.
This book was wonderful. I had no quarrel with it. I read it like a dry sponge absorbing moisture. I finished it quickly and then I started at the beginning and I read it again. The effect of that experience did not wear off. For many weeks I walked around on what we laughingly called to each other a blue cloud. People said I looked crazy. They'd go out of their way to come close to me. I know that to me they looked beautiful.
The world was beautiful. The sky was bluer than I'd ever seen it. The grass was greener. All the people were loving. I was in tune with the world for the first time in my entire life. And I believed. I knew of being in tune with it. I knew there was a God. I knew he cared about me. I knew that underneath me were the everlasting arms. That I was free of horror and danger and the agonies I'd been in. That I was free to be myself. I didn't know how to meet those people though. I was afraid of them.
I didn't know what they'd be like. I couldn't visualize them. And I told him about that. I said I'll go down there and there'll be a bunch of bombs and they'll all pray over me. Well he let me pass away for a month or so and then he picked up the phone one day and he said she'll be in tonight. She'll be at your door by seven. You'll take her to a meeting and I went. But in that little apartment in Sutton Place in New York was a man and his wife and another man for me and we had a delightful dinner party. Then we got on the subway and went to Brooklyn.
The closer the subway got to Brooklyn the more scared I got. We arrived at a brownstone house which belonged to Bill and Doris W. and when we went in it looked to me as if there were hundreds of people. Well actually there were probably about thirty. But I went upstairs to leave my coat and I didn't come down. And my hostess came up and got me and she put her arms around me and said you know we're all waiting for you and we want you down there.
And she led me down and many men that I'd never seen before came up and began asking me questions like when did you have your last drink and to my amazement I discovered I was telling them the truth without thinking twice about it. And I was instantly in deep conversation with these people I'd never seen before on a more intimate level than I'd ever talked to anyone before. And suddenly it dawned on me I was not on the outside looking in. I belonged. These were my people.
I had come home. We talked to each other on a level of communication that I had never had with other human beings. We were terribly different. We came from every different kind of background and yet instantly we had an intimacy such as I'd never had with people I'd grown up with all my life, even with my own family. We could finish each other's sentences. We felt together. We didn't just think together, we felt together. That's when I learned what it means when you say the fellowship of AA.
[00:50:12]
That's when I learned what membership means. Membership in a group of people to whom you belong. Joining a group means belonging to something. For the first time in my life I belonged. There was a man up at the sanitarium to whom I had passed on the book and read it and accepted it. And I tried to make him come with me this night when I had to go and he said, Homer, you go see what it's like. It's all right, I'll come next week.
But he telephoned the next morning. How was it, he said. And I said, Granny, we're not alone anymore. This was the first great lesson that I learned in AA, the first great gift that I had from the AA group. The first gift, of course, was finding God, which I did through the AA group. The second was finding fellow human beings through the first meeting that I attended. And then as time went on I began to find other things. I worked at those steps. I didn't have an easy time. I had a bad flip after eight months. And it wasn't until I came back from that, which I did quite quickly after I was sober, that I learned one of the new techniques they were developing in AA then.
How to live on the 24-hour basis. What that could mean. That it wasn't just a way of staying away from drinks. It was a way of meeting the problems of every day. It was a way of handling your whole life. And I began to realize that my whole attitude toward life had changed. That my way of thinking was different. After that slip, when I was recovering in the house of one of our members up in Spring Valley, New York, and I was lying awake at night and Lois, Bill's wife, came through my room about three in the morning and saw that I was awake.
And she came over to me and put her arms around me and said, oh Marty, I wish you could find a little love in your heart. I said, what in the world does she mean? I've got too much love in my heart. It's other people who don't love me enough. Then I began thinking this through. And I realized that all my life I had waited to see how far the other person would come before I'd move an inch. I wasn't giving out anything for nothing. I didn't even go 50% of the way. I had to come much further than that. I didn't trust anybody.
I never gave until I had already got. As for love, I measured it out with an eye dropper. Drop for drop after I already had a drop. So I decided to try to do something about that. I didn't really feel I'd made any progress for quite some time. But the following year, we had our clubhouse in New York and we had our first Christmas party. And we had that party because so many people had slips over Christmas.
So many people found the holidays very difficult. And so many of us were alone. We didn't have a wife or a husband or a family. And the holidays can be a very lonely time if you're alone. So we had a party. And we spent a lot of time decorating the living room in the clubhouse. We had a Christmas tree. We trimmed it. And there was somebody who could play the piano. And a lot of people were standing around the piano singing. A lot of people were sitting around by themselves just in the gloom.
But I was there and I suddenly looked around that room and I was overwhelmed by a rush of love out of me toward all those people. I loved them. I really did. And I realized it didn't matter a bit whether they loved me or not. What mattered was that I could love them and did. These are the kinds of things I learned in me. I learned another thing that's been invaluable to me. I found that in many cases, someone I was trying to help had old idiosyncrasies or characteristics or ways of doing things that were terribly irritating to me.
[00:55:26]
I couldn't think why they behaved like that when it was so irritating. In almost every case, I was trying to overcome my feelings in order to help them anyway, even if I didn't like them. I would begin to notice that this thing that irritated me so much slightly resembled something I had myself. And I discovered that in the faults of other people that I found most irritating, I could learn what my own faults were.
I wasn't irritated particularly by the faults they might have that didn't strike that recognition. The ones that really irritated me, that really upset me, that really made me angry, were the ones I had myself. And so I learned an extra value in 12 Step Up as a mirror that I could hold up and that would help me learn a little better who I really was, what kind of a person I was. And I began to see that for me at least, Alcoholics Anonymous had nothing whatever to do with drinking, that I'd been brought in under false pretenses.
It was perfectly obvious to me that I couldn't conceivably follow the 12 Steps if I was drinking. I don't think a drunken drunk could. Therefore, that first step was just literally the threshold. Lost control over drinking, my life had become unmanageable, so I stopped drinking. Once I'd stopped drinking, then I was able to grasp and understand the following 11 Steps. And not a one of them had anything to do with drinking. Not a one.
They had to do with what kind of a person I was. Really, honestly. What were my assets? What were my liabilities? How could I make more of my assets? How could I get rid of my liabilities? How could I become the kind of person I had always wanted to be? The kind of person other people could respect and like and want to have around? What kind of a person was I with other people? How were my interpersonal relationships? And if they were lousy, I'd better do something about it, make them better.
That it was my responsibility, not anybody else's. And I learned through those 12 Steps that there was nothing in the world that I could change. Nothing. Except me. But this I could change. And then I learned by actual experience that as I changed, the world around me changed to meet that change. And in the end, everything was changed. What I had discovered was the process of growth. And the process of growth was truly a spiritual process. I know it couldn't have been done if I hadn't believed. If I hadn't had the help of God.
If I hadn't come to feel that I was an integral part of the universe, and so was everybody else. So that we were all united in this way that I had first felt in an AA meeting. That we were brothers. That we belonged to each other. That we could help each other. And in AA we do help each other. We are more truly practicing the deepest spiritual principles than any other group I know of. Because we must. For us there is no choice. But after a while it's no longer because we must. It's because we want to. No one you know ever graduates from AA. There's no such thing.
The people that drop out and drop away and lose touch and lose contact are the ones I hear about as I go around the country. After 15 years, after 18 years. After 15 years, after 18 years, after 20 years, so-and-so's gone back to drinking. And I say, how did it happen? We don't know, because we haven't seen him for 10 or 12 years.
[01:00:00]
He'd never come around. We can't afford to stay away. Not because we have to come and get our medicine once or twice a week, but because we have to actively show our gratitude for what we've had. We have to show up as an example of what AA has done for us, and be ready and willing to give it away to those who still need it. In other words, it's an active thing. It's not a passive thing. You can't get it and wrap it up in a package and put it in the drawer and forget about it.
You have to keep living it, working it, feeling it, and growing in it. I don't find too much difficulty doing that, because I love it. I've never been bored in an AA meeting in my life. I've always heard something that meant something to me, or opened a new door, or gave me some help I needed. And I have watched AA grow. I wanted to say just one other thing to you. I had been in AA five years when I conceived the idea that something else was needed.
We in AA could not, and had decided that we would not, become educators of the non-alcoholic world. We had always found from the beginning real difficulty in teaching and informing the families of those alcoholics we were trying to help, because they weren't keen to listen to us. We were just drunks. We had in those early days no doctors that would come when we called them. We had no hospital beds where we could put people who desperately needed that.
We had no clinics where we could take some of those that needed more than we could give, or that perhaps did not belong with us because there was something else wrong with them. And I conceived the idea that this could be done by a companion organization, a different group for many. We needed the help of non-alcoholics. We'd always known that. When the book was written, the book Alcoholics Anonymous, the manuscript was distributed to doctors and clergymen for their opinion.
That's how my doctor had it. Because they didn't want anything in there that would offend either medicine or the clergy. This was to be the source of the new people that they needed and wanted to help. But very few of them, way back then, knew enough or were willing to help. But even more important was the fact that I had sought so long, nearly five years, for an answer to what was wrong with me and hadn't found it.
I never had found anybody at any level of any kind who knew what the word alcoholism was, let alone what it meant, or just what it was that was wrong with me, or whether there was any hope for people like me or where to go to find that help. For five years I had struggled. I had looked. I had sought an answer and couldn't find one. Nobody knew. And I felt deeply that it should be made easier for the people who needed help, that people should know the words alcoholism and alcoholic, that they should know what they meant, that they should understand that this was a disease, an illness, not just a moral weakness, not just a lack of character or willpower.
And I knew they were never going to learn this unless somebody made an effort to teach them. I emphasized for you earlier the number of doctors I went to, internists, general practitioners, but mostly psychiatrists, who not one of them used the word alcoholism or alcoholic or described to me what was wrong with me or told me what I had to do about it. Not one. They didn't know the word. It wasn't in use.
They hadn't learned anything about it in medical school. Nobody knew anything.
[01:05:01]
The last time that I talked at an AA meeting in Hartford was in March 1944. I've been up here since but doing public talks not AA. And it was an intergroup meeting in a high school building. And I came up here because the first alcoholism clinic in the country had opened that month in Hartford, the Yale Plan Clinic. And I had already drawn up my plan of action, which was to become the National Council on Alcoholism, and I wanted to see a clinic.
And so I came up to Hartford and I spent the day after the meeting in that clinic. And I thought, how wonderful. And that was the only one. It was another month before the second one opened in New Haven. And so I heard about the men at Yale and what they were doing and what they hoped to accomplish. And I decided I would go to that group and ask them if they would sponsor my idea to teach the public the facts about alcoholism, to remove the stigma from it, to make it a respectable illness, to bring hope and teach people that there was an answer, that alcoholics could get well and that they were very much worth helping, and that this was not a moral problem.
It was a public health problem, deserving of attention and deserving of respect. This was what I wanted to do. One of the strongest motivations I had had come to me one day as I walked up Park Avenue in New York and looked up at all those apartment buildings with their myriads of windows. I had spent six months in one of those buildings, at least half of it in a blackout, much of it awake at three o'clock in the morning having the horrors, much of it in a state of acute sickness, the last year of my drinking.
And I would look up at those windows and wonder, behind how many of those windows is there someone lying, man or woman, just like me, just as ignorant as I was, just as helpless as I was, not knowing where to turn or what's wrong or what to do. Somehow we have got to get the information to them or to their families or to their friends. And this is why I founded the National Council on Outcomes. Its primary objective is changing public attitudes about alcoholism, teaching people what it is, teaching them hope that something can be done about it, gaining the cooperation of the medical profession, of hospitals, getting facilities established where alcoholics who need it can get that kind of treatment, getting programs set up in companies so the employed alcoholic will have a chance instead of just being fired, teaching the clergy how to handle alcoholics and where to send them for the treatment they need, teaching everybody what AA really is.
God, there are so many misconceptions about it still. So many people that know the letters AA but they don't know what they stand for. They're afraid to make contact with it for their alcoholic. They're not quite sure. Is it just a meeting where everybody has a drunken orgy? Or what is it? What do you have to do to turn? There are barriers there that they themselves alone cannot get over. The council is building a bridge for them so that they might get to where they can get the help they need.
And remember another thing, that a council on alcoholism is not AA. It is made up largely of non-alcoholics who want to help, and we need non-alcoholics who want to help of all kinds. Alcoholism is an immense problem. There are six and a half million alcoholics in this country, and we only claim 350,000 AA.
[01:10:00]
That's a drop in the bucket. AA can't reach them all alone and unaided. It needs the help of all the outside groups there are. It needs their understanding. It needs the climate in a community that permits alcoholics to seek help without shame, that permits their families to seek help without shame. This is what your ally over here, the council, is trying to do. So give it a hand when you can. Don't take it in the teeth.
Don't think of it as a rival or a competitor. It isn't. It's there to help alcoholics and their families and friends just as much as AA is, but in a different way. The two groups need each other. There can't be a council if there isn't AA, because most of their referrals will be made to AA. Most of the people walking over that bridge have to have somewhere to go. The best place to go is AA. If they can, if they're willing, and if that is enough for them.
Remember, too, there are many alcoholics who are sicker than others and who may need many kinds of help before they can stay well. Not just AA, but a lot else. Medical help, psychiatric help, chemical help, pastoral counseling, church help. And if somebody is very sick, we shouldn't deny them any of the kinds of help they need. The objective is that they get help, that they get well. So I brought you two things tonight and talked over my time.
I hope you will remember this. When sobriety is given to us so freely, and it is given to us freely, it brings with it a responsibility. You know, getting sober is not such a great thing. Most of the world does it all the time. When we get sober, we are merely becoming normal like other people always are. So just being sober is not enough. What differentiates us, you know, what makes this a very remarkable fellowship, is what we do with our sobriety.
How do we use it? Do we realize it's only a means to an end? That sobriety in and of itself is not such great shakes. We used to have a saying, it's the quality of your sobriety that counts, not the length of time you've had it. It's a pretty good saying, remember. But how are you using your sobriety? Are you using it for the good of mankind? Are you using it for the good of other drunks? Most AAs do.
Are you using it for the good of other sober drunks in AA? Are you using it for the good of your family, your friends, the people you work with? These become your responsibilities when you get sober. And every one of us who is a member of AA represents AA in the minds of people who know us. We can say that we're blue in the face, but no one represents AA. But to those who know us, we represent AA. What kind of an example are we?
How well do we represent this way of life of ours? How well do we use our lives now that they've been given back to us? AA is so much more than sobriety. It's a way of life, yes. It's a way back to life. It's a way to a good life. It's a way to the kind of life you always wanted to have. It's a way to become… It's a way to become the kind of person you always wanted to be, providing you use it. It doesn't do it to you. You have to do it. And it's up to you.
[01:15:04]
If all of us accept this responsibility and use AA as it's supposed to be used, as it's there to be used, we can become, I think, one of the most powerful influences for good in the world today. We have the potential. We have the responsibility. I think we'll do it. Thank you. How nice. Congratulations on your 25th anniversary. It has been a pleasure knowing so many of you so long. Lucy E.. Mrs. E. has been with us for 23 years, answering the telephone from all people calling for help in the greater Hartford area.
Marty, that was a wonderful birthday present for the Blue Plate group, and we certainly thank you. And now, because it's late, and because I have a pillar of our group staring at me, and as we have no dues or fees, and we need a little help in defraying the costs, our good old-timer and pillar, Henry H., will bring his gang forward. So we can extract a little dough from our pockets. All members, please dig a little deep.
While the collection is being taken, I'll take this opportunity, and before we close, directly after the closing of the meeting, refreshments will be served in the smaller gymnasium, which is out this door and down the hall. Follow the crowd. Much coffee and some sweet things. Before closing this meeting in the usual manner, and for speaking for all Blue Platers, thank you sincerely for coming. Let's ask our higher power for continued guidance in extending our AA hands to the still-suffering alcoholic, so that happy anniversary meetings like this will take place for as long as the problem and illness of alcohol persists.
I want to remind all of us in the area also, and anywhere in Connecticut, en masse, this meeting tonight does not substitute for the meeting which will be held regularly the day after tomorrow at the Blue Plate in West Hartford. Seriously honored and cordially invited, will you join me in the Lord's Prayer? Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen.