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Source: DICOBE-00273 – Lynn C – MOTIVATION AND DESIRE.mp3 File: dicobe-00273-lynn-c-motivation-and-desire.mp3 Duration: 00:33:17
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This is the second presentation in Mr. C.'s series for personal recovery from alcoholism and drug dependence. It is entitled Motivation and Desire for Recovery. Mr. C.. This morning I would like to talk about motivation. And motivation is simply the thoughts and actions that cause us to do certain things and, uh, it's part of our thinking. Some of them are instinctual. Some of them develop, uh, motivating things in life.
And they change sometimes and life goes on. Life goes on. Uh, perhaps the greatest motivating force in life is the desire for survival. That will cause men to do things that are far beyond their ordinary capacity. It wasn't long ago that I read of a sailor who had been in the water almost 48 hours before he was rescued. It was simply the desire for survival that is instinctual in human beings. The last thing any of us want to lose in life is our consciousness.
There's the motivation of economics, which is a great gold, at least for some of us, at the time of our drinking because it is necessary to have money to live in this world. And it's one of the motivating forces that drive men, uh, to continue on with working. There's the motivation of pleasure. And all these things are good. They're reasonably used, but when they get out of control, of course, they're a disaster.
There's a motivation of revenge, which you find in a few people. They're unhappy people. They seem to, uh, have a resentment, not against a person or place or circumstance, but against fate or fortune. Why me? Why do I have to be settled with the only wife that a man can't live with? Why do I have the kind of a boss that I have? And always the idea of getting even for what fate has done to them. And it's not a sin, it frequently leads to sin, it's a passion.
But the only antidote for that is generosity and gratitude. You've seen a case of that in recent history of Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler, who were resentful men. And one of the characteristics of a resentful person is the destruction of the people that brought them to power because they resent ever being placed in a position where they have to ask for help. I've seen that in a minor way in AA, where a sponsor gives the sponsoree the best of help, and when the sponsoree reaches a point where he has some security in his own sobriety, he can't say enough evil things about his sponsor.
That is a resentful person. There's a motivation of power, which you witness in politics in this day and age, the struggle for men to have some power or dominance over other people. And a reasonable amount of that is good, but most of these men overlook the fact that leadership is always for the benefit of the leader, or for the followers, and never the leader. That's a mistake that many men make in marriage, believing that the marriage is for their benefit, and it never, never is.
For the benefit of the leader, it's always for the benefit of the followers. There's a motivation of material things, and I think many of us clutter up our life with a lot of debris that isn't of great value to us. There's an old expression, it's nice to have money and the things the money can buy. But occasionally stop to look yourself over to see that you haven't lost the things that money cannot buy.
The scientists say that our goals are weak and undefined, and that's the vagueness of life. Looking back on it, I expected that I was going to have a certain amount of contentment or happiness in life,
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and perhaps some difficulty and tragedy, and somehow they'd balance each other out, but that isn't true. Happiness is a thing entirely within inside you. I remember the founder of AA talking to us one time and telling us, if you will accept AA as your way of life, and live it honestly and well, no one, absolutely no one can ever hurt you again in this life except you. And that is true. I'm the only person that can hurt me.
If I let these slights and hurts that are flying around the air all the time affect me, I'm going to be an unhappy person. They're going around the air all the time, they should be like radar and bounce away from us, but if we take them in because of the self-criticism that we have of ourselves and the recognition that we're being criticized by other people. Some men come here, men and women, under some form of compulsion.
That is, some event surrounding their drinking has brought them to AA unwillingly through the pressure of the family or some outside agency. I don't think it's very important what brings you here if during the course of the time that you're here, you recognize that you have a problem that has to be solved. You're going to be dependent upon the people in AA for your recovery for a period of time. That's vital because they know that no alcoholic can help himself alone.
It's not a possibility and you have to depend upon other people to help you during the early difficult stages of recovery. But it matters little what brought you here if you learn that your drinking or the taking of pills is a problem and an all-consuming evil in your life and that you have a chance to correct it. Why we became alcoholics is of very little importance. If we accept the fact that our lives are out of control and we cannot tolerate the normal use of liquor or pills, what that is, no one can tell you.
Many people drink more alcohol than any alcoholic and yet it doesn't gravely affect their lives. Some people can take pills normally without too great an effect on their life. And what we refer to here is the self-treatment or self-prescription of drugs which are very, very available today. I think one thing that's very important is to destroy this very complicated and involved and almost mystic alibi system that we develop.
You know, I said I wasn't going to drink or take pills but nobody can take the grief that I have in life. And I remember saying that many times. Well, I know that I shouldn't drink and it's caused disaster but nobody's got the problems that I have and therefore I can't take it anymore. And if I ever told myself a disastrous thing in life was was when I said I can't take the ordinary stress and strain of life unless I stultify or dull my mind.
This alibi system has to be a conviction in your mind that never again in this life can you take a pill or a drink with impunity. I know that I have been guilty so many times in life of doing the right thing but doing it for the wrong reason and that's the characteristic of many of us. We do nice things in life but there's an ulterior motive behind it. An illustration of that is the attempt of many men to buy the love and affection of their children.
And sometimes it becomes a contest in a family relationship where the alcoholic recognizing that he has not lived up to his capabilities is by generosity or acquiescence trying to buy his children's affection. And that is true of the pill users, of the mother. And in a great many cases you set a conflict between the husband and wife for the love and affection of their children. We know that, and it's a pretty well established fact, that man's greatest desire or the most desperate desire
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is ultimately going to control his life. When the desire for the pill or liquor was the dominant thing in our mind to ease the pain of living, then it controlled our life. When your desire for sobriety, and when I talk about sobriety I mean complete absence from pills or drugs of any description. I'm not a doctor. I'm not talking about the prescribed medical use. But I think of any addicted person or a person who has a tendency towards addiction has to take any kind of a pill.
It should be given to him by his wife or somebody else because most of us couldn't control it. These urges are going to come back to you from time to time. You may as well anticipate it and plan on it and then plan out some other way of handling the stress and strain of life. Some men discover very quickly the stupidity of the drinking or the pill taking and latch on very readily. Others develop slowly and regeneration takes a greater effort.
I think in my case I'm a slow learner. Usually when I do learn anything it's pretty deep. But it took me a long time to recognize the extent of the damage that alcohol had done to my life and to make this tremendous effort that is required to sustain yourself over the difficult early days of the reoccurrence of the old alcoholic thinking. Personally I think it's very important that we destroy this illusion of the glamour surrounding drinking.
I remember this old ad they had, A Man of Distinction. And in spite of all the disasters that I had, I always wanted to drink like a man of distinction. You recall a picture, a man sitting in a library with a drink in his hand, a match a little redressed. And I tried it many, many times. No matter what I tried or hoped or prayed or dreamed or schemed, I always ended up like a bowery bum once I started to drink.
There's a great deal of fallacy connected with drinking. And I speak about drinking because I'm an alcoholic. I fortunately never got addicted to pills. But the principle of all addiction is the same, the effect that it has on your mind. And I always wanted to drink normally where it was an impossibility. And I didn't know until I had been enlightened and had the insight that I needed that I was an alcoholic.
There was nothing I could do about it. And I accepted this, finally, the same way that I would have to accept diabetes, heart trouble, or anything else. I wouldn't like it. But I would have to accept it and then follow the rules of recovery. But this Hale-Fellowell myth, you hear that so many times in this drinking field. To whom? To me, to my family, to the people that counted in my life? I wasn't much of a Hale-Fellow.
The unfortunate part of it is that all of these addictions are like B.O. Even your best friends won't tell you. And I found after I dried up, some of my friends said, Well, when I knew you were drinking, it was killing you, and I wanted to talk to you about it, but I knew that you'd blow up if I mentioned it. And that is true. That is one thing that we always defend, is our addiction. I finally realized that I have to ask myself and honestly answer some questions.
I was trained as a lawyer, and of course you learn to ask questions. And I asked myself whether I wanted to be a happy person or not. Drinking made me unhappy, and the last ten years of my drinking, I wanted to be a happy person, therefore I had to eliminate alcohol from my life, which was a very unpleasant thing for me to contemplate. There's a great deal of self-persuasion in AA. I have an expression that I used to say that I said a half a million times, which of course is an exaggeration.
But it was this, you can't drink, you won't drink, it means your life, your sanity, and your freedom. Sometimes I would go out and take a walk and keep time in the cadence of that in my mind. Many times I did. That my mind, many times after I made my peace with God at night, God in bed, I would start
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that statement going through my mind and wake up in the morning with it going through my mind. How much effect it had on my sobriety, I don't know, but it's still present in my mind. I also train myself to always think of the unpleasant part of the drinking, how sick I had been. Whenever I saw an ad, whenever I saw anybody drinking or talking about drinking, I tried to turn my mind as to what it had done to me, the unhappy part about drinking.
And I have no illusions in my mind about the glamour that's been thrown around drinking for years, the companionship and the fellowship. If rightly used, it's a fine thing. I have no objection to liquor. I rather enjoy seeing people who can handle it. But if I was a diabetic, I certainly wouldn't be resentful of people who couldn't, or could eat sweet stuff, but I couldn't, and the same thing is true about alcohol.
Alcohol has its place in social behavior, but when it's abused, it can be the most disastrous thing in the world, and I know of no other illness that so completely destroys the individual. There's a lot of glamour connected with it, a hail fellow well-met in the spirit of fun that's thrown around drinking, interesting to watch the ads today on the TV. The only thing that can be advertised is beer, but you always see gaiety and dancing and fun and vigor and interest in young people.
They never show the unpleasant part of it. I've often thought they certainly wouldn't put on the air a picture of me standing over a commode getting the well-known dry heaves which I assume some of you have had. Ask yourself, was I manly to my family or to myself? Was I an honorable person, which every person should be in life? Was I a good example of a man that believes in my God and Creator? Those are valid questions.
Ask yourself that and try to find an honest answer. What is more important to me, decency, honor, love of God, love of my family, my fellow men or drinking? You know, when I get half stoned and someone would play, I'll take you home, Kathleen. I don't know why that one always got me, but I can get almost maudlin about the love that I had for my family. You know, you'd go into a burning building, you'd swim a lake, and I'm not a very good swimmer either.
Anything to save their life, you'd give your arm to save their life, all the nonsense. I wouldn't give up one drink for them, and I think my family would tell you that that's the greatest gift that I've ever given them. Are you selfish or not? Ask yourself these questions and don't lie to yourself. I think you can lie to almost anyone in life and get away with it, but when you lie to yourself, you certainly are a sucker, and I know that we've been called the greatest of all liars, and I agree, but that's self-protection, the deepest instinct in the human heart.
We have to lie to protect ourselves. When I disappeared from the office for a week, I certainly wasn't coming back and telling everyone, oh, I've been on a horrible drunk, oh, I told them I had the flu or broke a leg or something else. I had the flu more than any person that ever lived, and yet that lying to self is the most disastrous thing in the world. That's what we mean by personal honesty, to tell yourself the truth.
Ask yourself, have I lived up to my responsibilities and capabilities? My responsibility is to other people. Have you lived up to the commitment of marriage? We believe in marriage, all of us do. Have you lived up to the rules of marriage or the rules or the demand of love, and the first demand that love always makes upon anyone is the demand that it makes for the reorientation of your thinking away from self and self-centeredness to others and the service to them.
The more outgoing you are, the greater the love, and certainly you find that where it borders on dedication. Dedication is simply the outward manifestation of inner conviction, when your desire is to do things for other people rather than have them done for you, then you're on your way
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to recovery. Did it ever occur to any of us that any moron could have done just exactly what we did? I don't think it takes much intelligence to follow the crowd, follow them to disaster. That's one of the difficulties today in life, that people are following blindly other people. But I'm not other people, I'm me. What's good for other people, fine, that's their business, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's of any value to me, and I have to treat myself as an individual.
No one has a right to question that. If you felt in the past that you had fun drinking, well and good, there was a time when we all enjoyed drinking because everyone starts out as a social drinker, or they take pills according to the prescription. But what started out with me to be an accepted social course and a very enjoyable thing became an all-consuming evil. But the last one to recognize that they have a problem with alcohol is the alcoholic.
People who know us know that we've had a problem for a long period of time, but again they're afraid to tell us because we train people not to question us about our drinking. We train our wives, they know that we're going to blow up if anything is said about our drinking. We reject this term alcoholic or alcoholism, which doesn't mean a thing, it's a catch-all phrase like so many of the phrases today.
Psychopath, it can be a very, very minor thing and any deviation from normal behavior is considered some form of psychopathy or mental aberration. And until we recognize that our behavior is not normal, that our lives are out of control, and recognize that we're using a toxic drug to ease the pain of living and to avoid the responsibilities of life. When we were married, we promised to do a certain thing.
Now if I was a contractor and I agreed with you to build a home, and I found halfway through that I wasn't making the money that I planned on making, work was difficult, material had gone up, would you stand for me coming to you and say, well, I know that I promised to build this home for you, but I'm not enjoying what I'm doing. I expected something entirely different. I'm not going to go ahead with this contract.
What would you say to me? You're going to live up to the letter of your contract. Yet we don't seem to realize that marriage, which is the most sacred obligation that can be possibly imposed upon anyone, requires a great deal of care and selection. We don't live up to our commitments to life. And when you cannot live up to your own convictions and commitments to life, you're going to be an unhappy person.
If you have felt in the past that there was some obligation to drink, for instance for business reasons, that's a fallacy. More business has been lost through drinking than any one cause that I know. And if you have to acquire business through drinking, I think you're going to find in the end that it isn't going to be very profitable. To illustrate that point, and to show the handicap that we are under in our drinking days, I often thought if you took your car into a garage for some minor repair, and when you came to get the car, the mechanic was drunk, I think I know enough about myself and human nature to know that if anything happened to that car, within two or three weeks afterwards, you're inclined to say, what did that drunken mechanic do to this car?
He may have done the best job in the world, but you're going to blame him for any failure that occurs after that. Also, in the practice of law, you can try a case as well as any man could, but if you happen to lose it, what's your client going to think? If this man had been sober, the results would have been different, or a doctor who's taking care of a patient, when he comes around, he's drunk and loses the life of a person, he may have done the best job possible, what are you going to think?
If he'd only been sober, he probably would have saved this life.
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If you drink for friendship, well, anyone that knows my drinking history and would urge me to take a drink is just about as friendly as a man that puts a loaded shotgun to my head. And if I have to depend upon liquor for friendship, I haven't got the right kind of friend. To be one of the gang, well, I'm not one of the gang, I am me, and I have to be aware of my personhood at all times. What's good for other people isn't necessarily good for me, and yet you hear that so many times, whether you drink for friendship or to be one of the gang, well, we have to realize that we are individuals like no other individual on the face of this earth, we have responsibilities to ourselves, to our God, and the many things that touches our life, and that no one else can do it for us.
For fun, how much fun did you have in the last years of your drinking? Drinking was a deceiving part of it when we first started to drink. We were young, usually. The fun was there in the first place, but as our alcoholism progresses, we make the mistake of believing that drinking equals fun. It certainly doesn't equal fun when it makes you sick. There is one of the great confusions in this field, this glamour that's been thrown around us, but look at what liquor has done to you.
I know that in this motivating thing that comes to life, one of them is a motivation of pleasure, and there's nothing wrong with it, there's nothing wrong with money. But they won't buy the things that are necessary in life. It's not having things, it's being a person. To illustrate the point, I'd like to take up three cases. One was an alcoholic, of how other people lived. There was a man named Domaine, and Domaine was a financial genius.
At the age of 16, he owned four businesses and invested in many others. A great deal of his money was made in later life by going into old established companies, buying stock control, firing men who had worked up to a good wage, and hiring young men and working them at a starvation wage. He was on the board of the New York-New Haven Railroad, and was kicked off of the board because of his bad relationships with unions.
He went out, bought stock control, and then the next meeting he went up in the daycoats and came back in the President's Special. Domaine had lived so badly, and had established such bad relationships with other human beings as his son, publicly apologized in several magazine articles for his father, saying that he hoped that he could establish better relationships with other people than his father had.
Domaine worked until the day that he died. He was stricken at the office at the age of 85, and the last four words he spoke on the face of this earth were, it wasn't worth it, and I don't want to die that way. Take fun. There's nothing to matter with fun, but be sure it's going to bring to you bitter abandonment. He went out, bought stock control, and then the next meeting he went up in the daycoats and came back in the President's Special.
Domaine had lived so badly, and had established such bad relationships with other human beings as his son, publicly apologized in several magazine articles for his father, saying that he hoped that he could establish better relationships with other people than his father had. Domaine worked until the day that he died. He was stricken at the office at the age of 85, and the last four words he spoke on the face of this earth were, it wasn't worth it, and I don't want to die that way.
Take fun. There's nothing to matter with fun, but be sure it's going to bring to you the things that are of value to you. I often think of this beautiful picture, The Sound of Music, where the Count proposes to the girl, and she sings this song, nothing ever happened, nothing ever could, somewhere back in my youth or my childhood, I must have done something good, and certainly all of you people have done good in life.
There was an actress named Jeannie.
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And it seems, though, there was a great deal of immaturity to her, just like a child who will play with a toy far beyond his capacity to enjoy it. He's over at another child's house. He doesn't want to let go of it. And Jean was like that in life. She wanted to get every bit of fun there was out of life. And fun shouldn't be part of our existence. But I don't think we're the only ones who believe that one crowded hour of joyous life is worth an age without a name.
Jean was so intent on having fun that they found at her desk a thing that she had written one time, If I be dead by dying, then I'll no longer be, but as long as I am living, I'll never be dead. And she died strapped down a raving maniac from drugs and booze in the sanitarium, and I don't want to go that way. Booze prisoner Gotham. Fame and fortune. A lot of famous people use it right. I think some of these people believe that some of the attention that's paid to them, the adulation that some of these actresses get is a personal tribute. Just like in the army, men are saluted all the time, and they begin to think that it's a tribute to them personally, or it's a tribute to the uniform they wear.
Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor of Germany, was one of the most famous or infamous men of his day, depending upon your point of view. Yet he wrote in his 84th year that he had never known 48 hours of happiness in his entire life. Genius comes to a few. Fame and fortune are not rare, but it seems as though Almighty God reserves for those who in simplicity follow his rules his greatest of all gifts, serenity and peace of mind.
That's why the poet said, you can lay your worldly gifts at the feet of foolish men, but pour the sweetest waters of serenity upon my head, that I may know an untroubled mind. Give it some thought. We'll close with the Lord's Prayer. Amen.