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Source: DICOBE-00274 – Lynn C – LIFE HAS BECOME UNMANAGEABLE.mp3 File: dicobe-00274-lynn-c-life-has-become-unmanageable.mp3 Duration: 00:34:19
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Mr. C.'s fourth tape continues to deal with step number one of AA, and is entitled, Life Has Become Unmanageable. Mr. C.. Yesterday we discussed the first part of the first step. We admitted we're powerless over alcohol, and eventually you have to come to accept that as the truth. But the thing that is overlooked so many times in this first step is, our life has become unmanageable. And that is something that you have to study.
I think it's based on a review and a study of your drinking experience. Because if you're happy and you're drinking, nothing that we say here is going to change your thinking. And to realize that the acceptance of this program is not based on someone else's thoughts or statements. It has to be from your own experience. And are you sincere in your desire for change? Because this physical sobriety alone won't take care of our problem, which is much deeper than that.
Alcoholism is drinking plus poor emotional control, plus a great deal of immaturity, plus character defects and personality disorders. Which are a part of all people, but they're particularly marked in the alcoholic, because when you're drinking you're completely out of intellectual control, which is a thing that should run our lives. Do you feel that you've been forced into this action? And if there's a measure of pressure behind it, you're not going to willingly accept this way of life and act accordingly.
Also, have you considered your obligation and responsibility to others, to your profession or advocation, rather than consideration of self? You can't have this type of life without self-denial, without self-sacrifice and self-discipline, which life is required or is required in any person's life. And you can't have it when you damage your mind. I think it was Cassius and Othello said, Oh God, that men would put an enemy in their mouth that steals away their brains.
And how often we did that with the expectation of reward or the fear of punishment. And that's one thing that I think is so characteristic of the alcoholic, to try and avoid his responsibilities to life by drinking and easing the pain of living. I'd like to take up some of the things that I found had made my life unmanageable in the past. And this not only applies to the alcoholic. Fundamentally, I don't think we differ one iota from the main body of people, except the physical susceptibility to toxic drugs.
Anger. There are angry people. Sometimes I think I'm the last angry man because I'm angry at some of the abuse that they're giving to alcoholics and I'm very verbal about it. Because I don't believe in beating anybody down. You don't treat sick people that way. Having any love for the alcoholic, I advise you not to get into this field because when you have gone through the experience yourself, you have empathy or understanding of what the other person is going through.
Empathy is simply the ability to put yourself in another person's shoes. And that's why we talk about love so frequently. You don't hurt people that you love. The first demand or choice that love always makes upon anyone, whether it's a man's love for his God or a man's love for his wife and the wife for the husband, the mutual love for the children, mutual respect that each has for each of the other, calls for the changing of your thinking away from self and self-centeredness and others, the service to them.
But we have this lexicon that suits our own fancy. When you say anger, you immediately think of blind anger, which isn't too common, although we all go through it at times. What about peevishness and frustration? You're irritated. We all get irritated at times. You're annoyed. You're all part of anger. And I've often thought that all of us use this shallow approach to it. For instance, the fifth, I think it's the sixth commandment in the Protestant faith,
[00:05:04]
thou shalt not kill. Well, I never put a bullet in anyone's body or hit them with a baseball bat. What about the anxiety that you cause in the mental and spiritual and emotional harm that we do to others that love and trust us? That's all part of the picture. Hatred, so much of that in the world today. We don't like people or hate them because of their religious beliefs or creed or color. I claim that I'm fortunate, you know, because six months before I was born, I decided I was going to be born white of Irish parentage.
And three months before I was born, I decided I was going to be a Catholic. And that's as much as I have to say the whole performance, and yet we resent other people because they're born differently from us. How much does any of us have to say about it? But there is where you learn from other people. The learning process requires two things. First, that you read, cull, and study and edit in your own mind.
And that is important in this field, a review of your own experience, and then learn from other people. And there's never any end to that. That's the most fascinating thing in the world to me, is to watch other people and see how they perform. I've seen people who've never had our trouble, never had a drink in their life, and they're just as wretched as we are. They've never known profound contentment.
They've never known profound tragedy. But I think they live the dullest lives in the world. We happen to have a sense of values that other people don't have, and I think that's true of anyone who recovers from any addiction. I was telling someone a story that I used to tell about that. A teetotaler and an alcoholic were playing golf, and the alcoholic just got off a horrible drunk. You know how he felt.
And he got to the fourth hole, and there was a drinking fountain, and the alcoholic rushed over and drank long and deep, and the teetotaler went over and took a sip of the water, and he spat it out. It was sulfur water. He said, That water tastes terrible. The alcoholic looked at him and he said, Say, mister, did you ever get up after a horrible, horrible drunk with a rock bite going on in your skull, and your throat is closed up, and you're spitting cotton, and you take a nice cool glass of water?
The teetotaler said, I've never had a drink of liquor in my entire life. He says, Hell, man, you don't know what water tastes like. There's a lot of truth to that. Your sense of value has improved. We know the value of a good night's sleep, a good companionship, good reading, and all the things that make life worthwhile, but you can't have it with hatred. And anyone that carries hatred in his heart is going to be an unhappy people.
Resentment, which is so common in this field. We resent almost everything. At the end, simply as a defensive mechanism, and habitual resentment will inevitably lead you to self-pity, and self-pity will throw any alcoholic. I'll mention to say that 99 and 44, 100 percent of all relapses are slips, which I've indicated Schindling calls whiskey. No matter what other words you want to use, you want whiskey more than you want to go through some of this uncomfortable feeling that comes to us.
But 99 and 44, 100 percent is somehow tinged or based on self-pity. He's pushing me around, she's pushing me around. You've got a boss like I've got, and you've got the work I've got to do. Whammity-wham, finally, I can't take it anymore. Therefore, I'm justified and stultifying my mind. If I ever told myself a wretched thing in life was, I can't take the ordinary stress and strain of life that everyone has to go through without doping myself.
That's a pretty poor admission for a grown person to make. We all resent people at times, but you learn in AA to get it under control. And I don't resent people because it hurts me, and I'm very protective of me. I don't get angry very often because my intelligence tells me that anyone that can get my anger is my master, and I'm giving him the range by which he can direct my thoughts and action. And I won't concede that to anyone except Almighty God.
That gives me the ego satisfaction I need, and it also handles a rather grave problem. Now, you're not going to get rid of these things by an act of the will. You act yourself into a new way of thinking much easier than thinking yourself into a new way of acting. This old expression that as a man thinketh so he is
[00:10:02]
is not correct in my book, not to the alcoholic. We're the product of how we live. And if you will act as a happy person long enough, eventually you'll be a happy person, and you'll affect people around you. There's an old Spanish proverb that if you put a thief and a hermit together long enough, you're ultimately going to have two thieves or two hermits. And that takes a lot of patience. But you can't do it with resentment, which will destroy anyone.
And the lack of discipline. We're people that despise discipline. And that's why we operate a little differently from most of these other places, because I don't think that you can impose discipline on any alcoholic. I know that I was locked up. My brother got out a statuary drunk charge against me, and it caused a lot of hatred and anger for a long time. Eventually I, of course, when I got my brains clear, I realized that he was motivated by love.
But I felt he was sticking his nose in my business. He wanted to save my life, and he did it. But the only type of discipline that'll work with the alcoholic is self-imposed discipline. That's an observation I made after the war when I saw young men coming into AA, where we always thought early that you had to be 40 years old or over and go through this routine of hospital, institutional, and psychiatric, and what have you, care, before you could be an alcoholic.
That isn't true. And I saw these young men coming in. They were all servicemen. And I questioned them. And they had been in service, and they learned to drink there or drank before, and it was readily available. And the addictive person would go out on a leave or a Saturday night. He was with other kids in the Army. He'd get drunk. The others wouldn't. But they'd cart him back to camp and dump him in the sack.
And the next morning, the iron discipline of the Army took over. They had to get on their feet regardless of how they felt. Well, that continues for a period of a year to five years, and those people are discharged very well-pronounced alcoholics, and they have the slightest idea of what has happened to them until they're retrained to self-discipline their loss. They're the people that, you know, they'll come back and get a job, and they think they're going to hang one or two on like the more mature man next door to celebrate getting out of the Army and go to work.
Some of them got to work but couldn't hold a job. Others never got to work. The type of man that'd say, well, the Army ruined them. The Army never ruined anyone. It's a very good practice and discipline, except the people that have been wounded. And there is where we have the greatest difficulty, is the self-discipline that life requires. I know that my last drunk, I finally realized how indisciplined my life was because I was never a person of any restraint.
I had my own office. I thought I could get there as I saw fit. No one can operate that way. The only way that I could see I could discipline myself was to get up at a certain time every morning. I said 7 o'clock. It's now 6. And I can honestly say I never violated that rule once in the first 18 or 19 years or more of sobriety. I was afraid to. You have to learn enough about life to know that when a thing is working, keep it up.
And you'll always find before a person loses their sobriety, they have dropped away from some discipline that they have started at first, like reading the 24-hour book. They'll drop that one-fourth of the time before they get drunk. Anxiety. Now, there's nothing the matter with some of these things. I have anxieties. We all do. It's a natural thing about certain things in life. You have an anxiety when you're driving.
We didn't have it when we'd be dead and have accidents all the time. I have fear. I have a fear of fire. I don't know why, but I have a great fear of fire because I have happened to see two alcoholics that burned to death. They survived for a few days and talked to them, and it's a horrible thing. Gambling can make your life unmanageable. Well, I can't understand that one any more than they can understand, perhaps, my alcoholism.
I know one man. He's both an alcoholic and a gambler, and he's lost over $100,000 going out to Las Vegas. And he tried to describe to me the enjoyment he gets out of it. Apparently, he doesn't regret it. And I asked him if he didn't think of the good that he could do with that money. You get some kick out of it. You get some kick out of it. I know I got a kick out of liquor, but I'd cry all night if I lost that kind of money.
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Immaturity, and boy, we hate to hear that, and it's a childish reaction to some of the problems of life. Well, I pointed that out the other day. The many illustrations of it, it's like a child who, in a moment of peak or frustration or anger, will smash the most precious toy that he has and then spend a long time regretting it. And the most valuable thing we have is our own self-respect. If you can't respect yourself, don't expect anyone else to respect you.
And yet, on one hand, we have a vital need for it and a love of other people. On the other hand, we're destroying it by our drinking. So we don't make sense in anybody's language. Dishonesty. And that's why I say you can have a perfectly sober body and a drunken, stupid, vicious, cruel, inhuman, immoral mind. And I think that condition is worse in a sober person than it is in an alcoholic. Dishonesty of thought, I think, is one of the hard things that we have to overcome.
To be honest in your evaluation of yourself, your life is unmanageable when you're driving a car and endangering the life of other people or your family. How many times have we done that? I think I mentioned this man that had six months sobriety, went back to drinking and killed this one child, crippled another, struck three kids on a bicycle. He came down here the week before his trial and spent three days here.
I thought he had accepted it very well. And I asked him, I said, Clint, you heard all the things we had to say. Did you give any consideration to the possibility that something might happen if you drank again? He said, I've read of a lot of men being convicted of manslaughter. It couldn't happen to me, but it did. He hoped for probation. He'd never gotten it. His blood tested 43 100s and 10 100s of 1%.
And it's considered unfit to drive. He was unconscious in that car. His trial was to start Tuesday, Monday night. He shot himself. I don't want that to happen to me. And when I look back on the number of times it could have happened when I was drinking, I am grateful to Almighty God that it didn't happen or that my family wasn't hurt or killed by my driving. The absence from home. Many of you haven't done that, but disappear for three or four days.
I remember one woman that I offered her sympathy for the death of her husband who died from alcoholism. And she shrugged her shoulders and said, at least I know where he is nice now. You could write a book on that. There's a history of alcoholism. And yet that's one of the things that I did. I think your life is unmanageable when a power greater than rational, intelligent planning causes you to do things beyond reason and good judgment.
Something else has then taken over your life. And our intellect is the best thing that we have. That's the thing, the gift that God gave us to run our life. And it should be in control of our life at every moment. But excessive drinking destroys the ability to be in control of yourself. Therefore, your conduct is not self-willed and hence destructive. Many, many illustrations of it. And yet we deceive ourselves that this time it's going to be different, where it can't be different.
If that wasn't true, I wouldn't be an alcoholic. If I had any predictable stopping point after I take that first drink, I wouldn't be an alcoholic. That's the characteristic of the alcoholic. And the greatest and the most marked symptom of pill-taking or alcoholism is the loss of control. Many others are morning drinking. I remember that. The first time I did that, I was at a house party out at Lake Winnetonka.
I was badly hungover. We were drinking alcohol in those days. And I got up and I'd heard about the hair of the dog that bit you. Everybody else was asleep because I've usually been fairly early riser. And I fixed myself up a drink and, boy, did I ever go into orbit. I thought, how long has this been going on? I woke up everybody and, oh, come on, you want to have a drink? And you see, the psychology of that is bad because when I found out that no matter how I felt in the morning
[00:20:01]
and I had a buddy and a nurse and a doctor all containing the bottle, I abandoned any restraint. And, of course, that's characteristic of the alcoholic. The very deceiving part of this whole thing is that many times we could stop short of satiety by dint of willpower. You can do that sometimes for a week or two, but you're having any assurance of it. And I remember so well, drinking and thinking I had control over it, something snapped in my mind.
I was completely out of control, and then you're off to the races. We're very dependent people, and yet we reject that dependency. I've seen that so many times in the young men, the mama's boy or the girl. They're very dependent upon their parents, and yet they hate them because they haven't freedom. Every once in a while I hear someone remark, well, he's a self-made man. Every time I hear that, I think someone's done a wretched job because none of us is self-made.
We depend upon hundreds of other people to keep us living, growing the food and making our clothes and all those things. So you're just kidding yourself when you think you're self-made. You may be fortunate, make money, and a great deal of it is predicated on a man's ability to make money. Well, I get to thinking about something. Here is one of the oldest stories that I know. I hate to tell you how long ago it was I heard it.
Well, if any of you are a little bit older than Methuselah, you remember when Mayor Haynes was in Minneapolis. And I heard him talk. I don't think I was over five or six years old when he talked the basement of the Holy Rosary Church in a political campaign. And I always remember this story. A man borrowed money from a banker, and he couldn't pay it. And he wanted him to extend the note, and the banker refused to do it.
But the banker was a riddle hound. He was always propounding riddles. Finally, he agreed if this man could give him the answer to this riddle, he would extend the loan. When does God love man? When does the devil love man? When does the world love man? And when do I love my man? Man thought a minute, and he said, God loves man when he refrains from sin. The devil loves man when he persists therein.
The world loves man when blessings on him flow. And you love me when I pay you what I owe. There's a great deal of truth to that one. But our life is unmanageable when we can't enter into rewarding and obligating relationships with other people. Now, we take the rewarding part. That's very pleasant for us. But we do not take the obligating part. And I've seen that happen in AA where men take, take, take the benefits of AA and return nothing.
I think the best way we can make amends is to be at your meeting every week. I know that my own experience as a man that I never talked much AA to that had a pronounced influence on my sobriety. I knew that he was a so-and-so, and he drank the same as I was. And just his presence there, the knowledge that he had gone through the same experience that I had, and had the same lows and the frustrations, anxieties, the common faults of human nature.
The fact that he was there and quietly helping other men when he could is a great inspiration to me. And yet I hear men say, oh, I don't go to AA. It's the same thing over and over again. Of course it is. That's the only way we learn is through repetition. I was taught early in school, Repetitio meta studiarum. Repetition is the mother of study. That's why until you practice these principles, do these things, that's all we ask of any of you.
You know the principles, you're given the tools, do them. And do them every day, and if you do them long enough, you'll get the same rewards that we got out of it. And I don't know what anyone else has ever gotten out of AA in the light of serenity or peace of mind or contentment. But one thing I know so well is what I have today is compared with those 22 drinking years, life to me is paradise, and music and poetry resounds along the streets for me.
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I couldn't have said that when I was drinking. But every person knows, if you wonder what the standard of living is, every person knows what's the best within him. And any time you turn away from that, with the expectation, the reward of drinking like I did so many times, or any reward, or the fear of punishment, you're in trouble with yourself and you're badly stained by this world. I think your life is unmanageable when emotional factors disturb your life.
And you haven't got the ability to live in your own mental home with some degree of happiness and contentment. And that's where life begins and finishes. I remember years ago, long before I was an alcoholic, long before I started to drink, because I didn't drink until I was 21. I'd taken a pledge when I was confirmed and kept it faithfully. God knows why I started, except it got smart to drink after prohibition came in.
This man was a young farmer and inherited a beautiful farm. And he got married. And they only had one child, and his love for that child was a fanatical thing. It wasn't true love, I think it was too possessive. They told many stories about him, even when the child was an infant. And they would have these barn warming parties or barn dances. He would take this infant along and find a table to put her to bed on and watch her every second when he was dancing.
And when she became a toddler, he was never seen around town without her. But he was a periodical drinker. Drunk, he'd disappear every once in a while for a week or ten days, and they'd find him in a nearby town or holed up in some hotel in the city. Then he'd have quite a period of sobriety. They also told stories of how he left the team out in the field, would come in and play with his youngster during the day.
Well, he went on a drunk when his child was eight years old. And he was gone for ten days, they couldn't find him. He came back to find that his daughter had been killed and buried. Is your life unmanageable? And could it have happened to you? Could have happened to me, that's the certainty. I knew a man out in Phoenix, Arizona. Very fine person. And he was another periodic who disappeared just like I did, holed up in a hotel for a week or ten days.
And after one of his drunks, he came home and walked in. Here was a strange woman in the house, and he said, where's, uh, Edith, I think her name was. And she looked at him, she said, you may as well know the truth. She said, Edith killed herself because she could not take your drinking. Is your life unmanageable? Think, you have to think in this field. Um, I've heard it so much in the A.A. and physical sobriety won't do it because I've had occasion to say to some women, well, it's nice to have the old boy sober, have them shrug their shoulders and say, well, I don't know.
I think we were better off when he was drinking. At least he was civil once in a while. What kind of sobriety is that? That wouldn't keep me dry for a week. If you can't bring A.A. into your home, and that is not just to your wife and children, it's to any human family that you're tied into, you're not going to get out of life what life should give to you. And that's the inherent right of all of us.
Alcohol affects people differently. It affects the same person differently on different occasions. Sometimes you have a jolly jag. You call that the chocose jag or the lacrimose, that's the crying jag that you see every once in a while. The bellicose, which is the fighting drunk. And then you get comatose when you're drinking now. But those are different experiences that come to us and most alcoholics are very sensible people.
There are certain people that come to A.A. that are poolers because drinking is an incident to mental illness. But I agree with Dr. Menninger that he said that before he wants to treat an alcoholic, he wants them to have six months to a year in A.A. And then you can do it. And, uh, then you could do something with a man if he's still humped with other problems.
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But to give all these tests that they give, the multiphasic and the, uh, Rorschach and the POI and all, on and on and on, is ridiculous. Because until a man is dry three or four months, his, his brain's haven't cleared out. With me it was longer, about seven months before I could think rationally. The residual physical effects last for a period of weeks. The mental effects last for, I think, months.
That varies with every person. Uh, until you realize the danger of drinking, and that's the hardest job that we have, is to convince people of the finality of their illness. The fact that I might want a drink has nothing to do with it. I can't drink unless I want to go back into that same rat race that I was in so long. And I'm free, and I haven't the words to describe that sense of freedom. You have to live this long enough so you sense and feel it.
And surely in this field I've recognized the, the inadequacy of words. Because what I know, sense and feel and, and think, I know pretty well. But to transmit that to you is virtually impossibility. We don't point a finger at anyone and tell them they must do things. We say walk along with us. If you like what you see us doing, do it, and do it long enough, and you'll get the same results that we do, that we have.
But it takes time, and we're very impatient people. I don't expect any of you to be thinking the way I, I am, because I've been working at this thing quite a long time. But the, the only thing that anyone is chargeable with is the, the knowledge that they have of themselves at the moment. And certainly while I, while I think of it, I say read that book. Read it not once. But sometime between the fifth and the fifteenth complete reading of the first 164 pages, you'll have a slight understanding of what AA is all about.
And then you better study it. Here it's comparatively easy. You're in a secluded attitude, or atmosphere. But the test is when you get out in the pressures and the confusion of the world today and the false values that you see around it. To hold that when you get out, well I use this term so frequently you'll hear it a dozen times, that it's easy in this world to live after the world's opinion. It's easy in solitude to live after your own.
But the great person is a person who in the midst of a crowd can keep the convictions being in solitude. There's the key to AA. Here in the seclusion and solitude, in the beautiful environment here, if you can formulate in your own mind how you want to live and then go out and face this world and keep the independence of thought that you formulated here, then you're on your way to recovery. I frequently think of this funeral oration of Father O'Donnell.
It's a funeral of Canute Rockne, this great Notre Dame coach of years ago. And it applies so well today. So then we may see that stamped itself, the era, the go-getter. A horrible word for a ruthless thing. He was a go-giver. Not much better word, but it means a divine thing. I think you'll find that's true in AA. We'll close with 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 and ever. Amen.