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Source: Dr. Don of Montreal – AA Recovery and the Second Step (Date Unknown).mp3 File: dr-don-of-montreal-aa-recovery-and-the-second-step-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 00:45:39
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Well, here's another one, Bill. This is a talk by Dr. Don of Montreal. Tonight we have as our guest speaker Dr. Don. I don't think he needs much introduction. I know my first recollection of meeting Dr. Don was when we had the clubhouse on Howell. I think I first met him there, and since then I've heard him talk on many occasions. I've called him on many occasions, and I consider him one of my close friends.
So without any further words from myself, I'll ask Dr. Don to take over. Thank you. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. It's usually my habit to stand when I speak. I hope this won't interfere with this apparatus. I'd like to thank you very much indeed for the honor and really privilege that you have extended to me for asking me to be your guest speaker here tonight. Like a lot of other people in AA, I'm not averse to hearing myself talk, and I find it wise to put a watch in front of me.
When I was asked by Eddie if I would come to speak to you tonight, I was a little confused, of course most of us are confused anyway, but a little more confused than usual, and I tried to give a little thought to what I should say. And I went through quite a number of rather flowery medical, scientific aspects of the so-called disease of alcoholism, and it occurred to me that the purpose that I am here for is to help you celebrate an anniversary of a group that started when two or three people gathered around a coffee pot, this is the way most groups start, and shared something with each other.
And therefore, I know that this is also a personal anniversary of one of your earlier members, earliest members. And so I thought I'd make it an anniversary for myself too. My own birthday in AA is the day before yesterday, and so I'm glad to share it with you. And because it is an anniversary, I thought it might be a chance for me to take a forward step in this organization and look at certain things that I have been doing and have not been doing.
And I thought I might take this opportunity to try to take the second step, because I honestly believe that up to this point I have been working on the first step. I was willing to admit I was an alcoholic, and I think that you will agree with me that I was. But I think probably I bogged down a little bit at the second step, which says that [unclear] believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
And the reason I bogged down was a very obvious one. You can't be restored to sanity unless you happen to be enjoying that state which is the opposite to sanity. And very few of us are willing to admit that we are in fact insane. Insanity is a thing that applies to the other fellows in AA, and it was specifically put into the 12 steps because of his needs. As far as I'm concerned, I was willing to go along on a purely medical and technical ground,
[00:05:08]
more or less on the old jingle that used to say, those who are addicted unto drink stand on the precipice of drink. They soon will cross the river with cirrhosis of the liver. It's a damn sight sooner than they think. I was quite willing to go along with the concept that my liver might be a little bit involved, but as far as the upstairs part was concerned, I had that figured out that this was fine.
As a matter of fact, it was rather above average. And so having been going along for a few 24-hour periods on this first step, I thought probably an anniversary was a good time for me to look at the second step and see what I could do about the wording of it. I'm not going to disappoint a number of you, but I'm going to skip a number of years in my life and go right up to when I was an adult. The time is short.
I don't tend to speak for more than two or three hours. And all these very meaningful and traumatic experiences that happened in my youth and which were directly responsible for my becoming an alcoholic, after all, we've got to have an excuse. I'm going to take as read, like the minutes of the last meeting. I don't suppose there are any people or group of people in the world more fortunate than I. We people in this room, because there are an awful lot of other people who are not in this room, they're stacked around in various rooms all over this man's city.
Some of them have got their heads on the table and they're sound asleep. Others of them are being kicked out and still others are still fighting. They've got their two fingers up. They've got ten cents or twenty cents or whatever it is to pay for them when they come along. It's a nice surprise. And these people are sitting in and going through what each of us has gone through, but there's one difference between them and us or the beginnings of us.
We know what's the matter with them. If they have this disease, maybe it's going to be some little time before they find out. So we have to jump on them and we hope to welcome them. Like a lot of other people, I was classified, I think, or I like to classify myself as a reactive type of drinker, by which I mean that I was not an alcoholic from my first drink. I enjoyed quite a number of years of social drinking without getting into too much trouble.
Drinking which consisted in pleasurable intercourse with my fellow men, drinking which didn't threaten me in any way, drinking which didn't harm me too much, and drinking which did not really go beyond the sort of habits of the society in which I found myself, not that I would want everybody to pattern themselves on the society with which I identified myself at all times. But there was a time later on in my life when I was a student in Scotland when I went out of control for the first time.
I remember it very well. I remember the place where it took place. Dr. Owen remembers the place where it took place. I think he went out of control there a couple of times too. And I remember sitting in a chair and suddenly realizing that I was in a pretty parlous state.
[00:10:05]
I was drunk certainly. I was drinking fast, gulping, getting them down, going into almost withdrawal symptoms before the waiter could come to fill up the glass again, simply because I felt that it wasn't coming fast enough. Intellectually I knew that I shouldn't stay there, I shouldn't continue to be there. I often get up and go that I was sick. I was scared that if I got up out of the chair I wouldn't be able to walk.
My legs would seem to have gone from me. I think that's fatigue, I'm not sure. And for the first time in my life I had to ask the waiter if he would be kind enough to telephone to a friend of mine and ask him to come down and get me. The waiter did it and my friend arrived and said, what's the matter with you? And I said, I don't know, I can't stop drinking. He said, oh, you've had enough to drink, you're plastic now, why don't you come home?
I said, I can't, I'm terrified, I couldn't go where there isn't a bottle. If I go on drinking I don't know what's going to happen to me, so I don't know what to do. And he said to me, he said, I think you should see a doctor. And I said, I think maybe I should. Who will I see? Well, he said, we'll get one somewhere. And he helped me out and we went home, but I had to buy a bottle before I went home.
I couldn't possibly face the idea of going anywhere where there wasn't a supply. And two days later I found myself in a nursing home for the first time being dried out for alcohol. And I stayed in the nursing home for seven or eight days. By about the third day I was well again. By the fifth day I'd rationalized the whole thing. It was all due to stress or strain or something or been working too hard or something like that.
And I came out and I promptly went back to drinking again. And I submit that the prompt return to drinking on the part of a supposedly sane human being immediately after an experience like that constitutes insane behavior. An uncle of mine once worked in an asbestos mine up in a place called Black Lake in the eastern townships. And he had a terrier dog. This was many, many years ago. And this dog was very fond of beer and he had a credit for the dog in the tavern.
And this dog used to come in and when it looked up at the barman, the barman would pour some beer in this bowl and the dog would drink it. Things went along very happily this way. The dog used to turn up pretty regularly. My uncle, who died of some euphemism for alcoholic poison some years later, told me about this. A lot of people knew this dog, this little terrier, and they used to like to buy it a drink.
And one night the dog got very, very drunk. He got upstairs. He was probably feeling sick. He went out on a veranda and he fell off the veranda into the road. And he hurt himself quite severely. And he never drank again. I was told that after this accident, and when the dog got better, I don't think he broke anything, I think he just sort of shook himself up a bit. But I was told that he would go back into the bar and if they poured beer, he wouldn't drink it.
If they gave him water, he would. So for my money, you can take the I-E-N-S off of homo sapiens because it's thrown to one side. It is true that this dog signed the pledge once and for all. Because I guess there isn't any A-A for dog. After this experience in Scotland of going out of control and [unclear], and back onto drinking again, I started a series of well-thought-out reasons for avoiding alcohol.
[00:15:13]
I did a number of things. Whenever my progress in whatever I was doing at the time was threatened by my drinking, which was fairly often, I voluntarily put myself where I could not drink. I might put myself again into a nursing home, get the kind offices of a doctor to put me there, or I would go away on a trip. I went on many trips to the Outer Islands, Scotland, the Hebrides, with a friend of mine who didn't drink at all, and where I knew there would be nothing to drink. We didn't carry anything with us.
And I would come back again determined that I had no problem with alcohol because I had been without it for a definite length of time. I submit again that this is insane reasoning. Of course I'd done without alcohol. There wasn't any there. But I could take the credit for having done without it, in spite of the fact that I couldn't get it if I wanted it, and use that credit to assure myself that I had control over this compulsion.
And I would then start to drink again, and the thing would repeat. It's this same behavior. Another time, I felt so sick of heart as a result of a period of drinking that when I drank, I never bothered with eating. I couldn't be bothered doing that. And I just got in pretty bad shape, so that a friend of mine suggested that I might put myself into a mental institution which specialized a little bit, or one wing of it anyway, in the treatment of alcoholism, and it was suggested I might go there as a student to do some medical work.
I went down. Arrangements were made. I'm a little hazy as to just how they were made. But I went to this large and imposing institution and started, as I thought, to do a little clinical medicine. But of course, the true nature of my position there manifested itself rather definitely when I decided one day to go out for a walk, and nobody seemed very anxious to open the door. They told me, of course, this was entirely a voluntary institution, but I had signed certain papers as I came in. I wasn't very well at the time. And in order to get out again, I had to submit in writing my reason for wishing to leave, which would be assessed by a committee which only convened at certain times.
This was one of the sneakiest things that was ever pulled on me. But after I came out of this institution, it wasn't very long before I was able to convince myself that in fact my stay there, which had been beneficial, had been really a part of my training. And I convinced myself that this was so. I'd had a very interesting time because I had been privileged to meet a number of well-documented and well-attested alcoholics whom I could observe.
Of course, I started drinking again, and I submit once more that in view of all the things that had happened to me in the past, this drinking again constituted insane behavior. By virtue of these methods of putting myself away from alcohol for periods of time, and I think one of the hallmarks of the alcoholic is his ability to abstain completely.
[00:20:07]
What we can't do is control our drink. I managed to achieve what I wanted to achieve, which was a degree in medicine, although I took a little longer than perhaps I should have taken to achieve it. Nevertheless, I did, and I came back to Canada, having been married in the meantime, and I set up my life here in Montreal, working in the Montreal General Hospital, without any very exalted position there, and getting along, as I thought, quite well.
When I look back on it, I wonder how crazy a guy can really get. The drinking, by this time, was properly out of control. I recognize now, in looking back, patterns of almost cyclical, compulsive phases. I simply had to drink at these times. I seemed to work up to a pitch, and then this nervousness could only be controlled by drinking until I physically was unable to drink anymore. On one of these times, and it's not always easy to work these in when you have a wife, at least the planning becomes a little more elaborate and involved than it does when you're single.
I had, by this time, adopted a child, made myself responsible for another human being, and when he was about five, six years old, I went out to Sherbrooke, and I've forgotten why I went there, but I must have had a pretty good reason for having to go, and I took him along. In the back of my mind, I think I knew I had a friend there who had children above his age with whom I could leave this job, and I proceeded to go on a bath.
My wife was terrified, she was telephoning every night, are you all right? I'd say, sure, I'm all right, how are you? Of course, what do you think? And, why don't you leave the car and take the train, as usual. And so, I started back to Montreal after this, three days, with this child, driving back. We stopped at a friend's house for lunch. The friend was out, he'd left a note that he'd be back, that everything was in the cupboard, and I drank so much of his bottle of very best there that I was ashamed and was very glad that I had a bottle of my own in the car because I came back and filled his up again so that he wouldn't see how much I'd drunk.
I must have drunk, for the better part, twenty ounces or so, and then he came and we had lunch, and I started back to Montreal with this young child, six years old, leaning forward, his face against the windscreen of the car, and me driving with one eye closed in order to just have one road to go down. I couldn't open both eyes because the two roads were diverging, and it was at that time that I thought, I think something was with me there.
What right have I to take and make myself responsible for the life of another human being and then put it into such jeopardy as this? How crazy can I get? I was approaching the town, the city of Granby, and I made it to a place, a licensed place, and I asked to see the manager and told him that I was suddenly stricken with a kind of vertigo of sorts. Difficult to diagnose, no doubt, but real from my point of view nonetheless, and wondered if he could get someone to drive my car for me.
A chauffeur was produced, and I arrived back in Montreal in my own car with a strange man employed driving it, my six-year-old boy directing him, and me passed out on the back seat.
[00:25:20]
We drove up to my house. One or two relatives were there consoling the widow, and they formed themselves into a delegation with the taxi driver to get me in bed. I still had to be convinced that I had any problem with alcohol. In a couple of days' time, I was able to suggest to myself with inflexible logic that this had all been due to some dietary indiscretion, a curious and probably obscure allergy, and that I had been rather sensible in recognizing that I wasn't quite myself in getting somebody to help with the driving.
I came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore [unclear], and yet at no time up to this moment would I have been able to buy the fact that my behavior was anything but that of a perfectly rational, normal human being going about his daily affairs. Of course, there has to be an end to all things like this, and the end came for me after a Christmas holiday when a surgical colleague of mine and great friend in England came out to spend Christmas with me in 1954.
He came out to spend a week, and we had a week together. Going around, I was trying to do what I considered then to be the practice of medicine, such as I was practicing, and entertaining him at the same time. I know that during the week he put me to bed four times. I also know that when I saw him again in England two years later, he told me perfectly straight-faced that with great regret and sorrow he had written me off.
I was finished. I was done. The writing was on the wall. It was too bad, but it was obvious and that's all there was to it. He said that in his own mind he gave me another six months before I would either injure myself so definitely, either mentally or physically, that I would never be able to be responsible again. He's an extremely astute observer, this one, and in no way an hysterical person. He left me to go back to England between Christmas and New Year.
This whole thing is so shrouded in a complete fog and in a mental confusion that I can only pick out moments here and there as they emerge from the general background of alcoholic obscurity. But anyway, I remember New Year's night of that year, and I remember it because I was at my meanest and most ugly self, and I was having a fight with my wife, which is not unusual for me. The fight was about a very simple thing.
Friends of ours had children singing in a choir in a church here in Montreal, and she wanted to go to the midnight service on Christmas Eve to hear these children sing. I was all in favor of hearing singing, don't get me wrong, it was the locale and the type of songs that were to be sung, about which we disagreed,
[00:30:10]
and as I look back I remember so well, doing everything I could, saying it's cold, or it'll be crowded, or we won't get a seat, or who wants to go anyway, or can't you go some other time, or we can go on Sunday, is that the next thing? And driven into the corner and against the wall, she said to me, something very definite and very clear, she said, I want to go tonight to this service and I want you to take me, I won't ask you to do a single other thing, and as soon as the service is over I don't give a damn where you go or what you do, or how much you drink or who you go with, but come with me to this service, at least.
So I felt myself completely cornered, there was no way I could argue about this thing, particularly with this promised freedom held over me, in front of my nose, like a [unclear] in front of a donkey, and so, with customary good grace, and the sort of polished manners of the gentleman I was at that time, I said, oh Christ, all right, let me go. We went. I don't know what happened there that night, but I know I remember another thing poking its head out of this foggy mist-like memory.
I remember looking around and seeing so many people that I knew in this church, and the thought came to me that they were there under their own steam, that they were glad to be there, that they were there by volition, whereas I had to be dragged. And I became acutely conscious of the fact then of my action toward my wife, of my responsibility toward my family, of my responsibility as a family man. I became as acutely aware of my remissness in these areas as I have been aware on the road to Granby of being remiss in the area of my child.
And I said to myself, with frightening clarity, what is the matter with me? Why is it that I have to act like such an S.O.B. when all this woman wanted of me is to be taken to a church service on New Year's Day to hear children sing? When all these other people are here of their own free will and doing it because they want to do it, I have to be ugly and mean and rather sadistic and arrogant and conceited and foul-mouthed and obscene and blasphemous.
And I think at this moment in this church I reached a point of low in spiritual bankruptcy that made me realize that I was indeed insane. Nobody in his right mind could have done this series of things. Only by the grace of something or other was I where I was. And all of a sudden I was aware of being more frightened than I have ever been before or since. I looked to the past. I looked around me at the present. I found myself enjoying the music, looking at the candles and the decorations, listening to the words which began suddenly to have meaning for me.
And I think then, unspoken, but very, very deep down, and somewhere almost below the point of my own conscious volition, I cried for help. And somewhere, somehow, from some place came not a presence, not a flashing of light, not a sudden realization, but all of a sudden I felt this fear dissolve.
[00:35:27]
Something seemed to say to me, you're all right. Everything's going to be all right. And for the first time in my life, I let go. For the first time in my life, I entered into an empathetic communication with other people around me. I wanted fellowship. I wanted freedom from insanity. And into my consciousness had flowed something that I had not had before, which was hope. It was a week or ten days later, eight days to be exact, [unclear aside]. It was eight days later that I attended my first meeting.
I went into yet another church, this time in completely different circumstances. I went full of curiosity, full of wonder, still full of fear, but I think I'm very much from Missouri, but I went to an AA meeting. I remember it well, Eddie's meeting. I remember the speaker, Jack. And I remember two other things about this meeting which I will never forget. One, this truck driver who got his three months' chip.
And I listened to a sponsor get up and explain how this boy had had a lot of trouble and had lost jobs and so on, and how he could not stop drinking. And here he was, complete with his wife and child, attending his meeting and getting his three months' chip. And I remember looking at him and I thought to myself, well, I don't know how the hell he did it, but apparently it can be done. That is one thing I remember in that meeting. The other thing was the voice I heard as I left the hall, two people talking to one another, and one said to the other, That is Dr. Donald. You'll never make it.
You know, I nearly turned around and took them by the hand because I was never so much in agreement with anybody in my life as I was with that man. But at this meeting had been suggested certain things to me. I had gone there on the understanding that I was going to be taught how to stop drinking. And my sponsor, who was not an easy sponsor, thank God, had told me, listen, you don't have any choice, so just listen, because these people have been through it and they've done it and they know.
And he made me more or less promise that whatever they suggested I would do. So this was a little difficult for me because I wasn't sure what they were going to suggest, or rather what they were going to tell me I had to do. And I was surprised when they didn't tell me to do a damn thing. They suggested that I might read certain pieces of literature. They suggested that I should attend meetings.
[00:40:08]
They suggested that when I felt like drinking, I should call somebody else and have a coffee or a chat with somebody and at least not try to make a decision until I had done a definitive act towards the attempt to maintain sobriety. And then, above all, they suggested that I only live for one day at a time. Out of this suggested program emerged, once again, but this time with an almost terrifying impact, a vision of hope that seemed to surge up within me and sent me right up onto a sort of cloud nine of happiness.
The feeling of hope merely stated in so many words that this thing could be done if others had done it, like my truck driver, that I could do it too. The 24 hours a day has been for me the most important adjunct that I have had in Alcoholics Anonymous. If anybody wants to talk to me about tomorrow, they'll find me rather uncommunicative because, as far as I'm concerned, I don't know a thing about tomorrow and I'm not particularly interested in it until I wake up, if I do.
As far as yesterday is concerned, except for the fact that I've had nothing but wonderful yesterdays during these few 24-hour periods of sobriety, and I think I'm grateful for them, yesterday has gone into a limbo of forgetfulness and I'm not the least bit concerned. I had my ups and downs. The cyclical nature of compulsion stayed with me and somewhat violent mood swings from time to time, but thanks be to whatever higher power was with me, thanks be to this curious grace that seemed to enter into me this night, New Year's Eve, I managed always, so far, to get a hold of somebody and have a cup of coffee, and things just didn't happen that I was afraid of.
So, ladies and gentlemen, there, in a rather brief nutshell, is the story of one man who, for a long time, has been wondering about this extraordinary fellowship of ours. I think about this a great deal. I talk about it a lot. I can't help living AA because it seems to enter into so many facets of my life, and it makes my life worth living and that much more comfortable to live with. The old Sanskrit proverb, which we have in our 24-hour book, ends very simply, as you'll remember, and it says, And it says, for yesterday is but a dream and tomorrow is only a vision, but today, well lived, makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well, therefore, to this day, and thank you for helping me to take the second step. Thank you. Joe again, Bill. I hope that I haven't taped anything that you have. I think that I kept
[00:45:13]
away from it pretty well, that I remember it that you told me you had, but unfortunately I don't have any tapes of Al-Anon at all that you asked for, and you seem to have all the tapes of the Toronto Conference that I have. So God willing, God bless you, and God help us all.