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Source: Unidentified Historical Recording – Fellowship Review Recording 831 – Date Unknown.mp3 File: chris-s-benchmark-recovery-and-the-12-step-process-ca-2011-archive-831.mp3 Duration: 01:02:59
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I'm Jonathan. I'm an addict. I agree with Sarah. This is so powerful to see so many people here. I was really surprised and blessed. We had a wonderful speaker earlier with Teresa and all the fun stuff. I'm glad this is a family event too. The kids seem to be having fun. The bouncy house, I haven't gotten into yet. I asked Marsha if I could introduce Chris. I've been sober since May 13th of 2008. Starting in the late summer, early fall of 2008, those of you who know me know that I'm kind of pathologically addicted to speaker CDs.
I have a huge vast library and the guy that's about to speak makes up probably a good quarter of it at least. He's got a real good solid message. He's very much a good explainer of the step and the recovery process and a big believer in what we do here at Benchmark. Without further ado, here's Chris S.. Good evening everybody. My name is Chris. Without the grace of God working in and through me, I am powerless over drugs and alcohol. With the grace of God working in and through me and my participation in the recovery process, I've recovered from a seemingly hopeless state of drug addiction and alcoholism. I'm very, very grateful.
This is really hallowed ground for me and there's a reason for that. Jonathan isn't the only person who is pathologically addicted to speaker CDs. Somewhere in and around the early 90s, I started listening to speakers. At first, I listened to a lot of speakers who basically did a story, an entertaining story and I got a lot out of that. I was exposed to some big book recovery workshops and somewhere around 1995, I got exposed to a Mark Houston, Joe Hawk workshop and that was instrumental. It was a life-changing experience for me.
What Mark was incredibly good at was not only living the program in his life, but being able to pass it on in a way that was very understandable and very influential. Anyone in here that knew Mark knows exactly what I'm talking about. One of the highlights of my life was he and I became pretty good friends. He invited me down here in 2008 and I got a chance to speak down here. I was also really close with Joe Hawk. This place was called Joe Hawk Hall at one time and Joe and Mark were very, very good friends. Again, this is a spiritual program. It's not a mechanical one, but I think we do need to understand the mechanics of the recovery process to really get as much out of the 12-step process as you can get.
Because this is CA, I get to tell some of my drug stories, which is really a plus. That does not happen too often. I was about six years old. I come from a family. We lived in a little Cape Cod. Mother, father, brother, sister. Everything was quiet. Everything was cool. They didn't know what hit them when I came along. I was about six years old and I was down in the basement and there was a big army jerry can of gasoline for the lawnmower. I don't know why I did this, but I opened up the top one time and I started breathing because it smelled good.
The old leaded gasoline smelled good back in the day. I think they put something in it to make you nauseous or whatever. I started huffing out of this gasoline jerry can. I got to tell you, that takes you to a whole new realm, especially when you're six years old. I remember getting so blown away that time distorted. I went back upstairs and I was bouncing off walls. My mother and father thought I was just goofing around. For a good year or so, I would go down to the basement and I would huff this gasoline.
I'm looking back on my life. There was always something different about me. You'll hear this with most people who suffer from alcoholism or drug addiction. There's something not quite right about reality for them. There's something that's missing.
[00:05:10]
For me, I found that by altering my state of consciousness with drugs or alcohol, I was able to fill a little bit of this missing piece in me. I never felt right. I always had anxiety. I'll tell you a story. The first time I ever felt serious self-centered fear. I was doing an inventory one time and one of the additional instructions I was given was, when you're writing out your fears, write down the first manifestation that you ever had of that fear. When is the first time you can remember having it?
I was putting down fear of people. The very first time was when my mother came to me and I was five years old. She said, get in the car. You're going to kindergarten. You're starting kindergarten today. I'm like, what? I get dressed up. I jump in the car and we drive across town. She pulls up and we're up on top of the hill and down below is the classrooms, the school building. She says, get out and there's your classroom. I get out and close the door and she drives away. I'm standing there looking down at this classroom and there's kids outside playing kickball and tag. They've already assimilated. They're already friends.
I'm standing up on the hill feeling like an idiot because I'm scared to go down there. I have this anxiety. If I go down there, what if they don't like me? What if I make a fool out of myself? I was terror stricken, but I knew that this was something I had to do. I just bucked up and went down and became a kindergartner. I was never happy about it. I was always thinking, whose idea was this? Kindergarten stuff. Why do all these other kids look like they're having a great time? I want to kill myself.
When I started huffing the gasoline, what that did was that altered my reality. It gave me a little bit of relief. A little bit of relief from what it talks about in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous, the basic foundational 12-step document that we have out there. What it talks about in that book is the separation that we feel. We feel different then. Looking back on my experience with this, I understand what happened with the drugs and what happened with the alcohol.
They filled this missing piece. Once I started using it, I was able to get rid of that bondage of self that it talks about in the book. I was able to feel like I thought all of you guys felt right away. I've had miraculous interventions in my life. A number of times, things have happened that I look back on and I see it as the hand of God. One day when I was huffing the gasoline, I got really blown away. A thought coming from outside myself, it seemed, said, you can't do this anymore.
Anybody who knows about huffing knows that sometimes you do so much, you don't come home. I was probably getting close to that point. This voice said, you're not going to do this anymore. I didn't. I'm about six years old. Fast forward to about 12, I am still this repressed kindergartner with all this self-centered fear and anxiety. I can't stand school. I don't know why people thought about this school thing. Something is really wrong with me. I'll give you one example. Does anybody in here remember barn dancing? Is anyone here old enough to remember square dancing that they'd make you do that in school?
In my particular school, I'm about 10 years old or 12 years old and they would line all the girls up on one side of the gym and all the boys up on the other and they would blow the whistle and the boys were supposed to run across the gym and grab a girl to dance with. Oh my God! You have no idea what that did to me. I'd probably still be in therapy from something like that. What they're doing to the untreated alcoholic and addicts with that stuff is unbelievable. All the other meatheads were having a good time. I went to die of embarrassment. Would you dance with me?
[00:10:02]
About two years later, I started drinking whiskey and doing downers. It was like, no problem. Hey, you want to dance? I don't think so. Well, don't be asking me later. You're going to be sorry. The drugs and alcohol completely shifted the way I thought. It got rid of that anxiety and that fear. I started using them early. Now, the drinking age was 21, so drugs were easier to get for me. Unfortunately, one of the first drugs that I got was LSD. Anybody in here have any experience with LSD?
That is different, isn't it? Oh my God! I remember one time we were going to a concert in New York City and I'm half drunk and we're going into the bathroom at the Beacon Theater and we're buying drugs, as was our want. I remember we brought a whole bunch of blotter acid and we took it. We're half drunk. We go back and we sit in our seat and one song plays and we're like, I'm not high. Are you? No. Let's go back and get some more. So we go back and we got five more. We come back and we listen to one or two more songs. We're still not high. We got ripped off again. Let's go back. Oh my God.
Walking out of there, it was unbelievable. We all crowd into this big van that we came into the city with. We're so high, we're not even really talking to each other. You're afraid to look at somebody in the eye. You'll freak out. We're in this van and if anybody's familiar with the Lincoln Tunnel, picture this. There's like nine lanes and seven lanes and five lanes and it goes down to two lanes and then you go into the tunnel. We're heading down to the tunnel and the tunnel's coming up and somebody in the front of the van goes, hey man, we'll never fit.
And so we all move up to the front of the van and we're like, he's right. It's a mouse hole. So 45 minutes we're backing out. We took the bridge that night. If you're a real alcoholic or a real drug addict, you're going to have a Lincoln Tunnel story. I'm going to tell one that's not mine because I just love this story. This is one of my spotsies. Somebody at a party in Jersey said, hey, who wants to run into New York City for second all? And he goes, me, me. So he drives in, he buys a big sack of second all and he thinks, you know, it took me about 20 minutes to get in. If I take 10 of these or whatever, I'll be high by the time I get back to the party.
So he takes them and then he hits rush hour traffic. So by the time he gets to the tunnel, he's smashed and he's on the nudge. So what happened was he's in the tunnel and he'd go like this and he'd hit the car in front of him. He'd wake him up and he'd go, sorry, sorry. He goes, Chris, I hit him a hundred times. Oh, my God. Crazy, crazy time. The great, the great Quaalude epidemic of 72. Anybody in here familiar with the Quaaludes? Oh, yes. Oh, weren't they fun? They were hard on the furniture, weren't they? You'd get up to go change the channel on the TV and break 13 pieces of furniture doing it. It was something, you know.
And I've never done these before, but I was the kind of guy where you'd have a pill in your hand. I'd go, look, what was that about? I was, I was crazy. So this guy brings a big sack of Roar 714s into the smoking area before school. I'm in my first year of high school, puts them down. He goes, I got Quaaludes for sale. buying them for like a dollar a piece. And we go to him, you know, he's never taken them. He got them late the night before from his brother, so he's never taken them. So we go to him, how many do you take? And he goes, ah, three or four. So about 50 of us took three or four Quaaludes before first period. The ambulance was back and forth all day. Oh my God.
Finally, finally, I'm walking down the hall, the 300 way, like hanging on the lockers like this,
[00:15:03]
and I go, I gotta get out of here. So I make a break for it. I see the exit sign, and I start heading for this, and I break through the doors and I tear ass across the field and into the woods. And when I get into the woods, I see people are holding trees. Like, I wasn't the only guy to do that. Now, the next day in school, all these guys are like looking at me, like laughing. I'm like, what? They go, they go, Chris, it was great, you made a, you made, you made a dash from the exit, and the whole 300 ring was watching you, and he goes, it took you five minutes to go 100 yards, you know, I thought I was moving, you know, he goes, yeah, yeah, you went like this, it was great, and, I mean, stuff, stuff like this, stuff like this was, was always happening, you know, and I mean, I was, I was nuts with this, I just wanted out, I wanted out of me, you know, I wanted a vacation from right now, and I would, I would take anything, this guy, the same guy that had the quaaludes brought in a bag of belladonna once, you know, somebody told him that this is a fun drug to do, okay, let me tell you, it was not, we all eat this belladonna, half of us went temporarily blind, but back in school the next day, we're going like, hey man, did you go blind too, you know, just crazy, crazy behavior, absolutely crazy behavior, you know, alcohol was always wrapped around this stuff, you know, I did a, I did a lot of speed, I did downers, you know, I did practically anything that you could imagine, I would, I would overdo, I would allow myself to be overmedicated, you know, and it really, it really did, it really did get gruesome, now, you know, the alcohol from the very beginning, though, was brutal, because I manifest the allergy and the obsession, you know, if you're wondering whether you're an addict or you're an alcoholic, pick a drug of choice or a drug of no choice, and you ask yourself certain questions, have I, have I ever, have I ever made a decision to quit this and found that I was using it again, and oh my God, if when using, can I, can I control it, do I have absolute control over it, or does it take me in directions that I don't want it to take me, and all of these things did, all these things did, this, this one time, there was a, there was a party coming up, it was a New Year's party, and this guy asked me, because I had some contacts, he goes, hey, can you get, can you get a quarter ounce of coke for the party, I'll pay you when you get to the party, so I go, yeah, okay, I bought it and, you know, sniffed a little of it, I mean, you have to try it, right, you know, you're not going to be passing around defective goods, so, so I sniffed a little of it, and then I called the guy up, and he goes, oh, never mind with that, we got some somewhere else, so now I've got a quarter ounce of cocaine, the physical craving is very, very apparent in cocaine, in other words, the more you do, the more you want to do, how many times has anybody in here said, you know, I know, I got to go to work in five minutes, one more line, you know, well, I started snorting this quarter ounce of cocaine, and three days later, I was chirping like a squirrel, I mean, I was stuck, and you go into like a delirium, you know, you're like, yeah, you know, looking out the window, FBI, somebody said, Chris, the FBI is after you, who the hell would pay overtime, you know, for DEA agents to follow you around, you know, kind of hurt my ego a little, anyway, anyway, I snorted so much of this stuff that I became convinced that there was a piece of scotch tape on the roof of my mouth, because I can feel it, so I get out a buck knife, because I can't, I scrape the skin off the top of my mouth, like right down to the bone, trying to get this, I mean, you know, this is just, this is just crazy behavior, you know, some of the people I was hanging out with toward the end of my drug use, these guys didn't even have names, they were like Weezer and Green Man, and there was this guy I was hanging out with called Rack, and he said, with two T's, you know, like that,
[00:20:18]
so I'm high all the time, I'm drunk all the time, you know, and sometimes you get lonely, you know, because who the hell is going to hang around you, you know, you're pathetic, you know, you're like, you're like 100 pounds, and you're always like nervous, like that's not what people are looking for, so I decided to do this prison pen pal thing, so I'm writing, I'm writing to this girl in prison, well, you know, she was like a lifetime criminal, I mean, have you ever met anybody that has absolutely no sense of right and wrong, and even if they did, could care less, you know what I mean, well, I move her in with me and mom, after the prison, okay, well, that really, really went bad, that really went bad, she was stealing cars and forging checks, I live in this little town, you know, called Basking Ridge, where if you walk your dog without a license, it's going to end up in the paper, you know, and I bring this psycho criminal into town, oh, oh, it was really bad, she broke up with me, you know, oh, my God, it was brutal, my life was just imploding, imploding, you've got to understand that these chemicals, alcohol and these drugs, they're poisons, and what you're doing is you're poisoning yourself up to a certain point, and it tears into your ability to think, it tears into your moral character, it tears into your personal relationships, and you start, your world starts getting smaller and smaller and smaller, stuff starts dropping off, and you try to convince yourself that I didn't need that anyway, I didn't need that friend anyway, I didn't need that family anyway, I didn't need that driver's license anyway, I mean, oh, my God, I had some real problems out there on the road, I come from a place where friends let friends drive drunk, by the way, you know what I mean?
I mean, you know, I come from a place where if somebody tried to take away your keys, you know, take my keys, I mean, that's what we would do, you know, take my keys, are you crazy? So I crashed a lot of cars, nine complete car totals, I killed myself in one of those accidents, I went through a telephone pole, and when the cops got there, I had no pulse, I wasn't breathing, and they had to revive me with CPR, and I died again in the ambulance, and they had to hit me with the paddles, and I come out of it, and I come to the hospital with stitches across my head, my ribs are bandaged, I'm really messed up, and the first thing I do when my friend comes in is I say, hey, you got any pot? You know, I mean, I can't sit in a hospital without drugs, you know, but think about how crazy that is, and the day I get out of the hospital, the first thing I do with all my bandages and everything is go to the liquor store, buy some booze, drive down to the park, and start drinking, you know, I'm going to be drinking and driving in a couple of hours, I never even thought about that this is, it didn't occur to me that this was something I shouldn't do, alcohol and drugs had become so ingrained in my fiber, my being, that they were part of me, like if there was a law against this, they didn't understand, they're wrong, you know, you know, the DUI laws, what they should do is instead of just saying everybody is like .05, they should give us drunk driving tests, and if we can drive on half a quart of whiskey pretty good, they should put that on our license, you know, I'm not some amateur, you know, two beers, and you know, you're going to arrest me for God's sake, I drink all the time, I believe that you should hit the road with some confidence, you know what I mean, put some booze back, and you know, so I started getting some DUIs, I spun around, I allowed myself to be over served by the bartender, this one time, and I'm coming home from the bar about one in the morning, and I spin the car around on some black ice, and I hit a bridge abutment going backwards,
[00:25:19]
and I get thrown out of the back of the car, my legs are still in the car, and I'm laying on the trunk looking up at the sky, and you know, the car is still running, because it's a Toyota, so I mean, what do you do? If you're anything like me, it's time to go home, okay, so I climb back in, I got glass in my hand, you got to understand, there's not a window left in this car, it's got three flat tires, the drive shaft is slapping the frame, you know, and the headlights are like this, and I start driving, I drive right by cops giving radar, they're like, I didn't even get pulled over, I got walked over, you know, the guy runs up to the car, grabs me, starts shaking me, where did you have that accident? I'm like, what accident? Where are you going? I'm going home, will you leave me alone?
And he goes, where's home? I go, Basking Ridge, he goes, that's 40 miles, you got no tires, but you cops are always hustling me, DUI, DUI number one, okay, now, let's fast forward all the way to my last DUI, I allowed myself to become over served at a party, you know, I don't take full responsibility, and I'm driving home, and supposedly, I cross the double yellow, you know how cops are, so I remember the lights go on, he pulls me over, he knocks on the window, I roll down the window, it's like, license, registration, insurance card, so I reach over into the glove compartment, there's stuff in there, I'm digging, five minutes later, you know, I give up, I just grab the entire contents of the glove compartment, and I go, here, it's got like mats, and combs, and tissues, he's like, get out of the car, he's like, get out of the car, I don't remember much about this, you remember hazy recollections, you know, on some of these drugs and alcohol, you don't really remember the whole thing, but you remember bits and pieces, I remember getting taken up to the police station, and videoed, now, some of the things I remember are, I got the ABC's right, I just remember that, I nailed the ABC's, ok, does it matter that I learned them when I was three, you know, I nailed them, and so, I think it was a song that helped, I hope I didn't sing it, anyway, anyway, I hire a lawyer, because they gave me a DUI, and I, you know, refused to wrestle, you guys are jerks, so I get a lawyer, and we go up to the police station, first thing we have to do is view the video, anybody in here ever seen a DUI video?
Don't, don't, don't, just plead guilty, don't, don't go see that, it's bad, so, picture this, I got a $1500 lawyer, three piece suit, very serious, he's taking notes, first thing that happens though is the cop hands us the VHS tape, and I knew something was wrong when the cop went like this, so, the lawyer plugs it into the TV, turns it on, and I'm horrified, I am shit hammered, I am gone, ok, I did the ABC's ok, I did them like this, I did them like this, me, can I have a cigarette, me, oh my god, I'm going oh, oh, there's pictures of me on video, grabbing the cop, doing the line, Mr. Shorty, would you please take your hands off the police officer while you're walking the line, The whole time, the whole time the attorney is very serious, $1500 serious, you know.
At the very end, the cop goes, Mr. Schroeder, we're going to turn the camera off, but we just want to give you an opportunity to say any last things if you'd like to. I look at the camera, and I go, the attorney goes, he's like, if you had any chance at
[00:30:04]
all, you just blew it. BWAAAHHH! I guess we plea, you know. Another time, another time. I'm down at our park, okay, and doing some LSD now. I've got a little experience with it now. I know that you take it, and then you go to a safe place. Because things can get spooky. Okay? So I take this acid, and I leave the park, I drive to the liquor store, you know, get some ballast. And then I go back home, and I put on the earphones, and I'm listening to Led Zeppelin 2.
You know, like this. And all of a sudden, my mother starts knocking. Chris! Chris! The police are on the phone! What I had done, in the middle of town was, I saw my buddy in front of me, and he didn't see me, so I gave him a little love tap with my car. Like, oof! I didn't know it, but he had like a marine father who reconnoitres the car every time he comes home. And he saw the little black marks from my bumper on there, and made the guy call the cops, and file an accident report.
So here I am, here I am at, you know, Disney World with Led Zeppelin soundtrack, and all of a sudden, the cops want me to go down, the cops want me to go down to the police station! So I'm like, oh no! And I know if I don't go, they'll come and get me! So like, I walk up to the police station, I walk up to these big, huge doors, you know, and the lights, and I walk in, and I go up to the desk, and I go, I'm just gonna show you, you guys, you guys don't need to come down here.
And the cop takes out a piece of paper, and he goes, okay, Mr. Shorter, draw the scene of the accident. So I take the pencil, and I go, I draw this tiny thing about the size of a postage stamp. And he's going, and he goes, no! He grabs the paper out of my hand, he rips it up, he goes, no, that's too small! And he starts drawing it, he's drawing this big intersection, I'm like, no, it wasn't that big!
Somehow I got out of there without, like, admitting, you know, I was not, and the next day at school I wanted to kill this guy! You know what you did to me! So, hopefully this paints a little bit of a picture of unmanageability in my life. You know, I was flunk in school, and, you know, I had friends with no names, and, you know, I end up getting out of school, and, you know, somehow becoming a bad electrician, I don't even know how that happened, when I woke up in sobriety I was an electrician, you know, and a bad one!
Back when I was drinking, I would do things like, I remember drilling this hole into a wall for a wall outlet, a big, huge, auger bit with an extension, and I pull it back out and it's got cloth on it, and I go, oh, God! I go downstairs to the guy who owns the place, I go, can I look upstairs in your bedroom? I look up there, and I open up his closet doors, and there's, like, 35 suits, all covered with plaster, and one of them's curled up into the ceiling, like this!
Oh, my God! Any drunken dialers in here? Anybody that does a lot of cocaine and calls people on the phone? Oh! I was bad, okay? I would come downstairs, and I would see, I would see phone numbers, Mary Lou McGillicuddy! McGillicuddy! Oh, no! From sixth grade! You know, oh, no! I could just picture myself going, Mary Lou, I have loved you like a thousand years, and I love you! Oh! So, it was, it was causing me a lot of anxiety.
So, what I started to do was I started to cut the phone lines when I started drinking or using. But I'm an electrician, so I'd fix it, and I'd put it back together, and I'd call Mary Lou. Well, I started, I started to get smarter. I would cut the wires by a knot hole or where it goes through a wall. But somehow, I'd chop it out, I'd put it back together. Then I started throwing a ladder up on the side of the house and climbing way up on the ladder and cutting it as high as I could.
But I'd find a milk crate when I'm drunk and put the ladder up a little higher and put it together. Finally, there's so much static in the line, we got to call the phone company because you can't hear the phone anymore. So, the phone company guy goes, what the hell? Because it looks like somebody cut the line 30 different places and scotch taped it back together. And I go, yeah, that's what I thought it was too.
Oh my God. So, on and on this goes, the dysfunctional tragedy and inability to cope of Chris. And finally, it gets to the point where the drunk guy
[00:35:00]
says, well, I'm going to call the phone company and I'm going to cut the line 30 different places and scotch taped it back together. And I go, where the drugs and the alcohol are making me insane. I'm starting to lose my mind. I'm starting to get really violent. My last episode was over Christmas 1989. And what happened was, I got a resentment, you know how we are. What did you say? You're talking to me.
And I threatened my entire family with a .38 caliber handgun. This is Christmas. You know, mother, sisters, brothers, nieces, aunts, uncles, aunts, uncles, aunts, uncles, aunts, sisters, brothers, nieces, nephews, cats. I'm going to kill you. I'm going to kill you. And this really wasn't the festive atmosphere they were looking for. It was yuletide season, you know? And so they took their Christmas elsewhere.
And I started to detox. And I started to go through the delirium tremens and hallucinations and all the fun stuff that can happen to us. And for like two days I did the fish flop. I finally, I finally got to the point where I had to go down where I could jump in a car and go to a meeting. I'd been exposed to AA. I'd been exposed to NA previous to this on different occasions. And I knew that something, if I was getting to the point where I could not trust myself to not kill people, that got my attention.
I mean, listen, I'd had a million DUIs. I'd lost a family. I'd been hospitalized. I was continually waking up with massive contusions that I didn't even know how I got. You know, you'd wake up and there'd be no skin on your shoulder blades. You know, where's that from? You know, you don't even know. So all of these things were not motivation enough for me to try to stop. But when it got to the point where I could not trust my mind to not harm other people, it really started to scare me.
So off I went. Now, I start showing up in the 12-step recovery rooms. And at that period of time, I really didn't understand what a recovery process was. I didn't understand what working a program was. I thought working a program was going to meetings and making coffee and calling your sponsor and all of those things. I really did. Because, you know, nobody told me different. That's what everybody seemed to be doing.
They seemed to be doing those things. Now, what I see back in hindsight, you learn so many things in hindsight. Usually, usually if you get to benchmark, you've had some treatment episodes. You've had some attempts to get sober. Those have been unsuccessful. You might have even been labeled a chronic relapser or somebody who doesn't really want it or somebody who's not being honest. That's par for the course at a place like this.
Thank you. Now, now what happens, what happens is there's a certain process that brings about recovery. And I believe that process is inherent in the 12 steps. The fellowship gives one what I believe. Now, I'm saying if you're in real trouble with drugs or alcohol, the fellowship will buy you time. It will offer you a reprieve, a grace period where you will be able to stay sober. Now, however much power, choice, and control you've lost in drugs or alcohol, that will be your grace period.
It will depend upon how far down the scale you've gone with lack of power, choice, and control. Now, I don't know what my grace period would have been, but I started to fall apart in sobriety. I started to fall apart. I was going to maybe 12, 14 meetings a week. I was a coffee maker over here. I was a secretary over there. I was getting really, really active within the 12 step fellowship. I was going out to the diners afterward, driving to the meetings with people.
But what was happening was, remember I told you about that scared kindergartner? That's untreated alcoholism. And if you're an untreated alcoholic, you're going to be suffering from two things, depression and anxiety. 100% of unrecovered alcoholics suffer from depression and anxiety. And my anxiety was getting really, really bad, going to a lot of meetings, doing what my sponsor was telling me to do.
Now, here's where Joe and Mark come into play. I get exposed to these big book recovery tapes, and the message in them is basically this. Chris, if you're not working a program out of the book Alcoholics Anonymous, if you're not actually doing these steps, you don't have an AA program, you don't have a 12 step program. You have something, you have fellowship participation, which has its own reward.
[00:40:02]
But if you're in real trouble, if you're a real addict or you're a real alcoholic, the time or the place is going to come and you're going to put booze or drugs back in your body. And that's what happens to many of us. If you look at the statistics in the 12 step fellowships today, you're going to see that there's a massive amount of recidivism. There's a massive amount of revolving door, sobriety, clean time.
And I believe it's because if you don't get active with the recovery process, if you don't put enough into your participation in the recovery process, you're not going to get enough power back to be able to stay. You're just not going to be able to stay. You're going to find reasons to disappear and to wander off or to slime out like a greasy weasel. And this is just something that I've seen happen time and time again.
So I'm listening to these tapes and my first impression of them is they're giving me a resentment. I am getting a big time resentment because what these guys are saying is almost a foreign language to me. It's a recovery language that I've not been exposed to in the North Jersey 12 step fellowships. We weren't talking about that. We were talking about what was going on with our day. We were talking about the challenges that we had in our life.
We were updating everyone on our drama du jour and telling them how much we had on our plate. That's what we were sharing. That's what we were doing. So that's what I thought the deal was. And then all of a sudden I hear these tapes and these tapes come from way in left field. And I'm like, these guys are crazy. This isn't how we do it in Jersey. You know? But I continue to sink down my spiritual malady, the restlessness, the discontent, the stuff that Theresa was talking about earlier, that the manifestations of untreated alcoholism were getting worse no matter how many meetings I was going to.
And it got to a point where I was pretty desperate. I knew I was at a breaking point. I could not live in my body in sobriety any longer unless something happened or something got better or I started to feel better. So I grabbed these tapes and I started to listen to them. Now with an open mind. These guys spoke with authority and they spoke like they really understood this from experience. And that made an impact on me.
So I start listening to these tapes, did some Joe and Charlie, did some Joe and Mark, and did some Joe Hawk Salvation Army stuff. And I pulled out a big book. I pulled out a pad and I pulled out a pencil and I started to try to do the best I could with the exercises out of the book Alcoholics Anonymous. And I did it out of desperation. There was no motivation of virtue in this. I did it because I just couldn't feel bad anymore.
I just didn't want to feel the way I felt anymore. It was disgusting. And I knew the time and the place would come where I would decide to take a vacation. I may lose my clean and sober time. I may pay for it with a six month bender but at least I'll get four hours of relief from myself. And I knew that type of a decision was coming at me. So when I started doing this work, I didn't know it at the time.
Before you take the 12 steps, you really can't possibly have an idea of the impact they're going to have on your life. It's very, very difficult to discuss or to visualize a spiritual experience because it's experiential. It's an awakening. And how can you visualize an awakening if you're asleep? So I did it basically because I had some belief in some of the people that were talking about this process.
And I started to do these steps and I did them, believe me, it's a good thing you're not graded on them. It's a good thing that none of us will maintain anything like perfect adherence to these things because I did not do a great job on it but I did enough of a job to start to heal my spirit. To start to allow the sunlight of the spirit to start shining in and start to help recreate my life, solve my problems, help me recover from alcoholism and addiction.
By this time, let's say six months or a year has gone by, people are starting to find my message, some of the sicker ones were starting to find my message attractive in these meetings because I'm starting to not just share about idiot I am, I'm starting to share about some of the solution. You know, in my area they just loved you if you were self-deprecating and you talked about how dumb you were today, oh here's the stupid thing I did today, oh they would love you for something like that.
But if you started to talk about, well here's the solution that I put into place today.
[00:45:04]
here's the results, here's my experience from that solution, then you were a jerk. You know, you were like a Big Book Nazi or something, you know. So I got some flack, but some of the sicker people started to become attracted to me, and I started to sponsor people. A lot of these people drank on me. Ever sponsor somebody that drinks on you, makes you look bad? You know what I mean? They'll come up to you, is Joe yours?
You know, he's trying to pick up the newcomer women and he's borrowing money and, you know, he's even drinking. Yeah, Joe's mine, you know. I'll talk to him, you know, making you look bad. So I decided I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to do what these tapes said. I'm going to bring them over to my house. We're going to start on page one of the book Alcoholics Anonymous. We're going to work through it, and where it says to do something, we're going to stop.
We're going to do it together, and then we're going to move on, and we're going to go through this book. I didn't know, I really don't even know why I did this, except to not look bad as a sponsor anymore. But all of a sudden, the guys that make it through these steps, every one of them is still sober. They're still card carrying, 12-step fellowship members in good standing. The people that decided this was an overreaction to a problem they could really take care of themselves, they're all gone.
You know, so I learned something very, very powerful in starting to sponsor using the book Alcoholics Anonymous. You know, some of these guys are great. Some of the people that I sponsored have really been characters because a lot of times the people who ask you to sponsor them are not always the people you want to ask. You're like, oh my God, he's coming over here, he's going to ask me! Oh no! But, you know, this one sponsor of mine, get this, get this for a dysfunctional trifecta.
He was a WWF wrestler. He was a large, very famous motorcycle club member. And he was like a Marine that had been disbarred or something. And this guy was just brutal. And he started to go through the steps. He started to go through the steps and he was willing to do this stuff. He was fearless enough to say, I'll do it. And I remember he was doing his amends and he comes up to me this one day and he goes, Chris, I want to talk to you about amends I did.
I want to make sure it was okay. And I go, okay, tell me about the amends. He goes, well, you know, I did some collection work for some of the boys for a while. And there was this guy that I think I harmed. And so what I did was I gave him a call and he wouldn't meet with me at his house. He wanted to meet on neutral ground. So I went to this diner to meet him. He brought muscle. He brought bodyguards with him.
So I sat down with him. I had my card and I was really clear on my amends. And at the end of the amends, I asked the three questions. Is anybody familiar with the three questions? So I asked him, I go, is there anything, any other harm that I caused you that I left out? I go, what did he say? He goes, the guy said, you shot me in the freaking knee. So he goes, that seemed to go okay. So I asked him the next question.
The next question was, how did that make you feel? So I go, okay, what did he say to that? He goes, I'm freaking crippled. And so I go, what did he say with the last question? The last question is, what do I need to do to make this right? He says, stay the freak away from me. Okay, Jimmy, nice work. You know, good work. Some of the experiences that I've had with these people have been extraordinary.
You know what we get to do in recovery? You know what we get to do? If we work with others, and working with others is not optional, folks. If you're not sponsoring, if you're not helping somebody through a recovery process, if you're not reaching out your hand to the still suffering and showing them a way out, you're missing the whole deal here. You really are. Because what happens is you get to become part of people who, and you can experience, you can be right there for the experience of the lights coming back on.
It says in the 12th step, having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps. I said it before, we're spiritually asleep, we're walking around thinking we're awake. We're in a state of disease and delusion. When we get through the steps, we start to awaken to our real nature. We start to realize that we're spiritual people having, spiritual entities having a human experience. And you see the lights start to go on.
[00:50:02]
And the lights going on are part of the recovery process. It says in our book, we have to be rid of selfishness. If we don't, it will kill us. Selfishness and self-centeredness, that we think is the root of our problems. Driven by a hundred form of fear, we step on the toes of our fellows and they retaliate. There's great, great visionary understanding of the alcoholic or the addicted condition in the book Alcoholics and Addicts.
And we are running around this planet like a tornado. Just screwing up everything that we can possibly screw up. And part of recovery is becoming awake to what's really going on. Has anybody ever said to you, what's wrong with you? Has anybody ever said that to you? Oh my God, I can't tell you how many people, you know, do you know what you did last night? I don't want to know. You know, blackouts are a wonderful thing.
Don't tell me. What's wrong with you? A lot of times we think we know what's wrong with us. But until we do a fearless and thorough four-step, that's backed up by a full understanding of steps one, two and three. And the understanding of the manifestation itself. Until we do that four-step, we are not going to know what's wrong with us. We will think that there's problems. We'll think that our problems are coming at us.
When we get through the four-step, we realize our problems are not coming at us. They're coming from us. At best, we're co-creating the disorder in our life. At worst, we're creating it wholesale. And that is a statement of hope. When I first heard it, like, oh my God, I don't want everything to be my fault. That's inconvenient. You know, I've been blaming other people my whole life. Don't tell me it's my fault.
Oh my God. But think about this. This is a true statement of hope. If it's your fault, there's a chance it can be corrected. If your problems are coming at you, you wouldn't have any control. You wouldn't have any ability to outmaneuver those problems through a recovery program. But because we're co-creating or creating our disorder, the lessons that we learn through a recovery process will enable us to move away from that.
Our lives will be recreated. Our personal relationships will be in a whole new footing. We'll start to, the promises, there's a lot of promises in the recovery process. They'll start to come true. But what we'll do, we'll become more effective at living life, and our quality of life is going to improve. And we're going to become better family members. We're going to become better husbands or wives, parents.
We're going to become better employees or employers. All these things are going to happen if we start moving away from our wrong motives and our operational platform that's based on self-interest and self-centeredness and self-centered fear. That stuff starts to heal. All of a sudden, we start to operate in a much better way. Remember, I was a bad electrician. I mean, they would say, Chris wired your house? Sleep by the door.
It was just bad. I get clean. I start a recovery process. I start working the steps. It's not like I did Tony Roberts courses or anything. I didn't even aim this way. I was working my 12-step stuff. That was my main focus. Slowly, I became more dependable. I became more honest. I became more promotable. I went from being a really bad electrician making like 10 bucks an hour to today, I run a large department for a pharmaceutical company.
I've got a couple hundred employees, tens of millions of dollars of budget, and it's all me. They swoop in once or twice a month just to look at the books and make sure I'm doing okay, but it's all me. As far as my personal relationships are concerned, I went from having people that either pitied me or resented me or didn't have names to having some real friends, some really, really seriously good people in my life.
I have a network. I have a crew of guys and people in my life that are absolutely extraordinary. Getting the opportunity to do some speaking, what that's done for me is it's not made the 12-step fellowship a regional thing for me.
[00:55:01]
It's made it very large. I've got support people, people who are friends of mine in practically every English-speaking country that I can count, in most major cities. It's opened up the door for so many things. About four years ago, I was asked to become a board member for NCADD. I was asked to become a board member for a company called C4 Recovery Solutions. I kind of balked at this. Most of my life, I tried to stay away from the treatment stuff because I was so hardcore recovery.
I got convinced by some people to take on a couple of challenges. What those challenges enabled me to do was to meet up with some really, really amazing people out there in the treatment world. Some of the organizations I've worked with have to do with improving treatment methodology for people like us, the drug addicts, the alcoholics, because we get treated. I want to say something here. I truly mean this.
Absolutely, 100% honestly mean this. If you're in here, you landed in a gem. I've got experience with well over 100 treatment centers, like working experience. I know the people that run them. I've done tours. I've checked out their processes and their procedures. There's something special that happened here. It goes all the way back to a vision Mark and some of his friends had who were putting this together.
They were only interested in positive outcomes. Any of the things that get in the way of those were not considered as part of the process. So the things that you do, the things that you participate in here are wholly about you healing and recovering from alcoholism and drug addiction. That's not necessarily true throughout the treatment industry. There are things that tie into reimbursements, insurance company reimbursements, Medicare, Medicaid.
There are different types of processes that you basically have to do to be able to get those reimbursements, and those processes don't necessarily help. Not people like us. What helps us is to show us how to participate in the recreation of our lives. To show us how through the step process to recover. We want freedom. We don't want relief. We want freedom from addiction. We want freedom from alcoholism.
We want to be shown a way to live an effective life. This is one of the places on this planet, and there's very, very few that do that. So if you've landed in here, thank your lucky stars. I'm absolutely serious about that. The outcomes here are probably seven times better than some of the very, very famous places that you could have gone to. Anyway, when I first showed up in 12-step rooms, every once in a while someone would introduce themselves as a grateful addict or a grateful alcoholic, and I would near get sick.
How can you be grateful for something like this? I almost died. How can you be grateful? You want to share about gratitude? I'm going to go out in the middle of the meeting and slash your tires, and then I'll follow you outside after the meeting is over and see how grateful you are then. You're just going to have to test this. I mean, I had a real resentment. There was this one guy, I'm a happy, grateful alcoholic.
Oh, my God. Today, I can honestly say I understand and I've experienced the gratitude that comes from the recovery process. I don't think every alcoholic is going to be grateful. I think the people that have experienced the spiritual awakening as the result of the 12 steps are going to be grateful because it's like night and day. My existence is like night and day. Teresa said it earlier, she was talking about a person that doesn't even exist anymore, almost, in her life.
And I feel the same way. I feel like the dysfunctional, drunken, high Chris is far removed from where I am today. But I also understand it's not really that far away. If I let up on this course of action, if I rest on my spiritual laurels, alcohol and drugs are a cellophane, you know, sobriety on a clean time is fragile and we need to maintain consistency at fellowship meetings, whatever that looks like, working the steps
[01:00:09]
with a sponsor or spiritual advisor on a continuing basis, whatever that looks like in your life, and then helping. the Still Sick and Suffering, Developing a Service Ethic so that you can go out and you can help the Still Sick and Suffering. If you do those and you do those consistently, you will be safe and protected. You have recovered from drugs and alcohol and you will have permanent sobriety.
Permanent sobriety is available. You know the DSM-IV, it's the psychiatric manual, it's a diagnostic manual that pins us to the wall, like when you go in to see a psychiatrist because you've been demanded to the mental hospital or something, he opens up the DSM-IV and he's like, yeah, this guy's like a psychopath. It talks about alcoholism and drug addiction as a chronically relapsing condition. Most people chronically relapse from drug and alcohol.
What the boys found in the mid to late 30s, back in the day, was a way to escape that chronic relapse, to be able to stay, to maintain recovery, to maintain sobriety, to be able to stay clean and to every single day experience a better and better life. One of the great promises in the big book is the most satisfactory days of your life are ahead of you. That is a wonderful promise. I've found it true.
When I was drinking, I wanted to be back in high school. I did. Here I am, I'm 30 years old, I don't have a friend left in the world, I'm drinking whiskey and I'm thinking, back in the day, man, when we had the high school parties. I wanted to be back in high school. Today, I understand the most satisfactory years of my life are ahead. My life keeps getting better. Recovery is progressive also. My life keeps getting better.
Every single day, more and more extraordinary things are happening. I can't wait. I can't wait to experience this. My biggest problem is there's not enough hours in the day and I have to sleep. That's really my biggest problem today. I absolutely love what has happened to me. I thank very, very much from the bottom of my heart people like Mark Houston, who is the principal architect and inspiration for this center.
I thank Marcia and Tony and everybody who plays a part in this for keeping this vision going. This is a special place. This is hallowed ground. I feel very, very privileged to be here. Thank you very much. Thank you.