Audio
Transcript
Source: 1985 Montreal International Convention – Multi Speakers – AA MEMBERS WORKING IN ALCHOLISM FIELD AA Menbers Working in the Alcoholism Field – RS 06318.mp3 File: 1985-montreal-international-convention-multi-speakers-aa-members-working-in-alcholism-field-aa-menbers-working-in-the-alcoholism-field-rs-06318.mp3 Duration: 01:29:14
============================================================
This is a workshop on AA members working in the alcoholism field. I'd like to have a moment of silence and gratitude for the AA recoveries of the past 50 years. Would you please all join me in saying the serenity prayer? God grant me serenity. Accept the things I cannot change. Prepare me to change the things I can. There is no difference. There may be some here who are not familiar with our tradition of personal anonymity at the public level.
Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion. We need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio, TV, and films. Thus, we respectfully ask that no AA speaker or indeed any AA member be identified by full name or photograph or published or broadcast reports of our meetings. The assurance of anonymity is essential in our effort to help other problem drinkers who may wish to share our recovery program with us.
And our tradition of anonymity reminds us that AA principles come before personalities. If anyone is interested in the tape of this meeting, it will be available for sale at the tape booth on the floor of this building, first floor. Our speakers will share approximately 20-25 minutes. And if we have time, which I'm sure we will, we can have questions and sharing from the floor. This is a workshop. Our first speaker is a past delegate from Massachusetts.
And Glenis is employed in the alcoholism field and of course a member of our fellowship. I would like to give a warm welcome to Glenis S. I am an alcoholic and a member of the Tewksbury Group in Massachusetts and residing in New Hampshire, if anybody is confused. And my name is Glenis. Hi, everybody. What a beautiful group. I've been turning this over for the last week as to what I was going to share here, like I do at all AA meetings.
And I'm here as an AA member. And I am truly, truly grateful to be a part of this 50th birthday of AA. Because without AA, I'm sure I wouldn't be standing here, and AA has saved my life. I don't really know what's expected of me, but in order to talk about how I have been working in the field, I guess I have to get back to a little bit of my story and how I arrived here. I worked for many years in the medical profession and was working in that field when I was doing my active drinking.
And I came into AA, and right away I got very involved, and I got saturated. And when they said, jump in and get soaking wet, this is what I did. You know, compulsivity and all things. But I believe that this has been part of the reason why I'm standing here today, trying to share with you about AA members working in the field. Early on, when I turned my life and my will over to the care of God through this program and the 12 Steps, He seemed to know what I needed in order to help me to maintain my sobriety on a daily basis.
And I was sent many, many people through phone calls and through other people, and I did a lot of 12-step work. And this was great for me, you know. I was in that stage where I couldn't look at myself, and I was using, running around like a stock-raving sober, dragging people here and dragging people there, and not really knowing what it was all about, but bringing them someplace where somebody could talk to them and somebody could give them some help.
And that's how I got started in AA. That's how I got involved in the Central Service Office and later on in the General Service in our area. And it's like, you know, I was ready, willing, and able, and I was in the right place at the right time, and things seemed to happen.
[00:05:01]
I very, very happily, you know, put day by day together, you know, by working this program one day at a time. I had been sober for quite some time when I got involved in service, and I was fortunate, and I had the privilege, as Curtis said, to be the delegate for Massachusetts. And that was a mountaintop experience which I will never, never probably be able to duplicate. However, this certainly is something in itself.
I have on the back of my car, Expect Miracles, and believe it, you know, this is it. This is a miracle. I was blessed to be at the 45th birthday of AA in New Orleans, and that was super. But this is beyond all expectations. I'm kind of rambling, and I'm kind of confused, and I'm kind of nervous, as you probably can tell. But along about 15 years into this program, staying sober one day at a time, I found myself working in the field of alcoholism, and this didn't happen just by chance.
I guess I loved working with people, and working with others was the thing that gave me the greatest joy in my sobriety. Around 1964 or 65, I had begun to look towards maybe when I was going to retire from the work that I was doing, and I thought it would be nice to take a few courses in alcoholism and to see, and this is the ego of the alcoholic. There was a new program that had started in Massachusetts.
Because of the needs of all of the detoxes and the new treatment facilities springing up, they had put in a degree program in one of the colleges there to try to get some people qualified to be working as counselors in the field. As you all know, early on when all of this happened, if you were sober and had been sober a while, you could work in the field without any other educational experience. So out of my own curiosity and my ego, I wanted to be sure that what they were telling these people that were going to be working in the field was right.
So I went just to take one course and to see if these people were qualified to talk about alcoholism, and that's real ego. So I went, and I got interested, and I got involved, and I continued to go, and I continued to take course after course after course until finally I did get through, and then I went to the New England school, and then I went to Rutgers, and then, you know, it was on and on and on, and I was just eating this up.
And then all of a sudden, you know, I had been doing, well, like many of the employee programs that got started in the early days, if you were working in a place and they had a drunk and they didn't know what to do with them, and you were sober and AA, you know, they called you. And this is what had happened over the years in the place that I was working. So about this time, I got the brilliant idea that I would go to the superintendent of this facility and ask him why he didn't start an employee program there.
And lo and behold, much to my amazement, he agreed to this. And so I set about starting an employee program in the place that I was working. And then I found, you know, here I am, I'm holding down two jobs, my regular job and the other job, and I wasn't doing what I should be in either one. Well, so I asked him if I could please leave my present job and do just the employee work, and he agreed. But about that time, Proposition 2 1⁄2 came along, and that was wiped out from under me.
I was at Rutgers at the time, and I got a phone call and asked to take a job in one of the industries in our area. And it was like, you know, this was the answer to my prayers. And I went for that interview, and I got the job, and I've been working in the field ever since. Now, one of the things that I feel as an AA member working in the field, that it's very, very important for me to keep my program separate from my job.
And this isn't always easy because where I'm working is in the same area where I go to meetings.
[00:10:02]
And when I run into people that I am working with during the day at meetings and they come up and they want to talk about things that have pertained to work, I try to very tactfully and very honestly tell them to see me at the office because I'm there for me. I know that it's very, very important for me, for my own sobriety, my own health, to be at AA meetings for only myself and to be an AA member and particularly not to be counseling people while I'm in AA.
You know, the guidelines I've read over and over again, and when anybody talks to me about how do you do it and what are you doing so that you don't burn yourself out and you don't do this and you don't do that, I refer them to the guidelines because I think they cover all the bases, you know. I feel that one of the very good advantages that I had in getting into this field, for me personally, was that my experience through service, because of the traditions, I know who I am, what I am, and what I can do and what I can't do.
There are many, many people who are my colleagues who haven't had the opportunity to have been as well-informed in the traditions as I've been through my service work, and I try to carry that message to them in my work area because I don't think that there's anybody out there working in the field who would intentionally hurt AA, and usually when there is something that is done that is not to our liking as AA members, it's because they're uninformed, and I believe that we, as AA members, it's our responsibility to carry that message of our traditions.
It doesn't mean that they have to abide by them because we're not affiliated with treatment facilities or agencies or any of these things, but we need to be friends with them, and we need to tell them what we're all about, what we are and what we're not, and I feel that this is one of the things that I can do because I have had this experience in AA and have been given the opportunity. I don't believe that I would be here today, and I don't believe I would be working in the field today, if it wasn't God's will for me.
I had all kinds of things I was going to share with you, and I really am drawing blanks here, and I have two beautiful colleagues here that I'm sure have a lot to say, so I think that what I'm going to do right now is to sit down and listen to my other friends, and thank you very much for allowing me to share. Thank you, Glynnis. The guidelines that Glynnis referred to are called for AA members employed in the alcoholism field, and they are available from the general service office.
One set of ten is available free of charge, and the rest you'll have to pay for. Some years ago I met our next speaker. I believe he used to sing for his money, but I realized that Jack has been around Alcoholics Anonymous for a few decades, and then I realized that he's been involved in the alcoholism field working with a union, so I'd like you to welcome Jack Hayes. Hi, everybody. My name is Jack, and I'm an alcoholic.
Hi. I'm from New York City. I'm a member of the 79th Street Workshop, and a lot of us are here. Thanks for coming. That was terrific. I remember you at Rutgers. Remember that? Yeah, I do. When that man talked and talked and talked and talked. No, it wasn't me. I'm going to qualify briefly, right? A guy spoke at our group the other night. He said he was going to qualify briefly. Forty-five minutes later, he was only up to World War II.
After World War II, and he hadn't picked up a drink yet.
[00:15:11]
Welcome to all of you. You're beautiful. I never saw so many. We're everywhere. I couldn't go anywhere in the city where there wasn't somebody with a badge. Fantastic. I hear there's almost 50,000 people. That's really incredible. This is my first international conference, and Curtis, thank you very much for asking me. It's really a thrill. I'm going to tell you a little bit about my story, because it dovetails into what I do for a living.
Curtis alluded to the fact that I used to sing with the big bands. And those of you that are too young to remember, well, there was a big band upstairs last night. That's the way it used to be. And you know, I loved singing with the big bands. It was at the end of the big band era. And it's been rumored that I contributed to the decline and fall of the big band era. But judging from last night, the bands are coming back, and I may come with them.
I drank for about 17 years. I never liked the taste of alcohol, but I liked what it did for me. I know this is a disease because I wanted to stop many, many times, and once I started, I didn't want to stop. And I used to commute up to a little town called Dobbs Ferry, a little Andy Hardy town that I grew up in just outside of New York. And I would call my mother up from the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station and say, Mom, I'm going to get the 609.
Mom, I'm going to get the 711. Mom, I'm going to get the 822. Mom, put my dinner in the oven. Mom, I'm going to stay at the Commodore. Well, I never stayed at the Commodore. I always ended up in a little hotel just off Times Square called the Arista Hotel. Oh, you've been there? It's one of those hotels, they knock on your door and said, you got a woman in there? And if you said no, they pushed one in.
So instead of disappointing my mother, I decided I would get my own apartment. And I used to love to buy a bottle of booze on a Friday night. What the hell, didn't I deserve a drink? And I'd chill the glass in the refrigerator, and I'd have a very dry, very, very dry vodka Gibson. Then I'd run out of vermouth, so I'd vodka on the rocks. Then I'd run out of rocks. And pretty soon I couldn't find the glass.
I used to love to wallow in self-pity. I loved to put on Frank Sinatra. He used to sing all those songs. And I used to love to drink and listen to songs like, I'll Never Smile Again. Saturday night is the loneliest night of the week. Don't get around much anymore. And then I wanted a dance. But there wasn't any partner. But I had a great mop I had bought in Gristedes. One thing you can say about a mop, it can't step on your toes.
And I would dance around the room, and I would end up on the living room floor. And then I'd wake up the next morning wondering what happened. But I'd take a couple of Miltowns, they had just come out. I would take a sunlamp treatment, and I would go back out again. Because this time, it was going to be different. And to me, that's the insanity of our disease. Not taking on six cops, or throwing your wife down a flight of stairs, or pulling the stove out of the wall.
To me, the insanity of alcoholism is thinking it's going to be different next time, in spite of overwhelming, overwhelming evidence. My last drunk was around Halloween. My first meetings, every room had goblins on the wall, and witches, and pumpkins smiling. I don't know how the hell I stayed sober. It's been rumored that I came to Alcoholics Anonymous on a broomstick. But I don't care how I got here.
I got here. That was in August 1959. I haven't had a drink for half of the length that AA's been around.
[00:20:04]
I'm going to be sober 26 years in a couple of months. And how did I do it? Thank you. How did I stay sober? I didn't pick up a drink. I haven't learned anything in 25 years. You can't get drunk. Absolutely. Impossible. If you don't pick up a drink. And that's what I try to do. In my 18th year of sobriety, I was a freelance writer and market researcher. You know what freelance means. It means you can hang around in your bathrobe and slippers till 11 in the morning.
Right? Any of you who have done it? I freelance. You know, that means you get up at noon time. So I got a job in an apartment house from midnight to 8. A guy that was in AA who is still a friend of mine was a doorman in the building next to me. So I went to work for my union, which is the doormen and the elevator men. We have 70,000 members in New York City. We're security guards, cleaning people, a lot of cleaning ladies.
Many of them from middle Europe. We have all the Fifth Avenue, Park Avenue doormen. All the people you see cleaning banks late at night. I worked in a building and I was going to do it for a year. And I did it for 11. And I got a phone call from my union president. Someone had given him my name. And I went to work for local 32BJ Health Fund as a alcoholism counselor. And I said, oh boy, what happens now?
What do I do? I was told by my good friend Jack Hennessy and my good friend, God rest his soul, Ed Small, in the early days of my coming into the alcohol business, was to talk to a lot of people. Find out. Find out what you're supposed to do. So we set up a program. We've seen about 1,500 members since we started the program. About one new alcoholic a day. In the beginning I was out there trying to save a lot of souls.
And then I realized that in industry we are intervening at an earlier time. Some would call it raising their bottoms, whatever that means. We started dealing with people who didn't want to get well. So that's the first thing I had to learn. That a lot of my clients do not want to get well. They want to get off the hook. So I learned, I used to go to counselor burnout meetings we have in New York, so that we talk to each other about what we're doing.
Some people are working 40, 80 hours a week, taking people to meetings, taking them to hospitals, doing this and doing that. I had to learn that I wasn't doing 12-step work. I love 12-step work. And my phone still rings for 12-step work. I love it. And I go out and speak when I can. I sponsor a few people, some of them here today, young man in the front row. I sponsor other people from my workshop meeting that I love so much are here.
I chair a meeting or two. I do all of the things I learned to do from when I first came to AA. My job is something completely different. If you're thinking about coming in the field, you're going to come up against a lot of frustration. Just after you do some training with shop stewards and with union delegates, and you think, oh, boy, they really know all about this disease, you get a telephone call, hey, Jack, I'm sending somebody over to you for the cure.
Well, this guy's got to go through your course before he gets his job back. And I had to learn that that was business. And that's my job. And though it's not a 9-to-5 job, it's not a 9-to-9 job either because I've got to take care of me. I never talked about what I did for a living before,
[00:25:00]
except joking around and kidding around at AA, and I still don't. Many, many people in my group and lots of people in New York do not know what I do for a living, and I like it that way. I don't want to ever be thrust in any role other than I'm a recovering alcoholic. If you do come into the field of alcoholism or you're in it already, you'll certainly know that people aren't batting down your door to go to lunch with you.
You are in Siberia. No one drops by and says, hey, you want to go for lunch? They don't want to be seen with you. Stigma still abounds. So you get tucked off, usually way off in some corner office. Nobody wants to know what you do or how you do it. All they want you to do is do it. So if you're prepared to be angry, hungry, angry, lonely, and tired, come into the field of alcoholism. Thank you. A particular welcome to those of you in the field who are not recovering.
You have brought great balance to the field. You've given us, those of us that are recovering, a little better perspective of what it's all about. I particularly welcome the young people that are in the fellowship. The Woodstock generation has arrived. I told them that you were coming, you know. You've brought great energy to Alcoholics Anonymous, new ideas, new sharings. You know, back in my day when we used to, we didn't say relationship, you know.
We said sex. Now they say relationship. Meaningful relationship. That means going steady for four days. I've learned since I've come in the field of alcoholism to keep my own personal sobriety in the highest priority. Because if I get drunk, then I can't do my job. And so it requires a great deal of going to meetings, listening to people, being active, and I find that very, very rewarding. AA has changed a lot in the 25 years that I've been here, you know.
Sharing has changed a bit, you know. In my group, 79th Street Workshop, they talk about everything. I mean everything. I've learned a lot. To show you how the fellowship has changed, I was speaking at a meeting and this big battle axe of a woman who was in the front row busted my chops. And she said, young man, and I thanked her for that. And she said, young man, what group do you belong to? I said, this is SOB.
I said, young lady, I belong to the Doom and Gloom group. She said, yeah? What nights do they meet? So anything is possible. If you're planning to come into the field, get an education. I think the day of the recovering alcoholic, without much more than a high school education, going to his boss and saying, let's start a program, I think that's fading off into the distance. So come into the field, get an education, be prepared to work for peanuts, right?
Stigma even abounds in our salaries. Be prepared to not make a lot of money. Be prepared to work very hard. Be prepared to go toe-to-toe with people sometimes on policies, on ways of handling things. Again, a very warm welcome to treatment people. So often treatment people are given second-class citizenship in some organizations we belong to, professional organizations. Without treatment people, we'd have nowhere to send the recovering alcoholic.
For those of you, and many, many of you, For those of you, and many, many of you, have come to Alcoholics Anonymous through a treatment facility.
[00:30:01]
I see several in the room right now. Isn't that great? I remember there was only one place, and that was Towns Hospital in New York City, where Bill had his spiritual experience. And the flight deck at Bellevue Hospital. There were no other beds. Now there's Slap Happy Valley. Let's not really call that. I just don't want to mention any particular names of places. We've got them in the country, we've got them in the city.
They've got a very, very professional staff. Very caring people. And I think, I wish treatment facilities were around when I got sober. Because I laid on my living room floor for four days. And I called to a telephone. And I called a guy up and I said, you still go to those meetings? And he said, yes. And I said, I'd like to go. Let me leave you with a thought that I think of very often professionally, as well as I do in my own personal recovery, which comes first.
A wonderful lady I know said to me about 24 years ago, She said, Jack, and I do this, I think of this also in my professional life. She said, Jack, hold A.A. like the blind hold a seeing-eye dog. Very gently and very firmly. And it'll take you where you want to go. Thank you very much. Thank you, Jack. My present assignment at the General Service Office is cooperation with the professional community.
And when I rotated on to the assignment just about two years ago, I wasn't too happy. Because, first of all, I didn't come through treatment. I had one of those hard-nosed recoveries where I did it on my own with the help of a million A.A.s. But I didn't go through any type of formal program. So when I came on to the assignment and I began to travel and meet different professionals in the field, I had the opportunity to be at a place called Newport, Rhode Island.
And I met our next speaker there, who was very gracious that particular day and invited me for lunch at his facility. And I got a first-hand view of a very professional, in my opinion, treatment center. And then I realized after some time that John is a member of our fellowship. And over the past two years, John has contributed to our About A.A. Bulletin anonymously and has helped me enormously in my task.
I'd like him to share with you now John W. Thank you. Hello, everybody. I am John W., and I'm a grateful alcoholic psychologist. I like to say that because when I came into Alcoholics Anonymous, I was a little bit before the Woodstock generation, too, Jack. When I came in mid-'60s, I guess it was, everybody was talking away in this meeting and they were talking about how they were filled with great tolerance for everybody and great love for everybody.
But those psychiatrists and those doctors and those psychologists, I thought, I'm not going to be a psychologist here. So somebody came up to me and said, What do you do, John? I said, I'm a jazz piano player. So in all these years, I've made some progress, and we've all made some progress. I can stand up and not hide the fact that I'm a recovery psychologist. It was easy to admit I was an alcoholic, but it was very difficult to admit I was a psychologist back then, to admit that I was.
This is a hard act to follow, these two. They were wonderful. My own experience has been in treatment. I had my doctorate when I got sober many years ago, and it was relatively easy for me to step over into the world of work of counseling alcoholics. I was a professor at the time. I've had an odd career, to say the least, like most alcoholics. I was a professor at Stanford University during much of my heavy drinking.
I can remember when the Palo Alto cops would get me, and they would put me in the rubber room. There was a room called the rubber room. Any of you folks young enough to remember what a rubber room is? That's where they would throw you in, and you would bounce because the walls were rubber,
[00:35:00]
the floor was rubber, the ceilings were rubber. Everything was rubber in the rubber room, and they'd throw you in there, and you'd bounce a while, and you'd settle down. So the first time the cops got me, they took me to the rubber room, and they opened the doors, and they said, Get in there. And I said, You can't put me in there. And he said, Why not? I said, I drew myself up with all the dignity I could muster, and I said, Because I'm a Stanford University professor.
That didn't matter at all to the Palo Alto police. They threw me in the clink anyway, and I bounced like all the other drunks and settled right down in the rubber room. Getting involved in Alcoholics Anonymous, or getting involved as a member of Alcoholics Anonymous in a professional field, was something I really did not intend to do. I had training in the field of human behavior and human sciences, but I really didn't want to mix up my program of recovery with all that stuff I was teaching and learning and researching and doing in the field of psychology.
I really wanted to keep that separate, to go on as just a member of AA, where I was John, and where everybody thought I was a jazz piano player. See, that was an easy disguise, because I was a jazz piano player. We had a big band singer and a jazz piano player. That's what I did for most of my life, was play with jazz groups. And when I was 14 years old, that was my introduction to Funny Little Cigarettes and things like that, back playing jazz in the bebop era.
All my heroes were the giants of modern jazz, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Max Roach, all of those people, and I just wanted to be like Charlie Parker. You know, I wanted to look like that, I wanted to sound like that, I wanted to walk like that, I wanted to carry my horn like that, and I wanted to be him, see? That was my whole life, was to be Charlie Parker. And then I heard Miles Davis, and I wanted to be like him, I wanted to carry my horn like him, I wanted to talk like him, I wanted to be like Miles, because he was a genius.
But anyway, being a piano player, I had to settle for Horace Silver, so that's who I was. In my Walter Mitty disguise, I was Horace Silver, and a little bit of Thelonious Monk thrown in, too. But in any event, I could pull off my disguise as a jazz musician. I thought, I'll just remain a jazz musician as far as A.A. is concerned, and I'll never be a psychologist working with alcoholics. I met a very dynamic lady out in Laguna Beach, California, back then, by the name of Muriel Z.
And Muriel heard me talk at a meeting once, and she said to herself, no jazz piano player talks this way. And so she was starting a hospital program, and she got on me, and she said, why don't you come work for me? Why don't you be a psychologist in this hospital program in South Laguna, California? And that turned out to be the first Comprehensive Care Corporation program that we built a model program, a group of us.
She somehow got me enticed into working in the field, and I really, really got hooked. I really got excited. Once I got backed into it, from the time she dragged me over to the offices and said, sign this contract, up to that point I was saying, no, I do not want to work in the field of alcoholism, and I took the pen and signed my name. Very strange. So I ended up working in the field, and I began to develop this huge ego that my group therapies, everybody got sober, and they stayed sober, and it was wonderful, and this was the way to go.
This was back probably then in the late 1960s, and I remember my first sobering experience as an alcoholism counselor was when I received a phone call one night at 2 o'clock in the morning, and my entire group that had been discharged from the hospital went out and got drunk. And I had what amounted to a group drunk phone call. And the first one on the telephone said, Dr. John, and I said, yes. They said, this is so-and-so, and we wanted to call you up to tell you what a wonderful therapist you are.
I said, what's all that noise in the background? What's that music I hear playing? What's those ice cubes rattling and glasses clinking and all that? And I heard all this laughter, and I thought, oh, my God, how am I going to handle this at 2.30, 3.00, 4.00 in the morning? One by one they got on the telephone and laughed hilariously and told me what a wonderful therapist I was, what they had learned from me, how exciting my group therapies had been, and without me they would be nothing, you know.
And so one by one I talked to them, and they all ended up crying. It was the most emotional night of my life. Then they were all on the telephone crying, and I said, you all know what you have to do, and they trooped back into the hospital, into detox. The next day, all of them, I think there were six involved, all these six little people came back in, all looking sheepish, and we had a time. One of the first experiences I had in working as a professional field
[00:40:01]
was on Christmas Eve about 1968, 69, somewhere around then. I had a great big guy, Bob, who was drunk as a skunk. He had what seemed to be an endless supply of half-pints, which he kept pulling out of pockets all over. I don't know where he got them. And we were in my rusty old Volkswagen in California, which had a sunroof where I used to put my surf fishing pole, and that's when I had a beard and I had hair way down to here.
I was a member of the Woodstock generation a little bit, but a little sober before that. But anyway, I looked like that, real professional. I didn't own a suit. My father died, I had to go buy a suit. I owned tie-dyed T-shirts and jeans and boots, but I had long hair, bandito and all that kind of stuff. And my fishing pole and Bob, Bob's head stuck out of the sunroof of my Volkswagen. But he was drunk and he needed to go to the hospital, and this shows you where we've come to in the field.
We drove around and around. I went from hospital to hospital with this guy, tried to get him admitted to a hospital in Southern California, and it was Christmas Eve. There was no room at the inn. And I, at that time, had my wife and two kids back home. I was in a hurry to get back home to see them and to spend Christmas Eve, and here I am, running all over Orange County, California, with this drunk named Bob.
So I finally got to this one. You know, back then, they didn't want us. Now you go to a conference in California and you look at all the hospitals, and everybody has a drunk program, and everybody wants us now. Back then, nobody wanted us. Now everybody wants us, as a patient, because they've discovered we're good patients, we have money, we have insurance, whatever, we pay our bills, we're amenable to treatment, and they all want us now, and they'd love to have us filling up all those hospital beds.
In any case, a very nice nurse said to me, she said, look, you're a nice guy. You want to get home to your family tonight. I said, yeah, I do. She said, what would happen if you left Bob over there by that water cooler? I said, gee, I don't know. She said, if you left Bob by that water cooler and we couldn't give Bob back to you, she said, the ambulance would have to take him over to the state hospital.
And I said, oh! I said, you mean that water cooler down the hall? She said, yeah. I mean, she did everything but hit me over the head, dummy, you know? So I took Bob and I leaned him against the water cooler. I said, Bob, I've got to go see a man about a dog. And Bob said, well, I should remote phone, you know? And I said, I'll be right back. And I went out the door and I went home, and of course Bob went to the state hospital in an ambulance.
After that, it was a secret. I learned how to get drunks into hospitals in Southern California. I'd take him in, lean him against the water coolers, and walk out. Now I know it doesn't work. So if I give him to you, you can't give him back to me. So in any event, I began then working in the field professionally, and I began to discover an interesting thing, which was that before I'd go to the hospital as a group therapist, I would meditate and ask for help always before I went into the hospital to run my group.
And when I would do that, when I would just stand and meditate quietly for five minutes even, ten minutes, and just give me help, give me support, give me help, show me what to do, I would go in and the group would just run intuitively. The group would practically run itself. And I was getting great. So this was going to my head. So after about a year of doing group therapy, I pulled up at the hospital one morning and I thought, you better do your meditation, you better ask for assistance.
And I thought, nah, I don't need that anymore. So I just raced in, my group was waiting for me, and went in and started to do the group. I was going to do all my razzle-dazzle techniques and everything. And here's the way the group started. There was a guy named George. George was having tremendous trouble trusting. So I decided to do a trust exercise with him in which I was going to catch him. You know, fall back into my arms, George, and don't worry, I will save you.
You know, I'm your safety net. Just fall into my arms, let go, and fall back into my arms. Well, in any case, George is standing there like this. He's fighting with himself to let go, fighting with himself to let go. Just before George lets go, a woman over here says, I'm a doctor, and I turn. George was about six feet five, and he was coming straight back like a redwood tree, you know. He was just coming back like that.
He had let go. He had this wonderful smile on his face. Filled with trust. And it went through my mind as a therapist, I cannot let this man hit the floor because if he hits the floor, it's all over. I've lost him. He'll be drinking inside of a week. He'll be drinking that afternoon. So I threw my body in under George. He fell down on me. He cracked three ribs. They took me to the emergency room. George had tears in his eyes when he took my hand, and he said, I trust you.
I trust you. I mean, I'll do anything to get a drunk sober. You see, I'll give up three times. Do Anything to Get a Drug Sober, you see, I'll give a free crack at it. In any case, after I had done this for a considerable period of time, I left California.
[00:45:01]
I went to the Chancellor of the University of California where I was teaching at the time, and I said, Chancellor, we need a drug and alcohol program on this campus, both for the staff and for the students. We need to educate people about the effects of alcohol and drugs. And he said, we don't have an alcohol and drug problem on our campus. This is like in the height of the acid movement and everything else is coming down.
We didn't have a drug problem on our campus, and certainly there was no alcohol problem with the faculty. So I said, Chancellor, he said, John, maybe you want to go hang up a shingle. We're about research. Maybe you want to go practice. And I said, no. I said, you really have serious problems here. He says, well, we're about excellence, excellence in research, excellence in knowledge, etc. I said, well, Chancellor, listen to this committee that I know of in the field of psychology.
In this committee, you have a fellow who's working on a doctorate who's dealing drugs to all of his committee members, five of whom are active alcoholics. I said, Chancellor, what sort of excellence do you expect to get out of this Ph.D. committee? And he looked like I slapped his face. He turned beet red, and I knew I'd lost it right there. I mean, being a good alcoholic, I didn't have a political bone in my body.
I didn't play it right. The Chancellor just about threw me out of his office, and I said, well, what the hell? I resigned and went to Harlem. That's the way a good alcoholic psychologist behaves, right? I'll show him. So I resigned after this senior professorship at the University of California, got on an airplane, flew to New York, and ended up running down 125th Street wondering, what have I done with my life?
Because, see, in Southern California, I mean, your most weighty decision was, shall you eat zucchini today or shall you get into macrame at that time, you know? And, of course, it was also walking down the street and smiling to prove that you were a beautiful person in Laguna Beach, California. So I ended up then being the psychologist in the alcoholism treatment program in Harlem, where I stayed for four or five years.
Everybody was taking bet on me. They were calling me then the albino shrink. Everybody said, we'll give him two weeks. And I fooled everybody by staying almost five years. And it was a wonderful, wonderful experience for me to work in the ghetto, because before I went to the ghetto, the ghetto was a word in sociology text. After I arrived in Harlem, the ghetto became very real to me, and I began to understand what that was all about, working with my black brothers and sisters and Hispanic brothers and sisters in Harlem.
And what I learned from that, I learned some very beautiful things from that experience. The first thing I learned was that black men and white men can become brothers, can love each other, can hold each other dear, can share, can give to each other. And that was a wonderful, wonderful learning for me to understand, to come to understand that that was indeed possible, that that was good, that that's what we need to do, and that's what will happen as more and more of us approach each other.
Black brother, white brother, with love in our heart, and for understanding. So a great God-given program like Alcoholics Anonymous was the only way that could happen for me. And that was beautiful. There I had many, many gratifying experiences. I'll share one with you very quickly. One of the groups that we ran, we used a technique where we would call each other by the drinking persona, whatever our drinking names were.
Every drunk has a name for himself, I believe. And mine was Charlie, not John. But I met many, many people with different names. I'd gather names and then do group therapy and have people reveal what these people were like. Like Honey West, who was a 70-year-old alcoholic, and she was wonderful. Pugnacious, who fought when he drank. Don Juan, who was a lover. But Lonely Sam was a young man I met in Harlem who, from the age of 17 on, and wrote poetry, drank wine and wrote poetry, and thought philosophical thoughts.
And Sam was a very lonely man because he never spoke to anybody. He thought people would laugh at him and laugh at his thought. Lonely Sam became the poet laureate of our group, our men's group, not AA, but men's therapy group at the clinic where I worked in Harlem. And we would start each therapy session with a poem from Lonely Sam. It was a wonderful, wonderful experience. To be able to share like that, to experience people like that, in the role of an alcoholic psychologist, for me to experience people in this role.
So for me, I've never burned out in the field. I direct a large alcoholism treatment center now. As a therapist, I was always energized by my group. I was never burned out. I'm sorry to say, in all the years that I did services, direct services to alcoholics, I never burned out once.
[00:50:00]
I never had a day in which I did a group therapy that I didn't walk out excited and happy and grateful to be working in the field and be overjoyed with the field and really thrilled to be who I was. Most of the trouble that I've had in the field, working in the field, has really come from my colleagues in the other sciences, especially in behavioral psychology, which I have constant warfare. I mean, we fight all the time.
They happen to believe in things like controlled drinking for alcoholics and controlled heroin use for heroin addicts and controlled marijuana use for marijuana-dependent people, and they don't understand that there's a genuine disease here. I happen to have become a specialist in the field of the chemistry of the brain. All my studies have been in neurochemistry for the last 15 years. All my interests have been in the chemistry of the brain, and I've been sort of tracing through the worldwide literature through many, many studies piecing together the chemistry of the addictions, the brain chemistry of the addictions.
Of course, I try to share this with my colleagues often in the behavioral sciences, and the attacks are frequent. If they find out you're a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, they immediately dismiss what you have to say. I'm sorry to tell you that. But if they find out I'm a member of AA, I'm immediately biased, filled with wish fulfillment, filled with fantasies, and I'm filled with ideology. I'm far from the truth, don't know what I'm talking about, and should not be trusted for an intellectual judgment of any kind.
I mean, that's basically what it amounts to. The difficulties that I've had there have been really efforts to try to teach in a thoroughly respectable and scientific way the disease concept of alcoholism to people who do not want to believe the disease concept of alcoholism. And I can tell you what it's been like. Many years ago, when I tried to teach the disease concept of alcoholism to my colleagues, they would say, what evidence do you have?
And I'd say, well, look, it looks this way, and I'd give a lot of metaphors and analogies. And they would say, huh, that's not evidence. Well, after the years, as the evidence slowly began to accumulate, and I forced myself to read journals like Brain Research, Biochemistry, Pharmacology, and Behavior, and all of these heavy, heavy journals on brain sciences, then I would say, well, you see, you drink alcohol, it converts to acetaldehyde.
Acetaldehyde condenses with various neurotransmitters, producing things called beta-carbolines or tetrahydroisoquinolines, like tetrahydropapavoline. When we infuse these into the brains of monkeys, we produce what appears to be irreversible drinking habits. And you know what they say? I don't believe you. Or they say, that's nice. But what proof do you have that it really is a disease? I found out that people simply suffer from what I choose to call hardening of the categories, you know.
As they get older, and it's either a disease or it isn't. It's either this or it's that. But do not trouble me with these more complex kinds of considerations. What people want when they ask you, why do alcoholics drink, they want you to say something psychological, basically. I've found this out over the years. They want you to say something that has to do with mothers or fathers or growing up, or that you had a promising career as a concert violinist and you took up woodworking and then you came around like this and out of this disappointment you drank for the rest of your life.
All of these kinds of understandings that they can understand. But if you then tell them about dopamine or noradrenaline or serotonin or condensation products of those, or you talk about the brain and how that could be involved in addiction or genetic histories in alcoholism and how people are predisposed to alcoholism, that's really not what they want to hear. I have a lot more I could say, but I suspect it's probably a good time to open it up for discussion.
From the floor, you've been a wonderful audience, and thank you for listening to me. Thank you. We have a few minutes. I see we have one microphone in this aisle over here, and I don't see any other microphones. So if you'd like to share something from the floor, please do so. My name is Joe, and I'm an alcoholic. Thank you. I'd like to direct this question to Jack. I presently work with a second-class citizenry that you speak of in the treatment center.
[00:55:01]
My question to you, Jack, is how long of a period of sobriety do you say that a person should have before he starts work in the alcoholism field? And the second part of that question, a person having a period of sobriety who goes out, should he be more or less not allowed, but how much sobriety should he gain the second time out before he returns to the alcoholism field? Okay, in answer to your first question, this is on?
It's working, Jack. Okay. In answer to the first question, my own personal feeling is that for the benefit of the person who wants to come in the field, I think they should have at least five years of sobriety. You're dealing with… I don't discourage anyone from starting their training any time after they've gotten sober, but to really be able to handle burnout, to be able to handle knowing where all the bodies are buried, being able to know how to make those referrals, and to be sure of your own core, I think at least five years' sobriety.
I've seen disasters with less. Now, the second question's tougher to answer. What happens if a colleague gets drunk? And it happens. It happens sometimes with people sober five years, ten years, sometimes 15 years. They get drunk. My own personal feeling is that maybe they should start training for another type of job in their company. I think it's… I know if I drank, if I drank now, I don't think I could come back to the field of alcoholism.
My credibility would have been blown. Not my working ability. So hopefully, if I did have a slip, my employer might want, after a period of rehabilitation, getting my job back, he might trust me in another area of my union. I don't think that I would be comfortable, and I think a lot of other people have told me this, that they don't feel they would be comfortable if they had a relapse, that they would be comfortable counseling alcoholics ever again.
Now, there are some people that have come back. A lot depends on where you counsel. A lot depends who you counsel. A lot depends on how long you've been doing it. So rule of thumb, those people that have relapsed almost don't come back in the field. And those that try, though they don't relapse, find that they burn out and change the type of work they're doing. It's very tricky. I've been… Let me tell you a quick experience.
One of our colleagues got drunk after 10 or 12, 14 years of sobriety. And we did an intervention. Somebody says there was a million dollars worth of EAP brains in that room. And I was very flattered to be included in that. And we had some very heavy hitters who I won't name, but real top EAP people in New York that many of you know. And it was beautiful. The guy showed up with his union president. The confrontation is like, this is your life, if anyone remembers that program.
You know, were your high school teachers there? And grandma and everybody. It wasn't quite that dramatic. But here we all sat. He came into this room. It went beautifully. It went beautifully. He agreed to go to a treatment facility. When he agreed to go to a treatment facility, we made one boo-boo this million dollars worth of professional experience. He agreed to go to a treatment facility. We had no limousine or taxi downstairs to take him to the airport.
[01:00:05]
He went back home, and his wife talked him into staying. Not going to the treatment facility. He is now no longer working in an EAP. He's working on a line union job with men very much younger. That was a tragedy. He did not accept help. So, it's such a heart-rendering, wrenching experience when one of our colleagues slips, and it happens. And what do we do? We try to help. Should they come back into the field, they should come back into some field with a lot of our help, but maybe not counseling alcoholics and drug addicts.
But that's my own opinion. Thanks, Jack. Thank you. I'm Gary. I'm an alcoholic. I'm currently undertaking a project in Toronto, Ontario, where I'm moving to from having just spent two years in the mountains in Idaho. I've been freelancing, Jack. I'm in my 13th year of consecutive sobriety and started working in the field of alcoholism almost from the beginning when I received a job at an Olano club after I was about three or four months sober in this program.
They didn't pay me for the first two years, but then I couldn't get a job anywhere else, so it didn't make any difference. Working as an employee in an Olano club and subsequent to that being on the board of directors of that Olano club for seven years, I received a considerable amount of experience in working with both sober and practicing alcoholics. Simultaneous with that, towards the end of that period, I began working in the field of alcoholism as an EAP coordinator, and I was hired to develop curriculum for an agency that was establishing model programs.
And so I had a six-month research task, which I completed and went on to market these programs and for four years did that and went into some consulting following that. What my remarks are addressed to is the dilemma of the non-certified, non-credentialed alcoholic working in the field who, after some time through work experience and life experience, acquires a certain standing or a certain stature or credibility in the alcoholism field.
And you reach a point of a dilemma. Well, now what do you do? Do you start working back at first-year university or second-year university and go on to establish yourself and become credentialed? And the dilemma for me reached a critical point when I started consulting for psychiatrists and PhDs and telling them what to do in setting up their programs. And as a consultant, being hired on a basis receiving a great deal of money on a per diem, and then writing curriculum for courses without having the credentials.
So I guess my question, if I have a question, is to ask, what does a person do? I mean, does a person in that situation go on and get a master's or a doctorate, or what do they do? That's an excellent question. I've seen the field change over the years, and I'm very eager to have recovering people continue to work in the field of alcoholism treatment and counseling. That's critically important to me.
My treatment staff, which is very, very large, we have a staff of almost 100 and so people. We have a counseling staff of about 55, 60. At least 80% of those people are recovering people. And it's very important to keep that many people recovering who are doing direct service. But I think in answer to your question, I think we have to become formally educated. The field is rapidly changing. There's a surplus of people coming out of schools of psychology with master's degrees, with PhDs, MSWs, who are not recovering people who really don't know alcoholism, but they've got paper behind them.
And I'm afraid that we'll see more and more jobs, competition for those jobs.
[01:05:05]
Plus, in terms of getting a decent salary for people working in the field of alcoholism, I think it's important that the standards are going to have to rise, that education is going to have to come behind it. Because one of the reasons, there are several reasons historically why salaries have been so low. First of all is the attitude that people come in the field with, this is such wonderful fun, I'd do it for free.
Don't ever say that around administrators. Don't ever tip your hand. It's wonderful fun, we'll do it for free, but don't tell it to the guy who's going to determine your salary. Because you're going to say, well, we can get this guy for nothing, let's offer him peanuts. So basically, that's been one problem, those of us who have kind of found so much excitement in the field, we didn't care about money to begin with.
And secondly, as we start to bump up against people with higher degrees, they're saying to themselves, this person has no bachelor's degree, they have no formal training in the field, they want X thousands of dollars, I can get an MSW for $2,000 more, or $3,000 more, so let me get the MSW. I think the answer to your dilemma is I see growing changes in the field, I see the push for more and more training, more and more education, formal education.
I think that we have to face the reality of that and keep recovered people working in the field of alcoholism. Thank you, John. Next question. My name is Larry R. from Columbus, Ohio. Hi, everybody. By the grace of God, I'm in my 10th year of sobriety. And I don't really have a question, but I was hearing you speak about doing it for free. I'm an architect, and I've never been able to meet an architect yet in the program.
I've gone to New York and the central office in New York and all over the world, but that's not what I came up here to talk about. When you talk about doing it for free, I can relate to that because the wages in architecture are very low. But be that as it may, my comment is more of an observation or a comment. I recently had a chance to participate on a governor's task force on alcoholism in my state, and I was honored to do so.
And one of my main concerns was treatment for the indigent at the outset, and I don't know how much was accomplished along those lines. I think more other avenues were investigated, but I simply would like to issue a challenge to everyone in their own communities to take a look out for the indigent. It seems like there are plenty of programs, inpatient programs, for those that have a medical card. I know that in my neighborhood, we have 40 percent of the residents that have no form of health insurance at all.
The government people will tell you that over 80 percent of the people are insured. We did a door-to-door survey in our south side of our city, and there's 40 percent without any kind of a card. And there's 40 percent of people who cannot afford to pay that have tremendous waiting lists to get into the public facilities. That's all I have to say. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Next question, please.
My name is Hardy, and I'm grateful to be a recovering alcoholic. Hi, everybody. It's an honor and a privilege to be here in Montreal with you people this weekend. One of the things I was hoping to do when I came to Montreal was connect with people that might know of holistically modeled, kind of alternatively styled treatment centers, talk about nutrition, maybe have massage therapy, and just work with kind of alternative forms of therapy in conjunction with working with steps, too.
So if anybody has any information about these kind of places and you see me walking around this weekend, stop and say hello, and I'd appreciate any information. Thank you. Thank you. Next question, please. Good afternoon. My name is Bill, and I'm an alcoholic. Hi, Bill. I'm also a credentialed alcoholic and counselor from the state of New York. And John W. You do it this way. Yeah. It don't work. You make it work.
But anyway, just recently I think John and I had worked closely together with two of our credentialed counselors in our region, of which I'm part of the impairment committee. And I'd like to have John's opinion as far as what he thinks about the future of alcohol counselors with impairment. With the impaired counselors?
[01:10:00]
Yes, please. I think from—I take an individualistic approach. I think people do differ, and they get the disease of alcoholism. There are reasons in every case to be looked at and understood in terms of impairment. I think that we're talking a disease. I don't see that it makes any sense to have an EAP referral, and we treat these people as having a disease, and we rehabilitate them and send them back to work.
And yet when one of our own falls victim to relapse, we don't rehabilitate them and send them back to work. I think they have to be taken out of direct counseling jobs for a period of time. That's my opinion on that, during which certainly they have to receive further therapy and try to understand themselves better and discover what went on with them and why this happened, why they drank again. But I'm as eager to salvage my impaired counselor as I'm eager to salvage any alcoholic.
And if I can get him back to work counseling, I want to do that, if I can. Thank you very much. Hello, my name is Don. I'm an alcoholic and a drug addict. I haven't been in the program very long, but I'm presently working under a federal project here in Montreal where we have a self-help group on drug abuse, including alcohol. The first thing I did was get myself sober from both things. Then I got my colleague sober three or four days later at my example.
Then I got another person sober. He had one slip for one day, but then he's back with us. He was considered incurable by the psychiatrists and treatment teams at the Douglas Hospital. I don't know. There's another fellow who's showing progress, and they thought he would never show progress. We're getting on, and I don't have much sobriety. I'm 43 days sober now. I just want to say that I think it can be done.
Thank you. Thank you. Next question, please. Hi, I'm Jerry, an alcoholic from Battle Creek, Michigan. I hope you've all eaten your cornflakes this morning, of course. I am in the work, but really I'm on the South Central Michigan Substance Advisory Council, Substance Abuse Advisory Council. We recently discovered that one of the licensed agencies in our county, in fact, subscribes to the Sobel's premise that an alcoholic can be restored to social drinking.
And this is becoming an issue that, in fact, we've summoned them to our next meeting on July 16th, but OSAS, the Office of Substance Abuse Services for Michigan, has issued them a license. So we're in the role of reviewing and commenting, and I'm wondering what can be done, what kind of review and comment can be brought to bear to have this agency not licensed. It is, in the eyes of someone who's been in AA for many, many years, it's almost criminal, in my opinion.
What can be done? Can I say something? Please. In 25 years, I've never known anyone that came to these rooms that can drink socially. And the message we have to get out to the scientific community is that no self-respecting alcoholic wants to drink socially. We have nothing to fear from the Sobel's. You know, they went out and did this study. They followed people for one year, and then they followed them for two.
By the third year, they had to go to graveyards to get the names off the stones. They had lost so many people. So it's a very dangerous concept. But it's one that we have to take seriously. They had lost so many people. So it's a very dangerous concept. But it's one that we don't have to even answer. All we've got to do is stay sober one day at a time. And we answer it. I agree in everything you said.
But the fact remains, they still are a licensed agency in our community. We Still Are a Licensed Agency, We're Authority.
[01:15:15]
I think you need to take the tact that the research that has been done on controlled drinking has been inadequate, has been scientifically indefensible, does not hold up late when you examine it critically like any scientist, and I think you have to really appeal to the work that's been done in dealing with a government agency. You have to come at it as a scientific problem, put your emotions aside, and say that you regard this as unethical, it's equivalent to treating cancer with Laetrile, say, rather than chemotherapy or other kinds of things.
It's medical quackery, and I would take the position it's medical quackery, say here's a prestigious journal, the New England Journal of Medicine, that shows it's quackery. You can force this other agency to produce the scientific studies that they claim to support controlled drinking, then call me up, I'll come at my own expense, I'll rip those studies apart. I promise you that. Thank you. Thank you.
Next question, please. My name's John Ryan from San Diego, California, and I'm a sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous, and I'm real grateful about it. For many years, prior to being in Alcoholics Anonymous, I was in marketing, and I didn't leave that field when I got here, except briefly to be a waiter as I sobered up. And I used to market booze, and now we have a company that markets recovery facilities, treatment centers.
And we run the gamut from Humana Hospitals to a little place called Hazleton, and we are able to affect a 101 percent average increase in census permanently to facilities who can meet our criteria. Our criteria are quite simple. Their AMA rate must be below 15 percent to begin with. The primary modality must be group therapy as opposed to one-on-one. We're not saying don't use one-on-one, we're saying the primary modality must be group therapy.
And we have some other criteria. We ask them to sign a piece of paper that says your primary purpose will be to help a suffering alcoholic and his or her family, and that's the way it's going to be. If they will sign that paper, we'll help them market. In the last year, prior to marketing any product, if it was a food product, we'd go look at the product to make sure it was okay, and we do that today.
In the last year, we got compulsive about computers. I will speak for myself. I got compulsive about computers and began to feed in information. And as a result of that, when we go to facilities now, and we have 63 facilities, by the way, we look at how things are happening. And more often than not, when a psychiatrist non-recovering, or an MSW non-recovering, or a psychologist non-recovering is in charge, a charge might be program director or executive director, I immediately need to go and look at the patient charts, and I find an excessive use of the diazepans and psychotropics.
And what I'm finding is it averages about 20 to 22 percent are still after detox and some kind of mood-altering drugs under those circumstances. My question, John, is how do you tell a psychiatrist he's nuts? It's a real legitimate problem, because I realize it's a lack of education, but I'm just a drunk from AA who happens to have a real good way to get you a lot of census and make a lot of money.
They know that. My criteria, our criteria is we want them to have a fighting chance, and we do not believe that you can treat drug addiction with drugs. How can we communicate that without the appropriate degrees behind our name? Can you please help? Well, I think you have trouble communicating it no matter what degrees you have after your name to certain people.
[01:20:00]
But I find that enlightenment comes slowly to other professionals who have not been through the experience of alcoholism themselves. But it's coming. I mean, I meet more and more and more enlightened psychiatrists—I couldn't say that 20 years ago—and clinical psychologists and social workers, et cetera. I don't know how you do that except to keep bringing the truth before them, to keep pointing out that Valium and Librium is not the drug of choice for alcoholics, and just point out, Doctor, do you believe that alcoholism is a Valium deficiency?
That may be one thing you can try, force a little awareness that way. Thank you, John. We have three people left with a few minutes. Could we get to the questions right away? My name is Phillip. I'm an alcoholic. Hi, everyone. It's good to be here. I'd like to thank you all for being here and sharing your experience and knowledge. I've been also known as Artie Shaw. I've been a musician for the last 20 years, John.
My question to you is, in your facility alone, is there any music therapy going on? I can see that music therapy might be a great help along with all this. I've never seen music therapy in alcoholism except in Yugoslavia, and the music therapy in Yugoslavia was extremely interesting. All of the doctors in Yugoslavia play violin or viola or whatever, so music therapy consists of the doctors sitting on the stage and the patients come in and the audience and the doctors play.
No, we don't do music therapy. I wish we could. I think it would be a great idea. Certainly, I've wanted to in many of the facilities in which I've worked in. There's just all kinds of therapies. The gentleman talked about holistic therapies. We need to look at nutrition more seriously. Massage is an excellent therapeutic device for people who are tense and anxious and strung out. I think music therapy would be fabulous along with some dance and movement therapy and expressive therapy.
There's a lot of kinds of therapies we need to be doing that we're still not doing. Thank you for bringing that up. Thank you. Hi, my name is Susan M. I'm from Cleveland, Ohio. I don't really have a question. I guess I just want to thank you folks for putting this meeting together. I'm in the process of entering into the field or applying to enter into the field, and there's been a lot of controversy with people saying there's an awful lot of burnout in that field.
It's something I've wanted to do for like three years now, and I've always allowed people to talk me out of it, basically because of insecurity, but really knowing as a result of doing it for free at different centers in the area that I'm qualified to do it. I like what you had to say about levels of education. I do feel that that's very necessary and important, and I'm entering the field on an entry level.
I do intend to get a formal education, but I also feel that I'm in the business world right now supporting myself, and I don't have a formal education. I was a teenage alcoholic, and so I blew my education, but I'm in the process of gaining that, and I feel that I get burnout from my position now. It's just real encouraging for me to see all these people here that are recovering and in the field. Thank you.
Hi, I'm Debbie, and I'm an alcoholic. Hi, Debbie. I'm from Minneapolis, Minnesota, and on July 9th, I'll have six years of sobriety. My question is, within the last year, I've gotten a job working in the field, which I've been working on since I was sober one year. I started in school for that degree, and so the last four years, I was training, and the last year, I got the job in the field. I have some questions about how I can mix my AA program with the people that I am working with in my group.
Many times, I find they might be living in my area, or they might just happen to end up in one of the groups that I'm going to an AA meeting at. I've had some psychiatrists that I've been working with mentioning, well, do you think it's a good idea to have your clients in your AA meeting with you? If I'm telling my story or sharing things in groups on a personal basis in an AA meeting, they're saying, maybe you should ask them to leave.
If you came to that meeting first, you should ask them to leave. Some people in Al-Anon said that, too. They've had small groups in Al-Anon, and they said if they've seen one of their clients walk into their meeting, they'd ask them to leave. I said, I couldn't do that, and I felt like it was against the principles of AA. I feel that, as a professional, I can keep those things separate while I'm working with those people as clients, but once they're out of my jurisdiction, and I'm not working with them anymore, they're just one of the big world of AA.
I wondered what your knowledge is on that. Can I address that? Because I go to meetings where a lot of my clients go.
[01:25:03]
My union has 70,000 members, a lot of them Irish, which helps. I have to remember I was sober 18 years before I came in the field, so I still go to meetings just like I used to do. I have no secrets. I am what I am, and if my clients are there, terrific. If they want to ask me a lot of questions about therapeutic questions, or questions about their job, I tell them to call me tomorrow at the office.
I have to remember that recovery is the most important, my recovery is the most important thing for me, and if my clients happen to be in the room, fine. I am not Superman. If I need to talk about a problem, I talk about it, and my clients hear it. I listen to them, and they listen to me. So I have to be able, I would not have taken my job if I did not feel free to go anywhere in the country, and I have, to AA meetings.
And so United Street Workshop, which is my group, we have 40 meetings a week. I don't go to all 40, but my members go to all those different meetings, because they work on different shifts. So if I'm in the meeting room, I'm proud to be in the same meeting room with my clients. I have nothing to hide. Thank you. I went to that meeting. That's my own feeling. I came to your meeting in March. I'd like to share a little with you on that.
I too am at many, many meetings where there's people that I work with on the job. I've found that if I keep it simple, keep it basic, I'm there as an AA member. And if there's something I can share in my AA experience with these people, I share it. If it has to do with a therapeutic group or work or that type of being an expert, which I'm not. In AA rooms, I'm just an AA member trying to stay sober one day at a time.
If there is something that I feel should be taken up in private at the office, I just very tactfully say, you know, call me and make an appointment. I'll see you at work. I'm here for me, and I need this for me. And I certainly don't think that working in the field makes me a second-class AA member, and I'm there for me, and I need to get what I need to refuel my own self at the meetings. And if I try to do therapy at meetings, I'm in trouble.
Thank you. I have a comment for you. I agree with what everybody said here. I think sharing basic AA stuff is fine at a meeting. I think I hear you saying, what about myself? Can I talk honestly and openly in front of people I'm doing therapy with? That's a very difficult situation. I think that when you have some stuff that is really, really pretty private material, take it to your sponsor. I mean, you don't have to necessarily share that in an open meeting.
Take it to your sponsor. If you're seeing somebody privately, as some people are, take it to your own therapist. But as far as sharing the program of AA is concerned, sharing your story, your experience, your strength, and hope, you can do that in front of your clients. But if it's something that you would regard as pretty devastating to them, especially newcomers to the program, I think you take that to your sponsor.
It's just about that time. Maybe you can ask your question after the meeting, is that all right? No souls are saved after 5 o'clock. I'd like to thank Glynnis, John, and Jack, and could we all end this meeting in the usual manner with the Lord's Prayer?