Sober Sunrise – Bob D. – Adelaide, Australia – 2012
AA speaker Bob D. from Adelaide explores Step One and the difference between acute and chronic alcoholism, using the Chinese farmer parable and Dr. Silkworth’s insights on the allergic reaction to alcohol.
Bob D. from Adelaide, Australia got sober on October 31st, 1978, and hasn’t touched alcohol or any mind-altering substance since. In this AA speaker tape, he walks through Step One in depth—not the intellectual understanding of it, but the gut-level realization that has to happen inside, in the heart. He breaks down the difference between acute and chronic alcoholics, using the famous Chinese farmer story and Dr. Silkworth’s medical insights to explain why some people can quit drinking and move on, while others like him need a complete spiritual solution.
Bob D., an AA speaker with over 30 years sober, explores the difference between acute alcoholics (who can stop or moderate with sufficient reason) and chronic alcoholics (whose problem intensifies when they quit drinking, creating restlessness, irritability, and discontent). He explains Dr. Silkworth’s concept of the allergic reaction to alcohol—the phenomenon of craving—and why Step One requires more than intellectual acceptance; it demands a deep, emotional concession in the heart. Bob uses the Chinese farmer parable to illustrate ego and non-judgment, arguing that the real problem for chronic alcoholics is not the craving itself, but the inability to stop starting.
Episode Summary
Bob D. opens with a prayer about setting aside everything he thinks he knows—a practice that’s been central to his recovery for three decades. He’s particularly interested in newcomers, especially those in their first 30 days, reminding them that the weekend’s talks might lift a veil and show them a path they hadn’t seen before. He connects this openness to ego—the part of us that blocks learning, the smug part that only listens to find others wrong.
He frames the talk around a Buddhist story about an old Chinese farmer who owns only a horse. When the horse runs away, his neighbors call it terrible. When the horse returns with wild horses, it’s wonderful. When his son breaks his leg breaking a wild horse, it’s horrible. When the Chinese Army arrives and conscripts only able-bodied young men, suddenly the son’s broken leg saves his life. The farmer responds to each event the same way: “I don’t know if it’s good or bad—maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.” The point: enlightenment is knowing that we don’t know. Ego assumes, judges, and supposes. Ego is the enemy.
This sets up Bob’s exploration of Step One, which he calls the hardest thing any alcoholic ever does. The Big Book says most of us are unwilling to admit we’re real alcoholics. Bob illustrates this with brutal honesty—we don’t want to be alcoholics. We’d rather be mental health cases, drug addicts, anything else. Yet denial persists even when the evidence is overwhelming.
The distinction Bob makes is crucial: Step One as written in the Big Book (“admitted we were powerless”) can be said without meaning it. You can sit in a treatment center, nod along, check the box—and not truly concede it in your innermost self. The Big Book language in Chapter Three is different: “we learned…we had to fully concede to our innermost selves that we were alcoholics.” Learning implies a process, an evolution. It has to happen in that quiet place inside where you know things without debate, without the chatter in your head.
His sponsor used to say, “This is an inside job.” That’s why intellectual treatment approaches fail. You can get a doctorate in alcoholism in 30 days at a fancy treatment center and still drink. Knowledge doesn’t move from the head to the heart automatically.
Bob then walks through Dr. Silkworth’s writings on the allergic reaction to alcohol and introduces a critical distinction: the difference between acute alcoholics and chronic alcoholics. Both might appear the same in a doctor’s office, but the recovery path is entirely different.
An acute alcoholic is what the Big Book calls a “hard drinker.” He drinks habitually to the point of physical and mental impairment. It shaves years off his life. But—and this is the key—if a sufficiently strong reason emerges (doctor’s warning, lost love, health crisis, job loss), he can stop or moderate. He may find it difficult, may even need medical detox, but within him is the ability to do one of two things: stop or moderate. Bob shares stories of people he’s known who fit this profile—guys who quit drinking in the Navy, fell in love with someone who wouldn’t tolerate it, and stayed sober 30+ years without ever working the AA program. Their alcoholism ended when they quit drinking.
Bob is not that guy. He’s a chronic alcoholic. And this is where the talk cuts deep.
When a chronic alcoholic quits drinking, the problem doesn’t end—it starts. In a vague, indefinable way, right below the surface where he can’t see it clearly. That’s the baffling part. The acute alcoholic gets sober and becomes nicer, friendlier, more able. Bob gets sober and becomes restless, irritable, discontented. He sees how stupid people are. Not in a mean way—it’s a gift, he says with dark humor. He just sees the idiots.
Silkworth describes it: restlessness, irritability, discontent. These aren’t character flaws—they’re symptoms of chronic alcoholism that hit when the drinking stops. The restlessness is an aimlessness, a vague feeling that wherever you are isn’t where you need to be. It’s like being a dog circling a living room, unable to find its spot. Bob spent his whole life running from one thing to another—this job will fix it, this woman will fix it, this house will fix it—and nothing ever does.
Irritability comes because life rubs him wrong. People do things wrong. He can’t forgive them until they’re “properly ashamed,” so he keeps score. His sponsor described it best: it’s like a spring in the pit of his stomach, and life tightens up every day—the kids are too loud, taxes are too high, the boss is an idiot, it’s been raining all week—until his head feels like it’s going to blow.
Discontent runs deepest. It’s independent of reality. Bob notes that alcoholics living in $10 million homes feel the same dissatisfaction as those in cramped apartments. It’s not about circumstances; it’s a misinterpreted yearning.
Here Bob introduces Carl Jung, the psychiatrist who influenced AA indirectly. Jung worked with a man named Roland H., a wealthy businessman who got sober, relapsed, and came back to Jung asking for help. Jung told him the truth: there is no medical help on this planet. The only hope is a spiritual conversion. Roland felt like the doors of hell were closed on him. But Jung continued studying alcoholics and, in a letter to Bill W. in the early 1960s, wrote something that hit Bob hard: “I came to the conclusion that the alcoholic’s thirst for alcohol is not really a thirst for alcohol. I believe it is a thirst of the alcoholic’s being for unity, for connectedness—or if you’re more religiously minded, a union with God.”
Something deep within yearns for a homecoming, to connect with that from which we came. But this is a misinterpreted yearning. In our culture, it gets channeled toward bars, liquor stores, drug dealers, sex, acquisitions—anything promising relief and gratification. Bob’s never consciously thought, “This is a misinterpreted yearning for God,” but when he read Jung’s words, something clicked: “My God, I think that’s it.”
This yearning drives the cycle. The chronic alcoholic gets sober, the vacancy opens up, the restlessness begins. Bob spends his whole life with his antenna out, radar on, looking for the next thing that might fill the hole. A relationship—immediately he notices better people. A good job—he sees better jobs. He acquires things, convinced that enough of the right stuff and people will fill the vacancies. Every time: oh yeah, oh yeah, come here—oh no, no, no, wrong again. Depression settles in.
Over 10 years sober, Bob was sponsoring someone who said something that made the light go on. He realized he’d gotten sober, then got the job—the job with real money, the boat-and-Harley-money job. Six weeks in, it just starts looking bad. The shine wears off so fast. He got the girl he’d been infatuated with for so long. She fell in love with him, which meant she automatically failed his standards. But when he finally had what he wanted, the shine wore off there too.
Here’s the devastating realization: unconsciously, he was comparing what it felt like to have that job to what it felt like to drink four shots of tequila. The job didn’t compare. He was comparing being loved by her to drinking a pint of whiskey. She didn’t compare. The problem was inside him. Alcohol had spoiled him, ruined him. A normal drinker never understands because they never had the spiritual experience from drinking that he had. They just get drunk.
Bob’s sister illustrates this perfectly. She’s not an alcoholic. She has one drink, takes a half hour to drink it, forgets it’s there, orders a second drink and leaves two-thirds of it on the table. When he asks if she’s going to finish it, she says, “No, I’m starting to feel it.” She stops because some sane part of her senses that more will mean losing control. Bob gets to the same point and feels like he’s about to get control. “Come on, come on, come on,” his mind says, and he doesn’t have that off-switch.
When his parents, the women he loved, his family watched him build his life back up sober and then tear it down again, they were baffled. Why couldn’t he have “just a little high”? Why did he have to get so wasted? Why didn’t he know when to stop? But he doesn’t. Chronic alcoholism means there’s no “enough.” One more, one more, always one more. He might stop to prove a point or to shut someone up, then sneak out later.
This is the restlessness, irritability, and discontent cooking him from the inside. Silkworth says it perfectly: “We succumb to the desire again. We pick up a drink, hoping, and the phenomenon of craving develops. We pass through the well-known stages with a spree, to end up somewhere swearing to myself again I ain’t ever going to do this again—just to start the whole cycle of progressive restlessness, irritability, and discontent, until it’s backed me into a corner.”
Bob studied, got certified as a drug and alcohol counselor, believed knowledge was power. He was great at his job right up until the day he lost it for being drunk on the job. The relapse cycle was baffling to him.
He uses the frog-boiling metaphor: if you throw a live frog into boiling water, his strong hind legs get him out, scalded but alive. But if you set him in room-temperature water and turn up the heat slowly, he never realizes what’s happening. He stays until he’s dead. Alcoholism works the same way, cooking him slowly in his own emotional juices—the restlessness, irritability, discontent. It cooks him so slowly that if you’d told him three days before a relapse that he was about to burn his life to the ground, he would have jumped out of the pot. But he doesn’t know, because the disease works in the inside.
Then comes the moment when he walks into a bar, and it’s insanity. The day before, he would have given a lecture about how grateful he is, how he’ll never drink again. But the frog’s been cooked a little more. That’s the hideous, smoldering secret insanity—not running down the street with his hair on fire, but the quiet madness that has him walking into a liquor store when he swore to himself, in full understanding, that he could never do it again.
This repeats over and over. The real problem, Bob says, is two-fold. It’s not so much the phenomenon of craving itself—because there’s nothing you can do to change that. There’s no medical cure, no way to make the allergic reaction go away. The litmus test silkworth found was the allergic reaction: Do you have it? You can’t safely use alcohol in any form if you do.
But the craving isn’t the business at hand. You can’t control it. What you can control is whether you pick up that first drink.
Bob outlines the Big Book’s test: go to the nearest bar, have two strong drinks, then shut it down and go home. Two drinks, that’s it. If you’re like Bob, halfway through the second drink it becomes evident that this isn’t a good test day. The game’s on TV. A girl walks in. A friend shows up. His mind shifts any way it has to, to make him think the next drink makes sense. And he never glimpses what’s driving the shift—the allergic reaction to alcohol that he has no power over.
Sometimes the disease takes different forms. Bob had a year and a half where he switched to drugs because he’d had so much trouble from drinking. Heroin can beat an alcohol problem for a little while, but he always went back to drinking. He came out of a treatment center insisting he wasn’t an alcoholic—he was a heroin addict. There was panache in being a heroin addict in his day and age. He would have sworn to it.
He left treatment, still looking for something to fill that vacancy. There was a girl at a bar, at the Regency Hotel. He went there, knowing she might invite him to her apartment. When he sat down next to her, she asked if she could buy him a drink. He said, “You know, I’m not really a drinker.” Heroin addicts looked down on drinkers. He wasn’t a drinker, he’d just done drugs. She pressed him. “Well, we’re going to be here for a while. Let me buy you a drink.” He gave in: “Give me a rum and Coke.”
He killed it quickly. She still had her original drink. She offered another. He went into his spiel again, less fervent: “I’m not really a drinker.” She said, “Well, we’re going to be here. Let me buy you one.” He took it. He killed that second one. She finished hers and said, “Let’s go up to my apartment.”
Those were the words he came there to hear. But the alcohol had hit him, and he’d had an allergic reaction—the phenomenon of craving for more. Whatever it was, didn’t matter. He ran across town and banged on his sponsor’s door.
This is the defining feature: if you have the allergic reaction to alcohol, if you’re an alcoholic of this type, and you pick up a drink, it’s like having sex with a gorilla. You ain’t done till the gorilla’s done. You can dream all day about how you and the gorilla are just going to dance tonight. No, you’re not. The last time and the time before that should tell you how bad it was. But the gorilla has such big brown eyes. It looks lonely. You ain’t done till the gorilla’s done.
That’s the crux of the problem: How do you stop from starting?
Notable Quotes
My ego is that part of me that thinks it knows stuff right, that blocks out learning anything new. The ego is the enemy, and it’s that little part of you that’s smug, the part that you can’t tell anything to, the part that already knows.
When you get to the point where you know the most important thing you’d ever know is when you know you don’t know. Enlightenment is that.
Step One is the hardest thing we ever do. It kills most alcoholics because they can’t do it. Most of us have been unwilling to admit we were real alcoholics.
This is an inside job. It has to happen in that place inside where you know stuff—not chatter, not debate, but where you just know it.
The chronic alcoholic’s thirst for alcohol is not really a thirst for alcohol. It’s a thirst for unity, for connectedness, a yearning for a homecoming—a union with God. But this is a misinterpreted yearning.
Alcohol spoils us, ruins us. Normal drinkers never understand because they never have had the spiritual experience from drinking that we have.
Alcoholism is like boiling a frog. If you throw it in boiling water, it jumps out. But if you set it in room temperature and turn up the heat slowly, it never realizes what’s happening and sits there until it’s dead.
If you’re an alcoholic of my type and you pick up a drink, it’s like having sex with a gorilla. You ain’t done till the gorilla’s done.
Step 2 – Higher Power
Spiritual Awakening
Big Book Study
Topics Covered in This Transcript
- Step 1 – Powerlessness
- Step 2 – Higher Power
- Spiritual Awakening
- Big Book Study
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Full AA Speaker Transcript
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welcome to sober Sunrise a podcast bringing you AA speaker meetings with stories of experience strength and Hope from around the world we bring you several new speakers weekly so be sure to subscribe whether you join us in the morning or at night there’s nothing better than a sober Sunrise we hope that you enjoy today’s speaker good morning my name is Bob darl and I am alcoholic and only through the grace of a God that I was afraid to believe in that I’ve accessed and maintained in my life through the process in this book good sponsorship and ability to remain sponsorable and a persistent and consistent effort in this alteristic movement of our primary purpose to help others I haven’t had a drink or any mind or emotion altering substance since October 31st 1978 and that is the most important day of my life the day that I stopped dying uh I’m delighted to be here I want to thank George and all the members of the committee for all their hard work I’ve been on a lot of committees over the years and it’s it’s really a labor of love and they’ve put a lot of energy into putting this weekend together and I want to thank them for that I’m I’m curious uh before we start let’s I’d like to open with a prayer if you’d indulge me with a moment of silence Lord help me to set aside everything I think I know about you everything I think I know about myself everything I think I know about others and everything I think I know about this program recovery all for a new experience in you Lord a new experience in myself a new experience in other people and a much needed new experience in this program of recovery amen who’s here that’s what I’m curious about how many people here are in their first year of absolute abstinence don’t be embarrassed oh great oh I’m really glad you guys are here welcome welcome welcome anybody here in their first 30 days oh welcome welcome all right cool very cool um anybody in their last 30 days I always want to check catch you on the way out um the people that are new I hope you hear something here that will drive you to get with your sponsor there’s nothing going to ur this weekend that’s going to change your life but there may be some things that occur this weekend that will lift a veil and you will see um a path that you didn’t see before maybe you’ll a fire will be put under you to drive you to do this thing that changes lives um one of the things uh that prayer we opened with has been an important part of my my recovery for about 30 years now I suppose I got it it’s an extrapolation of a prayer I got from a guy in Colorado who’s been dead for a few years it was a dear friend named Don pritz and the reason it’s so it’s such a great prayer for me is that my ego is that part of me that thinks it knows stuff right that blocks out learning anything new it’s that thing that little part of you that that that feel the smug part the part that you can’t tell anything to the part that already knows the part that that only can listen to see how people are wrong that part and uh that is the enemy the the Buddhists uh often uh teach by story and and one of their stories that depicts uh what they believe is is Enlightenment when you get to the point where you know the most important thing you’d ever know is a story about an old Chinese farmer who exists U on this meager piece of land with his son and they they’re very very poor and they don’t own the land uh a lord owns the land and allows them to live there and work hard in the field and they have to tithe most of their crop to the Lord they get to make a meager living they don’t own the house they don’t own the tools that they toil the fields with um they own only one thing it’s their whole estate and that is a horse and they’re very proud to own this horse um one day the horse runs off and they virtually have lost everything they owned and all their friends and neighbors and families come over to console them to tell them how horrible this is and this little old wise Chinese farmer just looks at them and as they’re telling him how terrible this is he’s lost everything and he shrugs his shoulders and says I don’t know if it’s terrible maybe it is and maybe it isn’t and they look at him like he’s he’s out of his mind a couple days later the horse returns and it’s runs right into the Corral as the son stands there holding the gate with a leading a whole herd of wild horses and and it all of a sudden this guy is the richest man in the valley he’s hit the freaking horse lottery I mean like oh my God and now his friends and neighbors and family come over to celebrate to tell him how wonderful this is and he he says I don’t know if it’s wonderful maybe it is and maybe it isn’t and they they think this guy must be smart smoking something you just hit the horse Lottery you don’t even think it’s good and he just goes I don’t know maybe it is maybe it isn’t and about a week later his only son is trying to break one of the wild horses and he’s thrown and he’s crippled up pretty good and his leg is all mangled up and broken badly and he can’t walk and he can’t work and of course his loved ones and his friends and his family come over to console him to tell him how horrible this is that his only son has been mangled up pretty badly and he looks at them and he just shrugs his shoulders and says I don’t know if it’s bad maybe it is and maybe it isn’t and they look at him like he’s crazy this is your only son and he’s been crippled up and he’s got a terribly badly broken leg and you don’t even think that’s bad and he says I don’t know maybe it is and maybe it isn’t a week later the Chinese Army Army came through the valley and they would force all the young men to go and fight in a battle where none of them could survive and they couldn’t take the sun because of his leg see the old man knew the most important thing he would ever ever know what true Enlightenment is is that he doesn’t know it is the ego that supposes it is the ego that assumes it is the ego that judges it is the ego that is my enemy and uh the worst thing I can carry um into today’s recovery is the stuff that has come from yesterday because it limits me here and and it I think sometimes some of us puff ourselves up with how many years we have or our accomplishments in AA and and it really blocks us from having legitimately new experience today and today the only day I God I want to talk some and I know there’s a lot of new people here so this is very important uh I want to talk some about what what step one has been in my experience I’m not I’m not an academic guy even though we will talk about some things in the book but I’ve discovered over the years that the most important thing that we have to give each other is our experience not our opinions not our beliefs but our actual experience you can argue with my opinions because you may not be your opinions but you can’t argue with my experience it may not be your experience but it’s my experience I mean it’s just it is what it is and and that’s you’re going to get a lot of that today and and the great thing in alcoholic synonymous is that we connect with each other through our the genuiness of our experience that and and I know everybody in this room has had that experience sitting in a room and someone is opening up and talking genuinely about themselves maybe some things they’re hard to talk about and you’re sitting there and something is happening between you and that person there’s a resonating thing inside of you some of you may have also had the experience of sitting in a meeting and listening to a man or woman share something that intellectually you know you’ve never heard that and yet it is it hits you with such a rightness as as if you always knew it and you never heard it before and and that is always been the power of alcoholic synonymous it’s not in what we know it’s in our experience I was baffled uh by step one I I think Step One is the hardest thing we ever do it it is so difficult it kills most alcoholics CU they can’t do it when it says in the beginning of chapter 3 that most most of us have been unwilling to admit we were real alcoholics oh my God that’s so that is such a universal thing I I bet you there’s people in this room that sitting here today know beyond the Shadow of Doubt you’re an alcoholic yet you can look back in your life to a point that you can see now you were alcoholic that 10 years ago but you didn’t know it did you you would have bet anything you Wen an alcoholic back then we don’t want to be alcoholic I’d rather be I’d rather be a mental health case I’d rather be a drug addict I’d rather be anything but not I don’t know what is that about a I mean about alcohol we don’t want to be alcoholics uh but I am and I didn’t know it and very slowly uh over years of failure trying to control and enjoy my drinking I I started to to get it down in here in chapter 3 it talks about step one differently than than it does on the than it does here here it says we admitted we were powerless over alcohol that our lives had become unmanageable I I could do that and not mean it and think I meant it uh you know I could you get me in a treatment center I’m and a bunch of people looking at me in a group all just about anything just I don’t want I don’t want any problems here you know I don’t want conflict I don’t want I don’t want the counselor jumping me after the meeting yeah I’m alcoholic but that doesn’t mean that in my innermost self that I believe it and that’s what it says in in chapter 3 it says we learned which implies that this is a little bit of a process that an evolution a learning that we learned that we had to fully concede fully concede that’s like complete fully concede to our innermost selves that we were alcoholics this is the first step in recovery there is a place in every single one of us I believe where you know stuff it’s not chatter up here there’s no conversation in your head debating about it you just know it like you know you need your NE next breath and that’s where this stuff has to occur my grand sponsor was again a guy named Chuck Chamberlain and he us to say that this is an inside job and because of because of this place that we have to do this in here uh and the reason it has to happen in here I think exemplifies the great failure of intellectual approaches to the treatment of alcoholism treatment centers will try in 30 days to give you a a the equivalent of a doctorate degree in alcoholism um I I’ve watch I watched we have a a big very fancy Treatment Center in the US called Betty Ford and I would sit in meetings and people who just got out of Betty Ford they’re they’re sober about six weeks would come to meetings and announce that they had they just graduated from B Ford and they had the new information here uh as if they they they they said it as if they had graduated from Harvard or Oxford or something you know I want to say it’s a detox it’s not some kind of but they you get they come out of there with a head full of information and how often that’s a setup and how often those people drink again because it has to happen in here well how do you do that I think you I think there’s a thing that happens it it involves God’s grace whether you’re con whether you believe in God or not there’s something inside of us that has to happen and you can’t manufacture it it’s a coming together of our own bitter experience coupled with the experience of others and the information in this book where all of a sudden stuff moves from up here down into here down into the heart where you start to get stuff um one of the great contributors to alcoholic synonymous and I don’t think any of us would be here without him was a man by the name of U William G silkworth and Dr silkworth was a psychiatrist who had devoted his life to us and he wasn’t an alcoholic and he was a remarkable man and he made inroads in it he had insights and intuitive insights into this disease that were remarkable that that decades later have been proven absolutely scientifically accurate by research but he just came to the conclusions from observation over and over and over again of us and on on in the big book on page XXV II silkworth starts to talk about these things that he’s come to know and and this is important information for me if I’m going to understand at a gut level what it is to to be powerless over alcohol in the First full paragraph on that page silky says we believe and suggested a few years ago that the action of alcohol on these chronic alcoholics is a manifestation of an allergy that the phenomenon of craving is limited to this class what class chronic alcoholics limited to this class and never occurs in the average tempered Drinker well there’s a whole bunch of stuff in those those couple lines the first thing he says that is Meaningful to me is he’s talking about a type of alcoholic a chronic alcoholic I am a chronic alcoholic I have come to believe over the years through observation that there’s also acute alcoholics and it’s a big it’s a world of difference between the two positions yet when the acute alcoholic drinks and The Chronic alcoholic drinks we appear to be the say if if a chronic alcoholic that has been drinking an an acute alcoholic that’s been drinking will end up in the office of a therapist or a doctor or a clergy member that both of them will be easily diagnosed as alcoholic but there is a very major difference between the two and it is important to know which one you are because the whole course of your life depends upon knowing that and your whole recovery is different the recovery of a chronic alcoholic is different than the recovery of an acute alcoholic on page 20 and 21 of the book it talks about the two differences it it talks about uh the first on the very very bottom of page 20 it talks about what could be considered an acute alcoholic it it they call them the hard Drinker i’ I heard other I’ve heard therapists I’ve heard doctors refer to it that are so sober AA is the problem Drinker and it says we have a certain type of hard Drinker now listen to the symptomology of this guy he may have the Habit badly enough to gradually impair him physically and mentally this is not good first of all he’s he’s drinking habitually to the point of mental and physical impairment most people would diagnose this guy as an alcoholic uh it says it may cause him to die a few years before his time it’s it’s shaving the more longer he drinks it’s shaving years off his life this is horrid this is a a lifethreatening disease and then and then here’s the difference between him as an acute alcoholic and me as a chronic alcoholic and I bet you every chronic alcoholic in here has known people like this maybe you grew up with people people like this maybe you went to church with people like this or worked with people like this it says if a sufficiently strong reason ill health the doctor says hey you got you got some liver problems and some pancreas problems you keep drinking you’re going to die a horrible death falling in love oh you meet that perfect person and they don’t want to put up with your drinking and they give you an ultimatum and you just okay and you stop change of environment warning of a doctor warning of a judge warning of a boss these things become operative this person this person who look is drinking horridly can also stop or moderate although he may find it difficult and Troublesome and may even need medical attention if he’s been drinking every day he could even need detoxed he might even have a little bit of Tremors when he stops drinking but within him is the ability to do one of two things and there’s two types of acute alcoholics there’s the type that can stop and there’s the type that can stop and moderate I I’ve I’ve bet you I’ve had the experience at least eight times where I’ll be I’ll be somewhere maybe I’ll be on a plane sitting next to someone or I’ll be in a restaurant I when I had my Corporation I used to put on a lot of social events and I’d meet people and they’d find out I was an A and they’d say oh I used to be an alcoholic really oh yeah when I was in the Navy oh my God I was in the brri I was it was terrible but I see you’re drinking a beer oh I learned my lesson I just have a couple once in a while he don’t have what I had if I could do that I’m telling you I’d be doing it I’m not sober CU it’s a moral issue here you know you kidding me or or you I grew up with guy I grew up with a guy he was the first time guy I ever knew I never even knew what DTS were and he had first guy ever he had DTS in high school ended up in a mental hospital in high school from drinking CU he oh he just he couldn’t stop once he started and he he’d gotten in a lot of trouble he got a DUI he had his license taken away from him lost jobs and then he fell in love and this girl he fell in love with I just said you know I’m not going to have it and he said he thought to himself man I really I don’t want to lose her and he put the plug in The Jug and 30 some years later he’s still sober and he’s happy and and and he’s comfortable and he what happens to him when he quits drinking is his problem is solved but the chronic alcoholic like I am when I quit drinking my problem in a vague way I can’t put my finger on in a right below the surface where I can’t really see it my problem starts and it’s baffling to me uh I I’m not that guy I would I used to want to be that guy cuz I had sine guys that could make up their mind to quit drinking and they did and they were fine there there’s people in AA like that that are sober 30 years with the benefit of Step none and they’re happy joyous and free I mean their their their alcoholism ended when they quit drinking and they come to AA because it’s it’s it’s a it fills the social Gap that used to be filled by going to the pubs a to them is like the sober Elks or something you know it’s like you know it’s it’s a social support group and that’s all they need and there as long as they don’t pick up the first drink their alcoholism is over but mine isn’t see I’m the guy I’m not like them they’re they’re kind of cool people when they quit drinking they’re nice people friendly able kind I I’m I’d like to be that way but when I quit drinking I just I really see how stupid people are you know I just see it I just see the idiots I mean it’s a gift it’s a gift what can I say I just see how stupid everybody is I’m Restless silkworth says the bottom of the page he says when we get sober we’re Restless we’re irritable and we’re discontented what does that look like what’s this what do they mean by Restless every chronic alcoholic whoever’s quit drinking knows what that means that that vague undefinable feeling that wherever you are it’s not really where you need to be now I don’t know where I need to be it’s just not here you know did you ever watch a dog Circle a living room looking for its spot to lay down I’m a dog that can’t find its spot you know I’m just there’s an aimlessness I I I spend my whole life running from one thing to another as if this is the thing and it’s not the thing and this she’s the one and she’s not the one that’s the job and it’s not the job I can’t get settled anywhere really I’m Restless the next symptomology that soor says to that the and these are the things that make me so sick sober it drives me back to drinking restless and the second thing is irritable and people rub me the wrong way it it it but see I don’t know that see what it looks like to me is now that my mind’s clearing cuz I ain’t drinking I can just see oh my God you are really messed up oh my God I you know when I was drinking this was a nice place to work but now oh my God they’re doing it wrong they’re they’re idiots and it’s it’s that it’s my ego puffing up I I don’t know um that what I really am is I’m an egomaniac with an inferiority complex and that what that means it’s not so much I’m a piece of whale crap I’m a very special piece of whale crap I I don’t I loath myself I have no self-esteem and yet at the same time think I’m better and smarter than everybody else that’s crazy it’s almost a contradiction but I’ve always been that way when I get sober and and so constant consequently I I get angst up because life just seems to irritate me and and because people are doing it wrong I don’t I can’t can’t forgive them until they’re properly ashamed of themselves so I keep score because nobody’s really properly ashamed of themselves so I keep score and until I feel like I’m going to blow up until it’s I’m overwhelmed with all these judgments and these conflicts inside of me till I’m just about insane my sponsor says it best he says it’s he says he gets sober time and time again and after a while it was like some hideous Force put a spring in the pit of his stomach and life just started tightening up every day a little bit more a little bit more and the and the kids don’t why are they making so much noise and you know and the tax look how much taxes I’m paying and the boss he’s such an idiot and the traffic has gotten worse and my God it’s raining all week and and just until you feel like you’re head’s going to blow up um so I’m Restless and I’m irritable and then the last thing is goes goes deep down within me and discontented alcoholism is a disease of chronic malcontent that and it’s independent of reality to know that this the the same feelings of of dissatisfaction and disillusionment occur in the alcoholics living in $10 million homes just as much as in in a couple couple1 a month Flats because it’s it’s a misinterpreted yearning um Carl Carl Young the great psychiatrist who was influential indirectly he didn’t realize it in the forming of Alcoholic Anonymous he’s the psychiatrist it talks about in our big book when it talks about the guy who went to Switzerland the the the rich businessman he went to see Carl Young and he spent a year in treatment with young his name was Roland Hazard and um Roland drank again and Carl told him the truth Carl said oh you’re an I didn’t I was hoping you weren’t a real chronic alcoholic but you’re a chronic alcoholic and there is no help anywhere on this planet for you and your only hope is to make some kind of spiritual conversion to have some kind of connection and he thought he could find it in church and young said going to church may be nice but it hardly will provide the vital spiritual experience you need and Roland felt like the doors of hell were closed on him and and young continued to work with alcoholics he was fascinated by them and in a letter in the early 60s to Bill Wilson our our co-founder young said something to Bill that is so right on to me he said after working with Roland and countless other alcoholics he said said I came to the conclusion that the alcoholic’s thirst for alcohol is not really a thirst for alcohol he says I believe it is a thirst of the alcoholic’s being for Unity for connectedness or if you’re more religiously minded a union with God that something deep within me yearns for a homecoming y yearns to connect to that from which I came but young also says that this is a misinterpreted yearning and and so consequently the uned in our culture and Society this misinterpreted yearning will take guys like me down cont constant roads to predition to hell and yet I’m driven by the earning and never knew it and never once was conscious of it I have never been on my way to to obtain any kind of self-gratification that later I’m going to regret whether it’s going to a bar a liquor store a drug dealer’s house going to have sex with someone I really don’t even want to have lunch with uh I mean any or go spend money I really can’t afford to spend or do anything self self self where I’m clamoring for some kind of relief and gratification on my way to the drug dealer’s house or the bar or the p it I never once have stopped and thought to myself this is a misinterpreted yearning for God never I never comes on the radar for me And yet when I read that I thought my God I think that’s it I think that’s it um so silki says uh with this I always return to drinking this chronic Mal content and if you’re like me uh this this vacancy drives me unconsciously drives me I don’t know that’s driving me but it’s all it’s like I always got my antenna out I always got my radar turned on looking for stuff that might make me feel better uh if if I’m in a Rel relationship immediately I start noticing better people if I have a good job I automatically see better jobs I I I acquire things because I’m an acquire I I I think I’ve been driven by some sort of delusion that I can fill my vac vacancies by acquisition if I bring enough of the right stuff and people into my life surely then my vacancies will be filled and I spend my whole life going oh yeah oh yeah oh come here oh no no no oh oh oh yeah Oh wrong again you know there’s a tremendous depression that settles in after every time it’s just this depression because I I don’t I don’t realize I was I was over 10 years sober and I’m talking to a guy I’m sponsoring and he said something and the light went on and I realized what where the what the Mal content was is that I I get sober and I’m vacant and I I I get I get the job the I get that job I mean the job the the own a boat buy a house and have a Harley-Davidson kind of money job I mean the job J and I’m not even at the job 6 weeks and it just sort of just starts to look bad you know it’s just it’s just the the shine wears off of it so quickly for me I get the girl that I remember there’s this girl I was infatuated with her for such a long time I finally hooked up she fell in love with me which is is not good because if you love me you’re automatically blow my standards I mean I want someone who has taste uh but but when she when she’s I finally had what I wanted and the shine just started wearing off on it and this guy said something to me and the light went on and he and what I realized is unconsciously now I was never conscious of this but on an emotional level unconsciously I would compare what it feels like to have that job to what it felt like to drink four shots at tequila and the job sucks I compare what it feels like to be loved by her to what it felt like to drink a pint of whiskey and I don’t like her anymore now nothing’s changed with the job nothing’s changed with her the problem is within me see alcohol spoils us it ruins us really those of us normal drinkers never understand this because they never have had had the spiritual experience from drinking that we had they just get drunk but it does something more for me than it does for them and if you’ve ever watched a non-alcoholic drink it’s it’s a baffling thing to watch my sister is not an alcoholic I’ve sat my sister and I are very close we we have dinner together quite often and my sister will have a drink or two um I don’t I don’t think she’s ever I think she might have been drunk once once in her life and doesn’t ever want to do that again but my sister well first of all it takes her a half hour to drink one drink I mean the ice is melding it’s like this is alcohol abuse if you know what I’m talking about this is like I mean it’s evaporating right before my eyes she’s just she she forgets her drink is there you have to I remind her oh do I hey I paid for that um she’ll order a second drink in the second half hour of the evening and drink about 2third of it and then leave it on the table and if I ask her about it I say aren’t you going to finish that you know what she’ll say she’ll say the the weirdest thing you ever she say no I’m starting to feel it yeah I mean you’re quitting now you’re you’re 5 minutes from Heaven what are you quitting now for but my sister when she feels the effect of alcohol when that feeling starts to come over her she likes a little bit of that feeling just a little bit but she gets this sense and it’s really a sane sense that if she drinks more she’s going to lose control and so she goes whoa but there’s something wrong with me that I get to the same point where my sister gets to where she’s starting to feel the effect of alcohol and gets a sense that if she goes further she’s going to get drunk and lose control I don’t get that I get a feeling like I’m about to get control I get a feeling like oh my God come on come on come on and and I don’t have the same reason I don’t have the same relationship so when my sister and my parents and and the women that I lived with and tried to love me when they would see me build my life back up again sober and then tear it down one more time they were baffled why I would do that they would they were baffled why when I start to drink I just can’t get a little high I have to get whacked why I have to go so far why if you ever been if you ever drank with a non-alcoholic they’ll say things to you don’t you think it’s time to stop don’t you think you’ve had enough is anybody in here have you ever had enough you ever sat in a bar and I thought oh this is good I I mean it’s never I’m I’m a chronic alcoholic it’s one more one more now I may stop to prove a point or if I’m with you and you’re on my back about my drinking I’ll show you I’ll quit and then I’ll sneak out somewhere later on and um but I I have a different relationship to alcohol than these people people and so what happens to me is I quit drinking and it just starts to wear on me this restlessness that I can’t really put my figure on I remember in this in the irritability and discontent I had a counselor one time I cuz I’m I get depressed after I’m sober for a little while I just sink into these depressions because like my my life pales what I yearn for and what’s so depressing is I’m not back to where I was when I was 18 years old and getting high like that that’s that’s depressing and this counselor said to me one time she he said because I looked like I was depressed he later sent me to a psychiatrist for to get medication and he said to me he says Bob what’s wrong and I remember sitting there and I thought I don’t know I I don’t know I’d like to tell you I really would like to know by this time I’d been to a dozen psychiatrist probably I’ve been to In and Out of treatment centers I I talked to so many people I I don’t know it’s not that there’s anything wrong and that’s the baffling part it’s just that nothing is right it’s just that there’s something terribly missing here and I don’t know what it is and I do today it’s the it’s the the uplifting spiritual effect of alcohol was what was missing I’d have given anything in my periods of abstinence if I could have drank and got the effect that I gotten when I was 18 years old I give anything so what happens silkor says it best he says we succumb to the desire again as so many of us do we pick up a drink hoping and the phenomenon of craving develops we pass through the well-known stages with spree to end up somewhere swearing to myself again I ain’t ever going to do this again just to start the whole cycle of progressive Restless irritable discontent until it’s backed me into a corner till I pick up a drink or maybe I switched to something else and that starts to Cy over in the book silare says this is repeated over and over and over and unless this person can experience an entire psychic change there is very little hope of his recovery this thing about relapse Is So ba was so baffling to me how this could happen to me I I remember I even I I I’ve always secretly believed that knowledge was power that if I could get enough information so I I went and studied and uh took a lot of courses and and uh seminars and stuff and I became the when I was just a kid my early 20s I became certified uh drug and alcohol abuse counselor because I believed that if I my God if I was working in that field and I had the information I was a professional surely then I’ll beat this thing and I was a great counselor right up to the day I lost my job for being drunk on the job um it was baffling to me that the thing that happens to me in my mind that would drive me so insane that the that I’m the guy who knows I know I just can’t and I made up my mind never touch it again and I and I keep going back to it and you know what it’s like it’s it’s if you ever have you ever had a biology course where you work with live frogs it’s very if you’ve ever if you can imagine trying to boil a frog that’s alive it’s very hard to do if you take a pot of boiling water about this deep and you throw a frog in there to boil him his hind legs are very strong he gets out of the pot now he’ll get scalded like hell but he’ll get out of the pot so what you have to do in order to boil the frog is you have to set him in a pot of room temperature water and he just settles in gets comfortable and if you turn the heat up slowly enough the frog never realizes what’s happening and he never jumps out of the pond and he will sit there until he’s dead and alcoholism is very much like that in my own emotional juices it Cooks me and when you think about it if I’m just curious H how many people in here have ever gotten to a point where they seriously said to themselves I’m never doing this again and they did it after that anybody most of the room okay if 3 days before you picked up the first drink that was going to end up in your demise where you’re almost wishing you were dead if 3 days before you picked up the drink you knew you were about to burn your life to the ground you would have jumped out of the pot but you didn’t know because alcoholism Works us so slowly on the inside it Cooks us slowly in our own emotional juices in my own restlessness in my own irritability in my own discontent until it just drives me insane insane like running down the street with your hair on fire no it’s a it’s a it’s a more hideous smoldering secret Insanity the insanity that just all of a sudden has me walking into a bar the insan when I swore to myself and I I understood I should never ever can ever do this again Insanity that has me walk into a liquor store and the day before I would have given you a lecture about how I’m never going to drink again how grateful I am the day before because my frog hadn’t been cooked quite yet and this is repeated over and over and over again and and so the real problem with alcoholism in this two-fold Fork that I’m impaled on um is is not so much the phenomenon of craving and the reason that that is not the business at hand is because there’s nothing we can do to change that there is no medical way there is no there is nothing that you can do if you have alcoholism which is the litmus test is do you have the allergic to reaction to alcohol there’s a te there’s a test in the book because a lot of people nowadays come here I work with a lot of guys they’re not so you know I actually probably did more drugs than alcohol well that’s not the issue here we want to find out if you have this terminal illness that encompasses everything this this this hideous disease called alcoholism and silkworth came up with a litmus test um the phenomenon of craving and the book says here’s how you can find out chapter 3 it says if you don’t think you’re an alcoholic here you can check it out go over to the nearest pub go in there and have try some controlled drinking now you may need to do this a couple days in a row to get a good view of it but go in let’s go in there and you’re going to have two drinks and two strong drinks if you want and then you got to shut her down and go home now you can’t drink nothing later you can’t smoke nothing you can’t take nothing no pills nothing two drinks that’s it well if you’re like me you have the mind I got I’m going to go into the pub and I’m going to I’m going to see if these AAS are full of crap I don’t think I’m alcoholic I know I’m in trouble but I don’t think I got that thing I’m going to see I might have two drinks I’m going to shut her down and go home about halfway through that second drink it becomes very evident to me that this is not a good test day I didn’t realize that that game was on TV oh my God that game’s on I can’t leave now not with that game on or or she would walk into the bar you know she’s always there you know the girl I mean oh my God it’s her I got to have a drink with her she might be the one got to have a drink with her Joe would come in Joe’s got good stuff to smoke I got to have a drink with Joe tomorrow would be a better test day and then tomorrow I go to take the test and isn’t it odd how this disease uses my own mind against me halfway through the second drink as the feeling of the alcohol hits me my mind starts shifting any way it has to to make me think that the next drink and the reason this isn’t a good test day is my idea and I never ever once glimpsed what was driving the shift in my thinking which was an allergic reaction to Al alol that I have no power over at all I never have and and sometimes it takes different forms I I like a lot of people in my day and age uh I had about a year and a half where I uh I was had so much trouble from drinking that I switched to drugs and I I’ll tell you if you do enough heroin you can beat a alcohol problem for a little while but I always eventually went back to the drinking and I got out of a treatment center and I was in there you could have put me on a lie detector I said I’m not alcoholic I’m I’m a heroin addict there was a little panach in being a heroin addict at that time I mean Lenny Bruce was a heroin addict Billy Holiday I mean there was and I came out of there and I I would have sworn to you I’m not an alcoholic I could have maybe if I would have been able to get Hest tell you how I’d been an alcoholic at one time but I’m not anymore I don’t drink anymore that’s not my druged choice whatever that means and I got out of there and I wanted to I hadn’t hadn’t had sex in a long time and I got out of this treatment center I’m freshly out of there and I there was a girl that I knew that hang hung out at this bar the Regency Hotel and I knew if I went down there and talk to her there’s a good possibility she’s going to invite me to her apartment and I you know how you are when you you’re newly sober you got this vacancy you’re looking for something you’re looking for something to make you feel better right and I’m I’m thinking okay I’m going to go down there and talk to her and when in there she’s sitting there at the end of the bar I went and sat down next to her started talking she says can I buy you a drink and I said you know I’m not really a drinker when the couple years I did drugs we used to look down on the drinkers you know that which is that’s about as pathetic as you can get really um I’m not really a drinker I’m just a but but she said I oh you just do drugs you doing drug no I’m not doing anything I just got out of treatment oh do you have a problem with alcohol no I don’t have a problem with alcohol I’m not a drinker she said well we’re going to be here for a while let me buy you a drink all right give me a ram and Coke she gets me a ROM and Coke well I drink quickly I’ve always I don’t know I think evaporation is a childhood issue or something drink quickly I killed that Ramen Coke like that she’s still drinking the same one she used to had when I came in there she said let me buy another one I went into my Spiel a little bit a little not not as fervent as I was before you know I’m not really a drinker she says well we’re going to be here let me buy one all right give me another one I kill that second one she’s finished hers and she says let’s go up to my apartment the words I came in there to hear and now the alcohols hit me and I said hold that thought and I ran across town and banged on the guy’s door because I had two drinks of alcohol and I had an allergic reaction to the alcohol that manifested in a phenomenon of craving for more more what whatever is on the radar doesn’t matter do you have the allergic reaction to alcohol you know we saw after in the states after the Vietnam War we had literally thousands and thousands and thousands of people coming back into the US with these incredible heroin addictions I mean incredible because they were getting stuff so cheap and so strong so easily over there that the VA hospitals were flooded with people to detox and do you know that a a large percentage of those guys who by every definition would have there were drug addicts No Doubt a lot of those people 35 years later have been now they’ve been detoxed by they can go into a bar and have two beers and go home and they don’t have to go do nothing they’re good their problem came in a substance mine comes within me alcoholism doesn’t come in bags and Bottles it comes in people it comes in me there was a certain amount of those people that came back from Vietnam that had never had a problem with with drugs until they went over there and they came back into 35 years later they’re drinking themselves in and out of skid row on cheap wine and they can’t stop they have the definitive characteristic that makes the one group alcoholic and the other group just having a problem with some drug or substance is the allergic reaction alcohol when silkworth looked for years for the litmus test that’s what he found and if you if you’re an alcoholic you can’t safely silkworth says it you can’t safely use it in any form at all there’s never there’s never been a case of a chronic alcoholic that can use cocaine heroin or pill socially there’s been hundreds and thousands of cases of people addicted to a certain substance that can stop that substance and do and drink and smoke a little pot but if you have Al alcohol encompasses is everything because anything that will do something for me will do that thing to me where I now it’s set in motion something I can’t stop um if I’m an if you’re an alcoholic of my type and you pick up a drink it’s like having sex with a gorilla you ain’t done till the gorilla’s done it’s just the way it is you can you can dream all all day long about how me and the Gill are just going to have a dance tonight no you’re not no you’re not and your experience should tell you the last time the the time before that how bad it was but the gorilla had such big brown eyes it looked lonely you ain’t done till the grill is done and that that is the Crux of the problem how do you stop from starting let’s take a u a short break morning tea time thank you for listening to sober Sunrise if you enjoyed today’s episode please give it a thumbs up as it will help share the message until next time have a great day