AA Speaker – Chris S. – Playa Guiones, Costa Rica – 2012
AA speaker Chris S. explains the Big Book movement’s origins in Canada and Denver, his severe alcoholism, relapse after early sobriety, and how literal Big Book study transformed his recovery.
Chris S. is an AA speaker who got sober in the late 1980s after a life of blackout drinking, violence, and multiple failed attempts at recovery through meetings alone. In this AA speaker tape recorded in Costa Rica, he traces the history of the Big Book movement—from a desperate group in Canada to the Denver Young People’s Group—and explains why he believes serious alcoholics need more than fellowship and service work to recover.
Chris S. shares his story of severe alcoholism, early relapse, and eventual recovery through intensive Big Book study rather than meetings alone. He explains the origins of the Big Book movement, tracing it from a Canadian group through the Denver Young People’s Group and speakers like Joe and Charlie. As an AA speaker, he argues that chronic, low-bottom alcoholics need the structured recovery process outlined in the book itself—not just fellowship—to stay sober long-term.
Episode Summary
Chris S. opens with a powerful claim: we’re in a renaissance of literature-based, solution-focused AA meetings built around the Big Book as a recovery tool, not just a historical document. He then walks through why this matters by telling his own story—a story of being so catastrophically alcoholic that meetings and service work alone nearly killed him.
His drinking was severe from the start. Within two hours of his first drink, he’d black out. Within three and a half hours, he’d be unconscious—alcohol poisoned, unable to wake up. He lost his driver’s license three times, crashed thirteen cars, lost his social life entirely, and ended up in his mother’s room where he could safely drink himself into oblivion. What finally forced him into treatment was violence—he started threatening people with guns, and that terrified him enough to check into a 28-day rehab.
But here’s the turning point of his talk: getting sober and staying sober turned out to be two different things. After treatment, he did what he was told. He went to AA meetings. He went to outpatient therapy. Two meetings a week. Two outpatient sessions a week at $85 each. He was willing. He was trying. But nobody ever explained to him the difference between a heavy drinker and an alcoholic—and he was the latter, chronic and advanced. The meetings were filled with people who could just decide not to drink and be fine. He was filled with obsession, resentment, and self-centered fear, sitting in meetings judging everyone around him, terrified to even get up to use the bathroom.
Then one day on the way to a meeting, a thought crossed his mind: if he drank a gallon of vodka, maybe he’d really appreciate sobriety and do AA properly. He bought the vodka. Three glasses in, he realized his mistake. He’d opened the cage door to the beast. For seven months he drank almost continuously in what he calls “absolute hell”—blackouts, hallucinations, threatening his family with a gun. The demoralization was so thick you could cut it.
But this relapse became his education. He went back to meetings with a vengeance—seven to fourteen meetings a week. He got a sponsor who had a service ethic and started doing fellowship work: coffee maker, helping at picnics, service commitments. Still, nobody told him that none of this was treatment for alcoholism. It was just participation in the fellowship.
Then a friend named a certain individual (Chris refers to him by first name only in the talk) gave him a set of Joe and Charlie Big Book workshop tapes. These tapes pissed him off. They were strong Big Book messaging, using the actual text to back up everything they said. But the truth in them haunted him. He started listening to them obsessively on his way to work. The meetings he was attending were mostly sharing meetings—dump your problems and leave half as light. For a real alcoholic in real trouble, these were useless.
So Chris did something radical: he started going through the Big Book on his own. He tried to do the examples in the book. He started to heal. He bought more Big Book workshop tapes—David Aronowski from Texas, Sandy Beach, Bob Bazant, and crucially, Joe Hawk’s Salvation Army Big Book Study. These tapes showed him the recovery mechanics in precise detail. He began a recovery trajectory that he’s still on today.
Chris then pivots to explain the history of this movement. He traces it back to a group in Canada called the Golden Slippers who couldn’t stay sober in meetings. One of them had a “wacky idea”: what if they opened the Big Book and did exactly what it said? About twenty or thirty of them made a pact. Ninety percent of them stayed sober.
The movement spread to Denver when one of the Golden Slippers spoke at a conference. Don Pritz, Gary Brown, and others in the Denver Young People’s Group got the message and started doing the same thing. They treated the Big Book like it was literally true, the way born-again Christians treat the Bible. A second generation emerged—Mark Houston, Joe Hawk, and others—who brought this message to people like Chris.
Chris emphasizes that he’s not critical of meetings or fellowship. There’s a scale in alcoholism. Some people can get sober through meetings and service. But the chronic, low-bottom, desperate alcoholics—the ones who’ve lost everything and continue drinking anyway—they need something stronger. They need the recovery process the Big Book describes: a thorough Fourth Step inventory (the four-column resentment inventory), a detailed Fifth Step, a list of amends, and a consistent prayer and meditation practice. They need to work with other alcoholics and carry the message.
He then addresses the controversy in AA about Big Book literalism. Some see it as radical or threatening to AA unity. His response: it’s not about making old-timers look bad or dividing AA. It’s about finding the people who are critical and chronic and offering them the medicine strong enough for their sickness. AA has about a 6% success rate, but as the book says, “rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed the path.” The question is: how many are actually following the path, versus just sitting in the waiting room?
He closes with a call to recovered alcoholics to go into meetings and single out the struggling alcoholics—not to piss off old-timers, but to offer them a solution. Being a “Big Booker” doesn’t make you a better alcoholic. It just means you’re sicker and might need stronger medicine. His medicine is recovery.
Notable Quotes
There’s a scale in alcoholism. No matter how far down the scale we’ve gone, we’ll find our experience can benefit others.
The obsession of the mind doesn’t care if you’re going to meetings. The obsession of the mind doesn’t care if you’ve got a coffee commitment. It is aggressive in its nature, and to fight something so aggressive, you need an aggressive recovery process.
I realized that I was suffering from an obsession of the mind. Being powerless over alcohol means lacking the power to choose when you’re going to drink it and lacking the power to control it once you’re drinking.
Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed the path. Ask those people: did they do a fearless and thorough Fourth Step inventory? Did they do a four-column resentment inventory? Did they share everything holding nothing back in their Fifth Step?
Being a Big Booker does not make us better alcoholics than the oral tradition version. It just means we’re a little bit sicker than some of the other people, and we might need a little bit stronger medicine.
Big Book Study
Sponsorship
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Step 5 – Admission
Topics Covered in This Transcript
- Step 4 – Resentments & Inventory
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- Sponsorship
- Hitting Bottom
- Step 5 – Admission
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Full AA Speaker Transcript
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We hope that you enjoy today's speaker. Ah, good evening everybody. My name is Chris.
I am an alcoholic. It's a very interesting topic. Um, I think I've I've probably spoken a little bit about it before, but you know, having it as a topic made me made me think, you know, what really what really has happened?
Um, I believe we're in the middle of a of a renaissance. Uh I believe that there are groups springing up all over all over the world that are lit literature-based meetings, solution-based meetings that are um using the book Alcoholics Anonymous as um a recovery tool for uh for experiencing the uh the freedom freedom from uh alcohol. uh the spiritual transformation uh that's inherent in working the uh the exercises and the steps in the book Alcoholics Anonymous.
And so it's it is an interesting topic for me. uh you know like like um uh like the other two speakers u Scott and Jonathan uh my my experience showing up in the rooms of of AA uh was an insufficient experience uh for me just showing up in the fellowship I I believe u I believe very very much in what uh what you find in the big book the explanations in the big book make good sense to me they're not necessarily scientific uh but they're observable. And one of the things that is observable is there's a scale in alcoholism.
Uh no matter how far down the scale we've gone, we'll find our experience can benefit others. Uh one's ability to quit on a non-spiritual basis will depend upon the amount of control one has lost in drink. There's a lot of references to this scale in in the book.
If you look in the chapter to wives, it's got uh the four different kinds of drinkers, alcoholics, and each one is progressively worse. And I believe that uh that the fellowship itself can be a solution to some people who show up in Alcoholics Anonymous. And that's that's a good thing.
But I think if you've uh if you've gone down the scale as far as some of us had, you'll find that a fellowship experience by itself is uh is going to be insufficient and hence you know the big book workshop that we're having today. Now there's there's uh some controversy rolling around uh the different conferences and uh different speakers in Alcoholics Anonymous today and many of them uh see the big book movement as uh as radical as new fangled and as um uh as as kind of a threat to uh to the unity of alcoholics and I've heard this from multiple fronts. Um, I I want to talk about where personally, you know, this big book thing came from me.
And I I want to liken it to something just to give us some perspective. Um, I've I've um I've been a um kind of a historian of uh religion, a a scholar of uh religion for a long time. And I've done much biblical study, especially New Testament study.
And one of the things that I found out was uh I think what we all know uh we all know uh the experience of being a born again Christian, the experience of believing the Bible is the inherent word of God that if it's in the Bible, it's true. Uh we all know people who who believe this and there's areas of the country where they're basically in the majority uh you know the the born-again uh brand of uh of Christianity. Now, what a lot of people don't know is that did not exist until about the 16th century.
Up until that point in time, people used the Bible in a historical metaphorical sense. In other words, they believed that there was some history in the Bible and they believed that there was the some of the stories in the Bible were meant to be understood metaphorically. like these were stories that were uh that were designed to be read in congregations that would tell a lesson in how to live a moral and spiritual life.
And then around uh around the 16th century or so, I'm never good with numbers. Uh a man named Heinale came along and uh and he came up with the idea that if it's in the Bible, it's true. if it says this, this is exactly what it says.
This is exactly what happened. And he's basically the guy that started pushing out the idea that uh the Bible was inherent and it was the word of God and it was to be understood literally. Uh so we went 16 and a half centuries without believing that believing that it was metaphorical.
And now there's a huge section of people who believe it's literal. Now, why I tell this story is because when the book Alcoholics Anonymous was written, there were some things in it that said things like, "These are the steps we took." Well, how could those have been the steps we took? You just wrote them.
You know what I mean? Now, we need to understand, we need to understand this a little bit metaphorically. What Bill was talking about, what he he changed the steps and he numbered them.
There was a reason he did that. The number 12 is a is a very spiritual uh practically religious number. The things in the steps were things that they were doing back in the Ashra group and they were certainly things that they were doing in the early AA groups, but a lot of the things in the big book that Bill talked about that they were doing, they really hadn't done yet.
He was uh he was very prophetic and he understood what was going to happen better. He he was prophetic. He understood what was going to happen better than we can imagine.
There's some promises in the big book that hadn't even happened to anybody. Yet there are valid experiential promises that happen to us when we experience uh the work in the book Alcoholics Anonymous. Now, looking back at some of the history, I studied some of the history of AA long enough to know that I wasn't interested in studying it anymore.
Uh, uh, that happened to me about 15 years ago. I kind of stopped studying it and went on to other things. But what I believe is that I don't see that the book Alcoholics Anonymous was used in a very literal way for a long time.
I think they used some of the principles and some of the exercises certainly, but they didn't open up the big book and go through it page by page, sentence by sentence, and take the take every single instruction the way we sometimes do today. where the big book movement came from that I understand today uh from from uh the recovery masters that I have studied came out of a group in uh in Canada called the Golden Slippers. Has anybody in here ever heard of those guys?
Some people have. The Denver Young People's Group is probably the genesis of the modern big book movement that I'm a part of. Now, there may be other genesises and other experiences, but the people I have listened to and basically studied under came out of uh the Denver Young People's Group.
And what happened was this. There was a group in Canada who could not stay sober. that and these guy, you know, listen, just because somebody drinks, we used to think that somebody got drunk cuz they didn't really want it or they weren't really trying.
I know that is not the truth. Some of us are absolutely desperate to stay sober and can't. Now, the the this group of people in Canada were were of that mold.
They were real alcoholics like the book talks about. They were lowbottom, tragically pathetic type of alcoholics that had lost most of the things valuable in their life and continued to drink but continued to go to Alcoholics Anonymous hoping for for some miracle, you know. Uh but just going to meetings for them was not sufficient for for sobriety.
So what happened? One of them came up with a really wacky idea. He said, "You know what?
There's this book called Alcoholics Anonymous and it and it says on the cover that it's the basic text of the fellowship. Why don't we why don't we all meet and open this book and read it from the very first page on and if it says to do something, let's do it. There was a group, I don't remember because I'm terrible with numbers.
I'm numerically dyslexic. There was 20 or 30 of these guys who did this. They made a deal.
They made a pact with each other that that they would start to meet together and go through these pages and do the things that the book asked them to do. And the people who made it through that like 90% of them 90% of them stayed sober for good and for all. And that got their attention because again they'd been going to meetings and trying not to drink for a long time.
All of a sudden they actually they actually do the third step prayer. They actually do a fourth step. They actually do a fifth step.
They actually put an eight-step list together. They actually go out and make amends. They actually start to pray and meditate.
And they actually start to take other people through this work. And what catches their attention is they stay sober. Now, let's go to one of the uh Denver conventions in some somewhere in the mid to early 80s.
Don Pritz is there. a number a number of uh a number of our heroes, a number of the people that come from my spiritual lineage uh were there and and Max Jeter, one of the golden slippers, comes down from Canada to speak. Now instead of telling his drunkalogue as was many of people's wants back in those days, he starts talking about his experience with this group and getting together and opening up the big book and doing the big book.
Now he gets some attention from some hardcore dudes in the Denver Young People's Group like Don Prince. I think Gary Brown was there, Big Frank. There's a number of them.
I don't really know who all was there. But these guys then decide to do the same thing. And they get a group of people together and they open up the book Alcoholics Anonymous and they start to go through it like it's true.
Like the born again Christians of today will go through the Bible like it's true. They start to go through the book Alcoholics Anonymous like it actually is a textbook and it's not some metaphorical historical document from the past. They start to go through it and they have the same type of experience.
And some of these guys are still alive and some of these guys are the best people that you can listen to today because they speak from recovery experience. Now, what happens after these guys get sober in the dunk uh Denver young people's group? There's a number of guys that are younger who get exposed to these people as sponsors.
Uh Mark Houston, Joe Hawk, a number of other people uh that I've found very influential in my own recovery. And they they get it secondhand from these old-timers at the Denver Young People's Group. Now, this is where I first heard the message.
I first heard the message, the the the very clear, very concise recovery message um from from the these these second generation speakers. And I'll tell you what my personal experience was. I um I drank a lot of alcohol.
Okay? Uh when I started to drink, I was going to get the job done. If it was your experience to sip some wine and have some beer and maybe go home and watch TV or something, my hats my hat is off to you.
When I started drinking, within 2 hours, I was in a blackout. Within 3 and 1/2 hours, I was passed out wherever I was, unconscious, alcohol poisoned, out cold. You couldn't wake me up.
If if an ambulance saw me, they'd pump my stomach and tell me that I had died kind of drunk every single time I drank every single night. So if you drink like that, some bad things end up happening to you. You when you drive, it's really a bad experience.
When you travel, it's a really bad experience. When you try to date women, it's a really bad experience. They just hate it when you pass out on them at 8 o'clock at night on the date.
You know what I mean? I mean, I was I was relegated to a room in my mother's house because that's the only safe place I could drink cuz I could pass out on the floor, wake up, crawl into bed about 1:00 in the morning, shake it off, come to the next morning, and try to struggle to work. And it wasn't a big to-do, you know.
I had zero social life. I had zero quality of life. I was drinking for that oblivion, that that sense of peace and comfort that came at once after 13 bourbons.
You know what I'm talking about? Now I get sober because I started to get violent. Listen, I I'd lost my driver's license three times.
I crashed 13 cars in totals. You know, I you know, I didn't have a friend in the world left. I was damn near unemployable.
I was 125 lbs soaking wet with yellow eyes cuz my liver was going into failure. And none of that crap bothered me. I always thought that people that showed up in rehab because of things like that, you know, that was pathetic.
How do you let cops like force you to get sober? What got me sober was I started to get increasingly violent. I started to try to kill people and threaten to kill people.
And that really got my attention for two reasons. One of them was I usually was fond of the people I was going to kill. And the other was I really didn't want to be in a cell the rest of my life, you know, with like some big huge, you know, bank robber, you know what I mean?
Wearing some pink dress and doing a dance. That was not something that was uh that was on my list of to-dos. So, this got my attention.
The the insanity got my attention. Listen, a normal person, you know that book that that I think Robert Lewis Stevenson wrote called Dr. Jackekal and Mr.
High. Do you know that Robert Lewis Stevenson was an alcoholic? Read the book.
Next time you read that book or look at the movie, think about that because that's what I was. I was I was I was Dr. Jackekal during the day.
I was a bad electrician who tried to keep out keep out of trouble and you know you know just like like really filled with self-centered fear and really bad self-esteem. You you give me a quart of bourbon and I'm and I'm I'm I'm Mr. Hyde and I'm a psychopath carrying around a 38 handgun.
You know, it it was it was that different. It was and there was a level of insanity that was terrifying to me because I didn't want to be this. I was scared to be this.
But I but I was so obsessed with alcohol, so driven to alcohol for that that escape that I so needed because the burden of living within my own mind was so great that I was driven to it night after night after night. Now, through some uh through some different experiences, I I I uh I signed myself into a 28 day uh rehab uh to because I knew I I I couldn't stay a day away from booze. I was so critically toxically alcoholic that to stay away from booze for a 24-hour period of time would throw me into delirium tremens and uh raise my pulse to a very unsafe level, throw me into hallucinations and you know the the pink elephants and the maggots and all that stuff.
So I I really couldn't I really couldn't go through you know sober periods of of time very well. So I saw myself into a rehab and I I remember just showing up there and you know this this uh this old counselor he was a grizzly old AA you know this guy Charlie and I go Charlie Charlie you know I'm really I'm shattered I mean that's the only word I could descri I'm shattered because that morning you know I was shaking myself to pieces and I knew that I wasn't going to drink that day I was signing myself into rehab and he immediately that's that's back when counselors un unttrained trained counselors could write you a prescription. This guy wrote me a prescription for Librium.
And they started to double me down on this stuff. And um and they got I was on Librium for about 10 days uh during uh during the detox. And um and I you know I started to experience treatment.
That was a lot of fun. Uh I remember the Father Martin movies. Uh oh my god.
You know I Father Martin movies. Oh my god. If there's somebody on this planet that has no idea what I am like or what my experience is, it's a nun in a it's a it's a priest in a movie for God's sake.
And I thought, you know, I just I had such contempt for that crap. And then they then they had this movie about cocaine where, you know, your your head explodes. This stuff, you know, you cannot scare somebody that was pulling handguns on their family 24 hours ago.
You know what I mean? It's just and they had group. Uh, anybody in here ever been in group?
You know where you sit in a big circle and you talk about the day. Chris, what are you feeling today? I want to kill you.
That's what I'm feeling. So, I did I did this treatment and I had one half an hour meeting with a counselor in 28 days. That should be malpractice.
You You know what I mean? I I mean, they threw me into the population and just left me in there to Well, I started to organize everybody, right? Started to organize, you know, we we want to we want better coffee, you know.
I mean, you know, really, I tried to unionize all all the inmates. Oh, God. Anyway, but I would I guarantee I was the person most serious about not wanting to drink.
I mean, I listen, I wanted to stay away from alcohol the rest of my life. I get out of treatment and they said, "You might want to go to AA, but you should really go to outpatient." So, uh, so I'm going to two outpatient meetings a week, paying $85 a session. And guess what we did in the outpatient?
That was fun. Listen, it's some boneheaded truck driver hog the whole two hours talking about the pathetic nature of his life and what and and why it's filled with tragedy and misunderstanding. I couldn't wait for him to drink.
You know what I mean? Just one after another had to listen to. But I was doing it because I was told to, you know, and I was even paying money for the privilege of being completely disgusted.
That's how much I didn't want to drink. And I went to 2A meetings. I went to 2 A meetings.
Um they weren't a home group. They, you know, they were just at the top of my street. And so I really, you know, I had no idea of what what was what.
I thought I was doing what you were supposed to be doing. the people who were staying sober and afterare doing what I was doing. You know, I was going to two AA meetings, two outpatient meetings.
What more do you guys want? You know, I mean, I'm here. I was willing.
I was will I was willing, but I didn't understand alcoholism. I didn't understand that the meetings were filled with heavy drinkers who all they could they all they had to do was decide not to drink and everything was going to be fine. You know what I mean?
they could take a coffee commitment and feel part of and everything was fine. You know, I was so in my head. I was so filled with resentment, self-centered share.
You know, I'd walk into a meeting. I just be thinking, "Oh, God. Oh, the meeting.
Oh, there's somebody. Oh, she's not going to share again. Is she No, she's going to raise her hand.
No. Oh, she raised her. Oh god, I'm going to hear all about her family again.
Oh. Tell somebody who cares, lady, please. Oh, I mean, this is what's going through my head while I'm sitting in the meetings.
And, you know, I think I think, oh god, I got to go to the bathroom. Oh, if I go to the bathroom and get up and walk across the room, everybody will look at me and they'll where's he going? You know, I'll look small.
I mean, all this stuff is going I'm nuts. Okay. But I think I think going to the meetings and going to the outpatient is the treatment for alcoholism, you know.
And nobody came up to me and explained the difference between the hard drinker and the alcoholic. I don't think they knew, you know. No one came up to me and said, "Chris, you're not treating your alcoholism.
All you're doing is showing up showing up at the waiting room. You know, that's all you're doing." And uh nobody nobody told me that. I didn't know.
So, one day on the way to an AA meeting, the thought crossed my mind that I I probably wasn't doing this AA stuff all that well. You know, I'm not I I don't feel like I'm I'm giving it 100%. And people are saying, you know, you got to give it 100%.
I know if I if I buy a gallon of vodka and I drink it, I I'll be able to come back and really do this AA stuff, right? So, I buy a gallon of vodka to improve my sobriety. Can I tell you it went wrong?
>> Does that surprise anybody now looking back on it? Because you know, you usually know things in hindsight. you're usually a clueless before that.
Uh I recognized the fact that I was suffering from an obsession of the mind. Um in the first step it says we admitted we were alcoholic. You know uh we admitted we were powerless over alcohol.
Being powerless over alcohol means lacking the power to choose when you're going to drink it and lacking the power to control it once you're drinking. So you really only got those two problems when you're not drinking or when you're drinking. If it wasn't for those two problems, everything would be good.
So uh so I experienced a suddenly in the book Alcoholics Anonymous says, "Suddenly the thought crossed my mind that some whiskey and some milk wouldn't hurt me on a full stomach. So here's how." Well, I experienced the suddenly. I know what they feel like.
Suddenly the thought crossed my mind that if I buy a gallon of vodka and drink it, it'll improve my sobriety. So I did it on the way to an amate. Now three glasses into this vodka.
All of a sudden, I realized the enormity of my mistake because I started to get drunk and I opened the cage door to the beast and the beast is going to fling open the the cage doors and and ram his hand up my ass and move me around like a puppet for who knows how many months because I'm not going to have any control over that. I'm just going to be puppeting like this. So, that's what happened.
And uh 7 months I drank almost continuously. It was really ugly. It was really ugly.
Um the obsession of the mind doesn't care if you're going to meetings. The obsession of the mind doesn't care if you've got a coffee commitment. The obsession of the mind doesn't care if you're on the grapevine committee or you're the cookie boy.
The obsession of the mind is one powerful some if you're an alcoholic. And it is aggressive in its nature. And to fight something so aggressive as an obsession of the mind, you need an aggressive recovery process.
And watching Father Martin movies and going to the close-minded discussion meeting at the top of my street was not aggressive enough. So after 7 months of uh of absolute hell uh it all culminated in a terrible scene at my house. Everybody split and I come to after being in a drunken blackout for days and the the pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization was so thick you could cut it.
Terror, frustration, bewilderment, despair. That that was the good part of what I was experiencing. I was seeing demons and flopping like a fish.
It was not good. I didn't I didn't sleep for about 5 days during this detox. And at the end of 5 days, I thought I had my wits about me enough to get to a meeting.
Uh and I did. I got in my car and I drove to a meeting just ringing ringing and shattered with, you know, the the this this detox. Now, I knew that um I was going to die and, you know, death didn't really scare me, but killing people I would I love did scare me.
And it became very apparent that in my last blackout, I had threatened my family with a gun. And it was just by the grace of God that I didn't shoot them all because they said something to me. You know how we are.
Um, and that terrified me more than anything. Uh, you know, death is almost welcome to to alcoholics at different points in our time. We don't we're not afraid of death.
I mean, when the doctor said uh, you know, if you don't quit drinking, you'll be dead in 5 years. You usually walk out of there going, I got five years. You know, you're not like I'm gonna die.
You're thinking, man, five years party. I mean, we're, you know, we're not we're not scared. But when when you can when you can tragically alter uh the people's lives about you that you you you're actually quite fond of.
Uh that that certainly got got my attention. Now, I go back to meetings with a vengeance. Now, um I you know I know somehow deep inside that I didn't put enough into what I was doing for it to work.
It would have worked if I did. So instead of going to two meetings a week, I'm now going to anywhere from 7 to 14, you know? I mean, I'm, you know, Saturdays I'm going to three meetings and and I'm I'm plugging in as much as the selfc centered fear will allow me.
Um, I'm doing as much as the selfc centered fear will allow me. Like for a while I was rendered mute in a I had to go to meetings where they would call on you to learn to share because I could not raise my hand. Uh that was too much for me to bear.
But I was going to a bunch of meetings and I had I got a sponsor. Says get a sponsor. I got a sponsor.
My sponsor had a service ethic. So he was asking me to do things like uh like be a coffee maker, help out at the treatment center picnic, you know, drive the boobies from the hatch to the meeting, and you know, go out to go out to the diner afterward. And I started doing all of this fellowship stuff.
Now, nobody ever came up to me and said, "Chris, none of that is treatment for alcoholism. That's participation in the recovery fellowship. That's some service, but that's not the treatment for alcoholism." Nobody said that to me.
Well, this guy uh this guy Radio Shack Mike one day came up and uh and gave me a set of tapes. He was my first friend in AA. He was just nuts enough to hang out with me.
Um, how we first met was he came up to me and how we first became friends. He came up to me and he was really freaked out and I said something like, "What's going on?" And he said, "Oh, there was a big fight at my house. I live with two three other guys and one of them beat the crap out of the other and I'm really scared to go home, you know." I go, "Would it help if I go with you?" And he goes, "Yeah, would you do that?" And I go, "Yeah, we're just going to stop at my house first on the way home." So, we stop at my house and I I got this big buoy knife about this long and I strapped it to my belt buckle and I come back out to the car and I said, "Okay, let's go." And that's how that's how we made friends.
I mean, you know, looking at me today, you would think that that's not something I'd be capable of, but I certainly was then. I was hoping this guy give this my new friend trouble, you know. Anyway, anyway, so he uh he was one of these guys who would go to the new age bookstores and he was very pious.
What that means is, you know, whatever he's reading that week, that's the thing. That's the key to existence. You know, I'm reading this book on crystal therapy.
You know, we got to go out and get you crystals. You need the blue ones. You know, and and you know, the next next week next weekend be the Cabala.
We got to do Cabala stuff. I mean, he just from one thing to another, he would just he would just run through the New Edge bookstores like like a drowning man seizing a life preserver. And uh and this one day uh he hands me a set of tapes uh 8 90minute tapes and they're a big book workshop and uh they were Joe and Charlie.
Uh I I put them in uh and I listened to them cuz I got kind of a long ride to work and I told them I would and they immediately gave me a resentment because they were a very very strong Bigbook message. Uh these guys were classic. Uh they were they were part and parcel of the early renaissance of getting us back to um uh paying attention to the recovery side of the triangle.
They were very instrumental and I listened to these tapes and they pissed me off. Um, but the truth in them haunted me. They spoke with authority and they used our basic text to bolster up any arguments or any positions or any philosophy they had.
They could show in the book where it would say anything they talked about. So that kind of haunted me like the the reason it haunted me was I was not hearing that at meetings. uh in in the in in the late 80s in my area there were sharing meetings.
Okay, go and dump. And if you dump all your problems at the meeting, you'll leave half as light or whatever they would share. So, uh so some of the meetings I was going to were quite toxic if you were in real trouble.
If you were a heavy drinker, they were home sweet home. Uh, but for somebody who was in real trouble, they they were like trying to stop a semi with a cobweb. Now, so I start I start listening to these Joe and Charlie things again and and I I start to buy into the theory that if you pay attention to the book Alcoholics Anonymous and do the things that are in it, you will have a transformational recovery experience that will offer you a new freedom, a new happiness, a new perception.
um will begin to eliminate that self-centered fear, that resentment, that inability to make good decisions. The defective relationships will start to fall in place. All these things were basically basic promises.
And out of no sense of virtue, uh I started to do this. Um personally, I started to go through the book because trust me, there was nobody talking about this in the meetings I was going to. I couldn't go to somebody and say, "Could you take me through the book?" They they'd pull out a 12 and 12 and say, "Read the first step over and over a 100 times each day for 12 weeks and don't call me." I mean, you know, that's about what you would get.
So, so I started I started going through the big book and I started to try as best I could to do uh do the examples in the big book. This is somewhere around 90 91 92 maybe. I don't really remember.
Anyway, what happened was I started to heal. I started to participate in a in a process that would allow God to heal my spirit to allow enough of me to get out of my way uh for my spirit to be healed. Now, I quickly because I love I started to love these Joe and Charlie tapes, I quickly started to go through the cataloges of Bigbook workshops and I got a hold of a bunch of them.
Uh David Aronowski from Texas. Uh you know, I had got the Sandy Beach one. I got the Bob Bazant's 12 Steps to Success.
You know, I I and and I'm looking in this I'm looking in this uh catalog and I see Joe Hawk Salvation Army Bigbook Study. And I say to myself, I wonder what an Indian could teach me about the steps. Now, when I told this to Joe, he laughed.
But I thought, hawk, that has to be, you know, an Indian name. So I send off for these Salvation Army tapes and they blow me away. Never had I heard the recovery mechanics put in such detail.
He was meticulous in his instruction. You got to understand, he was giving instruction to people in a Salvation Army. Has anybody ever had a Salvation Army commitment?
I have. You're talking to the living dead at a Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Sal Salv Salvation Army meeting, okay? They're they're there to get off the streets, get a cup of coffee, and try to find somebody to rob, you know?
So to so to try to instruct them on the big book, you had to be pretty specific, pretty sophomoric, pretty clear. So that's what these that's what these tapes were about. And uh and they blew my mind.
uh they they started me on a recovery trajectory that um um I'm still on. Now, that's that's my uh my personal experience with uh with uh with Bigbook Recovery. Now, I really don't want it to sound like I'm I'm critical of meetings or uh critical of sharing or anything like that.
I know it sounds that way, but I want you to I want you to believe that I think that every meeting out there should be out there. Uh, I think that every sponsorship style is appropriate for certain people. I I definitely though believe that if you're in real trouble with alcoholism and you've grown chronic and advanced with your case of alcoholism, your best hope is a recovery experience similar to the one that they talk about in the book Alcoholics Anonymous.
When Bill was describing this in the book, he was describing some of the tactics that they used with very lowbottom alcoholics in the first 5 years or so. They were going after people that were in straight jackets. I mean, they were going after the real hardcore lowbottom lost everything pathetic, you know, pants pissing alcoholics.
And that's who they were working with. So a lot of times the instructions in the book uh are about powerful enough and transformative enough to help those that are really really sick. That's why when the majority of AA members read the book Alcoholics Anonymous, they see it as a historical document that was an overreaction to something that they've learned a lot more about today because we go to meetings and we share and that's that's their truth.
That's what they see and that's what they experience. Again, I want to make very very clear that there's a scale of alcoholism and this big book movement that is a foot. I don't really think that we're about we're about uh uh you know hurting the unity of AA.
I don't think we're about making the old-timers that wouldn't know a step if it bit them on the ass look bad. That's not what this is about. Although many of them think that.
What this is about is finding the people who are critical, who are chronic and offering them a offering them the the the set of tools that's going to be sufficient for their recovery because we lose too many people today. We lose too many people today. I uh I was dabbling in uh in the professional uh treatment community.
Um uh Marsha has actually been to some of the some of the convention uh some of the conferences and stuff that uh I was a board member of uh of this organization that we put these conferences on and I did some web broadcasts for a while where I interviewed treatment professionals and I and I got to tell you I played in a deep sandbox with some of these guys. I mean I've met I've met the the the shining examples out there of addiction treatment in the world today internationally. I I've met many of them and uh and some of them get it.
Some of them understand that there's a scale in alcoholism and some of them are even honest enough to admit that there are a group of people who like Dr. Silk says in the doctor's opinion are hopeless. They're not they're not people that that professional treatment can help.
They're of the hopeless variety. And uh and some of them don't get it. Sometimes it's inconvenient uh for them to separate the heavy drinkers from the alcoholics because they're both paying customers and they only got the one van.
You know what I mean? They only got the one counselor at 2:00. So, it's it would be inconvenient for them to mold the treatment process one for the alcoholic and one for the the disco drug.
So, they don't do it. They give you the disco drug version. And if you're a real alcoholic, you're drinking in 30 days after you get through the treatment.
And they like to like to tell you it's your fault. It's not. it's their fault because they weren't honest with you.
Um, but I got in this argument just recently with u with a treatment professional. Um, I I made the mistake of blogging on LinkedIn professional groups, which uh I'm probably not going to do anymore because I don't go over well in uh in the professional treatment community and probably for good reason. I I can be I can be arrogant whether you guys believe that or not.
I know I'm I know I come off as very humble. Uh but I can be arrogant on some of these things. And and this one guy really pissed me off.
He was uh he was an addiction professional. And what he wrote was, "I don't send anybody to AA or NA anymore. My god, their statistics are so bad.
They're around 6%. I can get better results from a placebo. Why would I send anybody to those groups?" And this guy was serious.
Okay. Now, I had to think long and hard about a response because it's true that our our uh our survivability rates are around 6%. if you take your census at the door.
However, what is also true is rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed the path. So my uh my instructions my instructions to uh what I put in my reply to this guy was as a medical professional if a 100 people came to you for a specific operation and 95% of them sat in the waiting room but would not go in for the operation. Should I hold you accountable to a 5% treatment rate?
and he wrote back, "No." Well, I said, "You're holding us responsible for a recovery statistic for people that are sitting in the waiting room." Rarely have we seen a person who's thoroughly followed the path. Ask those people, did they do a fearless and thorough four-step inventory? Did they do a four column resentment inventory?
Uh did did they, you know, did they share everything holding nothing back in a f this step? Did they put a list together of all the people and institutions they harmed? Did they go out and actually make amends to all those people that and institutions that they harmed?
Do they have a prayer and meditation regime that they practice consistently on a daily basis, morning, during the day, and at night? And are they working with other alcoholics, taking them through the 12step because that is thoroughly following the path. That is our operation.
the waiting room is the meetings. And after uh rebutting him like this, I never heard from him again. Uh I think he probably saw, you know, my my uh my particular response as inconvenient to his pet theory that AA sucks.
But anyway, you know, both of those things are true. 6% and rarely have we seen a person fail. They're both true.
I don't know if I've talked on the the history of the big book movement. Again, I always make this disclaimer anytime I talk about history. Uh please understand that history is a movable movable science.
No one can actually go back in time with a video camera or record it as it is. Many of us bring our own perceptions and our own pet theories into the study of history and thereby uh skew it a little bit to the left or a little bit to the right. And I make no uh I make no claims as to accuracy in numbers or events or anything like that.
It's basically uh the doesn't make it not true. Just because it didn't happen that way doesn't make it not true. Um it's true uh it's true in the fact that these things uh these things happened and were were experienced in one way or another.
And today we have uh we have the the recovery movement, the big book thumpers, whatever you want to call them, uh alive and well uh in the English speaking world today. And that's a good thing. Should everything be that way?
No. We're only a small a small minority of AA members are the hardcore uh hopeless real alcoholics. And and we should recognize the fact that there's uh uh there's freedom and there's traditions in Alcoholics Anonymous to allow Alcoholics Anonymous to be what it wants to be.
And I think that that's right and good. And I think that as alcoholics who are recovered alcoholics, I think it's our job to go into meetings not to piss off the old-timers and make them feel small, but to try to find the alcoholics who are struggling trying to stay sober on fellowship or fellowship and or and service alone and single them out. You know, Scott talked about going up to somebody.
Uh Jonathan grabs people. That's what we should be doing. And we should be finding the people who are in real trouble and offering them a solution and never trying to stand above any other alcoholic.
You know, cuz we're big bookers does not make us better alcoholics than the oral tradition version. It doesn't. It just means that we're a little bit sicker than some of the other people.
And we might we might need a little bit stronger medicine. Our medicine is uh is recovery. And uh I want to thank Dave for coming up with this idea.
Going into the future, there's going to be the traveling big book study. And we're gonna we're already thinking of exotic loces to go to because this is so cool being in the Sara with the howler monkeys and the botflies. We are we're just really enjoying the hell out of oursel.
And we have not had a bad meal. Who would have thought there was gourmet food in in Costa Rica? I I wouldn't, you know, uh but uh that's been my experience and the people here, the the the weather, the local, everybody's so friendly.
Uh some great people here showed up. Uh uh some some of my favorite people in uh the recovery community are here. And uh thanks a lot, Dave.
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