Recovered Alcoholic

I tried many, many, many times to "play the tape through" or bring into remembrance my last degrading or demoralizing escapade-even if it was a somewhat "good night" where I only humiliated myself in private but woke up demoralized anyway, but, I could not. This is because I was powerless over alcohol and over the thought that preceded the drink. The basis and the foundation of the program. At a certain point in the drinking of every alcoholic, he passes into a state where the most powerful desire to stop drinking is of absolutely no avail. This tragic situation has already arrived in practically every case long before it is suspected. I promise you that I wanted to stop everyday. I wanted to kill myself because I saw no way out. So if all I needed to do was to play the tape through, then I wouldn't be here. I would just be off playing the tape anytime I thought about drinking when something went wrong in my life and I would just know what to do all would be we...

  Trust God-Clean House-Help Others  The minute we put our work on a service plane, the alcoholic commences to rely upon our assistance rather than upon God. He clamors for this or that, claiming he cannot master alcohol until his material needs are cared for. Nonsense. Some of us have taken very hard knocks to learn this truth : Job or no job—wife or no wife—we simply do not stop drinking so long as we place dependence upon other people ahead of dependence on God. Burn the idea into the consciousness of every man that he can get well regardless of anyone. The only condition is that he trust in God and clean house .  -Working With Others pg 98 of the BB ************************************************** When I was separated from alcohol for the last time, God willing , I had nothing left. My bottom was about as far as my HP would allow me to go --thank God, because I was pretty darn low! My "go to" people bailed on me after a drunken night of debauchery which ended with m...

  In between the stories of the man, Jim, who convinces himself that he can drink as long as his alcohol is in milk, and the Jaywalker who gets a thrill from jumping in front of cars even though he doesn't think so, is this passage I want to share:    We have sometimes reflected more than Jim did upon the consequences. But there was always the curious mental phenomenon that parallel with our sound reasoning there inevitably ran some insanely trivial excuse for taking the first drink. Our sound reasoning failed to hold us in check. The insane idea won out. Next day we would ask ourselves, in all earnestness and sincerity, how it could have happened. In some circumstances we have gone out deliberately to get drunk, feeling ourselves justified by nervousness, anger, worry, depression, jealousy or the like. But even in this type of beginning we are obliged to admit that our justification for a spree was insanely insufficient in the light of what always happened. We now se...

First of all, we had to quit playing God. It didn’t work. Next, we decided that hereafter in this drama of life, God was going to be our Director. He is the Principal; we are His agents. He is the Father, and we are His children. Most Good ideas are simple, and this concept was the keystone of the new and triumphant arch through which we passed to freedom. Going from thinking life, the world and everyone was just having their way with me and everything thing was just series of random events that always seemed to harm me or make my life harder, to - OMG I had contrived the entire thing and the fall out was because my way was so grossly misaligned to the divine script that I NEEDED to be fired from the director of the movie stat!  What I create when not attuned to God is an artificial construct generated, or, d riven by a hundred forms of fear, self-delusion, self-seeking, and self-pity.. .everything was a manipulation to attempt to produce the outcome I wanted so that I could get w...

  "Our real purpose is to fit ourselves to be of maximum service to God and the people about us" I could have sworn it said "my real purpose is to get sober, get the guy, and live happily ever after"....thankfully I was wrong. Purpose is the fundamental reason for which something is done, created, or exists. So the purpose of the sobriety I was gifted wasn't about me at all. It was all for God. After I swallowed hard and grieved that life I thought I was owed for getting sober, even though I didn't get me sober, but I digress, I went to opposite extreme of happily ever after to "I guess I'm a nun now" as interpreted through my egoic 3-D linear thinking...shocking.  Thankfully I was wrong about that too....I'm wrong a lot! LOL! Which is fine, because I now get to actually learn the lessons that genuinely do fit me to be of max service to God and the people about me through the experience of that lesson learned. If I already know everything ...

  I have been doing some deep meditation and diving into the word acceptance and how it came to be a part of the fellowship-not program. Just because it appears in one story from a fellow member from one edition, doesn't mean it's the program. The program is located in the first part of the book in all editions. The stories in the back are for identification purposes. So for example, if they had chosen me to write my experience with AA in the latest revision and a generation later people were quoting from my story as the program, rather than just my experience, that would be unfortunate. Back to the word acceptance that we have countless meetings about. It always bothered me because everything is kind of just thrown under the acceptance label.  The fact is that acceptance means approval. Mind you, I am coming from a place of doing a deep dive on the entire origin of the American English language factoring in the legal and the spiritual ramifications and how words are in fact e...