Suh-WEET!

Fantastic News!

DAVE CALLED. He left a voice mail message.

Let's give him a call back right now and see if we can get reel this fish in - get him to commit to meeting tomorrow.

That would be Suh-WEET!


Peace,

Danny S - RLRA
http://recoveredalcoholic.blogspot.com

Dirty Deeds

Step One - Done Dirt Cheap

Rockin' and Prospectin'


Went to see AC-DC last night at Gillette Stadium. Not only were the seats right up front on the field of the stadium but the best part of the evening was on the trip driving up. The opportunity to twelve step someone cropped up.

Took him through Step One right in the car.

The drive from The Peninsula of Doom to Foxboro, Massachusetts - one and a half hours. Perfect - maybe even a little roomy, time-wise, for a Step One.

Here is how it went:
Talk about being in good physical shape . At age fifty four Angus Young has got more energy than many twenty five year olds I see working at the Cape Cod Mall; whose bellies cast ecliptic shadows over size fourteen Nikes. Why are there so many fat, I mean seriously obese people . . .  on Cape Cod anyway? I mean really.  I have never seen anything like it. (More on that after I lose five or ten myself.)

The Scottish born guitar icon took his Black lacquered SG to . . . . oh wait . . . .this is about alcoholism, not a rock show review, right.
          Sorry. . . .I had to explain to Charlie what I know about alcoholism – what it’s ‘symptoms’ are and how they manifest. I know allot. Have to. It's part of what "carrying this message" is all about. I also know from experience that the best way to do this is conversationally – the one-drunk-talking-to another method. Not off a handout. Not out of a guidebook. Not  out of an essay like those published in the 12 & 12. Not even writing to a blog readership either. (This blog is not Twelve Step work)

It  is illustrated in the Big Book that one-on-one is the only way -  and I have found it to be so too. Everyone I know who is in this deal tells me this is their experience as well. 'Mass' sponsoring like at some Holy Roller healing bazaar, but from a podium, bullshitting ones self that this is the way to "carry the message",  is not how the co-founders describe “Working With Others" in their book.

Lecturing to him about allergy and obsession alone cannot do it either – and that isn’t very conversational. He’ll feel preached to. 

Taking a tutorial stance is OK in some instances as long as the reception room door leading to the real solution has been unlocked first.  So I start giving examples in my own life where I could not stop once I started and couldn't “not start” even though I needed to “not start”.


That's what I did with our friend Charlie on the way to see AC/DC.

Guess what happened?

He couldn't match my experiences! Not in the slightest. Charlie drank in order to raise the liquid courage to do something he really felt bad about:

SMOKING CRACK!

He never continued drinking once he got the crack. The prognosis? Charlie is not an alcoholic. Not because I told him he wasn't - but because he could see that he isn't.  I merely showed him how to  make "the distinction between the alcoholic and the nonalcoholic." (44:0) as my Big Book tells me to do.

Now if I was charging him money for this I wouldn’t want to let him go at this point – not before I got to swipe his credit card anyway or clean out his checking account – or maybe even get his timid, not so swift but loving grandma to take out a loan on her house to pay me ten or twenty or forty grand for a month of share-sessions, piss tests and making posters.

 If you have ever witnessed a 'sales close' during the in-take admittance of a treatment center you would instantly recognize and be able to make the comparison with the "intake"  and the manager’s office at the local car dealer. No difference.

I can tell you of instances where folks - one woman in particular comes to mind - who was run through the local facility, Gosnold, here on Cape Cod not once or twice but three times that I know of and possibly even more after relapsing immediately upon release and exiting Gosnold's treatment facility. Unconscionable! The greed and arrogance of the people running that facility is astounding. It ought to be investigated by the Massachusetts Attorney General's office. Why was she rerun through time after time after time - probably even against the facilities own written and apparently scoffed policies?

The answer is simple: Uh, she was not out of money yet! 
And she was desperate enough to be willing to pay it. Desperate people do desperate things and too often there is someone standing there waiting to exploit that simple human fact. ANYONE can become a certified alcoholic or drug addict if they just show up and write a check and suffer a few months of   easy multiple choice testing. Thus kind of stuff is not limited to The Peninsula of Doom either. It is all over over the country. If the check does not bounce no one is going to tell them any different. I have NEVER heard of anyone getting a refund from ANY treatment center because the administrators and counselor discovered that they were not real alcoholics and therefor could not help them. And I am quite certain I never will.

If I were a money charging "addictions cousleor" what I would do now is tell Charlie,

"Charlie I can still help - and you can still pay- because even though I only have the solution for and the experience with alcoholism and you are not an alcoholic but a drug addict . . . . guess what? ALCOHOL IS NOW A DRUG. We can still do business! Yippee Ai Oh Ty Ay! Now lets start running that short stack of credit cards you have there. . . K?"

Well there is some difference. If you relapse after the treatment people deliver their goods to you the treatment center will not give you a refund and will incredibly tell you it’s YOUR fault -- whereas the car dealer will be forced by their own good business practices, not to mention the Attorney General's office, to make good on the product sold. Treatment Centers will even exploit your desperate state by informing you of this beforehand.

Can you imagine a car dealer telling you, "Now listen Mr. Jones after you pay for this vehicle we will do all we can to see that you get it but frankly, you may never actually take delivery - and even if you do it the car might just up and disappear one day. If it does,there are no refunds."

You would have to be puh. . . ritty desperate to engage in the transaction with a disclaimer like that one, wouldn't you? I believe that is called adding insult to injury or maybe in this case the reverse: Injury THEN insult.

You know . . . there is nothing like desperation – the flames of raw and terrorized emotions tearing through a life and family as hot and deadly as flames and smoke through a South Bronx tenement.

Then again I am not twelve stepping Charlie to screw him out of his money, am I ?

So what does Charlie think about this ? Well, Charlie is very perceptive. Finally, after a couple of countless AA meetings and decades of bull-doodie, POP-AA indoctrination, he figures then that he is not a real alcoholic - not the kind described in the Big Book, anyway.  Not the true alkie conveyed by "Alcoholics Anonymous  the eponymous spiritual volume for whom the Twelve Step Program was designed and painstakingly delineated in that book.

Charlie also recons he cannot stop going to AA meetings because it has become a social thing for him. He has no other friends who aren’t taking substances like EtOH or drugs and Charlie feels that he needs to secure himself among people who even though some of them may relapse once in a while, at least they are living inside periods of being clean and sober.

He just rotates them in and out of his social circle as they use - cleanup - use - cleanup and he says that he is able to remain clean and sober himself - by association.

Maybe he does. But now it seems our pal Charlie has got as AA meeting addicting to rise above. Now I guess we'll have to get together again to make sure Charlie knows the difference between an "Opened" and "Closed" meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Hey! I'm Twelve Stepping at a fraekin' AC/DC concert here - I should remember everything?

Peace,

Danny S - RLRA
Real Live Recovered Alcoholic

The Torch Might Be On The Ass

When you are in this Twelve Stepping deal for while – intensely working with other alcoholics you realized that everyone who says that they want to stop drinking are telling the truth. Sometimes the self-pity we see and hear is nothing more than that - nothing more than the cries of a person who has a hot torch on his ass.

We haven't even gotten that far yet with Dave. As far as we know Dave doesn't really even consider his problem that serious. But that could be a verbal manifestation of his male bravado - ego talking.

Prospects are supposed to not want to drink as much as they do – they know what you want to hear when asked that question but they haven’t the complete honesty to say, “Hell no. I love my Budweiser man! I just want the problem drinking has caused me to go away.”

They want that Holy Alcoholic Trinity: The girl, the car and the job. Mobility, Prestige, Money and Pussy.

I don’t know if Dave is going to fall into this category. We cannot know. Hell we don’t know if he even needs this drastic solution that I might offer him.

I do know that I have no one with whom

to work this week and I am going to have to get cracking on another poor soul if this Dave fellow does work out.

There is a fellow named Gary who actually told me the truth. Heck out the link to my main blog and do a "search" for "GARY" if interested in reading about it. It is one interesting story.

I should not have let my pipeline of prospects dry out like this.

I will post all this week as I turn the knobs up to eleven to obtain more leads and convert them into prospects. I’ll also continue to call David. Stay tuned and I’ll update frequently.

Peace,

Danny S - RLRA

http://recoveredalcoholic.blogspot.com

Called Dave (again) To Meet Up With Him This Evening

See If You Can Guess What Happened. The video is the hint.

Day One With (or without) Dave - Twelve Step Call

Working with others seems odd at times. Those of us who have experienced the removal of the desire to drink - recovery - as the result of the Twelve Steps get a little excited about it all. Already we get VERY excited! What we have tried and tried and tried to do ourselves again and again and again for so many years just ‘happens’ one day without us even trying to make it happen.

No fighting. No running from temptation. It is just gone . . . kapoot . . . . and it happens fast and it happens as the consequence of an even more astounding spiritual awakening.

This is not some generalized fuzzy feeling of well-being like what comes from a great ice-cream cone or a “good share” in an AA meeting. Hell no. It is so much more than that. It is rapid, powerful and enduring and so when we can tell someone that we can show them how this happened and that if they want it all they have to do is what we did - it stands to logic that the person being presented with this solution ought to have dropped the phone receiver already and the sound of screeching rubber coming to an abrupt stop out to be the next sound we hear before we even hit the “off” button on the phone.

When this does not happen it seems very odd. Man, they should have been begging to have the solution NOW and be willing to do anything to get it! And it is common that it does not happen.

I called Dave today to set up the time for our first 'session'. I was hoping to change our plan from this afternoon to this evening or tomorrow since I had forgotten when we spoke last night that I was committed to a BBQ at my son's Boy Scout summer camp. Today is the first day and parents are invited.

He didn't pick up the phone. A voice mail message was left. I told him that I we were going to a an AA meeting - a literature based meeting in Brewster, MA where there are enough Twelve Step proponents and the folks are not so long on fellowship and as short on the steps as many of the other Groups are in the area.

Cape Cod is not exactly a bastion of Twelve Step recovery. It is very heavy on watered down bullshit lead by the usual proliferation of the worst kind of meeting to ever hit our Fellowship - the Open Discussion Meeting. WHURP. . . . I think I just puked in my mouth.

If it weren't for the inordinately high percentage of drunks on this peninsula it would hardly pay to even go to meetings once recovered. But fresh meat can be had there - as long as the "just show up and don't drink one day and try to make it till midnight" folks don't pollute him first with the "meeting makers make it" routine that I have witnessed to be so harmful to so many real alcoholics.

He never returned the call and it is now 10:30 in the evening. Not looking real good right now - but we'll try him again tomorrow - see if he is "one of us" an dif he is - if he is as desperate as he will need to be to take the actions necessary to experience a full recovery.

Maybe he read yesterdays article and saw that he was going to take the first threee Steps today? NAH. If he's a real alcoholic his head is stuck way too far up his own ass to be Googling for and actually reading Recovery Blogs.


Peace,

Danny S - RLRA
http://recoveredalcoholic.blogspot.com

Getting with Dave

I so love when a new prospect for the Twelve Steps and AA Fellowship of the Spirit shows up.

The call came in today. It was a voice-mail from a buddy named Josh - says he's got a friend he wants to introduce and who wants to stop drinking. I call Josh back for a rundown.

Josh has been an acquaintance for a number of years and we see each other at the gym. We met through a protegee of mine who is sober fifteen years and whom for that Josh holds great respect and so through Step One Josh went.

It was a "FAIL".

Josh could not admit powerlessness over EtOH. He could not admit it because it was not true - not his truth. Alcohol was a scourge to him and to others in his family but his truth is that all he had to do to lick the problem was "Just don't' drink".

There is nothing wrong with "Just don't drink" - not when you aren't a real alcoholic there isn't anyway.

When we went through Step One out of the Big Book, "Alcoholics Anonymous" Josh learned what the AA "description of the alcoholic" is.

Guess what? He didn't fit it! Oh he couldn't stop once he started - that much is true - his truth. Still Joshes solution was simply to not take the first drink thereby setting off the physical craving. In other words he even though he suffered form the physical side of the malady he was not afflicted with t he mental part - that inability to leave it alone despite the inability to stop. He just doesn't drink. Period. He hasn't had a drink now in years knowing this about himself - knowing that he is not a real alcoholic but a problem drinker with an easy solution. "Put the plug in the jug!"

This is the absolute beauty and simplicity of Step One. It filters out the non-alcoholics from the alcoholics. God it is SO frakin' simple! I cringe at the thought of all these newcomers out there trying to extrapolate some imagined "step One" code out of the Twelve and Twelve.

Josh has become a cool referrer of others to me over the years because now whenever he comes across someone needing help with their drinking problem I am the first one he thinks of - I am the guy that spared him a lifelong commitment to AA meetings when it wasn't necessary.

I get Joshes guy's number and some vitals - he is single - girlfriend dumped him because of his drinking - no kids - mid thirties - salesman - another one? lives nearby here on the Peninsula of Doom - has gone to a few AA meetings but nothing serious. Hopefully there will not be too much deprogramming involved and we will be able to get him focused less on the meetings and more on the Steps. We shall see. I'm calling him now.

_____

The call went well with David. It seems that his drinking is "not that serious" - according to him anyway. He' s been a heavy partier all his life and now within the last two years he has been experiencing black outs and the inability to stop whenever he wants. That is a good sign. Yes I said good sign. The more hopeless he is the better his chances.

"OK. Let's meet" I tell him.

Tomorrow, Sunday, July 25th we will meet at Starbucks in Mashpee. David doesn't know it yet but he is going to be taking Step One tomorrow - then if he passes muster he will take Step Two and Step Three - right in Starbucks. The poor SOB won't know what hit him -- not at first at least.

Somewhere in the conversation David got a little rushed and I sensed that he wanted to go. Maybe it's nothing. I am to call him in the morning to set up the time we will meet for our "coffee". Mwaaaahhahahaha!

Everything will be documented here as it happens - as we see just much of drowning man our new prospect is and whether or not he even wants to stop drinking forever. You are invited to join in this incredibly spiritual process we call a Twelve Step Call. This page will be update with new information tomorrow night.

In the meantime please say a prayer for David and for me that I do the right thing - that I keep my self out of this process and that I can truly be helpful to David as well as you dear reader - His will be done. We do not know yet if he is alcoholic but we are soon to find out. So is he. If I do my job right. Stay tuned for the Blow by Blow Step One process on a brand new prospect.

Peace,

Danny S - RLRA
Real Live Alcoholic

EMAIL FROM MARY

Danny,
Talked to John he will stay in Catumet for 30 days ,well it has been one week yesterday he went there sounds good. Just an FYI.
Mary

***************************************

Mary,
Once again he has taken the easy way out - The month-long breeze of happy horseshit. He' s been doing these "rehab" stints for years. Does it make sense the 2008 edition will be any more effective?

What will be so "special" about this time. Just the perchance "click"? PHULEEZE!

Rehabs don't work - Counseling doesn't work. They NEVER EVER DO. EVER!

For hard drinkers who are not real alcoholics and for certain types of drug addicts they do have some successes but John is NEITHER. They don't work - not for alcoholics of John's type - of my type, - our type - real alcoholics. We are talking about people, with "certifications" who do not even KNOW what I am talking about - who must not admit that there is any such thing as a "real alcoholic" for fear of losing their jobs or having to deal the lie of their own drug and alcohol abuse.

They will take him in there over and over and over as long as the money doesn't dry out through his health insurance. They are killing him - slowly - on the installment plan. He is screwed. Its always the easy way out for him and that's all that this represents. Sorry.

He does not want to do the difficult thing - the thing that I did and have been bending over backwards to show him. He would rather glide in to a 29 day happy acre stay with people who know NOTHING about ALCOHOLISM. NO THING! If they did they would tell him and he would run out of there as fast as he runs away from what I tell him. They haven't a clue and think they do. They will kill him and I have seen it again and again and again and I could cry. I cannot be positive when my experience tells me he's all wrong and that Gosnold is all wrong for him. He won't listen. And he's worse off now than the day I met him. It is such a shame. I don't know if I can put any more deprogramming time into him.

A month of crap is a lot to unload and I may just have to let him die. If he won't listen - then there' nothing I can do. I fear I have failed him for the last time.

Not everyone CAN recover. He may one of those alcoholic who just does not have the capacity to be honest. If he does, then I haven seen it yet. It look very bad for him from my perspective. I am sorry. He will get out and drink again almost immediately and I will take one more run at him - but the second you or anyone picks him up and brushes him off - lets him keep his job - makes him a meal - drops off his laundry - gives him a ride - gets his rent paid - whatever! Then he will be fucked once more.

Peace,

Danny S