Done Dirt Cheap
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 yeas olds I see working at the Cape Cod Mall whose bellies cast ecliptic shadows over their 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 twenty myself.) The Scottish born guitar icon took his Black lacquered SG to . . . . oh wait- this is about alcoholism, not a rock show review. Sorry.
I had to explain to Charlie what I know about alcoholism – what it’s ‘symptoms’ are and how they manifest. We know from experience that the best way to do that is conversationally – the one-drunk-talking-to another method. One drunk talking to a roomful of drunks is not how it is done. – one drunk writing to a blog readership is not either.
It has been and is always 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 i in this deal tells me it is their experience too. '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-founder 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. I have found that taking a tutorial position is OK in most instances as long as the reception room door has been unlocked first – and it is just done for the technical explanations of the experiences described before it. 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”.
Guess what happened? He couldn’t match my experiences. Not in the slightest. Charlie drank for the liquid courage to smoke crack. He never continued drinking when he got the crack. The prognosis? Charlie is not an alcoholic.
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 of forty grand for a month. If you have ever witnessed a sales close during the admittance process of a treatment center you would instantly recognize and be able to make the comparison with it 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 apparnetly 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 to charlatans like these -whether they are one or not. It 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 bu t you a re 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 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 but frankly you may never actually take delivery - and even if you do it the car might just disappear one day. If it does,there are no refunds."
You would have to be puh. . . ritty desperate to engage in the transaction, after that disclaimer, wouldn't you? a I believe that is call 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.
But I am not twelve stepping Charlie to fuck him out of his money - to get approval from others because I have "a another guy" or even approval from my own ego for the same reason.
Charlie figures then that he is not a real alcoholic - not the kind described in the Big Book. "Alcoholics Anonymous" and for whom the Twelve Step Program was designed and painstakingly delineated in that book --- but he 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 they 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. Now I guess we'll have to get together again to make sure Charlie know 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
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 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
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 a
nd 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.
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.
I so love when a new prospect for the Twelve Steps and AA Fellowship of the Spirit shows up.
the guy that spared him a lifelong commitment to AA meetings when it wasn't necessary.
