This year I will be 75 years old and sober half my life in AA. I have outlived five of my six sponsors and the one still around, a wonderful woman with nearly 50 years of sobriety who heard my first 5th Step 36 years ago is unfortunately no longer available as a sponsor.
So, what do I do as the years go on? How do I continue farther along the Road of Happy Destiny?
Alcoholism is progressive, but so is recovery when I focus on it.
I was born into beautiful circumstances in San Francisco, California a month after the first edition of the book Alcoholics Anonymous was published, grew up in a house with a bar room attached to a room we called ‘the Marine Room’ overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge and outer bay, was a success throughout my school years, and was not attracted to alcohol.
There were no alcoholics in my immediate family. Alcoholics were ‘skid-row’ bums who lived South of Market at Third and Howard near the Southern Pacific railroad station.
When I crash-landed into AA at a noon-time meeting near the White House in Washington, D.C. on Pearl Harbor Day (December 7th) 1976 at age 37 and took my last drink the next day, I began to learn a lot of things which my upbringing had left me completely blind to.
I did not identify with the Big Book which was handed me at my third meeting because the men who wrote it were ‘old men’. I was young and got sober in the ‘young people’s circuit’ in Washington, D.C. I later learned that Bill Wilson was only a year older than me when he took his last drink and 41 when he was asked to start drafting the yet-to-be-named book, Alcoholics Anonymous, one chapter at a time.
I did not identify with Dr. Silkworth’s “restless, irritable, and discontented” in “The Doctor’s Opinion” in the Big Book, because I had had such a great start to life. Later in sobriety, as the view from the Road of Happy Destiny got higher and wider, I saw that I was born “restless, irritable, and discontented”, but covered it over with hyperactivity that led to early success. I was the top graduate of the top Catholic (Jesuit) high school in San Francisco in 1957, but felt alone and empty inside. Something was missing and it would take 13 years of drinking, from age 24 to 37, to find out that alcohol was not the solution.
I recovered from alcohol in my first year in sobriety, pursued a quite successful international corporate Human Resources career and was able to retire early, took up long distance running and went on to run 200 road races including 15 marathons, learned four other languages, became a Cambridge-certified English language trainer for adults which paid less than the corporate world but was more spiritually and emotionally rewarding, and finally succeeded in marriage. Today, I continue to be invited to teach and translate for a major international humanitarian organization based in Brussels and recently received citation in two books and a documentary.
I credit my success outside of AA to my continual attempt to use all of the program…recovery, unity and service…the chapters on the Steps and Traditions in the Twelve and Twelve, AA’s first Conference Approved book…all of AA’s books…talking these days separately for 30 minutes a week on Skype with a bunch of guys who use me as a sponsor… regular participation in home groups (today I have two: a face to face group, the Maastricht International Group and an online group, the First164yp Group)…in all of my affairs.
I am recovered from alcohol, but continue to recover from alcoholism, that disease well described by Dr. Silkworth. Medical research in the past thirty years has confirmed Dr. Silkworth’s analysis. Here is one summary of that research:
“A certain number of individuals (8 to 10%) are born with a deficiency in the production of their neurotransmitters inside the limbic system of the brain associated with some other abnormalities, e.g. Dopamine D2 receptor.
The result of these deficiencies is a less stable mood, stronger emotions, and a greater capacity to use alcohol to ‘settle the nerves’ than other people.
These individuals can temporarily correct these deficiencies by consumption of alcohol which compensates for the abnormalities. However, because of the limbic system’s neuro-adaptation mechanisms, physical deficiency in the neurotransmitters increases with alcohol consumption over time and alcohol becomes less and less effective.”
Alcohol did not cause my alcoholism. I have learned that in my case, I inherited alcoholism from my mother’s German-born father who died alone in Montana when I was 18, but who she told me had died before I was born. He was a violent alcoholic at times and the family abandoned him 37 years before he died. That’s what happens to some alcoholics. They are considered dead by their family long before they die. I also inherited alcoholism from my father’s side, my Irish side. His brother who worked for the California State Alcoholic Beverage Control Board was a maintenance alcoholic. He always had alcohol in him, it turned out, was never violent, but died of bleeding ulcers caused by too much alcohol consumption and the results of a single-car accident (he ‘fell asleep’ they said then…’passed out’ we say now…at the wheel and hit a tree).
I have also come to believe what Bill Wilson learned from a lot of non-alcoholics (Dr. Silkworth, psychologist William James, Dr. Carl Jung, Fr. Ed Dowling, S.J., Rev. Sam Shoemaker, for example) that the only solution for alcoholism is spiritual.
I have the disease of alcoholism and need daily doses of spiritual medicine, just as one of my friends in the program who inherited diabetes needs his daily injections of insulin.
Most people can safely drink. I am one of the 10% to 20% who can’t. That’s no big deal. That’s as natural as my being right-handed and not left handed. Most people do not understand us or our disease because there is no physical test for alcoholism. We look like anyone else. The only test for alcoholism is how we behave when we drink.
So, how do I progress farther along the Road of Happy Destiny at this point of my life and sobriety?
My disease of alcoholism is a disease of isolation. I am a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator certified extrovert, but feel alone in a crowd. I have a bottomless black pit of loneliness and abandonment within me. I can identify with alcoholics who prefer to hide in their emotional bunker with steel-reinforced concrete walls because my preferred activity at the end of my drinking was to hunker down in the basement where nobody would bother me.
The antidote to my alcoholism is to reverse that isolation with all of the tools of AA. At 75, I chair an online voice and voice/video group which was started five years ago as a young people’s meeting. We have five meetings a week on Skype and WebEx and participants from throughout Europe, Great Britain and Ireland. There are frequently as many as 25 participants in the Monday night meeting I host on Skype, the maximum for free Skype, and they call in from as far north as Finland, as far south as South Africa, as far east as India, and as far west as Mexico and California. Impressive international recovery in AA on a weekly basis.
I also learn a lot from the guys who use me as a sponsor. Most of them read through one chapter at a time of any of AA’s books with me. I ask them to tell me three things that struck them in the chapter and I share with them three things that struck me. We are equals, just as Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith were. There are no gurus in AA. We can learn from anyone. The Quakers say that. They say that the divine is in everyone, you don’t have to believe in anything, and everyone has something to share. Part of Lois Wilson’s education was in the Quakers.
So, today, just as the original members did, I draw spiritual sustenance from inside and outside the program on a daily basis. What came to be called Alcoholics Anonymous in 1939 started as Oxford Group meetings in private homes in Akron and at Rev. Sam Shoemaker’s Calvary Episcopal Church in New York. The Oxford Group was a religious movement popular in the United States and Europe in the early 20th century. Members of the Oxford Group practiced a formula of self-improvement by performing self-inventory, admitting wrongs, making amends, using prayer and meditation, and carrying the message to others.
Thanks to the representative democracy that the founding members, including non-alcoholic trustees such as Bernard Smith, left us, AA continues to develop and I want to be part of it. I have just served my second of three years as a Delegate to the General Service Conference in York. Outside of AA, I draw great spiritual sustenance from the humanitarian workers I teach who put their lives at risk to directly deliver medical and living aid to the most needy in our world. Having read non-alcoholic authors such as William James and Emmet Fox who influenced early AA members, I continue to read people who are publishing today farther along humanity’s spiritual road. One example is the recently published Maß und Zeit (Moderation and Time) by Munich psychiatrist Wilhelm Schmid-Bode. Bill Wilson wrote repeatedly that we don’t have all the answers and that we should have the humility to be open to developments that might help us from those in the caring professions.
When I was at my lowest emotional point in university wandering around wondering what the purpose of life was, I was fortunate to be asked to do my senior thesis on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. He was a paleontologist who came to believe that humanity is headed toward a divine spiritual togetherness. Later I was influenced by a motivational speaker with the improbable name of Earl Nightingale. His message? “We become what we think.” Life is a self-fulfilling prophecy, it becomes what we think, we become who we think we are. That helped me stay sober in my first year when I went around saying to myself, “I am someone who doesn’t drink.” A year later, I quit smoking the same way.
Today, I begin each day with fresh-brewed espresso that I bring to the bedroom for my wife, Kate, and me to sip, reading of the Daily Reflections, then reading of some recently-published positive spiritual text that reminds me that we each and everyone have a divine spark in us and my purpose is simply to show up and learn how I can use my talents, skills, and motivation in service to others that day.
I try to pursue what Bill wrote on AA’s 30th anniversary in 1965: “What can we still do that may multiply our assets and decrease our liabilities?” from “The Language of the Heart” © 1988, page 331. I recently did my second 5th Step, this time with someone with six years of sobriety to show him how it can be done. At nineteen years of sobriety, I threw away the Fourth Step that I had used to do my first 5th Step because I was no longer the person in that Fourth Step written when I had a year and a half of sobriety. The program had completely changed me. I wrote this second Fourth Step based on behavioral questions intended to elicit my assets and liabilities, and have offered these questions in workshops I have been invited to give at conventions the past few years. I also continue to be invited to give workshops to college students in Belgium on “Career Considerations” and “Keys to Success”. My message today inside and outside of AA is the same: seek to continually discover how we can use our inherited talents, learned skills, and innate motivation in service to others in thanks for all that we have freely received. Life is learning. Enjoy the journey.
Thank you for your sobriety.
Continued success.
Dan F.
Verviers, Belgium
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