Reading versus studying the AA Big Book

      I have often thought of myself as a smart man, quite brilliant at one point before sobriety; hopefully a bit humbler now. Without higher education, in just a couple of years I was playing jazz with the best of them in LA. After being discouraged by the music scene in LA went back to Silicon Valley where I now enjoy pestering by any number of head hunters lining up to put me in a myriad of high paying positions as a Systems Engineer. The truth is though, with all my so called intelligence in the booze area I was quite stupid to put it mildly. In the getting along with fellow human beings and attaining some humility department I fell short as well. I had read the Big Book 3 times and attended many hundreds of AA meetings for 7 years before I became a student of the Big Book. I am well over 17 years sober now. I found out something really humbling through careful study of the Alcoholics Anonymous book and that was this. That with all my brilliance and superior intellect I really hadn’t comprehended all the main points made in the first 164 pages.

    I actually was pushed into studying it by my third sponsor who’s first book at age 34 was the Big Book. (he was illiterate before sobriety) I found out by the help of more studious and patient men than I, ( Joe and Charlie to be exact) that the first 164 pages of the big book are a text and meant to be carefully studied. The preface of the book illustrates this point.

A mistake in thinking I made was to classify myself unique, a cut above, an exception. I found that this trait is often shared by many an alcoholic. This feeling of being alone but superior than the rest and at the same time a victim of life. Over the years I have found something out about myself as well. That is that even with all the Big Book studying I had done it’s always good to refer back to it as my disease will often push back those good points and I’ll find myself getting out of sync with the principals. Refering back often keeps me on track. Writing blogs about it helps too.

Trying to control drinking as an alcoholic; the day may never arrive.

I must say that something I found out was that by virtue of being alcoholic I could never regain control of my drinking. If you are really alcoholic you may find that is the case for you. I’m going to paste in and excerpt from the AA Big Book, all of which I have taken to heart and look to as more or less Gospel for alcoholics. Here is Alcoholics Anonymous take on an alcoholics' attempt to control drinking.

quote:
We know that no real alcoholic ever recovers control. All of us felt at times that we were regaining control, but such intervals—usually brief—were inevitably followed by still less control, which led in time to pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization. We are convinced to a man that alcoholics of our type are in the grip of a progressive illness. Over any considerable period we get worse, never better.
We are like men who have lost their legs; they never grow new ones. Neither does there appear to be any kind of treatment which will make alcoholics of our kind like other men. We have tried every imaginable remedy. In some instances there has been brief recovery, followed always by a still worse relapse. Physicians who are familiar with alcoholism agree there is no such thing a making a normal drinker out of an alcoholic. Science may one day accomplish this, but it hasn’t done so yet.
Despite all we can say, many who are real alcoholics are not going to believe they are in that class. By every form of self-deception and experimentation, they will try to prove themselves exceptions to the rule, therefore nonalcoholic. If anyone who is showing inability to control his drinking can do the right-about-face and drink like a gentleman, our hats are off to him. Heaven knows, we have tried hard enough and long enough to drink like other people!

Readers, I certainly hope you may control your drinking, but if you are really alcoholic that day may never arrive.

You may not like what I’m about to say, but here it goes. If you are really alcoholic and your therapist is telling you he feels you “have it under control” he is not at all well informed about alcoholism and doing you a great disservice. Alcoholics by virtue of being alcoholic will never ever regain control of alcohol with the exception of nothing short of a major miracle. Not even AA promises control of drinking to alcoholics, only abstinence through spiritual means.