Clancy I. from Venice, CA at Santa Ana, CA – “Disease of Perception”

(0:00 – 0:18)
I am the last speaker of a very distinguished panel of authorities in the field of
alcoholism. I don’t know if you’re familiar with carnival procedures. I once was in one of
my incarnations.
(0:20 – 0:39)
There are three aspects to a carnival presentation. One, the guy comes out, someone
called a barker. And he, with pretty girls or music or something, talks.
(0:39 – 0:54)
He’s a talker. And he talks people to in front of the stand and he entertains them and so
on. Then, when they get a bunch of boobs standing there, they do what’s called turning
the tip.
(0:54 – 0:59)
That is where they do something to make them buy that ticket. Here, get that ticket.
Wonderful things inside.
(1:00 – 1:03)
Don’t miss it. Now, now, right now. Oh, good.
(1:04 – 1:27)
And when they get all done with that and the show is over, they want to get rid of these
boobs so they can make room for the next crowd. And they have some particularly turnoff guys do what is known as the blow-off, where you get rid of them. My job in this
series is your blow-off man.
(1:33 – 1:51)
Now, hopefully when I’m done, you’ll have had enough. But in looking over the program
for this series, there have been a very, very, I’ve known a number of those people. Some
of you do not know, but they’re bona fide, certainly are impressive.
(1:53 – 2:21)
And I have known some of them with a great deal of admiration. Dr. Persh, for example,
who I’ve always felt was one of the very few non-alcoholic professional people who really
understood alcoholism at a visceral level and can talk about it knowledgeably. And when
he can’t talk about it, he sends people where they can be talked to about it
knowledgeably.
(2:25 – 2:55)
But if information on the subject were sufficient, we would not have the vast problem of
alcoholism. Because in the last number of years, there’s been a great deal of information
made available and disseminated. If that amount of information were made available on
cancer, cancer patients would flock to get the data, or friends of cancer patients, or
relatives of cancer patients.
(2:55 – 3:29)
If that amount of information was made on diabetes even, there may be that much on
diabetes, but if people with diabetics in their family would rush to find out about it. But
the peculiar aspect of alcoholism, it is one of the borderline or negative illnesses in which
your mind may tell you it is a physiologically conditioned illness, but your deep heart
said, no, it isn’t. It’s people who don’t care.
(3:30 – 3:35)
It’s people who don’t give a damn. And you can think all you want. And this happens to
people who have it.
(3:36 – 3:57)
So it certainly must happen to people who surround people who have it. And that’s why
the dismaying, lethal statistics in this field continue to go, continue to diminish
somewhat over the years, but not so much. It’s an amazing thing.
(3:58 – 4:16)
Most of you, I’m sure, are familiar with some of the self-help groups, perhaps. Some of
you are familiar with AA or some of the others. I know that that is the posture of the
National Council on Alcoholism, to say there are a number of self-help groups, and it’s
true that the National Council is connected with none of them formally.
(4:17 – 4:50)
But I used to do, many years ago, a good degree of public information speaking for the
Los Angeles Council on Alcoholism, years ago. And whenever we went out, it was
necessary for the moderator, we talked all over other places, for the moderator to say,
now we have a representative here of one of the ways to stay sober. And there are many
other ways to stay sober, but we have a representative here from one of the ways.
(4:51 – 5:06)
The moderator must say that. And I went out about ten times like that, or maybe more,
and I finally… I’m like a guy on a comic strip. One day I was driving down the road and a
cloud formed over my head, and a light bulb lit in it.
(5:07 – 5:30)
And it said, Idea. The next time they asked me, I said, I feel that I’m giving a one-sided
picture to the recovery program from alcoholism. All these poor people are overhearing
from is one of the ways to stay sober.
(5:31 – 5:47)
Next time, why don’t you bring representatives from all the ways to stay sober, and we
can all talk. And when you get them together, let me know. Somehow or other, I never
got called back.
(5:50 – 6:00)
But that’s not putting anything down. I know that that is necessary, because it is true.
There are people… There are people who are sober in other disciplines or self-help than
AA.
(6:01 – 6:14)
It’s just sometimes hard to locate them. And I don’t mean that derogatorily. I just mean
that… I’m just implying derogatory… derogatory… I’m not really saying it is.
(6:15 – 7:04)
But the problem… What’s amazing is that… And it has been said here, I’m sure, by every
speaker who spoke here, that the great problem in alcoholism is lack of knowledge of
what it really is, and with that lack of knowledge, the denial of the alcoholic to accept his
own involvement in it, and the inability to treat people who don’t feel they need to be
treated. It really is… And the puzzlement of families who have one of them… And
everybody knows they’re one of them, except them. And it really is a baffling thing.
(7:05 – 7:22)
It’s kind of funny for a while, but it isn’t funny after a while. Well, I’m in a position
probably hardly anybody in this room is in tonight or today. I have the experience almost
every day of my life of seeing alcoholics die.
(7:23 – 7:39)
Probably most of you don’t have that opportunity. I have the opportunity intermittently
of seeing cases of alcoholic insanity. Now, I’ve always thought, or had thought for years,
that alcoholic insanity was measured by people who act crazy.
(7:41 – 7:50)
Now, if they’re someone who’s gone too far, they have alcoholic insanity. But that isn’t
really alcoholic insanity. That might be borderline psychoneurotic behavior.
(7:52 – 8:02)
Alcoholic insanity is something different. You know, they say that alcoholism is the
second greatest cause of insanity. And you just imagine someone acting, running
through halls, acting silly.
(8:03 – 8:20)
But that isn’t what it talks about at all. Alcoholic insanity is when sufficient alcohol is put
in the bloodstream, and it varies from individual to individual, to desiccate enough brain
cells so that you’re no longer able to function. Alcoholic insanity is just like advanced
syphilis.
(8:21 – 8:36)
When enough brain cells are gone, you don’t go around acting funny. As a rule, you wind
up on the porch, where someone comes along and changes your diapers, and feeds you
three times a day, and takes you to bed and back. And once that happens, you never
recover.
(8:39 – 8:55)
Alcoholic insanity is a terminal thing, because anything that affects brain cells is a
terminal thing, because brain cells do not reconstitute themselves. There’s no
regeneration in brain cells. It’s really singularly unfair to alcoholics, I’ve always felt.
(8:56 – 9:08)
The liver and the brain are two of the major organs in the whole body that do not
regenerate new cells. And that’s what alcohol hits, the brain and the liver. Some days
you just can’t make it at all.
(9:08 – 9:16)
It’s just everything you touch goes bad. But alcoholic insanity is a dreadful thing.
Watching people die from alcoholism is a dreadful thing.
(9:17 – 9:42)
You think of people dying from alcoholism, and the way they’re listed, of course, if
they’re dead, as we find them in the alley behind their building in the morning, I suppose
that could be considered a death from alcoholism, although sometimes they call it
exposure. But I see many deaths of alcoholism, but I don’t assume they list as a death
from alcoholism. A man who’s no longer able to walk and topples forward in front of a
bus, and the bus runs over his head.
(9:43 – 9:59)
And it wouldn’t be listed as a death of alcoholism, but it certainly is. But we see more
and more on Skid Row now, that never was there before, because of the different
character of the population. More and more now.
(9:59 – 10:12)
It’s really sad to watch two old broken people having a knife fight, and one goes down
and comes clutching in, and his stomach is cut out. Now, you say, that isn’t really a
death from alcoholism. But if you say it is a death from alcoholism.
(10:14 – 10:23)
But if you are like me, you might think, well, that’s Skid Row. Sure, they’re dying on Skid
Row. But I think the figures are something defective.
(10:24 – 10:57)
Those deaths on Skid Row, all over the world, all over the country, are maybe 3% of the
deaths from alcoholism, or less. That leaves 97% or more in places like Santa Ana and
Anaheim and Los Angeles and Minneapolis and Indianapolis and Atlanta, and people like
you and me, who look almost indistinguishable from you and me, and who you would
think would not want to die a miserable death. It isn’t even a quick death.
(10:58 – 11:20)
That’s one of the great recruiting lines of all of a sudden was absolutely innocuous,
where they say, well, if you’re an alcoholic, for you to drink is to die. God, I hope so. It
would be much more realistic to say, for you to drink is to ensure continued misery and
pain and anxiety.
(11:20 – 11:35)
Not from the drinking, but from the emotions that go with it. Because nearly all of the
medical research that has gone into alcoholism, they found out all sorts of things. You
can get all sorts of data.
(11:36 – 12:08)
Over the years, over the years, medicine has made some rather significant advances.
You know, for many years, medicine had no training in alcoholism, so it’s not surprising
that they didn’t know what the hell they were talking about when they talked about it,
unless they chose to look into it. Up until maybe 25 years ago, in medical school, you got
the same amount of training in alcoholism that you got in dengue fever.
(12:09 – 12:19)
One half of one day. And there hadn’t been a case of dengue fever in 50 years. And you
get, you know, just, this is alcoholism, this is what we think happens, and on and on.
(12:20 – 12:56)
And so doctors were significantly ill-trained to deal with alcoholics, because alcoholics, if
anybody in the world, looks like just another bunch of self-indulgent neurotic pukes, it’s
alcoholics. Which is why traditionally, for many years, the medical treatment of
alcoholics was, here, take these, as needed, and good luck. Because the doctor
traditionally wanted to get these goops out of his office so he could take care of people
who are really sick, you know.
(12:57 – 13:09)
How do you deal with someone who staggers innocent? They looked at me funny on the
bus this morning. Here, take that. I’ve got a lady in here with a ruptured spleen.
(13:09 – 13:55)
Who cares about how they looked at you, you dummy. And the first major study of
alcoholism ever made, it wasn’t even made of alcohol, it was made of alcoholics, was in
the late 1950s, at Yale University, Yale Institute of Alcoholic Studies, and they studied
alcoholics to, they were going to make a breakthrough and try to find out what is it with
these goofs, you know. And they had alcoholics of all backgrounds and all socioeconomic
profiles, they gave them psychological profile tests, they tested them against controlled
groups of people they knew to be non-alcoholic, like they’d give them each two drinks
and try to measure their reaction to see if they could identify this and on and on.
(13:56 – 14:07)
I’ve often thought I would, I’m certainly glad that I, as a practicing alcoholic in those
days, was not involved in that test. That must have really been, you know. Well, here’s a
drink, drink it.
(14:07 – 14:12)
Here’s another drink, drink it. Okay. Well, that’s all of our tests for today.
(14:14 – 14:22)
Fair enough. Maybe it’s painful. Maybe all of your tests, Jim, but it’s not all I want.
(14:23 – 14:40)
You want to see a real reaction, give me that goddamn bottle. But they examined all
sorts of people and they never really found anything that they all had in common except
two things. They found two relatively similar things.
(14:40 – 15:10)
One, for reasons they could not identify nor measure, nor can people really measure it
today, alcoholics react differently to a given amount of alcoholics than non-alcoholics.
Doesn’t mean they go crazy or they act weird, they just seem to have an overreaction
somehow, which later came down to be, they call it a personality change, perhaps. But
something literally, you can watch an alteration.
(15:10 – 15:35)
It’s like, you know, it’s not surprising that Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde, suffered from alcoholism. I’m sure he was, much of that was
autobiographical, just watching that personality change. Then, the other thing that they
all had in common was they all ranked very, very high in perfectionism on the
psychological profile.
(15:36 – 15:44)
They were all perfectionists. Although none of them, I’m sure, would have identified
themselves as perfectionists. I never would have identified myself as a perfectionist.
(15:45 – 16:08)
I do have a certain flair for, if it isn’t perfect, screw it, but I mean, I am not a
perfectionist. And there was one other aspect which they did not measure, and I’m sure
that if they would have measured it, they would have gotten unanimity on this subject.
I’m sure that if they could have put a, found some way to insert the question or the
information.
(16:09 – 16:24)
Do you, deep in your heart, believe your case is different? You bet. You bet. And those
are the characteristics.
(16:25 – 16:54)
And then alcoholism became kind of a, with Yale, that study, it became a little more
socially acceptable. And I remember, I became sober in 1958. Our moderator this
morning made it sound as though I were very gracious in going, some years ago leaving
a, I left a marketing job in Beverly Hills about ten years ago to go down and run the
Midnight Mission, which is a different situation.
(16:55 – 17:12)
And when you get introductions, as our kindly Muriel did this morning, it makes it sound
that I were a dedicated, wonderful man. It isn’t quite that way. One of the reasons I went
back there is because in 1958, I was 86 out of the Midnight Mission, and I swore I’d go
back and get him someday.
(17:14 – 17:28)
And, uh, so I’m down there looking for that guy assiduously. He hasn’t showed up yet,
but he’ll be along. But I got sober in 1958 through the, after that.
(17:28 – 17:42)
And by the early 1960s, I was working again as a writer. For a long time, I just worked in
non-writing jobs, such as furniture moving and washing dishes. But I finally held a job,
and I was working in medical corporation.
(17:42 – 18:06)
I remember in 1961 or 62, seeing the first full-page ad, I recall, ever being in a medical
journal about the treatment of alcoholics. And it said, uh, to the effect, you know,
doctors, now you can treat alcoholics without side effects, without negative effects. You
can do something with them.
(18:07 – 18:31)
You can reduce the anxiety and conflict and keep them smoking. And I remember
thinking, isn’t that, isn’t that just the way it goes? I bought that damn alcohol for years
and almost killed me. Wound up on Skid Row, and if I could have held out three more
years, and it even had a lovely name.
(18:31 – 18:38)
It had a name that indicated freedom. It was called, this new product called Librium. And
I thought, oh, if I only could have had them.
(18:39 – 19:18)
Librium. And there was a, I don’t know, sometime after that I began to see the first
Librium survivors and… I don’t drink as much anymore, but I don’t get up out of my chair
much anymore. And Valium and so on, and there were still in the mid-1960s, the late
1960s, agencies who could not, and there still are, but much cut down, who felt that the
treatment of alcoholics is somehow withdrawing them.
(19:19 – 19:37)
Or that they are basically people who don’t want to drink, but they just don’t realize what
drinking does to them. In the late 1960s, there was a lot of press given to a doctor in
New Mexico who had found a breakthrough to psychologically keep alcoholics from
drinking. And that was, he took movies of them when they were drunk.
(19:39 – 20:09)
And then, the next time they felt like drinking, they’d go by his office, and he’d run a Rio
for them, and say, oh man, I don’t want to be like that, oh, thank you doctor. And it really
was tremendous, got a lot of ink around the country, except unfortunately, of course, it
got to a point where people didn’t feel like going to a show before they had a drink. You
would think intellectually that they’d want to not drink, but that’s the whole problem.
(20:10 – 20:36)
And it’s hard to understand that. Near the end of that decade, beginning of the last
decade, they had a great treatment out in Redlands, at a big hospital, and that got two
full pages, a page with a run over for another page. And they, this is a religious hospital,
very fine people, but they were going to find a way once and for all to get these goofy
alcoholics to be shaped up.
(20:37 – 20:54)
And they installed one of their wards and a bar. And these poor goofs would come in
there, and they thought they were going to a religious hospital, there was going to be
some sort of harangue from them. And they walk in, here’s a bar.
(20:56 – 21:12)
And some goof back there, you want a little drink for them? I’m sure their first sip was
very tentative. What is this? J&B Scotch. Say, you religious people know how to treat
alcoholics.
(21:16 – 21:29)
And it really was a great cure, I’ll tell ya. Sorry I missed that one, too. In fact, I always
thought the booze was so good, they had the glasses wired right to the bar so they
couldn’t take them back to their sleeping room.
(21:29 – 21:43)
And these guys would get along fine, have a few drinks and do good. After a few days,
they’d come in and have their drink in the morning, and they’d shoot an electric wire
through that, or electric shock through that wire. So the guy just, happy days.
(21:47 – 21:57)
No more ice next time, Fred. And they’d give them a drink without the electric shock.
That’s more like it.
(22:00 – 22:19)
And after a while of this, you can imagine, you get just like a fawn in the forest fire. Now
finally these guys would come in and say, you want a little drink? No, I don’t think so.
And another cure went on the book.
(22:20 – 22:48)
Funny now, but they really thought they had cured them. And they did a follow-up
sometime later, of course, and discovered that most of them hadn’t got by the first place
and had glasses without wires. There was a big hospital in Seattle in the early 1970s,
who I don’t think had a hobby of seeing cures, to see what I missed.
(22:48 – 23:01)
That’s why I look into these things. But they had a big hospital, and they were, and
they’re still there, but with a different format. Their theory was that alcoholism is caused
by an enzyme imbalance.
(23:02 – 23:19)
And if you can readjust your enzymes, you should be able to drink socially. This craving
and so on will go away. And they had a, the director of their program, gave public
addresses in which the most, he was a known bad alcoholic.
(23:21 – 23:35)
And he was now sober, apparently. And he’d give public addresses, and he had a
staggering presentation. He’d say, some of these fanatic self-help groups tell you that
abstinence is required.
(23:36 – 23:48)
It may be for them, but not necessarily. With the program we have, something different
can be done. And at the end of his talk, he would pick up a cocktail and drink it.
(23:52 – 24:18)
Now, something like that, that’s what you call your basic staggering presentation. A lot
of people drifted by a 7-Eleven to see if they had any enzymes. And that was a very
impressive, except unfortunately, the director one day, his enzymes kicked up, I guess,
and he wound up in a padded cell at that time.
(24:20 – 24:46)
So they begrudgingly moved to abstinence as their product from then on. In the 1970s,
most of you remember, I remember very well, our Santa Monica think tank coming out
with a concept, the Rand Report, alcoholics can drink again. And that, of course, there
was a little disclaimer in small type, unless they are the ones who can’t.
(24:48 – 25:01)
But, but they said alcoholics can drink again. And they had evidence, they had hundreds
of people who were out there drinking successfully. They didn’t issue the report until
they did.
(25:02 – 25:26)
It wasn’t until relatively recently that a massive follow-up was made and found that they
were, nearly all of them dead or dying. But, you know, I often wondered how could they,
what kind of follow-up did they use? Why didn’t they see this? And I found out later from
a guy at the Rand Corporation how they made the mistake, because they didn’t
understand the alcoholics either. Do you know how they did their follow-up? They called
them up.
(25:29 – 25:37)
Yeah. In my worst day, I could pass that test. Still doing fine.
(25:37 – 25:53)
Yeah. It really is a… And it goes on and on. And, for instance, that deal in the hospital,
and myself in the hospital.
(25:53 – 26:20)
It all goes back, in a sense, to things that were pretty well set aside 50 years ago. The
aversion treatment, but the O’Keeley cure, which was, became a laughing stock after a
while. Because the knowledge of… It’s… I can project myself to that situation and just
understand the bafflement.
(26:20 – 26:41)
Again, if anyone had anything that was destroying them, and you got them away from it,
you would be absolutely baffled if they went voluntarily back to it. You know. I know that
this last year, a year ago about, a guy I know very well, a lawyer, had advanced
emphysema.
(26:43 – 26:53)
And he was dying from it, almost. He’d have to go to the hospital every once in a while
to have oxygen stuck in his nose and down. And he’d come out and go home and fire up
a cigarette.
(26:54 – 27:13)
And I said, Joe, what the hell is this? How can you smoke when your lungs are… And it
was just… It was like watching a man commit suicide. And as I was going home tonight, I
thought to myself, that’s just the way it’s got to be. That’s just the way it had to be for
my family or people who love me.
(27:13 – 27:30)
Watching me, after being laboriously withdrawn, be hospitalized, be strapped down, be
put into an insane asylum. All these things, to come back and one day hit it again. And
never know… I couldn’t explain to them because I didn’t know why.
(27:30 – 27:48)
I knew why going in, but by the time they asked me, I didn’t know what it was. And that’s
what makes this problem so baffling. And that’s what makes it so difficult to understand.
(27:49 – 28:26)
Because it really gets down to this. How can anyone understand it when the person who
has it won’t accept it? How can anyone else accept it? And that’s why alcoholism has, at
the current stage of understanding, pretty much universally among anyone who knows
anything about it in the medical profession or psychiatric profession, not entirely, but
among the people who know anything about it, they pretty well agree that abstinence is
the only answer. There is no control left.
(28:26 – 28:50)
Nobody knows why. There may be control for a little while, but as far as one of these
self-help therapies say, there seem to be brief recoveries followed always by still worse
relapse. And that’s what that’s what makes alcoholism smack of moral degeneracy.
(28:51 – 29:19)
And that’s what makes alcoholism smack of weak-willed, pathetic people who should
know better. And that’s why a real case, I suppose, can be made to call alcoholism a
disease of perception. A disease of perception.
(29:20 – 29:43)
Not not how anyone views their drinking, but a much more much more complex. The one
aspect that makes alcoholism cunning and baffling and powerful is that neither the
treater or the treaty usually understands what’s wrong. Really.
(29:44 – 29:56)
They keep thinking that it’s the alcohol. And if I can get the patient off alcohol, I’ll be all
right. And look what alcohol is doing to you.
(29:57 – 30:50)
Why do you keep using it? And all all of the research, all of the investigations into the
metabolic differences of the alcoholic body, and all of the differences of the
malfunctioning of the endocrine or ductless glands or whatever the hell it might be, or in
reverse diabetes, hyperinsulinism, all the theories that have gone on to try to describe
this, the only thing that they’re unable to measure is the perception of the alcoholic. And
the alcoholic doesn’t know it and they don’t know it. And that’s why formal clinical
treatment has almost always been non-effective in the treatment of alcoholics.
(30:52 – 31:30)
And so I want to, for a couple minutes this morning, discuss by an odd coincidence the
title of my talk I noticed in the program. Alcoholism, a disease of perception. The
probably the number one mistake in the treatment of alcoholism or in the identification
of alcoholism and I’m certainly not accusing people of treating alcoholism wrong I’m
talking about the identification by the alcoholic or by the non-alcoholic is as I said that
alcoholism is that we’re dealing with an alcohol problem.
(31:30 – 31:38)
It is not an alcohol problem. I would like to give you my opinion. I could give you only my
opinion.
(31:38 – 32:08)
I may secretly feel that I speak for the wisdom of the ages but I’m required to say this is
only my opinion. In my opinion the great problem I think it’s borne out is people thinking
they have an alcohol problem now if you have an alcohol problem the treatment for an
alcohol problem is relatively simple. You have the people not drink.
(32:09 – 32:14)
That’s all. That’s how you do it. You may charge them a lot for the data but that’s what it
is.
(32:15 – 32:24)
Don’t drink. But this is not an alcohol problem. I don’t believe alcoholics have an alcohol
problem.
(32:24 – 33:05)
Now that sounds upside down but I want to say this slowly and clearly and distinctly
because it sounds like heresy but I bet my life on it every day. If my problem is alcohol I
am not an alcoholic or conversely if I am an alcoholic my problem is not alcohol. Now
that sounds really crazy doesn’t it? But it really is literally true because if the problem is
alcohol the solution to it is not drinking and that solution has been found five thousand
years ago.
(33:06 – 33:31)
This is nothing that was stumbled on in research recently. If you have a problem with
alcohol you don’t drink alcohol. If you have a problem if you are allergic to orange juice
and every time you take a glass of orange juice it makes your nose fall off you know but
finally with an additional amount of help you come to the conclusion I am not going to
drink that orange juice.
(33:32 – 34:06)
You might give it one last shot just to be sure. I have lost my nose how do I smell? Pretty
bad you know. But if that’s the problem if it’s changed and people like me and I am sure
like many people like me have tried that again and again I have sworn off with and
without oath I’ll tell you probably the most important single swear off I ever made.
(34:06 – 58:11)
Once upon a time many years ago my little boy died when I was in the hospital when I
was in jail I was in jail not in the hospital and the judge released the judge he was in
there for drunken scuffling and I was an executive and he was his little casket was about
this big and I felt so remorseful and I carried his little casket and I said I’ll be his paulder I
don’t want anybody else touching his casket and I I set it down and I put my hand on it I
took a vow this will never happen again ever ever baby John if it ever happens to me I
hope I hope my arms wither and fall off and I had tears of absolute sincerity of my own I
would have given my life to keep that from happening and about 29 days later in
another city I was working the feelings of remorse and pain were so intense that I had to
have a few drinks to relax now you try to explain that to anyone and I remember my my
family saying how could you how could you after what’s happened to John how could you
get life and there’s no answer I have no answer I don’t know I knew why going in but I
didn’t remember why coming out and it goes on like that you have to withdraw from
alcohol is the answer no matter how you do it whether it’s done nicely in 30 days or do it
cold turkey on the floor of a jail the one thing is you get to withdraw but that’s how you
beat an alcohol problem now this funny deadly bewildering baffling frustrating thing
called alcoholism has one significant difference and that is this and it’s one that nobody
ever seems to recognize at the moment and that is this the difference between an
alcohol problem and alcoholism is that stopping drinking has no effect on alcoholism in
fact it begins to make it worse stopping drinking moves you across the line from some
degree of relief to unvarnished gray cold remorse filled anxiety filled reality and it gets
worse as you go along and that is the greatest evidence I know in my life that I was able
to deny but my problem is not alcohol I have these other problems real problems
problems I couldn’t describe problems that seem to me and apparently seem to
everybody else who ever had them but they all think they are unique in it somehow or
other I’m more sensitive than other people somehow or other I feel things too intensely
somehow or other I have anxieties that I somehow feel different somehow and I I don’t
want to feel different it isn’t a great feeling I feel lonely more than other people I feel and
the only way you have to measure how you feel compared to other people of course is
you look at them and you fall into the trap that every human being falls into sometimes
alcoholics fall into it a lot because you go into that trap when you’re feeling insecure and
that trap is when you begin comparing to see why you are different when you feel
different and you look around in a job situation a social situation amongst people you
know well and you get answers and the problem is the answer is always wrong but you
never know it and you have no way to compare it and the reason is because every
human being must and they always make these comparisons when they feel bad you
don’t ever compare when you feel good you compare when you feel bad and I never
realize I am comparing my insides against other people’s outsides I am comparing my
raw meat against defense mechanisms they’ve spent 30 years building to conceal their
raw meat and I can tell anyone here alcoholic or non-alcoholic when you make
comparisons when you feel bad I think it’s safe to tell you that you will never see anyone
who looks as sensitive as you feel you will never see anyone who looks as though they
have the secret anxieties that bother you you will never see anyone who looks as lonely
or frustrated as you feel sometimes and conversely as they look at you they will feel the
same these are comparatives when you are feeling negative the very tools I have used
to feel to overcome my feelings of difference have made me more alienated and I never
knew it because these are things there is no way to measure you know you can measure
alcohol but you can’t measure difficulties in perception when the highway patrol can stop
you and measure you for alcohol but they can’t take a drop of water in your ear and say
I’m going to run this through the scanner and see how much anxiety you got today walk
this white line and determine if you are feeling different kind of funny but it really isn’t
funny because it’s lethal that’s why nearly everybody who has alcoholism dies from it
one way or another slowly or quickly that’s why relatively few people really relatively few
people ever achieve reality very long and of those some of those go back because they
keep falling back into that same trap I no longer drink therefore I am alright and that is
the lethal error in that equation the curse of alcoholism is not that you can’t get sober if
getting sober was the answer detoxes would turn out winners hospitals would turn out
winners and they don’t detoxes don’t turn out winners in fact the classic American detox
is not either a hospital or a detoxification center the classic American detox for most
alcoholics get sober is a toilet works as effectively it’s a little less jarring a little more
jarring on your nerves but there are few problem drinkers who haven’t knelt in front of
the old porcelain altar in the morning and just gazed in those shimmering waters waiting
for an answer to surface down the surface you know and you even can say your morning
prayers you can say Oh God but the one thing that happens is you detox one of the
things that makes alcoholics a little bewildering I used to have the impression I used to
hear people real alcoholics talk about they had stayed drunk around the clock for 20
years now I think to myself that’s an alcoholic not a slick guy who’s had a series of bad
breaks and misunderstandings but I found out something else it is physically impossible
for a human body to stay intoxicated 14 straight days and nights in laboratory conditions
in laboratory conditions you certainly can’t in the real world so you always get sober and
the curse of alcoholism is sobriety and now that doesn’t make you an alcoholic
necessarily having an unpleasant reality but if one other factor is there it will be I think
probably the the study of this point that I want to make I’m running short of a little time
so I’m going to have a coffee break but what I was trying to do in this first few minutes
was establish establish how bewildering this thing is I think that to come to understand it
we would have to understand the perception of an alcoholic to understand what makes
an alcoholic an alcoholic and therefore to get some understanding of how it can be beat
it cannot be beat with withdrawal it cannot be beat with vows of chastity and obedience
it cannot be beat with swearing oaths it cannot be beat with anything it can be beat only
in one way and that way is impossible you have to change the world around an alcoholic
but there’s a way to do that and uh I will take that up in the next hour thank you I’m
acting alcoholically what is an alcoholic emotion is it something specific to alcoholics I
don’t think so I don’t think there’s such a thing as an alcoholic emotion again there have
been no emotions discovered new emotions in 5000 years when I get when I get
frustrated and crossed I get frustrated and crossed just the way that the pharaoh of
Egypt got frustrated and crossed different stimuli but it’s always the same emotion
alcoholic emotions are can also be I would suppose be described as highly sensitive
emotion or another word that is really just terrible I would prefer never to hear it
mentioned in my presence because it’s so true childish emotion childish emotion and it’s
almost impossible to evaluate them because they’re in a grown-up body with a grown-up
brain with grown-up abilities with grown-up skills with grown-up abilities to rationalize
and justify with grown-up everything and all of this at the intermittent beck and call of
childlike emotions overreactive emotions immature emotions to handle and overreact
badly to conflict when the alcoholic gets sober little by little the conflict comes back and
he begins to react and overreact he attempts to control it with his intellect to get things
in order he attempts to control these growing intense emotions but there’s one fact I
think that is unquestioned in the study of the human psyche and that is this from the
intense emotions and the intellect are in conflict the emotions will always win always win
sooner or later they will win the intellect gets tired and takes a walk and you can fight it
and fight it and fight it and so your reaction to them becomes real and that’s the only
way they can be reacted to given the nature of these things and pretty soon you get to a
point where life just begins to grey down you just get grey and tense and anxious and
you might be clenching your fist and people you’re making sacrifices for no longer seem
to appreciate it and on and on and on and one day you get to a point where it just seems
to be too damn much they joke about it sometimes they say why did you get drunk and
you know a man getting up in the morning under pressure hates to go there and face
them again everything is going to hell what he’s wanted all his life the dreams are
obviously now frayed and dirty and the hopes are being destroyed by unfeeling hands
you put on those clothes you put them on you lean over and just can’t stand up you’re
going to tie your shoe to go to work because the damn shoelace breaks and it just is one
thing but when you talk to the man later you say you were just getting back together
with your family and you had your job back why did you get drunk and the man thinks
well I broke my shoe string it sounds funny but it’s tragic because a lot of people will die
from little things like that just little things you cannot recreate human you cannot
recreate emotional pain you can talk about it but you can’t recreate it the human mind
has been blessed or cursed with something called dynamic memory in other words the
tendency to enhance pleasant memories and to diminish unpleasant memories that
helps people stay sane of course thank god nature has put a scab over it or you wouldn’t
have been able to bear it but also you cannot recreate what happened so there you are
and you get to a point where it’s untenable now even then that doesn’t make you an
alcoholic that is not exclusively alcoholic there are millions of people who get just like
this who are not alcoholic they are known medically as intense or acute neurotics they
still see reality psychotics don’t see reality correctly but they see reality correctly but
they are reacting to it badly and emotionally and things get obsessive and it just gets
terrible and unless something happens to help these people either diminish the conflict
or diminish their reaction to it some of them snap and they become what’s known as
psychotic and psychosis is when your brain ultra simply lowers a distorted glasses so you
see reality differently but at least it resolves the conflict for much of them now it’s a
funny thing alcoholics rarely ever become psychotic hardly ever cases of alcoholic
psychosis are just as rare as hen’s teeth why because when it gets that bad they will
drink alcohol now the question is why don’t these neurotics drink alcohol and relieve the
pressure and there comes the most interesting facet of alcoholism because they do and
it doesn’t remove the pressure that’s the difference between a neurotic and an alcoholic
an alcoholic gets a special effect from alcohol that most people don’t get that’s why their
drinking will not give them any relief an alcoholic he keeps every alcoholic and the
people around them keep seeing what alcohol is doing to you but by that time it’s way
down the line so operational aspect of an alcoholic is what alcohol does for him or her
and he doesn’t know it does anything unusual for him and nobody else does but he can
literally alter his perception of reality with alcohol he can alter I can literally alter my
relationship to my environment I can literally almost instantly make myself bigger and
more self contained and them smaller and less threatening now I didn’t know this was
doing this to me I don’t know where you’d ever find it out cause you know that’s an
inside thing and you just assume it does that for other people too and if they don’t want
to that means they don’t have the pressures you have that’s why drinkers wind up
running with drinkers nobody wants to be a drinker and wind up with some goof you
know stop after work and say you want a drink yeah thanks ok let’s have another one oh
no thanks I’m starting to feel it I want to be with people who understand a colorful
environment when I’m in a bar at 1130 at night and somebody says hey let’s go to
Tijuana I want to hear voices saying yeah yeah I don’t want to be around some little goof
that says why I have to be to work at nine what will I tell Phyllis tell Phyllis to keep you
home you sick little son of a bitch come on let’s go I want to be with colorful people I’ve
suffered enough from grayness it’s time to have a little color Jim there’s a lot of ways to
measure alcoholics it’s just kind of a joke way but it always strikes me as kind of funny
the non-alcoholic personality and I’ve seen people do this and it just baffles me theme at
parties cocktail parties years ago I guess I had a little too much Betty I think you better
drive home if I ever saw an alcoholic do that my heart would stop the correct answer for
me is give me that goddamn key I’ll do it I can walk I’m in charge now baby but alcohol
has a special effect for me and the only bad thing about that is I’ll tell you if you are an
alcoholic two martinis will make you feel better than six months of psychotherapy a
bottle of good wine or bad will be better than years of metaphysical insights I’ve tried it
both ways and I’ll tell you the I think probably the best example of that is when I was
about a year sober I had a little job working at a firm called Weinberg Advertising out in
West LA I was wrapping packages which was kind of a comedown for a man who had
been an award winning writer I didn’t have any front teeth either I thought I’d been
scarred in a fire somewhere but one of our accounts was something called Kamchatka
Vodka and for years and years you must have seen their boards it always says Vodka is
pronounced Kamchatka now they’ve changed in the last couple years but for years and
years but I was there when it was old that was 1959 and I thought I’m gonna let these
guys know that there’s an award winning copywriter back there they think I’m just a
package wrapper but why not let them know that I’m ready to make my move so one
day they were laying out this board artists and copywriters and I came by with my
packages and I said hey it’s none of my business but instead of that same slogan that
you’ve been using for ten years how about using something like Kamchatka Vodka so
there’s move better than all the other Vodka’s anywhere and they looked at me and I got
the same look of disdain and oh you goof and get out of here and one guy said if you
don’t like the way we do things why don’t you wrap packages in some other advertising
agency just move it along and I was just crazy I tried to give them an idea and because I
looked bad they wouldn’t listen to me and that night I was talking to my sponsor and I
tried to tell him this story shut up he explained try to be a man about it but I finally told
him this whole hideous story and he said can’t you ever understand I’ve been trying to
tell you this for a long time and those kind of situations they’re not putting you down
they don’t know what the hell you’re talking about to them Kamchatka vodka doesn’t go
boom to them Kamchatka vodka goes blah blah blah that’s why you’re in this damn
meeting and they’re not I always said yes but I thought about that many times you know
a lot of times alcoholics wish they were non-alcoholics they don’t want to be nonalcoholics they want to not get the bad stuff nothing changes but it looks different now if
it does that for you the one little negative thing happens the tools I have or have lost in
dealing with conflict the ability to process conflict and difficulty atrophy a little bit more
from non-use. What’s the sense of working out a painful situation for two weeks where I
can change it in two minutes? So, by the time alcohol is doing something to you, it’s way
down the line. By the time it’s doing something to you, sustained reality is just about
untenable, piece by piece.
(58:12 – 58:30)
The curse of alcoholism is that reality has become untenable, sustained reality. And you
can have every reason in the world and you can prove your reasons are right. As I say, I
watch men die and everyone can assure me they’re not really alcoholics.
(58:30 – 58:57)
They had real problems. So, it appears that the insoluble, unsolvable aspect of
alcoholism is that somehow the world has got to change for this guy to make it or this
girl to make it and you can’t change the world. So, there you are.
(58:57 – 59:19)
That particular combination of alcohol, the answer now becoming alcohol, the problem,
together with a reality that sooner or later is so full of sharp corners it’s unbearable, that
is called alcoholism. And the reason people die from it a lot of times is because they
confuse it with an alcohol problem. Alcohol.
(59:20 – 59:38)
That’s why very, very few people who work in the field of alcoholism understand it unless
they be alcoholic. That’s why many people who work in the field of alcoholism and teach
it well and do not take care of their own perceptions get drunk again. Sad fact, but true.
(59:40 – 59:59)
All the knowledge of the intellect doesn’t help when the emotions start to surge. You can
be the smartest or the dumbest. I watched a department head at Caltech and I watched
ditch diggers die for the same exact reason.
(1:00:01 – 1:00:35)
Now, that is why it is almost imperative that sooner or later the alcoholic gains
something besides knowledge of his illness because knowledge alone is not enough.
That is why for most alcoholics something in the, nearly all of, every of, I suppose,
something addition must be added. He must have something or some way to little by
little take some stride towards altering his perceptions of reality.
(1:00:36 – 1:00:45)
Now, you cannot alter your emotions by thinking. You can over a long period of time. But
that’s like saying, I’m going to make up my mind.
(1:00:45 – 1:00:52)
I’m not going to be hungry tonight. You have no control over it. There’s that old hideous
example they’ve used many times.
(1:00:52 – 1:01:05)
It just makes me sick. Of eating a bar, a whole bar of Echolax and saying, I’m not going
to go to the toilet today. I’m never going to look at another pretty girl.
(1:01:07 – 1:01:15)
I’ve never, you know, you can’t, these are from the subconscious. You’re just conditioned
reflex. Like saying, I’m not going to blink.
(1:01:15 – 1:01:20)
But a guy waves his hand by your eyes and you blink. You don’t think about, shall I blink?
You just do it. It’s a conditioned reflex.
(1:01:22 – 1:01:43)
That is why things such as Alcoholics Anonymous is very effective. But Alcoholics
Anonymous is not effective much of the time. Because people go there and keep
thinking if I learn what it’s about, I will be alright.
(1:01:45 – 1:02:03)
Somehow or other, there must be a motivation and a teacher that will enable people like
me to act myself better. I cannot control my emotions, but I can control my actions much
of the time. I can literally superimpose action over my emotions.
(1:02:04 – 1:02:25)
The purpose of a sponsor or someone helping you is to superimpose objective
perceptions over my subjective perceptions. The best way to describe that is that when
you are seeing things with an upset mind and things look different and you’re
overreacting, you just, you don’t see it. You see it, but you can’t believe it’s anything but
that.
(1:02:25 – 1:02:37)
But it isn’t that. It’s like this wall. If when I was new, my sponsor would have said to me
something effective, Fancy, that wall is green.
(1:02:38 – 1:02:51)
And I’d think, you goof. Either you’re kidding me, or you’re crazy, or you don’t
understand what brown is. That’s brown.
(1:02:51 – 1:03:14)
I don’t care if it looks brown to you, you act like it’s green. Now we never discussed the
colors of walls, because that’s easy to be matched against the color scheme. We
discovered, we discussed perception colors, such as, I don’t care how it looks to you,
don’t quit that job.
(1:03:15 – 1:03:27)
I don’t care how it looks to you, you go over and apologize to her. You acted badly. And
those perceptions were just as foreign to me as telling me that wall was green.
(1:03:28 – 1:03:36)
Because I could prove from my side that wasn’t the way it was. She hurt me. She said
something terrible to me.
(1:03:36 – 1:03:44)
I’m not going to work for that guy who’s exploiting me. On and on and on and on. But
that’s in a sense what a sponsor is.
(1:03:45 – 1:04:01)
To find someone who can give you objective perceptions when your perceptions are
discolored. Because you will act on your discolored perceptions sooner or later. They will
create emotional problems that you will have to justify and away we go again.
(1:04:02 – 1:04:32)
The function of acting, to relieve conflict, of walking through it, of finding some way to
say, you do this and then you do, you get a certain security just by accepting the
direction and doing it, even though you disagree with it. But the purpose of this sort of
therapy is not to enhance the strength of your intellect, it is to do something that, I don’t
know of any other way to do it for people like me. It relieves pressures on the emotion.
(1:04:33 – 1:04:55)
I get back control with my intellect, not by strengthening my intellect, but by weakening
the pressures on the emotion. And it has to go on and on because the world is full of
stimuli. I can know everything about how to stay well right now, and if I don’t take some
sort of continuing therapeutic, when I get out of whack, I’ll think that’s real again.
(1:04:56 – 1:05:08)
I have to have some benchmark to bring me back. That is why knowledge will not keep
people sober, as a rule. Information will not keep people sober.
(1:05:09 – 1:05:26)
Love will not keep people sober, because love comes and goes. A love of God will keep
you sober perhaps? No. I’ve been thrown across the country a couple of times to talk to
big groups of clergymen that are sent to this big home from all over the world, and they
love God, but they can’t stay sober.
(1:05:26 – 1:05:39)
And AA’s teach them how to stay sober so they can go back and love God sober. There
has to be something more. There has to be something to deal with the intermittent
spells of childish perception.
(1:05:40 – 1:05:49)
That’s why we have to have a continuing therapeutic. That’s what makes alcoholism
baffling. That’s why sometimes people who’ve been sober for many years get drunk.
(1:05:49 – 1:06:03)
They say, I now know all about it. I shouldn’t have to keep doing that stuff now. And they
stay all right, but the rest of the world gradually gets out of whack in their perceptions.
(1:06:04 – 1:06:17)
And they all start to go to hell again. In fact, to oversimplify, the function in recovery of
alcoholism is not even to change yourself. It’s just to make everybody else in the world
shape up.
(1:06:20 – 1:06:31)
And if you stop doing it, they find out and act bad. That’s why they say, alcoholics don’t
get too hungry or angry or lonely or tired. Not because those are bad things.
(1:06:32 – 1:06:47)
They are perception distorters. When you’re hungry, you have a tendency to become
impatient and intolerant. Hey! When you’re angry, it is always justified, but it’s an
obsessive emotion.
(1:06:48 – 1:07:09)
Hey! How could you do this to me? Could you be angry? Shut up! When you’re lonely, it
presses every self-pity button in every neurotic personality. Oh, I guess they’re probably
all at a party tonight somewhere. I’ll be all right.
(1:07:11 – 1:07:22)
I like watching poker. And when you’re tired, you say the same, but people take
advantage of you. I don’t know how they know.
(1:07:23 – 1:07:30)
Total strangers. I’ve noticed this a couple of times. I get on the Santa Monica freeway in
the morning to go to work after I’ve given my all for others.
(1:07:31 – 1:07:37)
And I’m tired. I just want to get to work. And I can just see some old lady up there.
(1:07:37 – 1:07:48)
See the boy in the blue t-shirt? He’s tired. I’m going to cut that son of a bitch off. Makes
you creep.
(1:07:52 – 1:08:04)
That’s why people like me have to sacrifice all the time. I must sacrifice and take care of
myself and keep taking remedial action. I don’t even do it for me.
(1:08:04 – 1:08:18)
I do it so all of you will stay okay. That’s a hard concept because all of my life I’ve been
trained if I know it, I can beat you. And here, knowing it isn’t worth a pitcher of warm
spit.
(1:08:19 – 1:08:38)
It isn’t worth anything. Doing it. Doing the remedial action, no matter how you feel at the
moment, I must not allow my life to be at the beck and call of childish emotions that
even now, occasionally creep up on me when I’m not taking care of myself.
(1:08:39 – 1:08:48)
That’s what alcoholism is. Why it’s so deadly, and that’s why it’s so recoverable. All I
have to do is surrender.
(1:08:48 – 1:08:54)
The hardest single thing in the world. And surrender to this concept. I’ve used this
analogy many times, but it’s still true, you know.
(1:08:55 – 1:09:03)
You make it sound as though you just, you just throw in the towel and live happily ever
after. Humans can’t do that. Not like me.
(1:09:04 – 1:09:18)
I throw in the towel. And as soon as the heat is off, I inch it back. And I spend the rest of
my life tearing off small strips and see if that’ll satisfy the dirty bed.
(1:09:20 – 1:09:28)
Just little by little. Incremental surrender. I’m getting singed up.
(1:09:30 – 1:09:37)
If I didn’t feel so good, I’d cut out. But that’s what it’s about. I think it’s a real case.
(1:09:37 – 1:09:44)
I know that you’ve heard many, many fine speakers here. Much more knowledgeable
than I. Much more experienced. Much finer people, perhaps.
(1:09:45 – 1:10:00)
But I think maybe you can understand. That’s why we, to people, some people,
alcoholism is not recoverable by any tool applied to any disease. Because alcoholism is
basically, the lethal aspect is, it’s a disease of perception.
(1:10:02 – 1:10:10)
And the recovery has to be in conjunction with something that will alter the perception or
the alcoholic must surely drink. Thank you.