Friend of Bill W.

Carrying the message of hope from the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. Posting passages once daily from the Fourth Edition.

[Friend of Bill W. @BigBookMessage]

* Posting from AA Big Book, 4th Edition, Personal Stories: “Me An Alcoholic?” p 382-387 *

Alcohol’s wringer squeezed this author - but he escaped quite whole.

[Friend of Bill W. @BigBookMessage]

The most terrible blow of my life befell me after I'd found sobriety through A.A. Perhaps the single flicker of decency that shone through the fog of my drinking days was a clumsy affection for my two children, a boy and a girl.
#recovery #sobriety #alcohol #alcoholic #odaat #aa

[Friend of Bill W. @BigBookMessage]

As might have been predicted, my teetering tower of worldly success collapsed. My alcoholic associates fired me, took control, and ran the enterprise into bankruptcy. My alcoholic wife took up with someone else, divorced me, and took with her all my remaining property.
#sobriety

[Friend of Bill W. @BigBookMessage]

My story has a happy ending but not of the conventional kind. I had a lot more hell to go through. But what a difference there is between going through hell without a Power greater than one's self, and with it!
#recovery #sobriety #alcohol #alcoholic #12Steps #BigBook #odaat #aa

[Friend of Bill W. @BigBookMessage]

What is this power? With my A.A. friends, all can say is that it's a Power greater than myself. If pressed, all I can do is follow the psalmist who said it long before me: "Be still, and know that I am God."
#recovery #sobriety #alcohol #alcoholic #12Steps #BigBook #odaat #aa

[Friend of Bill W. @BigBookMessage]

Moreover, I am deeply convinced that so long as I continue to strive, in my bumbling way, toward the principles I first encountered in the earlier chapters of this book, this remarkable power will continue to flow through me.
#recovery #sobriety #alcohol #alcoholic #odaat #aa

[Friend of Bill W. @BigBookMessage]

That was seven years ago - and many A.A. meetings ago - and I haven't had a drink during those seven years.
#recovery #sobriety #alcohol #alcoholic #12Steps #BigBook #odaat #aa

[Friend of Bill W. @BigBookMessage]

(2/2) Here was power to live to the end of any given day, power to have the courage to face the next day, power to have friends, power to help people, power to be sane, power to stay sober.
#recovery #sobriety #alcohol #alcoholic #12Steps #BigBook #odaat #aa

[Friend of Bill W. @BigBookMessage]

(1/2) Here I found an ingredient that had been lacking in any other effort I had made to save myself. Here was - power!

[Friend of Bill W. @BigBookMessage]

Many times in the intervening years I have thanked God for that man, a man who had the courage to admit failure, a man who had the humility to confess that all the hard-won learning of his profession could not turn up the answer. I looked up an A.A. meeting and went there-alone.

[Friend of Bill W. @BigBookMessage]

“However, I've heard of an organization called Alcoholics Anonymous that has had some success with people like you. They make no guarantees and are not always successful. But if you want to, you're free to try them. It might work.”
#recovery #sobriety #alcohol #alcoholic #aa

[Friend of Bill W. @BigBookMessage]

And I knew that somewhere along the line I’d lost the power to stop drinking. "Well, Doc," I said, "what are we going to do?"
“There's nothing I can do," he said, "and nothing medicine can do.”
#recovery #sobriety #alcohol #alcoholic #12Steps #BigBook #odaat #aa

[Friend of Bill W. @BigBookMessage]

Only through being beaten down by my own misery would I ever have accepted the term "alcoholic" as applied to myself. Now, however, I accepted it fully. I knew from my general reading that alcoholism was irreversible and fatal.
#recovery #sobriety #alcohol #alcoholic #12Steps #aa

[Friend of Bill W. @BigBookMessage]

“It wasn't until just lately that, in your case, I could draw it. Second, you wouldn't have belleved me even if I had told you." I had to admit to myself that he was right.
#recovery #sobriety #alcohol #alcoholic #12Steps #BigBook #odaat #aa

[Friend of Bill W. @BigBookMessage]

"Then why in God's name haven't you told me so during all these years?"

"Two reasons," he said. "First, I couldn't be sure. The line between a heavy drinker and an alcoholic is not always clear.”
#recovery #sobriety #alcohol #alcoholic #12Steps #BigBook #odaat #aa

[Friend of Bill W. @BigBookMessage]

After talking with him for a time, I heard myself saying, "Doc, I think I'm an alcoholic."

"Yes," he said, surprisingly, "you are."
#recovery #sobriety #alcohol #alcoholic #12Steps #BigBook #odaat #aa

[Friend of Bill W. @BigBookMessage]

Science could take my mind apart expertly, but it couldn't seem to put it together again. I crawled back to my analyst, not so much because I had faith in him, but because I had nowhere else to turn.
#recovery #sobriety #alcohol #alcoholic #12Steps #BigBook #odaat #aa

[Friend of Bill W. @BigBookMessage]

I’d had absolute faith in science, and only in science. “Knowledge is power," I'd always been taught. Now I had to face up to the fact that knowledge of this sort, applied to my individual case, was not power.
#recovery #sobriety #alcohol #alcoholic #12Steps #BigBook #odaat #aa

[Friend of Bill W. @BigBookMessage]

After my last binge I came home and smashed my dining room furniture to splinters, kicked out six windows and two balustrades. When I woke up sober, my handiwork confronted me. It is impossible for me to reproduce my despair.
#recovery #sobriety #alcohol #alcoholic #odaat #aa

[Friend of Bill W. @BigBookMessage]

It was a fantastic structure, built on a crumbling foundation. It was tottering and it had to fall. It did.
#recovery #sobriety #alcohol #alcoholic #12Steps #BigBook #odaat #aa

[Friend of Bill W. @BigBookMessage]

My professional life looked fine on the surface. I was now head of a publishing venture in which nearly a million dollars had been invested. My opinions were quoted in Time and Newsweek along with pictures. I addressed the public by radio and TV.
#recovery #sobriety #odaat #aa