If you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m mostly publishing free pieces right now, but paid subscribers do have access to monthly premium pieces—such as THIS comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes!
At a meeting the other night, we read The Doctor’s Opinion from the Big Book. If you’re unfamiliar, give it a read some time. I hadn’t read it in awhile because I tend to yawn during it. Before you yell at me for that kind of blasphemy, let me explain myself.
It was written by Dr. William Silkworth at the very beginning of 12-step recovery about 80 years ago. It defines what alcoholism is and what alcoholism treatment looks like, and it is very hopeful and optimistic about what 12-step treatment could mean for a person and for a community.
I always need to remember that, and I don’t. I go into churches where the rent has been paid for quite some time, where recovery people way before me treated the church with respect and maturity so that it could exist for me now. I also usually sit down in a chair that someone set up for me, along with a recovery book that people who came before me paid for, so that I could sit and read during a meeting years down the road.
I can’t stress enough how crucial Silkworth’s opinion seems to have been. I have a friend who is almost 90 years old and has been sober for 50-plus years, and he always says, “You younger people have no idea how different it was back then to say you were an alcoholic.” He’s talking about saying it in 1963 or so, after 12-step recovery had been around for 20-some years and had some members with two decades of recovery. Imagine what Bill and Bob were dealing with 20 years before THAT, with no track record whatsoever. That’s why the credibility portion of Dr. Silkworth’s opinion is so critical. The recovery community really needed someone with serious standing to stand up and vouch for the program, and also to emphasize that there is a medical component to this. Even today, I’ve come across people who chalk up addiction to that person being a bad person, making immoral choices. Dr. Silkworth’s writings do a nice job of outlining the disease portion of this.
So why do I occasionally yawn about it? Part of it is that I have read it at least 50 times now, so I know it quite well. And part of it is that I already reap the benefits of it. Have you ever read about the people who stood up for clean drinking water in elementary schools? Or the benefits of indoor plumbing? Probably not, because it seems so obvious and accepted now. Dr. Silkworth’s writings helped to change public perception of alcoholism, and over the course of many decades, that perception became an incredible gift.
When I got sober in 2008, there were laws protecting employees who needed treatment for drugs and alcohol. There were thousands of churches and other facilities that opened their doors to drug addicts and alcoholics because they came to believe that recovery was possible. And on a very human level, public perception has changed so much that when I say I am an alcoholic, people don’t recoil and lock their front door.
I’ll close with a funny related story. I recently was on the playground picking up my second-grader from school, and a dad that I casually knew started talking to me. He said something like, “We should get together some time and watch football and drink beer.” I gently said I was in for the football part, but I don’t drink and I try to avoid situations where there was a lot of boozing because I am in recovery.
He thought about it for a second and said, “Oh wow, that is so cool. Good for you. I know a few other people in recovery, and they’re all awesome people. I don’t have a drinking problem, but I sometimes wish I could be in recovery. It seems like such a cool club!”
That made me double over laughing. I was thinking, OK, yes, I love recovery but it is a bunch of people who hit absolute rock bottom in life and are trying to get better. It’s not a Dungeons and Dragons group or an Oprah book club. But I just smiled and shook my head and said, “Yes, it is a pretty beautiful thing.”
Imagine telling Dr. Silkworth 80 years ago that some day, people who aren’t alcoholics would be daydreaming about going to 12-step meetings. He probably would have thought you were still drinking.
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
HEARD AT MEETINGS ....
"You know you're an alcoholic when you wrap your car around a tree and blame it on a landscaping error."
(Credit: AA Grapevine, by Anonymous, December 2006)
Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com.
