Does Alcoholics Anonymous Work? My Steps, Meetings and Sponsors

Alcoholics Anonymous is the reason I am sober. I had my last drink on the night of April 21, 2014, woke up throwing up blood, and have been sober since April 22, 2014. For years after that I went to AA meetings five to seven days a week, and I still go to them most days. So when people ask me whether AA works, my honest answer is yes. But it does not work because a meeting makes you feel good for an hour. It works because you practice the twelve steps, you tell the truth to another human being, and you keep showing up after the good feeling wears off.

That answer took me a long time to earn. I went to an AA meeting once in college, drank two drinks straight afterward just to prove I was not like those people, and kept drinking for years. I came back in 2014 with no real plan. The first time through the steps I did them without a sponsor. I wrote a roughly 10,000-word honest story of my life for step four, started raising my hand in meetings to share what I was finding, and kept working while the obsession to drink came and went. The turning point came in a Massage Envy parking lot, where a quiet, clear experience gave me three instructions: ask Tony to be my sponsor, go to five meetings a week, and read the Big Book. I did all three.

My view has shifted across the posts, and the order matters. In my first step study, AA Step 1: Powerlessness Over Alcohol, from July 2019, I focused on the first step as the moment you stop asking what you want to be true and look at the evidence. One drink can take your power away, and a sober life can be unmanageable even when you think you are doing fine. By early 2023 I was talking about the practical side. In How To Work The Steps of AA Without a Sponsor I explained that you can do the steps alone, but you will benefit from a sponsor you feel safe with, and that you should replace one who is wrong for you.

In Why I Keep Going To Alcoholics Anonymous After 8 Years Sober I argued that the danger is forgetting how you used to be, and that watching other people fail is a reminder that sobriety is something you choose every day. In The Truth About AA: Meetings, the 12 Steps, the Big Book, and Sponsors I was more direct. A sponsor is there to help and keep you accountable, not to run your life. Try several meetings before you decide one is not for you. The Big Book is a helpful resource but not a Bible. By then my position was that AA is a program of action, a program of people, and a program of growing up.

My longest telling of the story is the December 2023 speaker meeting, AA Speaker, From Sad Drunk to Happily Sober. It covers the family history of alcoholism, my first drink in college, the years of drinking through ROTC and into a police career, and the night everything came to a head. In 2024 I shared a diary entry from the morning of April 22, 2014, in The Morning I Hit Rock Bottom and a Thought About AA Gave Me Hope. I wrote it years after the fact, and it shows how small the first real hope felt when it arrived.

The newest posts are the most complete picture I have. The 12 Steps of AA Explained: A Beginner's Guide walks through each step in plain language for someone who is new or who is trying to understand what a family member is doing. Working the Steps and Telling the Truth is an excerpt from my memoir. It covers my fourth and fifth steps, including the Fifth Step I did behind a meeting building when a memory surfaced that I had buried for years, and what I learned about honesty from doing it.

Below this introduction you will find a contents list and then every post in full, newest first. If you are new, start with the beginner guide and the step posts. If you are reading about my own drinking history, the story is in My Drinking Story, and for the milestones of staying sober, see Sobriety Milestones. Take what helps, leave what does not, and find the meetings and people that fit you.

On this page

Every post I have written on this subject is below in full, newest first, each under its own heading.

1. Working the Steps and Telling the Truth (June 21, 2026)
2. The 12 Steps of AA Explained: A Beginner's Guide From 9 Years Sober (June 17, 2026)
3. The Morning I Hit Rock Bottom and a Thought About AA Gave Me Hope (October 24, 2024)
4. AA Speaker – From Sad Drunk to Happily Sober 9 Years in Alcoholics Anonymous with Emotional Sobriety (December 14, 2023)
5. The Truth About AA: Meetings, the 12 Steps, the Big Book, and Sponsors (February 10, 2023)
6. How To Work The Steps of AA Without a Sponsor (February 1, 2023)
7. Why I Keep Going To Alcoholics Anonymous After 8 Years Sober (January 31, 2023)
8. AA Step 1! Powerlessness Over Alcohol and Unmanageable Life in Alcoholics Anonymous (July 14, 2019)

Working the Steps and Telling the Truth

Originally published June 21, 2026.

This is an excerpt from my full-life memoir, Un Fn Myself — my real story of addiction, recovery, fatherhood, and everything in between from 1984 to 2026, including the parts most people would cut out.

I asked him to be my sponsor right after that. He was a big guy—overweight, but also solid and strong, unmistakably a construction worker, and an unlikely choice in every way. When I asked him if he would sponsor me, he shook my hand and said yes, and then he said something that immediately made me feel relieved: he told me he would call me every day. That mattered more than I realized at the time. Most sponsors expect you to call them. My first sponsor flipped it around. He showed me what it looked like to reach out by doing it himself. Every day, he would call and check on me. A lot of the time I didn’t answer. I’d be working, working out, or just not ready to talk. Sometimes he called early in the morning before I was up. Sometimes it felt random. He’d just leave a voicemail saying things like, “God loves you. Thinking of you. Looking forward to seeing you at the meeting later.” It wasn’t dramatic or heavy. It was consistent. That kind of steady, someone-checks-on-you-every-day connection is exactly what I want to offer, and you can book a private call with me so you’re never just an anonymous body in a folding chair.

Because I was now going to five meetings a week, I saw my sponsor often. I saw everyone at AA more often. Familiar faces turned into actual connections. People stopped being anonymous bodies in folding chairs and started becoming part of my daily life. That’s when I actually started doing the steps instead of skimming around the edges of them. I had already written what amounted to a Fourth Step inventory—a roughly 10,000-word story of my life. Years later, I posted that story on my website because some people had read it as a series of blog posts and told me it was inspiring. In 2019, I even put it on the jerrybanfield.com homepage. What I didn’t think through was what would happen when parents from my daughter’s school friended me on Facebook, clicked through to my website, and started reading that story without any context. They stopped halfway through, never got to the part where things changed, and apparently decided I was some kind of dangerous lunatic. They called the police.

So one day in 2019, four police officers showed up at my house because of a Fourth Step inventory I had written in Alcoholics Anonymous and then foolishly published on my homepage. That story didn’t stay on my homepage after that. That experience taught me something important about containment. That’s one reason this material goes in books now. If you want to read this, you buy the book or someone hands you the book, and you read it in the context of a full narrative instead of stumbling across a fragment on the internet and inventing a nightmare around it.

That Fourth Step itself was incredibly revealing. What it showed me was that I was the creator of my life. Yes, other people had done things to me, but the one constant throughout every chapter was me. I did this, then I did that, then I made this choice, then I reacted that way. Seeing it laid out like that was grounding. It shifted me out of victim mode and into responsibility, which was uncomfortable but stabilizing.

I thought that by writing that Fourth Step, I had already covered the worst things I’d ever done. I included my darkest moments—things no one else had ever witnessed, with no police reports, no hospital records, no documentation. No one else was ever involved. Around that same time, I’d also had the thought that I should see a therapist. But when I looked at one therapist’s intake form, I knew immediately I wouldn’t be honest. There was no way I was going to put my darkest secrets down in writing on an official form. I wasn’t doing that. If it didn’t exist in writing or in some government system, then in my mind, it didn’t officially exist. Because of that, I didn’t go to therapy at the time. I only went to AA.

Ironically, I’ve done plenty of therapy since then. But in that early period, this was my thinking. Alcoholics Anonymous was the only place where I felt like I could tell the truth without creating a permanent paper trail that might come back to destroy my life.

My Fourth Step showed me something fundamental: when I write my life story out honestly—even the things nobody else knows about—it adds up into a coherent sense of self. I could see that I had created my life, that there were patterns, choices, and behaviors that kept repeating, and that I carried real guilt about some of them. That alone was stabilizing. Then one day in a meeting, something surfaced that I had buried so deeply it hadn’t even made it into that life story. It was a night I felt especially bad about. Nobody got hurt, but I was drunk and I had been a real danger that night. Thankfully, nothing happened. Still, I felt awful about that night because I knew how close I had been to hurting someone. When that memory came back, it hit me immediately: oh shit, this is what the Fifth Step is for.

Up to that point, I had talked openly in meetings about the worst of what I had done, but this was different. This was something I had never told anyone. The incident had happened around 2006, so by the time I remembered it, roughly eight years had passed, and I still felt sick thinking about it. I went to my sponsor and told him everything—where I went, what I was thinking, exactly what almost happened. I’m intentionally obscuring some of the details here because this is a book that anyone can read, but I told my sponsor the precise truth. The only reason I felt safe doing that was because of a twisted piece of rationalization: if he told anyone else, I could deny it. Plausible deniability felt airtight. In my head, I told myself that if this guy repeated it, I could just say he was crazy and made it up. That sounds awful, but that’s how my mind worked at the time. That belief gave me enough safety to finally tell the truth.

His response stunned me. He wasn’t shocked. He wasn’t horrified. He didn’t react with the kind of fear or disgust I had been carrying around for years. He just said, “God loves you,” and told me it was okay. That was it. And somehow, that was enough. I felt dramatically better afterward. I remember thinking, holy shit, that actually worked. The Fifth Step really worked. This isn’t just talk. This isn’t symbolic bullshit. It actually did something. That realization lit a fuse in me. If reading the book, getting a massage, and doing the Fifth Step worked this well, then what else did these people know that I didn’t? My curiosity exploded. If there’s something you’ve been carrying that you’ve never said out loud to anyone, I know how heavy that gets, and you’re welcome to set up a call with me to talk it through with me.

Not long after that, something similar happened in a meeting. My grand-sponsor—connected to both my first and second sponsors—shared something from the front. He has since passed away, and he would be perfectly fine with me telling this story. He died about ten years ago. In that meeting, he made an offhand sexual joke. Nobody laughed except me. I laughed loudly, almost uncontrollably, and I didn’t understand why I was laughing as it was coming out of me. The room stayed quiet. Then, as suddenly as the laughter came, memories slammed into my consciousness—memories of the abuse I had experienced in childhood.

These were things I hadn’t remembered in at least twenty years. Things I had been told never to talk about. Things that had been buried so deep they might as well have been sealed underground. All of them came rushing back at once. In that moment, I understood something terrifying and clarifying at the same time: the racing mind, the obsession, the constant noise I had lived with for years had been protecting me from these memories. This was one of those toxically buried wounds, locked so far down that my system had been running nonstop just to keep the door shut. Somehow, that stupid joke cracked it open.

As soon as those memories surfaced, the urge hit immediately. I thought, fuck, I need to drink right now. As soon as this meeting ends, I need to go straight to the liquor store. I need relief immediately. At the exact same time, another thought arrived just as clearly: you need to do your Fifth Step again with my grand-sponsor right now. Those were the only two options. There was no middle ground. I couldn’t just walk out of the meeting and pretend this hadn’t happened. Either I was going to be drinking within fifteen minutes, or I was going to sit down with him and tell the truth. One way or another, this was getting addressed.

At the time, he was dying of cancer, and he was having a particularly rough day, which he had shared about in the meeting. As soon as the meeting ended, I walked straight up to him. Other people were trying to talk to him, to offer support or small talk, and I interrupted them without hesitation. I stepped right in front of him and said, “I need to talk to you.” At first, he thought I was just trying to cheer him up, and he brushed it off, saying something like, “Oh no, no, I’m fine.” I cut him off and said, “I need to do a Fifth Step with you right now,” and I said it with urgency, the kind that doesn’t leave room for negotiation. He looked at me for a second and then said, “Okay, let’s go out back.”

We went behind the building and sat down in a couple of chairs, and I poured my life out to him like I had never poured it out to anyone before. I told him everything I could think of that I hated about myself and my behavior—the things I was most ashamed of, including the night I had already told my first sponsor about and what had happened to me in childhood. I didn’t minimize anything. I didn’t soften it. If anything, I tried to make myself look as bad and as responsible as possible. I wanted the whole thing out in the open. I cried while I talked, and I didn’t stop myself. I just kept going, dumping it all out for what felt like ten, twenty, maybe thirty minutes.

When I finally finished, he looked at me and said, “Do you want to hear about my life?” I said yes immediately. I was exhausted from talking about myself and more than ready to listen. What he told me shook me deeply. He had survived far worse than I had. His life had been brutal, and the suffering he described was beyond anything I could have imagined. He talked about the insane things he did afterward and how sobriety fit into all of it. Hearing his story bothered me for days afterward. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I remember thinking, this is a fucked up world where things like this can happen to a person. And yet, I had heard him hint at pieces of this in meetings before, just the tip of the iceberg, which is exactly why I had felt safe going to him in the first place.

After that conversation with my grand-sponsor, I felt an enormous sense of relief. When I look back at that period, I can see how all these things stacked together. I had done my Fourth Step. I had gotten a massage that finally quieted my mind. I had asked my first sponsor to work with me and started opening up to him. I had done a deeper, more complete Fifth Step with my grand-sponsor. Somewhere in the middle of all that, after a few months of sobriety, as August approached, something shifted. On a daily basis, I started to feel love for myself. I felt joy. I felt hope. It was like I was breaking a trance I had been stuck in for years, dismantling these internal knots that had kept me miserable for so long.

If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.

The 12 Steps of AA Explained: A Beginner's Guide From 9 Years Sober

From my video published June 17, 2026.

My friends, you're about to hear the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous explained in just 12 minutes. I'm Jerry Banfield, and I've been sober for nine and a half years in Alcoholics Anonymous. The number one thing you need to know is that being sober is awesome. I know that when you're newly sober or trying to quit drinking, like I did so many times in the past, it's easy to think, "Man, sobriety sucks. I'm really missing out. Life's passing me by. I've failed. How am I ever going to have fun and enjoy my life again?"

What I can tell you today is that I love being sober. I love the life I have. I love the wife I have, the kids I have, the house I have, the work I do, and the health my body's in. All the things I came in with and felt hopeless about when I got sober have been fixed. I've even had to make new dreams, because my life has gotten so good.

Doing these 12 steps is the way that this works, and going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings is where you can find people to help you with it. But getting an understanding of the steps is the most crucial part. In my experience, you can actually do the steps without even having a sponsor and without even reading the whole book, using what I'm about to share here. It will work better and be more thorough and effective if you can really apply this process with other people. I hope this helps you understand how I've done this, and how you can do it too.

Step One: Getting Honest About Powerlessness

Step one in Alcoholics Anonymous is very simple, but denial can be one of the hardest things to get through. It was for me. For many years, everybody else in my life was sure that I was an alcoholic. They had no denial about it. My father, who was also an alcoholic and who got sober at 40 without Alcoholics Anonymous, had told me, "Jerry, you abuse alcohol." I remember it hurt my feelings. I couldn't deny it, but I also didn't want it to be true.

Step one is about getting honest and stopping that line of thinking that asks, "Well, what do I want to be true?" Instead, you look at the facts. The facts are that if you drink alcohol in a way that causes problems in your life that wouldn't have happened without alcohol, I think that's enough evidence that either you're an alcoholic, or the safest, smartest thing to do would be to just not drink at all. And if it's ever difficult to not drink at all, then alcoholism exists there. There's powerlessness over alcohol.

What we've seen the longer Alcoholics Anonymous has been around is that people don't have to go all the way down the drain to the very bottom. The earlier you can catch your alcoholism, the fewer consequences you might have. I never went to jail as a result of my alcoholism, and I never got arrested as a result of it. And yet I had signs that were all over the place. I wrecked a car drunk driving, but I got away with it. They even let me become a police officer afterward, so I thought, "It doesn't really count, does it?" But as an alcoholic, I lost jobs and relationships, I hurt myself, and I caused so many problems for others. If I hadn't been drinking, most of those things at least wouldn't have happened. That's evidence of powerlessness over alcohol.

If you can't just easily stop drinking and never think about it, never worry about it, and never struggle with staying sober, then you're probably experiencing powerlessness over alcohol. The easiest way to test that out is to see if you can stay sober. If it's really super easy, and you never change your mind and forget all the reasons you should never drink again, that's one thing. But if you do change your mind and forget, that's proof that not only are you powerless over alcohol, but that your sober life is unmanageable.

That was the hardest thing for me to stomach. I thought that if I just quit drinking, I was a great guy with no problems. What I realized is that I used to struggle with wanting to drink even when I was sober, because I didn't like being in my own head and my own body throughout the day. When the pain would come up of hating myself, being frustrated with life, and hating others, drinking was my solution to get through it. That's why it was so hard to give up.

That's where we begin to see, in step one, that if you really do it thoroughly, you realize: I am insane. I know I should never drink again. That would be the only smart thing to do, the only way to take care of myself and prevent all these problems. And yet my mind still fantasizes about it and really wants to do it, and I have a hard time. That's insanity. Real step one is looking in the mirror and realizing, "I'm crazy. Sober, with nothing in me, I'm crazy."

Steps Two and Three: Hope and a Decision

Step two is looking around and seeing other people at AA meetings. You see people who were crazy. Maybe they're still a little crazy, but you can see what I saw, which is, "Wow, these people used to be crazy like me, and they're not anymore. That's amazing." Step two is that simple thing of looking around at meetings and realizing other people have been as crazy as me, and they've been restored to sanity, and I want that.

Step three is a decision that I'm going to do what it takes to get what they have. When I walked into my second AA meeting, which was nine years after my first meeting, I had walked into the first one thinking, "No, I'll just keep being crazy, there's no problem here." By my second meeting, I knew I was really messed up. I walked in and saw people who were happy and clearly weren't crazy anymore, and I thought, "I want what they have." Step three is just that decision: I want what they have, and I'll do whatever it takes to get it.

Steps Four and Five: Inventory and Honesty

Step four is, "Okay, let me figure out what I've got. What exactly do I have?" And that's comprehensive. It's not just, "Well, why do I suck so much, and what are all these resentments?" When I did my fourth step, I wrote a 10,000-word honest story of my life. For the first time, I looked at my whole life from birth to that day. I didn't lie or hide about anything. I wrote everything I thought should be in a story of my life, as if it were a movie, or as if it were told from God's point of view. This is how my life looks from start to finish.

Step five is, "Okay, I'm going to talk with somebody about my life." I'm going to talk with them especially about the things I don't want to talk about: the times I've harmed myself or others, or when bad things have happened to me. I'm going to talk about all the things I really don't want to talk about, that I'm scared to talk about, with someone I trust can handle it. I found people in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings who I realized I could tell my entire life story to completely honestly, not holding anything back and not minimizing anything, just being totally honest, and they could handle it.

I even started the fifth step before I had a sponsor. I just started raising my hand and sharing about the surprising trends I'd found in my life story. For a guy who just thinks he's nice and isn't doing anything wrong except drinking too much, you write that whole life story out and think, "Wow, this hasn't been going so well, and I've been a part of everything that's happened."

Steps Six and Seven: Ready to Change

That gets us to step six, where we start to see, "I don't want to keep acting the way I've been acting. I don't want to keep drinking. I don't want to keep being crazy sober either. And I'm ready to change." That's what step six is really about: saying, "I'm ready to change. I'm ready to stop being afraid. I'm ready to stop being crazy. I'm ready to start loving myself and loving other people." This is where the fifth step can give us a vision into the sixth step. When we talk with somebody else who's been through this process, we see how they feel about their life, and that's where I thought, "I want to feel how they feel about their life. I want to be how they're being."

Step seven is very similar to step three. It's, "All right, I'm going to do the work. I'm going to do whatever it takes to change. I'll do whatever it takes to be a person I'm proud of, to create a mind that I like spending all day with, to create a body I like being in all day. I'm going to take control of my life." If you need to pray to God and say, "God, please, I'll do anything to be free from these defects of character," and if you want to read the seventh step prayer, all that stuff is helpful. To me, the seventh step is, "Look, I'm ready to be free of this crap from the past. I'm going to use it as experience, and I'm going to go forward and be the kind of person I really want to be and am proud of being."

Steps Eight, Nine, and Ten: Making Amends and Staying Current

In step eight, we look around and take inventory, especially of our relationships and where we've hurt people. What's most important, to me, is to identify the people we have ongoing relationships with that we want to keep having relationships with, and who we've hurt. These are the people where we can start being a different person and changing. For me, it was looking at my wife and my mother especially, and then my brother and friends and other family. These are the people I've really hurt with my drinking, and these are the people I'm going to make amends to.

In step nine, I start making amends by first being honest about how I acted before. The things I lied about and tried to hide, I bring those out in the open. Even if in the short term it creates pain, now we have honesty. Now we have transparency. Now you see what I was doing before, you see that I want to go forward and not do any of that stuff, and you see that I want to have a healthy, happy, supportive relationship. I want to be the kind of person my brother describes today when he says to me, "Everybody gets along with you, Jer. You used to be a real jerk, but now everybody gets along with you." That's working these steps. That's when you know you've gotten into the ninth step: when people find it easy to get along with you.

Step ten is where I continue to take inventory of what's going on with me on a moment-to-moment basis. If I'm disturbed, then I slow down and step in, and I ask: what's going on?

When something goes wrong, I've found the most effective thing I can do is immediately ask for help, set an intention, or simply experience the emotion and move forward. In my experience, the problems usually start in one of two places: when somebody hurts my feelings, or when I get scared. Those are the two situations where I tend to get completely selfish and delusional. So the first step in catching it is step ten, where I notice, "Oh, I'm in this crazy mindset again." Once I see it, I tell myself I will do whatever it takes to get out of that mindset, to learn from it, and to move forward while actually feeling the feelings.

Sharing It Out Loud

A very effective way to do that, in my experience, is to share about it: talk about it at a meeting, call somebody on the phone, or tell somebody in person. The more I practice it, the easier and easier it gets.

Step Eleven: Prayer and Meditation

Then we get into the part of life that I think is truly amazing, which is step eleven. We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, which to me means conscious contact with the human collective, with the bigger reality. From there I start setting very clear intentions through prayer. I'll say, "I'll do whatever it takes to have a healthy body. If I have to change my diet, whatever it takes." I work this process on all the different parts of my life, deepening it alongside sobriety. I'll do whatever it takes to have a very happy, loving, productive, sober life. I'll do whatever it takes to be a husband I'm proud to be, a father I'm proud to be, a person online I'm proud to be.

I set that intention, and then meditation, to me, is simply listening. Once I've set the intention, I get quiet and I listen. I've seen people do great things with this approach. Someone might say, "I want a really loving partner in my life. I'm going to prepare myself to receive them." That's the prayer. And then the meditation is being quiet and paying attention, watching for the guidance and instruction from the universe.

Step Twelve: Carrying the Message

That takes us to step twelve, where we have a spiritual awakening to the truth that I am one with God, that we are all one. I've come to believe I'm much more than a mind, a body, and a story. We're all connected. And now I'm going to carry this message to alcoholics who are still suffering, and I'm going to keep practicing everything I've learned in Alcoholics Anonymous in all areas of my life.

So that's exactly what I'm doing right here: carrying the message. If you want to see more of how I've been living this out day to day, you can follow along with my Life playlist. I hope this was useful for you.

The Morning I Hit Rock Bottom and a Thought About AA Gave Me Hope

From my video published October 24, 2024.

On April 22, 2014, I woke up with a miserable hangover. I had drunk the day before for at least eighteen hours, and now I was throwing up blood, lying in bed, my body physically wrecked, with a pounding headache. I hated myself.

My wife was at work

My wife was at work. The night before, she'd told me she can't stand to be around me anymore when she drinks, and I told her, that's fine, you can leave. I realize now — wow, if she leaves, I'm totally screwed. My life is going to certainly end at my own hands if she leaves. And who would blame her? I'm a drunk, I'm a bum, I'm hopeless. I've ruined my life.

I know I can't stop. I know I'll promise her to stay sober, I know I'll try, but I've tried to quit so many times. Why bother? I'm hopeless. I have to drink. I didn't even want to drink yesterday, but I had to. I have to drink, and it's hopeless. I'm basically dead at this point. I don't know what to do.

A desperate prayer

So I desperately pray: God, please help me, I'll do anything to stay sober. Because I can see that if I could just stop drinking, there might be some hope for my life. But every time I've tried to quit drinking before, I went back to it. Nothing has worked.

But now there's this thought — well, maybe going to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting will be a part of the anything that I just offered. And now I feel some hope. That doesn't sound so bad.

I went to an AA meeting once in college, and I went home and drank two drinks straight afterwards, just to make sure I wasn't like those old people there, and to make sure I wasn't like those losers there. But now I feel some hope that if I go to Alcoholics Anonymous, I might have a chance to stay sober.

I'm also thinking maybe I should go see a psychologist or a therapist. But honestly, I know I won't tell them about all my self-harm thoughts and attempts, and so there's no point in going to see a therapist or a counselor and lying to them. So I'm going to plan to go to this Alcoholics Anonymous meeting instead.

Planning around my dad's memorial

My dad's memorial is coming up in a few days. Based on my previous behavior, I know that regardless of anything else I do or say, I'll have to get drunk the day after we get back from his memorial — if not the night we get back from driving from Starkville, Mississippi, back to Sarasota, Florida. I'd probably have to get drunk that night, if not absolutely the next day.

So I'm going to plan now. I'm going to go to this Alcoholics Anonymous meeting the day after we get back from my dad's funeral.

For today, I'm going to try and get down some soup now to feel better, and try and just sleep as much as I can, and pull it together so that when my wife gets home from work around 5 p.m., I won't totally still be a wreck. I'm a little afraid of her coming home. But I have a little hope that things might be okay now.

I sure do miss my dad

That was a cool thought about Alcoholics Anonymous. I don't really know where it came from. But I sure do miss my dad. I miss being able to talk to him and ask him for help when I'm getting sober. So I hope this AA meeting will work.

I'm sharing this diary years later because that hungover, hopeless morning turned out to be the beginning of everything. That thought about AA did come from somewhere, and that meeting did work. If you want to see where this road eventually led, I later wrote about long-term emotional sobriety in action years into being sober, and I keep sharing the rest of my life in my Life playlist.

AA Speaker – From Sad Drunk to Happily Sober 9 Years in Alcoholics Anonymous with Emotional Sobriety

From my video published December 14, 2023.

Nine Years Sober: What I Hope You Get From My Story

My friends, you're about to hear how I've had nine years sober in Alcoholics Anonymous, and I hope you get a lot of hope from this for your own life. I'll be sharing my story — my life story back when I drank, what happened, and the spiritual awakening. I'll also be answering a lot of questions that I hope will be really helpful for you to get sober and stay sober in Alcoholics Anonymous. Or even if you're not in Alcoholics Anonymous, you might just enjoy hearing my life story. My job, since I've had a spiritual awakening as a result of the steps, is to try and carry the message to the alcoholic who still suffers, and doing this online has proven extremely effective.

I'll be answering lots of questions like: What is emotional sobriety? What was the turning point that led me to AA? How did I cope with cravings? How do I handle social situations where alcohol is present? What are daily habits or routines that have supported my sobriety? So whether you're a beginner who isn't even sober now, or whether you've been sober for a long time, or you've been sober for a while and you'd like to have truly happy, joyous, and free sobriety, you're going to enjoy this a lot. I'll have advice if you are struggling with the idea of going to an AA meeting. I'll talk about how I deal with stress without turning to alcohol, and I'll share lots of stories. So, let's start.

I'd like to give some background. I've been sober since April 22nd, 2014. I drank for 11 years. My drinking was plenty bad enough, even when I was 21, to merit getting sober. And I've had an absolutely wonderful life since I've gotten sober. That's the bottom line. In my experience, drinking sucks. It's a lie. You don't need it. It doesn't make life better — it makes life worse. And the question is: do you want your life to be worse, or would you like your life to be better? I feel you can't reach your highest potential in life if you're drinking or using other substances to essentially try and bring yourself down and control yourself, when you can, in fact, do this stuff sober. I love being sober today.

And to my surprise, I don't care what religion or belief system you come from. All I was looking for was something in my heart that would let me stop drinking, and getting that was beyond me on my own. For me, it was either get sober or die. And thankfully, that made the stakes very clear. I'll give you background as to how we got there. But the most important thing to remember is this: drinking is totally unnecessary. It is a complete lie. It is not a solution. Learning how to live sober is the solution. I've talked to some alcoholics who say, "Well, I tried being sober and it didn't work." Why don't you try as hard to learn how to be sober as you try to learn how to manage your drinking? I bet you'll have a way, way better life sober. I love that I can drive anytime, anywhere, without having to worry about the cops pulling me over for drunk driving. I love that I can handle life sober today. And if you want what I have, this is exactly how to get it. So I appreciate each of you listening.

Where My Story Begins: Family History

Let's get started from the beginning of my life — and even before that. My family has a history of alcoholism on both sides, mental illness, and physical, mental, and emotional abuse across the board, which is pretty common. What's silly, when we come into Alcoholics Anonymous, is we think this stuff has only happened to me. No, it's actually incredibly common. Many of the things that, if you are new to getting sober, you think have only happened to you — they've probably happened to half the people in the room, if not more. We've often been conditioned to put these things away and think that we're bad and these things are just ours. No — you'd be amazed how many people I've talked to who have shared their lives with me, and to find out how common the struggles we have are and how similar we all are.

When I was born, my father had been kicked out of the house for his alcoholism. My mother was living with his family, in his family's house. Right shortly after I was born, my father was kicked out, and he went to Texas to try and sober up on a farm with his family. Meanwhile, my mother's family had cut her off, because they said it was either them or my dad, and she chose my dad. So I was born into an environment where I had a very loving mother who was there for me all the time, and I had my dad's family around. But my mother didn't know how she was going to support us. So my mom went into the Army, and then it was an adventure from there. We lived all over the place. The first place we moved to was Texas, where my mom did her basic training to be a veterinarian in the Army. That's when my father reunited with us. After months of being sober, and my mother getting all kinds of hope about my father being sober, he celebrated by greeting her at the airport and immediately starting to drink. My mother did not understand alcoholism at this point, but she was about to get a lot of lessons in it — from 1984, when I was born, to 1990, when my father got sober.

My Father's Addictions and His Transformation

My father, before my mom came along, had gone to Vietnam and was an alcoholic, a drug addict, a sex addict, and a gambler. My father had been in mental hospitals many times. He worked at the racetrack and had a very interesting, colorful life, also filled with a lot of shame and guilt and self-criticism and lots of deep levels of pain. My father saw some of the worst things people do to each other in Vietnam. He had a child in secret in Vietnam that no one knew about even after he died — that's when we finally found out about it, through genetic testing. When my father was in Vietnam, he was also married and had two kids from that marriage, and ended up getting a divorce. The pain of losing that first family was through his addiction. He could not be there for that first family because he was in the middle of all of his addictions. My father had not started drinking until he went to Vietnam, at which point he started drinking and got into all kinds of addictions.

My father then got sober. Before he got sober, he quit doing drugs, and also gave up women, and finally gave up gambling and drinking as well in 1990. So in the first six years of my life, my father went through some amazing transformations that I witnessed. He describes the last time he did cocaine: praying to God to please never, ever do that again — and then he never did it again. My father just quit all of these different addictions without going to Alcoholics Anonymous or any other support groups. He had been to Alcoholics Anonymous in the mental hospital, but he did not like the experience of Alcoholics Anonymous in the mental hospital, and he decided that AA was not for him. He did have a sponsor at one point, but he went back out. When my father got sober, he did it directly on his own willpower, and he was very much dry for quite a while.

What "Dry" Looks Like: Sobriety on Willpower Alone

If you're new to the term "dry" — dry means you're basically an alcoholic who's not drinking, which generally means your sobriety is as difficult, or more difficult, for everybody around you than your drinking was. My wife said that my early sobriety was more difficult for her than my drinking. And my father's early sobriety illustrates this completely.

At the time, we were living in Japan, because my mom was stationed at Yokota Air Base as a veterinarian there. My father was a stay-at-home dad. He'd stay at home and take care of us, then he'd go to the wood shop and drink. Basically, there was usually just my mom or my dad home, as one was working — and if my mom wasn't working, my dad was out drinking. Sometimes my dad would come home very late from the bar. One night my father was drunk, and my mother told him, "Look at what time it is." And he punched the clock, smashing it, saying, "There — now you can't see what time it is." The next day he wakes up with a hangover and is remorseful, and we all think it's delightful that now we're going to one of the Japanese markets and buying a new clock.

Then, when my father got sober, there was no more of that. There was no more remorse. There were no more of those days of being tender and loving and trying to do whatever the family wanted. And all of us missed that, because my mother said she thought the guy my father was on the day he had a hangover and was remorseful was the more accurate picture of who he was sober. She didn't realize that if he stopped drinking, he was more the irritable, anxious, on-edge guy who was there before he drank. That was a big surprise to her, and that was challenging for all of us over the next 10 years as my father simply stayed sober on sheer willpower.

You spill a glass of milk, and he might snap and curse and bang the table. One day I was flailing around and being a pain, and I banged my head off the door, and blood was flying all over. There were what I would call small levels of physical abuse in our house — spankings until your butt was all bruised. My brother got sat down hard in a chair, which broke one day and injured him. Then social work was coming around. There were little things like that, but there was also just this general level of tension and anxiety in the household that, if my father had gone to Alcoholics Anonymous and gotten sober there, might have been a lot easier for him.

So I grew up in a household where, looking back now as a parent myself, I'm very grateful and impressed with how well my parents did based on where they came from and what they went through. And I'll share how we got to that in a minute. The big point of talking about my childhood is that I grew up knowing the truth about alcohol.

Growing Up Knowing the Truth About Alcohol

The truth about alcohol, as a kid, was that it just didn't seem worth it to me. I'd see Dad drink and then often do things he would regret, then feel bad the next day, and then get all anxious and irritable and do it all over again. To me as a kid, it just looked insane — which is how it looks to someone with a normal, healthy point of view. It looks insane. Why do you do this to yourself? It didn't make any sense to me. And that perspective held as long as I lived at home with my parents in a sober household, because my mother also was sober. My mother never drank at home, and last I asked her, she said she only drank twice in the entire time my father was sober. Once, she had a bad night at home herself — she has some mental things she was diagnosed with as well — and one night she went out and got a hotel room and a bottle of liquor for herself. That was one night she drank. The other night, she was on a work trip and she said they ran out of water at the bar, so she had half a beer — which my brother and I endlessly teased her about, how crazy she must have been after having half a beer. Those are the only two times my mother drank in the entire time my father was sober.

That was a big part of why he was able to stay sober, in my opinion. What I've noticed is that a lot of people who have partners who drink have a very hard time staying sober with that partner. They always end up either just having unhappy sobriety, or they come to a point where they either need to leave the partner or drink again — and an amazing number of them choose to drink again. Thus, I'm very grateful for my mother's support in being sober for my father, even though my mother wasn't that into drinking to begin with and it wasn't much for her to give up. Still, her being sober made it very much easier for my father to stay sober, and she and my father raised my brother and me in a sober household.

That entire time, I knew the truth about alcohol, and I never drank all the way through high school. I only went to a couple of parties where there was drinking, and it was pretty easy for me to abstain because I remembered what drinking was really like. While I saw people drinking and having fun at the party, I knew that was not the whole story — that the next day they were going to feel miserable, that they were doing things they would regret in many cases. And with my father coming to pick me up, I could not stomach the idea, or even conceive of the idea, of having anything to drink at all when my sober father was going to come get me.

College: Watching My Mind Change

Then I went off to college when I was 18 years old. When I went off to college, I still remembered the truth about alcohol, but removed from the supportive environment of my family, it was amazing how quickly my mind started to change. I went to a lot of parties in college when I first got there where there was drinking. I consistently remember saying at parties that I didn't need alcohol, that I could have fun at the party without alcohol, and I remember thinking people were stupid for drinking — sad, sad people. I remember looking around at these people thinking, what sad people, that they think they need to drink to have fun. I remember feeling very superior to everyone, that they were all fools for drinking. And I often would get just as crazy as they would get at the parties. I liked that people often didn't realize I wasn't drinking, and that was a pass for me to say whatever I wanted, and then I was the designated driver on the way home. Although sometimes my driving was bad enough that the people who were drinking would ask me to let them drive — because I'm like, hey, I'm going to race this car up faster; I'm sober, so what are they going to do, pull me over and give me a ticket? So what? I had no fear of being pulled over because I was sober.

Then something happened. My biggest frustration at the time in college was with dating girls. One night, this girl who had been drinking quite a bit — someone I had met at an event — just knocked on my door. This was before I had a cell phone. I had no idea she was coming over. There was no text beforehand, there was no anticipation; I didn't even know she knew where I lived. All of a sudden she's just knocking at my door at like 1 or 2 in the morning, which was fine because I often stayed up way later than that. And there she is, and she's drunk and she's ready to go. Well, I was sober, and I was not so easy to just get ready to go, and I was kind of too sober to really go all the way in the hookup. My sobriety and my clear mind kind of killed the mood — because when you're sober, hooking up with someone you barely know is obviously not a really good idea.

Then the next day I felt all frustrated, because in my mind I was very much a virgin when I went to college, and the main thing I needed to do was lose that. I got this idea in my mind that being sober was getting in the way of losing my virginity. I started to believe the lie that alcohol would help me have sex. I started to believe it because I saw other people around me who seemed to be much more fun when they drank — they weren't very nice or very fun lots of times when they were sober, but I loved how they were when they drank. Then I looked in the mirror and started to think maybe I'd be a lot more fun if I drank too, and maybe I could relax a bit myself and just hook up with somebody. I finally believed, after years of conditioning from thousands and thousands of beer commercials I saw while watching football games with my father — who was a big football fan, and I got to be a big football fan too — that if you hear a lie enough times, you just might believe it, especially if you get into an environment where that's the prevailing truth.

The First Time I Drank: A Lie From the Start

Despite not having drunk most of my freshman year in college, one day my mind suggested that we should get a six-pack of beer, because one of the girls my friends had hooked up with was going to come visit me that evening. She was attractive and she was fun, and it was pretty obvious to me that she was going to hook up with me too. I was scared that I couldn't do it sober, and I thought I would impress her and make things easier for myself if I had a nice six-pack of beer there. Meanwhile, she did not suggest this. This was all my idea. By this point I'd completely forgotten about my father's drinking, completely forgotten the truths I'd known about alcohol. It's like I'd consciously decided to fall asleep and forget.

I went to the gas station with the guy on my hall who had a fake ID. He bought me a six-pack of Miller High Life, and when she came over, I had the Miller High Lifes. We each had three. I drank two and a half and poured the other half down the toilet to make it look like I drank mine too. Like, what kind of drinking behavior is that — your first time drinking? From the first time I drank, my drinking was abnormal: trying to make it look like I drank more than I did.

What happened was, after two and a half beers, I found I didn't care about her anymore. Because that's what alcohol really triggers. Alcohol is really about selfishness — self-centeredness. That is the root of our problem. All of our alcoholism, to me, is just a symptom, and this is what it says in the book. This is one of my favorite passages from the book Alcoholics Anonymous: selfishness, self-centeredness — that, we think, is the root of our troubles. Alcohol dives you deep into the depths of selfishness and self-centeredness. After I had a couple of drinks, I felt so euphoric that I didn't even care that she was there anymore. I remember just laying on the bed and not even wanting to do anything, totally disconnected from her, just having this feeling of bliss by myself — and then again waking up the next day like, what the heck happened? I thought alcohol was going to make this all work, but alcohol actually sabotaged the very thing I was trying to have it help with. From the very first time I drank, alcohol was a lie. It was counterproductive. It was unnecessary. And yet I remembered how I felt. I remembered that euphoria and feeling so relaxed, and the instant transformation of my perception, and I immediately started thinking about the next time I could drink again.

Easter Sunday 2003: The Worst Hangover of My Life

The second time I drank was Easter weekend 2003. I went to a party — I had been to this same apartment with the same group of people sober a bunch of times. Well, this time I was ready to participate in the drinking games, and I drank a bunch. I had something like four or five shots and several beers, and I had what I thought was a lot of fun there. Then I came back to the dorm room and was hanging out with some other friends, and I was shocked to start experiencing symptoms that took me totally by surprise. The room started spinning, I started vomiting, and the next day was Easter Sunday 2003. I experienced the worst hangover I've ever had.

Still, out of all the times I drank, that very first hangover was the most brutal, because at that time I did not know any of the little hangover remedies. I didn't know to try and throw down some food as soon as possible. I didn't know to try and get down as much water as possible, and my body was not practiced at dealing with hangovers either. Instead, I was throwing up all day — I mean from 2 a.m. to 7 p.m., throwing up — and I still didn't feel right the day after the hangover. That is one of the longest, worst hangovers I ever had, even though I drank much more in later years. I remember having so much clarity at the time, too. I remember really regretting what I had done, and I remember wishing so hard that I was just at home with my family with the Easter basket, instead of miserably sick by myself in a dorm room. There was a movie on the college TV network — and back in 2003 there were a very limited number of channels on the college TV network — a movie called Pay It Forward, with Jodie Foster, who played an alcoholic.

The Movie I Hated But Couldn't Stop Watching

I remember hating the movie and not wanting to watch it, but I felt so miserable I was desperate for anything to distract myself, and I felt that I needed to watch this movie. Given my first hangover, my mind was relentlessly fighting with it, saying, "This has nothing to do with you. You've only drank twice. She's an alcoholic. You're not." But yet I kept watching this movie. I felt like I had to watch it, like this movie was showing me where things were going to go on my current trajectory. The problem was I felt helpless to really do anything about it. I felt helpless to change anything. Part of my mind was denying that it had anything to do with me, but there was another part of me going, "Well, this is where we're going to go. I wonder how this is going to end up."

I remember, after I felt better from that hangover, thinking that I just needed to do a better job drinking in the future — that I could get the fun out of drinking without having the punishment. Even from the second time I drank, clearly my mind was screwed up when it came to alcohol, because I got a few hours of self-centered, euphoric pleasure from drinking, and I experienced way more hours of brutal suffering — some of the worst pain I had felt until that point in my whole life. It's insane that my mind was thinking, "Well, we should just try and squeeze the fun out and we'll avoid that pain the next time." That is insane thinking, right from the beginning.

Finding a Sponsor for Drinking

From there I continued to drink more, but I paced myself. It was a while before I had the third time I drank, and I didn't drink that much. For quite a while I just drank somewhat reasonably. I'd have a drink here, a few drinks there, feel a little bit good, and make sure I didn't have another hangover. I was a resident advisor in a dorm, and — law of attraction — if you want to drink, you'll attract other people that want to drink to be your friends. I made what was kind of like a sponsor for drinking. I made a best friend who taught me how to drink, the same way a sponsor in Alcoholics Anonymous can help teach you how to live sober. This man taught me how to drink — much more experienced drinking than me. He spiked my drink when I was working, and a regular person, if you'd spiked their drink when they were working, would have taken one drink and said, "That's disgusting and rude. Don't do that again." Me? I tanked the whole drink and asked for some more, and then kept drinking.

From my sophomore year is where I started to descend into alcoholism, even though you can see just from the first few times I drank that all the alcoholic foundation had already been laid. What we'll talk about in getting sober is how to dismantle the alcoholic foundation. You can tell from just the first couple of times I drank, the alcoholic foundation was there, and the real work in getting sober is dismantling the stuff that was in place before you even drank and made drinking so lucrative.

Through my sophomore year in college, I would pay people to go to the liquor store for me and buy handles of vodka, and I'd throw parties in my dorm room. I started to descend into drinking, and I finally did hook up with a girl — and that was fueled by drinking. It was someone I wasn't even enthusiastic about at all. She wasn't enthusiastic about me. But that's what drinking does. It made my first experience with sex sad, and something that my friends joked about, and that started this negative reinforcement loop.

Negative Reinforcement Loops — and Where the Hope Is

There are a lot of reinforcement loops in life. For example, you do something nice with someone, and then they're nice to you, and because they're nice to you, then you're nice to them, and it just creates this feedback loop of good. Well, especially with alcoholism, there are a lot of these bad feedback loops that get created, where you drink and poison your body so you feel bad, and then you treat someone bad because you feel bad, and then they treat you bad because you treated them bad, and then you treat them bad because they treated you bad because you treated them bad because you treated yourself bad by poisoning yourself with alcohol. And then you get into all these negative reinforcement loops where all of a sudden your life becomes unrecognizable, because you've made one bad decision after another, you've hurt one person after another, until you're like, "How did I get here?" Well, you got here with one bad decision after another. That's what's tricky about alcoholism, and life in general.

But that's where the hope is, too. Because if you can just do the next right thing right now — like taking in something that inspires you, like this — my intention with this is to make something that will inspire you and help you with your sobriety. Just taking this in is one of those single little actions you can take that can start a positive reinforcement loop, where you listen to an AA speaker, you feel better, you get hope, and because you feel better and get hope, you stay sober, and because you're sober, you have the chance to learn, and you start treating people a little better, and they treat you better, and that makes it easier to stay sober. It's like my life today — it's like, how did my life get so good? Well, I started putting one foot in front of the other, doing the next right thing, and when you do that repeatedly, you can get to places that seem unimaginably good — or unimaginably bad. I'm grateful I've been through both today.

Sophomore Year: Drinking Sabotages ROTC

Sophomore year, my life started to descend into alcoholism. At first it was just drinking a little bit on the weekends, maybe occasionally getting drunk on the weekends, until it was drinking Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. It was going to my physical training drunk for ROTC. I went to college to do ROTC, but drinking ended up sabotaging ROTC, because when you go out and get drunk Thursday night, then you either miss the physical training Friday, or — a couple of times I went to it after going out — doing physical training at 5:30 in the morning when you've been out drinking and at the club until 2:30 in the morning. That was miserable and humiliating, and it wouldn't have been miserable and humiliating if I'd gone to bed, gotten a good night of sleep, and gotten up ready to go.

Drinking ended up becoming one of my top priorities, and while I was so frustrated that I didn't have women that wanted to date me like I thought I should have, all I was doing was drinking and playing video games and doing school. I didn't really have time for women to date me — the very thing I was frustrated about. And then I started drinking more and more because I was getting lonely. The more you drink, drinking often becomes lonely. There's this big lie that drinking makes socializing easier. No — drinking makes being antisocial easier. If you really learn to socialize with people, you want to be sober and fully paying attention to what people are saying, so that you can really get to know people. And if people are nuts and insane, you can hear that, and then you can not hang out with those people anymore. When you are drinking, you often really can't understand what people around you are even saying, or really make a connection with people. That's how you end up having these disastrous relationships that seem like such a surprise — when, well, that happened because you didn't even get to know the person. Nobody was listening to the other person, and there were misunderstandings.

Gambling, Downloading, and Quitting ROTC

By the end of my sophomore year, I had also picked up the habit of gambling. I had been into downloading music illegally from when I was in high school, because I'm not paying for a CD when I can just use Napster to download it for free. So I had initially gotten into downloading music for free, but then I started getting into drinking in college, and then my friends showed me what else you could download for free. You combine downloading all this stuff and drinking and then gambling — my life, by the end of sophomore year, I quit doing ROTC because the physical training and the drinking and the gaming and the poker playing were all getting into conflict with each other. And I chose that drinking and playing video games and gambling and hanging out with my friends was more important than pursuing the career that I had been planning on pursuing for years.

I switched my major over to criminal justice because I was hoping I could figure out what was wrong with me. I was hoping that if I could be around a bunch of other people in the criminal justice system who were screwed up, I could discreetly figure out what was wrong with me, and from seeing things on the inside, I would maybe have a chance to not go there myself. When I started doing criminal justice, my drinking really took off, because at least sophomore year, when I was doing ROTC, I was focused on physical fitness. I was trying to keep myself in shape. I was able to pass one or two of the PT tests for ROTC. But then — no more physical training with ROTC, no more getting up for 8 o'clock classes. That's when I started drinking, and I moved in with my friend who showed me how to drink. Then I really started drinking and getting really lonely. That's when some of the first loneliest nights of my life came along, and that's where I started having bad things happening as a result of my alcoholism.

Lying to the Police and Consenting to Anything

Now, I'd already been vandalizing property drunk when I was a sophomore. I'd already had an encounter with the police where the only way I had gotten out of it was by blatantly lying. And then I felt triumphant, like I had gotten away with something, but really, deep down, I felt ashamed — like, why am I the kind of person that is breaking the law for no good reason and then getting in trouble and having to lie my way out? All because I took those first few drinks. And when you take those first few drinks, you're basically consenting to anything that happens afterwards. If bad things happen when you're drinking, with that first drink you're saying, "I don't care what happens after this." Most of the nights where I drank and I did stupid things or bad things happened, I didn't, at the beginning of the night, think, "Well, somebody's gonna call the police and I'm gonna have to lie to them to avoid going to jail." I didn't think that's what I was signing up for, but I also realized that anything was possible.

By junior year in college, I was heavily into gambling and drinking, and I was starting to feel really isolated and alone, because each of these little incidents, like lying to the police, leaves you feeling like you're not a very good person.

Drinking Alone and Nearly Dying at 20

Living that way leaves you feeling like you're not a good person, which leaves this pain of shame and guilt and remorse deep down. When you're alone, that pain often becomes the most apparent, and that's when I started drinking during the weeknights — drinking until I would throw up, and consistently drinking until I passed out. One night I threw up while I was unconscious. Thankfully I had passed out and thrown myself face down on the bed, and I had thrown up unconscious. Then I woke up. It was dark, and I'm feeling around like, why is the bed all wet? Then I had to throw up again, and I realized, wow, I was literally laying in a pool of my own puke. I could have died. If I had been on my back instead of on my face, I might have died right there at 20 years old from alcohol poisoning, never having been old enough to drink.

Things immediately started to compound — more and more bad decisions from drinking, like hooking up with girls and paying for girls to come over. These things started when I was drinking, and they left me feeling even worse about myself. Then I was interacting with people who were more alcoholic at the time than me, and in my experience, when you make connections — especially physical connections or emotional connections — with people who feel bad about themselves and hate themselves, and you're an empathic person, you take on those feelings too. So by junior year in college, just turning 21 years old, I'm descending into alcoholism. By senior year of college, I am all the way in. Now I'm drinking every day — maybe I'd take a day off a week, but I'm drinking almost every day by senior year. Thankfully I got a girlfriend. She did also like to drink, but she helped stabilize me a little bit.

Wrecking My First Car Drunk Driving

That's around when I ended up going to my first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. I was 21 years old, and I wrecked my car drunk driving on the way to Waffle House at 7 in the morning. After watching Fight Club and playing poker and drinking for at least 12 hours, I drunk drove by myself to Waffle House and took a turn that you shouldn't go more than 15 or 20 miles an hour around. I floored it going into the turn and came into it well over 40 miles an hour. With my slow reaction times, I didn't turn nearly fast enough. I totaled my car. I ripped one tire off the rim, the windshield was broken, the airbag came out — and thankfully I was able to limp the car back home. It was like bump, bump, and I made it about two miles home on a wrecked car, managed to drop it in a parking lot, ran into my dorm room, and went to sleep. Then I called the junkyard, had it towed off the parking lot, and got rid of the evidence the next day. There you go — I had just turned 21 years old and I'd already wrecked my first car, which I had told my dad I was going to wreck when I bought it, a couple of years before I wrecked it. How insane is that?

That car was basically my entire net worth. I'd paid about $6,000 for it, and that was my whole net worth. Now I had nothing, and the money in my bank account was almost zero. I got these tiny paychecks, but I could always afford to buy alcohol, even if I had to eat the cheapest ramen noodles and goldfish just to live on, and eat off the meal plan for every meal. I'd always use whatever money I had first to buy alcohol, then to gamble and pay for video games. If that meant I didn't have any money to take a girl out, I'd just tell her she had to pay for it. That's how I lived. It was sick.

Selling Liquor in the Dorms

Right before I wrecked my car, I was offering to drunk drive students who were freshmen — I was a senior — offering to drunk drive them wherever they wanted to go. One of the other resident advisors ratted me out to my boss, and I told half of a truth and half of a lie to my boss, saying that he had exaggerated. Yes, I was going to drunk drive them, but I only admitted that I was drinking with underage people. At the time I was also selling alcohol to many of them, and they were paying for my drinking, because I'd buy a handle of something, mark it up 5, 10, 20 bucks, and sell it to them. I was making thousands of dollars some months selling liquor, because I'd walk in the front door with six handles. After I wrecked my car, I would walk from the liquor store to the dorm — half a mile plus — carrying all these handles of liquor, and I would get rides to go to the liquor store. The lengths I would go to get my liquor were crazy. If you put that much effort into learning how to be sober and like it, you'd be a superman or woman or alien, whatever.

My First Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting

By the end of senior year, my life was getting into some of the darkest spots it had ever been in, because my whole life at the time had been college and drinking. I hadn't done any career planning for graduating college. I went to my first AA meeting senior year because I nearly lost my job, and the only way I didn't lose it is that my boss was quite probably an alcoholic as well, so he understood my situation and had some sympathy. I said, look, I'm an alcoholic, I need to go to an AA meeting, I'm sorry, will you give me another chance? I was literally planning on ending everything if I lost this job — my mind was that screwed up. My boss agreed to take me to an AA meeting to make sure I went, and we sat at this table. There were 8 people at this AA meeting, and all of them said they were alcoholics and shared their experience. I remember while they were sharing, I was just thinking: I didn't do that. You're dumb for doing that. That's sad that you live like that. I compared constantly, because deep down I didn't want to be like that — and deep down I knew I was just like them. My boss then shared right before me and talked about what an alcoholic his dad was, and I took the same approach. I didn't say I was an alcoholic. They asked me if I wanted a white chip — I said no. Do you want a sponsor? No.

I went straight home and had 2 liquor drinks, and I looked around the room like, see, nothing's happening. I had 2 drinks — mind you, each was 2 shots of vodka, so that was 4 shots, but you know how we count drinks. I looked around and I'm like, see, nothing bad happened. I'm not an alcoholic. If I was an alcoholic like you guys, I'd just burst into flames having these 2 drinks. I thought if I got away with drinking once, I'm not an alcoholic — and what about all that other bad stuff? Let's just try and forget about that.

By the end of my senior year, I'm drinking almost every night. I have no career prospects. I absolutely hate myself. I feel like a disgusting person. I'm full of secrets. My friends are either continuing college or getting real jobs — they're moving into apartments, they're advancing — and I'm not. Because I was so antisocial by this point, I'm drinking in my room by myself most of the time. The parties had already stopped, and most nights I'm just getting drunk by myself playing video games. I ended up moving in with 2 other alcoholics, and one guy was even worse than I was at the time. I remember he drank over half of one of my handles of vodka while I was actually at work. I'd gotten a little internship, and I had to walk to work because I'd wrecked my car and couldn't afford to buy another one. I come back, and he's drunk half my vodka.

Seven Days Sober and the Last Time I Smoked Marijuana

This is where I start trying to get sober. There was a week in college, after I wrecked my car drunk driving, where I stayed sober for the next 7 days. This was towards the beginning of senior year. The next 7 days I stayed sober, and it was awful. I felt so much self pity — feeling sorry for yourself, feeling left out. Even though my body physically was full of energy, all my mind was doing was complaining, talking about how it's senior year, I'm gonna miss out on all the fun, I can't have any fun sober. To be fair, most of the people around me — not all, but most — were drinking and often doing drugs as well.

I tended to stay away from drugs most of the time. I had a feeling that if I did drugs, I was totally going to lose control of myself. But I did smoke marijuana 4 different times. The last time I smoked marijuana, I had just gotten the results of my LSAT — the law school standardized admission test, the test you take to figure out what kind of law school you're going to go to. I had not done much studying. I had done fantastic on the SATs in high school, where I had been sober and had put a lot of effort into studying and getting all A's. After 4 years of college trying to put in the minimum effort possible to keep my scholarships and keep my parents happy, I didn't do very well on the LSAT — not well enough to get a great scholarship or anything. Given I had no money to pay for law school and my parents wouldn't co-sign any of my loans, I was really upset about my LSAT score.

That was the last time I smoked marijuana. I had also had 8 or 10 drinks, and then smoked some marijuana that I think was laced with something else. I went on this trip where I couldn't remember my own name. I couldn't remember what the LSAT was. I felt totally separated. I was also violently ill, throwing up. I remember laying in my bed not knowing anything about Jerry Banfield or Jerry Banfield's life — it was all gone. That scared me, and from then on I swore I would never do any kind of drugs or marijuana again, because I knew that night I had completely lost control of myself. I was lucky I even made it back to my dorm room, because just a few minutes later I was flat laid out. I swore I would never do that again.

I Called the Sober People Losers

I wanted to be a police officer, and I knew they don't want people who are police officers doing drugs. Alcoholics, maybe, if you can keep that on the down low or minimize it — but they definitely don't want drug users. So I never did drugs again. Around that same time I also had seven days sober, and after seven days sober I was so miserable that my mind said, "You don't want to waste your senior year sober. You don't want to miss out on all this fun. You can't have any fun sober. Everybody else drinks." And I went right back to drinking.

I would love to see what my life would look like now if I had gotten sober at 21 instead of 29 and experienced college sober, because there were people who were sober. I knew people who lived in my dorm and went to class, and they had these high ambitions for their life — and I called them losers. I thought of them as losers. Now I look back on it and I'm like, I was the loser, pissing my life away hanging out with other losers. Not everybody, but lots of other losers who were pissing their lives away too. The people who didn't drink often were helping others and were going to have lucrative careers in their future. And me? I graduated college with my bachelor's in criminal justice and ended up working as a correction officer at the Department of Juvenile Justice.

Short Stretches of Sobriety That Never Stuck

During the year after I graduated college, I tried to get sober several times. After that initial week in college I never tried to get sober again — I waited about eight or nine months, and then I started making some more serious efforts because my drinking kept scaring me more. Whether it was spending all of my money gambling and drinking, or having something with sex like a hookup I regretted, often it was just how bad I felt, too — like, I can't stand to live like this anymore. I was shocked at how bad I was starting to feel. On the first hangover I ever had, I was physically miserable, but my mind was still in pretty good shape. After just a few years of drinking, my mind was starting to really be ready to give up — like it's hopeless, there's no point in even trying anymore, this life is all a waste. And that started to motivate me to get sober.

I kept trying these short periods of sobriety — another week sober, a few weeks sober — and it was brutal. I remember just being at work sober all day, hating my job, wishing I could drink, fantasizing about how great it would be to drink, feeling guilty and criticizing myself for thinking about drinking, and then complaining about how I was going to miss out on hanging out with my friends, and then just rationalizing why I might as well drink. By the weekend I often would go right back to it, and it took the most trivial excuse. My roommate would ask me if I wanted to paint, and he was getting a few beers to paint — and him getting a few beers to paint turns into me drinking and playing video games all night, getting crazy and screaming, and then it's like, why bother trying to stay sober again?

I tried to get sober several times after that — a week here, a week there. I remember feeling so sorry for myself every time I was sober, and I'd get just the crappiest jobs. I got a job as a medical billing assistant and was sober that whole week, then quit that job and just binge drank after quitting. I got this horrible job as a door-to-door salesman, stayed sober a few days, quit that job, went straight to the liquor store and got a bunch of gin, a bunch of Tanqueray, and just got wasted listening to Snoop Dogg, watching crappy TV, and playing video games. Then I'd be sober for a few more weeks, apply to some jobs, go visit my parents, and then get right back into it, having my friends over and getting wasted.

Then I bought a new car, and I swore I would never drunk drive this car and wreck it the way I did the last one. As you can imagine, that lasted successfully maybe a month — until my girlfriend wanted to come over for a booty call and I drunk drove to go pick her up. At which point it was drunk driving all the time again. Like, well, look, I didn't wreck that time, so let's just not take any corners too fast.

Drinking Before Work in Corrections

Then I start working as a correction officer, and all the mental and physical stress I'm putting on my body leads to physical illness. I come down with mono. I'm fatigued, I'm exhausted, my body gets to be in some of the worst health it's ever been in, and I am so unwilling to ask for help that I won't move home and get help. Instead I'm taking cash advances on my credit cards, I'm trying to drink to feel better — and then drinking with mono and having a hangover means several days go by where all you've done is lay in bed. It was insane.

Then I'm going to work, and I'm at work with these kids who have had absolutely brutal lives, kids who would just punch you in the face or beat you up, and I'm not in a good place myself. I start to have things with the kids where they're talking about "I'm going to kill you" and "I'll beat you to death." When I first got to corrections, I had a few days where I was sober, and I got elected to be the class leader, and I gave this really inspiring speech about how we were all going to go in and help these kids recover. And then I started drinking again. I start going into work and it gets so bad that I'm terrified of going in. I'm going into work sick with my organs swollen up from mono — if one of these kids punches me in the belly, I might need to go to the emergency room from having an organ split. And I start drinking on the way before I even go into work. I'm on night shift, so I'm waking up at 3 or 4 in the afternoon, having my first meal of the day, drinking like five beers before I go to work while playing the Scarface game on PlayStation 2. Then I'm driving into work buzzed, slash a little drunk, and sobering up during the night at work, which was brutal. I had coworkers fighting with the radio — I'm trying to read and they put this radio on with all this garbage music.

Finally it got to the point where I was so sick I couldn't work anymore. I couldn't make it through a night in there, and they expected me to quit. I had hardly any sick leave saved up because I had just started there, and I went and spent a couple of weeks with my parents. Of course, my body gets better with being sober and being away from that corrections environment. My body heals up, and I could see that I could make it as a correction officer if I just wouldn't drink. That would fix everything.

"Once I'm a Police Officer, Then I Can Drink Again"

At that point, in 2007, I had the longest amount of sobriety since I first drank — I put together three months. And my condition was: once I get to be a police officer, then I can drink again. I applied to every police department I could, anyone who would hire me to be a police officer. I figured I'll just take any job that will hire me, and then once I'm a certified law enforcement officer, I can always get a better job. At that point, getting a dream job like the one I ended up in seemed out of reach. But I remember the day I got the offer to be a police officer. The last three months at corrections were amazingly positive compared to when I was drinking. The kids started to respect me more, I started to respect them more, they stopped trying to hurt me and put me in situations where they would jump me. The last three months I was at corrections went pretty smoothly. I lost weight and life was going good.

And then I got my offer to be a police officer, and that's when I'm like, okay, now I can drink again. See, it was corrections that was the problem. This is where your mind starts to get so sick that from an outside point of view your behavior just doesn't make any sense at all — but from inside it's like, well, I was just having a hard time because I was working at corrections, and now that I'm a police officer, now I can drink again. So I get this job as a police officer, a state law enforcement officer working for the state mental health department, and I go to the police academy and I start drinking again. For about a month or so I have fun and there aren't any real consequences. My friends are glad that I'm back and drinking with them, and we're getting kicked out of bars and doing very unsafe things like drunk driving all over the city and having fights in the car — the driver getting his eyes covered up while we're on the interstate — just very dangerous, stupid things. And I'm, of course, drinking mostly by myself at home and only occasionally going out with my friends.

The Breakup That Nearly Broke Me

Then my girlfriend at the time gets tired of my antisocial drinking. When I actually do want to be social, I don't want to go out and drink with her — I'm going to go out with the boys and really drink how I want to drink. So I go out with the boys instead of going out with her. Then she gets sick, and I don't have time for her because I don't want to be around her being sick. I tell her I can't afford to be around her, because if I get sick I might not pass the police academy — so I rationalize drinking all by myself at home all weekend instead of spending the weekend with her. As soon as she feels better, she ends up cheating on me and then dumping me. And of course she comes over to dump me after I've had a hangover from a long night of drinking and playing Rise of Nations by myself.

Then my mind becomes obsessed with hurting myself, and that was the closest I came up until that point. I was about a week sober, and all I'm thinking about all day is how horrible it is that she's dumping me, how unfair it is, how I can't live without her. And there was something magical that happened — a spiritual experience, looking back on it. After a week of being in utter misery, racing thoughts, constantly being scared to drink — I mean, I was terrified to drink. The only times I would stay sober were when I was too scared to see what the consequences of drinking would be. I stayed sober for a week, and I went to visit her at her apartment to try and win her back.

A Moment of Silence on the Interstate

On the way there I was on the interstate, and my mind had been racing relentlessly for a week. Then, for a minute or two, it stopped. My mind just stopped. I remember looking around on the interstate thinking, what is this? The only thought I had was, what is this silence? Time seemed to slow down. I could clearly see each of the lines passing, the cars were moving slower, and then I thought, oh my God, that was so peaceful and so nice. What was that? I loved it. And I was perfectly sober as this total feeling of peace and joy came over me — everything's okay, you don't need to worry about anything, just utter bliss out of nowhere. And I was able to stay sober for the rest of the police academy.

What happened was I started finding that as long as I was scared I was going to hurt myself over this breakup — which, to be fair, I didn't even really like my ex-girlfriend anymore, she didn't even really like me, we should have broken up quite a while ago — I stayed sober. Then I started dating. I was on Facebook, meeting these girls to hook up with, and as soon as I felt a bit better about myself after hooking up with a rebound girl from Facebook, I was about three months sober again and my mental process was, well, it's safe for you to drink again. You can drink now — you're over her. So right back into the drinking again. That was the second time within a year I'd been sober for at least three months — I did about six months sober in total — and yet went right back into the drinking game again.

Hurting My Back and Going Back to Drinking

In that time I had also hurt my back at work. I was arresting this lady, and she was pretty heavy, and I threw my back out trying to protect her and my partner from getting hurt. I threw my back out arresting her, took her to jail, and the jail immediately kicked her out — right back to the mental health facility. It was utterly pointless even arresting her. I hurt my back for nothing. When I hurt my back they gave me some mild pain pills, just muscle relaxers and some things a little heavier than over-the-counter stuff, but no real pain pills or anything. Those pills knocked me on my butt for like a week — muscle relaxers — and after a week I thought, I can't live like this. These pills are knocking me down, I can't stand this. My back didn't seem to be getting much better either, because taking those pills would relax it too much, then I'd strain it too much, and then it would tighten back up. I wish I'd known about yoga back then. So I stopped taking the pills they gave me after a week, and pretty soon after that went back to drinking again.

One of the things that triggered me was thinking about my friends having this poker game and drinking, and I felt so sorry for myself that I couldn't go to the poker game and drink with them. Soon after that, the next time they were going out, I went out with them. I remember this feeling both times that I went back to drinking after three months sober — thinking how reckless and irresponsible and crazy it was, and also thinking, I don't care what happens. I know bad things could happen. I don't care what bad stuff happens. Feeling totally reckless. And then I did have lots of fun, I did have lots more nights of joy with my friends, but I paid serious prices for it.

I also remember being sober at work right before I relapsed. I didn't go to AA or anything — I just tried to stay sober on my own willpower. I kind of used my dad as a sponsor and would call and complain to him about being sober. I remember thinking, right before I drank again, that I was losing my mind. This mental health police officer job I had was pretty boring most of the time, except then it would suddenly get fun when you have a patient with AIDS that you're trying to restrain, and there's a nurse with a needle, and sometimes the patient gets stuck, and then an officer would get stuck. So it would quickly go from boring to life and death in no time. Most of the time it was boring, occasionally with life and death or serious harm possible, and I liked the excitement of it. I loved when there'd be a call that they needed to restrain a patient — I'm like, let's do this, I'm ready, let's go risk my life, this sounds fun. I remember thinking that I was losing it, that I was getting bored at this job, and I either needed to go back to drinking or do something really nuts like go in the Air Force. And I remember thinking, well, going in the Air Force would be really stupid — why don't I just drink? I mean, what kind of logic is that? So I started drinking again.

The Dream Job at USC

And then I got the dream job. I ended up being a police officer at the University of South Carolina, where I was a student, and that was my dream job. I remember people at the Department of Mental Health talking about being a police officer at USC like it was just the best police job you could possibly get. It was one of the best-paying police jobs in the area. You're working on a college campus, you get awesome benefits like going to the world-class gymnasium they had there with all kinds of new equipment — a rock climbing wall, brand new basketball courts, an indoor running track. It was wonderful. That was one of the best police jobs, at least if you didn't care about doing real policing like being a city or county officer. If you just wanted nice pay, great benefits, a little bit of action but not too much real danger, that was one of the best police jobs you could get.

I remember I had to greatly minimize my alcoholism, and I was such a pathological liar that I made it through the polygraph. To be fair, they didn't grill me as hard on the polygraph as they would have grilled someone who wasn't a certified officer, because they really wanted me to pass — I was already a certified law enforcement officer, which was much easier for them. Still, there were a lot of tough questions, and they make you fill out this undetected crimes questionnaire, and there were lots of them I had to answer yes to. Yes, I vandalized — and if you go in somewhere where you don't live and vandalize to commit a crime, I guess that's called burglary. There were lots of things I had done that I had to answer for on there, things like drunk driving. And I managed to even talk my way out of some of the questions like that, where I was able to successfully minimize many of my yes answers and always make myself sound like such a great person who just occasionally had accidentally been lured into doing bad, dumb things. I got through the polygraph, able to pass it and answer what I thought was honestly at the time to all the questions, and then I got to be a police officer exactly where I wanted to work. And it only took a year for my alcoholism to tear all that down.

Night Shifts, Strip Clubs, and the Scariest Time in My Drinking

When I first got there, I was in the middle of my drinking, and I'd work month-long night shifts. Normally I didn't drink in the morning, but when I worked these night shifts I would adjust my sleep to be on the night shift. So if I worked from 7pm to 7am, I'd get up the same as if I was on day shift, except I'd switch it to pm. On day shift I'd wake up at 5:30am to be in to work by 7am, get off at 7pm, go to bed at like 9 or 10, get up at 5:30. Well, on night shift I'd get up at 5:30pm, work from 7pm to 7am, then go to bed at 9 or 10am. That plus drinking started to get really scary, and that was the scariest time in my drinking — when I had this police officer job I was real proud of.

That's when the other police officers on my shift actually introduced me to strip clubs. I had the intuition that I should not go to strip clubs, and I was starting to get some financial abundance for the first time ever, and I immediately began blowing it at strip clubs — a thousand dollars to go in the champagne room, dropping hundreds on lap dances, and making it rain.

All of a sudden, after a year of being a police officer, the drama started. I dated this girl at work, and we had some drama when we were drinking — especially me drinking by myself — and it got ugly. There were lots of crazy, nasty things said and done on all sides, and then I brought stuff into the police department. I came in lying about what had happened with her. She had not said anything. She had already gotten another officer fired, and another officer moved away to get away from her, and one of the sergeants — who has since passed on, rest in peace to Ron — warned me. He saw me texting her and he said, "Banfield, I'd be careful." And I'm like, nah, I'm not trying to be careful. I'm trying to have adventures. I'm trying to have fun.

Getting Everything I Wanted and Still Not Being Happy

And then came the worst I ever felt in my whole life. I had this idea in my head that if I could get my life set up just perfectly — if I could be this police officer with a respectable job, some adventure, and good pay, and if I could get this really attractive woman to be in love with me — that I would be happy. And I lined all that up when I was at the police department. The dispatcher fell in love with me and we had a nice one-night stand, and two days after that one-night stand I started to hit my worst bottom drinking, because I wasn't happy. I had her over and we had gotten drunk and hooked up, and I thought at the time that was the best night of my life. Shortly after that I experienced the darkest nights of my life, because I was not happy. It didn't matter that I had the job I wanted. It didn't matter that I had a girl who was a perfect ten in looks who loved me. That didn't matter. I wasn't happy. And drinking started to not even help either. This is when my drinking nights started to get really scary, and it was just one drama after another — paying a woman to come over that I wouldn't have been with sober for free even if she paid me, but drunk, I'm doing it.

The Call That Broke My Dad's Heart

Just because I was reckless, and the dispatcher wasn't answering my calls, I remember I called my dad up at this point and told him that I had nearly ended it all one night drunk, and that I was definitely going to do it soon. That's the worst pain I've ever heard in my dad's voice — talking about how, look at all we've done for you, we've raised you up, you can't just throw your life away like this. My dad came to try and rescue me and stayed with me for a week over my birthday. I stayed sober for a couple of weeks, and immediately everything started to get better. The dispatcher, after my drinking drama, had some space while I got sober. She went on a cruise, came back from the cruise ready for action, and there I was — sober a couple of weeks, all positive and hyped up. She and I took a trip together with my friends after my dad left.

On that trip I was restless, irritable, and discontented, despite outwardly having everything. If you had looked at my life and listened to my goals, I had everything — this was exactly what I said I wanted. But I was restless, irritable, and discontent, and all day I was miserable. I was even complaining to my friend about the dispatcher, even though she wasn't doing anything to merit it. I was just sober without a program. Then we went to the liquor store, because these friends drank, and the dispatcher was arguably as crazy as me, and we all started drinking. Then things got really ugly. There was a little bit of euphoria for an hour or two, but then things went down the ugly hole — all kinds of confusion and nasty things said. The dispatcher ended up having her parents drive a couple of hours in the middle of the night to come pick her up. I felt so bad about myself, I had so much of my own self-hatred, I couldn't even try to make things better with her. At one point she yelled at me that I needed to stop drinking. And I did — I stopped drinking for two more weeks after that. Then I was out at the bar with my friends, rationalizing that I could just have one drink.

Losing the Badge

Finally, by September 2009, my parents were sure that I was not going to live through another night shift. They were certain I would not survive another night shift, because after I pushed things down the drain with the dispatcher, I started really getting crazy on night shift. I was going to strip clubs by myself. I was having strippers over to my apartment and bringing other security guards over from work. It was just getting insane, and my sergeant could see that I was starting to really lose it.

Finally — thankfully — they intervened at work. One day, after I made the best arrest I ever made — somebody had made a report that this guy was around, I went the extra effort, searched an entire building, finally found him, and made the best arrest of my career, someone they had wanted to get for a long time — they called me up to headquarters. I thought they were going to celebrate my accomplishment. Instead, like eight officers jumped out of everywhere — cubicles, conference rooms, people were hiding — everybody jumped out, because they'd heard what I'd said I was going to do if they tried to fire me. They took all my guns and equipment off me and sat me down, and it turned out some of the things I'd done drunk had been reported to the police department. Every problem they listed — like six or seven things — all of them had happened while I was drunk.

I was so into my alcoholism, I had made a decision I would never quit drinking again, and I refused to admit I had any problem with alcohol. I told them, fine, I'll just quit and move home with my parents. And I did that — I quit and I moved home with my parents. But I also told them I thought they were not being very nice to me. When I look back now, they were being very nice to me. Because I was a bit confrontational with them, they gave me a trespass order that I couldn't come on campus anymore and a restraining order that I couldn't talk to the dispatcher anymore. These were all things that my drinking had set in motion.

A Year at Home with My Parents

I moved home with my parents and had a year living at home. My parents said no drinking if you live at home, so naturally I went out to drink whenever I could — which wasn't that often. I lived mostly sober with my parents for about a year. I lost 20 pounds of mostly drinking weight. I exercised. I got myself in the best shape I'd been in since I first went to college. Girls were finding me really attractive, because I started to love myself a bit more, because I had my parents' love and support every day at home, and everything got much better for me while I was living there. I did still have episodes — I would take an overnight trip to a casino and get so drunk I'd throw up, trying to take a nap in the bathroom before I could drive home. But most of the time I lived with my parents, I was sober. I was emotionally unstable, but I was much happier and much more loved.

From that launch pad, I went to graduate school at the University of South Florida. I got a nice scholarship to work on my PhD even though I only had a bachelor's, because when I lived at home with my parents I put some serious effort into studying for the GRE and got some great scores on it. And I remember my dad, when I moved home from being a police officer, saying, "Boy, don't you think your drinking had something to do with this?" And I said no — it was all the police department. They treated me unfairly. They believed all the lies she told, and they didn't believe any of the things I said that were true, and they disregarded all my lies. So it was all their fault. It wasn't me, it wasn't my drinking — it was them.

Meeting My Wife and the Delusion of "Reasonable" Drinking

Then I moved to the University of South Florida from this place where I had essentially been healed a lot by the love of my parents, and I was able to meet my wife pretty soon after that through online dating. After we'd been dating for a couple of months, I was honest and told her that I struggle with alcoholism, I struggle with video game addiction, but I will give these up to be with you. She ended up calling me on that eventually, especially on the alcohol. When I was at the University of South Florida, my drinking was about the most reasonable it had been for a long time, and I was under the delusion that it was being a police officer, living by myself, and being single — that's why my drinking had gotten crazy. I was able to live in an apartment and just drink fairly normally without any consequences for like nine months.

I go into this level of depth because, in my experience, some of us get deluded. You think your alcoholism is getting better at various points, when really you're just kind of on good behavior to some degree. The real issue has not gotten better overall — the symptom is just not as acute for a period of time.

So then I moved in with my wife after a year that was one of the happiest years I'd had in a long time, where my drinking was fairly reasonable. I'd have two or three nights a week where I'd get drunk. I didn't have any real dumb things happen — I mean, I certainly did dumb things here and there, like I'd throw beer bottles into the street from my apartment. One time a police car went by right after a beer bottle smashed in front of it — glad the officer didn't come looking for me. And I was under the delusion that I was so close to being in a good spot that when I moved in with my wife, everything would be fine, and then I would change, and then I would grow up.

I moved in with my wife, and very quickly — we were still dating, I hadn't proposed yet — we had a real big fight one night when I was drinking all night. I swore to her after that I would never drink again, because the fight was scary and I realized I couldn't stand to lose her. So I made it sober a couple of months again, full of self-pity. I also tried to quit playing video games at the time, but then I relapsed on the video games, and we had this huge fight when I was playing video games and drinking, because I was screaming at the TV at 3 in the morning while she was trying to sleep and get prepared to go to work at 7 the next day. So I stayed sober for a couple of months again, just on willpower, again feeling sorry for myself. I skipped my friend's bachelor party because I knew I couldn't go and be sober — full of self-pity, being a total child, and also not taking responsibility for my life. Then over Christmas break I arranged for 10 days away from her, at which point I relapsed with my friends. I had fun, nothing bad happened, but I woke up the next day feeling miserable and remorseful, calling her crying on the phone and saying it wouldn't happen again.

Five Months Sober and My Father's Heart Attack

Then I had five months after that where I was sober — the longest time I'd been sober since I had first drunk. And man, I started a business. I poured all my energy from drinking into being an entrepreneur online. That's when I started cranking out YouTube videos in 2012, and I started reading all these books. That was the first time I got a real taste of what being sober could be like, and I started to get really excited. During that time, my father had his first heart attack, and that's when I could see that my father was going to die soon, and this level of pain started to come up that had never been there in my life before.

My father came to my graduation for my master's degree, and right around that time I relapsed again. I remember calling my father and telling him that I was going to drink, and I drove to drink with my friends all the way up to Columbia, South Carolina from Sarasota, Florida. I remember him being so hurt and so confused, wondering how I could do this. And I was like, why doesn't he think this is good for me? My mind was so far gone I couldn't even understand why my father — who was dying, and who had been sober himself — couldn't see it my way.

The Slow Slide Back Into Drinking

For over 20 years I couldn't understand why he was upset that I was about to relapse — like, where had my mind gone? Then I steadily got back into drinking. At first I said I'd only drink out of town. I told myself that as long as I didn't drink around my wife, we weren't going to have a big drunk fight. Another thing had happened too: I'd had this huge fight with my wife while I was sober, because when I was sober there was no part of me that would back down, that would say I'm sorry. Back then, when I was sober, I was right all the time — everything I did was right because I wasn't drinking, and anything besides that was wrong. My wife and I had a fight just as bad as any we'd had when I was drinking, except I was sober, and I used that fight to rationalize that being sober was not helping me get along with my wife any better — therefore I could drink, just as long as I didn't drink around her.

So for a few months, maybe six months, I only drank when I went out of town. I would drive eight hours to Columbia, South Carolina just to drink, stay with my friends, and then drive back. Finally I rationalized that that just wasn't safe — I could get in a car accident again. The delusional thinking is so obvious to someone else, but to me it made perfect sense. I then rationalized drinking at home, and for about a year and a half it was rough. It started off with my wife not happy with the drinking, and she progressively got more unhappy with it, and I went back down the dark rabbit hole all the way for about a year. Then my dad died, and the entire year before that was me drinking and crying in my drinks, talking about how unfair it is, how awful life is. Even though I'd go do these great things — my wife and I took a trip to Toronto and ate at this wonderful restaurant — I ruined it with my drinking and my self-pity.

When I Couldn't Quit Anymore

There was no more quitting at that point either. I started to be completely unable to even put a few days or a couple of weeks together getting sober, and at this point you can hear how many times I'd quit. It started to shock me — I really couldn't quit anymore. I remember I put two days together one time, and I killed this snake in the yard because it jumped out at me after I hit it with a weed whacker. I didn't see it was curled up next to the air conditioner, and I came over with the weed whacker and it got scared. It didn't bite me — it slithered over to another part of the yard — and I'm stone cold sober, and I got a shovel out and killed it. And then I rationalized that it had been a tough day, I had to kill that snake — never mind that I chose to — I had to kill that snake, and I need a drink.

I had another similar thing happen. I had a couple days sober — and at this point I'd stopped telling people I was trying to get sober — and I got some chlorine water in my eye from refilling the chlorine container in the pool. I had a complete panic attack. I washed my eyes out with water so much my vision got blurry. I called the poison control hotline and the lady's like, well, we don't even know if you're going to be all right right now. Man, I was praying to God so hard to not lose my vision, that I'd do anything if I just didn't lose my vision. I called my wife and made her come home from work, working an hour away. And the next day I rationalized that, well, that was so hard yesterday, I deserve a drink.

By the time my father died I was just getting to be an absolute mess. I was drinking so much that I saw my father and my grandfather and my great-grandfather — their blue ghostly faces. I drank so much one night I saw all of them appear out of the wall, and I screamed at them for an hour. My wife at this point thought I was taking drugs, and I'm like, no — that's just what happens sometimes when I drink too much. I fell and sprained my ankle just walking around the house one day because I was so drunk.

The Last Night I Drank: April 21, 2014

The last night I drank was April 21, 2014. I had started drinking at like noon while my wife was at work, and I remember before I had that first drink thinking, I don't want to do this. I don't want to see how this turns out. I don't want to experience what's going to happen. I don't want those consequences. I don't want to jump into "anything's possible and you consented to it because you had the first drink." I don't want that. And I remember my mind telling me, you have to drink — this is the only time you're going to be able to feel better, do it now. And I listened to that, and I just started drinking. I remember feeling relief and feeling better for those first few drinks, and then just going down the rabbit hole. I was playing Call of Duty Black Ops 2 Zombies on Origins, and I got the highest level I'd ever gotten on it at the time — round 71 — playing for six hours, drinking the whole time.

My wife got home from work, I was drunk, and she was really unhappy about it. She told me that she couldn't stand to be around me when I was drinking anymore, and I said, fine, leave. I then signed up for an account on this Chinese website to gamble. Online gambling was an even worse addiction than alcohol for me. With that one, I would tell my friends I was never gambling again at lunch, and right after lunch — like in college — I'd be putting in a wire transfer to a third-world country to start gambling immediately after I'd said I was never going to do it again. That last night I blew $500, and my finances were not in a position to blow $500 — it was credit card debt and client money I was operating on at that point. I blew $500 gambling online. My friend started to be seriously concerned with the stuff I was telling him while we were playing Diablo, and it was like 2 or 3 in the morning. Finally, on that last drink, I just didn't want any more. There was like an inch left in my 8-inch-high cup — the same cup I'd drunk from since college — and I finally didn't want any more. I ended up on customer support — I'd already deposited $500 on this website and lost it from being too drunk to even play properly, playing like 4 or 5 tables at once from being so bored, just throwing my chips all in, not even caring, just trying to feel something. Then I was on with customer support for like an hour, and I finally just went to bed.

I woke up and I threw up blood that day. I threw up blood, which really scared me — I'd never thrown up blood before. I was brutally sick. I was horrified. I hadn't gambled online since 2006, so it had been 8 years since I'd gambled online, and I was terrified, because I knew if I was willing to gamble online drunk, there was literally nothing I wouldn't do. If I could gamble online drunk, there was nothing that was off the table.

Nothing Was Off the Table

I had been deluding myself into thinking, oh well, I had actually made it 4 years without drinking and driving after the last time I drank and drove in 2010. That time, I drunk drove 700 miles in the middle of the night on energy drinks after a trip that had been set up as a booty call went downhill because of drinking, and I decided I needed to immediately end my road trip and drive home to my parents in Mississippi. So I drunk drove 700 miles, and I tried to sleep in this rest stop bathroom in Alabama, because I was paranoid to sleep in the back of my car even in a rest stop parking lot, for fear of getting robbed or getting a DUI from the police. So I tried to sleep in this rest stop, and there were all these families out doing stuff, and I just remember thinking, what kind of a loser are you that it's like 8 in the morning and you're trying to fall asleep in the bathroom at a rest stop in the middle of Alabama? What has happened to your life? So I swore to God I'd never drink and drive again, and after that I at least got a night of sleep before driving — although I definitely drove hungover, with some kind of a blood alcohol level, a few times. But I realized that last night gambling that if I could gamble online, I could drink and drive, I could cheat on my wife — everything was possible after that first drink.

And at the same time I felt utterly helpless — like it didn't even matter. It didn't matter if I tried to stop. I knew I couldn't stop drinking. I'd failed so many times I was sure that I couldn't stop. At the time I was agnostic — I figured it was unlikely there was a God in the world we live in, but it was also ridiculous to say you could prove there wasn't one. I prayed desperately to a God I didn't believe in: please, I'll do anything to get sober. And in the process of that prayer, my mind gave me the idea that going to Alcoholics Anonymous would be a part of "anything" that I'd just offered.

Walking Back Into AA

With that thought I felt hope, even though at that time — it was 2014 — I hadn't been to an AA meeting since 2005. I felt hope, because the first time I went to AA I obviously was just there to try and look like I was doing something. I felt excitement, and I decided yes, I will go to that AA meeting. I got on my phone and I found an AA meeting. My father's memorial was coming up, and I knew I could stay sober until my father's memorial. Then I scheduled an AA meeting for the day after I got back from my father's memorial, because I knew the day after dad's memorial I'd have to drink — so I'd go to this AA meeting, and then maybe that would stop me from drinking or give me something else to do.

So I went to the AA meeting, and I remember walking in just feeling scared, feeling like a failure, feeling ashamed of my life. Like, wow, look at what I've got — it's Tuesday afternoon and I'm walking into an AA meeting. What a failure. I walked into this AA meeting, and the first thing I noticed is that there was this air of happiness and joy in the air that was completely illogical to me — I'm walking in feeling real bad about myself.

Walking Back Into the Rooms

My life was falling apart and I was real thirsty too. I had just been to my dad's memorial — I was really close to my dad — and then I walk into this meeting and they're so freaking happy. The first thing I'm thinking is, I want that. I want to feel how they feel, because they don't feel how I feel. I am miserable and scared, and this is like the atmosphere of some family barbecue — everybody's all happy and shaking hands — and I'm like, I want that. So when they asked if anybody was coming back, I raised my hand and said yep: I haven't been to a meeting since 2005, I'm an alcoholic, my life's going down the drain, and here I am.

Then I immediately started ignoring the suggestions. They suggested I get phone numbers. I said no, I don't want any phone numbers. I had these ideas in my head that people were going to try and sell me stuff, and some of the old ladies were going to try and come on to me — maybe even some of the guys — and I'm like, no, I don't want any of these pervs' phone numbers. But I did write my name down in the membership book, and that meant something to me. I'm a member of this group of Alcoholics Anonymous now. I've got a place where I belong. And Ruth, the person who chaired the meeting, said, "I tried to do it the hard way like you and didn't take suggestions, and I would recommend against that — it was hard." I'm like, alright, well, thanks for your advice, and I went home.

Crying in the Parking Lot

But here's what happened. I went out in the parking lot — and I had been really missing my dad at this point for three months — and I just sat in my car and cried. For the first time, I felt really close to my dad. I felt like all these prayers that people had been saying for me — "please God, help Jerry" from my mother, my wife, my brother, anyone else coming across me and praying, and the people at AA seeing this newcomer and praying "please God, help him get sober" — all these prayers that had been said, that I was keeping at arm's length, I finally let them in. I cried, and I felt all this love and joy and hope.

I remember thinking, I've got to come back here. I want to feel this feeling again. Because really, I had just been drinking to try and feel better, and I go to this AA meeting and I feel better. It wasn't even the first meeting — this was the second meeting — and I felt so much better. I felt like there was hope, because before that I had felt desperate and hopeless. But that hope also came with a catch: because I felt hope, I no longer was desperate. I'm like, good — all I need to do is go to a couple of these AA meetings a week and not drink, and that's it. That's all I've got to do, right? I'm good, I'm fixed, I'm cured. I'm glad that's done with. Now I can move on.

Two Meetings a Week and God Moments

So I went to two meetings a week for a couple of months, and things started to happen. I started to have these little insights — people call them God moments, little realizations, quantum moments. I realized that alcoholism had been a big deal and had been going on a long time in my family, and that I had the chance to help on behalf of my whole family — to help the whole family advance. Maybe if I could get sober, my kids would have an easier time, like I had an easier time than my father. On behalf of everyone who had struggled with alcoholism in my family, I really owed it to all of them to get sober.

I also started to have so much more energy again. I had all this time and passion to pour into my work. I had my own business helping people with Facebook ads — people would pay me to set their Facebook ads up — and my business had totally gone down the drain. When I started my business and was sober for all those months, I had learned so much and had so much energy that I poured into it, and I got all these clients. Then my drinking just steadily destroyed my business. If I'm drinking all day, I'm not helping my clients out. If I'm hung over all day, I'm not helping my clients out. And when I did have a day sober, like in 2013, all I'm doing is trying to get more money in the door, because I know my existing clients aren't going to hire me again — I'm not doing a good job for them. So I'm just out there selling more to get more money in, and then doing the minimum to try and keep people from getting a refund.

In 2014, I poured my energy into my business. I started teaching on this website called Udemy — I was one of the first instructors there — and I started to get this sense that, where I never could do anything with my life financially when I kept drinking, now I could. I started to get this excitement: man, now I can really make money, now I can really be famous, now I can really do all these things I've wanted to do that my alcoholism has stopped me from doing.

Sober but Not Changing

The challenge was that aside from going to two AA meetings a week, making a little bit of a start on the steps without a sponsor, and reading a little bit of the book, I wasn't changing. All I was doing was going to two meetings a week, but I was basically being the same person that needed to drink the rest of the time. As I said earlier, my wife said that my early sobriety was worse for her to experience than my drinking. Because at least with my drinking, I'd have days of remorse, days of empathy for her where I could commiserate — "I'm sorry I'm like this" — days where I'd just lavish all this love on her and be so sorry for what I did, and days where I'd be really just sober and happy and in the middle of life. On my drinking days she'd just try and keep her distance, but at least I would have a bit of fun and lighten up. I kind of had a whole personality when I was drinking. Sober, I didn't really have a whole personality anymore. I was just self-righteous and filled with volatile emotions, willing to argue and be nasty, criticizing other people relentlessly. I do still feel those Call of Duty lobbies calling to me sometimes.

The Dog, the Dinner, and July 4th

What happened was, after a couple of months being sober, the same thing that had happened every other time I tried to get sober happened. I got so restless, irritable, and discontent — so miserable being sober — that my behavior started to really piss other people off. In this case it was my wife. A week before July 4th, my wife's parents were at the family dinner, and they had this little dachshund that was just endlessly barking. They had recently adopted him, and he was sensitive to the energies of people around him — he barked like crazy when I was around. I'm glad I'm alive and sober to share this story today, because at that family dinner, two months sober, I finally broke. I screamed "shut the F up" as loud as I could at that dog in front of all of Laura's family.

And you know what happened next? I decided not to like them, because they were the problem. When they all looked at me and saw me act like that — they had seen me a couple of times when I was drunk and I was a mess, but I had mostly hidden it from them — now they see me stone cold sober yelling "shut the F up" at their dog. Now they all see me. And in order to rationalize my own behavior, I have to say that they're jerks and I don't like them, when really I am embarrassed at how I behaved in front of them.

On July 4th, a week after this incident, my wife says we have plans to go spend the whole day with her family, which she did every year. I said, I don't like your family, I don't like how they treat me, and I don't want to be around them all day on the 4th. My wife said, well, that's too bad — you can stay home, I'm going to go spend the day with my family. And that's when, after two months of delusion that I was cured from alcoholism and would never have the obsession to drink again — when I had been acting at AA meetings, trying to act like other people, faking it, trying to sound like other people, trying to fit in — all the pretenses broke. The obsession to drink came back, and it came back hard.

The Obsession Comes Back Hard

I had this huge motivation to get sober because I knew my wife was going to leave me if I kept drinking, and I knew I wouldn't survive my wife leaving me. Now she leaves for the day, and my mind — which clearly had set this up, clearly had tried to make this happen — says, why, this is the perfect day to drink. It's like 10 in the morning. You're going to have the whole day to yourself. You have time to go rebuy the liquor. The last time I went to the liquor store, I traded back — they refunded me $80 of liquor that was unopened in my closet, and I also poured all the open bottles out down the drain. Now my mind is saying: this is your chance. You can go to the liquor store, you can get all the vodka you want, you can go to Walmart and buy all the Diet Dr. Thunder, you can start mixing that stuff up, fire up the Call of Duty zombies. And look at you — your wife doesn't deserve you, she's being mean. This is your chance to drink, and if you don't take this opportunity, you might never have one this good again.

I think it was Friday, July 4th, when this happened, because I had just gone to my AA meeting Thursday, and I was looking at five days until next Tuesday when I went to a meeting again. The obsession to drink was brutal. I started praying to God, because now things people had said in meetings were coming back to me — things I had often disregarded, or didn't believe, or didn't think were needed. Now I'm at home with the obsession to drink, and I'm realizing: this is what they were talking about. I'm sober two months and my mind is saying drink, even though I know alcohol is poison and I know what I stand to lose.

Two Weeks of Obsession and Total Hopelessness

If I drink, why is my mind so obsessed about drinking when this is killing me? All day, and then for two solid weeks, all day every day, the obsession to drink. I had never made it through a fraction of that much obsession to drink. Weeks in, I started to feel utterly hopeless. I finally got really honest at my AA meeting when they asked one day, "Is anyone having trouble staying sober today?" I immediately raised my hand. At this time it was Thursday, and I'd had the obsession for a week or two straight at this point. As soon as I woke up every day: drink. Praying to God to stay sober, going to bed the next night. There was no hope. It doesn't matter that you made it through today sober, because you're going to wake up tomorrow and want to drink again. I had never had that level of hopelessness or obsession before.

I woke up, I went to this meeting, and they asked if anyone was having trouble staying sober, and I said, "Yes, I am. I barely made it to this meeting sober, and I'm drinking tomorrow." They said, "Just don't drink today." I said, "I'm telling y'all now, I'm going to drink tomorrow. Just thought I should let you know." And they poured their hearts out. They shared their experience, strength, and hope with me, and I made it through another day. I started reading the book, and it was like a critical mass was starting to build up. I remember I called my mother when I was in the liquor store parking lot. I don't remember this, but she remembers it vividly. I called her, and she said I was calling her to talk me out of drinking.

Standing in the Hallway

Another day I was going to personal training. On this day my mind all day was just a relentless battle, a relentless argument. Drink. No, I can't, I'm going to lose my life. Drink. No, it's killing me. I said I won't drink, all day. At one point I stood in the hallway because I was afraid of going unconscious. I was afraid of going into autopilot, where in autopilot you just basically go through these pre-programmed sets of routines. I remember thinking, if I just stand here in the hallway, I know I'm safe. But if I go to the bathroom — maybe if I go to the bathroom, then I'm just going to get in the car and go to the liquor store. So let's not go to the bathroom right now. But if I go into the kitchen and I make something to eat, then I might go to the liquor store right after that. So I'm just going to stand here. I remember just standing there, terrified, in the hallway. As long as I stand here, I can't grab a drink from where I'm at. I know I'm safe, so I'm just going to stand here until I feel a little better. So I stood there. I'm not even sure how long I stood there, but I stood in the hallway, halfway on the way to the bathroom, hungry and wanting to get something to eat, and real thirsty, wanting to go to the liquor store. I just stood there until I was confident that I could go to the bathroom without immediately slipping into some routine and going to the liquor store.

So I then went to personal training, and the whole day I was like, should I go to personal training? No, screw personal training, I'm just going to drink. No, I'm going to miss that — just go straight to the liquor store. Well, I should do my personal training, and then I can go to the liquor store on the way home. No, why even bother? I finally just went to the personal training, and I thought, you know what, I'll decide when I'm at personal training if I'm going to drink or not. So then I got to personal training, and I was thinking about whether I should drink the whole time, thinking some miracle was just going to happen where the decision would just get made for me and I wouldn't have to actually do it.

Praying to My Father in the Car

I got out to the car from personal training, and I was like, man, I have to go to the liquor store right now. What am I going to do if I don't go to the liquor store? I have to drive to the liquor store. It's just too much. I can't take this anymore. And I remember praying. I had tried praying to God — He didn't seem to be listening. I started praying to Jesus — that didn't seem to work either. I figured I wasn't very worthy of Jesus listening, that Jesus had so many other people to attend to who were so much more devout than I ever could consider being, that Jesus was too busy for me. So I finally resorted to praying to my deceased father. I figured that poor bastard had nothing better to do than listen to my prayers and help me. So I prayed to my father. I said, "Please drive this car home for me. Please drive the car home for me, because I know you would not drink. You would not take us to the liquor store. I surrender my body to you. Please possess my body and drive this car home, because I have to go to the liquor store right now."

And I felt like my spirit slid over into the passenger seat, and my dad possessed my body and drove the car home as I curiously watched the liquor store going by, in disbelief that I could drive by it. I just sobbed the whole way home, because I could really feel the presence of my father, and I could feel the love. I got home and I still felt hopeless. I was like, I can't just have my dad live my whole life for me.

The Fourth Step and a Flicker of Hope

Then I woke up again. I read the book. I started reading the book more, and by this point I had done a fourth step. I wrote out a 10,000-word honest story of my life. For the first time, I wrote an honest story of my life with all the good, the bad, and the ugly — nothing omitted. I wrote the whole thing out and read it and got honest with myself about the entire picture of my life. And then I started to share things, like I couldn't believe how many times I had nearly ended it all in my life, how my mind had been programmed for self-harm. I started to share these things and do a fifth step at the meetings, just sharing things from my story, because I didn't have a sponsor. And I started to read the book more. I finally finished the first textbook part of the book, and then I started to read the stories.

I remember something happened when I read one of the stories one night, where the guy said he realized he didn't have to drink and he didn't want to drink — so what else was there? And I realized, wow, I don't have to drink and I don't want to drink. There's no more problem. I don't have to and I don't want to. That's it. It's gone. And I felt a little bit of hope on this night before I went to bed.

The Massage That Changed Everything

The next day, when I woke up, the obsession to drink was on me again. And on this day I said, I'm going to do something about this. I have to do something. I can't just go through another day. I have to do something. And I was praying to God to stay sober, and I remembered something. This lady who had 20 years sober said that getting a massage was so relaxing and it always helped calm her mind down. I grabbed onto that. I was like, that's what I need — to relax — because I'm so miserable and I'm so tense, and even working out only helps for a little while. I need to relax. So I got the idea: I'm going to go get a massage. But the only way I could even get out of the house was because the part of me that wanted to drink said, yes, let's leave the house. You think you're going to get a massage, and what we're really going to do is go to the liquor store.

So I drove to a massage place, a corporate massage place, and they said they were fully booked. I was like, that's it, it's a sign. The part of me that wanted to drink said, see, you shouldn't get a massage — just go to the liquor store. There's a Massage Envy right next to the Publix liquors that I used to go to, so both parts of my mind fully agreed that parking lot was the place to be. I couldn't take the stress anymore. Either I was going to get a massage or I was going to go to the liquor store, but either way I was not going to live like this anymore. I looked at the liquor store, terrified, knowing that certain misery and death was facing me if I went in there. And I looked at the Massage Envy, and I felt the same thing. I was like, that's completely irrational and stupid. There's no reason I should feel the same way about Massage Envy that I do about the liquor store. And that's where my mind kind of came together, and it was like, the one thing all parts of me believe in is fear. Fear is my only god. Fear I have total faith in. And I decided, I don't care how afraid I am, I'm taking my butt into this Massage Envy, and I don't care that my mind is suggesting all these ridiculous things that could happen. I'm keeping this part PG because it's in such a public format — I had to delete my last two speaker meeting recordings because they were a bit graphic, and I don't want to delete this one too.

I walked terrified into that Massage Envy, and I had a spiritual awakening in that Massage Envy. My body and mind calmed down. Remember that spiritual awakening I described earlier, when I was breaking up with my ex-girlfriend and I was visiting her, and for a minute or two I experienced silence and peace in the middle of absolute chaos and misery? Out of nowhere came this moment of peace and quiet, and at the time I was like, what is this? When I got a massage, the relaxing energy of relaxing my body shut my mind off, and I slipped into meditation. I didn't realize this is what was going to happen, but I had listened to a suggestion from somebody else who had experienced it, and I got the same experience. And I had very clear thoughts that felt like they were the voice of God, or my dad, or a guardian angel. The thoughts came with exact instructions on what to do. The first thought was: ask Tony to be your sponsor. The second thought was: go to five meetings a week. And the third thought was: read that book, Alcoholics Anonymous, which I still hadn't finished in over two months sober. From that moment it was like, wow, this is what people are talking about. But I didn't realize it immediately. All that happened is I walked out of that massage feeling completely transformed.

The Massage That Showed Me Another Way to Feel Good

Feeling relaxed, I realized I got that same kind of feeling from the same thing that alcohol did — instantly transforming how I felt. Getting a massage just did that too, but I wasn't drunk and I didn't have to deal with consequences. Like, wow — things besides alcohol will have a profound effect on my mind and my body, and I wanted to find out more. I went to dinner with my wife and her friends right after that, and she said it was like, "I got you back. After that massage, you were back to the person that I loved and that I had married and that I really wanted to be with."

From there my life has been absolutely fantastic. It has been one spiritual experience after another. It has been kicking one addiction after another. It has been staying sober through all kinds of people dying. My first sponsor died. My first grand-sponsor died. Both of those were tough losses. So many people I've known in AA have died — many of them have died sober, and the other half have died relapsing and overdosing. My mother fell off her horse and almost died, and I stayed sober through that. All my living grandparents — all three of them — died. And there were lots of births. Often in sobriety, one of the tougher things that can happen is when things go well.

Dreams That Came True in Sobriety

I've had so much family success, with two healthy, beautiful children that love me and that I love — an 8-year-old and a 5-year-old, both that I've gotten to have in sobriety. I've had huge worldly success: making hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit and millions of dollars in sales online in 2016, being one of the top crypto YouTubers in the world — one of the top in 2016, '17, and '18 — one of the top 10 Udemy instructors in the world in 2015 and 2016, getting paid as much as a thousand dollars an hour to listen to somebody pitch me on a crypto, which I said no to, and having all kinds of lavish praise and attention. I made over a hundred thousand dollars in a single year playing video games on Facebook and was one of the top Facebook partners in gaming. Celebrities like Ronda Rousey raided my channel twice, and I got all kinds of shout-outs from the other top people. Dreams have come true that, when I first got sober, weren't possible — things that have actually happened that I didn't think were possible.

For example, I made a full-time living in 2021 — and part of 2020 and 2022 — playing video games. I've had millions and millions of people watch me play video games. I got paid to play with some of the best Call of Duty players in the world. Dream after dream — things that as a kid I would dream, like, "man, it'd be great if I could just play video games." I've lived all the way through those dreams to where playing video games as a job got to be boring for me. I felt like I wasn't really contributing the most that I had to offer, that I wasn't carrying the message as effectively as I could possibly carry it. Right now I feel I'm giving the message in its purest form, where there's not the distraction of a video game playing in the background. If I played Call of Duty Warzone in the background, more people would watch — but the message would also get diluted and distorted to the point where it was often unrecognizable. I've carried the message of Alcoholics Anonymous to millions of people online, and I'm grateful to see people have done so many of the things that I've done to change my life — you all have been doing them to change your life too. Being sober has been the best thing that I've ever done in Alcoholics Anonymous.

Intelligent Rebellion — Speaking Out and Getting Banned

No matter what has happened, I've stayed with it. I've had drama with people at meetings — sitting at meetings with people three or four years sober, wishing they would drink, and they did, and I didn't feel good about that. Sitting at other meetings just hating people at the meetings and changing my meetings up. I was kicked out of meetings because I refused to cover my face in accordance with the law. I was kicked out of my home group and kicked out of other meetings because I refused to follow the law — because I felt the law was wrong. When I got sober, I was afraid that I had to just put my head down and do what I was told all the time. I used to think of alcohol as kind of a rebellion against an oppressive world. Now what I love is that I can intelligently rebel. Alcohol is kind of a mindless rebellion — being like an animal flailing around — and often you actually end up supporting the system doing that. Now that I'm sober, I can pick areas and say: you know what, I'm not going along with what you all are doing right now, because I feel what you all are doing is insane, it's sick, it's wrong, and I will not support it. I will not act like I'm supporting it. I will openly and publicly protest and speak what I think is true, even if it causes me serious consequences — which it did.

I've survived being cancelled and banned multiple times in very public ways. I was banned from Udemy because I spoke out against the things they were doing that looked like cheating — allowing the top instructor on the website to blatantly exploit the review system — and they were making changes that were exploitive and disrespectful towards instructors. I spoke out about those. I showed people how I was making huge amounts of money on Udemy, and I didn't hide anything, and they banned me for telling the truth. Then I was on Facebook gaming in 2021 and 2022, and I spoke out against the massive hypocrisy I observed there in so many different formats — it's amazing I got away with it as long as I did. I criticized everything. I blatantly violated the oppressive terms they had put on me and every other Facebook partner, and it eventually caught up with me: they cancelled me for speaking what I thought was most needed to say — pointing out the hypocrisy of saying you can do this but you can't do that, forcing people to make decisions on their health in a way that I thought was a blatant violation of people's rights and not at all presented honestly. I did stand-up comedy that was absolutely insane on Facebook, and I'm glad I got away with it as long as I did.

The last couple of years have been challenging for me in terms of my work, because I felt really lost. After having so much success online, I felt like: what do I need to do with myself? But since I'm sober, I'm always connecting and praying to a higher power to guide me, to show me how I can most help and serve other people — and I can do it in a way that's joyous. Some people get it in their head that being sober is supposed to be suffering. There was a guy who talked to me after a meeting last night who was basically saying that he's afraid to get too happy being sober, because he associates real happiness and joy in sobriety as a threat to sobriety. I told that to someone else, and they said that being miserable is also a threat to sobriety — and so is being bored. The only way to really stay sober, to be sure of staying sober, is to keep showing up and helping other people all the time and to keep practicing these principles through all my fears.

Taking the Program Into the Other 23 Hours

I remember when I was six months sober and I had the spiritual awakening, I was all miserable again with my wife's family — all resentful and angry at them because of the things I'd done in the past and how I still felt about that. My wife asked me, "How can you go to these AA meetings and be all loving and accepting towards these people you barely know, and then you can act this way with my family? Can't you act the way with my family that you act at those AA meetings?" And I'm like, wow, that is a really good point — I certainly should be able to do that. To me, that's how you really work the ninth step: you take what you learn at meetings and apply it to the rest of your life. When you learn how to treat people with kindness and respect at AA meetings, you bring that into the workplace, you bring that into your home environment. You take what you learn in the AA classroom and apply it the other 23 hours of the day.

Staying Sober Through the Highest Highs and the Crash

I'm very grateful that no matter what I've done, I've remained sober through huge highs where my ego was absolutely on top of the world. Like in 2018 — everybody's getting rich off of my advice to buy Steem, I'm the most popular author there, two years after I'd been banned from Udemy, I'm making hundreds of thousands a year in crypto, and my popularity is at an all-time high online, even bigger than Udemy. And then I realized the founders of the project I'd been promoting were rug-pulling it — constantly selling and dumping the tokens, lying about the features they were going to release — that everything was going to collapse, and that I'd gotten everybody into this. Hundreds of thousands of people I had gotten into this situation. And I stayed sober through that, even though I felt horrible about myself, because I wasn't practicing these principles in my business. I realized that for some reason I felt like it was okay to deceive myself and lie to myself and everybody else if it meant I could get rich off of it. So I quit doing crypto, and I essentially destroyed my own business online.

Repeatedly, since I got sober, I built this massively successful platform up on Udemy; then when I got banned from Udemy, I built this hugely successful platform up in crypto YouTube and on Steem; and then I destroyed my own business in 2018 and 2019. Trying to start a business back up, I failed. I've seen the worst financial situation I've ever seen and the best — and I've seen both of them sober. I remember at my financial bottom at the end of 2019 — just a year and a half after I'd felt like I was once again on top of the world — I was at a bankruptcy lawyer. This is what I had feared. She looks at my finances and she says, "Well, you've got like $600,000 in debt. You can only get out of $50,000 of that by declaring personal bankruptcy. You can get out of more of it declaring business bankruptcy, but you're going to lose all your business assets" — things like my YouTube channels and all that. Going back, I might as well have just declared full personal and business bankruptcy, surrendered everything, and started over. But I remembered my power, and I thought: I want my story in the future to be that I chose not to do bankruptcy — I chose to change my mind.

Walking My Way Back to Financial Abundance

I applied what I learned about getting sober to my finances, and I chose to walk my way out of that hole — to make the changes I needed to make without bankruptcy and to bring financial abundance into my life. Today my wife and I have one of the highest net worths we've had since my 2018 high, when I had $600,000 in Steem for a day and we actually had a positive net worth of hundreds of thousands of dollars. We now have a positive net worth again after it was in the negative hundreds of thousands because of my bad decisions. Just a year after that low, I was on my way to being one of the top Facebook partners and was blowing up on Facebook gaming. A year after that I was at an all-time high again — and then some would argue I destroyed it again by taking my speech to the point where Facebook felt they had to censor me, after I created a huge uproar pointing out their insanity and hypocrisy, helping people see through the matrix of control that the powers that be stick us in, helping people see through the system and how morally wrong and ridiculous and insane it is.

And here I am again now. My new crypto YouTube channel has been blowing up. I've found what looks to me like the absolute best crypto — I've put all my money into it, it's up double since I put it in, and it looks like this is just the tiniest beginning. That's my experience and my belief, not financial advice, and I've learned so much from all the other lessons I've had. Now I've got my business set up where I just do one livestream every day — every other day I do a crypto stream, and every other day I stream on this main Jerry Banfield channel — and then I upload recordings to my X page. I do whatever I think will be most helpful for people and most fun for me to do. Some days I err more on the side of what's fun for me, and other days I err more on the side of just trying to help someone else.

The AA Music Series and the Books That Changed Me

I have done a step 1 through 12 music series — if you search "Jerry Banfield AA step 1," I've made a whole step 1 to 12 series where I talk about each step in detail for about 10 minutes with background music. Some people love it, some people hate it, and I invite you to try it. I've also got a playlist — a podcast on YouTube for Alcoholics Anonymous — where you can watch all my YouTube videos about Alcoholics Anonymous and getting sober.

After I read the Alcoholics Anonymous book, I've read so many books. Nonviolent Communication has been really helpful for me. The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle was a massive transformation. I've read Thich Nhat Hanh's book, and I'm reading Autobiography of a Yogi now. I read The Body Keeps the Score, which — if you're wondering about the role of medication in sobriety — I recommend. It's written by a medical doctor with a lot of experience dealing with trauma, and it's the best resource I've found on that question. In my own experience, I've been able to get sober without taking any medication. I don't take absolutely anything except a multivitamin supplement every other day or a B12 supplement, because I've changed my diet — that's what worked for me, not medical advice for anyone else.

Diet, Yoga, and Taking Care of the Body

When I was about two years sober, I realized that how I eat greatly impacts how I think and how I feel in my body, and that if I wanted to have the best sobriety possible, I needed to pay close attention to how I eat. From my first to my second year sober, I took a deep inventory of what food I was eating every single day for a year, and I found that I was eating in a way that was completely chaotic — filled with all these ingredients I didn't even know what they were, filled with processed foods and animal products — and I came to believe these things were messing up my thinking. I've changed my diet, and I've lost weight from 240-plus pounds when I got sober down to 170 now, at 19 percent body fat with 130 pounds or so of muscle. The books How Not to Die and How Not to Diet were both very helpful for my journey in eating.

I do yoga every day, I get a massage every week, and I go to five meetings a week. I find that I can handle about anything that comes past. Sometimes I might need to cry for a bit to help my mind feel the pain and adjust, but lots of times my mind will just handle something new and be like, okay, that's how it is now. It was a painful learning process being demonetized on Facebook last year, all the way until a couple of months ago when I permanently deleted my Facebook page with 2 million followers and my Facebook account that I'd had since 2005. I'm getting more and more sensitive to the places I show up and the energies those places have.

Material Abundance and Family Healing

Material abundance — I have all the material stuff I want. In fact, at this point I need to get rid of stuff. I have a car I love driving, my wife has a car she loves driving. We have a house we have more equity in than debt for the first time ever. We have a mortgage with only 13 years left on it and a great interest rate. We have kids that are really healthy. I have so many friends from Alcoholics Anonymous meetings that I don't even have time to hang out with all of them, because I spend lots of time cleaning the house, having a garden, and hanging out with my mother. I could do a whole speaker meeting just on my mother — my mom lives across the street now, and we have the best relationship we've ever had. I have the best relationship I've ever had with my brother, too — we get along really well — and life is absolutely fantastic.

Life can continue getting better and better sober. You never have to plateau and just settle for where it's at. You can continue constantly to learn and evolve. Right now I'm looking into how to have the kind of extraordinary abilities other people say they've had — levitating, being in two places at once, teleporting, maybe not even needing to eat. Some of these yogis said that they lived just off the sun and cosmic energy. What I've noticed happens with a lot of people getting sober is they often have this spiritual awakening and transformation and then kind of just settle into a new ego and don't learn and grow that much or that fast from there. What I've been obsessed with, based on the change I saw in my first 90 days getting sober and then my first year, is keeping this level of growth happening constantly. If I'm not growing, I'm dying — that's how I look at it.

Books, Mentorship, and Asking Me Directly

I had a whole list of books on my website — I might need to relink to that again — and I do have a whole reading list with hundreds of books on my Amazon shop page. But what will be more helpful is if you join my Jerry Banfield Family community, where you can ask me directly what book you need for the situation you're at in your life. That's where I can probably help you a lot more, because I've read hundreds and hundreds of books. A Course in Miracles was fantastically helpful — I went through the entire workbook on that. What I can help you with better is being kind of a mentor: tell me where you're at and ask if there's a book I'd recommend for that particular situation. I read a bunch of books to be a better husband — things like Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, which was a very helpful book, and The Way of the Superior Man. For any area I've been struggling in, I read books to help learn and grow in that area, and I feel omnipotent — I feel all-powerful now. To me that's the exact opposite of what I used to feel when I drank and when I first got sober.

Why I Carry the Message Openly Online

That's why I consistently carry the message. Some people have expressed frustration that I carry the message openly online. They say I shouldn't — that their reading of the 11th tradition says I shouldn't talk about my experience in Alcoholics Anonymous while having my name and face attached. I'm glad that today I am free to make my own decisions in Alcoholics Anonymous. I disagree with the way the 11th tradition has been interpreted, and I have helped millions of people through sharing my experience online — to get sober, to think about being sober, to seek help with getting sober. I have helped huge amounts of people go to their first AA meeting, get back into AA meetings, and remember that being sober is a possibility. I refuse to give in to fear. To me, "well, what if you drink?" is a self-centered fear. Let's think instead about how many more people I can help by openly and transparently carrying the message online.

Somebody I'd messaged just texted me that they basically don't agree with me doing a live speaker meeting. And you know what I love about Alcoholics Anonymous? Too bad if you don't agree with it. That's great, but there's nobody that's going to shut me up or stop me from doing it, because I've followed the YouTube terms and conditions. I've made this speaker meeting much more publicly acceptable than some of my other ones were, where I used a lot of rough language and more graphic stories. I hope this has been effective to transmit the ideas.

Someone said they miss my solo wars — the snipes and strategies. I miss that sometimes too. Today I'm really careful where I put my time, because I used to put a lot of my time into triumphing in video games, and my rationalization was that I was carrying the message while doing it — which I definitely did. But today I ask: how can I most effectively carry the message with the least amount of time, effort, and distraction? This speaker meeting has been long enough, and I like that it's been focused very clearly — no distractions, we've talked about this the entire time, no video game in the background making noise and sound. Today, if I'm not carrying the message, or very much serving people online, or having lots of fun, then I'd rather be doing something else.

Taking Inventory: The Hardest Addiction to Conquer

I took an inventory of my life recently, and going forward I don't want to spend all that time playing video games. Video game addiction has been the hardest addiction for me to conquer. I've quit playing video games in sobriety several times — multiple times for nearly or more than a year — and I came back to it twice when I was at bottoms in my business and didn't know what else to do with myself. Which is funny, because if I just hadn't quit in the first place, it probably would have been totally sustainable — but at that time it wasn't enough money for me. So I'm glad I got to go through the dream of being a full-time gamer, that I've gotten to teach and help so many people online, and that I've carried the message so far.

My life has meaning now, and the real case for what I'm doing is my example — because what I say only matters if it's what I'm actually doing. What I say today matches what I do, which is why I'm able to feel good about myself, to be transparent, to love and serve others, and to always feel like what I'm doing is enough.

The Work That Matters Long Term

I've also come to realize that the work that will make a big difference in the long term might not get much of an applause in the short term. Some of my previous AA speaker meetings that I uploaded got hundreds of thousands of views — those helped lots of people. And my Facebook gaming videos where I talked about getting sober went out to tens of millions of people, and that made a huge difference. I definitely was a big troll and a big downer for quite a while on this planet, and if a thing like karma exists, I'm doing everything I can to serve others in a way that covers all of my past karma and much more. What I'm feeling on a daily basis is massive amounts of joy, of love, of peace.

That's why I show up every other day on my main YouTube channel and every other day on my crypto channel. If you found this helpful and you listened to this whole thing, I really hope you'll keep coming back, because every day on one of my two channels I'm putting on a live show that I hope will be really helpful for you. What a lot of you seem to be struggling with right now is money, so my crypto channel is dedicated to working on that, and this main channel is dedicated to covering everything else — you can see more of my story on my Life playlist.

I love you each. Thanks a lot for being here. I'm going to upload the recording of this on X, and I'm going to go to yoga now.

The Truth About AA: Meetings, the 12 Steps, the Big Book, and Sponsors

From my video published February 10, 2023.

My friends, you are about to hear the truth of Alcoholics Anonymous, including the Big Book, working the steps, an AA sponsor, and the meetings. This comes from me. I have almost nine years sober in Alcoholics Anonymous. I've been to thousands of meetings. I go to a meeting almost every day, and this program has saved my life.

The truth about AA is that it's worked to help millions of people get sober and stay sober for the rest of our lives, and it's also helped millions more people make some improvement in life. Alcoholics Anonymous is a program of action, and it's a program of people.

The truth about sponsorship

The truth about sponsorship is that while it can be very helpful, I worked the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous the first time without a sponsor. I simply went through the book, wrote an honest story of my life, started sharing about it, raising awareness, raising my hand at open meetings, talking about my self-harm experience, and sharing my fifth step right in the middle of a meeting as a part of the topic. I started to see some character defects and some patterns, and I'd talk with people after meetings. I started taking suggestions, made a list of the people I'd hurt and got to work, immediately making amends, continued to take inventory, did lots of prayer, started to discover meditation, and had a spiritual awakening, all without having a sponsor.

However, once I got through the 12 steps the first time on my own, I had a thought that I needed to ask this specific person to be my sponsor so that I could deepen and do the steps more effectively.

Alcoholics Anonymous is a program of action

The truth about Alcoholics Anonymous is that if you go through the steps and actually do the process as fast as possible, things will get drastically easier. There's not going to be almost any relief at first. In fact, things may feel like they're actually getting worse until you make some real change. Alcoholics Anonymous is a program of change. It's not a program of just sitting in the seat and listening and going home and then being the same way at home that you were before.

To me, Alcoholics Anonymous is a program of growing up, of learning what grown folks do when various things happen, of letting go. Letting go of dumb little thoughts like, what am I going to do at my son's wedding when people are toasting? That's a stupid, useless thought that you might have when your son's a baby and you're trying to get sober.

It's a program of helping others. What really got me excited to come to Alcoholics Anonymous, even when I'd had my last hangover and hadn't been to a meeting in nine years, what got me excited to come to AA meetings was imagining helping other people. AA is a program of helping other people.

The mastermind and the higher power

If you've read the book Think and Grow Rich, which is one of the definitive books on building wealth and recognizing many different forms of wealth, it identifies a mastermind, a group of people who've come together for a common purpose, as being one of the most helpful methods of achieving anything. The truth is Alcoholics Anonymous is a group where you form a mastermind. It's a higher power.

When 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 people get together and all sit down in a room at Alcoholics Anonymous for the purpose of staying sober, it's as if there's this entity that comes alive and lifts everybody up. You could call it a god, a higher power, the spirit of the universe. When everybody's all working towards the same goal, all members are lifted closer to that goal. It's literally miraculous.

It works if you open your mind

The truth is Alcoholics Anonymous works if you will open your mind. I don't like the term surrender as much, but if you find that helpful, go for it. It's about giving up this idea of, I know who I am, I know exactly how the world is, I know, I know, I know. If you want Alcoholics Anonymous to work, in my experience, it's about saying obviously I don't know. Obviously I don't know how to have a happy sober life. I don't know how to be a productive, useful human being who actually finds joy and connection with others.

The 12 steps are a program of living. It's a way to take out the garbage that's in your own mind and body and soul, to let go of that, to chisel away and to make yourself into the beautiful person, soul, and body that is within.

I've watched it transform people, body and soul

I love seeing new people come in. Their bodies are just trash, their minds are trash, their spirit is sick. And the more they come to meetings, man. I just saw a woman yesterday at a meeting. When she first came to a meeting, she was fat, her skin was all messed up, and she was in this just awful state of chaos and drama. She's still having a challenging time in her life, but nine months later, she's lost 20 pounds. Her skin, her body, it looks beautiful now. Even though she's going through the challenges of new sobriety, just nine months of not drinking has made a fantastic positive difference on her entire mind, body, and spirit. This is normal. I've seen this happen so many times.

Now, some of us will pick up addictions. For example, when I got sober, I was disappointed. I only lost 20 pounds after a few months, because I wasn't sober. I was eating a whole bunch of sweets. When they're like, have a piece of chocolate, if you have a little bit of a craving, I thought, why not have a whole box of mints? And I'm going to drink all these juices. I'm going to eat lots of ice cream. I actually stalled my weight loss, and then I needed to go in further and work on my eating.

AA is a gateway to getting your power back

The truth about Alcoholics Anonymous is that it's a gateway to gaining your power back. We come in at the first step of Alcoholics Anonymous, and we feel powerless. And by the 12th step, we feel very powerful. We feel that we are not alone. We are connected to the rest of reality. And if I am able to get sober, if I can work a process that will remove the obsession to drink from me, if I can have a happy, useful, sober life, what else is possible?

That's what happened to me after about 90 days. I went through the steps for the first time on my own without a sponsor, just by going to a couple of meetings a week. I was utterly miserable, and the obsession to drink was all over me. Then, when I finally got into the 10th, 11th, and 12th step, I prayed desperately. I got a massage, which helped me do a very deep meditation and take a very effective inventory. In the 10th step, I had a spiritual awakening, immediately got a sponsor right after that, and doubled down on the program. Since then, I've come to meetings most days, at least five days a week on average, gotten completely cleaned out with my 4th and 5th step, and went to change my whole life to make amends and live as a productive, useful adult.

If hearing how this actually plays out over years helps you, I share more of it in my post on long-term emotional sobriety in action, and a lot of what I'm describing here is the same ground I cover when I explain the 12 steps of AA for someone just starting out.

You don't have to let anyone run your life

The truth about Alcoholics Anonymous is you don't just have to submit and give up to whoever is trying to run your life. I can't stand that crap in meetings. Maybe that works for some people, but for a rebellious personality like this one, I've never just done what everybody's told me to do in Alcoholics Anonymous. I've continually processed things through.

This one guy in a meeting shared one day that mushrooms had been a great part of his recovery. I asked my sponsor, I'm like, that doesn't sound like a good idea to you, does it? And he's like, no, that does not sound like a good idea either. But I've done things my sponsor said that didn't sound like a very good idea to him, like publishing a book with my whole fifth step in it, called Speaker Meeting 2017. My sponsor said he didn't think that was a good idea, and I said, I understand why you think that's not a good idea, and I know that I need to do this, because this is how I carry the message to other people.

A lot of people have told me, Jerry, you can't keep having your name and your face in these videos, you're violating the 11th tradition by saying you're a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. I say that we need to change Tradition 11, where I can tell my own story. Now, I don't go tell your story, but I can tell my own story anywhere. I don't care what they did in the past, I know this to be right for me. I follow my own inner guidance from within, and I check with others on my own inner guidance, because sometimes my own inner guidance gives me dumb ideas. When I check with other people, I get clarity.

What a good sponsor actually does

I find that the truth about having a sponsor in Alcoholics Anonymous is that my sponsor is there to assist me, to help me, and to keep me accountable. My sponsor is not there to run my life, to tell me what to do, and to play God over me. I love that I've never had a sponsor that's tried that crap with me.

My sponsor's been very gentle and made subtle suggestions. When I first started working with my sponsor, who I've been with almost eight years now, he suggested that I go to the rector at the Episcopal Church and do another fifth step. After I'd already done a few, he suggested I go do another one. He didn't say I had to, he didn't tell me when to do it, he suggested it, and I went and did it. He suggested that I try some different meetings, because I went to the same meeting at the same time and the same place almost every day. He suggested I try some new meetings. I did that. He has not had very many other suggestions for me, and I love that. However, I ask him questions. And when I ask questions, he gives answers.

My sponsor leads by example. I think the best sponsors in Alcoholics Anonymous simply lead by example, and offer support to those who ask for it. Believe it or not, I used to get more people that asked me to sponsor them when I was newer than I do now. I guess some people feel like they can't relate with me. But the truth about AA is there are lots of different ways to successfully work the program. Some people love having a militant sponsor that tells them exactly what to do and exactly where to do it. Others, like me, that doesn't work. And what's beautiful is Alcoholics Anonymous has all kinds of different choices.

If you don't like one meeting, try a different one

The truth about AA meetings is if you find that you don't like one AA meeting, try going to a different one. And try checking your app. Try checking your attitude. I went with someone to an AA meeting one time. We sat right next to each other, and they thought the AA meeting was just so depressing. Look at this sad room full of people who can't drink anymore. I sat right next to them and I said, I didn't get that. I got, how inspiring.

All these people were hopeless, miserable drunks, living lives that they're ashamed of and felt powerless over. And look, these people are empowered now and helping others. We sat at the exact same meeting right next to each other. If you're taking all this depressing, negative outlook out of AA meetings, maybe that's because that's how you're choosing to look at it. Maybe there is that inspiring, hopeful component that's there in meetings. But if you're filled with self-pity, oh poor me, I can't drink, my life sucks, I'm a victim, everybody did this to me, I don't deserve this, it can be hard to see that.

And yes, the truth is AA meetings are not for everybody. There are other recovery programs out there. I'm big into going where you feel the energy is right. If you go to an AA meeting and you think the meeting sucks and it's depressing, try going to a different meeting. I would suggest you try at least five different meetings to get different flavors.

In St. Petersburg, Florida, where I'm at, it's one of the best places I've seen to get sober. There are so many different meetings. There are meetings filled with just old dudes that have tons of sobriety. There are meetings filled with working people who are just getting off of work and have jobs. There are meetings filled with young people who are crazy as hell and sick as hell and desperate for help. Those tend to be the ones I really like going to. I like the sick, crazy cases. I'll be happy to help you with that.

Work with people after the meeting

The truth is, in my experience, working with people after AA meetings tends to be what has worked best for me. I did my first two fifth steps with my sponsor and then with a grand-sponsor by just sitting down with them after the meeting. I did not plan ahead to do it. I simply had like the butterfly effect or total recall. I had these memories that were blacked out in my mind all of a sudden come back to me. Some of them all the way back from being a young adult in the middle of my crazy drinking, and others from childhood, things I hadn't remembered and been told never to talk about in 20 years. These things came up and I talked to people after meetings.

The truth about AA meetings is you want to listen like only the dying can. Pay attention to people who have what you want and then go work with them. Ask for help. Some people say, well, Jerry, you seem intimidating and unapproachable, like I can't just come up to you. I'm like, look, if I see somebody who has what I want, I go to them. They're not obligated to come to me and give it to me.

When I was new in my first year sober, I relentlessly went to people who I saw with great long-term sobriety. 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, and happy and courageous, and that other people loved them and had passion for them. I didn't go to the grouchy old timers that seemed to be bitter and full of resentment and just hanging on by a thread. I did not go to them. I went to the people who had the kind of life and the kind of energy that inspired me. I asked them to help me do my first step, like my grand-sponsor. I would go to them and talk about all my crazy ideas that came through my head, and I would ask them, what do you think? Often they'd actually done the things that were crazy ideas in my head, and they shared their experience and they helped me feel better.

I find this works in any area of life, like being a parent. When I was about to be a parent, I went to lots of other parents and asked for advice and asked for help. I went to parents whose parenting I liked and was inspired by. In my business, I go to people who have what I want. I started a new crypto channel, and I talked to two successful crypto YouTubers and got a lot of feedback from them that helped me learn from them. AA is a place where you can find people that have fantastic sober lives. If you want people to go to for help instead of going it alone, you can join Jerry Banfield Family.

The truth about alcohol

The truth about alcohol is that it is a mostly inert substance that is a little bit of a depressant and a poison to the human body. Through the collective work of alcohol companies and all the people they employ, and all the money they spend on advertising and product placements, the truth is you've been programmed very hard to drink alcohol. If you're an alcoholic, that programming is set in you successfully. There's no telling if you can ever get rid of that programming or not. But the truth is, AA meetings, a sponsor, the 12 steps, and the Big Book will help you have a chance to reprogram your mind, that being sober is awesome, that you don't need alcohol to quench your thirst, to dance, to have sex, to have fun, to talk with people.

Anything I did drinking before, I can do much better sober. My dancing is better sober. Actually, drinking ruined my dancing. When I was a freshman and I didn't drink in college, I had way more fun dancing. As soon as I started drinking, it became all about the drinking. While I certainly didn't care anymore about my dancing, the actual quality of my dancing dropped drastically. The quality of the decisions I made dating dropped drastically once I started drinking. I had beautiful girls that I went out with before I started drinking. And man, you don't want to see the heifers I was out with at 7 in the morning after a night of drinking, and all the money I spent at strip clubs.

The truth is, alcohol sucks, and people are making a massive profit selling it to you and keeping you oppressed by drinking it. The truth is, I prefer not to be around alcohol anywhere. While the Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book says it's possible to go places where alcohol is served, it's much easier and preferable to simply stay away from it and to stay away from people who drink as a way of life.

The truth about the Big Book

The truth, to me, is that the Big Book is a helpful resource. But there's a lot of stuff in the Big Book that is crap, or that I find is not relevant to me. I've read the Big Book three times all the way through on my own. While I do go to a literature meeting every week or two, I prefer not to read the Big Book anymore. I've got it. It's sunk in. I prefer to read other books like A Course in Miracles and so many others, Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, books on nonviolence and communication.

The truth is, if a book like Alcoholics Anonymous can be a very positive force to change my life, then there are thousands of other books that can do the same. Instead of reading the Big Book repeatedly, I've chosen to read a book about just focusing on finding a higher power, A Course in Miracles, and getting to know myself. To find a book just about how to eat healthy, like How Not to Die and How Not to Diet. To repeatedly read books to educate myself and grow up.

For me, reading the same literature over and over again gets to be pointless. I read Daily Reflections every day for a couple of years, and I don't do that anymore. I don't need to read that. I've read those, and it doesn't work for me anymore. I think that many of us crave new ways of hearing the same message. If you're going through the motions doing something like reading the Big Book or Daily Reflections, and if you're brand new doing that, there just might be some resistance. Once you realize, for me, this is a life and death program. This is a miserable, dishonorable death and a crappy, half-lived life if I drink, or I get to see my full potential if I stay sober. Those are the two choices. There's no middle. To me, this has been an absolute gift from God.

Hold your opinions loosely, even mine

The truth for me is, in AA meetings, it's valuable to hear a lot of different opinions, and to not be too attached to even what I say. Sometimes people are going God, God, God too much in a meeting, and I'll talk about how people that are agnostic and atheists really inspired me when I first got sober. In another meeting, no one's talking about God, and I'll go off on God. In another meeting, I'll say that I found that I am God. I need no higher power, higher than my own awareness. I am certain that the same energy that flows in you, and in all the rest of us, and in whatever God we come up with, that's who I am. That's who all of us are.

I'm certain that Alcoholics Anonymous gives me the chance to find a higher power, and that in seeking and getting to know the higher power, I will see there's no difference between me, who I really am without this mind and this body, and a higher power.

The truth, all together

The truth is, Alcoholics Anonymous has been one of the best things that's ever happened to me. The 12 steps are a way of living that I practice every day, and I'm out here carrying the message as often as I can carry it, and in meetings almost every day.

The truth is, the Big Book is very helpful, but it's not a Bible. It's not something, in my opinion, you want to read every day and just stick to forever. I read the Big Book, the 12 and 12, Living Sober, Came to Believe, Daily Reflections, Twenty-Four Hours a Day, and hundreds of other books since then.

The truth is, having a sponsor in Alcoholics Anonymous can be very helpful, but if you get the wrong sponsor, you need to get rid of them and find the right sponsor. The truth is, I wouldn't be here alive today without Alcoholics Anonymous, and I show I'm grateful by constantly paying it forward. If you want to see how all of this weaves into my ordinary days, I keep sharing it openly in a day in my life with ICP crypto, AA, and owning my reality, and you can watch more of where I'm at lately over on my Life playlist.

How To Work The Steps of AA Without a Sponsor

From my video published February 1, 2023.

My friends, I worked the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous the first time through with no sponsor. I'm going to tell you exactly how you can do that now, based on my experience. I will, of course, say that it is going to be much easier for you to do the steps with a sponsor. That said, if you're a stubborn mother lover like me, then you might find yourself doing things on your own. And yes, you can do it, and in my experience it is effective. I had my spiritual awakening as a result of these steps before asking anyone to be my sponsor. In fact, out of having my spiritual awakening came clear guidance that I should get a sponsor and go through the steps again with them. And here today, I've got almost nine years sober. It clearly has been very effective for me.

Two meetings a week and a last chance

When I first started coming to Alcoholics Anonymous, I came to about two meetings a week, because I told myself that, well, I drink like two days a week, so if I go to a couple of meetings a week, that's about the same. Now, never mind that I would drink 10, 12, 18 hours on each of those two days, and I'd end up spending 30, 40 hours a week drinking, and then add in all the time with hangovers. I probably only had one or two good days during the week where I wasn't hungover or drinking. And then you replace that with two AA meetings. Get there right when it starts, leave right when it ends. And that's what I did for the first two months.

Now, for me, I knew it was like life and death that I stay sober, because I tried to end things, tried to harm myself, so many times that I knew this is it. There's no more chances after this. This is the last chance. And that's the only reason I even got to a couple of months sober without doing anything except a couple of meetings a week.

Then the obsession to drink came back. It came back steadily. After the initial desperation and the "I'm going to really change," then after a month or so the obsession to drink creeps back in. I feel sorry for myself that I can't drink. And that's when I started doing step four.

Writing a ten-thousand-word inventory

I just wrote it out. I read the book and I'm like, I don't know what the hell this is talking about. I can't even understand this crap. What I did get out of the book, and out of listening to people at meetings, is that I needed to take a deep, honest inventory of myself like I'd never taken before. And I think I heard somebody share in a meeting about how they wrote a story of their life. So I wrote out a 10,000-word story of my life for the first time, an honest story, without omitting the relevant, more interesting parts like suicide attempts and crazy thinking. I put down on a computer, in a Word document, things I had never even been willing to admit to myself and then tried to hide as much as possible. I thought if nobody else knows about it, it's like it never happened. Unfortunately, if I know about it, and I think I'm a scumbag because of it, it very much counts.

I did that fourth step, and then I immediately started sharing what I was finding in my fourth step in the middle of open AA meetings. I started raising my hand. I'd hear other people talk about their experience with self-harm, and I'd say, yeah, I didn't realize I tried to kill myself so many times. I wouldn't have thought that before I did my fourth step. So I started immediately sharing the findings of my fourth step directly in meetings.

Now, in my experience you can do that if you don't have anything that's going to send you to prison. If you've got some more serious stuff, then you definitely would need a sponsor, or you could go to a religious figure or somebody who has a definite obligation to maintain confidence when you've got whatever you had to share. For me, I just started blabbing stuff all over in meetings that normally I wouldn't even admit to other people, like all my suicide attempts, my crazy thinking, and everything else.

Seeing the patterns and my character defects

From that, I started to see some clear patterns. Like, my mind was saying that everybody else is the problem, and if I just stay sober, I'm now a saint. I started to see how insane I was, and a bunch of character defects that had been unsuspected. I figured that if I stayed sober, I was a great guy. Literally, that was all I had to do, stay sober. There were no other issues. Then from sharing in open meetings and hearing other people's experience, and looking at my life, I'm like, wow, I'm a pretty screwed-up guy.

And that's step six, starting to look at these defects of character. Like, wow, it's not them, it's me. And I would like to do better. I'm willing to do whatever it takes to do better. So I started praying more to stay sober, and I was working that step seven, like, all right, whatever, I'll do whatever it takes to be a better person, to stop being like this.

Then I started to see all these people I had harmed. Things like, wow, I've been an awful husband. In my mind at the time, I'd always beg off, like, well, somebody else has been worse. But most importantly, what do I think I should be able to do about this as a husband, and where am I doing? Way down here. I could do a lot better as a husband. My wife and my mother would be really harmed if I drank, and they've been through a lot.

Making amends by staying sober

And so my ninth step began with, actually, when I thought about a drink, thinking of my wife and my mother. That's a big way to make amends, instead of just getting lost in myself. The last time I did the obsession to drink, the first big amends you can make is to pray to stay sober and think about how much it'll mean to other people. So I started thinking about my wife and my mother, like, wow, if I drink, I'm hurting them. If I drink, I'm dishonest and I'm lying. And I started to see that these character defects could be removed if I stayed sober. If I drank, I was a liar. If I drank, I was an idiot. If I drank, I was very sick. But if I stayed sober, there was hope, and the best thing I could do to make amends would be to stop drinking and to never consider a drink again.

Then getting into step ten from there, like, wow, I'm sitting at home while my wife is at work and I'm scared to go anywhere, because I don't know if I leave the house whether I can stay sober or not. Like, I'll suddenly go on autopilot and go to the liquor store and be drunk before I knew what happened. That tenth step was like, wow, I'm full of fear. I am just rigid, locked up with fear. And I continued to take personal inventory, like, I need to relax. I seriously need to relax. And I need to find a way besides drinking to relax.

Step eleven and a massage next to the liquor store

And that took me into the eleventh step. I'm like, please God, I'll do anything to stay sober. I want to get closer to my creator. I'm desperate, I'm alone, everything is wrong with me, and everybody else is counting on me to not fail them again. Please God, let me get to know you better. Please, I'll do whatever it takes to stay sober. And from there I started to take some more suggestions that people gave in meetings, because up until that point I hadn't taken many suggestions.

I remember this one lady said that when she was stressed out she'd get a massage. The topic of the meeting was different ways to relax when you weren't drinking. We used to drink so that we could take the edge off and relax, and without drinking, what do we do to relax? And this one lady said how she would get a massage, and it was so nice, and it really helped her to relax. At the time I heard it, I thought, yeah, relax, she's probably getting a happy ending, it costs a whole bunch, and what a dumb idea. And that's called contempt prior to investigation.

But the more I prayed to God and sought to make conscious contact with my higher power, I started to listen a little bit more for thoughts that were not the usual obsession to drink and the everybody-else-is-wrong crap. One of the thoughts I got was, well, if you're very upset and stressed and anxious, and you know the solution is to relax, and you know this lady with 20 years sober said that getting a massage helps her relax, don't you think you should try that, at least? I'm sure you could say no if somebody suddenly tried to give you a happy ending.

So I finally got myself out of the house, realizing that I'm going to go get a massage, and I hopefully won't go to the liquor store. I'm going to find a way to relax. And I ended up in the parking lot of a Massage Envy, and there was a liquor store right next door that I used to go to. I'm like, please God, just let me stay sober, I really do want to stay sober. And I realized I was terrified of going in to get a drink, but I was also terrified of going in to get a massage. I'm like, that's stupid, I'm just going to do the next right thing.

Where my spiritual awakening began

And that's where my spiritual awakening began, realizing, wow, I'm afraid of everything. What all of my personalities agree on is fear. I saw this shirt somebody wore and it said "fear is your only God," and in that moment I'm like, wow, yes, all of my personalities are terrified. And you know what, we're going to do the next right thing terrified. I went in to get a massage, and my mind stopped.

That's when I went really deep into the eleventh step. I got this deep meditation that I could not get sitting, or even listening. I heard what sounded like a voice from God, or a guardian angel. It was a thought that was unlike the usual thoughts I had. It was very deep and authoritative, and it sounded like it was already a fact. It knew what I was going to do, and it was making sure I knew that that's what my instructions were. I heard the thought that you're going to ask Tony to be your sponsor. You're going to go to five meetings a week instead of two. You're going to read that book. I had not finished the Alcoholics Anonymous book in three months sober, despite a lot of struggle and obsession to drink.

As soon as that came through, I had the spiritual awakening. I was ready immediately to carry the message, to tell everybody what happened. That's so inspiring. I love seeing that at meetings today, when you've got somebody new who just has had that first spiritual awakening or experience, and they're telling everybody about it. I love it. And that's how I went through the first time through all 12 steps on my own, without a sponsor.

Finding a Sponsor You Feel Safe With

Then I asked Tony to be my sponsor, and I remembered something that I had not even consciously remembered when I did my first fourth step. I remembered a night when I was insane and I had nearly harmed people. I had never told anybody about that night before. I realized I was sitting in the meeting, and I thought, my God, I either need to go drink and end it all right after this meeting, or this is where I work the steps. In my experience, you will benefit a lot from having a sponsor. The key is to have a sponsor you feel safe with. It may be better to just do the steps the way I've done them until you have a sponsor, or someone you can really tell anything at all to.

I wish more people would make use of my services at in-person meetings, because I've heard it all by now. I've read books on alien abductions and everything else. What I loved was when I did my first fifth step with my sponsor, and then I did my second, more detailed one. I did my first person-to-person fifth step, not just raising my hand in meetings and sharing things, but a deeper fifth step, and then my second deeper fifth step. The two men I talked to were men I felt safe with, that I could tell them anything at all. And that's because of how they shared. They left me feeling safe based on what they said, that they could handle whatever I had to say. And I got the gift of their point of view.

You Can Work the Steps Even Without a Sponsor

Even in open meetings, you could do this. In theory you could even do it on Zoom if there are no meetings around you. You can absolutely work the twelve steps of AA without a sponsor and get sober. And what has really kept me coming back is then helping others. Because the more I help others, the more I make videos like this, the more I'm taking inventory. I'm doing another tenth step, taking inventory right now of how my sobriety is, how my program is. I'm practicing carrying the message to the alcoholic who still suffers.

So I really appreciate you spending this time with me today. If you want to keep working on your recovery alongside me and connect with others walking the same road, the best way to do that now is to join my community over at the Jerry Banfield Family, where we share honestly and help each other keep coming back.

If you want some more of me, I've shared a lot of my own story and my program over the years, and you can follow the whole journey through my Life playlist. I love you. You're awesome. Thank you for reading all of this today.

Why I Keep Going To Alcoholics Anonymous After 8 Years Sober

From my video published January 31, 2023.

My friends, I'm grateful for almost nine years of consecutive sobriety in Alcoholics Anonymous. And I keep coming back every day because I want to help as many other people get sober as possible. I feel good, I'm accountable, and other people were there to help me. When I came into Alcoholics Anonymous in April, May 2014, when I first got sober, there were people who had been coming to Alcoholics Anonymous and had consecutive sobriety my entire life. The whole time I had been alive, they were going to AA meetings. And today, I love the idea that maybe someone who hasn't even been born yet is going to run into me in the future in an AA meeting. I am very much aiming to stay sober the rest of my life, because if I want to reach my full potential, I do not want to have my vision or my mind screwed up ever with alcohol or any kind of drug.

The fog of alcoholism

It was really foggy this morning driving my daughter to school, and it was such a good analogy for alcoholism. When you are taking things like alcohol and any other kinds of drugs, regardless of who gave them to you, mind-altering substances create this fog that makes it difficult to see. And what is difficult about getting sober is that when the fog lifts, you see why you wanted that fog there in the first place. Because often problems seem to become more acute and more challenging instead of less. That's why many of us drank ourselves into this fog where we can barely see anything around us, and we can lie to ourselves and say it's okay, because we really can't see anything around us. We can't even tell where we're at or what we're doing with our life anymore.

Going to AA gives meaning to my life. In fact, when I had my last hangover on April 22nd, 2014, one might argue I was so inspired, or so delusional, that the thought of coming to Alcoholics Anonymous and helping other people get sober really excited me. Now, remember, I had a hangover at the time. I couldn't put together a few days myself. And yet, I thought about how good it'd feel to help other people get sober. That's the magic of Alcoholics Anonymous and many other programs where people show up with the goal to help each other, like Al-Anon. You have this great feeling that comes with trying to help someone else, even if they don't get it.

Watching others fail keeps me sober

Most of the people I've worked with and tried to sponsor have not stayed sober. I only have one person out of all the people who have asked me to be their sponsor, whom I've worked with and started the steps with, who is still sober. And I'm glad he's got more than four years sober now. I started working with him a little bit after he had his first year. What I am grateful for is that I have stayed sober. Watching other people fail, ironically, gives me a lot more motivation and helps me continue to learn to have even better sobriety myself.

I called one of the guys, Bill, who was instrumental in helping me get sober. He was one of the men who had been sober my entire life in Alcoholics Anonymous when I came in. I was 29 years old and he had more than 30 years sober when I came in. I called him up one day as another sponsee was failing, and I said, "Bill, what is going on with all these guys I sponsor? They all just drink. They don't want to do the steps. They don't want to take suggestions. They just ask me to be their sponsor and then they keep doing whatever they're doing. Like, why even bother?" And he said, "Well, Jerry, I told one of my sponsees one day, after he had drank, that I thanked him." And I said, "What? You thanked him?" He's like, "Yeah, because I thanked him for showing me that this works." Because his sponsee didn't do anything he suggested and drank again, and in the process, showed him how well what he does works. So being accountable to other people keeps me doing better and better myself.

The people who stop coming back

This is where I see a lot of people miss out on the biggest gifts that the program of Alcoholics Anonymous has to offer. I've seen so many people who get sober, get a much better life, and then stop coming. Now, not all of them drink. Some stay sober, but it seems a lot stay sober and then things get a bit rough. Sometimes they'll come back before they've drank. Lots of times they'll end up relapsed. And I see so many people who just get too busy to come back to Alcoholics Anonymous. They forget how much it made a difference that all of us were there to help them, and they forget how they used to be.

Because I see that if I stop coming to Alcoholics Anonymous, I could very easily forget how I used to be. 2014 is 2023 now. That seems like a long time. I didn't have kids. I had only been married to my wife at that point for a couple of years. I was still very much a child in a lot of ways. I feel a lot more grown up now, and I've learned so much since then. And with that, it would be easier than ever to BS myself, or to believe the mind and the programming from the outside world where alcohol companies make a fortune selling a substance that is pretty cheap to produce and is a depressant and a poison to the human body. These companies make a fortune and spend billions of dollars advertising alcohol in order to program all these moist robots that alcohol is a great thing for you, because it makes them profits. And it actually keeps people submissive. Drinking keeps you in this obedient state. Especially when you are hungover, you think that you're drinking to rebel, and yet drinking is blocking your ability to intelligently rebel.

Why I still go five to seven days a week

I see how easy it would be if I dropped it. I go to an AA meeting five to seven days a week, and sometimes I get there late and leave early. Other times I get there early and stay late. I frequently get there right about on time, and often spend anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour talking with people after the meeting. Those conversations consistently help me get out of myself. The root of our troubles with alcoholism is selfishness and self-centeredness, and listening to someone else talk about their life helps me get out of mine.

I love the real conversations we have at Alcoholics Anonymous too. Alcoholics Anonymous kind of screwed me up on having conversations with people in other parts of my life, because I just don't want to talk about superficial nonsense. If I'm going to hang out with you, I want to get down into the real energy of life. I don't want to just talk about the weather or fashion trends. I want to talk about things that really matter. I just won't tolerate hanging out with people now who can't have that heart-to-heart, real connection, quality conversation.

I'm so grateful Alcoholics Anonymous saved my life. It gives me a place to continue to show up and help others, which is why I've started this new Jerry Banfield Recovery channel, so that I can have all my videos dedicated to the subject of recovery here instead of putting them on my other main channel where I've got all these other different subjects. Going forward, on this channel, I'm going to keep putting out anything I'm inspired to share about recovery every day. I hope this is a great resource for you to expand your sobriety and expand your life. If you want to go deeper on any of this with me, the best way to walk this road together is to join the Jerry Banfield Family, where we can have the real conversations that matter.

There's no substitute for being there in person

That said, there's no substitute for being with people in person. I love listening to AA speaker meetings on YouTube, and videos and books about recovery, when I can't make a meeting in person, mainly when I'm traveling, which doesn't happen that often because I like staying at home. I like hanging out and just creating stuff in my studio. I have a sponsee, and consistently when he's traveling, which he does often, I send him these AA speaker meetings and videos. That can make a big difference if you can't make an in-person meeting. As I've said, with the connection with others and the working with others, there's no substitute for face-to-face interactions and really being present with another person. It's so much of a higher energy. Zoom is certainly better than nothing, but being face to face is ideal.

This is why I continue going to Alcoholics Anonymous when many of you might think I should have graduated, that I don't need to go anymore, that I'm wasting my time. I look forward to my AA meetings almost every day. I look forward to the people I'm going to see. It gets me out. It helps me to meet new people and get new perspectives. I often see what I am not interested in. I see people who are new who are just going to continue drinking, and they are sick and insane. I see what I don't want to be like. There's nothing like hearing somebody who's drunk just blabber on in a meeting, just nonsense, and it reminds me, wow, that's what I used to sound like when I drank. And it doesn't look sexy, because all these fake commercials make drinking look sexy. But when you see some alcoholic who's drunk in an AA meeting going on and on, and then the chairman cutting them off, it doesn't look sexy. It looks sick. Wow, this poor person is running at a reduced capacity. This poor person has no better idea of what to do with themselves than to get drunk, even though they know they should never do it again. If you want to follow more of this journey, I've gathered a lot of it in my Life playlist.

I'm grateful for Alcoholics Anonymous, and that's why I keep showing up to meetings almost every day, and that's why almost every day I make a video on recovery as well. Gratitude is an action word, so thank you for being part of that with me. Almost nine years in, this is what keeps me sober: showing up, being accountable, and helping the next person however I can.

AA Step 1! Powerlessness Over Alcohol and Unmanageable Life in Alcoholics Anonymous

From my video published July 14, 2019.

Are you ready to talk about step one in Alcoholics Anonymous? The first step of Alcoholics Anonymous is as follows: we admitted we were powerless over alcohol and our lives had become unmanageable. What we're here to do is talk about this in practical terms for the AA beginner, or for an AA family member or friend — a potential Al-Anon member — who is trying to understand this. I'm Jerry Banfield. I'm an alcoholic. I'm grateful that my sobriety date is April 2014, and I've been going to meetings every day for five years. I've put this together for you with the hope that it's useful, and I've got a whole playlist for these.

What Does Powerlessness Over Alcohol Actually Mean?

The question is, what is the practical meaning of step one in Alcoholics Anonymous? Step one really helps us see whether we need AA or not — whether we belong in AA. Ultimately, we just need a desire to stop drinking to go to Alcoholics Anonymous. For many of us, getting to that first step is really hard. Are we truly powerless over alcohol? What does it even mean to have power over something? In Alcoholics Anonymous meetings we frequently say the phrase about whether one is able to control and enjoy their drinking. Many of us were able to either control our drinking or enjoy it, but not consistently control and enjoy. To me, the hallmark of powerlessness is the inability to consistently make the right decision with regards to alcohol.

Many of us need help to remember all those painful memories that we've swept under the rug and forgotten about, in order to stay sober. Hearing other people talk about theirs in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings helps me to remember mine, because our minds very easily forget the pain. When I remember even a fraction of all the examples of how powerless I am over alcohol, I see that taking any alcohol at all into my body is a very bad decision. Why? Because to have power over something means I can control and determine what happens next. For me, powerlessness means that if I take even a sip of alcohol, I cannot consistently control what happens next. That's powerlessness.

Think about getting on a roller coaster. Once you strap yourself into the roller coaster, you are powerless after that. You are going on the ride whether you want to or not — whether you kick and scream, whether you have a panic attack, whether you try to get off. You are going on the rest of the ride whether you want to or not. The same thing with alcohol: for me, it's a ride. Now, sometimes I could influence it a bit, at least in the past. I'm not interested in trying it again. What I've noticed is that sometimes I could have some control, but the thing about powerlessness is the illusion that you do have some control. Having a drink, saying you're only going to have two, and then ending up drunk at the end of the night — that's not control. Even if that only happens 10% of the time, that's still not control.

Think about the things you do have control over — driving, for example. If you decided to drive in a certain lane, you would say you had control over the car. But if 10% of the time the car drifted into the wrong side of the road against your will — if you thought you changed your mind and decided to drive the wrong way down the road, and that happened 10% of the time — you'd probably never drive again, because that would be terrifying.

To me, something like a DUI is an indication of powerlessness. Two DUIs, to me, is almost certainty of powerlessness. Because if one could control and enjoy their drinking, maybe you could say anyone could make one bad decision — whoops, I drank too much and drove. But someone who had control would under no circumstances do the exact same thing again. That's what's tough about alcoholism: we blame it on other things. Well, if that cop hadn't been sitting there — he should have something better to do than be pulling me over after I had six beers. Come on, I'm not a real criminal. If we are doing things that we didn't set out to do as a result of drinking, that is clear evidence of powerlessness.

Think about it this way. If you had one Diet Coke and suddenly decided, after having that one Diet Coke, to drink 12 more, and ended up in jail the next day, you'd probably never have Diet Coke again. Like, whoa — I can't believe that happened as a result of having a Diet Coke. You would see that after you had that first Diet Coke, your decision making took the power away from you.

The Magical Change of Mind

For me, it was always the magical change of mind. After one drink, I'd start changing my mind a little bit. And after a few drinks, I'd change my mind a lot more. And there goes all the power I'd had. What was scary to me was seeing how I'd change my mind about staying sober. I'd swear to God and my wife and my parents and anyone else who would listen that I was going to stay sober. And then — sober, before taking a drink — I would change my mind, and I would think I changed my mind in my own best interest. I'd say, well, I think I can handle a couple of drinks. And then guess what? Lots of times, I would be able to handle a couple of drinks the first time, and the second time, and maybe even the fifth and the tenth time sometimes. But that eleventh time would go way out of control. And that's powerlessness.

When you have the illusion that you have control over something when you really don't, that is real powerlessness. When you think, I've got control of this drinking thing, I can do this — and you keep making the same mistakes over and over again — that's helpless. That's like a baby who wants to do something and yet is just screaming and crying on the floor and can't do it. That's powerlessness. Even if it's just 5% of the time — you might be able to drink 19 times out of 20 and have control over it — if that 20th time you lose control and do something dumb, and you wake up the next day and wonder how you did that, that's what powerlessness looks like.

Our Sober Lives Had Become Unmanageable

Once you recognize that, then you see into the next part of the first step, which is that our lives have become unmanageable. It can be relatively straightforward to say, okay, all right, Jerry, I got it — I realize that once I take that first drink, I don't have power after that, at least not all the time. Once you can get to that point — okay, I understand now that if I have one drink, I cannot always control what happens next; okay, I'm powerless over alcohol — for me, the harder part was the second part of the first step: that our lives have become unmanageable. Let me throw an extra word in there: our sober lives had become unmanageable. That was a tough one for me to realize, because I thought if I didn't drink, my life was pretty good. I thought I was managing my life perfectly sober. I thought my only problem was this little alcohol thing.

Once I started coming to Alcoholics Anonymous, almost immediately I was able to realize my powerlessness. I had thousands of examples of where I had one drink and at some point after that lost total control, and lots more examples of losing partial control and making a little bit bad decisions. The hard part for me was seeing that my sober life was unmanageable, and that's where I really needed help. Because with a thousand examples of why I should never drink again, why is it that sober, I still wanted to drink anyway, even when I knew better?

Imagine someone who put their hand on a hot stove, got burned really bad, and said, well, I just won't put my hand on that stove as long next time. And they get burned again and again. You'd say they were insane and needed to be locked up. Well, that was my life with alcohol — let me just see — and I got burned again and again. What was really scary to me was realizing that my sober decision making process was horrible. My sober decision making process consistently led me to think a drink of alcohol was better than whatever my life was sober, despite all the evidence that it wasn't. Despite all the times I'd been burned. Despite losing a relationship, a car, at least one job directly from alcohol, and nearly another job from alcohol. Despite losing my health, despite losing friendships, despite losing thousands and thousands of dollars and thousands of hours to hangovers and stupidity, smashed and broken property, all kinds of undetected crimes. Despite all that, sober, my mind would tell me — and I would believe it — that the best thing I could do that day was to take a drink. That's an unmanageable life.

The Result of Step One: Seeing the Insanity

When you see that consciously you are purposefully trying to screw yourself over, and when that is realized, you've fully completed step one. When you can see that I'm powerless over alcohol — I have that one drink and I'm knocked out of the batter's box, as one guy said, and there's no telling what's going to happen next. Even if that particular time everything's fine, give it 10 or 20 times and there's no telling what'll happen. Once you see that — wow, my sober life is so bad that I still think drinking's a good idea anyway, even though I know better — really, the result of step one is seeing that, oh my God, I'm insane. That leads us directly to step two.

For me, this came about three months into Alcoholics Anonymous, going to two meetings a week, after 11 years of alcoholic drinking, averaging 20 drinks a week or so. Now, that would include times when I was sober for months — just, I'm going to stay sober. That includes other times where I had 40-plus shots of liquor and/or beers in one week. Usually those would be nights where I'd have like 10 or 20 in one night, and I'd do that one or two or three nights a week. I usually did binge drinking, so I'd get really drunk, hangover, sober up, really drunk, hangover, sober up.

What we get out of step one is we see: oh my God, I am insane. I am trying to hurt myself. I'm clearly disregarding anyone else around me. I am a sick person. I am an insane person who wants to hurt themselves and who craves the opportunity to hurt themselves and hurt others through my alcoholic drinking. That is an issue going on with me sober. That's an issue going on with me without any alcohol in my body. That's really, really screwed up. The gift of seeing that after 90 days was seeing that I was so insane that I was two. I wasn't one — I was two. I was a me that wanted to drink and a me that wanted to stay sober. I was literally two people. Everything was this miserable back and forth. At some points, I literally was so full of fear that I locked up, and I would just stand in the middle of my house and just stand there, because I was so afraid of what I was going to do next. The only way I felt safe was to just stand still. I don't even know how long I'd get stuck there.

Once I saw — whoa, this is insane; this is like what they talk about for people going to mental hospitals — the gift of that is seeing, oh, I need help with this. I am insane and I need something to restore me to sanity, because clearly this is not an ideal state, and alcohol is not going to fix this. Thus, we are led into step two: when we see the nature of our insanity — that despite all of our alcoholic drinking, we still want to get drunk again, no matter what the cost.

Thank you very much for joining me here for this step study — here with me, alcoholic Jerry Banfield. I intend to go through all the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, plus all the related Living Sober things that we encounter, and if you want to walk this road with me today, the best way to do that is to join the Jerry Banfield Family community. You can also see more of my personal story in my Life playlist.

Thank you very much for reading this. I love you. You're awesome, and I'll see you again at step two.