15: Bill Tierney: Business, Leadership and Life Coach
“What I mean by being addicted to meetings was that I was getting something there that I really wanted and needed. What I understand it now to be is connection, relatability, community, and fellowship. All very important things.”
Almost 36 years ago Bill went to his first AA meeting and became sober from substances. While he was no longer drinking, he became addicted to AA meetings, or more importantly, what they offered him. He found a place for connection, relatability, community, and relationships. Tune in with Jeff as Bill shares his journey of sobriety, how transparency and connection with likeminded people helped him along his way, how we must listen to what our bodies are telling us, alcoholism is a family disease that all involved need recovery from, and his insights on living in the present and minding our own business.
Highlights:
02:05 Who Bill is
05:14 Early recovery
10:26 Addicted to AA Meetings
15:08 Emulating those he admired
20:30 Sober but absent
26:38 Bill’s upbringing
30:05 Taking time to work on the internal healing
39:05 Alcoholism is a family disease
43:33 Trust your body
Tweets:
Tune in with @TFRSolution as Bill shares his journey of sobriety and how transparency and connection with likeminded people helped him along his way. http://thefamilyrecoverysolution.com/ #family #recovery
Quotes:
11:32 “What I mean by being addicted to meetings was that I was getting something there that I really wanted and needed. What I understand it now to be is connection, relatability, community, and fellowship. All very important things.”
12:17 “How we feel determines so much of the choices we make about how we spend our time, what we do with ourselves, and what we become addicted to if we are in fact in the state of being vulnerable to addiction.”
Dr. Mark
Website: https://breakthroughsuccessclub.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/billtierneycoaching/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BreakthroughSuccessClub/
Email: bill@breakthroughsuccessclub.com
Got ideas? Perhaps a future podcast? Schedule time with Jeff here: https://meetme.so/jeffjones
Transcriptions
JEFF: Welcome everyone. So, today my guest is Bill Tierney and I just met him a while ago. I’m excited to have him on the show. I will let him introduce himself. Essentially, the reason why I’m having him on this show is because Bill has been in long term recovery for quite some time. I’ll let him talk about the specifics. However, he has a very interesting part of his journey that, he’s in a discovery phase. And he’s been in AA for quite some time. And he’s been clean and sober for a long time. And he’s just been taking a look at some of what really supports him in his sobriety. So, welcome Bill. I’m glad you’re here.
BILL: Thank you Jeff. Glad to be here. Thanks for letting me be a guest on your podcast.
JEFF: Yeah – yeah. No problem. So, if we could start with you just kind of talking a little bit about who you are as a person and then, you know, whatever you want to talk about as far as like your recovery journey when it started and what that was like.
BILL: Okay. Sounds good. I think the first thing I want to say is that for anybody that’s listening that is a member of an anonymous 12 step program like Alcoholics Anonymous or Al-Anon or NA or whatever program that might be. You noticed that Jeff announced my first and last name and then there’s a couple of reasons that I asked him to announce, introduce me that way. One of them is that I no longer considered myself to be a member of alcoholics anonymous. And that’s not because I decided to start drinking again. I’m still sober. But it was the result of a process that I engaged in last year where I got myself in AA sponsor, probably the seventh or eighth one that I’ve had and asked him to take me through the steps according to the AA big book of Alcoholics Anonymous. And as a result of that process I realized that I no longer can say in an AA meeting or to anybody for that matter that I worked the AA program to get sober and that I worked the AA program to stay sober. And I’m going to share with you what I did do that helped me to get and stay sober and why I drew that conclusion that I no longer could see myself identifying as an AA member.
JEFF: Okay. Thank you. Yeah – yeah. So –
BILL: Let me –
JEFF: Yeah, I was just going to ask you to, if you could just talk about yourself a little bit, just kind of who you are as a person.
BILL: All right. Well, today I’m working in a coaching practice. Self-employed. And I worked with between 20 and 30 clients at a time by offering group coaching to people that are typically they’re in business. And recently, I’ve decided to refocus on working with people that are also in recovery or interested in being in recovery. I’m married. I have three kids. And my wife has three kids. Together we have a total of 14 grandkids.
JEFF: Oh my gosh. Wow. Cool.
BILL: Family’s a big deal. Family’s important. I do a little bit of traveling so that I can see my, two of my children. One of them lives right in the same area where I do. And the other two are six and eight hour drive away. So yeah, it is great. My relationship with all of my grandchildren has improved dramatically over the last, I’d say 15, 20 years or so because of some changes that I’ve made in my own life. And some efforts made to try to clean up my past, which really impacted them in a negative way. Even in early recovery.
JEFF: Yeah – yeah – yeah. Wow. So, can we kind of go back to early recovery, like when you got into recovery and I guess you started with AA. And how many years ago was that?
BILL: 35. It was 1982 and probably hearing about, I guess it’s one month from today, I’ll have 36 years of continuous sobriety.
JEFF: Wow.
BILL: What was going on back in 1982 was that, my wife and I had been together. We’ve been married for five years and we had dated for three years prior to that. And I was a very jealous and insecure husband. By then we had a little girl and little boy. Sarah was three years old and Billy was two years old. I had no idea. I really had no idea that I had a problem with alcohol. My wife had given me an ultimatum about three years prior to this with marijuana. She told me if I ever smoked pot again, she would leave me. And so I quit smoking pot but continue to drink. It surprises me as I look back on it now that she didn’t seem to have a problem with the alcohol as with pot. She didn’t like who I turned into when I smoked pot. I really liked who I turned into a lot. So it was a big, a big thing. For me it was huge to give it up, but I did because I couldn’t imagine life without my wife.
Well, she’d gotten a job working at a pizza place that had around till two or 3:00 in the morning. And my magical imagination of a mind would create all kinds of horrible things that were happening either to her or with her. And I thought for sure that she was probably having an affair with her boss who she had really befriended. And her boss and his wife were, became frequent guests at our home for dinner and for social socializing. And I felt more and more separate and apart from my wife and of course from her boss and her boss’s wife. And I just to me it felt very awkward. I was absolutely convinced in my mind that my wife was having an affair with this guy. And I couldn’t believe that his wife was going along with it and that she didn’t see all the writing on the writing that I saw.
JEFF: Wow.
BILL: So, he invited me one evening. He invited me to an AA meeting. And I was really angry that he would invite me to an AA meeting with him. It seemed really presumptuous of him that I might even consider that because of the assumptions he must been making about me having problem with alcohol. You know, it shouldn’t have been a surprise to me anytime he saw me I was drinking, but I didn’t say no when he asked me to the meeting. In fact, the thought came to me that it might be a really good idea to go because if I went with him to an AA meeting, then he would be with my wife. And I could kind of figure him out and learn more about him. And figure out for sure whether or not he was having an affair with my wife.
So, this was in 1982 and he asked me that on the 14th of November to go to this meeting. And asked if I could manage to not drink between then, when he asked me, and 8:00 the next night when I went to the meeting. And I said that’s not a problem. And I really was, I was able to just put down my beer and then after I got off work, I worked in a grocery store at the time I just didn’t drink between then and the meeting. And to my surprise, I spent an hour with a group of people who were just as crazy as I was afraid I was.
JEFF: Oh my gosh.
BILL: These people in this AA meeting we’re telling on themselves. They were saying things about the way that they thought, the way that they felt and the things that they did that I thought were all my secrets. I didn’t think anybody felt, thought, and acted that way. And if we would be willing, it didn’t make sense to me that they’d be willing to talk about it. So, I was very attracted to how transparent and willing people were to tell about themselves. And for the first time really in my adult life, as much as I can remember, I felt like I can relate to this group of people on a level that I didn’t. I don’t know that I even was aware of the results level in me that existed that can relate it to people. So, It was very refreshing for me and I wanted to come back. I wanted to go back to more meetings. And almost immediately Jeff, I switched my addiction from alcohol to AA meetings. And I started going into two and three meetings a day and work full time. Needless to say, my wife and kids didn’t see much of me.
JEFF: Wow. So what I heard you say is I switched my addiction from alcohol to going to AA meetings.
BILL: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.
JEFF: Can you say more about how you see that Bill?
BILL: I needed to go to a meeting. And I couldn’t have told you at that time what it was that I was getting out of the meeting. But, and believe me, I certainly tried to figure this out. Why for my entire life was I able to go without an AA meeting and now that I had been introduced AA I couldn’t seem to go a day without one. Part of it I think was my fear, which I heard the message that alcohol is just outside the door doing, alcoholism is just outside the door, doing pushups, getting stronger and stronger everyday that I stay sober and then I need to do to avoid it at all costs. And the safest place to be in the world was in an AA meeting.
So, I heard that. That was my motivation for going. But I think what I mean by being addicted to meetings is that I was getting something there that I really wanted and needed. And what I understand it now to be is connection, relatability, community fellowship, all, all very, very important things. But maybe because none of my inner life had been touched, let alone healed, let alone acknowledged and developed since none of that had happened yet. All I knew is that I felt better in an AA meeting than out of one. So, and I believe for me and many of the addicts that I’ve met over the years, that how we feel determines so much of the choices we make about how we spend our time, what we do with ourselves and what we become addicted to. If in fact we are still in this state of becoming vulnerable, being vulnerable to addiction
JEFF: Yeah – yeah – yeah. So, kind of what I’m hearing then is that you, you know, just going to the first meeting. It sounds like you were really struck with a level of transparency. The level of sharing people, were talking about things that you could relate to that you kind of assumed were your little secret. And there was something really important about that, something that drew you back to that kind of environment, the connection, the community, the relationships.
BILL: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I just felt like I was a part of something finally.
JEFF: Yeah.
BILL: To that point in my life, I had just felt really alone. Like nobody got me. Nobody understood. I didn’t get other people. I didn’t understand.
JEFF: Yeah. Yeah. So at this stage, how did this affect your family? You know, you were saying you had two small children at that time, a wife.
BILL: Yeah. Yeah. You know, sad to say I can’t really report accurately about the impact on. They certainly didn’t see me nearly as much physically, but I don’t know that that was such a bad thing for them. I wasn’t a very loving dad. I mean, I love my kids, don’t get me wrong. I love them. And I played with them. And I enjoyed them until I didn’t anymore, you know. And as painful as this is to say out loud and to admit, they were pretty inconvenient. And so, I lose my patience and my temper with them. And my wife kind of played the role of protecting them against me. Some of it was verbal and some of it was physical. I would call myself an abusive parent at that time. I’d spend some amount of impatience and anger. I would handle them in a real rough manner and I would shout at them. And that was the way that I was raised. I really believed that I was doing better than my parents were, but the truth is, it was shameful behavior. And no kid needed to be, deserved to be treated the way that I treated my kids.
JEFF: Yeah.
BILL: It hurt actually. I absolutely loved them. I adored my kids.
JEFF: Yeah – yeah – yeah. Wow. So, then like the evolution of your own. Like what you were just talking about is when you started AA and, you know, kind of the relationships you had with your kids and your family then. And so, can you talk a little bit about what you remember of the evolution of like five years, 10 years, 20 years in or whatever, kind of how that journey unfolded for you?
BILL: Sure, sure. Well, I think it’s important to report just that although I was successfully abstaining from alcohol and any other mood altering drugs. I believe that my program consisted of watching people that I admired and wanted to be like, and then trying to emulate them, in other words, pretending to be like them. And so, there was really no internal work being done. I wasn’t examining my inner workings. I wasn’t looking at my own thinking. Examining my own judgments, my own values. I was noticing people that were living life the way that I would have liked to have lived. And all I knew about how to live that way was to pretend that I was like them. I would talk like them. I’d laugh like them. I began to value the things that they valued.
And these were all people in alcoholics anonymous. I had a lot of respect for the people in AA because they were so transparent and vulnerable and honest. And so that was in the early days that’s what recovery look like for me, but my body knew better. When I was clean and sober about seven months and I was working in the grocery store and my body said: “You know, this is now time for us to begin to feel all the emotions that we’ve been packing away for the last 28 years.” It was 28 years old at the time and I was [inaudible] toilet paper display in this grocery store. I began to weep and convulsively sob. And I could barely get myself back into the bathroom to try to collect myself and I failed to gain any kind of composure. My body just went into this process all on its own of beginning to release all the – what I understand now is to release all the emotions that I’d been suppressing for most of my life.
JEFF: Yeah. And was there anything like that you remember that contributed to that release or did it just at one point that’s what started happening?
BILL: That’s– it’s just that it was that ironic. I there, I didn’t have a thought any different than the thought that I’d had an hour before or the day before. I wasn’t focused on anything that I hadn’t been already focused on. I mean, all of this time I still was obsessed with the idea that my wife is probably having an affair with this guy [inaudible]. And that really tension.
JEFF: Yeah. So there wasn’t anything different in your family or your environment or?
BILL: No. No.
JEFF: Wow.
BILL: Your body had not had the assistance of alcohol to deal with my emotions. Alcohol did such a great job of keeping my emotions at bay.
JEFF: Yeah. Wow. And so how many years in was did you –
BILL: It wasn’t. It was only seven months.
JEFF: Oh, I see. Yeah.
BILL: And I had a buddy who had been sober already in AA for six years who just happened to be in town, looked me up and found me locked in my office upstairs in the grocery store, hiding underneath the desks so that nobody can see or hear me as I’m having this huge emotional breakdown. And unable at all to understand what was going – I was really scared. I thought, what is going on that I don’t have any control of my emotions here?
JEFF: And so, were you bringing that into AA meetings?
BILL: No. This is like something that happened one day. It wasn’t over days. It happened one day. And by the time my buddy showed up, it had been going on for about four hours. And it wasn’t going away. It just continued, kept role, like, would roll over me that in waves and then the next wave would come and the next wave would come. And I just, I thought I was going crazy.
JEFF: Yeah.
BILL: And when he suggested that I agreed to go off to treatment. I thought great. That sounds awesome. I didn’t care if I had a job when I came back or not. I didn’t care if I was still married when I came back or not. I just didn’t want to continue to feel this out of control with all these pain and all these emotions. So I went off to a 28 day treatment center and miraculously was just fine once I got there.
JEFF: Yeah. Wow.
BILL: I was starting to teach people about AA. And people thought I was a counselor there at the treatment center.
JEFF: So you were clean for seven months and your emotions came out and then you went to a 28 day treatment center.
BILL: That’s right. That’s right.
JEFF: Wow.
BILL: It’s a bit of an unusual story.
JEFF: It is a bit of an unusual story. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. And so, what was, I mean, can you talk a little bit about like what was happening with your family then, do you recall? Or?
BILL: Well, I can only guess that my wife must have been very, very relieved that I wasn’t drinking and while at the same time probably resentful that now that I wasn’t drinking, not only was she not getting a benefit from that, from me being a better guy, you know, I’m paying better attention to, more attention to her and the kids. I was just absent all the time now. Culminating in a four week vacation at the treatment center where she was left to fend for herself. So, I’m thinking that she just became more and more resentful. We’d had intimacy issues throughout the entire marriage. And I won’t talk about her side of what was the cause of all that, but we have, let me just say that we both brought issues into the marriage. And so, when I came back out of treatment, we started going to marriage counseling and that was my introduction to counseling and therapy. And really my introduction to beginning to address my own issues for the first time ever in my life. It wasn’t happening in AA meetings, not because AA didn’t provide a way to do that, but because I just wasn’t interested. I was just interested in looking good, making it look good.
JEFF: Yeah, – yeah – yeah. The image peace. So, but it sounds like what was attractive though too, is to have people around you being very transparent and talking about what was going on for them. So you got to see a lot of other people kind of going through that process.
BILL: I did. And it was inspiring. And I just didn’t have the, I had the willingness to be transparent and authentic like I saw them being. I just didn’t have the ability. So what it really was, was me pretending to be authentic. As funny as that sounds. I was pretending to be authentic and transparent until I began to get some therapy and counseling and actually be able to access that which I was hiding from the rest of the world.
JEFF: Right.
BILL: And just even see it myself.
JEFF: Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. So then what I heard you say initially was that you didn’t work the steps and AA didn’t help you stay clean and sober.
BILL: I would say that the program that’s described in the basic text of alcoholics anonymous was not the program that got me sober. What did getting several was the fellowship –
JEFF: Yeah.
BILL: – and [inaudible] alcoholics anonymous in the meetings.
JEFF: Yeah – yeah – yeah.
BILL: And that’s what keeps me sober for that and combination with the work that I then finally began to do outside of AA with therapy and counseling is what kept me sober for all those years.
JEFF: Yeah – Yeah – Yeah. And so here you are like 35 years later. And what I heard you say is that you’re in like, you’re at this place of self discovery.
BILL: Yes – yes – yes. I, you know, I wouldn’t say that I’ve ever been somebody that had a lot of confidence that I had an answer, that may not be true. There may have been a time that I was way over confident about the answers for myself and other people. But, I’ve always had a questioning mind. I’ve always been very, very curious about the truth.
JEFF: Right.
BILL: About what is actually true, which is paradoxical since I was such a prolific liar for so long, for so long. I was such a great liar. I had myself convinced that I was telling the truth for years and years and years. But –
JEFF: Even when you were in AA –
BILL: Yeah.
JEFF: – you were seeing yourself as well as lying and not telling the truth.
BILL: Well, yeah, for the longest time I was — I didn’t seem to have the ability to tell the truth. This is something that I got really nailed up on in treatment at seven months sober. They really just began to peel away all my lies and exposed to me how this was so shameful to me at that time. So embarrassing to be found out as the liar that I was. Just simple things. I would lie instead of telling the truth when it would’ve been just as easy, it would’ve been much easier just to tell the truth. There was no advantage in lying. Like how many kids do you have? Three. No. Only had two. Just ridiculous things. How long have you been working on your job? I would say 10 years. I’ve been there for four. How long have you been married? 12 years. No. I’ve been married five. I could not tell the truth.
JEFF: Wow. So there was just kind of a habitual pattern.
BILL: Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Reality. I think reality is just too uninteresting, so I had to, in my own mind, make things up.
JEFF: Creating. Yeah. And so like before you got into the drinking or smoking pot, was it any different with the not telling the truth or, you know, making a high priority image?
BILL: Well, I certainly did work on an image before I discovered alcohol and before I started smoking pot. I had a different kind of image that I had developed. Shy. I was very, very shy. People, especially women just terrified me. I was a loner. I isolated. I didn’t have a lot of, I used to say, and this isn’t far from the truth that before I got to Alcoholics Anonymous, I couldn’t complete a sentence. I just was not a skilled communicator at all. I pretty much just kept to myself. And speaking out loud was too risky. So I guess, didn’t have conversations with people. I avoided them at all costs.
JEFF: Yeah. So I mean, I just in listening to your story, I can’t help think about your, you know, your upbringing. You were probably in an environment that reinforced that, I’m guessing.
BILL: Oh yeah. Absolutely. You know, my folks handed down to me what was handed down to them. They both were violent alcoholic people. Not at first, it developed over the years, but by the time I was in high school, they were beating each other up once or twice a week. And there were some pretty obscene and horrendous scenes that took place in our home. And I have five sisters and one brother. Both my folks are gone now, but they were both very, very alcoholic and very, very angry and very, very violent.
JEFF: Yeah. So maybe it wasn’t safe to tell the truth.
BILL: Oh no.
JEFF: Or talk –
BILL: Yeah. I learned it was deeply, deeply embedded in me. It was not safe at all. The world wasn’t a safe place.
JEFF: Yeah. Yeah. So then just looking at AA, it seems like, you know, the community, environment, the fellowship, the transparency, that was attractive. And it’s like, it seemed like that was a really big part of what helped you stay clean and sober.
BILL: Absolutely. No doubt about it.
JEFF: And then, yeah, you know, so down the road, years down the road, did you kind of, when you said you got into therapy and that kind of stuff, like then did you kind of circle back and do the steps again?
BILL: Well, yes, but I had a real problem with authority figures, so in AA they would say get a sponsor, read the big book, work through the steps and go to meetings. I mean, that’s the formula –
JEFF: Right.
BILL: – to stay sober. Well, I would get a sponsor and then I would lose my respect for this sponsor very quickly because it turned out they were human. Sometimes that meant that they were liars. Sometimes it meant that they were hypocrites. Sometimes it just meant that that I would see through, I could just see through the humanity of each of them. And I wasn’t very forgiving about that. I would set these men up on pedestals and expect them to be the perfect image of what emotional recovery should look like. And then when they showed up as human, I wouldn’t want anything more to do with them.
JEFF: Yeah. So like put them up on a huge pedestal with a lot of expectations and then when you see that they’re human kicked that pedestal out.
BILL: Exactly. Exactly. And I just always had a lot of reasons to, a lot of justification for doing that. And I went back to my old MO of being a loner.
JEFF: Yeah.
BILL: What I found was that I was comfortable as a being a sponsor, uncomfortable having a sponsor. I can help other people, but I didn’t trust and this is really what’s the bottom line for me. I couldn’t trust another human being to have any say in my life at all.
JEFF: And so when did that like switch? Transformed because, I mean, I’m making the assumption that that did.
BILL: I was going to point that out. I’d say that’s still in process. I have found a lot of healing and a lot of recovery in the last 16 years or so. Let me just insert a couple of things. My wife died of a brain tumor when I was, I think I was eight years sober at that time and the way that I dealt with it was I just got into one relationship after the other, after the other. Over the course of two years and then married one of the women that I’ve gotten involved with. And it was just a really poor choice. Sold her short. I wasn’t – the reason that I married her was because I was afraid I was just going to keep getting into these relationships unless I got married. So I got married and she knew all along that I didn’t really love her. That I still loved my first wife and she thought she even said one time she thought she was competing with a dead woman.
So we constantly fought. She didn’t feel loved by me and felt justified in trying, in punishing me for that for the entire marriage. And after about nine years with me, not, never, never been able to see how I had contributed to the extreme dysfunction of the marriage. We got divorced. And by then I was so afraid that I would repeat that pattern again, that I became more willing to do my work, my internal work than I ever had been. And that’s when I discovered Byron Katie. And the work of Byron Katie, which you can learn about thework.com has made all the difference in my life. It’s a method for being able to take a look.
JEFF: Yeah. I’m familiar with Byron Katie. I don’t know the work really well, but I have seen her in person and read some of her stuff. I have a lot of respect for. Yeah. So, then Byron Katie was it sounds like responsible or impart was a piece or a factor for your transformation?
BILL: Absolutely. No doubt about it. I really don’t think that I would have drank. I stayed involved in AA and I just, it feels nothing short of miraculous to me that I just haven’t been interested in drinking for over 35 years now. But what has been a problem is just being in a journey. Living a life as me from the inside out. And Byron Katie helped me to begin to sort out why that was, why thinking the way that I used to think created so much pain and suffering for me and the other people in my life.
JEFF: Wow. Wow. So yeah, and right now you’re a coach. You said you do group coaching in a business people.
BILL: Yeah.
JEFF: And so, I’m assuming you’ve done quite a bit of work on yourself.
BILL: I really haven’t. And part – the initial reason I started doing so much work as I said, it wasn’t that I was so afraid that I might repeat the pattern, that I may not be aware enough of what I was doing and the choices I was making in my life that I wouldn’t just repeat the pattern. And get involved with another woman. And create another very, very toxic relationship. So I wanted to know what it was inside me that attracted me to my second wife and frankly to my first wife. And so I did a lot of Byron Katie work. I got involved with landmark education. I stayed involved in therapy. I’ve read, it’s not an exaggeration to say hundreds of books to help me go inside, take a look at what’s in there, do a lot of healing and blow up a lot of the beliefs that I’ve had in my life that I brought with me into adulthood that just weren’t true. But that had lived in me like they were the truth, so I just automatically react from. Like, I’m not good enough. There’s something wrong with me. I’m fundamentally flawed. And the list goes on and on and on.
JEFF: Yeah. Wow. So then, you know, looking back at your journey and say if you had a friend or someone came to you as a client and they wanted, they were in the very early stages, you know, how do you look at AA now kinda thing. Like, do you suggest AA for other people?
BILL: That’s a really great question.
JEFF: Well, I’m just curious because I mean, AA is like all over the world then, you know, and the community and the fellowship. And like there are like, they have a certain technology, you know, and it’s doing the steps, like you were saying. Get a sponsor. Read the big book, you know. Go through, I mean data, data, data kind of thing. And a lot of times that, what I’ve seen that can be really helpful specifically when at the very beginning.
BILL: Yeah, I believe that the AA program works. I absolutely do. And here’s why I can say that. It was probably this time of the year, last year, when a friend who had gone in and out and in and out of recovery came to me and said: “I need some help. I need to get clean and sober again.” And he’d been trying to get clean and sober since 1988. And had as many as seven years at a time of recovery. And he said: “What do you suggest that I do?” And I said: “Well, I’ve got, I think I can really support you. I’ve got a lot of things that have worked for me in recovery, but I think that you need to get sober first. You need to go through the physical withdrawal. Detox. You need to get some real solid guidance and direction in your life and there’s nothing better than Alcoholics Anonymous for that. And I can introduce you.”
Well, that’s what I told him. The truth is there’s nothing better that I know of than Alcoholics Anonymous for being able to hold your hand, help you to normalized through the early days and early weeks and months of recovery. And have some clear guidance and direction to begin to gather up all the insanity of the craziness of the thinking that that’s part of being addicted to substance behavior. Like I mentioned at the beginning of the conversation, that’s not what I did. I didn’t get, didn’t follow that guidance. I just stayed plugged into the meetings and yet it still worked for me. And I used to say this when I was going to meetings, I’ve done it all wrong and it still worked.
JEFF: Yeah.
BILL: So number one, I think there’s gotta be, you gotta want it. You gotta want to be sober. And for some people, really being sober and living sober is not what they want. They want to be able to control their drinking. They want to be able to manage it and do so socially and there’s people that can do that. And AA is not for that. But if somebody does want to just learn how to live without alcohol, AA is absolutely a great place to go. A great place to start. And my advice to anybody would be to not waste the 34 years that I wasted. By the way –
JEFF: Do you see it as wasted really?
BILL: Yeah. A poor choice of words. It wasn’t wasted. Here I am still sober and it put me on my path. And I don’t think I would have access to all the help that I got without the introduction to recovery by AA. But waste of is a good word to use when I consider that had I somehow been able to get past my own trust issues and rebelliousness and really allowed some of the loving members of AA that wanted so badly to help me, to guide me through 164 pages of the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous and show me how to work the program. If somehow I’ve been able to muster up the willingness to do so, it would have made a big difference for me in terms of the quality of my life and the choices that I made much, much sooner in the process of recovery.
JEFF: Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I just want to kind of like look at this from a little bit different angle and that is seeing that, you know, the majority of people who may listen to this podcast, I mean, the name of this podcast as Families Navigating Addiction and Recovery. Do you have some thoughts or takeaways or lessons learned specifically for families that they may find of interest?
BILL: I think I may have. There’s conversations that are just permanent in my memory. And one of them was a lecture by one of the counselors at the treatment center that I went to 35 years ago. And they were trying to explain that alcoholism is a family disease. And I would say that that’s probably true of dysfunction of, excuse me, of any addiction that creates so much dysfunction like alcohol. Doesn’t matter what the addiction is, whether it’s an act or substance of both. But he said, imagine that each member of the family that you’re in is represented by a little part on a baby’s mobile. That goes –
JEFF: Right. I know that mobile. Yeah.
BILL: Okay. And now, it works just perfectly. It’s perfectly balanced. And he goes round and round and round and things work until you pluck one of those little parts off of the mobile. And now it’s sideways and gravity’s thrown things way off and it won’t even turn around anymore because it’s out of balance. You can expect that to happen. And that was really meaningful to me back then. And it still is a great model for what to expect whenever someone steps out of their role. And I know you teach this too Jeff, that’s whenever somebody steps out of their role in the family, whether it was seen as a positive role or a negative one, somebody steps out of the role, then that affects the roles that everybody else –
JEFF: The whole. Everybody. It affects everybody. Yeah.
BILL: So that being said, you know, the scapegoat of the of the addiction is the addicted person. That’s the person that it’s easy to point the finger at and say: “If this person would just change and everything will be alright, but what families find out over and over and over again is that when that person changes, everything’s not alright.” In fact, each member of the family begins to feel a certain amount of discomfort and displacement until they began to do their own internal work and find recovery for themselves. And what they’re recovering from is their addiction to whatever role they were playing in this –
JEFF: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah – yeah. I mean, the way I talk about that is they are in habitual patterns as well and their nervous system gets activated and it automatically has a way to deactivate the nervous system with a certain behavior which is their role and the family, their reaction. And so oftentimes they’re, you know, imagining the thoughts and feelings of everyone else and you know, taking action as if that imagination was true.
BILL: Yes, exactly. I’ve gotten involved in another 12 step program and since I’ve named my first and last name and I want to honor anonymity for that program. I won’t name the program but what we talk about there is dosing. That we use our behaviors to dose ourselves using the internal chemical factory that we have.
JEFF: Yeah. Yeah. I like that. I mean, how the lens I look through at this, I really see the, you know, the nervous system and the brain chemistry really being a big part of, you know, what’s underneath the mobile that you described. You know, and if one little mobile is cut off and the whole thing kind of goes, you know, gravity takes him down. So, it’s like those habitual patterns that can get in the way. And it’s like when everybody in the family starts to have an understanding of that. And they can start to be aware of what’s happening in their own body and track their own body sensations are there. It’s like there’s so much information and knowledge and wisdom that our bodies have kind of like your story earlier of, you know, when your body just, you know, at some point it’s like, it just, all this emotion needed to come out. And it’s like it needed to do what it needed to do. And it wasn’t you thinking about what the right thing to do was.
BILL: No. No.
JEFF: You know, the body leading.
BILL: Yeah. The body is very – we can trust our bodies. It took me a long time to learn this, that we can absolutely trust our bodies to tell us the truth, even when it’s painful. Even when it’s uncomfortable. Our bodies are constantly trying to communicate with us so that we can get back into alignment where our thoughts, our feelings and our actions are once again in alignment.
JEFF: And so Bill, like you were talking about the family disease component. And can you talk a little bit about that from the standpoint of, you know, your own family? And if you don’t want to, just say no.
BILL: Oh no. I’m happy to. Are you talking about my children and my wife at the time that I got sober up to now? Or are you talking about my family of origin?
JEFF: No. I’m talking about your kids, your wife, you know, maybe your wife now kind of thing. Not like day one or the first year.
BILL: So, let me say that after my second marriage, I stayed out of relationships for 13 years before I began to date my current wife. And during that time I wasn’t spending that time avoiding catastrophe completely, although that was certainly part of it but I spent the time diligently doing the work that I had. And one of the very first things that I did when I left my second marriage was I reached out to my two older children who are now 37 and 39 years old. And I began to do the work of healing the damage that I had done with them their entire lives, including having them living with me and their stepmother in a really, really dysfunctional circumstances situation. To their credit, they both were very, very forgiving and understanding and forgave me right away. And, but I insisted that we have some frank and honest conversations about the things that had happened and asked if they would just be willing to let me acknowledge how I had hurt them and how I’d let them down because I needed that for myself. But I also wanted them to know that I was committed to being now the parent that I could be, although I couldn’t change the past.
And like I said, they’ve been very gracious and our relationships have continued to improve over the years. And I’d say the key to that is that, you know, that I’m very, very honest now, about my thoughts, my feelings. And I have actually the capacity of having compassion and curiosity about what’s going on with them. They’re no longer an inconvenience. I –
JEFF: Yeah. Wow.
BILL: Is the precious beings that they are and just really constantly am trying to connect with them and they reciprocate it. It’s been a wonderful healing.
JEFF: Yeah. That’s so beautiful that you got to that place and you went right in. I mean, what sounds like, you know, right in and saying: “Hey, I need to have this conversation with you. And can you just listen to me, you know, tell you how I hurt you.” And it’s like, wow, that I mean, so that happened. That’s huge. And they listened and it sounded like it had an impact on them.
BILL: I believe so. Eventually it got to the point where they began to trust me again. They didn’t trust me. Why would they? I’d hurt them so often and so bad but over time they did begin to trust me and they began to see that I was actually this person. Not just pretending to be this person.
JEFF: Yeah.
BILL: And all of that was a result of the work that I’ve done. You asked earlier if I had some sort of any words of wisdom or, I don’t know exactly how you asked me for –
JEFF: Takeaways. Lessons learned. Yeah.
BILL: I didn’t really believe that I could change at first. And I’ve been in my family of origin, every single one of my siblings has had struggled with addiction. And one of my youngest daughter also, she didn’t struggle with addiction, but she did have behaviors that absolutely terrified me. I wasn’t sure that she was going to survive herself through her teenage years. So, I got to have the experiences of someone who is not in addiction and yet is impacted by a close family member who is. And there’s been a lot of lessons for me in letting go and getting clear about what is and is not my business. And clear about how I use my efforts at control to try to control another person. How I can use that to once again go away from who I am and what is my business, which is my life and all the things that entails by distracting myself and focusing on someone who is in an addiction.
JEFF: Yeah. Well that sounds like a really good takeaway right there. You know, just being clear about what is your business and what isn’t your business. And you know, what is like the serenity prayer kind of thing?
BILL: The things I cannot change. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. And so, that would be anything outside of what I call my power center.
JEFF: Yeah.
BILL: Any – I can’t change the past. I really can’t change the future. You’re actually even exist in the present moment is all that does. So, I can’t change anything unless I’m in the present moment.
JEFF: Yeah.
BILL: There is something that I can change. It probably has to do with – really what I’ve discovered is getting me and my will and my great ideas out of the way to allow what’s supposed to happen to happen.
JEFF: Yeah.
BILL: I believe that we live in a friendly universe. So that’s not such a bad deal.
JEFF: Yeah. Yeah – yeah. Wow. Well it sounds like there’s been just a huge amount of transformation that you’ve experienced in your journey in the last 35 years. I mean, that’s huge. So you know, is there anything that you wanted to share that you haven’t or I haven’t asked about yet?
BILL: Yeah, thanks for that. There is one thing. And that is the word recovery implies that we might be restored to a previous state doesn’t it?
JEFF: Right? Yeah – yeah – yeah.
BILL: No, thank you. If that’s what recovery is. No, thank you. I don’t ever want to return to who I used to be.
JEFF: Right?
BILL: Unless I go far back enough. And so, I’m going to throw a little philosophy here. And you can agree or not agree and welcome or just disregard it. I believe that we’re all born as perfect whole human beings. That there’s nothing wrong with any of us despite what may apparently be wrong with this.
JEFF: Right. I’m on that page.
BILL: Okay, good. So –
JEFF: I am.
BILL: And I’m not a religious person. And I’d struggled with even identifying as a spiritual person, but I feel for some strange reason, entirely comfortable saying, I believe we’re all God’s kids.
JEFF: Right. Yeah – yeah.
BILL: Is that we’re all perfect. And so we just made up, all of us have done this to some degree. We’ve all made up somewhere along the lines, probably in the first six years or so, in real life that were flawed. And I know that I did that. I did that because as a young person, as a young child, being so completely powerless and unable to really and vulnerable and unable to really make much of a difference in my own life, the only thing that I had any hope at all changing was me. So, I had to make me broken so that I had some hope of fixing me so that I could finally get what I needed in life.
JEFF: Yeah. Yeah. Well, so I mean, one way I see this is our mind is going to create stories no matter what. There’s going to be stories. It’s just, what stories do we create? What belief system is being reinforced by our stories. And those stories can either empower us or disempower us, but yeah, yeah, yeah. So, if people wanted to get ahold of you, you were saying you’re doing recovery coaching. Can you talk a little bit about that? And you have a podcast, is that right? Like Recovery and Discovery or something like that.
BILL: Yes, that’s it. That’s the name of the podcast. It should start showing up on Itunes any day now. We just got the first five episodes edited and up. This movement in the direction of dealing with people in addiction and recovery is new for me. So, I’ve got group coaching programs in place. Curriculum that I’ve written for people that have been in recovery long enough to have stabilized both physically, emotionally and mentally and already to rejoin or join the mainstream of life and begin to create the kind of life that they can begin to imagine having. This same program I’m offering to people that don’t have addiction or at least haven’t acknowledged it if they do, and are using this program with great success to be able to accomplish whatever it is that they want to accomplish in their life.
I’m imagining that as I began to work with people in recovery, that I’m going to probably coach them to get the kind of support that’s needed. Whether it’s medical, 12 step, treatment, like I said, I’m in the discovery phase of that. And I don’t have any fixed answers, but what I do know is that each one of us were introduced on this planet whole perfect and complete, and that if we can get access to that perfection again, and I think we all can do that, then we all have our own answers. And that’s what I want to help people do.
JEFF: Great. And so can you say how you would like people to get ahold of you?
BILL: Maybe a good place to start would be to just go to my website and look at my message there. Maybe listen to my podcast, read some of my blog articles and the website is breakthroughsuccessclub.com.
JEFF: All right. Great. Bill, thank you very much. I appreciate it.
BILL: Jeff, thanks for having me. This has been a great experience. I appreciate you.
JEFF: Great. Thank you.