Don went to 18 asylums and spent two years believing AA couldn't work because he was simultaneously too magnificent and too terrible — until they told him the Big Book isn't a philosophy, it's an instruction manual.

We just launched our new Episodes page — search hundreds of AA speaker meetings by topic, speaker, or step ☀️  Sober Sunrise Episode Archive

Check out our lighthearted sober t-shirts and help support the channel🧡 Sober Sunrise Merch

Don grew up on a tobacco farm in Kentucky, fell in love with the honky-tonk heroes in the beer joints at age seven, and chased that image for 25 years through law school, a destroyed practice, and a car wreck at 130 that broke both legs and separated his pelvis. His brain would tell him AA couldn't work because he was too complex — and in the very next heartbeat tell him it couldn't work because he was too broken. He believed both every time. When he stumbled back to the door they said he'd been criticizing the literary style and quoting the book while he was dying — and that sobriety is a doing process, not a learning process. He did the steps like taking penicillin: didn't understand it, didn't believe it, did it anyway. Nine years sober he was still miserable until he realized he'd been trying to put out a fire with gasoline — treating a self-centered illness with more obsession on self. Today every crazy idea he's ever had introduces itself as common sense, and the only therapy for not wanting to do the right thing is doing it anyway.

Don M. from Louisville, KY speaking at the North Dakota Northern Spring Roundup in Grand Forks, ND - 2001