Hello, and welcome to AA Beyond Belief, the podcast. I'm ......Monday the 14th was my actual belly button birthday, even though I hate that term. It was my real birthday. So, we stayed

Richard H from We Agnostics Calgary

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[music] 0:00:15 John S: Hello, and welcome to AA Beyond Belief, the podcast. I'm your host, John S. Today, we'll be speaking with Richard H from Calgary. Richard shares his story, talks about his group 'We Agnostics' and we'll have an interesting discussion about singleness of purpose and how social media has impacted the recovery community. Hey, Richard. How are you doing?

0:00:37 Richard H: Good, John. How are you?

0:00:38 John S: Excellent, and thank you very much for agreeing to be on the podcast today to talk about your story and anything else that might come up.

0:00:46 Richard H: Perfect. I'm glad to do it. It was fabulous to meet you and various other people in Austin.

0:00:52 John S: Yeah, that was a lot of fun.

0:00:54 Richard H: Yeah. It's just really fun to have people go from virtual to real, in 3D.

0:01:02 John S: Yeah. So, did you stay very long after the conference?

0:01:06 Richard H: Megan and I stayed until Tuesday evening. Monday the 14th was my actual belly button birthday, even though I hate that term. It was my real birthday. So, we stayed an extra couple of days. She also had some friends who had moved down there so we went for dinner with them and then, unfortunately, we had to go our separate ways, back to our separate lives, on other sides of the continent.

0:01:36 John S: Yeah. Where does she live?

0:01:38 Richard H: She lives just outside Washington DC.

0:01:40 John S: Oh, wow. Okay. So that's quite a long-distance relationship, huh?

0:01:44 Richard H: It is. It's challenging but, at the same time, I really enjoy spending time with her and talking with her. There is an emotional investment.

0:01:56 John S: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, why don't we get into it? It's always a good way to get to know somebody in AA, is to hear their story. Why don't we just start with that? We wanna go into it a little bit and then we'll just take it from there.

0:02:10 Richard H: Absolutely. I'll start right, I guess, from being a child real quick and then go into a little bit of my drinking and story and getting into recovery and see what happens. Okay?


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Well, I'll start with... I just celebrated my 42nd birthday. I was born in a small town called Cuckfield in the county of Sussex, which is roughly halfway between London and the South Coast of England.

0:02:42 John S: Oh, wow. I didn't know that.

0:02:43 Richard H: Yeah. My mom is a registered nurse. My dad was a chartered accountant. They're both retired now. They moved to Canada in March of 1977, along with a two-and-a-quarter- year old and a six-week old baby, who is my little sister, Ruth. We moved to Calgary, Alberta, Canada, which at the time, was a city of about 500,000 people and is now a city of 1.2 million.

0:03:13 John S: Oh, wow.

0:03:14 Richard H: It's a oil and gas, energy city, much like Houston, except North and a little fsmaller, 'cause Houston's five or six million, I think. I had a disgustingly normal childhood, the type that Norman Rockwell would be proud to paint. Neither of my parents drink heavily. Their idea of being wild and crazy is having two beers on Saturday after mowing the lawn and doing yard work, and then finishing a bottle of wine at dinner. And that's my parent's idea of a wild and crazy weekend. So while I get that a lot of people have a lot of alcoholism throughout my family, I don't. There is little bit of depression that permeates through my mom's side of the family and a little bit of my dad's, but I'm not as sure about that. Anyway, life ticked along pretty good. I remember being 12 or 13 and being given a little sherry glass of red wine with Sunday night roast beef dinner, very much in that European way, and nothing really happened with my drinking then. The first time I got drunk was in high school. Went out to a house party, got drunk drinking Labatt Blue. God knows why I remember that, but I do.

[chuckle]

0:04:56 Richard H: The little things, right?

0:04:57 John S: Yeah.

0:04:57 Richard H: That was all good. It was fun. It wasn't all magical like some people describe. Then life went on. I graduated high school. I joined the Canadian Armed Forces in their ROTP program and went off to Royal Roads Military College. Was gonna be a pilot and live every little boy's dream and fly fighter planes and be Tom Cruise in 'Top Gun' and get an engineering degree with the military. And that was all fine and dandy until my eyesight deteriorated. And this was back in the day before laser surgery. This would've been the early '90s, where laser surgery was not a thing. For most of my university days, I drank like a normal university student, which realistically, probably means that I drank at least a little bit unhealthily. Whether you wanna call it alcoholically...

0:06:02 John S: Sure.

0:06:02 Richard H: But, go out, get wasted on Friday night, binge drinking, for sure, 'cause that's

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what you do at 20... 18, 19, 20, 21 years old. But everybody else around me was doing it. Maybe you'd go for wings on Wednesday, and have five or six pints, and that's it. Then I left the military and moved back to Vancouver, where my parents had subsequently relocated, and from Vancouver, came back to Calgary about a year later. And that's where I have been now, for about the last 20 years, I've lived here by myself. This is home. I'd be back about a year, and I met a woman, who I subsequently ended up marrying. Her dad didn't drink. I don't think he was in AA, but he definitely had had alcohol issues, issues with his drinking, and had had to quit. I didn't know the difference. I was, at this point, aware that AA existed, but that was it. And I didn't drink, when I was with her, more than a couple of times. She didn't drink and whatever.

0:07:24 Richard H: My depression started really ramping up at the end of my marriage, as it was falling apart. And when we separated, I did start drinking pretty good. First time I tried some of the drugs, like ecstasy, as well. And then I met another woman shortly after that, and we dated for about a year, and we broke up. And it seemed like a combination of those two meaningful emotional relationships ending in fairly rapid succession really got my alcohol and drugs use really, really ramped up. And in a matter of a short period of time, it was on. And it starts what I refer to as my 'decade', which was from about 2004 to the beginning of 2012, which I know is not actually 10 years, but that was the time where my drinking and drug use was completely unhealthy. I was drinking alcoholically for all of that, very quickly. Every Friday and Saturday night, I was out doing ecstasy and all the rave drugs, and cocaine, and all of it, just to try to lose myself into... To dull the pain. And Dr. Gabor Maté, in his book 'In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts' says that addiction is born of a wound to the psyche and poor coping skills. And those two relationships tore open that wound from my childhood and some self-esteem issues that I've always suffered from. And I couldn't deal. And I just... I was on, drinking morning, noon, night.

0:09:48 Richard H: I'm a waiter at a restaurant. I would work lunch and dinner and have a two- hour break in the afternoon and go and pound back two or three pints before I went back to work, just all kinds of unhealthiness. Gradually, over time, over that decade, specifically, over the last three or four years of it, my drug use tapered off, because my drinking was my favorite. And I can't explain that. I just... Everybody's brain chemistry is slightly different in whatever ways that... Jack Daniels did it a little bit differently and better for my brain chemistry than the ecstasy and the cocaine did. And that's just the way it was. Then in February of 2012, I was sitting at home on a Friday evening, where I didn't have to work at the restaurant, with a 30-pack of beer, and overflowing ashtray. Sometime in... And went, drank 30 beers and half a bottle of Jack Daniels a day. And then, the following evening, just had a mind... I can't even explain it. It was just a complete moment of clarity. I hadn't left my apartment in 24 hours, and had... I drank an incredible amount of beer and Jack Daniels. And I had this realization, that normal people don't do this, and it would be unhealthy, and I wasn't gonna stop. And I also realized that I had to stop. The only thing I knew was that if you needed to stop drinking, you went to AA.

0:11:37 John S: Right, that's how... That's my experience too. [chuckle]

0:11:40 Richard H: And the first step was to admit you had a problem. Which is, of course, a bastardization of the first step, but close enough.

0:11:48 John S: Yeah. Did you know that then, at that time?

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0:11:50 Richard H: That was all I knew. The first step was to admit you had a problem. And if you had to stop drinking, you went to AA. That was all I knew. That was the entirety of my knowledge. And I'm really grateful I didn't know any more.

[chuckle]

0:12:08 John S: Yeah? That's true, me too, actually. It might have scared me away.

0:12:13 Richard H: Yeah. So, in my drunken state, I looked up AA Calgary on my laptop and found out where... A meeting was fairly close to where I live. And I walked over the next afternoon, Sunday afternoon. That was my first meeting and that was day zero. That Sunday morning, I woke up with the shakes, and I had an airline bottle of Southern Comfort. You know those little airline bottles when you used to buy a bottle and they'd stick it on the top?

0:12:51 John S: Yup.

0:12:51 Richard H: You'd buy your bottle of Jack Daniels and they had the little plastic thing with the little small bottle on it? I had one of those airline bottles of Southern Comfort in my kitchen counter at the back that I had pulled off and thrown back there 'cause fuck it, I want Jack.

[chuckle]

0:13:07 Richard H: Anyway, I had that and I woke up with the shakes. And I woke up and I rummaged around trying to find something to drink. I found that, slugged that back, and I haven't had a drink since.

0:13:20 John S: When was that, Richard?

0:13:22 Richard H: The day, day zero, was the 12th of February, 2012. So, that was day zero.

0:13:29 John S: So your first meeting, was it a traditional meeting?

0:13:33 Richard H: That was a traditional meeting. There was no secular AA in Calgary.

0:13:38 John S: Okay. I was wondering about that.

0:13:40 Richard H: Yeah, No. I...

0:13:40 John S: There is now.

0:13:41 Richard H: Yeah. There was a group of us. Erin, who you met at the convention and you might've met in California, Erin and I and two other gentlemen, Rob and Al, actually started the agnostic meeting in Calgary.

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0:14:00 John S: Okay. So, let's talk about that a little bit. What was it like... Okay, before you went to AA, did you already identify as an atheist?

0:14:09 Richard H: No.

0:14:10 John S: You didn't?

0:14:12 Richard H: I didn't. I had given up religion in my teens, late teens, mid-late teens for a simple reason. I couldn't believe that there was a God. At this point, I believed in a God in a deistic sense. I didn't know that word. I didn't learn that word until I was in my 30s, late 30s. But looking back, I would've been a deist.

0:14:43 John S: Gotcha.

0:14:45 Richard H: I couldn't believe that if there was a...

0:14:46 John S: So you believed there was something, maybe, but it wasn't involved in our daily lives? But there was some sort of a...

0:14:52 Richard H: Absolutely not. I believed that it started everything. It started the Big Bang. I was very clear that evolution and science, the scientists are right. They're the smart ones and they've done all the tests and the research and that's clearly the way it is. He wasn't involved in our lives, but he had still started stuff. And it sure wasn't what was written in the books, whether it was the Torah or the Bible or the Quran or whatever the other holy texts are, because I couldn't believe that he would play dice with where you were born, because I happen to be born in Western Europe, in North America. I got born with the right religion and I was gonna be saved, where somebody who was born in China and was preached Confucianism or whatever was gonna be burned in hell because he was born in the wrong part of the world?

0:15:48 John S: Right. Right. That makes no sense.

0:15:50 Richard H: That was the logic. That made no sense, and that was why I discarded religion. That just didn't make any sense, so I could write them all off because you can apply the logic to all of them. Just write them all off.

0:16:02 John S: So what did you think about AA when you got to that first meeting?

0:16:06 Richard H: There was a bunch of people that didn't drink. That was the entirety of my thought.

0:16:10 John S: That was the main thing? Okay.

0:16:12 Richard H: There were a bunch of people that didn't drink, and if you believed them, they hadn't... There was a couple there who hadn't drank for years.

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Richard H from We Agnostics Calgary 0:16:21 John S: Right.

[chuckle]

0:16:23 Richard H: And they were nice. They talked to me, and they offered me a cigarette, and all those little things. And in that...

0:16:35 John S: It's huge. It makes a big difference. That was my experience too. I was like you. I did not know anything, really, about AA before I got there. I didn't even know they had 12 steps. I honestly knew nothing about it. All I knew was from what I saw in the movies. And so when I got there... And I was like you too, I didn't really necessarily identify as an atheist but I didn't really have any religious beliefs either. I didn't grow up in a religion. So I was just kind of... It was not really an important part of my life. I tried the religious thing, I guess, for a little bit, but it just wasn't in my nature. So I saw the God everything all over the place and it surprised me, but like you say, everybody, they were sober. I could tell that they had been through what I had been through and they got through on the other side, and they were good to me at a time when everybody else was pretty much done with me.

0:17:34 Richard H: Yeah. Very, very true.

0:17:34 John S: So I thought, "Yeah, I'm gonna stick with this." So that's how I was. Is that pretty much how you felt about it at the time?

0:17:44 Richard H: Yeah. The other thing was when they were talking and when they were talking about their experiences, and this wasn't necessarily at the first meeting but this was definitely over the first couple weeks or months, when people were talking, they were describing how I felt. And you hear this cliche, "Oh, you hear your story being told by other people," but it's really true. I heard...

0:18:15 John S: It's true and it's a powerful thing.

0:18:17 Richard H: It's a very powerful thing. I heard people talk about their feelings of self-hatred and not being worthy, and getting up in the morning, and cracking a beer, and having a beer in the shower, and how drinking was more important than relationships, and avoiding their parents' phone calls or avoiding their parents because they were drunk, all these things that I did. Some of them are pretty minor, but in collective, I heard a lot of things that I did and felt. And at this point, I was working as a waiter at a fairly nice restaurant in downtown Calgary, so evening meetings were challenging to get to because my schedule would float around. But there was a morning meeting that started at 9:30 in the morning, ran until 10:30 called 'Daily Reflections'. And it read from the Daily Reflections, which is a book that, having gone through it once or twice there, I'm not a big fan of it.

0:19:31 John S: No, me either.

0:19:33 Richard H: However, I remember there is one reading in that book, which I really, really,

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Richard H from We Agnostics Calgary really do like. And that's the February 13th reading, which is the first day that I went to Daily Reflections and is the day I celebrate as my sobriety date. And it was day one. And the reading on February the 13th is 'we can't think our way sober'. To the intellectually self-sufficient man or woman, many AAs can say, "Yes, we were like you, far too smart for our own good. Secretly, we felt we could float above the rest of the folks on our brain power alone." I'm done. And...

[laughter]

0:20:16 Richard H: That I effortly floated through school and whatever, I realized that I couldn't think my way sober. That made so much sense to me. And if I needed any further convincing that I was in the right place on day one, that sealed it.

0:20:40 John S: I agree with that. I can't... It's not an intellectual thing altogether, but a lot of the traditional AA people are gonna say, "Okay. This means you need God." How did you see that reading? If it's not your intellect, what was it?

0:20:54 Richard H: Doing stuff.

0:20:55 John S: Yes, that what I was gonna say. It's a test Richard, I'm testing you.

[laughter]

0:21:00 Richard H: Yeah, doing stuff. I was still on day one here. But the funny thing was is the gentleman who became, and is still, my sponsor was at both meetings. I didn't know that at the time. It was funny. I just, the other day, was straightening up my desk and I found the welcome package where everyone writes their name and phone number on it. And I poked down through that. And that was... I found David L, who is my sponsor today, his name and phone number on there. I never knew that he was there, and he didn't become my sponsor for another month or so after this, but his name was on there. And he was also at Daily Reflections, and that was cool. But the first few days and weeks, I felt like I was done drinking. I just really didn't know how I was gonna get and stay done. I feel that the one commonality that everybody who has successfully put together some time... And I'm not only talking about people that go to AA. I'm talking about everybody, whether they stopped on their own, whether they do SMART Recovery or LifeRing or Refuge or anything, the one... Or nothing. The one commonality that we all have, I think, is we all got done. We all got finished. We had this moment where it was like, "I'm done. How do I do it? How do I go about doing that?" But we all have that and... Even watching... I just finished watching Duff McKagan's documentary on Netflix, and he talks about the same thing.

0:23:05 John S: I like the way Bill W worded it. He called ego deflation at depth. That, to me, was that... It was like, I knew that, by myself, absolutely, I was done. There was no way I was going to figure this out on my own. I needed help.

0:23:22 Richard H: Yeah... No. I needed help doing it. I didn't know how to do it. I didn't know how to stay stopped 'cause even when I was gonna have a dry month, it would last two days. So I didn't really know how to stay stopped for an appreciable amount of time. And that, to me, was the

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Richard H from We Agnostics Calgary big thing that I needed help with. But people said, "Go to meetings everyday." And that made sense. It was doing stuff. I didn't quite clue in onto... I was still a little too foggy to clue in to all these steps. I was... Knew that there was 12 steps and they were on the wall, and they read them every morning, and there was some weird stuff in there, but I was still way too foggy to [chuckle] worry about it. And Monday... Monday crawled around and Monday the 20th of February, and that was a week, and I can't remember the last time I hadn't had a drink for a week. And then, the 28th of February came around, but... Yeah, whatever, the 27th of... And that was two weeks and, God, I can't remember the last time I had two weeks without a drink. And then, I got my month chip, and I'd probably had... Probably been 15 years since I'd gone a month without a drink, maybe longer than that. I don't even remember.

0:24:50 John S: I remember feeling like that, counting those days and those milestones. It's pretty amazing.

0:24:54 Richard H: It was weird. I had this realization or... Early on, I found that these people who, "Oh, I've been sober for 30 years," or you have your birthday meeting where you celebrate birthdays and people who are celebrating 20 years of sobriety, I couldn't wrap my head around that. But the guy who took the six-month chip, I was like, "Yeah." Maybe I didn't believe that at first, but the guy who took the one-month chip, I had two weeks. So he's got a month, "Yeah, okay." And my outlook expanded out, and then, I got the one-month chip and suddenly the three-month chip didn't look unreasonable. And then, I got the three and the six-month chip and one year didn't look weird. And then, I got my one-year chip and three and four years didn't look unreasonable. And now, I'm coming up five years sober, and now, the possibility of having 35 years sober, it's a long way out, but it doesn't seem impossible, 'cause my horizon has expanded, and...

0:26:06 John S: Well, it sounds like your experience in AA, the traditional AA, was always a positive one. The daily reflections group that you were going to, and I know that they talk about the steps and those daily reflections, but they will talk a lot about God, but what was it that eventually got you to start your agnostic meeting?

0:26:27 Richard H: Well, in those first couple months, I found a sponsor, I started working through the steps, I memorized the Third Step prayer, still didn't believe in this, but I was told to say it every morning, so...

0:26:44 John S: Oh my God.

0:26:44 Richard H: I said it every morning.

0:26:45 John S: Wow.

0:26:48 Richard H: But I was... And people said, "Don't worry about defining what your higher power is, just accept that you have one." And that was weird, 'cause if I didn't know what this higher power was, that just didn't make sense. I get that maybe I don't have to understand all of it, but I have to know what it is.

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0:27:13 John S: Right. You couldn't really buy into it completely.

0:27:16 Richard H: I couldn't buy into it completely. So, I definitely knew that religion was out. The religion was out, but maybe I could put something together that made sense to me.

0:27:29 John S: I did the same thing too, 'cause what I did, they told me to do all that stuff, to pray everyday and I did. I got on my knees and prayed everyday, but I told myself, "Okay, there must be some psychological benefit to this." I was always trying to figure out some way to understand it. And I did the fake it till you make it thing, so when I went to meetings, I always talked about God, being, me praying to God and God, God, God, God, God, but to myself, I was always thinking, "There must be some... I'm doing these things, but there must be some psychological benefit that I'm getting from this." I was always trying to reason it.

0:28:02 Richard H: I was trying to figure it out, but I was trying to cobble together some kind of belief. And I started Googling, and reading, and I found a book... Well, I was trying to figure out this whole God thing, and the Internet's a powerful tool. But I ran across some things, like Christopher Hitchens, and some of his debates with believers. I ran into people like Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, and Dan Barker, who was an ex-priest, and these... And I ran across a book called, "The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality," by a French philosopher. And all these things... And reading these books and... They led me to this conclusion. They presented such an amazing, foolproof case to me, that the entirety of the God thing was ridiculous. It made no sense.

0:29:14 John S: Yeah. That was my experience too. I read some of those same books. That was exactly what happened to me, although a much longer timeframe, I was...

[chuckle]

0:29:23 John S: For me. But anyway... Yeah.

0:29:25 Richard H: Yeah. And so, I was really concerned, because I was... I had a couple of months and I was sufficiently clear to realize that all the God stuff that they wrote about in AA was silly, but I was still sober and I was... Somehow... I remember the day that I was going to tell my sponsor that I couldn't believe, didn't believe, didn't make any sense, and I was convinced he was gonna fire me. I was convinced that as soon as we finished our meeting, my first stop was gonna be the liquor store on the way home, regardless of the fact that I had absolutely no desire to go to liquor store. I thought that there was gonna be some anti-miraculous...

[laughter]

0:30:24 Richard H: Force stop, driving me right into the liquor store. That wasn't the case. He laughed at me, in the way that he still laughs at me, and said, "We'll talk about this later." He says, "Just think about it as the universe. You know the universe exists, and there's stars, and you can look up and it's bigger than you. Try that, and we'll talk about it later." And we still haven't had that conversation.

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0:30:50 John S: Oh.

[laughter] 0:30:54 Richard H: And it's been... That was, four and whatever it is, years ago. And then I did some Googling, and I discovered some of the online forums. I remember there was a page called Sober Recovery. And then there was a bunch of people who were sober and who seem to have really fulfilling lives, and really happy lives, and they were... Very openly didn't believe in God. And that was the first time I had heard about that. Well, no. Sorry. Then there was a guy at my home group, David B, who had five or six years sober, and he didn't believe and seemed pretty happy as well. But one's an outlier, bulletin boards full of people, all saying the same thing, aren't outlier. And then, onto Facebook, and I found Don S's page, Agnostics and Atheists in AA. And then from there, I met... Virtually, I met Mark C, from Texas, who I think you did a podcast with a couple months ago. And then from him, he added me to several debate groups and whatever.

[chuckle]

0:32:13 Richard H: And my entire... And then you guys, and from meeting Mark C, I got plugged in to this entire network of atheists, agnostics, Buddhists, all you guys who have a complete variety of secular views.

0:32:36 John S: It's a pretty incredible network, isn't it?

0:32:38 Richard H: It really is. People like John C, from Paris, who I was on the panel with in Austin, you in Kansas City. I met Megan through that whole connection as well. So across Canada, the US, everywhere.

0:32:58 John S: It blows me away. Sometimes I wonder if it's unique among us secularists, to have this network, or if other AA people have the same experience. 'Cause I've never really experienced anything like this, but I do feel very, very connected to all these people through the websites, the Facebook groups, and of it.

0:33:18 Richard H: Of course. There are some non-secular AA Facebook groups and pages, and they have connections for people all over the US and around the world. My experience, having been on all of them, is that the groups range from quite serious discussions about recovery and whatnot, through to just people behaving badly.


[chuckle]

0:33:58 Richard H: And with a heavy lean towards the people behaving badly part. 0:34:03 John S: Yeah. Yeah.

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0:34:05 Richard H: But my experience has been that the network and the pages which are run and

frequented by the secularists, by us, tend to lie much closer to the more serious side. And that's not to say that we don't sometimes, post silly things and have a good laugh at ourselves.

0:34:25 John S: Oh, we do. And we behave badly sometimes too.

0:34:29 Richard H: Well, of course.

[chuckle]

0:34:29 Richard H: But I find that they... Yeah, we do. I do find that they lean more towards the serious side.

0:34:35 John S: Yeah, I agree.

0:34:36 Richard H: Than some of the other ones.

0:34:37 John S: I think one thing that's different about it is, it seems like that they're thinking, "We're part of something new and different, and we're creating meetings and we're building." It's almost like, I feel like we're building something. There's this sense that we're part of something really greater than ourselves. I don't know.

0:35:00 Richard H: Yeah. No, I do think... I'm not a huge, huge student of AA history. Knowing the basics, but I never really felt the need to explore massive quantities of the history. But I'm familiar with Jim Burwell and some of the secular members before us. But I think... I get the feeling that, right now, we're in a real explosion of secular AA.

0:35:41 John S: I think so too. I really do. I think we're really at a unique time in AA history. And it has to do with everything that we're talking about, how we've all come together online. And we're really organized ourselves online. And not only that, but we're starting to meet up in these conventions. Like we've had, now, our second international. We got these regional ones. We're gonna have one in Toronto next year. We already had one in Phoenix.

0:36:12 Richard H: Right. Yeah. It's amazing. It's really amazing and I really think that the technology of the Internet, the widespread and the cheapness of it, the fact that essentially everybody is on the Internet. And it's so easy to spread the information, to have the discussions, to meet other like-minded or similarly-minded people like yourself in Kansas, and Mark in Texas, and Doris, and all the people, and Eric, and... Yeah.

0:36:54 John S: It's amazing, when you think about it, because we're like... What we're doing right now? We're recording this podcast. We're going to post it out there and people all over the world are gonna be listening to this thing. And they write every once in a while and they'll say, "God, I really like this podcast. I've never heard somebody tell my story like that before." There's a lot of people out there that don't have agnostic or atheist meetings, AA meetings, and they feel alone, and these podcasts help them connect with us and us connect with them. It's really amazing. It blows me away

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Richard H from We Agnostics Calgary still.

0:37:29 Richard H: Absolutely. And I had that same thought. When I was writing the article for AA Beyond Belief, I had written a first draft. Megan and I were online and were booting it back and forth to each other via Dropbox while she was living in Washington DC, I was here in Calgary. We were editing this to send it to someone who lives in Chicago, so that she could put it up on a website run by you in Kansas City, which was started by a gentleman in Toronto.

0:38:13 John S: Exactly.

[laughter]

0:38:15 Richard H: I think we got the entire continent covered. 0:38:19 John S: It's funny.

0:38:21 Richard H: And it's really amazing.

0:38:22 John S: It really is.

0:38:23 Richard H: Without the Internet and without that technology, this couldn't happen. Because how could we do that?

0:38:32 John S: So, Richard, but going back to your...

0:38:34 Richard H: And it could be read by a guy in...

0:38:35 John S: Go ahead.

0:38:36 Richard H: In Russia, is gonna read it.

0:38:38 John S: Yeah. Yeah. A guy in Russia.

0:38:41 Richard H: Just to add another layer to it.

0:38:42 John S: Yeah. Yeah. And then some guy from Paris read your article and put you on a panel.

0:38:46 Richard H: Exactly. It's amazing.

0:38:49 John S: So getting into all that... Getting into this network, this incredible network of seculars in AA. So is that what got you motivated to get this group going, the agnostic group going in Calgary? And are you the one that got it going?

0:39:04 Richard H: No, I'm gonna give total credit to Erin for that. I had a regular Sunday night

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Richard H from We Agnostics Calgary group that I would attend called Southwest Serenity, which was fairly secular. A bunch of Buddhists went, including a gentleman by the name of Al B. And Al and I became friends. Al's got 20 odd years sober. Al and I became friends and had kicked around the idea of starting a secular group, but Erin filled out a form on AA Agnostica looking for potential matches...

0:39:50 John S: Yeah. I did that.

0:39:51 Richard H: In the region and ran across a gentleman by the name of Rob O, who's sponsor was Al. And Rob and Erin met and Rob was like, well, we should definately invite Al. Al's a Buddhist, an atheistic Buddhist, and we should invite Al to these meetings. And then Al said, "Well, there's another guy we should invite and that's Richard." So we ended up meeting a couple of times, three times, at a second cup coffee shop in Calgary, just North of downtown, and started putting together the structure and the idea for our We Agnostics group. We definitely wanted it to be in a secular location. We definitely did not want to be in a church basement. And that was something that we felt fairly strongly about.

0:40:58 John S: Yeah. It is important in a way, if you think about it, because a lot of people think that AA is religious simply because so many meetings take place in churches.

0:41:05 Richard H: Yeah, and we wanted it to be fairly central, accessible via transit very easily. We definitely didn't want any prayers or the Serenity Prayer, and we didn't really want to deal with the Big Book.

0:41:29 John S: It's really difficult to deal with the Big Book in our meetings because the Big Book, basically, does try to convert us. I'm not saying there's no value to the Big Book. There's some value to it but, boy, it's hard for our types of meetings to use it.

0:41:42 Richard H: Yeah. At this point, the whole kerfuffle in Toronto was going on, had gone on. So we were able to learn from them, and I mean... A lot of their issues, at least from my understanding, have to do with reading altered versions of the steps and we decided that it wasn't worth it to do that, so we didn't. We went with Living Sober, which is very, very handy practical book, and that's how we cobbled together this idea.

0:42:33 John S: That's interesting. You did the same thing. That's what John C in Paris did. He used Living Sober. Although later, his groups started using... One of the groups in Paris started using Alternative Steps, but his group... That he really liked the Living Sober meetings. He liked that one.

0:42:47 Richard H: And the other thing that we decided to do and we specifically brought this up was, we wanted to be on the liberal side in applying singleness of purpose. We understood that this was still an AA meeting but we weren't going to read that terrible disclaimer, please when... Their discussion with the problems of alcohol.

0:43:16 John S: That's the stupidest thing they ever came up with and there were some people in Kansas City that really went overboard with that, some groups. So how do you feel about... How do

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you see the singleness of purpose thing? How do you view that? What's your view?

0:43:30 Richard H: I wanna help people. I wanna help people get clean/sober. I definitely fall in the alcohol's a drug, let's not kid ourselves here. I understand though, at the same time, that it's difficult for me to understand some of the problems that, say, somebody who did a lot of crystal meth did. So let's be real liberal about it. Let's not shut people down if they start talking about their use of crystal meth or cocaine or whatever because it's all the same thing, but let's at least keep it going mostly in the right direction of the alcohol discussion. That's how I view it.

0:44:13 John S: The way I see it... I'm like that. The way I see it... Okay, the only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking. So I don't care what other problems a person has. They can talk about any other problem they want to as long as they have a desire to stop drinking and I have yet to meet a drug addict in AA, who's drinking and says it's okay for them to drink, 'cause alcohol's a drug. So if they're gonna be clean, they also have a desire to stop drinking. Even though alcohol might not have been their primary drug of choice.

0:44:47 Richard H: And the other point is, it's real hard to meet somebody who tells a drug story that doesn't also feature copious amounts of vodka or beer or whatever in his story.

0:45:00 John S: Exactly. Exactly. Almost always do. They almost go hand-in-hand all the time. Maybe not all the time, but a lot of the time. And besides, too, when you get down to it, we don't really talk about our using that much in meetings, really. What we're really talking about is what we're doing to stay sober, and we're clean and so...

0:45:21 Richard H: And how we felt and what those feelings were that caused us to use and drink.

0:45:28 John S: So see, I feel the same way 'cause it's like, there is a group here in Kansas City, I'm not gonna name them but they know who they are. They made a huge mistake.

[chuckle]

0:45:36 John S: They went through this thing about reading that card and it put a chilling effect on their meetings where people were afraid to say any damn thing if it didn't relate to alcoholism. And then some of the people were interpreting the Third Tradition by taking the long form of it and saying that to be a member of AA, you must suffer from alcoholism, not just have a desire to stop drinking.

0:46:03 Richard H: Isn't the Third Tradition the only one that has the long form as less words than the short form?

0:46:08 John S: Is what?

0:46:09 Richard H: What is the long form?

0:46:13 John S: The long form... I got my book, I should... But it's... Okay. The Third Tradition

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simply says, the only requirement for membership is...

0:46:19 Richard H: Requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking. 0:46:21 John S: But then it goes into this long version where it says, 'our membership is for all who have suffered from alcoholism.' Let me go get a copy. Let me go get the book. I'll be right back. So you found it?

0:46:33 Richard H: Yeah.

0:46:34 John S: Okay. Read it.

0:46:34 Richard H: Our membership ought to include all who suffer from alcoholism. We may refuse none who wish to recover nor ought AA membership ever depend upon money or conformity. Any two or three gathered together for sobriety may call themselves an AA group, provided they have no other affiliation.

0:46:50 John S: So people... What this group is doing, they were taking that stupid long form and they were, I think, misinterpreting it. Now they're defining... They're saying that having a desire to stop drinking doesn't mean you're an alcoholic, basically, and I think that's crazy. Anyway, so this group did... They did this and they scared people away. We got some people who started coming to our group because of it. And now that group, they had to shut down a bunch of meetings. They decided to open their meetings and stop reading that card. So hopefully, maybe they'll start bouncing back. But anyway, I digressed and took you off your topic a little bit.

0:47:30 Richard H: No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. I think it's an important topic. In the... What? Two or three years that We Agnostics Calgary has been around, we've never had to shut down anybody.

0:47:50 John S: Well, another thing about it, people don't know... When they come into AA, all they know is they got a freaking problem, they don't know if they're an alcoholic, they don't know if... And the verbiage that we use if we ask somebody, "Do you have a desire to stop drinking?" That's a weird way to say something. I didn't want to stop drinking. I would've loved to have continued to...

[laughter]

0:48:16 John S: So I might have answered that... I was in a situation where, fuck, I would really love to drink.

[laughter]

0:48:23 John S: But... So I don't know. Desire to stop drinking, it just sounds like you're almost asking the person to make a pledge or something, 'cause I've been guilty of this. What happened, somebody came to me and they said, "Your guys are not a real... " Talking about my group, "Are

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you a real AA group?" I said, "Of course we are." "Well, I hear that you have drug addicts at your

meetings, people who aren't alcoholics." I was like, "I don't know. What're you talking about? We don't have anybody like that." So anyway, I started getting nervous that people were thinking that we were doing weird stuff at our meetings. So anyway, I'm at this meeting and this guy introduces himself for the first time, and he says he has this problem with eating and stuff like this, right? So I go to him. I say, "Well, this is a AA meeting, you have to have a desire to stop drinking. Do you have a desire to stop drinking?" And he's like well... I don't know! He didn't know. But it turns out, the guy did. The guy does have a problem with drinking, he just didn't know how to verbalize it at his very first meeting.

0:49:25 Richard H: Well, yeah.

[laughter]

0:49:27 John S: And I'm sitting there quizzing the guy. 0:49:30 Richard H: Yeah. And you're doing this...

0:49:31 John S: He asked me... He said, "Do you want me to leave?" I said, "No, I don't want you to leave."

0:49:34 Richard H: You're doing it with the best of intentions, but I see it as, "Do you have a desire to stop drinking?" That's...

0:49:43 John S: It's like a test.

0:49:45 Richard H: It's an outdated language.

0:49:47 John S: It is outdated language.

0:49:48 Richard H: And you see this throughout the book, the Big Book, and Living Sober is a wonderful example of a book written in the past and the prose is fabulous, but it's sure not how we would talk today. The language has changed. It's interesting. Do you have a desire to not drink? Do you wanna not drink? The language is...

0:50:18 John S: Yeah. It was the language that they used. It is a weird way to put it. I guess you'd say... If I was just talking to somebody, I'd say, "So you think you have a problem with drinking? [chuckle] You think you might have a problem with drinking?" They'd say, "Yeah, I think I might."

0:50:34 Richard H: "Do you think you might drink a little too much?"

0:50:35 John S: Yeah, and they'd say, "Yeah, I think I might." And they'd say, "I just need to... " A lot of people just need to find out if they do or not. I don't know. Anyway, so...

0:50:43 Richard H: Talking cliches, another one that I... And I don't generally like them, but they

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occasionally have little pearls of wisdom in them, and the one you hear, "If you think you got a

problem with drinking, you probably do."

[laughter]

0:51:04 Richard H: I don't know. It strikes me as that's probably true. 0:51:07 John S: I think so. Hardly anybody makes it to an AA meeting by mistake.

[laughter]

0:51:14 John S: It's like... 0:51:15 Richard H: That's true.

0:51:16 John S: I remember people would sit around and they'd wonder, "Am I an alcoholic or not? Am I an alcoholic?" Well, I'll tell you what, people who don't have a problem don't have to sit around and wonder if they do.

0:51:29 Richard H: No. No, no, no, very much.

0:51:31 John S: So if you think you might have a problem, you probably do. I don't know.

0:51:34 Richard H: Yeah. Because I sure don't see my mom, my dad, and my sister worrying about whether they got a problem with alcohol.

0:51:43 John S: No. [chuckle] And they're not gonna accidentally find themselves at an AA meeting. It's like, "Oh shoot, that was a big mistake. I don't really belong here." [chuckle]

0:51:47 Richard H: No. The only reason my mom and dad are gonna find themselves at an AA meeting is probably because I'm taking a year medallion and they happen to be wherever I am and they're gonna go and see me do it. That's the only reason my parents are ever gonna make it to one.

0:52:05 John S: Very interesting. So you guys decided you weren't gonna make a big thing out of that too, which was smart.

0:52:10 Richard H: Yeah. And we started it up, we announced it at a new AA meeting called 'We Agnostics', meets on Monday night at 8:30 at the Sheldon Chumir Center, which is a medical center here in Calgary, and that was it. And four or five of us, and we're up now to 15-ish, 10 to 15, 15 to 20, somewhere in there generally-speaking.

0:52:42 John S: Yeah, that's pretty good. I like that size of meeting. That's about what we do too. Most of our meetings, we have usually about 15 people. And it fluctuates sometimes, you might get up to 20 sometimes, but I like that size of a group, about 10 or 15 people, I think, is about right.

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0:52:58 Richard H: Absolutely, you got... You have three or four who have several years, and then

you've got a couple people that are moving along with... Into solid, three, four, five, six months, and then you got a couple of new people or a couple of people that are visiting or whatnot who come by, and that tends to be how our breakdown goes.

0:53:25 John S: And do you still read from Living Sober? Is that your main thing? Is that how you do your meetings?

0:53:29 Richard H: Absolutely. Our meetings are Living Sober. So we read a chapter from Living Sober every week. We just rotate one through 32 or whatever it is. There is one that we tend to break in half, which is Getting Active. It's seven or eight because it's a fairly chunky read and we break it up, getting active in AA one week, and then getting active outside of AA the next week. Then we also... We rotate through the steps one through 12, and we specifically say, for members to discuss how they worked that particular step in accordance with their beliefs.

0:54:14 John S: Right. So how do you do that? Do you read from anything or did you just have people to share?

0:54:20 Richard H: No, we write the whatever step is on the board, and then that is one of the topics of conversation, if you want to or not. So whatever chapter in Living Sober, and then... And for members to share how they dealt with that particular step in accordance with their beliefs.

0:54:38 John S: Oh, that's interesting.

0:54:39 Richard H: So that's maybe a little bit more focused from some of us who have a little bit more time, who have worked through the steps in some form, whereas somebody who's got two months sober probably isn't gonna have a whole great deal to say about step three.

0:54:58 John S: Right. True.

0:55:00 Richard H: But some of us who have a couple years or maybe eight or nine months, who have worked through the steps in some form, can maybe provide a little bit of insight and maybe not scare somebody away when they see some of these steps with the word 'God' in them.

0:55:21 John S: Yeah. It is real helpful, because people, they want... If they're a non-believer, they want to somehow figure out how to do that step while not giving up their own belief system, and they don't know how to interpret it. It's hard when you first see it. I like the way you guys do your meetings, though, and it's... We do step meetings once a month, and I think we talk about the steps pretty regularly, but most of our meetings are taken from some reading, like from Joe C's book or from a book called "A Walk in Dry Places." We always try to find some type of secular reading.

0:55:57 Richard H: What's that book? "A Walk in Dry Places?"

0:56:00 John S: "A Walk in Dry Places." What it is, it's a...

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0:56:02 Richard H: I'm not familiar. 0:56:03 John S: It's like a daily reflections book, and it's mostly secular. It's produced by Hazelden. It's produced by Hazelden. And they sell it at our central office, and there are a few God readings in there, but we just cross out the God part.

[laughter]

0:56:18 Richard H: Fair enough. I'll be honest. I've not heard of that book...

0:56:23 John S: Yeah. It's okay.

0:56:25 Richard H: I'll have a look on Amazon, see if I'll pick up a copy or something.

0:56:28 John S: Yeah, but I'm getting burned out on meetings that talk about readings. I'm starting to think... I like the 'just write something on the board' like that. Write the step on the board and talk about it. That's so much of... I think the best of AA just comes from our own personal experiences rather than something that we read. But anyway. But, yeah, we do read. We mix it up a little bit.

0:56:52 Richard H: Yeah. No, no. The discussions are important, I think. They really are. It gives a sense of legitimacy that we are doing some readings from a conference-approved piece of literature, which...

0:57:12 John S: Yeah. Yeah. Is that important where you are, 'cause it's not... Our central office, it's not such a big deal, what we read.

0:57:21 Richard H: I get the feeling it is. I get the feeling... Matthew, who's a gentleman who works in central office, implied to us that it's pretty important that you don't go altering the steps.

0:57:41 John S: Right.

[chuckle]

0:57:43 John S: Pretty sensitive about that in Canada, aren't they? Actually there are parts... 0:57:47 Richard H: Pardon me?

0:57:48 John S: I was just making a joke, 'cause I know that the big problem in Vancouver and big problem in Toronto with altering the steps.

0:57:52 Richard H: Yeah. So I...

0:57:53 John S: So they didn't wanna see something like that in Calgary.

0:57:56 Richard H: Yeah. And maybe we... I'm trying to remember back three years here in

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conversations that I was either casually involved in or hearing second-hand and whatnot, but whether we were specifically told to read conference-approved literature or told to not change the steps, I'm a little fuzzy on. But we definitely decided that we were gonna read from 'Living Sober', which is conference-approved, which gives it, the staff of...

0:58:39 John S: And you have a nice secular meeting.

0:58:42 Richard H: Yeah, and it is a secular book.

0:58:46 John S: Yeah. That's great. And I'm sure that you're finding people get to your meeting that are looking for a secular meeting and you're helping those people.

0:58:52 Richard H: Absolutely. Absolutely. And it is a great book with great, practical day-to-day tips that some of us... I think that a lot of people who have managed to... Again, I'm gonna say, people that have managed to put together some time in recovery, whether we have read 'Living Sober' or not, we've done some of those things.

0:59:22 John S: Sure.

0:59:24 Richard H: They talk about changing your evening routine, getting fit and active. It seems like a lot of people, a year or two sober, suddenly they wanna get fit. Did you know? So we do a lot of those things because they seem to work, and we stumble around in the dark until we find them.

0:59:42 John S: Yeah, you're right.

0:59:42 Richard H: And then reading them in a book, it formalizes some of that stuff. That we're like, "Oh yeah. I do that."

0:59:50 John S: So it's been a nice conversation, Richard. I need to have you back sometime, 'cause I wanna talk to you about... This is always a big, fun topic for us is the spirituality, not spirituality thing. We probably won't have time to get into that now but we'll have you back sometime to talk about that.

1:00:04 Richard H: I would love to.

1:00:05 John S: Yeah. My whole thing on it is I'm not really that passionate about it one way or the other. I'm not 'spiritual' myself but I see some value in the language. But anyway, it's always an interesting topic.

1:00:21 Richard H: Yeah. I certainly don't identify as a spiritual in any sense because it implies I'm seeing things which I don't see and it also... It muddies...

1:00:35 John S: That's the thing.

1:00:36 Richard H: The language is so muddy that nobody knows what the hell they mean.

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1:00:38 John S: Yes. That's the dangerous part of it, is it's not real clear. It doesn't work... It totally doesn't work, I think, in interpersonal communication to speak that way and use that language. I think it might work okay in a book if you read it as poetry and you use it as metaphor, perhaps, but...

1:01:00 Richard H: But then, you have to spend the first half of the book explaining what the hell you mean.

[chuckle]

1:01:05 Richard H: So that you can understand the...

1:01:07 John S: That's true.

1:01:08 Richard H: Yeah. I know. I'm not a fan of the language and... So...

1:01:12 John S: Yeah. Well, I'm gonna have to have you back sometime. We'll talk about that.

1:01:16 Richard H: Absolutely. We'll set something like that up, maybe, for the New Year or something. Perfect.

1:01:21 John S: Yeah. That will be fun. Well, I've enjoyed the conversation. It's been a blast. Thank you very much for agreeing to do this.

1:01:28 Richard H: No problem at all, John. Thanks so much for inviting me and it was great to meet you in 3D, in Austin.

1:01:33 John S: Yeah. Maybe, if I meet you again... I'm gonna be in Toronto in... When is it, for this one in 2017? I hope you can be there for that 'cause I'm gonna be there.

1:01:42 Richard H: Oh, next year?


1:01:44 Richard H: I know I'm planning to go to the one in 2018.

1:01:47 John S: Okay. I'll see you for that one too.

1:01:51 Richard H: Yeah.

[chuckle]

1:01:51 Richard H: I'm actually also thinking about doing a workshop at that one.

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1:01:56 John S: Oh, fun. Yeah. That'd be cool.

1:01:58 Richard H: Actually, about social media.

1:02:01 John S: Oh, awesome. That'd be really good.

1:02:03 Richard H: Because I really enjoyed Joe C's workshop, 'Living Fiber'. 1:02:07 John S: Oh, yeah. He did a really good job with that.

1:02:10 Richard H: Yeah, and I wanted to...

1:02:14 John S: I'm sorry I didn't talk to those guys from St. Louis, from the Since Right Now network. I wish I would have talked to them.

1:02:19 Richard H: Oh, yeah, yeah. I chatted with... What was the gentleman's name? I don't remember. I talked to him. He was really interesting.

1:02:27 John S: Yeah. And then there was some other guy there. He had a cowboy hat on. He started talking to me later. He had a podcast and a website, at one time, that was pretty popular.

1:02:39 Richard H: Oh, yeah. What was his name? I don't...

1:02:42 John S: He gave me his card.

1:02:42 Richard H: I can see him.

1:02:43 John S: I'm gonna look it up sometime. I might contact that guy.

1:02:46 Richard H: Yeah. No, no, no. I know exactly who you're talking about. He was really interesting too.

1:02:50 John S: Yeah. That was fun.

1:02:52 Richard H: I really enjoyed that workshop.

1:02:54 John S: Yeah. I did too.

1:02:56 Richard H: And I wanted to, maybe, expand on that to social media because I think that it's not going away.

1:03:07 John S: No. It's not. It's a huge... It's a powerful tool.

1:03:09 Richard H: Whether it's Reddit or some of the Facebook groups and the WAAFT page

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and stuff like that. I think that there's a workshop in there somewhere.

1:03:19 John S: Yup. I agree.

1:03:23 Richard H: And I know it's two years away but I came away feeling like that would be something fun to do.

1:03:28 John S: Alright, my friend. Well, we will post this actually, believe it or not, this coming Wednesday.

[chuckle]

1:03:33 Richard H: Oh, jeez. So, two days from now, you've got your work cut-out, editing... What is this? Nearly an hour and a half down to an hour.

1:03:43 John S: There are some parts where I got up from my chair and stuff like that. Alright.

1:03:47 Richard H: Perfect. Thanks so much, John. I appreciate it.

1:03:50 John S: Alright. You take care.

1:03:52 John S: Well, that's it for another episode of AA Beyond Belief, the podcast. We'll be back next week to speak with Bob K, author of Key Players in AA History. That'll be a fun one. Until then, you all take care and be well.

[music]

Documents

Hello, and welcome to AA Beyond Belief, the podcast. I'm ......Monday the 14th was my actual belly button birthday, even though I hate that term. It was my real birthday. So, we stayed