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Source: Ellen B – Meeting on the River (2022) – Speaker Talk – Date Unknown.mp3 File: ellen-b-meeting-on-the-river-2022-speaker-talk-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 00:36:11
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Can you hear me? All right. You are a good-looking crowd. Thanks for being here. I know that Bill thanked, you know, people in his lead, but I want to say thank you, too, especially. It's just an honor and a great grace to be here to speak together, but always to speak for Al-Anon. Of course, I came into Al-Anon the same time that Bill came into AA. I did not choose Al-Anon because I didn't know it existed. I suffered for so many years when I could have really benefited from that support and maybe learned how to get off the merry-go-round a little earlier, but, you know, everybody has their own timing, and usually Bill talks in his lead about how I got into Al-Anon, and so the sponsor that you heard about, he was a pretty tough guy, he had hung around with one of my drinking brothers, so I knew who he was, and I knew that he had joined AA, and I also knew that he had several years of sobriety, so it was not hard to trust, to entrust, I'll say, my husband to Nick's care, but I guess the way it happened was they had been talking, you know, day after day, week after week, and Nick dropped the bomb. He said, it's a family disease, and she's sicker than you, give her these books. So that's basically how it happened for me.
I was invited, maybe not ever so gently, but I was invited to take a look at Al-Anon as a way of adopting a spiritual program that would be compatible with Bill's program, and I found that to be entirely true. So Nick sent home a book, which we call A Daily Reader, and it was the first one that came out in Al-Anon, and it's called One Day at a Time, we affectionately call it the ODAT book, and it's a little blue book, and you're supposed to read a page a day, but I read it all at once. I had a lot, I do that, I do that a lot. One of my brothers calls me, read a book, know it all, Ellen. That's kind of true, too. Hopefully that doesn't really come through right now. But anyhow, so I loved the literature from the start. I could very easily see myself in the sharings of this one book, and I had a lot of time on my hands. As Bill had mentioned, I was pregnant with our fourth child, and I was soaking my bones in the hot tub, and Bill was gone, like, all the time. And I remember thinking, oh, for God's sakes, he was never home when he was drinking, and he's still not home. I've got all this responsibility, and all this work, and all these kids, and I'm having another baby. But anyhow, I'm laying in the tub, and I'm just reading page after page, and I'm thinking, oh, I've thought that before. Oh, I've experienced that before.
Oh, I've said that before. And so, all of a sudden, like a light bulb, many Al-Anons will say, like a light bulb, I discovered for the very first time in my life that I had been born into an alcoholic family, and I had indeed chosen an alcoholic husband. And at first, I was kind of resentful that he was spending so much time in AA, but I also knew that the God of my understanding was offering us a great gift. And I really believed that I was being asked to embrace Bill's life in AA, that I was being asked to entrust his recovery from the effects of alcoholism on his own life to AA members, and that I was supposed to take my hands off of the whole situation. I mean, every aspect of it. I heard loud and clear that I was powerless, that I had been doing it wrong, that I was making it worse. And I guess the most difficult part of all of that for me was admitting that I was harming a sick child of God. I just not really see myself that way. I know that that's true today because of all of the Al-Anon literature. We have something called the Four M's, and you might have heard of it, but I like to use them often as a tool of inventory.
[00:05:01]
Of course, there's the managing that I do so well, because those are my gifts and talents and I just can't help but manage things. Then there's the manipulation that comes into play when things aren't going the way that I think that they should go. I'll try a little bit of manipulation, usually by guilt. Guilt, shame, that kind of thing. And then the mothering. Of course, that's what I was born to be, is a mother, and we have five awesome children, so I'm doing that pretty good, but I just didn't understand you don't mother your husband.
So I can fall into that sometimes. It's so easy, depending on what's going on. And then of course, martyrdom. And I took a good, hard look at all the years that I had enjoyed playing the martyr, and how that got me, well, a lot of attention, a lot of praise, a lot of affirmation. Look at the good woman that puts up with so much. And I heard that over and over and over throughout the first 10 or 15 years of our marriage. But I had not realized that having my focus on another human being as close as this man is to me, and I to him, I had not understood that it stopped me from growing and developing as a person.
And that was the root of my discontent, and that was the root of my anger and my bitterness and my resentment, that too much of my life and my energy and my time was being spent on another human being. And I just didn't know that that was not the way to be. Everything that I learned growing up in my family home told me that I was doing it right. But I was not getting the results that I was looking for. And it was Al-Anon that told me, well, that's our definition of insanity. And I railed against that. I'm not crazy. I'm not insane.
I could see that I was doing it wrong, but I could not see that I was getting a little crazy about this. So you come into Al-Anon, and they ask you to go to meetings, and they ask you to get a sponsor, and they ask you to work the steps, and then there's the slogans, and then the serenity prayer that we just prayed, and all the wonderful sharing and the fellowship. Great women, 29 years ago, really helped me decide for myself a course of action that was going to give us the beautiful life that we share today. And it is beautiful.
It's beautiful being here with all of you. It's beautiful still being married. It's beautiful to have five grown kids that are relatively, like Katie said, good. We have good kids. They are so good, and we have these grandkids. And number 12 is on the way, but we don't have a name for him yet, but we know he's a boy, and everybody's very excited about that for that family. So we have this very, very full life that today, one of the things that I'm most grateful for, and I think Bill might say the same thing, very grateful that we've learned how to balance the invitation and the grace, the gift of AA and Al-Anon in our life. We balance it with our faith journey. We balance it with some awesome relationships within and without the rooms of AA and Al-Anon, and these adult children who we think still need a very good, fine example of what marriage can be. And then these children, these grandkids, they're just so sweet, and they come over, and they want a sleepover with Mimi and Papa.
And they don't sleep, but that's what they call it. They still want to sleep. But sometimes I could just cry sometimes thinking about the hand of God on our lives, about the graces that have come to us, about how we've tried to implement them into all of our relationships and our marriage and our family, and the joy that comes to me from seeing what God and AA and some very, very special people have done for my husband. And that has truly blessed me, and it has blessed our marriage, and it has blessed these adult-grown children, and now blessing these grandchildren. And on and on it goes. The gift just keeps on giving. But it doesn't happen magically, most of you would agree. It really takes a lot
[00:10:04]
of discipline to get up every morning to pray, to read the steps, to work the steps, to apply the principles, to have your hand out and your heart open to newcomers, to support the meetings that you go to, even to add this conference to our calendar. It's a little bit challenging, but we made our minds up a long, long time ago to say yes whenever we were asked. And so again, we're very, very grateful to be here. I want to share with you, really in the best way that I know possible, some of the changes that I was asked to make, and they're changes that I have successfully, with God's grace, been able to make, and they've made a huge difference in our lives together. This is a little pamphlet that I got in Al-Anon called The Guide for the Family of the Alcoholic. And it was one of the very first pieces of literature that I set about to read and study and pray and ask God, is this what you want me to do? And so near the end of the pamphlet, it says, it's often easier to understand why you fail than why you succeed in dealing with alcoholics. And I often just also substitute the word alcoholism. Therefore, it can be easier to follow a list of don'ts, and that is the medicine I needed. I needed someone to be very firm with me and say, don't do this anymore. It doesn't work. So number one, I'll just read them. Don't lecture, moralize, scold, blame, threaten, argue, pour out liquor, or cover up the consequences of the drinking. Wow. Those were big changes in my life. You may feel better, our pamphlet says, but the situation always gets worse. And I'm like, oh, that's true. Number two, don't lose your temper, thereby destroying yourself and any possibility of helping. So okay, that night when I got so angry and I hit that door and the slats went flying. Not a good night. Number three, don't allow your anxiety to compel you to do for alcoholics what they must be doing for themselves.
And I made that mistake over and over and over again. I was so exhausted and angry by the time that I got to Al-Anon, but I realized from that statement, I was bringing it on myself. Number four, don't accept those promises, for this is just a method of postponing pain. In the same way, don't keep switching agreements. If an agreement is made, stick to it. I did not have any stick to it stuff in the beginning, but I do now. Number five, don't believe everything the alcoholic tells you. It might not be the truth. Oh, really? He's lying to me, his wife? Bill, I don't know where, this is definitely not conference approved stuff, but Bill says if the lips are moving, they're lying.
I'm like, oh, okay. That's good advice. Number six, don't let the alcoholic exploit you or take advantage of you, for in so doing, you become an accomplice in the evasion of responsibility. And you already heard him say he wanted no part of responsibility. Number seven, don't try to follow this pamphlet as a rule book. It's simply a guide to be used with intelligence and evaluation. And those are two great skills, intelligence and evaluation. Again, reminding us of the tools of the program and the inventory we already spoke about. It's very, very important for me to take an inventory almost every day. Number eight, don't put off facing the reality that alcoholism is a progressive disease, and it gets increasingly worse as drinking continues. And so those are the eight things in this pamphlet that I set my mind, my face, the Bible says, my face like flint, against, not my husband, not a child of God, but the disease of alcohol.
Husband, Not a Child of God, but the Disease of Alcoholism.
[00:15:01]
And they told us, go to AA meetings, you know, the open ones, and read the big book. And learn as much as you can about the disease of alcoholism. And they told me the reason why. It's so you can detach from everything, you know, that can bring you down, that can scare you, that can produce anxiety, that can distract you, you know, from working on yourself. So that's like the gospel for me. And then much, much later on, you know, when things settled down, I would get a little lax.
Not in my prayer life. I'm a praying woman. But lax in my reading, lax in my meetings, lax in my working with other families affected by this insidious disease. And I would notice that I too would become again irritable and discontent. And it does almost happen without me recognizing it. But then something will happen and I'll say, aha, you've fallen down on your spiritual program and it's time to get back on track.
And I can't tell you how many times that's happened in 29 years. Lots, probably lots. But there's another bit of conference approved literature that always encourages me, gives me the direction that I'm looking for, and kind of helps me get back on track. Now I've been using this in Leeds for many, many years and I'm always calling it the gifts and the promises of Al-Anon. But just last week I looked it up on the internet and there was something saying don't call it that anymore.
So I didn't know I was breaking an Al-Anon rule. I'm not allowed to call these the gifts and the promises, but I am allowed to tell you that it is from survival to recovery. And it's on page 269. And then I'm supposed to tell you that all of Al-Anon, all of its literature, and they have great literature, all of it is gift and promise. So let me read this very powerful page that has really helped to form my life.
If we willingly surrender ourselves to the spiritual discipline of the 12 steps, which I have and I do, and work the program, our lives will be transformed. Members work their program by being willing to attend meetings on a regular basis, reading Al-Anon and Alateen literature, getting a sponsor, I have several, working towards applying the 12 steps of recovery to their lives, which I do, and becoming involved in Al-Anon service work as they begin to recover.
And I have done a little bit of service and enjoyed every minute of it. So, number one, we will become mature, responsible individuals with a great capacity for joy, fulfillment, and wonder. Though we may never be perfect, continued spiritual progress is going to reveal to us an enormous potential. And I think that's so beautiful. Two, we will discover that we are both worthy of love and loving. We will love others without losing ourselves, and we will learn to accept love in return.
And that has happened to me. Three, our sight, once clouded and confused, will clear, and we will be able to perceive reality and recognize truth. Again, very powerful. Courage and fellowship will replace fear. We will be able to risk failure to develop new hidden talents. Five, our lives, no matter how battered and degraded, will yield hope, which we share with others. Six, we will begin to feel and will come to know the vastness of our emotions, but will not be slaves to them.
I think that's very, very powerful. Seven, our secrets will no longer bind us in shame. Eight, as we gain the ability to forgive our families, the world, and ourselves, our choices are going to expand. With dignity, we will stand for ourselves, but not against our fellows. Ten, serenity and peace will have meaning for us as we allow our lives and the lives of those we love to flow day by day with grace and ease and balance.
[00:20:02]
Eleven, no longer terrified, we will discover we are free to delight in life's paradox, mystery, and awe. Twelve, we'll laugh more. Thirteen, fear will be replaced by faith and gratitude comes naturally as we realize that our higher power is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves. And so those are very, very dear and special to me, as well as the five G's, if you haven't heard about them. If I can get it right, get off his back.
That was not easy to do. Give him to God, a little easier. Get to meetings. Well, with five kids, sometimes that's hard, but I'm managing. Get busy and get a sponsor. So I've already mentioned my sponsors. I'll talk a little bit about that. I had an awesome sponsor in the beginning, 29 years ago. She had an alcoholic who I would say was in the fourth stage of his disease. It was awful what she lived with.
She had four children. She had to flee to another state because he had, in a drunken stupor, tried to strangle her. Her name was Holly, and she's doing fine out west. I chose a woman a little later on because she had a happy marriage, a content marriage, a marriage that seemed to rise above the consequences of many, many years of drinking. And she helped me pray these prayers of gratitude. And I began to feel grateful for the fact that Bill was alive, that he had found AA, that he would go to meetings later on, that he would take this little bit of medication that he talked about, that he was open to the children, that he began to tell the truth in the smallest ways, but it was much appreciated.
I began to be thankful that we had faith that we could share together. I began to be grateful for the home, the food, the electricity. The first time that I sat around in an Al-Anon meeting and one of the women shared the way that she was living, it just broke me up that I had wasted so much time being ungrateful. It had become, before Al-Anon, so much easier to see what I didn't have rather than what I did.
And so Al-Anon was huge in my life for generating gratitude. In fact, one of the old-timers, not my sponsor, but one of the old-timers said to make a gratitude list. And I did that. And she said, you need to read that every day. Well, I don't do that today. But it did its trick. I read it until it went from my head down into my heart. And many, many times as I'm beginning my day and my morning prayer and my morning shower, I'm still thanking God for electricity and hot water.
And many times driving to my job, I'm still thanking God for a car and four wheels that are not flat and gasoline. That's hard today. Gasoline is a bit high. Anyhow, so gratitude was huge. Sponsorship. Well, one time I chose a woman to help me with the finances because that was one of the things that scared me. I'm not really an anxious person by nature. I don't really have a lot of fear. But when it comes to security issues and finances and that kind of thing, it can shake me up a little bit.
She taught me how to pray for peace and happiness and even prosperity, which doesn't necessarily translate into dollars. But I have moved from this place of wanting more to being very grateful for what we have and knowing that what we have as a husband and wife and as a family and these kids and these grandkids and the intimate relationships that we have with them, I know that that is the greatest gift that there is to give God thanks and praise for, which I do.
So the 5 G's and the 4 M's that I told you about and then Al-Anon's famous for the 3 C's,
[00:25:08]
which was very, very life-giving to me and our family. You didn't cause it, you can't control it, and there's no cure for it. And so I contemplate that because, like I said, sometimes there's this complacency that falls into our lives, which really it's an insane thought to ever stop going to meetings. So we have never stopped. By the grace of God, we have never stopped, and we have always said yes when asked, and we have always in our home practiced these spiritual principles.
And we've done very nicely as a family, more than nicely. So then there's the 3 A's, and this is a program of awareness, acceptance, and action. And again, this is a life-giving principle, but it is not easy to practice. When something comes up that happens that's not quite to our liking or something that disturbs us or sometimes frightens us, we have to remember the 3 A's. First, to take time to become aware of what's happening.
And acceptance, they say, is the key to serenity. So again, accepting reality sometimes is not the course of action, but that can always make it worse for me. So taking time to accept what's going on, trusting that our higher power, God has us in his loving arms, and that everything's going to be okay. Bill said that. This is how we talk to each other, and this is how we talk to God. We allow him to love us and to show us, to guide us, to direct us, to heal us.
We just allow him to be a very, very big part of our lives, and it's beautiful. It's a beautiful gift. That was not our spirituality, I would say, was not what it is today. We were, of course, as many times we hear in the rooms, we were religious but not spiritual. Well, now we're both. We're religious and spiritual. So that's the three A's and the three C's, and then the slogans. I'll just talk very quickly about the slogans.
You know, when I first got into Al-Anon, I sort of made fun of the slogans. I thought, it can't be that easy, you know. It can't be that clear. It can't be that concrete. It can't be that complete of an answer. But honest to goodness, the slogans. I used, of course, one day at a time. Very, very helpful to me. Whose problem is it? That's one of our slogans. That helps me get clarity about some of these issues that happen time to time.
First things first helped me in a marvelous way. First things first, when I decided that the primary way that alcoholism was affecting my life, being that I wasn't focusing on myself and I wasn't growing and developing, I decided, well, I'm going to put the focus back on myself, and I'm going to go to school. So in my middle 40s, I signed up for college. There were some doubts. This one woman said, well, you just try out the academic waters.
Well, I took a little bit of offense to that, as I do sometimes, but I thought I'm going to try. And I signed up for college, and I was a straight-A student. Lo and behold, I had the intelligence that it took to attain a college degree. Again, by the grace of God, though. And then I decided, well, what am I going to do with this college degree? So Mama went to work because she wanted to, not because she had to.
So often the women that I bump into go to work to pay the bills. I resisted that as often as I could along the way. And I enjoy my education, I enjoy my career, I enjoy my paychecks, and I spend it all on the kids. Literally. I didn't talk very much about my upbringing. My mom and dad, they stayed married, but my mom was filled with bitterness and resentment towards my father, who had stopped drinking about, oh, I don't know, I think I was in high school.
My perception of my father, though, I did believe that he suffered from alcoholism. He was very good to me. He was very good to me. He was a fine example as a father, but not so good of a husband. That's the conclusion that I came to.
[00:30:05]
I offered my mom Al-Anon. She took the book, and I don't even think she had it for a day or two, and she gave it right back, and that broke my heart. Because I had already come to view Al-Anon as such a gift in my life, and really the answer. I don't like being angry. I don't like carrying a resentment. I don't like any of those ugly, messy feelings that rob me of joy. So I use the steps. Every time I get into a pickle of any kind with any person, any area of my life, I go right to step one, and I tell myself I'm powerless over other people.
And then I tell myself that there is a power greater than myself, and it's God, and it's these sponsors, and it's these conferences, and it's my daily reading and everything, the guidance that comes to me every day in my own personal prayer and in the great literature. And then I just make a decision. No matter what's going on, I just make a very firm decision to detach and to let go and to put it in God's hands.
And I'm getting very, very good at taking my own inventory. I didn't do it so well in the beginning, but I guess maybe after 29 years, you get really good at the spiritual discipline of looking at yourself and seeing what is going on inside of Ellen that I would react so strongly. And I usually can come up with a pretty good answer. It's not hard. And as I shared before, it's usually one of those four Ms.
I've somehow wandered into something that's not useful. It's not going to work. It's not helping us grow. And so I have wonderful people to share these things with. I have a great home group. It's Courage to Be Me in Akron, and I've known some of these ladies for almost the whole 29 years that I've been in Allen. They're my sisters, really closer to me than my own blood sister. And so I find it very, very easy to share these things with a number of people, not just a close sponsor, but close Allenon friends.
I don't think a day goes by that I don't talk to somebody in Allenon. I know a day doesn't go by that I fail to pray. There might be a day that goes by that I don't read the page for the day, but I don't think there's a day that goes by that I don't read something Allenon, because I love the literature. So these things work for me. I guess you could call them spiritual disciplines. This is how I work my program.
And lots of people have my phone number, and I get calls in the middle of the night occasionally, and I lose my patience sometimes with some of my sponsees. And on and on it goes. It's just a journey for me. It's just a wonderful, beautiful journey. And in Allenon, they say, well, there's no destination. You don't graduate from Allenon. That's what they tell us. So here I am, 29 years later, still enjoying meetings, still enjoying people, still growing, still recovering from the effects of this insidious disease we call alcoholism.
So growing up, I kind of was the golden child, so I didn't get abused in any way like a couple of my siblings did. That was really sad to face, all of that. I didn't really stop loving my parents, even though they stopped loving each other. There was craziness in some of my siblings' lives. I've tried to always pray for them. Being that I had this tag put on me, read a book, know-it-all Ellen, they didn't really see me as approachable most of my life.
I think that's changing a little bit. I think I have enough humility now and enough recovery and enough compassion for suffering people that my siblings now do see me as approachable. And we've had some great conversations in the last two, three years, so I'm very grateful, very grateful for that. My mom and dad are gone now. I visit their graves sometimes, and I tell them, thank you for raising me.
And I tell them, thank you for providing for me. And I tell them, thank you for loving our kids and a couple of our grandkids. And I tell them that I hope they're happy and at peace, because they weren't at peace. It's really hard growing up in a home where there's a lack of peace, lack of charity, too, and a lot of yelling and screaming, which was why I felt so comfortable communicating with Bill that way.
That's all I knew. But AA and Al-Anon have shown us a totally different way to live and to relate to each other and have opened up for us so many new adventures.
[00:35:04]
This is our first time at this conference, and Bill said, we lead a very sheltered life. How could this be going on for 33 years and we never heard about it? I'm like, well, we've been a little busy, you know. But we're at this point in our life where the kids are raised, they're doing well. The grandchildren are their responsibility, not ours. And I really think, hope and pray that the years that unfold will be able to spend more time with all of you.
Like Katie said, giving service. You know, I've given back in little ways, but I know, I feel a call on my life to give more. And I plan on doing that. With your prayerful support and with God's grace, I will say yes to the next thing that comes along. So I think I've said all that I want to say this morning. I wish you well. Have a great conference, and thanks again. Applause.