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Source: Tom W. (Father) – Fr. Tom W – How To Live Surrounded by Crazy People 2 2010 – Date Unknown.mp3 File: tom-w-father-fr-tom-w-how-to-live-surrounded-by-crazy-people-2-2010-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 01:05:19
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The new group coming into Al-Anon are parents. And their parents, grandparents who are raising their grandchildren because their kids are out there. And it's a new thing. Now, I used to think that anyone in Al-Anon could sponsor anyone in Al-Anon. And this is an opinion, but I'm right. In some ways, that may be true, but I have found I don't sponsor people married to alcoholics well because I've never been married. I've seen the movie and I've read the book and I get the theory, but I don't have the experience. And I tried sponsoring some married people and it just didn't work out at all. So, I don't do that anymore. I can sponsor adult children because I know that crazy. I'm going to talk about that a little bit in the next few minutes. And then people who have kids. I don't have kids. I taught kids. That's different. I sponsor a fellow who has adolescent sons. And when he's having stuff with his kids, I tell him to go talk to another dad because dads know.
I don't know. I don't know. Well, can't you just flunk the little guy? No, you can't do that. He's not your student. He's your child. Oh, okay. Well, that's different. And I find what I need to do when I'm practicing a perfect Al-Anon program is I talk from my experience. And if I don't have the experience, I refer them to someone else who does. I was in priest school in Berkeley in 1994 to 97. It was a wonderful learning experience. The Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley has nine different denominations and 12 different schools. So, you could take, each school had its own requirements, but you could take classes from any school.
So, you could study with Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, Dominicans, Franciscans, Jesuits, and all kinds of people in between. It was a great place to learn. And one of my mentors was an older priest named Robert Daly who was very familiar with the world of recovery and was an Al-Anon person. And Robert Daly had a rough life. Went into the seminary and went to China to be a missionary. And after he was there a year or two, the Japanese came in and he spent some time in a Japanese camp, like three years. And then the war ended and civil war broke out and he spent some time in a communist camp. And then they let him out and he went to the Philippines and they put him in a place where they starved him in school for a while. A few more things happened. Anyway, he had a nervous breakdown and crisis and we would say low self-esteem. I think prison does that to you. Even in our nice prisons here, it does it to you that Japanese were a little tougher. And he had to rebuild his life. Out of his suffering came much wisdom. And that happens with grace and community, as you know. Anyway, when he was teaching us the class on how to hear confessions, which is how you listen to people who are doing a fifth step or a tenth step. People are coming and they're being very vulnerable. And people sometimes talk about officially what might be sin. That's a great big conversation. I usually don't go there. But breaking laws or breaking commandments or doing something against your conscience. People also come talking a lot about their sorrow and their pain. So it is a great privilege to listen to this and make some kind of response. And Robert Daly said this, when you're in that position and someone is talking to you about their deep insides, pray for the grace to know when you're in over your head. Now, see, I didn't think I could be in over my head because I was 35 years old and I've read a lot of books. And again, the arrogance shows up there. But his word stayed with me and I have been in those situations where someone talks about something and I don't know what to do or say. And what I've learned to do is refer them to someone who's had the experience. I had a sponsee for a while who was a delicate
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cutter. She would cut herself. And this is a sign of deep trouble. And she'd been doing it for a while and I'd been her sponsor for a while. And in Al-Anon we say people sponsor people, you know. And so I was people, she was people. And she came to see me with this big secret and she pulled back her arm and she just said, I do this. Now, I had the wisdom and the grace to know I have no idea how to handle this. And I referred her to someone who had much more life experience and it was a good thing. I, there are so many things I'm not good at. There are some things I'm good at. But I need to know what that is.
And I need to know when I am, what is the phrase, out of my pay grade. So referring I think is a good experience. Alcoholism, allergy of the body and then obsession of the mind. Dr. Silkworth. Dr. Silkworth loved alcoholics. Now, I hope this doesn't shock you but a lot of medical people don't. It's because alcoholics lie. They refuse to follow directions and then they blame the doctor. Well, Dr. Silkworth loved us and the literature says he had an affection for and a knack for working with alcoholics. We didn't burn him out. We didn't exhaust him. Although, in the AA text, in the letter from the physician, it says, let me see, always read. I don't memorize stuff because it's written down.
Let me see. He says this. This is on page XXVII. He's talking about meeting Bill and many years ago, one of the leading contributors book hooked up and we did stuff and things. The unselfishness of these men as we've come to know them, the entire absence of profit motive, Americans are amazed when things aren't for sale. We don't know what to do. And their community spirit is indeed inspiring to one who has labored long and wearily in this alcoholic field. And that's an awful lot of the folks who work in treatment and work in homes and work in rehab. They just become exhausted and I have done that a couple of times. You give and give and give and give and give and give and they want more. And I have to learn how to turn off my phone, go for a walk, know when it's none of my business and stop giving advice to everybody especially when I know nothing about the subject. That's a lot of Al-Anon. Allergy of the body, obsession of the mind. I also heard this presented at a meeting and I found it very useful. I like thinking in pictures. I like pictures and I like picture books. And this person said, alcoholism is a lot like dancing with a gorilla.
You're not done dancing until the gorilla is done dancing. Now, I'll admit, a lot of gorillas are cute and you can have a good time with a gorilla. And I have on a couple of occasions. But once the gorilla gets his arms around us, the gorilla is in charge. We worry, we see the people we love sick with alcoholism and we say, I'm so worried. And they'll say, listen, if I ever get to be as bad as you, I'll just stop. One of my sisters-in-law has a way of meditating that I find very helpful for me. I'm a worrier and a control freak.
Not as much a control freak as you are, but I'm a control freak. She'll visualize, it's an imagination, God as light. And I give God a time schedule. And by the way, I'd like this done by Tuesday. Because Wednesday, we're all going out and I'd like him to be in good
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shape by then. I've learned in my Al-Anon program to let God be God. Ask for help. I think when I ask for help in any way, it helps the energy flow. We talk like that in California. And step two, slowly being restored to sanity. Sanity, human life, emotionally and psychologically healthy. How do you know you're healthy? Big topic. Healthy people can work. Healthy people can love. And healthy people can play. If you know someone who can work, love and play, you know someone who's doing really well. I used to think I was a workaholic. I'm not. Workaholics get things done. I like the busy. I like the busy, busy, busy. And that's not the same thing. I just want them to think I'm busy and then they'll leave me alone. To start a project, to stick with the project, to finish the project, to clean up after. That's very adult. Now, I'm distracted so easily. I'm bored so easily.
I start a project and it's boring and I put it down and I start something else and get it done. I'm better at that now, but it's still an effort. Loving, loving, loving, which is what a lot of this is. Out on the West Coast, I have to tell people when I'm talking about loving, I'm not talking about having sex. Some of us have been sexual with people we would not have coffee with. It's talking about the quality of relationships of human beings. Friends, family, learning how to love with the powerlessness that's involved in that. There's just so much I can't do for people I love. Love is not control. Love is wishing well for someone else, but it's not control. When I was growing up, love meant control. I love you, therefore, you must do the following nine things. And when I was a young adult, whenever anyone said, I love you, I felt all the oxygen leave the room.
Time to run for your life. Loving. Grandparents do this better than parents. This is generic now, not in every circumstance, but a lot of you notice grandparents and grandchildren get along real well. It's because they have a common enemy. Learning how to love, learning how to be helpful, learning how to let go, learning how to detach, learning how to not control stuff. Loving. And playing, learning how to play. And this is my last point and then I'm done. We'll get back together at 1.30 so you have some time for lunch and maybe a nap. If you fall asleep on these chairs, no one will bother you, I promise you. If we don't learn how to have fun in recovery, we don't recover. And for some of us, we have so much loss and so much grief and so much trauma that it's really hard to learn how to enjoy anything. So start small. Find something fun. I remember I was in therapy and the therapist asked me, so what are you doing for fun? I said, I go to meetings. He said, that's really good, but what are you doing for fun? Oh, we laugh very hard at meetings sometimes.
And he just said, Tom, if you don't learn how to enjoy your life, you're not going to stay in recovery. So I had to find there are things that give me pleasure. There are things I enjoy doing and we learn that through trial and error. Some stuff that works for me is not going to work for you. But there are some things I really like to do. I like gardening. I like cooking. I'm not a professional gardener that has to do it seven days a week for money so I can still enjoy it. And I haven't cooked meals for an unhappy family three times a day for 20 years.
for an unhappy family three times a day for 20 years. So I can cook pleasantly, you know.
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I like doing that. And I like other things. I like music. One of my friends is a musician and he also is a critic, a musical critic, like he writes reviews. Their mental experience is completely different from mine. But he would get tickets anywhere in the San Francisco Bay Area, two tickets, for anything musical happening. And so he could choose every night anything to do from five or ten choices. And he would, he picked me up once and he came over to the East Bay. I was his date. And we went to hear jazz, some Cuban jazz musicians.
Now, I like jazz but I really don't know much about it. I don't know anything about Cuban musicians. This guy played at a jazz club in Oakland called Yoshi's. And people come from all over the world to go to Yoshi's. I didn't even know that. I lived in the same town but I've been busy thinking about myself. So we went. And this guy, he was a pianist. He played away and there was a guy on a horn and there may have been someone on a bass fiddle and they played. Now, I liked it. I liked it. But I looked around for the people who were real jazz people and they loved it. Okay. Now, I can enjoy their enjoyment, you know. And I learned stuff and I, it was out of my comfort zone and now I could go again and maybe have a better time because I'm very guarded when I do new things. But the whole world of live music is life-giving for a lot of people. Going to the beach, doing a, finding inexpensive things that give joy. I would highly recommend it. So work on that this afternoon. We're going to come back. Before you come back, do something fun. It doesn't have to be long. Only two or three minutes will qualify. But I know some of you need assignments, you know. So you can check it off. I had fun for four minutes doing something.
There's a little pool to stick your feet in. There's a shop to wander through and gawk. There are people to have conversations with. If it's fun, it qualifies. Telling your sponsor you can't get back to them, that could be fun. Find different ways of enjoying yourself, you know, that don't hurt anybody. Oh, well. Let's end with the serenity prayer. We'll be back at 1.30. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. I'm Tom and I'm in great need of 100,000 Al-Anon meetings. Oh, let's see. I've had some good contact with physicians in recovery and physicians who have helped people recover. And one of my mentors is a physician named Dr. Gil Ayotte. Gil's been gone about two years now. From French Canada, got sober when General Eisenhower was president, and then relapsed under Mr.
Kennedy and got sober again under Lyndon Johnson. And Gil, as a sober physician, helped a lot of people get well. And he sure worked a lot with families. And he would go around giving talks on alcoholism and recovery, because there are so many questions. People don't understand alcoholism. People don't understand the family dynamics of alcoholism. People don't understand how truly crazy you can be, even if you're not drinking. When I was fairly new in recovery, I met a fellow who was a bad drunk. He was a bad drunk. And he'd been a bad drunk for years and hospitalized lots of times and on the street lots of times.
And his mouth was ulcerated and his esophagus was ulcerated. His stomach was ulcerated. He was very damaged from years of alcohol abuse. But he wanted to drink. He had no interest in getting sober. So how to deal with this? Because if you take alcohol and put it on an open sore, it burns terribly. So he went looking for an appropriate lady. And he found
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a nurse, of course, who just wants to help. And she would give him wine enemas. Now, perhaps you haven't thought of wine enemas. This could be a step up or a step down for some of you. I'm not sure. There's no ulcers down there, at least there weren't yet. And wine in the bowel is absorbed instantly. And you're very, very drunk. And that's what he wanted. So you can imagine their conversations about room temperature or chilled or, you know, red or white. I can just, I do wonder about things like that. Now, we haven't gotten to the crazy part yet. So far, it's just another day at work as far as a lot of us are concerned.
The crazy part was he was a violent alcoholic. And she would give him his little enema. And then he would get very, very drunk and very, very violent and beat her unconscious. And she was hospitalized three times in five years, something like that, broken bones and broken jaws. So the question that I would present to the community for discussion is, which one's crazier? Which one's crazier? And I think she wins. She's just trying to help.
She just wants to be nice. And she is very clearly enabling someone not just be sick himself but endanger her life. And so recovery, there's a discipline to recovery. And to help, to get out of people's way, to stay out of the cage, there are things we in Al-Anon need to learn how to do, one of which, of course, is learning about how the disease works. Dr. Gill would phrase it like this when he would talk to groups. He said, alcoholism is a disease that has three distinct phases to it. Phase one is the fun phase. This is when it's fun.
Now, a lot of people don't think alcohol is fun. They don't know. They don't know that it's the best time you can have if you're an alcoholic. Fun. Fun. Stage two alcoholism is called fun plus problems. It's still fun, but you start to have problems. And stage three alcoholism is just called problems. The fun's gone. But you keep doing it. You're in the gorilla cage. You don't know what else to do. You're trapped. And you're trapped on many, many levels. You're trapped in being very immature and manipulative and charming and immature. I don't know if I mentioned this this morning, but there was a fellow who was talking to his father. And he said to his father, Dad, when I grow up, I want to be an alcoholic. And his father said, Son, you can't do both. Who wants to grow up? Who wants to experience all the experiences of being a grown-up? Who wants to go through the losses of being a grown-up? Who wants to figure out that actions have consequences?
And that's how people learn. And I need to let people have the consequences of their actions. This takes a long time. And it's important to know that for a lot of people we love, pain can be their best friend because otherwise they'll never reach out for help. Pain and disgust and humiliation and, you know, being on Jerry Springer, I mean, that could bring you to your knees, you know, and you reach out for help and ask for God's help.
Help, help, help. Those of us who love alcoholics, we manipulate and we get manipulated. There are dynamics of stuff we go on. In the Jesuit community over in San Francisco, there's a couple of communities there. There's one with the University of San Francisco, and that has 20 guys or so. There's a high school, there's a parish. And a couple of my friends over there are active members of Al-Anon and they have alcoholism in their families. And they said it's interesting when if there's active alcoholism in the community, you don't notice it by seeing the alcoholic, you notice it by seeing the adult children because they
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start acting out. They start acting like kids. They start acting like nine-year-olds. And you don't, you might not know who the alcoholic is, but he's somewhere. You know, pay attention. People are getting involved in stuff. And the family dynamics kind of work like this. There's your alcoholic, then there's your person who's obsessed with the alcoholic, and then you have kids. And frequently it breaks down where the oldest child plays the role of hero. Mom and dad are busy. Someone has to raise the family. This is the child who raises the other children, feeds the other children, makes sure the other children do their homework. This is the kid who's a very, very good kid. If you're a teacher, this is the kid who's 14 going on 35. And if there's an emergency, you can trust this kid to do it. Help please, we need help. This kid fits in. This kid edits the newspaper. This kid is captain of the football team, would be the head cheerleader if he could arrange it.
This kid is a public figure and takes care of everything. Great future marine, great future cop, great future social worker, great future nurse in intensive care unit, great pastor or archbishop. This is the person that takes care of a lot of things. Well, frequently not always, frequently the second child reacts. And the second child plays the role of scapegoat. The kid in trouble. The kid who also wants attention, but there can only be one hero per drama, so this kid will be the bad kid. This kid smokes. This kid gets in fights.
This kid might end up in juvenile hall. If a girl pregnant at 14, how did it happen? I don't know, it was so quick. And the problems of the family can focus on this kid. Why does this kid want attention? Why aren't you more like your sister? Why aren't you more like your brother? But you're getting attention. The third child in the family doesn't want any attention. This kid just wants to be left alone. In the family photo album, the oldest child, there are 10,000 photographs. Second child, 5,000 photographs. Third child, no photographs. Even in the family group photo, there's no photo. This kid escaped. This kid is gone. This kid doesn't want to get noticed. This kid never volunteers for an answer in school. This kid is invisible, also called the adjuster. Like a chameleon, you blend in, you blend in. You don't want to be noticed. This kid runs away from home. This kid goes to Alaska. This kid goes to San Francisco. This kid does not come back home for the holidays.
The lost child. The youngest child can play the role of the clown or the mascot. This is the funny kid. This is the kid everybody likes. There's tension at home. There's fury at home. Something happened. Fight. Someone got suspended at school. Dinner table. In crazy families, dinner is not really fun. Oh, let's sit down together and talk. I can remember I developed an irrational affection for the Huntley Brinkley News Hour because someone thought of turning it on at 6 o'clock at the start of dinner. Dinner was over at 6.30. We watched the news. The only dangerous time was commercials. But I loved Huntley and Brinkley beyond anything you could imagination. It's how I kind of learned about the world and learned more things. Oh, well, that's not the point. But say there's a lot of tension.
Say that one of the parents is ready to blow. Now, it doesn't always have to be the alcoholic. Sometimes the alcoholic is the nice one. Dad's passed out in the kitchen. Who's the crazy woman in the kitchen cutting things? Sometimes kids in the family are much kinder to the Family are much kinder to the alcoholic than they are to the person who held the family
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together. That's not fair, but it happens a lot. So what the mascot, what the clown will do is something silly to break the tension. Pull the cat's tail, spill the milk, do something comical, get everybody laughing. Everyone laughs, the day is saved, and you are a hero one more time. You're a very useful member of the family crazy system. Now that was me. That was me. And I found even as I carried these survival skills with me into adulthood, if there's tension in the room, I really pick it up fast.
I'm terrified of people fighting. I don't want people arguing. I don't want voices raised. It makes me stop breathing. I get sweaty and panicky. I was working in West Oakland, early 1980s. We were doing social work there, and we had a staff. Adults disagree and discuss things, and sometimes argue fairly. You're not saying, pigs, swine, war criminal, but you discuss things. Yes, I like this. Ideas are talked about, presentations, tension in the room.
I would become so aware of the tension in the room, I would just start acting out. And I was 35 years old. I would start being funny, making comments, make side comments, get people laughing and break the tension. Now, I saw myself as charming. They were furious at me. Because if I was present in the room, there could be no honest discussion about anything. I'd interfere. I was rescuing the family one more time.
And what I had to learn is this, and this took, oh, I'd say five years of Al-Anon. If I'm in a group, if I'm at a meeting, and something hilarious occurs to me to say, it's because there's tension in the room. And I should keep my big, fat mouth shut and let people have their feelings, instead of trying to perk everyone up because I was interfering in honest conversation. Now, I can do that, but it doesn't feel good.
I want you to know this doesn't feel good. I'd much rather be funny at a meeting or make some interesting wry remark. And I sometimes only know how uncomfortable I am by how amusing my brain gets. By the way, of the four children in the family, say there are four, that youngest child is the most likely to commit suicide, just statistically. The second child, the scapegoat, is the most likely to get help because that kid might end up in juvenile hall before anyone else does.
One kid moves, everyone else adjusts. Scapegoats become heroes, lost children become scapegoats. What'll happen to you? You were such a nice kid when your oldest brother was in town, now you're a jerk. There's a dynamic thing in the family and here's a way of understanding that. These are survival skills, not living skills, but survival skills. And what we have to learn as we grow up is to learn other skills besides the one that got us through when we were six or ten or twelve years old.
For instance, the child who is the hero has to learn how to ask for help, has to learn how to let someone else help. The scapegoat has to learn how to not act out all the time. I have been scapegoat too. I was at a church event and everyone was wearing church clothes and everything was very, very solemn and I felt a huge need not to be funny but to start using the F word just to see what people would do.
Well this is behaving badly. But see, I was anxious, so I'm going to be verbal and anyway, I think I did that for a while and now I do that less, that's good. The lost child who learns how to make himself or herself present to get found and the mascot learning how to let other people be. Claudia Black has done a lot of work on crazy families. She was the middle child, the observant child of both parents, alcoholic.
And what she'll put together is that crazy families run by three rules. Rule number one, don't talk. Rule number two, don't trust. And rule number three, don't feel. Don't talk, don't trust, don't feel, you'll survive. So as recovery begins, we have to learn how to talk about things directly and that was
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not a skill I had. My family was not violent and we didn't go to jail and we didn't beat each other. We used avoidance and denial and circumlocution. We talked around things. We indicated problems without ever really pointing to them. I have a suspicion that Agatha Christie was an adult child. The way she thinks and the way there are clues and you have to guess the clues to find out what's going on, I get that very much.
Also probably Arthur Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes running around solving crimes. It's Byzantine. If you're a Star Trek person and I am, it's Vulcan chess, three-dimensional chess. Something moves over here and there's going to be a reaction over here. It's very complicated in the crazy family because you have to communicate without communicating. And we get really good at it. What I liked about meetings, for the most part, is that at meetings people focus on speaking simply and directly about real things.
That's not what happens in crazy families. Simply and directly about real things. Don't talk. We're not going to talk about the alcoholism, no, no, no, no. We're not going to talk about the mental illness. We're not going to talk about the suicides. We're not going to talk about the crazy people. We're not going to talk about the runaways. We talk about the weather and everyone's health. And from that you figure out what's going on.
In my family also, we had Irish Catholic Democrats on one side and Swedish Lutheran Republicans on the other. Those were the two big groupings and then there were the minor groups in between who would go back and forth. In the Swedish Lutheran Republican group, we never talked about the alcoholics. We talked about the nervous people. My mom called me once. She was concerned about one of the neighbors.
She said, I don't know what to make of it. He parks his car on the lawn in front of his house and then falls asleep next to it. And what did I think? As a college graduate, I said, does he drink? And she said, well, of course not, but he's very nervous. Now, if my mom thought you were nervous, it means it's time to get sober because that's how she sees it. On the Irish Catholic Democratic side, we didn't have alcoholics either.
We had characters. And what that really meant was don't let him drive. So part of recovery is learning how to talk about real things. Alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide, manic depression, the things that make up our lives, my tendencies and inclinations, my defective character and my obsessions. I need to keep an eye on these things because they're there. Don't talk. Don't trust. You don't trust anybody.
People betray each other. People manipulate each other. People are selfish. Today's confidence becomes tomorrow's ammunition. And you don't have to be a real slow kid to figure that out. And you do get to a place where you just shut down, close down, and how are things just fine thanks. You don't trust anybody. Don't talk. Don't feel. Because if you feel anything, you feel lousy. When I began going to meetings and asking God for help and listening to other people do things, slowly, slowly, slowly I started learning how to feel.
And it was not comfortable at all. This was not nice. This was not polite. My first feelings were catastrophic to me. I had to learn a new language, which is the language of feelings. And I thought I was losing my mind because I was having emotions. Took a long time. Found out what anger felt like, what fear felt like, what makes me angry, what makes
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me afraid. Inventories are helpful on this. And after I was in recovery for a while, I had to start paying attention to that whole process of grief. Grief is part of recovery in Al-Anon. There's even a book out on this now that talks about the grief process. One of the reasons that grief is such an important part of our recovery is because there have been such tremendous losses if there's alcoholism in the family.
Alcoholism, addiction, compulsive, wacko, crazy, takes its toll. I talked to a physician in Berkeley who worked at the methadone clinic. This is not an optimistic place, the methadone clinic. And she was not an optimistic person. And she said in her work with heroin addicts, what she noticed was that if someone gets off heroin for a while and then other things and becomes a clean and sober person, part of their healing process is to visit a lot of empty places.
Well, I think that's very true for those of us who love alcoholics. There's a lot of loss. There's a lot of empty places. The grief for some things that never will be. All the losses. And part of loss is to feel sad and part of loss for me is to feel numb and part of loss for me is to be mad and then I have an experience of acceptance and then it starts all over again. Lots of losses. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, who is someone I studied with a little bit, I liked her a lot.
She, Swiss, German-speaking Swiss, came to the United States and physician, psychiatrist. She worked for a while with the parents of murdered children. That's a pretty special group of people to experience grief and horror with. When she was a little girl, it was the end of the Second World War and she went with the United Nations as they went through Europe. Her first job, I think she was 17 years old, was to go into the concentration camps and find the children who were still alive.
That was her first job. So she had a knack for working with real hurt people and people who'd been through great trauma. And she's the first physician who says out loud that dying is a normal part of living and that we all get to die and there are stages of grief and loss. There's denial and acceptance and bargaining and anger and then acceptance finally. And I just found it very helpful to start to learn some of that language.
It was very helpful in my head, but I also had to have the experience of feeling the feelings. And I'm better at this now. I'm really better at this now. But sometimes when I'm having a real feeling, it freaks me out. I'd much rather it just pass. If I had no feelings, I think I'd be more efficient. But some days are really long and some things really hurt. And what I choose to believe is this does not mean I'm doing it wrong.
This means I'm doing it, walking through this stuff. If you love alcoholics and addicts, there's going to be a lot of loss and a lot of wreckage and we get to learn to grieve together. And we get to learn to grieve and I get to let you grieve. Instead of saying, oh, you're having a feeling, quick, let's do something. You get to grieve sometimes. I do too. Spiritually, when we're talking about this spiritual program, one of the images that gets used over and over and over again for the work that we do and the changes we go through, it's called you were on the journey or we're on the path or we're on the road to recovery.
I like all of those images. I think they're dynamic. And I think it indicates we're going somewhere, trudging the road of happy destiny, I think ultimately happy. But journeys, they're uphill and downhill and I don't frequently want to leave any place that's comfortable. There's a retreat leader and a teacher named Anthony DeMello. named Anthony DeMello, and he talks about people being asleep, and he says, most of us are asleep. We live in our sleep, we marry in our sleep, we have
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children in our sleep, and we die in our sleep, and we never know that we were alive, because we've been so sedated, so unplugged, so shut down, so shut down, and that happens to a lot of us from crazy backgrounds. We shut down. In fact, if I'm caught by surprise, I still shut down, but I don't stay shut down for months. Might be a couple hours or a couple days, and then I have feelings again, and sometimes they're red, and sometimes they're black. I remember when 9-11 happened, I, living on the West Coast, I was waking up just when the first plane hit the towers, and I went downstairs, it made no sense at all, I went downstairs, and I had no understanding for this, and then the second plane hit the towers in New York, and I remember being confused and baffled, and the towers collapsed, and I am, I just shut down completely. I don't know what I'm feeling, I don't know what I'm thinking, I don't know what just happened. Went to a meeting that night, and a young woman was talking, whom I've never seen before or since. She said, there are really big things happening in our world. There are big issues and big events. But in meetings, we focus on our recovery and our experience, and what it was like, and what happened, and what it's like now. And she said, so I'm just going to tell my story, even though I know, compared to anything going on outside, my story is very insignificant, but that's what we do here. And she shared her story, and the topic was, it's a great Al-Anon topic, when the world blows up and falls down, what do you do?
What action do you take? Well, people could talk on that. And what most of us said was, we want to seek out safe places, and we want to seek out safe people. Make that connection. And then we see what happens. But I'm not, I can't stay isolated, and the room was full of people that night, looking for safe places and safe people. So the next day, I knew I was, we had a little more information, and I was starting to loosen up, and I was getting mad. By the way, I like mad. It makes me feel directed and purposeful. If I'm mad enough, I can even vacuum. I mean, I'm, it's energy, and I want to make use of it, because it's not frequently there. Well, I did yard work. I had a yard overgrown with weeds and things and crap and stuff, and I needed to be physical, and I went out and I started digging and pulling and digging and pulling and digging and pulling. And there was a rose bush, a tree rose, that had not, never, it had never thrived. It had never thriven. What's the word? Thrived? Thriven? It had never really done very well. And there it was being, in Texas, we'd say puny, you know, puny and pathetic, and I had talked to it before. And I, by the way, to help my anger, I turned on one of the talk radio shows, Who's Always Mad? And if I'm listening to someone angry, it helps me get angry. So I was listening to this fellow blow his hard and just got madder and madder. And I remember walking by the stupid little rose and yanking it out by its roots, and then I left it there as a warning to the others. Well, it took a while to work through some of that anger, because there was a lot of it. But I found it comes and goes. It's like grief. It comes and goes.
It comes in waves. It comes and goes. But I have to find something to do with it, because I don't want to live in that place. And I sure don't want to do anything that hurts me, and I sure don't want to do anything that hurts you. The journey. There's an American poet named Mary Oliver. We, as Americans, don't value poets, and we don't know anything about them. We like other forms of entertainment. In Russia, poets are considered national treasures, and in Japan, you're considered respectable if you're a poet. Here, we want to know what your day job is. We don't respect that. Mary Oliver, she's been writing a long time. She's still alive. She is a real American voice, and she is in love with
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the great outdoors. And a lot of her stuff is about the trees and the plants and the animals and the this. I just find her captivating. But in one of her poems, she writes about the journey, the journey of being alive. And I don't know if she is connected with the program or not, but here's what she writes. One day you finally knew what you had to do. One day you finally knew what you had to do. I go through periods when I don't know anything. I don't know what I'm supposed to do. Everything's vague. There's so much to do, you know, the cat box and the socks and the kitchen on fire. But one day you finally knew what you had to do. There became clarity and there became purpose and there became focus. You knew what you had to do and began. You took steps. You took action. Though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice. Did you ever notice how frequently bad advice is shouted? Shouted their bad advice. Though the whole house began to tremble.
Earthquake country, tornado country. The whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. You're trying to get out the door and they're just going to hold on. They're not going to let you go. Mend my life, each voice cried. Mend my life. Take care of me, me, me. It's my turn, me. Mend my life, each voice cried. But you did not stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy was terrible. It was already a wild night. It was already late enough and a wild night and the road full of fallen branches and stones. When there's crisis, it's never really lovely weather in the middle of the day. It's hurricane time and 4 a.m. It's time to run for your life. But little by little, poco a poco, day by day, slow work of God.
Little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own. It takes a while. I almost remember that day. I heard a voice and it wasn't my dad and it wasn't my mom and it wasn't my third grade teacher who was nuts and it wasn't the pastor who was crazy. It was me. My voice. You slowly recognized as your own that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, not away from the world, but into it. My craziness and my isolation keeps me from making friends, companions, and allies.
It keeps me from being someone who can work, love, and play. I'm isolated. Strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do, determined to save the only life you could save. Poems should be read twice and the second time without editorial comment. I heard Mary Oliver speak. It was a sign of civilization. It was at Dominican College of San Rafael in Northern California. An American poet came to read her poetry and there were 500 people to hear her. I took that as a little flicker of evolution and hope in an otherwise dark year. The Journey by Mary Oliver. One day you finally knew what you had to do and began. Though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice, though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. Mend my life, each voice cried, but you didn't stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough and a wild night and the road full of fallen branches and stones. But little by little as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn
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through the sheets of clouds and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do, determined to save the only life you could save. I think she's been there and I think she made some decisions that weren't easy. And sometimes what I notice with the family's really crazy, if the system is really crazy, if you're the only one getting well, they will blame you and they'll think you're crazy and it's your fault. And sometimes the only thing you can do is run for your life. We had a home group meeting, which has flaws, let me tell you. There are things I wish we could change there and make it better. We were talking one night about stuff, we had read some things from the literature and somehow the topic of running away comes up. And running away is not the same as being on the journey, just so you know. And the first fellow who shared talked about when he was 11, he ran away from home. The other fellow, when he was six, he ran away from home. Some of them were regular runners away from homes. And I listened to these men share and things were impossible, things were difficult, things were, things were. And I did not run away from home. I discovered books. I did not have to leave the house. I could open a book and go anywhere. And I loved biographies. And with the craziness at home, I became a voracious reader. And I still am. I still like it a lot. I like to read and I like to learn things. And I like novels and I like serial killer novels.
And I like horrible disembowelings. Helps me sleep. But what I need to learn how to do is be present in my own life with friends, companions, and allies today. I have one more thing to read and then we can take a break and break for 15 minutes and come back for a final half hour, then we're done. Okay, how's that? Because it's a long day and I know you need naps. I should say this or I'll forget. Some of us are worriers. My mom was a great worrier and I always thought that if I worried enough, I was doing something.
And if I liked you, I was supposed to worry about you. So rather than say, gee, I like you so much, I would say, I'm worried sick about you. It's a little Al-Anon crazy right there. Most of us, this is from How Al-Anon Works for Families and Friends of Alcoholics, page 33. Most of us want the very best for those we love. And the best we can offer may be our refusal to contribute any further to their path of destruction. It's called letting go. We cannot make choices for other people. Boy, I'd like to. And I have. I was working with another priest. We were working together doing some talks and I liked him but I thought he was a little socially retarded. I didn't tell him that, of course. But alcoholic family worse than mine and his dad was a drunk and a gambler, which makes it much more complicated.
And we were going somewhere and I'm trying to make nice to this guy because he needs some friends. Notice the patronizing, controlling thing here. And we were in Northern California. We were driving by Marin County, which is its own little part of the world. I don't like it very much but it's there. And they had those sheep and cows and goats and horsies on the hillside. And it was very pretty. It was springtime. And I said to my friend, I said to my friend, It was very pretty, it was springtime, and I said to my friend, look at those horsies on the hillside.
And he said, I hate horses. This is un-American.
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This is un-American. I mean, this is our national bird, you know, how can you hate horses? But I didn't ask right away, although inquiring minds want to know, I figured, let's wait a while. And a day or two later, I just said, what's the deal with the horses? And he said, my father was a gambler. And there were a number of times that the rent money went to the track. He hates horses. Oh, my. Well, we were doing something, and I did feel more evolved than he, more mature.
And even though he was my age, I was treating him like a child. And we were in Los Angeles doing something. We were doing something together, and a situation came up. If two adults had been involved in this situation, they would have had a conversation. But I did not have a conversation with him because I was making the decisions because he's socially retarded. So I, in his presence, mind you, made up our minds for both of us, and it was by far the better choice.
Well, he was the lost child in his family and didn't talk and didn't fight. Anyway, two or three weeks later, we were supposed to work together six months. Two or three weeks later, he just said, I'm leaving and I'm going home. And I said, what happened? He said, well, it's clear to me you think I'm an idiot, and I don't want to waste your time. I had no idea what he was talking about. I really did not remember when I took over, made the decisions, did not consult, did not ask.
I was doing it for his good. What's the problem? And what I found out, we had known each other for a long time that adults talk about things like that. I needed to engage him, and I had to tell him that I do not think he's an idiot, and I really don't. He's very, very bright. I did not think he was, but I thought out of the purest of motives, I was protecting him from an uncomfortable situation, but I was treating him like a four-year-old.
And I haven't done that with him since. And he has helped me ask for feedback and ask for input when I'm dealing with other adults. And I will sometimes just say, what would an adult do in a circumstance like this? Because I don't always know. In fact, rarely do I know, and then we can have a conversation. But I was busy making decisions for other people for their own good. I'm better at that. I still have problems with that.
We are not gods. Someone gave me a three-by-five card. I like three-by-five cards. I use three-by-five cards. This one's right by my phone, and it simply says, avoid playing God. Judging, knowing, learning, punishing, you know, God. We are not gods, and we can't truly know what is best for anyone else, no matter how obvious a particular course of action may seem to us at the time. Most of us had to hit a bottom, a point of personal agony, before we were ready to make real choices in our lives.
Alcoholics and others suffering from the effects of this family disease deserve the same chance to hit a bottom of their own. Along the way, there may be many awful, painful lessons for them to learn, and it can be excruciating to have to stand by and watch a loved one suffer through those experiences. And this is where I'm at the gate of the roller coaster, waving hello as they go by. I'm not going to get on the roller coaster.
It's no longer fun. It used to be fun. It's no longer fun. We cannot, some never learn at all, but we are powerless over alcoholism. We cannot hasten the process, nor can we spare a loved one from it. All we can do is serve as an example of the joy and serenity that recovery can provide and respect the rights of our loved ones to make the choices they need to make, even if we despise the nature of those choices.
Boy, that's hard information for me, and it's crucial to my understanding of my reactions
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with other people. Let's take a break. Let's come back in 15 minutes, one more half hour, then we're done.