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Source: DICOBE-00465 – Yvonne N – CETA GLEN CONF – 1972-04-15.mp3 File: dicobe-00465-yvonne-n-ceta-glen-conf-1972-04-15.mp3 Duration: 01:15:40
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It's selfish enough that I'd like to stand up here and talk about me for an hour and get a standing ovation from all you people. But I won't. Instead, I'll give you Yvonne from Oklahoma City. Thank you. My name is Yvonne Sparger and I'm an alcoholic and a pill head. I, uh, I get tickled, you know, when we go around and we say our name is like, well, mine is Yvonne S. I'm so conscious of my anonymity that it's spelled S-P-A-R-G-E-R.
When I came in, uh, at the beginning of the meeting, I sat back there in the back behind that dentist bunch. And everybody was opening their mouths and they were looking at me. I thought I was at a dentist convention. I really did. It is really, uh, well, I'm just quite grateful to, uh, to be here this evening. This meeting came at a right time for me. By profession, I'm an attorney. Uh, and that's a lot better than I, the profession that I would have been in if I hadn't quit drinking.
And I'm involved or was involved in a, in a lawsuit, uh, I'm from Oklahoma City, involving $50 million a year. And it's the biggest lawsuit that I ever handled. And I was sitting there writing the brief a couple of weeks ago. And, you know, I had a little, uh, a moment of being lucid and realized the, uh, the repercussions if I lost. And I faced that reality and I just started shaking all over on the count of, we just go on our merry way.
And so this week, having been in hearings, let me say that it's part of the trade or part of the art that you have to act hostile. And, uh, you have to object and you have to debate and you have to fuss and you have to fight in a courtroom. Because, uh, well, you never saw Perry Mason kiss Hamilton Berger. And so I have been surrounded, you know, by all this. And after the hearings were over, all of the other lawyers went out and they could relieve their tensions with a couple of drinks.
Well, I've used up my license to chemicals and I couldn't do that. And so I'd have to go home and I'd have to try to face the problems there and relieve the tensions by attempting to work the program. And my God, did I release everybody. It was just unbelievable, especially the other side. So this, to me, uh, is kind of a retreat. And though they say to us we do not get, uh, too thirsty or we do not get too hungry or we do not get too tired, the first thing that I did was just not pay any attention to that, you know, being an alcoholic.
And so, uh, I slept all afternoon. And all of a sudden this, I'm back now with my people. And this retreat, to me, is a chance to refuel, to go back out there and face the world. There's one thing that I learned when I got sober. And that's the thing that I didn't want to know. And that is that you can't hide anymore. There's no place to go. In reality, I think it's full of tension sometimes. But we can't hide.
And we've got to get out there with them. And we can't live in AA as a sanctity all the time. We have meetings to share our experience and our strength and our hope. And these are the places where we refuel. Because the AA program is to teach us to live with other people. And other people are not all alcoholics. And so we have to go out with them. And we cannot retreat into isolation. And that's the whole point of why we meet and we have these sharing experiences.
We're supposed to tell what we were like, what happened to us, what we're like now, and how we work the program. First of all, I'd like to say that I am not an expert on alcoholism. All I can tell you is what happened to me, how I came to this program. I don't consider anyone to be an expert in AA. I look at only the Big Book. And I have found that most of my problems, and really all of them, are solved by the Big Book.
And, of course, we get advice and we consult and we share. And it's so much easier, like at one of these retreats, if we have a problem and someone has been through that same thing, they help us and we just don't have to grope and fight for so long. And we're going to hurt as long as we're tired of hurting.
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And then when I get tired of hurting, I try to do something about it. I have found that since I have been sober, that I liked to hurt when I was drinking. And that was my occupation, is self-pity, feeling sorry for myself that the world was wrong, and that I loved misery. And, of course, its companion was alcohol. As I look back in my life, it is necessary for me to examine, to a limited degree, my childhood, because I became an alcoholic when I was growing up, though I did not drink at that time.
This program, to me, is a program of attitudes. And I had all of the attitudes of alcoholism when I was in the third and fourth grade and as a teenager. They just simply had not manifested themselves to the point that to relieve myself, I had found alcohol or pills. I was an only child for 13 years, and I was born in the Depression, and we did not have the material things as a lot of us didn't have in the Depression.
But my parents were, uh, my, I had a doting mother. She was overprotective. And it was, she loved me a great deal. And as an only child, a lot of people go through that. If I had an only child now, I probably would do the same things, because I guess that's just inherent in motherhood. When I was 13, I had a younger brother who I resented a great deal, simply because he was upstaging me, and he took the spotlight.
And though I loved him, he presented competition. I never really felt adequate as long as I can remember, even in the first grade. When the other kids were out on the playground, I just never fit in with them. I didn't have a lot of close friends, because it just seemed as though I couldn't communicate, and they didn't understand. I have always been insecure. When I was in high school, my mother became a practicing alcoholic.
And of course, this presents problems to someone who is growing up. I have been on both sides of the fence. I have been the child of an alcoholic and an alcoholic. And as a child of an alcoholic, it's difficult to convey the feeling that I had, the total loneliness, the total insecurity, the embarrassment, the humiliation, the hatred, yes, the hatred, and the resentment that I had for alcohol and for her.
Because, you see, I never knew when I came home from school how I would be treated, whether I would be loved, or whether I would be chastised, or whether she would be drunk. And I never felt free to bring people home, because you never know what the conditions are going to be like at home. And I, as an alcoholic, can attest to that, because you can't predict when you're going to be drunk and when you're not.
So I really withdrew even more from society and from them and from friends. And the only release that I had was that I had to go to the books, because that, to me, could prove to the other kids of my age that I was adequate and that I meant something and that I stood for something, and that at least they'd like me and they'd respect me, because I knew that they didn't, you know, for what I was. I was not talented in any way.
I could not excel in any way. And so I figured if I studied hard enough, then they would accept me. Now, that, as we know it now, certainly is alcoholic thinking, the lack of acceptance. Well, I earned a scholarship to college. I went away to school, and I still had these same problems. I started drinking, you know, as all kids do in college. And at that time when I was in school, this was years and years ago, about 21 years ago, she found the program of Alcoholics Anonymous.
And at that time, it was, you know, they met in apartments or in garage apartments, or it was a clandestine-type group meeting, particularly in the Midwest, because it was not as acceptable in this section of the country as it was on both coasts where it started, and then, of course, you know, in Cleveland around in there. And AA meant to me only one thing, and that was a convenience. And that was that when I came home, she wasn't drunk anymore, and that I didn't have to be embarrassed, and there was somewhat a stability in my life.
Again, everything was measured and gauged
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as to how it affected me, not what it had done for her, certainly not that it had saved her life. I could not accept 12th step work. Now, when she brought those people into our home, they were stinking, puking drunks, and I figured that I had had enough of drinking around me, and I had a great deal of resentment, and I wanted… To me, they had venereal disease. They were unclean, and I remember one time, you know, there's a poor guy, and he's shaken to death.
The guy's got 16, 17 years of sobriety now, and his name was Fred. I said, why don't you go wash Fred's coffee cup? He's got syphilis. Look at him. And I… I was really terrible, and I did not understand that the AA program… of necessity. We have to be of service, and we have to work… do 12th step work. But you see, again, AA to me was just how it affected my life, and I was grateful that she was sober because then I wasn't embarrassed.
I heard them talk about AA a lot over the dining room table, and she brought all those kooky people home, sober. Damn, they were crazy, just crazy, and they talked about that physical allergy, you know, even then. I didn't accept that, and I thought, well, now, if they want to believe… if those dum-dums want to believe that, that's okay. I don't buy that physical allergy business, but if that's what keeps them sober, then they can do their own thing, and I'm not going to argue with them because you get in an argument, and if you win, they get drunk.
That's the way I figured it, and I knew I'd win. So… So I just released the whole thing, but I had a knowledge, an intellectual knowledge of the 12 steps and of the 12 traditions. So it was… for me, when I came to AA, it was not as though it were a brand-new thing, and I had to learn all those steps, but let me say this, that an intellectual knowledge of the steps will not make this program work.
It takes a gut reaction. I knew all about the steps. I'd heard them discussed for years, but it takes an acceptance down here inside, and if you work it in your head, forget it. You see, the thing that was wrong with me was that I had worked everything in my head, and my head's what got me here. And when I came to this program, they said, you got to leave your head outside. That's what's wrong with you.
You don't analyze, you utilize, and you feel. Well, back to her recovery, I was… I just considered AA a convenience. I then went to law school, and in 1955, I became addicted to amphetamine. Of course, kids use this to get through exams, you know, and finals. I used it all the time once I was introduced to it. At that time, I was mixing amphetamine and alcohol. Even now, if you'll just give me a pure old stupid simple drunk, I'd rather work with them anytime than cross addiction of a pill head and a drunk, because those folks are crazy.
Crazy. And you know, I've heard people that have been on this program a long time, and they say, AA is for drinking. AA is for alcohol. Well, thank God that the people that I went to in AA didn't feel that way, and they had room for me, a pill head and an alcoholic, because if they had felt that way, I wouldn't have been here. I'd have been dead, I'm sure. So for me, the AA program includes pills, but that's just a personal opinion.
And you know, I want to work with pill heads. They're a lot harder to handle sometimes on the account of, I consider pills to be much more dangerous than alcohol. I don't mind, at this point, having alcohol in my home. It doesn't bother me. I've been sober three and a half years now. I have no desire to drink and haven't, you know, since I've, the desire was lifted from me about a month after I came on the program.
But there's no way that I will have a tranquilizer, an amphetamine, or a barbiturate in my medicine cabinet, because to me, that is the most dangerous thing in the world. Pills are too easy for me. I will not have them around me. I fear them, and to me, it's a healthy fear. I fear alcohol, but its presence doesn't upset me. Going to a cocktail party doesn't upset me as much as if somebody said, hey, you want a little eye opener.
If somebody said, hey, you want a little eye opener, you know, a little truck driver, I couldn't handle that.
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And so the application of the program in my life is very strict in this sense. I cannot comprehend how anybody can be on this program and can feel that they are successful and are working this program and taking pills. But that's my opinion. I know that if I took a tranquilizer, a tranquilizer, my date of sobriety would start at the time that I quit taking tranquilizers. I went to a meeting last week in Oklahoma City and I made this statement, you know, but I have to feel that way for me.
It doesn't make any difference what anyone else wants to do. But as far as I'm concerned, I'm not sober and I'm not clean if I'm taking pills. And I couldn't possibly get up and take a birthday cake. Well, this girl came up to me after the meeting. She said, I haven't had a drink in five years, but I've been taking sleeping pills and tranquilizers every night. And she said, but I've been sober, you know, for five years.
I said, no, in my opinion, you do your own thing. In my opinion, you've been sober today, and that's all, if you took a sleeping pill last night. However, if you want to work it your way and if you can, you know, make it, I have nothing to say at all on the count. I'm just concerned with Yvonne, that's all, and this is my sobriety. But I have never known anyone yet who has been able to take pills, who had to cross addiction like I did, who didn't get drunk.
I had a very close friend who last year, I thought, had a great program going for her. She also was a dual addict, and somehow or another, she started in on tranquilizers. She had a job, had a lot of tension in it, so she started taking them, you know, like a slip. She started taking them in February, and we buried her in March. And let me tell you something, if you really want to know how it feels as to what death is like, you go to a funeral, and you see the body of a friend, and you have someone get up and read chapter 5.
When they start out, rarely have we seen, and that'll get you, and that brings it home. But you see, my sponsor said to me, these things that happen to us on this program are object lessons. They are for us to learn by. And my fear of pills increased, you know, really. I'm doubly scared today. Well, after my addiction to amphetamine and 55 and mixing the two and so forth, I went ahead and I graduated from law school, and I have, I guess, what we call controlled drinking.
I went to work in the United States Circuit Court of Appeals, which is a federal court. I was always able to handle good jobs. I never got fired because of drinking. I never went to jail. I never went to a mental institution or to a hospital. And yet, when we tell our stories to each other, though we do not go through exactly the same things, in many instances we are able to identify because we have a common denominator, and that is an emotional sickness.
And I can identify with women who are in the federal penitentiary and people who have been in jail. I have been desperate enough to have been put in a mental institution. I was an alcoholic before I married this last time. To me, marriage was just a revolving door, you know. It was to make it legal for a period of six months. And I have always been, you know, up to that time, totally incapable of loving because of the attitudes that I had and the feelings and the crazy, you know, the insanity that goes with alcoholism.
And so being an alcoholic when I married this last time, I don't think my husband really knew what he was getting into. We have three children. They're a year apart. They're now ten, and they'll be nine, and they'll be eight. And all of a sudden, with all these kids, it was like a trap door. It was unbelievable, you know. Just constantly I was having kids. And I could not accept that responsibility because I had gone 31 years with no responsibility.
And all of a sudden, it was too much for me to handle. I could not accept it. And to me, my total freedom was gone. My alcoholism progressed, as we know that it does. I started drinking not at 5 o'clock, but at 4 o'clock. And then I moved it back until 2.
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And then I had to have a little drink at noon. And then pretty soon it was back to 9 o'clock, and then it was around the clock. I could not sleep at night. I was so filled with fear that I was afraid that if I went to sleep, that I would die in my sleep. And the thing that bothered me about dying was that I was such a terrific mother that nobody would be able to take my place. And, you know, I was stoned half the time with those kids.
And I knew that my husband could never find anyone as terrific and great as I was. Now, I weighed about between 165 and 170 pounds. I never took a bath. I never rolled my hair up. And I had a moo-moo. It was my drinking dress, and I slept in it. And I'd just drink, you know, into oblivion at night. And then I'd get up the next morning, I'd start again, and it was in the same dress. And that dress was going to crack if I didn't wash it.
It was that dirty. Women know how they feel, you know, when they're drinking. You look in the mirror and there's no self-respect. There's hate. You're so scared, so frightened. There's so much anxiety. There is no future. There is no hope. It is utter despair. I contemplated suicide many times. But I knew that I just didn't have the guts to carry it out. And I didn't really want to die. And yet I couldn't stand to live.
And I had projected myself into a mental institution. And I knew that my kids were going to come and see me on Sunday and we'd have a picnic lunch under the tree at the Happy Farm. And so one night, my husband was gone, and I guess, well, in November, I was walking the floor and I was drunk, and I didn't have any faith. I was afraid not to believe in God. I was raised in the church, and I was afraid not to believe in God because I was afraid of Him.
And yet it didn't, you know, and I didn't like Him. As a matter of fact, I hated God because I thought He had punished me constantly and He had done all these things to me, poor me. And so I said, God, if You're there, just help me. Just help me. Well, He works in strange ways, and it wasn't until February, three years ago, this last February, that I had a lucid moment, and I was drunk. My husband was gone, and I just went in and I dialed the operator, and I said, Get me Alcoholics Anonymous.
And she said, Where do you live? And I told her, and she rang them, and it was the North Hollywood Clubhouse. And they said, Are you drinking? I said, Hell yes, I'm drinking. Why do you think I'm calling you, you know? And so they asked me for my address, and they came. And so, you see, the hate and the resentment that I had for those stinking, puking drunks, I hated them so much. I hated everybody so much.
I had to call them to help me, and that was impossible for me to do. And they came, and I cried a lot, and I told them what was wrong, because I thought that I was the only one in the world who had felt that way, and I was so frightened. And I used to tell my husband that I just felt like that I was in an open grave, and people were just walking by and kicking dirt in on me. And he used to say to me, What are you afraid of?
Well, you see, I was an alcoholic, and if I knew what I was afraid of, I wouldn't have been afraid, and that was the dumbest question that I ever heard. And he was not an alcoholic, and there was no way that I could make him understand, but when those folks came that night, they understood. And I told them how I felt inside, and they said, We know. Those magic words, We know. And so they said, If you can just keep drinking, you know, till in the morning.
And they said, When do you start? I said, At 9 o'clock, because I got the kids off to school, and at 9 o'clock that phone rang. And they called me all day long, and I called them, and for me to keep drinking that day, I had to go five minutes at a time, and it was hell. And I went to my first meeting, and I saw this sign, and it says, We Care. And the guy that was leading that first meeting said, If you want to do something about yourself,
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he said, You've got to picture fear as a great big ball. And he said, The fact that you walk through that door means that you can cut that ball in half, and half your fear is gone. And we want to help you, and we care, if you care. Well, that guy is the fellow that's going to speak tomorrow night, Phil. He was the first person that I talked, that I listened to at the beginner's meeting, and he helped a great deal in my sobriety, and I'm grateful to him.
They told me when I first came on this program that drinking was not my problem. Now, I think that's pretty ridiculous to tell a newcomer, when you're sitting there shaking and dying, and you want a drink. That is your problem. And it takes a while for you to comprehend that drinking is not your problem. I thought they were crazy. If that Rosemary, the woman that's calling me at 9 o'clock on the phone, would have said, Yvonne, drinking's not your problem.
And my God, I was, you know, just dying to go out and buy a bottle of whiskey. But they don't do it that way. Pretty soon this realization comes that my problem was me, and that drinking was just a symptom of what was wrong with me. I liken that to an automobile accident, and I say that it's not the fuel that's at fault, but the driver. And the thing that I had tried to achieve was that I would have a plateau or a constant feeling that I got when I drank.
And we know that's impossible, because we have to sober up, and we have to go through the remorse and the guilt. But if I had been able to sustain that permanent feeling that alcohol gave me, I don't know if I'd have ever gotten here. But I had to take the pills. I had to take the uppers to get up. I had to take the barbiturates to go to sleep. Even though alcohol was a depressant, I had taken so much amphetamine, I was up to 150 milligrams a day, and I had taken so much amphetamine, and I was so high that even with alcohol I couldn't get down at night.
And so I had to take barbiturates, and I was really on thin ice as far as just staying alive. But I didn't know that until now. I remember that I had so much resentment and so much hate in me for people in general, particularly my family, that I could not… I thought it was all their fault. They tried my patience, and how could I be wrong? There were times when my children would come in the kitchen and I would have to shut the drawers that had the knives in them because I was afraid of what I might do.
I was that sick. And that fear of being unable to predict or to control my behavior led me to believe that I was insane, and I truly was. This program is simple for me, and yet it's the hardest thing that I have ever done because this program is exactly the opposite of what I am. I had a bunch of tools that I worked with out there, dishonesty and deceit. I had impatience. I had lying, cheating, stealing, all those things.
And so when I came to AA, they said to me, we're going to have to take those tools away from you, and we're going to have to replace them with just the opposite, and you're going to have to learn to love, and you're going to have to learn to be honest. And some days I take my first set of tools back, you know, and I work out there with them, but I'm better than I used to be, and I've got a long ways to go.
I'm not the person that I want to be ultimately, you know, because I still have that kooky thing of being a perfectionist, and I'm trying to get rid of that, and some days it goes away, and some days it comes back, even in my work. I'm never happy with my work because I'm an alcoholic, you know, but I'm growing, and I'm better. I call this disease a three-fold disease. The allergy of the body, of course, with the mental compulsion to drink, they say it's two-fold, but for me it was a spiritual sickness.
I had to completely unlearn everything that I had believed The thing that I had believed about God, I stated a moment ago that I didn't like God
[00:30:01]
at all before I came to this program. God was terribly unfair to me. God punished me a great deal and it just seemed like that he had it in for me and it was every third day, zap, I'll get her, and he did, you know. This concept of God that I had was one that I had learned in the Blessed Church. It was that concept of punishment that we in the Bible Belt are taught to believe. It was that if we did something, we were going to get punished and we equated this wrongdoing with justice and there is always punishment that is involved with justice.
I could not understand forgiveness. I could never ask for it. And you see, God to me just sat there with a book and he just put black marks by my name mostly, you know, with my ego. He didn't pay any attention to you guys, besides I was doing, you know, a lot of things. And he was the kind of a God who to me had allowed his son to be cruelly crucified on the cross and said, now, Yvonne, if you don't believe that, you're going to go to hell.
And this is the kind of loving God that the AAs were asking me to turn it over to. Well, needless to say, I was somewhat reluctant. And so, because he was going to do it to me when I wasn't looking, he always has. And so I had to learn that God loved me. And that was a difficult task because my concept of love, as I had grown up, was that like a child. If you do good things and you act right, mama's going to love you.
But if you act wrong, you're going to get punished. And consequently, I felt that I had to earn love and that by wrongdoing, I could not receive love. Now, this was my problem with my higher power, that by my wrongdoing, he couldn't love me. I had no understanding of forgiveness. And I felt that I had to earn his love by doing good things. Well, the Lord knows I hadn't done any good things and that I didn't deserve his love.
And so that is why I, as an alcoholic, felt so undeserving and so unworthy. And I had a deep sense of sin and all those things because of my childish comprehension of what love was, that it had to be earned. And I could not understand that God just loved me regardless of what I'd done. He loved me and that I could, and he was patient with me. He waited a long time on me, you know, with all the things that I felt that I'd done that were so wrong.
And all I had to do was sincerely ask to be forgiven and instantaneously those things were forgiven and he didn't think I'd done anything wrong anymore. Like in the Lord's Prayer, it says that, there's a metaphor, it says, forgive us of our debts as we forgive our debtors. By debts we're talking about, well, like if I owed you some money and if I came to you and you said to me, the debt's canceled, you don't owe me anymore, well, you couldn't collect on that debt.
You can't cancel a debt and collect on it at the same time. And the same is true. You cannot forgive someone and punish them at the same time. The two are incompatible. And if my child asks me for forgiveness, I cannot whip him and say, Ricky, I forgive you. The two do not coexist. And this was the sudden spiritual awakening that had to happen to me, that when I asked for forgiveness, that God loved me and I was forgiven.
And that the guilt was gone and this is something that I had carried all of my life. Sometimes alcoholics have a tendency just to feel guilty for no reason, you know, like you get up in the morning and you feel guilty. And it was just, it's kind of a neurotic thing. Everything is magnified and it's focused in on you. And I had this terrific sense of guilt that I carried for 38 years and it nearly caused my death.
This program was no utopia. They didn't promise me anything. They said, if you'll do what the big book tells you to do, you'll stay sober.
[00:35:06]
And then they talked to me about the fringe benefits. Well, my personality was so warped that I was a paradox. I wanted to be loved more than anything else by people, a people pleaser, acceptance. And yet at the same time, I was totally incapable of loving myself. I wanted people to tolerate me and I was totally intolerant. I wanted people to approve of me and yet I approved of no one or no thing. I felt so superior and yet so inadequate inside.
I felt so deserving of everything that happened to me, never grateful, but deserving. And yet inside, so undeserving and so unworthy. And that's how I got here. I say that I was compulsive, repulsive, and impulsive. And I learned that this program is, it's kind of like the little red hen. You know, you got to do it yourself. Nobody can do it for you. They can give you advice with love, but you got to do it by yourself.
And it's hard. It was hard for me and it's hard today for me because, again, it is everything that is the opposite of what I am. And we only work for progress, that's all, spiritual progress, never perfection. And I know that as long as I am alive and as long as I am sober, I will have to continue to work this program because if I don't, I will drink. And if I drink, I will die. And it's as simple as that.
So this program to me keeps me alive. Today, I started taking my fourth step again when I was up there resting. I think that when we grow a little, we can become, I quote, a little more objective. I didn't say objective, but you know when you're sober a year or a year and a half and you take your fourth step, say you list 20 things. That's as far as your horizon is broad, but then you get, so you have a little longer length of sobriety and pretty soon you're going to list 30 things on the count of we're more objective and we know ourselves better.
And so I've been saying I'm going to take that fourth step over again because I don't think that I really did it to my satisfaction. Again, you see, there's that old junk about being a perfectionist, you know, like I want to take the best fourth, best fourth step of anybody in this room and I'm going to keep on working at it. So I started today trying to be real honest and all of a sudden some things came to me and gee, I don't know why I had never seen them before.
I started listing all of the character defects. I started with impatience and that's a biggest, one of the biggest problems that I've got. And I said, okay, why are you impatient? Well you're impatient, I'm impatient and we put that down as a defect. I'm impatient because people don't agree with my point of view. I'm impatient because people do not live up to my standards. I am impatient because my children do not behave like adults.
I am impatient because people do not want, do not conform to what I think they should do and that the root of impatience, folks, is ego. I took every character defect that I could think of that I had and to me it was like a tree and the trunk was ego and all the branches that went out had labels on them of character defects and like drinking is a symptom of what's wrong with us, our character defects are a symptom of our ego, my manifestation of my ego.
And I just had to boil down my problems and why I'm an alcoholic and what this program is about to one word and that's ego. The twelve steps that we have work on that. We talk about taking our fourth step, listing that stuff. We talk about the fifth step, going to somebody. We talk about having to make amends to people. All these things are working at my ego to deflate it, to try to make me humble, to try to make me the opposite of the things that I have always been and I still possess, though I work at them.
The tenth step, you know, that we apologize when we're wrong. The eleventh step, that when we seek through conscious contact, you know, a prayer meditation,
[00:40:02]
a conscious contact with God, we pray, and this is the key word to me only, we pray only for the knowledge of his will. And how many times have I been guilty of praying for Yvonne? Oh, God, please don't let them treat me that way. God, please let this deal work out for me. Please let me get this appointment. Always me, always. Sometimes other people. I've prayed for drunks, I've prayed, but you see that eleventh step says true humility is when we pray only for the knowledge of his will.
And if we pray for that, we accept whatever it is that happens to us. Therefore ego cannot be involved, because when ego's involved, we're running it. We're running it. And that's my problem, is trying to run things. When I use my head, I get in trouble. There are a lot of people who are too smart to make this program, but I've never seen anyone that's too dumb. And I just about fit into that category of being too smart, you know, for a long time.
Because I've gone to school longer than those other people that they were so stupid. And yet, you see, they had the answer for me. All the logic and all the reason in the world could not give me the secret. And that secret was love. It's a feeling. I took another character defect, responsibility. And I don't like responsibility yet. You know, I didn't like that old lawsuit about, you can't tell people that.
I couldn't tell my boss, I don't like to be responsible, see, because they don't understand, you know, how we feel. And the responsibility goes back to, what's a kid not have? What is it that a kid doesn't possess? He doesn't like responsibility. I can't make my children responsible. And you see, it's that I am so emotionally retarded as a, when I came in this program, I was a child. I had the body of a 38-year-old woman and the emotions of a child.
The only time for a child is now. And that's time, that's like I am, impatience. And I want it now. I want you to do it now. To my kids, I want to tell you once, I want you to do it now. Impatience is childlike. And what is a child? A child is the center of his own universe. They are selfish. They are conceited. They are not responsible. Because responsibility comes when we begin to accept that others have rights too.
And we begin to consider those things. A child is wrapped up in his own world. Only his needs are the ones with which he is concerned. You take a six-months-old baby, if it's hungry at night, folks, it doesn't say, gee, I hate to wake up and cry because my mother's tired. You know, my children now, seven and eight years old, are not concerned with the fact that I might be a little tired. They want me to get up and make them a cake or cookies right then.
And I'm exhausted. But they don't understand. They're childlike. They're irresponsible. They're selfish. That's how I got here. With the emotions of a child. Responsibility, being childlike, and being childish, of course, again, was an ego problem. The world centers around me to the exclusion of all others. And in my prayer and in my meditation, I seek to have a closer spiritual relationship with God.
And as a result of this, I call it personal piety. How many times have we heard alcoholics say, gee, I felt like I could walk on water. I felt that way. I have felt so pious and so sanctimonious. But you see, when I have felt that way, I have had no love. You can be pious and sanctimonious without love. And you can be spiritual, you think. I could, and I am sometimes now. But it's that I've got to understand how I feel inside.
And when I feel that way, somehow down in my gut, I'm uncomfortable, but I don't know what's wrong. Well, it's that I've got my ego involved. It's like I feel like I'm a chosen person. And I go to meetings sometimes, and I've heard members of AA that have a long length of Members of AA that have a long link to sobriety, and we all just sit around and it's a can you top this piety contest. And everybody's sitting there and they've all been sober a long time
[00:45:03]
and they're filled with pride and self-congratulations. And they ain't got no love. No love. Because you can't have personal piety and have love because ego is involved. Ego is the only thing that stands between man and God. And you can't be spiritual if your ego's in the way. And you can't relate or love other people if ego's in the way. So it's ego that's my problem that I will have to continue to try to do something about the rest of my life. It's ego that caused all of my warped attitudes, my insanity, my relationships with other people which were unpleasant, and certainly my spiritual or soul sickness. When I get angry now, on this program this long, I do one or two things. I either rebel and, you know, want to hit them in the mouth, or I withdraw. And by withdrawing I say to myself in a phony way, I'm going to release you. That's not what I'm doing. I'm taking my toys and I'm going home because I didn't get my work. And again, you see, it's that ego. And the same thing is true with self-pity. When we become angry, we relive that anger. And when we relive it, we sit at home and we say, that dirty guy, and that becomes resentment. And then from resentment we go into self-pity. And we feel sorry for ourselves. And why? Ego. And we look at things that are happening to other people. And gee, it's cool for them. And it's great. But to us, it's really. We, the whole world, we look at the whole world through a thin veil of manure. And, and there we are and they're after us again. And again, it's the same source or the same disease of all character defects.
And that's ego. It was difficult for me to ask for forgiveness when I was drinking because of my pride. I could not ask to be forgiven on the count of if I asked to be forgiven, you see, then I would have had to have admitted that I'd done something wrong. And I couldn't do that. I couldn't tell God that I'd done something wrong because I had my own image of myself. And I was perfect in my eyes. And everything that had happened to me was somebody else's fault. They did it to me. And had it not been for them, they're the ones that got me drunk. He caused me to lie if it hadn't been her fault.
So this element of forgiveness, this lack of understanding that I had in my concept of God, was again based on ego. Ego alone. You know, when we come to AA, there is a, a terrific thing that we do when we have our humor. And we can laugh, you know, at ourselves and what we've done. I never could laugh at myself before I got here on the count of if I had laughed at my mistakes, then I would have had to admit that I wasn't perfect. I would have had, it would have been a destruction of my image. And so I could laugh at other people, you understand. Oh yeah, really laying on them. But when it came to me, I couldn't laugh at anything that I'd done. And yet we come to AA, and this again is a method or a technique in our treatment and in our, the control of our ego. Because I can stand here tonight and say to you, which I couldn't have done four years ago, that there were times when I was drunk and I would wake up in the morning and the bed linens around me contiguous to adjacent and under had a humidity of a hundred percent.
And that's not ladylike, you know. And my husband had to put up with that. Now, as long as, you know, as I've been sober, if he did that now, I wouldn't sleep with him. What they have to put up with, you know, from us drunks, but we have humor and the humor in effect, what it does to us, we're laughing at ourselves and we're realizing that we're not perfect and that we're just human and we're kind of weak. In Corinthians, Paul has said, love is neither anxious to impress, nor does it cherish inflated ideas of its own importance.
Sometimes I think that when we talk about this program, it's just boiled down. I know that some
[00:50:01]
people say it's love and service. It's just boiled down really to one word and that's love. And we cannot love with ego. There's no way that we can love another person. When I practice these character defects of impatience, when I am deceitful, it's because I want to protect myself or I've got another motive. Or when I lie, it's the same thing. And I've got disdain for myself and I've got the same thing. And I've got this ego that's involved. I can't love, really love you all or God if my ego is involved. On the Sermon on the Mount, the carpenter opened it, the Sermon on the Mount, and he was talking about those with humility will find happiness in the kingdom of God.
Now then, if humility means the lack of ego and the lack of ego means love, when we're talking about the kingdom of God, we're talking about doing God's will. And God's will is love. I've always had a problem with understanding all this stuff about what is God's kingdom, because having been raised in the Bible Belt, I always thought that the kingdom of God was something that took place ad infinitum, 50,000 years hence. And that's when we had the battle of Armageddon, and some of us were left in the fields and some of us weren't. And we went up there and Peter gave us this thumbs up and you thumbs down and, you know, some got through and some didn't. Now that I had always felt in Sunday school, that was the kingdom of heaven. But that's not now what I have understood from this program to be the kingdom of heaven. 2,000 years ago, you know, it was said in the scriptures, the kingdom of heaven is at hand. It said the hour of the kingdom comes. In the Sermon on the Mount, the master said, I have come to proclaim the establishment of my father's kingdom. And he was talking then in present tense. So the kingdom of heaven is right now and it's here. And what is that kingdom? Well, this program has taught me that that kingdom is, well, it's God's will. It's doing God's will. And yet we're also told, and we've been told many times that the only way that we can enter the kingdom of heaven is as a child. Now I'm not talking about childish. I'm talking about child-like. Why child-like? And what does that mean? Well, I learned at a meeting, I learned a definition at a meeting one night, and they were talking about faith. And they said that faith is undoubting trust, undoubting. And it's like the faith that a child has in his parents. You see, a child doesn't have to earn their love, really. A child doesn't have to earn the care of his parents. And he knows that you're going to protect him, and he knows that you're going to take care of him when you're sick. And he's got the security in you, and he depends entirely on you. It's dependency, utter faith, undoubting trust.
And that's what it's talking about when you say like the faith of a child entering the kingdom of heaven. Now, in our program, what we call that is when we take our third step, that second surrender that we make, the first surrender being the first step. And when we take our third step and we have a complete and total surrender, it is an undoubting trust, a faith. Because when you truly turn your will and your life over to the care of God, you've got to be willing to accept what happens, whatever it is. This was the most difficult thing for me to do. It was impossible. And I went to a lot of meetings, you know, third step meetings, and they'd talk about that. And I'd say, how? How do you do it? And they'd say, oh, when you do it's Marvey. You got to pack your bag. You're going to travel fast. I said, how? Folks, how? And I couldn't get an answer. And so I had to go home and I had to work out my own technique in taking my third step. And I had to do it literally, literally. I've done a lot of things literally. And it said that I had to turn my life over the care of God. And I started there.
And so I made the decision that God could have my life. It was as simple as that. And by that, I mean death. And if he felt that it was necessary that I be called or whatever,
[00:55:03]
I had to be willing to go. Not that I wanted to. There's so many things that I wanted to be able to do. I wanted to be with my kids, you know. But I had to be willing to go. And once I was willing, then I was able to turn my life over to him. And that was total surrender. I had to be willing to be able to die that night in my sleep and accept it. Going to sleep knowing that I might not wake up without fear. And then when I could accept this, turning my will over wasn't that much of a problem. And so when I took my third step and I had to do that, and I have to take my third step 25 times a day now because I've still got that I'm gonna run it and I know best. And from past experience, all I do is mess it up. Always. And so I have to constantly fight this. So I take my third step and what I do is with a complete faith. Knowing that whatever God wants me to do, I'll accept that and I want to do his will. And I just trust him completely. That is entering the kingdom of heaven. And when we enter the kingdom of heaven and we do God's will, we got to do one thing.
Everybody goes around, you know, and I've heard it asked a lot of times, well, what's God's will? Well, it's simple. God's will's love. That's all. And it's love without ego. And this whole program is love. And it's boiled down. It's uh, it's a simple program. It's me that's complicated. And yet I'm really not complicated at all. My problem is ego. I'm just wrapped up in myself and I'm trying to get better. And I am better than I used to be. But some days I ain't so good.
However, at the end of the day, when I go to sleep at night, I know one thing. And that is that I'm sober and I've had 24 hours of sobriety. And that's enough to be grateful for because I could have never done it alone. I could have never done it without you people. And I certainly could have never done it ever without the help of my higher power. They say that in AA, we, we share our experience and our strength and our hope.
In the words of Kahlil Gibran, he said, unless a heart be broken, how can it be unsealed? And all of us have had heartache and all of us have hurt and all of us have suffered, all of us have suffered, but it is that thing which binds us together, that suffering and that feeling with our heart for each other. I have learned another thing on this program and that is the, well, it's to be grateful. And I have never been grateful in my whole life.
I had always felt that I deserved everything that I got because I was so terrific. And a lot of times I got a lot of things I didn't deserve because that was dirty God up there punishing me because he didn't like me. And the technique that I learned came from an AA meeting. And they said, you cannot be unhappy and be grateful at the same time. There's no way. If you're grateful, you aren't unhappy.
Well, now the next question is, well, how do you get grateful when you're in that bag and you're miserable and you don't want to read the big book and you want to suffer and you love it? Well, I just had to go in and I just, you just lay down on the bed and you start giving everything you own away and you just give it to God and you give him, and I'm talking about you really give it to him. From your gut, you really give it to him. And I give him my kids, just give them away.
And I give him my family. I give him what I own that is material, everything. I give it all. I give him my pajamas and I'm just laying there with nothing, nothing. And that's a pretty scary feeling. Really knowing inside that you don't have anybody or anything and you're talking with God and then you ask God to take them back and you do just one at a time. And that's And you do just one at a time, and I take my kids back, and gee that's great, and then I take back my family, and they're like presents, and then I'm grateful, and then all of a sudden all of the things that have bothered me just suddenly diminish like ice in the sun, and they're nothing, just nothing, and I realize how truly lucky I am, when I learned that God loved me, and that he
[01:00:18]
in his love had given me lots of presents, he did it with generosity, and he just splashed everything in the world, you know, he didn't measure it out by cupfuls, he gave it to me in abundance, and it's mine, and it's there, and I'm grateful for that, and when I, well you know like it says, my cup runneth over, and when I can feel that sense of gratitude, then the problems of the day seem to go away, as a matter of fact you just don't hardly think of them, because you're so busy loving God, and sometimes I feel like now I just want to go out and hug a tree, you know it's that simple childlike feeling that you get, that's what this program has done for me.
I know that when I, I first came on the program, I always tell this story, when I pitch, because it was the first realization that, even when I was sober that I was a bitch. And I really was. And, uh, now you understand that I was an alcoholic, you know, before I got married, and that I, well, did all the things that alcoholic single women do. And we're very lucky that the membership requirements do not require virginity.
I don't, I don't know very many that could belong. And a lot, I know you guys couldn't. You know, it's just a desire to stop drinking. But I was at this meeting, I was at this meeting and this, this woman got up and she was a prostitute. And so she was talking about how she turned tricks in order to get a drink. And you must understand that I knew what she meant when she said she turned tricks. And so after that meeting was over, I said, I think it's really terrible.
They should let someone like that at the microphone. It doesn't impress the newcomers. And so with all of my arrogance and my personal piety, I immediately condemned her for what she had done and what she had been, and that she was scum. And so an old timer said to me, Yvonne is the definition of alcoholism that when we take a drink, we cannot predict what our behavior will be. I said, oh, that's right.
Condescendingly, I said, oh, that's right. It's like as if I'd written it. And so he said, if that's true, then we are capable of doing anything that any other alcoholic has done. And he said, don't you ever sit in a seat of condemnation. Don't you ever judge what any other alcoholic has done. Because the only difference between you and that woman up there is that she charged for it. You know, sometimes we wonder what our purpose is, and we wonder, why me?
Why did I have to be the drunk? You know, why couldn't it have been somebody else? I don't know why I'm an alcoholic. You know, I mean, it's like if you were going to do a random sampling and the Lord just zapped us. I don't know, but, and I don't understand what my purpose is. But you see, if I could understand God, my God would be pretty small. And so all I can do is just depend upon this program, knowing that I got sober for a reason.
I don't think any of us got here by coincidence or by happenstance. There are too many drunks dying tonight in the streets of this country, in their bedrooms of heart attacks, whatever, for us just to happen, to get to AA.
[01:05:00]
I think there's a reason, and I think that we've all got a purpose, and we don't know what it is. But I know this, that this program works. I don't believe it, I know it. And there's a difference between those two things. It's like the preacher that was talking, and he was about the difference, and he said, on the front rows got 12 children. She knows they're hers, but her husband just believes they're his.
And I know that this program works. I know, I have seen it. This whole room is filled with miracles. It is a miracle for me to be here and to be sober. A true miracle. You know, in a way, I think we're kind of miracle workers, because we do what we're told to do in the 12th step. We go out to help the practicing, the suffering alcoholic, and a lot of times, you know, the sober suffering alcoholic. That's what we do with each other.
And like, again, this is not new. In the scriptures it says, and be of service to one another. And it says, You see, it's love in action. Now, nobody can know how I really love God unless I act that way towards someone else. And I can do my personal piety thing and put my hash marks on and yell I'm an AA and gee, I'm great, I don't drink. And I love God, but until it is intermingled with my living, it doesn't mean a damn.
I don't want what those folks have got that practice their program that way. I don't want to be pious. I just want to be able to love without ego. That's the only way that I can love. I just want to be able to share and I've got to be able to receive at the same time the love that we have for each other, that you give me and that I give you because it's a thing that flows. This program to me is one of total commitment.
I can't work it halfway. If I work it halfway, you know, I'm going to get drunk. I've heard people say that they don't have any more drunks left in them from the podium. I do. I've got a lot of drunks left in me. The point is I don't have another recovery. I don't know that I'll ever get back. And if I don't get back, folks, I die. And I don't want to gamble. I've got it too good right now to go out and risk that.
It's kind of like the story of the pig and the chicken and they're walking down the road and they see a bunch of hungry people. And so they say, Hey, let's give these people breakfast. And the chicken says, Let's give them ham and eggs. And the pig says, That is a contribution from you and a total commitment from me. That's the way I have to do it. A total commitment. Well, I was supposed to tell you where I'm at now.
My time is about up. I got my sobriety in North Hollywood and a friend of mine called and told me that he was going to run for office. And he asked me to come home and campaign for him. And I'd known this guy since we were eight years old. And we'd gone to school together. And so I was going to come back to Oklahoma anyway that summer to visit my parents. I said, yeah, I'll come home and, you know, campaign.
And I did. And I stayed through September and we had a runoff campaign and stayed through September and then we had a general election. And so I had to stay then. And the guy was elected. And, boy, it was really rough. It was really rough. And a lot of people used this program and we were using it then. In Oklahoma County we were doing, you know, saying first things first. And he called me the day of the election and he said, well, what do you think?
And I said, I've surrendered. I've surrendered. He says, I know what you mean, Yvonne, but don't let anyone from the press hear that. Well, the time came that I had to go to him. He was elected governor. And the time came that he asked me to come back and go to work on the crime commission. And the time came that I had to tell him that I was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous
[01:10:01]
and that was very difficult for me. And so I went to his office and I didn't sleep at all, you know, the night before. You know, sometimes it's that stinking ego and that pride and you don't want to go and zip your guts. So I went in and I said, you know, I don't drink. He says, oh, that's right. He doesn't drink either, by the way, but it's not because he's been through what we've been through. I think he's crazy because he doesn't drink.
I can't comprehend anyone. And so I said, oh, that's right. And I said, well, the reason that I don't drink is that I'm a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. I didn't say to him I'm an alcoholic. I said, I'm a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. Couching it. And he said, gee, that's great. That's really great. He said, those people are something else. They really do have a lot of strength. You're strong. You know, I wanted to say, hell, I'm so weak.
You just don't know. And so I went home and I just was practically in tears because, you see, I felt that I had really missed it all because looking again, ego, acceptance. I wanted him to approve of me. So I went home and that afternoon the telephone rang. And he said, the Attorney General is here now and he wants you to go to work for him on Monday. Which was not even, I wasn't going to take the job that I was supposed to take.
And the Attorney General didn't know. I said, I'll be there. I was really excited. And I was so sorry I had told, you know. And then this happened. So then I had to go in. I had to tell the Attorney General. I says, you know I don't drink. Same script. The reason I'm a member of AA. Well, this guy is 32 years old so it was a little more difficult to communicate with him because I thought he was too young to understand.
And so he said, gee, that's really great. That's marvelous. I said, well, there's a little more. I told the Governor this too. I said, you know, I was also on drugs. I was a pill head. Well, now that upset him. That did. So I told the Attorney General that. Well, he had just been appointed the Chairman of the Narcotics Commission. And I was telling him I was almost a junkie, you know, working for him.
And so, well, I said, well, you know, I shouldn't have told. And two weeks later I was appointed as the attorney to the Narcotics Commission. So those folks care and they know and we shouldn't be ashamed. And I truly was reluctant to tell him but you see it was necessary and I think that was my purpose. But I didn't have enough sense to realize that. But somehow you just do the thing that you feel that you've got to do.
You know, maybe it's just innate or something or God just kind of tells you. But I'm stupid sometimes that I don't know and I just go ahead and do it and then regret it and then it works out and then I take the credit and there's ego. In closing, I just want to say that I've got a lot of fringe benefits. My husband's still with me. God bless him. Still got my kids. I'm sober today. And what this program has done is that it has made me able to face living in those people.
And I have taken reality and I have made it a spectrum. And I've cut off the past with all of the guilt and the remorse that I have felt because I have been forgiven for those, of those things. I've asked sincerely. And that burden has been lifted. And then I've taken my future which is always filled with anxiety as we understood it before and when taking the third step that has been relieved. And so it has cut my reality down to a small slice that's left in the middle and that's today.
Just 24 hours and I just try to practice the program to the best of my ability. And some days it's not so good. And some days I've got that personal piety, you know. And then some days I just really feel good because I've been able, I think, to love. And it's the first time in my life that I have ever been able to feel. I never felt. to feel I never felt before. I don't have a lot. I've got three and a half years of daily bread, and that's all that I can ask for if I live by this program, is just my
[01:15:03]
daily bread. And I know that tonight, when I go to bed, the curtains, I guess, of night are going to fall on today's sobriety, and like we say on this program, tomorrow they will rise on the first day of the rest of my life. God bless you.