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Source: Marie – Practicing the Twelve Steps in Milwaukee (Date Unknown).mp3 File: marie-practicing-the-twelve-steps-in-milwaukee-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 00:44:27
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Marie, I didn't get to know too well when we were in New York. I met her, but I didn't get to see too much of her. But from the beginning, I felt as if when I did meet her, I was going to like her. Because when Bill would refer to her, he would always say, My Marie. It was such a twinkle in his eye, I was sure I was going to like her too. So now, Marie will give us the other side of the story. By the way, Marie.
Applause Well, now you're going to hear my version. Can those of you in the back hear me? You can't? Okay. My name is Marie, and I am an alcoholic. And I'm very happy to be here in Milwaukee. It's the first time I've ever been here. And my father's father lived here as a boy. And I found four or five [family name omitted] listed in the phone book that I hope to check out before I go home. And I hope to get to know many of you before we leave for home tomorrow.
It's delightful to be on an early meeting and to get this behind me. Poor Sylvia over there is hanging until tomorrow. And tonight I'll just have fun and my butterflies will be gone and she'll be growing eagles. I would like to use the time that I have to talk to you today, talking about our 12 steps to recovery in AA and what I have tried to do with them. I think it's wonderful when someone who is new in AA will speak at all.
And I don't care what they say or how long they take to say it. But in my opinion, too darn often, people who have been around AA and sober long enough to know better still spend the lion's share of their time babbling about how they used to drink. And then when the time is almost gone, they say, and then I came to AA and I got sober and I'm happy, thank you. You see, there's very little I could tell you about how I used to drink that would be much help to you.
Because as you may have gathered, I didn't do it well. But there is quite a bit I can share with you. Not about getting sober, you've got to do that yourself. And if you've been trying and if you haven't been able to, for heaven's sakes, go to a hospital so that when you come out you will have a choice. You will be physically well enough to have a choice about whether you will drink or you won't. But there's an awful lot I can share with you of my experience in staying sober.
Because once before I came to AA, I managed to get six days without taking a drink, without any help from you or God or anybody else. I did it on my own. Once. [unclear] found it necessary to take a drink. So I found an awful lot here in AA that I didn't know before I came. Things that have made the difference. Things that have made it possible for me to have a choice about whether I will drink or whether I won't.
Now in the first step we admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable. Now, someone who is new in AA very often does not want to identify with me and how I used to drink. What they want me to do is shoot off my big mouth about things I did that they haven't done yet. Because then they can explain it all away. They can get the devil out of here and get back to drinking, which is what they want to do.
Now why do they want to go back to drinking if it's so harmful and so awful? I'll tell you why. Because all the effects of alcohol are not bad, even for the alcoholics. And in many ways I had learned to use alcohol to make my life more bearable. I had learned to depend on alcohol before I knew of all the nasty little side effects that I wasn't going to care for.
[00:05:00]
But by the time those things reared their ugly heads, the hours I couldn't account for, the times I disgraced myself in public, the whole nasty mess, by that time I had reached a point that I couldn't imagine trying to live without the things that alcohol would do for me. It's true it was doing less and less for me and more and more to me, but I didn't know any other way. Now that, I didn't even have to get drunk to be in real trouble.
All I needed would be enough to affect my judgment. That Indian Bill mentioned, it sounds awful, but believe me it was innocent. In the last and worst year of my drinking, I wasn't drunk all the time. In that last and worst year of my drinking, I got a national award for service to children. And they don't give you those awards because you were drunk all the time. I was still able to serve on the State Executive Board of Woman's Club and I had 125 women who worked at my direction.
And unfortunately, that year I was State Chairman of the Navajo Indian Health Project. Well, the local PTA were looking for an Indian to come and entertain the children and they were willing to pay good money for this. And I had more Indians than anybody could shake a stick at, so naturally I offered to get them an Indian since they were going to pay and everything. Well, it came the morning the Indian was supposed to arrive and he was late.
Bill said I wouldn't drink in the morning. Most of the time I slept in the morning. But I was up bright and early this morning and the Indian wasn't there and I was getting nervous. And I had a bottle of scotch. And I knew that a couple of drinks would be very good first aid. And if I had a couple, it would take the edge off my nerves. And it did. But unfortunately, it also affected my judgment. Now, I wasn't drunk. I swear to this day I wasn't drunk.
But when the Indian arrived, he was plastered. Now, if I hadn't had those couple lousy delts of scotch to settle me down, I would have taken one look at him and I would have said, Ouch! I would have called the school. I would have canceled the whole thing. But no. I gave him a couple cups of coffee. Well, since I've been to Yale, I know that it doesn't sober you up. All you get is a drunk that's wide awake and it would have been better if I had let him go to sleep.
But I took him and off to school we went and everything went all right, fairly well, until we got to the question and answer period. One of the kids said, Are you married? And the poor devil must have thought he was playing the nightclub circuit because he said, I got married on Groundhog's Day and I've been in a hole ever since. There I am up on the stage with this nitwit, the representative of Junior Woman's Club.
All those generations my family had lived in town went down the drain. Well, anyway. Whether your life has been made unmanageable through the use of alcohol or not, I don't know. And I don't care. But I know mine would. When I came into AA, I was 23 years old. And back in 1950, that was an awful lot younger than it is to be in AA now when you're 23 years old. And I'm awfully glad I stayed because I saved myself an awful lot of trouble.
And you can too. I would advise, however, that you stick around long enough to develop a preference for not drinking. And it takes a while. When someone makes a call on you, they might tell you, Come to AA and you'll be sober and happily ever after you will live baloney. You're going to get your lumps right along with the people who never took a drink. And in the beginning, it's going to be awfully hard and you're going to be miserable and uncomfortable.
But if you stick around long enough, I think you will get to prefer it the way I have.
[00:10:00]
Now in the second step, we came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. When we see that restore us to sanity, we usually have enough brain cells left to know that if we're asking to be restored to sanity, we are also admitting we were insane. Now many of us have preconceived notions about what insane is. Maybe when you think of insane, you think of somebody stark, staring mad, kicking, screaming, cursing, like we sometimes did when we were actively drunk.
And we can't see ourselves in that picture. But if you have ever done very much work with people who are mentally ill, you will know that most of the time they aren't that way at all. Most of the time they look like just anybody else. And you can sit down and have a conversation with them and most of it comes up halfway sensibly. But here and there, two and two adds up to five and you do a double take.
Now maybe we are not insane in the usual sense of the word. But when we are actively drinking, most of us are not capable of seeing reality when it comes to the effect that alcohol has on us. You talk to any new member that you might know what they really want to know. You talk to any new member that you might know what they really were like when they drank. And you listen to their story. And it isn't that they mean to lie to you, they just honestly don't know how sick they are.
Until they begin to recover. And they can look back. In the third step we made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. I love that as we understood Him and I interpret that in my case to mean as I understand Him. I don't have to believe in the God of your understanding. And you don't have to believe in the one of my understanding. You don't have to have the same thoughts about it that I do.
And I don't have to have the same thoughts you have. I am free to start with whatever I have, whatever makes sense to me, and work from there. And my idea of the God of my understanding has changed and changed and changed again as I have grown and as I have matured in AA. When I was new in AA and did get to believe in a God of my understanding again, I felt that He was all-powerful and could do anything He wanted to.
Just like once I believed that my parents were all-powerful and could do whatever they wanted to do. I didn't know that they were limited in certain ways, by their education, by their finances, whatever it might be. And now I have come to believe that the power of my understanding is capable of helping me in just about the same ratio I am willing to help myself with His help. I think that if you are continuing to drink and you are praying for God to take this away from you, and you expect He's going to show up and take the glass out of your hand, I think you're wasting your time in His.
If, on the other hand, you are willing to accept as an answer to your prayer for help, the fact that you would get to know there is a place like AA, and there is something you can do to help yourself and start to do it, I believe that you will recover. I, the God of my understanding now, has passed laws of nature that always work. You cannot break these laws, and if you try to, you, not the law, will be broken.
I believe with all my heart that there is some law of nature that says an alcoholic cannot take one drink with safety, because in more than 15 years I've seen hundreds of them try.
[00:15:13]
Bigger than me, smaller than me, smarter, dumber, better educated, less educated, men, women, everything. People who really planned, I mean these aren't people who take a couple drinks and have trouble and quit, you know, they really try to make it work. They really try to beat the rack. And I've never seen anybody who was able to do it for any length of time. I've seen thousands of them who appeared to get away with it for a while, but always it was the same mess or a worse one before they were through.
I think it's a darn shame that when they take that first drink the roof doesn't fall in right then so they can see what caused it. But unfortunately it usually looks like they get by with it. They think maybe those other poor slobs can't drink but I'm different. They're different all right. In the fourth step we made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. Now back in that first step I had to make an inventory about how alcohol affected me.
In this fourth step it has nothing to do particularly with how alcohol affected me. It has to do with what kind of person I am now that I'm sober. What kind of moral values I have now. What kind I had before I took a drink. Some people have said to me, isn't it enough, doesn't it cover the fourth step to get up and tell about the things we did? In my opinion, no. In my opinion we want to look for the twist in us that made us such suckers for the disease of alcoholism in the first place.
The things that might have kept us drinking as long as we did and even more important, the things that might lead us back to drinking again if we don't find out what they are so that we can start to do something about them. In your inventory you want to include the good things about you too because I don't care how sick you were. There is still good in you as there was good in me. So count those things too.
The fifth step we admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. Many people take this step in AA and I feel this is very unwise. The big book suggests that it should be an interested but unaffected person who will not be hurt by what we have to say. And they recommend someone outside of AA, a clergyman they particularly suggest. Now if you don't know any clergyman, it doesn't matter.
I wouldn't suggest you go to just any clergyman anyway. I think you should go to one who knows something about alcoholism, who knows what we're trying to do and would be capable of helping you. Now if you don't want to take this step at all, that's your business and it's certainly none of mine. And if you want to take it in AA, that's none of my business either. But there's one thing I'll point out to you.
In AA we are at all different stages of recovery. Unfortunately there are some people in AA who are sponsors who feel that they, not you and God in AA, but they are responsible for your sobriety. Now if you talk to a person like this and you continue to stay sober, they'll probably keep their mouth shut. I mean you're the fair-haired boy and they don't want to take any of the gloss off. But you get drunk and this type of sponsor is apt to hate you for it because you have destroyed something they worked hard for, you see.
And so when you come crawling back to AA needing help and understanding more than you may ever have needed it before, what you're apt to find is an awful lot of gossip.
[00:20:03]
It doesn't happen very often, it's true, but it only has to happen once to be very damaging and I've seen it happen and I'll bet you've seen it happen if you've been around here very long. If you want to take it in AA, I suggest that you get someone who is well established in their sobriety so they're not apt to be plastered to the ears tomorrow and telling everybody who will listen all about you. And get someone with a good reputation for keeping their mouth shut.
And there's another side to this coin too. There have been times over the years when people have chosen to take the step with me against my wishes and sometimes have put burdens on me that were so heavy I could hardly drag them around. If you tell me something you have done and you stop doing it, I can very easily live in the same group with you, see you every day and forget it. But you tell me something you used to do and you keep doing it right under my nose and I know what you're up to because you told me.
Makes it a lot harder. In AA we live a very close life and there are some things that I don't want to know about you and there are some things I don't want you to know about me either. Now in the sixth and seventh steps we were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character and humbly ask him to remove our shortcomings. When I came to AA I knew so little about me that it really came as a surprise to me in a closed meeting when one of the older members said, you know some of our defects of character are like old friends and we don't want to give them up.
And I thought, good heavens, I mean maybe she doesn't but I'm sure if I'm doing something wrong and I know it's wrong I'll want to stop doing it. Well, I didn't know that some of these things we do wrong have a certain amount of pleasure connected with them and we don't want to give them up. And so we're apt to say to God either knowingly or unknowingly, consciously or unconsciously, you may take this one and this one, that one's my own business.
And you do that and you are leaving a big block that you might trip over and land back where you came from. In my own case I think there were three different kinds of character defects and because their roots were different they had to be dealt with in different ways. There were the kind of things I had to be drinking to do. I didn't say be drunk, drinking, just enough to affect my judgment. For instance, when I was drinking I would take money that didn't belong to me.
Now the very first day that I didn't drink this character defect left. It has never troubled me again and I don't believe it ever will. I'd take an oath on it unless I start to drink again because completely sober I wouldn't anymore take something that didn't belong to me than fly. So that one was gone. I just quit drinking and it went away. Then there were the kind of things that I had learned to do when I drank.
Things I might have done a couple times before but they weren't very serious with me. But when I drank they got to be serious. And in my case it was that I was the most god awful liar that ever walked in shoe leather when I came into AA. I had been a Girl Scout for ten years and you can laugh but I was proud of that. And my father who died in the spring wasn't much to look at but that man was honest and how I respected that.
If he told you something it was like somebody else signed on the dotted line three times. And that's how I wanted to be but it wasn't how I was. So when I came in AA and you would ask me a question immediately into my mind would come a lie. And to stop lying or get it under any kind of control at all when you would ask me a question I would have to stop and think and consciously decide to tell you the truth.
[00:25:06]
In the beginning it wasn't much of the truth at all. If you knew what the truth was you'd never recognize what I told you. But it was a start and to arrive anywhere you've got to make a start. So over many years and I mean years I don't mean weeks and I don't mean months I mean years of stopping and thinking and telling the best of the truth I could. Now when you ask me a question immediately into my mind comes the truth.
And if I want to lie to you I've got to reverse the process and I've got to stop and think. And you know I'm not any good as a liar anymore. I can't do it under pressure unless you can look somebody square in the eye with big innocent eyes and belt one out that isn't even worth bothering with. And then there are the kind of things that I believe are part of our human nature. Things that we are going to tend to do for the rest of our lives.
Things we might be able to control most of the time but watch out because they'll sneak up on you. You know I was sober a lot of years before Bill went into Al-Anon. And when he first went in I thought that was very nice. And I thought the poor ladies of Al-Anon could probably use a man to drive them around and stuff and I thought it was fine. And we lived happily for quite some time until he got to be very well known in Al-Anon.
And he got to be the delegate from the state of New Jersey. And we were invited out to speak and I hear these half-wits referring to me as Bill's wife. Bill's wife! I mean that's Marie's husband! And I didn't like it. I didn't like it one bit. I didn't mind him having his little spot in the sunshine but don't try to put me in the shade. Pride. Pride and the other capital sins. That are not sins of themselves but are the source of almost any sin you can name.
Pride of itself is not a bad thing. You're supposed to have a certain amount of pride. But not wicked pride. And so on down the line the source of sin just like the capital of your state is the source of your government. The source of all sin. [unclear]. Thank God the things that will drive you to do. And all of it. Now maybe you will try to overcome some of these types of sin and for a while you'll be successful.
Trying everything you know how to do. And try as you will there will be times you will fall. Because you're no angel anymore than I am. And you weren't meant to be. And when you fall and you get up and you try and you fall again. The most important thing to do is never forget to get up and try again. In this program we don't try for perfection because we can't have it progress. Just be a little bit better today than you were yesterday in some way.
Now in the eighth and ninth steps we made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all. Made direct amends to such people whenever possible except when to do so would injure them or others. The most important thing here I think is that if you were the kind of drunk I was. There may be some things you did that your family are very suspicious you did. But they don't know for sure. They haven't got the goods on you.
Now there is a great temptation to buy peace of mind at their expense. If it's something that it would only hurt them to know keep your mouth shut. Dump it in the fifth step where it belongs with the interested but unaffected person who is not going to be hurt by it. Allow them time to rationalize because rationalization isn't always bad either. If you will allow them time to twist the facts that they're pretty sure of,
[00:30:00]
they will choose to believe you didn't do it because they love you. So give them a choice. In the tenth step we continue to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it. This is the third type of inventory. The one of the effect of alcohol on us, what we're like when we're sober, and the running inventory of every day. In the eleventh step we sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
I think part of this step comes to you as a free gift. If you have tried to practice the ten that came before, you are closer to the God of your understanding whether you feel it or not. This, what you have done on this step I think is what decides whether you will be capable of staying sober or not when the really devastating blows in life come. I said that when you come to AA you're going to get your lumps along with everybody else and you will.
And when I was sober five and a half years one of my children was drowned. And I don't think any mother would ever have a better excuse to go back to drinking again than the death of a child. Not a sick child that I could say, poor soul, she's out of her misery. A beautiful, healthy, lovely in every way child. But these things do happen. And if you believe with all your heart in a power outside yourself that is greater than you are, you can accept even such a thing and you can continue to stay sober.
You can, if you will, be a good example that the program of AA works in the bad days as well as the good days. If this program is only going to work when everything is going my way, it isn't worth the power to blow it you know where. It has to be able to work when things are not the way I want them to be. Many people in AA do their best praying on their knees in church. Well, I'm not one of these. I have done my best praying by myself.
It can be anywhere, especially if it's quiet. Sometimes I try to kneel and pray and my knees get to aching and I get to thinking about them. And I do best if I sit down in the most comfortable chair I can find and put my feet up and raise my mind to God of my understanding and tell him of my love for him and thank him for the love he has for me. If your God is one who's just laying waiting for you to step out of line so he can squash you like a bug, fine.
The God of my understanding isn't that way. The God of my understanding loves me just as much when I am at my worst, maybe a little bit more because he knows I need it more. I think this is one reason why AA works so well. When someone new comes, we don't give them love because they deserve it. Most of us don't deserve love when we get here. We give it because they need it. And the God of my understanding loves me always.
In the 12th step, having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs. It says there, right plain like the nose on your face, having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps. You must have the two steppers out here just like we've got them home. They come in and they get sober and they go out to carry the message and they have no more idea of what the message is than I could fly.
This is a serious thing.
[00:35:01]
And the person who calls AA for help might only have this one time to get help. And if you're going to try to carry the message, you'd better try to find out what the message is. And if you haven't even read the big book, I don't really know what you'd have to offer. I think if you're new in AA, you can have a lot to offer to go along and watch what the older members do and listen to what they say.
And you can take people to meetings and you can help set up chairs and you can do anything you want to do. But for your sake as well as for the person you would like to help, I think you should try to stay within your capabilities. And if you don't know what you're doing, I think you should ask somebody. I feel very sorry when I see these people go out and try to carry the message when they don't know what it is.
And I think the reason I feel so sorry is because I know how well they mean because I was one of the worst of them. When I came into AA and I read the big book through once, the guy across the street was the town drunk. I knew it and I figured he knew it. And I was so glad to find out about this and I thought he'd be glad and I went over with the big book to tell him and my God, he got so mad. He didn't speak to me for eight or ten years.
He never did come to AA. Now maybe he never would have, I don't know. But how I wish to God I had had the good sense to ask somebody else who knew better than I did and act on their advice. It would have been much better. It's very easy to practice the principles of this program when you're at the meeting. Because unless you're an old timer, at which time you're fair game for anybody, and sometimes we deserve what we get too, people will be very nice to you and they won't do anything to make your hackles rise on purpose.
So it's easy to be a good fellow. But what kind of principles are you practicing at home? I didn't practice these principles at home for a long time. I didn't even try at the meeting. And then I began to try to practice them at home and it was much harder. And now I try to practice them in all my affairs with anybody, no matter who they are, how well I know them, where they come from. And I try. And I'm never, ever entirely successful.
But I try. And over these years of practicing these principles, many things have happened to me. When I drank, I was the family idiot. I was undependable, irresponsible, you name it. And yet when my father died in the spring, he left me as trustee and executor of his estate and trusted me to care for my mother, who is 83 years old. And I know with the help of God and this program in AA, I won't let him down.
I'll be able to live up to the trust he has placed in me. And a couple of weeks ago, my sister, who has seven small children still at home, made her will and she left me as guardian to her children. And I pray every night she lives till they grow up. There have been the bad days. There are some days I wish to God I never even got up. But I've got a son who's 21 years old, senior in college, doing very well.
A daughter 19, another 14, and an English boy I kind of adopted. He asked me if I'd be his mother. I was so happy. And I have been able to be alive, to be sane, to be sober,
[00:40:08]
to be part of the family, to raise these children. I have been able to be the kind of mother I meant to be, the kind of daughter I was meant to be. There are many people in this world that have been helped because once I was a drunk and I was cursed. And I found the message of AA, at which time the curse became a blessing so that I was able to help the other people who were suffering as I had suffered.
And so in AA I believe we have a debt that we can never pay back because I was given my life and you were given yours. And what you're going to do with it is up to you. You can be one of the guys who gets up and beats your breast and says, I never took the steps, don’t know what they are. Big deal. A lot of people who don't know any better will admire you and respect you and look up to you and think [unclear].
But you won't help many people and you won't be able to help yourself much either. And if you try to live your life with the same set of values you had when you drank, you're going to miss the greatest benefits of sobriety and God help the people who have to live with it. This program is here. They'll tell you there are no musts in AA and there aren't. There's nothing you have to do. And they'll tell you, take it the cafeteria style, take what you like, ignore the rest.
If there's something you can't accept yet, put it aside. But keep in mind some of the things you might least want to try might be the very things you need the most. So, if you don't like it today, look at it again tomorrow. I thank you very much for letting me come out here to talk to you. If you haven't heard anything at this meeting that could help you, there will be other meetings. These things I have passed to you I've only [unclear] in bits and pieces here and there at meetings just like this.
And if you've only gotten one thought you didn't have before, you're better off than you were before. And if I've given you anything at all that you can use, you don't owe me anything. But you owe everything to the people who don't know yet. Because whatever I may have given to you, I didn't give to you to keep for you. I gave it to you to pass on to the next guy. And that's how AA works. We're all part of the great big chain.
What you get, you pass it on. Thank you and God bless you. Thank you. Thank you, Marie, for all of us. What can I say after that? What a wonderful message. I'm sure we will all go forth inspired to do a better job. What a wonderful couple, both busy on their programs. AA and Al-Anon going hand in hand.