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Source: DICOBE-00029 – Jack A – IOWA SPRING CONF – 1980-06-15.mp3 File: dicobe-00029-jack-a-iowa-spring-conf-1980-06-15.mp3 Duration: 00:48:48
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I want to thank you for the introduction and I want to thank you for inviting me here to the conference. One other thing about my wife I wanted to say, my wife is a member of AA but also a member of Al-Anon, so she calls herself a double winner, and if you see her popping in and out of an AA meeting one time and an Al-Anon meeting the next, well that's why. And I wanted to give her a special recognition for being here because you know when you walk into a strange conference and you don't know anybody, it's helpful to have at least somebody that you can hang on to and be nervous with, and she's been a great source of support.
I belong to the Topeka Group No. 1 in Topeka, Kansas, and like the name says it's the original group and probably one of the largest groups, and I think you always think that your home group is the best group and your home area is the best area and home district and everything, but I'd like to share with you that I've been to the Al-Anon meetings here and I've learned an awful lot, and it's really nice and gratifying and edifying to go to other places and other parts of the country and share with other Al-Anons and find out that the Al-Anon program is every bit as good there as it is back in your hometown, and I think probably it may give you some security if you had to move or had to travel, you know, that wherever you can go that Al-Anon and AA are going to be there, and they're going to be pretty much the same. And I've picked up a lot of things here that we would do well to incorporate in our own area and in our own group, and I'm grateful for the things that you've shared with me and the things that I've been able to learn. I'd like to tell you briefly before I tell you how Al-Anon helped me, because I guess the theme of the conference is Reflections on Serenity, and I'd really like to share with you how Al-Anon has helped me, but I'd like to begin by qualifying myself a little bit and telling you a little bit about my background and how I came into the Al-Anon program. I grew up as the only male in the family. I shared with some people last night that my father was a compulsive gambler and he left home early in my life, so I grew up with my mother and my sisters, and so I grew up in a home which is not a normal family. I didn't, you know, in my growing up years, I didn't have any idea of what the role of the father and the husband was in the home, and I suppose I was in sort of limbo. There was no drinking in our home. I think it was more a matter of economic necessity than anything else. We really didn't have very much money, and it was just something that we didn't do. So again, I grew up with no idea of what a normal home was like, and I had no idea of what normal drinking might be like, if there is such a thing. I'm not sure that there is, but at least I grew up feeling like I was different, so this gave me an excuse to be different and to act differently. As I grew up and got in, we moved from a smaller town into a bigger city, Wichita, Kansas, and as I got into high school, I discovered that there was such a thing as booze. I grew up in a small town in Kansas that had a law that you couldn't even own a bottle of booze.
It was not only illegal to drink it, it was illegal to even own it, and so anybody that did any drinking at all in that town did it behind closed doors, and so I never even knew what that was like growing up, but when I moved to the big city, I began to see taverns and beer joints, and my mother and I moved in with my uncle, and he did an awful lot of entertaining with alcohol, so I began to see this, and it was brought to me as a pleasant form of, you know, a pleasant way to spend a social evening, and I began to think this is what everybody did to have fun, this is what everybody did when they invited people over to their house, and indeed that's probably what quite a lot of people do do.
So I was introduced to a different kind of drinking and a different kind of home life. When I started dating my wife, I think almost all of our dating centered around alcohol. I was in college at the time, and I drank a lot. I was in a fraternity that liked to pride themselves on being the biggest drinkers on campus, and I did my best to contribute to that image. And so I did a lot of that, and everything that we did in the beginning of our courtship and in the early years of our marriage pretty much centered around drinking.
After we got married, our social life all centered around drinking. It seemed like that was the only thing we did. We'd have a couple over to play cards, and we'd get a six-pack of beer, and we'd get
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drunk and play cards. Shortly after I got married, I went into the Army, and I was an officer in an Army, and there was an awful lot of drinking that went along there. That seemed to be the only thing to do in off-duty hours. And so there was a pattern of regular drinking in our home in the early years of our marriage, and I only mention that because I think that's probably what kept me from seeing or realizing that drinking was becoming a problem in our home, because I didn't see anything out of the ordinary with the way that my wife drank.
There were some officers' wives in our group that got pretty blasted when we would have a party, and I could see that they were in trouble, but I never saw my wife being anything like that. She always remained pretty much a lady. There may be one or two instances, but things never got nearly as bad as some of the others, so I never had any idea that my wife had a problem with drinking. I guess that's the way to summarize it.
And this went on. And then problems began to surface in our marriage. That's not to say the honeymoon was over. I don't think that there ever really was a honeymoon. It was kind of a mixed-up marriage from the beginning. And we had difficulties from the beginning. I had difficulties with myself. My wife got pregnant on her honeymoon, so we were parents right away and were trying to adjust to that. I wasn't making much money.
I was being shipped around. We were moving a lot, and everything seemed to be mixed up. So I had quite a lot of things that I could blame other than alcohol. And so for a long time, alcohol still remained our source of entertainment and a way of relieving the pressures of the day for both of us. And we began to develop problems in our marriage. We had terrible fights. We still have them, but these were drunken fights and name-calling and throwing things and stuff like that, or at least they got on the verge of violence.
We had problems with sex. We had problems with money. We had problems in communications. We had problems in raising our children, not being able to agree on how we did that. And things did not get worse, or got much worse. They did not get better. The alcoholic drinking was beginning to emerge, but I still was not aware that that was the problem. After I got out of the Army and we moved to Topeka and pretty much settled down, I thought that, okay, I've got my job, this is where I plan to stay, we're not going to be moving around anymore, and so maybe we'd have this happily ever after type life that I thought we would have.
I began to make enough more money, not a lot, that we enjoyed a little bit more prosperity and perhaps a little bit easier, a little bit better lifestyle, and I thought those kind of things, money might be the answer to our problems. Not that I ever had any, but that didn't work. Problems still were there, present in our marriage, and problems with our children. Eventually, my wife's drinking got to the point where she decided she needed help.
And when she first came to me with that, I just flat didn't believe it. I could not see my wife as an alcoholic. It's kind of an old cliche, you know, but I still grew up with the idea that an alcoholic, my vision of an alcoholic was Raymond Land and The Lost Weekend, someone totally out of control. And my wife was not that. My wife was a periodic drinker, she did not drink a great deal, in fact I think her actual consumption of alcohol may have been a good deal less than mine.
So it was hard for me to see her as an alcoholic, and because I could not see her as an alcoholic and didn't want to know anything about alcoholism, to me I couldn't see it as a disease. And so to me it was a character defect, something she could do about, something she could take care of with willpower. So it was very hard for me to be very sympathetic or to relate to her being an alcoholic. And I believe I really resented her going to AA.
It took her away from the home, it made me have to watch the kids, I sat at home and felt sorry for myself, just a whole lot of things like that. And my wife going to AA was not the answer in our home. I was approached very early by an Al-Anon member and asked to go to Al-Anon, but I'll be honest with you, when a person first mentioned Al-Anon, I thought it was just another word
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for AA. I really didn't understand what they were talking about. I didn't know that Al-Anon was a fellowship for the relatives of alcoholics, and I certainly didn't think that I had a problem that needed help. So you know, that person might as well not even have come, except at that time the seed was planted because the next time I knew something about it. She left some literature, and my wife left some literature, and it was really mysterious how I would put it in a drawer in my nightstand and it would come back up on the top again, or I'd put it away somewhere and it would show up somewhere else.
And so there was a specific pamphlet for husbands of alcoholics, and it just seemed to be around everywhere. Or at least it kept kind of haunting me. Not a terribly subtle hint, I guess. Finally things in our marriage got to the point where we were very near separation. I think my wife had realized enough recovery in the AA program that she knew she did not have to live this way the rest of her life.
And that because I wasn't going to Al-Anon and getting any help, we were growing farther and farther apart. And the sickness that I had as a result of living with an alcoholic, the sickness that I brought into the marriage wasn't getting any better, in fact, it was getting much worse. Sobriety merely amplified the difficulty in our marriage because I didn't go to Al-Anon, and because I wasn't willing to look for any kind of help for myself or even to admit that such a possibility even existed.
The only thing that I can think of that saved us from a separation or divorce was, I suppose, our religious background, but more importantly than that, I got called back into the Army. I was in the National Guard and the Kansas Guard was activated and I got called back into the Army. And this gave us a forced separation for a period of time. I went off to Fort Carson and my wife didn't want to come with me and at the time I didn't think a great deal about it until one day I came home on a pass and I asked her about it and she said she didn't want to come.
And all the time I guess I had thought or was wanting to believe in my own mind that the reason she didn't come was because of leaving the house and taking the kids out of school and stuff like that. But she faced me with the idea that she didn't want to come and that she couldn't live with me the way I was. And that was a tremendous blow to my ego. I don't know when I've been really more down than that particular time in my life.
But it did cause me to begin to look at myself. I didn't do a great deal about it, but I at least was turned that direction. I subsequently got, well we did have a short period where she moved out to Fort Carson but that was just, you know, nothing really ever came of that, it was kind of a truce period and I finally got orders to go overseas and I was gone for nine months. And during that period of time I guess I had a period of total separation from family, from wife, I really couldn't be much more isolated from my family background and situation than I was over there.
And I believe it gave us both the time to think that we needed. I know it did for me. When I came back from overseas and someone asked me to come to Al-Anon, I was ready to go right away. Well I recall when the lady, the same lady that called on me two years previously, called me up and said she was coming by to pick me up to take me to an Al-Anon meeting. And she didn't ask me if I wanted to go, she just said she was coming by to pick me up.
They got me there on a kind of, well it wasn't really a false pretext, it was for me, they told me that there was a new lady in AA and that her husband really needed help, that he was pretty bad off and they finally talked him into going to Al-Anon and they didn't want him to go there and be there by himself because he'd be the only man, and that if I went, he wouldn't feel so lonely. So I thought, good, I've got an excuse to go, I'll help this new guy out.
And I went, and he never showed up. As a matter of fact, I think he ended up in AA. I don't know that I ever saw him anywhere. And I went in, I walked in to where they had the Al-Anon meeting at the time, and the thing that I didn't realize is that the husband of one of the members, by that time my wife, as I said, had been in AA a couple of years before I went to Al-Anon, and I had met some of the people, so I knew some of the people in both fellowships, and it wasn't quite as hard for me to go because I could, in my own mind, I could make a lot of excuses for why I was going to go.
So I went there and there was a husband, well two of the husbands of the members were there, and I thought they were going to stay for the meeting, and I sat down and started visiting with them, and then it came time for the meeting to start, and I got up in one room where the meeting was, and they closed the door, and I looked around and I was the only one. I guess maybe there for a minute I thought I really had…
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Not only did this guy not show up, but these other two guys weren't coming to the meeting either. But something happened to me at that first meeting that's probably happened to anyone that's come to an Al-Anon meeting. Sooner or later, I discovered that they were glad to have me there, regardless. And although I didn't understand what the meaning of love and Al-Anon was at the time, I felt it, and inside I knew that's what was happening.
I guess maybe in the beginning, I was sort of a novelty. I was the only man that was there, and it probably fed my ego for a good bit of the time that I got a lot more attention than other new members did. I guess for me that helped me to come because I had this problem of ego, and it helped me to think that I was doing them a favor by being there. But in reality, the reverse was true. I did realize that they cared about me, and I did feel accepted, and I did feel the love that I think everyone feels in a fellowship when they finally come to.
I kind of rode around on this ego trip for a while in Al-Anon, thinking that I was doing them a big favor. And then after about six months, we were at a social gathering after an open AA meeting, and some young gal that hadn't even been going as long as I had, and I tend to equate people's, the worth of their opinion by how long they had been in, and she said something like, she said, Boy, you sure have gotten a lot better since you started coming to Al-Anon.
And my first reaction to that was, What the hell do you know? You haven't even been going as long as I have. That's not what I said, I just said thank you, because I was kind of flabbergasted. But that particular remark was another turning point for me, because I realized at that point in time that, yeah, I really was better since I started going to Al-Anon, that the Al-Anon program was beginning to make a difference in me.
And I began to realize that I wasn't nearly as perfect or as well as I thought I was when I first went to Al-Anon. I didn't think there was anything wrong in our marriage that couldn't be straightened out by my wife changing her attitude, or changing some of the things she said or did, or the way she related to me. I really could not see any faults in myself. But that particular remark got me started looking.
I think it really was the beginning of the fourth step for me, because after that point in time, I guess there was an admission that there were some things wrong with me, and I began to look at them. When they'd have a four-step meeting, we used a sheet at that time quite frequently, and I'd go down that sheet and I began to find some of those things. Yeah, I could check those off. I did have those character defects, and they were really bad.
I could also look at some of the good things I had. I could become, and I could start to make a really objective evaluation of myself. And so that was the beginning of my help. The other thing that happened to me, and I can't really pinpoint when it did, was that I accepted the fact that alcoholism was a disease, that my wife had that disease, and that I was powerless over that disease. And the important thing about that for me was, well, first, I traveled somewhere in those days, so I first came into Al-Anon, and I used to wonder about what would happen if while I was out of town, my wife started to drink.
Who would take care of the kids, and what would happen to the home, and what if she went to sleep in the couch with a cigarette in her hand, burned the house down, all those kind of things that you can fantasize about. But, you know, my wife had drank for quite a long time, and none of those things ever did happen. To my knowledge, you know, she may have not been late with the laundry and stuff like that, but she never did neglect the children.
She never burnt the house down. None of those things ever happened while she drank, and I don't know why I began to worry about them happening when she was sober, but I did. And I think those are just the kinds of thoughts that can come into your mind when you're really not guarded against it. But when I could accept the idea that it was a disease and I was powerless, I began to realize that it didn't make any difference for me to worry about it.
There wasn't anything I could do at that particular time anyway. And the other important thing about that, I began to realize this more later on when another problem developed, but I realized that since I was not the cause of her drinking, that I couldn't be the cure either. That there was nothing that I could do to make her drink, and I was equally powerless to make her stop drinking, or to do anything about the fact that she was drinking.
That it was something that she had to do for herself, and that the only thing I could do was work on me. And that gave me an awful lot of relief. Very early in the program,
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and I think again it was because I was one of the few men going, if not the only man, I got involved in service. And a lot of people may go for a long, long time in Al-Anon before they get involved in service, and sometimes that's a good idea. I think to some extent I jumped into service a little bit too early because I was not prepared for it. But one thing I did experience was I think a lot more growth because of my involvement in service than I would have had if I had not been.
At that time, there weren't nearly as many meetings in Topeka as there are now, and I only went to one meeting a week. And I found out lately that one meeting a week isn't enough, that we need more. You know, when new AA members come into AA, they take them to every meeting they can for a week, or a month, or a year. And I talk to new members there, and they go to as many meetings, they just saturate them with meetings.
Well, Al-Anon members, at least when I first came, they'd take them to a meeting Monday night, and they'd say, we'll see you again next Monday. And there wasn't a great deal that went on in between that. And I began to find out that going to more meetings and getting involved in service really helped you grow a lot faster because you got just that much more exposure. And not only that, you met different people.
Going and meeting different people, I think, at least to me, helped to bring out different things. A person in another group might more readily recognize something that you need to work on, might be more apt to give you help, might just be more frank to you than someone that you've been around a long time. And that helped me. It helped me to meet other members, and it helped me to be more at ease when I had to go out and do something in the service dimension.
So I really believe that we should get involved in service as early as we can. I heard our past delegate say one time that service needs to be a part of Al-Anon and not a part from, and I hardly endorse that. And I want to tell you that for my own self, that service, involvement in service, had a lot to do with my getting better much faster than I would have. I think in all, I progressed at a much slower rate than some of the newer men coming into Al-Anon, but I do know that service helped me grow faster than I could have otherwise.
The next thing that happened to me, I believe, well, it happened to me later on in the program, that I finally came to understand what the spiritual awakening in the twelfth step was all about. It happened to me coming back from a conference one time, and we were talking about the twelfth step. And I think, I don't recall exactly, my wife was reading something about the twelfth step, and my concept of the twelfth step up to that point meant twelfth step work.
It meant, well, like I was doing in service, spreading the message. But something was said like, you can't give it away if you don't have anything to give away. The twelfth step says that after we have this spiritual awakening, then we carry this message to others. And so I began to question myself, have I really had this spiritual awakening? And I went back and I looked, and I read what our big book, Living with an Alcoholic, says about the twelfth step.
And a description of the twelfth step says very little about going out and calling on other members. It talks a whole lot about spiritual awakening. It talks about living on a new plane of consciousness. It talks about being able to make decisions that you weren't able to do before. It talked about having a power beyond yourself. And I looked at that, and I finally realized that that's what the spiritual awakening was all about, and I realized that I had begun to have that spiritual awakening.
And from that point on, I think, slowly but surely, I began to build on that idea of a spiritual awakening. I began to look at the step that says we develop a conscious contact. I began to look at things where people said to pray about things. Prior to that experience with a spiritual awakening, when they said pray about something, I could mechanically rattle off a prayer and think that was done, because that's how I've been brought up in prayer.
But then I began to see that if you develop a relationship with a higher power, as our steps suggest, then prayer is really a much more intimate thing than just a mechanical rattling off a request or a grocery list to some kind of a nameless, faithless God. I began to develop a relationship with a God that I could live with on a daily basis. And this God became present to me not only in the big things, but in the small things of everyday life.
The one, I think, most significant thing that happened to me was a totally insignificant incident.
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I thought that miracles and that the way God worked was like with Moses, the parting of the waters, or there'd be something come down out of the clouds, a thunderbolt, or a mighty revelation, or some tremendous work, or someone being raised from the dead, or something really miraculous like that. And it was nothing like that at all. I had been searching for some time for a way to make prayer a daily part of my life, because I heard so many people talk about it.
They'd talk about saying, please, in the morning, and thank you at night. And I could not bring myself into that daily routine. I'd get up in the morning, and I'd forget. I'd go to bed at night, and I'd be tired, and I'd forget. And I could not come up with some way of doing that on a daily basis. And I was searching really hard for a way to do that. And one morning, while I was getting up in the morning and tying my tie, and I used to be kind of particular about how my tie came out, and I was late, and I didn't have much time, and sometimes I'd tie my tie two or three times to get it just right, because it was one of my character defects, I suppose.
Anyway, I said, God, please help me tie this tie. And I tied my tie, and the thing just came out perfectly the first time, and I rushed out. And then I realized that God could be present to us every day in the little things, that God could meet our every need and our everyday needs. And from that day on, every morning when I got up and tied my tie, I remembered to say my prayers in the morning. And from that day on, I began to build a much closer relationship with a higher power.
And since that time, there have been many, many more incidents of the same thing happening. And I begin to develop a prayer life and a spiritual life that I can stick to and hang on to on a daily basis. I don't have to fight it anymore. It's a part of my way of life. It comes naturally to me, as naturally to me as breathing. And I have Al-Anon to thank for that. And it's been a very important part of my life and a very important part of my story.
Some of the things that Al-Anon has helped me with, once I was willing to look at Al-Anon as a spiritual program, prior to this spiritual experience, I had not been able to deal with character defects. Once I had learned to meet God as a personal God on a daily basis, then I began to be able to find help for these defects that I've been struggling with for years and years and years. Some of them I didn't really want to give up, and some of them I really did want to give up.
I had a tremendous problem with anger. I still do, I believe. But my anger used to be a violent kind of an anger, not a physical violence, but there was a violence of emotion that was really quite bad. And I'm sure the children, my wife, all suffered from it. I had a tremendous problem with self-pity. I used to spend most of my spare time in self-pity. Like I mentioned earlier, when my wife first went to AA, I really would sit home and feel sorry for myself.
I'd think all kinds of ways that I could sit around the house and look so pitiful that someone would come and take pity on me and say, oh, you poor thing. But no one ever did. And you know, that even made it worse. That gave me more reason for self-pity. And I hung in that, and I lived in that, and that was almost my whole life at one point in time. But God has helped me to deal with that. I have a tremendous problem with procrastination.
In fact, my wife and I just had a discussion about this on the way up, in regards to preparing for my talk. She says, you know, you really don't have to be under pressure to do these things. If you'd started a little earlier, you wouldn't have to deal with that. Now, I want to tell you today that even though I do put things off, it's a whole lot better than it has been in the past. I at least didn't do it all this morning.
I had a tremendous problem with relationships with others that Al-Anon has helped me to deal with. I mentioned that I grew up in a family with women, of all women, and I think for some reason, I don't know why, but I had, for a long time, difficulty relating with women, or relating to women, with both. Coming into Al-Anon and coming into an all-female fellowship helped me tremendously with that, because I learned to have women as personal friends, and before that, I did not have any women as personal friends.
And Al-Anon has helped me with that. Al-Anon has helped me with my role as a husband and father, because through the help that I've gained in Al-Anon, I've been able to see that more clearly. And I didn't have that as something in my growing up years. I think the principles of the Al-Anon program and the idea that we have to share things with one another
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has helped me tremendously with my own preoccupation with my own wants and needs. I tend to think that the things that I want and need are much more important than anything else that's going on. Again, I think it's related to my ego problem. But Al-Anon and my relationship with God have helped me with that. And finally, I think I want to talk about one last area where Al-Anon has really been of tremendous help, and that's in the area of problem with our child.
And that's probably, this is our most recent experience, and this is a good bit of the reason that my wife is in Al-Anon. We have three children. We have two teenagers and a young baby. And I'll share with you we have another one on the way. I don't know if that's a side benefit of the program or not. We have two children that have been raised partially without the benefit of AA and Al-Anon, and we're starting again with another family that are being raised with the benefit.
I think that our, the two teenagers must have been about seven or eight. I was trying to pick out ages when Kathy first came into AA, and we began to have trouble with our son principally about the time that Kathy came into AA. Not that they were related. I think that's just when the problem began to show itself. And this was about the second or third grade, and it began just merely with poor schoolwork and being a discipline problem in school.
You know, with the illness in the home and everything else going on, it's easy enough to blame all those problems on that. And at that age, in my own mind, I wasn't willing to admit that there was a problem with my son. I just wanted to say, well, he's a kid, and maybe he'll grow out of it. But he did not. The problem got worse. It grew from just poor studying and a discipline problem to serious problems with the school administration.
He had problems with stealing. There were problems with vandalism. You know, a tremendous problem with lying. And my reaction to that was wanting to cover it up. I didn't want to admit that this was a problem in our family. I wouldn't face it. I thought he would grow out of it. I resisted my wife's suggestion that we look for treatment because I thought that reflected on me. I went the whole route.
I subsequently did agree to certain things, and we tried a whole lot of different avenues of approach, none of which, well, I guess they had some effect. They didn't change the eventual outcome, I guess. The school problems eventually developed into drug and alcohol abuse. I think probably it was drug abuse in the beginning. Later on it became alcohol. And this started around in the sixth grade. We had all the problems that we had had before with him in school.
Boy, I don't know how many trips I made to the principal's office for one reason or another. And boy, every time we had to go to a school conference and we had to sit down with these teachers and they had to talk to us about what he was doing in school, I just really cringed. I did not look forward to those things at all because I knew they were going to be bad. But finally all these problems began to get worse, and now they involved the police.
He began to get in trouble with the law. And that was even more a source of embarrassment to me. You know how embarrassing it is to have a police car show up in front of your house and drag some member of the family off. I got very angry at him. I began to see these as things that he did to discredit me. I think that was part of the reaction I had. It severely strained our marriage relationship because this son with all the problems was becoming the center of attention.
We had an awful lot of disagreement about what ought to be done. As I said earlier, I didn't want him to go to treatment and she did. She'd want to do one thing and I'd want to do another. We got into the mode of one day she'd want to be nice to him and I'd want to nail him. The next day I'd want to be nice to him and she'd want to nail him. And it was like Bob was saying earlier, standing at the top of the stairs saying, Mom, can I do this? Dad, can I do this?
Poor kid never knew which way to turn. As Bob was talking earlier, I know we did some of the same things. Dad, is it all right if I do this? I don't know, ask your mother. Same drill Bob was talking about. We had an awful lot of disagreement and some tremendously strained marriage relations over it.
[00:35:04]
It finally developed to more and more involvement with the police and finally he got involved as a juvenile in the court system and that's a whole other whole ball of wax. Boy, I still have some resentments about that that I haven't dealt with. And he ended up on probation to us. And this, as I see it now, was another attempt by us to take him back, to make right everything that we'd done wrong. I think we were still in the guilt mode, still blaming ourselves for everything that he was doing and everything that was wrong with him.
We took him back into our home and it didn't work. He was still doing the same things. He still had the same behavior patterns. He had not changed. He still used drugs. He still used alcohol. And he was still trying to be the center of our home. The one thing that was different now was that I had agreed to go to treatment and we were, as a family, seeing a social worker. And that whole process of seeing a social worker may not have done anything for our son, but it did prepare us for him eventually having to leave the home.
And so I think when it finally did happen, we were prepared for it. And it took a whole lot of prayer and a whole lot of help and support from Al-Anon and a tremendous amount of application of the Al-Anon principles. Now, I don't know how a person, I had eight years in the program at the time, can have spent so much time in the program, got up and talked about all the principles and how they work, and turn around and be so blinded to it when it involves your own son.
The whole idea of the first step was totally foreign to me when it involved him. You know, I guess there's a built-in problem. You know, when we marry someone, we figure maybe we can rationalize that they came into the marriage with all those problems. Their personality is set. There's nothing we can do about it. It's easy for us to divorce ourselves from that and say it's their problem. When it's your own child, and you grew up with him, and you carry this, what we can carry, this load of guilt, I'm responsible for this, all the times that I didn't meet his need there, all the times that I didn't do this, the times when he brought in a bouquet of flowers and I said get away, all those little things that you can blame yourself for that you might have done or not done when he was growing up, and say, well, this is the reason he's the way he is.
It was difficult for me to see that the reason he was in trouble was because of deliberate and conscious decisions that he made all by himself, and that he had the choice to be or not to be what he was becoming, and he made the choice to go the direction he was doing. And that's not my fault. That's not my problem. And there's very little, if nothing, that I can do about it. And I finally sunk home.
We have a group of friends that we meet with on a regular basis that are not involved in the Al-Anon program, and a couple of them were a little bit shocked at our seeming detachment to our son's problem. Fortunately, we have Al-Anon friends to go to that can understand why we're doing things. When it became obvious that he wasn't meeting the conditions of his probation, it was us that initiated the action to get him taken back into custody.
And what that says in simple terms is that we turned him back into the police and said, here, you have him. We don't want him at home anymore. And that was a very difficult decision to make. It was difficult for us. It was difficult for him. And I think for a period of a few seconds in there, we almost felt guilty enough about it that we almost said, no, we were going to take him back. I think we were that close to doing it.
But with a lot of prayer and a lot of reciting back to ourselves, I think, by rote, some of the principles of the Al-Anon program, we were able to say, no, we don't want you at home anymore. We can't have you in our home if you're going to live the way you are. And it was really that simple. And how many times have you heard that in the Al-Anon program, that we refused to accept the unacceptable behavior?
And how difficult it was for me to come to that decision, and for Kathy to come to that decision, and for us to agree on it. And how much help and how much growth we experienced in Al-Anon to be able to do that. He went from there to a group home. Things didn't work out in a group home. He ended up in the youth center, the state youth center, which back in my days they called Reform School. He's still there, and he's there because we refused to take him home.
[00:40:02]
We've had more than one opportunity for him to come home. He's been there twice. He was released once and sent home to find a job, and he still did the same things. And we were back in the same situation. We were at the point of telling the probation officer he needs to go back. He can't stay here. He's not doing what he's supposed to. He hasn't changed his behavior. When he came home the first time, he'd get weekend leave, and we'd go a three-hour drive down there to pick him up and bring him home, stay for the weekend, another three-hour drive to take him back.
And I did that for a couple of months. And when he went back, we had to tell him, I'm not going to do that anymore. When your weekend passes come up, you're just going to have to stay there. And we're at the point now that he's pretty much completely on his own. And I think a lot of you have had to face the same thing, but I think it's a difficult thing for every parent to do. It's an easy enough thing to talk about when you say, let the so-and-so suffer the consequences of his own behavior, but it's very difficult when it's your own child.
And that's why I think I'm most grateful to Al-Anon and to AA and the fact that my wife goes to Al-Anon too, that we have been able to do this. And through all that, that we've been able to grow spiritually. Not only has this experience with our son helped us to grow spiritually, it's helped us tremendously in being able to talk to others who have the same problem. Because it seems like invariably more, if this particular topic comes up in a meeting, there are four or five other parents with the same problem.
I think it's probably a much more widespread problem than most of us parents would like to admit. Since we have kind of set the problem of our son aside, you know, he's there and we're here and there isn't much we can do about it until he decides to do something about it, we began to look at our other teenage child. And again, I have not wanted to admit that there's anything wrong with her, but she has some serious problems that are unresolved.
She's been goody two-shoes through the whole thing. All the time that our son was getting into trouble, she was being a little angel. She was working hard, and I think, you know, in her own way, she saw the anger and the disapproval directed towards our son, and I guess she didn't want any part of that, so she has gone out of her way to seek approval. So she's way up there on the scale of people-pleasers.
And, you know, to her it's to the point of being a character defect because, you know, that's more important than her own self. And so she's got a serious problem that needs dealing with. And we kind of had to get this other garbage all out of the way before we could even take a hard look at that. But this, again, is some of the things that begin to surface as we began to look at problems, I think, one at a time in Al-Anon.
First I came in and I had to look at myself. Then I had to look at the problems in our marriage relationship. Then I had to look at the problem with our son. And now we're having to look again at the problem with our daughter. And if it weren't for the fact that we both go to Al-Anon, go on a regular basis, we try to stay in contact not only with meetings, we try to stay in contact with other people who are trying to live a spiritual way of life, I know we would not be able to cope with all these problems.
I know that if there's any part that I might have in helping my daughter work her way through these problems, if there's any part I might have in that, I need all the support and help from Al-Anon members and other people that are trying to live a spiritual way of life that I can get. Because you simply can't get it by talking to people out in the ordinary world. They don't seem to have any understanding of it.
There's no way that seems like I can go. And that's pretty much where we are today. We still have problems in our marriage relationship. There are still some things that we need to deal with on a daily basis. I'd like to tell you that we've solved all our communication problems. We've been through counseling, we've been to encounter, we've been in religious groups, we've been in couples discussion groups, both with AA and Al-Anon couples and with people outside the fellowship.
We've tried all those different kinds of things in order to improve our relationship, and we still struggle on a daily basis with communication. We still struggle on a daily basis with communication. We still struggle on a daily basis with family finances. In fact, lately, that's been the biggest issue around our home.
[00:45:00]
We still struggle with problems with the children. As I said, we've got another whole family coming up. We've got to go through that teenage problem all over again someday farther down the road. I guess the point my wife made when we were discussing this on the way up is probably the one that's most important. Because in her book, and she's talking about the AA, Big Book, it says that we have to continue to grow.
As she said, I don't think it says that we have to keep on going to AA and Al-Anon means, but we do have to continue to grow. And if AA and Al-Anon are the best ways to do that, and I think they are, then that means that we have to continue to go to Al-Anon and to AA and to continue to work our program. That none of us is ever going to get well. That we're all going to have to continue on a daily basis to work with our problems.
Just as I hear alcoholics say from the podium that they have to continue to remind themselves that they're an alcoholic and that they can't drink and that they're one drink away from a drunk, I think we in Al-Anon also have to continue to remind ourselves that if we don't keep working our program, that in a very short period of time, and I think I can testify to that, we'll go back to being just as bad and probably worse than we ever were before we came to the program.
So that we can't afford to not come to meetings like this, we can't afford to not work our program, we can't afford to not observe the traditions, and we can't afford to not get involved in service. Because if we don't observe the traditions, the group is not going to survive. If we don't look at the concepts and get involved in service, the groups are not going to grow. And if groups and people don't grow, the only evidence of life is that there's some growth.
And so when we quit growing, then there's no life. And then we can hang it up. So I know for me that I need to continue to come to conferences like this. I need to continue to be challenged to do different things, to meet new people, to get new ideas like I did at the conference here. I need to continue to reach out in service. You know, I've been a group representative, an alternate DR, I've been an institutional chairman, I've been a whole bunch of things.
It would be easy for me to retire and say, okay, I've been all those offices, I've been every office in the group. It'd be real easy for me to retire and say, I'm not going to do that anymore. But I know that I can't. I know that I have to stay in there. Each of us has to continue to stay in our group and to be able to speak out when we see something wrong, because if it isn't, the group doesn't survive, and we ultimately as an individual will not survive without the group.
So I guess in closing I would like to say that I really want to thank you for inviting me here. I've been challenged by my need to prepare a talk and to look at my own life and my own recovery and the way I work the program. I have been challenged and informed by the things that have been shared in the other Al-Anon meetings, and I look forward to attending the rest of them. And I thank you very much for being Al-Anon members.
Although you're not the ones that were there when I came to my first meeting, you're the same people that were there. I thank you very much for the love and acceptance that I've felt here, the same as I felt when I came to my first meeting. Thank you. APPLAUSE