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Source: DICOBE-00307 – Mildred F – GOPHER STATE RNDP VII – 1980-05-23.mp3 File: dicobe-00307-mildred-f-gopher-state-rndp-vii-1980-05-23.mp3 Duration: 01:01:48
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I'm an alcoholic and a drug addict, and my name is Mildred F. Hi, everybody. Just in case you should happen to be in Toronto within the next whatever number of years, I'd like to invite you to come and meet my group and visit with us. We have our open meetings on Wednesday nights, and it's only for special people that we turn the lights off. Following Bob in this capacity of speaker, I guess, and I draw on an old joke, is kind of like being Elizabeth Taylor's next husband. I know what I ought to do, but I have no idea how I can possibly make it interesting and exciting. I would like to thank, first of all, the committee for inviting me here. I would like to thank Marguerite and Boyd for coming to meet me yesterday, and for the kindness and the hospitality and the graciousness with which I have been received. It's overwhelming. It reminds me that seven years ago last Sunday, I celebrated my, no, last Sunday, I celebrated my seventh anniversary in the program. And seven years ago last Sunday, I guarantee you, I had not one friend in the world, there was not one person in this world that I think really cared whether I lived or died. That was not their problem. I had brought that kind of thing about. At the end of the preamble in the Twelve Steps, it says, that our experiences made clear three pertinent ideas. A, that we were alcoholic and could not manage our own lives. B, that probably no human power could relieve us of our alcoholism. And C, that God could and would if he were sought. And having said that, I have told you every important thing that has happened in my life. By the time I came to this program, I think I had only three choices left and I was a hair's breadth away from any one of them, and that was to become a tramp, a convict, or a corpse. I am not one of those people who slipped into alcoholism from a little too much social drinking. You see, my first recollections of consciousness are of feeling afraid, alone, angry, unwanted, unable to reach other people, and to be reached by them. And so, when I found my father's home brew at the age of four and five, I just knew that everything was going to be all right, because I no longer felt the way I have just described to you. I was sure loved me and I loved everybody. By the time I was 18, I was already sufficiently crazy to decide to enter a convent. Not that I think going to a convent is a crazy thing, but I believe it is, if you're the kind of girl that I was, very headstrong and independent. I love all you ladies now, but at that time I hated the lot of you because I thought you were a threat to me, and that included my mother. And I also had a gigantic drinking problem, so serious that the night I entered the convent, I was drunk. I stayed in that convent for 15 years, eight of which I had lost complete control of my intake of alcohol, and by that time I was also seriously addicted to barbiturates and amphetamines. And so, you may be saying to yourself, well, I really can't identify with that woman, because after all, I didn't have my weekly supply of booze delivered to the bell tower of the church. And I didn't do my heavy Saturday afternoon drinking up in the choir loft, playing the organ and singing praises to God, and in the meantime, guzzling the 26th of rye that I had stashed beside the foot pedals. And you might also say that you didn't drink gallons of mass wine in the sacristy, all of which I did. I have also been hospitalized in psychiatric wards, mental institutions, and insane asylums, in that order of progression, 29 times. And I think it says something for the power of this program, that since I have come to terms with what the program asks of me, it has not been necessary for me to be locked up in any of those kinds of institutions. And that is only by the power of the fellowship and the grace of God, as I see it.
So, the things that I have told you, and I could add the fact that I've had DTs,
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I've had the convulsions, I had numerous blackouts, and if you find that hard to identify with, I don't think that's so strange. But those external manifestations of the problem, I think, are not the essence of the problem anyway. To me, what is the essence of the problem is that I can know that I'm embarked on a self-destructive course, and continue to do it, and even worse, justify that this is the only thing that I possibly could do with my life. And how I drank, and how much I drank, and where I drank, and when I drank, I don't think these are the important things either. I think these are simply the function of our circumstances in life. After I left the convent, I suffered what I consider a 10-month moral decline. And following what Bob said, I tried to catch up what I had missed as a good Roman Catholic nun in 15 years. I can remember being locked up three months after I left the convent in a jail for drunken driving, and the policeman wasn't all that impressed when I suggested I use my one phone call to phone the bishop so he could get me out of jail. He suggested it would probably be more prudent if I were to phone a good lawyer. I can remember that 10 months as hell on earth. I remember being thrown out of hotels. I remember as a particularly shameful experience having my telephone cut off in a hotel, and when I went to inquire, they told me that I had been using such bad language to the operators that the operators had asked that my telephone be cut off, and I didn't even know that I knew such words. Well, at the end of that time, I met the man who was to become my husband, a psychiatrist, wouldn't you know? And a drunken one at that. Now you put a drunken psychiatrist and a drunken ex-nun together, and you've got a combination that boggles the mind.
Needless to say, we are divorced. So he suggested to me, because he knew about Alcoholics Anonymous, these psychiatrists have a way of getting other people to go without going themselves, Bob. He suggested to me that I go to Alcoholics Anonymous, and I thought that was a marvelous idea because I have a brother who I'd seen go down the skids, and I'd also seen him become a respectable human being. He's been sober now about 25 years. And I went to Alcoholics Anonymous. I was in Prince Albert at the time, and Cease and Elmer and Jack did their best to help me. You see, I stayed sober for five and a half years. I had no desire to drink, and I thought, I will never drink again. But you see, I was also addicted to pills. And consequently, whenever I got into any kind of problem, I got into the pills. You see, and I didn't do the program. I didn't do what the big book recommends, come to terms with things, be ready to give up my old ideas and take the steps. I sat in at meetings, and that's really all I did. My honesty at that time was about like the honesty of the lady who got on the bus and sat down, said to the lady beside her, oh my goodness, I forgot to pay my fare. And the lady said, well, you know, if the driver isn't excited about it, why should you be? And she said, oh, I just joined this program that recommends rigorous honesty. So up she went, paid the bus driver, and when she came back, she said to the lady beside her, see, honesty pays off. I gave him a dollar and he gave me change for five. Well, I drank again, which is no big news. I don't believe that in this program, it's my prerogative to have shortcuts, and it's not my prerogative to do it the easy, soft way. I have to do it as it's laid down in the big book, in the preamble and in the twelve steps. I believe I have found the answers to all my problems there, if I want to find them and if I want to use the answers that are there. I was married by this time, and I simply, just one story to give you an idea of how sick I really was, and how badly and how addicted I was.
I used to go on these binges at this time. If my husband was away on a conference, I would send the housekeeper away, and I would drink, and then I would not need to take booze to the bedroom. One morning I woke up about 3.30, which was about the time I desperately needed a drink, and the door
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had slammed shut, and something happened to the knob, and I couldn't get out, and I had no booze in the bedroom, and I knew I couldn't live without it. So the only way out was the window, and our bedroom was a story and a half up. So I took off the screen and looked down, and I thought, my god, that is a long way down. So I thought, I will throw out a chair, and I'll jump on the chair, which will break my fall, and I'll be very cool. And that's what I did, but thank goodness the chair flopped over, and I landed on the ground, broke a foot, and then I had the problem of getting into the house. A few days prior to that, the housekeeper had taken me out to the riding stable that was on the property, and she showed me an ox goad. And for those of you that don't know what an ox goad is, they're about six feet long, made out of very heavy wood, and tipped with metal. So I thought, well, that might be a good weapon to break down the back door. So here I am with the ox goad in my baby dolls, bare feet, weighing about 95 pounds, taking flying leaps at the back door.
And after about six of these, I realized that I was not going to be successful. So I decided I'll take a rock, and I did, and I finally pounded in the glass, went downstairs, got a few drinks, and then to cover my tracks, called the OPP, which is the Ontario Provincial Police, told them that there had been a burglary. I had chased the burglars away, but would they come anyway to check everything out? They did come. They complimented me on what a fine, courageous woman I was, and I went to bed, and that was the end of that story. Well, about three months later, as was always my wont, I blamed people, circumstances, and things. It never dawned on me that I was the author of my own misfortune. And so I thought that at this point, my husband was the problem, and I decided to leave him. Within ten days, I packed my suitcase, driven out to Saskatchewan, which was about twenty-two, twenty-three hundred miles, drunk every mile of the way, gone to Prince Albert, disgraced myself, signed myself, called cease, by the way. By the time he came to where I was, I had changed hotels and registered under my pseudonym, and I hope there's no creature called Margaret Robb alive, because she has done things she never knew of. In a blackout, I decided that I would go back home, called my husband, told him I wanted to come back, flew back to Toronto in a blackout. I vaguely remember being on the outskirts of the city on the way back to our home in London, and then, that's the last I know, because I woke up on a Friday night in bed, in a psychiatric ward, wouldn't you know, with a psychiatrist and a private detective sitting at the foot of my bed, thinking it was Monday and it was Friday night. I was at this point not your average raving beauty. I had teeth knocked out, my hair was straggly, I was skinny, and my face was black and blue, and even I was shocked when I could walk enough to go to the bathroom and look in the mirror. This was to be my last drunk up to this point, and by the grace of God, my last drunk. On Sunday morning, at a point in my life when it is most unexpected, and the further I'm removed from that in time, the more I believe truly that that was a miracle, a man came into my, my room, and he said, Mildred, can I talk to you? And I said, certainly. He said, are you an alcoholic? And I said, yes, I am. He said, would you go to Alcoholics Anonymous? And I said, no way. Those people can't help me. And if you hear what I'm saying, again, it was this idea that there should be somebody or something out there that would do it for me. I was not willing up to that point to pay the price for sobriety. He said, would you go to a treatment center? And I said, yes, if they'll have me. The last time I was to be there, I was drunk in Cleveland instead. So that man left my room. I don't know his name, and I guess I will, he will never know what he did for me. But when he left the room, it was as if the scales had been taken from my eyes, because I saw what I had never seen in my life before. That first and foremost, I had to stop drinking, and I had to put the cap on the pill bottle. And that nothing good could possibly happen in my life until I did that. And you know, I think that we do not do the new person a service if we tell them it's easy. It is not easy to get sober. It involves a whole new way of life. Any one of us. Wouldn't we have a lot of difficulty if tonight we had to get accustomed to a way of life not wearing clothes? It would be a lot more difficult than just taking off our clothes. We'd have to change our thinking and our whole perspective on everything. And that's exactly what I had to do with the drinking, because by this time, alcohol was my higher power.
By this time, alcohol was my higher power, and alcohol was woven into the entire fabric
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of my existence. But you know, that morning, it was just so clear to me, the fight was out of me, and I surrendered completely. And the other thing was, for the first time in my life, I had a little ray of hope that maybe, just maybe, I could, if I worked hard at it, if I shut my mouth and did what they told me to do, if anybody would take me by the hand and tell me what to do, just maybe, I could become a decent human being. And I think the big thing about that decision was, it was really a decision. It wasn't the kind of thing before where, in desperation, I'd put the, I'd say, well, yes, I'm going to be sober, but I'd leave the door open, just that much. If it gets too tough, I can always go back and have a drink. This time, it was a firm commitment to sobriety and to trying to change my way of life. And that's another thing that I've learned. I can't just be sober. It's the change of the way of life that I have had to pursue so arduously. So I went to the treatment center, and they got me off the pills and all the other things that I had been on. And eventually, I backed into the doors of Alcoholics Anonymous again.
I didn't come back because I thought you had anything for me. And part of it was my wrong attitudes toward God. I was not ready to deal with a higher power. I came back to the program because I had no place else to go. By the time I sobered up, we were in bankruptcy. We had no money. I had no self-confidence. I had no job. There was nothing left. When I got out of Donwood, I had no home to go to. Another patient took me in for a couple of weeks.
Now, for me to get—a couple of things happened that helped me to come to terms with Step 2, as I understand it. One was the love of the people in this program. And, you know, our theme is I Am Responsible. And just as they passed that love on to me, when I was feeling just this low, I felt I didn't deserve a thing. They loved me, and they cared for me. They didn't do for me what I ought to do for myself, but they supported me 100 percent.
And as they loved me, I began to feel a little different about myself. And as is always the case, what I'm seeing in here, I project out there. And people started to look better, and I started to think in different terms about God. Now, I had a real problem with this higher power, because all my life I blamed God for the way I was. My rationale went something like this. I've been taught that God is love and God is power, and if he saw what my life was going to be like, if he is a loving God, then he should never have let me be created or he should have let me die in the cradle.
I have since come to understand that this is an orderly universe, thank goodness. It's a reliable universe, and it's reliable because it's a universe based on law, on cause and effect. And if I put good causes into operation, I can expect good effects. But if I do bad things, then I must expect the consequences. And it has nothing to do with whether God is good or God is not good. It's simply a fact of life that if I turn on the stove and put my hand on the burner, my hand is going to be burnt. And I'm a fool if I kneel down and say, dear God, don't let me suffer the consequences of my action. You know, I think there are a lot of parallels between the natural order and the spiritual order. And in the spiritual order, I was doing my own self-will, but I wanted God to preserve me from the natural consequences, the suffering that followed on my actions. And putting that all together, I was finally able to come to terms with this idea that God was not the author of my problems, that I was responsible for what had happened to me, and that if I could be responsible for the bad things, I could also put some good causes into effect. And I began to work on the program, and I began to be really interested in what there was here. Things didn't change appreciably, and I still had the football in my stomach because I was sitting on the doorstep of step three and I couldn't do it. And you know, you would think, wouldn't you, that somebody who had spent fifteen years in a convent, and on the average we spent about five to six hours a day in spiritual exercises of one kind and another, you would believe, wouldn't you, that I would have some understanding of what spirituality and giving one's life to God was all about. I didn't know it was suffering that brought me to my knees and that cracked me wide open so that I could receive the grace of God. God doesn't need me if I think I'm powerful. It's when I'm weak and ready to let him act through me that he will, if I let him. And so I sat there saying to myself, well, you know, how
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do I, how do I take step three? And what's going to happen if I do? And what does it mean? And I wasn't doing anything. You see, I think I was trying, confusing step three and eleven. I was trying to do step eleven when I was still a cauldron of, of seething guilt and depression and all kinds of problems, anxiety inside. You see, I think God speaks in quietness. Somewhere in the Bible it says, be still and know that I am God. And somewhere else it says, God is not in the whirlwind, but I was a whirlwind inside. And it's, if you want to see the rays of the sun or the moon, you don't go to the turbulent waters.
You go where it's quiet. And I think that quietness of soul is something that we can have after we do the cleanup steps. But I was confusing that. So there I was. One day in desperation, I was at my morning meeting and people were talking about how desperate they had been and that they had taken step three out of sheer desperation. And I thought, well, if it worked for them, I'm going to try it. So that afternoon I went home and knelt down in my bedroom and I do not recall what happened. I only remember the fruits of it. I remember that coming out of there stunned because for the first time in my life I understood what was wrong with me. I understood what all the psychiatrists, God helped them and all the counselors and priests and nuns and whoever it was that had tried to help me had not been able to tell me. And I'm sure they had all told it to me. And that was that I had the order of the universe completely turned upside down. I had put myself squarely in the center expecting God and all my fellow human beings to satisfy my whims. And that is not the way it is at all as I understand it today. God is in the center of the universe.
He is the host. I used to think that I was the host and I found out since I'm a guest here and a very contingent guest at that. And you know, it was so obvious to me. And then when I went to the big book and when I heard Max speak at our conference, which really was a turning point for me, I began to understand what the big book said, that the alcoholic is a typical example of self-will run riot. Did anything change appreciably then? No, except that my attitude started to change and the way I was handling things started to change. And I'd like to share something else with you that if it's of help to one person, it will be worthwhile having said it. I believe today that it is not necessary to understand the steps in order to do them and to receive the benefits. I am not a chemist and I'm hard pressed to say two intelligent sentences tonight about electricity. It does not prevent me from if I have the willingness to go to the wall and turn on the lights, I can have light energy or the stove and turn on the heat. I can have heat energy and I can do all the wonderful things with it that it allows me without understanding a thing about it. And I have always found if I have the willingness in the program to do what people tell me to come to terms with my problems, I always get the understanding later. And as I look at step three today, the wording is so simple. I think it could be reworded to say made a decision to change. Now, a decision I can make. I may not like to make a decision and I may make wrong ones sometimes. And that reminds me of the story of the man who went to Ireland. As he was walking down the street, a man stuck a gun in his back. He says, what are you? And the man thought, my God, if I say I'm Jewish, if I say I'm Catholic and he's Protestant, he'll shoot me. And if I say I'm Protestant, he's Catholic, he'll shoot me. So he said, I'm Jewish. And the man said, I must be the luckiest Arab alive. So, decisions we must make nevertheless. And if I make a decision, whether it's to go to New York or to come to Minneapolis, if the decision is going to mean a single solitary thing, I've got to follow it with action. And that reminds me of a story, too, of the man who went into the restaurant and he ordered a piece of pie and a hamburger and a glass of milk.
And as the waitress brought it, three tough-looking fellows with hobnail boots and so on came in and one grabbed the hamburger and ate it and the other one mashed up the piece of pie with his thumb and the third one upset the glass of milk. The little man looked neither to right nor left, showed no emotion, picked up his check and went to the cashier to pay his bill. Out he went and she went over to take the order of the three fellows. And before they gave the order, one sneered and said, sure wasn't much of a man, was he? She said, he wasn't much of a driver either. He just backed his Mack truck over the three motorcycles that were packed out there. The part about this program that I think is so wonderful
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is that it's so practical. It never leaves anything to chance. I didn't see that when I first came to the program. But the program has the solution for everything and it lays down in minutest detail what it is that I must do. Step three does not leave me hanging saying how am I doing this step. It gives me a prescription. Steps four to nine for doing that change over. Because I think really that's all the turning of my will and my life over to the care of God is. That I change my thinking and that I change my behavior.
And hence step four to nine follows so logically from that. I teach in a school for emotionally disturbed adolescents and my field is English. And again, this analogy comes to mind because very often in September the kids come and you say to them, do you know what your problem is? And they'll say, I have to improve my reading. Now I can tell you from experience with many hundreds of kids that if that's where it stays, they come to June and they have improved very little. What is necessary is two things. One, you have to diagnose and see exactly where the learning problem is. And secondly, you have to be able to give the kid some practical strategies that he can put into effect so that he can improve.
And I think the program is just tailor-made for that kind of thing. In steps four and five I am, I diagnose myself and go discuss it with somebody. And talking about step four, I remember when I first came to the program in that first five and a half disastrous years, talking about doing step five with Cease and Cease said, step four, pardon me. And Cease recommended that I do it. I guess thinking maybe I'd get honest and stop taking pills or at least admit that I was doing it. And I said, there's nothing wrong with me. So he said, write it down. So I did. And he said, now under that you write liar and you're in business. When I came to the program the second time, I tried all kinds of means. I was willing to do step four, but I had this foolish idea that I had to do the perfect step four. I guess that's really what it amounted to. I had to scrounge out every detail and everything I had done wrong. And it was going to be a real work of art. I don't believe that today. Step four is there so I can get to know myself and get to know what is blocking my progress in the spiritual life, basically, because I believe to what the big book says that my daily reprieve from alcoholism is my spiritual condition. And Cease told me another thing. He said, if you can't still do step four, he said, get a piece of paper and write down the name of somebody that you dislike most in the world and write down all the things you dislike about him. And then when you're finished with that, stroke out his name and put your own on top. And that works very well too. I one time did that and I found fourteen things about the person that I disliked and when I went back again, twelve of them were things that I was doing wrong. But in the big book, again, it prescribes exactly how step four is to be done. And I won't go into that. But I did it just the way the big book said. And I can tell you this. I walked away from step five a free person, something I had never been in my life before. I didn't want to do step five. I was ashamed to go to one human being and lay everything on that person. And I think it's too easy to say, well, I'll go do that part with so-and-so and that part with so-and-so because I'd pick out the people who would be the right people to do the various areas of my life with. To lay it all on one person, there's a special kind of ego deflation takes place. But I walked out of that place a free person. And then the big book says when you finish step five, you go home or someplace where it's quiet and you review the first five proposals, seeing if you have left anything out. And if you have not, then you are ready to do step six and seven. And so I did. I felt that I was entirely ready to have God remove my defects and I humbly asked him to do so. And there's a prayer on that page, which makes it very, very straightforward. My creator, I am now ready that thou have all of me and so on.
But then I kind of stopped on that step because I couldn't figure out. I used to say, well, I wonder when God is going to remove my defects. I know today when he's going to remove my Remove my defects. I know today when he's going to remove them, when I stop doing them. I think it's just that simple.
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It's just like the drinking. You know, I used to say, sure, I'm willing to be sober, but as long as I picked up a drink, I wasn't ready and willing to stop drinking. God gave me sobriety when I stopped drinking, and I believe he'll give me the virtue of patience when I stop getting angry, and he'll give me the virtue of love when I start treating people with kindness, and so on. And I think the other word in there that bothered me was that thing of humility. Now I used to sit on two opposite poles in that area. I either felt that I was Mildred the Magnificent or I said I was nothing, and I don't know about you.
But next to sex, I don't know anything that I like as well as a good bout of self-pity. But the truth I believe is not that I am nothing. The truth is that I am God's child, that I am the handiwork of the Almighty, that he at some point saw fit to make me as I am, and that of all the billions of people, there has never been another one exactly like me or like you. And if I say that I'm no good, then I'm saying God makes junk, and I don't believe that. I believe that I am precious, not because of myself, but everything that I am and have comes from him, and on that basis, I am precious, I am unique, I am special, but so is every other human being that walks the face of the earth, and on that rests their dignity.
And I believe this business of accepting my humanness I found very difficult, because I believe today that to be truly human means to be imperfect, and to be always in a state of imperfection, that I will never arrive, and that I am always dependent, that I'm always dependent on that higher power who gives me daily bread, not weekly bread, not monthly bread, and not annual bread, but daily bread. And that keeps me on my knees, asking for it, and in gratitude.
Now, I had to get on to steps eight and nine, because there were a lot of things that I, there were a lot of scales between myself and other people, because I had done so many things that were so shameful. And generally speaking, in making the list and going to make amends, I was well received, except in one case, and I didn't understand why, and I went to my sponsor and I asked him why, and as we talked about it, he said, you know why, he said, you're full of hostility toward those people, and I thought about that for a while.
You know, I think no alcoholic is so foolish as to believe that we were always wrong, and that everybody else was always right. I'm sure that other people took out their aggressions and their angers once in a while on us, and that once in a while they did hurt us. But I have learned, too, that you have no power to hurt me. It's only what I think about you, my attitudes toward you, that can hurt me.
And if I am resentful toward somebody and angry, that's not their problem, that's my problem. And so I had to make sure, before I went back to those people, that I had fully and freely released them, that I had forgiven them completely. And then I went back, and then my amend was received, and so that brought me up to step 10. Now, when I had finished step 9, you see, I've always been one of these people that have believed, if such and such a person would come into my life, then all my problems would be over.
If I could have such and such, then things would be better. If, if, if. And I think the first year and a half of my sobriety, I thought, now, if I could only get all these cleanup steps done, I would be home free, and I made an amazing discovery. I got to the end of step 9, and I was not free of anxiety, and I was not free. My emotions were completely out of control. I was completely dominated by the way I felt, and it became painfully obvious to me that sobriety without control of my emotions was going to get me nowhere.
I might be sober 200 years, but I would amount to nothing, because I really was emotionally unstable. I'll give you an example. When I was the last drunk that I went on, my folks live out in Saskatchewan. My parents are dead, but that last drunk, I passed through their town, and I stopped at one of my sister's places, and I set the gin bottle on the table. I told her that I'd developed an ulcer. Now, my family are well aware of all the goings-on of alcoholics, because there have been two of us.
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Nevertheless, I set the gin bottle on the table, told my sister that I had developed an ulcer, for which the doctor recommended the drinking of beer, and that night went to bed. The next morning when I got up, they had gone to church. I rummaged the house for a drink. There was none. I got in my car, and that's the last they saw of me. It never dawned on me that they might be worried about me. Two months later, I called them from Toronto.
My sister said, well, you know, we prayed for you, but she said, we have just had to let you go and see when you would find your own way. But that's just an example of how irresponsible I was. And the little man used to come to our group at that time, and he used to say, do the do things. Now, that made an awful lot of sense to me. At that time, you know, my head was still so, my brain was so scrambled, I couldn't put too many ideas together.
But that made sense. And what that means to me today, and it's as powerful to me today as it was then, when I have calmly and in a clear frame of mind set out a plan of action for myself, I must carry it out. You see, I used to be the kind, when I felt like it, I would promise you the world, and I would not keep any kind of commitment to you if I didn't feel like it. And so do the do things stands me in good stead, and I have found that my feelings have leveled out a great deal.
And then another problem of mine with my feelings was I used to say I'm super sensitive. Don't jolt me. I'm an alcoholic after all. And as I look at that today, I say to myself today when I'm feeling that way, no, you're not super sensitive. You aren't any more sensitive than anybody else. You're being irresponsible, immature, and neurotic, and that doesn't sound nearly so good. I still have a problem with getting too involved with myself.
Did you ever come home from a party and rework the whole party? But only in terms of yourself. My clothes, the food I served, what did I say? Did I talk too much? Did I talk enough? I wonder, you know, and on and on. It has come as a shock to me that I am really very inconsequential in the ordering of the universe, and that were I to die tonight, I would be very, I might be mourned for a little while, but I would be very quickly forgotten.
If my principal ever dared walk down the hall and not greet me, and preferably with a large-sized smile, that was good for three days of worry and similar silly things. I have had to learn that I must take responsibility for my feelings, and this is something that I did not want to do. I have had to accept the fact today that nothing can hurt me if I don't let it. It's the attitude, the ideas that I approach things with that will kill me.
As I said before, what you think about me, I hope you love me, but it can't hurt me if you don't. It's what I think about you. It's what I've got inside. You see, with all my geographic cures and all my trying to get away, my change of state, I've been single, in the convent, separated, married, and divorced. You haven't got any other place to go other than that, and I always found I never changed.
Sure, there'd be a little bit of change while the new state of life was new, and then it was back to the same old thing. The problem I know now is always inside me. About three years ago, I was in a very difficult relationship, so I asked this man who'd been sober in the program about 23 years to be my sponsor, and I was sure that I had made a very bad choice, because the first night we sat down to talk, he said, Now, Mildred, I want you to understand one thing.
If you're emotionally upset, you're wrong. And I thought, My goodness, what an unspiritual man that is. But I know today he's right. I've already talked about the if-only, and I've had to get a lot of acceptance into my life. Because, you know, it's not good enough to try to say, Well, you know, my feelings are my responsibility. How do I get them under control? That's the thing. I find that if I can try to accept people, recognizing the fact that I don't know where I should be in the order of existence, I don't know if I've grown enough or whatever, but the fact is I'm doing the best I can today.
I am what I am today. And I think I ought to be able to give everybody else that same leeway,
[00:40:06]
believing that they have done the best with their life at any given time, and that they are where they are, and accept them. And I find that if I can accept people and say, He's just where he should be today, and he is the way, and it's not my prerogative to try to change people, it makes it a lot easier, and I have a lot less trouble with my feelings. We aren't trained that way, though, are we? Listen to the songs we sing.
I Can't Stop Loving You. Well, if I can't, who can? And we sing, Please Release Me, Let Me Go. That implies that you have me chained if you have to release me. And I always used to say such things as, You make me angry. You can't make me angry. If I choose to react with anger, that is my responsibility. Or, You made me look foolish. Only I can, by my own actions, can make me look foolish. If you wish to dance with the lampshade on your head, because you happen to be my escort, why should I look foolish?
We act as individuals. So I have had to take responsibility for my feelings. I've had a lot of trouble with relationships. I am not talking only about male-female relationships. I'm talking just about people. I sometimes used to get the idea if I could just get on an island where nobody could disturb my serenity, wouldn't it be wonderful? You know, I'd just get myself just right tuned up, just the way I think I should be, and then watch somebody come along and louse it up for me.
But, you know, isn't it true, wouldn't life be miserable without people? I used to try to build defenses around myself, be very inflexible and very rigid. I think it was so I wouldn't be hurt. I know today that if I love people, and if I let people get to know me, and if I really have a free interrelationship with people, sure it's going to hurt sometimes. People aren't on this earth to satisfy my whims, and they're going to go contrary to the way I think things should be, and I will feel like being irritable and all those things.
But isn't life beautiful because of the eyes that we look into, and the hands that we hold, and the arms that we feel encircling us? The price is not too high for the hurts. But I think that I was raised with some real myths about relationships, and as I was thinking it over, I have had to come to terms with this. Human relationships are not a solution to personal problems. I used to think if only Mr. Right would come along, then I would be different.
About two years ago, Mr. Right, I think, did come along, and then my whole world blew apart because I became jealous and possessive. So that one didn't work. And then in our literature we read, the two shall be as one. The problem is, which one? The other option is, if you take one and you split it, you've got two halves. That's not such a viable alternative either, is it? What I've had to learn is this.
And right at that time, Mac was at our group, and I talked to him about this, and he told me to go to step 10 and step 11 and try to work out how to do it. And I said, well, you know, I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it. I'm going to go to step 11 and try to work them every day. And that helped me. I think the best relationship today is where two people can be individuals and go do their own thing and not expect that somebody else can be your happiness, can make your excitement for you, and yet there's a lot of that still in me, wanting somebody else to do it for me.
Well, um… Another thing I should mention, when I came here, I was a completely negative person, and I can't think of anything… I was so negative that I didn't even know what negative was. I just lived in a complete world where anger, resentment, fear, worry, self-pity, hatred, all those things ruled me completely. I was sure that always the worst was going to happen, like the lady who went to the racetrack, and as she was standing there waiting for the race to begin, she felt something slipping at her waist, and she turned to the man at her right and said, You wouldn't have a pin, would you?
And he said, No. She turned to the lady at her left and said, Would you have a pin? And the lady said, No. And at that point, the horses were at the starting gate, the announcer said, They're off! And she fainted. Now… I began to look at negative thinking because people used to say to me, Mildred, you are
[00:45:00]
so negative, and I didn't know exactly what they meant. But as I look at it today, being negative is a complete waste of time for a number of reasons. But basically it's a waste of time because it implies, I believe, that the problem is out there. If only you would change, and if only the circumstance would change, and some situation would change, then I would be all right. And I have just never found that to be the case. The problem is always inside me, and if I change me, the problem always solves itself. As my sponsor said to me in this regard, in relationships and so on, he said, Mildred, be yourself and be honest. And he said, the right things will happen in your life, the right people will be in your life, and those people that are not right, you will shed like a skin. And he was right. He said, be honest and be yourself. And you know, the awful part of this negative business, and I still go through these stages where I have to really deal with myself not to be negative, is that it's almost like justifying a drink. I can almost justify that I'm angry.
Well, I have a right to be angry. I have no right to be angry. So I've had to look at the thought structures that are underneath this negative thinking. Why do I feel negative? What am I really thinking back there that allows me to be so negative? And I find I think that it boils down to four things. One, I sit in judgment. The throne of God has only room for one, and I know who is not going to be occupying it. The second problem I have is if I get too puffed up with a sense of my own importance. The third problem I have is I want results now. Once I see the truth, that is no guarantee that I'm going to get the truth like that. It's like trying to stop drinking. I lost the craving to drink immediately, but I know many people who have not. And I could give other examples. I've got to work for things. You see, if you're parents and you woke up tomorrow morning and your son or daughter had grown seven inches, you wouldn't say, whoopee, isn't this wonderful? You'd rush to the doctor. You'd say something is wrong. And in the spiritual order too, I think I have to remember I have to do the right thing every day. I won't see evidences of growth every day, but I must not get weary in doing the right thing every day. And I will get to the top of another little hill. What I'm saying is we don't see spiritual growth, evidences of it, all the time. I always find myself in a little slump, maybe for two or three weeks, you know, where I'm feeling irritable, and once in a while I feel as if my nerves were sandpapered and all that kind of stuff. And I used to wonder what was wrong with me. I think it's just growing pains. If I could look in my life and see that I'm not doing anything really wrong. And then, you know, you come out of that because you've taken another look at an aspect of the program and you get over that hill and you come to a new summit and you coast along there. And then all of a sudden, whoops, it's almost as if I start feeling uncomfortable again. And I know it's time that I've got to grow.
And that's the way it is. I used to fight that and I don't anymore because I think that's really, at least that has been my experience. I haven't found that kind of elixir that gives me peace and serenity all the time. What I have found is a way of life that allows me to deal with it. And I've got a little bit of the baby in me still that says, do it for me. Wouldn't it be nice if it were a little easier? Wouldn't it be nice if the world would only change so that I wouldn't have to deal with all these uncomfortable emotions and all this, this, uh, these things that I don't really want to cope with. I haven't found a fairy godfather. As a matter of fact, I don't even believe in the tooth fairy anymore.
So I guess I'm really in trouble. So that brings me to step 11. And I can tell you the first year in the program, I learned to pray. I remember the day we spent our last hundred dollar bill and I was full of fear and anxiety because the next step to that was the welfare. And that to me was the equivalent to, uh, uh, I don't know. It just filled me with anxiety and terror. The first year I was sober, we had to have our dogs put to sleep. And those two dogs were like little children to me. We simply couldn't afford to keep them. I remember sitting up on the 26th floor of the, uh, Simpson's Tower, working in an office, doing filing. Not that there's anything wrong with filing, but I believe it's not a sign of terribly good management if you have three degrees behind your name. And I say that not to impress you. A friend of mine said, if you say that at a meeting, also remember to add rectal thermometers have degrees as well.
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Those were things I had to deal with that first year. And what kept me going was prayer, but I was praying in a different way than I had ever prayed before. And I, I really believe this. If I did not pray, I would eventually drink. That's as important as prayer is in my life today. It's the stabilizing force. It's that force which allows me to put the truth into my life and at least make an attempt to practice it. Step 11 does not say so, but I believe that it assumes when it says we sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, I think it assumes that we would do some spiritual reading.
At least I have found the necessity for doing that. You see, for 40 years, I filled my mind and my subconscious with ugly things, with negative thoughts and negative feelings. And so when I used to sit down to try and pray and meditate, that's what welled up. So I had to try and put some positive things into, into my mind and into my subconscious. And I don't think the idea of spiritual reading should frighten anybody because I don't mean anything very esoteric by that. I mean simply things that make me want to be a better person, whether that be the writings of Norman Vincent Peale or Napoleon Hill, or whether it be the Sermon on the Mount or whatever. I really rely on spiritual reading today. I find it as helpful. It's like mental handholds. It's like giving my mind something good that it can chew on. My prayer has changed a great deal. I used to spend a lot of time asking God for things, and all that got me was frustration. If not God's fault, I don't think prayer was ever meant to change the mind of God and to bend him to do things the way I want things done. I believe today prayer is to change me. That is the big important thing. And if I change, the whole world changes. And I believe what step 11 says now. We sought through prayer and meditation to find God's will. I believe today that God is good, and God doesn't change. God is not like my whims and like my imaginings are. And I like to think of the sun. It is the nature of the sun to give heat and light. The sun has never been known to send down darkness, and it has never been known to send down cold, because these are negative things, because it is its nature not to do so. And I believe if God is good, and I believe he is, and if he is love, then he's not goodness and love today, and tomorrow decides to send little suffering on me. I believe it's just like now. We say, you know, the sun is not shining. That is not true. The sun is shining. The sun is obscured from our view by the rotation of the earth, or sometimes during the day by the clouds that separate us from the sun. And I believe that sometimes I separate myself from the goodness and love of God by letting my self-will get in the way. But I can have as much of good in my life as I can handle if I will simply get out of the way and let God put into my life the people and the circumstances and the things that he sees are good for me.
There have been times, even in sobriety, when I have asked God for things that I did not get. And in hindsight, I can see that if God had given them to me, they would have been to my destruction. So I feel these days that most times I can really say, God, I really don't know. This is what I would like, but I don't really know if that's right for me. You take over. And I can tell you this. I've had miracles happen in my life. I thought I would never teach when I got to that point where I could say, if you want me to be a sales clerk all my life, by gum, that's what I'll be. And if you want me to wash dishes, I'll do that too. That has nothing to do with my dignity as a human being. And it was at that time that I got the inspiration to look in the newspaper and saw the teaching ad that brought me to the place where I am today. So I utilize my prayers to talk to God as I would talk to a loving father. And I think along with this, I have to remember thanks and I have to remember trust. And I think the best example of trust that I ever see, and I think of it often when I'm sitting in my car at a red light, is a little child going across the intersection with his daddy. He doesn't worry about whether there's a bus bearing down on them or whether there's a Mack truck with loose brakes or whatever.
He's got his little hand in his daddy's and he just, where does he look? Not to right or left. He's looking at his daddy and he knows it's okay because he's got his hand in his daddy's hand and it's going to be all right. And I think that you and I have every
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reason to walk through life with just that much trust in our heavenly father. I think prayer has taught me a couple, two other things. Or no, it's been useful to me because if I pray and meditate in the morning, it puts me in mind of the principles by which I ought to live. And it has been my experience that despite that, and despite wanting to do good, I still do bad sometimes. How much worse would I be if I didn't take time in the morning to read the big book and the 24-hour book and think of the principles that the program has taught me? And also prayer has given me answers. I understand now that I don't have answers and it's a waste of time to look for answers. And I'd like to share with you a little story that I heard a minister give in a sermon. He was talking about this problem of trying to find out why there are starving people in the world and why children are born deformed, et cetera, finding answers to the suffering in the world. And he said, if you're watching the salmon going up the stream to spawn, you may be rooting for the salmon.
You want him to get where he wants to go. And you see the big black bear come out of the woods and he puts in his paw and he out comes the salmon, one gulp and the salmon's gone. Now, if you're the salmon, that's not such a great experience. But if you're the bear, that may have saved your life. Now, he said, what are the rights and wrongs of that situation? I don't know, but that's just the way life is. Sometimes I guess I'm the salmon and sometimes I'm the bear and that's just the way it is. And anyway, who am I to question the mind of God? If I could come to terms with the way things are, then of course, my mind would be as great as the mind of God. And that, of course, is ridiculous.
And so having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, and it says the result, not a result. And I believe that it is humanly impossible to do the steps to the best of my ability, whether that be a very poor ability or whether whatever. If I do the steps to the best of my ability, I will have a spiritual awakening. I have had a spiritual awakening and I hope to have a lot more as I go on this journey of life. I have had a change of heart and a change of attitude. And my life is different today than it was seven years ago. We tried to carry this message to alcoholics. I am not responsible for somebody else, how somebody else receives the message, but I am responsible that the message be carried.
And I think there's a big difference. Other people were not responsible when they carried the message to me and I would not receive it, but I am responsible. And I always must remember it is not my message. I am only the water. I am only the pipe through which the water flows. I am not the life giving stream. That is that whole business of whether the message is accepted or not. That is between the individual and his higher power and his God. But I must remember that as there were healthy people here, when I came through those doors and I can never tell you what it meant to me to have healthy, clean, prosperous looking people at meetings, it gave me hope and it gave me the courage to struggle along and say, I will do this one day at a time because it got better for them and it will get better for me slowly one day at a time. And I believe that it is my responsibility to now to do anything and everything that I can to help other people who want help, to help keep Alcoholics Anonymous, the healthy, thriving program that it is, and to carry the message wherever and in whatever way I can and whether that be cleaning the ashtrays or making the coffee or speaking at a meeting or going someplace on a dark rainy night on a 12-step call. That is my responsibility and I believe I did not get a free ticket when I came into this program.
And I know, too, that it's only those things that I give away that I truly keep. And I know, too, that somebody else's life may hang on whether I take that responsibility. How and where would I be if the people who got sober had said, well, I'm sober now. I've got my life in order. Let the rest of the world go hang. I might be dead today. And that is something that I must take very seriously. And it says then, we tried to practice these principles in all our affairs. And, of course, that's the hooker, the all our affairs, isn't it? Because that leaves no wiggle room. That does not allow me to go to a meeting and be one kind of a person and then go someplace else.
Unkind of a Person, and then go someplace else and put on another kind of a face and go to school and snap at my students, and that kind of thing. I have to try to be an honest, decent, responsible human being wherever I am, regardless of the
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cost. I can only tell you tonight that my heart is full of gratitude for the seven years of happiness that I have had in the program, for the changes that have come about in my life. I am deeply grateful that I have been allowed to become a member of this program, and I'm deeply grateful to have had the opportunity to speak to you tonight. And I would like to close with what I think is really the summary of everything that I believe and everything that I have said and everything that I try to live by.
And these are the words of King George VI to his people, I think it was at Christmas of 1939 when the war had just broken out and people were fearful and not knowing where they were going. I don't know about you. I have tried to find security in people and things and jobs and so on, but I have not been able to do so. And I know now where the security is. It is as if God has put a string on my heart and has said to me, Mildred, go where you will.
You will always have to acknowledge that what you are and what you have is from me. And these are the words of King George VI. I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, give me a light that I may safely tread into the unknown. And he replied, go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God, for that shall be better than a light and safer than a known way. And for each of you, I pray that God may give you all the good things that he sees are good for you.