Thank you. Hello, everybody. I'm Claire Kelly, and I'm a grateful, recovering, and slightly nervous member of the Worldwide Fellowship of Al-Anon. Hi, Claire. That feels good. That feels real good. That helps a lot. The other thing that'll help me be a little less nervous is if I give this meeting back to God. It's His meeting anyway. And if there's anything that God wants me to say tonight, I'm sure that my God can shout louder than I can, and I'll think of it as it comes up. And if there's anything God wants you to hear tonight, even if I don't say it, sometimes God works somewhere between my mouth and your ears, and you'll hear what you need to hear. So I can relax now and give the meeting to Him and just talk to my friends. This is gonna be all right. I came into Al-Anon 12 years ago in Houston, Texas, and since that time, my life has changed dramatically. I have purpose and commitment. I have peace, at least some of the time. I know what the word serenity means. I know what the word joy means. I don't always feel it, but it's always there, right under the surface. I know what the word happy means, and while I'm not always happy, I know that happy comes back, that it's always right around the corner. And I have this fellowship to thank for all of that. Before I came into this program, I didn't know what those words meant. There were a lot of other words I didn't know what they meant either. I didn't know what the word resentment meant. I had a stack of them, but I didn't know the name for them. I didn't know what fear really was. I just panicked all the time. I didn't know what codependency was. I thought I was just responsible and compassionate and worried about everyone else, taking care of people. I didn't know what the word caretaker really meant. I was real good at being one, but I didn't know the words for it. So when I tell my story now and I start at the beginning, like it says in the big book, and tell you what it was like and what happened and what it's like now, I… it's hard to go back and really remember what it was like because I didn't have any of those labels to describe what was going on in my life. I'm gonna try tonight to share with you what it really felt like before I came into the program, the things that I remember that really stuck in my mind and made a difference, even though I didn't understand them at the time. If I back way up, I get to when I was three years old. When I was three, I started having horrible headaches, head-banging headaches, the kind you bang your head against the wall. They would last for a couple of hours, and I would get nauseated. And finally, I would throw up, and I'd feel a little better and go to sleep. And then I would wake up a few hours after that all right. I was three years old. My mother was concerned, and she took me to a slew of doctors who tested me for everything you can think of. I didn't have a brain tumor. I didn't have any of the, the problems that I might have been having. When I was about five, they finally put a label on the kind of headaches I had, and I remember the doctor saying that I had migraine headaches, and they were the result of a combination of allergies and stress. Now, I didn't really know what stress was, but I did know that my headaches happened at times like, oh, just during the dance, the rehearsal for dance recital or when I went to visit a friend's house where there was a lot of fighting going on. Of course, they happened at other times, and I couldn't have told you what the excitement or the stress was that was going on. But they were pretty constant from the time I was three until I was in my teens. The next thing I remember that's a pretty significant point is that, uh, when I was five or six years old, I started school. And at about that time, things changed in my house. My mother became irritable and unreasonable, and I don't think she even knew it. And for those of you who are familiar with the Al-Anon welcome, that's a part of the symptoms of our disease. But I didn't know that at the time. I was five years old, and five-year-olds think magically. There's a child back home who tells me that he made his mother pregnant. He did it by praying for a little brother. He's sure that what he did is what caused her to get pregnant. That's the way five-year-olds think, and I thought that way, too. So I started trying to think what I had done to make my mother so angry all the time. And the only thing I could think of was I had started school, and I wasn't always good in school. I mean, I was good with the grades part, but I misbehaved a lot. So I decided that was probably what it was. We weren't together as much, and I was getting in trouble at school, so I resolved not to get in trouble anymore. Only I couldn't keep that resolution, so I changed it, and I resolved not to tell Mother I was getting in trouble. And I learned to lie at the age of five in order to make my mother not so irritable anymore. And I learned to latch on to Mom and spend as much time with her as I could, trying to make her happy again the way she had been before I went to school. I thought I was responsible. Magical thinking. Next real significant thing that I remember happening was when I was in the fourth grade. We lived in Birmingham, Alabama at the time, and Birmingham had a school for gifted children. It was a real big deal, and they tested students in the fourth grade to see if they qualified to go. I was tested, and I was invited to go to the school for gifted children, and my mother told me what the tester had told her, or at least… Well, my mother told me something. I guess it's what the tester had told her. Uh, Mother told me that not only was I bright, but I was really good at understanding what motivated people, why they acted the way they did, understanding why they behaved the way they did, and that was a really valuable thing to know. Uh, the psychologist who did the testing suggested maybe I should go into psychology. Now, I got patted on the head a whole lot for that. Mother bragged about me and this score I had made. We were all excited about how I was going to go to this special school, but in the summer between the fourth and fifth grade, my dad decided we needed to move, and we moved to Mobile, Alabama, where they didn't have a school for gifted children. And what I learned from that, regardless of what it was really about, was that I didn't matter, that what was good for me wasn't important. As far as I could tell, and I still think to this day this is true, the question of whether or not I was gonna get to go to that special school wasn't even a consideration. I knew this wasn't my mother's idea. She wasn't happy about it, so I blamed Dad. It was his fault. He obviously didn't really care. And then we moved. Now, we got to Mobile when I was about 11 years old, and, um, I didn't have any friends in Mobile, of course, and neither did my mother, and we already had this, a little overly close relationship. It got closer. We kind of hung around each other a lot. Mother used to talk about how I was her best friend as well as her daughter. She was real proud of that. So was I for a while, and that was really very much the case. We were kind of in each other's hip pocket. The one good thing about moving to Mobile was I was gonna get a room of my own away from my little brother. I was excited about that. That was gonna be nice. But within the year, my mother moved into my bedroom. She and Dad were having such serious problems they couldn't sleep in the same room together anymore. Now, Mother told me that it was because Dad had arthritis, and I guess I believed that for maybe a year until I figured out that didn't make sense. And I knew that they were unhappy with each other. I knew that they didn't like each other very much, and I resented the hell out of my mother being in my room, not having that room to myself. I'll tell you one other thing. That was supposed to be a secret. Now, nobody ever told me to keep it a secret, but if I invited someone over to spend the night, we went to elaborate lengths to make sure it was a night when Dad would be out of town so Mother could move all of her clothes and personal belongings back to their room and cover up any sign that she slept in my room most of the night. That's all it takes when you're 11 or 12 years old to get through to you real clearly that you're not supposed to talk about that. So I didn't talk about it to anybody. When I was in about the seventh grade, two things happened that were real significant. My mother got pneumonia. She was sick for a couple of weeks, and during that time, her coughing kept me awake at night. She was continuously getting sicker during that time, and I was getting angrier. By this time, I knew that my mother in my room wasn't the way it was supposed to be, that there was something wrong between Mom and Dad, and I was so angry. I was angry at Dad because this was his responsibility, and why was I taking care of my sick mother? And I was angry at Mother because why didn't she do something different about the situation? And then one night about two o'clock in the morning, we had to rush her to the hospital, and she nearly died, and I felt so guilty for the way I had resented her being sick. The next thing that happened was I spent the night at a friend's house, and this friend had a bedroom of her own, and she had gotten to pick out the colors and the furniture, and it only had her stuff in it, and my room was crowded with two people trying to share it. It had mostly her junk in it, not mine, and I was resentful, and I came home that afternoon just ready to pitch one of those adolescent tantrums that kids throw. And I was having at it, and I tore into Mother about how I resented all this junk in my room, and my mother burst into tears and said, "First your father rejected me and now you." And then she proceeded to tell me the truth about what was going on between she and Dad in a lot more detail than any seventh grader ever should have heard, and I never brought the subject up again. As a matter of fact, I didn't think about it again for a long, long time. When I was 19 years old, I decided to get married to run away from home. I was too scared to go out and get a job and an apartment of my own, and I was too sick and tired of living in this bad situation. My parents had since divorced, but my mother was still in my room and my hip pocket. And I decided to get married because that was the easy way to, to move out without a whole lot of effort But I had concluded some things about marriage and living in that house. I decided, first of all, that in most relationships, maybe all, there were two people, one who was a user and a taker, and one who was a giver and a martyr. And I decided that since my parents had gone to such lengths to cover up to the outside world how bad their relationship was, that probably everybody's marriage looked a lot like theirs. And just because the people across the street seemed to be happy, that didn't mean they really were. They could be just as miserable as mom and dad. And just because my best friend's parents kissed and smooched and hugged didn't mean they were happy with each other either. It was all phony and fraud. After all, mom and dad did that in public right up to the divorce. So I decided that although I was gonna get married, I really believed that marriage was an outmoded institution, that monogamous marriage should have gone out as soon as the pill was invented. I really did think all this stuff through, y'all. And that if it got difficult, I wasn't gonna hang around till I was fat and forty and lonely. I was gonna get out quick. So I got married at nineteen. I had my son at the age of twenty-one, and by the time I was twenty-four, I got my first divorce. I didn't have a particularly good reason. I just was bored, I think. That and the fact that I had married a man who let me win all the arguments. I never lost one to him until after we were divorced, and I sort of lost respect somewhere in there. And besides, you see, I had decided if there was a user and a martyr, a giver and a taker, I sure as hell wasn't gonna be the martyr. I was gonna be the taker. And so I manipulated, and I dug my heels in and got stubborn, and I got my way all through the five years that I was married to that man. I behaved very badly, very much like my father had behaved all the years that he and mom were married, and I didn't like myself at all. And I couldn't figure out how to change and stay in the relationship with that man, so I got out of the relationship. And a year and a half later, I found a way to do penance. I married an alcoholic. Now, I knew he was an alcoholic. When I met him, the bartender at the bar across the street from the law school where we were both in school said, "Don't have anything to do with this guy, John. He's an alcoholic," and she showed me his bar tab to prove it. I had no doubt about it. This guy was a… just drunk. He started drinking early in the morning. He drank all day long. He looked like a slob. I didn't want anything to do with him. But a year and a half later, we had gotten to be friends. He would sober up occasionally and be real nice, and I kind of liked him then as a friend, but I wasn't gonna date him 'cause I knew he was an alcoholic. And then he went on the wagon for a while, and he said it was because I had told him he had potential and that he was wasting it. See, I had gotten him sober , and I was in trouble now. And so while he was on the wagon, we started dating, and in very short order, we got engaged, and we got married on December twenty-first, and on December twenty-fourth, I have a picture of him falling down drunk. Uh, he proceeded to drink for the next year and a half on a regular basis with little periodic attempts at getting sober, and I proceeded to go stark raving crazy because as that was going on, certain things started coming back to me that I'd kind of skimmed over in my life before that. You see, shortly before my parents got divorced, my dad was in a horrible automobile accident. He crushed two vertebrae in the process, and there was no doubt at all that alcohol had something to do with that because the car was filled with empty bottles. And I can remember sitting and talking to my then boyfriend and telling him how worried I was about my dad, not because he was hurt right then, he was gonna be okay, but because I knew this would happen again. And while I was married to John and he was drinking, I remembered that time when I was living in Houston and I got a call from my little brother who was still back in Mobile where my parents were living. And my brother said, "You better make a plane reservation 'cause Dad's had a wreck, and he's in a coma, and they haven't been able to get him to come to at all, and I think you better just come on." And I got off the phone at about eleven o'clock in the morning, and I made a plane reservation for the s- the next flight from Houston to Mobile, which was about six o'clock in the evening. About four o'clock, I get another phone call from Whit, and Whit says, "Never mind. Cancel the reservation. Dad didn't have a coma. He was just dead drunk." He had been in the hospital for twelve hours, and they hadn't been able to wake him up. But my dad didn't have a problem with alcohol, according to my brother, and so I hadn't thought about it a lot until I was married to John, and then it looked so familiar. John just became somebody else when he was drinking, and I didn't know who he was, and I didn't want to be married to him. He wasn't the same person I had made vows to, and our marriage had distance growing in it. He would get drunk, and I would withdraw. He would get sober and be penitent and tell me how sorry he was, and I would feel guilty for hating him. And then… This would happen like he'd get drunk on a Friday, and he'd get sober on a Sunday at that point for the most part. On Monday, he would be Saint John. On Tuesday, he would be Saint John. On Wednesday, he would say, "Let's go buy something." Oh, you know, a house, a car, a color TV, whatever. And I would think, the first thing I thought… Now, I was a lawyer by this time, and I was doing largely family law. And so, uh, the first thing I would think was, we can't go buy something that's just one more piece of community property to have to divide up. And I would feel so guilty for thinking that, that I would say, "Okay," and we would go buy something else we couldn't afford. On Thursday, we'd have a fight, and on Friday he'd get drunk again. And this happened week after week after week. And I felt so stupid. I spent so much time telling myself how dumb I was to have married him. I mean, I knew he was an alcoholic. I should have known better, and that four or five months of sobriety he had, or dry, on the wagon he had, shouldn't have fooled me. I'm an intelligent woman who has all this insight into people's motives, right? And I'm supposed to be able to tell these things. And if I could just figure out why I had been so stupid and married him in the first place, then somehow it would be all right. And so, I would lay awake at night thinking, "Why did I marry this person? And what did I do to do this to myself?" And trying to sort it out. And when I got really tired of thinking that, then I would start thinking… He was out drinking at this time. I would start thinking what I would do if he was in a horrible accident while he was out there. Now, I knew what I would feel was relieved. But what I would do when the cops came to the door and said, "Mrs. Hurling, I'm sorry, your husband has been in a horrible accident," I would have to look so- really sad, you know? And I, I would practice, laying there in bed practicing how to look sad when I was really feeling relieved. I really wanted him to die or get sober, and I wasn't sure which. And I really wanted him to be that person he had been briefly when we were dating. And I worked at it. I manipulated, and I pleaded, and I told him everything I knew about alcoholism. I went out and read some stuff, in fact, you know, about how it was a disease and how there was help available and… None of it was getting through. And finally, I'd had enough. Now, I, I was self-supporting or able to self-support. So I was able to have enough a lot earlier than some people. It had only been about 20 months of continuous drinking, and I did have a son from a previous marriage, and I did feel very guilty for having brought him into that situation. So those two things came together to give me kind of an early bottom. And after 20 months of the drinking, I came home one night to find John passed out, and when he woke up, I told him that I was leaving. And he knew I meant it. And, well, actually, the first thing he said was, "You can't leave. It's all your fault." And I told him I didn't care. And the second thing he says is, "You can't leave. I'll go to AA," which is, of course, what I'd been telling him he ought to do all this time. And I said I didn't care. But I couldn't move out till the weekend, 'cause I didn't have time to go look for an apartment. And in between, he actually did. He went to AA, and he didn't have another drink. And by about Saturday or Sunday, I was trying to figure out whether I… Well, frankly, I was trying to figure out whether I could still leave him. Actually, I was really angry with him for getting sober. I've heard people tell me that the reason they were angry when the alcoholic got sober was because they had wanted to get him sober, and these strangers had done it. That wasn't my problem. I was just mad at him that he got sober, 'cause there went my excuse to leave him. And I had gotten all revved up to get out of there, you know? And here he was sober. And furthermore, he was back to being Saint John, you know? So, so I s- I hung around. Uh, at one point… David was five then, maybe six. Not any older than that. At one point, David and I were sitting in the car, and I was still trying to figure out whether to stay or to go. And I turned to my five-year-old, and I said, "Well, what do you think? Do you think he's really gonna stay sober this time? Do you think I should stay with him and give him one more chance?" And my five-year-old said, "Well, he looks like he's really trying, and, and I think you ought to give him another… But on the other hand, he, he really made you unhappy, and I don't like it when you're unhappy. And why are you asking me? You're the grown-up." And I realized what I was doing to my son, what my mother had done to me. I had turned him into my confidant, my little surrogate spouse. And I felt a little crazy. Just a little. Couple more weeks went by, and I couldn't stop being angry and irritable and unreasonable. I had by that time realized I was, though. I was screaming about stupid things. You know, where before I'd been screaming about important things, like, "You're drunk, and you can't drive my car, my son in your car with you drunk," now I was screaming about, "You flipped ashes on the carpet of my car." And I was screaming just as loud and just as crazy about ashes on the carpet of my car. And I knew I needed help, and I was so scared. Here John had gotten sober. He was being, at that time, all the things that I wanted him to be. He was being a good stepfather and an attentive husband and sober. All right, he was going to a lot of meetings, but I didn't mind that. I mean, I wasn't all that fond of having him around at that point, so he could be gone. That was okay. He was being what I'd asked him to be, and I was still screaming. And I wasn't just screaming at John. I was screaming at David. I was screaming at everybody. I wasn't working well at work. You know, the brain wasn't functioning. I was terrified. I knew I was crazy, and I was scared. All the things that I had said would make me happy had happened, and I wasn't happy. And I didn't think I was ever going to be happy again. I thought my happy had broken, that there was something wrong with me that kept me from being able to be happy. And John suggested, because a friend of his at the meetings had suggested, that maybe I should go to an Al-Anon meeting. And of course, I wanted to support his sobriety, so I thought about it. And one night I said, "Okay, I'll go." And we drove up to this little building in Bel Air, Texas, in the middle of Houston. And all of a sudden, I started to cry. And I was just terrified. See, I knew what I was afraid of at that moment. I was afraid I was gonna walk in, and I was gonna tell them how crazy I was, and they were gonna say, "You're right. It's you. It's not alcohol anymore. It's you. And you're gonna have to change." And I was afraid I couldn't. And I was just crying hysterically there in the car. And the minutes went by, and now it's gonna be five after 8:00, which was what time the meeting was supposed to start. And then at that moment, I really do think God put the words into John's mouth that he needed to say. He said, "You don't have to go if you don't want to." And all of a sudden, I knew that I could. And so I got up, and I went to that meeting. I don't really remember a lot of that meeting. I remember a really sweet lady who held my hand and got me a cup of coffee. I think I remember people smiling at me. And after the meeting… When I turned to someone and I said, "What I want to know is, how do you know if he's gonna stay sober?" And someone said to me, "You don't. But then again, you don't know but what he's gonna die of a heart attack tomorrow or get run over by a bus, and you don't waste any time worrying about those things. You take it one day at a time. Enjoy the sobriety today." And that made sense. It was the first thing that had made sense in so long. And I thought, "I gotta come back. You know, maybe there really is something to this." Besides, these people were smiling and laughing and things, you know, strange stuff that I wasn't doing a lot of anymore. And I did keep coming back, and little by little, it did begin to make sense. I knew that something had happened when I was driving home from a meeting one night, and I found myself laughing out loud. I was alone in the car laughing out loud, and the sound of my own voice laughing was so strange to me. It hadn't done it in a long time. I wasn't laughing at anyone, at anyone's expense, anything of that sort. It had just been this really good feeling in the meeting, and I was thinking back on something somebody had said, and it was… and I was laughing for the first time in at least two years, and maybe a lot longer than that. And so I kept coming back, and I got a sponsor, and she was great. She didn't put up with too much from me. She was very kind and very diplomatic, but she was also very firm. And I started to work the steps with the help of my sponsor and the help of my group. Now, at that point, John was going to seven meetings a week. I was going to maybe three, 'cause we all know Al-Anons aren't as sick as the alcoholics and don't need as many meetings. Or we all know that Al-Anons aren't as important as the alcoholics and don't need as many meetings. I think that was really my thinking. Somebody had to stay home and take care of the kid, you know. And the kid came to meetings. Kid played with trucks and color crayons under the tables during meetings. He grew up in meetings. Poor child. Lucky kid. Uh, and I was struggling to work the steps. Now, I really thought I had the first step down that first night. I knew that alcohol had beaten me. I knew that I was helpless to fix it. I knew that I had blown it, and I'd failed, and I thought that's what the first step said for a long time. And then I finally read the first step, and it doesn't say that. It says that we were powerless over alcohol, and I finally began to understand that that means that we have no more power to sober up an alcoholic or to keep ourselves from going san- insane while living with one than we have the power to make the sun rise five minutes earlier tomorrow morning. It's not our job. That's a lot different from, "I failed." You know? That's a relief. That's, you can relax and smile about it. That's just wonderful. I liked the first step after that. There was no doubt in my mind that my life was unmanageable. I event- well, actually, when I first read that, it said, "Our lives had become unmanageable," and I thought that meant John's and mine together. And eventually, I realized that was our Al-Anon's minds, our lives, rather, had become unmanageable. And, and I finally understood that it was just my life that was unmanageable, whether or not his was or not. And I moved on to the second step, and I thought, "This is a snap. I grew up in the church. Hey, no problem. I believe in God." And I started to just move on to the third step. Well, somebody told me about this point, if you have trouble with the next step, back up. You probably missed one. So I had kept backing up to the second step until finally it occurred to me that it didn't say we came to believe in a power greater than ourselves who could restore us to sanity. We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity, and that's different. And up until that time, I guess I believed in God the same way that I believed in the Loch Ness Monster. I believe the Loch Ness Monster exists. There's something living in that lake over in Scotland. It has nothing to do with me. It doesn't change my life one iota. I don't spend any time thinking about it. It's not important, and if I'm wrong, so what? That was how I felt about God. And this step was challenging me to believe that there was a God who could do something about my craziness, and that's a whole lot different. And a God who would do something about my craziness if I'd move on to the next step, where I was supposed to take a, make a decision to turn my will and life over to the care of that god. Well, I wasn't afraid of God. I grew up in a very gracious kind of religion where God was forgiving and loving, and so I wasn't afraid of punishment. And it sounded like it ought to be easy, and I tried to move on to the fourth step, and I had to back up again. Um, I kept struggling with the idea that I didn't know how to turn my will and my life over to God. And so I stumbled around on that step for a while until my sponsor pointed out to me that I didn't have to do it. I just had to make a decision, and then I could take the other nine steps, and they would do it for me. And so I decided that I had pretty well botched it up to that point, and God could handle it better than me, and that I wanted what the other people in the program had. And that's how they got it, was by turning their will and lives over to th- this God. And so I moved on to the fourth step, and I ran smack into a wall. I couldn't get started on my fourth step. I was… I kept starting and stopping. I'd start a line or two and stop, and I'd ask everybody under the sun, "How are you supposed to do this?" I called my sponsor for the fifth time in one week, or in one day rather, to say, "Is this right? Am I doing this right?" And she said, "The only bad fourth step is the one you don't take." And she said, "Perhaps you could start by writing down, I am a perfectionist." Which was obviously the problem. I wanted to do it perfectly. I wanted to get my first fourth step and make it my last one. And I didn't understand about that onion. You've heard about the onion, where you peel a layer and you cry, and you peel a layer and you cry. And that's what life is like, and that's what doing fourth steps is like. You work on what you know about, write that first time, and then you work on through for a while until you realize that a new layer has been revealed, and you've gotta back up and do it again. You can't do a perfect one first time. I don't think you can do a perfect one in this lifetime. So I, I've relaxed a little on that. My first fourth step is where I learned a lot of things that had gone on in my life up to that time. In the process of writing down my life, and this is the way my sponsor suggested I do it, was to sit down and just write significant things I remembered from each five-year period in my life. That was my first fourth step. As I did that, I realized that, yes indeed, my father is an alcoholic. He was still dr- he is still drinking. Uh, I realized what warped ideas I had come up with in the process of living in that house I grew up in. I realized finally why I had married this guy. Now that it didn't matter anymore, I realized why. Um, and I began to see what it was I was doing that kept getting me into these difficult situations. Why it was that I didn't feel good about myself. I didn't think I was good enough unless I was rescuing somebody somehow. Why it was that I felt so responsible for how everybody else felt, and didn't take any responsibility for how I felt. See, I really had been taught that, that I was responsible for other people's feelings and for making them happy, and I had to unlearn it. I had to unlearn the idea that you could make me angry, sad, happy, anything else. You can't do it. And I had to eventually learn that when you say even the cruelest things to me, all you do is vibrate the air, which vibrates my eardrum, and that doesn't cause me any pain. What happens between the eardrum and the middle of my brain is where the pain happens, and I do it, when I take it in and take it to heart, and believe it, and give you the power to do that. That was probably the most important thing I learned from that first fourth step, was how often I had been giving away responsibility for how I felt. I took a fifth step with my sponsor. I told her some of the, the really awful things I had done in my life, and there are some. Quite a few. And she didn't hate me. In fact, she gave me a big hug, and she kept right on being my sponsor, and I felt a little better. And then I got to the next stumbling block. I got to six and seven. I was supposed to become entirely ready to have God remove these defects of character, and it sounded so easy until I tried to do it. And I got this panicky feeling. The harder I tried to, to pray to God to do that, the scareder I got. I was afraid that I would be a vacuum if all my character defects were pulled out, that I would just collapse in on myself. There would be nobody there. I thought I was my character defects, and there was nothing else. And I had to back up and do a positive side of an inventory to get a little edge on that. But before I could really take that sixth step, I had to learn something else from someone. And someone in a meeting said, "Have you ever noticed how in all the stories of any miracle that God's ever performed, God never takes away anyone's crutches before they can walk?" And I realized that that's what my character defects were. They were the crutches that had kept me from feeling hurt, hel- kept me from feeling powerless and scared and small, like I did when I was little. They were the crutches that kept me feeling that I had control, and it was gonna be all right, and I was gonna be safe. And I knew that as God, in a process, removed my defects of character, that He would give me something to replace them, and I began to look for that to happen. Sometimes just pray specifically for that to happen. I can remember one night when I was lying awake in bed doing my worry thing. I don't know what I was worrying about that particular night. I've completely forgotten that. But I knew that I had to get rid of that. I, I kept asking God to take this worry away, and it wasn't happening. As soon as God would take one worry away, I'd grab another one, and I was still wi- wi- wide awake worrying about stuff. And finally, I prayed for God to take the worry away and replace it with gratitude. And I lay there and remembered taking my son to the mall and watching him eat ice cream that afternoon. I don't remember anything else. I think I fell asleep immediately. Just those little flashes of moments during the day that were worth feeling grateful for. I could replace worry with gratitude. God could replace worry with gratitude. I couldn't just make it go away, then I really would've been a vacuum or crutchless cripple and fallen down. God doesn't work that way. And so I had the courage to take that sixth step with regard to each of my character defects, usually one at a time. And I took the seventh step, humbly asking And then I hit the eighth and ninth step, and I thought I had an incredibly long list of people that I was going to have to make amends to. Former bosses I hadn't really worked for because I was so busy obsessing about the alcoholic or about whatever. One ex-husband already, my son, my parents. It didn't occur to me I owed any amends to me. And my sponsor convinced me I needed to put me on the list, and I did. And the only amends that I really needed to make to me was to take care of me, to get to meetings, to put it on the priority list and say, "I'm entitled to go to meetings even if I am just an Al-Anon." And I did. To make commitments to myself to do what I needed to do. And sometimes I had to kind of hedge and make commitments to you in order to make commitments to myself. I made commitments by promising to do service work in the program. It made me come back. Even if I got to feeling lazy, if I had promised I would chair the meeting this month, I'd show up. And usually by the time the month that I was supposed to chair got over, I got over feeling lazy. And so I worked hard at making amends to myself. I recognized after a while that it was part of making amends to my son, that if I could get sane, if I could grow and recover in this program, I'd be one heck of a lot better mother. And I had been a pretty bad one up to that point. And I began to make amends to my parents. I made amends to my mother in a kind of strange way. I told her I didn't want to hear any more about her marriage to my father, and I didn't want to hear any more about how awful he was, and I wasn't going to listen to it. And I really did believe that that was working on making our relationship healthier. She didn't believe it at the time, and we didn't speak for two years. But when we did speak again, the relationship really was better, and the boundaries were set. And although she occasionally tries to violate them, it's not nearly as often, and it's not nearly as hard to say, "Let's talk about something else." And so I worked at making amends. Now, through all of that, I was working the 10th step, seeking to improve my… No, I'm sorry. 10th step. I skipped a step. I got to working the 10th step simply because I didn't want to work too many more fourth steps. And if I get lazy about the 10th step, I have to start all over again real often. I found it's a lot easier to promptly admit when you're wrong than to save it up until it becomes something large. And it's a lot help, more comfortable to take my inventory at the end of the day than it is to take someone else's. Because if I sit and take someone else's, all I do is feel frustrated because I can't fix that, and angry because they didn't do me right, and generally miserable. And if I take my own inventory, then I can get up and promptly admit when I was wrong. I can make amends if I need to. And I can go on and ask God to remove that defect of character again sometimes. And that is a whole lot more relaxed and comfortable way to end a day than thinking about what everybody else did to me. As I said, I started to say, from the beginning, I think I was working on that 11th step, sometimes without really knowing I was working at it. I've heard the story told in some speaker meeting somewhere that before we have our spiritual awakening, before we improve our conscious contact with God, that we are like fish swimming through water. It's all around them, but they aren't aware of it. It's just the medium we live in. And I know that God had been in my life, struggling with me, pushing me the directions I needed to go, giving me what I needed even before I asked for it a dozen times. But today, because I pray to God, because I talk about God to you, I'm aware of it a whole lot faster. There was a time when I was in law school when it just wasn't chic to talk about God. My friends were very sophisticated, very intelligent. None of them went to church, and they had nothing to do with that sort of thing. So we didn't talk about God. I thought I still believed. I thought I was just as religious as I had ever been, just as spiritually connected. But if you don't talk about something, pretty soon you don't think about it very often. And eventually you get to the place where even when you're in desperate straits, that's not what you think of. You don't think of that God who can help you out. You start looking for your own power instead. And I recognize that that was what had happened to me before I came to this program. And so I have worked hard to improve my conscious contact with God. I do it sometimes by reading the literature. I do it sometimes by prayer and meditation. I do it sometimes by reading other literature. But God is a part of my life every day and has been since the day I walked into this program. And I certainly believe in taking that 12th step. Once you have any inkling of what this program can do for you because you've worked the first 11, how can you not practice it in all your affairs? How can you really say, well, that's fine for home, but work's going to be different. I can't do it. It's the only thing in my life that has ever worked. And so I find myself eager to practice it in all my affairs. I have to kind of work at it. And sometimes I have to start all over again with the first step and kind of adapt the steps to fit the situation. But I want to. It's the only thing that has ever saved me, and I have to carry the message to others because I am so grateful for what this program has done for me. That gratitude spills over. And so when they told me when I first came in that if Al-Anon ever asks, you don't say no unless you have to, well, I really do believe that now. And no matter how nervous I was when I started, I'm glad I came tonight, and I'm glad I didn't say no to this. My marriage to that man I was married to when I w- came into the program ended a few years back. We'd done a lot of damage to the relationship in those first years of drinking and the first early years of sobriety, and we didn't know how to fix it. And we care about each other. I'd say it's safe to say we love each other very much. Uh, he's a good man, and he's still sober, 12 years now, and I'm really glad. He gave me a lot. But I don't really regret that the marriage ended. It was time. A dear friend of mine told me at the time that we divorced that it was okay because that marriage had given us everything God wanted it to. I have since then married again, and I am married now to a man who doesn't have a problem with alcohol. And I thought, well, that, that'll be easy now. Everything will just be fine, right? But I still do. I still have all those crazy ideas I grew up with, and if I don't keep coming to Al-Anon and keep doing the steps and keep talking it out with people who understand about crazy people like me, then I go crazy. And I start trying to control him and fix him, whether he needs fixing or not. And I know that none of us need fixing by someone else. That's an inside job. Happens between us and our higher power, and the rest of us need to keep hands off. I know that, but if I don't stay with my program, I forget it real quick. Now, there is one kind of significant thing I've sort of left out of this story. When I had about seven years in the program, my then husband and I decided between us, separately actually, that we, neither one wanted to practice law anymore, but we didn't know what we wanted to do. And we both flailed around trying to figure out what it was that we were supposed to do. Now, at some point, I heard somebody in a meeting say, "It's okay when you turn your will and life over to God because even if God wants you to be a missionary to China, if that's what God wants for you, that's the only thing that will make you happy, joyous, and free, 'cause that's what God ultimately wants for you." And I do believe that, folks. I really do. As I was flailing around trying to figure out what it was I was gonna do with the rest of my life, what it was God wanted me to do with the rest of my life, and that was the question. Oh, I considered a lot of things. I considered going back to school and finally majoring in psychology. I considered becoming a writer. I considered different kinds of the practice of law. And somewhere along the way, someone suggested that maybe I ought to go to seminary and become a minister. And I said, "Do what?" I mean, I'd already spent so many years in school becoming a lawyer, and that meant at least three more years of education. And I lived in Houston, and the seminary was in another town, and it meant transplanting my family, and my husband wouldn't wanna go, and it just wouldn't have worked out at all. Meanwhile, John was kind of struggling with the same questions, and the same suggestion got made to him. And one day we sat down and compared notes, and sure enough, it, uh, it looked like the thing for us to do. Uh, it didn't immediately. I thought, sure, we'll go to seminary five or six years from now when David gets out of high school. No problem. But God said we're gonna go now. Within, uh, four months of the time that we first considered going to seminary, our law practice dwindled down to absolutely nothing. Clients died. Clients settled cases that were unsettleable, and not one new client walked through the door in that time. Cases that weren't supposed to go to trial for years did. And at the end of four months, we were bankrupt, for one thing, and completely out of, out of the practice of law. There wasn't anything much to turn over to anybody else, and so we went to seminary. And even though our marriage ended while we were there, I know that neither one of us could have gone without the other. It took the two of us together to hear what God was saying to each of us separately. John is now a minister in Dallas, and I'm now a minister here in Arkansas, which is kind of like being a missionary to China. For the first time in my life, I live in a very small town, and I love it. And I love what I'm doing, and I know it's exactly where I'm supposed to be. It's the only job I can think of that I would get to do all the things I really like to do. I get to play with little kids, teach grown-ups, stand up for an hour once a week and be the center of attention, and just go visit folks, sit in their kitchens and drink coffee, and oh, it's just wonderful. I really love this job. It's just marvelous. And on top of that, I get to carry the message because the only message I really know is these 12 steps. Now, there's my religion, and I know a lot about that now after all those years in seminary. But at the very core of me, I know that I didn't know how to talk to God. I didn't know how to get to know God. I didn't know how to get to you– I didn't know how to use the faith I had grown up in until you gave me these 12 steps. Now, maybe out there someplace, there are saints who don't need instructions, but I do. I need step-by-step instructions. I'm a wonderful cook if I have a recipe. I can do just about any craft if I have just instructions, directions, and these 12 steps are the directions I have for putting my faith to use. And so while I sometimes give the 12-step program credit as I go about doing my ministry, and sometimes don't, depending on the situation, always at the core, what I'm giving away are the principles I learned in here. Principles like let go and let God, and take it one day at a time, and live and let live, and trust God in the process. Those are basically what's at the very core. And one more thing that is probably the most essential thing, and that is there but for the grace of God. Because it's by the grace of God I'm here. It's by the grace of God that I've gotten to know you. It's by the grace of God that I've gotten through this hour, and I can sit down now. Thank you.
