Al-Anon Can Give You Detachment and Still Miss the Alcoholic in You — Mary N.

About This Speaker Tape

Mary tells a story most speakers don't get to tell: she stopped drinking in 1976 when she got pregnant, stayed dry for thirty years, and then at fifty-something walked into an early morning study group at the NAVA Club and picked up a white chip. Her sobriety date is January 17, 2004. She drank from age eleven — when her parents left her home alone for a week and she discovered that her alcoholic father's refrigerator and liquor cabinet could put her to sleep the way they put him to sleep. By college she was in blackouts, being auctioned as a sorority slave to the accounting professor who became her first husband. By her second marriage — the ex-pro ball player in the Corvette with the picnic basket of wine and cheese — she was measuring drives by how many bottles it took to get there.

The pregnancy stopped the drinking but not the alcoholism. She spent thirty years inside a marriage she describes as a nightmare: a husband with a sex addiction, a hotel near their house, her name forged on IRS paperwork and liens she didn't know existed. She raised her daughter, became a rigid Christian, acted exactly like her mother — angry, over-religious, putting people in the doghouse. Al-Anon gave her detachment and the family disease framework. It did not give her the bondage of self. When her daughter finally left for California, Mary planned to fill a new refrigerator with wine. A Big Book passage about a man who stayed dry twenty-five years, drank again, and was dead within four scared her into an AA chair instead.

In the program she found a four-step that made her own choices visible to her, a second marriage — to Gary Neidhart, Bill Rupp's driver — that had to be a recovery marriage to work, and in 2013 a cascade of antibiotics that left her with two autoimmune diseases, a heart attack, and eighteen months in bed staring at the ceiling angry at her Higher Power. A woman in the program walked her through it with page 60 to 63 every morning. She closes with the line that frames the whole talk: the disease doesn't go dormant just because you put the bottle down.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Carl opens the NAVA Monday Night Blue Chip Speakers' Meeting and reads the preamble from page 29 of the Big Book
• 3:30 Mary opens: sobriety date January 17, 2004 — but she stopped drinking in 1976, almost 42 years ago
• 6:00 Childhood — Italian Catholic mother, part-American-Indian alcoholic father home from the tuberculosis sanitarium when Mary was 18 months old
• 11:30 At 11, left home alone for a week — discovers her father's liquor cabinet and the 'wow' of fear disappearing
• 16:00 College blackouts, the sorority slave auction, and the accounting professor who becomes her first husband
• 22:00 Husband number two — Corvette, picnic basket with wine and cheese, 'five bottles to Hilton Head'
• 26:30 Pregnancy — doctor orders her to stop drinking; husband threatens to take the baby if she ever works; she stops cold
• 33:00 Al-Anon first — learns detachment, family disease, stops being her mother; husband's sex addiction, hotel, forged IRS documents surface in 1999
• 39:00 Reads the Big Book passage about the man dry 25 years who drank again at 55 and was dead in four — decides to pick up a white chip
• 44:00 2013 health collapse — antibiotics, autoimmune disease, heart attack, 18 months in bed; page 60-63 every day; meets Gary Neidhart and builds a recovery marriage