Beth H. at the Design for Living Group – 2020

Here is Beth. That is my favorite kind of introduction, man. Sometimes people get all flowery and she saved my life and she did this or did that and then people expect something. So I really, I like keeping the expectations low. Thank you. My name is Beth Hartley. I'm an alcoholic and because of the grace of God, Steps and Fellowship, Sponsorship, Alcoholics Anonymous, I've been sober since June 26th, 1988. and um that boggled my mind when it was july of 1988 so now it's kind of surreal it's uh i i didn't even know anybody sober this long when i was new i mean the people sober longer than god in a big book meeting where i went were like five and six and seven and i think the old timer at our home group was uh 17 i saw him pick up an 18 year chip so it's crazy that of course when we were new when my husband and i were new uh 20 years was an old timer and they keep moving the bar so we haven't caught up yet so now now we're i think at 30 we're qualified to get coffee for the old timers so um anyway i um i loved hearing dave i think it was dave said that his boss said that his work ethic spoke for itself um it just brought to mind we have a big meeting here now which is formatted like the one where i got sober in cincinnati ohio where we read an entire chapter every week so that you hear the whole chapter in context instead of picking it apart and and taking you know a year and a half to get to page 164 so we start with the preface and four words the first meeting doctor's opinion the next chapter 1 through 11 and start over and that allows us to go through the first 164 pages four times a year and last week we read the doctor's opinion and i am what the thing that strikes me the most dr silkworth had two letters in there a little short one and then a longer one but the end of his first letter i always forget until i see it uh the last thing he says before he signs it is you may rely on absolutely anything these men say about themselves and nobody was saying that about me before june 26 1988 my word was worth nothing to my kids to my family to my employer when i was employed um you know the alcoholics anonymous is where i learned to be where i said i'd be when i said id be there alcoholics synonymous is where I learned to do what I said I would do when I said, I'd do it. Now I'm quite sure my parents tried to teach me that, you know, before I got to kindergarten. Uh, but somehow it made more sense coming from AAs after I got sober, uh, because I just, you Know, I didn't, I Didn't show up. I was one of those employees who, you Now I'd have a Monday. I well Mondays who wants to work on Monday, you know, and then I'd be sick on Tuesday because if I was just sick on Monday they'd think I was hungover, right? So I'll be sick on Tuesday. And then I think, well, if I miss Wednesday then I'm like really, really sick and maybe they'll worry about me, you know. And then it would be Thursday and God, that's almost Friday. And so long story short, I wouldn't go back till the next Monday. So I'd be like work Friday, miss an entire week, go in the following monday and be like what i was here friday you know and it's like you do that stuff well enough you will have people believe in you you know it is no wonder that non-alcoholics who live with us end up in the psych ward a lot um because because we um well i would just say i i i can lie up there on a just borderline sociopathic level uh and be very convincing and so my my employers would think no, she wasn't here last week. Was she? And I'm just going along like I was there Friday. I don't know what your problem is. So it's good that my word is worth something today. You know, I was born in Northern California up with the Redwoods. I didn't find that out till I was older. I apparently was moved to Ohio against my will when I was two and a half. and i grew up in oxford ohio and that was my first resentment i was pissed off about growing up in ohio when i was born in california and i'm talking it like you know by first grade i'm mad about this and uh i just the first day of first grade I'm looking at a map of the U.S. and I see California where I should be you know and there's oceans and redwood trees and all this cool stuff and Texas, and the Gulf of Mexico, and Florida, and palm trees. And then there was Ohio. And I just, I literally remember thinking that you could look at a map and tell that nothing is happening in Ohio. And I mean, you know, this is first grade. Where does that come from? You know, I already by first grade, I mean what I know now is I was already restless, irritable, in discontent. You know, before I ever got into school, I already had this laundry list of things that if they were different, I could be a little happier. If my bike was blue instead of red, if my room was bigger, if my mom didn't work, if you would just do this, ifyou would stop doing that and all of this stuff. So already long before I take a drink, I am dependent on anything outside has to change so that i can be comfortable where i am i was an only child that was another resentment we always lived next door to a big family so i just hung at their house where there was noise and confusion because uh at an early age if i was alone in a room and it was quiet it just wasn't a friendly place i had a chorus of voices in my head and they would tell me things like nobody likes you they're all laughing about when you fell down playing kickball you know all of this stuff and uh i i did uh well my dad got sober when i was was six years seven years old so i'm i'm going to aa meetings in hamilton ohio in 1966 right i'm 61 now so you don't have to do the math but i you know so i know about aa i know it's full of old old old men who drink coffee and smoke and eat donuts because i saw it every friday night you know my dad had been mid-30s um you know these guys are old and uh but i also knew that you know i mean he wasn't drinking mom seemed a little happier my mom is not alcoholic she's one of those weirdos that would take two drinks and get sleepy uh i told her you could push through that she was never interested in that i just you know i mean and they say we have no willpower it's like try to drink with us for two weeks and then tell me who's got willpower you know um but i didn't you know i so growing up with a sober dad i know that aa has a whole lot to do with not drinking so by the time i take a drink i am very very interested in avoiding alcoholics anonymous at any cost because i have no interest in not drinking you know I um I drank at 15 years old Didn't get knee-walking drunk. A lot of my friends were starting to experiment. They're falling down, throwing up, looking bad. I don't like to look bad, but I put on enough of a glow that I felt it. And what I didn't know, again, hindsight, a lot of myself, everybody's in hindsight, is that when I felt the effect of alcohol for the first time, I exhaled. And I had no idea that I had been holding my breath since I was four until I exhaled. and when i drank i could breathe when i drank it was okay um sandy beach used to talk about you know walking into a room and it's full of people and you know none of them like you and they're all looking at you and you just want to run and but you got to stay and three drinks later it is the friendliest group of people i've ever seen i know you guys all can't wait to get to know me you know aren't you glad i'm here and and the only thing that changed was alcohol, and if you're new, I know there's some newer people here. If you're anything like me, when I walked through the doors of AA as an adult and looked around, because I periodically would go visit with my dad as a teenager, you know, he would invite me, so I would go, and they'd go around and say, you now, my name's Jim. I'm an alcoholic, and I would say my name is Beth. I am with him because I already knew, like, I am not saying that a word in the same sentence with my name there is no way because if you have a sober parent we have friends who you know when they speak they'll say they sat in the bar and said i'm alcoholic who cares well with a sober pair that's not an option i intuitively knew that if i even wondered aloud if i might be alcoholic that a big book was going to fall out of the sky so i never You never heard me say Beth and that A word in the same sentence ever. And so I finally came in and said, you know, okay, I'm Beth. I'm an alcoholic. In 1983, I was living in the Keys. I was 24 years old, and I had gotten fired from a job that meant a lot to me. I intuitively knew I wasn't going to find another job quite like that one anywhere else. I was working at an oceanfront resort in the upper keys where they had seven bars and three restaurants. And they, um, they, they paid me well and I had the keys to all seven bars, you know, and I worked third shift. So I drank free all night. It was fabulous. So I, uh, I got fired and I went to an AA meeting and said that I was an alcoholic. So now I'm 24, I'm walking in as an adult. it is just as lame as I remember it being when I was a teenager visiting with dad there's a circle of people these people are really old they're like 40 50 years old you know they're in a circle they're all relating to each other for an hour the meeting's over and they run over and invite me to Perkins Perkins right I'm thinking I am 24 years old I ride Harley Davidson's it is 9 30 at night and I have been invited to Perkins. I mean, what do you do with that? I am thinking like, do I kill myself or do I go get pancakes and then kill myself? You know what I mean? And the thing is they've been doing AA meetings and TV shows. It seems like somebody's getting sober on every show and I found myself watching them like, stop, don't do that because they always do it wrong and it looks lame. It just, I don't want people to think that we're lame watching it on TV. and then one day it just dawned on me that when i was new and i walked in it was lame and if you're new and it's lame if it looks lame to you that's because it is okay it's because it is but what happens when you stay here and work the steps and there's a spiritual change is the same thing that happens when we because we walk into a room full of aas and we're pretty We sure nobody likes us and we don't want to be there and they don't care if we're there. And, you know, but we start working steps and one day we walk in and it is the friendliest group of people we've ever met and we know they're glad we're here and we're kind of glad we'RE here. And the only thing that has changed from the day it was lame and the day that I walked in and it's an entirely different room full of people is that I have worked these steps and undergone a spiritual change. So basically the steps in Alcoholics Anonymous has had the power to change my perception the same way that alcohol did, except that it's way healthier working the steps. Does that make any sense at all? That, you know, and really if you read the ninth step promises and think about, you know when I drank fear of financial insecurity leaves me when I drink, I intuitively knew how to handle situations which used to baffle me. I mean, you get a certified letter that's never good, right? but three drinks at the bar and you you intuitively know how to handle the certified letter you just rip it up right i mean so all of those promises came true when i drank but when i turn around and begin to work the steps which were my path to god you know i didn't and i didn' t come in not believing in god i didn''t come in mad at god i came in because i i was raised in a pretty non-threatening religion. You know, it's pretty laid back. I grew up in a college town. The campus ministry was at our church. And so I, you know, I just, I didn't have all of that baggage, which I'm grateful for. But I mean, my deal was I was not praying because I didn' t want him to know where I was. Right? I'm just going to stay under his radar and you don't bother me and I won't bother you. And that was kind of, so I believed in God the whole time, but I did not have a clue how to trust or rely on God. And that's what I learned to do here. But back to that 1983, I didn't get sober till 1988. And during that five year period, I got divorced, which was not really a big tragedy because it never should have been a marriage. It was a one night stand that just dragged on and on and On. You know, I can't leave because then it would be my fault that the marriage failed and it took him five very long years to say get out so I said for years I never should have been a second date but there wasn't really he had a keg party and I stayed because I was I was in this little town in Florida it was either move in with him or go back to Ohio I mean what would you do right and he was six two with a Harley I mean it was an easy choice at the time. But I am, so I end up in this, you know, this five years between the first, the first AA meeting and getting sober. And something that's become clear to me this year is that during that time, not once did I relapse ever. And I say that because I never got sober. You know, I would have periods of not drinking i generally would go to treatment to you know get arrested go to treatment to stay out of jail get fired go to treat me get your job back you know i i uh but i pretty much i don't consider that i ever was in aa long enough to leave it i would go through treatment i'm a test taker you can ace treatment if you're a test take or you know if you are a test maker you know who you are we can read anything get the a on the test and not know what we read and that works great in treatment. And so I would always leave treatment most likely to stay sober forever, you know? Um, but I would give it everything I had for a good week. You know what I mean? And then it just wasn't really working fast enough for me. And, and I, you guys didn't really want me here anyway, and nobody's remember my name and any one of a hundred other reasons. Andso I'd be off and running again. So I just, I kind of consider that five-year period that I just did, I just call it drive by AA. You know, I would just kind of cruise in, cruise through when the heat was on and then I would be gone, you know, for another, I was never one of those ones who got sober for six or seven months and drank for a weekend. I would like, you know, get sober for a week and then drink for six or seven months. That was more my style. But when I was doing the drive by, I heard him talk about being self-centered. And I thought I knew what that meant you know i thought that meant vain and selfish i didn't think either of those applied to me um never thought to use a dictionary or anything but uh this this thing happened when my daughter my kids were four and six when i got sober they were not in my custody during that five-year period got divorced moved back to ohio within a year my children were removed from my custody at age one and three um one of our favorite banners we fly is i'm not hurting anybody but me so i was out there only hurting me and meanwhile my mom's wife got turned upside down with a 2 a.m phone call and with absolutely no warning she became the single parent of a one year old a three-year-old because i was under arrest for child endangerment but i am only hurting me you really should butt out of my business you know so now the kids are gone i go to treatment my dad dies i'm the only child of divorced parents so i get the insurance money and I drank the way I wanted to drink for another two and a half years so when I got sober my kids were four and six so um you know seven years later my daughter's 11 now she's the one I was a liar and a thief long before I drank um but Sarah raised lying to an art form that I could only dream of I mean she just she was good you say Sarah why didn't you put your clothes away and she'd say i did and you would say sarah they're on the floor and she go i don't know how those get i put them away i don' t know how they got and you'd be you'd apologize to her you know so chuck and i used to tell people you might be saving for college we're saving for treatment because we knew it was coming right so we're just waiting for sarah to get you know old enough to drink and at 11 years old she uh let us know that she wanted to be on a swim team because a lot of her friends were swimming and so we took her to try out she didn't have much experience in the water and the coach said why you know i think you'll be okay but you don't have much experience so i'd like you to practice down an age group now this means he wants my 11 year old daughter to practice with nine-year-olds because this is age group swimming she's 11 he wants her to practice with 9 year olds this is totally fine with her i am dying a thousand deaths at seven years sober just because my kid is 11 and swimming with nine year olds but she's fine with that and she was only on the team two weeks before they had their first swim meet and these were big USS sanctioned swim meets with you know 10 or 20 teams at a meet and they would run heats and post the results and her first race ever on Saturday she was 70th out of 72 um and she that was Saturday Sunday morning she's up with her swim bag packed ready to go I would have been trying to get my parents to leave town you know if I had been 70th Out of 72 and and we said well Sarah you didn't win you know but you have a baseline time now and then your next race if you beat your time even if you don't win that's a successful race and the whole time i was telling her that i'm thinking right you know i mean come on you know maybe you could just move up a little she beat her time and she was happy now the rest of that story is that two years later she was a state double-a swimmer okay and what i realized when all the reason i tell that story as at 11 years old she had not yet had a drink. At 11 years old, I had not yet had a drink, however, had that been me as the 11-year-old and the coach said practice with the 9-year olds, that would have been the first day and the last day of my swimming career I could not even have gotten in the water with the 9-years-olds because how would it look and people would laugh and they would tell other people at school and I would never live it down and And she was unaffected by all of that. And so Chuck and I started kind of watching her with interest because we really didn't know what to, you know, she internalized that stuff. You know, you teach your kids that I'm sure they tried to teach me, like set the goal, work for the goal. Achieve the goal that just took too long for me. My outlook has always been just give me the goal。 I mean, surely you want me to have it. you know i i used to joke about being a 50 yard dash girl in a five mile world you know good starter not not so much finishing but the sad truth is if i can set up a lawn chair at the start line and you bring me the trophy i'm okay with that you know my husband who has a master's degree in social work told me one time that i had a type al personality which i had never heard of and he said i said well i'm i'm quite sure you're type a but you're lazy enough that you're not annoying and um and it's true you know my my lazy tendencies kind of buffer the type a in me and so you know i get some stuff done uh or i work in spurts you know but anyway what i learned watching sarah was that we react very differently to life and and as we continue to watch her well she doesn't react she just responds she just goes on you know we start watching her with interest with this swimming thing. And she just, she took this turn and she just kind of kept going that way. She got a summer job and she saved money. She decided that she wanted to join the military her freshman year. She went to career day and came home and announced that she was going to join the army when she graduated. When she graduated, she joined the army. Now she graduated 12 years of school in 12 years, same school, same friends. My first geographic cure was change in schools after sixth grade. I had to get out of there, and I wasn't old enough to move, so I changed schools. You know, she had the same friends in 12th grade that she had in kindergarten. She went through 12 years in 12 years. She joined the Army as planned previously three years. She served on active duty for 10 years.She met a man while she's in the Army. They got married and had a daughter. They had the daughter 18 months after they got married. Who does that? you know i mean we just she's 36 years old now and and we our granddaughter's 13 and uh i know you're thinking i'm way too young to be a grandma with a grandkid that old but there it is but uh my husband's laughing um but you know we tease her all the time like you had this brilliant future in alcoholics anonymous laid at your feet when you were like six and you just threw it all away when you started swimming but she when she was 14 we told her well there's supposed to be one mature person in the house and we're pretty sure it's you you know because what else could we do so our son on the other hand was much more of a kindred spirit and uh you know bill's story says that if we don't maintain our spiritual condition we will not survive the certain trials and low spots you know so nowhere in that book does it say that you are going to be just floating on air the entire time you know but what it does say is we've been rocketed into a fourth dimension of existence and part of that for me is that even during certain trials and low spots if i can just get it down to where am i right now you know my sponsor was like because our son as a teen he was suicidal um it was it was just what it was a long year or two in his teenage years and uh and he that's why bonnie called me um we ended up sending him to wilderness school because we really he couldn't live at home and they had put him on prozac when he was trying to kill himself and within a week he wasn't trying to kill myself anymore but he's threatening to kill us so that was kind of a problem and uh he was spent almost a year and a half in the woods in dillwyn virginia uh at a wilderness school but i'm i'm quite sure it saved his life you know he's 38 years old now, still drinks, currently not speaking to us. So we don't have to watch him drink, but he's, you know, he seems to be happy. He's much more of a binge drinker than I was a daily. I mean, cause my God, if you could drink every day, why wouldn't you? You know, I wasn't a daily drinker in high school because I didn't have access to alcohol every day. That's the only reason if I had had access, I would have been a daily drunker. But I mean on top of it's hard enough to get as a high school student Oxford well Ohio had this horrible affront to beer that was called 3-2 beer which was a lower percentage alcohol and that's all you could get in the entire city where I grew up so uh and I'm I'm a child of the 70s you know better living through chemistry and uh so I you know I when I was in treatment they would say what's your drug of choice and I would think that's easy my drug of choice is yours you know whatever you have that is my favorite because i you know we have we have yours and then i have mine but when i when i got sober i didn't struggle with should i be an naa should i be in aaa should i go to both because as my alcoholism progressed i mean i started out drinking and very quickly i'm you know doing a boatload of drugs because i could and they're well they're way easier to hide at school too you know it's way easier put a pill in your pocket than a bottle of whiskey in your locker. But as my alcoholism progressed, by the time I'm going into my mid twenties, drugs started to interfere with my drinking. And so they had to go because anything that interfered with my drink had to go. And by the time I was done, that was my integrity, my employability, my children, my money, my driver's license, you know, every bit of it. My friend Sharon says she used to push it across the bar. You know, She'd sell it for a drink. And and to me, it's more not so much that I sold it for a drink, but I pawned it for A drink because I always thought I'd go back and get it. You know, somehow I just thought I just go pick it up when I needed it. And I just never, you know, for growing up with a dad in AA, I knew remarkably little about alcoholism, you Know, and being in treatment multiple times because I just, you No, I did not get sober until June 26th, 1988. It was my last drink and I had run off to Florida. I called my mom a few days later, told her where I was. I was 29 and a half and she picked me up at the airport at midnight and drove me straight to the county detox and just said, you can't come home with me. I got you here, but you have to do it yourself. And thank God she did. And she did that because, you know, while she was waiting for me, she consulted her Al-Anon friends and I will be forever grateful for that because if she had taken me home and let me, you know, clean up and rest up, I would have come up with a new plan on how I was going to run my life. But I woke up and detox the next morning and I'm 29 and a half. And I realized I had no plans for being 30 because I expected to be dead. You know, I have been drinking and drugs, you know, since I was 15. I added drunk driving to that at 16. I added Harley-Davidson's to that. At 19, I ran with very large people that, you know, drank and carried guns and rode motorcycles. I bartended places where people shot at each other. You know? I just should have been dead over and over and over and I'm in detox just distressingly healthy. And I realized I was farther away from anything I ever thought I'd do at age 30 than I had been at 15, you know, and this voice came out of nowhere and just said people like you don't die Beth. You are going to live to be 80 whether you drink or not. And that scared me. Dying did not scare me. If they had promised me that if I left there and drank, I would have been dead in six months. I would have gotten the beer. But I knew that voice was telling me the truth. I have a friend in Greensboro that says grace is the moment when we see everything exactly the way it is. And I knew it was true. I was 29. I'm 61 now. I did not have a drink in my 30s. I Did Not Have A Drink In My 40s. I Did NOT HAVE A DRINK IN MY 50S. That is mind boggling to me. But what was different this time, you know, I had this passing thought that whatever these people in AA are doing seems to be working for them and AA as modified by Beth is not working for me. And this one voice in my head just said maybe you ought to just go do what they do and see what happens. And so I made a commitment, you knows, kind of to me, God, and somebody else that I would just go to all of AA and see what happened. And I started going to that big book meeting where we read a chapter a day that met at noon, five days a week. So every 13 days I heard the first 164 pages of the book. By the time I was three weeks sober, I had done a fourth and fifth step because somebody said, you've been around before Beth, why don't you do an inventory? And I thought, okay, I didn't know I could tell them I'm not ready. You know, and I'm so grateful that I was with people who read the book because the book says, the book doesn't say you have to wait till you're six months sober or a year sober, or when your sponsor says to write it, to, to work the steps. You know, the book says, if you have decided you want what we have and are willing to go to any link to get it, you are ready to take certain steps. And I was, and I wrote that inventory and I shared that fifth step and I, you know, my life took off my life. I have never looked back. I have stayed in the middle of Alcoholics Anonymous from then to now. I have always had a sponsor. I have been sponsored. My husband and I met in Alcoholics Anonymous. We're both class of 88, so that's fun. We're just kind of on the same path together. We started dating at the end of 1990. We got married in 1992. We celebrated 28 years of marriage in July. Every year on our wedding anniversary, we laugh on how many people probably lost money on us because we were an unlikely pair when we first met but you know we uh we were sober together 14 years in Cincinnati and then I got a job offer in North Carolina and um sorry my cat just shoved something off the table uh because he's a cat that's how you know the world isn't flat they would have showed everything off the edge by now But anyway, we were 14 years. Knock it off, Riley. We were 14 in Cincinnati, and then we moved to North Carolina, Cary, North Carolina. We were there for 18 years, and we have just retired to Destin, Florida. And it is spectacular here, you know? And during that time, I had become a wife and a citizen and a mother. I did get custody of the kids' bag. Of course, a couple years later, why did we do that? Because they were teenagers. uh you know i had a relationship with my mother i was an employee my employer was sorry when i retired they were sad to see me go i had been there uh at the same place in north carolina for 16 years you know um that stuff just was not happening in my life before i worked the steps and stayed in the middle of alcoholics anonymous you know my best effort got me to a county detox after three years of drinking at the dew drop in um you know for for a badass biker that i was i was driving a 1985 lemon yellow amc pacer and i know i'm gonna hear joe laugh i hear chuck laughing yeah that when i want to think of pitiful incomprehensible demoralization i just look at a picture of that car and i go to another meeting uh but i you know i've become all of these things because of the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, which were my path to God. And I know if you're new, you're not thrilled to hear about God, but you know, it's like the bad news is we talk a lot about God here, but the good news is that we talk a little bit about God. We talk a whole lot about God here. You know, I saw a picture the other day of a big book and then one where all the pages with God had been ripped out of it and it was about that thick versus that thick there. But But, you know, that's what the deal is. The power greater than myself is no longer alcohol. You know, the power greater and interestingly, Latin uses the same word for alcohol and God. So for the most depraved poison and for the highest order, same word. Carl Jung mentioned that in a letter that he wrote to Bill Wilson. You can Google it. um but he said they use the word the phrase spiritus contra spiritum meaning the spirit works against the spirit that when i had alcohol in my life and it was running my life god i didn't stand a chance trying to get to god but by its very nature when i'm walking with god the alcohol has no power over me and and that is pretty cool you know if it was daylight you'd be looking out the window at the gulf of mexico um you can't get here from the dew drop in without alcoholics anonymous and the power of god you know my best efforts to get out of ohio and the dew drop in land of me and detox in 1988 and uh if you are new and it looks lame it's okay like i said it's just because it is but it won't stay lame if you will get a sponsor take some direction and actually work don't just study the book do what it says you know my my late friend clancy said uh and i like he said that it is possible to starve to death while studying a cookbook in the kitchen you know we have to do what the book says so thanks joe for asking me to talk i'm a minute early there you go thank you