Comparing Insides to Outsides: Pride Masked as Confidence for Decades – Betty L.

But I knew she was from the GSO office in New York. And I've never met anybody from GSO before, so I was looking forward to meeting her. And since I have met her, I've discovered that she's a delightful person. She's worked at GSO for about a decade now. I'm sure she'll tell us about it. A lot of these delegate types know her because she's been the General Service Conference Coordinator for the last two years. That sounds like a pretty big job right there. Probably the biggest job that she's done, though, for AA is then to coordinate the International Convention in New Orleans. And all y'all that were there know how well that went. So she does have a good program going for her, I'd say. She's been here a few 24 hours, and it was nice this morning that she was sharing that she still working on her ego, something I have to work on every day. So I think that's really what gives us our unity, like this theme, is that we're all working along the same lines on the same thing. I'd like you to help me welcome Betty Elson, Brooklyn, New York. Thank you very much, Lisa. My name is Betty Little, and I'm an alcoholic. and uh it has been a delight to meet lisa uh she demonstrates to me that the future of the fellowship is in very good hands um i i also have met some other very wonderful people right from the time i stepped off the plane uh peggy and eugenia were there to meet me and uh to see to it that i got over here and everything was all right and of course i've met many old friends in your past delegates and it's indeed a great pleasure for me to be here in the state of georgia for your 29th visit annual uh a convention um i am betty and i do live in brooklyn now i was born in the bronx i didn't take too much of the geographical you can see I come from a Bronx Irish Catholic family eat your heart out Elkie and when I came to AA they told me that I didn't have to be an Irish Catholic to join this group but that it would help my family moved to Long Island when I was an infant and that's where I was brought up in a small middle-class community my My family were good people, Irish Catholic and neurotic, of course, but good people. And I can't say that I was the victim of neglect or any of that sort of thing that some people are. My parents' greatest error was overprotection. I had the classic alcoholic family, the passive and quiet father, and the dominant mother. and my mother was terrified of alcohol her father had a different personality when he drank though I don't think he was an alcoholic and my father's father had died of alcoholism in Bellevue Hospital before I was born and before this fellowship came into being so she was very afraid of alcohol she was afraid of what it could do and when I was nine years old she forbade me to drink now I I hadn't even thought of it yet, but she just said you must never drink. Well, of course, I already had the personality of an alcoholic at that time and so I became fascinated by the whole idea and I contained myself until I was 14 when I had my first drink. The only thing I have to report about it is that I liked the taste of it, the smell of it and most of all I liked how it made me feel. When I was 14 years old, I was as tall as I am now and I weighed a little more than I do now. Considerably more than I do mean. Needless to say, my social calendar wasn't excessively filled. I was a compulsive eater as a child, which was perhaps one of the first signposts of my disease. And so I – because of this very overprotective family, I didn't get into a great deal of trouble in my team except for the fact that at every opportunity that came along, I would drink. And it became evident to my friends early on that I had a capacity to hold my liquor better than most of them did. And in my youth, I was the one who always drove the cars home and held the other heads over the toilet bowl. As time passed, however, and I got further and further into excessive drinking and drinking large quantities, I lost this capacity. It took less and less alcohol as time went on for me to be drunk and more and more alcohol for me feel comfortable. And by the time I came to AA, I was hanging on to sanity like it was a fine thread because course there was only a few moments in the course of an evening's drinking where I was comfortable and not drunk and out of control. Of course getting to that point was a long and arduous road. I graduated from high school and went to business school, and then went into New York City as all young women who live in the suburbs did to begin what was supposed to have been a business career. And I I was then about 16, 17 years old. I quickly found out about the lunchtime cocktail and I liked that. And I found out a lot about bars and I liked them too. And I liked the bottles and the mirrors and the nice men in the big white aprons who gave you the drink. And I quickly find out that if you drank at the bar you got a stronger drink than you did if you were sitting back in the cocktail lounge. And so I disposed of the cocktail When I was 22, I went away on a vacation in the Pocono Mountains, and that's what you did in those days. And I went to a place called Split Rock Lodge, and there, there was a woman at our table who I started to kind of buddy up with. And the first night there, we took up with some local gentleman that we met at the bar ended up at an after-hours place and we were drinking all evening, and at least I was drinking all night. What I didn't notice was that she was the person who stopped drinking alcohol after the first two or three drinks and switched to some innocuous beverage like ginger ale or something like that. However, she did notice that I liked to drink, and we had a very good time at this place. But when we returned, it turned out that we both worked in Rockefeller Center in New York, And she said to me, I know of a bar in New York that I think you might like. And so when we returned one Friday evening, I met her for dinner and we went to this bar. And I liked it so much that about two years later or seven years later, whatever, I was getting mailed there, telephone calls there, and it was for me a home away from home. Many years later, when I was in AA, she told me that she felt great guilt about this because I became a regular in that law, which she did not, because she wasn't an alcoholic and drinking is not the central force in her life. And it was in mine because I was an alcoholic. And of course, I relieved her of any guilt. I said if it hadn't been that law it would have been another one uh i was still living at that time at home with this overprotective family and uh at that point there were other forces in my life i was so young and when i was 11 years old i can remember becoming involved with a group of people are known as the save the children federation and i would go around and knock on doors and collect clothing for the poor children in the south I don't know why we were always told that all the poor children were in the South but I'm really pleased to be here tonight and this afternoon and see that some of you transcended the poverty you know but at any rate I was involved with this sort of thing and interested in this sort of thing when I was a child it was also very active in the drill scouts and then activities these like that uh i became active in my early 20s and the junior women's club in florida park and then the federation of women's clubs on long island and i would have to get up and read meetings and yeah i would be overcome with anxiety and there i'd be with my hat you know and everything uh sharing these meetings and i quickly found out after my introduction to alcohol that if I had a few drinks before I led these meetings, or I had to get up and give a report, that I was able to do it a great deal better. At least I thought I was going to do a great feel better. Pretty soon the alcohol became essential for us, and I fit the hell with the junior women's club, and so much for that, the weight shifted entirely over to drinking and drinking activities and drinking friends. I worked for many years in an advertising agency, and I think I was working there when I began drinking in the bar. And pretty soon it was lunchtime at the bar as well as evening at the bar, and there were many people in advertising and publishing who drank beer. And one lunchtime, the man sitting next to me who I knew who worked for Newsweek magazine said his boss was Secretary of the Committee of Suicide over the weekend. And so I went out and bought a hat and applied for the job, and that was sort of the way I did things. Other people, when they wanted a new job, would give things to The New York Times. I responded to the big information that I got at the bar, and I got the job. But I was, at that time, 26, 27 years old, something like that, and I was totally dependent on alcohol to go on the job interview. I was, by that time, a daily drinker. By that time it was evident that my ability to form relationships, particularly with the opposite sex, was totally depending on alcohol. Therefore, I really didn't form relationships because I was totally involved with himself, which is in my anxieties and my ill-easiness, which is again a signpost of alcoholism, which I was incapable of recognizing at that time. And so I went along on my merry way and I got this job and there were all kinds of opportunities to drink there. I supervised the secretaries of all the And there were 14 space salesmen and seven secretaries. And very quickly, with alcoholic expertise, I organized the department so that all these girls did all my work, you see. I would call meetings. I would put that hat on I had left over from the Junior Women's Club and call a meeting in the morning just like the boss did with the salesman. And then I delegated responsibility. And actually, in fact, I got the department running better than it had been in years. But once having done that, I would go to lunch, you see. And unfortunately, the man that I was working for also went to lunch for elongated periods of time. And I don't want to take his inventory, but he certainly seemed to be suffering from the same disease I was, only more so. And what he needed was a secretary who was going to be there to cover his tracks when he wasn't here. And so, two years later, I was fired from that job, and it was the first of seven jobs that I was hired from as a result of the use and abuse of alcohol. And they would say to me, you know, we really had high hopes for you because when I would get a new job, you now, I would chase up and I would say, well, I'm not – I'm only going to drink on weekends," or, I won't drink when I have to be at a meeting in the morning, or I have do this or I'll have to do that. And I made all kinds of confessions about my drinking within my head. And, uh, I always broke these rules I set up for myself. With one bartender, I used to say, don't let me drink more than two dry Manhattans. Insist that I switched over to rind soda after that, or rind water. And of course then when he would try and enforce the rule that I had asked him to enforce on me, I would argue and fight with him and drink too many Dry Manhattans and once again not be able to get up in the morning. In retrospect, more and more, I can see myself as a victim of alcoholism. I can feel alcoholism as a disease and I can see how my life is totally controlled by it. From the time I picked up that first drink when I was 14 years old, I stopped developing emotionally because I was totally ruled by alcohol. And I think that I stayed at whatever stage of emotional development I had achieved at the time. I was fourteen years old until the day I came into this program when I I was 34 years old. It went on and it got worse. With each job that I lost, the next one was lesser and lesser and lessor. And I had less and less ability to hold myself together, put myself together, to look respectable when I went to work in the morning. I was gaining more and more and weight. My face was bloated and blocky. My eyes were, you I can remember in the ad agency going back to get my coffee in the art department one morning and one of the artists looked up and said, is that the route from Akron to Toledo in your left eye? You know, it had its funny spots, but basically it was tragic. At some point along the line, I used to go home to my parents on weekends, you know, and I treated my parents home at the filling station because I filled up. I ate proper food, and I did a lot of sleeping. My mother couldn't understand why I was always so tired when I was at home. And I would rest up and go back to New York and be baffled once again. And it went on and on. At some point when I went home, I was then about 30 years old, and I was in very poor physical condition or 31 years old. Something like that. my sister told me that my mother was being admitted to the hospital and we knew there had been something wrong and after the operation we were told that my mothers they just closed her up she had incurable cancer and by this time my incurable alcoholism had developed to the degree that I really was unable to manage my life the gas electric had been on his telephone would be shut off and I'd get it put on again and I would borrow money and get put out of the apartment and all of this sort of thing. And so when I learned that my mother was not going to recover from alcoholism, I'm from alcoholics, from cancer, I volunteered to go home and take care of her. I gave up the struggle and gave up department and volunteered to go home and care for my mother until her death. Today I understand that, in fact, I was going home to be taken care of because I seemed to have lost the ability to look after myself. And so I was able to go home, and move back into their household, and care for her physically until her deaths, and take care of the house. On a few occasions that would come and say that I was going to New York and get drunk. It was the only thing I knew how to do. I didn't know how to have a good time without drinking, and I didn�t know how drink without getting drunk. And then I would return and resume this task of looking after my mother. She died in 1961, and uh, I broke up their home, and, uh, uh cared for my father for about 18 months and my father began to drink with me because i wasn't afraid of him and while i cared for her i had hidden my bottle and i would just sneak drinks from time to time because i told you it was a matriarchal home and when she died i took the bottle that was hidden out from under the sink and put it on top of the sink and suggested to my father that we have a little drink before dinner and he agreed very very readily And within a short period of time, my father was drinking a fifth of a glass a day. The doctor had recommended—he was not well and the doctor had recommended a little drink for him to improve his circulation, but he did not mean every ten minutes. Pretty soon his condition deteriorated and after about about 14 or 18 months of this, he was put in a nursing home. And I was left to break up their home. And I did this. It took me an awful long time. I think I took two weeks off from work. I know I was drunk most of the time. I know I drunk when the Salvation Army came and I gave away what winter coats I had. They weren't in very good condition, but I gave away these winter coats because there was a certain stage in drinking, you know? And You know that stage when you've had four or five drinks and you can't understand what you were worrying about this morning because you're so smart and you're so lovable that everything is going to work out all right, you see. Well, the Salvation Army arrived at that point in my drinking that day, and I said, take these coats and give them to the poor. And they did that. And so I entered Alcoholics Anonymous in April, fortunately. But when winter came, and up north it gets cold cold in the winter. When winter came, I was without a winter coat. Needless to say, I survived it with the good offices of the friends I'd made and Alcoholics Anonymous. But I broke up their home and moved into a furnished room in a place called Massapequa, Long Island. The friends that I had since childhood had sort of given up spending very much time with me because I would pass out on their sofa, and I was very hard to move when they passed that and um it just it was like we love her butt you know and so i was invited to less and less dinner parties and uh less and less occasions where alcohol was served at all and so I spent the last uh year a year and a half of my drinking in this furnace room in massachusetts and in october of 1963 of 1962 i woke up one morning in that furnace room and said aloud what i believed today to be the first honest prayer i ever said in my life and it was simply my god my god get me out of here i was experiencing a desperation that i believe i don't have to explain to most people who are in this room this afternoon because uh if you understand send it i don't have to explain it to you and if you don't i can't it was a desperation that i felt down to my side uh i wanted god to get me out of my own skin out of out of the light out of way i was living uh and i believe that he answered that prayer on that day it was simply my god my god get me i picked up the paper and there was an advertisement for job in Huntington, Long Island. And by now I was doing temporary jobs. You know you'd get $21 for three days work or whatever it was and I wouldn't know whether to buy booze or pills because I was also into tranquilizers that a doctor had prescribed for me some five or six years earlier that I was totally hooked on. The first tranquilizer that I was given was a thing called Desmitol. Desmitool peps you up and calms you down simultaneously and the result was that you could cross the street against the light and not worry. I took those for years but pretty soon the dexedrine in them made me so nervous I stopped taking them and I moved on to things like uh like Miltown and Equinol, and it was before Lib—no, I think you could get Librium then, and that sort of thing. And I was as hooked on that stuff now as I was on booze. And so when I would get the $7 that I got from the temporary jobs or the $21 or the $28, I was always torn as to whether to buy the vodka or the pills. and in those days they weren't as worried about addictive drugs as they are today and the fda hadn't put all the restrictions on the druggists that they have today and it was possible if you were a smart girl like i was to get one prescription operative in three different drug stores and that's what i would do so that i was never you know i might run out of credit you could also get credit in drug stores so if you had it running and then see this and that's just, you're always safe. And that's what I would do. At any rate, on that day, I also had a car that was in the same state of disrepair that I was. And this particular car, you started by spraying ether on the carburetor in the summer. And so on this particular day, I saw this ad and I got an appointment for an interview And I had a can of tuna fish and a vodka miltini, which meant Miltown and a Vodka Martini. I went to the closet and chose from the two dresses. One was a black dress with splits in the seam, and the other was a navy blue or brown one with a cigarette hole in it. And I opted for the cigarette hole, and I put on over it a gray cashmere coat. It was in October, and put on a gray casimir coat that I had worn when I was working for newsweek at the women's ad club ball and it was still in pretty good condition i said this will cover the cigarette hall and the brown looks better and uh i went out to the car sprayed the ether on the carburetor jumped in and away i went uh i get the appointment was for something like three in the afternoon and right as i went after door i received a phone call on the landlord's phone from a gentleman of my acquaintance who invited me for a drink after the interview I got there and I said it was one of these industrial parks with the glass trunks you know and I signed the register and I sat in the reception room with the receptionist for over an hour waiting for this man to see me and many times within that hour I wanted to flee because the vodka was wearing off and the sun was setting and it was coming through the glass and it getting hot in that reception room and I couldn't take the coat off because the cigarette red hole was there and of course my eyes had that roadmap that route from Akron to Toledo and the receptionist also smelled my breath when I signed the register and unbeknownst to me God was working one of his anonymous miracles or coincidences on that afternoon because the receptionists in that office were two months sober and alcoholics anonymous and by some miracle the man finally came out at four o'clock and he felt so guilty for keeping me waiting so long he gave me the job the organization that owned this company also on the New York Mets and this is in 1962 I don't remember if you know what the New YorK Mets were doing in 1962 but it wasn't good and neither was this organization because they hired me you know and I became friends with that woman Dorothy and Dorothy would go home at night and say to her husband what do will I do if they fire her before I get her? And Bill would say, Dorothy, it's a program of attraction, not promotion. I would call in in the morning. Sometimes I'd still be drunk. And she would say hang up and I'll take care of this and don't call back until tomorrow. I'll call you later. And then she'd tell my boss after he hung up from a phone call that I had called while he was busy on another line and that I was ill. She would call me back and she could get me through to stay sober through the day and get me to work the next day. And finally, some six months later, Dorothy and Bill invited me to go to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous in Manhattan with them on a Thursday evening. And in that six months, he was very kind to me. By now, my father was in a nursing home, and I had moved out of the furnace room in Massachusetts, and then I was living in a little attic apartment in Huntington. In some ways, my life had gotten slightly better. I had a full-time job. There There were people that I spoke to each day in my life, though I didn't do much else. It was two miles from the apartment to the job, and there was a liquor store and a grocery store in between, and I still ate as much as I drank, which is why I weighed so much when it came to A. But Dorothy was always kind to me. If I didn' t have money, like maybe night before payday, she'd say, here, borrow five bucks, go buy your father some chocolates, and go to see him in the nursing home. But she'd never give me enough money so that I could get in trouble with it. She'd give me just enough money, so I could get the gas to go into the nursing home and buy him something on the way. She was one of the kindest people I ever met. And she and Bill took me to the meeting at Alcoholics Anonymous in Manhattan. Now what you have to understand is that Manhattan is the Gold Coast of Long Island. It's on the North Shore, and any of you that are familiar with Long Island would understand. And there were Cadillacs in the parking lot, and the women wore mink soles in April, and they had alligator shoes with pocketbooks at night. And I thought that was a living end. And I arrived trying to get the rungs in my stockings on straight in one of the two dirty black or brown dresses, not having washed my hair in a couple of weeks because it was was a lot of trouble for me to do those things. I just went home from work and drank as much as I had available, and fell asleep a sodden mess day after day, night after night. And I walked into the Manhasset proof like this, and a woman who came from what I still call old money walked up to me and said, my dear, are you a new member? And I stood my full height and said to her I'm considerate because I was not about to sign anything and she said darling come with me with a special row for considerate and she took me up to the second row and by some miracle in Manhattan Long Island on that night they had speakers from New York City and they had a man whose name was Jim and I remember he was very attractive and he was an older man but very attractive and the woman was a woman probably about my age now and she looked lovely and she told my story. She told the story of the beginnings of an excellent business career and of failing at it and she said that this man had called her up, she looked grand, and he had called her up at three o'clock that afternoon and he invited her to go to dinner and speak at this meeting that night. And now if I was going to look anywhere near the way that lady looked, I needed three weeks notice at that point you see. But here she was on short notice looking just right and her hair in place and lovely clothing and I listened to her tell her story and she sounded very happy and I knew that she had a good life. And she talked about going into a liquor store during her drinking days and walking up and down in front of the wine rack trying to figure out the bottle of wine for the least money with the highest alcohol content. And then taking that bottle and bringing it to the counter and saying to the man, is this the proper one with chicken? And I had done exactly that the week before. Maybe I said veal, I don't know. But I had gone precisely that. It's high mathematics when you have a hangover. And so for the first time in Alcoholics Anonymous I identified with what she said. I left there that night, and Dorothy and Bill drove me home, and they said, Are you going to drink tonight? And I said, No. It was Thursday, but I thought to myself, Tomorrow's Friday, and I'll get paid, and then I'll drink then. Well, Friday came, and at 9.30 in the morning, there was a call from a bill collector who had a judgment against me for one of the many bills that I owed. I had no telephone when it came to that. Because the phone had gone out long ago. and this this man had a judgment I don't remember which bill it was and he he had already spoken to my boss and my boss had already told me that if he put the judgment through that I was fired but they didn't want to be annoyed with the bookkeeping of going to keep dollars and if I was fired I was out of the apartment I was now in because I was paying the rent by the week I could not accumulate $90 in a month because i live hands now so i paid the man nineteen dollars and twenty cents a week for your accountants that comes up to ninety dollars a month um so he had told me if i missed one week i was out and i would be sleeping in the car with the bottom can of ether destroyed and that was where it was when i came to alcoholic anonymous and in the face of all of that i said i think i'll try it now that will be 20 years next april it was 19 years last day and i've been trying it one day at a time ever since thank you very much and it's been working beautifully and i would like to tell you some about what's happened since then uh i joined the group in uh i had moved from from the furnace room over to to Huntington, and I joined a group near Huntington called North Court. And in North Court they had step meetings, and they introduced me to the steps very early. My sponsor came around one Saturday morning and brought me a gift of the 12 and 12. I know in this country you study the big book a lot. I was given that to read, but we studied the 12-and-12. And I was told that I was to read the step before I went to the meeting, and that I should read it again when I came home from the meeting because they had set meetings then in the 60s in Northport and I was told that if I did this that I would find that the gremlins had been on the bookshelf because I would climb more in the text having discussed it at the meeting than I had been able to find reading it before I went and I did. This over and over in many sequences of step meetings in Northford and and they are the basis of my survival I took the first step within a short space of time because all the problems that I had when I came to AA disappeared within three months or a year. And I found that I have a whole new set, the new set of problems that I had for what was really wrong with this alcoholic in the first place. And I was told that if I learned steps and used them in my life that I would find a way to live in which i didn't have to drink and that i would find happiness and contentment beyond my wildest dreams and it has come to pass there is no doubt in my mind that it has come to past when i got to the second step they told me that if i would come to believe and do as they did and the power that that is demonstrated in this fellowship that I would be free of the fear that I had suffered from all of my life. And I am free of this fear that made me unable to play the piano in a concert when I was a kid, that made unable to lead the meetings in the Doomy Womans Club. I was freed of that fear that had of being approved of or disapproved of through the second step of Alcoholics Anonymous. And then in the third step they taught me to turn my life and my will over to a power outside myself i do that every day many days i do it over and over and over again because i'm a willful alcoholic who takes that will back over and over and over again and in direct proportion to my discomfort have i taken that world down but i know and believe in my heart that as long as i will remake that decision and turn my will back to God, that God's will for me is far better than my will for me ever could be. I then began to work the fourth through the ninth step, which to me are the workshop of AA where we work on our defensive character, where we learn to understand the meaning of each resentment, what is the meaning that there seems to be in this resentment that I may get. And I'll get them, I still get them. I think I'll get them until the day I die. I also give them and I have to understand that too. And the eight step tells me that I have to you know be willing to make amends to anybody for whom I've given anything. I'm not a person and I never was drunk or sober who doesn't do much. I have a tendency to get involved, too involved. And this has to do with the ego thing you were talking about. And it is the area of my character that I am re-looking at in this stage of sobriety. I find myself critical of some long-time members of AA when I see their egos. And like I was taught from the very beginning in Northport, when I point a finger there are three pointing back. And if there's something in your character that particularly disturbs me, I better look in and find out why it particularly disturbed me. And in the fifth step, I went and I shared with my sponsor everything I learned that first time I took the first step in Northfield. And I told her the major things that I had learned was that pride was the father of all my defects and that I have no ability to love. And she said to me, if you really mean that and you really know that you have a chance for a happy life she said because if you don't know that he can't love you'll never learn how but if you know that we have no ability to love you stand a chance of learning now and today because i've continued these steps and i continue to go to meetings and to listen at meetings uh have i learned a little bit of how to be loving. And I don't always practice it. And I use the 10-step, I use a 10-stick to try and bring myself back in harmony when I get away from it. And so it went. I was sober about seven years and life had gotten really nice. I no longer was in the attic apartment. I had a garden apartment in one of these places with the early penal architecture, you know. And I had wall-to-wall carpeting and I had gotten a really good job again in a community nearby. I had a new Chevrolet. I was the epitome of middle-class living. I was respected in the community. I was asked to speak at group anniversaries. You know what that means. And I was very proud of myself. And there was one thing missing, and I became enamored of this gentleman in the group who also became enamoured of me. me, and the problem was that his wife didn't like it. And you know in Alcoholics Anonymous I think we are the only place where people experience . It happens. This gentleman was one of those people who were quote in the process of getting a divorce I always say that's all one word you know some of some of us have been there and I misused what I believed was my ability to love and I did love and I'm not sorry for that I am sorry for any pain on me that may have been caused as a result of that but it was the greatest growing experience of my sobriety because the pain I experienced as a result of getting that far away from God's will for me was the pain that brought me what is the meaning of any kind of suffering I'm beginning to learn the most it was the most suffering I ever remember drunk or sober you know you don't suffer much when you're drunk because you can always have another drink and soften the edges But I couldn't. I had made a full commitment to staying away from the first drink, and I couldn�t. And I cried and wailed and screamed. And I had one thing going for me. I had some very good habits, AA habits. And if you're new in AA, I want to tell you something. The first year of sobriety is to make habits like picking up the phone every day. Just do it. And don't try to understand why because when the chips are down, you'll pick up the phone, not the drink. and it worked for me the willingness in those first years of doing what they told me to work for me when i got into the darkness again because i was in the darkness i had gotten in charge of my life again and i got this relationship i still have because it pushed me it pushed me into the 11th step into i had gone into psychotherapy which helped me enormously I have to say this, because when I got to the six steps, there was a lot I didn't understand about my life, myself, and my character. And I became willing to put the time, effort, and money into psychotherapy to help me. And the ability to stick with that I had gained here in AA, and I saw my therapy as an exercise in the six-step. And I made some changes in my work habits and my whole lifestyle that were very good as a result of the psychotherapy I graduated from that I've returned to a different kind of therapy today which is more spiritual but I did then what I needed to do and the reason I'm sharing this is to say simply that are the AA program is my diagram for living but it doesn't eliminate asking for help with anything else I may have to go to the Mayo Clinic for an operation on my feet and in fact this weekend I'm trying to put myself and accept that idea I want them to guarantee me that it's going to be all better if I have the operation and I experience the pain and they won't do that can you imagine and I am trying to gather that courage you see but I can't I can get my feet fixed in AA I I have to find in AA the courage to do what I have to do. And I experienced going to psychotherapy as having the courage do what I had to do, and moved into New York. And I was stripped again of all my power. But there were AA meetings in New York, oh they weren't asking me to speak at their group anniversary meeting. And they didn't think I was any big shot or anything like that. But there was AA meetings, and they read the preamble, and they talked about the steps and I went there and I opened my mouth and I started to cry and they thought I was a newcomer and I was in business. But they gave me the help that I needed and I worked on prayer and meditation and I established a conscious contact with my higher power which is very difficult to talk about I think for each of us. I love the book that we have at ESO called Pain to Believe because it is individual spiritual experience Mine came through the study of some books, Play on the Pops, Sermon on the Mouth, Power to Constructive Thinking, his meditation on the 23rd Psalm. I experienced a connection with it, with the power outside myself that saw me through that pain and it was the most interesting phenomena because I had moved from Long Island where I had a car to New York where nobody can afford a car and I would have to carry my groceries in one of these carts up Murray Hill, and I would be crying at the indignity of this. Of course all the New Yorkers do this, it's just part of the lesson. But I would be crying. Now within, it seemed like suddenly I'd been saying Karen that part. My consciousness changed because I got in touch with a higher power. The things that I hated, I began to love because I again loved being alive and I came into one with sobriety again. And that was the benefit of that experience. It was at that time that I fully took the third step. I had this silly job with the American Kennel Club that was keeping me eating. I had a lot of good old things. And I said, God, I'll go and write those silly doggie letters again today, but I know it's not your will for me for the rest of my life. I know that you you will reveal your will for me as long as I stay on this path. And what happened was, to make a long story short, I was offered the job of the General Service Officer. And all the natural tendency that I had to work in organizations, for organizations, was put to use. Everything I had ever done in my business life and in my social life and in my home life was put to use in this job. I have been there 11 years. It's been the most wonderful 11 years of my life the relationships that i have formed in that period of time with men and women with with the people i've worked with are wonderful loving relationships uh when i was a child uh i sat at my grandmother's knee and she used to tell me stories about ireland and i always wanted to go to ire island and i said well i'll never be able to afford to you know spend money on ire land i can barely get to the polka dots you know on vacation Well, in 1974, the World Service meeting was held in England, the third World Service meeting. And Juanita New, who's now retired, was a coordinator and she asked if I could assist her and go with her. She was then well into her sixties and she needed some help. And so I was sent to London with Juanita Niles, who wrote Dr. Bob and the Good Old Timers And the three of us staffed that meeting. And I had my trip to Ireland that I long, long dreamed of. And I was invited. I went into Dublin and I went to the General Service office and visited the AAs there. And I went for St. John and God's Hospital where the AA meetings were held. And I spent an evening in the home of one of the actors in the Abbey Theater who was a member. And we celebrated the anniversary of a Finnish man who had been at the World Service meeting there that night. I've had many, many wonderful, wonderful experiences in this period of time. I've met many wonderful people, John and Joe, the delegates you sent year after year to the General Service Conference. I've traveled all over the United States and Canada, and I can tell you that I'm a happy woman today. But the one thing I know is that I must continue to work these books. i must i go to a meetings in new york and there aren't very many people who have more than 10 years of variety and i must know and learn that people with a lot less sobriety than me can teach me i must work daily on on my ego uh i must worked daily on being a loving person through the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, because – and the truth that I learned here is the freedom to be what it was supposed to be in the first place. And you make that possible for me each day, and for that I thank you very, very much. Thank you. please remain silent we love you daddy let's close with the Lord's prayer our father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name that thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and help us to have faith in the Son, and make us not in temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.