Contrary Action — Whatever My Head Says to Do, I Have to Do the Exact Opposite – Terry D.
About This Speaker Tape
Terry D., sober since May 30, 1997, tells his story at the Monday night Blue Chip Speaker Meeting at the NAVA Club. After a friend introduces him as one of his best friends in the program, Terry says he prayed on the drive down just to tell the truth, and a text from a friend arrived moments later telling him not to embellish. He grew up outside Columbus, Ohio in a Catholic family — altar boy, Catholic grade school, Catholic high school in Atlanta, Loyola in New Orleans — and says he had a good relationship with the Higher Power long before he ever drank.
His first beer was a seven-ounce Miller Pony split with friends in high school, but New Orleans is where the light switch flipped. Four years of blackouts, a Catholic wedding, three kids, a transfer to St. Louis with his insurance job, and a Christmas party where he grabbed the regional vice president's wife on the dance floor with no memory of it. He left his marriage convinced his wife was the problem, moved in with a coworker who introduced him to drugs, and accelerated through jobs, apartments, and eventually a bogus-claims scheme at his insurance company that lost him the company car in 1996.
By Memorial Day 1997 he was living in a 1987 Toyota Corolla, writing stolen checks from a roommate to buy dope. He walked out of a St. Louis bank when a teller asked him to wait, came home to that roommate holding a baseball bat and two sheriff cars in the driveway. His ex-wife told him his parents didn't want to talk to him and he should go die. He checked into a St. Louis detox on the advice that a warrant couldn't touch him there, but security walked him out to waiting county police on discharge. His parents drove all night from Atlanta, a judge released him to their custody, and they quietly signed him into Marr for ninety days — walked him in, walked out, didn't look back.
Marr is where he learned to get sober. He got a sponsor, got current with child support, and did ten years probation and restitution for the state charges. At five years sober a dormant 1998 federal warrant for interstate mail fraud surfaced — sixty years of possible exposure across fifteen checks — and his sponsor Dennis Sanfilippo told him to drive to St. Louis and turn himself in. Terry called Dennis from the road steaming that he was sponsoring newcomers and praying daily and getting processed anyway; Dennis asked, "Did you steal the money?" Yep. Click. Nine hours later he was free. He met his wife Leslie at NAVA when she stood on a chair screaming for help, and they've been married fourteen years. He closes by saying the perception is always backwards — if you tell him he's a great friend he hears he's an ass — and that's why he has to be comfortable being uncomfortable, and do the exact opposite of what his head tells him.
Discussion
Be the first to share your thoughts on this tape.