If I Take the Right Actions the Feelings Will Change – Polly P.
About This Speaker Tape
Polly P. speaks in Redding, California in January 1996 with 18 years of sobriety (DOS April 11, 1977). She shares the podium with Ted, Karen, Bonnie, and Sean — all fellow speakers from the Pacific Group orbit.
She opens with a deeply personal story: her little Yorkshire terrier Winston escaped five days earlier and she came to Redding with a broken heart. Her husband Dave found the dog through a series of miraculous near-misses — inches and seconds, as Norm Alpe used to say — including a girl at a school who saw a found-dog sign just as Dave was asking. An eighteen-wheeler nearly hit Winston. She presents this as proof of the power of prayer and that everything is in perfect order even when she cannot understand the order.
The heart of the talk is Clancy's teaching that alcoholism is a disease of perception — her perception of reality was distorted. Nobody in her entire life ever mistreated her but her. She was always loved and always cherished. She was just too sick with a soul sickness called alcoholism to feel it.
She explains the action-thinking-feeling chain: take actions contrary to the way you feel, the actions change your thinking, and the thinking changes your feeling. Before AA she never knew you had to think something before you could feel it.
She and Dave had returned to basics — including giving her sobriety date again, because in Texas if you do not give your sobriety date it is probably because you do not have one. She describes getting sober in Dallas and finding that there are no negatives in Higher Power's world.
Discussion
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