Julie Started the Steps at 10 PM — by 4 AM We Were on Our Knees for the Third Step Prayer – Audrey C.
About This Speaker Tape
Audrey shares her story at Benchmark Recovery, speaking directly to residents and their family members. She grew up in a small East Texas town on a dairy farm, in a home full of love but shadowed by her father's alcoholism. When she was six, her mother left her father hoping to shield Audrey from the disease — but as Audrey puts it, "you know how that goes." She describes a childhood marked by depression, severe anxiety, and a deep sense of feeling separate from everyone around her, even when people were reaching out to connect. At 15, in a back alley with her stepsister, she took her first drink and could finally breathe.
What followed was a steady, grinding descent. She bounced from a private Christian school to a Baptist university to community college in Denton, each move a geographic cure that solved nothing. She developed an elaborate system for managing her drinking — pre-drinks, public drinks, after-drinks, weed, sleeping pills — and began living in total isolation, keeping vampire hours, stealing food and alcohol from her parents, and drawing paychecks from the family business without showing up. She slept on a urine-stained mattress. An intervention conducted by phone while she sat drunk in a pickup truck at a graveyard went nowhere. The moment that cracked her open came when she went home to do an intervention on her father and watched him — loaded at 50, swaying and talking to himself in the mirror — and realized she could end up living that way for decades.
She called her mother, admitted she was an alcoholic, and entered treatment in South Texas. There she first heard the Big Book explanation of the allergy, the phenomenon of craving, and the mental obsession, and it clicked — she wasn't a bad person, she was a sick one. Back in Dallas, she found Primary Purpose group and a sponsor named Julie who took her through the steps with urgency, starting at 10 PM and landing on their knees at 4 AM for the Third Step prayer. The work transformed her. She made amends to her grandfather, who gave her a concrete list instead of a pat on the head, and to her stepfather, whose only request was that she stop changing the captioning on his TV. She learned to live in Steps 10, 11, and 12 — staying current, praying, and working with other women. Her father got sober a year after she did, and she got to do Steps 2 and 3 with him before he died sober four years before this talk. She closes by urging the residents to go all in on the program the way they went all in on their addiction.
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