Sarah A. – Step 1 – The First Word Is We – 2025

Welcome, everybody. I'm so glad everybody got here safe. There's no snow today. Must have been meant to be. Awesome. Welcome, welcome, welcome. So my name is Kirstie. I am an alcoholic. Most important thing, I definitely am qualified to be in this fellowship. Yes, it's so good to have everybody here. So we have such a fun weekend in store for everybody. So before I introduce the speakers for the weekend, I think it would be nice to get grounded with a moment of silence and then kind of follow by the serenity prayer. So let's have a moment. A moment of silences. God? Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can't, and the wisdom to know the difference. I will not mind be done. Thanks, everybody. So we are very lucky this weekend. We have a couple of pretty amazing speakers, if I do say so myself. And they really don't need an introduction, but I'm going to do it anyway. So we have first Sarah M. from Harvard, who just yesterday celebrated, was it yesterday or two days ago? Yesterday, right? Just yesterday, celebrated 41 years of sobriety. And a fun fact about Sarah. Oh dear. so when sarah back in her drinking days was dating a guy and living with a guy one night she came home with a tattoo of another man on her body and i'm sure she'll tell you more about that story and then for our other speaker we have finn and sarah and finn are actually i would say best friends i think i think it would go that far and say best friends um Finn A is from Cape Cod and Finn is about to celebrate nine years of recovery in a couple weeks and a fun fact about Finn is that Finn married his first sponsor so we got some scandalous step one experience and really you know there's this line in the big book that's like there's a lot of levity with us right like we're not a glum lot but under there is like deadly earnestness right like we work a really serious program so I hope this weekend you guys can find both of those things you know like some really serious experience we work really hard they work really hard and this is the result right like we get to have a lot of fun. So without further ado, our two speakers. Thanks, Kirstie. Are we supposed to introduce ourselves at all? That was in that thing. My name's Ben. I'm an alcoholic. You just heard that. And I remember when I went on my first commitment, I had three months and I was going to share and I prayed that we'd all die in a car crash on the way there that was that was somebody who wouldn't pray when i heard the thing about the alarm i was like come on alarm you know we don't get out of that i'm just a little nervous even though i did ask for help so um anyway that's it huh no um i'm sarah and uh i'm gonna tell where we met okay so we um during covid uh finn and his wife started a zoom meeting because she was celebrating her anniversary as i recall and it was in march of 2020 so a lot of us were struggling at that time and i heard about this meeting there we go yeah and uh i got on and there was about 30 people from the Cape and Finn and I just hit it off like no tomorrow because we had the same sense of humor basically. And that meeting is still going. It's how many, five years later? Seven days a week. Yeah. Seven days in the morning. So if anybody is looking for a meeting early in the Morning, really great meeting, a lot of great sobriety and some great people and a lot of fun so um yeah anytime pop in so that's how we met uh you want to say anything about about yourself or should we start on step one go ahead yeah it's funny because um I was feeling kind of choked up while Kirstie was sharing because I've known there I go already I've know kirsty for a while and um when i first met her she probably weighed 80 pounds and she was a junkie and uh she's just a freaking miracle today and um god i just can picture her in this office i was in and um scratching you know scratching a lot and i remember thinking like man this girl is like in deep trouble and um so just to me like the miracle of aa and the miracle of one person helping another that that gal who literally didn't get sober that day by the way kept going out and is like sitting here today running a freaking big book step study workshop or whatever i mean and just as a miracle so it's it feels like full circle to see heard today and i remember she called me i don't know six months ago or something and said hey you know super bowl weekend you want to talk about the big book and i said sure not thinking of course at all what that meant and um so in the last month just really thinking about being with all of you and you know i said to finn earlier i'm like i can't believe like i got sober when i was 24 years old and it's like it's so mind-boggling to me sometimes because that girl like I hardly recognize of course um and when I think about you know I don't know if this happens to you guys but when I think About what she went through I only drank drank and drugged I was a coke freak for eight years I started at 16 and I stopped when I was 24 but in those years I literally can feel you know that feeling when you remember something and it just goes right up your spine like that pain darkness trauma whatever you know was enough the eight years were enough and You know, I was thinking today that this was close to my bottom. So this is going to sound kind of edgy, but I don't know if anybody knows about the combat zone in Boston. I mean, that's quite a few years ago. So in the end of my using, I Was Living with a Guy Named Dwayne and Came Home with a Tattoo That Said Scott. Yeah, that wasn't a good night, by the way. um so I was living with this guy named Dwayne and um he used to want to go into the combat zone and you know I think about this now and I just get so like choked up for this girl right so I'm this 22 year old kid and I think that I have to go in with him because that was his thing right so i remember being in there one night and god i had goosebumps thinking about this and of course we knew this stripper named crystal of course her name was crystal and um so crystal was dating a guy named kenny who was kenny and duane were best friends i'm blown away that you remember all these names yeah of course trauma trauma memories uh so anyways um we're sitting in i can't remember the name whatever the glass slipper problem there's someplace down there and this is how bad i felt this is going to kind of describe to you where i was in the end i remember sitting in this place totally dark of course and sitting next to duane and kenny and here i am like think about this this is my boyfriend and i'm in the strip and crystal comes out and i remember the following thought i wish i was her like in that moment i was so envious of this woman who by the way junkie right you know had a baby at boom, you know, just a fricking wreck. And yet I'm in this place and I'm thinking, I wish I was home. So, I mean, that's where my drug addiction took me. I felt so ugly, alone, desperate, vacant you know I think about those eight years and really from the beginning and I don't know if you guys you know used like this I hopped on a train at 16 and I didn't get off till I was 24 it was just that was it it was like I picked up my first drink and i fell in love i literally fell in love with alcohol and it's because and i always refer to myself like this i always felt like i was a horse in one of those gates that's about to be open like i always just you know this level of anxiety of restlessness of irritability of i've got to get out of my own and that was chronic from you know whatever five and you can guess the circumstances you know most of us alcoholism rage some type of sexual inappropriateness you know all the usual and um you know so you grow up in all this insanity i was the only girl i had four brothers and i often joked that i didn't know i was a girl till i was 13 because i was like a tomboy forever and um so i had that anxiety but i didn t know it you know what i'm saying like i didn' t even know i had this illness and so the minute and i know some of you can relate to this the minute i put alcohol into my system i felt okay i just felt okay. And I chased that feeling for the next eight years. And I just wanted some ease and some comfort and some peace. That's all I wanted. And, of course, the irony is that as the progression of your illness moves, you're getting less and less peaceful, right? You're not really feeling any more, you know any less anxious or any less depressed or any less tortured because you have to do more and more to get away from yourself and that's really what happened to me in the progression is uh so the booze was there and then i started doing cocaine and i fell in love with cocaine if any of you got sober in the 80s it was huge it's still huge now by the way but in the80s it was on every street corner and um that really just took me to another level of escaping and you know i often think about for me addiction is this way of just getting out of myself and so is codependency i talk a lot about codependancy but to me the codependence was there before the addiction so the focus on what someone else thought feel or was doing or thinking that was my first addiction i was focused on you i didn't know what was happening in me but i wanted to know what's happening in you and i was in that hyper vigilant i'm gonna know what everybody else is doing thinking saying so i can feel safe that was my modus operandi and there were good reasons for that so that was really the first thing and then you pick up an addiction and it's like oh okay i don't want to i don' t want to think about myself i don''t want to think about you know you I just want to escape and so from that moment when I got into the cocaine and I can tell you you know lots of crazy stories about that because the problem with cocaine is it costs a shitload of money and so what starts to happen is of course you start doing things to make money you know and you know that's when you go down down that road and usually the law starts getting involved you know I mean I tried to rob a bank once uh crazy just crazy stuff you know I was in college and I went home on Thanksgiving break and I owed a coke dealer a bunch of money so he fronted me an ounce of coke to take back to college in Chicago and of course by the time i got back to chicago no cake no cocaine left and um so i'm out with a couple of friends and i decide that we need this money and so we ended up stealing the checks from a roommate and three of us went into this bank and we had a getaway car and two of us went in the window, the drive-thru window. And a friend went into the main bank. And we're all trying to cash these checks. And what happened is the woman at the window knew the girl whose checks they were. Yeah, I mean, we're 18 years old, right? I mean my god. And so we notice that she's acting funny. And of course, what do we do? We take off in the getaway car. And at the same time, we come around the corner and our friend is coming out of the bank waving like hundreds. And I think, oh shit, she got the money and we didn't. So we ended up going on a bender that night. Long story short, the next morning what happened is three of our friends had gotten arrested. Three women got arrested that they thought were us. And so they were told to go back to the dorm, the college dorm, and for us to turn ourselves in the next morning, which we did. And my father, for years, had a picture of me with the black license plate in front of me in a box just to show to me when I was misbehaving, you know, to remind me this is where you ended up. So I mean, again, craziness, crazy stories like that, the progression and what i was thinking today is you never think it's the booze and drugs right it never once occurred to me that i had a drug or alcohol problem it was like the boyfriends it was my parents it wasmy shrink at the time she kept bugging me to go to these freaking meetings you know it was everybody else and you know i was looking at step one today you know when bill w talks in the step book about why is it that we have to hit such a dark bottom you know and i don't have the answer to that i mean you know there's lots of people around the internet now trying to help folks stop drinking and they talk a lot about trying to get people before they hit bottom you know there's this whole gray area drinking population which kind of blows my mind uh i'm glad i'm not in the gray area glad i freaking knew right um because you can be in the gray areas forever in my mind so for me it's like the progression just kept getting worse and worse the jackpots kept getting worse and worse and ultimately uh ultimately i ended up in a drug house one night um with a bunch of people you know like doing cocaine taking their blood pressures i don't that was a thing back then i don' t know what it is like thinking we're not hurting ourselves if we like if our blood pressure doesn't go off the charts uh anyways and of course when you're under the influence of drugs and alcohol, you think you're going to solve the world's problems. So you stay up for like three days and then you're like completely psychotic. So I ended up, I don't really remember the whole circumstance, but I went to this Coke dealer's house to get more Coke, of course. And I ended up just like on the floor, not really in a seizure, but kind of feeling like I was dying and bugs were crawling on me and just like having this kind of hallucinatory experience and feeling like I was going to die. And then I, you know, prayed to God, of course, please help me and went out to a phone booth and, you Know, called my brother who came and picked me up. So, you Now, that's kind of how I got in here and um you know and we'll talk about this more in the coming days but i also think a lot about you know for me these steps are not a one and done i know some people say that like it's one and done I did my fourth step you know then they're crazy five years later um so i'm really about you know i've hit a number of bottoms in my recovery i mean i've been around a long time So lots of shit happens. You know what I mean? And, um, it's not really what happens to me. It's how I handle it and how I cope with it and How I embrace it and hopefully I thrive from it. But I definitely have hit bottoms. And it's Not even just pain and suffering. It is just life. I mean, stuff happens, you know, kids get sick, husbands die, you Know, parents die things happen you lose jobs stuff happens and it's really about going back to that first step and remembering that i'm not just powerless over drugs and alcohol i'm powerless over all of you i'm powerless over a husband who relapsed i'm perilous over my 25 year old that just moved out i'm powerless over finn you know god knows what he's gonna say tonight and uh you know i mean i'm powerless over everything but you know what i do have power over i have power over this hulu i have power over you know whether i'm going to pray or not i have power over what decisions i'm gonna make if i can pause before i open my mouth i mean this program and i get so choked up around bill w and that guy like when i read over because i'm really obsessive in fact ben and i got in a fight in the last week i've been like studying the book right because for me like i didn't like i couldn't show up at an exam and i you know study the night before and get an a like that's not me i just didn't view doing the steps and working on them on a daily basis only doing you know studying the night before yes i know 41 years of this i don't want so it says to me so i call him i'm like hey are we gonna get together and talk about it's like what are we going to get together for like I'm just going to pray. I'm like, what? You're just going to pray? Oh my God. So anyways, there's lots of opportunities for growth, even at 41 years, you guys. And, um, you know, I really just want to be of service. I really want to be helpful and supportive and I'm here for you this weekend. Uh, anything you want to ask or any, any things that get churned up from, uh, sharing, please come up to us in chat. and I'm going to turn it over to my buddy. Absolutely. I'll just start by letting you all know I wasn't as sick as Sarah. I had all the same feelings but at my bottom I had in the last couple of years at least four years before I finally came into the program, I got exceeds every quarter at work. I was a high producer. I had multiple degrees. Well, I still have them. They don't go away, but I now don't like, oh my God, they're going to find out I don't know anything. You know, I did a lot. I had a lot of the same feelings. I grew up, I'll just give you a little history. I drew up in an alcoholic family. I'm off this vineyard and that means both my parents, my siblings, my aunts, my uncles, my grandparents, um, my great grandmother and my grandmother. I remember being a little kid staying at their house and they're drunk. And my great-grandmother was like 80 something smashing a lamp over my grandmother's head. And, you know, like that, that's where I grew up in and, and going to family weddings where sitting on, standing on the side of the road with all my cousins as the paddy wagons pull up and arrest every member of our family. And um, you know, I thought for a long time that I was only one, only one in sobriety, but I actually ran into a cousin at a meeting once and we were like there's two of us you know because you know we've lost a lot of family members and um you know I for me I would go home I never thought AA worked I didn't know um that alcohol and drugs were a problem I mean I know today they were my solution to the problem but when I was uh first coming around I didnít know like or growing up in this environment I didníd know it was drugs and alcohol because I didnís know anything else I didn't know that people lived a different way. I just knew that I didnít want DSS to take my kids, I didní want to lose my teeth, I didnít wanna lose my license, I had all these rules, so I tried to get as far away from my crazy family as I could, and that meant achieving as much as I can, and you know, I started attempting suicide before the age of 10, and what happened was, as I progressed, time I tried to get off drugs or alcohol, I would end up in a mental institution. And it took me about maybe into eight months into sobriety to realize, because I used to judge people, oh, they went to rehab, you know? And for me, it was like, oh yeah, you weren't healthy enough to go to rehab. You had to go to a mental institution and get tied to a bed. So, you know, a lot of things became aware to me, you know, I became aware of later on. But, you You know, at the end, for me, it was just I was traveling the country playing hockey. I was coaching women's tennis and traveling with them. I mean, I was killing it. And I remember, you know, the first conversation I had with the woman who became my sponsor asking me if I thought my life was unmanageable. I was like, I think I not drank for like three days. And I was, like, no, my life is fine. I just want to kill myself. And I really thought that. Like, there was no semblance of self. I couldn't. I was playing tennis competitively and my tennis partner was a pharmacist, head of the hospital. His wife actually packed would pack a cooler of booze for me to drink at tournaments because I was always showing up like, oh, I'm not going to drink. And he's like, please drink, because I could not do anything unless I was high or on drugs. And, you know, when I ended up coming in, I was six months sober. Well, I used a lot of sick time. I never called in sick. Like my boss asked me what the hell was wrong with me because I couldn't function. I couldn'T do anything sober. Like, so for me, it was a little different. We had all this outside stuff that looked really good, but I didn'T have a life. You know, I was miserable. When I went to law school, I did all my work before the semester would start. They would publish what our work's going to be because I knew once the semester started, as soon as I picked up, I wouldn'T get the work done, butI couldn'T tolerate not having the work. Like, I just had so many things, you know, my perfectionism and like people would know, you know, that I was a loser because I didn't do my homework. But yeah, so for me, like my Sarah and I joke about this all the time because at the end of her drinking, she was fired as an afternoon waitress in a hotel. And she's like, how the hell did you do all this stuff? I'm like, I don't know I had to. But you know what drove me in here? I went on a hockey tournament in Vegas. And my girlfriend at the time didn't come with me so i didn't have somebody that was managing me you know i hated this woman but she kept me alive like i i know i never would have gone to law school i never would Have done any of the things had anything had a home or anything if it wasn't for her because she basically managed my entire life you know i just had to show up and and she was like i'm not going to vegas so it went it was pretty bad you know I I was so like self-reliant crazy that my whole hockey team was flying through Chicago. And I'm like, it snows in Chicago and it's winter time. We're going to end up being stuck. We can't go through Chicago. Not thinking like the whole team's going there. Chicago is used to dealing with snow. So a friend of mine, we picked this other place we were going to fly through. And on the way to Logan, I was telling my friend, I'm not going to drink. I can't drink unless because I knew it would be bad. And we almost didn't catch the plane from that Cause she asked me if I wanted a drink in the bar at the airport. I almost didn't get on the plane, but anyway, I remember distinctly and I got sober, I think two weeks after this, where we're supposed to come home. My whole team hated me. Nobody wanted anything to do with me. I'd like cause so many issues just being out of my mind the whole time. I emptied my bank accounts playing craps, which I had never played before, but I could do it. You know, um, I was so insane. And you know, if you're like me and you're in a casino they don't bring those free drinks around fast enough for an alcoholic I was like spending so much money on booze as well and um I remember getting to the airport and them saying your flight's been canceled and I I thought I was gonna I'm like I'm gonna die because they're like we can't get you out today and I really you know I don't know if I, I feel it so viscerally today. I don't know if I felt it then, but I just was like, oh my gosh, I'm going to die. Like I needed to be stopped, you know? And it was a little while longer, like with my family, I didn't think AA worked. So I think I was 16 the first time I came in when I was 48 and I was 60. And the first thing I thought, oh, I should go to AA. But I, my family never got sober they were going to aa all the time you know and i people when i first started when i would share my story a lot i'd say you know my family was either drunk again or born again and i mean no disrespect to anybody's you know beliefs but for me it was like they were in church and we're all like we're doing well and we'RE ALL HOLY AND WE'RE BORN AGAIN and then i'd come home to the vineyard and be like where's my mother she's like on a ship going to venezuela with these guys she met at a bar and you know my sister's at the bar dancing I'm like what happens you know so I didn't think AA worked it took me a long time to realize in sobriety like never once like when I came in here I heard one day at a time I wanted to punch people's faces I hated that any slogan people would say just made me so rageful because as a kid I had so much hope you know and then they would come on with these slogans and I just hated them I'm Like that's that's BS but I never heard anything about the steps in my house growing up you know my my aunts my uncles my grandparents they would go to AA and they wouldn't come home you know and then we're like looking for them and um yeah so I didn't think the program worked so I don't even know where I was going with that that's what happens when I'm nervous it's like blackout um I'm pretty sure since I got sober I've had more sober blackout speaking than I did when I was drinking um yes yeah so i yeah i don't even remember where i was going with that but i ended up um coming home and i work for the state of massachusetts it's a commonwealth actually it's not a state but um i worked for the commonwealth of massachusetts and they had started letting us work from home and so you know i never really drank at work i would do drugs at work but that didn't count because you know to me that was just like a maintenance thing but when I started working from home I started drinking in the morning and that really took me out fast because prior to that I really only drank in the Morning on holidays um you know because you have to prep for the holiday you got to start early and pretty much anything was a holiday like the weekend you know that's a holiday um I did a lot of entertaining because it meant I could just start drinking and I would have parties where it was BYOB and there would be like 15 of my own coolers. I had an extra fridge in the basement just for me because I knew some sucker was going to come without a drink. Oh, I'm not drinking tonight. And then they'd be drinking your drinks, you know? So I was always just like over the top, but, um, I started drinking in the morning and I would be like, oh, I'm not going to drink. I'm not going to drink this morning. And I'd have two drinks in me by 7am, you know, and I still for a while didn't think that was drinking at work, but it was yeah um and i know like what happened it's crazy i must uh i started one of the things about my parents were always in the paper you know like my mother would go to bars and beat people up and i'd go to school and they'd be like oh your mom got arrested last night i'm like great i'm glad everyone knows um so i never wanted to like lose my license i mean i should have had lost my license a thousand times over. I mean, somebody was watching out for me. I would have never admitted that anybody was watchingout for me when I first came in, but I know that today. And I know, like, I started my last night of drinking. I was at my tennis club. Pretty sure I tried to give someone a lap dance. Just imagine it. Yeah, I was either becoming – drinking went one or two ways for me. It went to lover or fighter and we never knew which was showing up and I was not discriminatory about either. I had convinced everyone in my life that if I went out, I wouldn't cheat as long as I didn't dance. I had convincing myself that. I never thought like, oh, the booze might have given me a little loose morals or something. It was always, as long As I don't dance, I'm going to be fine. it's like the insanity you know it's like completely insane and yeah anyway I don't even know where I was going with that but you know I remember just like pulling up to the front of my door which was of course on my lawn and I walked into the house and I thought I can't keep doing this like I know what happened to was as soon as I went to the restroom all my friends ditched me because I would you know I was friends with people who drank but they also had families and at this point I didn't because if I lost my children you know i used to tell people like in my own mind at least i didn't lose my kids to dss and i thought that was a huge win but you know, I always moved the bar. I never had any so there was no opportunity to lose them but I thought that was a win you know it's like not that bad I didn t lose my kid and you know like losing my teeth was a thing too I didn't want to lose my teeth technically I did and I always lied and told people it was hockey it was actually plastic badminton racket by my gym teacher hit me in the face and I lost the tooth um you know there's a lot of things like I just changed stories in my head I was so crazy um and totally lost track of what I was oh so anyway I get in my house and I'm like my solution to everything I don't know if any other alcoholic in the room can relate to zero or a hundred all or nothing but that's pretty much how I roll so I was like I need to learn I need to stop drinking I'll have to kill myself that's where I went every time and for some reason this night I remembered this guy that had a friend of mine I'd known for a long time had 10 years of sobriety and I don't even know how I heard that because I hadn't talked to him in a while and I called him and I was Like I think I have a problem with alcohol I knew I had a problem with alcohol, but you can't really commit unless you know. Because I'm like, I don't want him to tell me that I have to do anything. I'm just going to test the water. And he shared with me that he was going to Florida for the winter with his wife the next morning, but he would stay an extra day and take me to this meeting that he goes to at 7 a.m., Bass River Morning Group. I don' t know if anybody's ever heard of it, but it's a great meeting in Dennis at 7 AM every day, 365 days a year. It's a daily reflection meeting. And so I was like, no, no, no. I don't need your help. Just tell me what to do. And I don'T know why, but the next morning I got up sick as a dog and I went to that meeting and I DON'T remember much about going there. I remember leaving my bedroom and thinking I'M GOING TO THIS MEETING. And then I remember BEING IN THE MEETing. And that was pretty much how I surrendered. That was the last night I drank and um you know god willing i can't even believe i'm using the word god but you'll hear more about that struggle later um you Know for me i had i had all the same feelings that sarah had i just somehow managed to get the outside stuff and i would say before i went through the steps i would tell you look at me i'm amazing honest to goodness if it wasn't for other people i mean it has taken a village plus to raise this person. And that was when I was drinking and, you know, my friends that would save me and all the things like the things that happened one time, I'll tell you the story about how my higher power watches out for me. I'm with my girlfriend and I had a little, I had bouts with cocaine as well. And you know my girlfriend and I are driving home from bar and should we get into a fight in the car? And this is now I'm in Chatham, right? So we're in downtown Chatham in the middle of the winter. There's nobody. And 28th here, we left Esquire, and I'm on this school street, or is it Cross Street? But it's right on the corner. We're supposed to go to her parents' house, and we're going to party some more. We're meeting people. And the car, we got the music blaring, the lights are on, and we get in a fight. Next thing you know, she's calling me at my house like, oh, why don't you come over? Because now we've cooled off. and i'm like i don't have the car you could come get me she's like i don't know the car so we both got out of our walked out of our doors and went in different directions and this vehicle sat for an hour downtown chatham running lights on doors open when i got back to it it was still running the radio was blaring the lights were on how the hell did the very relaxed cops of chathem not or anybody see this vehicle like because honestly if my name got in the paper that was endgame for me like that was one of my things i can't have my name in the paper you know like nobody could know who i was today i can'T even believe this i'll share anything because this brain man i got some crazy stuff going on in there i call my head the tower of terror because it likes to try to scare me but it's all fake yeah so anyway i i'm so grateful to be here feel free to you know i i welcome any questions and talk to people as well. I, I want to tell you a little bit about who I am. So as the weekend progresses, you can see the change now that, you know, I did get exceeds every quarter at work, but nobody liked me. And matter of fact, this one woman who I'm really close to now, I remember right before I got sober, walked into my office, told me to F off, told Me never to talk to her again. We worked very closely at work and um she walked out of my office and slammed the door and you know it was because i had started all i talked about people all the time at work because i needed you to get in trouble so people wouldn't be looking at me i would make crap up you know i'd say oh they're not you know sarah's not doing her job right look at her don't look at me you know and and that's how i succeeded you know. It took me after getting sober a few years to get back to exceeds and um and to be to do it cooperatively and be somebody like that woman and i are very close today she comes into my office and says i know i can trust you like well you know you can't trust me but you can trust the person i'm becoming you know um but you know that so much has changed i i can't even imagine killing myself that that wife that was my sponsor that i married you know driving up here was a little emotional for me because um in 2000 the end of no early 2017 um this is where we fell in love she was still married um it's where we had our first kiss i was here for the hockey um the coffee cup and uh and she she since passed she passed away in 21 um so you know driving up here i was just having a lot of memories and uh but it is really it's so good to be here you know i and we ended up getting married and you know i'm going to talk a little bit more about that because the dynamics of like cheating with somebody and then also her husband's in the program he's actually the one who um his name's don he's one of the guys that started big book step study in hyannis he's One of the original you know and how this this like we're very close today my step kids were all like really really close and we worked through that you know by just going through the steps and being able to talk about what was going on and um you know when i when i told him even he you know my wife told him about me and i went to him and i said i'm really sorry and you know he said don't be sorry these are the promises coming true in your life this is a man whose wife we were i was cheating with you know and he said i said is there anything i could do he said just don't pick up a drink because we don't need that in our family you know and uh we're still friends today and you know really close friends like we spend all our holidays together as a family my stepdaughter is about to have a baby um you know she's married to another person in the program yeah it's pretty incredible uh I've been able to show up for people I when I before I got sober I didn't have any problems really to be honest with you I mean I grew up in an abusive environment I ended up in foster care had a lot of those problems and I wanted to kill myself all the time but technically I was always drinking because the neighbor's brother's cousin down the street was having a hard time and I would I would tell you oh my gosh I'm really struggling this guy I know and I didn't know the guy you know and then in sobriety my wife dies and I show up for people like real things happened and that's the that's a miracle of these steps is that um I'm able to be present for people today. I don't want to kill myself. My life is amazing and real crap has happened to me. And it's just such a blessing. So I'm really excited to talk about the steps. I'm not one of those people who's like, I have 40 years and I did the steps once. I had to do the steps twice within five years because I dropped the ball on some of those ladder steps that I was supposed to be working and built up another two notebooks of fourth step. and uh you know and so i'm excited to share that because even though i did the steps out of the big book through big book step steady way both of my sponsors had little differences and they both had you know like the experience of going through this i mean the first time i finished the steps got you know through 10 and it was working 10 11 and 12 i was 11 months sober when i started taking the first person through the steps i you know i could goodness knows what it was even well I still have the fourth step, so I know what's on it. I was grateful to be able to do it again. And I'm really excited to talk about the steps. It is like my life today. I have a lot of other wonderful things. Anyway, you got anything to add? Yeah, I was thinking about self-reliance and also about the mental illness. So maybe just say a couple of things about that. Thank you, Fen. yeah um so yeah i mean i guess i was just thinking about you know the first step about uh powerlessness and unmanageability and how i remember when my first sponsor said my first sponsor that took me through the writing um said really it's all about how self-reliance failed and finding a God, right? And the thing was, I didn't even know what that meant. I didn'T even know what self-reliance meant.I mean, I can say Finn was self- reliant because he was so successful and had all these achievements. But if I thought about myself, like growing up being self-reliant, like it just didn'T occur to me. And then when I was doing my work and looking at my first step, I realized that at like three years old, I decided my parents were insane and I'm going to take over now. Do you know what I mean? Because I just didn't believe that anybody really knew what was happening. And so I decided like, I've got to wing this on my own. And I think that's the beginning for a lot of us, right? We don't really think, I don't think to myself as a five-year-old, geez, I'm going to like do this now. But that's really how it was. I didn't really ask for help. I was trying to always figure it out myself, you know, thought I needed to have all the answers, et cetera. So, you Know, when I think about self reliance failing, it wasn't just around picking up the substances and having the substances not work for me. It also happened in sobriety. And you made me think about that because, and I'm sure you guys have talked about this in your own meetings, that I had 15 years of sobriery before I did the steps. So my life got super colorful. And like Finn, I mean, I had tons of achievements. I went to college. I went and got a phd i did this i had a practice i you know i was helping people and um and at the same time i was kind of nuts and um so it's just interesting because you know i was still really run on self-will for a long time and we're going to talk about first thing in the morning about two and three because it wasn't that i didn't believe in god i just didn't rely on god and didn't trust god so my whole life i believed in a higher power but the thought that god was going to help me or i needed to turn my life over to something or someone or some being or the universe or whatever was beyond me you know i mean i trusted myself and that was that was pretty much it so um when i got to these steps at another self-imposed crisis as it says in the big book i was um engaged to be married i was 39 years old and the guy that i was engaged to be married to came up to me and said he had kissed someone and that woman had done the big book step study and she brought book she said to us said to him and then to me eventually you know you guys really need to figure this out meanwhile she's like you know having this thing with my my uh fiance so anyways long story short i got into the big book and started doing some of this work and the irony of that whole story is that woman i thanked several years later because you know what she saved my life and um the marriage was the quickest marriage in history but she saved my life and I got a son out of it but I guess my point is is that the first step can happen over and over again in our recovery and I definitely have had to revisit it frequently and the other thing of not just self-reliance but I was thinking about the more about alcoholism chapter and can I say something please go ahead about self-reliance about not about self reliance but powerlessness. I was telling Sarah today that when I was reading the doctor's opinion, so my sponsor's instructions were to read whatever reading assignment I was on once and then read it again and highlight it and make notes. And then we read it together. And at some point when I was reading about the allergy, really what I came in here for was to learn how to have one drink because I went out, I was always going to have one. I could not figure this out. Now, having the achievements that I had, I was like, well, if I get the right instructions, I will be able to do this. And I was so, you know, I'll say baffled now, it's in the book, but whatever, you Know, I was really confused, like, why can't I just have one drink? What is going on? And people said, oh, alcoholism is a sickness, it is an illness, whatever, I'm like, ah, BS, pull your bootstraps. You know, I Was Out There Like A Lunatic, but I did not believe in any of that and I remember reading that and having this thought well if I went to a doctor with a broken arm I wouldn't say like you're wrong don't put it in the cast and I don't know why I had that thought but I didn't I'm like so this doctor having all this experience is saying this is an allergy that's going to create a phenomenon on a craving it just all of a sudden in that moment I had relief like I didn't have to manage this there's something wrong with me when I put alcohol on my system I can't stop and that gave me such a freedom and I really surrendered there like that's where I realized that I was powerless over that drink like I wasn't going to be able to put alcohol or drugs in my system at the time I didn't really think about the drug piece but I wasn'T gonna be able TO put alcohol in my system and actually not pick up a second drink. And I remember the freedom from that, just having that thought. I don't even know where it came from. But, you know, I'm reading about this doctor's experience with hundreds of patients. And, you Know, who am I to say that that's wrong? And I don' t know why I let myself have that information, but well, my higher power probably, but at the time that I read it, there was no higher power involved. You know, it's like all hindsight. But yeah, so I'm grateful for that. I just wanted to bring that up. Yeah, because I really thought it was BS, this illness piece. But even if I didn't believe it, to just be like, okay, I can accept that, it was so freeing for me because I didn' t have to figure this out. I just had to not pick up a drink. My sponsors and people in AA said to me every day, don' t pick up a drink, ask for help, go to meetings, don't pick up a drink and I used to be like no crap, we're not supposed to be drinking. And then people would come to meetings with alcohol in their breath and I would be mad as hell because i didn't know you could i'm such a rule follower i'm like i thought you couldn't and they're like no and and you know my sponsor would say every day like don't pick up a drink ask for help go to meetings and ask for helping got old real fast used to dial up and be like do not ask me to ask for health i'm calling you when i need an answer but the whole thing about not picking up a drink i think i was like six years sober before i realized how important that was i hadn't been picking one up but it didn't occur to me that i wasn't going to get any of these things i got from doing this process if I was picking up a drink like that is the most important piece you know so if that's all you can manage today right good for you yeah yeah and I was actually that leads me to thinking about denial is what I was going to talk about too so what I didn't know is that I had a mental illness I don't know if you guys know that guess what we've got one um and um the thing that kills me about that i'm going to give you an example of it so i worked with addicts for 30 years in a practice and god i'm telling you people would come in like reeking of alcohol trying to convince me that they hadn't drank you know it's like this illness is just so mind-boggling uh and not that we all haven't done it because like again denial minimizing rationalizing romanticizing delusional thinking lying all of it living in fantasy land like that is addiction and i remember a client coming in that uh i thought was celebrating 90 days and so i said hey i'm looking now i'm really happy about you celebrating the science he's like yeah i feel really great he goes i went to this wedding this weekend and I had a couple of glasses of wine and I go I go I thought you celebrated 90 days and he goes I did and I know when you just said you drank wine he goes beer and wine aren't booze it was like what but literally and I'm not kidding when I say this that was his belief that was his belief beer and wine are not alcohol so to think that like we're gonna get out of this thing without like really diving deep on our mental illness part is fantasy so when i started looking at the level of denial and the levelof rationalization and the little level minimizing you know you know i only had three drinks on tuesday i only had six drinks there you know all of that i'm gonna quit the cocaine but i'll keep drinking beer i'll quit the vodka but i'll do this you know it's all this negotiating and the delusional thinking to me is such a killer you know I I talked to a guy literally literally two nights ago i've known him for 10 years he was a patient several years ago and i should have known he was drinking when i started getting provocative texts at 10 at night you know it's like never happened in our relationship ever but suddenly i'm getting these bizarre texts and the thing about him is i talked to him the next day he is still in this belief that he's okay now what's been going on just in my relationship with him for 10 years but he's a binge drinker so he doesn't drink for a month and then he goes crazy and he loses everything and he goes up to you know his third house in vermont or whatever which is part of the problem um but the level of denial and delusion to me is so mind-boggling that i'm not sure if he's gonna make it do you know what i mean i mean that's why i'm so i feel so grateful every day and thank the lord every day that i because i know that i am a statistic i could be a statistic and i've seen plenty of people not make it and we are so lucky to be here and it's because we have an illness that tells us we don't have it you know it's like bipolar illness if you're manic you don't think you're right you know you're off having a good time and spending all your money with a bunch of people but you don'T know what'S happening and it'S the same with addiction you know people you know when I was doing it you know i was thinking about those days that i was describing earlier romanticizing you know romanticizing the drink i literally in my mind thought i was some hot shit drug dealer i literally did i mean i i can't even believe i'm saying that to you like i i literally like oh i'm going into the combat zone no i'm like living in this drug house like how cool is it meanwhile like i'm you know barely functioning and that but that's the whole thing like right the lies we tell ourselves and the scary thing is and i'm sure we'll get into this tomorrow too is my sponsor said look you put the drugs down and you stop lying and rationalizing and minimizing your substance abuse but guess what happened you started rationalizing and minimizing or romanticizing everything else so suddenly i still have the mental illness of addiction and i may not be picking up a drink but i'm pretty much doing everything you know what i mean i mean i was yeah we'll hear more about that tomorrow but you know it's like i put one thing down it is like that game it just is going to pop up somewhere else because bottom line is like Michael W. said, alcohol is but a symptom, right? It's only a symptom. It's the underlying causes and conditions. And if I don't look at the underlying causes and condition, it's going to pop out somewhere else. It's so easy to lie to ourselves. You know, I was telling Finn right before we came in here, I've been married twice. And my second husband, we were dating for the first three months he had 15 years sobriety and i said to him i'm never getting married i never wanted to get married a second time i was done i had a son we all had the same last name that was like a thing i was proud of i said you know what i you know you're great we're having a lot of fun don't ever want to get marriage in fact probably don't want to live together six months later we're in the 99 restaurant he pulls a ring out and he says you want to marry me and i say sure at 99 yeah first of all i had to write on my resentments about the 99 restaurant but the bottom line is like what happened this is what happened freaking denial lying to myself i remember going to see his first apartment and saying to myself i am never going to be with this man who would have bunk beds in their living room who would have bunk bed in their building room and yet again reminder four months later 99 restaurant sure so i mean that's the thing with this illness it's like and thank god it's only sure about you know a marriage i mean you know right and that's a big deal i mean that we're going to talk about fear tomorrow fear got me into a relationship i was ever in ever in period at the end so you know just delusional thinking denial thinking the mental illness the things that we tell ourselves that are untrue that's why reality checking with friends is so important in fact today this last thing i'm so delusional he called me today on the way up here and she says to me i gotta tell you something and it happened two months ago and i go you know why didn't you tell me two months ago and then i immediately say because you wanted to keep doing do you know what i mean that's the thing with us we know this stuff right and we want to keep lying to ourselves it's like that's the nature of this i want to do what i want to do without consequences that's it so this is a killer illness and yes it can kill us with substances but can also kill us with really bad decisions later on really bad decision so anyways take it away bud bad decisions not at all denial mental illness yeah i definitely had some mental illness but i'm definitely delusional i still am i mean don't be fooled you can do the steps at least my experience has been it doesn't change the brain it only gives you a tool to deal with it you know i i still go through i remember you kind of reminded me like uh i played rugby and i was we always had drinking competitions you know after the rugby match and i would always win them and i remember bragging about it and my mother saying oh yeah i was always the fastest drinker too and i was like oh boy but but you know i just filed stuff away i realized when i got sober i you know i hated liars i hated anybody that lied i had no clue that i was a liar like i i started working on my steps and i called everyone i knew i'm like don't believe anything i say i'm a liar i never cheated i never lied i never stole anything and i really 100 believed it when i came into aa i was an amazing human being i would sit in meetings and listen to people talk about their fear and their resentment i'mlike these are the angriest scared people i've ever met I'm not, I don't have any of this. I don'T know how this is going to help me. I'M NOT ANYTHING LIKE THESE PEOPLE. I REALLY DIDN'T KNOW, YOU KNOW, BUT I STUCK AROUND LONG ENOUGH TO HEAR AND TO LEARN, YOU KNOW, AND I, I HEARD SOMEBODY SAY THEY HAD FEAR, THEY WERE SCARED TO DEATH AND, YOU KNOW, THIS GUY'S WORKING ON, I WORKED ON FISHING BOATS FOR YEARS, MY FAMILY BUSINESS AND HE WAS, YOU NOW, THEY, THEY'D ROTATE WHO HAD TO JUMP IN AND GET THE NET OUT OF THE WHEEL IN THE BOAT AND THERE WERE ALL THESE SHARKS AND IT WASN'T HIS TURN, BUT his buddy it was his buddy's turn and he's like i'm not going in the water with all the sharks and my buddy who's scared to death of sharks like calls him a pussy and jumps in and he talked about how he was afraid he was more afraid of people knowing he was worried that he was willing to jump in the river with sharks and that's when i was like ah you know i don't run away from stuff i run at burning buildings you know I get aggressive with my fear so you know I'm completely delusional. If you had asked me, I was doing a drive-by in AA to learn how not to pick up that second drink. I had lots of resentments and people would say, I went out to have two and I had six. And I'd be like, why didn't I think of going out to two? These are the kind of things I would sit in the meetings and be like why was I going to have one if I had two and then I doubled it. I had eight instead of one and eight sounds really bad, But two and eight's not as bad, right? You know, only four times instead of eight times. But these are the kind of things like my head. But I had this huge rug, you know, and I would just sweep everything I did under it. And then I'd go out like, you know, the second coming. And, you know, I really believed it. So, you know, I'm just grateful that the, you know, the surrender. I don't, so for me when I came in and I finally surrendered and was like, okay, I'm powerless over alcohol. I didn't know that my life was unmanageable because I had a lot of stuff so I thought that was fine and it wasn't until that person asked me if I thought my life was unmanageable and I said no I just want to kill myself it never occurred to me that it wasnít normal until I saw the look on their face because it had been my normal you know where I was 48 when I got sober first time I tried to kill himself was before the age of 10 thatís a long time to be someone who was in and out of mental institutions with suicide attempts So I just didn't know that wasn't normal. That was my normal. And, yeah, to just see the look on somebody's face in my life, you know, for me, that, like, is just the most insane thing ever. Like, and I would just jump back in, look at me. You know, as long as you thought I was okay, I was good. It was just all BS. The unmanageability thing, and we'll wrap this up. We got, like two minutes. but um i was just thinking about that too earlier the problem with unmanageability is like you're saying our lives are what does it say in the big book our lives Are the only normal one or something like that like meaning unmanagability seems normal to us like how we were in those years. Like, it's not like I stopped one day and said, Shay, my love is my life is super unmanageable. I think I should quit using. It wasn't like that because it was what I, it was, what I was used to. You know, I think about a lot of people who get sober and are addicted to chaos. I think about that a lot, that it's like, it'S that addiction to the unmanagability. And for me, what that's about is I think about the step work and the step work for me is I'm going to create a relationship with a higher power I'm gonna create a relation with myself and I'm gonna create relationship with you. That's what to me the steps are about I'm getting get to know myself, I'm be okay enough that I can have relationships with you and I am going to have relationship with God and now I don't know where I was going with that that oh I know what I was going to say the thing about the unmanageability is when our lives are that unmanable we're not connected to ourselves at all just like with addiction so with addiction I'm not connected with myself with co-crazy when I'm preoccupied with everybody else I'm non-connected with myself when my life's unmanagable not connected to myself. So, I mean, this is a real unfolding and ongoing revealing of who I am going to be in recovery. And that's, to me, what happens with these steps, really getting to know who you are. We call our groups coming home to ourselves because you're really just coming home for you if you can tolerate it. I mean that's the thing about recovery. A lot of people aren't really in their bodies in recovery either you know sometimes it's too painful so for us it's really about being able to be in your body and be okay and we always say life's about just tolerating uncomfortable feelings area and i i like to surround myself with people in the program that are going to tell me the truth because i'm not telling myself the truth and you know i'll share something with people and i'm grateful that from the start mostly in sobriety the longest i'd wait just like three days with information that would twist me up you know and um but and then i would tell somebody usually my sponsor or but today i have friends and i'll say oh blah blah blah and they'll be like you know well my sponsor used to say well what about this blah blah i'm like that's not it and then I'd get off the phone and I'd be like oh that was it I got a call back you know But at least they're willing to say it. It's not easy to tell people the truth, you know? But those people save my life daily because they're willing to break through the made-up stuff that I have going on. If I'm going to get to what's really underneath what's going on with me in my head, I need to be around people that are going to tell me I can write it out. But still, sometimes I don't, you know, I still try to make it sound good, you know? It's a lot of work. It's just not good, usually. um and yeah so i'm i'm just you know i remember one time calling my sponsor and i was like i didn't grab the ball when my wife tossed it at me you know like when we're you know just like don't you know don't take it and run with it or whatever and you know my sponsor's like oh that's great but what happened what'd you say before that and what'd você say before that and then i was like oh crap i started it i started the whole thing you know and you know i need people in my life like that today because it is difficult. And I needed people in my life like that from day one. I needed somebody to tell me the truth from day one. So my only suggestion to anybody, I don't like to tell other people what to do, but if you're sitting with something, talk to somebody about it. Nobody's going to judge you. Well, they might. I mean, let's be honest. There are people who judge. Well, hopefully you won't see the expression on their face that they're judging you. But this is a wee program. I hated that. my sponsor used to say to me what and I'll never forget like I was like half a second sober what's the first word in the first step and last thing on earth I wanted it to be was we I was like this is a trick question because clearly it's I like you know I wasn't I really couldn't read at this point because I was so out of my mind but to find out it was we i was like that literally the word we would just I want to vomit you know i'm like oh I can't I don't do people give me the book you know and i was constantly being told you're not getting a degree and you need a community and it even sounds sick when i'm saying it now you know i needed a higher power in the community and i do you know it is the first word of all the steps is we and if you're keeping it to yourself you're creating a week that's all i think amen