Seventeen Years Sober and Emotionally Relapsed — My Meeting Attendance Was Pitiful — Lisa C.
About This Speaker Tape
Lisa, sober since March 7, 1990, got sober at 21 after a drinking career that started at 16 with a mason jar of moonshine a restaurant regular handed her. She drank higher-proof liquor to avoid bathroom trips in the woods, carried a pint of Everclear in her purse to sneak in bathroom stalls, and drank Wild Turkey because she couldn't stand the smell of it on her boyfriend. At 17 she plowed through a party turn at 45 mph, spun another car a full 360, and ate menthol lozenges like candy so the cops wouldn't smell liquor. She walked away. The three women she hit left in neck braces. It took 18 years of sobriety and teaching DUI school to finally feel remorse for what she did that night.
She went through three treatment centers in one year, none court-ordered, and kept relapsing between 30 and 60 days when the numbness wore off. She came in with no belief in God and wanted to rear-end any car with a Christian bumper sticker. A counselor sent her upstairs to read "We Agnostics" twice; the second reading cracked her open — she realized the only reason she was still alive was that something bigger than her had kept her there. Six months pregnant, abandoned by a boyfriend who wasn't the father, working part-time at Sonny's Barbecue, she slept on a woman named Anna's couch and kept going to meetings. Her son, now 24, has never seen her take a drink.
The centerpiece story is Istanbul. Her grandmother — who had taken her in during active drinking, paid for a treatment center, and never gave up on her when everyone else told her to — fell on a cruise and ended up in ICU there, abandoned by her traveling companion. Lisa Googled "AA meetings in Istanbul," texted a British member named Russell, and flew over. Russell had already visited her grandmother in the hospital with Turkish delight candy before Lisa arrived. A Turkish man from her flight, noticing their luggage was lost, gave her his driver to deliver her to the hospital an hour away. On the last night, lying in bed together, her grandmother told her how everyone had said to give up, and how she never did. Lisa made the amends she didn't know she owed.
She talks about relapsing emotionally at 17 years sober — master's degree, teenage son getting kicked out for marijuana, husband relapsing, sponsor moved away, meeting attendance pitiful. Two sponsors (AA and Al-Anon) made her inventory every relationship back to 7th-grade crushes, then write a sound ideal. She thought the list was unrealistic. She met Sean, last week's speaker, and he exceeded every item. She closes on the Pat Benatar defiance she came in with versus the willingness to hit her knees every morning like plugging in a prong.
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