The Agnostic Who Found Out That Higher Power Believes in You – Don N.

Friday night open special meeting of the recovery group and I'm going to start off with how it works in the first part of the fifth chapter. Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program. Usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault. They seem to have been born that way. They're naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty. Their chances are less than average. There are those, too, who suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders, but many of them do recover if they have the capacity to be honest. Our stories disclose in a general way what we used to be like, what happened, and what we are like now. If you have decided you want what we have and are willing to go to any length to get it, then you are ready to take certain steps. At some of these we balked. We thought we could find an easier softer way, but we could not. With all the earnestness at our command, we beg of you to be fearless and thorough from the very start. Some of us have tried to hold on to old ideas and the result was nil until we let go absolutely remember that we deal with alcohol cunning baffling powerful without help it is too much for us but there is one who has all power that one is god are you finding them half measures availed us nothing we stood at the turning point we asked his protection and care with complete abandon here are the steps we took which are suggested as a program of recovery one we admitted we were powerless over alcohol that our lives had become unmanageable came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity three made a decision to turn our will and our lives over the care of god as we understood it four made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves 5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. 6. We're entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. 7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings. 8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. 9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others 10. Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it 11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out Well, having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message throughout the hearts and to practice these principles in all our affairs. Many of us exclaim, What an order! I can't go through with it. Do not be discouraged. No one among us has been able to maintain anything like perfect adherence to these principles. We are not saints. The point is that we are willing to grow along spiritual lines. The principles we have set down are guides to progress. We claim spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection. Our description of the alcoholic, the chapter 2, the agnostic, and our personal adventures before and after make clear three pertinent ideas. A, that we were alcoholic and could not manage our own lives. B, that probably no human power could have relieved our alcoholism. And C, that God could and would if he were son. Well we're honored tonight to have two special guests with us. We've got Don N. from Moorhead, Minnesota and Arbutus O. from Brownwood, Texas. And I'm just going to turn it over to you too and whatever you want to do you don't mind Austin he comes first in becomes for old my name is Don and I'm an alcoholic I'm sober tonight for the living grace of God a miracle of Alcoholics Anonymous and in case you're some newcomers here tonight I should tell you never really know what you're going to hear at an AA meeting which reminds me of the story of the Roman Catholic priest who went up to visit the convent one day and when he got to the convent, he was met by the Mother Superior who was all wrought up and distressed and anxious and uptight. He looked at her and said, good heavens woman, what's the matter with you? And she says, Father, we have a terrible problem in the convalescent. Well, the good father says, tell me what the problem is and perhaps I can be of some assistance. She says, no, Father. This is not a problem of spiritual nature. And he says, now just a moment. We priests live in the local community. We have a lot of experience in many areas of life it doesn't have to just be a spiritual thing tell me what the problem is well she said the nuns bought a pet he said that's great he says no father it's terrible because the pet they bought was a talking budgie bird and the good father said well i see nothing wrong with that she says father the only thing that little bird does is swings all day long in this little swing it swings back and forth and the only things this bird will say is root toot-toot i'm a prostitute now you know the nuns and novices apostles have tried everything to teach this bird to say something else she won't do it it's awfully demoralizing we're at our wit's end we don't know what to do well a good father says i told you it pays to talk about your problems because you see i too happen to be a bird lover and i have two talking budgie birds myself down in my apartment and he says my birds are so intelligent and they speak so well that i had a bible made up in miniature and also rosary and all day long my two birds were called clyde and clive they read the bible and pray aloud all day longer and the mother superior said that is unbelievable he said i'll tell you what i'll take your bird down expose your bird to my two birds and maybe they'll be able to teach your bird just say something else mother spear said fine she got me cut the cage gave the good father he got in his car and went down to his apartment in town as he walked in the door he looked up at his cage and sure enough there was clyde and clive standing in the bottom of the cage and they were praying and reading the bible so he took the nun's budgie out of his cage and popped it in with his two and stood back to watch and right away the nuns budgie got in the top swing swung back and forth and says root toot toot i'm a prostitute and with that clyd turned to clive he said clive you can throw away the beads and book our prayers have just been answered so they say you never know i was told that i'm supposed to talk something about sponsorship and one of the things that we do to me this is one of most important things in alcoholics anonymous is getting a sponsor and i say that for a very good reason because we're dealing with something that is tangible and something that isn't intangible now by tangible i mean something like this glass case we can see it taste it touch it smell it feel it we all know it's there and there's no doubt in anybody's mind that's very tangible but if i ever talk to you about the oxygen in this room you'd be a little puzzled because you know oxygen is an intangible you can't see it you can taste it, touch it, smell it, feel it or anything else but it's here nevertheless and I think we all agree that there is oxygen in in this room if anybody doubts it if you'll let me hold your nose with two fingers and put the rest of my hand over your mouth for 10 minutes would you permit that none of you would do that because you say no way because i have to breathe and i have get oxygen to survive and i would die if i didn't get my oxygen and so the thing is that we have to we have faith in the oxygen but before we could have faith from the oxygen we had to trust the scientists who told us all about oxygen and where it came from and we accept his word through trust we learn faith and that's what happens in Alcoholics Anonymous before we can have faith in a higher power we have to learn to trust a human being because trust is the beginning of faith and it's for that reason that we have a sponsor more than anything else and the thing is you get sponsor because if you have to level with him or her whichever the case may be probably for first time in our lives because I know all through my life I could tell each so much a little bit about myself too many people but I would never tell one all about me because that would be real problems I also when I got into the program found in the big book where it says in our fifth step we had to tell all our life story and i said you mean all everything and they said yes that's why that word all is in italics to make it stand right out so you can't miss because see i wouldn't have minded telling them about the things i did when i was drinking because you know there's always kind of an excuse for that and uh they'd always say you know i'd never done that if i hadn't been drinking of course that's nonsense but they said we have to tell everything the things I did even in between those drinking bottles and so I had to trust a human being before I have faith in the higher power and that's why it's necessary if we have a sponsor and we use that sponsor on a regular basis as we grow older of course it's like anything else is to begin to grow we start sponsoring other people and we need less and less as time goes on as we learn more and more there's many things that my sponsors taught me and one of the greatest things they ever taught me was definition of the English language, words in the English language. Now I will admit that I had two big advantages over most people when I got to Alcoholics Anonymous and the two advantages I had was that I was dumb and I was broke when I landed on your doorstep. And the reason I say that those were big advantages in all the years that I have been in AlcoholicsAnonymous, I have never yet met anyone that was too dumb to understand this program but I've met many that were far too well educated to understand the simple program and I have never yet met anyone that was too broke to get this program but I met many people who had far too much money to get the program and so by being dumb and broke is really a big advantage and so I started off and it hadn't been for sponsorship and the love and care they had for me because the first meeting I attended back then, AA was just a little over 12 years old when I first came, when I came to Alcoholics Anonymous. And I didn't want to go to that meeting because I was convinced I was not an alcoholic and I didn''t want to associate with alcoholics or any of this sort of thing. Of course even if I might be a little bit alcoholic, this AA wouldn't work for me anyway. You see I'm different and I was such a sensitive person and nobody had ever understood me my whole life. My family had never understood me, my teachers never understood me. Nobody had ever understood me and if you had problems like that you'd take a drink on occasion too. But I was finessed into going to that meeting and I went to that first meeting and there's four fellows there and AA was very small then and of course they started sharing in a general way what they used to be like and as they were talking I started listening thing and I started figuring it all out and I figured what has happened those guys have talked to her she's told them all about me and now they're saying they did those things just try to suck me into this thing if they think I'm stupid enough to go along with that they're crazy and then they got into that area that she didn't know anything about and I knew she didn t know anything about that she wouldn't have been still with me and I got very suspicious and finally I blurted out I says how come you guys know so much about me and they said oh we're not talking about you Don this is just when we say what we used to be like what happened this is a projection of the basic symptoms of alcoholism and I said well I've done all those things and I'm not an alcoholic I know they just looked at each other and smiled and kept right on going like I didn't exist you know and they kept on going and the more they talked the more I identified and in those days of course this was back in February of 1948 what an AA meeting lasted as long as it took them to convince that newcomer to come back to the next meeting and I was there right eight o'clock sharp when the meeting started and I got home at half past two in the morning that's the way it went in those days they weren't going to let a live one get away on them so they kept on going and they I saw I started going on regular basis and I didn't course I didn t believe I was an alcoholic I had all kinds of these other problems and then as time went on I started thinking I wonder if there's a possibility that I might be an alcoholic and then it got through you know I probably am and then I must be an alcoholic and it was about ten months and going to meetings that finally decided no longer I must been alcohol and I am an alcoholic when I finally admitted that I was and then they of course that's a very important thing to to understand because the first step says we admitted we're powerless over alcohol that our lives have become unmanageable and that's why i needed a sponsor because he had to get some management into my life now if we know anything about management the american management association defines good management does not solve problems that's bad management good management prevents problems and so they had to teach me all the things that I needed to prevent the problems that I was getting in my life. They told me that first of all I must go to a regular meeting that meets at same time, same place every week and I said you mean if I miss a meeting I'll get drunk? And they said no no that's not it at all but if you came from an alcoholic home the only thing that's consistent in that type of home is the inconsistency and so So we must go to regular meetings that meet same time, same place every week. Because by doing that, we're living our way into right things and we start becoming consistent. And once we get consistency in our lives, then we can start getting self-discipline. But you can't have self- discipline without consistency, and so this is where the program is such a wonderful thing for people like me that came from these quote dysfunctional homes. I mean, now they call it dysfunctional homes. It almost gives it, sounds like a touch of class. Back in those days, I used to say the old man was a drunk and so was my older brother. But now they have fancy names for everybody. The only thing that's similar now, I think, is my wife, she used to refer to me with a term something like we do now. I think she usedと refer to mе as her insignificant other. So that's probably the only thing that's different, slightly different from the same. so they taught me that how to live i had to start doing certain things and all my life you see i've been trying to think my way into right living and that was the problem we can't do that i was doing everything backwards and we have to live our way into right thinking now of course we had uh in those days we didn't have any women at the meetings we didn t know there were any women alcoholics we knew very little about alcoholism but they did know many things not to teach us how to live and so they taught us those things they taught me the definition of many many words uh one of the words they told me was honesty they said you have to get honest with yourself and they said of course you know what that means and i said yes of course and they says what does it mean and i really didn't have a definition and so my sponsor wrote it out in a placemat and he said honesty is the total absence of any intent to deceive I see I'm the kind of person for a letter my wife gave me a letter going out in the morning to mail I put it my inside pocket I come home that night and I forgot the letter she'd say to me did you mail my letter and I'd look at her and say what do you think I did with it I should say now wait a minute Tom did you mailed my letter when I says my god woman you know I go right out of this up this house every morning right down past the post office on my way to my office. And she said, did you mail my letter? I said, do you remember the other night we were arguing about what's gone wrong in this marriage? You have never ever trusted me from day one. And you don't trust me even to do a simple thing like mail a letter. And she says, well, I'm sorry I asked. And I said well, you should be. And so I found my pick up in the newspaper. Now, I didn't lie to her, I did it to think. Now if she wanted to jump to the conclusion that I had mailed it, that was her problem. But of course that's sponsorship does it shoots down all those things by teaching me the definition of honesty they also told me in the big book that selfishness and self-centeredness was my problem and the way the antidote to that is to practice humility and i didn't know the difference between humility and humiliation and so they taught me that humility is not thinking less of me but thinking of me less not thinking less of me but thinking of me less and once we start thinking of ourselves less and start thinking about other people then the program is starting to work in our lives and all these things come through sponsorship and it's so important that we have this sponsorship and and often that you know as i say it is important it's of course my case it's hard for me to get a sponsor because so many of them have died on me i don't know whether it's because of me or what, but really I guess it's just old age in their part. The thing is we've also learned that there's many changes over the years in Alcoholics Anonymous and one of those changes is something like the same one when I was a child growing up there was a disease called consumption and maybe there's not many white haired people here you'll remember it. There's a disease called consumption and it was a terrible disgrace if you had a member of your family that was consumptive. You wouldn't tell your best friend, and the only way a doctor would recognize consumption is you went to see them and you had terrible hacking cough, you're very anemic looking and probably had a collapsed lung. And so the medical profession got busy and they started working on the disease and as they learned more about it they found out it had nothing to do with morality, it had nothing to do willpower, it has nothing to do with spirituality or anything else. It was simply a disease and so they went on a program to educate the general public at large. At the same time they changed the name to tuberculosis and as you know today there's no disgrace to be tubercular. In Canada and many countries of the world every child must have an x-ray, a chest x- ray prior to starting school and the reason for that x-ray is if there's just a simple spot on the lung they have to be treated it's compulsory to be treated for tuberculosis because it is contagious and can affect other people in your family around you and of course we're finding the same thing with alcoholism it's just as bad it affects many people around us we didn't know in the beginning what alcoholism was all about it wasn't until 1980 that the geneticists came up with the description. They said that the physical sensitivity to alcohol is, quote, a biochemical genetic disorder, which means it is hereditary, whether we like it or not. And so we have to accept that. And the fact that we are emotionally and spiritually handicapped. If there's anybody new in the room, we use the word in AA, we say emotionally and spiritually handicapped or emotionally or spiritually immature and that's to go easy on your feelings because we're such sensitive people but really what it means is we're emotionally and spiritually retarded Alcoholics don't like being called retarded for some reason they don't mind if they've got a cousin retarded or a neighbor that's retarded but by God don't call me retarded so what we do is we sugarcoat that feeling and say it's emotional and spiritual handicap or immaturity, but it really means we're retarded. And so once we understand those things, the rest of the program, through our sponsorship, regular intensive meetings, we learn how to live again. And we start having to do certain things so that we can catch up to life. And as time goes on, it becomes a real challenge and it becomes very, very interesting. There's many other things we learn. As time has gone on, we didn't wait. You don't have to wait until you're 55 or 60 years of age and lose everything before you're diagnosed as an alcoholic. The best description that I've ever seen of alcoholism is in the Alateen book, and there they say that many of the symptoms of alcoholisme are in the behaviour of the alcoholic. And that is so true. We can tell by the behaviour whether a person's alcoholic or not. And that ist so typical. So that is another thing. So we're emotionally handicapped and spiritually handicapped. This emotional handicap is a tough thing to have, simply because when we're handicapped emotionally, we don't mature and therefore we have other problems. But, you know, as children we're very dependent and as teenagers we're independent and then we reach an adulthood and we become interdependent. But alcoholics never reach the adulthood. They're dependent as children and then they reach teenage and become independent and we're going to remain independent forever. Nobody's going to tell me what to do, so we're 21, 31, 41, I'm independent, which all we're doing is waving a flag saying, look how retarded I am emotionally. We don't realize that. Well, that's true because you stop and look at alcoholic behavior. I see, quote, non-alcoholics enter into interpersonal relationships. Alcoholics don't. we take hostages you know she is mine and by god i want to know where she is every hour of every minute of every day and i get insanely jealous of her and everything else i hate to admit i was jealous of my first sponsor because he was talking more to my wife than he was to me it seemed and of course that was necessary in those days and uh so we have to learn and as you know i'll know what's an uppermost in every hostage's mind is one day i'll escape from this situation. And some of them are fortunate enough to do that, others hang around and if we get into AA, that's fine. They have a wonderful program at Al-Anon that can help the families of alcoholics because our whole family is affected by the disease of alcoholism. But these things are very necessary. It's like that regular meeting. I must go to a regular meeting at the same time, same place. i must have a sponsor and i do this for a very specific reason uh and the reason for that is the best way to describe my alcoholism is to compare it to another condition i was familiar with at the time i got to weigh a and this is a condition known as bo body odor i think you all know what i'm talking about and the reasons i say my alcohol doesn't was like body odor i was the last person in town to find out that i had it everybody knew it but me now isn't that like body odor if you've got bo you're always the last to know if you suddenly just find out you've gotta go run into your friends say why y'all i've discovered i've got vo and they all say thank god because they can't stand you but again like vo being the last to find how i had i resented any reference to it by my family or friends if somebody came up to me and says you know you smell bad why don't you take a bath i wouldn't say oh thanks very much i wasn't aware i'd get very defensive and uptight want to punch them out and say well it's too bad you've never had to work for a living blah blah blah so it wasn't my drinking if you talked about my drinking i got very uptight and very defensive another thing like be all my alcoholism was like i was only comfortable with other people like myself now if we decide to stay here if there's three or four people in this room with bo and we just close the windows and it gets a lot warmer in here and decide to have coffee and cookies after the meeting i'll guarantee you no time at all you'll find that three or four with vo all clustered together away from the rest of the group because you know there's something strange and if i'm notice a strange order above me and i'll move over beside our beauties and i'm still coming on pretty strong i'll move over here and then over there and finally i'll be meet for somebody that's a little smells a little worse than me somebody else now that's great i'll stay with them because somebody says there's a strange odor here i'd say yeah you know them that's it so it's the same thing with drinking go to any drinking party you'll always find a little group of drunks the alcoholics all clustered together drinking in between drinks usually feeling sorry for the rest of people so you see the other thing about that is on vo that medical science as great as it is today has not yet come up with a cure there's no known cure in the world today for either body odor or for alcoholism however there is successful treatment for both conditions now if body odor is your problem successful treatment is regular bathing with soap and water but now the key to that is regularity it must be done on a regular consistent basis i can't go to go before i go out today and say go on uh into the bathroom and have five showers and then decide to go out and live in my car for a whole week to save money in hotel rooms anybody think i was stupid if i did that but yet we have members of alcoholics anonymous who think they can skip meetings here there and around them anywhere and they think we're going to grow emotionally spiritually they aren't it's the same thing it's very bad and when people say to me but Don you know you like those meetings you know it's different I just don't like going to all those meetings and I said who says I like them they said well you must like them you go to so many well what they're really saying to me is you know they say you know how long you've been sober now and I say 41 years and i said boy you know why do you still go to those meetings if you haven't had a drink for 41 years why do yo go well i'm no genius but i figured this one out all by myself really what they're saying to me is don you know you haven t smelled bad for 41 years why do y ou still bathe now isn t that what they re saying the same thing exactly and so i say well the reason i don t smell is because i bathe on a regular basis every single day as a matter of fact now that doesn't mean by the way that i like bathing and shaving but i bathe and shave seven days a week the reason for that is i have six grandchildren two grandsons and four granddaughters and they come up and hug me and kiss me say oh grandpa you smell so good i know there's a lot of grandparents who lose the love of those children because they smell like old goats you know and that's just too bad but i've discovered that by keeping clean and being shaved and clean. I get lots of hugs and the same at the group and our group back in Moorhead after a meeting, you know, the guys will come up and hug you and the girls will hug you and say, oh, you smell so good. Now there must be something wrong with you but I love being hugged, you know? So I don't bathe and shave because I love bathing and shaving but I like to be hugged and I love the effect it produces in my life. Does that make sense to everybody? It makes sense to me. The reason I bathe and shave is because I like the effect it produces in my live It's the same thing with regular meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, on a regular consistent basis. It doesn't necessarily mean I like meetings but I love the effect it produces in my life and that's why I do all these things on a regualr basis. We've changed, evolutionary change has taken place in AA, the average age keeps coming down. The groups are changing, they're growing, we have a lot of women, the group that I belong who has a little over 100 in a closed meeting on Thursday nights in Moorhead. One-third of them are women, and over 40% of the group are under 30 years of age. And so we have to learn how to live. And some of the things we do is that in our meetings we don't use profanity of any kind whatsoever because profanety is the attempt of a feeble mind to express itself forcefully. And so keep that in mind when you're tempted to just run off at the mouth. And the other reason we're learning how to live in mixed company is we're leaning how to become ladies and gentlemen. And really, that's not a big problem because all a gentleman is is a man who treats every woman as a lady. And a lady is just a woman who treats everyone as a gentleman. And so we learn these things, and this is why things change for us so dramatically. If we get to a regular meeting, we get a sponsor, and were sincere with our program of Alcoholics Anonymous. But I can't overemphasize the importance of sponsorship and regular attempts at meetings of AA. And so in keeping with all the things they say to be a good speaker in AlcoholicsAnonymous, you stand up to be seen, you speak up to being heard, and you shut up to been appreciated. So I'll shut up now. Thank you. I think Don must have felt sick straight one time, he can't talk sitting down, and neither can I. My name is Arbulus O'Neil, and it is by the grace of God that I belong to the Al-Anon family groups. Hi Arbulas. I don't have to explain that to a group of Al-A-Nan people, and I'd like to see how many Al- Anon members we have here. There you go, I believe we outnumbered them Cindy. I think, and I'll explain that to the AA people, I say by the grace of God I belong to the Al-Anon family groups. I didn't find out that drinking was a sin until I moved to Texas in 1944. I grew up in the Carolinas and you have to admit that we make the best bourbon in the world and drinking was not sinful in my peer group. It was an income for most of my friends' families and they were not bootleggers. They worked in the distilleries and things like that. And it is by the grace of God that I belong to the Al-Anon Family Group Fellowship and not the AA program. I used to say I drank more booze, I drank enough booze to float a battleship but Bill said that was a lot of booze. So maybe I didn't. But anyway, getting drunk does not make an alcoholic is the point that I want to make. I've been as drunk as most AA ladies, I'm sure. Probably drank a lot more boozes some women who are members of Alcoholics Anonymous, but my body chemistry protected me, and I had nothing to do with my bodychemistry. I did not make my eyes gray, nor did I make my own bodychemistry, it is by the grace of God. Enough of that. Now Don talked about the necessity of having a sponsorship if you're a member of Alcoholic Synonymous, and i've been in some parts of the country who felt that sponsorship was not necessary for Al-Anon members and that's tragic because we need sponsors just as much as AA people do. You see, we don't have two programs. We have one program and two fellowships. Those of you who have alcoholism go to AA meetings to stop your compulsion to drink and to maintain your sobriety. I go to Al-Anon meetings to change my attitude about somebody else's drinking, so my reason for going to a meeting is different from the AA people. Don I think made as good a talk as I've ever heard on the importance of and what sponsorship is for but he didn't talk very much about how do you go about getting one and this kind of thing and I think this is a puzzlement to new people. Sometimes someone will pick you up and take you to your first meeting, for example. And you're grateful. And then when the suggestion is made that perhaps you've been in a fellowship long enough now to get a sponsor, it's an automatic thing to choose the lady who took you to your 1st meeting. And that person might not be right to be your sponsor. And it's not necessary to choose a sponsor right in your own group. This causes a lot of confusion. So when you have grown to the point, and that should be pretty quick, that you feel like you need a sponsor to help you learn the things that Don talked about so beautifully, you look the group over and you find someone that you can identify with. Furthermore, you find Someone who works the kind of program you would like to work. And you go to that person and you say, Will you be my sponsor? This is a commitment on the parts of two people. The person may say, I'm sorry. I'm overloaded with people that I sponsor. I don't have time. And you have to accept that. But when you make the commitment as a sponsor, and when you're looking for a sponsor particularly, find out if your sponsor has a sponsor. I haven't been in the fellowship as long as Don has, I've been in it as long as is possible however because Al-Anon only started 38 years ago and I've been here ever since and a few years besides but and I have pretty much of a reputation I think some of you might know that I have a reputation of being smart aleck and I earned it oh I worked hard for it I earned it and someone said to me one time as big a smart alec as you are I'm quite surprised that you didn't ask Lewis Wilson to be your sponsor and I didn't but Lewis Wilson is my sponsor's sponsor so I got pretty close to the top but the thing about this sponsorship, when you make this commitment it's a lasting thing and you will tell your sponsor or ask your sponsor questions that you wouldn't ask your own mother or your own sister. I say this a lot of times if I get in an emergency I'll call a member of Al-Anon then I'll notify my family because I have my priorities pretty straight right now but But I was one of those smart alecks who came to this program when I was 29 years old. And I fell into a group of family groupers down in Abilene, Texas. There were seven of them. One of the women was twice my age and I worried about her. I thought she'd die before the meeting was over. Now I look around the room and all of you could be my grandchildren. And I'm so grateful I didn't verbalize it. I never shall forget what I thought at the first family group meeting that I ever went to. And like Don, I didn' think there was anything wrong with me. I certainly didn't come here to get my husband sober. I long resigned myself to the fact that he'd probably smash another car or two and I'd scoop him up off the Texas highway way and give him a decent burial and go home where I belong. And I've been in Texas now all these years. But, I looked at those dear ladies, and what I thought was, what in the name of God are you doing here? How do you expect a group of provincial Texies housewives to help you. To put it a little simpler, I was an intellectual snob. I listened to how people said things and not to what they said. There was a dear man in our group who butchered the King's English in a way that just made me shudder. And I complained about this to Bill one night when we had an open meeting. I said, honey please don't ask Perry to read the preamble he was an alcoholic and the old preample used to say that alcoholism and the way he said it alcoholism is devastating and if allowed to continue means death or loss of sanity and i said don't let him read the preamble we've got out of town people and so-and-so's a doctor and bill said our views if you listen to what that old gentleman said instead of how he said it, you would learn a great deal. And so I did. But I wasn't permitted to choose my first sponsor. Now get the picture. I'm number eight in the group and then we got a transplant from California who knew somebody named Chuck and Elsa Chamberlain. Oh, Lordy. And that pretty little gray-eyed Texas gal came home and found us. And, that early group of mine had incorporated the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the marriage ceremony, and they read this as a preamble to every meeting. And I sat there and squirmed. The guy tricked me into going to my first real... the first of the regular meetings that I have continued for 38 years. I had pneumonia for eight consecutive years when I came to Texas, always in February. I think I was trying to escape. but the guy came over to my house one afternoon and she suggested that she keep care of the children while I went to the hairdresser. She said, I always feel better when I get my hair done if I've been in bed for a few weeks and I do too. So I went along to the hair dresser and got my hair dry and then when I came back she said it would be such a shame to waste that hairdo let's go to a meeting and they read the rigmarole and those little size five shoes of hers hit the floor and to say she turned that group around is an understatement. She really did. We had a meeting on Monday night and one on Thursday night. Now I'm trying to hold down a job 52 hours a week, run a twelve-room house, keep four children in school and my husband on a sales territory. Well now under the pre Al-Anon schedule that I kept we didn't do anything on weekends everything had to be polished and shined up when daddy comes home. The meals were put ready to be warmed up before microwaves were ever heard of and we kind of coasted but they did while I went to work on Saturday Monday mornings the place looked like a herd of buffalo had gone through it so Mondays were not my best days and they had a meeting on Monday night of course as usual and I was the only thing on the agenda those eight ladies sat down among themselves to try to determine which one of them had the courage to be my sponsor. Guy Neal was a clinical psychologist I did not know that I would not have stayed in the same room with him but she allowed that she could handle the situation so she came over to my house and told me she was my sponsor now I'm a quick study when I first came to Texas I found out that those southern baptist people father fred calls them old sbs it was awfully easy to shock those dear little ladies and i had a ball and the best way you could shock them was to tell them you do not believe in god they'd just go they'd cross the street wouldn't speak to him so guy came to my house and she said i'm your sponsor well i didn't have much time to spend with the dear lady because I had things to do you know like worry and boss and nag but I knew I wouldn't have her long and so she started in this little rigamarole and she said have you come to terms with the first step and I said yes of course I have I said the step says we admitted we were powerless over alcohol and everybody's powerless over alcohol guy. It's a chemical. And I paused it off saying, I'm also powerless over strictness and carbolic acid. And she let me get by. And I said, you don't think I'd go to those kind of many meetings if my life was manageable to you. But I wanted to get rid of her as quickly as I could. And so I jumped ahead of her, you know, step two doesn't use the word God. It doesn't use that word until we get to three. But I said to Guy, we're going to have trouble with the second step because, see, I don't believe in God. And she didn't bat an eye. She didn't even flinch. She looked at me with those cool gray eyes of hers the kind you can't lie to. And she said, that's all right, our beauties. God believes in you. God believes in you and I was hooked. That was more years than some of you have been alive ago and it still intrigues me. God believes en me. I was then almost 30 years old. I had never had anybody to ask me if I believed in God, never. I attended Duke University which is a Methodist institution and in my generation you were all meetings. The chapel seats are numbered and if you missed two chapel sessions you talk to the dean. W.J. Martin's granddaughter didn't talk to anybody she didn't want to and I never went to check, but no one had ever asked me if I believed in God. And that little gray-eyed lady said to me, God believes in you. I hear AA people and some Al-Anon people talk about multiple sponsors, and I don't understand that. My loyalties are pretty limited. I'm a one-man woman. I've been married to Bill O'Neill for over 50 years, a few months, and I can't divide my feelings, and this is a feeling program. Alcoholism affects our feelings, and as Don so beautifully explained, we can't think ourselves into right actions. We have to act ourselves into thinking our feelings. If this was a thinking program, I'm smart enough to have got out of the box, but my feelings got mixed up in it. So I've never had but one sponsor at a time. I outlived my first sponsor. She died in 1965. and I went around in an emotional vacuum for a while until I had the courage to ask someone else to be my sponsor. My problem was the same as Don's. I couldn't find very many people in those years who'd been in the program longer than I had been in a program, and I was too egotistical to ask a younger person in the programme or a younger in age to be a sponsor. So I went around in this kind of emotional vacuum which is very, very dangerous. And then I met Margaret Now please do notice, I can tell you who my sponsor is, but there's a very thin line of anonymity involved in sponsorship. I do not have the privilege of telling you who I sponsor. That's an ego trip. Margaret Daugherty was the editor of the All 9 Family Group forum for 20 years. and actually I have a fixation for Margaret. She's older than my mother would be if she were alive, and I kind of made a substitution there, I'm pretty sure. But Margaret's tough. Oh Lord, she's tough! And she snorts! She's the best snorter I ever saw. And when I'd go to her with one of my little picky-oon things, the first thing she ever said to me. She said, Arbuce you're not aware of it but everything you say you preface it with Bill thinks or Bill says or Bill feels and she said I have no intention of sponsoring Bill O'Neill I don't ever want to hear you say that again. So I'd call her you know with a great big emotional crisis and she'd listen to me and then she'd say what does Bill think about this so bill seduce was sponsored but this gal was the one who put my nose down into this thing called spirituality i was like don i didn't know the difference in religion and spirituality and i wanted nothing whatever to do with religion it scared the daylocks out of me and margaret was the ones who clarified those points for me now something sponsors do not do very often they'll send you back to school so you can get an education to get a better job i do that on a regular basis when somebody grasps the cut don't have enough education to getting a better job I say well you're in walking distance to state university get over there and get you an education I might even give you car fire for a few weeks to get until you get settled into the routine but i won't loan you money i'd give you money but i want long anybody not my children my grandchildren my great-grandchildren are the people i sponsor i'm not in the money lending business and this is very important now we say of course the sponsors do not give advice do you want to bet but this is another area that in which you should exercise a great deal of caution if your sponsor cuts through that line of privacy I think you should be aware of this and you don't need a mother or a father as the case might be you need a friend mature people don't meet parents that's That's why I can't go along with this adult-children thing. It's a contradictory thing. You can't be an adult if you're a child, and you shouldn't be a child if you are an adult. But sponsorship is a sharing. And as you grow in sponsorship, you will learn more from the people you sponsor in many cases than you learn from your own sponsor. My sponsor's in a rest home now. Her hearing is so defective I can't even talk to her on the telephone and it's been a couple of years now since she's been able to answer the letters I write. And the only communications that we have, and that's not as much as I would like, is with a tape recorder. So I gain my insight, I gain a great deal from people who are a generation younger than I am that I sponsor. I'm learning about the difference in lifestyle that I don't understand and I don t have to. You see, we don't have to learn we don t even have to understand the alcoholics. We don t understand the people we sponsor. We just have to love them and accept them. And many commitments that I was able to make when I was in my late twenties and early thirties seemed to be impossible for this new generation I'm not in the judging business. Don't ever ask me to forgive you because I cannot. I cannot forgive you, because I have not condemned you. And I find that the lifestyle, many people that I sponsor, I have to do a lot of thinking about it before I answer a question. I was telling Don and Cindy earlier this evening, a little lady came over to my house this last month and asked me to be her sponsor. She's 28 years old, and she's been married five times. She has children by three different fathers. I don't believe she even has a secondary education. I'll find that out later. They send her back to school. But she said she wanted me to be her sponsor because she identified with me. I'm old enough to be a grandmother. I've been married to the same man for 50 years. When I taught school, I had a morals clause in my contract. If I was even seen coming out of a place that served alcoholic beverages, I could forget my job. I don't know what might have happened if I'd flurried with a basketball coach. But the lifestyle is much different. And I think those of you who are Al-Anon will understand this when I say to you, it is much harder to work this program. Those of us who love alcoholics have a harder time working the program than you do, you alcoholics. Because, you see, we were not forced into this thing by the threat of death or insanity. The majority of people come to Al-Anon because someone they love is in trouble. And that's one of the finest motives in the world. This is as close to divinity that we will ever know, is to lay down our life for someone we love. And that we literally did. That we literally do. Because the disease of alcoholism destroyed our very reason for existence, just as it destroyed you. But the tools are there, and I think that any group that fails to tell newcomers that one of the tools of recovery is good sponsorship is cheating their group. and I'm sure that you're not doing enough in Montana because I saw a lot of Al-Anons go up in an open AA meeting. And the best of all is that you are studying the big book. Now, I'll say this to you, and I may have to leave town in a hurry. If alcoholism caused you a few slight inconveniences, by all means, go to the nearest Al-Anon group literature table and grab up every bit of their literature and go home and sin no more. But if alcoholism fragmented your life, destroyed your motivation, destroyed your faith in God, your confidence in your husband's sobriety and alienated you from every human being that you ever knew, if that's what alcoholism did to you because the person you loved had alcoholism For God's sake get you a big book and find recovery. Thank you very much Anybody got any questions or anything How many, how many Al-Anon members in here have a sponsor? Look at that. Isn't that great? How many AA people have a Sponsor? I put them through a catechism, Cindy. I tell them my terms. And if they want to get well on those terms, they've got a sponsor and the first thing I say to them, I want you to get a big book. I want to study the first 164 pages then we'll talk and that's how we start and when they feel that they can get out of the emergency room you know quit using the slogans which your mental first aid and they they'll do till you can get in the program and when they get ready to take the steps we don't have any elevators you know I say get you an AA, 12 Steps and 12 Traditions book and let's go to work. And that's how I sponsor people. I supplement it with the online literature because we've got to keep that office open some way except we'll have a referral staff if nothing else. But if they don't want to get well on those bases, now I don't believe in firing a sponsor. I think if you outgrow your sponsor, it's permissible to find someone to sponsor you but I can't quite see myself going up to Margaret's rest home and saying you're not my sponsor anymore. Margaret will be my sponsor as long as she lives I may get help from another person but I'll never give them the label of sponsor Thank you What do you do? Well, the rules, if someone asks me to be a sponsor, I'll tell them that I have to know a little bit about them. Simply because we don't sponsor everybody the same way in Alcoholics Anonymous. Sponsorship depends on the requirements of the individual who comes to you for help. And you must understand that. And what we tell them to do is anytime you have a problem involves a lot of emotion remember what we are emotionally handicapped people and our our objectivity is blurred when we get emotions involved and so anything that requires a lot of emotion come and talk about it discuss it because the sponsor is not emotionally involved you can look at it objectively for instance you can give certain advice on some things other things you can't somebody came to me and said as I did one fellow he came in he said you know I'm getting tired of you always beating around the bush and I want to know whether I should ask Vicki to get married or not get married and I said there's no way can I tell you to get mad or not to get married all I can do as your sponsor is support your decision there's nothing wrong with being single there is nothing wrong with being married you know vicky a lot better than i do and if you decide to get married then let me be the first to congratulate you if you decided you're not going to get married i'll say that's fine there's lots of other girls around it's that simple but we have to use this sponsorship a little differently some things like there's some people come in that are are dead broke and so what we have to do is we'll have a special session with them and teach them how to budget because that's the secret of all wealth has nothing to do with how much you earn it's what you do with what you earn and so we teach them how to become well-to-do and that's by putting away certain amount every month and so he teaches them how the budget but everybody who comes to AA is not broke and it's the same thing with these other things they some people have problems that others don't have and so you don't say to everybody here let me you know help you with your checkbook and teach you how to add and subtract because they don't need that but it's very important we do have a sponsor in the end that sponsors get to know you because I know a priest by the way who will not do fifth steps for alcoholics he's a member of a himself and somebody goes to him and say father I want you to do my fifth step and he says to have you got a sponsor yes I do father well he says you expect that sponsor to help you fix your life he said yes father he said he's got to know what's broken before he can help you to fix it so I won't hear your first step you go to your sponsor and do with him so you'll know how to help you and I have a great deal of respect for that man because I believe in that that's if you're if you expect help from response you've got to what the problem is. And I agree wholeheartedly with Arbutus, we have no right to say who we sponsor or anything else. I can say who my sponsor is but that's it. And it's not a counting thing, and we also tell people that you know get a temporary sponsor if you want in the group, but then after you've been around the group long enough, and if you see someone that you know that you would like to be like, that walks the walk and talks the talk then if you want them to help you ask them for your sponsor. We have people move around the country and we tell them to get a co-sponsor in cases like that and the reason we have a co sponsor is for certain things they got everyday thing but usually for any major decision they have they will telephone. They'll always do that, so it's... There's another area. You know we say we share our experience, strength and hope and that's a great privilege. But so has its restrictions. I cannot share an experience if I've never had it. And this was brought home to me a couple of weeks ago. I think the last time Cindy was talking to me, I think she sensed that I wasn't on top of things. And my little sister who's retired now and bought a retirement home 30 miles away from me and went through a legal separation from her husband when they lived in Arizona, this man, She couldn't live with him, but he got terribly sick and lonely so he came to Texas and ran an apartment just down the street from her. And the last trip that he made to the doctor, the doctor told him that his emphysema would never get any better, that his physical condition would gradually decline until he'd be non-functional. So he came back to the apartment and put a bullet through his head now could i go to my little sister and say i know how you feel i could not i cannot share an experience that i have not had but when you are a sponsor now i will i will not violate the confidence of the people i sponsor but this is an area that i learned much from i've never been in a divorce court but some of the people that i sponsor have and i can learn from them now as long as i am careful about the anonymity i might say to someone else that i sponsored i've never been in a divorce card honey but i sponsor a woman who has and she did thus and so and it was helpful because when we share our experience strength and hope we have to have had the experience before we can share it there's there's one other thing i might add that in our group what we do is what we call group sponsorship yeah and that's if uh three or four fellows have a new sponsoree then they'll say how about a session saturday morning what saturday you're going to be in town and we come over the office we got some new guys we want to talk to them for about an hour and a half. It's not a regular AA meeting, it's just a come as you are but it's just a stag meeting and we talk about the facts of life. We explain to the boys the difference between boys and girls. I know they might... I'm not talking about the physical differences, we're all aware of that. I'm talking about the other differences, the emotional differences between males and females and the reason how to get along with them because if you're going to go and sell something in Japan, if I was gonna sell cups in Japan I'd be pretty stupid going over there trying to talk to a Japanese and American. If I was real smart I'd learn Japanese and talk to the Japanese businessman in Japanese then he's up to buy the cups. And so we tell them the same thing and then every so often our the older gals in our group will have a young gals and they say we want to have a meeting on a Saturday afternoon, just tag the gals to ask questions and ask the differences between the males and females. And as I say, we're not talking about the physical differences. They're obvious but there are great differences emotionally between males and females. If you're going to date somebody, you better talk in their language and vice versa and we explain the differences to them. And they're not afraid to ask questions. We always say that a wise person asks questions and appears foolish for a few moments. A fool never asks a question and remains a fool all his life. But usually in those sessions, those private sessions on a Saturday afternoon or Sunday afternoon, no matter what question is one of the guys ask, it's on the minds of every one ofthe other guys there. And the same thing with the girls. They all want to know what the answer is. And this is when we this is when we say we don't have any we don t have any answers we have solutions yeah and and we've started having something and i think we've heard it from this part of the country certainly did not originate in texas not many of these things do but we're having all women's get togethers they have various sundry names woman to woman friend to friends a safe place for girls and things like that and now they're having them for the AA and Al-Anon men out at Lake Brownwood, where I live. And this is the time that the AA ladies get some things off their chest that they can't ask in an AA meeting. They'll say, why do they treat me like a prostitute? Then some old hardball Al-Alanon member like me will say, it's because you act like one. Don't wear short shorts to the meeting and quit using so much makeup. And for God's sake, clean up your language. If you treat like a stepchild, it's usually because you act like a stepchild and other things. You usually get treated about like you expect to be treated. If you're sassy people, sass you back. If your angry with people, they'll give you tit for tat if you're kind and gentle and you get that kind of treatment. And AA ladies are so vulnerable and God they're brave. I don't know if I could be an AA woman or not. You know, we have a double standard in this country and I'm grateful for it. But you know, if a woman gets drunk she's a you-know-what. And if a man gets drunk he's just one of the boys. And they're very vulnerable. And so many times you see a beautiful AA lady get involved much more than they'd like to be because they mistake gratitude for love. grateful just for a kind word or a ride to a meeting or a cup of coffee because they haven't had that for a long time and so this is when we say you don't get involved you know until you've been in the program for a while and this is why you need a sponsor so very desperately it isn't only AA ladies that get into this mix up a little gal has been shoved around by a brutal drop for 10 years or so the first AA single that's kind to her look out you've got a campus romance and sometimes they don't work out that's the same thing we tell all our boys and girls in your first year we recommend no relationships because it's so difficult when you're an emotional to know whether you're in love or not just can't wait to use that and that's it we just we just don't know the difference and i never did because love is something we have to learn and that's that's it most people don't a lot of most alcoholics i should say don't know the between being in loving and being in heat it's that simple and don't ever get the idea that those of us who love alcoholics were attracted to you uh-uh you were attracted to us because we weren't retarded the guy keeps slipping all the time i have a very simple no i have very simple solution to it somebody comes to me and says i keep having problems slipping what is the problem i say that sounds very much like the fellow who keeps falling out of bed. You're sleeping too close to the edge. Get in the middle of the bed, get active in AA on a regular daily basis and get involved in service work. And if you're right in the Middle of the Bed, you're not apt to fall out of bed. And If you're Right in the Middle of AA, you are not apt To fall out. It's very simple. Really there's a simple solution as Abir says these are just solutions to these problems. But you've got a great catch-all now for the losers. They can always go to the adult children group. Of course, as far as I'm concerned, everybody's an adult child of something brother, you know what I mean? Let's face it. Pardon? What steps? You said you'd meet up in the middle. Instead of being on that side, what can you do? Get them involved in doing things in the group. Just so you get down there. Have you ever wondered where the coffee, how come the coffee was on when we get there at quarter to eight? You should get in there at 730 and help make that coffee. Be sure to help put the chairs away. We're going to go out and call on so-and-so tonight. We're gonna do something else. You get busy, stay in contact on a daily basis. Yeah, go to the jail meetings. Go to the institution and try and get a newcomer. Drag in some newcomer, yeah? Stick right with them. You get them to meetings and everything else. You start worrying about him instead of you and you'll be fine. That does work. Anybody got anything else? There's a couple of announcements. Tomorrow at 10, over at Cindy and John's, the Al-Anons are putting together their famous breakfast. Oh, we've missed you guys the last couple months. And any A.A.ers, you know, if you'd stop and get a coffee cake or something like that, something heavy, as I was told, to fill in the gaps, it would be appreciated. But it's at 10 o'clock at John and Cindy's. If you don't know where that is, just call them home tonight. and then again tomorrow we're privileged to have Don and Arbutus again 2 o'clock is going to be the workshop and again at 7.30 we'll have the open speakers I'm sure urge you all to attend and I want to thank you both very much for this evening I'm not sure you know why I'm going to have a long night tomorrow night Y'all please stand. We'll close with the Lord's Prayer.