The Dry Drunk Years at the Johnson Institute – Mary S.

Thank You Ross after that remark about my serve I want the money back I paid you to do that introduction my name is Mary and I'm an alcoholic and I will probably get in trouble for saying this but the only qualification I have for speaking in front of you tonight is that my sponsor made me do it now when I was drinking I used to use alcohol to give me the courage to do the things I didn't want to do now that I'm sober and in AA I have my sponsor to do me to get me to do things I don't want to but in actuality she didn't really make me do this she strongly encouraged me to do it but I she didn' t make me do it and really I only have myself to blame for being up here tonight because I'm the one who said yes I guess I'm a little nervous about talking as many people I'm sure who've stood up here have said to you and one of the reasons why I'm a little nervous is because I decided to do this without any notes, kind of flying without a net. And one of the reasons why I decided to do it that way was after I heard Lisa, one of those speakers at the Gopher State Roundup talk about what her sponsor had said to her was when she spoke in front of a group that what she said was really none of her business. That she didn't want to catch her taking any notes with her because she was just supposed to go up there and whatever she said she was supposed to say. And so I thought well if I want to do it right and do it perfectly maybe i ought to try it that way and so and i thought also that it might be a very humbling experience if i get up here and i get off track and i and i lose my place i figured that that would be okay because that was what aaa was all about that i could be whatever i was and it was okay and so that's another reason why i decided to do it and i just want you to know that if i do get off track if I do lose my place that it's all Lisa's fault but I want you to I'm real grateful to be here tonight and I want to know in order to be here tonight that I gave up an opportunity to be at a good old-fashioned Stearns County shower dance now my nephew who lives in Stearnes County is getting married in a few weeks and one of the Stearn's County traditions is that when a young couple gets married a few before the wedding they have this big old fashioned Stearn County shower dance and what this involves is that all the friends and relatives get together in this great big dance hall in the small town in Stearns County and they proceed to drink and then they danced to this old-fashioned umpah popoka band and then go drink some more and then they go try to dance some more, and then we go drink some more. And this goes on for several rounds until towards the end of the evening there are a lot of people who were more in horizontal positions than vertical positions on the dance floor but everyone has a really good time except for maybe one or two people who are left standing at the end of the evening but I'd like I'd to talk a little bit about Stearns County because Stearn's County is where I was born and raised in the Stearn County shower dance is where i learned how to drink in Stearn county I don't know if anyone if anyone has heard of it it's in central Minnesota And Stearns County is known for its Stearn's County Syndrome. And the Minneapolis Tribune did an article about five or six years ago on the Stearnς County Syndrome, and some of the characteristics of the Steerns County Syndrome is that one, you have to be German, two, you know, you're not going to be able to go to school, you have too be Catholic. And part of being Catholic, of course, means you have to come from a large family, and I had nine brothers and sisters. And so oftentimes when I would tell people that, one of the first things they would say is, oh, you must be Catholic. And I would think, my, you're perceptive. And I wonder what religion they think rabbits are. And another characteristic of the Stearns County Syndrome is that you have to be extremely conservative. Now I realize when you're talking about German Catholics it's probably redundant to talk about conservatism but people were extreme are extremely conservative and another characteristic of the stearns county syndrome is that everybody is related to everybody else and with families like of 10 children or more you can probably guess why but this made it a little bit difficult to do any dating in in stearnes county and one one of the speakers at the Gopher State Roundup had talked that the genealogist had discovered that everybody was related to everybody else. If you went back to the 50th cousin, you would probably find some relationship. But in Stearns County, you don't have to go back that far. It's usually the second or third cousin and you can figure out that you're related to somebody. And so after I go out with a guy once or twice, I'd have to start thinking about whether or not I had seen him at a family reunion in recent years. But another characteristic of the Stearn's County Syndrome is that you like to drink. You like to drink a lot of beer. And Stearns County was known sort of as the biggest consumption, biggest consumers of beer in the country. And there was this stretch of small towns in StearnS County that was known kind of as Little Germany because of all the beer drinking that was going on there. And so when I was growing up in Steerns County, I didn't have a very pleasant childhood. I wasn't very happy kid and I sort of sat on the sidelines of life and I was scared of everybody and everything. And I was kind of a loner even in a family of nine brothers and sisters, I was really kind of alone. My parents were pretty busy raising a family at 10 kids and working on the farm and so forth. So I sort of blended into the woodwork and I had to figure things out on my own. Simple things like how often do you brush your teeth or or when do you brush your teeth, and that kind of stuff. I sort of figured those things out on my own because no one really told me what to do. And so what I would do is I would listen very closely and watch very closely what other people did and said so that I could pick up some clues and cues as to what I was supposed to do and how I was opposed to behave. And I thought everybody else knew what to doing and how to behave, and that I was just a little bit slow in catching on to these things. and so I would put a lot of energy into putting up this front that I had everything together and I lived in constant fear that people would discover that I didn't really know what I was doing and so, I put a little bit of energy I put put a ton of energy into that front and I watched my brothers and sisters and my cousins and the family friends and neighbors and I figured out when you grow up what you did was you learned how to drink beer you got drinking buddies You went out and got rowdy and obnoxious sometimes, and sometimes occasionally you'd go out and smash up cars. Like with six older brothers and sisters, we went through quite a few cars in our family. I think my sister went through about five fender benders in one year. So I figured my initiation into adulthood would be my first beer or my first drunk and my first fender bender. And I watched my brothers and sister go out drinking and act like they had fun, and I figured that's what I was going to do when I grew up because I really didn't know what was normal And so I just figured I'd take my cues from everybody else. And the kind of fun that they were having when they were drinking really didn't appeal to me, but as I said, I just figure that was just part of growing up. My throat is getting very dry. So I don't remember the first time that I drank, but I do remember the First Time I Got Drunk. and I remember being at a party that my brother had in the basement of my parents' home and I didn't get drunk at this time but I might have had one or two beers, I don't remember but I remember there was this man there one of my brother's drinking buddies that seemed to be interested in me and I did not like him at all I mean I did think he was attractive I mean he just totally turned me off but I figured if he was interested in me and I do not like him there is something wrong with me and so I just figured maybe this is what you did when you grew up you know, you just went out with men that you didn't like and anyway, a few weeks later I went to probably one of my first Stearns County shower dances now I don't know if it was my brother's or sister's shower dance or one of many, many cousins who were having a shower dance but I got drunk and it was the first time I got drank and I was about 16 years old and I remember feeling like I was a totally different person that for once I felt that I had caught on to something and I had got on to something big and for the first time I could talk to people for the 1st time I could get out on the dance floor and dance for the 2nd time I could go flirt with men and for 3rd time I could be rowdy and obnoxious and try to compete to be the center of attention like everybody else was so I felt really great and this guy was there and he was still interested in me and I didn't like him anymore than I did the first time I met him but I could tolerate him a whole lot more being drunk and he asked me to go home with him and this was another thing I had figured out that adults did or at least my sisters had done is that you go out and you get drunk at one of these dance halls and then you go home with the guys that you meet and so I thought, okay, well I'll go home with this guy and then on the way home he was driving about 60, 70, 75 miles an hour down these curvy roads on the wrong side of the street out in the middle of the country and I remember feeling a little uncomfortable about that and I think I expressed my discomfort in somewhat of a non-assertive way and the message I remember getting from him is that there's nothing wrong with this and so I thought, there's nothing wrong mit this therefore it must be okay and I'm the one who has the problem and it's not his driving that's a problem and that sort of set the tone for my drinking was being in places I didn't want to be, being with people I didn' t want to b with and doing things I didn''t want to do and that happened to me time and time and time again when I was drinking and it happened many times with men but i still remember how wonderful it felt getting drunk and so i was about 16 and i knew my next step was to find some good drinking buddies and to find a place to drink because when i was 10 years old we had moved from the farm into town and when you're 16 part of the stearns county tradition is that you go out and get a job and you start paying your own way and so I like many good Stearns County girls went out and got a good waitress job I was working at Woolworth and I would I was starting to move up into the world and so I figured I couldn't go drinking at these small-town dance halls one they weren't terribly convenient because I was living in st. Cloud and second I wanted something a little bit classier than that now that I was working on my own in Woolworth and so I started looking for some drinking buddies and what I use the criteria used to pick friends was where there's were they people who would be willing to hang around with me and where they killing people that I could do things with not necessarily people I liked but just people like a new thing for it now sort of the criteria I used to think pick my drinking buddies were they people I could drink with were the people that I could go out to bars with and so I found a few people that i worked with and they took me out one night to a real classy place in st. cloud and the outside outskirts of st. Cloud called the bucket now the bucket looks just like it's town and this is dumping little 3-2 plays with a jukebox and I understand now that it's a vet clinic in St. Cloud, so you can just about guess how the clientele has improved since I used to hang out there. But as soon as I walked into that place, I realized that was where I wanted to drink because that looked like that's where the action was. And so I started going and started cultivating my drinking relationships with the people that I worked with. And I tried to sort of teach my non-drinking friends, or the people I had grown up with through grade school and high school, to try to get them to be also my drinking buddies. And some were better students than others, but I remember one of my friends in particular who just hated it when people drank, and just hated it when they got drunk. And we really had some pretty bad scenes, because I couldn't understand why she was so disgusted with my drinking i mean i just thought if she learned how to drink she'd be a whole lot more fun to be with and like one night i couldn't understand why she got so disgested because i had vomited in the women's bathroom and then proceeded to go through the vomit looking looking for my contact lenses i couldn'T understand why she thought that was disgusting i had a problem when i when i drank and that i always had this fear that I would pass out or fall asleep with my contacts in it so and then I would wake up blind and would never be able to open my eyes again. So every time I got drunk I'd be frantically searching for my contacts but then I could never remember how many contacts I had. So I'd been looking for four, five, six, I couldn't remember. I thought maybe it was because I started seeing double. I couldn'T keep it straight when I was drunk. But I graduated from high school and then went on to college. And I led sort of a dual life. And ever since I was 13, when I decided to do something, I really stuck with it, I was very stubborn and stuck with it and decided to go ahead and do it. I wanted to do it well. And I always had to do things three times better than anybody else just to feel okay, just to be accepted by them. And I also hoped that if I worked hard enough, I'd be good enough, and if I work hard enough people would notice me. And I was always afraid that if... I wanted to be noticed, but at the same time I didn't want to be noticed. I sort of wanted to being invisible. And so I worked really hard in school and I did very well in high school and college, but it sort of led a double life because I was taking like five classes a quarter and working two jobs during the week and some other weekend. So I only drank on Friday and Saturday nights because I couldn't let drinking interfere with my work and with my school. And I worked to really hard, but I was a totally different person in school than i was on the weekends and they were totally very separate lives i mean i didn't have any drinking friends at school i didn't know how to make friends without without booze so i didn'T KNOW HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS IN SCHOOL and i could go through an entire quarter in one class and not know what the person next to me looked like because i was too shy or too ashamed to look that person in the eye and i went through a number of kind of strange as i said i I got myself into a lot of situations that I didn't want to be in with people I didn' t want to be with, doing things I didn d want to do. As I was growing up, I stuffed a lot of feelings as I was going up and I had a lot of anger. A lot of stuff would come up in real ugly ways when I got drunk. It often came up when I was with men and I told a lot of men off when I was drinking because they couldn't make me happy. I didn''t know what I needed to make me happy and I couldn''t tell them what I needed to make me happy but it was all their fault that I wasn't and so I took a lot of anger out on them and they proceeded to take a lot of their anger out of me so I ended up in some pretty messy situations and you don't find a lot of candidates for meaningful relationships in places like the bucket I remember I was at TGI Fridays this past week for lunch and one of the waiters had a button on that said looking for a meaningful overnight relationship that was what sort of what it was like when I was drinking but there was this one man that I was going out with that I had gone out with for almost a year. And I really cared about this person, and this person really cared About me. And we even talked about getting married. But I was always angry with him because he couldn't make me happy. And it was always angry with them because he Couldn't do the right things. And no matter what he did, It wasn't the right thing to do. And We had a lot of arguments. And remember we were at This dance hall one night. I don't think it Was in Stearns County. I think it was in Meeker Connie but and I was angry at him for something in and I decided I wasn't gonna let that stop me I was gonna have a good time anyway so I grabbed the bottle of booze and I poured myself a good stiff drink and I just thought it was going to get drunk and he looked at me and he said I really wish you wouldn't do that because every time you drink we get into a fight and I'm just really taken aback by that I mean he was the first person that ever laid it on line for me to tell me that that maybe there was a problem with my drinking and I just thought it was totally ridiculous and I thought I don't need to get drunk to have a fight with you I can do perfectly fine sober thank you but anyway that relationship of course didn't last and I was going out this other guy for about eight months and I couldn't stand the guy unless I was drinking and I didn't like going out on individual dates with men the longer I drank because that took time away from my drinking friends and it took time away from me drinking and I usually have him pick me up at my place when we go meet my friends at the bar and that's what our date consisted of and the longer I drank I didn't even worry about him picking me up my place I just met him at the Bar that was our date and that went on and on through college and my last quarter of school I moved out of my parents place and moved down to the Twin Cities and got an internship at one of the big companies in downtown Minneapolis. And what I was doing was working on the company newspaper. And one ofthe first things, or one ofthethings that they had me do while I was there is do a story on their chemical dependency program. And so I had to go talk to the two people who ran the program who were recovering alcoholics. And so they talked about how awful it had been for them and what happened and what it was like now. and I remember thinking that it was so attractive to me that they were able to get through all this horrible stuff and have these people who were loving and caring and supporting and that they could talk to them about their troubles and they felt wonderful and I thought if only I were an alcoholic I could have that too and I used to remember when I was drinking I used think that well maybe one day I'll decide to be an alcoholic because if I'm an alcoholic then I can drink every day into oblivion instead of just living in it to Friday and Saturday nights. But that was my first taste of what the program was like and what sobriety was like. And then after that, after I was done with school, I got my first job at a newspaper in Shakopee. And I really hit bottom. When I was going to school, I'd go through these cycles of depression that would sort of coincide with the quarter. I mean, I'd goes in there and try to be three times as good as I was the last quarter. and this time I was going to do it and I was gonna work harder and be better and things in my room would pile up and get messy and things on my desk would pile off and then towards the end at the end of the quarter I would crash I'd get really depressed I'd go out and get drunk clean up my room and go at it again the next quarter but when I got out of school I didn't have a quarter to crash at the other end and so I went full speed ahead until I came crashing down really hard and to add to all this horrible feeling of despair and loneliness is that I had a boss who was a very active alcoholic and I was a good codependent so we had a pretty fun relationship but it was funny how all things started to happen at this point in my life a woman who was working there was a recovering alcoholic and she was fairly new to the program and she's also going through a divorce at the time, so she was really having a tough time. But she started talking to me about her loneliness and her fears and her despair and how AA was helping her get through this. And again I thought if only I were an alcoholic I could have that too. And as I said I got real depressed at this time so I went back to our family doctor in St. Cloud and told him how depressed I was. And he's a great doctor because you can go in there and you can tell him your scalp itches and you can walk out with a prescription. He gives prescriptions for everything. So I walked out with a good strong prescription, an antidepressant. And I started using that and I sort of became numb. I couldn't feel anything except for the pounding headache and the dryness in my mouth. But feeling nothing was a whole lot better than what I was feeling. And so I thought I was feelings better. and my and this friend of mine told me she said get your butt into therapy and i was so relieved when she said that because for so long when i was going through school i walked past those counselor's offices wanting to set up an appointment knowing that i needed some kind of help but i was too scared and i didn't know if it was okay so i was real relieved and she was the first person that I could start sharing things with, that I could tell her how I felt and that it was okay and that she'd accept me. It was the 1st time I was getting some relief for all that stuff that I had been carrying around for me for years. And during this time I wasn't drinking a great deal because I didn't have any drinking buddies in Shakopee. I didn' t really know how to make drinking buddies without drinking first. So I'd go home or I'd got to St. Cloud periodically and meet up with my drinking friends, or they'd come down to visit me, but it wasn't very often. But I found a drinking buddy in my box, and we'd go out to lunch and have four or five vodka gimlets. Then we'd go back to the office and work for a couple hours. Then, we'd go over to the country kitchen for the rest of the day and drink coffee. So, we had a great setup. But, I'm not sure how all things happened at this time. It's kind of a mumble-jumble in my mind, but, it was strange how things started happening and how seeds started getting planted. And I decided to go into therapy, and as I said, once I decided to do something, I really sticked to it and I was going to do it well. And so I made this appointment with this therapist in downtown Minneapolis, and it was in the middle of the winter, the appointment was at quarter to eight in the morning, it was 20 below zero and I didn't have a heater in my car. I decided I'd go anyway. And I drove down there and I proceeded to freeze my feet on the way down there and I was just feeling really numb and I walked in there with these bricks on the bottom of my legs and I stood there and she said the therapist had called in sick and I didn't know how to feel I was so zoned out because of the antidepressants I was on and I felt so tired of feeling so awful that I just left but I went back because I knew I needed to go back and I got set up with this counselor a chemical dependency counselor and he couldn't have been more than a couple years older than I was and we had a pretty storming relationship I mean, we spent most of our sessions just yelling and screaming at each other and he once told me he said, you are the angriest woman I have ever met and I remember looking at him just seething and thinking, I am not angry but he told me one that the reason I was seeing him a chemical dependency counselor was because of my dependency on those antidepressants and that made me furious so I thought, I'll show you I'm not dependent upon those things so I went home and tried to smash that bottle and the only thing I succeeded in doing was nearly breaking my hand in the process but I showed him and all during this time I was still talking to this friend of mine and in the meantime she had gone somewhere else to get a job but I still kept in touch with her and still kept hearing what AA was doing for her and it still sounded real attractive to me and somewhere along the line I don't know how it all happened but this therapist had left and I started seeing this female counselor and it was going a whole lot better and I was starting to get little bit better and I was starting to learn a little bit more about AA. And one day, my boss at lunch said that he was getting a little worried about all those empty gallon jugs of whiskey that were piling up in his garage. And I looked at him and I thought, well, how many of those do you go through? And he says, well, I go through one about every two or three days. And I thought、Boy, that's about a quarter booze a day. That's a lot of booze. I thought this guy might have a drinking problem. and so I started thinking about that and I started listening to what he said on the way things were working at work and why I felt so crazy and I just started thinking that maybe a lot of it may be due to his drinking and one day in my therapy session I happened to mention that he had a drinking problem I'd always go in and talk about how awful it was at work and I happened to mention that you know, he might have a drinking problems and she looked at me and she said Mary, you'll never get support from a drunk I thought, I didn't say he was a drunk I said he had a drinking problem I was a real good codependent I was really into denial but she said why don't you go out and get the book I'll quit tomorrow and read that and so I did being a good follower of rules I went out and did that and I got through the first chapter and I started to cry because I could really see where he was coming from I could see the problems and the feelings and the pain that he had and for the first time in my life I started feeling compassion for somebody else. I realized that I really cared about this person, I really care what happened to him, and for me that was a real new feeling. But also at the same time, I had to take a look at my own drinking because I could see myself in those real early stages of alcoholism and how I was learning to depend upon it to give me my mood swings. And about this same time I was going home a little or going to St. Cloud a little bit more frequently and so I was drinking a little bit more frequently and things started getting a little crazy because by then when I drank I couldn't control what would happen to me by the end of the evening I didn't know where I would end up who I would wind up with and what I would ended up doing and I could never remember what I had done and I would always end up feeling very scared and despairing and suicidal and it was really awful and I ended up doing some pretty crazy things A couple months ago, someone from my Wednesday night group spoke at our open AA meeting and he said something to the effect that he knew things were getting bad when he got lost in a Perkins parking lot. And I went up to him at the end of the meeting and I said, John, I finally heard my story tonight because I could really relate to what you said because I got lost him in Ember's parking lot once. and he looked at me and he said Mary, that's really bad because it's a lot smaller than a Perkins parking lot and I was fairly drunk that night as I usually got I mean when I drank that's what I did to drink I drank to get drunk and we went out to eat as we normally did after we went drinking and we met and we were going to Embers and I went to the bathroom as I often did when I was drinking and on the way to the bathroom apparently I had a blackout because when I wanted to go back to our table I couldn't remember where we were sitting and so that put me into a real dilemma and I thought, you know, someone who put a lot of energy into acting as if she had it all together I couldn'T let people know that I didn't remember where we sat and so I had to come up with a plan how to find them now the restaurant was divided into two sections with the kitchen in the middle and there was the door in front of the kitchen and the bathroom was back here in the back of one of the sections. So I thought what I would do is sort of act as if I'm walking towards the door and then on my way to the door I would sort of look around to see if I could see them somewhere and then if I did, I could just go sit down. But if I didn't, I'd just keep on walking and if they saw me and called me I'd say that I was on my Way to the Door or I was going to go get something in the car. And if I didn't see them, they didn't see me and I thought as I got to the door I could turn to look into the other section of the restaurant to see if they were over there. Well the problem when I drank that much is that anything that I saw didn't register so I could have looked everywhere in that restaurant and I wouldn't have recognized anybody because I was too drunk and too out of control and so I ended up going straight to the door and straight out the door. And I certainly couldn't turn around because then I'd really look stupid. So there I was out in the middle of that parking lot at 1.30 in the morning, and I was panic-stricken. So I thought, well, I'll just go to my car. But then I couldn't remember where my car was, or even if I had driven. And even if I could find my car, I didn't have my keys because that was in my purse at the table. And so I was all there terrified and just hysterical, and I was crying and I was just terrified that I was going to spend the rest of my life in this ember's parking lot, lost. And I don't know how long I was out there before my friends finally came out and I'm standing in the middle of this parking lot just crying hysterically. Now how do you explain to your friends that the reason you're crying hysterical out in the parking lot at 1.30 in the morning is because you couldn't find your way back from the bathroom? There was just no way that I could explain it to them. but that was sort of what it was like the last few times that I drank and about a week later I was up in St. Cloud again and I was at this bar by then we had graduated from the bucket to the BFW club on the other side of town and at that time I guess you could say I was dating this guy because he's the guy that I met at the bar when I went to the bar and we decided after we were done drinking there we would go over to this friend's place and she lives about three blocks away and I had been there hundreds of times before and she left and I was going to go with this man over there and I couldn't remember how to get there. I couldn' t remember how to get their. And I had gotten so drunk it was as if I had stepped outside of myself and was watching myself and I could' nt have any control over what I was saying and what I wa s doing and this person out there could' nd function without getting some directions from somewhere. And it was just a terrible terrifying feeling. And I tried to explain how I felt to this man that I was with, and he thought I was lying. He thought it was because I didn't want to be with him. Well, that's true, but I wasn't lying. And so he brought me over to his place, and I don't even remember how I got there, and all I remember is that it seemed like it was a huge house with a huge maze, and I was trying to find the doors to get out, or I was running down the hall trying to find my way out. It was a very, very terrifying experience. But I went back the next week to that same bar with that same guy and proceeded to get drunk again. And at the end of that evening I ended up, and I don't know how, in the middle of the country, I don' t know where, and didn't know how to get home with this guy. And he started saying some things to me that weren't very nice and I started thinking that I don''t ever ever want to be in this kind of situation again. I don't ever want have to put up with his crap again and I dont ever want feel this crazy and out of control again and I knew that the only way not to do that anymore was that I had to quit drinking because I couldn't control what happened to me after I drank and so I really took a first step that night they realized I was powerless over alcohol and alcohol was really a big culprit in getting me into those kind of situations and like I said I was very stubborn person and once I made a decision to do something, I decided to do it. And it was real tough to do. And so I think it was about the same time that I was starting to read I'll Quit Tomorrow and I was taking a look at how my boss was having these problems with drinking. And I don't know how things happened, but they just did. And Wheelock Whitney came to town and I had to go cover it for the newspaper and he said something like, if you know an alcoholic in your life, it's up to you to help that person because the alcoholic is the last person to know. so I thought now that I'd done a first step well I didn't know I had done a 1st step but I thought I'd move into the 12th step and help my boss get help and so his wife proceeded to give him an ultimatum that said you either quit drinking or you move out and our boss had given him an altimatum that said you either go into treatment or you're out of a job so I jumped in there with my ultimatium I said that if he didn't quit drinking and was going to take a job I didn' want in a place I didn''t want to live and I'd be miserable the rest of my life and could he have that on his conscience and I don't know if that affected his decision or not but he decided to go into treatment and when he was in treatment I went up to visit him and I started listening to what the program was giving to him and what sobriety was giving him and what he was learning from the big book and what they had seemed so attractive to me They had friends, they had fun without drinking, and they had people they could talk to about how bad things were or how good things were. And that was so attractive to me. And again I thought, if only I were an alcoholic, I could have this too. But I thought now I really screwed things up because I quit drinking so I'm not an alcoholic. And at the same time, I was living with my younger sister and she was having a lot of problems with drugs and alcohol and so I did another 12th step and got her into treatment and again I participated in her treatment I went to the family sessions and listened to the lectures and the AA people talked there and again it sounded real attractive to me and again i thought if only i were an alcoholic i could have this too but i went on from that job and moved back to St. Cloud and got a job in the newspaper there and things did start to get better i stayed sober but i didn't go to AA because i wasn't an alcoholic because i didn't drink and i continued to go to therapy and i did get better and in a way i kind of started working the steps without really knowing it because i knew that i was powerless over alcohol i knew my life was a mess and i had some i was developing some concept of a higher power in that there was somebody some force that would take care of me that i didn t have to worry about the things i didn d have any control over that somehow things would work out the way they were supposed to work out and i started mending some relationships and and I started taking a look at my character defects, so life really did get better. But I still had this nagging doubt in my mind about whether or not I was an alcoholic because I'd still go out to drinking parties, I'd Still go out for the bars, but I wouldn't drink. And people would ask me, Why don't you drink? And I'd give them this three-page answer. I'd sort of go into this explanation about how it had given me trouble here and there and that I didn't really want to bother with all that trouble that I was getting from alcohol, so I thought it was best that I quit and so on and so forth. By the time I got done, they'd always have this puzzled look on their face. And I know the question they really wanted to ask was, does that mean then that you're an alcoholic? But after my three-page answer, they thought it best probably not to ask it. And I was afraid they would ask it because I didn't know what I'd tell them. Of course I wasn't an alcoholic. I didn' t drink. but I decided after about two years of sobriety that I was going to find out for sure once and for all whether I was an alcoholic so I made an appointment at the Johnson Institute for an evaluation and the woman there that I had talked to I thought was extremely insensitive because she told me that I'd been on this dry drunk for two years and that everything that I hadn't done and learned really didn't count anything and that I should get my butt to AA. And I was furious with her. I was just furious with Her. She didn't give me any credit for staying sober. She didn'T give me ANY credit for what I had done in those two years, but things DID get better. And couldn't she see that? And I really expected Her to open me, you know, welcome me with open arms to the program. But it didn't happen. And so I went to my therapist and I told her how awful this woman was and how insensitive she was and how mean she was. And my therapist just looked at me and she said, Mary, if you want to go to AA, you have my permission to do it. And that's sort of what I wanted. I wanted somebody to give me permission to go to AA. And so I decided to go. And so, I was really looking forward for this wonderful AA experience that people talked about. So, I walked into my first meeting and all I got were a bunch of old men with red noses and a few teeth. But there was one man there who managed to smile at me and say hi. And as I said, when I decided to do something, I stuck with it so I kept going back. And eventually I found a young people's AA group and I got involved with that and I started making friends and I stated doing some things. But still to me at that time, AA was another social group that I could belong to. It was just a social group I could go on to and I could do things with friends now who didn't drink. So it was an improvement over having to do things with people who did drink. But at the same time, I was working some of the steps. I think I worked one through three, jumped occasionally to 10 and 11, and every once in a while did a step 12. But that was about the extent of it. And I always get a little uncomfortable when some of The Members would want to talk a little bit too much about God and what God did in their lives and for their sobriety. And I'd say, Why don't you keep the God talk down? You know, you're going to scare the newcomers away. Let's get this AA meeting over so we can go out for coffee and have some fellowship. And so that was what AA was to me about the first year. And then that group started getting a little younger since it was a young people's group and I was getting a lot older and I Was getting a Little smaller So I decided that there was still something missing So I Decided that I had to find a new group And I decided my AA group should be should include people who are a little bit more emotionally mature, like I was. And to talk about feelings and how you deal with that and your anger and your hurt and your sadness and how your week went and so on and so forth. So I found the perfect AA group. There were people about my age. They did a lot of fun things outside of AA and there were a lot good-looking men in it. So I thought this is perfect. And they talked about feelings. And every once in a while one of the guys in the group would bring in a big book or some AA literature and said, don't you think we ought to talk a little bit more about AA every once in a while? And I told them to get rid of this stuff and keep it out of here that we were doing just fine with the format that we had. And as you might guess, things got a little crazy in that group. And I started getting a little busy because I was still missing something and it wasn't meeting my needs. And so I thought, I know what I need. I need to go through treatment. All these people talk about how wonderful it was when they went through treatment and I just thought, that's what I need to do, I need to go through treatment, that's what I'm missing. So I signed myself in for outpatient treatment and I found out I really didn't miss anything. But it did make me take a look at the AA program and what it was really all about. And it made me take a look at that first step again because I always thought I'm not really an alcoholic. I mean, I quit before it was really a problem. So maybe I'm only two-thirds an alcoholic instead of 100%. And I was always afraid that people were going to catch me on that, you know, and say, well, no, no. Bring out your credentials. You're sure you're a full-blooded alcoholic? And I never really felt that I needed to go to AA to stay sober because I stayed sober for two years without the program. And I didn't feel that desperation when I first went in that I needed, absolutely needed that AA meeting to stay sober. And I didn't feel that way and so a lot of times I didn' t feel like I could relate to those people. But what I learned in AA was that I had some living problems. In AA, yes, it helped me to stay over but AA was a living program that helped me to live and it helped my life and it also helped me to deal with my living problems and that was a big revelation to me and it often made me take a fourth and a fifth step and so i went out and i and i started going to another aa group and it was a fairly new group in saint cloud and it's a big book study group and there were some good solid aa people that had started it and i walked in there and it was that experience that people had talked about that wonderful experience they had when they went to aa i felt welcome and i knew that i needed to be there because the people genuinely cared about each other and really welcomed me and were really cared and concerned about me. And the woman who chaired the group said that if you wanted to belong, that you should come up to her afterwards and she'd put your name and number and sobriety date into their master phone list. And so I went up to here and I said, I really want to belong. And so i started going and I learned a lot of things from that group. That's really where I think I grew up in AA, where I grew period Because I learned that AA was not the place to come in and dump all your personal problems, that you had a sponsor to work through those personal issues with. And then I learned how to have friends for the first time, real friends, not just friends to do things with, but friends who cared about you and accepted you the way you were and friends that I could care equally about because it was the one place that I was able to go and I could be happy, sad, angry, lonely, anything and it was okay. And it was the one place I could go where no matter how I felt when I went there, I felt better when I left. And I got involved in service work and I started seeing what a very important aspect that was to my sobriety. And I started sponsoring some people. And I even got a sponsor. I was sober, I think, for four years before I finally got a sponsored. and it took me that long because I figured first of all, I couldn't find a woman in St. Cloud who had as much sobriety as I did and second, I could not find anyone who had so much emotional maturity and insight that I did from going through three years of therapy so no one was good enough but after people started asking me to be their sponsor I remember one person in my AA group someone I really care about deeply who said, and who was much wiser than me in many aspects of the program, said if you don't have a sponsor, you don' t have any business sponsoring anybody else. And so I thought maybe it was time to give up my pride and get a sponsor and so I did and it was really a wonderful thing for me to do. And so I really felt like I belonged there and I really started to learn what the program was all about and things were still tough sometimes but I learned how to deal with them and my life got better before that I was on this rollercoaster ride that went up and down and up and up and up and up I was starting to finally build a good foundation in my life that I could depend upon and it got stronger and stronger and it get better and better and I didn't think it could get any better but it continued and throughout all those struggles that I have I outgrew a lot of things I out grew some jobs and I out drew some friendships but I never outgrew AA. It was something that always let me grow with it. And when I left St. Cloud to come down to the Twin Cities, a good friend of mine in the program had a going-away party for me and a lot of my AA friends came. And it just overwhelmed me to sit in that room with all those people who loved me so much and all those People that I love so much that I realized that was the greatest gift that I got from this program with all these wonderful people that cared about me so much. And I went home that night and I cried for an hour because I had never had anything so wonderful in my life. And it was real tough, it was really tough to leave that group and to come down here because I wasn't sure I could find something that could replace something that special. But I learned a lot from those people in that group. And I remember one guy in particular who kept saying And no matter how tough things get, just hang in there. If you keep working the steps, keep reading the big book, things will get better and things will work out the way they're supposed to. And that helped me a lot in my search for a job and it helped me along in coming down here and searching for another group. And I finally did find, you know, things did work out and I got a good job and I found a good group that I go to now in St. Louis Park on Wednesday nights. And so things do work out and things still get better. And every once in a while I think, and I especially thought a lot about this in my early sobriety, is that I stayed sober without AA. And I could probably do it again, but I don't want to because everything I have gained is worth a hundred times more than anything I had when I was sober without AAA or when I Was Drinking. And I wouldn't want to put that on the line at all for anything. And I remember one particular person in that AA group in St. Cloud and he to me was truly represented in one of the miracles of AA. and that was he came in looking like a really wild animal and after a couple of years in the program he grew into such a beautiful human being and I learned so much from him and I remember him telling this story at an AA meeting once in which he said, and he had gone through treatment I think like 18 times so he knew what it was like to be a drunk and this woman apparently came to his door and I don't know if it was a Jehovah Witness or whatever it was and she started preaching to him about being saved and stuff. And he looked at her and he said, Lady, I really don't want to hear this. And she said, Well, you know, you could go to hell. And he just looked at Her and he says, Lady, l've already been there. And l could really relate to that because l've really been there and as long as l keep coming back to this program, as long s l keep working the steps and reading the big book, that things will continue to get better for me and l don't have to go through that hell again. Thank you. Thanks for watching!