Twenty Months in Institutions and a House Full of Angry Alcoholic Women Laid Every Brick of My Foundation – Mary L.
About This Speaker Tape
Mary L. shares her story at an AA convention, opening with warmth and humor before diving into a life shaped by fear, approval-seeking, and mistaken identity. Born in 1943 in Chicago, she traces her core problem to age two, when she decided she needed her father's unconditional approval to survive. That unspoken demand poisoned her relationship with him for decades until, nine years sober, her mother revealed that Mary had been the apple of her father's eye all along.
Her drinking began as a teenager after moving to the affluent suburb of Wilmette, where she felt like an outsider among the pastel-sweater girls at New Trier High School. At a party in a ruined Al Capone casino on Lake Michigan, her first beer produced an immediate miracle: she felt whole, smart, fearless, and free. She chased that feeling through years of progressive alcoholism, blackouts, chronic relapse, and 15 or 16 treatment centers. A man she loved in graduate school at the University of Maryland promised to be there if she got help, then abandoned her. When her job at a juvenile detention home also disappeared, she discovered that her willingness had been conditional all along, with two hidden reservations.
Her turning point came at the Marty Mann Halfway House in Duluth, Minnesota, where she spent 14 months after six months in another institution. There, under sponsor Marion's guidance, she learned that alcoholism was not just a disease but an invitation to a spiritual journey she had been avoiding. Marion taught her that women sponsor women, that personality conflicts do not exist, and that as the wave is one with the ocean, so she was one with Higher Power. Mary walked through the steps with the other women and began building a foundation that would sustain nearly three decades of sobriety.
At nine years sober she married George, a recently widowed father of six, and together they adopted four hard-to-place children. Each season of her sobriety brought a new dark night of the soul: depression and suicidal thinking at nine years, when her bulimia was lifted; another crisis with the children's grief and anger, when her nicotine addiction was lifted. She shares that she was eventually diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and depression, and that her doctor's response changed everything: what she had called her sickness was actually what made her special. She closes with the teaching that Higher Power is the change agent, that great expectancy replaces expectations, and that the dark night of the soul always leads back to the sunlight of the spirit.
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