‘What Will They Say?’ — Built an Entire Personality Around a Question Nobody Was Actually Asking – Ajit S.

About This Speaker Tape

Ajit S. shares his Al-Anon story at Sessions by the Sea in Ocean City, Maryland. Born in Bombay, India, he came to the United States in 1974 and married a woman who turned out to be alcoholic. He describes years of obsessing over her drinking, inspecting garbage cans, moving bottles around, and watching her reflection in a blank television screen — all while insisting nothing was wrong with him. He entered Al-Anon around 1980 but spent 17 years doing service work and memorizing the steps without ever doing the real inner work of the program.

The turning point came in November 1997, after his divorce and a devastating rebound breakup, when his sponsor directed him to lock himself away and answer four questions from Courage to Change page 345: Who am I? What do I value? What traits do I want to keep? What traits do I want to lose? That solitary fourth step cracked open decades of image management, people-pleasing, and buried anger — feelings he had kept sealed behind what he calls the mantra of his childhood home: "What will they say?"

Ajit walks through each of the twelve steps with self-deprecating honesty, describing how he dismissed every one on first reading. He connects Al-Anon principles to Buddhist thought, early Christian desert fathers, and Richard Rohr's writings on spirituality, weaving them naturally into his own experience. He shares how the program transformed his relationships — enabling a civil divorce, reconciliation with his angry son Corey, and eventually a healthy marriage to his current wife Vicky. He closes by acknowledging that he and Vicky now face addiction in their home through her son, and that the work of the program never ends.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Introduction — spells his name A-J-I-T, jokes about first Al-Anon meeting in Detroit with six women
• 5:00 Reframes Al-Anon as being about his own obsessive thinking, not the alcoholic's drinking
• 10:00 Arriving in America from Bombay in 1974, meeting his future wife at a bar called Yesterday's in Detroit
• 18:00 Discovery of the half-bathroom bar — empty beer cans, Aunt Bunny excuse, inspecting garbage cans at night
• 25:00 Watching wife's reflection in blank TV, moving bottles around, almost arrested for molesting the vacuum cleaner
• 32:00 First Al-Anon meeting — dismisses all twelve steps in three and a half minutes, told to keep coming back
• 40:00 Homicidal fantasy about the icicle, woman at meeting shares identical pillow-smothering thought
• 48:00 Deep fourth step in November 1997 — locked himself away answering four questions from Courage to Change
• 55:00 Steps six and seven as underpinning of his program — sponsor's insight that remove means re-move, not extinguish
• 62:00 Reconciliation with son Corey — sitting and listening without defending, repairing the relationship