Whole Commuter Bus Stood Up and Clapped When I Finally Got Off at My Stop 🤣 – Terri B.
About This Speaker Tape
Terri shares a harrowing and ultimately triumphant story of survival, addiction, and recovery. Born in Northridge, California, she grew up in a deeply traumatic household where her father, a former Royal Air Force prisoner of war held by the Japanese for two and a half years, developed multiple personalities and subjected her to years of physical, verbal, and sexual abuse starting at age five. She made a survival decision as a small child to be a people-pleaser and hide everything, a coping mechanism that kept her alive but arrested her emotional development. Her mother, she later discovered through a torture diary found after her death, was also being brutalized by her father in ways that mirrored his own captivity.
Terri married young to escape her father, but her inability to be emotionally intimate after a lifetime of abuse eventually destroyed the marriage. When her husband called her "damaged goods" after she finally revealed her childhood secrets, she bought her first bottle of Jack Daniels on the way home from divorce court at age thirty. Despite hating the taste, she immediately experienced the phenomenon of craving and drank exclusively for oblivion, eventually attempting to drink herself to death after seeing the Nicolas Cage film Leaving Las Vegas. She lost her car to repossession, locked herself in her boss's office threatening suicide, and suffered an alcoholic grand mal seizure at a bus stop on the morning she got sober.
On June 17, 1998, covered in ants and bodily fluids after her seizure, she rode the bus to work while passengers fled to the back. Her therapist had slipped a newcomer packet into her purse, and she called the AA hotline that day. At her first meeting at the From the Heart group, she had no desire to stop drinking, but two women physically walked her to the front of the room and placed a white chip in her hands. She has never had to pick up another one.
Through working the steps with patient sponsors, Terri found freedom from her secrets. A pivotal moment came at a Joe and Charlie Big Book study where she was finally able to do her fourth step inventory regarding her father's abuse, learning that her part in what happened to her as a child was nothing. After repeated fourth steps, she came to forgive her father and honor his military sacrifice. Today she keeps promises to her children, including paying for her daughter's wedding dress, and her daughter honestly told a friend she does not remember her mother drinking.
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