Willingness Without Action Is Just Praying for a Hole Without Digging – Carrie B.

About This Speaker Tape

Carrie B. tells her story at the Monday night Blue Chip Speakers meeting at the NAVA Club, sharing an eight-year sobriety date of February 2, 2008. She grew up as Daddy's princess in Sarasota, Florida, until age 12, when a boat trip from Key West to the Dry Tortugas turned into a 26-hour ordeal in the Gulf of Mexico after the boat capsized. Her family survived through what she now calls a miracle, but the experience left her feeling she had cheated death and was living on borrowed time. That summer she began stealing gin-and-tonics from her mother's Turvis Tumblers, drinking alone in the kitchen every night from age 12 to 16 — a stretch she forgot for years.

Two years later, at 14, she fell 250 feet down a waterfall while rock-sliding in Beach Mountain, North Carolina, cutting her femoral artery and spending six weeks in ICU on heavy morphine. PTSD, depression, and a growing food addiction piled on. By college she weighed 350 pounds, sported a black mohawk and leather, and relied on the Carrie Show — her drunken performance persona — to mask terror. Three husbands, 30 jobs, 20 residences, and emergency custody papers followed. She signed her son over to his father because she wanted to drink more than she wanted him.

After suicidal runs to Peachford and two years in Overeaters Anonymous, she met her husband Robert through A Course in Miracles, married him in 2007, and picked up a white chip on February 2, 2008 — by osmosis, she says, from sitting in meetings she thought she didn't need. Her second sponsor walked her through the Big Book and taught her that her thinking was her alcoholism, that willingness required action, not just prayer.

Today she has made amends to parents, sisters, an ex-husband, and the IRS, finally paid off after 14 years. She was present when both her mother and father died. She sponsors women, goes to jail meetings and rehabs, and tells newcomers that every shameful thing from her past has been used by a Higher Power to help someone else. Her integrity, she says, is worth more than anything, and there is nothing she will do to jeopardize it again.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Julian opens the Blue Chip Speakers meeting and introduces Carrie B.
• 2:30 Carrie introduces herself, sobriety date February 2, 2008, home group is the Fifth Tradition
• 4:00 Age 12 boat wreck — Key West to Dry Tortugas, boat capsizes, 26 hours in the Gulf
• 9:00 Started drinking gin-and-tonics alone at 12 — chained to the bed at night for convulsions
• 13:00 Age 14 waterfall fall at Beach Mountain — femoral artery, ICU, morphine drip
• 18:00 Senior year SAT party — eight pulls of vodka and the birth of the Carrie Show
• 24:00 Food addiction confession — 150 pounds gained between 12 and 14, Quaaludes in college
• 30:00 Second husband dares her to drink — five years dry ends, custody lost within months
• 38:00 Peachford suicidal ideation, Overeaters Anonymous for two years before AA
• 44:00 Second sponsor, Big Book work — willingness requires action, not just prayer