September 12, 2025 • 40 mins
Carin S. Step 10, Step Series at the Tuesday Night Step Group, Twelve Step House, Fort Lauderdale, FL. 9/9/2025
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, everybody. I'm Karen.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
I'm an alcoholic, and I'm wearing shoes that are like
two inches taller than they normally are.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
So my biggest fear is not talking to you about
the tent step. It's staying on my feet, Braden. But
two sober.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Women told me they like my toes, so it's a
it's a win win, that's all I want to say.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
It's a win win. So I want to talk about
little something before we get to the ten step.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
And that's really a deflection because I'm bad at the
tenth step.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Period. I don't know how to say it.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Oh my sobriety date September the eighth, nineteen eighty eight, yesterday,
thirty seven.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
I keep looking over my shoulder.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Trying to figure out who that actually is. Anyway, So
a couple of things. First of all, who was here
last week?
Speaker 1 (00:55):
There's a lot of people here tonight, a lot of
people here, and you know.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
What, you really look good to me, and I need
to see you tonight. So I'm glad i'm here. I'm
gonna say some things will probably ruffle you know, but
again I'm gonna tell you that I'm not here to
tell you how to do the steps.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
I'm not here to show you how to do the
twelve steps. I don't actually care how you do the
twelve steps. That's between you and your sponsor.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
You know, I'm here to talk to you about what
happens after you do each of the steps, and what
happens to me.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
What happened to me after I did each of these.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
So you know, one of the things that I heard
coming in from some of the old timers, and I'm
happy to tell you that at thirty seven years I'm
now the old timer, so I can say something completely
different and you'll have to believe that too. That the
first thing you hear is steps ten, eleven, and twelve
are the maintenance steps. And that's the biggest funch of
bully you will ever see. First of all, who's here
(01:45):
has ever.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Been on a diet? Come on, guys, you have been
on diets. It is not just the women who wants
to be maintenance. I don't want to be maintenance. I
want to keep going until I look good.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
So so anyway, they're not the maintenance steps.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
They're the growing up steps. They're the growth steps we
grow up. These are the steps that we do a
day to time.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
These are the one day at a time Steps of
Alcoholics Anonymous, because the steps is what AA is, and
that's why we have.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
To focus on the steps, because here's the point.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
You know, I wrote a lot of stuff down because
I'm bad at the tenth steps. I had to make
sure that I figured out, you know, how to do
it again before I got up here. But the point
of the twelve steps, you know, they're designed so that
we not only stay sober, but that we're happy about it.
That's a big difference, because I think it's impossible to
(02:37):
stay sober and be miserable for any length of time,
any extended time.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
We don't know how to do that. And you know,
I know, you know what I'm talking about. You can
be technically sober and you're like.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
A time bomb waiting to go off, you know, And
you can't really explain that to anybody on the outside.
But we know what that feels like. And I don't
understand it because I'm going to AA and I'm doing
this and I'm doing that, and I want to explode
when you have to go back to the steps.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
You have to go back to the steps.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
And you have to go back to the steps for
the simple reason is that there's a gift waiting for us.
And you might think it's the gift of sobriety, but
it isn't. It's the gift of being.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Sober and being happy about being sober.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
That's a big difference than just being sober, because personally,
I feel like I'm gonna be sober and I'm gonna
be miserable, or I'm gonna be you know, resentful, or
I'm gonna be manipulative.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
Or I'm gonna be any of the things that were
on that list to get rid of. I might as
well be drinking, because.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
It went down much better with a shot at Jack Daniels,
and it does sober. So being sober and happy, you
know they of course they tell us, you know, happy,
joyous and free. But the real gift this is, and
I have to think about this, the real gift of
sobriety is the freedom from.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Thinking about drinking. It is the freedom from thinking about drinking.
The only problem is that I don't stop thinking.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
I may not be thinking about drinking, but I'm thinking
about a whole mess of other stuff.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
Because the longer I'm sober, the.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
More I think I'm supposed to know things, and of
course any of the Alzheimer's.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
There's several of these guys out here, and take me
out today. I can tell you. They will tell you that.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
The longer you're sober, the less you know, because your
humility has kicked into high gear. You've been catapulted and
rocketed to the fourth dimension. And all it tells you
is that I am now ready to learn many more
things than I ever thought I was ready to learn before.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
That's all that it is.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
So I know very little, and that's a good thing,
because one thing I do.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
Know is that knowledge changes nothing.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
Just because I know something doesn't mean anything because I'm powerless.
As long as I continue to believe that I'm powerless,
knowledge does me.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
No good at all. So what do I do?
Speaker 2 (04:55):
Well? I do what everybody else does. I overthink? You know,
how else can I get around this?
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Overthink? Because our instincts tell me that.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
My instincts telled me that the longer I stare at
something like, really stare at this problem, and the more
I think about it and I water it like a
weed and I get to it, the worse it's going
to get. I'm no danger of finding a solution. And
the reason I'm in no danger of finding a solution
is because when we enter the spiritual world, it's not
like our problems are solved. They've just kind of slipped away.
(05:28):
I no longer care about them. I don't care what
you're doing. I don't care where I've been. I don't
even care where you've been. I don't care.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
About any of that. So I thought about this as well.
Try making a deal with yourself. This is very hard
to do.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
I had a great sponsor that you know, you know,
I didn't like.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
So this is the thing he used to say to me.
He'd say, you know, Albert would say, you know, Karen,
try making a deal with yourself. And this is the deal.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
I want you to trade five facts about how you
think you should be live being your life five facts.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Trade them for one hour of an unplanned life. I
have no idea.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
Think about that, five things that you think are absolutely
true to have a great life, trade them in for
one hour a day of I have no idea. It
is the most freeing experiment you will ever do, because
for that one hour, your mind goes all.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Over the place.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
You know, all over the place. Do you ever work
with a newcomer and you tell them these things.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
And they go, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that, I
know that butt. You know, I know that. I already
heard that.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
I heard that from my fourth sponsor, and you're my
seventeenth you know, I know, I know, I know. But
and then you know as well as I do, that
whatever comes after the butt is never good news.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
Never good news, because it always separates us.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
It separates us from the herd, it separates us from
our fellows, it separates us from God.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
So whatever comes after the butt not good.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
So I sail this to say that, you know, when
I got to the step and we're gonna get there,
it was really hard for me.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
It's still hard for me. It's so hard for me that.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
I had to do one today and I had to
make an amends today. That's how hard it was today,
you know. And I'm thinking to myself, I'm really tired
of doing these. I should be done, I should be finished.
But here's the problem with step ten for me. For me,
step ten is the look before you leap step, look
before you leap, before you say that nasty thing, you know,
(07:31):
before you point out somebody else's flaws, before you steal
something for the deli that's not yours. Before you're inappropriate
with your friend's spouse.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
You got a look before.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
So the problem with that is I didn't know anything
about it then when I got sober, and I know
almost nothing about it now that I'm sober all these years.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
So what that tells me is that I need help.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
I need a lot of help, because I am a
leaper before. And not only am I a leaper before
I look. I have to tell you I don't care
where I'm leaping from. I will leap, I will land,
and I will figure it out, because that's the kind
of alcoholic I am. And when they told me that
you have to turn this around and you have to
actually look before you leap, well that went against every
(08:19):
grain in my body, because if you're an alcoholic like me,
no matter what you did to me, I'm going to
figure a way out. That's why I never had a bottom.
You know, they stressed you have to have a bottom.
Every time I got close to a bottom, I just
lowered the measure. I lowered the measure.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
I cannot remember a single time. That's not true. There
are two times in my life when.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
I broke, but all the other times after I leapt
from wherever I was.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
How do you think I got married? Five times? I
leapt right to the altar. I had no idea how
I got there. I was talking to my.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Best friend, she know me since I'm seventeen years old,
and we were talking about the first time I got married,
and she came up to me and she said, what
are you doing? And I said, zero idea, no idea.
She said, then why are you doing it?
Speaker 1 (09:02):
I say, if it doesn't work out, I'll get a divorce.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
That's how I felt on my wedding day in a
white gown.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
Bla bla da da. So so here's the thing I'm
going on about, how it is a look before you leap,
and the translation of that, you know, is pause. You
got a pause for a minute. So I'm on the
phone today talking about this step.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
With my significant other, who can be a royal pain,
and he is saying to me, well, what are you
gonna say. I said, I'm going to talk about look
before you leap, and he's going, you gotta say pause,
and in my head shut up. He says pause and
I say shut up, and he says pause, and I.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Say shut up. I have six more years than you
shut up. But here's the bottom line. None of those
words came out of my head, nothing came out of
my mouth. They sat up there.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
He never knew anything except if he listens to this tape,
he's gonna know.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
You can delete this part, right. I just want to
make sure that my home life remains intact at this points.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
So the reality is is that they call this the
pause step simply because you have to ask yourself the question,
and I know the answer. Do I want to go
for the rest of my life making amends? The answer
is I would rather die. I do not want to
make another amends, No matter how spiritual I get, and
how loving I get, and how perfect the situation is.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
I do not want to make amends to you. It
has never sat well for me. So I have to
figure it out. I can do one of two things.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
I cannot make an amends, or I can act differently
so that I don't do something that is going to
cause me to make an amends. So let me tell
you the latter is much easier than the former, much
easier to amend my behavior. And we learned how to
do that in six, seven, eight and nine. We learned
how to amend our behavior simply so that I don't.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
Have to go around. It's a sober alcoholic making amends
to you. So how do I know? Hess Here's the
other thing.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
Anybody will tell me that, you know, I don't pay
attention to a lot of things. I don't pay attention
to directions. I don't pay attention to people's names. I'm
not good at that stuff. My head is filled with
all this other information, and so the stuff that I
think I can get from other people, because first of all,
I just want to be honest with you. I don't
know anything about directions. I'm from New York City. My
mother used to say to me, if you get lost,
(11:25):
keep making left hand turns and you'll be back home.
So I don't really know anything about directions and a GPS.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
I mean they're good if they, you know, work. And
so what I'm trying to say is I always get
where I'm going. I'm here, are I?
Speaker 2 (11:41):
And so you have to think to yourself, if she
doesn't care about the directions, how does she get where
she's going?
Speaker 1 (11:47):
You just do? You just do. And that's pretty much
how this program works.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
Not calling anybody out, but I'm pretty sure he's in
this room tonight.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
That somebody who.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
Was talking at another meeting about having under two years
and couldn't find a sponsor and couldn't figure out how
to work the steps.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
But he'd been.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
Sober, you know, like sixteen eighteen months, couldn't figure out
how to work the steps because he couldn't find a sponsor.
And I turned around and I said, you're sixteen months sober.
You've worked the first step already. You know that you're
powerless over alcohol, and now because you can't get a sponsor,
you know how crappy your life can be without alcohol
without it. And so he looked up and I said,
(12:23):
you've already worked it, you know, keep going. So these
are the things that I don't pay attention to because
I don't care.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
That's the true I don't care. So how do I know.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
When my behavior has gone to the place where I'm
going to have to make an amends?
Speaker 1 (12:35):
This is very important for me to pay attention to.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
So what I'm happy to say is that now, after
all of these years, I get a gut punch when
I misbehaved.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
You know, I was a Jack Daniels drinker. And the
reason I was a Jack Daniel's drinker. Is because of
the burn.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
And if we have any other Jack Daniel drinkers, you
know here tonight, you'll understand what I'm saying was because
of the burn.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
And you know, when I get this burn.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
In the pit of my stomach, you know this gut
punch that says you have misbehaved, You have just said
something that offended somebody, You have just done something that
has hurt somebody's feelings. You know, something like that is
you know, you just run over somebody. I was a
steamroller when I was drinking. There were us streets were
literally literally littered with the people that I had run over.
(13:18):
And so I have to pay attention, you know, And
I'm much ting be funny. But in my purse, this person,
every other person I have, I have a bottle of tombs.
And the reason I have a bottle of Tums is
because I get a stomach ache. If I've hurt your
feelings and I get that gut punch, the next thing
is a stomach ache.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
You know, where's to say that in the big book.
We're just gonna walk around.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
With the stomach ache for the rest of your life,
you know it may have something to be, something to
do with being Jewish.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
I'm not sure, but you.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
Know, because we carry all of our guilds in our stomach,
so I'm not sure, but I can tell you that
when I get that gut punch, sometimes it can feel
like fear. Sometimes it can feel like fear. And I'm
going to tell you right now that is unacceptable to me.
After thirty seven years of sobriety, I have no intention
of ever for living with fear again, and so I
(14:03):
take care of it.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
I have to take care of it.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
You know. I will not allow myself to be governed
by fear ever again. And if you're alcoholic like me,
every decision I made was governed by fear.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
And the truth is that is how I got married
five times.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
I got married five times out of fear each at
every time.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
So I have no intention of being afraid anymore.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
So the twelve and twelve, and you know, I'm not
like Maddie, who's much more literate than I am.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
He reads and I don't you know, but the twelve
and twelve tells us. And it's my favorite.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Part, you know, because this is the partment shows what
idiots we are. It says, when we're resturbed, no matter
what the cause, there's something wrong with us.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
Now, if you work with a newcomer, they go, what's
wrong with me?
Speaker 2 (14:44):
Well, I'm pissed at this person, or I don't like that,
or I hate my job, or my husband's cheating. You know,
they count on the fact that we're not reading the
black parts. What's wrong with us? We're disturbed. That's the
entirety of the end. It doesn't matter why we're disturbed.
It just matters that we are disturbed. And the thing is,
(15:07):
the only question I have to ask from that is
what are the things I need to do to become undisturbed?
Speaker 1 (15:15):
And the answer is simple.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
I've got to go back to steps one, two and three.
Get out of step ten, go back to one, two
and three, go back to that third step that says
I'm going to make a decision, go back to that
second step that says I'm not in control here, and
go back to that first step that says I'm powerless
over alcohol when I'm drinking it, and my life is
unmanageable when I'm not. And I know that because I
haven't had a drink in how many years? And my
(15:39):
life is currently unmanageable. We have to go back to
steps one, two, and three. Do you want to call them
maintenance steps?
Speaker 1 (15:45):
I don't. I call them fixer steps. They're the fixers.
But the answer is not always so clear.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
And when I think that I have the answer, I
always remember that my first thought, frankly, is for entertainment
purposes only, you know, whenever I come up with on
my first thought is going to be really like, not fabulous.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
And the other thing is is that I fight for it.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
You know, it may look like I did something wrong,
but I think we should examine this for other causes
and for other people who might have done, you know,
something else wrong or you know the translation of that.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
So we have time to let my bullshit sink in.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
You know, that's it, Because I'm a leaper before I look,
I don't question it. I don't confer with you, I
don't check it out with the people around me.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
I thought about the story.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
I was, you know, in Manhattan, and my husband had
been killed and my two kids, you know, his son
and my son.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
We were living a really bizarre life. And I still
had my.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Business, and I was still working every day, and my
company was on fifth Avenue, and you know, I.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
Take the subway home. And one day I took the
subway home.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
We were living in Brooklyn, by them, and as I'm walking,
I'm walking on the street with the brownstones. I see
everybody is gathered around this one brownstone. And I said,
what's going on? And I look up on the third
floor and they've pulled the black shade down. They've blacked
out the window because the cops are there and they
don't want to see.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
And you see what's going on.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
And I said to the person next to me, why
is the top window on the third floor blacked out?
Speaker 1 (17:12):
And she turned around and said to me, that window
is not blacked out. Those are flies.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
Somebody died in there and nobody found them. You know
what I did. I applied to law school. I said,
I'm getting out of here. I'm moving out of New York.
I'm taking my kid with me. I am not going
to consult with my son's father. I am going. And
I did walked out, walked out of New York City,
(17:39):
took a flight to North Carolina. By the way, I
am such a good New York I didn't know where
North Carolina was on the mat, but I knew how
to get to LaGuardia, so took the flight to LaGuardia
with my son.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
Never consulted. What happened. What happen. I wound up in court.
I wound up in court for three.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Years while my son's father, who was one of us untreated,
won his court case. And because I took my kid
and I lost my son for eighteen months, just lost it.
Speaker 1 (18:11):
That must be for me. Could you tell them to
take a message and I'll get back to them in
a half hour and that would work.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
But the thing is this, by the time I did that,
it's important. I was sober for seven years. I'd done
the steps, I had a sponsor, I was working with others,
I went to meetings, and I still ignored the essence
of the tenth step.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
I never paused. I went ahead and I did whatever
I wanted to do.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
So that pretty much catapulted me into a place. Because
I wound up in North Carolina by myself. They took
my son, they brought him back. I'm there by myself,
So what else was supposed to do?
Speaker 1 (18:52):
I got married. I mean, what else was I supposed
to do? I didn't like being alone down there. I
didn't know anybody down there, and I, you know, I
married a guy. I'm sure he's a nice guy. I
have no idea.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
I just know I have no idea for the simple
reason is that I couldn't understand anything he said. You know,
he was from North Carolina. I couldn't understand it. I
couldn't identify the food on the plates. I couldn't figure
out anything.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
I said.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
This is really not the place for me, you know so,
but I stayed seven years, you know, because that's what we.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
Do as alcoholics. We're not giving up. I'm going to
figure a way out.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
After I leapt from wherever I was, apparently LaGuardia. After
I left, I'm going to make this thing work. So
I want to push ahead a little bit and talk
to you about you know, what I have to do now,
because it's different, you know I am, and I've said
this before. The only thing that's going to stop me,
the only thing that's going to actually put this tenth
(19:47):
step in my life, is to continue to pray the
way that I pray.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
I pray for clarity.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Please God, let me see this as it really is.
Let me see her as she really is. Let me
se see this job for how it really is. I
want to see it clearly. That's the entirety of the prayer.
And then I asked for the courage if there is
anything to do anything about, and there may not be,
(20:14):
but I asked for the courage.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Do I stay, do I go? You know whatever that
looks like. But that was hard for me to accept.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
I had a sponsor for maybe do that prayer over
and over again, but that was hard for.
Speaker 1 (20:25):
Me to accept because it wasn't my plan. It was
somebody else's plan.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
And remember my sponsor, Albert, was the one who told
me the only thing you have to do to stay
sober in his realm was to be willing.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
To stay sober somebody else's way, and you know whose
way is.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
That is what I asked, and he said anyone but yours,
and it turned out to be his. And so I
had to be willing to stay sober Albert's way.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
You know, I tried, I really did.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
I tried and tried and tried, but I never got
my answers from him. He was always like, you know,
like kind of a Yoda of something whatever. I never
got my answers from him.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
My skin was always tight.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
I pushed and I pushed and I pushed for answers
to something I didn't even know what it was. It's
important to know that this is how we roll as alcoholics.
We are seeking all the time and we can't figure
out what it is. And at the end of the day, again,
what we're looking for, we're looking with.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
You're seeking God. God is with it.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
So all I knew was with all of the pushing
and all of the pulling that whatever I found this
wasn't it either. You know the principles of the program
that they celebrate in the twelfth step, the principle for
this step is perseverance, which I always thought was odd.
I didn't understand why you got perseverance at the end
of the ten step after you had done that.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
But I can tell you that perseverance is a drinker. Well,
that just set me up for the next crisis. You know,
I could persevere through.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
Anything because there would be another crisis, and I needed
the gunpowder to do that, and so.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
It set me up. Well. But now I don't have
the alcohol.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
I don't have any alcohol, and I've gone through these
steps and I'm at the tenth step, and I want
to know what is it I'm supposed to do? What
changes do I have to make? How am I supposed
to cope it?
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Once again?
Speaker 2 (22:10):
You know, And clarity, by the way, only comes when
we're actually making the move. It's not like we're clairvoyant
and we can see this for you know what it is.
So when we make the move, it becomes clear. But perseverance,
that's trusting the process to God. Perseverance is trusting the
(22:31):
process to God.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
So that sort of catapults me back to the parachute thing.
We talk about the parachute thing all the time. And
here's the thing. If you're up in the plane and you're.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
Like me and they're telling me that I have to
believe this parachute is going to open, you know, I'm like, yes,
forget about you.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
I don't think it's going to open. I know what
I believe. I don't think this thing is going to
save me. On and on and on.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
But if you're in that plane and someone throws you
out of that plane and you're falling, guess how fast
you're going to believe in that parachute when you are
falling to the ground and the parachute is the only
thing between you and the ground that will save your life.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
You're like, oh, okay, okay, okay, I'm believe in the parachute.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
You know, when my son Oliver was sixteen, you know,
I was a single parent. His father disappeared long time
before then, and I said to him, what do you want,
you know, for your birthday's sixteenth birthday? And he said,
I want to be thrown out of a plane.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
I am a good parent, Okay.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
So I said, well, I'll check it out, and I did,
and I went to the flight school and.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
Sorry, god, I went to the flight school and they
said you have to be eighteen. And I thought I
didn't take care of that. I'd added to that.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
And I went to the store and I bought birthday
cards that say happy eighteen birthday, and I dressed him
up like he was eighteen. And he's following this whole thing.
He's like, Mommy, aren't they going to know it? And
they're not going to know if you don't say anything,
you know, And how many years am my sober?
Speaker 1 (23:51):
He's sixteen.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
I'm sober like eighteen years at that point, and I'm
still doing the same bullshit that I did eighteen years.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
I say this to say you know, one of the
things that.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
I love about Bill Wilson is how unbelievably fallible he
was then no matter how long he was sober and
what moniker he wore as the you know, as the
father of.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
AA, he made a million mistakes.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
During his sober time and he was always fallible. So
I tell you I was fallible. What anyway, they let
us in and they had to sit down, and they
had to sit down, and uh, they played a video.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
Of some guy, a zen guy who would tell you
what kind of a zen stake you were going to
be in. After they you know, threw out of the plane.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
And you know, I'm thinking, this is great, he's going
to get his birthday present.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
I don't think ahead. I'm just going. And so they
bring him up in the plane.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
And I'm down at the ground and all of a
sudden see him and he's thrown out of the plane,
and I'm thinking of myself, what am I going to
tell my parents that they're not grandparents anymore?
Speaker 1 (24:56):
And he never comes back. That was a tandem jump.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
And what I didn't know about the tandem jump is
that they first of all, they talked shit.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
In his ear the whole time. They just talked stuff
in his zar the whole time, and they filmed it.
They filmed it.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
There were two other fly you know, jumpers out there,
and they filmed him coming down and he got down
to the bottom of the ground and I went to
the bathroom and threw up.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
You know.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
He was absolutely fine. He thought it was the greatest
thing that he ever done, that he had ever done.
And by the way, just an FYI not aa, but
when you jump out of a plane, you would spend
four thousand calories. So anybody who wants to lose a
little weight and start jumping.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
So now it's different.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
First of all, you know, by the way, he says,
that was one of the best things that I ever
did for him was having him, you know, allowing him
to jump out of that plane. You know, I think
that I had to be committed. But that's I do
things differently now. Now I have a spiritual plan. Now
I don't have my plan. Now I don't even have
Albert's plan. Now I have a spiritual plan. And how
(25:56):
I got that plan.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
It was made for me. We don't get it, we
don't create it, we don't wait for it. You wake
up one day and you have this plan that's made
for you.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
And I got that after I finished the steps, and
I see that the action steps in this program are ten, eleven,
and twelve, that they're not the maintenance they're the action steps.
They are the steps where I'm taking everything that I've
learned from steps one through nine and I'm putting them
into action. You know, there is no chapter in the
big book marked into thinking. There's only a chapter marked
(26:27):
into action. And so that's what ten and eleven and
twelve are, you know.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
And this that's why it's a day at a time.
That's why they are the one day at a time steps.
So step ten in the beginning.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
Was different, you know, in early sobriety, they told me,
Albert told me. Albert told me, you know, when you
go to sleep at night, you know, you go over
your day, and when you wake up in the morning,
you go through your day to come and you know,
and you ask to be you know, don't be this
and don't be that, and all those things and.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Your spot check stuff during the day.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
So when I was doing the things in the morning
and doing the things in the night, after about six months,
I got bored. And if I thought, if I'm bored.
God's bored. That's how I felt about it. And I thought,
no longer necessary to do those lists at night and
the list of the morning. And by the way, I
know guys in this program who are thirty forty years sober.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
Who still write that list out who still do that
list every day, and it's.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
Necessary for them for some reason, some spirited me, somewhaever
me said, I need to find another way.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
There is a woman out there. She's in California. She's remarkable.
If you've never heard, her name is Lilah r. She's
a little Irish girl.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Her father actually founded you know, she founded AA and
Ireland and so she's like a long time She's amazing.
Saved my life many times. I mean I wanted to
kiss the ground that she was walking on, and Lilah
taught me how to do this so that I could.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
Live a day at a time without having to have
a drink to stand it.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
And so instead of doing this sort of litany of
things from the day in the morning and litten it
things at day to night, I would get into bed
at night and I had a list of questions.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
These were my questions I wanted to ask.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
God, and I'd say things like should I be married
to this asshole? And I would say things like are
they paying me enough money at work?
Speaker 1 (28:14):
And then I would say are they paying me too.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
Much money at work? And then I would say do
you think they know I don't work?
Speaker 1 (28:22):
You know?
Speaker 2 (28:22):
These were the questions that I would ask God, you know,
how do I make amends to my mother?
Speaker 1 (28:30):
How do I learn how to talk to my son
who's not one of us?
Speaker 2 (28:34):
And when I would I think I would do like
ten twelve questions at night, And when I was done
saying out loud the questions to God, I would say, Okay,
I am going to sleep now, but I need these
answers as soon as possible, so when I wake up,
I want the answers.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
And then I would go to sleep, and I have
to tell you I slept like a baby. Now.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
The thing is, when I would wake up in the morning,
the first thing that happened is I didn't remember the questions.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
That's the first ding.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
But I absolutely knew that every one of those questions
had been answered because I was as calm as calm
could be, and I wasn't worried about anything. And I
showed up at work the next day, and I worked
and I got my paycheck, and I stayed married, and
I spoke to my mother and I made my amends.
All the things that were on my questions were clearly
(29:19):
answered because every morning I would wake up calm, and
every night I would go to sleep and I would
ask those questions before I went to sleep. I don't
know if that works for anybody it but worked for
me for years and years and years.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
Now my step ten is very different again. It's about
being sober and being happy about it.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
I'm done with my daily inventories. Don't do what I say,
don't do what I do, Do what you want to do.
Talk it over with your sponsor. I don't spend my
day checking myself out. I'm too busy living a sober life.
That's what I get from this. And when I do
do something wrong, I get a gut punch and I
(30:02):
have an instant stomach ache, and I take a couple
of tons and I make an amends. And that is
how I live my life today.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
So the gut punch I have to tell you.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
And by the way, I don't care what you do.
I've said this before. I don't care if you take
an inventory. I don't care if you don't take an inventory.
Maybe your sponsor cares what you do. Maybe if you
have a mediocre sponsor, they're gonna care what you do.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
If you have a.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
Good sponsor, they're not They're not gonna care what you do.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
They just want you to do something. Just do something.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
And by the way, if you can't figure out what
you have to do, who better to ask than God?
Speaker 1 (30:40):
I need to tell you who's going to give you
the best answer?
Speaker 2 (30:43):
So you know, this gut punch that says, and I
feel like I'm losing it, you know, and I have
to make an amends, and I have to pause, and
I have to ask for help, and I talk to God.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
I talk to God incessantly all the time.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
You know, there's something about pain in the twelve and
twelve in the ten step, but it talks about you know,
pain is the touchstone to all spiritual progress. Not so
much for me because I'm an alcoholic that likes pain.
That what bothered me. I never had a measuring stick.
Give me as much, Give me everything you got, give
me everything you got.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
I'm gonna be okay. At the end of the day.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
Nothing is going to bring me down, doesn't matter, doesn't matter,
and so pain was not my spiritual touchstone. Who knew
that love would turn out to be my spiritual touchstone.
That the kind of love that I eventually got in
my life lost and then God again, that's my spiritual touchstone.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
That's how I.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
Learned to grow is from the amount of love that
is in my life and from my own comprehension and
my own description.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
And we've talked about this of what love is. That's
the only thing that's going to move me today. I
really don't care about anything else. I don't So yesterday
was a day. That's what I'm going to say. It
was a day.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
We'll talk about the se eleven Steve. We're gonna hear
much hard about it, but I will say that September
the eighth, nineteen ninety three, my husband, who had AIDS,
who was terminal, decided that he'd been He was sick
and tired of being sick and tired. And while we
were all manipulating his life and figuring out what we
were going to do with the rest of the time
that we didn't have, got up in the middle of
(32:28):
the nine he went to the West Forest Street subway station,
jumped in front of the subway and.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
He was killed instantly.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
And you know, it never fails that it rains on
the day that he died.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
It's not a sad day for me. It's the day before.
Speaker 2 (32:46):
It's when I go over my actions the night before
and how I screamed and yelled at him with sajerosity
that he dropped to his knees.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
I mean, I know the power of what I can do.
And I'm sober. I'm sober. You know, I'm short one
day of five years of sobriety.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
And I know that because he died on my fifth anniversary,
my fifth sober anniversary. And so I think about the
day before. I run the whole day down. I ask
God for forgiveness. I ask him for forgiveness, and I
talk a lot about love, and I talk out loud.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
And I've done this for years and years and gears
and years, and I talk about the amount of love
that we had, and I talk about all of these wonderful.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
Things that you know, didn't end the way I wanted
them to end, but what I got in the interim
was unbelievable. So I did that day, and then the
next day was my anniversary. And I've said this before,
I always have a choice on my anniversary. I can
choose to cry some more. I can choose to take
a look at what we had and see what I
(33:47):
lost and boohoo and woe is me? Or I can
choose to turn around and say, how the hell did
you get thirty seven years of continuous sobriety. You know,
isn't that a miracle? You should have been dead at forty.
So my significant other decided to take matters into his
own hands. Not a good idea, not a good idea,
and I think God agreed with him because he made
(34:08):
him sick so he couldn't figure out how to f
it make this plan work.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
But we were going to do this.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
Two day thing, so I'd be whisked away and I
wouldn't have to think about any of this stuff. But
I knew better, and I knew that God knew better.
There was no way that I was going to be
taken away from something that was so viscerally spiritual than
these two days that I needed.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
So the first thing that happened on is that it
started to rain. It just started to ring, But it
didn't rain like a little.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
For some reason, Delray got like this torrential hurricane rain
to the point where my ceiling started to cave in
from the rain coming from the apartment on top of me,
and it was coming in up the floors, and I'm
just looking at him, saying, really, this is the sign
this year that I shouldn't go out.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
Like literally, it was torrential rain, and the feeling of
powerlessness was unbelievable. And the powerlessness this was, you.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
Know, over the rain, over the rain coming in, not powerlessness.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
Over what I was feeling and what I was thinking.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
And by the way, you know, I wasn't that powerless,
because powerlessness, by the way, is not helplessness.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
I went to the grocery store and I got.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
All the fixes for good mats of ballsup and don't
think I didn't make them a big pot of super
bring it to them in the rain, in all the garbage.
Because I wanted to do a good deed that day
for somebody who's a good person.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
That's all I wanted.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
And the next day I did another good deed for
somebody who was a good person.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
And that's how I wound up spending my anniversary. You know,
the whole point here. The whole point here is to
understand that we are powerless.
Speaker 2 (35:36):
We are powerless, and Step ten is our way of
consistently and constantly getting undisturbed and finding some of the power.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
We need to find the power because I'm powerless. Where
I find it, It's coming up in the eleventh step.
I mean, that's what.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
It tells us, right, And I will tell you that
inside everybody in here, and I feel this with all
my heart.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
Inside everybody here is.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
This unbelievably beautiful spiritual being.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
That you don't believe is in there. You don't think
it's in there, But hang around with some old timers.
They can spot your mile away because.
Speaker 2 (36:13):
All you've done with these first nine steps, and now
the tenth step is peel away the garbage. So all
that's left is the beauty. And that's where God resides.
God is not residing in a hefty bag full of garbage.
God resides within us when we've gotten rid of everything,
and that spiritual being comes out.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
You know how it comes out.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
You show up in a meeting, You hug somebody, you
say hello, You ask somebody, I have a seat here?
Speaker 1 (36:39):
You need a seat?
Speaker 2 (36:40):
You know? The first un I think The first unconditional
act of love I did was so ridiculous, was giving
up my seat on the subway to somebody.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
Take my seat. Take my seat. You know you're all
here for the same thing.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
But I'm telling you, I know this that inside of
each and every one of us is this is incredibly.
Speaker 1 (36:57):
Beautiful, spiritual person and you're coming out. You're all coming out,
depending on what where you are in these steps. That's
what you get at the end of the day. That's
the endgame here.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
So once we've stripped away this garbage and we've allowed
ourselves to remain in this tenth step, and we decide
that we're going to take a pause before you know,
we do anything terrible, so you don't have to make
amends like me.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
We make it under decision. We make a.
Speaker 2 (37:25):
Decision to accept the parachute's purpose, the purpose of the parachute.
I'm not telling you to pray to a parachute, by
the way, I am telling you to take a look.
Speaker 1 (37:35):
At the purpose of the power of the parachute.
Speaker 2 (37:38):
That we're in a free fall and the only thing
that is going to help us is the God of
our understanding. The only thing that's going to save us
is God?
Speaker 1 (37:46):
And I have to.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
Pause long enough pause, pause, pause, to say, this is
not up to me?
Speaker 1 (37:54):
Where is God in all of this?
Speaker 2 (37:56):
Now?
Speaker 1 (37:56):
I have to make an amends today to this same
lovely person as I was rude.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
And the other thing is is that when you're rude
to somebody or you say something that hurts their feelings,
they don't all actually come out and tell you.
Speaker 1 (38:07):
Were rude and you hurt my feelings.
Speaker 2 (38:08):
All they do is stare at you and you have
to figure it out all by yourself. And so I
was stared at for a very long time today until
I figured out that maybe I had said something that
was slightly inappropriate and had to make an amends for it.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
And you know what happened after I made the amends.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
Nothing, nothing, We went on the way we were before.
Speaker 1 (38:31):
Nothing.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
I gave up nothing, nothing, And all I did was
make a little bit more room for God inside of me.
I gave this away and God moved in. So the
last thing that I want to touch on, because we're
pretty much out of.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
Time, is that, you know, I sponsor a lot of people.
I do, and I'd love it. You know, usually between
fifteen and twenty at any given time, and don't all
call me on the same day. So I'm happy about that.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
And I usually just have one newcomer who's running the
steps and the rest of old timer's you know who
call and you know something else is going on.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
But I remember them all. I remember them all when.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
They came in, and they all had the same question
at some point or another.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
They all turned around and say they asked two things.
What's the right way to pray?
Speaker 2 (39:14):
And how do you find God? And so the first
one was easy. I learned that early is that there's
no way to pray that's personal, that's between you and
your God, whatever you say. When they took my son
for those eighteen months, I remember distinctly driving into a
cornfield in Captain, North Carolina, because I don't really think
(39:35):
there's anything other than cornfield in North Carolina. And I
drove out to this cornfield and I'm standing there screaming
at the top of my lungs. F you God, if
you God, for doing what you did to me. And
I went back to the house after a couple of
hours of that, and I called Albert and I told
him what I said, and he said, well, that's good.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
At Easter, you're praying.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
But the second question, how do you find God, is
a little more complicated because I don't think the question is.
Speaker 1 (40:06):
How do you find God. I think it's when do
you find God?
Speaker 2 (40:11):
And I think me, I think that we don't find
God until we absolutely positively have to otherwise we think
we're going to die, and that's when we allow God
to come in.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
So next week we're going to talk about the eleventh step.
Speaker 2 (40:25):
About you know, when I found God, and you'll hear
the rest of this story. It's been a phenomenal forty
eight hours. I want to tell you it could have
been crappy, but it was great. And since I'm on tape,
I want to thank Jana because on my anniversary, at
some on Goodly Son ain't up yet time of day,
she sent me a note that thanked me for being
(40:46):
an AA, thanked me for God. And I thought, this
is the first thing that I'm hearing in my day.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
I must be living a very good life. It's a
good day to be so overseeing. And I tell you
Hi, everybody. I'm Karen.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
I'm an alcoholic, and I'm wearing shoes that are like
two inches taller than they normally are.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
So my biggest fear is not talking to you about
the tent step. It's staying on my feet, Braden. But
two sober.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Women told me they like my toes, so it's a
it's a win win, that's all I want to say.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
It's a win win. So I want to talk about
little something before we get to the ten step.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
And that's really a deflection because I'm bad at the
tenth step.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Period. I don't know how to say it.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Oh my sobriety date September the eighth, nineteen eighty eight, yesterday,
thirty seven.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
I keep looking over my shoulder.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Trying to figure out who that actually is. Anyway, So
a couple of things. First of all, who was here
last week?
Speaker 1 (00:55):
There's a lot of people here tonight, a lot of
people here, and you know.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
What, you really look good to me, and I need
to see you tonight. So I'm glad i'm here. I'm
gonna say some things will probably ruffle you know, but
again I'm gonna tell you that I'm not here to
tell you how to do the steps.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
I'm not here to show you how to do the
twelve steps. I don't actually care how you do the
twelve steps. That's between you and your sponsor.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
You know, I'm here to talk to you about what
happens after you do each of the steps, and what
happens to me.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
What happened to me after I did each of these.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
So you know, one of the things that I heard
coming in from some of the old timers, and I'm
happy to tell you that at thirty seven years I'm
now the old timer, so I can say something completely
different and you'll have to believe that too. That the
first thing you hear is steps ten, eleven, and twelve
are the maintenance steps. And that's the biggest funch of
bully you will ever see. First of all, who's here
(01:45):
has ever.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Been on a diet? Come on, guys, you have been
on diets. It is not just the women who wants
to be maintenance. I don't want to be maintenance. I
want to keep going until I look good.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
So so anyway, they're not the maintenance steps.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
They're the growing up steps. They're the growth steps we
grow up. These are the steps that we do a
day to time.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
These are the one day at a time Steps of
Alcoholics Anonymous, because the steps is what AA is, and
that's why we have.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
To focus on the steps, because here's the point.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
You know, I wrote a lot of stuff down because
I'm bad at the tenth steps. I had to make
sure that I figured out, you know, how to do
it again before I got up here. But the point
of the twelve steps, you know, they're designed so that
we not only stay sober, but that we're happy about it.
That's a big difference, because I think it's impossible to
(02:37):
stay sober and be miserable for any length of time,
any extended time.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
We don't know how to do that. And you know,
I know, you know what I'm talking about. You can
be technically sober and you're like.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
A time bomb waiting to go off, you know, And
you can't really explain that to anybody on the outside.
But we know what that feels like. And I don't
understand it because I'm going to AA and I'm doing
this and I'm doing that, and I want to explode
when you have to go back to the steps.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
You have to go back to the steps.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
And you have to go back to the steps for
the simple reason is that there's a gift waiting for us.
And you might think it's the gift of sobriety, but
it isn't. It's the gift of being.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Sober and being happy about being sober.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
That's a big difference than just being sober, because personally,
I feel like I'm gonna be sober and I'm gonna
be miserable, or I'm gonna be you know, resentful, or
I'm gonna be manipulative.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
Or I'm gonna be any of the things that were
on that list to get rid of. I might as
well be drinking, because.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
It went down much better with a shot at Jack Daniels,
and it does sober. So being sober and happy, you
know they of course they tell us, you know, happy,
joyous and free. But the real gift this is, and
I have to think about this, the real gift of
sobriety is the freedom from.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Thinking about drinking. It is the freedom from thinking about drinking.
The only problem is that I don't stop thinking.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
I may not be thinking about drinking, but I'm thinking
about a whole mess of other stuff.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
Because the longer I'm sober, the.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
More I think I'm supposed to know things, and of
course any of the Alzheimer's.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
There's several of these guys out here, and take me
out today. I can tell you. They will tell you that.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
The longer you're sober, the less you know, because your
humility has kicked into high gear. You've been catapulted and
rocketed to the fourth dimension. And all it tells you
is that I am now ready to learn many more
things than I ever thought I was ready to learn before.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
That's all that it is.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
So I know very little, and that's a good thing,
because one thing I do.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
Know is that knowledge changes nothing.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
Just because I know something doesn't mean anything because I'm powerless.
As long as I continue to believe that I'm powerless,
knowledge does me.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
No good at all. So what do I do?
Speaker 2 (04:55):
Well? I do what everybody else does. I overthink? You know,
how else can I get around this?
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Overthink? Because our instincts tell me that.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
My instincts telled me that the longer I stare at
something like, really stare at this problem, and the more
I think about it and I water it like a
weed and I get to it, the worse it's going
to get. I'm no danger of finding a solution. And
the reason I'm in no danger of finding a solution
is because when we enter the spiritual world, it's not
like our problems are solved. They've just kind of slipped away.
(05:28):
I no longer care about them. I don't care what
you're doing. I don't care where I've been. I don't
even care where you've been. I don't care.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
About any of that. So I thought about this as well.
Try making a deal with yourself. This is very hard
to do.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
I had a great sponsor that you know, you know,
I didn't like.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
So this is the thing he used to say to me.
He'd say, you know, Albert would say, you know, Karen,
try making a deal with yourself. And this is the deal.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
I want you to trade five facts about how you
think you should be live being your life five facts.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Trade them for one hour of an unplanned life. I
have no idea.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
Think about that, five things that you think are absolutely
true to have a great life, trade them in for
one hour a day of I have no idea. It
is the most freeing experiment you will ever do, because
for that one hour, your mind goes all.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Over the place.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
You know, all over the place. Do you ever work
with a newcomer and you tell them these things.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
And they go, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that, I
know that butt. You know, I know that. I already
heard that.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
I heard that from my fourth sponsor, and you're my
seventeenth you know, I know, I know, I know. But
and then you know as well as I do, that
whatever comes after the butt is never good news.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
Never good news, because it always separates us.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
It separates us from the herd, it separates us from
our fellows, it separates us from God.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
So whatever comes after the butt not good.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
So I sail this to say that, you know, when
I got to the step and we're gonna get there,
it was really hard for me.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
It's still hard for me. It's so hard for me that.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
I had to do one today and I had to
make an amends today. That's how hard it was today,
you know. And I'm thinking to myself, I'm really tired
of doing these. I should be done, I should be finished.
But here's the problem with step ten for me. For me,
step ten is the look before you leap step, look
before you leap, before you say that nasty thing, you know,
(07:31):
before you point out somebody else's flaws, before you steal
something for the deli that's not yours. Before you're inappropriate
with your friend's spouse.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
You got a look before.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
So the problem with that is I didn't know anything
about it then when I got sober, and I know
almost nothing about it now that I'm sober all these years.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
So what that tells me is that I need help.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
I need a lot of help, because I am a
leaper before. And not only am I a leaper before
I look. I have to tell you I don't care
where I'm leaping from. I will leap, I will land,
and I will figure it out, because that's the kind
of alcoholic I am. And when they told me that
you have to turn this around and you have to
actually look before you leap, well that went against every
(08:19):
grain in my body, because if you're an alcoholic like me,
no matter what you did to me, I'm going to
figure a way out. That's why I never had a bottom.
You know, they stressed you have to have a bottom.
Every time I got close to a bottom, I just
lowered the measure. I lowered the measure.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
I cannot remember a single time. That's not true. There
are two times in my life when.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
I broke, but all the other times after I leapt
from wherever I was.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
How do you think I got married? Five times? I
leapt right to the altar. I had no idea how
I got there. I was talking to my.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Best friend, she know me since I'm seventeen years old,
and we were talking about the first time I got married,
and she came up to me and she said, what
are you doing? And I said, zero idea, no idea.
She said, then why are you doing it?
Speaker 1 (09:02):
I say, if it doesn't work out, I'll get a divorce.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
That's how I felt on my wedding day in a
white gown.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
Bla bla da da. So so here's the thing I'm
going on about, how it is a look before you leap,
and the translation of that, you know, is pause. You
got a pause for a minute. So I'm on the
phone today talking about this step.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
With my significant other, who can be a royal pain,
and he is saying to me, well, what are you
gonna say. I said, I'm going to talk about look
before you leap, and he's going, you gotta say pause,
and in my head shut up. He says pause and
I say shut up, and he says pause, and I.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Say shut up. I have six more years than you
shut up. But here's the bottom line. None of those
words came out of my head, nothing came out of
my mouth. They sat up there.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
He never knew anything except if he listens to this tape,
he's gonna know.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
You can delete this part, right. I just want to
make sure that my home life remains intact at this points.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
So the reality is is that they call this the
pause step simply because you have to ask yourself the question,
and I know the answer. Do I want to go
for the rest of my life making amends? The answer
is I would rather die. I do not want to
make another amends, No matter how spiritual I get, and
how loving I get, and how perfect the situation is.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
I do not want to make amends to you. It
has never sat well for me. So I have to
figure it out. I can do one of two things.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
I cannot make an amends, or I can act differently
so that I don't do something that is going to
cause me to make an amends. So let me tell
you the latter is much easier than the former, much
easier to amend my behavior. And we learned how to
do that in six, seven, eight and nine. We learned
how to amend our behavior simply so that I don't.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
Have to go around. It's a sober alcoholic making amends
to you. So how do I know? Hess Here's the
other thing.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
Anybody will tell me that, you know, I don't pay
attention to a lot of things. I don't pay attention
to directions. I don't pay attention to people's names. I'm
not good at that stuff. My head is filled with
all this other information, and so the stuff that I
think I can get from other people, because first of all,
I just want to be honest with you. I don't
know anything about directions. I'm from New York City. My
mother used to say to me, if you get lost,
(11:25):
keep making left hand turns and you'll be back home.
So I don't really know anything about directions and a GPS.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
I mean they're good if they, you know, work. And
so what I'm trying to say is I always get
where I'm going. I'm here, are I?
Speaker 2 (11:41):
And so you have to think to yourself, if she
doesn't care about the directions, how does she get where
she's going?
Speaker 1 (11:47):
You just do? You just do. And that's pretty much
how this program works.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
Not calling anybody out, but I'm pretty sure he's in
this room tonight.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
That somebody who.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
Was talking at another meeting about having under two years
and couldn't find a sponsor and couldn't figure out how
to work the steps.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
But he'd been.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
Sober, you know, like sixteen eighteen months, couldn't figure out
how to work the steps because he couldn't find a sponsor.
And I turned around and I said, you're sixteen months sober.
You've worked the first step already. You know that you're
powerless over alcohol, and now because you can't get a sponsor,
you know how crappy your life can be without alcohol
without it. And so he looked up and I said,
(12:23):
you've already worked it, you know, keep going. So these
are the things that I don't pay attention to because
I don't care.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
That's the true I don't care. So how do I know.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
When my behavior has gone to the place where I'm
going to have to make an amends?
Speaker 1 (12:35):
This is very important for me to pay attention to.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
So what I'm happy to say is that now, after
all of these years, I get a gut punch when
I misbehaved.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
You know, I was a Jack Daniels drinker. And the
reason I was a Jack Daniel's drinker. Is because of
the burn.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
And if we have any other Jack Daniel drinkers, you
know here tonight, you'll understand what I'm saying was because
of the burn.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
And you know, when I get this burn.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
In the pit of my stomach, you know this gut
punch that says you have misbehaved, You have just said
something that offended somebody, You have just done something that
has hurt somebody's feelings. You know, something like that is
you know, you just run over somebody. I was a
steamroller when I was drinking. There were us streets were
literally literally littered with the people that I had run over.
(13:18):
And so I have to pay attention, you know, And
I'm much ting be funny. But in my purse, this person,
every other person I have, I have a bottle of tombs.
And the reason I have a bottle of Tums is
because I get a stomach ache. If I've hurt your
feelings and I get that gut punch, the next thing
is a stomach ache.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
You know, where's to say that in the big book.
We're just gonna walk around.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
With the stomach ache for the rest of your life,
you know it may have something to be, something to
do with being Jewish.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
I'm not sure, but you.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
Know, because we carry all of our guilds in our stomach,
so I'm not sure, but I can tell you that
when I get that gut punch, sometimes it can feel
like fear. Sometimes it can feel like fear. And I'm
going to tell you right now that is unacceptable to me.
After thirty seven years of sobriety, I have no intention
of ever for living with fear again, and so I
(14:03):
take care of it.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
I have to take care of it.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
You know. I will not allow myself to be governed
by fear ever again. And if you're alcoholic like me,
every decision I made was governed by fear.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
And the truth is that is how I got married
five times.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
I got married five times out of fear each at
every time.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
So I have no intention of being afraid anymore.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
So the twelve and twelve, and you know, I'm not
like Maddie, who's much more literate than I am.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
He reads and I don't you know, but the twelve
and twelve tells us. And it's my favorite.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Part, you know, because this is the partment shows what
idiots we are. It says, when we're resturbed, no matter
what the cause, there's something wrong with us.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
Now, if you work with a newcomer, they go, what's
wrong with me?
Speaker 2 (14:44):
Well, I'm pissed at this person, or I don't like that,
or I hate my job, or my husband's cheating. You know,
they count on the fact that we're not reading the
black parts. What's wrong with us? We're disturbed. That's the
entirety of the end. It doesn't matter why we're disturbed.
It just matters that we are disturbed. And the thing is,
(15:07):
the only question I have to ask from that is
what are the things I need to do to become undisturbed?
Speaker 1 (15:15):
And the answer is simple.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
I've got to go back to steps one, two and three.
Get out of step ten, go back to one, two
and three, go back to that third step that says
I'm going to make a decision, go back to that
second step that says I'm not in control here, and
go back to that first step that says I'm powerless
over alcohol when I'm drinking it, and my life is
unmanageable when I'm not. And I know that because I
haven't had a drink in how many years? And my
(15:39):
life is currently unmanageable. We have to go back to
steps one, two, and three. Do you want to call them
maintenance steps?
Speaker 1 (15:45):
I don't. I call them fixer steps. They're the fixers.
But the answer is not always so clear.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
And when I think that I have the answer, I
always remember that my first thought, frankly, is for entertainment
purposes only, you know, whenever I come up with on
my first thought is going to be really like, not fabulous.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
And the other thing is is that I fight for it.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
You know, it may look like I did something wrong,
but I think we should examine this for other causes
and for other people who might have done, you know,
something else wrong or you know the translation of that.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
So we have time to let my bullshit sink in.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
You know, that's it, Because I'm a leaper before I look,
I don't question it. I don't confer with you, I
don't check it out with the people around me.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
I thought about the story.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
I was, you know, in Manhattan, and my husband had
been killed and my two kids, you know, his son
and my son.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
We were living a really bizarre life. And I still
had my.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Business, and I was still working every day, and my
company was on fifth Avenue, and you know, I.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
Take the subway home. And one day I took the
subway home.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
We were living in Brooklyn, by them, and as I'm walking,
I'm walking on the street with the brownstones. I see
everybody is gathered around this one brownstone. And I said,
what's going on? And I look up on the third
floor and they've pulled the black shade down. They've blacked
out the window because the cops are there and they
don't want to see.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
And you see what's going on.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
And I said to the person next to me, why
is the top window on the third floor blacked out?
Speaker 1 (17:12):
And she turned around and said to me, that window
is not blacked out. Those are flies.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
Somebody died in there and nobody found them. You know
what I did. I applied to law school. I said,
I'm getting out of here. I'm moving out of New York.
I'm taking my kid with me. I am not going
to consult with my son's father. I am going. And
I did walked out, walked out of New York City,
(17:39):
took a flight to North Carolina. By the way, I
am such a good New York I didn't know where
North Carolina was on the mat, but I knew how
to get to LaGuardia, so took the flight to LaGuardia
with my son.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
Never consulted. What happened. What happen. I wound up in court.
I wound up in court for three.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Years while my son's father, who was one of us untreated,
won his court case. And because I took my kid
and I lost my son for eighteen months, just lost it.
Speaker 1 (18:11):
That must be for me. Could you tell them to
take a message and I'll get back to them in
a half hour and that would work.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
But the thing is this, by the time I did that,
it's important. I was sober for seven years. I'd done
the steps, I had a sponsor, I was working with others,
I went to meetings, and I still ignored the essence
of the tenth step.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
I never paused. I went ahead and I did whatever
I wanted to do.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
So that pretty much catapulted me into a place. Because
I wound up in North Carolina by myself. They took
my son, they brought him back. I'm there by myself,
So what else was supposed to do?
Speaker 1 (18:52):
I got married. I mean, what else was I supposed
to do? I didn't like being alone down there. I
didn't know anybody down there, and I, you know, I
married a guy. I'm sure he's a nice guy. I
have no idea.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
I just know I have no idea for the simple
reason is that I couldn't understand anything he said. You know,
he was from North Carolina. I couldn't understand it. I
couldn't identify the food on the plates. I couldn't figure
out anything.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
I said.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
This is really not the place for me, you know so,
but I stayed seven years, you know, because that's what we.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
Do as alcoholics. We're not giving up. I'm going to
figure a way out.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
After I leapt from wherever I was, apparently LaGuardia. After
I left, I'm going to make this thing work. So
I want to push ahead a little bit and talk
to you about you know, what I have to do now,
because it's different, you know I am, and I've said
this before. The only thing that's going to stop me,
the only thing that's going to actually put this tenth
(19:47):
step in my life, is to continue to pray the
way that I pray.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
I pray for clarity.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Please God, let me see this as it really is.
Let me see her as she really is. Let me
se see this job for how it really is. I
want to see it clearly. That's the entirety of the prayer.
And then I asked for the courage if there is
anything to do anything about, and there may not be,
(20:14):
but I asked for the courage.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Do I stay, do I go? You know whatever that
looks like. But that was hard for me to accept.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
I had a sponsor for maybe do that prayer over
and over again, but that was hard for.
Speaker 1 (20:25):
Me to accept because it wasn't my plan. It was
somebody else's plan.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
And remember my sponsor, Albert, was the one who told
me the only thing you have to do to stay
sober in his realm was to be willing.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
To stay sober somebody else's way, and you know whose
way is.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
That is what I asked, and he said anyone but yours,
and it turned out to be his. And so I
had to be willing to stay sober Albert's way.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
You know, I tried, I really did.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
I tried and tried and tried, but I never got
my answers from him. He was always like, you know,
like kind of a Yoda of something whatever. I never
got my answers from him.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
My skin was always tight.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
I pushed and I pushed and I pushed for answers
to something I didn't even know what it was. It's
important to know that this is how we roll as alcoholics.
We are seeking all the time and we can't figure
out what it is. And at the end of the day, again,
what we're looking for, we're looking with.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
You're seeking God. God is with it.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
So all I knew was with all of the pushing
and all of the pulling that whatever I found this
wasn't it either. You know the principles of the program
that they celebrate in the twelfth step, the principle for
this step is perseverance, which I always thought was odd.
I didn't understand why you got perseverance at the end
of the ten step after you had done that.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
But I can tell you that perseverance is a drinker. Well,
that just set me up for the next crisis. You know,
I could persevere through.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
Anything because there would be another crisis, and I needed
the gunpowder to do that, and so.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
It set me up. Well. But now I don't have
the alcohol.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
I don't have any alcohol, and I've gone through these
steps and I'm at the tenth step, and I want
to know what is it I'm supposed to do? What
changes do I have to make? How am I supposed
to cope it?
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Once again?
Speaker 2 (22:10):
You know, And clarity, by the way, only comes when
we're actually making the move. It's not like we're clairvoyant
and we can see this for you know what it is.
So when we make the move, it becomes clear. But perseverance,
that's trusting the process to God. Perseverance is trusting the
(22:31):
process to God.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
So that sort of catapults me back to the parachute thing.
We talk about the parachute thing all the time. And
here's the thing. If you're up in the plane and you're.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
Like me and they're telling me that I have to
believe this parachute is going to open, you know, I'm like, yes,
forget about you.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
I don't think it's going to open. I know what
I believe. I don't think this thing is going to
save me. On and on and on.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
But if you're in that plane and someone throws you
out of that plane and you're falling, guess how fast
you're going to believe in that parachute when you are
falling to the ground and the parachute is the only
thing between you and the ground that will save your life.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
You're like, oh, okay, okay, okay, I'm believe in the parachute.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
You know, when my son Oliver was sixteen, you know,
I was a single parent. His father disappeared long time
before then, and I said to him, what do you want,
you know, for your birthday's sixteenth birthday? And he said,
I want to be thrown out of a plane.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
I am a good parent, Okay.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
So I said, well, I'll check it out, and I did,
and I went to the flight school and.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
Sorry, god, I went to the flight school and they
said you have to be eighteen. And I thought I
didn't take care of that. I'd added to that.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
And I went to the store and I bought birthday
cards that say happy eighteen birthday, and I dressed him
up like he was eighteen. And he's following this whole thing.
He's like, Mommy, aren't they going to know it? And
they're not going to know if you don't say anything,
you know, And how many years am my sober?
Speaker 1 (23:51):
He's sixteen.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
I'm sober like eighteen years at that point, and I'm
still doing the same bullshit that I did eighteen years.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
I say this to say you know, one of the
things that.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
I love about Bill Wilson is how unbelievably fallible he
was then no matter how long he was sober and
what moniker he wore as the you know, as the
father of.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
AA, he made a million mistakes.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
During his sober time and he was always fallible. So
I tell you I was fallible. What anyway, they let
us in and they had to sit down, and they
had to sit down, and uh, they played a video.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
Of some guy, a zen guy who would tell you
what kind of a zen stake you were going to
be in. After they you know, threw out of the plane.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
And you know, I'm thinking, this is great, he's going
to get his birthday present.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
I don't think ahead. I'm just going. And so they
bring him up in the plane.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
And I'm down at the ground and all of a
sudden see him and he's thrown out of the plane,
and I'm thinking of myself, what am I going to
tell my parents that they're not grandparents anymore?
Speaker 1 (24:56):
And he never comes back. That was a tandem jump.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
And what I didn't know about the tandem jump is
that they first of all, they talked shit.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
In his ear the whole time. They just talked stuff
in his zar the whole time, and they filmed it.
They filmed it.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
There were two other fly you know, jumpers out there,
and they filmed him coming down and he got down
to the bottom of the ground and I went to
the bathroom and threw up.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
You know.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
He was absolutely fine. He thought it was the greatest
thing that he ever done, that he had ever done.
And by the way, just an FYI not aa, but
when you jump out of a plane, you would spend
four thousand calories. So anybody who wants to lose a
little weight and start jumping.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
So now it's different.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
First of all, you know, by the way, he says,
that was one of the best things that I ever
did for him was having him, you know, allowing him
to jump out of that plane. You know, I think
that I had to be committed. But that's I do
things differently now. Now I have a spiritual plan. Now
I don't have my plan. Now I don't even have
Albert's plan. Now I have a spiritual plan. And how
(25:56):
I got that plan.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
It was made for me. We don't get it, we
don't create it, we don't wait for it. You wake
up one day and you have this plan that's made
for you.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
And I got that after I finished the steps, and
I see that the action steps in this program are ten, eleven,
and twelve, that they're not the maintenance they're the action steps.
They are the steps where I'm taking everything that I've
learned from steps one through nine and I'm putting them
into action. You know, there is no chapter in the
big book marked into thinking. There's only a chapter marked
(26:27):
into action. And so that's what ten and eleven and
twelve are, you know.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
And this that's why it's a day at a time.
That's why they are the one day at a time steps.
So step ten in the beginning.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
Was different, you know, in early sobriety, they told me,
Albert told me. Albert told me, you know, when you
go to sleep at night, you know, you go over
your day, and when you wake up in the morning,
you go through your day to come and you know,
and you ask to be you know, don't be this
and don't be that, and all those things and.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Your spot check stuff during the day.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
So when I was doing the things in the morning
and doing the things in the night, after about six months,
I got bored. And if I thought, if I'm bored.
God's bored. That's how I felt about it. And I thought,
no longer necessary to do those lists at night and
the list of the morning. And by the way, I
know guys in this program who are thirty forty years sober.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
Who still write that list out who still do that
list every day, and it's.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
Necessary for them for some reason, some spirited me, somewhaever
me said, I need to find another way.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
There is a woman out there. She's in California. She's remarkable.
If you've never heard, her name is Lilah r. She's
a little Irish girl.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Her father actually founded you know, she founded AA and
Ireland and so she's like a long time She's amazing.
Saved my life many times. I mean I wanted to
kiss the ground that she was walking on, and Lilah
taught me how to do this so that I could.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
Live a day at a time without having to have
a drink to stand it.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
And so instead of doing this sort of litany of
things from the day in the morning and litten it
things at day to night, I would get into bed
at night and I had a list of questions.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
These were my questions I wanted to ask.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
God, and I'd say things like should I be married
to this asshole? And I would say things like are
they paying me enough money at work?
Speaker 1 (28:14):
And then I would say are they paying me too.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
Much money at work? And then I would say do
you think they know I don't work?
Speaker 1 (28:22):
You know?
Speaker 2 (28:22):
These were the questions that I would ask God, you know,
how do I make amends to my mother?
Speaker 1 (28:30):
How do I learn how to talk to my son
who's not one of us?
Speaker 2 (28:34):
And when I would I think I would do like
ten twelve questions at night, And when I was done
saying out loud the questions to God, I would say, Okay,
I am going to sleep now, but I need these
answers as soon as possible, so when I wake up,
I want the answers.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
And then I would go to sleep, and I have
to tell you I slept like a baby. Now.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
The thing is, when I would wake up in the morning,
the first thing that happened is I didn't remember the questions.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
That's the first ding.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
But I absolutely knew that every one of those questions
had been answered because I was as calm as calm
could be, and I wasn't worried about anything. And I
showed up at work the next day, and I worked
and I got my paycheck, and I stayed married, and
I spoke to my mother and I made my amends.
All the things that were on my questions were clearly
(29:19):
answered because every morning I would wake up calm, and
every night I would go to sleep and I would
ask those questions before I went to sleep. I don't
know if that works for anybody it but worked for
me for years and years and years.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
Now my step ten is very different again. It's about
being sober and being happy about it.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
I'm done with my daily inventories. Don't do what I say,
don't do what I do, Do what you want to do.
Talk it over with your sponsor. I don't spend my
day checking myself out. I'm too busy living a sober life.
That's what I get from this. And when I do
do something wrong, I get a gut punch and I
(30:02):
have an instant stomach ache, and I take a couple
of tons and I make an amends. And that is
how I live my life today.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
So the gut punch I have to tell you.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
And by the way, I don't care what you do.
I've said this before. I don't care if you take
an inventory. I don't care if you don't take an inventory.
Maybe your sponsor cares what you do. Maybe if you
have a mediocre sponsor, they're gonna care what you do.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
If you have a.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
Good sponsor, they're not They're not gonna care what you do.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
They just want you to do something. Just do something.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
And by the way, if you can't figure out what
you have to do, who better to ask than God?
Speaker 1 (30:40):
I need to tell you who's going to give you
the best answer?
Speaker 2 (30:43):
So you know, this gut punch that says, and I
feel like I'm losing it, you know, and I have
to make an amends, and I have to pause, and
I have to ask for help, and I talk to God.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
I talk to God incessantly all the time.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
You know, there's something about pain in the twelve and
twelve in the ten step, but it talks about you know,
pain is the touchstone to all spiritual progress. Not so
much for me because I'm an alcoholic that likes pain.
That what bothered me. I never had a measuring stick.
Give me as much, Give me everything you got, give
me everything you got.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
I'm gonna be okay. At the end of the day.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
Nothing is going to bring me down, doesn't matter, doesn't matter,
and so pain was not my spiritual touchstone. Who knew
that love would turn out to be my spiritual touchstone.
That the kind of love that I eventually got in
my life lost and then God again, that's my spiritual touchstone.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
That's how I.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
Learned to grow is from the amount of love that
is in my life and from my own comprehension and
my own description.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
And we've talked about this of what love is. That's
the only thing that's going to move me today. I
really don't care about anything else. I don't So yesterday
was a day. That's what I'm going to say. It
was a day.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
We'll talk about the se eleven Steve. We're gonna hear
much hard about it, but I will say that September
the eighth, nineteen ninety three, my husband, who had AIDS,
who was terminal, decided that he'd been He was sick
and tired of being sick and tired. And while we
were all manipulating his life and figuring out what we
were going to do with the rest of the time
that we didn't have, got up in the middle of
(32:28):
the nine he went to the West Forest Street subway station,
jumped in front of the subway and.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
He was killed instantly.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
And you know, it never fails that it rains on
the day that he died.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
It's not a sad day for me. It's the day before.
Speaker 2 (32:46):
It's when I go over my actions the night before
and how I screamed and yelled at him with sajerosity
that he dropped to his knees.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
I mean, I know the power of what I can do.
And I'm sober. I'm sober. You know, I'm short one
day of five years of sobriety.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
And I know that because he died on my fifth anniversary,
my fifth sober anniversary. And so I think about the
day before. I run the whole day down. I ask
God for forgiveness. I ask him for forgiveness, and I
talk a lot about love, and I talk out loud.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
And I've done this for years and years and gears
and years, and I talk about the amount of love
that we had, and I talk about all of these wonderful.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
Things that you know, didn't end the way I wanted
them to end, but what I got in the interim
was unbelievable. So I did that day, and then the
next day was my anniversary. And I've said this before,
I always have a choice on my anniversary. I can
choose to cry some more. I can choose to take
a look at what we had and see what I
(33:47):
lost and boohoo and woe is me? Or I can
choose to turn around and say, how the hell did
you get thirty seven years of continuous sobriety. You know,
isn't that a miracle? You should have been dead at forty.
So my significant other decided to take matters into his
own hands. Not a good idea, not a good idea,
and I think God agreed with him because he made
(34:08):
him sick so he couldn't figure out how to f
it make this plan work.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
But we were going to do this.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
Two day thing, so I'd be whisked away and I
wouldn't have to think about any of this stuff. But
I knew better, and I knew that God knew better.
There was no way that I was going to be
taken away from something that was so viscerally spiritual than
these two days that I needed.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
So the first thing that happened on is that it
started to rain. It just started to ring, But it
didn't rain like a little.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
For some reason, Delray got like this torrential hurricane rain
to the point where my ceiling started to cave in
from the rain coming from the apartment on top of me,
and it was coming in up the floors, and I'm
just looking at him, saying, really, this is the sign
this year that I shouldn't go out.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
Like literally, it was torrential rain, and the feeling of
powerlessness was unbelievable. And the powerlessness this was, you.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
Know, over the rain, over the rain coming in, not powerlessness.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
Over what I was feeling and what I was thinking.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
And by the way, you know, I wasn't that powerless,
because powerlessness, by the way, is not helplessness.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
I went to the grocery store and I got.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
All the fixes for good mats of ballsup and don't
think I didn't make them a big pot of super
bring it to them in the rain, in all the garbage.
Because I wanted to do a good deed that day
for somebody who's a good person.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
That's all I wanted.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
And the next day I did another good deed for
somebody who was a good person.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
And that's how I wound up spending my anniversary. You know,
the whole point here. The whole point here is to
understand that we are powerless.
Speaker 2 (35:36):
We are powerless, and Step ten is our way of
consistently and constantly getting undisturbed and finding some of the power.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
We need to find the power because I'm powerless. Where
I find it, It's coming up in the eleventh step.
I mean, that's what.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
It tells us, right, And I will tell you that
inside everybody in here, and I feel this with all
my heart.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
Inside everybody here is.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
This unbelievably beautiful spiritual being.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
That you don't believe is in there. You don't think
it's in there, But hang around with some old timers.
They can spot your mile away because.
Speaker 2 (36:13):
All you've done with these first nine steps, and now
the tenth step is peel away the garbage. So all
that's left is the beauty. And that's where God resides.
God is not residing in a hefty bag full of garbage.
God resides within us when we've gotten rid of everything,
and that spiritual being comes out.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
You know how it comes out.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
You show up in a meeting, You hug somebody, you
say hello, You ask somebody, I have a seat here?
Speaker 1 (36:39):
You need a seat?
Speaker 2 (36:40):
You know? The first un I think The first unconditional
act of love I did was so ridiculous, was giving
up my seat on the subway to somebody.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
Take my seat. Take my seat. You know you're all
here for the same thing.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
But I'm telling you, I know this that inside of
each and every one of us is this is incredibly.
Speaker 1 (36:57):
Beautiful, spiritual person and you're coming out. You're all coming out,
depending on what where you are in these steps. That's
what you get at the end of the day. That's
the endgame here.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
So once we've stripped away this garbage and we've allowed
ourselves to remain in this tenth step, and we decide
that we're going to take a pause before you know,
we do anything terrible, so you don't have to make
amends like me.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
We make it under decision. We make a.
Speaker 2 (37:25):
Decision to accept the parachute's purpose, the purpose of the parachute.
I'm not telling you to pray to a parachute, by
the way, I am telling you to take a look.
Speaker 1 (37:35):
At the purpose of the power of the parachute.
Speaker 2 (37:38):
That we're in a free fall and the only thing
that is going to help us is the God of
our understanding. The only thing that's going to save us
is God?
Speaker 1 (37:46):
And I have to.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
Pause long enough pause, pause, pause, to say, this is
not up to me?
Speaker 1 (37:54):
Where is God in all of this?
Speaker 2 (37:56):
Now?
Speaker 1 (37:56):
I have to make an amends today to this same
lovely person as I was rude.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
And the other thing is is that when you're rude
to somebody or you say something that hurts their feelings,
they don't all actually come out and tell you.
Speaker 1 (38:07):
Were rude and you hurt my feelings.
Speaker 2 (38:08):
All they do is stare at you and you have
to figure it out all by yourself. And so I
was stared at for a very long time today until
I figured out that maybe I had said something that
was slightly inappropriate and had to make an amends for it.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
And you know what happened after I made the amends.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
Nothing, nothing, We went on the way we were before.
Speaker 1 (38:31):
Nothing.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
I gave up nothing, nothing, And all I did was
make a little bit more room for God inside of me.
I gave this away and God moved in. So the
last thing that I want to touch on, because we're
pretty much out of.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
Time, is that, you know, I sponsor a lot of people.
I do, and I'd love it. You know, usually between
fifteen and twenty at any given time, and don't all
call me on the same day. So I'm happy about that.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
And I usually just have one newcomer who's running the
steps and the rest of old timer's you know who
call and you know something else is going on.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
But I remember them all. I remember them all when.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
They came in, and they all had the same question
at some point or another.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
They all turned around and say they asked two things.
What's the right way to pray?
Speaker 2 (39:14):
And how do you find God? And so the first
one was easy. I learned that early is that there's
no way to pray that's personal, that's between you and
your God, whatever you say. When they took my son
for those eighteen months, I remember distinctly driving into a
cornfield in Captain, North Carolina, because I don't really think
(39:35):
there's anything other than cornfield in North Carolina. And I
drove out to this cornfield and I'm standing there screaming
at the top of my lungs. F you God, if
you God, for doing what you did to me. And
I went back to the house after a couple of
hours of that, and I called Albert and I told
him what I said, and he said, well, that's good.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
At Easter, you're praying.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
But the second question, how do you find God, is
a little more complicated because I don't think the question is.
Speaker 1 (40:06):
How do you find God. I think it's when do
you find God?
Speaker 2 (40:11):
And I think me, I think that we don't find
God until we absolutely positively have to otherwise we think
we're going to die, and that's when we allow God
to come in.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
So next week we're going to talk about the eleventh step.
Speaker 2 (40:25):
About you know, when I found God, and you'll hear
the rest of this story. It's been a phenomenal forty
eight hours. I want to tell you it could have
been crappy, but it was great. And since I'm on tape,
I want to thank Jana because on my anniversary, at
some on Goodly Son ain't up yet time of day,
she sent me a note that thanked me for being
(40:46):
an AA, thanked me for God. And I thought, this
is the first thing that I'm hearing in my day.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
I must be living a very good life. It's a
good day to be so overseeing. And I tell you
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