How Al-Anon uses the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous

Yes. Thank you. Well, it's me, and I made it. Monday, it was touch and go. My doctor, yesterday told me that I could come today.

So I'm here with the approval of my physician, but he says I'm gonna have to rest. So if I just nod off, y'all know what's happening. My name is Mary Pearl and I'm an alanine who's happy, joyous, and free. And I'm so glad to in a place where you can say the word big book without having to hide or catch a lot of flack for it, you know. Never did understand that.

I wanna talk about how I have learned through the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous. Now, I'm not saying that everybody should do it. Everybody, I thought there will, but I wanna share with you my experience about how I make the big book mine. You know, I want it. This doesn't mean that I don't read and study and use almon comfort the privilege here.

I most certainly do. But I found that the big book not only enhanced my Al Anon program, but it changed my life. It, it was what I learned about alcoholism. Now I don't know about y'all, but, 1 year after I was in the program, my husband came down with cancer. And man, I've read everything I could get my hands on about that disease because that was gonna affect my life too, whatever affected him like that.

And I wanted to know everything there was to know about it, and then it hit me when I was talking to my sponsor one day. You know, I've lived in alcoholism for years and didn't know a thing about alcoholism. You know, I didn't think my husband was an alcoholic. I know he was a drunk but I didn't know he was an alcoholic. You know, he wasn't an under the bridge.

Wanna know? God knows I kept him out from under the bridge. You know, that was not going to happen. And I thought that, you know, like, a lot of people have preconceived ideas of what an alcoholic is supposed to look like or what the disease is supposed to be about, and I didn't have a clue. And I was hurt I heard over and over and over and over and on that alcoholism is a family disease.

Well, if alcoholism is a family disease, why wouldn't you study the textbook on alcoholism? Because obviously, you have it too, you know. Now, Now, I can't remember the first time I read the big book and I thought, God, he needs to do this and this and this and this and this, and I think that's probably why some people are against, especially, you know, without a little guidance, someone reading the book. But just like elbow? You know?

It's like, did you get that? Did you get that? And I know I remember one of the first things that I saw in the big booth, it really turned me on where it says sobriety is not enough. I was like, that's it. You owe me more than just being sober.

You owe me a lot. You know? And then I went on and I read a little further and I found out there were some things that I was gonna have to do too, but I received my first big book on my birthday over 23 years ago. And, it was during this time that my sponsor's husband, who some of y'all have met over the years as he's going around with this other gentleman and they have shared about the big boob all over the world. And so I learned when in their living room sitting there listening to him Joe and Charlie talk about the big book.

Back and forth, back and forth, and asking questions, and reading, and going back and back. And what I found was after a period of time, I read the book. I saw me on those pages instead of my husband. It finally had sunk in that this was not just for the alcoholic, but this was the family disease of alcoholism. And other than the allergy to alcohol, I don't say that there's very much difference in us because what do you get when you sober up an alcoholic?

You get a screamer Al Anon. I mean, that's the deal. You know, their problems are gonna be the same as our problem. They're gonna have to learn to live life on life's terms without drinking, and I'm gonna have to learn to live life on life's terms without using the alcoholic as an excuse for everything, because, you know, anything that went wrong in my life was his fault. I was always lily white, pure, self righteous, you know, arrogant, smug, self righteous, and dominating, I think it says in our literature, you know.

And that was true. That was true. But I didn't understand it. Now, my home group, we have a big book study every Monday night at 6:30. It was done through the the tradition, each one of us can do whatever we wanna do, the autonomy.

And so we've been having this big book study since not January 1989, and I get real fickle because when we have, some people in the other fellowship will come and join us. And when they come in there, it scares them. It scares them to go into a group of people who know more about the book than they do, you know, but then also we tell them from the get go that in this meeting, you don't share as an alcoholic. You share from the Al Anon standpoint and so we don't share. We don't talk about the alcoholic.

We read from the book and then we go, now, how do you relate to that? You know, what does that say to you? And, and when they try to get off on drinking, we say, hey, no drinking in here. We don't relate about drinking. Let's do thinking.

You talk about drunk thinking, now we can go there. You know, we're the specialists in that. In our ODOT on July 21st, it says there's no rules or regulation, no management control. Nobody says you must do this or you may not do that. That is government by principles, and that's what we do.

So that what binds us together is a common problem. You know, if we hadn't had alcoholism in our lives, we wouldn't all be here tonight and so what binds us together is the solution, the common solution and a lot of our stuff in our outline literature came straight out of the big book, word for word. And our welcome, although you may not like all of us, you'll come to learn us in a very special way, the way we already love you, talk with each other, reading things out. This is direct quote from the big book of Alcoholics and Honor. And if you don't believe it, read it, and you'll find it.

I'm not gonna tell you where either. Now, to me, the people that I've met who are really against us doing this haven't studied it themselves or haven't done it from the standpoint of how do I relate to the book. How do I and, and I love it. The book even addresses this. It says, there's a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance, and that principle is content prior to investigation.

You know, that's one of my favorite sayings from the book. I have people I sponsored like this. I had this little little girl in Canada and, you know, that that's pretty remote out in Ontario. She lives out, not like y'all, in the boonies, you know, so, you know, I mean, not knocking Amarillo, but, you know, y'all are way out here. And coming in, you know, I'm thinking, what the hell's out here?

You know, I'm looking and I'm looking in the plane and then I see, oh, well, there's a nightclub, there's somebody's joint. I saw that coming in. And then I found another so and so's place, and I said, they got drugs in this town. I can tell that. And if there's drugs in this town, there's craziest to match, and that's it.

But this little old girl, she's up there in Canada, and so she eats 3 or 4 things. And I tell her, I said, mommy, why don't you try something different? And she said, well, I don't like it. I said, have you ever tried it? She said, no.

I said, how do you know? I said, if you'd never had anything but an English bean, how the hell do you know you don't like green beans? I told that to a girl that I sponsored who didn't know how that was gonna be life after her one and only love of life too. You know? There's lots of others out there to try.

You know? But that's contempt prior to investigation when you know you don't like something even though you've never done it. You know, now, I've gotten into a lot of trouble because, you know, my drug of choice is adrenaline. That's what I learned in the book and, I'm an excitement junkie and so I'll do anything. You know, everybody says, you wanna do this?

You wanna do that? Oh, hell yeah. I've never done that before. Now, I have got a little bit of sanity in step 2. I haven't done bungee jumping yet, but there may come a day when I'll go right over the edge.

You know? Now, there's, learning how to live life on life's terms is what the book is all about, and I found myself on the pages of that book, And a lot of my friends in AA tell me that I'm just 1 6 pack short of being an alcoholic, but that's not true because beer is not my drug of choice, you know. I like vodka. Now, you know, why bother with beer? But just like with the they talked about the book, A Real Alcoholic.

Well, with the real alanine, the drug doesn't do for us what it does for other people. See, that's what makes an alcoholic. Alcohol does something different for an alcoholic. Here's what, alcoholics do something different for me. It's the person who drinks it is what does something for me, because that's exciting.

Have you ever noticed so much excitement around alcoholics? You never I mean, even though it's crazy and it's mad you know, I can remember one time, I was over at the vice president's house. We were at me, not the vice president of my company. Don't even go there. I think Vice says it all.

Anyway, now And we were all enjoying ourselves, I thought, and then I missed him. You know how that happens when you're at a party and there's alcohol and you miss him? And then I heard this strange little muted sound, and I look around, and he's inside the fireplace. He's got his head up the chimney, and he's saying there's all sorts of little spiders and things in here, and it's like, oh god. But, you know, I wouldn't trade those times or anything because that's when you have to be real creative.

You know? That really gets your juices flowing, you know. You gotta get them out of the fireplace where it doesn't look bad. So they say in the book for alcoholics that when it comes to alcohol, they are strangely insane. What they have makes them strangely insane when it comes to alcoholics.

I am strangely insane because I do really crazy things. You You know, we're at the Christmas party. It's again that time of the year. We're at the Christmas party at the country club, and, of course, you know, I was okay when he was, making, lewd comments. I was okay when he was crawling around flooring the table.

I was not okay when he was puking on a bush out in front of the country club. I mean, I was not okay. Now everybody there might have missed that except for the announcement. Okay, buddy. I have y'all can get out of bush.

Now, you know, a sane person would have gone on, got in the car, and left Instead of out there announcing for the entire the Kunku Cove parking lot that so and so is puking on a bush. So alcoholism is a family disease and I've been affected. You can tell. I am affected. And we adapted the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous for our recovery.

We changed only one word. In step 12 where it says, alcoholics, we say others. That's all. One little words always change. So we are affected by the same illness, and as far as, like, I have to start, I have the, addicted personality.

I'm obsessive compulsive. Is there ever too much of a good thing? I mean, really, you know, if it's feel good, good to you. Die on the spot for god's sake. Don't stop when you're tired, you know.

Wait till you can't function, you know, and they drag you out, you know. I love that, and I love the excitement in that. I love the tension. God knows you get attention when you're around a drunk, and I love being needed. That's some of the things that called me from the disease of alcoholism.

You know, he needed alcohol. I needed him to need me. There's a challenge there. Always been one up for the challenge. Don't tell me I can't do something.

My mama made that mistake a lot. Got in a lot of trouble. All her fault. If she hadn't said don't do that, I wouldn't had to do it. You know, I wouldn't have had to do a lot of that.

I remember one time I, mom, we lived, by the Arkansas River and, mama said, don't go out and play on the sandbar down at the river. Well, you know, there's little pockets of water around the sandbar that are very, very deep and it but there's a tremendous current and they won't let you swim in the river because people drowned all the time. But, you know, when you're a child and you're crazy, you're bulletproof, you know. And I hadn't even thought about going down to the sandbar, but once mother suggested that, I could hear it calling to me, you know? And so I got with a bunch of the boys in the neighborhood, and we went down to the sandbar.

It was wonderful down there. I mean, they had these little trees. We call them saplings, and you could pull them get 2 or 3 kids pull a tree over, and you get in the top of it, and they let it go. And you just slingshot. I mean, it's like almost like Peter Pan for about 3 seconds.

You don't fly along, and there's always a crash landing. But, damn, it's fun. And I broke my leg. And I told them I can't have a broke leg, not on the sandbar, so they drugged my body. Now this is very painful.

It just shows you the length that I'm willing to go in pain. I'm 14 years old, and I'm willing to suffer all this pain. The physical pain of being dragged a quarter of a mile and put under a tree. And then they went and told them I might fell out of the tree. But, see, it's acceptable to fall out of the tree in your backyard, not on the sandbar.

Yeah. So as it shows you, you know, there's a there's a little insanity running in here. Okay. And I also have this need to manage and control my environment. I need everything around me to be in its place and everything to have a place and I need all these little things going the way I want them to go so that I don't have to deal with my fears.

I don't have to deal with my feelings when I can control the environment around me. What we all know are powerless so you see I'm going to have problems right off, you know, because I'm not gonna be able to do that, but I never knew these were things that were wrong with me. I didn't have a clue there was anything wrong with the way I thought, the way I acted. Well, later on, I mean, you get thrown in jail. That's pretty good indicator.

Something's going wrong, but but I'm saying for the most part, it was always it was such a good plan. You know, we make plans and God gets hysterical. You know, you go, they're flying back there. You know? But see, that's where the alcohol we find is only a symptom of the disease for the alcoholic.

See, I thought if alcohol were removed from my husband, then I would be okay. Now today that doesn't make any more sense than I have a headache, would you take my aspirin? But that was how I lived, and, I mean, I lived for years thinking if he had quit drinking, then I would be okay because I did lots of crazy things. All he did was drink. Jay, he's pretty much a quiet little individual just over there drinking himself into oblivion, and I could not allow that to happen because if I allowed that to happen, he would get out of control.

In other words, he wasn't doing what I told him to do, and I had to stop that. I had to manage that, and I did a lot of things trying to manage the the disease of alcoholism. Lot of crazy things. But the book details us that we have to have if we're gonna get past it, if we're gonna get out of the disease, we're gonna have to have a complete and entire psychic change. Now how does that come about, and why do you even need it?

See, I didn't need it. He was the one that needed to change. Well, he changed. Guess what? It didn't help me.

Now that's not to say that our home I mean, we didn't have to worry about, you know, the hit and run episode. We didn't have to worry about the the sheriff or the attorney general people knocking on the front door so much anymore. But the feeling that I had on the inside, the fears, the frustration, the rage that I had on the inside, It did not help for him to get sober. So I was gonna have to have some help too, and the book tells us that there's very little hope for doing things differently without an a psychic change. You just can't do it without that change, and I was gonna need more than human power.

And that's what the book gives us. It tells us that that, you know, our life's out of control. Our life's unmanageable, you know, and no human power can do this for us, and that's my power, your power, no human power, but god could and would if he were sought, and I didn't like god. That was one of the things I had a lot of problems with when I first came in Al Anon. I did not wanna say the Lord's prayer.

I did not want to talk about God. I didn't like God. God didn't like me. He leave me alone. I'll leave him alone.

That was sort of how it was. Now I don't know if everybody could have obviously, we all come from a different place in that. But my deal was I had been raised in church, and I went to Sunday school, and I believed all the things that they told me, and then I watched my daddy die. 46 years ago yesterday, I watched my daddy die of a heart attack. And I knew that if God loved me, really loved me, like in the little song, we always sing, Jesus loves me.

Well, he didn't love me because he took the one person in the world that I could depend on, that I knew loved me, that I knew cared about me. I knew my mother did not like me, much less loved me. It was pretty obvious, you know, and to me it was as a child because I could not get my mother's approval, and approval meant love to me as a child. And so when I couldn't get approval, I did everything I could then to get this approval because I'll get attention whether I get approval or not. And so I turned my back on any type of spiritual belief or training at the age of 12.

And then as I went along my life, it's not that I didn't believe there was God. I just believe that I was one of those that God says she ain't gonna make it. And so I am not gonna make it anyway, so I might as well do whatever the hell I want to now. And that was my attitude about it. And I just didn't and every time something really bad I thought happened to me, I knew it was God getting me.

See, it just proved that bad opinion ahead of myself. Now the book says that each person has to make their own diagnosis as to whether they're an alcoholic or an alanine. You know, that's the reason we even tell people when they come to our meetings, come at least 6 times for you to decide whether you believe that you wanna do this. See, it's really a self diagnosis thing, and the common symptoms, you know, is that we need to control our environment, and that's because most of us live in self centered fear self centered fear. Trying to keep it all together.

Straighten up. What are people gonna think? You know, that self centered fear. What people gonna think about me when they see you out there puking on the bush? Forget about what people think when they hear me screaming because I'm not focusing on me.

I'm focusing on you, you know. There was, my sister did not understand the disease of alcoholism either, and the the irony to this is our grandfather died with wet brain from alcoholism. Grandma died of cirrhosis of the liver from alcoholism. My favorite uncle was shot in bed with another man's wife. He was drunk at the time.

Loved him. And, and I had 2 aunts that were practicing. My mother was the only one in her family that did not drink and she said she carried the bad seed. She was terrified of alcoholism because her father had physically, emotionally, and sexually abused her, and so she knew all these horror things about alcoholism, you know. So it wasn't that we didn't know about alcoholism, but you don't recognize it, you know.

You just don't. And and like I say, I had to keep this big image up that I'm okay. I've gotta be okay regardless. Well, my sister, like I say, didn't understand alcoholism and so she bought J. D.

A wine making kit for Christmas 1 year. Now up to this point, we have a bourbon drinking man, you know, and now he's gonna be the little mind maker. And I read the direction. You know how we are. We get in there and we read the information.

We gotta check it all out, you know. They might not be intelligent enough to know how to do this. Well, you gotta be in control. I mean, if you're gonna have wine, by god, I'm gonna be the winemaker. And one of the things I noticed was it had to sit for a year before you drink it, and I got hysterical.

24 bottles of mine are gonna sit in this house for a year. It's still funny to think about it. So anyway, oh, yeah. He's gonna do that. No big deal.

Well, this girl I worked with was pregnant. We were gonna give her a baby shower, and all the guys were gonna be over her husband or at their house with her husband. And so we lived in one town and the shower was taking place in another. When I got in that evening from work, I went tearing in and we're changing clothes and getting ready to go. And JD was sitting there and had a big you know how we have big ice tea glasses?

I love it in the south. You know, when you go to a meal, you don't get those little dinky glasses. You know? North, they're real bad about that. You gotta ask for 6 of them.

You know? But here, we get a decent side of glass. I tell you, well, he had this glass and I looked over. I said, what's in the glass? He said, Kool Aid.

He said, great Kool Aid. I said, oh. Well, we get in there and get ready to go, and he said, honey, why don't you drive? I'm tired. And I said, okay.

So I'm driving along. All of a sudden, JD just sort of went down out of the seat and into the floorboard of the truck. And I said, what the hell is the matter with you? And he said, I don't know. Now I had never seen anyone struck drunk before.

I mean, he was fine. My minute next minute, he's not. And I said, you're drunk. And he goes, yeah. And I said, where did you get it?

And he said, it was the grape juice. I said, grape collate? He said, no. It's a bottle of wine. It's about maybe 2 months old.

Well, I didn't know how crazy that stuff was gonna make him. Yeah. And he just laying there, and I didn't know how crazy it was gonna make me either. And so I told him I said, straighten up. Now he is liquid, and he's going.

And I thought, this is not acceptable. Don't you embarrass me. I work with these people. And he said, I'll try. So he got himself up in the seat.

He opened the door. He got out and did a triple flip right into a cactus garden. Well, he's wallowing around there in the cactus, screaming and hollering. We've arrived. Well, I get my girlfriend and we go over to this other place, and I'm like, oh my god.

Oh my god. And left him with the man. I'm thinking they can take care of him. You know, they they can pick all those little things out, whatever needs to happen. And when I got back, they were all just looking at me.

And he was sitting there and they were playing cards. Now half of his cards were facing the wrong way. Now these are serious poker playing people. And I said to him, I said, what happened? They said, he is so drunk.

And I said, still? I mean, you know, I couldn't understand why it was taking so long. That that green line was bad. And so they said, well, what do he need? And what do what do earth people think people need?

You need coffee or food? So they took him. They were afraid to leave him there. I was getting a little testy. And they took him and off they went to go to McDonald's.

And they were gone for several hours because they lost him. This is before the days of the drive in, and so they had gone in and left him in the car, and they came back and he was gone. And they knew they could not come back without him. And some kids had him in the back of the car, drove off, took him, shot him. I don't know what happened there.

And then they finally brought him back related to this thing of the accident, you know, and and so they brought him home. Now his solution to this little episode was, we'll never go back there again. I said, really? But I was a crazy person. You know, I was the crazed person, you know, and I had to look honestly at me.

What was my part in that whole deal? You know, I should have not have taken him with me. When when he went down in the seat, I should have made a u-turn, been late going to this, but see, that never occurred to me. Good logical thinking did not occur to me because my thinking was very, very sick. He had to be with me.

It was very important for us to present a couple, but he had to be okay. And I'll give him all this. And and and what another year, we were going back to the country club. I see. I just never learned.

I kept going back, you know, doing the same thing. Thing. It's like something different all the time. And, I mean and he was drunk before we left the house. And I said to him, I was just, you know, you know, just chewing him out all the way there, and I rear into the car because I was telling him.

And because there was so much alcohol on him, I had to take the sobriety pills first. Anyway, we're only a few blocks from the country club, and all my friends are turning on seeing me out there. Just awful. You know, I had to identify here, and I saw the progression of all the disease from the time I was a little girl and the defects of character that I had as a child, and what would happen to me again. And I began to realize for all my life I mean, I'm a smart lady, you know.

I have a wonderful IQ. Doesn't show up, you know. And you say here, you know, what's a girl like you doing in a place like this? I said that, you know, I've I've been in places I wouldn't be called dead in. I'm telling you, I have gone into places, I mean, with, like, motorcycle gangs and stuff like that, you know, and, I mean, got in there and and come out, you know, and you you thought I mean, it's just bad.

And it's like, I I wasn't raised to be like this. What has happened here? What is happening here? You know? That self knowledge wasn't much help to me because I knew a lot of things, but I couldn't seem not to do.

It's like, if he gets drunk, I'm gonna be crazy. Now, I know that. And it's like when he would come home, there was a lot of violence in our home. Not from him, for me. Because, you see, my little boy gone out, then I told him not to, so he gotta whip his ass when he comes home.

It's just so simple. And I hated how I felt about me when I do things like that. And I'd say, I'm not gonna fight. I don't care what he says. I'm not gonna fight.

He'd come home, and the door would open. My mouth would too, you know. And then he'd look over at me and I'd say, I said, I'm not gonna fight. I'm not gonna fight. I'm not gonna fight.

I'm not gonna fight. I know there's nothing more. I'm not gonna fight. He said, hey, bitch. What's happening?

I'm not gonna fight. I'm not gonna fight. I'm not gonna fight. I'm not gonna fight. I'm not gonna fight.

Hey. That woman. Oh, see, we know what to do. You know? And then I think, yeah.

Now I'd straying on him, you know, and then pulverizing. You know, don't call me a bitch. Okay. I know that. Don't call me fat.

That hurts my feelings. Why? I'm fat. That's why. Don't you hate it when people call it like it is?

Blah. You know? That's a progression, you know, and thinking every time. This time it's gonna be different. But nothing's different till somebody's different, and there wasn't anything different.

I couldn't control my thinking. I couldn't control my mouth. I couldn't control my actions and my reactions. I mean, years years even before the the, what I mean, like, the very first job I was on, I smarted off one day to the president of the company. Didn't seem like a big deal.

I was on my lunch hour. I mean, my free time, you know, I was sitting there talking to a switchboard operator, and he said, don't you have something to do? And I said, not on my laptop. Well, that cost me my job. Not that day, not that week, but that's smart that call me, it cost me that job down the line because, you see, I was a smart aleck.

I was and I call myself quick wit. Ain't that funny how you put such a good label on a bad action, you know, so that you because I couldn't be wrong. When I got in down on the very first speaker that I ever heard was a lady from Oklahoma. Her name was Ramona. A lot of y'all may have been blessed enough to know her, and she talked about giving me her god.

That's what she'd say. She'd say, I give you my god, but if I did, then I take away the joy you find in your own. And I said, that's okay. Because I'm always going the easier, softer way. I wanna do it quick, fast.

You know, do something even if it's wrong. I didn't have a clue how to find my higher power, and I've been so close minded about all that god stuff all my years. And I just knew if god love me, he wouldn't have taken daddy away. Now, I didn't quit going to church because mama made me. It's real funny.

I, I've always been a night person up until this year and we live next to a railroad track. We always laughed about. We lived on the right side of the track. The train still knocks the the buildings apart no matter which side you live on. And, mama would come in and she'd say, get up.

It's time to get up. It's time to get ready. And I said, okay. Okay. And then I just lay there.

Now I've done this from the time I was in the 1st grade school. I'm the kind that, you know, she just throw me out of the bed, drag me down. I never ate breakfast and who could have time? I'd rather sleep because I don't wanna be up in the morning. And so this Sunday, mama's telling me, get out of bed, get out of bed.

She said, God's gonna get you one of these days. God's gonna get you. And so I'm laying there in bed, and all of a sudden I hit it, it. And I look up, and all these little cracks are forming over my head. See, we had real plaster.

And I jumped up out of bed, ran in the hall, and the ceiling of my room fell in. Okay. I'm going. I'm going. You know?

I heard things there, though, and it's, you're guilty if you think it, much less do it. Oh, well. You know? I knew I was a goner, so I just said, the heck with it. You know?

So a couple of times during the active drinking, JD would be the one that would say, why don't we go to church? Maybe that'll help me and I won't have to drink. And I'd do anything for him, so I'd go in into church, and I had some bad experiences there. The first church that, the sweet little Baptist ladies, God love them, they couldn't help me in who they were. I couldn't help being who I was, and JB and I had been living together, And this, they came out of the house one day, and little did they know we'd been married now for 2 months.

And they came out of the house, and they told me they didn't need me there in their church anymore because they didn't need sinners in their church. So, see, I took that as a personal rejection, not from the little late Baptist lady. I think that is a rejection from god. God didn't want me. And so then about 6, 7 years later, JD is making another approach to this time he's going to Methodist Church and he wants me to go.

And so I go to the church with him that morning and I have on a gabardine pantsuit, jacket, blouse, slacks, hose, heels, and they told me I couldn't come in. You can't wear a pant to church on Sunday morning. Now you can come Sunday night. And I said, well, who's the god that comes in on Sunday night? So there's that smart mouth again, you know, and it's like they embarrassed me.

So what do I do? My mouth comes out, you know, and it embarrassed me. So I said, I'm just never gonna go back. So, one more time, I took it as a rejection from god, not from the little old ladies there at the church and the old eyes have to be the old ideas have to be defeated. You have to get rid of an old idea before you can have a new idea.

And I found out you don't have to like something to accept it. Once you accept it, it loses its power over you. This commitment used to be a process. Like, if you think that I stand before you today, a shadow of my former self because I got up on board and said, gee, I think I'll lose a £100. That was not the case.

That was not the case. A year ago, yesterday, 45 years to the day daddy died, my sister died in my car with me, and I rushed her to the hospital, and, I had had her to the doctor that morning. And, as I was coming back, had gone to the drugstore to get her a prescription. And when I came out, she choked a couple of times, and then her chest quit moving. And it was in bumper to bumper traffic in front of the biggest mall we have in Arkansas.

And, I got her to the hospital, but she went without oxygen for 12 minutes. And they were able to revive Dorothy, but Dorothy is no longer with me. My sister, as I knew her, will never be the same. And the doctor told me I started shaking, and I couldn't quit shaking for days. And he said, I think you need to be seen, and they found out I have a heart condition.

So here was I in one hospital having a heart catheterization, and here's Dorothy in another one in ICU, and JD is going back and forth between the 2. Because you see, that's all the natural family I have. It's my sister and she, me. So, anyway, I found out that you can follow the doctor's orders and do what he tells you to do in order to get the results you want, and that's what I learned in the book. You don't have to like it to accept it.

You don't have you just, by God, do it. And so I did exactly what they told me to do. He told me I was borderline diabetic, and my sister's being diabetic is what put her in this condition she was in. She had kidney failure. So when the doctor told me I have a kidney infection this weekend, that got my attention y'all.

But, anyway, I went ahead and I did exactly what he said to do, and as a result, 2 weeks ago, my doctors released me. The heart doctor then said that I'm fine. I'm released for a year. I'm no longer a borderline diabetic. All of that has self corrected itself, and, I've been on high blood pressure medication since I was 30, and I'll no longer have high blood pressure if anything is low.

Can you believe it? So you see, I get the benefits because, like, did I wanna do it? No. Did I like doing it? No.

Did I enjoy killing myself? No. No. Did I cheat? No.

And that was the discipline that I learned from working the program. That was the discipline. That's acceptance. You have to accept the reality, and I had to accept the reality of the situation I was in and then do what I was told to do, and that's what the book is about. Accept the reality of alcoholism in your life.

Acceptance comes hard for me. I don't know about y'all, but it has to get my attention. For some, I, you know, I fight stuff and not realizing I'm fighting stuff. I don't know if y'all do this or not. I had my my best example of this in a long time is, I don't like cats.

I just start off with that. You know, I don't like cats. My sister had a cat one time. The gentleman told me I had to have 16 stitches. I don't trust cats.

Don't like cats. They're sneaky little birds. You know? Dog, at least, will bark, you know, before he attacks, but a cat just get you. And, I planted this beautiful flower bed.

I walked on it. You know how we are. We never do anything a little bit, And so I went out there and I planted this flower bed that goes across the whole front of my house, and it's a free form flower bed. And I, went to the quarry, and I got my rocks 1 at a time, picking them out. So they all be the same size.

I got these New Mexico white river rocks, and I got all these wonderful rocks. And I lined them up in this little free form out there across the quarry because I had made me a template so I'd know exactly where I'd have one rock too many and not one rock too few. And so I've got all my rocks lined up, took an entire day. Not that I'm a perfectionist or anything. Went back home and I put those in.

I put big elephant ears across the front of the house, and then around this border, I put hostas. I've irrigated hosta, a plane. I've irrigated a plane, you know. Now they're all perfect, and in between, there's 15 foot. Impatient.

Seventeen flats of impatient. Never do anything a little bit, you know, and guess what? Now you're gonna let them grow, and they get out there and they start coming up. Well, you water them. Now the instructions oh, the little thing of miracle grow.

I got miracle grow because you know those commercials where you see the other, I got a £50 a liter here. Here's miracle grow. I thought miracle grow is what I need. So it says once a month to water with miracle growth. Well, if once a month is good, once a week is better.

People are driving by and going, my God. Did you ever see impatience like those? They're 4 foot tall. It's this little rainbow blanket. I mean, it's it's really impressive.

I mean, it was gorgeous. You know, people taking pictures, you know, and all of this. I'm just just my flowers. I'm waiting for miracle girl people to come so I can do my endorsements, you know. Come on one day and there's a big hole in the middle of my impatience.

What happened? What happened here? Because do you realize it's screwed up now? Because there's no way you can plant more impatience that'll never be the same. I mean, it's just it's perfectionist running.

Just running. And so I'm hysterical out there trying to figure it out. J. D. Finally, one morning, he says, Come here.

I found what it is. I said, What is it? Because every day more impatients are coming down. I said, is it gophers? What is it?