The 29th Bellevue Anniversary in Bellevue, NE

Go, Texas. Hi. Happy birthday. This is wonderful. You're 29, aren't you?

Gosh. That's wonderful. You were 2 years old when I came into this program. Such a such a wonderful, wonderful thing. I'm so grateful that I was invited to come up here and, share my life with you.

Let me start by introducing myself. My name is Ellen Florence, and I'm a very grateful member of the Preston Al Anon Family Group in Big D. Hi. Hi. You know, when I first came into the program and I was following my sponsor everywhere, she talked in at an anniversary in Tyler, Texas, and there was a saying somewhere that actually is very much what has happened to me since I landed in Omaha.

And the saying was that there are no strangers here, only friends that we haven't met yet. And that's how I feel about you. That's how I feel. I wanna thank you, the the, committee for, again, inviting me and also for the wonderful basket of goodies that was in the room. I just love to munch late at night.

Our literature suggests that when we share, that we do so by sharing what it was like, what happened to change it, and what it is like today. My it was my life. In a nutshell, before the program, my life was filled with darkness and despair. What happened to change that is nothing short of a miracle, and what my life is like today is an adventure. Now some adventures take me to really, really, really neat places.

And other adventures, I would just give anything not to have to go through them. But I have the tools of this program that you people and the people that went before all of us handed down to us, and I can live life today rather than endure it. I was born in Hartford, Connecticut, the last of 2 children. I have one sister that is 4 years my senior. When I was 4 years old, we moved to a small town on Long Island.

It was a very small community, and everybody knew everybody in that little town. We moved into a very big home that had been convert converted to a 2 family dwelling prior to the turn of the last century. My mother, dad, sister, and I lived upstairs. My paternal grandmother, aunt, uncle, and 2 cousins lived downstairs. And I I'm sure that if I were to go back there and ask the people in that little town what their impression of us was, I'm sure that they would say, oh, you were a very, very happy, loving family, and maybe they were.

I don't know. From my earliest remembrances, I always felt as though I didn't belong. I just didn't fit. I always felt as though I was on the outside looking in, and I so desperately wanted to be part of and I felt apart from until I found you people. This is where I belong.

When I was, 6 years old, I entered parochial school, well, where I learned my very first conception of a deity, and I'm very happy to tell you today that I no longer have that conception. When I was 11 years old, I was told that my mother was terminally ill. And I just knew that if I prayed diligently enough, went to mass of communion, did all the 1st Fridays, did all the novenas, and all the rosaries, at the very last minute, God would heal her. And I knew that this was gonna happen. So as 18 months progressed and everybody became more remote more, morose.

I became more jubilant because I knew I had a secret. I knew that she was going to be healed. And on December no. January June 17, 1957, when she passed away, I could not have been more shocked than had she gone to the store and never come home. I was truly traumatized.

At that time, there were very wonderful people around me, meaning very well, telling me that, well, God needed her more in heaven. And I remember thinking, well, if that's the kind of a god you are, I don't want anything to do with you. You know, I need her and you took her. So I turned my back on God at that point in my life. I was 13 years old, and I swore that I would never never look at him again.

But, of course, in a Catholic Irish family, you don't let anybody else know that. So I began to play the game, and I truly believe that that is when the soul sickness that the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous talks about took hold in my life. I began playing the game. I need you to love me, and I will do anything for you to love me. And the game that we played in my family was if you love me, you will know what I want you to do, and then you will do it.

Now I never mastered that. I tried to figure out what people wanted me to do, and it it never worked. I was playing that game when I got here to you people, and I don't play that anymore. And I'm so grateful for that. When I was 16, a friend of mine called me one Saturday night and asked me if I would agree to go on a blind date the next day.

It seems as though there were a bunch of kids going to the beach, and her friend wanted to go. But her boyfriend didn't have a car. However, he had a brother that had a car but didn't have a girl. So will I be the girl that went with the guy that had the car so they could go? So I said, well, sure.

And I remember I met them at a central point in town. It was Lawrence Cedarhurst Fire Department, and it was 1 o'clock in the afternoon on April 29th, and I don't know what year. And this green Oldsmobile pulled up, and this man got out of the car. He was 18 years old. 6 foot tall, dark dark hair, eyes the color of these chairs.

And when he got out of that car, the ground shook. And I remember looking at him thinking, oh, I do believe one of these days I am gonna marry you. Nothing impulsive about me at all. So we went to the beach. Now I was the only one that had a bathing suit and a towel.

Apparently, they were not planning on going swimming. They said, oh, you can just leave that bathing suit in the car. And I remember thinking, oh my lord. What have I gotten myself into? So we went down and we went down to the boardwalk, and they made a right turn, and then they made another right turn turn into this dive this dive that was on the boardwalk.

And I remember walking in there. The smoke, you could have cut it with a knife. The neon lights were way across the room. You could barely see them, and it smelled funny in there. And I remember thinking to myself, this is a side of life that I have yet to experience.

And, of course, it was a bar. Now had I been a little more astute, a little more streetwise, I may have gotten the message, because the name of that bar is Dirty Dicks. Now I want you to know that I talked to a couple of years ago, and there was one guy that just ran up to see me afterward, and he said, you know, it's still there. Dirty dicks in Long Beach. They're still there.

Yes. Well, we started we started going out, and we did what kids did in those days. We got we got, we started going steady. And then when I got out of high school, I did not wanna go to school anymore. I had had enough of the Josephites, and I didn't just didn't wanna continue in education.

And in those days, you either went to college or you got married. That's what you did. So I decided, well, you know, we'll just go ahead and get married. So at at the old age of 19, of course, I knew everything. I knew how to settle every problem in the world when I was 19.

So we decided to get married, so we did. I started playing house. I would have the dinner on the table at 5 o'clock every night when he was due home, and the dinner would sit there until 7, 7:30. By 9 o'clock, I am pacing across the living room floor, wringing the skin right off my hands, begging this god that I want nothing to do with. Please don't take him out of my life.

He is the only person that loves me. Pardon me. And long about oh, I guess for the next 3 hours, I would press my nose against the icy windows of the January snow outside waiting for him to come home. And about 3 o'clock in the morning, I would see the car come down West Broadway and turn into the parking lot of the home that we lived in. Now there are a lot of 2 family dwellings up there in New York, and we lived on the second floor.

Now being newlyweds, we did not have enough funds to carpet the entire place. We had these beautiful hardwood floors. When I saw his car come in the driveway, I was so relieved. Oh, thank you god that you brought him home. And then he was trying to come up the stairs.

You know, he he had a trouble finding each step. And when he got to the 2nd floor landing, he couldn't seem to get the key in the door. So I remember opening the door. All I wanted to do was just take him in my arms and just tell him how much I love him and how how grateful I am I was that he was still alive. And I opened the door, and when I opened the door, something happened to me.

And I went from, oh, I can't I'm so grateful you're here, to trying to kill him with my bare hands. Now we would have these knock down, drag out fights on these beautiful hardwood floors directly over the bedroom of these people downstairs. I still owe them amends if I ever see them. Now the 12 and 12 says that the definition of insanity is meeting the same a familiar situation with the same action and expecting different results. Well, what did I know?

My family told me, honey, you can have anything in this world that you want, but you have to work for it. So I just knew that if I made his life miserable enough, he would shape up and come home. So this scene was repeated night after night, week after week, month after month, year after year, and I was just I was just hard at it. Suddenly, I started crying a lot, and I would go to my family and I would say, you know, he didn't come home at night. How come?

And they would say, well, you know, your mother was a wonderful woman and I never drank. It's what my father would say. And that makes sense to me in those days, but it doesn't make sense to me anymore because I know about the disease of alcoholism and I know about the family disease of alcoholism. I began to suffer from what I was to later discover in these rooms was an obsession. I would open my eyes in the morning and before my feet would hit the ground, I would wonder, is he going to go to work?

Is he if he does, will he stay there? If he doesn't stay there, where will he go? Who will he be with, and what are they going to be doing? Now these thoughts permeated my mind so that I was unable to perform the task that I was employed to do. So as a result, I was fired from job after job after job after job after job.

1 year, I had 18 w two forms to attach to my don't tell me this disease isn't catching. 18. So I I got a brilliant idea one time and I thought, well, you know, there's one job that I can never get fired from even though 15 years down the road, I would have given you anything if you fired me from it, and that was motherhood. So 9 months after I got this beautiful idea, our first precious, and I do mean precious, daughter was born. She was wonderful, and I just knew that if he wouldn't come home to me, surely he would come home to this precious baby girl.

Well, he didn't. So, you know, if one's good, 2's better. So 16 months later, our second precious little baby girl was born. And I do want you to know I love them dearly, but I will be grateful until the day I die that I got the message after 2. Because you see, I am not a quitter, and neither was my sister-in-law who whose husband did all of the drinking with my husband.

She has 14 children. Thank you god that I quit something. So after my my last child was born, I I cried all the time, and people said to me, you know, Ellen, you should really go and talk to somebody. So I did. And I walked in there, and I said to him, I'm not happy.

And he said, I can tell, but I have something that will make you happier. So at the ripe old age of 24, I found myself behind the locked doors of the psychiatric unit going through a series of electroshock therapy. You see, in those days, they didn't know about the family disease of alcoholism, and they didn't know what to do with people like you and me because it wasn't out in the open as it is today. I'm so glad that they don't do that today. When I came through that experience, I made a vow to myself, and for all of you Catholics in here, you know how serious that is.

I made a vow of myself that if I ever felt as though I was losing it again, that I would simply end my life, and I was very, very, very comfortable with that. Now he got the message after that little step in the hospital, and he came home. He came home and he drank at home. He was a very happy, loving, quiet little drunk. He would just sit in the chair and be absent, you know.

Now years in this program, I wondered why was it okay for him not to be there intellectually or emotionally or spiritually, but just have his body there. Why was that okay and it wasn't okay when he was out? And the answer was because the car was in the driveway, and all of the neighbors would think that we were a happy, loving family. It was what people thought was so astronomically important to me in those days. We knew what the problem in our marriage was after I came out of the hospital.

We had to buy a house, so we bought a house. And then 8 months later, the marriage was going down the tubes again, and we realized, well, the cure for this is to get a bigger house. So we sold that house. Does that sound familiar? We sold that house and moved into a bigger house.

Now after we moved into the second home, our children became quite ill physically as well as mentally and emotionally and spiritually. Those poor kids were born into insanity. They truly were. As I said, he was a very happy go lucky drunk, and I was crazy. I was the violent one in the home.

It was me. I'm not proud of it, but it that's the way it was. I remember during the stay of my youngest daughter for kidney problems, I met the mother of a little boy in the room across the hall. He was 8 years old and Diane was 5. And I walked in laden down with presents 1 evening to see my daughter, and Mary was sitting there.

And she said, you know, is your husband coming? And I said, my husband? My husband come to see his poor suffering child? My let me tell you about my husband. And she said, why don't you why don't we let the children play?

And why don't you and I go down and have a cup of coffee? Does that sound familiar? We went down and she bought me a cup of coffee, and I talked and she listened. I talked and she listened and she listened and she listened and she listened. Nobody had ever listened to me before.

Nobody. Not even when I paid them to. And Mary told me that she was a member of Al Anon and that her husband George was a sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous and would I like to come to a meeting. I told her that I knew Al Anon was a wonderful organization. I had never heard of you.

But I did not know a single solitary alcoholic in the entire world, and I did not feel as though I had the right to infringe upon the privacy of you poor suffering people. Now my maiden name is Casey, and I come from a long line of Irish people. Do you know what the Irish produce? They produce drunks, priests no. Drunks, clergy, and policemen in that order.

So Mary talked to me every day for 3 years. She fed me this program with an eye dropper, and I'm so grateful. If any of you are working with someone that cannot hear you cannot hear you, please don't let go of them because they may die. Mary did not let go of me, and I I'm so grateful to her for that. The only person that I could hear the word alcoholism from was the man I was married to.

Mary and George became our closest friends. And in 1973, we figured out what the real problem in the marriage was, and it was that god awful New York. Good lord. Anybody anybody would have to drink in order to live in New York. So we decided to move to Texas and buy a ranch.

So I remember I stayed behind to sell the house, and my husband went to I flew down to Dallas, and he would come home on the weekends. And this was December 1973. I was watching the Andy Williams Christmas show. That was my one hour of the entire year that I lived for because I could see a normal family. Everybody loved each other.

The dogs and the cats got along. The children got along. The in laws got along. Everybody just loved each other. So I'm sitting on my end of the sofa watching Andy Williams, and he's sitting on his end of the sofa, doing what was normal for an active alcoholic, and that is drinking.

And when he drank, he got gabby, And when he drank, he got amorous, and I'm trying to watch my show that I waited a whole year to see. So he starts invading my section of the sofa, and then I hear sweet nothings being whispered in my ear. And I suddenly found myself in the middle of the living room floor, and I heard me say to him, if you ever touch me again after you have been drinking, I'll kill you. I said it just that way. I did not know that I was going to say that.

I did not know that that's how it felt. But when I heard those words come out of my mouth, I knew that I was prepared to do it. I was prepared. And I uttered that prayer that I think all of us utter at one point or another before we get here, and I said, oh, god. Help us.

Get him out of here or there's gonna be bloodshed. He got insulted and and went down the hall, and I just turned around and sat down and started watching Good Old Andy again. And then about 10 minutes later, he started coming down the hall in a crooked fashion, and he sat down in the middle middle of the living room floor. And he said to me, Ellen, I think I'm an alcoholic and I need to go to AA. Now I cannot tell you what that did to me.

Those words went straight into my knower, and my knower said, yes. You are. And you need to go to Allen on Ellen. And then my thinker caught up with what my knower just said, and my thinker said, oh, no. He's not alcoholic.

Now what would people think? He's not alcoholic. He he just needs to cut down a little bit. And his said that we'll have more money and everything will be you know what? It didn't work because I knew I knew he was alcoholic.

And once you know, you cannot ever not know again. It's impossible. You can try to forget by running away into sex, drugs, food, whatever, but you can never go back to the place that you were at before you knew. And I knew that he was alcoholic. Of course, when he woke up the next morning, he was sober and he wasn't alcoholic anymore, you understand.

However, I knew, and I went to my very first Al Anon meeting in the basement of the church on December 23, 1973. I had no idea what you all were talking about. No idea. There are 2 things that I remember about that meeting. I remember the softness of the speaker's voice, and I remember her eyes, the peace, and the gentleness.

After the meeting, people were hugging each other, and they were laughing. You know, I hadn't laughed in years, and here I was amidst people that were laughing. And nobody had hugged me in years unless they wanted something. Nobody. I had no idea what you were all about, but I do know that when I went to that first meeting, something happened inside of me.

It was this it was truly a feeling, and I remember feeling it thinking, oh my lord. What is that? I can tell you today what that was. It was hope that I lost many years before I got here. I was truly hopeless when I found you people.

When I went when I got it got went to Al Anon, I attended 3 meetings every day for the first three and a half months that I was in this program. I know in AA they suggest that you go to 90 meetings in 90 days, and I tripled that. Why did I triple that? Because when I came in here, I was dying. And knowing what I know about me today about the condition I was in when I got here, I can tell you I would not have gone alone.

I would not have left this earth alone. Now not everybody comes into Al Anon in the same shape that I was in. When I tell you that I was dying, I can tell you exactly when I was dying from. Spiritual, mental, emotional, and somewhat from physical isolation as well as futility and despair. These are not things that they write on death certificates, but these are indeed states of being that precede directly acts such as murder and or suicide of which I was totally capable, and I am so grateful that I got to this program.

I'm so grateful. The person that I tell you about here tonight doesn't live here anymore. It's as though I'm telling you about an old acquaintance that I used to have at one point in my life. We moved we moved down here to Texas, and I got involved in Al Anon. About 11 months after I came into the program, my husband well, he stopped drinking on December 24, 1973 and dabbled and played with AA for a while.

But 11 months later, he found his own he hit his own bottom without drinking again. And he went into AA, and he has been a sober and active member of Alcoholics Anonymous since then, and he has just celebrated 27 years of sobriety. And that's his miracle. You know, I'm so happy for him. We are no longer married.

I do wanna let you know that neither AA nor Al Anon is in the marriage business. We are not here to create marriages. We are not here to destroy marriages. We are not here to save marriages. We are here to save lives, and my life and his life and the lives of my children were all saved.

The marriage wasn't, and that's just the way it was. I think the true miracles in this program are those that come in and stay married, and both grow together. I think that's wonderful, and I applaud that, and I would like to have had something like that in my life. When I came into this program, I found my sponsor at the Preston Al Anon Group. Oh my goodness.

And, she pointed me toward the steps, and I had to look at my life. And I had to say that I was truly powerless over alcohol, and I didn't understand why I had to say that because I had more of a problem with Coke, Coca Cola. You know? I mean, I didn't drink. I didn't drink.

He drank. So why am I powerless? I now understand today that I'm powerless over anything that people drink or smoke or snort or do whatever. I'm powerless over everything. Even with my children, I am power I was powerless the minute they cut that umbilical cord.

And you see, I didn't know that until I got here. And my life truly was unmanageable. I remember talking to my sponsor and saying, you know, there's nothing in this world that I want more than to be relieved of this rage. Now I was as I said, I was a rageaholic. I truly was.

I was the one who the children came in to see if I was home before they brought any people over, any kids over to play. I was the one that our 85 pound Labrador retriever took a look at, saw me come through the door, ran down the steps, and tried to crawl into the bed. That was me. I was the one that was screaming and carrying on and destroying everything. I was the one.

Am I proud of that? No. No. That was a symptom of the family disease that I was infected with. And when I got to this program, I wanted that removed.

And my sponsor said to me, Ellen, what happens to you when you go into these rages? And I said, well, it's kinda like I see the storm on the horizon and then it's gone, and then there's all this destruction in the middle. I think they call that temporary insanity in the court. And she said, well, the next time you feel that, what I want you to do is put everything down and go for a ride. So a couple of nights later, Wonder Boy came home.

And I call him Wonder Boy because I used to look at him and say, I wonder. Anyway, he picked something out of the middle living floor, and I just started feeling this gut clutch. You know? So I put everything down, and I got in the car, and I hit I 35. By the time I was on I 35, I am screaming and yelling and cursing and pounding the dashboard and just throwing the biggest hissy fit you can imagine.

But, you know, I did it differently. I did not endanger my family. I own I only endangered everybody else on the road, but I did it differently. You know? I did it differently.

They said to me, Ellen, if you're happy with the results in your life that you have today, don't change a thing. But if you want different results, you must do life differently. And I did that differently. I couldn't stop the hissy fit, but I did it differently. And she had told me, just go for a ride and don't turn around until you feel better.

So by the time I felt better, I was in Oklahoma. I passed the Davis the Arbuckle Mountains, and I was in Davis, Oklahoma, halfway to Kansas. But I thought better, and I remember I turned around and I went home. And I went in, and he kinda looked at me like, well, she finally slipped a cog. And I sat down and I said to him, I said, you know, I want you to know that I'm in this program and there is absolutely nothing in this world more important to me than recovering.

Not you, not the children, not the horse not the horse, not the pony, not the pig, or not the cow. See, we bought a ranch. We were coming down here to where was my brain? We were coming down to Texas to buy a ranch. I don't know what century I thought I was deplaning in, but it was very cosmopolitan when I got there.

And I I told him, you know, there's nothing more important. And I want you to know if I ever feel as though I'm getting upset again, I'm gonna leave. And I went to bed that night, and I slept the sleep of an infant. You know, I had victory for the very first time in my entire life over that rage. I am very grateful to tell you today that that rage has been completely removed from my life.

That alone is a miracle. That alone. I came in here and then I, step 2 says that we came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. I had a real problem with that because it had that word sanity in it. And, you know, people had told me on a regular basis that I didn't have both ores in the water.

And here I come into this program, and you all are telling me that too. And I remember saying to people, listen. I have papers to prove that I'm sane. They let me out. Where were yours?

I am not insane. And somebody invited me to go to the dictionary and look the word up, which I did, and I found the definition to be sound thinking. And I realized at that time that the actions or the excuse me. The reactions that I was engaging in were not those of a sound a person who was thinking very soundly. And that brought me to step 3 where it said that we came no.

What's step 3? Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of god as we understood him. And when I got to step 3, I didn't understand anything. I didn't understand how to do it. How do you do step 3?

I would go to people and say, how do you do it? And they said, well, you just turn it over. And I would say, how do you turn it over? And they would say, well, you let go. Well, how do you let go?

Well, you just turn it over. I mean, I I couldn't get anybody to tell me. How do I do this first step? And I found this prayer that says, my god, I offer myself to thee to build with me and to do with me as thou wilt. Release me from the bondage of self that I may better do thy will.

Take away my difficulties so that victory over them will bear witness to those I would help of your power, your love, and your way of life. May I do thy will always. As I got on my knees with that prayer, I saw me in my mind's eye emerging from a medieval dungeon, and I was thoroughly wrapped in chains like a mummy like a mummy. And I went over that prayer again. And as I went over it again, I thought about it, and I said, yes.

Here I am, god. I do off offer all of me to you, everything that I know, everything that I have, every experience, and now all that there is to come. I offer to you. Please take it. And please build me and mold me and groom me into the person that you wanted me to be when you formed me in my mother's womb.

I asked him to take away my difficulties. Why? Because I was tired of messing with him? Because I had been handling them all my life? No.

No. No. That's not why. I asked him to take away my difficulties, and that's not what that prayer says. It says, please take away my difficulties so that when I experience the victory over them, it will bear witness to other people of your power and your love and your way of life.

May I do thy will always. I got up from that prayer and I began my 4th step. I wrote my life in an autobiographical form, breaking it down into 7 7 year segments. I asked god as I was on my knees to fill my mind with everything he wanted me to know, and I promised him that I would write whatever he put in my mind. And I did.

It took me 8 hours solid one day, and at the end of those 8 hours, I felt as though I had been run over by a fleet of 18 wheelers. And I called my sponsor, and I said, I have got to get rid of this stuff. I haven't finished it, but I can't I can't go on. I've got to get rid of this. The next day, we met, and I took my very first 5th step.

And I do say this first 5th step because I have done many and will continue to do many. It's called a housecleaning step. I wish that I only had to clean my house once in a lifetime. But you know what? It gets dusty, and people live there.

And fingerprints start appearing on doors. So I had to clean my house more than once in my lifetime, and I had to clean my emotional and spiritual house also more than once. As I was in that first step, miracles began to happen to me. I became acquainted for the very first time in my life with Ellen. Prior to coming into this program, one of my tries at saving everything was to see a psychologist who told me that I was a nonentity.

Oh, I was so insulted. Said I know who I am. I'm his wife, their daughter, their mother, their neighbor. This is who I am in the midst of my 5th step, and I became acquainted with me, I knew exactly what he had been saying to me, and he could not have been more right. Had you taken me and put me in the middle of an island somewhere in the Pacific, I would not have been able to tell you anything about Ellen.

After that first 5th step, I became away aware of defects of character, behavior patterns that I had used all of my life that I no longer wanted to allow to flourish and grow in the garden of my life. But I became aware of assets that I had no idea that I had. I had no idea. And for me, that's what an inventory was, looking at all of it and seeing the good, the positive, and the negative, and getting rid of what I didn't want anymore. 1 of the one of the miracles that happened in that first step is that I became aware of this word that we throw around in this program, and not everybody knows what it means.

And it's the word humility. And I found the definition of it in the 12 and 12 in step 5. It says that humility is a clear recognition of who and what we have become, followed by a sincere attempt to become all that we can be. And that happened to me in my first step. Then I was ready for step 6.

And I just knew that now that I did this 4th and 5th step, I would never throw another hissy fit. I just knew that. And I went home, and probably 47 seconds later, I'm bouncing off the wall. And I just knew, well, I'm not I'm not trying to control myself enough. So I exercised a lot of that control.

And finally, I called a friend of mine and I said, Mary Alex, this program doesn't work. And she said, oh, tell me what doesn't work. So I told her, and she said, go get you 1212. Step 6 says, we're entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. So she said to me, I want you to read that step again.

So I did. We're entirely ready to have god. She said, stop right there. She said, who does it say is going to do the removing? And I said, oh, we're entirely ready to have godly men.

Also, god's gonna do this. And she said, yes. However, there is a part that you play. And I said, oh, and what is that? So she said, leave this up again.

We're entirely ready, and she said, stop right there. And she said, Ellen, are you entirely ready not to have your own way? No. I wasn't. Oh, I wanted to say yes so bad so badly, but I wasn't.

And I started crying and I said to her, I said, Mary Alex, I said, I want a good family. I want us to love each other. I want the children to feel secure. I want I want my husband to love me. I want to love him, and I want us to get along.

And she said, these are very good things to want. She said, however, you want it so badly that you have a death grip on it. And she was right because I just wanted them to shape up. You know, I wanted this one to do this and this one to do this, and I wanted him to straighten up so we could all be happy. And I had to let go of what I wanted.

I had to. I had to start praying for God's will for my life. Step 7 came right after step 6, where I hungly asked him to remove my my shortcomings. And that brought me to step 8, where I had the list of all of the people that I had harmed and needed to become willing to make amends to them all. There was one person on that list that I absolutely refused to make amends to, and that was my dad.

Anytime my sponsor suggested that I might look at that area, I just said, no. I don't owe him anything. And she said, okay. She's very loving and very nurturing. She really is.

And she just kinda lets me have the rope until I can't breathe anymore, and then she says, well, let's talk. And, one of those situations had occurred, and my dad called me. And when I got off the phone, I was just ballistic. And she said, you might wanna take a look at that. So I did.

And she said, you know, she said in this program, we learn to pray for what we don't have. And there's not anywhere that you can go to buy a little box of willingness. So I would suggest that you, excuse me, you get on your knees morning and night and ask God for the willingness that you need to do what you need to do. Chapter 5 says, rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. It doesn't say rarely have we seen a person fail who has gone as far as they wanna go or proceeded until it got uncomfortable.

You know, you don't have to like what you have to do in this program in order to recover. All you have to do is do it. It doesn't have to feel good. It doesn't have to be pleasant. But if you want to get well, you must do it.

So I got on my knees in the only way that I could. I had my fist clenched. I had my teeth grit gritted, and I said, well, I'm here. And I know that I have to ask you for the willingness to make these amends to my father and I said, but I I know I have to do that, and I'm doing it. And at the end of everything I said and I didn't mean a word of it, and I got up.

But, you know, that's all I could do. That's all I could do. And I did that at night, and I did it the next day, and I kept doing it. And I realized as time went on that I was no longer gritting my teeth and I was no longer clenching my fist. And one day, the miracle overtook me.

See, I truly believe in this program that if I pray for God's will, in in line with God's will, that miracles happen. And one day, this miracle overtook me, and I had this urge to go see my dad in California and make amends to him. I did. Now I never went I did not go over to him and say, you know, dad, all of my life I hated you with a dripping purple passion. And I'm in this program now and they tell me I can't do that.

I did not say that. I would urge anybody that's interested in doing the IRM ends that they check with a sponsor first. I went out there and I merely allowed him to be who he was. I did not fight with him. I did not argue with him.

I did not try to change him. When I got on the plane to come to to go home, I was free. I was free. I'm very grateful that I was able to do that because a month and a half later, I was called back to California because my father was dying of cancer. I had, I said, an hour with him in the hospital where the 2 of us met as fellow travelers on this road called life.

I asked him how he was doing, and he said, I'm fine. He said, but I want to know how you are. He was interested in me and who I am. I left, and, of course, I went back 2 weeks later for his funeral. Now when I went back to California, I was, there was a lot of grief.

There was a lot of sadness. There were a lot of tears, but there was no guilt. There was no if only because I had because I had Because I did what I was told Yeah. Was necessary for me to recover. I'd like to how do you fit 27 years into 60 minutes?

You know? I wanna share with you something that happened, oh, I guess, about 10, 12 years ago. I was I was running into a store. I was literally running into a store to see if they had a sale on coffee, and I fell on a curb this big and almost killed myself. They took me away in an ambulance, and they wound up I wound up with a cast on my left leg and nerve damage on the top of my right foot.

But something much deeper happened to me when I fell, and that's another story. I remember I was sitting in my wheelchair at home, and a friend called and said, would you like to go to church? Now I hadn't been in church in a long time. And I thought, well, yeah. Why not?