Massachusetts AA convention in Newton, MA

I was promised there would not be any more than 40 people here today.

My name is Charlie and

I'm a recovered alcoholic. I'm a member of Al Anon. I would love to be a member Valentine, except I'm way too old and I'm nowhere near mature enough. And, and I and I am really thankful to be here. I want to thank Carol for asking me and, and, and the support that I've gotten in this program from people like Carol and Mark and Jeremy and Tom and Christine. And

let's see,

can we go through the list? Yeah, Carolyn and and Ernie and Wally and and Mindy and Cheryl and Amy and Amy with AY and Nancy and tall Nancy and Jerry. That's Angry Jerry and Barb and

and I think what you get from that is it that what I discovered is it isn't all about me. It's all about the fact that it isn't about me. It's all about the people of this program, this 12 step program, this little gift from God

that allows me to be vertical. And I have to tell you that the drinking, I mean, I'm an alcoholic, so drinking was part of my life. That wasn't going to kill me. That's what kept me alive. I drank to stay alive.

What was going to kill me is what I came to Al Anon for,

and that was the deep desire to make everything else OK. So I had a right to be here because otherwise I had no right to be here. I knew that from a very early age. I knew that there was something wrong with me being on this planet. My sponsor used to refer to it as being stuck behind the invisible protective shield. And that really dates me because that's a that's a toothpaste ad. You know, that doesn't happen anymore. But,

and that was true. I, I felt like I was from another planet. I, I was like ET

15 years before they made that movie, you know, I really felt like there was a ship that dropped me off and made a mistake and never came back.

I fantasized about what my life was supposed to be and then I tried to fit into that. And growing up in an alcoholic family

was an exciting adventure, especially considering I had no clue that that's what that was.

I I had never seen anybody else's family to live in, so

apart from Beaver Cleaver and a few other things on television, I had no no way to tell what was wrong with my family. And my family was happy to encourage me with to believe that what was wrong with my family was me. And that's perfectly normal for a child. Take a 2 year old next door to a birthday party and watch them. They are terrified about the fact that they're not at their birthday party because everything is about them and there's a party over there. Must be mine. Well, in a family where things are going

screwy, it must be me. It must be me. And they say, yeah, it's you. Yeah, it's you. Now understand that one of the things that happens when I grew up in an alcoholic family was I learned how to be an alcoholic and I learned how to take care of an alcoholic. I I learned the rules to live in an alcoholic family and I learned the roles,

and the rules and the roles basically are how I live my life. The only people in the planet who will accept those rules and roles are Alcoholics

and children of Alcoholics and wives and husbands of Alcoholics and parents and us basically. And I was very blessed because I walked into my first meeting an A a meeting with my drunken girlfriend 'cause I was a very good al Anon alcoholic, because I had a girlfriend who drank really badly. I, on the other hand, would stay OK, drive her home, go home and get drunk. And I knew she was an alcoholic,

flanked when she walked, you know, she had bottles in her pockets.

And we, I lived in Wellesley. I was, I was born just up the road here in Wellesley. And I grew up rich and I grew up without a first name. I was Clarence's grandson. That was my name all through school, junior high school, high school, even when I came back from college. Oh, your Clarence's grandson. I had a first name, but nobody knew it. My grandfather was a big mover shaker in the town for a long time.

Things that he did, for example, was they bought the poor farm, he and some other guys and they made a new Country Club,

which is on the road to Babson if you want to take a trip.

There was a he had a little row with a banker and so he started a bank with a couple of other people and started another bank. I mean, he was, everybody knew him when he died, there were 3500 people at his funeral and he was 80 something. When you're 80 something and you have a funeral, nine people show up, you know, nine. My grandfather, the only time we ever had policemen at our house was when he died. We had four police cars on the front of the house guarding it. You know that we didn't have the violent alcoholism, we didn't have the throwing things. We had the

don't make a sound alcoholism, don't express yourself alcoholism. Check it out first. So the first rule that I got was don't talk. And as you can see, that isn't working.

What they meant was don't talk about anything important.

Be verbal, that's OK, But don't talk about serious stuff like what's really going on because we will shut you down. You can talk about the weather, you can talk about baseball, you can talk about the politics. You can talk about anything you want as long as it isn't anything valid and real for somebody your age. And at 7, talking about politics is really exciting. You know, I was, I was a hit at the Bridge club. I want to tell you,

one woman came up to me and said, you know, you're never going to be a diplomat. And I said, no, I'm a Republican.

I was really good at at entertaining adults

and, and don't talk is a very important rule because if people talk, especially children, somebody's going to hear something they don't want to hear. Like what is wrong with his family? Everybody's nuts. It's Christmas, what's wrong? I was not allowed to talk. I was also not allowed to tell. So I couldn't talk in my house and I couldn't go outside my house and tell. And just in case I had an attempt, had a temptation to do so,

we passed laws that prevent children from doing that. Because if you tell somebody what's going on at home,

they punish you and they talk with your parents. So if I went outside and say, told my English teacher that I feel really scared all the time and want to die, my English teacher is going to call social services. And what are they going to do? They're going to put me in a foster home where I don't know anybody. And they're going to talk to my mother and they're going to talk to my grandfather. And they're going to say, we don't know what's wrong with him. And he they're going to say, neither do we. And this is a big help for a kid. So you learn pretty quickly. You don't tell anybody what's going on in this family. And then there are they have these little slogans like

than water, you know, family first, OK? And then there's another one called don't trust. Don't trust anybody because they will let you down. Now, there's a flip side to that, which is you, Charlie, must always be ready and trustworthy and loyal and ready to jump right in. I am a jumper in.

I am an insane jumper in. I've been jumping into things since I can remember,

and I'll give you an example. One night at 3:00 in the morning, I got a call from somebody I didn't know. This is before I stopped drinking and got into this program. The call was from somebody who said I know somebody who knows somebody who knows you. And my friend that you don't know is having trouble with her girlfriend and they're having a fight

and they're over on such and such a street in Wellesley Hills. Can you go over and straighten this out?

And I did.

I went over and there were two lovely lesbians chasing each other around the kitchen with knives

who immediately looked at this straight guy and said kill him. I was in big trouble. But that's what I would do. And I calmed it down. I want to tell you, I calmed it down. I was in the Boy Rangers. My, my Indian name was Peacemaker. So it was, There's something really strange about growing up in an alcoholic family. Don't trust anybody, but always be ready. Be be Superman. Have that suit on ready to jump into the fray. Now what good is that?

You know you get yourself killed unless you have a girlfriend who's a drunk,

unless you have a parent who's a problem, unless you have a child who's a mess. If you're always ready for them to create a mess, you have something to do all the time. Even though, like me, you feel like you're not worth anything, they provide you worth. They provided me worth My mother, my grandmother, my grandfather, the maids that came to the house and left, that my brother, my brother's wife, everybody. There was an opportunity for me to be of value and it's the only place I got my value from was by trying to

be for them.

The last rule is the one that kills us. It's the one don't feel, don't feel anything

because you have to check it out first. It might not fit with our plans.

So I remember coming home from school once with an A and I was not a student that was reminded all the time of how brilliant I am. And I had an A on something that I was not expected to get an A on. And I touched the front door handle and I remember the A going away and the joy going away and the yippee going away. And I knew already that I had to find out how I was supposed to be before I could be, that

this is not spontaneity. This is not childhood. This is walking into a corporate room where we realize you're in the midst of layoffs

and putting on a good front so you don't get laid off first. I was a child. I live here, and I'm worried about what mood I'm supposed to be in to fit with the mood that's already there. My grandmother would click a coffee cup on it on a saucer and the whole house's mood would change. It was like clink

and I was allowed to have one sort of emotion and that was called depression because it's quiet

and if I could be depressed, I could be left alone, not get in trouble.

And everybody was pleased because I wasn't making any noise. And I learned to do that. I had a basement playroom. I seldom turn the lights on. There was ATV in the and this is when T VS had everything like that. And I would turn the TV on and sometimes I didn't care if there was a program on, I would make one up in my head just because it was easier than having noise. Well, don't talk, don't trust, don't tell, don't feel. Doesn't work.

Especially doesn't work for a nine year old or A7 year old or a 12 year old or a 15 year old. In fact, it doesn't work. Just doesn't work. Maybe in the Army, but not on, not walking around in civilian clothes.

And what happens is I have to talk, I have to trust, I have to tell, I have to feel, and I'm not allowed to. So it goes in and stays in there. And then in, I think it was 4th grade, I beat up the largest kid at Honeywell School who was, I think in 6th grade for the ninth time. And he was very big and everybody was scared of him. And he cut the bubbler line,

you know? And if you've ever seen Honeywell School before, they started adding on to it, there was a big playground and

water line ran all the way across underneath the ground to the bubbler at the corner of the school. So in the spring, when the sun beat down in that, it was about 140° water for about an hour, which is not how long recess is. So it was only the very last people who got cold water. And he cut through to get cold water. And I took him down. I took him down big time. It took three teachers to prime prime off Miss Stairs

Took had to pull us apart. And she was way too old to be doing this kind of stuff.

But what was really weird is I was scared of me. I didn't know where that came from. I must be crazy. I must be from another planet. I'm like this animal, this violent thing inside this little wimpy body. This 4th grader shouldn't be taken down. Peter, who's this big. And I did. And I really thought I was going to kill him. And so today it turns out because I had his head in the water and he was sort of bubbling and he was underwater.

And so I, I kept a better lid on it for a long time. And I learned to drink a little bit. But I didn't immediately kick up to drinking at that point because it really wasn't around. And it was very carefully monitored by the people who wanted it more than I did.

But I do remember that in high school, I was sent off to various schools at various times because they didn't fit most places. Commonwealth School in Boston was a ritzy, fancy school, and I got thrown out of there. They asked me not to come back and I went to a school in New York State

and one of the high school football players at that school wouldn't leave my room after dark. It was lights out. I was a senior, he was a sophomore. He was the size of a house. He was a running back or something.

And I said, if you don't leave the room, I'm going to kick you in the air. And I did. And I broke things in his ear, in his face, and this wasn't good. It was like, where the hell did that come? Well, he was such a macho guy. He didn't complain a lot. And I got yelled at, but nothing really serious happened except in my head, which was that's proof I am a dangerous human being. I cannot be left alone. I've got to do something. And it was about the time I could start drinking. And I did. And it kept a lid on everything. It was all of a sudden I could be normal, I thought,

and I could pursue my object of helping everybody

so I could feel valuable. And that didn't work either. And the drinking took off. And the drinking is silly and stupid because it was my medicine that it then turned on me. And when I was 34, as I'm dragging my girlfriend to an A, a meeting, they said, you can't come here. I said, why? Because you know this person. There was somebody in the meeting that we both knew, and my girlfriend didn't want us to be seen together. So they sent me to an Aladdin meeting around the corner at Lender Morris Hospital

in the in the in the doctor's lounge Sunday night. It was pretty funny.

And I went down and I sat down. There was this guy named Ernie

and

my my grandmother's maid had given me an Odette book. I didn't know what it was because you didn't read it anywhere on the cover. It was all scuffed up and wasn't blue even anymore. It looked like somebody run over it with a truck a few times and dropped it in a toilet or someplace. It was a massive rubber band and Scotch tape together. So I walked in, sat down

and everybody looked at me because there were only two guys in the meeting, me and Ernie and and there was about 15 women in the meeting all they were all my mother.

I was 15. Again, these people were going to take care of me and I knew how to get them to. And Ernie looked at me and said hi, welcome. I said thank you. So you ever been to this meeting before? I said no. He took from the book just to start with it. Maybe I had been around Allen on a lot. Then I talked to him a little bit and he realized I hadn't been around anything a lot. But everybody else thought I had because I fit right in. They could help me.

And I quickly figured out that when Ernie started the meeting on Easy Does It, that he was reading the back of the book and looking up page numbers and that there were so many people in the book and there were so many listings for Easy Does It. And I flipped and I counted out how many people and I figured out which pages I was liable to read. And I read them in a real fast and I memorized and figure out what I'm going to say about them. And when it got to me, I was brilliant. I was brilliant. And people interrupted. They cross talked. Can you imagine? And they said it's so good to have someone with a lot of Al Anon coming to our meeting.

How long have you been coming? And I said, this is my first meeting. And they all went

mackerel and Ernie knew already. And at the break he said, here's some things we suggest. We suggest you try six of these meetings before you decide you were fine till you met us and you we made you crazy. Second, we suggest that you go to an, a, a meeting, not because you might have a drinking problem, because I understand I haven't had a drink from the night, like middle of the afternoon before, because I didn't want to upset the Alcoholics when I took my girlfriend in the meeting the next day. So I just didn't drink

so I didn't smell like alcohol. I was probably wicked fuzzy,

but I didn't smell like alcohol. I didn't have a hangover or anything like that, but he said. Because when you get to a a, somebody at some point or other is going to say from the podium, when I came here,

I was dying

and I didn't do anything. But come here

and I'm not dying anymore and I didn't do anything. It was done to me

and he said if it will work for them, it will work for you. And that is a key thing in my recovery is from that moment on, I didn't separate

12 steps are when these 12 steps and these tough traditions and those 12 traditions and what we mean here and what we mean here.

Because what I was dying of in a A and recovering from NAA is what I was dying of in Al Anon and recovering of in Al Anon. And to get it, all I had to do was stop drinking and it could get it in AA. I didn't. Drinking didn't have anything to do with what was going on in Allen. What had to do with going on in Al Anon is I needed an alcoholic in my life and it could, if it wasn't going to be me, it had to be you.

You follow me. I was a sick person going to programs that were to make me, well, not bad, make me better or good. So I went to that. I went to the Al Anon meeting the next night in Framingham, which used to be in a in a school, I think it's called Saint Stephen's. And the next day I tried to find an airline meeting somewhere in South Natick and they were tearing down a building and building condos. And it was. We were sitting on stacks of books

in some library in a, in a,

I don't know, some kind of convent or something. And the next night I went to an A a meeting and I heard a guy from South Boston.

And it freaked me out because nothing he did sounded like my life. And I could barely understand what he said because I was from Wellesley and he was from South Blotney dog like that. And he said, so I was down on L Street and I'm going, what's he talking about? He said. And I felt so ashamed. And I went,

that's me. I feel ashamed all the time. And nobody will tell me what I'm supposed to be ashamed about. The answer isn't here. I don't know what it is that's wrong with me. And Ernie kept patting the hands and keep coming, it'll be all right, keep coming. But he also said I needed to get a sponsor. And I said, what's a sponsor? And he said a sponsor is not God, it's a human being. You pick

who will remember probably what it was like to be as new as you are. And he didn't say an A, a or an element. He said a sponsor and he said it's somebody that you would not ever under any circumstances want to have a date with.

And I didn't understand what that was about, but I said, would you be my sponsor? And he said sure. That was at my first meeting. OK. By Wednesday I knew I was an alcoholic. Friday I went to another Allen meeting and I walked in and some of the women that I met at the Monday meeting and the Sunday meeting and the Tuesday meeting. And I walked in and I said, guess what I discovered? And they said what I think I'm an alcoholic. And they looked at me and they said,

what,

You can't be an alcoholic? You're too nice.

And I had already found out. That's nothing to do with it.

You know, I'm I'm a recovering person. I don't drink anymore. I got this ram down my throat one time at a an Al Anon conference. This woman came out and she put on the board. She said, tell me about the alcoholic. What's it like to be an alcoholic from your point of view? As Alan honors his wife's husband's children and parents of Alcoholics. And we started writing things down. See if these ring a bell. I feel overwhelmed. I feel depressed, I feel angry, I blame,

I steal,

I lie, I'm hurt all the time, I'm sad all the time, I'm lonely all the time. I hate my life. I want to die, she said. OK,

what's it feel like to be you?

Same stuff

and she leans on me. She said, OK, if it looks like a duck and it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck,

what do you call the duck

and I? What do you mean? She said it's called alcoholism. That's what we suffer from. That's what Charlie suffered from his entire life before he picked up a drink. OK. Like my one of my kids said, drinking, getting drunk, falling down, throwing up, passing out. That's not my alcoholism. That's how I avoid dealing with my alcoholism. OK,

that's from a 15 year old who was sober at the time.

That's pretty cool. So I started going to these meetings like gangbusters. I would go to an A meeting than an Al Anon meeting, sometimes both in the same day. I turned to my sponsor Ernie at one point and said when are you going to tell me to do 90 meetings in 90 days? He said you did like 120 in 90 days. You know, I and twice or 3 * / I, I went to step meetings up the wazoo. Why? Because what's the pro? What is this program to me?

What, what, what do I learn here? What I learn is 12 steps and 12 traditions and everything else is somebody's opinion. By the way,

this is all my opinion and when I leave here, I could go.

I don't believe that anymore. Why do you say that? You know, so don't get all wrapped up in it. This is just one person's opinion. But when I say we admitted we were powerless and our lives have become unmanageable, dad ain't opinion. That's the first step. And no matter where you go on the planet, that's the first step. And no matter how far down in recovery you've gone, that's the first step. And that's the first step in a a Alanon OAGASLAANA.

That's the first step. OK, now why did I come here and talk? Why did I want to come and talk about Al Anon?

Because thank God I found out this is a disease and this is one of the ways I found it out. It isn't I'm better than you because you drank or I'm not better than you because I drank. It's drinking has very little to do with it. But I'm not going to get anywhere unless I'm not drinking. I'm not going to figure out what's going on if I'm anesthetized because my brain is part of the part that gets anesthetized and that's sick and I'm not going to know it's sick unless it's not anesthetized. As an Allen honor, the way I anesthetize my brain was pick up a drunk,

find a drunk, get addicted to this drunk, make sure the drunk's OK. Let me tell you about Kathy.

Kathy was a horseback rider. I bought her a horse. I sent it a horseback riding lessons. I sent her to England for six months. I paid for a BHSA. I, I paid for training over there. I paid for $20,000 worth of clothes. I bought her a horse. As I said, I paid for $1500 worth of repair on one hoof and $2500 worth of repair on another hoof. And the horse was getting $600.00 shoes three times a month

and I was working in a camera store.

Explain that. That's insane. That's crazy.

You know, I needed her and she drunk as a skunk, one day turned to me and said, you know, without me you'd be nothing.

And she was right. At that point in my life without her, I didn't know what I would do with myself. And when she left my life, that's when I found this program. She gave me this program by walking out the back end of an A a meeting as I'm being sent around in the Al Anon meeting.

Now when I talked about these 12 these 4 rules don't talk, don't trust, don't tell, don't feel.

How do I get better talk?

I raised my hand in a meeting. That's what Ernie said. Raise your hand at every meeting. At least say I'm Charlie and I'm here on purpose.

I belong here, I'm in the right place. For those of you who've never been to an A A meeting, I'll just give you Ernie's suggestion. Go to an A, A meeting. And when they go around these, everybody's going. I'm afraid I'm an alcoholic. Never been so happy in all my life.

Raise your hand and say I'm Sue and I'm glad I'm here, I'm in the right place, I belong here, whatever. Because if you're there and you drove yourself there, you probably wanted to be there and he probably didn't.

OK, don't tell.

No tell. It's one of the steps. We're not going to get better unless we tell someone else what's going on. We share our experience, strength and hope with each other. They couldn't shut me up.

To start with, it's all about me. But secondly, I didn't know what was wrong with me. And only by sharing and having other people share with me did a lot of stuff I had no memory of come up.

And because of the program, when the memories came up, I could ask for help with them.

I could go outside the program, find somebody who could help me with it and say, and they'd say, sit down. I'll see you next week for 50 minutes and we'll work this through. But I didn't know what was wrong with me. I didn't know what had happened to me. I didn't know why my life was the way it was. I didn't know how my twists were. And there were a lot of twists. Don't trust. Of course not. I'm in charge of everything and I'm a slime. How can I have any trust for anything? I can't get anything to work anymore, and I'm in charge

of getting everything to work. I'm a total failure. How can I be trustworthy? How can anybody be trustworthy? I might as well just forget it. I might as well just pull the shades, turn off the phone, drink or not drink, it doesn't matter. Like Ernie said, you know, I don't think I'll ever drink again. I might take a bottle after I jump off the bridge, but it's jumping off the bridge that I have to watch out for because it's life that I think is the problem and it isn't. That's not the problem.

It's up here.

I need to learn to trust. Well, how do I do that? How do I trust anything or anyone? Well, takes work, takes a process. I got to have an instruction book and then feel. How do I learn to feel? It comes as part of the process. In the big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, it says we saw, we felt, we believed. I saw. There you are. You're not crazy. Well,

not as crazy as I am, OK? I felt I've already had tears come up in my eyes. Just here

I'm feeling

some things have to be believed to be seen. I have to see it in myself. I have to see it in you. You have to share. I have to share. We all get better. This is cool. This is going to work. And like my sponsor said, the first rule in enlightenment is lighten up. You know, this is not difficult. Meditation. I love that somebody was talking about meditation earlier,

he said. You know, I had a lot of trouble with meditation. First rule of meditation, it isn't supposed to be work.

It's the opposite. You want to see how to meditate? Where do you think we stopped learning how to meditate? Find it. 1 1/2 year old kid. Give the child something they don't have a name for and watch them. They'll pick up a spider and go.

That's meditation.

They don't have a name for it. They're just in awe.

I was never in awe of anything. Everything had to fit into some plan that I was supposed to have that I didn't have. But I have a plan now. It's 12 steps and I have a process to do. When I first came to Al Anon, the step book wasn't common. The Al Anon step book wasn't around much. We use the, a, a step book. We used a lot of the a, a big book. We read little portions of it. You know, we didn't talk about the drinking stuff and all that stuff because it really didn't apply. What really did apply was

are you willing to accept that your life is unmanageable? Period.

Yeah,

really. That you can't control anything? Well, there's some things I can control. List them. Turns out I can't control anything. You know, I can't control my sweat. You know, I'm going to sweat right through this shirt and have to go change it. I would rather not, but I will. So I can't control anything. Is there any power on earth that can relieve my my sense of of being useless and horrible? No. So far, you know, at 34, I hadn't found one,

but I can look at you folks and

tell me that they got better here and that they don't feel that way anymore. And they used to feel the way I did. And in Al Anon, my gosh, a power greater than myself can restore me to sanity. And then all I have to do is something real simple. I have to decide I'm ready to do whatever is suggested and do it until it works, not do it if it works, do it until it works. You know, a determined and persistent trial was one of the phrases in the big book, which is in a lot of alanine literature. I can't get

anywhere unless I determine and persistently try this. And eventually it will work, I promise you. Now, what does that mean? Well, I was talking to a young lady outside earlier, plays the flute. I said, suppose somebody is teaching you the flute and says there's a particularly difficult trill. I want you to learn. How are you going to learn how to do that? You're going to have a determined and persistent trial

until it works.

That's what this program is all about. That's what that turning it over part is all about. And it works. It really does 100%. It works 100%. I just don't do it 100%. I'm a human. I don't go in the dark.

OK, Now here's another little thing that I think was a tremendous gift to me. And that was, I came in just at the time that a bunch of adult children's stuff was popping up everywhere. And it was brilliant because for a long time, people didn't know what adult children were. They they've been fits and starts and people had talked about adult children and they didn't know what to do about it. And as a lot of people say, there wasn't a lot of recovery in adult children. There wasn't. Everybody was sitting around finding out what was wrong with them, but they had no solution because the solution is here in all Anon steps,

in a a steps, in the 12 steps, the 12 traditions that that Bill and Anne and Lois and Bob put together. OK. And it was really cool. What they said was when you grow up in an alcoholic family, there's a very interesting little process that takes place. And that is that everybody is sort of in a situation like a mobile. Everybody in the family is free and hanging off of a a stick. Have you seen mobiles? You know, you have this five or six or seven or eight things hanging there

and you tap one and everything else adjusts to it and it flows and everything is some things can be high one minute and low another minute. But for an alcoholic family, it's like somebody walks in every so often and goes snip and cut something off for an afternoon or a weekend binge. And the whole thing goes like this. And then you try to hook it back on. And when you hook it back on, it's all tied up. It's a mess. It takes weeks to unravel it. So what do you do? You get a big VAT full of glue and you dip the thing in the glue and you let it dry so nothing moves.

And then you can cut the piece off and hang it back on and cut the piece off and hang the thing back on it. And it doesn't fiddle with the family. The family looks like a family

trouble is it means you get assigned one spot and that's your spot and you can't get out of it and the spots are real simple. There's there's mom and dad and we'll make a cardboard cut out family. Somebody, somebody said I'm this is not original on my part. This is in all kinds of stuff, but

mom and dad are the dyad, they called it in psychology. Basically it's mom and dad and one of them was a cut out alcoholic and the other one is the cut out Alan Honor, who should be at meetings but hasn't gotten there yet. And they are like this OK, and they function as a unit. And that was my family. And the next thing that happens is you get a kid and the kid comes along and says let me in. I want to get in this group. And the only thing they can do, since they aren't strong enough to open the refrigerator and get the beer out for themselves, the only thing I can do is become an additional,

OK, an additional little helper for the drunk

3rd kit. The second kid comes along and goes, let me in. And the first kid says get away. You know, there's no more room for jobs here. This is my job. So the second kid starts making noise and breaking things and they become the scapegoat.

And it makes perfect sense. And nobody's going to pay attention to me unless I can make enough noise for the whole family to go, what are you doing? And if the whole family turns and says, what are you doing? They're not going to pay attention to the drunk, which is really helpful to the drunk who can go out and get drunk. So we've got a scapegoat over here and you've got mom will make mom the enabler and dad, you know, nice cardboard cut out cartoon family and you've got the little enabler. So you got those three and then the scapegoat over there being a panic. Third kid comes along and goes,

this is screwed up.

I'm going to my room and they go up and they turn the color of wallpaper and they put on headphones and they take LSD because life just doesn't crazy. And they write poetry and they love being alone because the family screwed up.

The 4th kid comes along. The 4th kid goes, what's going on? And everybody goes nothing. The kid goes, what do you mean nothing? They go, nothing, everything's fine. And the 4th kid goes, doesn't look fine to me. And they go, oh, shut up, you're too young, you don't know anything. That's the baby. That's the mascot. That's the kid

that can provide levity in a family that's tearing apart. So what does that mean? You basically get a cut out role and you're stuck there.

Now, the weird thing is there's a good part to everyone of those roles except the dying from drinking drunk and the adult parent, OK, the adult parent needs to become an adult parent, not, you know, an attachment to an alcoholic. And the alcoholic needs to sober up and get healthy. But the kids, every one of them has benefits. It's wonderful.

The hero. The hero can defer and say, you know, I don't have time to break down right now. I have to stop the bleeding.

I will cry later. The the hero can say, this is not my job. Here's the checklist. You know, the hero can say we can't do that because this will happen and this will happen. They can keep their emotions in check. They don't have to explode. They can take responsibility. Scapegoat. Scapegoat knows how to say, no, this is not my problem. They know how to put up a barrier and say you can't get any. That's it. I'm done with you.

They know how to get mad and own it. I am mad at you.

And you know they're mad at you. OK.

The Lost Child knows how to be alone. Doesn't always have to have a crowd applauding, doesn't always have to get, you know thrills. Can be quiet, can be contemplative, and also has the time and energy because they're not wrapped up in the hoopla to keep track of everything. So they're really good record keepers. And the mascot, the littlest kid, that mascot

can let things slide and say, hey, lighten up, This is not that big a deal. I know the dog died, but, you know, there are lots of dogs. We can get another dog. And I love the dog as much as you, but actually, he was kind of bad. He was pissing on the carpet a lot, you know? And everybody goes, oh, you are so funny. I mean, everybody's falling apart and you're so happy. What's wrong with you? Nothing.

But the problem is in an alcoholic family, you have to stay in that role. You have to stay in that because if you get out of that role, it screws everything up. It takes that lumpy thing and makes it slide. So I was at this little conference one time, bunch of Alan honors sitting around, and somebody said, why don't we all spread out, become who we are when all the heroes in one spot, all the mascots in another, all the scapegoats in another, and all the what's the last one?

Oh, last children, the one everybody forgets the last children somewhere else, right? Got 10 minutes to do it.

We look up and there's a woman standing in the back where the coffee was with a clipboard that says heroes meet here.

OK, In the corner, there's a whole bunch of people sitting on tables like this. Scapegoats. OK, There's a whole bunch of people sitting on the floor in front of the dais like this, like little I don't like Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts mascots. And there's a whole bunch of people wandering around going lost children. And he said, OK, come up with the three things for your role

that are good,

that are helpful and write them down. And then we did. And then the person said, now take the three things from each role.

Make a list of 12 things. And if you want to know what it's like to be healthy, that's healthy. If you can do in any given situation, have a choice to do any of those things, that's what recovery is all about. But to do it, you have to share with other people. You have to find out what makes a hero tick, what makes a scapegoat tick, what makes a lost child tick. And I got that. I was in my family, the scapegoat mascot.

I was walking out of an island and meeting at London Morris Hospital one day.