The Arizona State Convention in Flagstaff, AZ

Morning everybody. I'm Carrie, very grateful member of Al Anon Family Groups.

Y'all look good.

Yeah. It's funny. I got my name tag and I did meet many of the ladies here in Williams, and my name's tag says I'm from Williams. The program says I'm from Glendale. I actually live in Phoenix, but I grew up Mississippi, so I'm just here, OK?

I'd like to thank the committee for asking me to come. Is this too loud or are we good?

It's always an honor to be as share my recovery in the alumni family groups. My heart's just pounding. I'm nervous. That always happens. That's a good thing. It'll it'll slow down in a few minutes. One time I said that from the podium and I said I hope it stops. And the lady in the front row said, I hope your heart will stop.

Yeah, I guess you're right. OK, I need to think about what I'm saying. Anyways, I'm glad to be here today and and I'm grateful to have been asked are there any people and any new people to Al Anon or a a here this morning in your first year?

If you are, could you raise your hand? Welcome. I'd like to welcome you to the meeting this morning and welcome you to 12 steps and hope that you find something here that I found that saved my life, that's given me a new life. I was dying when I got here and I didn't even know it. So I hope that you will find a step on your journey here today. We're taught that we drink water when we have cottonmouth, so

I'm sorry I don't take myself too seriously today, and I sure did when I got here. I was almost dying from being too serious,

so hopefully we'll have some fun this morning. We taught to share in a general way what it was like, what happened, and what it's like now. And if I'm going to talk for 4445 minutes, it'd probably be a little more than general in some spots. But basically that's what I want to do. I have to start by letting him adjust this thing so it records properly. Oh wow, you want me to really be up there? OK,

so you know, I, I, I wasn't raised in a home that have act had active alcoholism in it.

I was raised on a 500 acre cotton and soybean farm and outside like 7 miles outside of this little town called Sledge, Mississippi. And Sledge is literally a dot on the map. It's where Charlie Pride grew up. And that might not mean a thing to many of you here, but he was a big country singer. And so we live way out in the country. We didn't even have a telephone in our community till I was like 12 years old. I think they finally paved the roads when I was like 10. So

the reason that I tell that is because we were really cut off

from any information coming in or going out of where we lived. And while I didn't live with active alcoholism, there was alcoholism in my family. I did not know that I found that out once I got into programming. Y'all taught me about alcoholism. I just knew that I grew up on a farm and I could hunt and fish and shoot guns and chew tobacco and do all that cool stuff. You know, I was a first born and my father wanted a son and and I wasn't, but he raised me like 1. And I'm forever grateful for having learned, you know, how to grow up on a farm and fix things and figure things out and hunt and fishing,

just, you know, be out on the land and feel close to nature. My grandmother was the matriarch of our family. What I know today is that she was a classic al Anon. She was raised by Alcoholics and she was probably a poster child for someone should have had who should have had Alan on. But she was a matriarch and she ran everything in our family, all of us. And and we had a family farm. So we were all working all the time. And my father never really he was the baby. There was three kids and he never really cut the emotional umbilical cord for my grandmother. So

always like my grandmother was probably not by her own design, sometimes in the middle of everything. And so when my when I was seven years old, my parents divorced. And I look back now and I think it's because my mom, my dad and my grandmother was one too many people in that marriage, you know? And so my mom, my mom moved back home to her where her mother lived. And my father got custody of us, which is sometimes unusual, but we had a lot of land and he was seen as

me, an upstanding citizen in our county. So, and I also found out that he said some things in the custody battle that weren't true to get custody of us. I got a lot of conflicting messages. Growing up, I always thought that my father was this big, you know, very man of integrity and stuff. And I think to the degree that he could, he was, But he was affected by alcoholism too. And sometimes I think he did things he had to do to get what he wanted or felt he had to do.

At any rate, my father remarried pretty quickly. I thought it was a couple years. I was told it was like 2 weeks

because, well, I don't think the people in my family know how to be alone. And he had two kids to raise. And so he remarried this girl that we thought was a seedy girl because she was from, you know, what we consider a big town. Maybe it was biggest Flagstaff, I don't know. But she couldn't cook cornbread very well at first and we didn't like that.

But she learned and, and we didn't get on very good. And, and I don't need to get into a lot of great detail about that, but I think my father kind of said some things that that had her feel at odds with me because he was very much about his children.

And what I did not know until I had been an alumni for quite some time is that a lot of this stuff is hindsight that I've learned through work in inventories and through work in the steps, is that she was raised by a violent alcoholic father and she was in charge of taking care of her siblings. And when he would come home at night, if she hadn't done something right, he would beat her and put her in the closet. Well, when she married my father, she she found someone that could be loving to her and I think anything

that she thought was a threat to that she didn't want to have and she saw me as a threat to my father's love. So we were at odds pretty quickly.

She wanted a little girl. I'm hunting, fishing, chewing tobacco at 7 years old. I don't want frills, you know, I just, it's not part of my nature, you know? And my grandmother was not a real huggy, feely, frilly type lady either. So I mean, you know it, I came by it righteously. And so we were at odds a lot.

Not too long after they'd been married, she began to be emotionally abusive. And I would never have put that word to it at that time. I thought that we just didn't get along well. Things escalated after a time and she began to be violent with me physical.

And she would say to me, if you tell your father when he leaves it's going to be worse. One like 10 years old, there's no reason for me to think that it's not true. And so I learned to keep secrets and I learned to put on a face and a mask that you looked at and you saw that everything was okay. You saw a little 12 year old girl that was great at softball that made straight as that everything was fine, that was hunting and fishing and was happy. And that's not at all what I was on the inside. I was terrified.

My father, I don't know if he knew about these things. I think in a way that he was there physically, but emotionally he wasn't very supportive. Maybe he didn't want to see. I don't know,

all I can tell you is this is my perception of what happened and what I share here today is not the opinion of Al Anon, it's my personal opinion about the steps to program everything. If you don't like what I say, it's OK and I hope if you really don't like it, you'll talk to your sponsor about it and let them help you work it out.

I've had to do that no more than one occasion. And this helped me grow. So anyways, my stepmother had a son that was a little bit older than me. And, you know, we just grew up, did things that you do

the country, you do a lot of hunting and fishing and playing ball and drinking. And we had the family car one weekend and I was 12 years old and me and my brothers went out and took some people with us that live near us. And I kind of like this little boy that I wasn't supposed to. He worked on our farm and my father didn't want me associating with him. And we went out that night. And to show you how distorted, I say that I have a disease of perception because of how alcoholism has affected me. I think the family disease,

it's, it's one disease and it affects us differently. I'm not that different from the drinker. I don't have a physical allergy to alcohol, but my behaviors are very similar to a drinker if you would look at any given time

or at some given times a lot. And so, you know, we were going out one night and I lost my virginity this night. And on the way home, my stepbrother raped me. Well, my distorted perception was at that age, I didn't know what was worse, what he had done or the trouble I was going to be in if he told on me for what I did earlier in the night. So what did I do? Shut it down, put it in a compartment, set it off, kept a secret.

So for the next two years, I manipulated and controlled situations

to not be in the same room by myself with with my stepbrother because I was afraid that that same thing would happen again. And at 12 and 13 years old, I would lay awake till 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. If I didn't go to sleep before my parents did, I would lay awake half the night terrified that that was going to happen. And it didn't. But I learned I lived in fear constantly, yet I didn't let you know it. I couldn't tell anyone I was so afraid. So probably when I was about 15,

my controlling and manipulating failed on me. One time

my stepmother made me go somewhere with my stepbrother to take some people somewhere. And on the way home that night, it happened again. And that night I told, I told my father, and he believed me. And for 24 hours there was sympathy, there was encouragement, there was acknowledgement. And after that, we shut the door on it. We swept it under the rug and we went on about our lives. And, you know, for 24 hours, I had validation for at least that long. So it was like I knew they knew, but I also knew that we didn't. I don't think I was conscious of the

that we didn't have tools to deal with it, but I just went on about my life. It got worse when my stepmother after that and when I was 15, my grandfather who lived next door to us, he died. Actually, we ran across the pee patch that morning when the phone rang and, and I watched, I held my grandfather in in my arms and I watched life pass for him. And for, you know, that was a pretty poignant moment in my life. And I couldn't cry about it because I was so trying to be strong for the family because that's just, you just didn't show your emotion,

didn't cry. You barely could be angry. And I certainly didn't know to have anger displayed was not something that I, I didn't want that at all because I only saw a very inappropriate anger. And so a couple weeks later I went, I went squirrel hunting where I had been squirrel hunting last with my grandfather. And I was able to just like really let myself go and have a lot of emotion. And so I, I went to college

kind of, oh, my father let me move in with my grandmother. As a result of that. I knew there was a reason for me telling you that I moved in with my grandmother. And then it was things were good because no one could bother me. Then my grandmother, why she wasn't really touchy feely. No one could touch me, you know. And so that was really good. I love living with her

and I got it again. My distorted thinking comes into play here. I wanted to have a softball scholarship to college because I love playing softball and I wanted to be, you know, great. And so I went and looking for a softball scholarship, but they didn't offer very good softball scholarships. So I resorted to a fully renewable 4 year academic scholarship that paid for tuition, books, room, board, everything. And I thought that was less exciting than a softball scholarship.

My perception leaves a lot to be desired. OK,

so I went to college and

here's where I normally say I got into a relationship within a month of being in college. I could save us all about 15 or 20 minutes and tell you that I was essentially in the same relationship for the next 10 years. But the faces just kept getting different. You know,

I would not have told you that. That relationship, by the way, was with the woman. I had difficulty with that. I didn't know some things about myself clearly until I got to college because we lived so far out. There weren't names for those kinds of things. I just thought I was different, you know, except for the fact that when I was 12 years old, I really, I probably will never understand the history of this. I know some of it. My father set me down and said, Carrie, there are three things that you can do that I will disown you for

Steal

love a black or love a woman. Now I like to joke and say that my first girlfriend was black and I sold her but that's not the truth. So

my my first sponsor was black but I don't know if that matters.

Anyways, I,

and you know what, I'll tell you a little bit later on, he held true to that, but I went to college, I got in a relationship and was in that relationship for two years. Would not have told you that that person was abusing alcohol or drugs, but in like, I had been in program like about 10 years when it occurred to me. God, denial is so powerful. I swear, even when you're working this thing, sometimes I was like, wow, she drank all the time. She, she smoked a lot of pot. I, I broke up with her and then got back with her because I felt like she was drinking too much and I wanted to help her not get in trouble. You know what I mean? It's like, whoa,

no, I'll just keep coming back, OK. Anyways, I was in that relationship for two years, got into another relationship and this is my senior year college

right before I started my senior year, my father and stepmother and two brothers had moved to Dallas quite a while back. They were my father was driving cross country then because they lost the farm to years of drought and and flood. And I called my father and I said, how's it going? He goes, oh, OK. And I know that meant like something tragically wrong.

Was that seriously right? And so my stepmother was very sick. She had been to the doctor. We don't know how to say how we feel in our family. And so he was in between jobs. She had gone to the doctor. And Long story short, she was, they didn't know it at that moment, but she was eating up with cancer internally. They wouldn't even open her up. So he had no insurance because he was in between jobs. So he brought her home to my grandmothers in, in Oxford, Ms. to have her nurse to death. And so I would drive up two hours each, you know, every other weekend, I would go two hours and be there with my grandmother.

And I watched. I didn't have any tools for living at this point. But I can tell you to watch someone go from a very large, large in many terms, ways of speaking that to like going down to 100 lbs, not knowing where she was, to watch that happen over like six months before she died was very incredible. And I didn't have any resentment in my heart when I watched her suffer like that. And I would go there sometimes and they would say she hadn't recognized anybody for 3-4 days. And I walk in, she'd be like, Carrie, how are you?

Freak me out, you know? But I'm grateful to have been able to be present for that, just because I think I'm so grateful not to have so much hatred in my heart for the years that it took me prior to getting the program. So I graduated college. My partner was going to go to LA to pursue an acting career. My stepmother died, and two weeks later, my mother's mother died. I wasn't really close to her, but I was getting ready to go to medical school.

There's something in my mind just said you can't do this

because you can't just go to medical school. You got to be the best brain surgeon in the world. That's going to take you way too many years and just don't do anything right now. So I did a geographic. I'm a good al Anon, right, And so I went I wound up going to California with my partner. My family thought I was like completely off my rocker and they probably were right. I mean, I I'd never been West of Dallas, TX, and I'm driving my little brown Pinto across country. You know, it's like it's like Beverly Hills comes to LA. You know, when I come out here,

my accent was so thick, people didn't even know what I was saying, you know, and, and they, oh God, they made fun of me. It was pitiful,

just beautiful and hurt my feelings, you know, I mean really hurt my feelings because I was southern hospitality thing and they were mean and anyways

that nice sometimes out there, but went to LA did what I do. I don't have tools for communication. I don't know how to be healthy. I don't know how to be a person in and of my own right, my an individual being.

And in about a month, I like, I realized I wasn't happy. So I came home one day and I told my girlfriend that I didn't want to be in that relationship with her, that I had found somebody else that I wanted to date and she needed to move. And I thought that I was, you know, acting out of integrity because I didn't like, I wasn't unfaithful. I came home and told her, you know, well, bludgeoning people with the truth didn't mean much to me at that point. I've learned,

gotten another couple relationships, found myself in a relationship with someone who drank and and partied a lot and did a lot of cocaine and the drinking didn't bother me. But at a certain point the cocaine had to go. So I told her she needed to quit,

and I thought she would.

I didn't know anything about drinking and alcoholism and the disease and craving and compulsion and I didn't know about any of that. And so it didn't stop, as you can imagine, and I left in big dramatic flare. You know, Alcoholics are not the only dramatic ones. I'm just as dramatic. Only I don't want to. I don't want you to think that I am. That's the thing. That's the difference. I want it to happen, but be behind the scenes. And so there was a series of events of trying to find out all the lies that I'm certain I had been told in that relationship because I couldn't let go of all the drama, even though

wasn't in it anymore. I met a person who was sober two years, excuse me, in A and A Yeah, it's a A, but I didn't know AAA, AA. I didn't know I knew what AAA was because I moved to Los Angeles and they had that there then. But so I meet this gal, she's been sober, they tell me in two years in, in AA. And I thought she was kind of sullen and Moody. And I won't use the B word that I thought that she was because we're being taped. But and and so does don't you know that the next time I met her, I fell in love with her, right. And so

that's exactly what happened because I love Alcoholics. I don't know about any of you Al Anon's. I love Alcoholics. You could put me in a room full of 100 people and if there was one person, one alcoholic in there, I would find them in 30 seconds like a heat seeking missile because that's what I do.

They're they're just magnetic. They're charismatic. And I'm coming right for you, buddy. You know, I mean, that's just how it's going to happen.

And Alcoholics are awesome people. They are, they're the life of the party, you know, and that's where I want to be next to you. I don't want to be that person, but I want to be next to that person. And so we went out on a date and we got married because I don't know about what you heterosexuals do, but that's a lot of what homosexuals do. And so there's a joke about a U-Haul coming, you know, and so, and also think about how I was raised. My father got married 2 weeks later, you know, after his wife had died. So I just kind of the modeling, I didn't even really know what stereotypes were going on. I just,

we were together now and I went to a lot of a meetings with her, a lot of open AA meetings because she had a problem and I wanted to help. That's what I do. I help, I help. And so we would go and I have to tell you, they said this God word, they would read these steps and they would talk about God. And I had a little flinch that would start to happen with me because I was raised Southern Baptist and you know, no. And Southern Baptist religion is fine. But my perception of some of the things that I learned tore me up

around the whole God thing. And, but I, I like that.

And meetings were so fun. They smoked, they cussed, they drank coffee. It was like a bar with no alcohol, you know, who wouldn't want to be there? And so we would go to a lot of 10:00 PM candlelight meetings, you know, and it was a lot of fun. And so that was my first introduction to AA. And at one point her sponsor mentioned to her that maybe I should go to Al Anon. And I'm like, well, I don't know, we'll see. Well, it wasn't too long for us being together that

life was about to catch up with us because we were just like 2 little broken kids who didn't have tools.

And she had a problem with anger and I had a problem saying no. So she'd get mad and I just give her a credit card and like she'd go spend $2000 and I'd be like, oh, that really wasn't what I had in mind. But you know, I started like doing things that I really shouldn't be doing in that regard. I remember this is funny. I got to tell you. So you know how crazy I was. We were, we weren't even really, well, we were living together because it was after our first date, but we, we were,

we were driving around somewhere and she lived in Pasadena. And I opened her glove box of her car and there were, I'm not kidding you, I swear to God, accounting. There were 101 parking tickets because she didn't have a decal.

I went and took out a loan for my credit union and paid $1000 worth of parking tickets. I'm not kidding you. So I earned my seat in this program. Nobody could take it from me. I earned it.

So anyways, we, it got nuts and we shared an apartment with another girl who was in a, a who who also had some issues. And it just, you know, we would get into fights and I would find that I did what I did when I was a kid, which was I never hit back. I learned when I was a kid, if you just don't, if you're passive, that it ends quicker. And so when we get into fights, I would just not do anything and it would end faster. And then we'd apologize and I would apologize because I'm certain that I did something to start it. You know, I mean, it was very, very sick,

and we were very intertwined. And I want to tell you, this is what our house looked like. This is a sober household, OK? Nobody's drinking in our house. And this is a thing about it. Even in recovery, we can still be very sick in our relationships, even if we're trying. I wasn't in program at this time, but I still lived in this house. And even when I was in program, some of the things that happened were like, I'd come home on a Friday

and our other roommate would be laying there. She tried to cut herself periodically to try to kill herself. And so I would check and make sure she wasn't bleeding too bad before I went back there and we start raising cane before we all went to the 8:00 AM meeting. You know, I mean, in those kinds of things still happen. And if that's happening for you, any kind of that kind of insanity, I want to tell you it doesn't have to be that way today. There is a solution. There is a way out. We have a program of recovery. You don't have to live like that anymore if you choose not to.

So what happened? Well, I was a butt. 24 years old. We've been together. I don't know, maybe a year. It seems like 10 years of my life. I kid you not, there was so much drama.

It gets so bad that I was kicked out of a car at 30 miles an hour. She busted my windshield. She busted my eardrum. I mean, just all kind of insanity. And I participated in it. This person wasn't the only one there. I was signing up for it. I'm not saying that I wasn't 'cause I was. I decided to go home. I hadn't been out on this time. I went. I did go to a meeting. I walked in an Alan meeting. The chairs were in a circle and they were sitting in the center of the room and people had Kleenexes and they were talking about their feelings and they were crying.

I'm like, oh heck no, I don't want to be here. You know,

at the break, I'm going upstairs where they're laughing and drinking coffee and cussing. OK, so, and that's an exaggeration. I'm sure they weren't cussing all the time, but it seemed like it's a me because it was fun, You know, it was just a lot of fun. And so I went back up there and I'm like, I don't

go there. And she's like, don't worry about it, it's OK. And so, you know, she just kind of didn't tell her sponsor about that. And the things, you know, I was listening to these listening. You can't sit in here and not get some of this stuff. You know what I mean? They were talking about rigorous honesty. They were talking about self will. They were talking about a higher power, amends and all these things that are in the steps, right? So I decided to go home and about this time I was getting this funny feeling that my partner, something was going on. I thought she was having an affair with our mutual best friend, but I couldn't.

One was telling me, and that was driving me crazy because I knew in my guts that something was happening and no one would tell me the truth. And that's the kind of thing

that made me crazy my whole life. I had a feeling. And they said, no, you don't. I said, the sky is blue. They said it's brown. What's wrong with you? You know? So I was going a little crazy over that. I go home, and I'd been living kind of this double life because I'm kind of recognizing there's some things about me that I didn't know, you know? And so I don't have any courage at this point in my life, but somehow, God help me. And I told my new stepmother, Oh, after my stepmother died of cancer, my father remarried

to the lady that had been the best friend of my stepmother. And they're still married today, actually. And I told, I asked her, I said, what do you think daddy would do if he thought that I was gay? I couldn't even say that I was. I just said, what if I was, you know? And so I left to go get on a plane. By the time I hit the LA, he had left a 15 minute message on my answering machine saying I told you when you were young, if this was the case, that I would disown you and you're dead and you're buried and you don't exist

and you're not part of our family and I don't want to have anything to do with you unless you change your life and it's over. And I'm sorry, I don't know what I did. I don't know where I went wrong, but that's it. And then that moment, coupled with the fact that a day or two later I was validated that my girlfriend was actually having an affair with our mutual best friend, that was when I hit the point of spiritual bankruptcy. You could have looked at my eyes that day, I'm certain, and you would have seen the lights wrong, but no one was home.

I've never in my life felt like I wanted to take my life,

but I knew at that point that if I didn't get some help that I was going to do something dramatic and something drastic. And our other roommate had gone through a treatment program for Al Anonism, or that C word that we don't say in here much codependency. Frown on that

and I was able through my higher powers hand to get in a 21 day treatment program and to have them show me I need it. Outside help. I did desperately. I needed outside help. And for the first time in my life they said you were abused. You need to say that word, put the word rape to what happened to you. I couldn't. I couldn't put the words to the situations because it would make it real and I didn't know how to deal with those kinds of things. I had no tools whatsoever.

So I was in 21 days of inpatient

and it was, Oh my God, essentially, I like visuals because I'm Southern. We like to tell stories. And so they, they like in essence to me, they pulled all my emotional intestines out. One all of them showed me what was on the floor out there when they put it all out, This is your life. And then they said, hold out your arms here. We're giving it all back to you now. You better go to Al Anon and you better find a way of living. And we suggest it's a 12 step way of life because we've given you some tools, but you got to go learn how to practice them now.

And that room that I went to where they had those Kleenex boxes, I went back to that room and I wasn't so haughty. When I came back this time

I was kind of crawling back in and I said I need help. You guys got to help me. You got to show me how to live. And I had been in open a meetings long enough to here to go to 90 meetings in 90 days and get a sponsor and be of service. I went to 90 meetings in 90 days. I got a sponsor. I asked this lady to sponsor me. She had what I want. She had recovery and she had a relationship with a recovering alcoholic and I was in a relationship with a recovering alcoholic. So she had what I wanted and I asked her to sponsor me. And she also had this light in her eye that I couldn't really explain,

but I knew that I was drawn to it.

And so I took a service commitment. We started working the steps. And I will tell you that it took me quite a little while yet to get out of that relationship because it was like someone saying, oh, yeah, just stop shooting heroin, you know? Yeah, right. I mean, it wasn't going to happen that quickly. I mean, I was addicted to this person. She would walk in the room, and my palms would start sweating and my heart would start to flutter. I mean, literally, I had a physical reaction to it. So I understand when they talk about a physical allergy to alcohol. It's just that my allergy was, it appeared differently,

you know, and so I couldn't leave. I just couldn't leave. And eventually God did for me what I couldn't do for myself. And she got a job 70 something miles away. And I tried to drive out there, you know, in the middle of the night and I couldn't do it too long and, and keep my job. I was lucky when I got out of that treatment program that I still had a job and I would go, Oh my goodness, I don't know how I survived this. My job, I'm a scientist. I would go into a room that was like 12 by 12. I have 4 white walls and an instrument and me for 8 hours

I would get up in the morning, I would cry all the way to work and I would make a deal with God that I had to not cry till noon and I could cry through my whole lunch hour and then go to a meeting. I could cry at night and I would call my sponsor and I would go to a meeting and I do what she told me to do and and it just was hard. I was trying to pay. I run up all this debt. I didn't have money and I was telling my sponsor one time,

I think I had gotten the first part of the first step and God was showing me the second part of the first step, the manageability. And I call my sponsor up and I said I don't know if I should get another job. I can't pay all my bills, you know. And she said God will show you. God will show you. You just keep doing what you need to do and it will become very apparent to you. I believe that's how God works, Carrie. He works for me that way and I think he'll work for you that way. The first several months I had to pray to her God

because I didn't have a concept of a God that worked. I still had an old idea of God that didn't work. That God was not friendly to me, the one that I thought about, but hers did. So I would get on my knees at night, dear Stephanie's God, you know, and be on my knees.

She said it was OK to use her God, so I didn't. It worked. It worked wonderfully, you know, because she was so nice, you know, and Sweden and I would call her God bless that woman. I would call, I don't know how she did it because I would call her and we would have been in a fight and she would say, are you physically safe? And I would say yes or no. And if I wasn't, she'd make me get the go, call her back when I was or I could talk to her. She never one time told me I needed to leave that relationship. And I'm so thankful for that. We don't give each other advice here. We don't tell each other what to do Personally, I don't want that responsibility. If I tell you to do something and it's wrong,

I don't want that. But we give each other direction for how to work the steps and how to get closer to a higher power, right? And so I didn't know if I should have a job. I'm getting to a second step. Stories, what's about to happen here. She would tell me to pray. And so every month I had for 18 months, I was supposed to pay $316.00 a month to the treatment center. That's a bill that was way beyond what I could pay, but I would juggle my bills.

And the third month I sent the check in, go to meetings, you know, trying to learn how to live. They were teaching me that, like, Nab's in a can of Coke was not dinner, you know? I mean, I'm just really trying to get through here, you know,

And so I went to the mailbox one day and I had this frame. There was a letter. Now, the insurance had like worked it all out. This is what I had to pay, right? I got a letter from the hospital that said, Miss Keller, your bill has been paid in full. And here is the last check that you sent to us. And in that moment, that was my miracle. That was some God up there saying, here's sister girl, we're going to throw you a bone because we know it's really hard. And I want you to know that I'm out here for you, you know, and

I, I went to my knees that night, you know, like I do every, like I did every night. I don't necessarily pray on my knees every night, but I pray all the time.

And I began to believe that there was a higher power out there that loved me because that kind of thing did not happen in my life. It just did not happen in my life, you know, So somewhere in there, I, you know, she moved away or whatever. And I kept going to meetings and, and my sponsor said when, when I got out of that relationship, what is, what is your greatest fear? I said my greatest fear is that if I'm alone, I'll die.

I really thought I would die if I was alone. And she said, you're probably going to have to face that fear before you can ever be healthy.

We're going to get you through the steps, and then we'll see what happens, you know? And so I kept working the steps. I did an inventory. I tried to look at my part in the relationship that I had. I did a fifth step with my sponsor. She didn't go screaming out of the room with her hair on fire.

She didn't look at me every any differently. And I watched, OK,

I watched it every turn. And you know, finally as I begin to get a God that worked for me, my life began to change. I might not have been able to see it in time that I'm, I'm so used to trying to live one day at a time. Now. I went into program in May of 17th and 1989. So May was 22 years. I celebrated, which is by the grace of God for sure. You know that I've done anything this long, but I can't remember things in the way that they happen. And the dates are chronologically because I'm, I'm here with you right now. That's where I'm at, you know,

and anyway, so got out of that relationship, working through the steps, you know, 567 get down through there, looking at my character defects, want to have God take them, make a list of people that have harmed, get to the point of making look. And I can't figure out what my part is in my relationship with my father. And I definitely have resentment.

After several months, I realized that I was judging my father for judging me.

And it took me a long time to get to the point where I'm making amends. But I wrote a letter, kept praying about it, wrote a letter, sent it, and the letter came back, returned to sender. I was like, OK, so I go to my sponsor, I go, what do I do? She goes, well, you tried this is a little bit and see what happens. God will show you what to do. So by the, you know, maybe a year later, my family told me that he didn't get the letter. So I sent the letter back. And then that letter, I thanked my father for all the wonderful things that he did in raising me because he taught me so many awesome things that made me who I am today.

And I kept looking at the things that I didn't like instead of the things that were good. You know, how many girls could knock the head off a match at 100 yards? You know, I mean, not a lot. You know, teaching us how to chew red men when I'm seven years old, I don't do that anymore. But hey, I liked it. You know, I can fix things. Something will be broke. He would say, what's the deal? I would tell him. He would tell me what tool to use. And he'd say, OK, you go fix it and come back, tell me what happened. I know how to figure things out today, you know, and I'm grateful for that. I'm so grateful for that, you know, And

so I made him into my mom

after my parents divorced. I really didn't have anything to do with my mother because I, I think what it was is I didn't know how to go to her, my mother. If there's an Angel that walks on this planet, it's my mother. She's the sweetest, sweetest person in the world. And I think I couldn't go to her house with her being so sweet and, and, and open my heart up to let it in and then go home to live with what I was. I just couldn't do that. It was too painful. So I just kind of shut her out as politely as I could for a Southern girl, you know. But when I got into program, I didn't tell my family for a long time that I had been in the treatment.