The Banff Roundup in Banff, Alberta, Canada

Notice

the tendency hasn't changed, just the substance.

I'm going to put the steps down here for me and a clock.

My name is Adele. I'm very gratefully clean and sober,

and I am so grateful to be here as a member of Alcoholics Anonymous and to be

I and to be free from the enslavement of alcoholism. That's how addiction is described, an enslavement

to a substance or behavior. And I was enslaved many years after I got sober.

And I'm so grateful to be free.

I thank you so much, Glenn and Christine for hosting us. And we've been treated so beautifully by everybody. Thank you, John, for taking us up to the Springs Hotel. How glorious that was. And my and my husband, whom I'm absolutely adore. I'm so glad you got to hear him last night.

I'm so lucky to be with him. This is our 21st year

and I love him more today than I ever have.

And that's what's possible. You know, I hope that we're we embody that love and and that our being together speak so loudly that you don't hear a word we're saying.

I took a walk this morning in this beautiful community. We've had just such a wonderful time. And thank you, Charlene and Chris, for bringing to the attention of the committee about us. We're so grateful to be here. And they are members of Sedona, where we live,

they are part of our community. They come down about once a year so and we're so grateful to have them. If you're in Sedona, I have a lot of home groups.

7:30 in the morning upon awakening, we meditate in that group and

share the Wednesday women's group at the Unity Church, and Jay and I attend on Saturday, 8:00 AM at Stutz BearCat. You're so welcome and we hope you contact us when you're coming through. It's a place is beautiful as here.

I was walking this morning trying to get settled before here and I came, you know, walking down the street and I saw this big mountain, so glorious. And I noticed there was something that was not happening in the mountain. Do you know what that was? It wasn't thinking

at all.

It was just being.

It wasn't running around trying to fix anything. It wasn't trying to go to Los Angeles to heal people.

It wasn't trying to take anyone's inventory. Didn't wish it was a river.

It was just being and the whole world comes to it. It was grounded in its source, in the glory of it brings people to its feet.

And that is a lesson that I've had a really hard time learning.

Yeah,

I hate to be with me, and I drank to be with you.

And part of my story is that when I came to Alcoholics Anonymous, I was not coming to recover from alcoholism. I was with someone from another program, and she was stalking someone. And so I came into the closing meeting of a roundup. There was about 4000 people there. And I was very, very grateful that all of you had Alcoholics Anonymous because it appeared that you needed it very much.

But I was so struck

by what was happening in there and at the closing prayer, when everyone held hands, I was deeply, deeply moved and I came back and I knew that there was something there for me.

I'm also recovering bulimic, and I want to talk to that about that for just a moment because it's extremely important with regards to my recovery from alcoholism. Number one, I want to be a pig and not pay for it.

As long as I look OK on the outside, then whatever's happening on the inside is OK. As long as I can hide it from you, then there's nothing really going on. That's number one. Secondly is both are going to kill me and I need to address them. I need to go where I can get recovery from that addiction as well. I have a sponsor in that program. I've attended in that program

and

and I can't. I need to hear specific information from people who do what I do in order to recover.

The other thing is I have 25 years in Alcoholics Anonymous. My my sobriety day is June 28th, 1989 and I have about 19 1/2 years in Overeaters Anonymous of abstinence. And I got abstinent and sober on the same day, which means I relapsed in Overeaters Anonymous while I was sober. And what happened was I was so ashamed about that that I came into meetings about Alcoholics Anonymous and I lied.

Mission. If you have a compulsion, if you have something going on that you're hiding every time you walk into and by, my favorite form of dishonesty is by omission. And you know what? There's a funny thing about that. It's lying.

And so every time I walked into a room and I didn't talk about what I was hiding, I was lying to you. And the voice told me you are a liar and a cheat and a thief. As I was standing, sitting there looking good. And you know why

it told me that? Because I was, I was doing all of those things. And that is a horrible way to live. And that is not being sober.

And if you have something like that going on, you know, you may be thinking, well, food that has nothing to do with alcoholism, you know, it might be like porn all night

or whatever it is for you. Or there's some lie. And what's happening is it's coming between you and your God

and other people and your job and all those kinds of things. Please grab one of us and tell us. We might not have that problem, but we know someone who does. And even more important, we know someone who doesn't have to do that anymore. And you don't have to suffer like that like I did for three years.

So that's a really important part.

I could

grew up in a really crazy family. I know that comes to a big shock to most of you. I and thank you to all the speakers this weekend. I was very moved. I related very much larceny. I related so much to what you were talking about. I was that kid in the family

I had. There was alcoholism. Let me describe what the house was like. Maybe about 13114 hundred square feet. There were nine kids. My mom had married someone with seven children and they had a child and an alcoholic. His wife was in a mental institution and she went to fix him.

We had in that tiny house, we raised Rottweilers in English mastiffs,

we had gerbils, we had parakeets, cats. We had Peacocks in the basement, chickens,

we were the family on the block that everyone talked about. But the crazy thing was we were told how special and above everyone we were.

When I grew up, it was like this and I knew something was wrong. I had come into this family. I, I was

kind of us really strange kid. I, you know, I never wanted to fit in. I hear that all the time in Alcoholics Anonymous. That idea made me nauseous. I wanted to stand above and apart. I wanted to be special. I wanted first place on the wall behind me. And that's how my office was when I got sober. They would be lined up and you would look at them when you came in. I had to get an A plus

for AC average A+ so I was allowed to breathe.

I did not want to fit in and

as a kid I experienced the whole world as a personal assault. My senses were way, way over stimulated. I came out of the chute like that. Everything heard. It was too bright, it was too loud. And I got dumped into this family with all this stuff going on. And I was, it was like Sarajevo every day.

And So what I did was I retreated to my mind.

I retreated completely into thought. I lived from above the nose up. That's it. I had no sense of body. I had no sense of anything. I went there to be safe. That's where I live. That's like going to like going to the ghetto to get a good night's sleep, you know?

And so I, I lived completely out of touch with everything going on. I was not interested in what was happening.

I was interested in what else was happening. You know what else might be? I waited for someone to come and rescue me and nobody came. When I was about 11, I realized nobody was coming

and that's when I retreated completely. To my mind, I was a straight A student. All of my my step brothers and sisters were into drugs and alcohol. There was a lot of compulsive overeating, a lot of insanity in that house

and I was the good kid. It was the only slot that was left.

I had my first drinks when I was about 13.

My stepbrothers who hated being around me, you know, there's nothing worse than the kid in the family who's getting straight A's. You know, they used to steal my report cards. They, they did everything to try to get me to shut up so I wouldn't get them in trouble

and they didn't want any part of me. But somehow they got, you know, talked into, to taking me with them. And, and I had, as I recall, I had 11 beers and, and a bottle of of Strawberry Hill I think it was.

I didn't have a shut off valve. I just didn't have one. I still don't have one. You can see I always carry 2 drinks.

Always.

And what happened was I had a blackout.

I was to have blackouts much through actually, I kind of brownouts.

That's when you come to in various points of the night. It's really bad. I wished I had just pure blackouts, but I I you know, I ended up in a park faced, you know, with it with a boy. I was a really good kid and and in the car and on the on the floorboards, you know, throwing out that kind of thing. And I had a couple other experiences like that where I blacked out and I decided

at that point that I was not going to drink until I graduated from high school.

It never occurred to me to drink less, never even went through my mind. I just knew that when I picked up alcohol, I could not control the outcome and I had too much invested in being good. And so I went about doing that.

I I want to talk a minute about what was happening in that house because I don't think that my environment caused me to be alcoholic. I have an abnormal response when I drink.

A couple things happen. I I flush, which means I get really hot and really red. That's a something that happened more and more the more I drank. The other thing is I want more. Right now I just want more. That's all I can think of. More, more, more.

That's an abnormal reaction.

And what I what I know about that is that, you know, I just, I made like that. I don't even care about why,

but what my family did set me up for

was delusion.

In my family, we were. I knew things were very different than

what was being reported in the house, and the way I experienced it was the walls were pink. Whack, they're blue. No, the walls are pink. Whack, they're blue. A lot of violence, a lot of insistence that things that were not actually happening were, and things that were happening were not. So ultimately, I stopped saying the walls are pink,

and then I stopped believing

the walls are pink. So I am well set up for delusion. When I came to Alcoholics Anonymous, I was not in denial.

The definitions is very important for me. I find that I'm confused about things a lot. It's really helpful to look things up in the dictionary. For me, I was a college educated. I was a college administrator when I came to Alcoholics Anonymous and my sponsor told me to look up the words in the big book

and I explained to her

she was never interested in my explanation,

that I was well educated, and she told me to look them up anyway. And

so I did. And delusion. Denial

is that there's some fact,

something that I'm saying that is is either I'm denying is either false or true. The underlying implication is that I know the difference, right? A delusion is a persistent false belief about something inside, or something I perceive to be outside,

that I deny with irrefutable evidence to the contrary.

I came into Alcoholics Anonymous believing the lie,

and so it took me several years to get up to denial. That was a big leap forward.

And So what I was set up very well for in my growing up was, was delusion.

The thing about delusion is it's completely self referential. That is, it's

kind of like a dream. You know, if you're inside a dream,

it's you only have the reference to the dream itself.

You don't have any outside reference. So when I'm trying to tell someone or yell at them and they're in a delusion, it's it's kind of like

if there's a some

who was delusional in a hospital, let's say he believes there are snipers in the room and you're you're in the room with him and he sees, it's not as if he's making up the fact that there are snipers in there and the way we think making up, he sees them as if they're real and they're shooting at him and I'm going to shake him and saying there are no snipers. Do you think that's going to be helpful?

No, it's not.

So there has to be some kind of a crack in the delusion in order for help to come into him, right? Has anyone ever seen A Beautiful Mind? If you haven't, I really urge you to rent that. And, and if you have to see it again and think of it in terms of alcoholism, there's a point at which the main character, the the scientist,

he's driving down the street. He's already been in a mental hospital, and he sees a whole set of events that aren't happening, especially in particular his college roommate, which we don't find out until halfway through the movie, only exists in his mind and a little girl. And he's driving in the rain. And he realizes suddenly that the little girl has never grown up.

And that's the moment in which help can come through.

And even though he sees that in the future, what does he do? He ignores that. He doesn't engage with the false belief even though it's present to him, because he knows that it's not real. That doesn't mean it stops appearing to him. That means he knows it's not real.

When I came into Alcoholics Anonymous, I,

I'll just tell you that I started drinking again when I went to college.

I never experienced what I hear in, you know, that people talk about having fun, and I looked like I was having fun.

You know, it's very theatrical. I wore opera. I know you can't believe that

I wore opera gloves and, you know, had all kinds of colors of hair. I was screaming.

You know that I was different and then trying to convince you of how smart I was.

I was just confused and

I I drank

to quiet down this head. I just, it was just like,

that's all I wanted. You know you have that drink and you go.

That's what I wanted. I wanted to rest. I believe that everything we do in the material world, everything we look for, everything we seek, everything we try to get and grab sober too, is for the purpose of resting. If I follow it down the line, I want that really nice car. I want to why? Why do I want the car? Why do I want the job? So people will notice me and then and they'll tell, you know, they'll tell me I'm OK and I'll

about myself. Why do I want that? So I can rest.

And The funny thing is that rest is our very nature. That's who we are. Can you feel it right here, right now?

Wow,

that's so cool. The steps are designed to clean us out so we can experience what we really are, which is rest. And the

way I went about before I got to Alcoholics Anonymous, getting to the point where I could rest was the most unrestful thing in the world. The place I went to feel safety and security and and peace was a madhouse.

I was, I was

the torturer of myself and looking for peace. It was, you know, I, I was so confused. I was just so confused. I got sober at 30

and what I was doing I I

because I flushed when I drank. I had to take my clothes off a lot.

Wearing lingerie in public became very popular, but in 1976, I assure you it was not

so. I, you know, at the end of my drinking, I couldn't go out

anymore because you know it when you're 21. It's cute.

When you're 30, it really stops being cute.

I wasn't cute anymore

and I was in at home doing exactly what I saw growing up. I was drinking a box of wine. You know, we had, we came from a wine connoisseurs. That's what my step dad always he had wine collections. But I'll tell you, at night the Gallo Vin Rose got opened and the lid screwed off. You know,

even today I have a really hard time with lids.

Just open it.

So I was sitting at home with that box of wine and it had become I I was in the progressive stages of alcoholism and I didn't know it. It started tasting like rubbing alcohol to me. And I was in the state of delusion. So I had told myself that this that what I was experiencing was normal.

I didn't go to sleep. I passed out, but I just needed it to help me go to sleep. I didn't drink in the morning. If it went in a blender, I was still drinking the night before,

or it went into something that looked like a breakfast drink, you know, I drank really sweet alcohol. I told everyone for several years I didn't drink vodka,

put it in all the sweet alcohol to cut the sweet. You know, I was absolutely delusional and my my sponsor

was,

was very wonderful, she said. Adele, you know, it might be that some other people can stay in program and not work the steps,

but you're far too sick.

I do want to tell you that I came in

to Alcoholics Anonymous and I did not get a sponsor for the first six months. And the reason I didn't was because I was too frightened to ask for help. I could help you, but I came in here dying of compulsive competency.

I came in with my world black. I had red lipstick on and high heels. I'm 6 feet tall on the natch and I had that. Do not speak to me under any circumstances. Look on my face.

I looked like I was here for years. People were asking me directions, but they weren't introducing themselves. And I wondered why you weren't talking to me, you know, get away from me and please, where are you going? You know, that kind of thing. So I look for the girls with their lipstick on straight

because I know that they're going to fall apart sometime and that's going to be the moment when they start getting well. And I want to be there when that happens,

you know, because I, I understand them. I understand them.

So she had me start with step one and she had me right out step one. I learned at that time I was using a computer and I never hand wrote anything. And I informed my sponsor of that

and I was trying to, you know, and she told me, Adele, when you type it accesses the wrong side of the brain.

When you write, it accesses your emotional and it's a, it's a great lie detector you can type a lie in in a heartbeat. It's much harder to write it. And so I have never written inventory with anything but a pen and paper. And she had me write down how my drinking had affected the people, my other people that I knew, my friends, my family, my job, my education, my relationship with myself and my relationship with the power greater than myself.

And I was really grateful for that because I got to realize make real

what had happened to me, and I was able to discern whether I love the word discern. The the word discern means that I look and see whether my behavior and actions brought about the effect that I had desired when doing them.

Great definition. I love that my sponsor gave that to me. And I got to see whether or not that was true in my drinking. And I got to see the delusion that it was true because it was in black and white before me. And that was the chink, you know what I mean? And I started in, in information started coming in. I really did not know if I was alcoholic for a long time. Everyone I knew drank like I did.

I grew up in that environment and I didn't know the difference.

And so that was, you know, wonderful

step two came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

I had a really hard time with that on 2 levels #1 the thing about insanity, I'd come from insanity in my family,

and I was too afraid to even admit that might be possible. Because if it was possible, then I might go crazy like my my father did. He was diagnosed as schizophrenic and bipolar homicidal. He drank himself to death

in San Diego and they found him dead weeks later. I found out about that when I got sober and my mom was

a very erratic

and so I was too afraid to admit that. The other part of that was that I, I really fought about whether or not I believed in a higher power. I mean, I I just couldn't sleep at night.

Any of you have the problem of thinking so much that your head hurts?

And I I would like to propose to you that absolutely nobody comes into Alcoholics Anonymous, an agnostic or an atheist. Nobody.

Here's the definition I love

of

a God or a higher power. Number one, I have to ask myself, what do I worship?

That is, what do I devote my attention and time to? And secondly, what do I turn to when I'm afraid? Bingo. There's my God now. It's a false sense of God, but nevertheless, it's the one I have. We know we are not asking anyone to believe in a higher power. We're asking you to believe, to try a different

higher power.

The ones I were using were alcohol and drugs and men and food and work. Work was horrible. It's the only addiction that the sicker you get, the more applause you get. And I was really sick with that one.

I was. I've never been asked to give

an Alcoholics Anonymous. We're always giving.

Always. We can't help it. What we are is what we give. What we're being is what we give.

If I'm being judgmental, then I give it to you.

If I'm being frightened, I give it to you. I just feel my fear all over you and and and say that it's I'm trying to be helpful. What I've taught,

I've been taught in Alcoholics Anonymous is to give something different.

And so I was, I was told that I could try these 12 steps and I turn myself over to Alcoholics Anonymous. It was a power greater than myself and the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, which is the steps. And it says, it doesn't say that we'll come to to figure out a different kind of a God, although I tried to do that. It said we'll have the experience of a spiritual experience by working the steps.

This is not a logical program. I have really good news for those of you who don't like that part of it. This is not a spirit. There's no spiritual part of this program. It's all spiritual, all of it. We are not human beings. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

If we were really human beings,

then the principles of the world would work on us.

It would work to solve our alcoholism. I was a business professor and and economics was the allocation of scarce resources.

That that is the material definition. It's the principle in this material sense of the world that we have, right?

How's that working for the world?

In God, it's infinite.

I don't have to give up something. We don't have to have limited things, you know, resources in this room and you're going to take a little piece of it and you're going to take a little piece of it. And God, I better get more than you do. We have access to infinite fulfillment for each one of us. It does not take away from you if I have infinite fulfillment, because it's

infinite, right?

If I were simply a human being, then all of those things would work. But

we have a set of spiritual principles because our problem is of a spiritual nature, and that's what works.

That's really, really cool to know. I'm looking down at the steps. I'm not reading my notes. It helps me to have guidelines and it helps me to remember that this is what we're doing here.

Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God

as we understood Him.

I don't understand what God is and I don't want to.

It's not in. God can't be found in the intellect. How could it be? The intellect is finite by definition. God is infinite. This power is infinite. Going to my intellect and try to describe or define God is like going to the hardware store for bananas.

It ain't there.

I looked for years there and couldn't find it. But it's not there. So I can rest and stop looking in in this mind, these thoughts for a sense of God.

I can relax

and feel that,

you know, and I'll talk about the 11 step, which has been extraordinarily essential

in my recovery.

In step through we make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

What was really helpful for me to learn and it took a lot of years

working the steps. And, and I do want to say that I've done the steps completely many Times Now for the last probably 20 years since I've been with Jay. Actually, I, I, I do the steps when they're indicated. I work with, I've worked with a lot of people I didn't mention. At nine months sober

I was sponsoring 11 people. I told you I was suffering from compulsive competency

and so doing was not a problem for me. Being was a whole other thing,

but what I and so I, I do the the full steps every five years with the group usually at whomever I'm sponsoring will go together and I go through as an equal. I do the steps fully. We usually do it over about 18 weeks on whatever's kicking my butt at the time. I do not do it on alcohol.

I did. Certainly it's essential to do it in the first inventory, but I haven't had a drink for a long time.

What's what is kicking my butt is something related to my thinking.

Last time I did it on the insistence and belief that I was right about anything.

That was illuminating.

I've heard,

you know, I heard people talking about sides of the story this weekend. And, and I realized as I was sitting there that we believe there's a story and then I have a side over here and then you have a side over there as if this story is an entity that exists without us. It's not. There's no story. Without us, there's nothing

but an appearance of something. That's it. We are the ones with the story,

and that's really helpful for me to know because I've already told you how confused I've been

on step three. I thought I was turning my will and my life over to the care of God and that it was an entity that belonged to me

and therefore I was going to turn it over to something. You know, my God often looked like Santa Claus sometimes had a Cape.

And what I've realized is that it's not mine. I don't actually have to. And for me, turning my will and life over is really about control. You know, I want to control my environment. I want to control everything. I told you I grew up in a very violent and insane kind of

house. I just wanted to be safe, so I'm going to control my environment so that I have a sense of safety.

And step three is about releasing that. But I thought I actually had to give up control. It was very helpful for me to realize I never had it. I never had a life of my own. Do I beat my heart, grow my hair? Do I do any of that? Did I, do I animate myself? Absolutely not.

So what I have to actually turn over is the idea that I do.

Isn't that cool? I mean, it's so much easier to to release an idea than it is to release an entity that I actually believe I have. The more I realize that, the easier step three is and I get confused still. But So what it what is it that I really want to do

in sobriety?

Stop trying to fix things out here? Turn my attention to being aware of the presence of God, Being aware that it is not my will in my life. Lift our our

increase the light in the room. In my consciousness in this room, they probably have dimmers, right? Guess what? In with us, the dimmers are on us. I want to increase the light of my awareness, not fix something out here. Because you know what? You're not broken and neither is anything else. And what I have to do is get out of the darkness of thinking it is.

So my whole sobriety is very different

than it was in the beginning. And thank goodness if I, you know, doing this, I hear people say that I'm doing the same things I've always done.

And yes, to some degree that's true. I go to meetings, I'm involved in Alcoholics Anonymous, we don't turn the touch the first drink, et cetera. But if I'm doing the same things that I did when I got sober, I'm in trouble.

Hopefully I've grown along spiritual lines. I can't do this. I can't get away with that kind of stuff anymore. You know,

when I made a searching in for fearless moral inventory, a hard time getting started on that. What I want to say is today I do it a little bit different.

The fourth step

is about our resentments.

I hear people also say that my part in it, what was my part I have no part in. I don't have a part in my resentment. I have 100% of it. It means the word resent means to refill. How can you feel or refill anything that I'm experiencing? The resentment is 100% mine

and if someone is feeling for you, God help you.

I looked up the word resentment

and again a couple day days ago, and I also saw from the lat, from the Latin etymology or history of the word, it also means sense. So I'm going to resense something so I have a perception of something that's happened in the past. It's a misperception,

and every time something reminds me of it, then I refill that original experience and guess what? Your body does not know whether it's happening now or happening then. You go through the same physiological response every time you think about that.

In my 4th step, I could tell you a lot. You know, I have stores that have actually been told this weekend, but I want to tell you about one in particular. I had two resentments

on my four step

that I couldn't get freed of.

One was from my father. When I was about

six weeks old, I, I was tortured and raped and just unspeakable things that happened with my father

and I was hurt. I was physically hurt. It caused a lot of problems in my life. I've had many, many surgeries. I've had eighteen major surgeries sober, it probably

50

that were outpatient

and a lot of those,

the initial ones and ones that came after were related to that and I could not get free from that. I knew that maybe I would stay sober, maybe I would be okay, but there was something broken in me, something dirty that I could not get cleaned. I tried absolutely everything. You know, I, I was in groups, I did a lot of therapy. I have not just come to program. I've done a lot of work. I had to. I never suffered more

than when I got sober

because there was nothing left.

What I did was I was willing. I was willing to be free of that resentment. I just remained willing. And I just, I, I just

couldn't get free when I was 16 years sober,

16 years, 16 years of depression, 16 years of of chronic illness, 16 years of feeling broken and dirty. I would be with my husband, whom I loved, and

I would want to punch him during sex and how could I forget something like that? How could I ever see that I had some piece of that? That was my doing.

I had a near death experience at 16.

I had fallen and broken my hip and I was in the hospital

and when I got home,

it completely changed my life.

When I got home,

my husband was gone and I, I was in the bathroom. I was so weak. I, I probably weighed about about 100 lbs. I'm 6 feet tall. I I was too weak even to lift myself, but I had a profound experience in which I knew I was already well.

And

shortly after that, maybe about a month after that, I was in the bathroom and I went to reach

for the faucet. And the thought came into my mind from nowhere, seemingly, he would never hurt his baby girl. And I knew it was true. I knew it was true. And all of a sudden, what went through my mind was everything I had done in my life to hurt other people.

I had done things that weren't what he did, but I had done things that that really injured other people

and I never ever did it to them. They were just there. And I knew that he did not do it to me, that I was just there, that he was looking for rest, he was looking for peace. And he was very confused as to its source.

And I got free. I got free of something that I absolutely knew I could never get free of,

and it happened. I'll tell you today that I have lived through amazing, amazing healings and absolutely nothing is impossible in God's world.

Step 6:00 and 7:00.

Oh, I about Step 5.

I did not have the relief that people experience. I heard that David say talk about that this weekend. I wanted to shoot my sponsor or move after it.

I didn't. I was, I was absolutely aware that I'd been in public for 30 years acting the way I did, and it was the first time I had any self-awareness of that. And it was just hideous.

And my sponsor put me right through to step 8:00 and 9:00. I went over six and seven then. And they're really important. I want to go back to them.

We don't have to worry about our defects of character getting in contact with them. They get in contact with us. And what happened

over the years is I have, I have come to understand that what I did in six and seven, which is

number one, I had to stop calling it a defective character. There's no problem with it, but language really affected me. And what I realized now is that coping mechanism. It's a character defense.

We're defending a sense of self that's false.

And for me, it's an effect of an underlying belief that's false.

And So what I had to do, and I've worked really hard on six and seven, particularly in the in the last years, is I had to do a lot of work with myself because there are there are aspects to my awareness that are very, very young. And in fact, in the fourth step, I have another column, 1/5 column that I asked people to write. And that is what does this remind you of

whatever it is, because it all goes back to that young part. And these parts

to me were we're young and I didn't like them. I had shoved them in a closet and closed the door. Work the steps. Just work the steps. That's what I would say to myself. And I wasn't addressing these, this frightened part of myself that I had ignored. I didn't want to deal with it. And do you know something? It dealt with me.

That's the reaction that I'm giving, that I don't want to give.

I like to think of it as putting a bridle on a bucking horse. It works for a while till you let go.

I was praying for God that remember it's the one in the Cape to come down and remove the defective character and some

times it would work in the moment but it would never sustain itself.

And why? Because I an underlying belief

that wasn't addressed. And what I had to do is I had to start dialoguing in the morning. I would write to this part of myself and I would say, sweetheart,

how are you this morning? Why do you hurt? I had a lot of physical stuff and that's really what gets my attention today. If I'm hurting physically today, I'll have to ask myself is what am I doing that's not OK with me regardless of my judgment? Or what am I not doing that's not OK with me regardless of my judgment.

And every single time I'll get to the root of why I'm feeling bad emotionally or physically. And I had to start writing, sweetheart, what he heard today. I hate you, I hate you. I hate you. I hate you is what I got back.

And what I was doing was I was making myself do things that were not OK with me, that were not OK with what my purpose is in this life, because I had an idea of what good Adele was supposed to look like. And you know where I got that? I got it in Alcoholics Anonymous. I had no good Adele before that. And I came in here and I started doing a lot of things

and making a persona in Alcoholics Anonymous that it was exhausting to keep up

really, really hard. I think it was harder to be good Adele than bad Adele, and bad Adele was exhausting.