Lisa’s 21‑Year Journey: From Early Drinking to Lasting Sobriety

- I'm Lisa and I'm an alcoholic.

- Hi, Lisa.

- First, I want to thank Karen so much

for asking me to lead or speak, to be here.

And Scott, for your share.

I identified with everything

and yet our stories are so different.

And welcome to the guys in the back.

I'm really glad you're here.

And I hope that if not tonight

at another AA meeting you hear what you need to hear to stay

'cause you don't ever have to leave.

I sometimes get teary when I share

because I'm so grateful to be sober.

I am so grateful from the bottom of my heart

to be a woman in recovery.

And I'm so grateful to be here.

So thank you so much.

Okay, I'm gonna look at the time.

I'm gonna take a breath.

So what it was like, what happened, and what it's like now.

I was gonna say my age just now.

I don't know what my age was.

No, I'll say my sobriety age.

I'm 21 years sober.

I got sober in 2002.

I celebrated 21 years in May.

That's my second sobriety.

I first got sober in 1981 at Radford,

the original Radford.

Shout out to Radford.

And stayed sober for 17 years and relapsed.

So I'm gonna share about my upbringing

and my first sobriety, my relapse,

which I think is the most important part of my story

because it happens and we don't all make it back.

Many people don't, and then my current sobriety.

So I was born in Canoga Park.

I'm a native, not too many natives.

I know.

And I went to Canoga Park just for high school,

but up until through the ninth grade,

I went to Catholic school.

I went to Orlaya Valley.

Then I went to a girl's school in Thousand Oaks, Lorena.

That's just to give you some origin of my background.

I have three sisters, two older and one younger.

And my younger sister spoke here about six months ago.

Definitely did.

And I came with her.

And I had incredible parents by my parents.

The value of life,

really all the values I learned from my parents.

And I had a great upbringing.

My dad was an alcoholic.

So two things can be true,

which is one of the gifts I've learned in sobriety.

I learned that life isn't black and white, there's gray.

And that was news to me because it was all or nothing

or black or white and two things can be true

at the same time.

I want to welcome my friends that came with me.

I just looked over, they came with me.

I love these two ladies so much.

So anyways, my dad was an alcoholic in our family

and he was a stay-at-home quiet drunk

and a bar drinker drunk.

And he lost a lot of jobs because of his drinking.

But prior to that, it was a good home life

until there was some pretty serious trauma

that happened to my sister.

And that kind of changed the dynamics of our family,

had to deal with her trauma.

My dad's drinking got worse,

but I felt like I was shield in some way by all of that.

You know, people share in AA meetings,

they remember being a kid and they never felt in

and they had all these weird feelings.

And I thought, God, you know, I don't have those memories.

But what I do remember is the teachers at the parent,

the nuns at the parent teacher conference.

And you know, I have not one bad thing to say

about the Catholic church or nuns or priests.

That was not my experience.

I'm grateful because it was the introduction to God

that I did not have and that I was able to bring with me

when I started AA.

So I'm very grateful for that.

But they always said I daydreamed.

That was their big, big note on me.

I was a daydreamer and I thought,

well, that makes sense.

It's that thinking that never stops

and that's what I still have, even though I'm sober.

It's the head that doesn't stop,

wishing about I was someplace else

or thinking about something else

or listening to the thoughts in my head.

And so that's my big takeaway from childhood.

I had great parents, a dad that was an alcoholic.

I went to Catholic school and what really changed

the trajectory of my drinking career and kind of my life,

I was in ninth grade at a girls' school

and I didn't go back to that girls' school.

And so I started 10th grade at a public school

and I'd never been to a public school.

And it was really different.

Coming from a close knit family

that was a loving, giving family

that was involved in the community

and going to a public school was very shocking for me.

And I didn't know what group to go with.

And so I went with the hippies

and I don't know why,

but they seem to be more welcoming than the sports freaks

or the, I don't know, I just felt more comfortable.

And so the first time I drank was with this group.

We went to the park, Shadow Ranch Park at night.

Remember that park?

I love that people know what I'm talking about.

This is so cool being in Reseda.

So I went to Shadow Ranch Park

and it was the first time I smoked pot

and it was really the first time I drank.

And I had sips off my dad's beer.

We had a pool and always had pool parties

and there was always beer and I'd had sips,

but it never really did anything for me.

But this night I had four cold 45.

- Oh my goodness.

- And I had never drank before.

And I was the only one in the group

that got so ship-based, falling down

and already embarrassing myself.

And they had to help me to Fallbrook Square,

which is not called that anymore.

I don't even know what it's called.

So they could call my dad to come pick me up.

So that was the beginning of my drinking

and really nothing changed after that

other than it got very, very, very bad.

I continued drinking and partying

and through high school, I did.

I don't remember a lot.

I got arrested once while I was still in high school.

That was Van Nuys Jail.

I got out of that.

My dad got me out for reckless driving.

And I remember thinking,

this is where I feel the most comfortable

because I'm accepted by these people.

And I really don't know what my place is,

but this seems okay.

And every time I drank, almost every time I drank,

I had blackouts.

And during that time,

'cause it was in the very early '70s,

so there was a lot of outside substances

or outside issues that I partaked in very heavily.

And then out of high school, I was just a lost soul.

All I did was party and drink and hang out

with people that were similar to me.

I had no goals.

I had no direction.

And then all of a sudden my dad decided

that he was gonna do a geographic

to the state of Washington.

And he said later on, 'cause he got struck sober there,

but he would say in his pitch,

no, I didn't know they had alcohol in Washington.

But so my younger sister and I moved up there with them,

being born and raised in California and going to Seattle.

The weather is different.

Everything is different.

It's gorgeous and beautiful, but everything's different.

So one more time, starting over and not knowing what to do.

So about a year after we were there,

my dad's drinking progressed.

He'd gotten a DWI or I don't know what they call it, 502.

I don't know what it's called now.

And one day he called me.

I didn't live at home.

And he asked me if I would come over

and bring him a six pack of beer.

I was 21 and my younger sister was there at that scene.

I know she said this part of her story too.

But anyway, so I went over there and he said,

I called two men and they're from Alcoholics Anonymous

and they're coming to the house.

And I just love that because that's how they did it then.

You picked up the phone, you called central office,

they came to the house and he was sober

from that day until the day that he died.

And they like to say they're at the big meeting

in the sky now.

But those men came every day and took him to a meeting

until he was able to get a shift together.

And he loved AA, he loved Alcoholics Anonymous.

So in an interrupt way, he was my Eskimo

because they had this Sunday meeting

that the family could go to.

It was a Sunday morning meeting and the family could go

and they had a regular AA meeting.

We could kind of like a combo Al-Anon thing,

but we could just go and hang out.

And he was so excited about sobriety.

He was on fire, he was on fire about sobriety.

He found it and he wanted his family to see it.

And we were on fire for him and we would go to this meeting

and the love in those rooms and the fellowship

in those rooms, I'll never forget that.

And so when it was my time, I knew what to do.

My drinking got worse after that.

And again, I was the blackout drinker.

You know, my first inventory after I got sober

was not a real inventory because I had so much shame

and self-hatred about all the things that I'd done drinking

that I knew that wasn't me.

I had to get that out right away.

And so with my first sponsor,

I said, please let me just write all this stuff down

because it's eating me alive

because it was not who I was raised to be.

It was not who I knew that was not the real me.

And if I had any chance of staying sober

and getting stained sober,

I needed to be released of that self-hatred and shame.

So anyways, I came back to California to visit friends

and then I met a guy and I ended up moving back here

and then my drinking really took off

because he worked in the motion picture industry

and he was gone a lot and I had no family here.

I had no friends.

And so my drinking really took off

into that home alone drinking and hiding the bottles

and not wanting him to see how much I drank.

And it was, you know, it was the worst part of my drinking.

And, you know, Scott was talking about, you know,

I didn't really know what was wrong with me.

I'm like, what is wrong with me?

And yet it's so obvious, I'm drinking every night,

I'm blacking out, that's what's wrong with me.

And my dad's in AA and by now my younger sister,

she had gotten sober.

And it's so weird to think that I'm not even thinking

that that's my problem.

You know, how could I not know that that alcohol

was what was doing that to me?

And I remember going to a doctor saying,

"Something is wrong with me, I must be depressed."

I mean, I really did not have a clue.

And when I say that out loud, it blows my mind

I didn't have a clue.

I was a falling down freaking drunk, you know,

and I couldn't stop.

You know, Scott talked about it too.

You know, once I took that first drink,

I had no control over how many drinks

I was gonna have after that.

You know, the allergy is so powerful

and then the obsession of the mind, I had no control.

And the book talks about, you know,

it sets up that craving that there's no stopping,

no matter how much I wanted to stop.

Once I took that drink, it was on

until I was falling down drunk in a blackout.

And every night I would go to bed

and I'd wake up in the morning

and I would be so hungover.

Physically, the hangovers were horrendous,

but emotionally they were a hundred times worse.

And I would wake up and I would just say,

"God, this is not who I'm supposed to be."

I knew in my soul that this is not what God intended for me.

This is not the child of God that I was meant to be.

And that was my call out to God.

And the next morning, and it wasn't even a bad drunk,

the next morning I woke up

and I knew that I had to call Alcoholics Anonymous.

And, you know, I didn't call my dad.

I didn't call my sister.

And I did one of those things, you know,

picked up the phone, hung it up, picked up the phone.

And that's torture, you know,

'cause the desire is so strong for me to finally get help

and realize that, yes, it is alcohol that's doing this.

Pick up, hang up.

And I'm like, "Please God, please God."

And finally I called Central Office in Van Nuys.

I said, "I need a meeting."

And they sent me to, it was a Monday night, 8.30.

Back then, most of the meetings started at 8.30

and it went till 10.

It's like nothing like that today.

We're so spoiled.

But so they sent me to Chandler Lodge.

I don't know if anybody, hey, shout out for Chandler Lodge.

Still there, incredible.

So I went there and I can't even tell you

what drove me there, but deep down inside,

there was a force that I had never felt before.

And now I know it's God, really,

that got me to that meeting.

Actually, I drove by it.

And back then it was, so I missed the lodge.

It's kind of a weird place, you know.

And so I drove by and I thought, "Oh my God, that was it."

And so I have to turn around on a one-way street,

but I didn't know it was a one-way street.

And now this bus is coming at me.

And I pulled off 'cause they still had dirt

on the other side, a dirt patch

before it all changed with Metro.

And I went, "Oh my God, oh my God."

And you know, I still went to that meeting.

Like that would have been the best time to say, "Oh."

You know, and so I parked and I walked in terrified

as we all are when we first walk in to our first meeting

of Alcoholics Anonymous, and I was so terrified.

And two young people came up to me and welcomed me.

And I cannot, and I know you guys know this,

but for me, that is the power of Alcoholics Anonymous,

is to reach out your hand to the new person

that walks in the room,

because that's what got me to stay there

and that's what got me to come back.

And I will never, ever, ever forget that.

And they said to me, "I can't tell you what they said

in the meeting, I have no idea."

But they said, "Tomorrow night, we are going to meet you

at Bradford at 730, or 830.

It's their Tuesday night young people's meeting,

and we're gonna meet you there,

and we're gonna wait for you out front."

And that was the key because I didn't have to do it alone.

I had someone who's gonna meet me there and they were there.

And that was the beginning of my journey for 17 years.

I loved Alcoholics Anonymous.

I got a sponsor, I got commitments.

My first commitment at Bradford was washing ashtrays,

because you had ashtrays all over the seats,

and then coffee cups.

And the reason why I took the commitments,

other than my sponsor suggesting it,

was because it made me feel involved on the inside.

It helped me to feel involved and to feel a part of.

When I got sober in May of '81, in June,

it was my birthday, I was gonna be 24.

And I remember saying,

"How am I not gonna drink on my birthday?"

I was like freaked out about that, because party time.

And what they said to me back then, and I just love it,

they said, "At least you can drink on your birthday.

You just don't drink today."

And it was so powerful.

They said, "This is the one day at a time program."

But that really said it out loud to me.

It's just today I don't pick up.

Today, I don't pick up the drink,

and maybe it's just this hour I don't pick up.

But on your birthday, you can pick up.

And by the time my birthday came around,

I had my 30 days, and I did not wanna blow that 30 days,

so I didn't pick up.

But I did the same thing with July 4th.

How am I not gonna drink on my, you know.

Anyways, I loved AA.

I, you know, in the very beginning, my dad,

you know, I told my sister, my dad, he would call me

every morning.

We'd just talk about Alcoholics Anonymous.

And, you know, I started reading the book

as they tell you to.

I have to say, I didn't understand any of the books,

so I decided to read the stories in the back.

They were, A, more entertaining.

And I could relate to them.

I could relate to the stories in the back.

I really did not relate to much in the front of the book.

And even though my drinking career was fairly short,

you know, I was the blackout drinker, and it was ugly,

and it was horrible, and I did many things

that I never would have done sober.

So now I'm in AA, and just to jump forward,

I'm loving AA.

I never thought my wildest dreams I would relapse, you know?

Never.

I'm in, I'm in this for good.

I go home to Seattle, I go to meetings with my dad,

I go to meetings with my sister.

So what happened?

'Cause this is important.

A couple of things happened.

I got married.

My husband and I adopted a daughter at birth.

I found out when I was five years sober

that I was never gonna be able to have children,

and truly damaged them because of my drinking.

I wanted to drink at five years sober when I found that out.

It was the first most devastating thing that I ever felt,

and I didn't.

And real quick, somebody told me about a book,

Why Bad Things Happen to Good People.

It was written by a rabbi,

and it was monumental in shifting my thinking

because I thought, I'm five years sober, life is good,

I'm good, I'm a member of alcohol.

Why is this now happening?

Because bad things happen to good people.

And it's what you do with that.

What am I gonna do with bad things happening in life?

'Cause they're gonna continue to happen,

so I better get a friggin' plan

on how I'm gonna deal with shit that happens to me.

And it's not that God did it,

'cause I thought he did for she.

I thought, God did this to me,

punishing me for being such a bad person.

It's what I'm gonna do with it,

and what the lesson for me was.

And it's not that God's testing me.

Actually, to be honest, it has nothing to do with God.

It's like something shitty happened,

and I have a choice to turn it around and to learn from it,

and to have it be a gift of growth.

And so that's what I've been able to do

with many circumstances in my life,

but that was the biggest one.

Anyway, so we're married, and we have Kit, a daughter,

and I'm in the PTA, and I'm a Girl Scout leader,

and I have lots of surgeries, female-related surgeries.

I lived with chronic pain for 10 years.

I was really careful with the pain pills 'til I wasn't.

I mean, that's the truth of it.

I need to go into details.

But one day, I took one too many.

I would stop after the surgeries.

Anyways, and the monster woke up.

It makes me think of that jack-in-the-box.

I could not get the monster back down.

Once it wakes up, it's awake, and I'm powerless over.

And I was out six years, out, out.

Like, no meetings, nothing, I'm out.

And the power of this disease,

I didn't pick up a drink that whole time,

so technically, I haven't had alcohol in 43 years.

But my mind was saying, "Well, you didn't drink.

"You're okay, so what?

"You took too many pills."

Well, now there are too many pills.

I could get, what is that phrase?

I'm gonna say it wrong, so I'm just forewarning you.

Blood from a turnip, is that how it goes?

Pills from a doctor.

I could get any doctor to write me a script.

I don't think it's blood from a turnip, is it?

Nobody's agreeing with me because I have it all screwed up.

Okay, thank you.

Well, I could get pills from any doctor back in that day.

Like, it doesn't happen nowadays, but then I couldn't.

And now I'm buying them in the alley.

One time with my daughter in the car,

and I'm the Girl Scout leader,

and I'm the PTA mom, and I'm all of it.

It got pretty bad, and one more time,

through the grace of God, 'cause one more time,

I would wake up in the morning hating myself so much,

and knowing that this is what God wanted me to be doing,

and this isn't who I am.

What the hell happened?

And so, many things happen,

aside from picking up the first pill,

because they say, "What is the number one offender?"

Picking up the first drink resentment

will take you out faster than anything.

So when I did come back, and I really had to look at,

this isn't about just picking up that first pill.

This is about what was building the whole time.

I was going to less meetings because I didn't have any help

with taking care of my daughter.

It was hard.

I took her to meetings for a long time,

but then it got really hard.

I was resentful at a couple of things,

and I blamed you for those things.

And anyway, so I looked up online now, where's the meeting?

So this is six years.

I'm terrified to walk back in.

And I walked back in to a Tuesday night women's meeting

that I had gone to for years before.

And to shout out for women's meetings,

and I'm sure men feel the same way

about their men's meetings,

but thank God that we have those meetings.

They're the most important meetings to me

because those women saved my life,

and I'm so grateful for it.

So I walked back in to a women's meeting,

and once again, welcome with open arms.

That saved my life, and I was done,

and I was back in, and now I have 21 years.

But it was hard, 'cause I think when you come back

after a relapse, for me, so much shame, so much shame.

I had a hard time.

Not just the shame, the frickin' ego is,

and I've heard people say, I know if I relapse,

I'm never gonna come back and raise my hand.

Well, I know what that felt like.

I didn't wanna raise my hand.

I wasn't gonna tell you.

The ego, for me, was the most powerful thing.

And even though I surrendered, and I was back in,

and I wanted to be there,

the ego was always right out in front of me

when I went to a meeting.

I'd see people I hadn't seen for a long time,

and right away, the shame and the humility,

I would just be overwhelmed with it.

So I would go to meetings, and I'd come home,

and I would just bawl my eyes out,

grateful that I was able to surrender again,

hopeful that still so much self-disgust, really.

And I picked up a book that I'd gotten in '81 or '82,

a new pair of glasses.

I felt like I needed some fresh eyes here,

'cause this was new territory coming back after a relapse,

and that book saved my life.

Chuck C. is a member of Alcoholics Anonymous,

if you don't know who the book is,

and he wrote this book, "A New Pair of Glasses."

And the main thing he talks about is God and ego and self.

And anyways, you'll have to read it

to find out more about it.

But it saved my life.

It really saved my life.

And the other thing, I went to a three-day workshop

of Joe and Charlie, the big book comes alive.

Another thing that saved my life,

it was three days of starting from the beginning

of the book with these two incredible men.

And one of the things they talked about,

each step we went through, the first step is surrender,

and the second step is sanity and insanity.

And this time, I had no problem

seeing the insanity of my disease.

And, but when I first got sober,

the first time around, I didn't say,

I had a hard time saying I was an alcoholic

because I felt I was so young

and my drinking career was kind of short.

And it was my dad that said to me,

"You don't have to say you're an alcoholic

to be a member of Alcoholics Anonymous.

You only have to have a desire to stop drinking."

And that saved my life

because I had a hard time saying that for a while,

but I did have a desire to stop drinking.

Anyway, so step three, Joe and Charlie talked about,

made a decision to turn our will and our lives

over to the care of God.

And I had a hard time with will and lives.

Like that was just too out there for me.

I have no idea what my will is or God's will.

And so they changed it,

made a decision to turn my thinking.

Well, that I could identify with 'cause it was F'd up.

And to turn my thinking and my life.

And that made sense to me

because my thinking is what got my life into trouble.

So if I can learn to work on what's going on in here

and turn that thinking before I take any action,

so that really made sense to me.

And then the fourth step,

it really is a coming to Jesus step for me.

It's all about honesty.

And the fifth step, sharing it with.

So I got a new sponsor when I came back in

and you know, but both sponsors sharing that fifth step

was humbling, very humbling.

And the gift of listening to someone give their fifth step

is saying, yeah, me too, me too.

So you don't feel alone.

And then the seventh, sixth and seventh,

I really had no idea, had so many character defects,

but apparently I did.

And one that came out was a victim.

I had no idea that I played that role.

And that was an awakening.

And it was the gift, you know,

I believe all my character defects are awarenesses

and they turn into gifts

because then I have an opportunity to work on them.

And then step eight night, making them ends,

which were the hardest in my second sobriety

because I let my family down.

My parents didn't let them down.

Armed my family.

I armed my parents.

My dad was, I think, had he passed yet?

Yeah, he'd already passed.

But anyways, that was, again,

very humbling and freeing at the same time.

And then step 10, you know,

I get to look at my shit every day.

That's what that comes down to.

Step 11 is my favorite step

because I believe for me it encompasses all the steps

because I want to walk a spiritual life.

And in order to do that,

I have to look at my shit every day.

Otherwise I'm not free.

And I like to share what my practice is.

I think that's important because I learned from you

and everything that I do is nothing new.

But I started this in my second sobriety.

I get down my knees in the morning.

It's not a religious thing.

It's a surrender and it's a humbling act for me.

And all I say is thank you, thank you, thank you.

And when I go to bed at night,

I did the same things.

I get on my knees, I surrender, I humble myself.

Thank you, thank you.

So many of the times my prayers are thank you, help.

It depends on what's going on.

It's either thank you, thank you, help.

And then I do have a meditation practice.

And I believe, you know,

Scott talked about a lot of things in the book.

And then one of the things that's always stuck out for me

is that we are self-disciplined people.

And one of the best gifts of Alcoholics Anonymous,

aside from sobriety and surrender,

is learning how to be a self-disciplined person

and what a gift that is.

All the gifts that come with learning to have a routine

that's meaningful and make a commitment to that routine

is such an incredible gift.

So I have a meditation practice and I light a candle.

I make it ceremonious because it makes it special to me

and not just routine.

I ring a bell and I get into my position

and I have a meditation.

And then I read some stuff out of the book

and I end my meditation with thank you, thank you,

thank you from the bottom of my heart for my sobriety.

And then I say the third step prayer.

And then because of my spiritual practice,

I wish things for other people that are struggling.

And so I have a group, little group of people

that I wish for certain things for them.

And then I end it and I get on with my day.

And I try to remember when the thinking starts,

I do a lot of breath work because it stops the thought.

If I can deep breath in and out,

it gives me an opportunity to stop the thought.

You know, the Buddhists call it the monkey mind.

So for me, I believe that this is the human condition,

that all people suffer from the monkey mind

and it's just random thoughts going crazy.

And that really made sense to me

'cause I pictured monkeys, you know,

in the jungle screeching from, yeah, that's my mind.

(all laughing)

And I just have to take a breath, invite God in,

let go, let God is a good one

so that I have another day to try to be a service,

to try to be a better human being, a better AA member,

and to have a commitment at a meeting

and to participate in my own sobriety.

Thank you so much.