vol 283. Emotional Regulation with Mary T.

Show Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

We believe that alcoholism is a disease, and that Alcoholics Anonymous is one solution to that disease. I'm here to bring you the voices of its members. Everyone that comes on the show, including myself, is an active member and has found recovery in the rooms of AA. As you listen, please take what works for you and leave the rest.

SPEAKER_01 0:25

Hi, my name is Mary, and I'm an alcoholic, and I am a drunk mom. My sobriety date is April 10th, 2009. I'll talk about my childhood and I want to preface that my parents were good people. And I will talk about how my childhood, I really believe, created a foundation for my alcoholism.

My parents were good people and I loved them very much. So I was an only child. I am an only child. My father was in the Air Force, and we traveled a lot.

We moved a lot, about every year and a half. My father was an alcoholic. I know he was because he was diagnosed by a doctor in my presence and my mom's presence. I grew up in a home where I was told that children are seen but not heard.

And my parents were very involved in the social aspects of the military. Whenever I displayed, and I'm thinking about my very young childhood, I don't have a very good memory of my up until 12 years old. I think it's because we moved so much about every year and a half. And actually, when I was in third grade, I went to four different schools in third grade.

So when I would display my emotion that was either angry or loud or happy or excited or sad, and and any emotion that was not a normal calm emotion, I would be sent to my room. And that really led to my isolation that I still do now, and my inability to regulate my emotions. I also learned in early childhood that my dad did not like me. I also learned that he wanted a boy.

I had a pixie haircut for most of my young childhood. So I was very close to my mother. My mother was very, very sweet. And I know my father didn't like women.

He had um opinions about women, especially in the military. And I know that my mother provided my father with a safe place. Um she loved she loved him very much, very devoted. And I say that because I I found out about my father's childhood um actually the last 15 years, and it was very, very bad.

So emotional regulation, I just did not have it, and there was abuse in the home. I had no self-confidence, but as I shared at a meeting today, I was a people pleaser, and I learned how to make friends, and I was good at making friends. I really, really wanted people to like me. So that really played a big part in my growing up and all the moving, and I really made friends, and it was always so painful to move.

And so my childhood was really scary in that I never knew what to expect. And because I spent so much time alone, and my parents were very social, I never knew what the world was going to be like when I opened my door, my bedroom door. I really, I really believed that that made me who I was and who I grew up to be. Alcohol was in the home every day.

And I've I've always said when I chair meetings, it flowed like water coming out of the faucet. Every holiday, every occasion, alcohol was there. Every picture that I look back on, people were holding a drink. And my father would get violence.

So we moved um when I was 12 to where I live now, and I started drinking with my parents. I don't know if I was 13 or 14, but it was somewhere around there. And I do remember my first dream, and it was at my grandparents' house, they had moved to our area, and I remember very clearly that sense of ease and comfort that everybody talks about because at that time, what I was a preteen, was so self-conscious, and I had terrible acne, and I was so I I had no self-confidence. I was absolutely just mortified when anybody looked at at me, looked my way.

I I just didn't know how to act. I did have my good good friends though, my the girls that that I became friends with, I did have some really good friends. My parents at that time set up a spare room with a TV and a stereo and a couch. So I spent even more time by myself.

I don't know if my parents just didn't want to deal with me or they didn't. I I think that was it. They just wanted to carry on and um and have their their cocktail time. My mom was not an alcoholic, but my dad was.

And so when I was in high school, his alcoholism got really, really bad. More more violence, um, anger towards me. He would be verbally and emotionally abusive. And my mom was always there to to pick up the pieces and comfort me in the way that the only way that she knew how, and that's just to listen.

And so I was able to really talk about my feelings with my mom. And as I got older, I realized what a sensitive and emotional person I was and still am. I just did not know how to regulate it, and I didn't have any tools. I moved out when I was 18.

I barely graduated from high school. I didn't have any study habits. My parents didn't check my homework, um, they didn't really check my grades. They were mainly interested in their lives.

Um and so I moved out when I was 18, and that's when I started drinking alcoholically. That's when I started drinking a little bit in high school when I would when I knew I could get away with it. But once I started, I could not stop. I never could stop drinking once I started, never.

I also dabbled in other forms of um of alcoholism. Then I discovered live music, and live music just became such an important part of my life. I started going to concerts and music festivals with um my roommates, and their drinking was encouraged, you know. I did have a good time.

I did, but I always overshot the mark. Always. I was always the person that got drunk first because I drank so fast. 19, 20 years old, I put myself in dangerous situations due to my alcoholism and um the other forms of alcohol.

I'm very lucky that I came away unscathed. So all the while that I've been out partying and going to see live music and going to the bars, drinking underage, I would see a boy that I met when I was 14. And during this time, I never had a boyfriend. I really had problems relating and understanding boys.

I I wanted a boyfriend, but I just didn't know how to go about getting a boyfriend or or anything. I was I was socially awkward in that way with boys. But when I would see the man who I ended up getting married to, when I would see him, it was easy because I met him through one of my longtime good close friends. Um, she was dating him in high school, and so when I would see him, it was always good, and he always loved to have a good time.

I knew his history, I knew that he was close to his parents, and I'm a crier when I think about him, it makes me happy. He introduced um camping and the outdoors, and these are happy tears and grateful tears. We, of course, we got married. Of course, I picked the the man that liked to party and have a good time, of course.

But he was also a really good person, and he was my first boyfriend, so my alcoholism, he was not an alcoholic, I was, I am, became more and more profound, my drinking. For some reason, on our wedding day, which is still the happiest day of my life, I kept it under control. But through the years, I would race my husband through the beer in the refrigerator, and I always won. We decided to have children um pretty early in our marriage.

I knew from the get-go he was going to be a wonderful father, and I wanted to be a mother very, very much. So I went to the doctor and I had tests to make sure that I had nothing in my system. And I stopped drinking, and we got pregnant right away with our first child. It was easy not to drink when I was pregnant because I was doing it for someone else, and I was doing it for this human being that I wanted so much in my life, both of us, and we were so excited.

He was born and we were really involved with everything. My husband's family was really involved, and my parents, not my dad, so much really in controlled situations because he was um unpredictable. My mom became my babysitter. And then when we had our second child, our daughter, two and a half years later, we were just absolutely overjoyed.

We were overjoyed that we we had a boy and we had a girl, and that they weren't going to be only children, but they had an alcoholic mom. I was very involved in their school, and my husband was involved, but every night I would get drunk. Every night I would get drunk. My husband kept my children safe for the most part from my alcoholism.

My children knew what was happening through the years: elementary, school, junior high. I never drove them. Although I did take them to school after being drunk the night before, and I'm sure that my blood alcohol level was probably beyond the the legal limit. I believe in yet.

But I believe it's a yet. It's a yet for me. Incarceration, I did probably lose some jobs because you know, in my early 20s, yes, yet, I believe in yet. We had a business, we started a business, we were self-employed, and my husband was very successful.

And all the while I was drinking every single night. And I started with beer and then I went to red wine, of course, and I would check the alcohol content at the store, and I would make up excuses to go to the grocery store if I felt like I was getting low or if I was out, and I would take both my children or just um my youngest to the grocery store and say, Let's make some cookies tonight, or let's let's make this recipe tonight. And alcohol would always find its way into the grocery cart. Very a lot of pain, stomach uh symptoms, and through the process of the doctors and investigating and testing biopsy, he was diagnosed with stage four cancer.

And he was 43. It was such a shock. It was such a scary, scary time, and I'll never forget my children. They asked me, they said, Is dad gonna die?

Because we always were honest with them. And I told them, yes, I said he'll die someday, and and so will all of us, but today's not the day. I said something to that uh effect. My husband and I in the hospital, I stayed with him.

Um, he had surgery and they found out it was stage four. He was scared and upset, and I said, Okay, we have two choices here. Either we're going to give it to God or give up. What's your choice?

And he said, give it to God. And he never gave up. He supported his family, he went to work at his business with stage four cancer, and he got on a medication that was chemo, but it was a um it was in pill form. And he had horrible interactions and horrible side effects, but he never gave up.

His cancer became in remission, and we had a big party for that. We were just so proud of him, and and it was his cancer never was who he was, but it was always a black cloud over us because we didn't know and we were uncertain and we were afraid. And that is when, of course, like the alcoholic I am, I decided I was gonna start drinking vodka. Because don't you know, if you had my life, you would start drinking vodka too.

And it very, very quickly became a fifth of vodka a day, a quart, you know, I guess a little bit less than a quart of vodka a day, from about 4:30 until I passed out. And the camping that we did, I did a little bit of day drinking because that's what you do, right? You you know, pop open a beer, and we did a lot of camping. My husband probably already said that he's a normy, he's not an alcoholic.

Um, he could drink several beers or or margaritas or or something and then stop and have a have a soda. I was not one of those people. I drank everything that was in the house if I didn't have it. And it caused a lot of problems in our marriage.

He said to me more than once, why can't you have just one glass of wine? Why can't you just have one beer or two beers? Why can't you just have a couple margaritas? And I didn't know why, but I knew I couldn't.

And I never did. My daughter at one point, when she was in high school, said to me, we were going into a store, she said to me, Mom, would you stop drinking? And I said to her, this ridiculous statement, sure, but I'm gonna finish what I have. Such an alcoholic viewpoint and statement, right?

So I did stop drinking for a couple weeks, and I would walk in the room as the egotistical alcoholic that I was, and I would say, ta-da! I haven't had a drink in two weeks. Look at me, yay! Well, I never intended to keep it up, I just planned to get sneakier about it.

But of course, when you're living with people, I I couldn't hide it because of the amount I was drinking, a tremendous amount. This happened a few times where I would stop. Everybody would get on my case, right? And I always said to myself, I'm not hurting anybody.

Everybody has food in front of them at six o'clock every night, everybody has a lunch, everybody has clean laundry, you know. Who am I hurting? In 2008, we had come back from a family reunion in another part of the United States, and I was holding on to dear life during that time. It was so Hard because I could not drink like I wanted to, and I was warned by my husband because it was his side of the family.

I'll never forget I was in another state, and this state had where the liquor stores they didn't sell after a certain time, and I remember calling to see if they were still open. And my husband, I said, You gotta take me, you gotta take me. And I remember calling again and and trying to disguise my voice so they wouldn't know that it was me. And just the same way as when I was in my alcoholism, and I would go to different stores, like all of us have said, you know, I don't want anybody to think that that there's something wrong with me.

I'm just gonna have a party. But I was having a party of one and and being drunk at home. So that happened in 2008. And so I started thinking, my son had already gone to college, and I started thinking I knew I was an alcoholic.

I knew what one looked like, and I knew I was. So I stopped drinking at the beginning of 2009, and I came into the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, and you all in the rooms became my people. I couldn't believe it. I listened and I cried and cried and I listened, and you said to keep coming back, and I did.

I picked the date April 10th because I really didn't know, I didn't really remember when I had stopped drinking, but that was when I knew I knew that I was going to get sober, was April 10th, 2009. I really found my people and I felt like I was home and I wanted what they had. It was the very first meeting I went to, which is my home group today, and I never left. And I surrendered to AA to Alcoholics Anonymous, like I surrendered to the bottle every single night.

At home, my husband was very angry because, as it turned out, he didn't want me to stop drinking, he just wanted me to control my drinking, and that was not possible. I could never control it. Also, the higher power concept was very easy. Um, I've always considered myself a spiritual person.

My family and I went to church. Looking back, I had the God consciousness coming into AA. I was very lucky in that. My God then and today is a gentle, loving God, and my God today is so much bigger than that God that I walked into AA with.

So my husband was mad, was angry, and one of the ways that he dealt with that disappointment was he stopped talking to me. We we had had some problems, and I'm not gonna blame his cancer because he was such a badass through it all of never surrendering to his cancer. He he fought through it, and also the concept of alcoholism being a disease, I did I did have a problem with that because my husband did not go to the grocery store and buy a bottle of cancer. How could alcoholism be a disease?

And so I heard someone say in my home group that according to the medical experts, a disease is anything that will kill you. And then I understood. And through the 16 years, I have personally known people who have passed away from alcoholism. So during this time, the beginning of my um sobriety, three months into my sobriety, my mother was diagnosed with a terminal illness, and she was given a short time to live.

I went to my meetings and I cried, and I talked to people and I shared how I felt, which I do so easily. And I got sober just in time to be with my mother at the end of her life and tell her that she was the best mom I could ever had, and I will see her in heaven. And I got to help my children and my husband with the passing of my mom. My father was by that time in a facility because his alcoholism had become completely unmanageable by my mom.

He had started having health problems and it was really bad. And so when my mom passed away, I went to the facility to see my dad, and I told him that that mom had passed, and he didn't believe me. And so I I had to show him the obituary. And so I would visit my dad every month, and my dad wanted to hear about the children, my children, and never asked about me, never asked how I was, um, never asked how I was doing, um, not having my mom.

Through the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, I was able to accept that and to love my dad as someone who is truly one of us, but never received the gift of sobriety. My dad died a year after my mom. I got sober just in time, thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous, to be there for my children and my husband and my aunt and uncle. And we got to have a funeral um at Arlington National Cemetery for my dad, and it was beautiful.

And I got to say I love you to my dad, and he said it back to me. I got sober just in time for that. So eventually my husband and I separated. It was it was amicable, it was painful, but it was amicable.

We were never enemies, we were never angry, there was pain on both sides. My husband was helping me with my parents' house, and we were going camping, we were having um holiday dinners together, the children would come home from college, they both were away at college, and we we were a family. My husband and I drew closer, and I consider him my best friend. Um, his cancer came back, um, and he had horrible symptoms of that, and he still worked, he still was working, and he was working with our son, and he got to see our son graduate from college, and we were a family, and it was beautiful, and he still didn't understand, but we were friends, and I asked him, I said, would you read the doctor's opinion?

And we were in our home, and he said yes, and he sat in the corner and he read the doctor's opinion, and it's a long one, and it's and I we were with our children and probably their friends are their wonderful friends, and I'll never forget he looked at me and he got it, he got it. So after that, he saw me get my two-year chip or my three-year chip. He started going to meetings with me, and also my children were going to meetings with me, too. My children were very supportive, and I got to make amends to my children, and I got to make amends to my husband, and he asked me to be his caregiver when he went in hospice, and he gave up five days before he passed away, and I got to be with him.

Um, my daughter was out of the country, but my son was there, and um my husband got to be at home where he wanted to be, and we got to say, I love you, I love you, I love you. Luckily, before my daughter went out of the country for her education, they got to spend some time at the beach. So thankful for that. So our daughter came home, had to come home early, and we got to heal together.

Healing, I don't know, we're it's we're still healing, right? When I got sober, my children were 17 and 19. When their father passed away, they were 21 and 23. We became very close, the three of us.

And I always called us the three-legged chair. We used to have, we used to be the four-legged chair, strong and beautiful, and we became the three-legged chair, the three of us, and we sent my my son and I took his sister, my daughter, to graduate school. We drove home and we began our life without without their dad. I met someone from my past in the meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous.

He was a C and E um alcoholic, and that is a Christmas Easter alcoholic, and I fell in love. He and I had a very codependent on my side um relationship. I I clung to him because he had a link to my past, um, a link to my parents, a link to my husband. Um, he too was was divorced.

I was divorced. There was a lot of codependency. It was toxic. I completely surrendered to Alcoholics Anonymous from from day one, and I was doing the deal.

I was doing the steps. I had a sponsor. I was going to meetings, meetings, meetings. I was working with other women.

I was of service. Alcoholics Anonymous changed my life. My oldest said, Mom, you're not even the same person. I felt like a different person, but I also didn't have the adult tools that are needed for a successful relationship.

I was very emotional and high strung, and and he wasn't on the same path uh I was in the program. And he would tell me, it sounds like you need to go to a meeting. One of the best things that I did was I got rid of social media right after my husband died. That was one of the best things I did.

I'm so glad. And I I did get TikTok a couple years ago, but that was such a mind uh suck that I just had to get rid of it. But um I I do I do believe that that that was such a great um that was a great choice that I made. So I got a job.

I was working full-time during this this time, during my sobriety, um, the big beginning of my sobriety, and my sponsor became my boss, which was a very bad experience because I needed to talk to my sponsor about my boss, but I couldn't really talk to my boss about my sponsor, and the the lines were blurred. Um, but my sponsor was so helpful when my parents died, and when my husband died, he she was so loving, and it took me two and a half years to do my steps because people kept dying. So I started to look for another job in in another agency, and I got another job, and I got to leave that situation. It was not good at all.

As I started this new job, I realized rather quickly it was a horrible fit, absolutely horrible. So in 2022, I had a series of events that happened to me that changed me, that changed my life. The job that I promoted to, I was diagnosed with cancer. My dog that my husband and I got the year I got sober, he was also diagnosed with cancer.

And I caught my boyfriend cheating. I caught him in the worst way that you can catch someone you love cheating with someone else. And then I had to, I couldn't stay at that job, and I returned to my former agency that I had left with my tail between my legs. And this all happened within two months, three months, I became a person that was still sober.

And mind you, I have never had a reason to drink since I got sober. It was never, it was never something that I considered the urge to drink and the craving was removed from me almost immediately, and I contribute that to my relationship with my higher power. But 2022, my life was burning down. I reacted to being betrayed, I reacted to getting a cancer diagnosis, I reacted to this dog that I loved so much, that my husband loved so much, getting diagnosed with cancer, and that I had to go back to the agency.

It was a horrible, it was the worst time in my life, the very worst time. When my parents died, I had the support of my friends, and I had the support of the tribe of women. And then when my husband died, and shortly after, I had that support from my boyfriend. But the betrayal that I experienced led me to see the world through the lens of pain and fear and anger, so so much anger.

And so my son at this time had gotten married and started a family, his family. And we started to drift apart, and I can see now that I was reacting to everything in my life through the lens of pain and heartache. I was going to meetings, I was working with people, I was of service, and I was working with my sponsor. But the pain that I was experiencing was nothing I've ever experienced in my life.

It was physical pain, betrayal, and all of my childhood, the abandonment issues and the hurt, it all came to the surface. And so for a year, I walked through my life in so much pain. And it affected everything that I did, and everyone that I came across and every conversation. And my self-worth was always based on what other people thought of me.

And this man that I was so in love with didn't want me anymore. He never broke up with me, he just started seeing other people without telling me. And I found out later that it had been going on for quite a while. I was heartbroken, and I let that pain rule my life.

I felt unlovable, I felt unwanted, I felt thrown away. So I know that my relationship with my son was affected by this. In 2023, I had a big falling out with my son. It was bad, it was really bad.

Um, I hold myself responsible for my part. And I decided in April of 2023, I didn't want to be here anymore. When I got home from work and I made that decision, and I received a call from one of my closest friends, and I did the best thing that I could have done, and I told her. Since then, the two years I've been healing and getting better, and my God has gotten bigger and bigger, and I tell my story.

I have learned to see the difference between depression and sadness. And I have learned that I have to die to be reborn, and I realized that we are the sum of our experiences, and my friends are such. Treasures to me. And my God is getting bigger and bigger every day.

And I can look back and I can thank that boyfriend for rejecting me because I still would be on that hamster wheel while he was cheating on me. My dog passed away this year, and I got to have the vet come in and he passed away here in his home in his bed, and he was content. And I got to say goodbye. I got to be so grateful and thankful that my cancer wasn't the kind my mom got or the or the kind that my husband got.

So grateful. I love poetry so much and music. And it's a poem called On Children, and it's by Khalil Gabron. And the poem goes as this your children are not your children, they are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself.

They come through you, but not from you. And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you. And that is the best thing I ever heard from one of my friends at in AA. And so amorfati, the love of fate, I'm so glad this happened to me.

I'm so glad those circumstances happened to me. My spiritual life and my sobriety would not be what it is today without those events that I survived. And if anyone, and I tell this when I'm carrying, if anyone comes to the point in their life like I did, that they think they can't go on, please voice that.

SPEAKER_00 46:53

Thank you, Mary. I love your storytelling. You talked about your God consciousness, that you kind of came to the rooms with it. You have built on that God consciousness. Can you tell us what has grown over those 16 years in way of your God consciousness?

SPEAKER_01 47:17

Yes. So when I came in, my God was a church God, loving and kind. And as I have grown, and the growth that I've experienced in Alcoholics Anonymous is phenomenal and unbelievable. My God, I can see in everything that's good. I live near a lot of wildlife, and I see God in nature, and I see God in music, and I get to go to music festivals with such good friends and concerts and movies based on music. And I get to so get immersed in that and remember it the next day. And I get to talk about that with people. And all of that, I think, is a gift from God. God is everywhere. God isn't just in church, God is everywhere. God is in all of us. I I can't really explain it, but my God consciousness now is through meditation. I am learning about Buddhism, learning about stoicism, and learning about everything that I can, and it's all God-centered. And I asked God in 2009 to help me get sober, and that's exactly what happened. I asked God to take away the craving of that fifth of vodka day, and that's exactly what happened. And I can look back on that now and see that the 16 years of transformation that I experienced because of Alcoholics Anonymous.

SPEAKER_00 49:14

You talked about having no emotional regulation when you were younger. How do you regulate your emotions today?

SPEAKER_01 49:22

Yeah, it's still a struggle. And I've never been able to do that before. It's amazing. I can see how how I react and how and I've told this at group level. I would kick the door in like a sitcom and stand on the door that's on the ground with my fists up and saying, now let's talk to my loved ones, right? Well, that doesn't work. Absolutely not. And um, so yeah, I I meditate. I retired recently and I'm and I go outside and I meditate and I run on the bike trail that I have near my house, and I walk and I hike and um I say yes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 50:31

Sounds like a good life. Yeah. I really appreciate that you shared how you got through a hard time sober. Sometimes we listen to somebody's lead and it's all rainbows and butterflies. And I have to ask, have you gone through a hard time in sobriety? And of course, there's always hard times in sobriety. So thank you for sharing that. And it's lovely to hear that you're on the other side of it and grateful for having gone through it.

SPEAKER_01 51:02

Oh, so grateful. And I do have another something that I would like to share. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 51:09

That's perfect because my next question was is there anything that you would like to share that you left out or that you're thinking of now?

SPEAKER_01 51:16

Yes, there is. So um, my daughter is my greatest teacher. My daughter has always shown me kindness and respect, even though even when I thought I didn't deserve it. And so I asked her if this would be something to share. I was born in the early 60s and they released the movie Bambi. They re-released it several times, and um, I believe it was in color. That's how old I am. And my mother took me to the movie Bambi. And when the sad, sad part comes, I cried out and became sobbing, sobbing. My mother put her hand across my mouth and picked me up and took me out of the theater. My love for animals and wildlife has always been in the forefront of my heart. And I got a job at an agency where I was working with people who oversaw hunting, who regulated, um, helped regulate hunting. I worked in a building that had taxidermy all over. Everywhere I turned, there was um a dead animal. We got to follow the mountain lion that lived in Los Angeles. We were monitoring this animal that um crossed freeways and we were cheering, and when it when it passed, we were sad. Um, I got to do that as a vegetarian. I got to work with people in law enforcement that helped people to hunt mammals. So ironic. But you know what? God's God laughs. We make plans and God laughs, and I that I swear that was a God thing. And I got to learn patience and tolerance and acceptance through those years, and I worked a lot for a long time there, and I'm so glad it happened. I'm so glad. Was it hard? It was really hard, but I grew as a person unbelievable, unbelievable.

SPEAKER_00 53:45

That's a great addition. Okay, our final question for the listener who is suffering. What would you like to leave them with?

SPEAKER_01 53:55

Meeting makers make it. I I so I so believe in that, and even when you don't want to go, let us love you. There's so much love in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. We love each other until we learn how to love ourselves. So if you're struggling, let us love you.

SPEAKER_00 54:20

For more information, read the first 164 pages of the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous or visit keepcomingback.net.