My name is Glenn H. I am a grateful recovering alcoholic.
I never would have thought I would be speaking to, (sharing with) a group of people. Let alone a group as large as this one and relating to them what I was like, what happened and what I am like now. Forgive me if I am a little nervous, I need to take a moment to ask the God of my understanding to join me and use me to carry the message of hope and love, to demonstrte through my experience strength and hope what He can do.
Not so many years ago. The only places you could hear me talk about my past would be at the bar stool. Well you could in fact hear me else where provided there were people willing to listen to my side of the story and that could have been anywhere. The dinner table, the living room, a campfire, work, parties, get togethers. Be it one on one or in a crowd I wanted to talk about my life and why it was so full of problems and who or what was to blame for that. What you wouldn't hear me talk about would be what my part was in all of this. What I did to create this chaos and the resentments not only I had towards others but how they found a few of their own towards me.
You wouldn't hear me talk about God either. Unless of course I was good and drunk. Then it was only to make deals with Him or debate His exsistance to others. I would sit there and say I have prayed for this or that and He never answered them. There fore he does not exsist. If you said He did you were a fool. I can not count the number of times I would say get me out of this and I will do that. Do this for me this one time and I will never ask for another thing. You see I had no idea how to pray rightly.
Today I have found a God of my understanding. I found Him hear in Alcoholics Anonymous.
My journey here though was a long one. Where my life once a good life progressively got worse. It started long before alcohol was introduced. Long before that first drink. Once that was added the progression accellerated. Throughout the next twenty-five years my life became a downward spiral. Taking with it or trying to take with it those things that didn't have the strength to escape. Oh I drank a little at first and enjoyed those days of fun and excitement. I was young and the disease hadn't taken hold yet, but it would. I can not tell you when the fun ended but it did. Drinking became an obsession then a nessesity. I still even then would say I had it under control. In all honesty that was a big lie. Perhaps the biggest, or one of the biggest I ever told. I didn't have it under control at all, in fact it had me. I wasn't willing to admit that, but I would in time.
On September the 9th, 2002 I was to drink my last drink and do my last drug. On September the 10th 2002 I fearfully walked into my first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. By that time I had successfully destroyed every relationship with every person in my life. A 19 year marriage gone, a son that would not even look at me and in fact wished me dead. A father totally disgusted washed his hands of me. My entire family I, by then, allienated. Friends were gone and my boss no longer trusted me. Fact is had my boss not intervened I may just have reached that ultimate bottom. I had in fact three weeks prior tried that exit and the gun misfired. What I know was my first spiritual experience.
When I attended that first meeting I was emotionally unmanagable, spiritually dead and physically ill. I had lost over ninety pounds my last year out there and most of that in the last six months or so. I was on my way out and really didn't need that gun to do it. I believe had my boss not stepped in when she did I perhaps would have died with in weeks or a few months, after being taken over by an irreversible illness and eventual death. What a terrible way it would have been to leave this planet. Insane, ill and alone. I am all to aware that still thousands perhaps still follow that path yet that was not the direction I was to go. Not yet anyway. For God gave me a gift. Grace and Alcoholics Anonymous a winning solution found here in this fellowship.
Admittedly so when I got here I had no clue what it was to be an alcoholic. I knew nothing of powerlessness or unmanagability. I knew nothing of a power greater than myself and although I once believed in God and had faith I certianly had none that September day. I knew nothing except the fact that I needed help.
I remember little of that first night or what the speaker actually talked about. I vaguely remember someone getting up and saying that if you have a desire to stop drinking and what to join us on this journey you may come up here and get a white chip. There I was standing there with this white chip in my habd that had the letters AA on it. Since that day I have not found it nessesary to take a drink since and that is only by God's Grace and an awesome fellowship known around the world as Alcoholic Anonymous.
I am not really sure what my desires were that night but what I did have was an overwhelming feeling that for the very first time in my life I was right where I belonged with the people I belonged with and I was home, safe. Less than 24 hours from that meeting I was sitting in another meeting. It was a step study meeting and I knew nothing about the steps or where to begin. But I sat there and listened. I was given a Big Book that night and a 12&12. I went home and opened it and began to read about me and this disease. I went to work the next day and my boss, who was about to have me check into a rehab center at the VA hospital was willing to give this "AA thing a chance" and so was I.
So the journey began. I had to look back at my entire life and how it all began. I didn’t do this alone for I was willing to go to any length. I grabbed a sponsor and found others I could confide in. I was on my way.
This is what it was like. Born October 12th 1961 to a school teacher and a printing press repairman. The middle child of three. I have two sisters, one older, one younger. We were by no means a well to do family. Fact is we struggled quite a bit to survive. My folks worked very hard and as early as I can remember we as children always had work to do. Chores and school work and the like. I wore hand me downs from cousins and friends. My father would buy saddle shoes, buy two pair get a third one free. He also cut my hair, so I hardly ever had any hair on this head. I was a strange looking kid and very few friends in school.
My father was raised in Hell’s Kitchen. His father was a hard man who worked all the time and was emotionally unavailable. Very strict and stern. Much like my own father. His mother was a raging alcoholic that died as the direct result of this disease. After I had gotten sober my mother told me that his mother tried twice to kill him in a drunken rage. That helped me some understand his fear in finding out that his own son was also an alcoholic. That also explained the three policemen he used to have me thrown out from one of his apartments.
My mother was a school teacher, one of five children. A God fearing woman that attended church every Sunday with her own children in tow. My father did not believe in God. My mother to this day is a laid back person, never taking anything too seriously. She wasn’t always that way I will explain that shortly.
We lived just outside of Buffalo NY at the time and for the most part my life was that of a normal kid. Looking back now though I can see where the isms were beginning. That feeling of not fitting in was born at a young age for me. I was the brunt of many jokes at school and at home by my sisters and even my friends would make fun of me. I was better off out playing in the fields or my sandbox or room alone than with other people. This is how I saw things then and saw them as I began this path of recovery.
All I wanted then was to be loved and accepted for being who and what I was. But seldom did it seem to me that I was getting that love and attention. So I did things to bring that attention to me, but usually it was not the kind I was looking for and always seemed to backfire. I would lie and manipulate situations to fit my circumstances or to get what I want. I can see today why that didn’t and doesn’t work. But I didn’t know that then.
Now I have to mention at this time my father was my hero. I idolized him. He could do no wrong as far as I could see. I wanted to be around him all the time and being a young boy I got in the way a lot. He would have to find things for me to do or to get me out of his way. Most of the time I cried about it and he was the type of man that if you didn’t stop crying he would give you something to cry about so I would get that too. All I wanted was the dad my friends had. But he could only give what was given to Him. It wasn’t until I got sober did the resentments I had toward my father began to lift. Fact is he could have never met the expectations I had placed on him. Nor could anyone else for that matter.
Unreasonable expectations lead to deep resentments.
When I began to uncover my life that I had for so long hidden I got down to the causes and conditions. There I uncovered some of the deepest darkest secrets of my past. I found those very things that the alcohol had helped for so long to hide. But that same alcohol brought with it it’s own set of things and there was no longer any hiding of anything. So when I got sober I looked at it all. As painful as it was I had to keep telling myself that I said I would go to any length and I kept digging.
Uncovered was the fact that I was the object of another mans obsession for two summers in a row. I hid that deep in the archives of a mind that was forever getting sicker. When I got sober I had to let that go and forgive the man. I had to or I may have gotten drunk again and I didn’t want that. So I had to call on that God of my understanding for help. One night before that I asked in a meeting what part of that event was mine? Much to my surprise it was a resentment that was my part and I had to do the work to be free of that. I prayed for the man as I would for a sick friend and eventually I came to forgive this man and was freed. I can not tell you how good it felt to finally let that pain go.
But there was more yet to uncover.
My folks began to fight. Many nights my sisters and I would be huddled up in my older sister’s room terrified that our dad was going to beat our mother to death. The fights continued. I being around my father found out the truth one night when I went with him to his girlfriends house. He had many girlfriends and I met them all. But I kept that a secret because I wanted my dad to love me. I even took his side and defended him the day my mother found out and in a violent rage confronted him. She came home that day bleeding. She had put her hand through the last girlfriends window and found dad in his boxers. I was 12 years old then and already had seen more than a child of twelve should see or be a part of. Of course unknown to me at the time my entrance into alcoholism was just around the corner.
I came home from school one day and my father was gone. Everything in the house that said a father lived there was absent. My mother was sitting in the kitchen crying and I had this huge feeling of abandonment. Something I had felt before but this time far more intense. I didn’t care about my mom or sisters then. I only cared about me.
In the year that followed I found that glue and gas fumes could give you a really good high and for a brief moment all your troubles vanished. I was instantly hooked. Then enter the boyfriend my mother brought home. He was a raging alcoholic and my father was livid that he moved in the house he paid for and stopped sending money.
Today I know that my mother did what she had to do to survive and raise three kids on her own. I did not see it that way then mind you. I was rebellious and would sneak drinks from Fred’s bottle or steal beers from the cases he stored. The gas and glue was gone, replaced by alcohol. I became unmanageable by my mother and had I stayed with her I am sure my step father would have killed me or me him sooner or later. Unable to control an out of control teenager my mom had no choice but to send me to live with my father and his girlfriend and her two kids.
It was 1976. I got off the plane in Roanoke Virginia ready to be with my dad. Those feelings of being less than only re-enforced by the fact that my dad lived in one mobile home with her and her kids and I was placed in another one below. I could sit there and look up and see them acting like a family and the anger and resentment grew larger. Here I was a skinny little yankee boy in a southern mobile home park. I had to find friends quick! I drank and by then smoked as well and immediately found guys that did the same.
We were a tough crowd on the outside. But if you could see our insides you would have known we were just boys. The drinking was then a task done at any given moment. Stealing from our folks whatever we could get our hands on. Looking back now even then alcohol had it’s grips on me and the grip would only get tighter.
A few years later we moved to a piece of land my dad bought and I had to make new friends. Again I was able to find four guys that were just like me. We were the badest boys in town if you asked us. For the remaining high school years I drank at every opportunity and that included during school. Now the feeling of not belonging was always there but as long as I could maintain the mask I could survive. Countless relationship failures and falling grades and all that that life includes I made it out of high school.
I have to share with you that during my junior year we had a visit from a fella that shared with us what drinking had done to him. He was in a wheel chair and had killed a family while drinking and driving. All my friends and I could do that day was sit there in the back of the auditorium and laugh saying we will never do that!. Well by the end of our senior year one of us had, in a drunken depressive state placed a shotgun in his head and killed himself. Shortly after that another vanished and was never seen again. A third got a batch of bad hooch one night and went insane right then and there and to this day is a wet brain. All that was left was Sammy and me. Sammy was my best friend ever and you would never see one of us without seeing the other.
That would change. After high school I left home in a rage wanting to be free from that sick family I was a part of. After a few months of living alone and selling blood to buy beer I met the woman I would marry. But I had to return home and live in the dirt dug basement under the trailer. There I stayed until I joined the Air Force. An attempt at straightening out my life and preparing to get married. I came home on leave and with in a year from then was a married man and soon to be dad. Stationed in Myrtle Beach SC. We lived there for four years and then I was reassigned to Plattsburg AFB NY. We stayed there for another four years.
Now I have to say that during this entire time I was drinking more and more. But the yets hadn’t happened despite countless blackouts. I drove drunk most of the time with or without my family on board. My wife would plead with me to stop drinking and become a responsible dad and husband. I would have none of that. Oh I wanted to, but didn’t know how or where to begin. I thought I did but would always fail and return to my way of dealing with life. That meant doing whatever I wanted and not caring about anything else. Why she stayed with me I have no clue.
After 8 years of service we came home. Reunited with my best friend Sammy I was back in the day of my younger years. We had catching up to do. During this time my son was growing up with a dad that wasn’t really ever there. If he was he was either drunk, drinking or getting ready to drink. Fact is I did very little without a drink in my hand and it would get worse. My wife then tired of trying to get the love and attention she deserved and sought out affection elsewhere. I was livid and offended and although I never was unfaithful to her or hit her I emotionally abused her. Yet she stayed and I stayed and this family was a sick as the one I grew up in. But it wasn’t my fault.
I went to every football game my son played in for four years and not once did I go sober. Fact is I would even take his girlfriend there drunk behind the wheel. It is only by the grace of God that I have never wrecked and killed anyone during those countless times. I did wreck several times and damage the truck or car or some guys yard but no personal injuries or jail time resulted. Once even driving 23 miles on a flat tire down a mountain. The truck caught on fire and burned the paint off the right side. I came to the next morning only to shake my head grab a drink and replace the tire and laugh.
Things were about to get worse. It was August 2000. The phone rang at 2 a.m. My best friend Sammy was found unconsiuos in the men’s room at work In a week they were turning off the machine that kept him alive. I was to drink the entire time not being able to cope any other way. A few days later we buried him. Long before that day the fun in drinking was gone. Now it was a nessesity. And yet it was going to get worse.
A year later I decided to end that marriage of 19 years and like my father before me abandoned them. Unlike my father though I was not doing it to be with another woman but that would soon be filled too. All the walls were crashing down and the drink was killing me. I grabbed onto this lady in a last ditch effort to save myself. Thinking there was nothing better than a new love to give an old drunk new life. That doesn’t work though as I found out shortly and she to save herself left running. I was already on my way down and she wasn’t going to go down with me. That’s not how I saw it then but I see with different eyes today and she was a smart lady.
It is now March 2002 and I am spiraling out of control towards that bottom required to smash any idea that I could ever drink again. Not amount of alcohol mixed with any drug legal or not could quiet the noise. The pain, the shame, the guilt, all that stuff came at me in one huge overwhelming wave. I had had enough of this life. Everything outlined in our text came true. Everything! I had not even seen the book yet and I knew I was beaten. I made one final attempt at taking my life and there by the lake on that summer night I put the gun in my mouth and pulled the trigger.
What happened next was what was to become my first spiritual experience. It started with the click of the hammer hitting the bullet, followed by silence and for the first time in my life a sincere prayer to the God I did not understand for help. He placed before me that night an angel which told me of a way to live and promised me that it would get better. Her likeness now a tattoo on my right arm, a reminder to me of that night. One I never want to forget. I did finish my bottle of tequila and smoked several cigarettes before passing out in my car. It was late August.
Three weeks later I was sitting in the bar trying to get down a beer and even the shot of tequila didn’t help. I hadn’t ate in a week or more and was getting close to that end. Having watched me come in smelling of alcohol and changing to smaller uniform sizes my boss had had enough and not being an alcoholic reached out to help. She could only tell me what she had been seeing for some time and was afraid I would die.
Once again God was using someone to reach me. Perhaps His last chance at saving His child. I am so grateful for that day and that talk. I believe today that I was ready. She sent me home and I called AA. I sat in that parking lot an hour before the meeting was to start. Scared, no terrified! I had no clue what was about to happen. This helpless, hopeless, beaten man walked in that meeting and walked out a changed man only armed with hope. Given when one alcoholic shared his story with others. Hope and a white chip.
What is it like today?
Well I am a grateful recovering alcoholic. I wouldn’t want to be anything else. As the result of these steps I have been freed from the bondage of self and have had a spiritual awakening. I can walk with my head up and know that I am the best I can be on any given day and that’s enough. I have been given a God of my understanding and can allow you to have yours and not debate the issue. I have been through the steps twice and have done the 4th and 5th steps three times.
I apply these principals as best I can to all my affairs and always remain teachable and willing to go to any length to stay sober and grow even more in recovery. Staying sober for me is not close to enough. I have to work with others and stay in the meetings where the books are read as well as to the meetings where newcomers come in. I never want to forget how I got here or why I got here and why I stay here. Together with the fellowship and God I have been able to rebuild a relationship with my son and have been blessed with a beautiful grand daughter.
I have that same job today and live in a small apartment. I have a car that has never been driven by me drunk and what do ya know it hasn’t hit a ditch. I have been blessed with countless friends. I have been reunited with some of my family. Man! I have been given a priceless gift known as recovery. I know there is no cure and that I can never again drink and am okay with that. That desire to drink left early in this journey and I am so grateful. Upon awakening, that means before my feet hit the floor I can say thank you God and come with me today. AA has given me a God and my faith in that God has returned even stronger than any other time in my life.
I have found a way to live not only a life free from alcohol but to live life itself. I have lived in the problem all my life. Now I have been given the solution. When I sit in a meeting and see the light come on in the eyes of another my heart pounds and I feel that unconditional love pouring out. Today I can remember what I was like and know that because of Alcoholics Anonymous and God I am nothing like that person.
I could not see that at first and now can only really see it when I share my story with others and reflect on what it was like and what happened and what I am like now. I know I did not do this alone and know that I do not have to. Nor does anyone that hears this message. You never have to be alone again. To say the 11th step prayer and know what it means and feel it in the heart is something I never thought I could accomplish. With your help I have.
I have taken out all of my deepest darkest secrets and shared them with another man, three in fact and have shared it with you in a general way. I have been able to be rid of those worst defects of character and am always willing that God remove the rest. Always more work to do. If I am to remain sober and die sober I must do these things willingly and to the best of my ability every day.
Whether I am working on a newsletter for our intergroup, working with another alcoholic, working with my sponsor, going to a workshop, retreat or camping trip I take this to them all. If I am at work or at play I carry this with me. If I walk into my homegroup, no matter where I go or what I do I know that I am part of something much bigger than myself. AA is in me, in my heart. It is something that has restored my life far beyond my wildest dreams and I will forever be repaying a debt to this fellowship.
With this I must close.
I want to thank you for giving me this opportunity to share with you part of me. A part that in some way or another you yourself have had a part of. You see I believe that God, the one of my understanding uses everyone to carry a message I only have to be willing enough to see that. So to the newcomer when you come in and ask for help you help me.
When an oldtimer comes in and shares that oldtimer helps me. I pray that I will always remain teachable and willing to learn more since we can only transmit that which we have received. Your recovery can be as small or as large as your wiling to allow it. But remember the more you reach out the better it gets.
May God bless you and keep you… Love and light…
Transfered from a tape dated sept 10th 2005 Thank you all...
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