Al-Anon: Donna - NSFW

SPEAKER_1 (0:06)

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Donna (0:27)

Hi, I'm Donna. I am a member of Al-Anon, and I'm also an alcoholic. There are, number one, I didn't think that I was an Al-Anon. I had been in AA since 2000, and there's a woman here that I want to thank for taking me through the work. When I first came into AA, that's Loretta and her husband, Sidney, and they were able to let me see the problem about my alcoholism and the fact that I was powerless over alcohol. I had always had the gift of willingness. I was willing to go to any length. I remember I was sitting in a treatment facility, and on my weekend passes, I was going up to a big book workshop in Harlem that they were facilitating, and I understood my problem with alcohol, and they guided me to my relationship with God. And I had been in AA, and I actually was facilitating a few workshops of my own and working with others. In my seventh year of AA, the unmanageability had come back, and it was the kind of unmanageability that Chris S had mentioned. It was a lot of fear. It was a lot of anxiety. It was a lot of anger. It was a lot of depression. I had got into a relationship with a man who I thought was the love of my life. I still, to this day, do love this man, but I was very delusional. I had been, I felt like I was very sick in the rooms. I felt like I couldn't talk to anybody about how I was showing up in life. I remember even working with other women, and the obsessive thought about this man was so powerful and loud in my head that as I was reading the big book, Working with Women, my mind kept shifting to where is he going? And I see how that kind of thinking was blocking me off from God and blocking me off from really helping other people. I did a lot of the insanity that a lot of Al-Anons do. And since I've been here today, it's like, well, why didn't I just go through the work with an AA sponsor? But my experience was different. I remember I was at a big book meeting on the east side, Yonhus, and a gentleman said, well, what does your Al-Anon sponsor say? And I had never thought of that. And the blessing was that there was no thinking that that's insane. Why would I go to an Al-Anon sponsor? But it just felt right. It gave me some peace and comfort. And so I remember going home that night and I called up Peter M. And I called up Tom N. Because I had heard Ginny share here at one of the fellowships of the Spirit years ago. And I knew that there were women in Al-Anon that were working with other women with co-dependency issues big time through the big book. And so I called up Peter, called up Tom, and they gave me the name of two women, Ginny and my dear friend, another spiritual teacher and my sponsor Lorraine. And I spoke to both of them and I didn't know who I was going to work with. And I just sat with it and I was guided to work with Lorraine. Now, I was living in Harlem at the time and I really haven't even touched on some of the insane behavior. But because of the unmanageability, the way the insanity was showing up in my life, I was very manipulative. I was very controlling. I wanted this guy to love me the way I wanted him to love me. I was such a snoop and a fucking sneaky bitch. I found the password to his computer. I found the passcode to his cell phone.

I needed to know where he was so I could be okay. I walked around with the cell phone in my hand just in case he called. I would break off relationships with other people if they wanted to do something with me because if he called, I would drop you like a hot potato. I hijacked his friends and I was so sneaky. I would call up his friends just so I could find out what he was up to. I have since made amends to his friends because number one, it was none of my business to share his behavior with his friends. If he wanted his friends to see him a certain way, then that was his right. It wasn't for me to expose him. And I went back and made amends for that. The insanity was off the hook. There was a time that I was really afraid of the computer.