Clare MT.

This speaker was recorded at an Addictive Eaters Anonymous event held in Dublin, Ireland, in January 2023. For more information, visit www.aeainfo.org

Thank you, Sian, it's good to be here. And as everybody has said, it's lovely to see you all in person. It made me realize how important it is to be around people. I just wasn't created to be in isolation, I was created to be in relationships with people.  What makes this special is that we're all here with the same purpose, and we're all moving in the same direction. And that's lovely.  Before I came into recovery, I used to pride myself on being somebody who was self-sufficient, I was fiercely independent and saw myself as being a survivor. Both my parents died by the time I was 22 so I was an orphan, it was just me against the world. That was what I thought. I was very good at taking care of myself. I did my own little DIY jobs and took care of my own finances, I was very good at going shopping and carrying heavy bags. It was really important that I was strong and I didn't ask anybody for help. I saw that as a sign of weakness, asking for help. Then I got married last year and I noticed every now and then that my husband would say to me, ‘‘You should let me help you with that". In my mind, I think ‘I am more than capable of doing this by myself, I do not need your help", then it just happened a wee bit more often - just little things! You know, like I'd come home with the grocery shopping and because we're both in recovery, we have many, many bags of fruit and veg! (Laughter!) Many bags and it takes many trips back and forth to the house with these big bags, and he would come out to help me but I'd already be loaded. I‘d just have them up both arms. Strong, and he would be trying to take one off me, ‘‘I'll help you with that.‘‘ I‘d say ‘‘No, it's fine I‘m managing‘‘ and I would go in with the bags. So I mentioned it recently to my sponsor. I said to her, ‘‘He seems to want to help me and I think I'm doing all right on my own, I can carry my own shopping.‘‘ She said, ‘‘Why don't you try letting him?‘‘ And something happened at that moment, which often happens when I speak to my sponsor or another sober member, I have this idea of what I think is right, and for me carrying my shopping in myself is what I can do. I don't need somebody else to do that for me. But when the other sober member says ‘Well, why don't you try this or that?‘ There's like, I don't know how to describe it, there's like a shift, I feel a shift. I feel something happen where there's this little awakening that says ‘That's quite a clever idea.‘ So I tried it. I went shopping recently and he came out to help me and I give him the heaviest bags (laughter) to carry and then I carried the rest of the shopping myself, and it was okay. It was, it was okay. 
Then yesterday, when we arrived in Dublin, we both had a little suitcase and a little rucksack. We were coming up the stairs that move, the escalators, and so my husband just naturally took my little case onto the escalator and I as soon as he did that I saw my hand immediately move to take it back. But I caught it. I caught what I was about to do and I just smiled sweetly. And we went up the escalator together and I thought ‘This is alright, this is okay, this is okay to let him do this". Then the thought crossed my mind ‘I wonder how willing he'll be to do this if I'm too over-keen to just give him everything for me to do?‘ We got to the top of the escalator and I took my little case back and then we carried on. I'm really grateful for those little changes because I don't want to do everything on my own. I isolate myself, I separate myself from people, I'm not able to be in healthy loving relationships, I still believe the lie that it's a weakness to ask for help, that it makes me vulnerable, that it's not okay to let somebody love me. And of course, that's all nonsense. I've learned here that I'm worthy to be loved. And the way that my husband wants to love me is to carry the shopping in or to carry a case up an escalator. And it's okay to let him do that. I can't come to these conclusions on my own, I need a sponsor, and I need sober members that are just going to share the truth with me and help me see things from another perspective. Because I'm emotionally involved in the situation my mind's influenced by all kinds of old ideas and ways of learning and things I've heard in the past. I need somebody who's outside of all of that, to just shift my perspective. Getting married is the biggest thing that's happened to me since coming into recovery. We moved into our first home together at the end of last year. It really surprised me how angry I was, because I was so used to living on my own, I'd done it for decades, I'd been single for a really long time before I got married, so I didn't have to think about anybody else. I didn't have to compromise or think about their feelings. I just did what I wanted, when I wanted, how I wanted. That was what I knew. And so when we moved in together, it was a huge adjustment. Huge. All of a sudden, I was living with somebody who just didn't do as he was told and that was the problem! He's not doing as he's told! He's not doing what I want him to do. And I've had to come to realize that I am completely powerless over somebody else's thoughts, behaviors, and actions, no matter how much I might try and mold them into the idea of what I think they should be doing. I'm powerless over it. And the only person, I was going to say, that gets hurt is me. But that's not true. So I find I was angry when we moved in together because he just did things that I wasn't okay with. And when I say I was angry, I was enraged, like, rage in the pit of my stomach. That really caught me by surprise, because I hadn't felt rage like that since I'd been in addiction. And so the mind said, I can't be sober. I'm clearly not spiritually well. And that rage was there for a while. And thank God, honestly, thank God for sponsorship and sober members. I could just phone them and say, ‘‘Look, this is where I'm at. This is where my thinking is at. I'm angry.‘‘ There's one lady in particular, one sober member that I like to speak to because she shares what it was like for her. And I take comfort because my mind thinks I'm not as bad as you were! (Laughter) But she always says, ‘‘It gets better. It's not like that today.‘‘ And she shares what her marriage is like today. And I know that when I'm listening to her, that will be the truth for me if I just hang on in there and I stay close to God and keep doing what I'm doing. So I'm not enraged now. We're coming up on our first anniversary, and I still get frustrated, and I still get annoyed. But I'm not enraged. I don't have this anger that just feels like it's going to consume me. And that's incredible. That's the power of God. That's the power of the 12 steps, and I just know that I can't do any of this by myself. Somebody said earlier that they just know they're gonna need this way of life for the rest of their life. And they're okay with that. I know that is true for me. As long as I stay close to God, and I keep being honest, I believe that I'm going to keep moving in the right direction. What I love about sponsorship is sometimes, I feel like it's a prayer. So when I speak to my sponsor, and I'm just honest, you know, as honest as I can be anyway, and I'm naming things that I see in myself, I know that in that conversation with my sponsor, God is listening. I know He hears everything and it just feels like a prayer to God. Because without me even having to say to him, ‘‘I need you to change this about me. I need you to do this‘‘, the changes just start to happen. You know, it's remarkable. It really is.
So thank God for this way of life and thank you for asking me to share. It's an absolute privilege to be able to talk about how incredible AEA is and how it has absolutely saved my life and given me a really good life today, and as a result, we're still married. So that's a good thing. Thank you all.