August 2024

Until this time around, I had stopped drinking many times – pouring my booze down the drain and vowing to quit for good, but inevitably soon hurrying back to the liquor store, feeling stupid and a failure.

If I managed to put together a few days or weeks dry, my behavior would be just as bad or worse. Alcohol was my solution to stress, anger, guilt, fear, and to any relationship problem. Without that crutch, my emotions were a raw, open wound, and I inflicted my misery on coworkers, other drivers – and especially on my wife and two sons.

AA taught me it doesn’t do any good just to stop – if I didn’t have a strong and constructive substitute, I’d either drink again or give in to the dark thoughts of doing myself in.

I can go to meetings, but if I’m not working the Steps and opening up to another alcoholic, I just won’t be able to live with myself or other people.

What have you good people in AA showed me by your example? I had to stop venting my rage and resentments on others. I never had a “filter” in the past – I’d repeatedly vomit out my harsh judgments and irritability. I learned to bite my tongue. “How important is it anyway?” Even if I truly needed to say something and stand up for myself, I could do it in a way that didn’t destroy a friendship or a marriage. The harder task was to reduce all the negative chatter in my “money mind.”

Why was I spending so much time and energy brooding, holding grudges, “picking at the scab” of real or imagined injuries?

You taught me to “pause when agitated.” You showed me how even a little “morning quiet time” could keep me from getting into pointless wrestling matches with everyone in my life. While drinking, I “had faith in God, but couldn’t let God into my life.” Sober, I can allow a Higher Power to “do for me what I can’t do by myself.”

-Kevin P
Northside Tuesday Night Group

I look across the room at some meetings and pray that the person I’m looking at has hit their bottom. Why? Well to get this program you need to get Step 1. That means getting it 100%, not 90% or 95%. Because without fully admitting that you are powerless over alcohol, your odds of staying with this program also go down to 90 or 95% (or less). You might be subconsciously looking for that reason to try drinking again.

For those who have heard my lead, I got here under protest and didn’t believe I was an alcoholic. I only kept coming back to stop all the complaining at home until I was lucky (Blessed) enough to hear my story being told one Sunday morning at the Promises Club.

From that moment on I started working the Steps and not only putting my head in the program but also my heart. From working the steps and listening to my sponsor, I slowly began to hear. What I heard was that I’m not always right and I don’t have all the answers. It was difficult for me to understand that it’s okay to not know the answer. No one knows all the answers!

Slowly but surely my attitude towards almost everything began to change. Some things still make me mad, but all in all I try harder to keep my emotions in check. I’m at the stage of my emotional sobriety where things can still make me angry, but not crazy. I still have feelings but try to not let them destroy my day. My current example is: My wife bought a Honda hybrid automobile. We now go to the gas station about half as many times as we did with the gas only vehicle. We thought we had made a great financial decision on the car purchase. Last week we received from the government a notice that we must pay a $60.00 fee. We assume it’s because we don’t buy enough gas and we aren’t doing our part for the road system.

Wrong? Yep, but since we have no option, I can be disappointed and not have it spoil my day.

I feel, for me, the key is attitude. I start my day expressing my gratitude to a power greater than my self and try to include this power in my decision process throughout the day. Attitude of gratitude. Thanks AA and thanks God.

-Mick S

As Andrew sees it: intensive work with another alcoholic Is not limited to sponsorship.

The best thing my sponsor and other members of AA has always done for me is allowing me to stay in my messes as long as I need or want to. Then when I’ve had enough of that misery and have a desire to get out of it, without fail, my sponsor or another member of AA comes down in the dirt with me till I can take their hand and begin the work necessary to get up out of whatever mess I’ve gotten myself in.

Sometimes the best thing we can do is just get down sit with someone in their mess a little while and shoo away some of the flies. Once they’ve had enough and earnestly desire to get up that helping hand will be more effective and appreciated.

However, it’s much easier to pull someone down off the steps than it is to push someone up them when they’re not ready or willing. The steps are the best way I’ve found for getting out of the messes I find myself in, but when I’ve stayed there too long I cannot get myself out of it alone.

It’s not the crap that kills me, it’s the damn flies. I don’t have to sponsor someone to get down in the dirt and shoo away some flies for them.

-Andrew M.

Previous Name: Friday Night Southgate Group (because it originated in Southgate)

Date Founded: April 1972

Founders: Ashley Ward and Lanny Shepherd

Early Members: Lanny Shepherd, Ashley Ward, Bonnie Garrison (first female), and Betty Howell. Lanny is the only living member.

Place of First Meeting: St. Therese Catholic Church

Day and Time of First Meeting: Fridays at 8:30 pm

Current Meeting Place: St. Paul United Church of Christ at 7:30 pm

One evening in April of 1972, two men went on a 12-step call to Batesville Hospital in Indiana. Lanny and Ashley were about 9 months sober at the time and Batesville was the only treatment facility for alcoholics in the ?Tri-State area. On the way back from Batesville, these two men decided to stop at St. Therese Church and ask Fr. Brinker who was paster at the time, if they could start an AA meeting there. He said they could because he found there were a lot of people with alcohol problems that he could not help. And so it was, these two men started the Friday Night AA meeting in Southgate, Kentucky.

There was only one other meeting in Campbell County at that time which was on Tuesday evening at St. Stephen’s in Newport. It was a Lead Meeting, so the Friday Night Southgate AA Meeting was the first discussion meeting in Campbell County.

Lanny and Ashley bought a coffee pot and began. Eventually some members from the Tuesday Night Newport Group came out to give support to the new meeting. Bonnie G. joined them and became the fist female at the meeting. Lanny was the first chairperson and Ashley the first Secretary and Treasurer. The next month Ashley was the Chairperson and Lanny was the Secretary and Treasurer. They alternated these positions until more members joined the group. Tom L. gave the fist Lead as it was decided to have a Lead the third Friday of each month. Two other supporters from the Newport Group, Bob Gerding and Jim Johnson, joined the group.

Lanny S. decided to test the waters but has long since returned an still attends this, his Homegroup. Ashley, a sober member of AA, passed as a result of cancer. The other early members have all also passed on.

The Melbourne Group at St. Ann’s Convent, which is also still going strong, was an offshoot of the Southgate Group.

The group stayed at St. Therese from 1972 through 1984. The group then went to Southgate Methodist Church, as St. Therese was remodeling and no longer able to accommodate us. We then moved to Southgate Methodist because we wanted to stay in Southgate. After several years, a Daycare at the church began, leaving less and less room for our AA meeting. We then went to St. Paul’s U.C.C. Church but decided to move again to the Christian Church on Alexandria Pike in Ft. Thomas. For some reason no one can remember, we only stayed for a short time there and returned to St. Paul in Ft. Thomas. It is still called the Southgate Group but inserted

“Southgate On The Hill” when we relocated to Ft. Thomas where we continue to share our experience, strength and hope.

Submitted by: Terry H. (as dictated by Lanny S)

I think that many oldsters who have put our AA "booze cure" to severe but successful tests still find they often lack emotional sobriety. Perhaps they will be the spearhead for the next major development in AA -- the development of much more real maturity and balance (which is to say, humility) in our relations with ourselves, with our fellows, and with God.

Those adolescent urges that so many of us have for top approval, perfect security, and perfect romance -- urges quite appropriate to age seventeen -- prove to be an impossible way of life when we are at age forty- seven or fifty-seven.

Since AA began, I've taken immense wallops in all these areas because of my failure to grow up, emotionally and spiritually. My God, how painful it is to keep demanding the impossible, and how very painful to discover finally, that all along we have had the cart before the horse! Then comes the final agony of seeing how awfully wrong we have been, but still finding ourselves unable to get off the emotional merry-go-round.

How to translate a right mental conviction into a right emotional result, and so into easy, happy, and good living -- well, that's not only the neurotic's problem, it's the problem of life itself for all of us who have got to the point of real willingness to hew to right principles in all our affairs.

Even then, as we hew away, peace and joy may still elude us. That's the place so many of us AA oldsters have come to. And it's a hell of a spot, literally. How shall our unconscious - from which so many of our fears, compulsions and phony aspirations still stream -- be brought into line with what we actually believe, know and want! How to convince our dumb, raging and hidden "Mr. Hyde" becomes our main task.

I've recently come to believe that this can be achieved. I believe so because I begin to see many benighted ones -- folks like you and me -- commencing to get results. Last autumn [several years back -- ed.] depression, having no really rational cause at all, almost took me to the cleaners. I began to be scared that I was in for another long chronic spell. Considering the grief I've had with depressions, it wasn't a bright prospect.

I kept asking myself, "Why can't the Twelve Steps work to release depression?" By the hour, I stared at the St. Francis Prayer... "It's better to comfort than to be the comforted." Here was the formula, all right. But why didn't it work?

Suddenly I realized what the matter was. My basic flaw had always been dependence -- almost absolute dependence - on people or circumstances to supply me with prestige, security, and the like. Failing to get these things according to my perfectionist dreams and specifications, I had fought for them. And when defeat came, so did my depression.

There wasn't a chance of making the outgoing love of St. Francis a workable and joyous way of life until these fatal and almost absolute dependencies were cut away. Because I had over the years undergone a little spiritual development, the absolute quality of these frightful dependencies had never before been so starkly revealed. Reinforced by what Grace I could secure in prayer, I found I had to exert every ounce of will and action to cut off these faulty emotional dependencies upon people, upon AA, indeed, upon any set of circumstances whatsoever. Then only could I be free to love as Francis had. Emotional and instinctual satisfactions, I saw, were really the extra dividends of having love, offering love, and expressing a love appropriate to each relation of life. Plainly, I could not avail myself of God's love until I was able to offer it back to Him by loving others as He would have me. And I couldn't possibly do that so long as I was victimized by false dependencies.

For my dependency meant demand - a demand for the possession and control of the people and the conditions surrounding me.

While those words "absolute demand" may look like a gimmick, they were the ones that helped to trigger my release into my present degree of stability and quietness of mind, qualities which I am now trying to consolidate by offering love to others regardless of the return to me.

This seems to be the primary healing circuit: an outgoing love of God's creation and His people, by means of which we avail ourselves of His love for us. It is most clear that the current can't flow until our paralyzing dependencies are broken, and broken at depth. Only then can we possibly have a glimmer of what adult love really is.

Spiritual calculus, you say? Not a bit of it. Watch any AA of six months working with a new Twelfth Step case. If the case says "To the devil with you," the Twelfth Stepper only smiles and turns to another case. He doesn't feel frustrated or rejected. If his next case responds, and in turn starts to give love and attention to other alcoholics, yet gives none back to him, the sponsor is happy about it anyway. He still doesn't feel rejected; instead he rejoices that his one-time prospect is sober and happy. And if his next following case turns out in later time to be his best friend (or romance) then the sponsor is most joyful. But he well knows that his happiness is a by-product -- the extra dividend of giving without any demand for a return.

The really stabilizing thing for him was having and offering love to that strange drunk on his doorstep. That was Francis at work, powerful and practical, minus dependency and minus demand.

In the first six months of my own sobriety, I worked hard with many alcoholics. Not a one responded. Yet this work kept me sober. It wasn't a question of those alcoholics giving me anything. My stability came out of trying to give, not out of demanding that I receive.

Thus I think it can work out with emotional sobriety. If we examine every disturbance we have, great or small, we will find at the root of it some unhealthy dependency and its consequent unhealthy demand. Let us, with God's help, continually surrender these hobbling demands. Then we can be set free to live and love; we may then be able to Twelfth Step ourselves and others into emotional sobriety.

Of course I haven't offered you a really new idea -- only a gimmick that has started to unhook several of my own "hexes" at depth. Nowadays my brain no longer races compulsively in either elation, grandiosity or depression. I have been given a quiet place in bright sunshine.