Tools That Have Helped Me In Long-Term Recovery
*This blog post was transcribed from Terry’s speech at Rose City Girlstock’s annual conference in 2019 by Keziah Wong, MHAAO Communications Intern.
My name is Terry. I'm an alcoholic. My sobriety date is April 22nd, 1995. I'll give you a little bit of a background on where I came from and what it was like, and then share some recovery tools that have really impacted my life and made me become the person I am today.
It is my hope that if you're new, you hear something that compels you to continue and keep coming back. Insanity is the inability to see the truth. Sanity is the ability to see the truth and inventory is a tool to enable us to see the truth. The truth will set us free.
From when I was a baby to age 14, I did not know what it was like to be wanted, needed, and loved. I was born in Hong Kong in 1959. Back in those days, they did not like baby girls. I was put in a basket, placed in a rural area in Kowloon, found, and placed at the doorstep of an orphanage. At the orphanage there, their process is to try and figure out who owns the baby. They posted all over town. When they finally found that no one was going to claim me, they put me in this book of adoptable babies.
The first parents that I had were looking for an adoptable baby, because they had another baby child that they adopted from Castro Valley, California. They were a Chinese family who did not have their own children. My parents didn't not know that when you bring a child from overseas, the difference between rice milk versus formula and things like that would give me a belly ache. I was hell on fire. My grandmother used to say that I was possessed by the devil because my stomach was so hard, and I yelled from the top of my lungs to the core of my being.
My family could not comfort me. I remember from the very beginning that I could never do anything right. I was never going to be like their first daughter. I didn't even have anything else to compare with; this was my life.
Around the age of four, I started going to the hospital on a regular basis because of lung problems. Every October, I would go in for pneumonia. I thought the hospital was a lot more fun than my home. Whenever I had to go back home, it was horrifying. My mom and dad were in an arranged marriage. My dad came from China and my mom lived in San Francisco. You can imagine the frustration because they didn't like each other. When there was a conflict in the home, for some reason, I was always the target of her anger. They used a bamboo stick on my back all the time. I had scars on my back and my legs because you miss sometimes when you're just so angry and frustrated. I lived that life until I was about twelve or thirteen. I went to school, I would come home, and I would be locked in my room. I was given limited food. There's really a big gap of those years that I do not remember, and people say that's good because it protects me.
When I was about twelve or thirteen, there was this awakening. I was seeing other people in school who weren’t going through what I was going through. These groups of people would hang out way out there in the baseball diamonds, and they were smoking these funny little cigarettes and having a good time. That was where I felt wanted, needed, and loved. Before I never smoked any kind of funny cigarettes. These people were so nice. They were showing me the way. When I went back to class, my face just hurt so bad because I was laughing the whole time. I wanted to eat all these Oreo cookies, and I was shoving them in my face and things were just hysterical. That was my introduction to anything that was mind-altering.
When I was fourteen, I decided I was old enough to not have to deal with this kind of family life. I went to the neighbors and I said, “I can't go home. I don't want to be beaten anymore. I am done.” The police came, and all this other stuff happened. I went through the juvenile hall. I loved juvenile hall because I got three square meals and I got to socialize with people. They even taught you how to cook. They had classes where you got to learn how to sew.
Then, I was placed into a foster home. And, my foster home is where the magic started happening. I didn't know that these people loved me. They just wanted to embrace me and take away the hurt, but I didn't know what the hurt was. I didn't want to be embraced and I didn't really like people.
My foster parents were counselors and they were counseling another girl, Karen, who was in the same grade as me in high school. They said, “You two should be friends because you guys are the same age.” She was popular and she looked like Goldie Hawn. When Karen and I got together, we always drank. The first time I ever drank a lot of booze was when you take the Coke can, empty some of it, and fill it with rum. I did not realize that other people were only emptying a little. I was pouring it all out and then it was burning all the way down. I would throw it all up, but then I started learning how to keep it down. That was just the start.
I got to avoid my feelings and I got to avoid growing up. I learned how to be with other people who wanted to party. I thought you have two choices in life: you either have fun or you don't have fun. The people that were having fun were drinking. The people who weren't having fun were not drinking. I chose to have fun.
As things progressed, I graduated high school. I tried to go to college, and it didn't work out so well. When I was 23, my friend, Karen, got married in Corvallis, Oregon, and I moved in with them. It was a college town. I was in that age bracket where you could still party and look like you were in college. I was just hanging out with people who went to college and I drank as they did. All of a sudden, they started growing up and growing out. They actually moved on to their careers. That's what people in college do: they go to college, get a degree, and then they get a job.
How do I do this without having to get a real job? I was always in the retail business because I could sell anything. I could sell well. I came to Portland in 1987 and I sold rainbow vacuum cleaners, air purification systems, and I sold them for full price. In that field of direct sales was another layer of insanity. Another layer of things was introduced to me, other mind-altering substances. Someone said, “Alcohol gave me the wings to fly, and then it took away the sky.” That is exactly how I felt with all these substances.
In between all of this, I also stole a lot. My money wasn't my money. In between drinking and partying, I was stealing, and I went to every county jail. I found my [recovery community] in the Washington County restitution center and they said, “Hey, you should come. You should sign up and go to this meeting.” I said, “Well, why would I do that?” They go, “Because they have cookies and coffee.” I like cookies and coffee.
In 1995, I got arrested for the last time. I was so sick and tired of being sick and tired, to the core of my being. I was so exhausted. My ex-husband actually called my parents in California and said, “Your daughter is not doing well.” He calls me up and says, “Hey, you're going to be pissed at me because I just told on you and you need to call your parents and let them know you're okay.” I called and I said, “Mom, I'm okay.” And she says, “Tell me more.” Counselors have a way that they ask questions. I started crying and I told her, “I don't know, I just can't behave. I can't do anything right.” I felt it was a real moral issue, going to jail and doing all of these things. I could not seem to behave when everybody else around me knew how to go home at night. They knew how to continue working. They knew how to be responsible. I had some of that, but I would always fall, land in jail somewhere, and mess it up.
I insisted on having fun in recovery as well… I had to find the balance of when to have fun and when to be serious.
My mom said, “I have a lot of people that we counsel, and they go to [this recovery group]. I'd like to take you to your first meeting.” She flew from Sacramento, California and took me to my first meeting at the URS club. She tells me as we're driving, “Oh my God, you are going to just love [this group]. These people are going to be like your family.” We were walking up the ramp of the old URS club, and the ramp was lined up with all these smokers and bikers, who were huge and intimidating. I was thinking this is not my family. This is not what I had in mind, but I was desperate enough to go back to another meeting on my own. I was given a schedule and told what to do. I went to meetings in different parts of town, just to see. There were people that I just didn't understand. They all looked like they wanted to beat me up. So, I started going to a noon meeting. I went to the grotto and I grew up with the people from the grotto like Paris and Rita, a lot of the old timers who were so patient with me.
I started the journey one day at a time. One day at a time, not drinking, not using. And one day at a time going to meetings every single day. I was so scared I could not go home and be in my head. I could not be alone. I was so uncomfortable in my skin. I did not know what to do with myself. I went to a noon meeting, five o'clock meeting, seven o'clock meeting, and then I went to the ten o'clock meeting and then drove all the way out to a recovery club, Beaverton RCB at the time to the midnight and a half meeting. I was one of those kinds of people who isolated in a crowd. If I'm with you, I'm not physically isolated, but I also didn't share what was going on with me.
My first sponsor, Sandra, was the first person who talked to me. She gave me her phone number and she said, “Call me anytime.” I did at two o'clock in the morning, four o'clock when I couldn't sleep. She was like, “Oh my God, you need to take a bath.”
My second sponsor was the Oregon archivist and a huge advocate of service. She threw me immediately into service. She said, “You’re going to do the registration, and you're going to pass out these little things and you're going to do this, that, and the other.” All of a sudden, I was involved.
My sponsor would have me go into working the recovery tools, and of course, I was an overachiever. I wanted to go through all of the recovery tools within the first six months. I didn't know that right after you did all those, you start over again. You're never graduating. That’s why she said, “You don't ever have to do anything perfectly, because you're going to do it again and again, and then I want you to start learning about the traditions and you're going to start putting those into action.” The first year was all about reading, how all this works, doing some of the footwork, and doing some of the writing.
My grand sponsor used to say, “Act as if. If you don't believe that this is true, act as if.” Whenever we were talking, she always let me know that I was powerless over people, places, and things. She had me start practicing this principle in all of my affairs. Because she said “You don’t want to go to jail again or go back to where you came from. I need you to go deeper besides alcoholism and start practicing this principle in every part of your life.”
When I [started taking my first moral inventory], I didn't know how to do it. I just started writing and I wrote all kinds of stuff and followed the format. I got together with my sponsor, told her all this stuff, and I was like, “I don't feel the magic. I heard so many people talk about [how when they used this recovery tool], they were so lifted out of themselves. I am not in that magical moment.” I wasn't going to necessarily have that burning bush. One of the things that did happen is that as I gradually started telling the truth to her, I was no longer isolated in my head.
I always thought that I was born evil because my grandma said so. I always thought that I was a defect, a big old blob in this world that was not meant to be. In Hong Kong and China, I wasn't supposed to be. I should be dead. I should be gone. That didn't happen. Now, I'm here and I'm pissed. Now I have to deal with all this.
My grand sponsor really helped me with that. She says, “You were born in a perfect way, but the world and your experiences changed it. What we need to do is unearth who you are. You are not what your grandmother told you that you were. You are not what you acted like when you were drinking and using. You are not those things. This is about being able to find out who are you and what are some of your natural skills, gifts, and capacity, and what are some of the things that you take to the extreme that harm others?”
Taking a moral inventory made me feel my wants and needs for material and emotional things and security are not bad. They will never go away, but it's about being able to bring that balance. It’s about being able to live in that balance and being able to be comfortable in that balance.
I was a great person who made every excuse for why people did the things they did. My mom didn't mean to beat me up. She was really angry because she was in a fixed marriage, and I'd be angry too. The reality is my parents were the adults and I was the child. The fact-facing and fact-finding were about being able to say, “Let's take some of those delusional thoughts and throw those away because they aren't doing any good to you. Let's put in some fresh things. Let's talk about the assets. Let's talk about what are the patterns that you do.” I went through all the resentments, the causes, and the effects. Being able to go through all of this, the anger, the frustration, and the fear, and being able to face those.
What are some of the patterns that come up when I take things to the extreme? I knew that one of the things I took to the extreme is when I was younger, I always stole whenever I needed food or cold medicine. I was a little kid. I was just stealing whatever I needed. As I grew up, I didn't know the difference between my needs and my wants. Those were never satisfied. I did not know how to discern the difference between my needs and my wants, and that was where the problem was.
My biggest go-to when I am afraid is lying. When I was uncomfortable too, I would shop. I would eat, and I would do anything that would make me feel better. That's what we uncovered in the moral inventory, to know what my reactions to life are.
I insisted on having fun in recovery as well. I was a jokester and sometimes, I will do things to make people laugh. In a meeting, this guy thought his coffee was so valuable. I saw some plums and I plopped it in his coffee, and he didn't see it until later. All of a sudden there it was, and he was the kind of guy that didn't know how to be quiet about it. He was cussing, threatening to leave. I got in big trouble for that because, in the rooms of [the recovery group], it’s serious. It’s about life and death. I had to find the balance of when to have fun and when to be serious.
As time has gone by, fear comes to me in a different form. I took a new job about two years ago and fear came back. I thought, “maybe they found something they don't like about me.” Those are the kinds of things that go into my head. I have to remember what's real. What's real is that they emailed me and said, “We're looking forward to seeing you.” My boss had said that they were going to take one of the programs off my plate. Again, I was like, “Oh, I'm not good enough.” If you had a stereo that would just crank it up to as high as you possibly can, that's how loud my voices were in my head about not being good enough. Now they are quieter. I have turned down the volume to where it's manageable. When it's yelling at me, I call my sponsor. When I can't get ahold of my sponsor, I call my sisters in recovery. My sponsor is not someone that's going to be the end all be all to all things.
How do I continue to seek a spiritual life? I need to always admit to another person. Time after time, newcomers have tried to keep to themselves certain facts about their lives, to avoid this humbling experience. They turn to easier methods. Almost invariably, they got drunk, after having persevered with the rest of the program. That scared me, because I did not want to leave the recovery group, and I didn't have anywhere else.
When I started going back to yoga and I had a new sponsor, I started coveting everybody's yoga mat. I'm a little thief, so I have to really quiet that down. I was noticing that this one mat in the lost and found was there for a long time. I went up to the counter and asked how long they kept the mats for. They told me thirty days and about thirty days later, it was still there. I asked to trade my yoga mat for that one. The guy at the counter didn't really care one way or another, but they didn’t want mine and gave me the yoga mat still. Then, I found someone else in the class and they had this other yoga mat I wanted.
I had to tell my sponsor these things. I tell her what I have done with this yoga mat. I tell her about how I'm coveting another yoga mat from the studio. She is laughing so hard. I said, “I'm telling you, because I want to stop this behavior. Cause this is insanity.” When I disclose to another human being the exact nature of my wrong, I get to be free from it. I haven't coveted any more yoga mats. Whatever is off balance or has gone to an extreme, I need an overhauling and I need to bring it back. Somewhere in the middle, I will find that balance.
At the beginning of this path of recovery, it was not my intention to keep coming back. It was my intention to get the recovery tools and leave. My grand sponsor was the key factor of why I keep coming back. She told me, “I just want you to be able to have the whole thing. I want you to have everything that this program has to offer and what life has to offer. And you didn't come into this world starting the way you did so that you can go out doing nothing. You just need to keep coming back and you need to keep using the tools and you need to see where God has you in mind.” The peace and ease are something that happened when I continued to keep coming back and keep working with the recovery tools I have learned and practiced and continued to enlarge my spiritual life. That lets me walk this earth and be a worker among workers, not any better than and not any less than. I am just a human being.
The Asian community is seen as the quiet model minority, but there is a high need for treatment and mental health services. I feel like we don’t really have a voice always or a platform to express our voices, but we need to have the community at large be diverse and make sure many voices are heard.
When we talk about ease and comfort, I did have that feeling recently where someone couldn't find something. This time I know I didn't take it, but then it felt like I took it and I was having to ask myself if I took it. I didn't.
I took a job recently and it has the word director in it. This is the kind of job where you never direct anyone. This program has given me all the tools on how to be more trauma-informed with my employees and know that my job is not to direct. My job is with policies and procedures and these are the things that we need to walk towards. And how do we do this? It's the same thing in sponsoring. I’m not better than the people I work with. In the old days, the supervisors used to say, “You're stupid, you're not working fast enough, or you're not on time.” That never really worked. With that experience, these tools teach me how to help us and support us to be our higher selves. We can't become our higher selves, if we don't do a full inventory and if we don't really tell somebody else. I cannot express how invaluable it is to share your truth with another human being.
In 2000, I was in the Recovery Association project, a part of Central City Concern, as a community organizer, and I met William White at a DC conference, where we asked what would help people stay in recovery or what it would look like to engage people without judgment. A lot of times the recovery community can feel like you have a lot of “musts,” as in you must do this or that. With my recovery, I must do a lot of things in order to have the life I have today, but that’s my mind, and it’s not your “must.” Everybody’s path is different, and the peer movement asks how we broaden and make it larger? We decided to do a first-round of recovery mentors: to get people who were in recovery and understood what it was like to go through addiction and everything that comes with it, teaching each other to walk side-by-side.
I also went back to school at 50 and became a Certified Alcohol and Other Drug Counselor, because I wanted to understand the clinical side of recovery after seeing how peers view it. I got a job at Bridges to Change, which was more authentic to the peer movement than I’d seen before. I was moved by the people at Bridges who were peers themselves and knew what it was like to be in prison, in recovery, homeless, etc.
I met Janie Gullickson, a leader of in the peer movement, in 2017. I loved how MHAAO is so intentional, and it felt like everybody I met had an actual fire inside their soul to want to see people change. It’s not just a job. I really wanted to work with Janie’s team, so I waited and then this director position popped up and here I am! The vision of MHAAO is passion-driven and matches and connects with people from all sorts of backgrounds. It’s growing fast, but it feels like we are all rowing in the same direction, driven by our core values.
I’m also the oldest member on the board of Partnership for Safety and Justice. Especially on the justice side, I’m extremely passionate, because you have young people in prison for a long time, just because they didn’t fit the criteria for the juvenile justice system, which is outrageous to me. I felt it was important to make sure we always have our ears to the ground with lawmakers if more prisons are being made or more services are being reinvested into our people.
I also seem to be walking towards the Asian and transgender communities. The Asian community is seen as the quiet model minority, but there is a high need for treatment and mental health services. I feel like we don’t really have a voice always or a platform to express our voices, but we need to have the community at large be diverse and make sure many voices are heard. For some reason too, all my previous employees I’ve helped with gender transition speak to my heart because we share similarities as far as the intense feeling of what they feel like on the inside and what they look like on the outside. After being raised in a Chinese family for fourteen years where I was isolated, in foster care, all of a sudden, I was surrounded by white people who were loud and talked a lot. As I grew into the world, it felt like I was this white person trapped in this Asian body. There was a time I was going to be deported because I was not a citizen when I came from Hong Kong. In 2008, I tried to marry my husband, but I only had my green card with my baby face. I had some felonies, so I didn’t have the “moral turpitude” for citizenship. Advocacy is something I’ve done as a survival trait when I felt like a woman without a country.
It is my hope that if you're new, you hear something that compels you to continue and keep coming back. I also want to really honor the people who keep coming back because if you have years of recovery, that is years of showing up for life, and it is the years of having to find a solution when life is really tough. Insanity is the inability to see the truth. Sanity is the ability to see the truth and inventory is a tool to enable us to see the truth. The truth will set us free. Thank you.