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Hi everyone, my name is Ellen and I am an alcoholic.

Hi, Ellen.

You can take the other one down too.

Now I can see everybody.

And I am from Buena Park.

Not too far away, just 20 miles off. I was born in Victoria, British Columbia and I came from a home where I was, I felt no self-esteem in it whatsoever.

My mother would always put me down and tell me

that everything was wrong with me and never, you know, do anything. And my father was just as well in Lala Land, let's put it that way. It's a nice way to cover up a disaster.

Anyway, I am, I, my family did not drink that neither my mother nor my father drank, but I did have come from a line of real rough alcoholics. I had four uncles that died of it and then I had a cousin that died and I had two cousins. One flew up from Ireland on a geographic and he died of it out here.

And there was plenty of it around and it just skipped a generation I guess because I was the only one in my family that was an alcoholic and

and the other children were all younger than I was and I'm the only member of that family alive today and it's a strange feeling because I went through so much.

My story and my disease took me into the gates of hell, literally into the gates of

health and AA brought me up right up into into heaven. It did. This program works, but we always have to work it. I left

that home as soon as I could. I had started to drink and I remembered my very first drink I was at a dance and I was hiding in a corner

because I was too bashful to dance and I couldn't dance I'd stumble over everybody but my mother

insisted that I would go to this YWCA.

She says now you'll have a good time.

...