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Thank you to the whole group for asking me to come share my experience, strength, and hope. Can you

hear me? Yep. Okay, perfect. So the topic is emotional

sobriety. And I have a lot to say about this particular topic because I believe that most,

if not all, real alcoholics were actually restless, irritable, and discontent before they took the first drink.

And so what does that mean for me?

You know, they say things like, it's a family disease.

It's hereditary.

And I look at that stuff and they still haven't found the gene for alcoholism.

I don't believe they're ever going to find the gene for alcoholism because I believe that when they say it's hereditary, when they say it's a family disease, they're talking about the environment and behavior that is mimicked and passed down and imprinted from grandma to mommy to baby to grandbaby, etc., etc., etc.

And most of the time, these behaviors are subconscious.

You know, very few people had access or still have access to a really good therapist that's going to take you into childhood trauma and show you, like Bill Wilson says in the 12 and 12, the patterns that have discolored the tapestry that has discolored the patterns of your life.

And so I look at that and I can see that my own mother is a war

survivor. That alone from Germany is very, very, very severe. She starved, bombs went off. They were in

bomb shelters. Her father had to go to war. There was no food. I mean, my mom was hungry, her whole

childhood. And so often people think about the Germans and they think, was your mother a Nazi?

No, she wasn't a Nazi.

They were German peasants in the mountains.

They didn't know that people were being exterminated.

They didn't know anything about anything.

...