Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Is that okay, Marilyn? Can you hear me all right, darling. Okay, good. Hi, everybody.
[00:00:08] I am on so many microphones, it's not even funny. Okay. Hi, my name is Sandy.
[00:00:16] Hi. I'm a very grateful, recovered, compulsive overeater, and I'm delighted to be here and thank you all for coming.
[00:00:28] We did it. We're here. We. We did it. We did great. Tons of notes. I'm going to forget them all. It's going to be great.
[00:00:37] I'm going to open with a set aside prayer.
[00:00:44] God, please help me set aside everything I think I know, and everything I know I know about everything about myself, about my spiritual malady, about the 12 steps, about this fellowship, about today, about right now, about giving a keynote speech. God, please help me set aside especially everything that I think I know about you so that I can have an open mind and a new experience. Please help me see the truth. Amen. Thanks, you guys.
[00:01:21] My colleague, last night's speaker, who's extraordinary, Amy, she managed to tell my entire story.
[00:01:30] So we're all set there. Absolutely. Came in, didn't identify in, heard that God thing and thought, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm.
[00:01:42] I grew up in the Upper east side of New York city in the 60s and 70s, and both my parents are brilliant, brilliant, well educated people. And so our higher power, the one I met first, was intellect and its disciples, smug superiority.
[00:02:04] You got to watch, because later you're going to hear smug superiority about spirituality.
[00:02:12] All right, we're going to get there, though. We're going to go slow.
[00:02:17] So intellect and money and connections and who you knew and all of the above. And then not a debate for me any longer about nature versus nurture. But my mom passed away at 36 years sober, so there was some extraordinary, fun stuff that happened in my childhood. And my dad is rocking something at 85 and just going strong, unstoppable with his stuff. Okay.
[00:02:55] The reason I don't need to know if it was nature or nurture is because I no longer am preoccupied with why, right? Why did I have a crazy childhood?
[00:03:06] Why were they the way they were?
[00:03:09] Because when I'm asking why, what I'm really asking, I know this about me, is I'm asking God, if you could just. If I could just understand what happened, I could fix it, right? I could change the outcome. I could change the past if I just understood why.
[00:03:33] So that defect is pretty much lifted. I'm going to say a quick word about the word defects. I love what Amy did last night with the word defects. Isn't that beautiful.
[00:03:45] I relied on myself in my childhood. I was bright and I was shiny and I was adaptive. My parents were cuckoo birds, and I figured out how to survive. And those, that sense of over responsibility, that hyper vigilance, the knowing what's happening in every part of the room, pre planning, contingency planning, all of that evolved into character defects. But none of those were character defects. Those were survival skills, right? Those were coping mechanisms for dealing with insanity. Essentially.
[00:04:26] I went to my first pay and way when I was 12, and in a minute, Lauren's going to put up a picture of me in what I'm going to say 1986. So I'm going to say 24. Oh, let's do some fun numbers. Does anybody here not know that I'm tall?
[00:04:45] Because I've been reliably informed. So I'm five'eleven I am my top. I'm going to. I want to do this. I want to build to a big finish.
[00:05:00] I'm maintaining 150 pound weight loss.
[00:05:06] And I'll tell you more about how we got there. But the person I want to show you is that's me in 1986. Okay. This. I think she's beautiful.
[00:05:17] She's lovely. She's so bright and shiny. She's gorgeous.
[00:05:22] And so 86, 24 years old, veteran of the pay and ways at this point, you know, in and out of the WW several times.
[00:05:31] And I will tell you, I can tell you with certainty what this young lady thought about herself. And I thought, ooh, ooh. She thought she was fat, ugly, and morally flawed because she knew she was bright and she couldn't handle the weight problem. She couldn't get it done. She felt incurable and alone and isolated and different from everybody.
[00:05:56] And she was lovely. She was absolutely lovely. Lauren, leave her up there for just a second.
[00:06:04] You are this lovely.
[00:06:07] You are this magnificent and spectacular and shiny and wonderful. You just are. You can debate it with me all night long, but you are this shiny and lovely. So leave her there for one second. So somewhere around here, my mother starts working her program, and my coping mechanisms are starting to crumble at the edges, right? All my controlling and impulsivity is not doing what it's supposed to be doing. And she gently says, or with a hammer. She was my mother, you know, she gently says, honey, adult children of alcoholics. I promised Chuck I wouldn't mention all the other 12 steps, but I started going to 12 step programs. I started getting some help.
[00:06:52] Why did I tell you that? Oh. Which got me to OA first maybe two meetings in OA Got the literature, got the pamphlets, got the food plan.
[00:07:05] And then they said, they them said the thing that had me run screaming from the room. They said two things that had me run screaming from the room. The God thing, which we're going to talk about. But then they said, the nerve of these people. They said I was going to write down my food, I was going to tell somebody else what I ate.
[00:07:25] I'm going to what with my who with a how? No, no, no, no, no, no.
[00:07:32] Again, identifying out, right. These were not my people. That we were not the same age. Right? We all lived on the Upper east side, so we were fabulous and posh, but we were not the same age.
[00:07:44] Another deep conviction that I held that this young lady held is that if she got the weight handled, the guy would love her, he'd marry her, and her life would be bliss, golden, easy, bliss done, signed, sealed and delivered. So that weight problem was pivotal to my, well being. Pivotal. And what I was being offered in that room was not going to solve that problem and get me that guy so screaming out of the room, figuratively.
[00:08:22] And then of course, there was the whole God thing, which we're going to get to, and then proceeded for 20 years to do all of it. The celebrity doctors, the every pain way, the cabbage, this, carbohydrate that. Oh, I got to tell you something. When I was a little kid and I was doing it was a lot of crazy, I found this thing called carbs.
[00:08:47] And the ease and comfort of carbs and the constancy, right. The reliability of carbs to mood alter, to knock me out was glorious and needed and necessary for survival. Absolutely necessary for survival.
[00:09:10] And one of the things I've learned, especially in this last year, is there is nothing, nothing, nothing wrong with seeking ease and comfort.
[00:09:21] We are. I am, you are. We are ease and comfort seeking machines gets us clothed, gets us housed, gets us fed, gets us sticking with our loved ones and caring and nurturing for each other. We are ease and comfort seeking machines. And it's okay. I firmly believe now that that is God's planned for us. Please seek ease and comfort. Seek your own ease and comfort. Absolutely do that.
[00:09:52] But what are you using?
[00:09:54] Where are you looking? Where was I looking for ease and comfort. And the answer is I was looking for ease and comfort and the thing that had provided the ease and comfort, the carbs, the sugar, the flour, but it wasn't working anymore. It wasn't working to the point, Lauren, where we're in 2009. And I weigh 324 pounds. Up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down.
[00:10:22] Total of probably 600 pounds. Lost and gained and lost and gained and lost and gained over the years.
[00:10:29] Last big, big trauma drama food plan was the shakes. The medically supervised Shakespeare.
[00:10:38] Lost £120 in six months and thought, well, that's it, I'm golden, I'm good, right? I'm good, I'm good. I was already married, already had a baby, worked all that out, lost 120 pounds, was unrecognizable not only to family members but to myself in the mirror.
[00:10:58] And was full of anxiety and pain and fear and depression. Full, full, full, replete with anger, fear. And here's what I think happened.
[00:11:13] That you can turn it off now, Lauren, love, thank you.
[00:11:18] That armor, right? That extra 150 pounds of armor, right, Protected me in ways that I couldn't protect myself. Set boundaries that I could not set myself.
[00:11:34] Kept people literally at arm's length, right? So I had that. The other thing I had when I was morbidly obese is I had a medical emergency. I was morbidly obese, I was diabetic, I was on meds for diabetes, I was headed towards blood pressure meds.
[00:11:54] I was 48. I had a seven year old child. But I had this emergency, you see, I had this emergency.
[00:12:03] I was morbidly obese and I needed to solve that problem before all other problems. So I lose 120 pounds on this medically supervised diet. I get off the meds, the diabetes meds, and I gotta look at that other stuff now. I gotta look at my parenting now. I have to look at the intimacy in my marriage now. I have to look at my finances. Ooh.
[00:12:31] And I don't want to. I couldn't have told you then that that was what was going on. But I didn't want to. I didn't want to look at my career, didn't want to look at the clutter in my basement. Didn't want to.
[00:12:42] So nobody's going to be. Is anybody going to be surprised to find out that I put 60 pounds back on? No, no, no, no. So I put 60 pounds back on and I've started yet another 12 step program because stuff has happened. And all of my friends from Monday morning in the church basement are going to OA on Tuesday morning in the same church basement. And they're like, come on, come on, come on. And I hear the small quiet voice. Okay, we're going to talk about the small quiet voice, right? The God voice. The kindest, gentlest, sweetest, most patient voice of all the. In my head, you could go to those meetings. You don't have to do anything else. Just go to those meetings. Go, go, go. So I go and I hang out and I'm gaining weight and I'm dropping my kid off her carpool in front of the drugstore, hitting the aisle three, getting a pound of you know what and honk right in my mouth before driving to the meeting.
[00:13:42] And I'm putting the weight's going on and I know it's not left to my own devices. I know I'm not going to stop at 3:24. I don't know where I'm going to stop, but I know I can get to 324 easy. And I can go beyond it. And I'm out. I'm absolutely out, out, out. Out of ideas, out of ideas. And I've got friends and I've got this invitation to be in this meeting. And I go to the meeting and I get a sponsor because I'm a joiner. Is anybody else a joiner? Like a super good girl right out of the bucket, like, ha, ha ha, you know? Yes. What is the literature? I'll be your treasurer, you bet.
[00:14:24] And you know, good girl, good, good girl, good girl. And later we're going to find out how defiant and sneaky she really is.
[00:14:32] And then. Okay, so I do all of that. I'm getting frustrated because I'm trying to weasel my way back into the medically supervised SHAKE program. And I'm trying to work at the oa, which isn't neither.
[00:14:48] So I finally said to God, and please, please, please, cautionary tale. Cautionary tale. This is no God. I had this thing with God. There was a God. It's for big problems, not little problems. Big problems.
[00:15:04] What is the least I can do?
[00:15:10] And call myself abstinent.
[00:15:14] Because there was nothing I wanted to be more than one of the cool kids.
[00:15:18] And here, did you know that? We're all sitting at the cool kids table. We are. We're us. We're us. We did it. We are us. And I wanted that.
[00:15:30] But on my own terms, right? Not your terms, not God's terms, my terms. And God ever so gently, kindly, sweetly said, honey, if you could just stop eating flour and sugar and maybe eat five times a day, you're abstinent. I was like, okay, I can do that. I can absolutely do that.
[00:15:52] And over the course of the next seven years, I added in some other stuff. I started writing down my Food. I started weighing and measuring, not because I wanted to weigh and measure, but because I got really tired of having the conversation in my head about what was 4 ounces of protein. Is it this?
[00:16:10] I just got tired of that conversation in my head. Wanted to have other conversations in my head. Didn't want to think about, oh, and this one. I love this one. Does anybody still get mad at the serving sizes on the back of packages?
[00:16:26] I was like, no, that's not an adult size.
[00:16:31] Anyway, so weighing and measuring gently, gently, gently, with a very loving sponsor, identifying a couple of other things that were problems, that were trigger foods. Right. That were causing cravings, but still. Absolutely, Sandy's in charge. Absolutely. Sandy's the one you'll find at the grocery store in the aisle, reading the back of the protein bars, trying to figure out which ones meet all of her conditions of satisfaction. Not God's conditions, Sandy's conditions of satisfaction. This kind of sweetener, this kind of protein. Somewhere in there. My child asks us to become vegetarians. So we do that.
[00:17:14] Okay. And that, you know, trying to just like, Sandy, Sandy, Sandy, Sandy, Sandy.
[00:17:22] But I'm abstinent. Hey, but it's a. It's a grasping abstinence. It's a very controlled, very tightly controlled abstinence. I now call it dieting with group support. But I didn't call it that then. I didn't know that. If I had heard that expression, it didn't get in.
[00:17:44] So then we had an adventure. Life got lifey. 2016, my mother passed away, not unexpectedly, but young. 76, 36 years sober. God bless her. And that was July. My kid began his transition from female to male. That was a thing. I love my kid. I'm so proud of him. He's unbelievably courageous and strong and bright and shiny.
[00:18:11] And if you've done this as a parent, your heart breaks. Your heart absolutely breaks. I could just sit here and just weep. And he's amazing and extraordinary.
[00:18:21] And we do a memorial service for my mother on August 8th. And my husband wakes up gray on August 11th, and I take him to the urgent care and he has no white blood cells and he's got leukemia and he was already.
[00:18:44] He was bad back surgery, disability, narcotics, opiates, dependent. And so we're at the urgent care with a leukemia diagnosis. And we missed everything that preceded that moment because he was so heavily medicated for pain management, for his back stuff that we missed everything that might have informed us that that was happening.
[00:19:11] Scramble to get him into Dana Farber to get him treatment.
[00:19:18] And somewhere in there we had World Service convention in Boston.
[00:19:24] And I'm at the podium, oh my God, the sanctimoniousness of moi. I'm at the podium and I'm like, my husband's in the icu, but nobody gets my abstinence. Nobody takes it away from me.
[00:19:40] I'm on the recordings. You can, I'm sorry.
[00:19:47] So sorry.
[00:19:49] And I go to assembly, region six assembly right after that and I have to like literally almost evac out of there and get back to Boston on a six seater airplane because my husband's been turfed from one part of Dana Farber to the other part of Dana Farber and I gotta get the kid up from Rhode island and, and spoiler alert, he was gone four days later. Thanks, Chuck. And so we had August 11th to September 28th, so about six weeks from diagnosis to death. And my 14 year old is transitioning and internalizes that trauma this way. If I hadn't transitioned, daddy wouldn't have died.
[00:20:32] Yeah, socks sucks, sucks. Life got lifey, right? Hanging onto this like, I don't want to fall. Okay. Sorry about the sniffles.
[00:20:42] So, yeah, so my son and I, we coped, we dealt, we managed, we figured it out, we took, I can now tell you reflexively that we reflecting that we took next right action. I made the best decisions I could with the resources that I had at the time. I cursed my husband out for not being here to help me with this kid and the kid's challenges.
[00:21:04] And we built a nice, beautiful little life for ourselves.
[00:21:08] And it was time to really work the steps. I had done this step work stuff. I'd done a fourth step. It was fine. It was the outside layer of that onion and I'd done a fifth step and there were some eighth and ninth steps in there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was sponsoring it. I was doing a lot of surface and I can't really remember exactly what happened, but a friend of mine gave a sermon and she started talking about the will of God. And I was like, oh yeah, this is the will of Sandy show. This is the Sandy show. I was telling my sponsor what I was eating after I ate it. I was telling her I would announce when I found a new trigger food. Ta da.
[00:21:51] No more nut butter. Ta da.
[00:21:58] I had mostly putting down artificial sweeteners, but I still was clinging to my natural sweeteners at every meal, every possible moment I was eating in bed. I mean, there is a lot of nonsense going on and somehow the message got through.
[00:22:15] In March of 2019. That I wasn't abstinent, that I was taking my will back. I was writing my food down, watching my calorie count go up, watching my weight go up, headed up, up, up, up. And I had to get honest, and I had to go to my intergroup and say, I can't.
[00:22:32] I don't meet the abstinence requirements. I have to, you know, remove myself from my position.
[00:22:39] And then I had to. I still did, Mistro. I had to figure out what my new abstinence was, which I can't even tell you what happened. But somehow, Around November of 19, 2019, God and I were talking. I was arguing, and God said, you gotta go to 30 meetings in 30 days. And I said, God, I can't. I can barely see to drive. I hadn't had the cataract surgery yet. Come on, God, please. And he said, we'll go to phone meetings.
[00:23:14] Phone meetings. Phone meetings. But I'm fabulous. How are they going to know how fabulous I am on the phone?
[00:23:24] And let me tell you, y'all, stop muttering on the phone. My name is Gabby, I'm from Chicago.
[00:23:32] Stop.
[00:23:35] Get all the syllables out, all the consonants.
[00:23:42] It's eased up a little bit, but what are we, four years into that? So I started going to the phone meetings. Now, the joke of the phone meetings, one of the meetings that I attend has a membership list. And I went to put my name on the membership list because I'm a joiner. I like to be part of the cool kids club. My name was already there.
[00:24:02] I'd already joined at some point because a friend said, I'm going to these phone meetings. And they're great. They're amazing. And I was like, okay, I'll go to the phone meetings. I went to, like, two meetings. All these people are too bright and shiny.
[00:24:15] They are too cheerful. It's too early in the morning. I can't possibly be a member of this club.
[00:24:23] But there it was, my name and my phone number. Okay, so now I have my login. I introduce myself, and I get a new sponsor to work the steps deeply in the big book, Thoroughly, deeply, quickly in the big book.
[00:24:37] And we go through the steps, and I'm on my step nine, and I'm working through stuff, and that lovely, wonderful phrase comes up.
[00:24:44] Trust God, clean house, help others.
[00:24:48] Trust God, clean house, help others. Now, I'm rock solid on help others, rock solid, you know, champion.
[00:24:56] I'm working on cleaning my house, like, figuratively and literally and still cluttered. And, you know, it's trust God. What No, Talk to God. Yeah, listen to God. No. Trust God. No, do not. Do not, do not. And one of my glorious sponsees started doing this thing called two way prayer.
[00:25:22] Started doing this thing where she got quiet, asked God a question, wrote down what she heard as the answer, and then shared that with another person.
[00:25:32] I was like, okay, I gotta start somewhere. I gotta start somewhere with this God that I don't trust, that I don't know, that I'm not sure what it is. And really, what can you do for me, God? What can you do for me?
[00:25:47] That was my current working relationship with my higher power. Because, you see, I'd taken step three, but I didn't mention that I spent 25 years as a TV producer and I negotiate everything.
[00:26:00] Everything's a deal, everything's a contract. And so I would say the third step prayer, totally unaware. I'm going to just pull it up because I'm still nervous and I'm like, I don't want to mess it up.
[00:26:11] All right, here's the contract. God, I will offer myself to you.
[00:26:20] You can build with me and do with me what you will, as long as it's what I want.
[00:26:28] And if you relieve me of the bondage of self, I will do your will. But let me tell you something here. Let me be very clear. I'm keeping score.
[00:26:39] I am keeping track of God's behavior and I'm making sure that I'm.
[00:26:45] It's fair, it's equitable, what I'm given, God is giving, okay? And at that moment I thought that might not be.
[00:26:56] That might not be quite what the intention was.
[00:27:00] So I don't trust God. So I do not trust God. But I do start going to these meetings and I do start getting quiet and writing, asking God a question and writing the answer. And the first thing that floods out of me is, ooh, the ego. Ooh, the ego so good. The next thing that floods out of me is, oh, I can't wait to read this to the group. They're going to think I am so cool.
[00:27:24] Ooh, wait till I tell them this.
[00:27:28] Yeah, and that starts to soften out. And my whole idea of a higher power is really softening, really changing. You know, it starts as just all I can think about is energy and light. And I had the Santa Claus God. I had the God of good Parkinson's spaces in New York City.
[00:27:45] I had the God of emergency money. Like, haha, you know, like, you know, I had Zeus with the lightning bolts fixing the drama and making it all go, you Know, Bobby wakes up on Dallas. Remember Bobby woke up on Dallas. That killed a whole season.
[00:28:02] That was my higher power. And yeah, so I had that God, that was a great God. Then I sort of did a little redefining my higher power with. I used a lot of music. I was told a long time ago to listen to music as if they're. Listen to love songs as if they're between me and God.
[00:28:23] You've got a song right now you're thinking, ooh, that one. Yeah, like I love God, God loves me. There's little songs, come talk to me afterwards. I'll give you the one I started with and I was doing that, I found a meditation, a doodling meditation practice that really slowed me down and got me in touch and got me right in where the ink hits the paper. And I did that a lot. And now he's doing this two way prayer thing. But what was I hearing? You know, what was God saying? What was I hearing? So we start with this light and this energy and then we get, you know, I close my eyes, I sort of envisioned a little lake with the sunrise, all kinds of groovy stuff. And I'm writing and I'm writing, writing. And the thing that happens in the reflecting, right? I read out loud and then you say what you hear from your higher power. And what my higher power said to you is that I started to trim off the ego. Like we started to just kind of pare down to the good stuff. The really, the connecting stuff. The stuff I wanted, I was craving, right? The source of true ease and comfort. So the source of true ease and comfort for me now is my relationship with my higher power.
[00:29:37] Yeah, yeah, I know it is, it is. Some of you joined me this morning. We did a little two way prayer meeting at, in Scarsdale. We're going to do it again tomorrow morning, 7:30. Come on down. Bring paper and pen and a friend.
[00:29:55] And I'm going to. In a second. I'm going to read you something I wrote recently.
[00:30:02] But it has been absolutely life changing. It has made me so much nicer, kinder, softer, easier, better listener, better worker. Thanks, Jack.
[00:30:15] More present, more fabulous parenting. I'm rocking the parenting thing right now, today. It's good. My son's in college.
[00:30:25] He's building a life for himself. He's got friends, he's amazing.
[00:30:31] I may have started a new relationship again. Come talk to me.
[00:30:38] I've watched the wipes since the end of May. I've watched the wipers go. I'm 61. Ooh. I'm 16. Ooh, I'm 61. Ooh, I'm 16. Does he like me?
[00:30:48] When is he calling me? He read that text. Why isn't he responding? Ooh, I have self esteem. This is Okay.
[00:30:58] I kept. Listen, I kept saying to God, God, do I stick? Do we do this? Do we today do? He goes, just today do this, Keep doing this. Because I really like him. He's cool.
[00:31:11] And God said, yeah, just today. Just do it today. Okay, okay, we'll do some more. We'll do some more. Okay, okay.
[00:31:17] And I do a 10 step every day, and I rotate partners every two weeks. And the women who have supported me from the end of April to now with this 16, 61. 16 are glorious, magnificent. Oh, thank all of them from the bottom of my heart for their kindness and their patience and their compassion with me now. There's a million things I haven't told you.
[00:31:43] Somewhere in there, I was maintaining 100 pound weight loss, and I got the thought, I don't want to die 20 pounds overweight. That's what I was thinking. I was 220. I'm 20 pounds overweight. I don't want to die 20 pounds overweight. And God said, well, let's lose that 20 pounds. And I was like, okay. We went real slow and we looked at some trigger foods, more trigger foods, and it was cool. And we, you know, and we got that £20 off. And God said, let's lose a little more. And then it was another 30 pounds. So it was a total of 50 pounds in Covid that I just let go of that. I released. Amazing, Amazing.
[00:32:22] Somewhere in there, I absolutely. The natural sweeteners had to go. The natural sweeteners had to go. They go, they went early. Like in 2019. They just. I can't do sweet on my tongue. It gets me all cuckoo looky. There's a lot of things I don't do anymore because. Not because I want more of that thing that I did, but because now, suddenly I want more of everything, right? Suddenly I find myself hungry, angry, hangry. At times when I'm not normally hungry, I'm like, oh, that thing makes me want that thing. You know, Weird little connections. The gloriousness of my abstinence, my entire recovered abstinence now is. It's resilient.
[00:33:06] It's okay. I can eat a buffet occasionally and be fine. I can eat a moderate amount of food and be okay. I can go out to dinner, I can go out to brunch. It's okay. And then I have a rock steady Regular food plan with very little decision making in it and. And almost no cooking.
[00:33:27] And really an aggregation of live foods, not like power bars with 18 ingredients in it. Like just food. There's food in my food.
[00:33:39] I know.
[00:33:40] Come on. So, all right. All of that is to tell you all about that.
[00:33:44] So I have this abstinence. I've got this sort of slimmed down. Turns out my legs are really long.
[00:33:53] So cool. And I'm loving being at a healthy body weight. It's delicious. It's delightful. I can walk up hills. Amazing things are happening. Amazing things. All because I was willing to expand my relationship with my higher power. I say. That's what I say. All right, so I just want to read you. I just want to give you a quick teaser, a little example of two way prayer. And then not only do I want you to come to the Scarsdale tomorrow morning at 7:30. Porchak, he's going to have to edit this whole thing. I want you to come to a workshop on November 5, on Sunday afternoon, which I have flyers for. I'm going to put them out at registration.
[00:34:29] So I got quiet the other day. This is October 8th.
[00:34:34] There's too many microphones.
[00:34:38] And I asked God this question. God, what have you told me to obey, that I have not obeyed yet.
[00:34:48] Dearest little one, I love you. You do not have to do anything, think anything, feel anything in order to please me.
[00:35:03] I am delighted by you. I adore you just as you adore me.
[00:35:12] Your survival is not dependent on pleasing me or anybody.
[00:35:22] Your survival is no longer an issue.
[00:35:25] You did survive.
[00:35:28] You survived a crazy childhood. You survived your obesity. You survived the death of your husband and you survived your son's challenges.
[00:35:39] This is God.
[00:35:41] Note your son's challenges, not yours.
[00:35:46] Okay.
[00:35:47] The instinct to survive is a deep one and tied profoundly in your case, to people pleasing.
[00:35:57] It is taking time to unravel all the tightly bound threads binding these two together.
[00:36:06] Time takes time.
[00:36:08] Love God. And with that, I'll close. Thank you very much.
[00:36:15] We did it. We did it.
