Peter Marinelli from The Florida House Sober Living Program
Peter Marinelli from http://www.floridahouseexperience.com/ Sober Living Program in Deerfield Beach Florida.
My name is Peter, and I’m also, like Jimmy, a recovered alcoholic. In June of 1988, God separated me from alcohol and I’ve been sober since June 23 1988. I’m very grateful for that. I guess what I want to talk to you guys about is what it was like for me living at the hands of alcoholism. And what my family looked like because of my alcoholism and what my family was doing with alcohol and drugs. This time in 1988 in the month of June, I was living up in new york and I had been through 6 treatment centers, the type of places that Jennifer and Laurie worked with, and my family couldn’t believe that I turned into a full blown drunk and was addicted to heroin and some other substances. It just couldn’t happen. But my family tree was evidence that it was going to happen. I grew up with a mom who was alcoholic and addicted to valium and had been through maybe 15 or 20 institutions and after several attempts of trying to commit suicide, because the bottom in addiction, is wanting to die. She finally succeeded in taking her life in January of 1974 and I was all but 14. I remember it was about 6 months later, I couldn’t deal with that kind of pain. We didn’t have therapists to go talk to. I gave up on God because God took my mom. I will tell you, for many years, I despised God. So what do you do with this? You keep it in, you don’t talk about your feelings. Until one summer night, my friends were drinking, and I drank with them. Suddenly the pain of loosing my mom, and me being me, because I was always insecure about being me, was removed and I found a panacea for my ills. It was called beer, it worked. The more I drank, the further away I got from God, the more I despised god. I will tell you in June of 1988, the last person I wanted to have a relationship with was God. But we find out that god forgives, and god doesn’t build any kind of bridges that are impossible for me to cross. I went on a drunk from about 14 years old to 28 and I was homeless in the streets of new york. This time of year I was walking around with a turtle neck, a coat, blood stained and soiled clothes, I was wearing construction boots with holes in them, and I would carry a pint of mr. boston blackberry brandy. I would hustle and panhandle, do all the things I could do to get money to get another pint of brandy; because if I didn’t I’d get violently ill and I slept in hallways and rooftops and things like that. My life today makes no sense compared to where it was. No matter how much alcohol I put into me, it couldn’t remove the pain that I was feeling. The thing about alcohol, maybe some of you guys might experience some of this, is when regular folks take a drink, sometimes they get drunk, sometimes they don’t, but at some point they put a lid on it. With an alcoholic, the craving is always intensified, it’s never satisfied more as a drink and even though we don’t want to drink, and we say were never going to drink again; Laurie talked about the mind, its the obsession of the mind that will take us back to that which is killing us.
