Episode 262 Minisode: Country Roads Take Me Home (1): Checking all the boxes

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This is the first of five episodes in my mini series, Country Roads Take Me Home. I’m gonna walk you through a recent trip that I took back to the small mountain town where my first husband and I relocated with our four kids in 2009. We only stayed for two years, but when we moved back, I was not the same person. And going back this summer gave me a chance to reflect with fresh eyes on what really happened.

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So in this first episode, Checking All the Boxes, I take you back to what felt like the perfect fresh start. My husband had gotten his first role as CEO of a hospital.  My four kids were at that sweet spot age, post-baby and pre-teenager, and I was welcomed into a circle of women who I still count among my favorite people. But below the surface, I was starting to rattle the bars on my self-imposed cage of perfectionism.

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For the first time in my life, I resented feeling like I had to check all the boxes. I wasn’t sure who I was working so hard to impress. I’ll share what it was like to live in constant pursuit of being good enough and how bulimia and drinking became my secret coping mechanisms and why letting go of who I thought I was actually cracked open the space that I needed to begin the delicate, sacred process.

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of finding myself.

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My name is Colleen and I’m a mindful drinking coach helping high achieving professional women permanently reduce their alcohol consumption by 80%. Join me each week for evidence-based holistic strategies  to regulate your nervous system,  balance your dopamine,  and activate the growth mindset that makes you so powerful in other areas of your life  so you can stop worrying about losing control  and trust yourself again.

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Get happy, not sober. It’s not about the alcohol.

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I am in  West Virginia this morning in the New River Gorge area and drove down here yesterday for a two day quick trip. My son and his girlfriend, Beyonce, have decided to get married here  at the confluence.  And this is a very special place for me. My first husband and I moved here with our four children when he was  rising in the corporate ladder.

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This was his first CEO position at a hospital.  And  in that field,  often  you have to move in order to get what we used to call your wings, to get your CEO wings. Once you had the experience, it was a lot easier to get higher level jobs. But where we were in Fort Wayne, Indiana at the time did not allow for the upward mobility. And so we decided to take the opportunity to move to a small town.

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in West Virginia. And more than that, we were both ready and open for what I now refer to as a field trip. I had spent the first 35 years of my life hurrying up to become an adult, graduated college in three years, was teaching high school chemistry before my 21st birthday. By the time we were 23, we had a five bedroom house in the nice neighborhood, at least at the time, you know, that we could afford.

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We had two brand new cars.  We had our first child  on the way. And by the time I was 30, we had four children  and he had a big career. And by then I had left teaching and was a full time stay at home mom. And I was very high energy, very checking the boxes, very perfectionist, very goal oriented.  And didn’t know at the time, I didn’t have the ability to recognize a growing hollowness.

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and sense of disconnect from my experience of who I was  with the performance of who I was.  And by all  outside measures, I was killing it. Like many of us, I had a very deep need from that tender age of 16, 17, 18 to prove myself worthy of being called an adult, to being a good person. I thought there was somewhere to get.

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And  I married someone who also thought there was somewhere to get and we were a good team in the getting of the there.  And  in that mindset, what that means  is that I was always evaluating myself from the outside in and completely disconnected from my own felt experience. And  I had no awareness that there was any other way to live or to be. I did my best to suppress bad behaviors. I was

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bulimic all the way up until I was mid 30s actually when I moved to West Virginia and I’ll  circle back to that but the bulimia was something that had started in high school with my desire to stay tiny and small and be skinny  and kind of became my go-to coping skill for what I now understand was managing my emotions and I remember

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coming home, you know, getting all the kids to bed, whether it was in the evening or whether it was in the middle of the day,  and kind of dissociating. And I’d wake up  and realize I had just eaten massive amounts of food, and then I would go and purge.  And  honestly, looking back, it wasn’t even the food that I wanted to consume. It was the release  of the purging. It was almost euphoric.

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I remember, especially if I had the ability to do it when I would purge, I would also have this vocal,  ah, you know, just letting it all out. And then I would experience such relief. It was almost like a good cry. Like I felt better after I did all that. And I thought it was because I had released the food and now was skinny again. But in reality, I was regulating my nervous system.  Not the best way to do it, but that’s what I was doing.

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as little girls and little people meant to, we are taught to manage our behavior  and suppress any emotion that doesn’t align with who we think we are supposed to be. And this is what causes the disconnect between our felt sense  and erodes our relationship with ourselves and our bodies, because there’s just certain things about our bodies that are not acceptable.

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And for a long time, I just thought it was the size of my ass or the urge to eat certain foods or the way my hair looked. And I had no idea that the thoughts in my head were not all true at any given time,  or that I was so externally focused on looking at myself from the outside in that I was completely ignoring my own  feelings because I thought any feeling was telling me the truth.

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that I was bad or I was too much or I was too big or I was too small or I was too late or behind or that there was something wrong with me that I was inherently less than and not good enough and therefore I was constantly trying to perform my way out of those feelings not knowing that none of your feelings are true. Not knowing that the rock star feelings I had on my best day were also just feelings in a story I was telling myself.

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And so I was constantly chasing these highs and also suppressing the lows. And it’s got to come out somewhere. Like that’s how we end up with eating disorders and drinking disorders or shopping habits or prescription drug habits or a complete lack of boundaries. That was another thing. I was always helping people because that helped me feel like I was there. I was supposed to be there. So I

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being a good person always wanted to help people who didn’t quite get it, who needed my help, who somehow couldn’t get all four of their kids to the gym before 730 on a snowy day, that somehow they were weak, not knowing I was just fucking crazy, and that in my strength I could support them. Which is why for years I found myself in friendships where not only was I managing a house with my four kids and three dogs and

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husband that was never home and my teaching schedule at the gym where I worked out every single day every single morning come hell or high water and did all the things with all of my kids and was reading to them I mean I was killing it but I also attracted friends who couldn’t quite keep up with my pace like literally I can remember pushing my double jog stroller having a baby on my back and a baby in a bjorn and the double  jog stroller is

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filled with toys and snacks. Of course, they were all healthy snacks, the right kind of snacks and the proper kind of sunscreen  and all of the things that you would need. And my friends would drive past me  on their way to the pool. And I was going to the pool, but I refused to drive to the pool because, you know, the planet and the gas and the petroleum  and all of that. Plus I was getting extra calories and workouts and I was teaching my kids that walking in the morning was good. And my friends would drive back.

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past me and be like, do you want to ride? And I’d be like, do you need to walk a little more? I mean, I’ll see you there bitches. Like that’s how I lived my whole life, performing the role of rock star. And as you might imagine, most rock stars drink in the evening. So I was also doing a lot of that with more and more hangovers over the years. I never had trouble controlling my drinking when I was pregnant. I didn’t want it. I was real good when I was breastfeeding, but then, you know, when my kids were little,

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While I cooked, I was having wine O30 because wine also was helping me regulate my nervous system. And so all that to say when my first husband came and said, I have this opportunity to go to West Virginia. I was like, oh fuck yeah, please get me the fuck out of here. I was so ready to escape this cage that I had built for myself where every morning I did the same things and then went to the gym. That was what I did.

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and had the same conversations with the same people about being fat and maybe we were a little hung over and laughing about that and talking about the same gossipy things.  And I just remember thinking, I can’t do this one more Monday. Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s burn the whole thing down and go start over somewhere else. And so  I did it. I said, yes,  we did it. And while we thought we were climbing up the corporate ladder  and my first husband,

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did end up climbing all the way up as high as you can go.  And at some point our stories diverged. For me,  West Virginia will always be the place  where I found myself. I found my people. I saw another way of being and of living. And I’m going to end this here because I’m going to do a little series. I’m just going to talk about my own journey  of meeting myself  and trusting myself.

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learning to be myself  and ultimately falling in love with myself.

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All right, thanks for listening. And if you’re a high achieving, coachable woman who is ready to commit to manifesting your best life, and you’re going to need to reduce your alcohol consumption by about 80 % so that alcohol goes back to being a pleasure instead of a soul sucking problem, get in the show notes and click the link and schedule a discovery call with me or my team.