Episode 61: The role childhood trauma plays in addiction

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So today I am interviewing one of my clients named Jess. She came to me back in February, a few weeks into her sobriety, because she realized that, as we all do, alcohol was not really the problem. She’s a very high functioning, get her done, positive, fun person. And she was able to quit drinking without too much trouble, and we’ll explain why.

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buttload of shame helping her out with that. But once she got through the first few weeks, the initial stages of early sobriety, and expected to feel so much better, all of her problems would be solved, she realized that this goes much deeper. And this conversation started via email between Jess and I as she was explaining why she was ready to move on from my program, which is...

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perfectly normal and most people do, but she was saying why she wasn’t going to re-up and do another 12 weeks because she has realized that she has a lot of trauma to deal with and wants to go in a direction that allows her to address and heal from past traumas. And quite frankly, as a coach, I was tickled to hear this.

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You know, when you sign up and do 12 weeks with me, what I consider my program to be is the gateway to your recovery. Prior to her coming into the next chapter and learning about emotional sobriety, she would never have had the awareness that trauma was even in play. She, like me and many of you, had diagnosed herself with an addiction, a really bad habit.

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that needed to be changed and had no idea that the reason that that habit had developed was much deeper and bigger and that just giving up alcohol and changing her behavior with that substance was just the beginning of her healing journey. And learning the skills of emotional sobriety where

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she was able to take full responsibility for the way she thinks and therefore feels and therefore acts, she was able to take full responsibility and recognize the calls coming from inside the house and that her stress is not just a product of her life or uncontrollable circumstances or her personality, but that all of those things, her life, her stress, her personality were being

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created and fueled by unresolved traumas from the past. So before I get into the interview, I just wanna take a moment to explain what it is she has discovered, the work we were able to do together uncovered for her. And that is what trauma is and how it affects your nervous system. Trauma.

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is the way you experience a situation. And it is anything that basically is too much, too fast, or goes on too long, in that the demands of your external circumstances are overwhelming your nervous system’s ability to process. What does that mean? That means you get stuck in a stress response. Because

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resolving stress requires you to make sense, to make meaning, to take corrective action, and it’s impossible to resolve your stress if you don’t understand the source of your stress. And much of our traumas, big T and little t, are unresolved stress from childhood.

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you don’t have the cognitive skills or the power to change your circumstances. So even if you figure out what’s wrong, there’s not a lot you can do about it. And so when you experience trauma, something that is overwhelming to your nervous system, and you can’t make sense of it and resolve it and take corrective action, that memory gets stored in your nervous system.

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Anything that triggers that memory or reminds you of that situation sounds smells tastes feelings people certain behaviors anything that even subconsciously reminds you of that same sensation that you had of not being Having the power to resolve or take action or to speak up on your own behalf anything that reminds you of that and

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because our memories are stored in our subconscious, which our body is our subconscious. So anything that elicits the same sound, smells, tastes, feelings, all of that, it triggers an automatic nervous system response. It puts you back into the stress response. The body remembers, the body keeps the score. And so dealing with trauma is a process of repatterning the nervous system. So...

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that it doesn’t experience new situations through the filter of the memory, or it doesn’t experience them as a threat, because you’re able to disconnect that active pain of the past. The end goal of healing trauma is to be able to remember the pain without reliving the pain. You can see it, you can still feel it, but it’s a memory.

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Part of trauma healing is changing your relationship with the past so that it doesn’t continue to repeat itself in the future. So that when that feeling comes up, you know where the source of it is, the source of your stress. And you’re able to deal with that as a memory of the past without filtering and perceiving the present moment as being the same and requiring the same response.

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So again, in childhood, we don’t have the cognitive skills to do this. We don’t have the power to change our circumstances. So what happens over time is that we learn how to respond to certain situations in whatever way allows us to feel safe again. So we can’t resolve the source of the stress, so we have to just do whatever it takes to feel safe again, which usually means...

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in even the best of childhoods. It means you’re telling people what they want to hear, or you’re avoiding or hiding. You learn how to not take up space. You learn how to play small, or you learn how to play big and draw the attention, draw the fire. I mean, there’s all sorts of coping mechanisms that we develop. But we learn how to deny ourselves and our experience in order to stabilize somebody else. Because a big...

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part of relieving stress and feeling safe requires co-regulation. Our nervous systems co-regulate with other people. We have mirror neurons that detect imperceptible gestures and facial expressions and body language that tell us in any given moment whether we are or are not safe. And then we learn coping mechanisms that keep us safe with the people around us.

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So when in childhood, a lot of your stress is coming from outside of you, not inside. It’s not your thoughts and feelings at this point. That’s what we save all that for adulthood. It’s just about surviving. It’s about being safe in your environment. And so you learn how to respond and react so that you soothe the stress in other people, giving them what they want or what they think they need to hear or who they think you need to be, whatever, and those become habits.

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You know, when we feel this way, then we act that way. And not just with physical behaviors, but also with our thoughts. You know, the baseline, which may not even be words in the brain, but the baseline is I am safe or I am not safe. And then that begins to translate to this is good, this is bad. I am good, I am bad. This is right, I am wrong. I am right, I am wrong.

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And we internalize these beliefs. We’re problem solving. We’re drawing conclusions. And when we internalize beliefs like I am bad, or something is wrong with me, those beliefs then get applied to new scenarios. And this is how our neural networks build themselves out. We take that belief into a new situation. We look for evidence that it’s true. And then we.

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rely on old behaviors to make it not true so we can be safe again. So growing up, for example, with an unpredictable parent who gets angry when things aren’t done a certain way means that you start applying that standard that things need to be a certain way. You internalize that standard for yourself and then also for other people that you end up being in charge of. Because you have a belief that you’ve never questioned.

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from childhood that that, whatever way, is the right way. And doing it the right way is what allows you to feel safe. And so this is how we grow up to be raging perfectionists, demanding high level of performances from ourselves, fearing mistakes, and doing all of this at the expense of our own needs and bodies. Because as children, we weren’t safe.

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if all the boxes weren’t checked and if dad or mom wasn’t happy or if we made a mistake, we were punished or shamed for that or if we got tired or decided we didn’t want to play soccer anymore and that wasn’t acceptable, then we learned that the only way to be safe in our environment when somebody else is in charge is to do the things that they think are right and wrong.

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Since it wasn’t safe in childhood, for most of us to some extent, I don’t care how good your parents were, I have kids too and I’m sure that I passed a lot of this on to my own children where they needed to make me happy before themselves, of course. I mean, clean your damn room, whatever. But since it wasn’t safe to address our actual needs and desires in childhood, we developed coping skills to compensate

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for the stress of not meeting our own needs and desires because it’s safer to ignore them. And then we have to figure out the problem of how to function when we’re overwhelmed and deprived and what that looks like. And so that’s how we become, again, raging perfectionists or whatever. And many of us, if you’re listening to this, what happened with alcohol, at least in the beginning,

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is that anesthetized our fatigue. It blurred the lines. It disconnected us from the thoughts that this is unsustainable, this isn’t working, I’m not happy. Because as children, it wasn’t safe to think those thoughts. It wasn’t safe to question that. We didn’t have the power to take action. So as adults, we start using alcohol and we just drink through it.

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But then, of course, unfortunately, alcohol doesn’t resolve stress. It actually increases it. So instead of being relieved of our stress, because we’re making mom and dad happy when they’re no longer with us in our daily lives, but their voices are still in our head, and those beliefs and standards and expectations are still driving our behavior, we end up even more stressed. Because now we’re using alcohol.

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which is toxic to our nervous system, jacks up our cortisol, blocks our REM sleep so we’re not well rested, and it’s just a slippery slope. And then, you know, we have less capacity. We make bad decisions here and there. We start feeling ashamed of our drinking. We start telling ourselves we’re out of control. And now those beliefs start being taken into other situations. And so that leads to even more alcohol use, because

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We feel like we can’t control ourselves. We believe that we don’t have the ability to control ourselves because of whatever reason. And overall, big picture, we just don’t have the ability to tolerate the stress that we’re dealing with because we don’t understand the source of the stress. We don’t understand that alcohol is causing the problems and that our own beliefs and thoughts and feelings are causing our problems. And it just becomes a vicious cycle.

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And this is what Jessica realized once she removed alcohol and reduced her physical stress because she was no longer drinking a toxic substance and dealing with hangovers every single day. She realized that there was a lot more there. And what I will say about Jess is the reason she was such a pleasure to work with is that she showed up so fricking ready to take full responsibility for herself because

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that was actually one of her coping mechanisms is to blame herself. And where we had a lot of transformations with her was in her realizing how hard she was on herself. Realizing how the, at one point she had to write a job description and we talk about this in the interview, but where all the daily things she was expecting of herself, and it was like five single paged, single spaced pages long.

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And that was where she was able to really pull out and see the big picture and realize that the call was coming from inside the house and that there was trauma that she needed to untangle and heal from. And towards the end, I asked Jessica if she has any advice and for her former self, like what she would say to herself in 2022 or what...

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what she might say to any of you listeners who might be struggling and kind of at a precipice of like how do I move forward, what do I really need? And her advice, she emailed it to me because she wasn’t happy with her question because that’s standard perfectionism, right, to overthink her answer, which I’m keeping her answer in, I thought it was great. But her advice, and I’d like you to take this into listening to the interview, is...

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But if you can just temporarily exit the cycle of self-abuse, whether that be quitting drinking and or becoming aware of how hard you’re driving yourself and how much shame you are heaping on yourself and the negative self-talk that is keeping you stuck in that cycle of shame and then also the behaviors that you’re using to cope with that shame, if you can even temporarily

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exit that cycle and just get curious. Just get curious. That will allow you to untangle some of the beliefs that are driving you about what is right and wrong and good and bad and what you need and don’t need. Like you’re telling yourself you need certain things, but being able to step outside and see this from a bigger picture asks, it allows you to ask yourself.

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What else could be true? What else could I need? What are my options? What am I telling myself that is not true and that’s actually working against me? How do I want to feel? How do I want to show up? Where am I shooting myself in the foot? And if you can give yourself a chance, just a chance to glimpse this from the big picture.

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Jessica wants you to know that that is all it takes. You just need a foothold that there’s an alternate reality out there from the one you’re living in every single day. And that getting that broader perspective, you don’t immediately adopt it and drop all your old beliefs. I mean, it doesn’t work like that. But realizing that there’s a reason that you are the way you are, and it’s not because there’s something wrong with you.

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It’s because you’ve gotten wound up in beliefs that you no longer question and habits that you believe you can’t change or control. And when you can see from the big picture, that is what gives you control. And you’re able to start healing your trauma, unwinding one belief, one bad thought.

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pattern. It’s not even about your behaviors. It’s the way you’re thinking about yourself that these things can be untangled. And that you can learn a new way of being that restores your sense of power, and also joy, joy and happiness. Because in the end, what Jessica found is that all of her coping skills that she was actually using to abuse

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you know, unexamined subconscious beliefs about what kept her safe and what she needed to do to stay safe, all of those coping skills are neutral in the end, and they can be used for good and bad. And what Jessica discovered was that her hypervigilance that she developed from trying to make her parents happy and her extreme empathy of

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being hypervigilant and concerned about what other people think and feel all the time, which she didn’t know how to use that skill for good. And so it kept her insecure and uncertain and really stressed out all the time. Once she learned that those skills are neutral and can actually be applied for good, she was able to turn all of it, and she ain’t done yet, trust me, but she’s been able to turn some of it, let’s say that, into a superpower.

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Like her hypervigilance and extreme empathy, to be specific, are now what she would call her superpowers at work. Because she has the ability to anticipate her clients’ needs, she owns her own business, I think she talks about it, but she has the ability to anticipate her clients’ needs before they even ask. She can pick up on subtle cues that allow her to stay ahead and serve and make her clients happy and expand and grow.

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her business and she believes now that the reason she’s so successful in business is that she has these skills. And so it’s not all good or bad. And her takeaway that she wanted me to share before our interview so that you might listen with an open mind that this is not scary. It is not scary to.

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get in and untangle your feelings, because they’re just feelings. Feelings are like shadows on the walls. And she has now realized that not only are her past traumas not a problem anymore, they are not causing her pain, but the fact that she experienced and endured those traumas taught her coping skills that served her. And now, taking the time,

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to heal from those traumas actually gives her another skill. It makes her more willing and capable of addressing other problems in her life. She’s no longer afraid of her feelings because she knows that they’re informing her of shitty, faulty beliefs, and they are going to give her a path to correct self-destructive behaviors. She’s no longer a victim of herself anymore.

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because having taken the time, the time out in her life to deal with the traumas that she’s experienced in the past has given her a new skill. She now knows how to do it. And she likes being able to see where she’s in her own way because it doesn’t scare her anymore. She knows how to get out of her own way. And so she’s here today to share her story of the first

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I think four to maybe five months now of her sobriety, what she learned, where she started, and where she’s going from here. So enjoy the interview. So thank you, Jess, for joining us today. I’m so privileged and honored that you’ve agreed to come on and share your story. And before we get started with all that, do you wanna just give us an introduction? Tell me who you are, what you do, maybe explain how we came to meet. Yeah.

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So my name is Jess Carlin. I currently live in Charleston, South Carolina. My husband and I own a landscape design build company. I have three small children, all girls. And you know, we live life hard and fast. How I came to meet Colleen was as I feel like everybody

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does in the recovery standpoint is you wake up one day and you’re like, holy shit. Things have gone awry. And I knew I had a problem with addiction, alcohol specifically, and I started grasping at straws being like, who’s in my corner? Who’s on my team? And lo and behold, a previous client of Ms. Colleen’s pointed me in her direction. We got to give a shout out to Michelle.

24:06

Yes, we do. We had to give a shout out to Michelle. Michelle’s the great connector for sure. Yeah. She’s like, oh, I got a guy for that. Michelle has a guy for that or a gal for sure, always. Yeah. So you met me because you knew that you wanted to take some action. And in fact, I remember you were three weeks sober or so, so you had already made the decision and already taken action.

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Can we back up a little bit and go into the backstory and sum up your lifestyle? I mean, saying you live hard and fast is funny. And I think I know I understand that, but can you explain, you know, how you were living, what it was that was so unsustainable, the shit show, you know, your kids, your business, all of this stuff.

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Just tell me what your life was like and maybe talk about how you were a drinker too, because a lot of us, there’s a lot of different types of drinking. I was a daily drinker. Some people are binge drinkers. So maybe just kind of sum up a picture of what life was like before you were like, and check please. Yeah. I would say I’m going to go back just a smidgen into upbringing in the sense of, you know, I grew up in a very, I would say low socioeconomic sort of status.

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And I knew very young that I did not want to stay trapped, if you will. So, you know, education became my ticket out. It was, you know, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, do whatever you got to do to move up and out. Right. So that landed me in college, putting myself through it, you know, 40 hour workweek, 18 credit hours. I did it all. And my way to cope with that sort of.

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pressure and stress was always drinking, but also in college, like, dude, that’s America. So I finish a couple years down the road, I meet a very handsome man, if I must say. And in a five year time period, we got married, had three kids, started a business and bought a house.

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And so if you think it was a shit show before, I mean, it definitely was after. And so I have this business that’s so successful, but very much in the infant stages. And then I also have three human infants that all require my love, need and attention. You know, it was a lot. It was like, if you equate like living life to juggling balls, right? So family and work, right?

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If I put too much attention on one, the other one would suffer. And so the only way I thought, well, at the time, thought, right, like, how can I reduce this overwhelmingness that I felt was my life? You know, it was always an outside source. It was cigarettes, it was alcohol, it was like, whatever I got to do to forget the day happened until I get to the next day. And

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You know, I was always, you know, one to two drinks an evening, um, but always drunk weekends, you know, rock and roll. And then that wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough. And so then I graduated into, you know, probably I’d say between eight and 12 beverages an evening, liter bottle of wine, like the big one, right? We need the big one. Yeah. And if, if, you know, I wasn’t feeling how I felt,

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like I wanted to feel by the end of the night like whiskey vodka kicker come on like whatever I gotta do to feel how I want to feel which was numb um but you know that I was using alcohol to sleep because I was needed in so many places I didn’t have any boundaries that I couldn’t fall asleep naturally because I couldn’t shut my brain off and so

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I had to be a certain level of fucked up to be able to rest for three hours or so, you know, give or take. Yes. And so that for multiple years, right, I didn’t drink while I was pregnant or breastfeeding or any of that stuff because I am mama bear through and through. It came to a head. It just it caught up with me and it was, you know, it was a weekend bender.

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And my husband had to come procure me in the wee hours of the AM and was like, Jess, you need to come in the house. And I was like, whatever. Maybe I dragged back to the tractor into a building and maybe I had to sit out by the fire. Maybe, you know, all these things. And he approached me this time, you know, like, what are we going to tell our kids? How are we going to teach them how to be instead of you need to not, you shouldn’t.

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You shouldn’t because I was so defensive. Like you’re not my dad. Leave me that alone. And hit me right in the mama bear heart. And I was like, you’re right. I’m the only one who can provide the example. Not the only one, of course he can, but felt like I was the only one in the wrong in that sort of situation. Yeah, that’s how I got to you.

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Can you describe that moment? Did you feel any sense of relief that it was going to be over? Did your problem-solving brain kick in? How did you meet that moment? How did it feel? Yeah. So it was very, I would say the initial desire to quit was very motivated by guilt and shame, as is almost all things.

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during a lifetime of life, trauma even. But it was so, I just felt embarrassed. Like I didn’t want them to be embarrassed by me and my actions, how I sort of grew up, you know? And I grew up with the sense of, that’s how you solved your shit, right? You stuff it down and when it hurts, you medicate yourself by yourself.

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And I was like, it was like, he brought that up and I was immediately like, Oh my gosh, I can change this. I can be the one to change this. You know, I don’t have to be, I could be a better example, right? How can I say, you know, avoid drugs and alcohol, their program circa 1990 when I’m the one who’s like

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Um, listen, you don’t need alcohol to enjoy yourself. Can you go grab mommy another bottle of wine? Yeah. Right. So what did you think you needed? Like, um, I know for me, I had no ideas, no frame of reference. Nobody I knew was sober or had ever quit drinking. We, we knew a lot of people that probably should, but.

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I had never seen anybody take action. What did you think was coming next? I will tell you that, you know, actually quitting drinking, I’m sure everyone who has done agrees. It’s not the actual quitting that sucks. It’s being left with the thoughts and the feelings and the inability to numb it out, right? Cause you’re left with all of your bullshit at the end of the day.

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And so I realized that a couple of weeks in, if it was going to be sustainable, then I needed help in navigating how to do that. I had no idea how to self-regulate, none whatsoever. So I’m like, somebody’s gotta know something, right? And Michelle, we both know, I had seen her like 180 turn her life around. And I literally, Facebook novel message, like,

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what did you do, who did you talk to, help, right? Just reached out to the one person that I knew that succeeded, and that was it. Okay. So then you come into my world, and we start working together, and I just fell in love with you because you are so bubbly and so open.

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And at the time, you know, I didn’t have a group. I was between successful Facebook ads. And I was just like, girl, we’re gonna work together. I’m gonna give you my best and we’ll get through this together. And you just showed up with 150% all the time. And my experience of working with you is that you truly wanted to change and you were really open and able and ready to take.

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full accountability for your actions. Cause you were just exhausted. It was one of those, and I understood the same thing. Like just tell me what the fuck to do because what I’m doing is not working. So I will do what you say because I just, I can’t do this. And from my perspective as a coach, I definitely felt like that accountability was super helpful, but I also could see pretty early on that.

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in some ways it was actually gonna hold you back a little bit because you were so willing to blame yourself and you had so much judgment, so much contempt for yourself. You were your own biggest bully. And where all that came to a head, if you don’t mind, I’ll share the story of you had been, we’d been working together for a few weeks and you were killing it. You were like, emotional sobriety, let’s get the tattoo. Let’s do it. Like, I love this.

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I’m going to take accountability, everything I think, whatever. And then as happened so often, you had a slip up. And by slip up, you would have said it’s because you drank. And the way you described that experience was so informing to me because you describe kind of an out of body experience. You had gone to the gas station or wherever, some sort of small convenience store.

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to get yourself mocktail ingredients. We had talked about like ginger, beer, and soda water or something. You were like, I’ll have what Colleen’s having. And you had gone to look for those ingredients and they didn’t have it. And that was when you had that out of body and you just ended up buying a beer. And the way you described it to me, and forgive me if I get it wrong, correct me if you need to, but you had the beer, but then the self-

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talk, you were so upset with yourself for having had slipped up, but then you kept drinking throughout the weekend. And by the time I saw you the next week, you were ready to get back on the horse, but super upset with yourself because you hadn’t been able to stop it at the one. So it was like the one was such a big problem to you that it caused you to go, I don’t know how much more you did.

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in class on Monday and it was fine. But it was the way you described it as an out of body experience, I reframe that for you as kind of a nervous system response. Like something had triggered you in the gas station and as we talk in our class, like willpower is directly proportional to stress. The more stressed you are, the less you’re able, your cognitive function goes offline. And so something happened to you in that gas station or before, like I don’t know,

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It sounds like you had intentions of getting what you needed, but the straw that broke the camel’s back was they didn’t have any goddamn ginger beer. Yeah. So screw all of it. And what I reflected for you was that that was a legit stress response and that the real problem wasn’t that you had had the beer, but it was how you responded to yourself having failed, having not met your own bar. And so, or excuse the pun.

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having not met your own standards. And so it was your self-loathing and self-criticism in response to one beer, which never killed anybody, it’s all the other beers, that kicked your nervous system into a state of fight or flight. And I feel like that was the point where you kind of really grasped that this was bigger than just you setting an intention and being really disciplined and...

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forcing yourself into change, even though you really wanted to, that it was beyond your capacity to behave your way into goodness, like something, this was deeper. And so can we use that experience as a jumping off point for how your ideas about recovery shifted from that experience and then what came next? Yeah. So I...

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I forever will remember that phone call because you had a phrase that you brought up that I still think about, well, a lot, not daily so much anymore, but when I get that certain sort of level of stress and overwhelm-t-ness, and you said you didn’t have enough bandwidth to make a new choice. And I was literally like, oh my God, it was like a light bulb finally went out because it wasn’t about...

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drinking anymore. It was about we can only do the best we can do at the level of our nervous system and mine was constantly constant even when I quit drinking it was still high levels of stress and overwhelm. So putting myself in a certain situation you know I was already maxed out I couldn’t

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fire a new neural pathway and make a new habit because I was, I couldn’t regulate. I couldn’t, I couldn’t do anything other than what I’d always done. And so just that idea alone allowed me to be able to take the blame off of myself. Right? Like it, it then became not about how hard I tried or cognitively how many books I read.

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or how much I journaled, or it was about having more compassion and less self-loathing. So it was like at that point, it was like fireworks, what are we going to get into? Okay, how do I really do this? You know, so- Well, in your homework after that call, or one of them, I mean, sometimes things run together months later, but I had you write out a job description of all the things that you’re responsible for.

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for and you showed up on the next call with like four or five single-paged task lists and broken down into the various segments and contexts of your life. And I feel like that was also a beginning of where you could see like, nobody can do all of this. Of course I’m crazy. Yeah, it was a little bit of, you know, having no boundaries whatsoever.

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It was a lot of it of being a control freak, perfectionist, workaholic, nobody can do it right unless I do it. And that is not a way to live. It’s not sustainable. I am a perfect example of that because I tried to do it for about a decade. And it landed me, you know, meeting you, which is a benefit. But it’s a lifetime of

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Just being in constant stress where, you know, there’s no listening to your body. There’s no, my brain needs slowed down. There’s a lot of disease. There’s, you know, GI tract issues. There’s joint pain. Just shit that you should know, right, if you listen to your body as a human being. That I just was ignoring. I was pushing through. I was like, I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna do all of it.

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And it took writing it all out for me to be like, like you said, this is impossible for anyone. Why am I putting myself on this? Who do I, who am I answering to? Who’s my boss? Can I talk to the manager? Talk to them. And, and so that, that, that signaled a shift for you, but can you talk to how, can you speak to how?

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You did this because I know I’ve been there. And the question is, if I can’t do everything I’m doing, but I think I should be doing everything I’m doing, what do you do next? What do you let go of? How, what did that process look like for you? Yeah, for me, it was a lot of lists, a lot of writing out. Okay, so I started with all of my duties. And then I was like, what can I let go to somebody else?

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what are as a pure result of not having boundaries or holding spouses and family members accountable for their own shit, you know? And then it was like, okay, the list after that, what can I do to change, you know, either my business or my family life to even make that list smaller? And it was having to face a lot of...

42:30

of hard truths of core beliefs, even limiting beliefs that I thought I had, you know, being like, do I really need to, you know, triple quadruple check? Accounting? No, hire a better accountant. You know, it was like, it’s just staring. It’s being completely honest with yourself to be honest. And that’s not funny.

43:00

You know, it’s just trying to be removed from the situation and looking down and being like, okay, what do we actually need to accomplish? And then if it’s not done, then it’ll be there the next day and the next day. And all you can do is do a little bit better than you did today. And that’s, that’s how I rolled. Yeah. So.

43:25

In the bigger picture, it sounds like you kind of had to change who you are. You know, this, this identity of being the mama bear, being the, the top of the food chain, you know, all of the things like that was how you were identifying. What was it like to shift your focus from external accomplishments and the optics of success?

43:55

to the experience of how you felt in your body. What was that like? Well, I think culturally it’s a little bit difficult, right? Because in the rat race of life, I feel like there’s a lot of focus societally based on what you can accomplish, who you know, how much money you have in the bank, what your house looks like, what kind of school your kids go to, right? And so it was having to step outside of that and being like,

44:24

what truly matters and what truly matters to me is completely different than what truly matters to Joe blow down the street. And you know, it became more of like, I had to get really comfortable with the idea that my business might fail. And it might fail because I have to step away from it, you know, and that could be the universe saying, Hey, girl, slow your shit down.

44:52

Or it can actually be like the accumulation of you not really pushing control up until a certain point and handing it off to somebody, you know, and I would always use the excuse, Oh, I just haven’t found the right person. Oh, I haven’t found the right person. No, it was, I had to admit to myself that we won’t survive trying to do everything. I think a big kicker was I actually had somebody mail payment for their job.

45:22

Um, to my house and the addressing line was spring landscape. And then it was C O wonderful. And I was like, like at first I was like, Oh, that makes me feel good. And then I was like, do I want to wear that cape? I’m going to have to walk this back a little bit. Yeah. I was like, maybe I.

45:51

Maybe that’s not a badge I need to wear, you know, that doesn’t success does not mean happiness And if you’re comfortable with that, then you can move up and out, you know, I was just always so concerned about not Being how I grew up that I was like Tunnel vision. How do I got to get there? Everything’s about how hard you pull up your boots on right like you can will yourself to do anything but

46:18

Inevitably that punishes your body. It punishes your psyche. It like dysregulates your nervous system. Yeah. Multiple good things. So since kind of this realization that you were placing all this pressure on yourself and it wasn’t life that was so stressful, but it was your brain creating it and realizing that you had to take care of your body.

46:48

and or it’s not sustainable. Since then, what, what does your recovery look like? What has, what have you found easy? What have you found hard? What have you discovered about yourself? Yeah. I started, I started with a big question, right? Which was why, why did I end up

47:18

I had to do everything. Why, you know, aren’t there any boundaries? And so that just, you know, you keep going back to past and nuggets and in certain life events and, and I came to the realization that my life had been accumulation of, of traumas of big ones and conglomeration of little ones. And so then it became less about alcohol. And it became

47:48

more about, well, why am I acting this way? Or why do I feel like I need to be this way? And it was crazy the day that I realized that things that I would list as character traits were actually trauma responses. You know, being a perfectionist, 100%. Giving from an empty cup, 100%. And so I was like, literally, I threw up my hands one day and I’m like, who the fuck am I?

48:19

every behavior pattern, everything comes back from these nuggets of just traumas. And so then I was like, all right, so how do we deal with this? You know, it became ravenous for information, like just consumed books and podcasts and websites and was like, somebody teach me what I don’t know because this can’t be the way to live.

48:46

Right, there’s got to be a better way to deal with it than shove it down and drowned it And that was a hundred percent my priority And and because I made that my priority, right that allowed You know Slack was was happening in in that to-do list And you know what the house didn’t burn down The business didn’t die Yeah, so it was like just

49:15

Having to focus and deal with the layers of the onion, right? And I realized that there’s a bajillion layers to the onion and if you’re so concerned with the Destination like I would when I started I was like I’m gonna make a gear and then I’m gonna get a medal and then Everything is gonna be awesome No

49:37

Definitely that. I’m sure they’re going to print you out an award though. I will print it and send it to you and you hang it on your fridge. Yeah, I’ll take it. I’ll put it up there. I’ll even put gold stickers on it. So this idea, you know, putting this in the big picture, when you, your husband has that conversation with you, you accept accountability for yourself. You decide to get help. You see Michelle. You move into a...

50:06

program, you and I are working together, you realize your to-do list is the problem, but then you realize your to-do list is a symptom and the symptom is unhealed, unaddressed traumas. And you know, I don’t know what books you’ve read, probably some of the same ones that I have, but there’s one guy, I think it’s Dr. Carl Fisher, who talks about how addiction is actually an adaptation.

50:35

It’s a response, like you said, it’s a trauma response. And it’s not a personality disorder or lack of willpower or genetically disadvantaged brain chemistry or something. Can you speak to how viewing your response, your urges, the way you’ve built your life, can you speak to that paradigm shift of seeing it as addiction or...

51:04

personality problems to trauma response? Yeah, I think a lot of it is just going back to that inner bully, that inner critic. You know, when you can attribute that, you know, things happened in your lifetime that you could not control, either you were too young or you were incapacitated, you know, it gives you a lot more compassion, I think, for yourself.

51:32

And I think to go and do the inner child work, which sucks, you know, can, can really lessen how bitchy that inner critic is because she’s me. And I, I just, you know, there was something I was reading about, you know, using, using affirmations, right. As a way to manage feelings and thoughts and.

52:01

and self-worth, but I still like I’m always going to be a progress for me. I literally cannot do affirmations because they feel fake, but I have stopped talking negatively to myself. So I feel for me that’s a huge step, right? And just calming down that inner critic. But it’s also like, you know, when you feel like you’re up to your ears in in just

52:31

the muck of going through your limiting beliefs and things that you thought you needed to know or do or expectations you put on yourself, which are completely unrealistic. You know, you have to go through it. You got to feel to heal it. Sounds corny as hell. Really. But it rhymes. It rhymes. It gets points for rhyming. You can remember it. But like you actually have to do that before you can level up.

52:59

And by level up, I mean, get to another layer of the friggin’ onion. Big down. Yeah. Really more of a leveling down, digging deeper. Yeah. Can you give me a picture of, of the actual, how the logistics, the habits, like what have, what have you been doing? You know, like, for example, people talk about, well, I get up every morning and I spend 10 minutes meditating. And then I.

53:28

I do this. I mean, can you talk about the logistics of you doing this work? What does it look like? And how do you, because I know four months ago, if I would have told you, you had to do all this stuff, you’d have been like, bitch, have you seen my to-do list? I ain’t got time for that. So you’ve had to make even more time, not just get a nicer account or a smarter accountant.

53:55

offload some of your work, but you’ve had to make even more time. Can you talk about how that actually plays out in your days or weeks? Yeah. You know, and I think there’s daily habits and then there’s stuff that are practices you can use when you are in a stress response. So daily habits for me is, you know, actually having to move at some point during the day, whether it’s like...

54:24

Stupid 30 minute yoga YouTube class or if it’s going for a walk or if it’s pushing a damn wheelbarrow for work Like it’s actually physically moving. I feel like There was a point during recovery where I was under the assumption and we all know what we say about assuming that I could control and change everything cognitively and That is not true

54:51

I think too when you when you look at trauma, there’s a lot of dissociation In in and that’s just a survival tech tactic right that your lizard brain being like, okay This is how we go keep you safe and so it’s been a lot of I actually have to move and think and you know as a way to Re Unify mind body spirit

55:20

Um, I did, uh, go into a lot of, uh, Reiki, which is just a energy healing. Um, and I did lean a little bit in the spiritual aspect, but I think two in a trauma sort of trying to heal that it was easier to believe in magic than that people could be that awful, right? It’s like baby stepping into like the hardship.

55:49

and you know, belly breathing, like the simplest things. I mean, just five deep breaths, long exhales, literally a stress response. I would like try to meditate in the office when I had like the worst client and I’d be like, oh, and I always do it before I go to bed and just like kind of reevaluate, like what are the good things that happened today?

56:17

Cause I spent a lifetime focusing on the negative. Like I need to do this better. This has to be done blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that got me nowhere. So being appreciative and using positive, you know, feedback has helped tremendously. Um, I don’t know. Does that answer your question? Yeah. So it sounds like you are. Actively pinpointing when there’s a problem to redirect the diagnosis from what’s going on out there.

56:47

to what’s happening in your nervous system. And then not trying to think your way sane, but redirect, you know, maybe redirect your thoughts, but also redirect your body. And so you’re learning how to quote, as I like to say, drive your own nervous system. Yeah. And that is a practice. And I feel like too, in order to change like a lifetime of.

57:14

Acting a certain way, there’s a lot of little daily habits that have to be picked up, right? They have to be, you know, like in the shower, I have to be like, okay, the water is touching my head and on my shoulders, my elbows, like semantically like feeling body parts to be like, okay, this is where I am. It’s okay. Or like doing peripheral eye, you know, exercises to, you know, yes.

57:44

the hypnotic one, the one thing and then focus on the peripheral and yeah, or bilateral stimulation. Sounds like we’re reading the same books. Yeah, just like five minutes, a couple times a day, just, just, just rewiring. Like that’s all we’re trying to do here. Well, before we go on, I do have to tell you that you haven’t done the breathwork class that, you know, I brought in that breathwork coach and you’re still a member and there’s a replay from last month.

58:13

You got to clear an hour and trust me when I say you’re welcome. Like just, just, we won’t even go too much deeper into it, but I want you to, to take advantage of that replay. And then if you want to come next month to the live call, uh, just text me. But so if I was listening to this and hearing all the changes you’re making, yeah, yeah, yeah. You gotta, you gotta feel your feelings. Okay. That’s great. Can you give me an overall sense of why the changes you have made?

58:42

and the work that you’re doing, which you make it sound hard and awful. Can you tell me why there’s a net positive, why it’s worth doing? I think literally if you compare me myself even, I started in January, right? If I compare myself from now to the first of the year, there’s significant changes. I feel like it’s a net.

59:11

Positive because I’m more present like in all aspects of the word being a mom is hard, right? like life sucks sometimes and You know, you can only suck it up buttercup so long before your body’s like no And and it’s a lot of of just Realizing, you know when you’re not numbing out all the time. It helps you realize, you know People that truly care about you

59:40

not ones that are your party friends. It helps you realize the things that are important and are not in life, in general, in relationships. And it allows you to just do different things. I feel like in the cycle of drinking and recovery and drinking and recovery daily, right, you’re just, the only thing you’re doing is trying to make yourself feel better from the night before so you drink again.

01:00:10

then there’s no time left for you to read books or learn a new task or hobby or go hiking in a new place. There’s no time for that because you’re so consumed either by drinking or the thoughts of drinking or when or where. And so it’s just like opened up my, I think, my purview of life. Because I’m like, oh, I’ve got this.

01:00:35

I got a free 45 minutes, what am I gonna do right now? So you’re not living in survival mode anymore? Oh my gosh, yes, good thing you brought that up. Because that was a lifetime of it. Yeah. So do you believe that it’s possible to heal completely? Do you feel like you’re getting tools that will just manage?

01:01:03

Or do you actually experience this as healing? And what gives you hope to keep doing this?

01:01:13

I think that hope is a key word, right? Like, my hope is that

01:01:23

My children don’t have to wake up in their mid 30s and have to recover, you know? So sorry. But just to give them that leg up of you can live this way and be fine, you know? Who cares what whoever thinks, you know? Like you do you and and that hope of just

01:01:52

If everyone could do that collectively, I think as humans, we would be a lot better off. But, you know, just want the best for everyone. So if I make myself better than that contributes to something, you know, that’s how I feel. It sounds like you’ve had a big life priority shift or belief.

01:02:18

It’s a belief where once upon a time you thought, me too, that the only way to be okay is to go do all the things and to get all the things. And now it sounds like the foundation of being okay is taking care of yourself. And because if you’re okay, everything else will be okay. And that that’s what you wanna pass on to your kids. Taking care of yourself.

01:02:45

is the foundation of making everything else okay. Like if mama ain’t okay, nobody’s okay. And teaching your children that instead of, you gotta get better on the test, you gotta get into the right college, you gotta get onto the elite soccer team, you gotta go, go, go and get, get, get. And where are kids gonna go with all that? They all gonna be in recovery too if we drive them and teach them. That’s how I raise my kids, you know? Or a loser if you didn’t get a good grade on the test. Now we’re walking a lot of that back.

01:03:14

Yeah, and it’s a lot of two of, you know, there was like, almost love and compassion withheld if you didn’t receive X amount of whatever it was, whatever achievement it was. And I’m not trying as long as you do the best you can with what you got. Right. That’s all we care about. And you know, self care. If you don’t take care of yourself, you cannot help.

01:03:43

Little people who can’t regulate their nervous systems regulate themselves. But self care is more than like a mani-pedi. Self care is taking a bath in, in five minutes away from the chaos just to just breathe. Right? Self care is like actually eating fruits and vegetables. Self care is a lot of things. It’s just, you know, whatever you need to do to help you be the best person you could be, I think.

01:04:13

But it could be. Yeah. And to speak to what you’re saying, to go a little bit deeper, the, the phrasing that helps me is it’s not taking care of quote myself because myself can be a little bit crazy. It’s taking care of my body. Yeah. Like what is my body need? My body needs to go to bed right now. You know, my body needs to eat three meals a day. My body needs to move. So Cray Cray town, you know, you can, you can think while we do it if you want, but my body.

01:04:41

has to be the priority. And for me, that’s how I frame self care, just in my own head. Colleen needs certain things, and I’ve got to make her a priority on my list, because if I get too far away from that, my stress, it’s just my body, it’s not fair to my body, and my body kicks back, you know? 100%, yep, agreed. So do you have any advice to the Jessica that was

01:05:10

a year ago or to somebody who’s out there that’s listening, who hasn’t started on this journey yet and is like, fuck. Do you have any advice?

01:05:25

damn AA for taking the slogan, but it literally is one day at a time. And it’s one situation at a time. And the best thing you can do is show up for yourself. And there are periods where you want to retreat and go back into. And I’ve even tested it, right? The, the old way patterns. And then, you know, it’s like 30 minutes into that seltzer. I thought I wanted, I’m like,

01:05:52

well, this isn’t making me feel better because it never did to begin with. And like just doing the best you can. I mean, as long as you’re nice to yourself, you’ll be all right. Takes a while to get there, but you’ll be all right. Yeah. Learn, but that’s the skill, isn’t it? It is such a skill. And an unteachable one, I feel like has to be so- Letting our bodies make the decision or at least get a vote and not let our, you know, let our brains make all the decisions and-

01:06:22

Yeah, I have found even recently, you know, I allowed myself to have a glass of wine here or there and I was real excited. You know, look, I overcame alcohol use disorder, put it on a poster. And now it’s like when I get the chance, I get halfway in and I’m like, I don’t even want this. I don’t, my brain chemistry has changed. My nervous system has changed. So I don’t need the relief. And really I’m just screwing up my sleep or, you know, giving me a low grade headache tomorrow. Like I get a low grade headache from half a glass of wine. It’s like...

01:06:51

This is this is not about alcohol ever anymore for me either. But my body like I’ve got to listen to my body. Yeah, 100%. So yeah, I found those same things because I was like, I’m healed. I’m past this. Whoa, right. I can I can take that one drink that was offered to me at a party. And then I threw it away because it wasn’t what I needed or wanted. And it yeah.

01:07:17

You know, you just have to come to that realization, but you do have to abstain, I think for a period and I know that the recommended is 14 months, you know, but some of us rebel raisers like to test the water sooner than like, Well, I just read, so here’s the good news and I’ll share it with you. I just read the book, biology of desire, why addiction is not a disease. And here’s the good news. First of all, the brain, the gray matter that you lose.

01:07:47

as addiction progresses, your brain actually gets smaller. What does that mean? The neuropathways, there’s less and less, you got real strong but very small neuropathways and all your other neuropathways are kind of going away as you lose other habits. And that the measured reduction in brain volume that is normal for people in active addiction actually can be restored within a few months, like three to six months. And that within six months to a year, wait for it,

01:08:17

you are actually more resilient, more able to self-regulate yourself than people who have never overcome addiction because this book talks about, we mentioned addiction is a trauma response. Addiction is also a habit. It is not alcohol that changes the brain. It is your behavior over and over and over. And because alcohol is addictive, you learn, the learning is accelerated. But learning to overcome it,

01:08:46

actually makes your brain bigger than people who have never overcome what you’re overcoming. And so we’re going to take over the universe is what you’re saying. So what we’re saying here is, uh, we don’t work here. No, I don’t work here. You don’t work here. What I’m saying is we are smarter. Like we now have a PhD in learning to regulate your nervous system, manage your nervous system.

01:09:12

You know, I used to say like drinkers are my favorite people. I could never imagine like there’s just something special about that. And then after I got into sobriety, I was like, no, ex drinkers are the coolest people in the world. And now there’s scientific evidence that backs that up because ex drinkers fricking get it. They, they, they get all the dark and they have a sense of humor, but at the same time, they, they know it’s their own shit and they’re willing to dig in. And that makes your brain.

01:09:40

better and more resilient. And so, and that can happen in six to 12 months, you know? So I mean, I did over almost three years of complete abstinence only to find that I don’t even want it. So there’s that. Well, there’s the thing too about, you know, I don’t want to be fuzzy. I don’t want to numb. I just, I don’t want to be dumb, right? I want to have all of my wits about me and I want to be smart.

01:10:09

Okay, so why? Why participate? Yeah. Well, and for me, you know, I can get a little bit of a buzz off a half a glass of wine or a glass of wine. And that’s really fine in the right setting. I mean, really just when like just when I’m with my husband, if I got to talk to people, like you said, I don’t want to be dumb. Not that I don’t want to be dumb around my husband, but it’s just different. But he forgets a lot easier. Yeah. Yeah. Well, he dumb too.

01:10:37

Let’s just say that, keep them too. But what I find is then I wake up in the middle of the night, like I don’t wanna pay the bar bill on a glass of wine. It’s like, it’s not worth it. Even if there is a little bit of a pleasant sensation for 15 or 20 minutes, then I gotta, you know, wake up in the middle of the night and have conversations with Colleen about that choice. And I’m like, I’d rather just sleep, so.

01:11:03

Anyway, your brain can heal. The 14 months was the dopamine study, the brain matter and the synaptic connections, that shows six to 12 months. So at least a good year is good, but I don’t think having a drink and testing the water sets you back. I think that in some ways it accelerates your learning. What you just said, I don’t want to do this. Well, there’s only one way to find out you don’t want to do that. Yep.

01:11:33

And if you are in a place where you’re listening to your body and you’re doing the work, you can’t screw it up because you’re going to fix it no matter what. Yep. So you got it. Well, I appreciate you so much for doing this and sharing your story. And I just adore you. Oh, the pleasure was mine. I adore you too. Yeah. And I’m telling you the breath work, you got to do it. So I, I’ll, when we get off of this, I’ll send you a link for.

01:12:03

to do the replay, schedule an hour, and I promise you, like if you like Reiki, this is like Reiki on drugs, because it does release DMT in the brain, and it is, it just, you can feel your whole nervous system cleansing, it’s like being hooked up to electrodes. I’ve almost been electrocuted before, so I can vouch for this. It’s like an electrical current is going through your body, it’s not painful or anything, but it’s beautiful and healing, and I highly recommend it.

01:12:33

All right, well, I love you and. Hey party people. So thank you for listening. And it was just, just not the best. I just love her. I love what I do. I love that I get to walk with women through the early stages of recovery where they’re getting their sea legs and figuring out this is not about alcohol. It’s about all the other stuff that you are using alcohol to cope with. And.

01:13:03

Being able to just bear witness, hold space, give my support, and then watch people as they are ready to move on, it’s just the best. So thank you for listening, and once again, I am at the end and realized I have not recorded another outro that is more adept to fit what I’m doing now. So I can sing the song here in a minute, but I do wanna say that if this podcast is

01:13:31

valuable to you, please leave me a review. I didn’t even know that was a thing because the only podcast I listened to, somebody told me about, so I’m never on the page. But leaving a review on Apple or Google will drastically improve my showing up in search engines. So, I mean, it would be awesome if you wanted to share this episode or another episode on your socials. Give me a little bump. But if...

01:13:59

you don’t want to do that, then if you could leave me a review, that would be such a gift and a show of gratitude for the time and effort that it takes to produce this. And I really appreciate if you do that. And then if you have any questions about working with me or how to get into recovery, I have so many tools and resources. I will put links in the show notes for my free masterclass that is a deep dive into emotional sobriety.

01:14:29

and at the end of that master class is a layout of my 12-week program. So if you are even kind of contemplating doing something that allows you to pause and start peeling some of the onion layers and figuring out, you know, how to get the cart behind the horse these days, I would love to work with you. And you can find that information at the end of the master class. And also, if you are interested in just getting your feet wet with me,

01:14:57

you’re not ready for a 12 week program, consider joining our Bitch Free Recovery Zone. And that’s over on Circle, it’s not on Facebook or anything and that’s a private community for emotionally soberish women who are elevating the conversation. Because if you’ve ever been in a recovery support group, oh, a lot of people talking about drinking, like we’re not talking about drinking. It’s not that the conversation never comes up because we all here for one reason and that’s the common thread that brought us all together.

01:15:27

But for the most part, I teach emotional sobriety right inside the circle group. You will get access immediately to my foundations of emotional sobriety course. And I ask that you do that before you get too active because when you post, there are certain parameters that I ask that you post around, not oversharing stories and getting to the nitty gritty of the feelings and the thoughts that are underneath the story.

01:15:55

and then the actions that you need to move into. So we have very solution-based, forward-focused conversations in there. I coach people directly, whether you are in the next chapter or not. So for 20 bucks a month, you can join our community and get access to me and all of the resources and people like Jess that just make recovery so much more fun to know that you are not alone. So I appreciate you listening. Thanks, and I’ll see you next week.

01:16:24

Do do do do do do do do. That’s the extra, I know, I know. I’m gonna do it, I’ll stop.