Month: April 2025

Link to Spotify

In this episode:

Sobriety helped me stop blaming my mom and start healing. This episode is about grief, generational pain, and the peace I found—without ever getting an apology.

Resources:

The Mastery of Love by Don Miguel Ruiz

Mother Hunger by Kelly McDaniel

Coaching Information

Bottomless to Sober – Coaching, Classes, and Workshops⁠⁠

Transcript:

Hey y’all, welcome back to Bottomless to Sober, where we talk about recovery, healing—and in today’s episode—what it really means to grow into love. I’m Jessica Dueñas, and today’s episode is definitely a tender one. It’s about grief, it’s about love… and it’s about my mom.

May is coming up quickly, and here in the U.S., that means Mother’s Day is near. But also, it would have been my mother’s 86th birthday. Her memory has become this quiet, constant companion. It shows up in how I care for my daughter, in how I challenge old beliefs about beauty, and in all the ways love and loss blur together. I don’t know if it’s because her birthday is around the corner or because the grief is still so fresh—but she’s been on my mind nonstop.

One thing that’s struck me since she passed in January is this:
I loved her. Truly. Unconditionally.

And that kind of love wasn’t always there. It’s something I had to grow into—and something that sobriety made possible.

One of my favorite authors, Don Miguel Ruiz—best known for The Four Agreements—also wrote a book called The Mastery of Love. In it, he says, “Love has no obligations.” He talks about how real love doesn’t try to control or change. It simply accepts.

That was not always the case with my mom. I carried a lot of resentment toward her—for the shame I felt about my body, for my disordered eating, and eventually, for my drinking. She was proud of my accomplishments, yes—but I never felt fully accepted.

I remember one middle school picture day. I had picked out a dress I was excited to wear. My mom looked at me and said it was too tight—and then added, “You don’t want to look like una vaca.” A cow.

I bit my cheek to hold back tears, changed into a sweater, and posed for the photo—expressionless. I wasn’t just trying to shrink my body—I was shrinking my spirit.

That sense of “not enough” stayed with me for years. First, I tried to manage it through food. Then, I numbed myself with alcohol. And I blamed my mom for a long time.

But then I got sober. And sobriety gave me the space to reflect—and with reflection came clarity.

I was reading Mother Hunger by Kelly McDaniel, and one line hit me like a mic drop:
“Many women who fail to nurture their daughters were never nurtured themselves.”

That was it. My mom didn’t carry my wounds because she didn’t know another way. The beliefs she held were inherited. She brought them with her when she immigrated to the U.S.

And here’s the thing: my mom didn’t have the luxury of therapy or journaling. She had to survive—raise kids, keep going. Healing was not in her vocabulary.

Her words still hurt. They caused real damage. But with recovery, I saw that she was doing the best she could. And no, that doesn’t excuse the harm—but it helps explain it.

That understanding helped soften my resentment. I let go of the blame. Because blame was never going to heal me. Healing came from recognizing that I wasn’t broken—I had been shaped. And she had been shaped, too.

Eventually, I stopped trying to change her. I stopped needing her to apologize. I started to accept her.

And listen—before I go any further, I want to say this:

What I’m sharing is my story. This was my path to peace. Acceptance worked for me. But that doesn’t mean it’s right for everyone.

You might not be in a place where acceptance of a parent—or anyone who’s harmed you—is possible or safe. And that’s okay. This isn’t a prescription. You don’t owe anyone acceptance if it comes at the cost of your peace or safety.

I’ve cut off other family members completely. So I get it. Sometimes no contact is what keeps us safe. Boundaries are necessary. You are allowed to be exactly where you are.

But for me—accepting my mom helped me put down what wasn’t mine to carry. It helped me grieve with a full heart.

One of the last times I visited her in Costa Rica, we were having coffee and she made a typical comment about a woman passing by—something like, “She really takes care of herself.” The old me would’ve launched into a speech about body positivity.

This time, I sipped my coffee, rolled my eyes gently, and changed the subject.

Because it’s not my job to educate or fix her. I just needed to love her. And that was freeing.

When she passed this January, the grief was sharp. But also—there was gratitude. Because I had learned to love her as she was, while she was still here.

That was a gift. And now, the love continues.

With my daughter Amara, I hope to pass on something different. I hope she never feels like she has to earn my love by shrinking, overachieving, or performing. I hope she knows she’s enough, just by being her.

I hope she sees me love myself—not because I’m perfect, but because I’m enough.

That, to me, is what true love looks like.

Reflection Questions

If you want to sit with this topic a little longer, here are a few reflection questions for you:

1. What kinds of love have you had to grow into over time?
2. Can you remember a moment that shaped how you saw yourself—and are you still carrying it?
3. What beliefs or behaviors have been passed down in your family that you’re ready to question—or break?
4. Where in your life could letting go of the need to “fix” someone lead to more peace?
5. What kind of love do you want to pass on—to your children, your community, or even to your younger self?

Thanks for being here with me today. If this episode moved something in you, I’d love to hear from you. Leave a review, share the episode, or just take a moment to reflect.

Until next time, stay grounded, stay loving, and remember:
You are enough.

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Link to Spotify

In this episode:

Whether you’re raising kids, teaching, or questioning your own drinking—this one’s for you.

Addiction isn’t about being bad. It’s about being human—and healing is possible. I share some powerful stats from author Jessica Lahey, and reframe the shame with truth and compassion.

Resources:

My Interview With Jessica Lahey in 2024

Jessica Lahey’s Site

Coaching Information

Bottomless to Sober – Coaching, Classes, and Workshops⁠⁠

Transcript:

Jessica Dueñas:
Hey, everyone. Thanks for tuning back into Bottomless to Sober. If you’re new to the podcast—welcome. If you’ve been hanging out with me for a while, you know that this space is all about telling the truth—whether it’s about addiction, recovery, healing, or simply holding on to hope.

Today, I want to talk about something I believe every educator, parent—really, every human—should know. It’s this important reminder:
Addiction is not a moral failing.

It’s not about being weak.
It’s not about making bad choices.
It’s not about lacking willpower.

Addiction is complex. It’s biological. It’s psychological. And it’s so deeply misunderstood.

Last week, I had the opportunity to hear bestselling author Jessica Lahey speak here in Tampa. I’ve been following her for a few years, and let me just say—not only is she brilliant, but she also gives the best hugs. It was so nice meeting her in person. I’ve actually interviewed her on this podcast before, and I’ll link that episode in the show notes.

Jessica wrote two incredible books that I wish had been required reading back when I was still in the classroom—or even in college studying to become an educator.
The first is The Gift of Failure, and the second is The Addiction Inoculation.

One of the facts she shared during her talk absolutely knocked the wind out of me—again. I’ve heard it before, but it still hits hard every time:

If an 8th grader tries alcohol or drugs, they have a 50% chance—a coin toss—of developing substance use disorder in their lifetime.

That 50% chance is real. And it’s a powerful argument against the idea that, “Well, I’m okay with my kid drinking as long as it’s at home and I take away the car keys.”
No. That risk is significant.

But here’s the hopeful part:
If they wait until 10th grade, that 50% chance drops in half—to 25%.
If they wait until 12th grade, the risk drops again—to about 10%.
And that 10%? That’s the same as the general adult population.

In The Addiction Inoculation, Jessica offers scripts and practical advice for talking to your kids—especially teens—about alcohol and drugs. Her approach is all about transparency. Like saying:

“Hey, your brain isn’t fully developed yet. When alcohol or drugs enter your body, they affect your brain differently than they do for adults. I highly recommend waiting. And when you’re an adult, you can make your own decisions.”

Having real, honest conversations like that can make a big difference. When young people understand that they could become addicted, it might help dissuade them from trying it in the first place.

Let’s come back to that 10% number—the adult addiction rate.
That means 1 in 10 adults is living with substance use disorder.

Think about that. One in ten. That could be a teacher.
A parent.
A doctor.
A neighbor.
A youth pastor.
A coach.

It was me—struggling with alcohol behind closed doors while publicly being celebrated as Kentucky’s State Teacher of the Year.

And yet I carried shame—like my drinking was proof that I was broken, or reckless, or bad.

But here’s the truth:
Addiction says nothing about your character.
It’s about how you’ve been coping.
It’s about trauma.
It’s about how our brains learn to survive pain.

When we really understand that, we stop asking people, “What’s wrong with you?” and instead we start asking, “What happened to you?”

Jessica Lahey made another powerful point during her talk. She explained addiction through a gun analogy I hadn’t heard before.

She said that genetics are like a loaded gun. That’s your predisposition—your family history.
But trauma? Trauma is what pulls the trigger.

In other words, even if you’re genetically predisposed, it often takes life experience—stress, loss, pain—for addiction to surface.

So again, instead of judging people, we ask: What happened to you?

Now, if you’re listening and thinking, “Could I be that one in 10?”—I get it. I was there too. I asked myself that question a lot. And yep, I Googled it a lot.

You can search “Am I an alcoholic?” and take all the quizzes. But when you start digging, you’re going to see terms like “heavy drinking,” “alcohol use disorder,” and others. And it can get confusing fast. So let’s break it down.

According to the CDC:

• For women, heavy drinking means 8 or more drinks per week.
• For men, it’s 15 or more drinks per week.

And yeah, that probably doesn’t sound like a lot—especially if you compare it to how alcohol is normalized in our culture. But science isn’t measuring social norms.
It’s measuring risk.

When we talk about alcohol use disorder—also known as alcohol addiction—we’re talking about a medical condition. It might look like:

• Needing more alcohol to get the same effect
• Trying to cut back but not being able to
• Continuing to drink even when it causes problems at work, in relationships, or with your health

Regardless of the label you use, if your relationship with alcohol is hurting you, it matters.

Here’s the thing: drinking in a problematic way increases your risk for over 200 health conditions.
That includes liver disease, certain cancers, heart issues, depression, and anxiety.

And that’s just the physical stuff. It doesn’t even touch the emotional toll—
The isolation.
The shame.
The broken promises to yourself.
The loss of trust in your own word.

But here’s the wild part:
You don’t need to hit a “rock bottom” for your drinking to be a problem.
You don’t need a diagnosis.
You don’t need to wreck your car.
You don’t need to go to rehab or have liver disease or get a DUI.

You don’t need any dramatic moment to deserve a better life.

That’s why I love this quote from author Laura McKowen—who also founded The Luckiest Club, where I’m a meeting leader.

She says:

“The typical question is,
‘Is this bad enough for me to have to change?’

The question we should be asking is,
‘Is this good enough for me to stay the same?’

And the real question underneath it all is,
**‘Am I free?’”

Whew. That last one hits, right?
Am I free?

Free from hiding?
Free from shame?
Free from anxiety spirals and broken promises to yourself?

Because that’s what recovery is. It’s not punishment.
It’s not exile.
It’s a path toward freedom.

So whether you’re a parent, an educator, in recovery, or still figuring it all out—just know this:

You are not alone.
You are not broken.
And you are absolutely not beyond hope.

You are worthy of support.
You are worthy of information.
You are worthy of connection.
You are worthy of freedom.

Thanks so much for spending time with me today.
If this episode moved you or made you think of someone you love, please share it. Word of mouth is the best compliment.

Let’s keep breaking the stigma and replacing it with compassion and understanding—for ourselves and for one another.

Thanks, y’all. I’ll see you next time.

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Link to Spotify

In this episode:

In this episode, I reflect on how sobriety reshaped my relationship with my body, and why I now lean on neutral affirmations to speak to myself with honesty and care.

Resources:

Just Eat It by Laura Thomas – The book I got the quote from in the episode

Coaching Information

Bottomless to Sober – Coaching, Classes, and Workshops⁠⁠

Transcript:

00:03 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Hey y’all, it’s Jessica Dueñas, and thanks again for tuning in to Bottomless is Sober. So today’s episode is all about the bodies that we live in, right, these same bodies that we have spent years numbing, judging, trying to fix, trying to shrink, and how sobriety invites us to really come home to our bodies. Right, not to change our bodies, but literally gives us the opportunity to just meet our bodies Honestly, maybe for the first time. There’s a book that I love called Eat it, and it was written by Laura Thomas, and here’s a line that I love from Laura. She writes you are not a before and after photo. You are a human being with a rich and complex life and you deserve to be heard and seen and respected in whatever body you’re in. I love that, right.

01:00
I think about how, when I first got sober, you know, I would have folks asking me questions like so have you lost weight now that you’re not drinking? Or you must feel amazing, right, like glowing skin, more energy, and some of those things can sometimes be true for some people. Right, let me say that again, some of those things can sometimes be true for some people. I actually gained weight because in my addiction, I started to lose weight as a result of my alcoholic liver disease, and I was hardly eating. So for me, a sign of health was the fact that I was gaining weight right. And then, as I started to exercise and lift weights, I actually started to add muscle onto my body. So I have been heavier since getting sober, but regardless, right, getting on that sobriety journey, my body did start to feel different. But the thing is, when someone asks you eagerly, right, like, oh so have you started to lose weight now that you’re drinking, or now that you’re not drinking, or you must feel so amazing, right, when you start to get questions like that, there’s definitely something loaded in those questions, right, there’s almost like an unspoken expectation and unspoken assumption about sobriety, as though we’re supposed to look a certain way to prove that we’re healing, as, like you know, if our body doesn’t show a visual evidence of change, that maybe our recovery doesn’t count. Right. But the truth is, is that sobriety forced me to just be in my body again? It forced me to feel the anxiety, to feel the shame, to feel the exhaustion, but also, eventually, right came the strength and sobriety enabled me to feel that it was like I don’t know, meeting this part of myself that I had abandoned for years, and, honestly, when I met my strength, I didn’t know what to do. You know, growing up for me, my body, it just was never mine, right? So this whole like meeting our body for the first time thing it was definitely brand new to me.

03:22
Growing up, my body was constantly commented on. It was constantly controlled, constantly compared to others. You know, though, my mother had the best of intentions, it didn’t work out that way. So I still remember, you know, mommy saying I don’t eat that You’re going to get fat. Or you know, when I did actually put on weight, you know the constant like. You know, that’s why you are as big as you are, and so and then.

03:52
The funny thing, though, was that she’d still pile my plate super high with food, because that was also how love showed up, right, and she grew up so poor that to have like a full plate was a blessing. And so, here, eat all of this. And if you don’t eat like this food, where’s all this food going to go? Right, you know she definitely didn’t mean harm, but she was definitely passing down messages that she got from society, you know, from survival and from her own mother, which weren’t helpful messages, right, there was one time I was sitting on the couch with her and we were watching one of those, you know, like diet commercials that we always see, with the before and after. You know, like the before is this like sad, slouched woman, and then suddenly, like the woman after, she’s just like glowing and she’s loved and she’s like happy. And you know, and my mom like literally had pointed the screen, I was like, oh well, that’s what you want to aim for, right? Así es como debe estar. And that’s the thing, like I did aim for that.

04:49
I spent years aiming to me to be like the smaller, quieter, prettier woman and if I could maybe just shrink myself enough that maybe I’d finally feel like I was enough. But that was never the case. And then thankfully jokingly I’m not seriously saying thankfully, but you know my experience with alcohol was that alcohol did make it easier to not feel at all Right, so if I couldn’t shrink my body, well, at least I couldn’t feel anything. It’s just that over time my body became something to escape and I escaped over and over and over again until getting into recovery finally brought me back to her. You know, getting sober it cracked me open, and so it wasn’t just about the quitting drinking piece, but it was about facing what I had been trying so hard not to feel. And in my journey, a lot of it was decades of body shame, of perfectionism and, just you know, making myself worth being conditional on whatever number was on the scale or what size clothes I was fitting into. Worth being conditional on whatever number was on the scale or what size clothes I was fitting into.

05:56
And now, you know, as I approach my fifth year, sobriety. You know, now, after becoming a mother, I’m definitely looking at my body through a new lens. You know. It’s not that I’m looking at my body with constant praise, you know, but I’m looking at my body with permission. Right, I’m giving my body permission to just be. I’m not going to pretend that I always love what I see, but what I do have for my body is a huge amount of respect. I respect my body. Today, my body is a home. My body carried me through trauma, heartbreak and healing. My body grew and delivered my daughter Amara, and my body is still showing up for me every single day. So how dare I tear this body down? I won’t do it. I absolutely won’t. So today I want to invite you into a space of curiosity, right? Definitely not judgment. And so let’s wrap up the episode with a couple of neutral affirmations Now.

07:05
I love neutral affirmations because they are not as phony sounding as positive affirmations. Sometimes positive affirmations are great if we are in the head space to receive them and practice them and we’re feeling really good. So a positive affirmation lands well. But sometimes, like when I coach my own coaching clients, I teach them about using neutral affirmations because sometimes the positive stuff it feels too phony and if it feels phony it’s not going to click and land on your body, right, and it’s not going to do its job in helping you with the healing process. So sometimes we’ve got to go neutral, right. Oftentimes neutral affirmations are based more so on facts, right, undeniable facts that help negate the negative self-talk that we might’ve had otherwise about our bodies. So they don’t hype you up unrealistically, but they’re basically almost like a peace offering and they’re just a nice small shift in how we speak to ourselves.

08:03
So here’s a couple of neutral affirmations that you can take with you, right, take what you need, leave the rest. Feel free to grab a journal, right, and maybe list out your own that might resonate with you better, but here are a few that I know have helped me a lot. With you better, but here are a few that I know have helped me a lot. My body is allowed to exist without explanation. I am learning to relate to my body in a new way. I don’t have to love my body to respect it. I can feel discomfort and still be kind to myself. My body tells me the truth and I am listening. And so, again, I invite you to take some of these neutral affirmations and adjust them to yourself Again. Whatever might land for you, great. If you need to do something different, go ahead and do something different. And then, lastly, just to wrap up, I always like to.

09:03
I’m switching into trying to offer people reflection questions. Whether I’m working with you in a sobriety support meeting, whether you are one of my one-on-one coaching clients or here on the podcast, I love, love, love the idea of just taking questions and sitting with them and journaling them or just thinking about them, right? And so here’s a couple of questions for you to go home with. So, number one since getting sober, how has your relationship with your body changed, physically, emotionally or spiritually? Number two have you noticed any ways that body image pressures show up in recovery. What’s one way you respond to or want to respond differently. And then number three if your body could speak right now, what would it say? And if you could respond with compassion, what would you say back? And so just a reminder, right Again, thanks so much for listening today.

10:07
But you’re not this project, you are not some product, you are not a before and after picture. Right, we are constantly evolving, always. You’re a person and this journey that you’re on you’re never going to reach a perfect after. Let me just keep it real with you. So it’s about learning to live fully in your now, learning to live fully in your now. So, thanks so much for spending time with me today. If the episode resonated, please feel free to send it to someone else. Right Again, someone can always benefit to have a nice little reminder that they are enough in whatever body they are, in whatever body they are occupying. Until next time, take care, I will see you all next week. Bye.

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