Category: Podcast

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In this episode:
CW: pregnancy loss and death by overdose

This episode touches on the unlearning that happens when “doing the next right thing” is overshadowed by life’s most painful moments. I discuss how recovery has taught me to handle the hard things, including navigating a miscarriage—a topic often kept silent yet desperately needing a voice.

Resources:

Bottomless to Sober – Coaching, Writing Classes, and Workshops

Transcript:
Today’s episode is going to have a content warning specifically for conversations around pregnancy, loss and death by overdose, so if those are things that you do not want to hear about, then don’t listen to today’s episode. Otherwise, thank you for joining. So it’s my birthday, the time of this recording. It is Sunday, february 4th, and today is my 39th birthday, and normally I would be feeling more excited, but it has been a hell of a week and I’m honestly just living in a lot of pain right now, and two things can be true at once, right. So I am living with a lot of emotional pain right now, while I’m also experiencing a lot of gratitude for several things. I’m absolutely experiencing a ton of gratitude for how I have handled myself this week with the loss that I’ve been dealt, and I’m also really grateful for the people in my life who have shown up for me. I don’t think that I realized how loved I was until things started to go wrong this week and the amount of support that I have had on all sides, like from people at my day job to my colleagues at the luckiest club, to the people in my personal life, right Like I have really been so loved and supported and for that I am so grateful. But, anyway, what I wanted to do for today’s episode, I actually wanted to read the reflective piece that I wrote. I always like delivering content in different forms and I think, like some people are readers and then some people are listeners, and so for the folks who I connect with here on this world, who like to listen to the things that I share, this is really for you and I’ll probably, you know, add love a couple of things. But I did want to share this reflection because it means a lot to me in my journey that I was able to put this together. So I titled this piece when doing the next right thing wasn’t enough, and I hope that if you know anyone who has dealt with pregnancy loss themselves and especially is navigating the walk of recovery, I hope you’ll share it with them. I think a lot of people really don’t talk about miscarriage like at all, and it really does a disservice to folks when they go through it and they think that they’re the only ones right, and so I’m speaking up because I hope that this helps someone else feel a little bit less alone, and I also speak up because it helps me feel better to share. So, with that being said, here is this piece that I wrote this week when doing the next right thing wasn’t enough.

03:04
In the social media realm, sobriety related posts present enticing promises to people who might want to quit drinking from promises of glowing skin and better sleep to weight loss in the prospect of a life so fulfilling that the idea of escaping to drink seems unimaginable. Appealing as they are, such promises are only true sometimes, especially the ones about loving your life so much that you won’t want to escape it. In my early recovery, I subscribed to the belief that doing the next right thing would shield me from the unknown future, that getting my addiction under control would end my suffering. The bulk of my suffering was caused by drinking when, out of desperation for companionship, I found myself repeatedly entangled in relationships with men who feared commitment. When one of them did offer me commitment, it turned out that he struggled with opiate addiction and, ignoring it, I trusted that love alone would conquer it and, as no one likes to admit, love was not enough, while on the pain of the pandemic and the world being shut down, and he was driven back to the needle. I saw him for the last time, bluish, before the coroner wheeled him away, just before his relapse and death. We had talked about what it would look like to build a family. His rough, calloused hands carefully held my face as he gently whispered you are my family, and I shared with him that I wanted to have a baby. Not a week later, in what felt like an instant, he was gone. Instead of seeking help, I dove into every possible bottle to avoid the pain of losing him. My dreams of a family were shattered. I felt I would never find a partner, fall in love or become a mother. That year, isolation and grief landed me in eight alcohol-related hospitalizations that lasted from three days to five weeks.

05:07
When I finally got sober in November of 2020, I needed to believe that I had paid my dues of emotional suffering due to a life of alcohol addiction. I had to hold on to the hope that if I could stop pouring this poison into my body, that everything would go just right. Surely, sobriety would bring me peace in life. I would want to embrace, rather than escape, a belief I carried until recently. In December of 2023, I was in a new, healthy, long-term relationship and finally felt safe enough to consider actually trying to get pregnant.

05:46
On a chilly afternoon, I went to the grocery store and filled my cart with snacks, suddenly, strolling into the family planning section Like a teenage girl with a secret, I glanced around to make sure no one was watching and I snuck a box of pregnancy tests into my shopping cart. My stomach fluttered with excitement as the cashier rang up my total. Rushing home to use the bathroom, I ripped into the box and tore open the test packaging. A faint pink line came up, eyes wide, my chest tightened with anticipation as I pulled out another test and waited. I was pregnant. Grabbing the third test, I waited again, I was still pregnant. After years of not trusting myself or my partners, I rejoiced Finally, I get to be a mom.

06:39
On Christmas, I told my partner the news, the joy of which was the best gift I could give. Weeks later, we confirmed the pregnancy with an ultrasound and upon hearing the heartbeat, we beamed at each other and right with excitement. We shared the news with our loved ones and colleagues and I started to write notes to the baby in a collection of random thoughts titled All the Things I Wish I had Known. The joyous anticipation abruptly extinguished during a routine checkup on January 30th. The ultrasound delivered the heartbreaking news of a silent miscarriage. I’m so sorry, jessica. The sonographer said quietly the baby is gone. Looking at the screen, trying to make sense of her words, I listened for a heartbeat that was not there. On the screen was a misshapen sack. My heart sank, my eyes watered. My partner squeezed my hands tightly as the room spun out of control.

07:44
Despite my beliefs about recovery, life had shattered the illusion of sobriety as a shield against pain and loss. About one out of four pregnancies. Don’t make it, it’s not your fault. My doctor explained there’s no reason. As I wept silently in my partner’s arms tears in his eyes too my heart felt that familiar feeling of shattering and my thoughts raced. Will I ever become a mother? Do I have the courage to try to get pregnant again? What if I never become a mother? I’ve been through enough already. Why do I have to go through this? Haven’t I done all the right things?

08:30
That final thought right, that final reflection is precisely where I got things wrong about recovery and I had some serious unlearning to do you see, recovery? It’s not a guaranteed dispensary of desires earned through time and effort sobriety, it turns out. It doesn’t equal immunity from hardship, but rather it equips us with the tools to face life’s challenges. And in the face of this loss, I went ahead and I revisited a note that I had written to the baby. And the note said this difficult times come to reveal something about you to yourself, something that you would have never known otherwise. How could you know how strong you are if you never had something to overcome? Don’t seek hardships, but when they come, say hello. What are you here to teach me? Right, like here’s the thing Recovery. It doesn’t exempt us from life’s tribulations, but it does transform our ability to navigate them.

09:46
When I read that note and I contemplated this loss, I realized that I had to process the lesson that recovery owes me nothing. Right, it has armed me with the means to handle life’s challenges without needing to escape when my partner passed away in 2020, isolation and alcohol those were my coping mechanisms when I miscarried this week. I immediately leaned on others for support. I accepted offers of food and companionship, I took time off work, I cleared my calendar, except for one thing that I couldn’t figure out how to clear and I sought refuge with my sister after having surgery to complete the miscarriage. Like you know, on Tuesday I found out I was miscarrying and then I had to turn around and have surgery on Thursday. It was fast, right, but, simply put, I have allowed others to take care of me and I have changed the narrative of how I respond to hardship because of my recovery. And again, it’s my birthday weekend. Today is my actual birthday and I basically canceled the entire celebration, right, because of my broken heart. Like, I feel like shit. I don’t feel like being a social butterfly, and that’s okay, but you know what? I’m still choosing to stay sober and I’m choosing to sit with this inevitable pain that is coming with everything that’s happened this week.

11:11
During the support group meetings that I lead with the luckiest club, one of the things that we do is we always close out those meetings with a reading of the nine things. And so the nine things. If you’ve ever read Laura McCow and spoke, push off from here. She basically says that the nine things are exactly like what she has always needed to hear during her hardest times, right and so, and that these are things that she needs to hear. Excuse me for my cough, but these are the things that she needs to hear in her daily experience. Right, and I realize when I listen to the nine things it’s almost like they’re applicable beyond sobriety, because I feel like I need to hear these damn nine things to help me recover and start this process of healing from the miscarriage as well. And so I’ll go ahead and I’ll read the nine things they say.

11:58
One it is not your fault. Two it is your responsibility. Three it is unfair that this is your thing. Four this is your thing. Five this will never stop being your thing until you face it. Six you can’t do it alone. Seven only you can do it. Eight you are loved. And nine, we will never stop reminding you of these things.

12:30
And so, going back to that note right, that I had written to my unborn baby don’t seek the hardships, but when they come, say hello.

12:40
You know what are you here to teach me? Yeah, like hello, you fucking hard times. I’m not grateful for them, but I am thankful for how I have learned to handle them, and that is a true testament to my sobriety, right when I, when I met with my therapist yesterday, she brought up the point that in recovery journeys whether we’re recovering from different substances or behaviors, whatever we’re recovering from in this life because we’re all recovering from something that we go through phases of having to hold onto certain beliefs to get us through certain windows and then letting go of those beliefs. And so in the beginning of anyone’s sobriety journey, right, we have to latch onto that belief that sobriety is going to be this ticket to a happy, healthy, beautiful life. We’ve got to hold on to that because if there’s no hope in sobriety, then why the hell would we stop drinking?

13:42
But eventually, right, and I almost feel like this is my official transition from the early recovery into I don’t know, I don’t know what you call go beyond early recovery, regular recovery, long term recovery. But I think that this to me feels like it’s the big transition where I have finally let go of the pink cloud, right, like that’s definitely gone, and I absolutely recognize that I’m not immune from the pain of this human existence, but I get to handle it totally differently from how I would have handled it in my drinking days. And I think that that is the transition from early recovery into, like, the rest of recovery. And, who knows, like I might have other revelations in time but I really do kind of feel like that’s my big, big takeaway that in the beginning I needed to believe that everything was sunshine and rainbows. I needed to believe that you could have fun sober, and I needed to believe that sobriety was all this rah, rah, rah. And now I understand that sobriety isn’t all those things, and that’s okay. I don’t need to believe that anymore.

14:53
In order to stay sober, now I just know that sobriety equips me with the tools to handle whatever comes my way, and for that I’m grateful. And, like I said at the start of this, I’m also just really grateful for all the love that I have received. I don’t know if I’ll get to become a mom, right, like one in four pregnancies don’t make it, and that’s crazy that that’s not talked about enough, right, I’m getting older. Today is my 39th birthday, mind you. My mom had me at 45, so, and she had me naturally. So there’s hope, right, but I just don’t know, and I have to find and seek that radical acceptance that I just don’t know. I can only control what is in my control, what’s in my power, but these outcomes that I seek, they’re not, they’re out of my hands, right and it really hurts to face that reality.

15:53
So, anyway, thank you all so much for your time. Thank you for listening. It would mean the world to me if you shared this episode, or if you go to my site and share the blog entry. Share it with other folks who might need that support and, yeah, I will see you in the next episode. Take care, hey. If you are enjoying what you are listening to, I invite you to subscribe and share the podcast. But also go to my website, bottomlessdeseobercom, and find out other opportunities to work with me, from free workshops to writing classes, to one-to-one life coaching opportunities. You can schedule a free consultation for that. Everything is available at bottomlessdeseobercom. See you then.

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Link to Spotify

In this episode:

I dive into a heartfelt exploration of the complex dance of forgiveness, boundary-setting, and finding community that accompanies recovery with fellow sober traveler Dana White-Guerrie, owner of the Yarn Consolery LLC. We highlight how forgiveness sometimes involves crafting the space we need to heal rather than rekindling harmful ties. Listen in to learn about where we go to heal when we need to distance ourselves from those who hurt us.

Resources:

Follow Dana on Instagram

Bottomless to Sober – Coaching, Writing Classes, and Workshops

Transcript:

00:05 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Hey, everyone, on today’s episode I have a guest. I have Dana White-Guerrie and she is the owner of the Yarn Consollery LLC and really for today, we’re just going to have a candid conversation. Dana’s got some questions for me, actually, and we figured why not go ahead and have an opportunity to sit chat? I can answer questions about sobriety in life in general, and then we’ll go ahead and make it into an episode. So, hey, dana, so nice to have you.

00:45 – Dana White-Guerrie (Guest)
I think I told you I found you or saw you on the sober summit with Maggie and I was drawn to you. I told you this I was drawn to you just because you were so forthright. You had a no BS attitude and the thing that really struck me is you didn’t really sugar coat forgiveness and the need for forgiving others to bring your sobriety to the forefront. So that’s a lot of what I wanted to talk to you about. I know you’ve talked about forgiving yourself, but I love your stance on kind of how do we forgive others, or is it necessary or kind of moving on from the past to really live a life of recovery?

01:35 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Yeah, I love that you bring that up, because I would say that definitely my stance on forgiveness it’s. I definitely am not a forgive and forget type of person, and what I mean by that is that I will not continue to put energy into something that caused me pain that another person did to me. However, I’m going to absolutely make the decision, if I choose to, to go no contact with that person, and an example of that would be I have a brother on my mother’s side. I mean, he’s probably about 17 years, my senior, and so we did not have the opportunity to grow up together. So you know, by the time I was born, I think he was on his way out to the military, and so we just never were together.

02:18
But what I did find was that he was placing these expectations on me for how I should be as a sister, and because, again, he’s 17 years older than me, I kind of just automatically throughout my life assumed that whatever he was expecting was the right thing for him to expect. And then you know later on him and his wife and it took me getting sober and getting clarity of mind that I didn’t want to be told how to show up for another person for me to finally be like. You know what I’m going to just end this entire relationship. And so you know, like my mother’s aware, my siblings are aware that I’ve made the decision to go no contact with him, and I realized that I just didn’t want to be told how to show up for other people like I really wanted to determine that myself.

03:04 – Dana White-Guerrie (Guest)
So I guess my question for you there is how do you handle almost the peer pressure of what do they call them, the flying monkeys, right, the people that are sent, you know other family members that are sent to tell you to forgive. You know that if we don’t forgive someone else, it’s like drinking poison and wishing, you know, someone else to die. How do you, how do you kind of come in, come to peace, more so, with holding your ground, not giving in to kind of the peer family peer pressure to forgive someone because that’s just how they are, or you know that was 10 years ago or they’re. They’ve changed now. How do you kind of get your mind around that?

03:51 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
That’s a great question. So I’ve got to say I’m pretty fortunate that my family there’s many of us who are siblings, and nobody has pressured me to maintain a relationship with him. And I think that, at the end of the day, everyone knows how bad things got for me in terms of my drinking and if this is what’s working for me and my sobriety, I think it’s pretty clear. We’re not questioning whatever’s keeping Jessica sober, and if she’s making this decision to keep herself sober, then it is what it is. Other things that I am mindful of you know I do my best to say not complicate family situations. So since my decision to go no contact with him.

04:26
I’ve only had to see him one time and it was very simple. I was very cordial, you know. I saw him and his wife and I said, hey, how are you? And that was it. And I just went to another part of the room. It was like a family get together and I just did not engage with them. So I had to be in the same space. My mom was there. I had not seen my mother in over a year, so it was an opportunity to see my mother as well. But I just pretty simply I said hello and then I kept it going. You know, I wasn’t going to get into an argument.

04:53
I, if they had approached me with any type of conversation about the past, I was not going to have that conversation, and I still won’t, because I’m pretty firm in my decision.

05:03
You know, when we make certain decisions, right, it really helps us to look at our future self. And so if me in 70 years or maybe not, so I don’t know that I’d be around in 70 years, if I’m when I’m 70 or when I’m 80, would I look back at this decision and regret it? And my 80 year old version does not. My 80 year old version is firmly okay with still being no contact with this individual, and so that’s what I use to kind of anchor myself in a decision. That can be a tough decision, absolutely, but I know that future me won’t regret it. And you know and I’ve run the gambit of possible scenarios, right, because when we decide to go no contact with the family member you know we’re essentially saying that if one day we needed help, we are letting ourselves know that that person is not an option for help. Right, I’m giving myself permission to understand that I’m cutting off a possible source of help in the future and I’m okay with that because I’m that resolute with my decision.

05:58 – Dana White-Guerrie (Guest)
And I love. I love that because that was sort of the major things that resonated with me. As you said, you know, a lot of people this day and age are talking about inner child, this inner child that you know, work with our past selves. But you said, really, you know, looking forward to that older person, what am I doing to ensure that they have a good life?

06:16
And I guess that kind of leads me to wonder this might be more of an existentialist question, but how do you know if someone’s changed? I mean, maybe they’re, maybe their words have said they’ve changed, but even if their actions are changed, like how many chances do you give someone right? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Or you know I don’t want people to hold me to all the, you know, hard things I did when I was using you know. So I want to. You know I want people to forgive me. Of course, hand over fist, but I have a hard time forgiving others. And so how do you know? How do you kind of determine when you give a second chance, third chance, or if they’ve changed? Or is that more of like a gut feeling for you?

07:00 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Are you more logical or I think I’ve definitely become more logical. I think the more sobering and the more logical I get, and so I think everyone ultimately has to make that decision for themselves. Right? When I’m working with a client one on one, I’m never going to tell someone you need to let this go, versus you need to, like, hold on to this, etc. But what I ask myself, or would ask another person, is are you okay with this happening again to you? Right? So, because again, someone can change and work.

07:29
People and humans backtrack sometimes. Right, it’s human nature to be imperfect, so are you okay with whatever that imperfection was to happen to you again? If you are by all means like, let this person back in your life, right, if you know fully well that you can handle whatever disappointment it was that this person brought to you. However, if you know that your nervous system could barely tolerate that event and you know that it’s just something you wouldn’t want to deal with ever again, then this is where you let that person change and evolve and show someone else how great they are now. Right, like, you don’t have to be the recipient of this person’s new version of themselves. They can absolutely be their new self and give that to someone else, right, whether it’s a romantic relationship, a family member, a friend, you, it’s totally up to you. But I that’s kind of like my question that I used to measure that am I okay with this happening again? If I can handle it happening again, sure, let them back in. If not, they can go exist somewhere else.

08:28 – Dana White-Guerrie (Guest)
So what do you think of the phrase? You know, if someone shows you who they are, believe them.

08:34 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
I think that it’s it’s a great phrase and I think it’s a very true and spot on these right, and I think that a lot of times we we want to see the good and other people right, and sometimes we have those rose colored glasses and sometimes we’re attracted to red flags, right, Like sometimes somebody who screams drama and chaos seems reassuring to us because that’s all we’ve ever known Exactly. However, I do think that, yeah, like when someone shows you by their actions what they mean, what their intentions are with you, if you choose to ignore it again, don’t be surprised when the following things happen that you know, perfectly aligned with exactly what they showed you. And then again, you, you can make that decision. Do you want this to continue, yes or no? And if you don’t, then you have to make a decision in terms of keeping this person in your life or not.

09:24 – Dana White-Guerrie (Guest)
So this if I, and if I start to go too far out there, you know, bring me back down. But what about your idea on almost like ancestral wounds, you know, do we pay the price? This you know, as children of you know parents, or you know grandparents or great grandparents who had issues in the past. Do you think we pay the price for them? Or I mean, maybe that’s a karma kind of question, you know, and maybe that’s, you know, the trauma factor. How do we move on from those kind of ancestral wounds?

10:02 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Yeah, I mean, I would say I don’t know that. I would say that it’s karmic in that we automatically like it’s something like a debt to pay, right, like that. It’s a tit for tat sort of thing, like our parents, this. So now we deal with this. But what I do think happens is that these are learned behaviors, right. So if our grandparents went through something, they learned how to survive it a certain way, whatever, whether it was some sort of system of oppression at the time, any specific type of laws, any specific you know, depending on their identity and where they lived, right, like it could have been a straight up like surviving genocide, whatever the case may be right.

10:37
That definitely imprints itself on folks and if anyone, researches, say epigenetics, we do understand that we do carry the trauma of those before us.

10:46
At the same time, we, with like tools that we have, you know we’re definitely and as a generation, like anybody who is alive right now, in 2024, what we’re very fortunate for is that there are a lot of resources and there is a lot of understanding and there are a lot of conversations about personal development and taking care of yourself, because I think, for example, my mother’s generation, they never would have had conversations about, like reflecting on your behaviors and thinking about where your emotions are coming from and what your emotions mean and how something that happened to your ancestor may be impacting you today, right, so my mom really didn’t have a lot of tools to help her with her excuse me, with her behavior, so to speak, and her mindset and her thoughts and her emotions. I, on the other hand, can go online. You know, there’s tons of resources online. There’s tons of books to read, there’s lots of safe spaces that are being created to facilitate these conversations about our emotions, our state of well-being, the things we’ve gone through, so that we can actually empower ourselves to break the learned behaviors that the people before us had to use to survive, so we don’t have to operate in the exact same manner.

11:55 – Dana White-Guerrie (Guest)
So do you think where do you stand on, feeling as though you almost need to go back and educate people who have wronged you, like maybe your brother, you know, or your mother, or you know, whoever we have in our life that you know isn’t as elevated, or have that you know, consciousness that we have now? Do you feel, I mean not that it’s our job to teach them, you know, I don’t need to teach a grown, grown ass woman how to behave, you know. But at the same extent, how do we kind of educate others? Or is it kind of like, hey, that’s you, you’ve done your thing and I educate, going forward to like my children?

12:37 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Yeah, I mean I don’t, it’s not my place. You know, if my brother were to ever be curious and want to have a conversation about it, we can have the conversation about it. But you know, everyone is walking through life through their own lens and their own perspective. So I’m sure he thinks I’ve done a million things wrong. Right, and it’s not my job to convince him that. You know, his perspective is one way and my perspective is another. I just know, in my reality I did not want to be told how to show up in this relationship and so I removed myself from the relationship so that way there was no more drama about being told that I’m doing the right or wrong thing. You know, whatever he thinks is going to be, whatever he thinks, all I can do is just show up authentically.

13:16
And then, yeah, in terms of educate, right, there’s opportunities conversations, just like on this podcast, that anybody can sit and listen and kind of have opportunities to reflect. When I’m facilitating meetings, right, I work with the luckiest club. I previously worked also with the reframe app, you know. When I’m having conversations with people in recovery who are reflecting on their own journeys, right, these are the opportunities that I have to kind of share my perspective on, say, forgiveness and interacting with other people who have hurt us, or choosing not to interact with other people who have hurt us. And then if I were to have a kid, of course, you know, I would definitely pass this on to my children, right, and give them the option of knowing that they don’t have to be forced into any relationship that they don’t want to be in, you know. But yeah, I don’t. I don’t believe that it’s my job to go teach other adults how to, how to live and how to think and how to act.

14:07 – Dana White-Guerrie (Guest)
I’m making all these notes over here as you’re telling me this. I’m like note to self what about? And then maybe this is switching gears a little bit how are you when you’re working with a client, how do you work on like the forgiveness of self? So maybe we can forgive people because they did the best with what they had at the time or you know, that’s all they knew. Like you said, your mother wasn’t equipped, she didn’t have the tools you have, that she did the best she could. How do you kind of decide how to forgive yourself? You know I can be hard, you know, hard nailed to not forgive her. I have a brother to that. I have some strange relations with. You know I can, I can definitely keep distance between us. But how do you kind of determine? You know forgiveness in yourself, how do you, how do you work with that?

14:55 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Yeah, that’s a great question. So when I work with clients one on one, you know, first it’s kind of like defining just some basic terms, right, and it’s like I feel like the big one is what is guilt versus what is shame? Right, and I think Brené Brown does a really great job of explaining that like. I think she says something along the lines of shame is a focus on ourselves, right, that we think we are bad and we think we are not worthy because of whatever it is that we did that we regret having done, versus guilt. That’s not personal to ourselves. We can feel guilt for having done something that is wrong, quote unquote but even then, diving in deeper, like, let’s say, if someone is feeling guilt right and they’re they’re like, well, I feel bad about having done something wrong Then the question goes deeper into well, what do you define as right or wrong? Because you know, for ages, you know society will say something is right or wrong that is actually wrong, but then it’s legal, right, like segregation was totally legal, but we know it’s wrong, right. And so when folks are managing guilt and shame towards themselves, it’s like we have to kind of peel back the layers and go back to what do you believe is right or wrong for you? Right, because when you are feeling guilt about something, first I want to make sure that the person is feeling guilt about something that actually is out of alignment with their values, and then that’s fair, like, okay, if you, if you feel guilty because you took money from your mother to, you know, go buy alcohol, right, like you pickpocket at your mom or whatever, and it is not in your values to take other people’s belongings, then absolutely that makes sense, that you should be feeling guilt for that, right. And so now let’s go to let’s, let’s peel back those layers.

16:33
But some people feel guilt or shame over, say, their body size. Right, like their, their body is not a small body and then they’re feeling guilt and shame about their weight and it’s like, okay, where did you learn that there was something wrong with your, your weight? Is this actually in your true value system or is this something that was adopted and absorbed from outside sources? So we have those conversations to really determine if you are feeling badly because of something that you actually did wrong, according to what is your internal measure of right or wrong, or if it comes from an outside source. So once we know if it’s coming from an outside source, then it’s like alright, let’s, let’s tap into what do you really believe, and usually coming into what someone actually believes is right or wrong can help a lot.

17:21
It doesn’t happen overnight, because nothing ever happens overnight, but just recognizing that if you start to feel bad because you’re a couple extra pounds higher than what you think you quote unquote should be examining where that belief comes from, can really help alleviate some of that emotional like discomfort that you feel when you like step on a scale because you’re like oh wait, I’m worried about that because this is something that I was taught but I don’t really like. For me, there’s nothing actually wrong with being the body, in the body that I am in today. So that’s a lot of the work that I would do in terms of like the self, the self forgiveness piece, right. And then I think also it really helps like providing clients with resources in terms of like connecting what your feelings are telling us so, for example, like when they are experiencing, you know, shame. Again, bernay Brown is a great resource on like shame and shame resilience and really that when we’re feeling shame about something, the greatest way to break down shame is to actually talk about it, right.

18:19
And then the question is well, where do we talk about these things? Again, when it’s specific to alcohol abuse, right, especially with alcohol addiction, you know where can you talk about your drinking so that you feel safe and you feel seen. So typically it’ll be. I’ll refer people to different communities where they can go in a meeting and share, right, I mean talking to like a coach helps, but maybe they’re not ready to put it on their social media. Totally fair, not, that’s not a requirement, but you’ve got to talk to someone about it. So who are you going to talk to about it, where you can be safe in that experience? Like massive consequences for talking about whatever you’re ashamed of? So things like that are really how we target, say, self forgiveness work. I love it.

19:00 – Dana White-Guerrie (Guest)
So what about You’re saying have someone speak to other people about it definitely working with a coach, but what would you say about, as far as someone, the difference between speaking to like a therapist or a psychologist, versus a community? Because I work with a lot of people and they say, well, I already have a therapist, I’m good, I don’t need to go to meetings, and so I think maybe differentiating between the two. A therapist is good, a coach is good, but what makes having a community so much more impactful than just going to your therapist? I mean, you pay them to listen to you, technically right, so that’s a bias there, and maybe they don’t have what you have, maybe they’re not an addict, so maybe there’s a difference there. A coach again maybe there’s a hierarchy. What does the community aspect do? Or how could you even convince? Not convince, but how could you encourage someone to go to a group and share? Because that’s a hard thing to do.

20:01 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Yeah, excuse me this cough. It really is a hard thing to do to show up in a community and tell all these people, right, like that, you have been struggling. The way that I get folks to go is just that reminder that their shame is fueled by their isolation. And I basically break down the fact that if you are struggling with an addiction, we talk about it. How are you drinking?

20:25
Most of the time, most of my clients are drinking in secret. They might drink a little bit socially, and then they wait to come home and drink more. They wait till their kids go to bed and then they drink. Right, they wait till their kids go to school and then they drink. Like there’s always this part that’s hidden, and what I let them know is that they deserve to be seen, and the best place to be seen is in a community where you have peers who are going through the exact same thing as you.

20:52
Because, for example all right, let me slow my breath down, okay, for anybody who’s listening I’ve had this weird cough and it’s just been really annoying and life goes on. But because here’s the thing, when you’re working one-on-one with someone again, you made a reference to the hierarchy you have the therapist, you have the coach, and even if the coach is still someone in recovery. The point is, there is this implied hierarchy in that dynamic between the person providing the service and the person paying for the service, as opposed to when you go into a community, everyone is equal and you don’t have to feel like you’re less than or more than or anything, because you’re literally on the same playing field, even if you and your coach have like the exact same amount of sobriety, there’s just still this dynamic between the provider, the service provider and the person receiving the service that is done away with in a community setting.

21:48 – Dana White-Guerrie (Guest)
So what if you’re in a community and you’ve only had you’ve only stacked a couple days, a couple weeks, and you go to a community meeting and everybody there is long timers. They’ve all had years or a couple months, or how do you kind of I’m having a hard time thinking of the word, but how do you kind of come to terms with I wrote down? Shame is fueled by isolation. How do you not compare yourself to other people that are in recovery?

22:26 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
I mean, we’re humans. We’re always going to compare ourselves to other people. The question is, what do we do with that comparison, right? Do we walk into the space and compare ourselves and then think badly of ourselves and think that we’re not good enough and we’re never gonna get there? Or can we use this comparison to fuel motivation? So we walk into a space and we see folks who have been exactly where I am today and see them doing the damn thing for months or years and say, okay, there is an opportunity for me to maybe get to where some of these folks are at. And the ideal would be that in a community space, if they don’t have newcomers meetings, that the people with the experience are welcoming and ushering people in and excited to see these brand new, fresh faces when they’re appearing, so that somebody who is coming in with a day sober feels welcome and feels safe in that space.

23:23 – Dana White-Guerrie (Guest)
And do you almost think, and sometimes I feel this way I’m coming up on four days I’ll be three years sober from alcohol. I’m about gosh three years in a month from cocaine and two years in March from marijuana. And I almost like to be around people who are new quote unquote to sobriety. Maybe they’ve been having a go at it for some time but it kind of the fire in their bellies are there. They’ve got more invested, whereas kind of I think as you get along you can kind of have the fuck it button is kind of lingering.

24:00
You’re thinking and then you kind of get into that can I moderate You’re, maybe I’m cured now. I mean I know I’m never cured and I can never go back. But that addict voice sometimes pops up and says, oh, come on, dee, you’re cool, now just have one. Or you get around those, the family members or peers, that say, oh, you’re fine, now, geez, babe, you could probably just have one, or maybe just have a puff and you’ll be cool. And so I almost was curious if you thought that maybe it is good for old timers to be, and not that I’m an old timer, I mean, three years is not much in the span of how long I was using, but to be around people who are starting out because they are ready to go. They have a lot to teach us too.

24:40 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Yeah, I mean I will always say that the newcomer is absolutely everybody’s important in a community. But your new folks are golden because, especially for folks with time under their belts, the new person reminds you of exactly what it was like in the beginning, right, and it can be that very powerful reminder that we might need to be like you know what. Let’s stay put. Let’s not have that one right, because a lot of times the newcomer comes in and there’s a lot going on, right, you typically don’t walk into recovery on like a winning streak. It’s usually because something really rough happened that you’re like holy shit, I’ve got to stop, right. So when that person gets to the holy shit, I’ve got to stop, point, and they’re walking into a meeting or logging onto a meeting, whether it’s online or in person, you know they have so much to offer because just their experience on that day one is so important to remind everyone else of how beautiful it is to come from that you know to push off from that point.

25:41 – Dana White-Guerrie (Guest)
I’m making notes, I’m just I’m going to feverishly over here like love in this system, speaking about golden. What is talking? Kind of jumping back to shame. Do you think if you’re a person who drinks Kind of like you said, it’s ice shame is fueled by isolation that you need to get that on a shirt, like that could be your like theme theme mantra? I’ve never heard anybody say that before and I almost was. I’m curious if you think that people who kind of drink in private it’s harder for them to seek help, maybe because they haven’t hit a rock bottom, quote-unquote Whereas like the hardcore part of your, if they get to you eyes, they go to rehab. You know bad, they almost die, they want to take their lives. Maybe that’s like an imposed bottom, whereas if you’re drinking in private and nobody really knows, you’ve got to determine when you go for help.

26:37 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Yeah, I mean, I would say that was definitely my experience, right Like I was so outwardly successful in drinking so much in secret. I didn’t want anyone to know my secret, not even my doctor, who was like sworn to secrecy because of HIPAA, right Like even that wasn’t good enough for me, and so I would go to my regular doctor and lie about my alcohol consumption until the one time that my blood work came back and it was glaring the obvious that I had been drinking because I had alcoholic liver disease. I couldn’t hide it anymore. But you know, before that point I never wanted to open up because I didn’t want anyone to know that side of me.

27:11 – Dana White-Guerrie (Guest)
Yeah and I wonder if and that’s a lot of the the people that I see now in different groups that they really nobody knows and they just want somebody to see it. They just want somebody to pick up on it and go, hey, do you need help? And I think that I mean in theory. I would hope that it’s getting easier in today’s society. You know, you can follow people on insta. Like you said, there’s tons of groups to go to. But making that first step and we talked about, you know, going to a group and really talking about how the people can be seen and another great one you said was Comparison really fuels that motivation. How would you get somebody? You know maybe they’re googling, am I an alcoholic? Maybe they’re starting to see, you know, these kind of red flags coming up. How do you get? How do you encourage someone to make the leap to get help?

28:09 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Yeah, it’s so tricky because when someone is in that situation of doing everything in secret, they almost they want to recover in secret too, right, like, because you know it’s almost like, well, you want to treat your recovery the same way that you were about your alcohol. But if, in this case, if you were very secretive about your alcohol, it’s like well, how can you ease this person in right you a recovery space so that they can feel safe and they can feel anonymous and so and, like you said, if they’re super successful and they’re everything, you looks great and wonderful on the outside and they don’t want anybody to know.

28:43 – Dana White-Guerrie (Guest)
So, and almost think you know I can do everything else, like I’m a hardcore, independent woman, like nobody’s gonna help me. I’ve got this, you know, and so maybe would how I’m sorry I cut you off, but that was I was thinking of you saying, like I’m a successful woman, like this is how you know I’ve got, I’ve got this almost a facade of how great I’ve got it handled. How do you know? How do you read, how do you know? And then how do you reach out?

29:11 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Yeah, I mean, I think, like for the person who is drinking in secret, you know, if the first thing is needing to ease into a space, you know, I would say an online community is going to absolutely be like your best bet to start, because you can go on there when you sign in to zoom, you don’t even have to use your full name, right, you can turn your camera off and then slowly start to build that trust with the community space. And as you build that trust, then maybe one day you can challenge yourself and turn your camera on right, or maybe.

29:38
Challenge yourself and use your voice and maybe keep your camera off. But I think like that’s going to be the best way for someone who is so attached to the secret life of drinking To transition into a recovery space where there can be in community and start to see that they’re not the only one, because as soon as they were to share that hey, I’m so and so and I drink in secret, I would be confident that like half the room would say, oh yeah, that was me too, right, right, right right and even if you’re not the person who drinks in secret, eventually, even if you’re a hardcore party or hardcore user, you start doing things in secret.

30:13 – Dana White-Guerrie (Guest)
You know, eventually it starts to get to a point where you’re, you know, pulling the wool over eyes at some point. You know, and even I was, I was pretty much out there, but when my family would go to bed I would. I would continue, you know. So, although I was, I was not hiding anything per se. I did, you know after, after the sun went down. You know, gosh, I know we’re coming up on time.

30:36
I guess there is one other question that I had for you, and so we’re going to kind of encourage people to get into a meeting, get into. How do we find meetings and groups? If I’m not really in the community, I can find. I know everybody, right, and we all know everybody. We think we know we go to the sober summit. How do you find somebody if you don’t want to go to AA, because you might go in there and somebody would recognize you Right? Or you know Bill sees you not I hate to use Bill because that’s right, the AA thing, but you’re walking down the street and they see you go in how do you find people if you’re not looking?

31:16 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Yeah. So I mean I think like your first best bet. I mean, you know, in terms of online communities, the first one I would recommend is the luckiest club. That’s the one that I work with. We run meetings. We have about 60 meetings a week. I would absolutely recommend that they have a free seven day trial.

31:34
I recently finished working at the reframe app. The reframe app is good for folks who are also considering moderating. Even though it does not work for me, it works for some folks. So the reframe app does support people who are quitting and people who are moderating. You also have smart recovery. I believe they have online meetings as well.

31:55
If you are a woman, she recovers also is another option for women. If you are an African American woman, the sober black girls club is a great option. So for women of color, that is an option. They are also now hosting meetings for men, so I believe they also have like an option for men there. So, yeah, I would say those are really good communities. And then, in terms of say, like online, like yeah, if you use Instagram, if you don’t want to use your personal Instagram, you know you can create like a little anonymous one just for following a bunch of sobriety accounts and I mean, just hit those hashtags. You know hashtag sober hashtag, sobriety hashtag sober women. You know hashtag sober women of color. You know, whatever you want to look for and you would be able to find find folks that way as well.

32:42 – Dana White-Guerrie (Guest)
Awesome. I’ve been doing a lot of work with the Sober Town podcast and they they’ve got a great website. They do a lot of work with Erica Spiegelman she does rewired and I’ve also been working with Ola Sober, which they have an Ola Sober for men as well. And what do you think about? This is my other little question here what do you think about like a tracker? I started on the I am sober, like it’s like a tracker on your phone and then you can, you know, count your days, and then you they have a community there and I think there’s what sober buddy they kind of count days.

33:16 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Did you count your days in the beginning, or I let the app do it for me, okay, so you know, I mean, I have a couple of apps that keep track of, like you know, my sobriety date that I’ve just put in there, and on occasion I’ll like open up the app and be like, oh, it’s been this much time. You know, I definitely I pay attention to my anniversary and at this point that’s really all I pay attention to. I kept an eye out for my 1000 days because Comic club, yeah, the comic club.

33:45
So I did pay attention to when that came. And then, yeah, I really just pay attention to the anniversaries, and after that it’s just a day at a time really, so I would not be able to tell you how many days I have right now like off the top of my head. I can’t tell you, I would have to look it up.

33:59 – Dana White-Guerrie (Guest)
Well, can you look it up and tell us what about, um? Do you? Did you give yourself little gifts as you reached milestones? Or do you celebrate on your anniversaries? Or I know you said you don’t moderate. What do you think about people who do moderate? I mean, do you work with people who do moderate? Or are you kind of like, hey, you know, if you’re doing a dry January, it’s like, oh, I’ve got, you know, 10 days left and I can get hammered, you know, whereas if someone’s going, hey, this isn’t for the long haul, you know, um, and that’s a little bit easier than doing one day at a time.

34:34 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Yeah, so in terms of moderating, um, I do actually not recently, but I have had clients who have wanted to moderate, because it’s not my job to tell you what your goal is, right, okay, the client to decide what, what they’re working on and what their goal is. So I have worked with a few people who have tried to moderate and I have seen some of them do better than others, and the ones who really have struggled, um, you know, with them I have said, you know, like I think this is an opportunity to really explore being alcohol free, right? So with regard to them, um then, in terms of your other question, I can’t remember what the other question was- Do you celebrate milestones or do you encourage that?

35:17 – Dana White-Guerrie (Guest)
Or, like, you know even your anniversary, like do you buy yourself a cake, or I don’t know if you love sugar, but, um, you know, do you buy yourself gifts as you hit milestones. Like what do you think of that?

35:26 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
So, yeah, I do celebrate my milestones, but I don’t really do anything like crazy for them. I think it’s more just like I make sure to always, on my anniversary, share. You know, I make sure to post about it and share about it because, again, I do think it is important for that visibility, for people to see, okay, this person has not drank or has not had alcohol in this much time, and so for those reasons I do, um, but I mean, I don’t personally like have a cake or do anything like particularly special now.

35:55 – Dana White-Guerrie (Guest)
Okay, well, I figure you know that’s kind of that. Oh, I’m going to buy myself a present when I hit milestones, and you know. So I’m kind of thinking well, you know, maybe I just want to there, I changed addictions. Right now I’m a shopping, shopping and sugar fiend over here. But, um, I think I know we’ve got a wrap soon, because and I probably just hit you with more questions than you can tolerate for today Um, what else? Just wait to when, as I wake up at three in the morning like, oh my gosh, I should have asked Jessica that one.

36:30 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
It’s funny, yeah, I mean I don’t really have anything else just off the top of my head. I mean I think the topic of forgiveness is a really important one for folks to really reflect on, whether it’s for themselves or for other people. And again, there is no one right or wrong way to do it. Like you have to decide that you are doing it how it feels right for for you and that that’s the end of it. You know, other people can insert their opinions and it’s up to you to you can listen to them or you cannot. I find life a lot more peaceful when I’m not like letting myself be flooded by other people’s opinions and just following what feels right for me. I love that.

37:08 – Dana White-Guerrie (Guest)
And I really like the idea that you know I can forgive you, but that doesn’t mean I have to let you back in my life.

37:14
You know, and just kind of coming to terms with what you need and what’s best for your recovery. I think that’s amazing. Yeah Well, thank you for all these tidbits. I’ll I’ll get the shirts made for you for but it’s been awesome and I so appreciate just letting me get your knowledge and I know you’re doing amazing things and you don’t. You don’t need me to stroke you and how incredible you are, but your brilliance is touching a lot of people, so I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with me today.

37:47 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Thank you, dana. That means a lot. So it was. It was my pleasure. Thank you so so much. Hey, if you are enjoying what you are listening to, I invite you to subscribe and share the podcast, but also go to my website, bottomless to sobercom, and find out other opportunities to work with me, from free workshops to writing classes to one to one life coaching opportunities. You can schedule a free consultation for that. Everything is available at bottomless to sobercom. See you then.

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In This Episode:

Let’s explore the complex emotions that come with the turn of the new year. This week, we reflect on self-forgiveness and the often unspoken struggle with guilt and shame, particularly when it comes to our New Year resolutions. With wisdom from Brené Brown, and Brianna Wiest, I break down the distinction between feeling bad about an action versus feeling unworthy as a person. Together, we’ll ask the hard questions about our feelings and whether they truly resonate with our values or if they’re imposed by external standards.

Resources:

Bottomless to Sober – Coaching, Writing Classes, and Workshops

Transcript:

Hey everyone, happy new year. At the time of this recording, we are officially one week into 2024 and, oh my goodness, I see so much stuff on the internet of people constantly dying to change themselves, and so I figured that I would take some of the content from my prior New Year’s Eve workshop and kind of make it into a podcast episode, because I really feel like there’s a lot of energy that I see online of people just really being hard on themselves, and so I just thought that maybe having some conversation, a one-sided conversation around self-forgiveness, might hopefully be helpful to someone listening. And so first I want to kind of talk through some terms, and I really really the big one that I want to talk about is the difference between guilt versus shame, and I’m pulling this from Brené Brown’s work, right?

01:12
So when we’re talking about shame, shame, according to Brené Brown, is a focus on yourself, right? Guilt is more so focused on behavior. So if you experience shame, it’s essentially like you’re saying I am bad, I am not worthy of connection, right? Like I’m a terrible mother daughter, I’m a terrible parent, terrible friend versus guilt is you’re separating yourself from the behavior and you can recognize that the behavior is not in alignment with your values, right. So you can say I did something bad, I made a mistake, and you can feel guilt appropriately regarding that behavior. But shame is when you put that all on yourself and that can be really heavy and that can really separate you from wanting to connect with others. And then you’ve even got, say, feelings like resentment or anger towards ourselves. And really, Nedra Glover Tawwab, when she talks about anger in her books that boundaries find peace, she’s defining anger as a feeling of hostility or annoyance, right, and that it can be expressed either inwardly or outwardly. So when we’re talking about what that might look like towards ourselves, maybe we engage in self-injurious behaviors, right, maybe we are returning to habits that we know don’t serve us, returning to people we know don’t serve us. You know that the way that we’re living is hurting us and we just continue in that direction because we’re angry at ourselves and we don’t think that we deserve anything better.

02:37
And so, you know, I would invite you to take a moment and think about what area of your life, you may be feeling some of these complicated feelings towards yourself. Right Like, where might you be feeling shame towards yourself? Where might you be feeling guilt or anger? And then sit with that for a second, because I’m not saying that these feelings are necessarily bad feelings to have. What I am going to say, though, is that these feelings are definitely providing you with a lot of valuable information, which I’ve said in the past. Right Like, you can absolutely get curious about any feelings that you have, especially if they are uncomfortable, because by uncovering what they’re telling you, you can probably move into action and work to maybe change the situation, or it might give you the opportunity to move into acceptance. Right so, like, for example and Brianna Wiess, her book the Mountain is you, is a really excellent resource on how to interpret emotions and what our different emotions are telling us, and so kind of pulling between her book and also some of Bernan Brown’s work.

03:43
First, like, let’s talk a little bit about guilt. Right so, guilt’s purpose is essentially just our body, letting us know that we did something that doesn’t align with our values. Notice, I’m not saying right or wrong why not, jessica? Because right or wrong is subjective. Anybody can see that something is right, and then the person next to them will say that it’s right. And there have been things deemed legal by governments that today most people would say are wrong. Right so, for example, segregation, it was legal, but was it right? No. So just to kind of give you that example.

04:21
So when can guilt become problematic for us? Right, guilt becomes a problematic emotion for us when we have not slowed down to determine what is right or wrong for us. And so we are sitting around feeling guilty about something that we never actually thought was wrong for us to do, but we were just taught that it was wrong for us to do. And so we’re here feeling guilty over some sort of basically social programming that we adopted, without actually determining if it’s something that does or doesn’t align with our values. So I mean questions that you can ask yourself, right, when you are experiencing guilt, like, hmm, is there something that I can admit to having done wrong based on my values, that I can correct moving forward, or is it something that I actually didn’t do wrong? Right, like, those are good questions to slow down and ask yourself and like, especially if the behavior completed does not fall out of alignment with you, can you give yourself permission to reframe this narrative around your feelings? Right, moving on to shame. So shame, right Shame.

05:39
Brianna Wiess talks about how it’s like a dark side of embarrassment. Like embarrassment, if you feel embarrassed, your body’s letting you know that you did something you’re not proud of. Right, you might feel like a little sinking feeling in your stomach. You might feel tightness in your throat. It depends on every individual is different, but when it turns into shame, shame is problematic because it makes us falsely believe that we’re not worthy of connecting to others. Right, and, like I said earlier, we take on this mindset of I am bad, I’m not worthy, etc. And that’s that’s hard and that’s heavy on the heart. And so if you are experiencing shame, right, like what are some questions that you can ask yourself?

06:20
Again, kind of going back to the same guilt question am I feeling shame about something that doesn’t align with my values, or is this something that I was taught that was wrong but it actually isn’t right? For example, addiction is a great one. A lot of people who struggle with addiction carry around this heavy shame that they are, you know, not worthy of love, not worthy of getting help, because they have believed the stigma that was passed on to them without stopping down and slowing down and thinking well, it’s actually not my fault, maybe there isn’t anything really wrong with me, right? So just something to think about. Another question that might be helpful to ask yourself let’s say you did do something that is actually outside of your values. What if you recognized it and took accountability for what happened, right?

07:14
Brené Brown talks a lot about this in terms of the shame resilience piece, and a part of that work that she says is that you, basically you own your shit, right? What if you owned it? What if you owned your shit? And if you do choose to own it, do you have a safe space to reach out to somebody else, to another human, and talk about this experience, right? How would you treat a loved one who was in this situation? Could you? Could you practice that love that you would show them, but turn it around and practice it towards yourself?

07:49
What about if you’re experiencing some sort of resentment towards yourself, right? Or anger towards yourself, right? When you’re feeling that kind of emotion internally towards you self-directed, I mean, your body is basically letting you know that you’ve set some sort of unrealistic expectation for yourself, right? And when the expectations we set for ourselves are not immediately attainable. We’re breaking trust with ourselves, right, and so we’re hurting our own relationship with ourselves. And so questions you can ask yourself.

08:20
I feel like I said yourself a lot, but whatever, what expectations did I have for myself? Were my expectations reasonable and within the scope of my control? If they were within my control, can I break this goal down into something that I might be more confident in achieving in smaller increments? And then let’s say, this thing that I want to achieve is outside of my control. How can I practice acceptance, say, for example, in my case, when I was younger I used to run a lot and I’ve hurt my knees. I’ve had like six knee surgeries, like in my twenties and early thirties, and I can’t run anymore. I honestly I’m pretty confident that if someone held a gun to my head and told me run or die, I would probably have to die because I literally cannot mechanically run, like it’s just not a motion I can do anymore.

09:10
For a time I became resentful at myself and angry at myself because I had hurt my knees, but honestly, back in those days I didn’t really understand what was going on with my body. I was not caring for my body in any way, shape or form. To be honest, and at this point, like I feel that resentment or I feel that anger because I want to run, like I would love to be able to get on a treadmill or go outside on a trail and run, just run. But I can’t do that anymore and so this is outside of my control, and so the only option that I have is to practice acceptance and have peace over the situation. Or I can be continuously like feeling the pain of being resentful and angry towards myself, and that’s not going to be helpful. But I wouldn’t have this self-awareness if I hadn’t slowed down to kind of talk this through and ask myself is running within the sphere of my control and it’s just not right.

10:14
Same thing, going into more specifically anger right, like anger is when we experience it like, let’s say, towards another person. It’s typically because they have violated a boundary that maybe we didn’t even know existed, or maybe we did know it existed and the boundary still was violated. But you know what? We can violate boundaries towards ourselves as well. We might violate our own boundaries, and so when we feel angry towards ourselves or anger towards ourselves, we’re learning that maybe there’s something that I need to take action on. Maybe there’s something that I actually really care about that I need to work more on.

10:49
Right, you can ask yourself what are my core values? How did my behavior violate them? How would I treat a loved one who made the same mistake? Right? What limits do I need to set with myself moving forward, and what support might I need? Right? And so, just kind of using these reflection questions to look at these different emotions, we can move from the narrative that these are just terrible emotions to have and gosh, how can I numb them, how can I escape them? Oh, I’m such a messed up person. Why am I angry and resentful at myself? We can move from that narrative to okay, what information can I pull right? What can I do now that I know this about myself?

11:36
And so I say all of this because it’s January 7th and you may be listening to this and you started on some sort of a goal and it’s already not happening and you’re a perfectly fine human, exactly where you are. But especially if you’re feeling some frustration about some of these goals, I invite you to like get curious, just there, right, like why are you trying to accomplish what you are trying to accomplish. I always ask people that where did wanting this goal come from and is it in alignment with what your values are Right, and if you’re finding that you have these complicated feelings coming up, then dig deeper, get more curious. But again, if you are feeling frustrated with yourself, if you’re feeling like man, I already broke my trust with myself, then maybe break down that goal just a little bit more. And also just so you know, not all goals, I don’t know what the goals are that you’re thinking about, right, but maybe some goals are meant to be like left alone for a little bit and you can focus on just doing one thing and doing that one thing. Well, there’s always the people that like, try to do 50 different things at the start of the year and none of them get done. Well, so you know, don’t hesitate to make those kinds of decisions.

13:00
But anyway, with that being said, I hope that you have a great rest of your day. Thank you for listening. Again. January 27 starts my bottomless to sober book study, so I hope that you will join to check out the body keeps the score, and you can sign up for that on my website bottomless to sobercom. Thank you so much and take care. Hey, if you are enjoying what you are listening to, I invite you to subscribe and share the podcast. But also go to my website, bottomless to sobercom, and find out other opportunities to work with me, from free workshops to writing classes to one to one life coaching opportunities. You can schedule a free consultation for that. Everything is available at bottomless to sobercom. See you then.

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In this episode:

I explore the emotional toll of navigating the holiday season while staying sober—a beautiful yet daunting tightrope walk. We talk about the importance of reframing the experience of guilt, so it’s more tolerable and discuss looking ahead at 2024 including a new book study opportunity!

Resources:

Bottomless to Sober – Coaching, Writing Classes, and Workshops

Real Self-Care by Dr. Pooja Lakshmin

Transcript:

00:05 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
I’m Jessica Dueñas and this is Bottomless to Sober, the podcast where I talk about anything and everything related to life since my transition from bottomless drinking to a sober life. Hey everyone, happy, awkward week between Christmas and New Year. Hope you are doing well and, if you’re listening to this, well after the holiday season, hello. So first, I’m actually really excited to share that I am going to be having a new offering, and that is that I’ll be hosting a book study. This one will specifically be five weeks long, starting January 27th, for the Body Keeps the Score. The Body Keeps the Score is such a powerful book that really breaks down what the hell is going on in our bodies after we have been through some really hard times. However, the book is really difficult and the book can be really triggering, right, and for a lot of folks, the story is they pick it up, they read a couple chapters and they put it down and they never go back to it. So if you have ever been curious about reading that book and you feel like you would benefit from the accountability of basically taking a class on the book, you should totally sign up for this book study. The cool thing is that you only have to pay for the sessions that you choose to attend. So all of that is outlined on my website, and here’s this. The starting price to join is only $4.99 for the Body Keeps the Score, so go check it out on my website, bottomless-to-sobercom.

01:33
I am really excited for this opportunity to teach and I hope that you will be a part of it. And speaking of teaching, I will also be hosting my next round of the Writing for Healing program. It is a six-week writing program where we dive into the writing process from planning to publishing, all embedding also just wellness strategies in there. You get opportunities for feedback from peers, opportunities for feedback from me, including a one-on-one with me, so that we can really dive into your writing. For any sort of short narrative piece that you have been wanting to work on. Highly recommend it. Folks really enjoy the class that is also on my website, and that’s $125 for the six classes plus a one-on-one with me and feedback, so please check those out. That is actually starting on January 6th, though it will be here before you know it.

02:19
Anyway, moving on to what I actually wanted to talk about, though, which is I wanted to do sort of like an end of year wrap up right, not so much like a personal wrap up, but just an opportunity for us to sit and reflect together, wherever you are, as you’re listening to this, right, because I feel like this week between Christmas and the new year, it’s almost like a recovery period. There are a lot of people who are working on their sobriety, right? They have spent so much time and energy gearing up to survive Thanksgiving and gearing up to survive Christmas. Even if you don’t celebrate Christmas, it’s just the fact that the world is celebrating Christmas that still impacts you, right? So it’s like, whether you voluntarily are a part of it or you’re not, you’re still impacted by freaking Christmas and for a lot of folks, they had just gone through sort of like their first rounds of probably holding some boundaries, setting some boundaries and holding some boundaries, and chances are, those were really really hard moments in individual people’s lives. And so, if you’re listening and this this is you the first thing I want to say is that I really hope you’re proud of yourself for holding whatever boundary it was that you set this holiday season, and I hope that you’re giving yourself grace for any feelings that have come up as a result, that sit heavily on your heart, right, as a result of you setting these boundaries. So I hope you are proud of yourself. If you are not quite proud of yourself, I am proud of you because setting boundaries is so important. If you don’t look out for you, if you don’t watch your back, who is going to watch your back? Right, nobody, at the end of the day. It is beautiful to lean on other people, it is beautiful to be in community, but if we do not care for ourselves and if we do not take responsibility for our journey, no one else will.

04:13
And so if you just went through this period of setting boundaries, saying no to folks, deciding to stay home, whatever it looked like, and you’re reeling from it, you’re recovering from that? I hear you. It is hard, it is absolutely hard and it will get better, right, women? It’s just like you just have to think that guilt that is still sitting there because you said no, because you. Another thing you may have done was opt to not engage in an uncomfortable conversation topic, right? Or maybe you’re the parent who typically goes above and beyond for your kids and this time you did a little bit less right? I again just want to really drive home the point that you did Nothing wrong. The guilt that you’re feeling still does not mean that you did something wrong. It’s just like, at the end of the day, you’re not used to choosing yourself and so your body is reacting as if you’re doing something wrong. And if you join that book club and read, the body keeps a score. You will understand that your body will send you signals that are incorrect because of past experiences, right?

05:26
So anyway, speaking of books, I actually wanted to share a passage from Dr Pooja Lakshman’s book Lakshman sorry, I said her name wrong from her book called real self-care. I’ve talked about it a lot. If you are in any community where I have hosted meetings, you’ve probably heard me talk about her book. Real self-care is a really wonderful read. Especially her target audience is women, but really anybody can benefit from the content of this book, and so I’m going to read this passage from pages 100 and 101, where she’s talking about guilt, and I’ve made reference to this before, but I really wanted to like put it here in today’s episode. She wrote I frequently see women struggle with guilt.

06:06
Tolerance Facing guilt requires accepting the fact that we cannot control and are not responsible for the emotions of other people. To effectively say no. We must learn to tolerate other people’s disappointment and trust that it is not a moral failing on our part. Right like I’m gonna pause there that we have to learn to tolerate other people’s disappointment. For anyone listening who is a people pleaser, how painful does that sound? It sounds like torture, right? However, that’s what you have to learn to tolerate and handle. If you want to say no and set boundaries, you’re gonna have to be okay with disappointing others. I’ll continue. Because many of us did not develop this muscle growing up, it is not unusual for it to feel uncomfortable when we start setting boundaries as adults.

07:02
So much of the suffering I see in my practice is in women trying to get rid of guilt or avoid feeling guilty. They see the guilt as a giant red flag that they need to drop everything and attend to so it will go away. But this doesn’t work. In order to avoid feeling guilt, or fighting with your mind to stop feeling that way, you are still engaging with guilt and letting it, or the avoidance of it, control you. The goal is not to stop feeling guilty, but instead to turn down the volume and not let guilt control your decisions. It means seeing the guilt not as a giant red flag, but as a faulty check engine light, something that’s always been there but operates primarily in the background. You don’t want to let it take up extra energy or have you running to the mechanic in a panic. Sure, it means something, but it doesn’t mean everything. In other words, guilt does not need to be our compass. It can just be a feeling in the background While we learn to reframe the discomfort as a signal that we’re taking responsibility for our own emotions.

08:28
Guilt is pretty much always there. It comes from outside us, from the contradictory expectations that are put on women Sorry if you’re a man listening to this by a culture that asks us to serve others without taking up any space of our own. That feeling of chronic guilt is a way for women to dismiss themselves and make their own thoughts and feelings small. So, again, I highly recommend, if you’re like well, what can I read in the new year, I highly recommend reading real self-care, honestly, because I think that for anybody again who is still reeling from the holidays and setting these boundaries and saying no and, you know, changing these uncomfortable conversations and refusing to engage, refusing to drink when someone offers you something, and now you feel like shit as a result. Again, like the author, dr Pooja Lakshman, says, you are fine. Your body just needs to be retaught. How to interpret this sensation that is so uncomfortable, and eventually you’re gonna get there. You’re just not used to choosing you, that’s all.

09:33
And so, now that we are in this awkward space between Christmas and the new year, I did want to take a moment to invite you also to think about what on earth you’ve got coming up next. Right, it is completely fair game If you have completely not even thought about the fact that next week is the new year. That’s fine Again, for a lot of you. If this is your first time trying to have a healthy holiday season, you probably haven’t really busy with just surviving. Right, you’ve been in survival mode, and that’s okay.

10:10
But now that there’s a pause, now that there’s a chance to breathe and slow down, I do want you to go ahead and reflect a little bit, right? So first I want you to think about how you feel about the following areas in your life and feel free to adjust any of these areas to something that might be more applicable to your situation. But you know, how do you feel about your relationship with alcohol and other substances? Where is that at today? How are you feeling there? How are you feeling about your career? How are you feeling about your education? How are you feeling about your own personal growth? Slash spirituality, right? And again, note when I’m saying spirituality, I’m not meaning religion or connection with a specific organized space of beliefs, right? I’m just meaning in terms of your connection with yourself, right, your connection with yourself, your connection with others. How are you feeling about that development?

11:23
How are you feeling about your finances? Because that’s always a tough one, right, it has definitely been a tough year for folks’ finances. So how are you feeling about your money situation? How’s your health? Now, let’s break that down. How’s your physical health and how’s your mental health? Right? How are your personal relationships with your family? How are your personal relationships with your friends? And also, let me go back and scratch family and say family or family, you choose, right, because not all of us are even in contact with our family of origin. So I want to recognize that.

12:04
And then, how are you feeling about romance? Is that even something that you care for, right? Like, have you thought about it? Is that something you want, or is that something that’s not even on your radar? And then the last one that I have for you is how are you feeling about, like, your sources of pleasure and fun, right, that are not mind-altering? So, again, not alcohol and not other substances, but things that you do that bring a smile to your face, things that you do that brighten up your spirit just a little bit. How are you feeling about those things?

12:42
And, if you’re curious, some of these areas that I’ve pulled, they’re pulled from different wheel of life exercises that you might see in different coaching programs, different personal development programs. Some of them I adjusted just based off personal experience, but in general you can Google Wheel of Life and check out any exercise where you can kind of do this reflection activity right. So I want you to ask yourself how you’re feeling in these areas and first, if there’s any area where you feel good, let’s celebrate that right. Like if you literally need to go and pause this recording right now so that you can jot down what is going well, what is it that you’re doing that is going well in this area, so that you can keep that energy going right. It’s super important for us to pause and recognize what’s going well so that we can keep at it. That’s always so, so, so important.

13:35
So if it’s your sobriety and you have been consistently engaging in a sobriety support community, you go to meetings. You have found either a sober mentor, a coach, you have a therapist whatever it is that’s helping you to stay away from your substance of choice, right Then, like, keep doing that, for example. But now let’s switch gears a little bit and let’s look at the areas that maybe you don’t feel so great about right. Now I’m going to be fair. It is totally possible because you are a human being and we, as human beings, love to be tough on ourselves that you might be thinking well, I feel bad about all these different areas that you listed, jess, and that’s fair and that’s fine. What we’re not about to do is try to flip the script on every single area that you might be feeling uncomfortable in. That, right, like, I understand that maybe you aren’t happy with you where you are in terms of the spaces that you’re occupying, depending on where you’re at, that’s okay. What I want us to focus on is the fact that change big changes don’t happen from a big, grandiose action. They actually happen from being really consistent with small actions, right? So pick one of the areas that you’re not feeling satisfied with, and maybe it is your relationship with alcohol, right, like, maybe you’ve been in and out in terms of, like, recovery, and now you’re realizing what with the new year might be a nice opportunity to really like be consistent. So pick that right.

15:06
What is one small action that you can consistently take to help you move the needle just a little bit from where you are at? And here’s the thing whatever you are choosing, it absolutely has to be something that you will actually do, right, Because it’s so important for you, a to build confidence in yourself and, b to also trust yourself, right? And the best way to build that confidence and self-trust is to complete things that are going to actually happen, or aim to do things that you’re actually going to complete. So think of a small action item that you can take. So again, I’m just using the alcohol example, but you can use this for anything in your personal life too, right? So let’s say it’s with alcohol and your goal is to not drink alcohol.

15:56
What is one thing that you can consistently do on a daily basis? That is a small action item. The small action item might be getting into a community space and showing up on a meeting right, that is a perfect example. You can do that every single day, pretty much no matter what, because, if it’s not, say, like the two communities that I’ve been involved in the Reframe app and the Luckiest Club they both have meetings seven days a week. But let’s say, you go beyond that if you are interested in 12-step programs, aa has literally meetings going on 24 hours a day. Right, so you can have anywhere that you can go and literally get on a meeting. Whether or not you drink or not, that doesn’t matter. The point is that you can build your confidence and your trust in yourself by showing up every single day to a meeting, no matter what. That’s an example.

16:47
Another example might be, let’s say, if movement is something that you’re wanting to do in the new year and doing it more consistently, I’m not saying, go to the gym, pay thousands of dollars for a trainer and then sign up for, like, the biggest training package when you’ve barely moved. If you’ve just been like a couch potato which, being couch potato, can be nice, right, but it might be okay every day, no matter what, there’s five to 10 minutes of movement that I’m going to commit to, no matter what, so that you can build that trust with yourself that, once you’ve hit that first level of completion successfully, you can add on to that right, and add on to that with confidence, adding on to that something that you know that you will then be able to complete, moving forward. And the point is that you keep adding to where you’re starting at, so that by the time we’re sitting here in a year you should have moved significantly from where you are today. As you’re listening to this episode, notice again, I’m not saying for you to change all of the things. It is very difficult to do multiple things and spread yourself in and do multiple things. Well, right, just find that one small thing that you can do for yourself to build that confidence and that trust, and then you move on.

18:06
Because, again, like I said, where your life looks like a year from today is going to depend on your consistency in taking the small actions. And here’s the thing with regard to the actions If there’s one day that you break from the consistency, does that mean that you throw everything out the window? No, what is going to be really important for you to recognize is that consistency means that some days you’re going to feel like you’re doing, like taking three steps forward and you might stumble backward, but then you get back up and you keep going right. Because the point is that if you, the person who literally, let’s talk about walking, if a person takes three steps forward, falls back, gets up and then continues in their forward movement, are they making progress? Absolutely, they literally are moving forward. So, likewise, whatever it is that your journey is, think about it with regards to walking a path, some days you’re going to move quickly, some days you’re going to move slowly, some days you might have a setback, but the point is that you get back up and you continue moving. The only way that you are going to fail at whatever it is that you want to accomplish is when you stop trying. But as long as you don’t stop trying, you are on the path to get to wherever you’re trying to go, and that’s so, so, so important to remember.

19:26
The other last point I’m going to make, and then I’ll stop for today, is whatever it is that your goal is, please don’t attach your worth to that goal. That’s in the future. Please go look in the mirror and tell yourself that you’re worthy now, or play me saying you are worthy now if you are not comfortable enough with telling yourself such words, because here is the thing For so many of us, myself included, we are socialized to think that life will be better when we accomplish this. When I hit six months of sobriety, my life will be better. When I hit one year of sobriety, when I lose these 10 pounds, these 15 pounds right, when we hit all of these markers, then we will be worthy, then we’ll be happy. But let me tell you what happens when we hit those markers we’re not happy, we’re not worthy because of those markers, because our worth and our joy is an inside job.

20:28
It’s not determined by the things that we do on the outside. It absolutely isn’t. There are things that we can do that can help us build confidence and feel better about ourselves. Of course I’m not saying that. But at the end of the day, you can acquire all the things. You can acquire recognitions and awards, and you can acquire everything and still, in the end, have nothing. And so please recognize that your dignity, your humanity, your worth is not determined by outside things. It is not determined by attaining things. It is determined by you simply existing in your flesh as you are.

21:13
So, in closing, just remember, if you’re going to feel guilt when you do the right thing. Just like Dr Pooja Lakshman said, treat that like a check engine line and ignore it and you keep driving and again, pick one small thing that you know you can do to build trust with yourself. Moving forward and regardless of where you are on any journey that you may be embarking on for the next year, remember the most important thing is that you’ve always been worthy. You have always been worthy. So with that, I hope to see you again in my upcoming book study for the Body Keeps the Score.

21:53
Check that out on my site, bottomlesstosober.com. Or I hope to see you in my Writing for Healing program same website, bottomlesstosober.com to sign up. Hope to hear from you. Have a lovely new year and I will see you in the next episode. Hey, if you are enjoying what you are listening to, I invite you to subscribe and share the podcast, but also go to my website, bottomlessesaubercom, and find out other opportunities to work with me, from free workshops to writing classes, to one-to-one life coaching opportunities. You can schedule a free consultation for that. Everything is available at bottomlesstosober.com. See you then.

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Link to Spotify

In this episode:

We’ve all heard of post-traumatic stress disorder, so listen in as Jasmine Vatuloka from Rising Rooted Wellness, a post-traumatic growth coach with a counseling background, discusses the transformative nature of post-traumatic growth.

Resources:

Connect with Jasmine on Instagram

Buy Jasmine’s Book on Amazon

NPR ACEs Quiz

Book Reference: Unbroken Brain by Maia Szalavitz

Book Reference: The Mountain Is Your by Brianna Wiest

Bottomless to Sober – Coaching, Writing Classes, and Workshops

Transcript:

00:05 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
I’m Jessica Dueñas and this is Bottomless to Sober, the podcast where I talk about anything and everything related to life, since my transition from bottomless drinking to a sober life. Hi everyone, thanks so much for tuning in. On today’s episode I have a special guest, Jasmine Vatuloka, who is actually a post-traumatic growth coach with a background in counseling. I’ve seen Jasmine’s post on social media for her practice rising rooted wellness. Just talk a lot about this idea of post-traumatic growth and I thought that for anybody who’s listening in, who has been through tough times and is recovering not just from substances and just life itself and traumatic events I just thought that Jasmine would be great to have on to share information on what post-traumatic growth is and resources and things like that. So hi, Jasmine, thanks so much for joining.

00:57 – Jasmine Vatuloka (Guest)
Hello, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate you. Yeah, just recognizing my voice and finding it important enough to have me on. So thank you.

01:07 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Yeah, thank you, thank you. So I think for a lot of people listening, you know, when we hear the term post-traumatic, we think PTSD, right, post-traumatic stress syndrome, etc. So could you tell us a little bit about what is post-traumatic growth?

01:23 – Jasmine Vatuloka (Guest)
for anyone who’s hearing this term for the first time, yeah, totally, and I love that you bring that, because we have sort of this idea of whatever is post-traumatic kind of comes with this dark cloud over it, as if it is something that is like, okay, we have to brace ourselves for whatever this topic is going to be.

01:41
But something that I find really inspiring about post-traumatic growth is that it’s incredibly empowering and it’s very it fuels a person with hope. When we experience trauma, an imprint is usually left if it’s on our way of conceptualizing ourselves as a human being, our sense of safety in the world, our sense of safety in relationships, whatever it might be that shifts for us. There’s definitely a shift in who we feel we are before and after trauma exists so or presents itself. So post-traumatic growth is sort of the reconnection to yourself and the sort of reclamation of your voice, your power, your story as you, as you integrate all of the lessons from your healing journey and you move forward into the world with a sense of choice and autonomy. Essentially, we feel like we lose our power after trauma and I think in the post-traumatic growth phase of healing, we are realizing that we have choices and we have power and that we can actually make the life that we want, without the burden of our traumatic imprints. So, in a nutshell, that’s how I would describe it.

02:57 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
I love that right, because I love hearing terms like empowerment and also just that reconnection piece I think is really relevant. I think, for people in recovery, a huge part of why we drank or consumed other substances is a sense of isolation, a sense of shame, a sense of just feeling very alone in the world, and I think that the idea of connection between people is really important for people in recovery. But there’s also just that relationship to self right, and so if there are opportunities for people to reconnect with themselves after traumatic events, yeah, like that to me just very powerfully speaks to the word hope, and so I’m really excited that this is the work that you do with others. So I guess my other question was how does post-traumatic growth connect to your personal story? I feel like a lot of times when we pursue career paths, there’s a personal passion behind it. So whatever you’re comfortable with sharing, I feel like we love to hear how does post-traumatic growth relate to your journey?

04:04 – Jasmine Vatuloka (Guest)
Yeah, so winding the time wheel back a few decades, I was born into a family with where you can consider as well generational trauma to really be something that is imprinted into your experience right from the get go.

04:19
So I was born into a circumstance where there was a lot of chaos, and I was exposed to violence right from the get go, and so my own sort of nervous system as a little toddler and a little baby was quite activated from the get go, and I also had a baby sister, and so as a young one I really internalized however that may have come to be a parentified role to and a protector role of my sister and my mom, who was a survivor of domestic violence.

04:56
And so this little seed grew and grew and grew until I found myself in many relationships that were very disempowering from early ages, with my friendships as well as early romantic relationships, where I was trying to understand what my needs were, unconsciously trying to get them met with whatever tools I didn’t have, and trying to navigate what that looked like as a little kid.

05:23
And of course, that blossomed into abusive dynamics as I grew into a young adult and my process of reclamation in my power has been really around like finding my voice and using it, supporting other women and doing the same thing and navigating what safety in relationships looks like as an adult and as somebody who wants to be a mother and somebody who wants to have a kind of traditional nuclear family where I feel safe and I can kind of heal the cycle of generational trauma and maybe dysfunction that I’ve seen and what was modeled for me.

06:00
So, yeah, there are, like you know, there are, there are other stories within the overarching story, but it’s a very common thing that I see with, like honestly, most of most of, if not all of my clients, where there are little seeds that are planted sort of in earlier years and then they, they grow into certain kinds of ways of navigating relational dynamics and then there’s a breaking point and then there’s a recovery point and all sorts of different ways of coping with that breaking point, which is so human and totally there’s nothing wrong with that.

06:34 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
So, yeah, yeah, and you know it’s interesting that you talk about kind of like the seeds being planted in your youth. So right now one book that I’m working through in a group setting is Maya Salavitz, unbroken Brain, and basically you know, one of her big points with regard to addiction is that it starts way before our first like drink right or way before our first like interaction with a substance, because typically you know she talks about like brain development and how much everything has such a really strong imprint on children. And so there’s even like the conversation of adverse childhood experiences, which you know ACEs, and I’ll put a link to that in the show notes for people there. I have like an NPR link that has the ACEs test that people can take but just really high correlation between adverse childhood experiences and a subsequent substance abuse years later. And it can be and you know the childhood experiences can be things such as abuse, but it can also just be, say, like divorce in the home, right, a parent that’s completely absent.

07:42
So it’s I’m glad that you’re bringing up the, this connection to the childhood roots, because I think a lot of people, probably a lot of people who listen to this episode, are just like wondering well, where did my problem start and oftentimes there’s roots that go before your first drink. So I’m glad that you brought that up and I know you mentioned a little bit about your client. So how do you find post traumatic growth showing up for the people you work with, whether it was your previous therapy clients or, now that you’ve transitioned into coaching, your current coaching clients?

08:16 – Jasmine Vatuloka (Guest)
Well, with coaching clients it’s sort of like our goal. So, like in more of the counseling setting, it’s like we’re looking at what is presenting and then going into the past and unfolding it and unpacking it and sort of unweaving the tangled web that we’re left with, whereas with coaching it’s more like looking at what is presenting and then saying, okay, how do we want to, where do we want to go, what is that goal post at the end of the tunnel and how are we going to get there? And maybe there’s some unpacking of the past in order to understand how we’re going to move forward or what those blocks might be that are preventing us from moving forward. But there’s this real like orientation towards post traumatic growth is the goal. So with my coaching clients, a lot of them are finding that it’s in relationship that they are struggling because those inner wounded parts are coming online and they are upset and they are realizing, like with the creation of what a person might call safe relationship, safe enough relationship, whatever safety feels like for the person. There’s kind of like a process of grief that also becomes activated when somebody is meeting your needs in live time as an adult. But then you’re realizing, oh, this is a new experience for me to have my needs met, because that’s not my childhood experience, or the opposite, a real sort of inflamed sense of meeting your needs to be met by your adult partner because of that wound that’s there but them not having the skills to be able to do that. Or maybe it’s a sort of inflated sensitivity of needing everything to be met in a sort of like hyper vigilant, coming from sort of a hyper vigilant state trying to assess whether or not they are actually safe in relationship, whether or not it’s actually possible to create safety for themselves as an adult, because there isn’t really the embodied experience of what safety is or what safety feels like, because as a child or as an adolescent that wasn’t there or it was there on paper, but perhaps just like some subconscious, underlying needs that were really subtle were just missed over.

10:27
And none of this is to ever criticize or blame parents, because of course everyone’s doing the best that they, you know, I kind of have the belief that we all grew up with emotionally immature parents. Like I know, this is something in the community that people are like. My parents were immature emotionally and it’s like people are so emotionally mature and articulate now Like this is a brand new thing, and so just I always sort of encourage people to extend some grace where they’re, where they can, assuming that the parent was not actually intentionally causing harm. But I see, yeah, predominantly I see a lot in people trying to navigate how to articulate getting their needs met, articulating their needs at all, navigating their emotional responses when people aren’t able to meet those needs and how to just sort of like do the dance of really activated inner child in an adult body and validating that those needs are still present and how we can help people self soothe in order to tend to what those needs are without necessarily projecting all of their trauma onto another person and causing harm to that person.

11:30 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
So yeah, yeah, no, that’s fascinating, so like if I were almost visualizing it, like I picture, and again, in the context of coaching, so not therapy. So in the context of coaching, someone comes to you who has gone through, say, traumatic events, and you’re setting the goal. The goal is the post traumatic growth, right Again, that that space of reconnection with oneself. So, in a sense, and are the steps basically like that? They have to be able to define safety for themselves, but for some of them they’ve never experienced it, right?

12:06 – Jasmine Vatuloka (Guest)
Yeah. So it’s a lot of understanding, like what is safe enough, I think, for folks, and like really marking and imprinting for the person, like every single little win, because for some people, like we think that we need to do something at 100% in order to really experience a corruption or a sense of healing. But even just like the tiniest little, like even every 30 minutes, just remembering to look outside the window to give yourself a sense of like, okay, I’m here, I’m in the present moment, I’m safe, my nervous system can just like relax from this conversation for a little bit and then coming back for like 15 seconds, like even that little decision to tend to yourself and to tend to the needs and to create safety for yourself is a win. And so just really sort of assessing in the present moment, like what feels, like it needs support, and then helping people create a sense of support and connection to themselves. And then eventually, you know, folks realize that as they’re able to attune to their own needs.

13:11
What I witness, at least in my session, is that as folks are feeling like they’re able to attune to their own needs more quickly, they’re feeling more empowered to be able to have those conversations with other people relationally because there’s less risk because if I’m only okay if another person is tending to my needs, then that person can tend to my needs or not, but there’s risk in that and there’s becomes a dependency on that becoming the outcome. Whereas if a person has ability to soothe themselves and work with their own nervous system, their own emotional regulation skills, there’s a lot more agency that comes in that, a lot more choice and how you want to navigate the world and interactions with all kinds of relationships bosses, partners, friendships, parents, whatever.

13:54 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Yeah, and you know. So what I love to was your word choice safe enough. The reason why that jumps out to me is because I know a from my own personal experience. Like there, I was in a phase at one point and I’ll speak specifically to romantic relationships where the idea of being vulnerable in the first place was paralyzing and I was in my mind. I was like, well, I’m going to create safety by never opening up. And if you ever encounter that right, like if someone is like, well, I’m not going to have a boundary, I’m just going to go ahead and create a whole wall. And how do you work backwards with people from when they they’re coming at you and they’re like, oh well, don’t worry, I know safe because, yeah, I just created a whole wall or a whole fortress and I stuck myself in the middle of the fortress with like alligators and a moat or all that. So, like, how do you work backwards from that? Or how do you help people work backwards from that?

14:57 – Jasmine Vatuloka (Guest)
I think just circling back to that feeling of safe enough, like if you’ve got this fortress, this is like imagining like a thick, thickly lined castle that goes up to the sky and alligators and dragons and everything, and it’s just like if safe enough for you looks like just looking out the window of your fortress and just seeing what’s outside Cool.

15:16
And if it looks like just talking to your alligator and saying like hey, I don’t need you to be, you know a kilometer out, I don’t need you to be patrolling in this way, I just want you to be at the door, like whatever it feels like to you to create just like 1%, 1% of vulnerability while you’re still maintaining your personal boundary. Because when we’ve been through experiences of trauma, oftentimes it’s a violation of our personal boundaries and so we need to like we feel that we need to like swing the pendulum all the way over to really protect our boundaries Sometimes. Sometimes that’s the response right and that that’s okay, and to just sort of like normalize that that’s where a person is at and that, instead of trying to make it like you’re doing something wrong, like we are trying to dominate our own selves again, and like internalize even further this, like responsive, I’m doing something wrong, I’m bad, I’m not okay, like whatever. I’m just honoring something happened to me. I feel like I need to put up this 1000% boundary and like that’s okay.

16:21
And I don’t I don’t ever push clients to like not respect their boundaries but once there is, oftentimes, once there is a sense of acceptance of, okay, this 1000% boundaries, here the boundary like kind of like it loses a bit of rigidity because, because it’s been honored, and then it might feel like a little bit okay to come down like to 999% or whatever you know and and you know, just to honor a person’s nervous system where they’re genuinely at, I think is really, really important, especially as survivors, you know.

16:54 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
That’s really thank you. That’s such a really helpful way to visualize it, because I think sometimes you know I also love your previous statement that we are in an age where, there, I feel like we’re in an age where so many people have been diving into personal development work and I do think that this is absolutely new for our generation. I think, especially like for me as a woman of color and you know, my family immigrated to the United States you know this being silent was so important to kind of keep a low radar right, like if I’m struggling, I’m not gonna go ask for help because I don’t wanna disclose my status as being, say, an undocumented immigrant, which was the case for my mother, right, and so there were. There’s no way that we were gonna, or my mom’s generation or the women before hers. We’re gonna have the luxury or the privilege to really have conversations about our feelings, because really they just haven’t survived, right, like they just had to get through the basic like needs, like making sure that there was shelter, making sure that there was food, making sure that there was clothing, and our generation. Thankfully we, overall many of us have those things already, and now it’s like well then, what’s next? And so I really appreciate you making that point, because I think, like when so many of us are like what the hell? And we’re so frustrated with our parents’, generation and those before them, I think it’s important to recognize, like that people are functioning as a result of the environment that they’re in, and when you are just surviving, you’re not gonna have that luxury of having conversations about your feelings and what you’re dealing with and handling. You’re just getting things done.

18:29
So to like bring that back to the other thing that I was gonna say was this idea of, yeah, the castle and the moat and the gators and people having the 1,000% boundary because they have been so wounded before.

18:45
I love that you talk about like, okay, once they’ve assessed a little bit of safety, bring it down to 999%, because I think what happens now, what I’ve noticed, is social media. You know, people make their grandiose posts on social media all the time, and I’m guilty of it. I post all the time too, and I think it’s very easy to see what other people are sharing as their experiences and measure ourselves up against that, and so if someone, for example, I’m very open about the things I have gone through and it is very healing for me. However, I never want other people to think that they have to go to the extreme of what I have done to get my story off of my chest in order to make progress. So when you have someone coming to you and they’re practicing that comparison of like, here I am and I have my moat with my gators and I see this other person who has like demolished the castle and has like planted a field and is frolicking around with all these little flowers and such how do?

19:49
that person kind of focus their growth on themselves.

19:53 – Jasmine Vatuloka (Guest)
Oh my God, I love that question and I also really just like when I circled back a little bit before, when you had said that like it’s a luxury to be able to be in this time and this generation where there’s so much information available, like I really feel I think about generational trauma a lot and I really think that it’s a privilege to be where we’re at right now and it’s a privilege and we’re on the backs of all of the people who’ve been in a state of survival to get us here and so in. I think that like, hurt people, hurt people and we can pass along generational trauma. We also are privileged enough to be passing along generational healing by being in this space. So like, yes, there’s validity in your needs not getting met, yes, there’s room for grief and anger and rage, even fine. And like it doesn’t cancel out the fact that it’s really amazing that we have this access that we have right now and to be able to be in a space where maybe our parents, grandparents, cousins, ourselves even might be in the castle. And then there are folks out there that have like a sunshine, sunflower field and they’re just like tra-la-la look at me, like in my post-traumatic growth phase which I think like it’s really important to just remember that where everybody is at is beautiful and it is okay and it’s not wrong. Like you can’t do this wrong. We all are born. I think it’s important to remember our own privileges, like we’re all born in different intersections of many different factors and so if you need to have a castle and the gaiters in the moat, that’s okay, because there’s a reason for that and there’s no wrong way to go about your healing process.

21:31
I think that, like shame is really insidious and shame is really a huge part of navigating trauma and it’s a part of why I use my voice on social medias, because I’ve lived in a bubble of shame and I’ve lived in my own castle with maybe it wasn’t gaiters, maybe it was more of like just I don’t know fire breathing dragons like, but it was like one big, safe, purple dragon that just like covered the whole castle and kept me really safe. But it wasn’t that kind of energy Like it was a very fearful energy, like I lived in a castle of shame and fear and just being like a really scared little kid. And so I think it’s totally okay if you have your own dragon, your own gators, your own castle. It doesn’t.

22:17
It doesn’t mean that there’s anything Wrong with who you are, and I think that, like that voice that comes up or the narrative that comes up that says there’s something wrong with how I’m healing, that’s where your healing is is is, in whatever narrative that’s coming up, to say that you’re doing this incorrectly because there’s no way to do it Incorrectly, like even though social media has all of these kinds of like different people who make it seem like it’s something All of those people have a life behind their grid and behind their phone, where they’re a hot mess, just like all of us, because it’s a hot mess to go through trauma, it’s a hot mess to heal it, like there’s no other way to talk about it, like it’s not pretty. So I think that we don’t need to Minimize our experience further. A shame our experience further, because that is just kind of like the, the narrative of what it is to be in survival, and so we can just soften that a little bit and accept where we are. You know, it’s my hope for people anyway.

23:18 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Yeah, and you know, and this is perfect because it kind of leans into my next question, because I was going to ask, right like, what are Common challenges that you see people facing as they are experiencing this growth? Right, because I mean, I think, like one of them has got to be that the comparing their journey to someone else’s journey and Feeling like they’re doing it wrong. I think that that’s common and I see it happening in recovery spaces too, where people think that their version of sobriety is wrong, when, mind you, there is no right way to Stop using substances that are deadly to you. Right, like, for some people, they go through phases and do harm reduction, some people cut Everything out co turkey, some people go to the doctor and get medications. Right like, there’s all sorts of different ways to get to that end goal for yourself and your relationship with substances, which absolutely makes sense in terms of also trauma recovery.

24:16
I also wonder, like, if guilt ever comes up, first, say your clients as they’re making progress, because, like they’re, again, I think from a recovery standpoint, there can sometimes be the guilt because suddenly we’re, we’re doing well, and there might be this internalized false narrative that we tell ourselves in recovery often that like oh well, you know, I caused so much Pain in my thinking, I caused so much drama in my drug abuse and I stressed everyone out. And how dare I now be happy?

24:48
Right, there’s a complicated grief that can come up. So I’m curious how you see that showing up for people specifically with post traumatic growth and obviously, like, as you all are listening, like I want to recognize that hand in hand work people’s recovering from Addictive substances can very easily fall under the umbrella of people recovering from traumatic experiences. So you know, obviously we’re not talking about two separate groups of people.

25:12
Sometimes Weaves and sometimes it doesn’t but I’m just kind of curious how it shows up in Jasmine’s experience with the people she gets to work with.

25:21 – Jasmine Vatuloka (Guest)
Yeah, they definitely. They interlock and interweave. I think that guilt comes up a lot, like this sort of survivors. Guilt is something that I kind of hear often. You know, like I I’ve showed up really messily in certain circumstances or when I was in I try to kind of like use language of different parts with my clients, so kind of like we’ll have sort of survivor brain or trauma brain is is online and that’s what we used to describe one life. We’re really emotionally Disregulated or nervous systems really activated, and so it influences our thoughts and our feelings and our behaviors. And so when I’m in survivor mode or survival mode, I kind of like I Interact with people or act in certain ways, and then I feel bad about that later when I look back on it and I see the impact that that had on other people, on my job, on my relationship with myself.

26:16
Some people feel guilty for even how they interacted with them themselves, and so I think that guilt is a super common like and it doesn’t mean that anything. Again, like it doesn’t mean that anything is wrong with a person for experiencing guilt. I think guilt is a there’s a human emotion and it’s it’s one that deserves honoring because it shows where your values are, and so when you are unpacking the emotion of guilt, it’s probably that it’s rubbing up with a value as to how you feel about it, that it’s rubbing up with a value as to how you want to be or how you Value yourself to be, or the image that you want for yourself, and that the way that you know things have unfolded have been not in Alignment with what those values are. But again, when we’re acting from a space of survival or a space where our sort of like inner child wounded parts are really online, we act. We actually don’t have access to the same parts of our brain that we do when we’re regulated, when we’re calm, when we have been, you know, practicing or certain self-care practices, whatever those might be for longer periods of time. We have more access to, kind of like our Prefrontal cortex, like the part of our brain that allows us to regulate and have conversations from a space where our rational parts are online. So I think, yeah, guilt is super common.

27:38
And I think another thing that’s an Like, not an issue, but something that comes up often is Sort of just intellectualizing, like there’s so much information out there and social media really like adds fuel to the fire, and so there’s so much intellectualization and kind of like hyper awareness as to what’s going on internally for a person.

27:57
That doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re processing what’s going on. Just to speak to your feelings is not the same thing as feeling your feelings, and so I think that that’s another little caveat that kind of comes up as a little bit of a trend in in sessions where it’s like Okay, I’m hearing you say that you’re feeling guilt, I’m hearing you say that you’re feeling shame, I’m hearing you say that all of these things are present for you, but can we be with those feelings? Can we actually feel those feelings? How do we Express those feelings in a way that is healing for you, positive for you, not going to harm anybody or yourself, and how can we work with those experiences in a way that is supportive for your post traumatic growth, instead of maintaining your trauma loop of whatever. Whatever that is for that person?

28:43 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Yeah, yeah, that part on intellectualizing versus experiencing, I think, is like you said. We have so much access to information where we can talk the talk really easily, and so I guess how does someone go from saying I feel guilt to actually experiencing it? Is it like, do you have folks like name the sensation in their body? Like how are someone able to go from just yes, I know I have this versus I’m dealing with it?

29:17 – Jasmine Vatuloka (Guest)
Yeah, it kind of depends on the person, their comfort level with going into emotion, because we all have our own relationship with ourself and we all have our own relation like. Therefore, we have our own relationship with our emotions and so if a person is feeling very like they have a castle, but not only to people into the world but also towards their own heart, it’s the same thing. It’s like you know, okay, what is 999 look like for you in terms of accessing that guilt, whereas somebody who has no castle at all and this is something I’m really proud of for myself and my own journey is I wouldn’t say that I’m 100% comfortable feeling all of my feelings, but I’m pretty close and in my own process of being like okay, like we can feel this and it’s not going to kill me, because I think that’s what we, when we have difficult or constricted relationships with our emotions, we oftentimes have a reason for those boundaries being around our heart. Like it can become so overwhelming to experience an emotion like guilt, it can completely consume us and we can’t get out of the bubble. So it’s about, like you know, if somebody does have sort of a boundary with their own heart to access their emotions, it’s about like titrating, we call it so like going into that feeling a little bit in a way that is safe, and then coming back to putting your wall back up. Okay, I’m going to let it down just a little bit, feel it for like 35 seconds with a person who can actually walk me through this. I’m going to put the wall back up and creating a sense of actual safety in the body so that we’re able to go into those experiences and feel our feelings.

30:49
And then, if a person is totally comfortable feeling their feelings, then we might do full blown practices.

30:54
We might, like you know, bring that into a session, we might ask a, we might create a ceremony around it.

31:01
We might do, like you know, with with anger. I think is really especially important for women. Like, a lot of us carry a lot of anger, to the point where it might even make a person sick, because there isn’t a, like, socially acceptable way for a woman to be angry still somehow, you know, and so I really encourage my female clients who all clients really but like, especially with, like you know, I want my women to be able to access their anger, like to do walks and to like do things with their or to sing, or to scream or to like hit pillows or whatever it is to like actually allow that energy to move instead of stay stagnant in their body, because our emotions and our feelings, like our feelings, are intellectualized idea of what we’re experiencing in our body, but our emotions are just energy and so we can express our energy and whatever capacity feels safe. But it’s about really assessing that boundary internally as well as our external boundaries towards the world. So there’s no one-size-fits-all, I guess.

32:05 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Yeah, and that’s a super helpful point that you made and I love that in terms of, like a way to express I actually have started taking boxing classes and I highly agree with that Like it’s so good, it’s so therapeutic, just to guess, get that energy out. And a couple of things you know remind me of a book that I love also Brianna Weiss book. The Mountain is you.

32:26
Yeah, I love that book. Yes, when you were talking about guilt and how guilt is basically showing you where your values are, right, you know, her text just does a really excellent job of pinpointing the different pieces of information that different emotions are actually giving you. And so, as opposed to feeling bad about the different emotions, as opposed to resisting those different emotions, like really being able to sit with them and kind of get curious and figure out what are those emotions telling you. So, with that being said, for someone who you mentioned is struggling with guilt, and that guilt is pointing out what their values are, what would you recommend as a way for people to find out what their values are?

33:09 – Jasmine Vatuloka (Guest)
Well, I think that there are tons. I think in this case, like language is actually really important. I know I was just sort of like don’t intellectualize, feel, but now in this case I’m like okay, intellectualize a little bit, like I think there are a lot of really good resources out there where you just look Like I think we don’t really similarly with needs and feelings, like we don’t really realize how many words there are to actually create a sense of cognitive structure around our experience. And so if you don’t know what your values are, like, just go look up a list of values and like just circle them and you’ll actually find like I recently had a session with my therapist where she was like, do you wanna do a values exercise?

33:47
And my ego came out and I was like, okay, I think I know what my values are, but it was so good to go back because our values change. And it was so good to just go back to just like looking at a sheet of paper and like, okay, out of all of these things, what are the 10 most important, what are the five most important? And then of those five, like which three feel the most relevant right now? And you can learn a lot about yourself by just creating a little bit of language. Yeah, and let your values change, and I think that our values really change after we’ve been through trauma as well.

34:17 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Well, and you know the interesting thing too, going back to this idea of our generation having the privilege and the luxury to be having these conversations, we definitely were not talking about our values in the home.

34:28
Growing up, I feel like that narrative of family values is a common term thrown around, but I feel like the only values that I feel like that I was ever exposed to as a kid in terms of conversation was just like the general, like family values, like oh, women do this, women don’t do this, we do this like this, we don’t do this like this.

34:49
Right, and really, again, that was never giving me the opportunity to slow down and sit with myself and think about, well, what actually matters to me. You know, and I think so much of the work that I’ve had to do in recovery has been, you know, working on going through different beliefs that I’ve always had and then being like wait, does this actually resonate with me? Or have I just been like doing like busting my tail trying to meet some of these goals because other people set them up for me and I just bought into them, right? Or like my family was told that these were things that mattered and so I just automatically followed suit. So that’s been really empowering and I think that, yeah, I’ll post a resource in the link in the show notes also to a value survey for people to check out, because it is really helpful to have a sense of what actually matters to you like forget your family, forget what the people before you did and really tap into yourself.

35:46
Yeah, so my second to last question is I feel like you’ve probably hit on it, but if there was anything else that you would recommend for folks in terms of strategies for dealing with the growth period after a traumatic event, I think it’s important. I would love for you actually if you can differentiate therapy between coaching, because you have had the opportunity to navigate both walks as a professional and when should someone see a therapist for their trauma? When should someone transition into coaching for their trauma? Like, if someone’s like man this is me I’ve been struggling how do they?

36:30
know which path to take.

36:32 – Jasmine Vatuloka (Guest)
Yeah. So when you, it’s so wild because we live in a time where coaching is just like such a broad scope and so there are a lot of somatic coaches out there that probably would be able to be really supportive when it comes to like post-traumatic stress symptoms. But if you’re finding yourself like really really, really, really, really really stuck there are certain areas of town that you can’t go to, you’re having like chronic panic attacks, like those symptoms of your PTSD symptoms are really loud and really frequent all the time and you’re feeling like you are really not able to move through them, I would really support getting, or really suggest getting support from like a mental health professional. It’s just a different experience. It’s just a different experience, like educationally, where a person is coming from in terms of coaching. You don’t really know. I would really also recommend that you vet your coaches, like I would. Really there’s such access to coaches out there and like where it’s like trauma informed or all over the place, but we don’t always know what that means for certain people, and so I really encourage people to, when you’re seeking help from a coach, remember that you’re seeking sort of supportive tools to help you from where you are presently to go towards the future. In some cases that might look like doing emotional regulation tools. For some coaches that might be just like goal setting and following through with like little goals here and there. I don’t know, I don’t know all of the coaches, but I know there’s so many out there but just like doing a little bit of research to really identify what your needs are and then choose from there in terms of coaching and to do your. It’s kind of a catch 22 because you don’t really know what your needs are until you get support. And so sometimes my experience okay, I’m gonna go into a bit of my experience right now, that’s okay A few years ago was working.

38:29
I knew that I had a lot of traumatic stuff that I was processing and I sought support from a coach, thinking that because they had a really glowing presentation online, I thought that this person was gonna be the one that was gonna help me go through it. And there was this real kind of codependency energy that I was going into the relationship with of like this person is going to six me, help me, heal me, whatever. And that’s not the energy that you wanna go into these relationships with, but that’s the energy that I went into this relationship with and I was attracted to this person because of the way that they talked about trauma, the way they talked about healing. They were very spiritual but in a way that seemed very like grounded in ancestral work, in a way that seemed very in alignment with what I valued. And so I did like pay a good chunk of money to go into a container with this person where actually my needs were not met and harm was kind of done because their trauma or their lens was not what I thought it was.

39:38
And so I think, just like really getting articulate and articulate with what you are looking for and advocating, like really advocating for what those needs are are really important and it’s kind of difficult because sometimes, like for myself, I had to walk through it to realize that my needs were something else than what I thought they were. So just being really careful and honestly like nothing, nothing bad can come from seeing a therapist like a mental health professional first and then sort of working through is it here in this kind of space that I need support, or is it in a space that’s more coachy that I need support? But I think it’s always important to prioritize, sort of like your safety and your stabilization and with that it’s probably better to go the mental health through. Yeah.

40:28 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Okay, that’s really helpful because I think, like, that question comes up a lot for folks and so I always love to hear different people’s takes on that, that question, for sure, and I think that the vetting a coach is incredibly important because, you know, anyone can call themselves a coach and so basically, like, if you are going to invest in someone supporting you, just making sure that they’ve got the resources and the tools to actually help you get to where you want to be and if not, again like same thing with people in recovery who come to me, I always encouraged them to go to mental health professionals for therapy, for really, like doing that, digging into the past- I always am like you know, because I work with a therapist myself like I have a coach and a therapist and I feel like they’re both very helpful for my mental health in different ways, right like the coach movement, I feel like for me a coach is action based and forward moving, is kind of like a good accountability and support and like a good cheerleader and so like mirror up to you and call you out, but I think the therapist is the one that really helps you kind of like dig into those skeletons in a in a safe way so that you can kind of harm to yourself either.

41:36
What’s your inspiration so awesome.

41:38 – Jasmine Vatuloka (Guest)
Yeah, and it’s like it’s not a, it’s not a linear process, like I think that in my head at a certain point I was like okay, well, I need to do all of this, like skeleton digging up, and then I need to like figure out what my forward steps are. But I find that it’s just a constant ping pong, because as I move forward I’m like wait, but that is activating something, what’s that? And so then I kind of so, you know, I think it’s it’s great to have access to both, like if that is accessible. Like you know somebody that can kind of like toe the line a little bit between both?

42:09 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
yeah, yes, I’m so glad that you brought that up because you know I’ve just hit six, six, one, I think six I have hit three years sober. I don’t know where the number six came from.

42:21
Thank you. And this past year, so in my third year of recovery, I actually went back and got a new therapist with a background in disordered eating, because I realized it took me two years of not drinking to discover that I had such a complicated relationship with food and my body that I was like, whoa, like this is not, I’m not. I can’t talk to a personal trainer about this, I can’t talk to just like a health coach about it, like no, no, no, I need to talk to a therapist and really dig in. And so I’m so glad that you brought that up, because it this is absolutely not linear and you know we didn’t really intense work this past year for me to really reshape my, my mindset around my body and eating, because I just I had no clue. I literally had no clue how much of the seeds that were planted when I was a child, like how much those grew into full blown, like just lack of self acceptance and certain areas of my life that were really hurting me.

43:27
And again, because alcohol for me was my primary issue, I couldn’t see the other layers of the onion. So it’s like kind of with alcohol, and then you just keep going and going and so you know, who knows that I feel like more will be revealed as my life continues. But I’m just really glad that you brought that point up because I want folks to realize that like there is really an endpoint for either or for that kind of support, right like you have both at the same time. There may be times when you going to a therapist isn’t relevant and really coaching is going to help you, and then there’s times that you need to stop everything and go back to a therapist because something has come up. So just thank you so much for bringing that up, because I think that’s a super, super, super important point.

44:11 – Jasmine Vatuloka (Guest)
Of course.

44:12 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
So, jasmine, anything else that you want to share about the work that you do, anything else or how can people connect with you? Like, what’s the best way to put for folks to find you because you are taking clients correct? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

44:26 – Jasmine Vatuloka (Guest)
I am taking clients. The quickest way to get in touch with me is probably through Instagram because I, like many others, seem to not be able to put my phone away as often as I should. But I, yeah, I’m at rising rooted wellness on Instagram or my website. You can get in touch with me there as well, which is rising rooted wellness calm. But, yeah, I am taking on one on one coaching clients for folks who are navigating post traumatic growth and I’m going.

44:54
Oh, and I just released a little book. I don’t know if you saw it on Instagram. It’s a little. It’s a little like nurturance book for self care. It’s a three months habit tracker and it’s got coloring pages on every day for those three months so that there are little pockets of slowness like woven into your day. There’s a lot of free practices, like weekly self care challenges. It’s really supportive. I wanted it to come out for winter time because I know a lot of folks struggle in the winter, myself one of them being one of them, and there are actually there’s a values list in the book as well as needs and emotions and like over 150 affirmations for your times when you’re struggling, like it’s packed full of all sorts of like seeds for growth. So yeah, so that’s also a part of who I am now. I guess that’s in the world.

45:46 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
That’s awesome. Thank you for sharing that. I will definitely share that as well. Yeah, I mean Jasmine, thank you. Thank you so much again. I think that you have provided a wealth of education in you know the time that we’ve been having this conversation. And again, folks, you can follow Jasmine at rising rooted wellness on Instagram. I will put all the links for the different things that came up in our conversation in the show notes as well. Thank you so much, Jasmine. I really appreciate your time with us today.

46:13 – Jasmine Vatuloka (Guest)
Oh, my gosh. Thank you so much for having me, and I’m just going to have that image of the castle with the gators in the front in my mind, I think, for the rest of the day. Yeah, thank you so much.

46:27 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Hey, if you are enjoying what you are listening to, I invite you to subscribe and share the podcast, but also go to my website, bottomless to sober calm, and find out other opportunities to work with me, from free workshops to writing classes to one to one life coaching opportunities. You can schedule a free consultation for that. Everything is available at bottomless to sober calm. See you then.

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In this episode:

I share a recent talk I gave at a treatment facility for women about finding and using your voice to recover. I discuss the terrifying experience of almost being exposed by a former friend/love interest and how I turned that fear into courage. I also share the effects of intergenerational silence on mental health, and I emphasize the power of breaking the generational silence, encouraging you to reclaim your voice and use it as an essential tool in your recovery journey.

Resources:

Free Writing Workshop on Christmas Eve

New Year’s Eve Self-Forgiveness Workshop

Transcript:

00:05 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
I’m Jessica Dueñas, and this is Bottomless to Sober, the podcast where I talk about anything and everything related to life, since my transition from bottomless drinking to a sober life. Hi everyone. So I was invited by my fellow sober sister, Kiola Raines, to share my story at a women’s treatment facility, specifically at their graduation ceremony, and sharing my story there was really powerful, and so I decided to go ahead and record it as a podcast episode, because I think that the message that I gave to those women is really applicable to anyone who is struggling to maybe find their voice, and so this episode is for you. If you have been struggling with tapping into your voice, if you are like, oh my gosh, why can’t I talk about these things, this is for you. So I invite you to get comfortable. Close your eyes, pretend that you are at a point of a transition. At the time of this recording, it is December, so we are getting ready to face 2024. But even if you listen to this at some point in the future, it doesn’t matter. We’re always at a transition point because we’re always evolving. So, with that being said, I’ll go ahead and share what I said to this group of women. Hello everyone, good evening and congratulations to this graduating class of the Alcoholism Center for Women. Getting sober during the holiday season is no simple feat, and I do commend all of you on planting seeds today that will blossom into strong, firmly planted and beautiful flowering trees later.

01:49
It was actually during the holiday season of 2019 when a former friend, slash complicated love interest, who is a journalist, threatened me in the middle of an argument to out me to the public. He was very angry with me because he had pulled me, in a nearly blacked out state, from an abusers apartment after I had called him to help me get out right and when he wanted to take me into a treatment facility, I was refusing to go. Mind you, I did end up going into the facility the following day, but at that moment I was very under the influence and I was angry and I did not want to go. I just needed to get out of that apartment space. So this man with his thousands of online followers turned to me and said how would you like it if I outed you right now to everyone on Twitter? Maybe I should go ahead and do that. He knew he was hitting me where it hurts with that threat because at the time I was titled the Kentucky State Teacher of the Year, so I had a lot to lose Because of my work as an educator.

02:51
I hid my addiction from everyone possible, so the very idea of someone telling my story without my consent was terrifying. What would others think of me? Would I lose my job? Would my students and their families turn their backs on me? My family and friends? And what about my mother? She had always been so proud of me. My sister and I are her American Dream children. What would my immigrant mother say to me if I was outed?

03:18
Mental health issues and addiction were not open topics for discussion for the women in my family, though I was raised not to talk about those issues. I’m here to tell you that that type of silence can be deadly for us. That type of silence where we don’t talk about what’s hurting our spirits is 100% a breeding ground for shame, which creates isolation. And then we start to believe the stories in our heads. Right the voices that are telling us things like I’m a terrible mother, I don’t deserve this opportunity or I’m not worthy of connection, I can’t do any better, so I’m going to stick through with this terrible relationship. Right these stories. When we start to believe them, turn us to want to numb with alcohol, other substances or behaviors and eventually we lose ourselves. My hope for you, as you transition to whatever your next step is on your recovery journey, is that you find your voice and, once you find it, that you never let it go. Your voice is going to be your tool for liberation from active addiction.

04:33
So the question comes up where did the silencing of women’s voices come from, anyway, right? So from my experience, my grandmother living in a Latin American country, my grandmother was from Nicaragua, where women had no rights. She protected herself and her children from the heavy hands of her husband at that time by staying silent, right. My mother was then born into that code of silence and carried it into the United States when she migrated here, and though my mother did not suffer from abuse at the hands of my father, for her she was undocumented, she was an unwelcome immigrant in a foreign country where she did not speak English right, and so, for my mother, she relied on silence to help her to not be seen and to avoid getting sent back. The less attention that she drew to herself the better. Even when she was struggling and needed help, right, just keeping that low radar was so important for her. Using resources from my mother would have meant possibly disclosing her status, so it just was not an option for her to get help, and I grew up witnessing her quietly carry everything that hurt her. And as I grew into a woman, she expected me, her US-born child, to do the same, and for years I did think that silence served me.

06:03
As I struggled to balance my life with my addiction, I found ways to cope with the shame. I worked harder for everyone but me. I worked to be the best teacher, the best employee and the best at everything that I tried to do, because it helped me sleep at night. I spent years at happy hours counting others’ drinks so I could pretend to drink like a normal person, when in reality I just wanted to go home, be by myself and drink how I wanted to. I knew I had a problem, but I was taught to not ask for help. And eventually my silence got me alcoholic liver disease, the tool that had once kept my mother, grandmother and the women before them safe. That silence was killing me because it was blocking me from getting help. Something had to change. I had to break the cycle that worked for the women who came before me.

07:09
So what did it take to find that inner voice and speak up? It took becoming willing to break the attachment to the things that staying silent was protecting, those things that staying silent was cocooning and protecting in that bubble. They fueled my drinking and I had to let them go. I had to learn to release things such as my old habit of keeping everything hidden because the idea of being seen as a person with an addiction was paralyzing. I had to let go of the idea that a person with an addiction was not worthy of love and support because I 100% bought into that stigma. Today I understand that whether you are actively struggling with your addiction on day one or day a million, you are as equally worthy of love and support.

07:58
Back then I did not understand that, believing that if I could do more at work for others, get more degrees, get more accolades, that I would have a higher value as a person. I had this idea stuck in my head that working harder at everything but myself would offset how poorly I felt about my drinking, which is not true. I had to release my unhealthy relationship with my brother. They often say blood is thicker than water, while family is not thicker than my peace. I had to learn that settling for breadcrumbs in romantic relationships was something I had to stop doing and let go of because I didn’t think I was worthy of anything better. I had to let go of my career that consumed so much of my time that I could not focus on my recovery and, lastly, I had to let go of worrying what other people thought of me.

09:02
On my day one, which is November 28, 2020, when I realized that I had to clear these things in order to make space for a life of recovery, I decided that it was time to say effort and use my voice. On December 3 of 2020, it wasn’t the journalist who told my story to the world. It was me. I wrote an op-ed article that I published on my terms in a local newspaper, where I told the world exactly who I really was, about my nearly deadly addiction to alcohol, and that I didn’t care anymore what anybody thought of me, because that shame wasn’t going to drown me anymore. I closed that article with the following words from darkness comes light.

09:48
Each day, as I go through this process of choosing life, of choosing to stay sober just for another day, I know I made the best decision ever. My dream is to attain long-term sobriety and I believe one day I will. But just for today, I choose to live in recovery until I fall asleep. I will fight my alcoholism daily. I no longer live in fear of anyone trying to out me. There were times this year I felt ready to die, but here I stand to tell my story of choosing to live. I will live a good life. I will have a family, find peace and still be of service to others, just not in the way I had planned. My mother has a saying in Spanish uno pone y ellos dispone, meaning we can have one plan, but God will have another plan, and I accept that as my journey. And so today I stand proud of who I am and embrace all parts of me. My recovery will no longer be a secret. Instead, it is my story to share, to tell others that we all deserve a fighting chance at a good life, no matter how many times giving up feels like it’s the only way out.

11:09
So I close my article with that piece, and I’m not telling you all here that you need to write newspaper articles and tell the world your business, not what I’m saying. What I am saying is that, in order to find your voice, first, I want you to recognize what role not speaking up has played in your life. What has not speaking up blocked you from Silence may have served the women before you or people before you. Let’s not deny those facts, and I challenge you today to face another truth you are not the women before you and you do not have to do things the way they did to survive and to thrive. What is one way that you will clean your voice as you move into the next phase of your journey after today? Is it a commitment to tell at least one person a day what you’re feeling? Will it be a plan to share in a recovery support group meeting? Do you have a community already picked up for you to participate in, or do you need to find one? What about journaling? Have you put a pen to paper lately? Today’s world will not read your mind and present you with the support you need on a silver platter. Every woman’s journey is going to be different, but at the center of every woman’s journey in recovery is the force of a woman who decided to be the change that she deserved. Thank you again for your time tonight and I’m wishing you all the success in the future.

12:33
So that was the talk that I gave at the graduation and it felt really really good to have kind of like that version of my story. I have been taking writing classes myself to really build on my writing craft, and so that that was very it just felt really good and soothing and healing to the soul. Again, reminders on Christmas Eve I will be doing my free writing workshop. So if you haven’t done that before with me, I totally invite you to come check it out. You can register on my site, bottomlesstosobercom. On December 31st I am doing a self-forgiveness workshop as well, just kind of again having offerings during the holidays, because I know holidays can be tough. And then, of course, you’re always welcome to check out one-to-one coaching and schedule a consultation for that as well.

13:22
So with that, and the funny thing too, speaking of writing, if you noticed, I did pull parts of my previously written story to kind of redo it. So again, it’s just been a really, really, really fun to play around with things I’ve previously written and remaster them, so to speak. So with that, have a lovely day. I hope to see you at some of my upcoming workshops and in the meantime, take care of yourselves and each other. Bye, hey. If you are enjoying what you are listening to, I invite you to subscribe and share the podcast, but also go to my website, bottomlesstosobercom, and find out other opportunities to work with me, from free workshops to writing classes to one-to-one life coaching opportunities. You can schedule a free consultation for that. Everything is available at bottomlesstosober.com. See you then.

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Link to Spotify

In this episode:

I reflect on my personal experience with addiction and how storytelling helped me after years of keeping my drinking a secret as a teacher. I share my viral op-ed article, which was published in the Louisville Courier-Journal, and got me on Red Table Talk. I touch on the fear and shame surrounding addiction, reminding you that if you ever feel alone, you’re not. I also discuss some resources to learn more about addiction beyond the disease model, which is frequently presented in treatment facilities.

Resources:

Black Friday Discounts on Programs at Bottomless to Sober

Recommended Reads:

Unbroken by Maia Szalavitz

The Biology of Desire by Marc Lewis

Transcript:

00:02 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Hey everyone, happy Thanksgiving, if you celebrate. I’m recording this on Thanksgiving morning and I’m planning on making this go live the same day, essentially for the fact that I know today can be really hard for a lot of us. I have a history, a complicated history, with Thanksgiving myself, and I just wanted to make sure that I could help as much as possible whether I’m leading meetings, putting out a podcast episode, just creating different touch points for people to feel connected to other folks and so the cool thing, too, is that my sober anniversary will be on Tuesday, the 28th. It will be three years since I last drank, and it’s also going to be the anniversary of me publishing my op-ed article that went in the Louisville Courier Journal. That went viral. That will also be the third anniversary of that in the next two weeks as well, and so actually, I want to share that op-ed with you guys, because if you haven’t read it, it is a first. It was courageous as hell because I was maybe three days sober at the time that I wrote it. I got sober on November 28th and this went live in the newspaper on December 3rd. So to give you that quick turnaround of how quickly I knew in my heart that I needed to get my story out. And I’m not saying that you need to get your story out in the same format, but I do want to speak to the power of healing that storytelling does provide us right. It’s just that power of connection, the strength and breaking stigmas and breaking the shame that really can keep us locked in silence and trapped, especially for me as an educator. So I want to go ahead and read that and also give you that heads up.

01:33
A lot of you know that I teach a writing program several times a year. It’s the six week writing for healing program. Because of good old Black Friday, I’m like you know what, let me go ahead and do a discount on that. So I’m offering that at 50% off If you sign up through Monday, the 27th. You can do that on my website, bottomless to sobercom. Then the other program that I’m offering at 50% off is my New Year’s Eve workshop, the self forgiveness workshop that I’m holding. That one is only $7.50. And we’re going to do 90 minutes of some pretty deep work on ourselves, talking about different tools and strategies, so that we can start the new year loving on ourselves a little bit more, because, especially if you struggle with addiction or have a history of it, that self love is not the easiest thing to come about. So putting that out there, take advantage. Those are both live. Those discounts are live through the end of Monday, november 27. So just that heads up, and with that, let me go ahead and share my story with you all. And again, this is the type of writing that we would be doing in that six week program, whether it’s that you’re actually writing it to share it or you just want to get your story down on paper so that it’s not like on your chest holding you down right. So with that, my story is called my Darkest Secret.

02:47
A Kentucky teacher of the year share story of addiction and recovery, published on December 3 of 2020 in the Louisville Career Journal. How would you like it if I outed you right now to everyone on Twitter? Maybe I should go ahead and do that. At the time, a friend threatened in the middle of an argument to out me to the public. They threatened me with telling the world what my darkest, most painful secret was.

03:16
My name is Jessica and I’m a recovering alcoholic. For years, I’ve struggled to balance my life with my addiction. To cope with guilt. I worked diligently to be the best teacher, the best employee, the best at everything. Because it helped me sleep at night. I spent years at happy hours counting others drinks so I could pretend to drink like a normal person, while aching to go home to isolate and imbibe. I hid my disease from everyone possible.

03:47
The very idea of someone telling my story without my consent was terrifying. Fear was crippling. How would others think of me? Would I lose my job? Would my students and their families turn their backs on me? My family and friends? What about my mother? She’s always been so proud of me. My sister and I are her American dream children. I’m a first generation American. I grew up in one of Brooklyn’s toughest neighborhoods, excelled academically and later became a nationally recognized, award winning educator as a 2019 Kentucky State Teacher of the Year. What would my mom say to me if I was outed? I’m not the first in my family to struggle with addiction, though I am the first to be in recovery. My mother’s disdain for those relatives’ choices was always evident. Some have died, some live in unfortunate living circumstances. Would she use the same language she’s used to describe them to talk about me? Would she look at me in disgust In December of 2019, I was struggling so much under the pressure of a new position and teacher of the year responsibilities that I had to relapse.

04:59
At that time I came out only to my family because I spent the holidays in a rehab facility. My family was blindsided but thankfully, through everything since, they have always stepped forward and believed in my ability to recover. I remember returning from winter break sitting in a faculty circle. When asked how our breaks were, I immediately fell apart. I had spent my holiday hospitalized and couldn’t tell a soul in the room where I was or how I was truly feeling. I was so ashamed of who I was. I was so disgusted with myself. I thought I could not tell a single beloved colleague about the significant part of my life I have to struggle with daily. I felt so alone. I had not accepted that I was sick.

05:44
I continued with my sobriety journey, feeling isolated, knowing my family was far away. I hated that. When I needed my mother’s hug or my sister’s hand on my shoulder, all I could get was a phone call. I was able to lean on my then-boyfriend, as he was also in recovery and understood the daily work it took to get sober and stay sober. Then COVID-19 came and I’m going to pause for a second and just give you because I didn’t do it at the beginning of this episode content morning. I do talk about tragic death. So if that is not something that you want to listen to on Thanksgiving or whenever you are accessing this episode, I highly recommend that you skip this episode. Otherwise you may continue to listen. Then COVID-19 came.

06:37
As the virus reached Kentucky, I assumed we were going to have an extended spring break. I anticipated an excellent opportunity to catch up on work. I hoped to build further on my relationship, get some well-needed rest and have an excuse to order food from local restaurants. Quickly, the truth was becoming apparent. This quarantine was not going to end anytime soon. I began missing my old life. The quarantine shattered my routine that was so vital to recovery. This new normal that was encroaching became terrifying as the many restrictions further physically removed him and me from our support systems. We entered grocery stores, fearing infection, just to get necessities, scrambling to get essential items such as toilet paper.

07:26
Life became increasingly depressing for the two of us and he relapsed. He struggled, he cried tears of shame and guilt, tears that I had experienced so often. One morning he said he would run out to the gas station and he would come right back. He never did. I went looking for him at his apartment and knocked no answer. I called his phone. I could hear it ring, but he didn’t answer. I banged on his door. I yelled, but no response. I grabbed a fire extinguisher to beat his door down. A neighbor called the police on me and when they arrived and got the apartment door open, I heard there is a dead male.

08:16
Everything was a blur until the coroner let me in. I saw him lifeless and there went my sobriety. At that moment I thought my dreams of a future vanished, dreams of marriage in a family just gone. I was utterly devastated and horrified. I couldn’t have my family rush over to help me because of COVID-19’s travel restrictions at the time, and since then I had gone back and forth fighting the battle of my addiction to alcohol. At the time of writing this, it was early December of 2020. So since the spring of 2020 to then, I had experienced seven hospitalizations, with stays from three up to 35 days.

09:00
My summer of 2020 was a complete blurred wreck that almost killed me, and I would have accepted that fate at that time. However, each time I fell, I was able to get back up with other support and as the fog cleared, I tried my best to move forward. Yes, the grief was too much and I would fall again. Thankfully, covid-19 allowed for remote work, so I decided to risk travel to leave Louisville and stay with my family. I sought their help because I could no longer try to do this recovery work daily on my own.

09:35
Ever since I’ve started to feel better, I have had more solid days than rocky ones. Each time schools were possibly gearing up to return to in-person classes, I noticed that panic filled me. The idea of being forced to return to Louisville for work permanently triggered my trauma. I tried once to go back and it was a failed experiment. I knew that I narrowly escaped death over the summer. Going back to Louisville would have set me up to die by prioritizing my career, so I finally decided finally to truly embrace my recovery. I decided to let go of this beautiful thing called teaching that has consumed every part of my being, and resigned.

10:19
My last day is December 4th. Do I love Louisville Absolutely? Is it a place full of trauma for me? Yes. Did I ever think my 13 year career teaching would end like this? No, however, from darkness comes light.

10:38
Each day, as I go through this process of choosing life, of choosing to stay sober just for another day, I know I made the best decision ever. My dream is to attain long-term sobriety and I believe one day I will. But just for today, I choose to live in recovery until I fall asleep. I will fight my alcoholism daily. I no longer live in fear of anyone trying to out me. There were times this year I felt ready to die, but here I stand to tell my story of choosing to live. I will live a good life. I will have a family, find peace and still be of service to others, just not in the way I had planned. My mother has a saying in Spanish uno pone, dios dispone, meaning we have one plan, but God can have other paths to our goals, which I accept as my journey. Today, I stand proud of who I am and embrace all parts of me. My recovery will no longer be my secret. Instead, it is my story to share, to tell others that we all deserve a fighting chance at a good life, no matter how many times giving up feels like the only way out. I hope and pray.

11:53
If anyone gets anything out of my story. It’s the following. Number one death is never a solution to any problem we have, no matter how overwhelming it may feel. Number two always lean on others for help. We don’t have to suffer in life alone. Number three recovery is possible. If you fall eight times, get up nine, fight for your life. You are worth it. And number four, which I have changed my stance on since reading tons of neuroscience literature, but I’m gonna go ahead and read it.

12:31
Number four addiction regardless of the substance is a disease period. No one judges a person with diabetes. Don’t let anyone devalue you for your condition. 標. And that’s my story. So first I want to thank you for listening to it, right, and I’ve got to say that when I read that story back years after it’s been written, first, I’m grateful for progress, right, just in that last bullet where I say addiction regardless of the substance is a disease period, with such firm belief. At that time I was repeating what I had been taught in treatment facilities, and in the treatment facilities that’s pretty much the only model that they function off of, which is the disease model. And to be fair treatment facilities, they have to get paid by insurance companies, and health insurance companies aren’t paying for things if they aren’t medically necessary, right? So, yeah, addiction is absolutely going to be categorized as a disease. In order for my health insurance to pay for my stays when I was in treatment facilities and in my case, was I sick? Absolutely, I had alcoholic liver disease, right, my liver was shot. So, yes, I was sick, I was very, very sick.

13:51
But I do have recommendations for a couple of resources that have helped me sort of reframe how I look at addiction, and I don’t necessarily look at it as just a disease, right, for me, I look at it as an incredibly powerful habit that is learned through repeated actions having to do with the substances, right, and so I’ll put a couple of books that I do recommend in the episode note so that you can kind of check it out and make a decision for yourself. Right, and that’s the beauty of this whole journey, right, the journey starts when you stop drinking, and so when I wrote this, it had been a few days since I had stopped drinking, right, and to see kind of where my beliefs are in terms of what addiction is three years later, that’s really powerful. But the other part that, to me, is really powerful is just this assertion that I made early on, right, that, like I understood and I had come to accept that the path that I thought I was going to be on was definitely not the path that was meant for me. And as hard as that can be to accept sometimes and if you may be sitting there as you’re preparing some food or you’re getting ready to maybe just sit around and have the day to yourself, right, that acceptance is so, so powerful because it’s just the path of least resistance and the path of least pain. And so, no, I’m no longer a classroom teacher, right, like now.

15:14
In the daytime I work out of college, sort of like in an entry level position in a residence life job, right. And then at night I like spending my time coaching people, I spend my time running meetings and I do all this other really powerful, meaningful work. It took a lot of humbling, you know. My recovery definitely humbled me quite a bit because, yeah, I went from state teacher of the year to working at a tutoring company to now being like entry level at a college, and you know what it’s fine and you know why it’s fine Because I’m sober and I’m free to do whatever the hell I wanted to when I was drinking. Sure, I was at the top of my career in the position that I was in and I was miserable and I was unhappy and I was constantly drunk and sick and making myself sicker every day. So, you know, when I read this piece, it’s just very powerful to see the transformation that came since then.

16:07
And I really do believe that writing this piece was the springboard for me to really, or the catalyst for me to really just seize the different opportunities to grow myself and really help other people as well. And so, with that being said, if you have been thinking like man, I would like to write my story, right, you don’t have to write to publish. I wrote to publish in the newspaper, but you don’t have to right. Sometimes just getting it off of your chest, getting it out of your head, can be incredibly healing as well, and I have had lots of folks. You know this is going to be the fifth time that I run this class and in the first four rounds, like I have had plenty of folks who take what they write. Then they take it back to their therapist, right, like it’s an awesome opportunity to bring content back to the professional that you’re working with to really help you do a deep dive here, and so, again, I would totally take advantage. It’s a 50% discount, so it’s $62.50.

17:03
If you sign up through Monday, the dates are on my website at bottomlesstosobercom and you can see the different dates. If you can’t make any dates, the sessions are recorded and will be sent back to you. So just that heads up as well. And then again, like I said, we also are doing that 90 day self-forgiveness workshop on New Year’s Eve, right. So kind of give you some tangible strategies to practice when you want to beat yourself over that and you’re frustrated with yourself and you don’t want to practice self-compassion. You’ll have some solid ideas for what to do with that kind of energy when it comes up.

17:38
So with that, I am wishing you a happy holiday, if you choose to celebrate. Yes, this world is on fire and sometimes it can feel very hard to celebrate anything when you know you turn on the news or you turn on your phone and things are falling apart. I also want to recognize that things have always been falling apart. It’s just that the amount of access that we have to news and to media today is overwhelming, right, and so if a part of you is like why should I bother trying, you know, because the world’s gone to shit. My invitation to you is to think about what. Will you be contributing to this world if you’re drunk Right, if you look at what is within your spheres of control.

18:25
You can’t control what’s happening in the world you individually, but you can’t control not making things worse and you drunk you under the influence of other substances. That is, you not helping in any circumstance. And somebody needs you sober. It might not be somebody across the globe who needs you sober, but it may be a loved one, it may be a colleague, it may be a friend, it may be that person that loves to hear your shares on Zoom. They need you sober. So, even if you’re not able to do it for yourself for today, think about somebody who has thanked you for something recently and do it for them until you’re able to do it back for yourself. So, with that, have a lovely rest of your day, take care of yourselves, and I will talk to you on the next one.

m Thanks so much. Have a great one.

---

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Link to Spotify

In this episode:

Kiola Raines takes us beyond getting sober. As a Black woman, her recovery journey unfolds against a backdrop of unique challenges that fuel her mission to establish safe havens for individuals like herself. Join us as we explore the distinct hurdles Black women encounter when seeking support for addiction, from the glaring lack of representation to the enduring impact of the “war on drugs.” Kiola not only sheds light on these issues but also takes proactive steps to rewrite the narrative and dismantle beliefs that could impede recovery. Check out this insightful conversation that goes beyond the surface, delving into the transformative work of reshaping the recovery landscape for Black women and other women of color.

Resources:

Kiola’s Site – KiolaRaines.com

Follow Kiola on Instagram

Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction by Maia Szalavitz

Stack ’n’ Days Podcast by Ray Donovan

Transcript:

00:05 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
I’m Jessica Dueñas, and this is Bottomless to Sober, the podcast where I talk about anything and everything related to life since my transition from bottomless drinking to a sober life. Hey everyone, so today I’m really excited to have my fellow colleague and friend, Kiola Raines on the episode. I really just wanted to have her on, so just have a conversation about sharing her story. I think Kiola is a really powerful story that a lot of women can benefit from all women, but also women of color, considering the different options for what may work for them in recovery, and so I am honored to have a busy mom, fitness coach and also recovery meeting facilitator on here. So thank you, Kiola, for coming on. I appreciate you.

00:51 – Kiola Raines (Guest)
Yes, I’m glad to be here, looking forward to it Coming in straight from the gym, eating my post-workout meal and then taking my son to a birthday party. So you covered all of the things. Yeah, you covered all the things that I’ll be doing today?

01:07 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Yes, basically. So first, if there’s anybody on listening who has not heard of who Kiola is, can you introduce yourself a little bit and just give the listeners a background of your story?

01:18 – Kiola Raines (Guest)
Yes, I just did a presentation yesterday and the woman said lots of folks in our class have heard about you. You have got such a good reputation. I was like good, because if you met me seven or 10 years ago, I don’t know if I would have had such a great reputation. So I come into the recovery world with four years and 10 months almost 11 months in my journey and I am really happy to be able to share a fitness and nutrition foundation with one-on-one clients that I work with in a peer recovery relationship and then also sharing that knowledge in communities as well. So my education background is in kinesiology. I have a bachelor’s and a master’s in sports and exercise psychology and I spent about 15, almost 17 years actually now that I think of it in gyms, in group exercise classes, doing one-on-one training, running boot camp classes and achieving what I thought was my ultimate dream, which was opening a gym, and that was an amazing experience. But I also was not prepared in my sobriety to take on a feat like that, and now I get to share all of the things that I wanted to share in that space in a community that’s even more near and dear to my heart. So not to say that I don’t have a passion for sharing fitness and nutrition education with everyone. I never in my wildest dreams thought that I would be able to do what I love to do and pair that in sobriety and recovery. And, looking into the new year, I’m definitely being called back into the fitness world and into the coaching world in that aspect, which will drive my programming a lot more geared towards people in recovery still, but really focusing on implementing movement and nourishment so that you can have a strong foundation in your recovery.

03:25
What else? And I have a three-year-old son and an awesome partner, a sibling to four folks. I’ve got three sisters and a brother. My parents met at Disneyland. That’s always a fun little random fact about me. They’ve been together since they were 15. And I guess that’s my first experience with recovery is watching my dad in his sobriety recovery journey. He’s got over 25 years and one of my foundations and values is family, love, love, love, family, love. To be able to have such a supportive family as well.

03:58 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
That’s awesome and congrats to your dad. I’ve seen his content pop up on occasion. He’s like I can see where you get the motivational, inspirational vibes from, yeah.

04:08 – Kiola Raines (Guest)
That is him.

04:10 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
So you mentioned that your first experience in recovery was actually witnessing your dad, or what motivated you to actually get in recovery. Was your issue with alcohol showing up the same way that they did with your dad, or did it look different?

04:28 – Kiola Raines (Guest)
It looked much different because I was single, with no kids, so I could go deeper and deeper and deeper, Not to say without anybody concerned about it, but there’s less concern when you don’t have children and a household to upkeep and all of those responsibilities. But my family did reach out. They had an intervention that didn’t go so well, Also lots of individual conversations of concern, and so for me what sparked it this time around was the full on moment of clarity. I deserve better. I know I can do better, and if I’ve achieved what I’ve achieved so far while drinking and misusing alcohol and other substances, then I just had that conversation with myself. Imagine what your life could be like if you just get this out of the way.

05:22
But that wasn’t the first time I tried to get sober. Not at all. My first drink was at 15. And until I got into recovery I assumed everybody’s. First I just thought isn’t that what everyone does? You get into high school, you get a little access to it and you just kind of experiment, and from then on it was just something that I thought was part of my social life, part of my personality, and I had that first really bad hangover and did the I’ll never drink again thing.

05:55
And then, in 2015, got a DUI. But this is all after a decade over a decade of whoops. That might have been a little too much or, oh, I don’t know if I need to keep it up at this rate. A lot of little signs and experiences that I realized were telling me you’re doing this in a completely different way than your friends. And my parents don’t even drink. I didn’t grow up in a household with alcohol In my dad’s substance. He never brought it in the house or anything like that, but for me it wasn’t. I need to do this for my family, like with my dad, it was. I need to do this for me because I deserve better and I know that I can do better. So they were prompted for different things, but I will say losing relationships with my family members was a part of, was a part of the reason that I knew I needed to recover.

06:56 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
So kind of leaning into that next part, what were some of the obstacles that you faced in recovering? So I mean, I think one thing that sounds like it may have been helpful in your family was that your dad was actually a model of someone being in recovery, Culturally speaking. What’s been your experience about the narrative around? The conversation of mental health and addiction, and what barriers did you face in the beginning when you were trying to get help, if you did?

07:22 – Kiola Raines (Guest)
Yeah.

07:23
So ironically my dad doesn’t. He doesn’t consider himself to be in recovery. I know that he is, but he’s one of those people that was like I will I don’t want to call myself an addict and so he wasn’t going to regular meetings or anything like that. I just I saw the stone cold like hard quit, I can quit. I knew this on my own and we didn’t talk about it. That was a huge barrier. I knew what was happening and my mom shared at one point one of the weekends he had, you know, disappeared on his little weekend getaway. My mom shared what was happening and she, I said where’s dad? And she said you know what? I don’t know where he is, but you can ask him when he gets home. So she was at that point of like I’m sick of making up stories, I’m not going to tell these kids anymore lies. And he she made him face the fire himself.

08:21
So that was when I understood drugs addiction and I saw his behavior changing over time. I would notice that was longer amount of periods of time between his disappearing, which was that was kind of a good thing, like okay, he’s doing this less and less and then one day it just not happening anymore. But because we didn’t talk about that, I didn’t quite understand how the whole thing worked. Like, how did sobriety work? Do you just stop and you start going to church? That’s what we did, that’s what he did, and so that was also a barrier. We didn’t talk about it and then I thought the solution was church and it was also a different substance. So those were challenges.

09:04
The benefit is that I knew it was possible. I knew that it was possible to break free from addiction or substance misuse. I just didn’t know exactly how to do it. So my only outlet, the only thing I thought was available, was 12 step, and when I got a DUI, I walked into that space because it’s required in California. You get a DUI, you have to get a breathalyzer in your car. I mean thousands, tens of thousands of dollars in fines and fees and you have to go to 10 AA meetings. And I walked into that 12 step room again with this message kind of from my dad that, like I don’t go to those meetings because I’m not an addict anymore and I’m not going to go up there and say I’m an addict. You know and this is my story he believes that he’s been delivered from addiction. He’s free from it and he is a former addict.

10:01
So I already had that kind of mindset and I went in to the room and my sister was with me my younger sister but I looked around and it was me and her and we were the only people of color in that room and I was like, oh hell, no, I’m not doing this, like this is not, this is not it for me. And that was another barrier that I stayed. Who knows, you know what would have happened, but I just wasn’t ready to share my deepest, darkest secrets. I wasn’t ready to share my energy. I also just wasn’t ready really to quit and that kind of turned me away.

10:40
I lasted eight months on my own, doing my own thing. There was some benefit that I got from the alcohol education classes that I had to attend, but I didn’t have any community. I had some support from my family, which was great, but I didn’t have any tools, and so that was the next barrier. And because I didn’t see myself in that room, because I had this message from my dad that was different than what I believe about myself now, and because we didn’t talk about the sobriety piece, it was just kind of like this understood thing that was happening. Those were several obstacles for me.

11:22 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
So I have a question. I know back then your dad didn’t talk about his journey. I know now that you’re so open with it and you know, I know that you have a really tight relationship with him.

11:31
Have you ever like? Asked him about back then, like if he had ever looked for spaces? Cause I’m curious and, based off what you’re saying, I’m like well, did Keel, does that ever go? Maybe into a 12 step room? And he was like I don’t see anybody. It looks like me. So I’m going to go to church, Cause at least people look like me in church. I’m just curious what happened there.

11:49 – Kiola Raines (Guest)
That’s it Exactly. And I didn’t learn until I was 30 days into recovery. So, January of 2019, January 1st, I walked into a space and was just like help. You know, I don’t want to leave this room without some kind of support and I started off really on fire, you know, for that program and ended up moving back home, you know, had no car, no money, was this at the bottom, bottom, bottom, and because I got to see him every day, I was on, I was on his ass like dad. So how come you never went to, you know, these meetings? How come you never did this? How come you never made a mess with us? How come you and he’s like actually and he, you know, pulled out some stories. He’s like this is what happened for me.

12:40
He had gone to rehab two or three times and he had gone to NA meetings and CA meetings and he was experiencing people outside of the meetings trying to sell him his drug of choice, because they knew that everybody at that meeting probably wanted it, you know. And so he experienced that. He experienced pushback. When he would name his higher power and say who he believed in and what he believed in, he got pushed back from that he got pushed back from not wanting to call himself an addict, and so I learned a lot. And I joke with him I’m like, well, this would have been helpful, dad, 20 years ago, If you would have been helpful. We talked about this then I would have had a little bit more understanding of what you experienced. And we also talked about the reason that he chose to go into his religion. That is where he found his peace, that’s where he found his power. Through prayer, through joining the choir, he found his community. That way he found his ministry in coaching, specifically football and track, so ministering to young men. He felt very called to be the father figure or the coaching figure to try to steer these people in the right direction. And that’s. These are things that I had no idea. I thought my dad was coaching to avoid coming home. I thought that he was like too too, had too big of an ego to say he was an addict. I didn’t understand that he had gone through all of these experiences and I pulled out those conversations, which also allowed me and him to have a closer relationship and him to be a part of my recovery.

14:34
Now he’ll come on Any meeting. I ask him to come on, but he’s talking about his recovery much more, which I think is I think he really needed to do that. I think there was a lot of shame for him and me being so proud and open about like I have no shame I mean, you already know like I am proudly in recovery. I’m so happy that I got sober. It’s the best thing that ever happened to me, and I think I’m showing him that we don’t have to be ashamed, we don’t need to be feel guilty or ashamed that we fell into a cycle with substances that are highly addictive. It’s not like we chose to become addicted, you know, like TLC, it’s not our fault. It is our responsibility, though, and I’m showing him that you don’t have to have this dirty little secret. You can walk proud that you are sober now that you are in recovery now. So I learned a lot in those conversations. They just I wish they had happened sooner. I’ll say that for sure.

15:33 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Yeah, and you know, I mean I’m so grateful for that kind of like new opportunity that you’ve been giving your dad, right, Because it goes to show that you know we learn from them, they can also learn from us. And also it’s just a beautiful image of like literally just breaking the cycle, Because I feel like that’s the thing in a lot of our communities we don’t talk about things, we go through the worst of things and we have to put up these masks of being like strong and we’ve got this, but there’s so much help to be had when we open up and share our stories. So you’re a mom now and my question is obviously your son Ziggy he’s only. You said he’s three, right, he’s three, yes. So as he gets older, what is that going to look like, like the conversations that you’ll have with him?

16:17 – Kiola Raines (Guest)
Yeah, any and everything, I hope. Whatever he wants to know, I want to do that opposite of what my parents did. My parents both of them, especially my mom, will say they were in full on panic survival mode. My mom was trying to protect her kids and so she didn’t want to share too much. My dad was ashamed of his actions and ashamed of his addiction, so he would kind of just hang his head down when he came home from those weekends and reach out to mentor other kids because he thought we didn’t like him which was sometimes true, but we were hurt and because they were in that panic survival mode, they just didn’t share a lot of things that were going on with us and then they dove into their religion, which also brought on shame and guilt about so many things. I want to do the opposite. I want to let my son feel free to ask me any questions me or Nathaniel and I want to keep an open line of conversation, age appropriate. I’m happy to share with him what I’ve experienced. He’s going to grow up hearing the word sobriety, hearing the word recovery. He’s going to grow up in a household where there isn’t any alcohol and he we’re also on a different topic. We’re also open about letting him choose his own spirituality and his religious beliefs.

17:50
So I grew up in a Christian household. My partner is Jewish. We agreed that we’ll present both of the things to him. We’ll celebrate all of the things and let him decide what works for him. So that’s very different than either one of our households. We were not encouraged to have our own spirituality, even just the sex conversation. Nathaniel’s parents didn’t talk to him about it. My parents were like no, no, no, don’t do that, that’s bad and I don’t want to do any of those. I want to change the narrative in our household to open conversations, ask whatever needs to be asked. Teenagers get a little awkward. They don’t necessarily want to talk to their parents about everything, but I want to make my son know that I’m available or his dad is available, or, if he doesn’t want to talk to us, we’ll find you a resource that you can talk to. But no shame and guilt and fear around these conversations. I just want him to be curious. I really do want to have a child that’s open to asking questions.

18:51 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Yeah, and that’s so powerful and I’m so grateful to hear that that’s an opportunity that you are going to give your son, because a lot of us our parents generation did not encourage the curiosity or the questioning right.

19:03
It was very much just do as I say or you know, maybe not even as I do, but do what I say. There is something you touched on. You talked about survival mode, which I think is an important question. There’s been in spaces where I’ve heard people say well, you know, the decisions that our parents or their parents made were made in survival mode, but we’re not in survival mode anymore, so we can be free to loosen up in certain ways.

19:29
I would say yes and no, because I think, that, as people of color, especially say black people in America, there are times when, especially when there’s police violence or any other like systemic inequities happening, that people might still feel or genuinely actually be under a threat. Right, and so when people like I feel, like sometimes I like some of my one on one clients, like, let’s say, if something really harsh happens on the news, their first go to is why bother, jessica? Why should I bother being sober when this world is so fucked up? Right?

20:04 – Kiola Raines (Guest)
Yeah.

20:05 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
I’m a black woman and such and such just happened on the news. Why should I try to get sober? Why should I even bother? And so I guess my message, my question for you is like what’s your response for people, whether they are people of color or there are allies right, like when the world is falling apart, like how do you respond to it and stay focused on your recovery?

20:28 – Kiola Raines (Guest)
Yeah, oh, that’s a good one. I definitely was used to be in that this world is shit, let’s get faded, because, you know, let’s just stay faded to not think about it and ignore it and avoid it. I was very much in that cycle. I was just so sad and so upset and so broken. Sandra Bland’s death, murder, I should say it really impacted me because at that time I realized I would have, that could have been me. I was that feisty person. You know I was smoking cigarettes at the time. Everything she did and that could have been me. I don’t need to put the cigarette out this like I just it hit me really hard and I did spiral.

21:09
You know, there was a dark time for me in that, realizing the world is so dark, in recovery I have truly found serenity and peace. It’s something that I I didn’t realize. What a gift it would be to have a peaceful mindset and to lean into calmness and serenity. And I would encourage folks to focus on being the light in the dark world. You know, yes, there’s darkness, there’s war, there has. I don’t think there’s been a time since the beginning of humanity where there wasn’t some kind of war going on or some kind of fight going on or struggle or hunger or death destruction. It hasn’t happened. It’s a part of humanity and I think it’s okay to give space to honor people’s lives being lost and honor that that is happening and acknowledge it and then to fuel your fire to be a light. Show up in a way that is peaceful, show up in a way that is encouraging. In your own small space, you can be impactful in your community. You can be impactful in your household, being a peaceful person, and I have definitely switched from the doom scroll and the deep dive and looking at the pictures and looking at the videos and looking at all of that stuff, I just don’t.

22:41
I just don’t look. I know what’s happening, I’ll hear it, you know one of my family members is going to mention it or someone’s going to say something about it and I acknowledge oh man, yeah, that’s really tough. So the best thing I can do today is stay sober, which I feel like is an act of revolution. It is a rebellious act. To be sober and be clear minded.

23:00
Rather than numbing myself or numbing ourselves and staying on that low vibration. The best thing we can do is become higher with our vibration and our energy and be the smile that someone sees that day, be the light, be the helping hand, be the peace that someone can experience. That’s the gift that we have in sobriety, rather than adding to the negative energy. And I really want to go towards being more positive and being light. It’s not easy, it’s not, and I also thought about toxic positivity like, oh well, there’s a war, you know that’s okay. No, there’s a war, and that’s fucking sucks. People are dying every day. That’s horrible, and the best thing I can do while I’m here on this planet is be peaceful and be a light and be encouraging, be positive.

23:49 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Yeah, definitely Like one of the things that I will always share and I think like that’s the same thing, like we have always 100% been living in unprecedented times. It’s just that nowadays we have the technology to access it like 24 seven and be connected, but sadly, humanity it can be a very like a source of beautiful things and also a source of really dark spaces and horrible, horrific things that you know, you’re spot on with that and I think like that’s the same thing that I tell people, right that look at what is in your control and focus on that.

24:22
Maybe we are not able to suddenly execute world peace, but you know what? We sure as hell aren’t contributing to the population of the earth if we’re trashed right. And so we can at least maintain sobriety. Then at least there is the opportunity a for us. Like you said, you can make an impact within your home, you can make an impact online, you can make an impact with another human in some way positively, but you can’t do that if you are just gone into the oblivion of substances like you just can. That’s right.

24:48 – Kiola Raines (Guest)
Yep.

24:50 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
So the other thing that I guess I just wanted to ask you in terms of recovery as a black woman, right when, what are barriers that you’re seeing for women, other women of color, whether it’s black women or just black and brown women?

25:05 – Kiola Raines (Guest)
what are?

25:05 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
barriers you’re seeing and what are some recommendations that you might have for any woman of color who is like listening to this and kind of exploring what her next step might be?

25:17 – Kiola Raines (Guest)
Yeah, barriers are when you walk into a lot of in person spaces. Depending on where you are, you will likely be the only one in the room and if you grew up experiencing that like I did, I grew up as the only black person in my classroom from kindergarten to about seventh grade and the last thing I wanted to do was experience that awkwardness all over again. So that was definitely a barrier. Also, culturally and I know this is true for a lot of Asian cultures, because when we think of people of color, I know a lot of groups there’s black, brown, latin indigenous, and then there’s the Asian Pacific Islander have kind of like a separate, they have that API designation and so I think that group also is missing out on experiencing sobriety because they will walk into a room and be the only one in the room or not feel included in this person of color by pop group, because now there’s a separate designation. That’s a whole separate issue. I think we need spaces together and I think we all need separate spaces to to heal in our own ways to address different cultural challenges. So that’s another barrier, the lumping together plus the separation. It needs a little work, it needs a little attention.

26:42
When I walk into. I say walk into me virtually. So if I go to a virtual meeting, the what? The meetings I’m hosting? 99% white women, 99% white women. Even for white men that might be intimidating because it’s like, wow, is this a women’s group? Nope, this is just. This is just the community. That’s the new age virtual space. Years ago and still in, I think, 12 step, it is predominantly male. In that 12 step space where they made women’s meetings, in that space, smart recovery has started to add on women’s meetings and by pop meetings. But when you walk into or log into a room and there’s 200 people and all the folks that have their cameras on you see me hosting or you hosting, and then that’s it, it’s.

27:35
It makes it challenging to be vulnerable. It makes it challenging to talk about your mistakes, your shortcomings, your character defects, when we know that the media has painted us as defective for many, many years, has painted us as lazy and addicts and or loud and just, you know, not getting the work done that we need to get done. Like we’ve had this negative story being told about us and I’m supposed to go into this space and talk about my personal challenges and in 12 step, you’re not even allowed to bring up race, you’re not even allowed to address the fact that you’re not in the same or your socioeconomic status or the things you’re seeing in the media are affecting your mental health, which is then affecting the relationship with substances. And there are there are not enough spaces specifically for sober black women or black women in that are not just social spaces. I’ll say that there’s one space that is a club, that is more exclusive. I’ll say like a sorority. That’s my experience.

28:50
And then there are some by Poc, 12 step spaces, but you have to search for those. It’s much more challenging just to walk into a space. I’ve gotten lucky and the reason I’m in recovery is because the 12 step space I walked into in my neighborhood and LA was predominantly black and that was the miracle. That was the miracle of the higher power or whatever that was like. We need to make sure that she stays this time. So find a meeting in your community, but if you’re not in a predominantly black community or predominantly Latin or Asian community, you are going to have a hard time. You know walking into spaces and being vulnerable.

29:32 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
You know it’s funny when you were talking about kind of like painting the picture of like the defects quote unquote, the defects of different populations. You know the book I’m going through right now with the book club on the reframe app, it’s Unbroken Brain by Maya Salavitz, and she goes through the history of addiction, specifically legislation. And it’s wild because the first cocaine laws were written during the Jim Crow era to target black folks, under this assumption that black people were the ones predominantly using cocaine. And around the same era there were laws written against opiates because Asian people, there was this association with opiates and Asians, and so there were all these opiate laws written around the same time period.

30:15
And then the other wild fact was that the KKK was a huge proponent of prohibition because of immigrant groups being associated with alcohol consumption. It was really really fast, sad and infuriating but fascinating information because you know when we were talking about it, right, like just this idea that, like you know, for some people it’s. You don’t even realize that that’s the subliminal programming that’s happening to us as a society, that we just start to picture the faces of addiction looking like you or me, just because of like laws that had been written so long ago and it’s just like the. And then you know if you go to the 1980s and the war on drugs really war on people.

30:57
Yeah right, really a war on people. Because now that we have say like, I don’t want to say predominance, I don’t know them stats, but now that we’re seeing, say, opiate addiction impacting so many white Americans, you know, now we’re getting it, the people are getting the opportunities that they need for treatment, whereas, say, in the 1980s, 1990s, when you had the black community getting affected by the crack cocaine epidemic, not the same, the access was jail. That was a treatment. You know, yep, it’s wild.

31:24 – Kiola Raines (Guest)
I’m curious how that what are the responses? Will be in that book club from this book. So you’re dropping gems on them, which is like a beautiful thing for people to see that truth it’s we people of color, specifically black folks in the US have been the picture of addiction, but we have not been the picture of recovery, and that is a huge problem. That’s the reason that I reached out to the creator of the sober summit and I was like look, this is great and I’m so happy you want to make this summit, but this is not the picture of recovery. This is the reason people are not going into spaces, because they log on to a meeting or they walk into a room. They don’t see themselves and so they don’t stay. But we are recovering too. You know, I get to see that.

32:13
That’s one of the reasons I go to that in person meeting I go to is to be reminded that there are black folks surviving and recovering and overcoming, just like everyone else, and it needs to be broadcasted.

32:30
That is something like if I have a project in 2024, it’s to align with the podcast stack in days and and similar to what you’re doing highlight our voices, highlight our stories, highlight our faces. You can see that we are recovering as well and we are not going to stay the picture of addiction. We can be the picture of recovery. And even I mean with the whole war on drugs versus opioid epidemic, it’s like, oh, this is, we need to help these people, we need to solve this disease, this epidemic. But then with crack and black folks even though I mean we could go down a whole rabbit hole with that it was a war on drugs, just the verbiage around it is completely different. So we definitely need to continue talking and sharing. And so I tell my dad, like, don’t be ashamed. Don’t be ashamed because you, speaking about being sober, will help somebody else realize that it’s possible. They see it in you, they can connect to you and your story, your language, all of that stuff.

33:41 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Yeah, and the same thing with your dad, right, like your dad, when he was struggling, he was probably constantly receiving messaging that told him that there was something terribly wrong with him. Yeah, he was lesser than human being because of his addiction, right, and thankfully. I mean the good thing about the internet, right, the bad thing about the internet is that there’s sometimes so much bad information out there. But the good thing about the internet is that, when, say, there’s mainstream recovery programs that aren’t necessarily representative of what recovery can look like, there’s just people like us, regular people in recovery, who are able to speak up and use our voices to really help cast this message far and wide. And for anyone listening the Stacking Days podcast, I’ll put a link to it in the show notes.

34:22
It is a podcast that highlights the stories of people of color in recovery to get a good sense of what recovery can look like from a whole range of perspectives and a whole all sorts of different recovery paths, whether they’re 12 step connected or not. Because the 12 step programs do save many people’s lives because if they didn’t save lives they wouldn’t still exist but they don’t resonate for everyone. So how do you approach 12 step program spaces now? Because you do still attend meetings in person. What does that look like? How do you stay true to say what works for you while attending different programs meetings?

34:57 – Kiola Raines (Guest)
Yeah, first I will say me and you are not regular people in recovery. We are rock stars. We are rock stars in recovery and humble also. We know we take it one day at a time, but I think some people really dive into this work and want to share it. There are a lot of people who will keep it for themselves, which is great and fine. I’m not saying one is better or worse. And then there are teachers and coaches and leaders. We cannot help but want to share and spread this message.

35:28
So now, when I go into 12 step spaces, I’m much more confident than I was. Obviously, at 30 days and 60 days I thought this was the only way and I need to just do what they say. I didn’t know about smart recovery, I didn’t. Reframe didn’t exist, tlc didn’t exist, silver black girls club didn’t exist and I didn’t know there were spaces like celebrate recovery and women for sobriety. I thought if I don’t do this, I’m going to be fucked up forever. Basically, now, fast forward.

35:58
Years later I put myself out there in the social media world and I learned so much like oh wow, I can use therapy, I can use fitness, I can use nutrition, I can create my own social circle of sober people who will share their tools with me. I can participate in virtual spaces and I built my own program or building, still building. I’m learning things all the time of my own program. So I walk into that space very confident because I, in January I’ll be five years sober and even though they a lot of people don’t remember me because it was three years in between since the last time they saw me, if I go up and share and I say I’m four years sober, they’re like how, who’s your sponsor? What is this miracle of sobriety that you speak of? So I’ll share. But I honestly do much more listening in that, in that space I go in and unless I’m called on or there’s, you know, nobody is sharing. I listen, listen, listen and take in the information and the stories, the reminders of why I stay on this path and I don’t go there to campaign for my journey and my path. I go there with respect, you know, drink a little coffee, maybe have a donut, and just I. Honestly I’m sitting in that room like I mean I wish I could record it because I am just like giddy, big old smile ear to ear, just like sitting next to this 68 year old woman and this 30 year old woman and seeing this man get his 40 year chip, and just it’s like a celebration for me. I take the things that resonate with me and I leave behind what. What doesn’t resonate, but there is, and there always will be, wisdom in that room.

37:53
The reason that I started and stayed on my journey is because of that room, because I was given the opportunity to reflect on me and realize that it’s not just alcohol. You needed something, you needed a feeling. Why did you need that feeling? Why were you trying to escape certain things? Why were you trying to numb certain things?

38:15
So it’s the first place I learned to reflect and if I met anybody in that space that was new to sobriety, I would not say, hey, you know, there’s, there’s other things you can do. I’m not here to disrupt anybody’s journey. If somebody asks me, what am I doing, I’m happy to share. But I’m not going to go in that space and try to deter. I go in as it’s a celebratory space for me. It’s like a reflection space for me and I honor it. I respect folks that are doing what they’re doing. I could maybe laugh a little under my breath about things and I’m like, okay, well, there is another way. But that’s not. I don’t need to go in there and like fight people about it and debate people about it.

38:58 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Yeah, for me definitely. So I got exposed to 12 step programs through the different treatment facilities that I had been hospitalized in by default. That’s kind of like at least the treatment facilities that I was in in Louisville, kentucky, and I don’t know about other places.

39:12
They automatically just kind of feed their patients into the 12 step programs and they have speakers coming in from 12 step meetings and you know like since getting sober I’ve reached out to treatment facilities to share my story and they pretty much has been like well, if you’re not a 12 step person, we were not taking your story. The only place that let me share my story was a facility I was hospitalized in myself, so they’re like okay, you graduated from here so you can come back and share your story.

39:36
But you know, at that time being that early on I was told this was the only way. I was so desperate to not die that I was okay with complying and, honestly, to this day I would probably still be in the program if I hadn’t been exposed to other people. So you know, the way that I ended up leaving 12 step programs was when I did my Red Table Talk episode back in May of 2021. So I was like maybe seven, six, seven months sober. I was on set with Khadi and Annie Grace.

40:08
So Khadi was Black Girls Club and Annie Grace, the author of oh my gosh, I’m blinking on her book right now.

40:13 – Kiola Raines (Guest)
The.

40:13 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
This Naked Mind yes, thank you. And I remember I genuinely asked them. I was like, oh, what, what like, something about. Like, what did your sponsors say about doing this? You know, I have no idea and each of them was like no, we don’t go to AA. And I was like, like how you said what’s this miracle?

40:31
I was like what, you don’t go, you don’t do AA? And they were like no, we don’t do AA, you know, we do whatever. You know each of them does their own thing. And I came back, I flew back to Florida and I saw my therapist and I was like you mean to tell me I don’t need to do this? And she was like you don’t have to if you don’t want to, but it’s a good idea to have support. So as soon as she said that, that’s when I just started like looking at my options and exploring Because you know, again I was fine, I was totally fine with the space.

41:02
But yeah, there were certain things that frustrated me, like, you know, not being able to really talk about certain things when they were happening, like when the Black Lives Matter protests were happening in Louisville, kentucky.

41:13
You know that was one of the primary effects because of Breonna Taylor and I taught at a school for black males and I knew that if they weren’t protesting, their family members were out there protesting and I couldn’t talk about that at a meeting and the one time I brought it up because it was stressing me out, I was told that’s an outside issue, you can’t talk about it, and I was like I’m a teacher who loves my students desperately and I can’t talk about an issue that is directly impacting them and that left me very disheartened. But again, I was complying because I really wanted to stay sober. So I was still showing up. But once I learned that it wasn’t something that I had to do, I definitely got out there and stayed curious. But I told my support group what I was doing so that they could hold me accountable, like if they saw me suddenly flying off the handle.

41:56
Because I’m not gonna lie, when I stepped out of my normal routine with the 12 step program, checking with the sponsor every day and doing that, there was a part of me, there was a seed of fear that had been planted in me that I would die, that I would drink and that’s exactly how I felt, and I had seen people relapse and die most of them not alcohol, to be fair, but still, and so I was just really worried that I was gonna rapidly become a statistic that they talk about in meetings, like the people who go back out and just die. But years later I’m still here. Thank, God.

42:30
And I do appreciate those spaces and like, let’s say, if anyone comes to Tampa who I know from Louisville and is in recovery and they want a meeting, I’ll help them find a meeting and I’ll go to the meeting with them. You know what I mean. And it’s just like yeah, if you need a meeting, I’ll go with you. When I work with one-on-one clients and I always encouraged them to find a community, like I talk about the online communities and then I’m always like what are your thoughts on 12 step programs? And if it’s something that works for them, great. If it’s not, I let them know. It makes perfect sense. Especially when my clients a lot of them are women of color, it makes perfect sense that it doesn’t resonate with them and I just let them know it’s okay. Mainstream recovery isn’t for everybody.

43:08 – Kiola Raines (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, the whole outside issue thing is like I’ll never understand it, which is fine, because I don’t. I’m not stuck in a place where I have no other tools, but if you understand addiction and you understand human nature and human experience, you have someone write down these resentments right that they have, like I resent this and I resent that. Well, one of the things for me that I resented was the fact that I grew up the only one in the room, and so how is that no longer an issue in my sobriety or my recovery, when it caused anxiety which caused me to drink? So if I’m in this room with people, anything that’s affecting me is an inside issue. I’m in this room, we’re in this room together, I’m looking around, I’m sharing what’s happening inside my physical body, my mind. That’s up for discussion. So I think it’s great that we have spaces where you have freedoms to share and.

44:10
I call it new age, sobriety, new age recovery, where we’re in this evolving space that is much more predominantly women, 12 step spaces originally were mostly men, and so it is cool to watch it evolve. And the next thing I’d love to see and it’s slowly but surely happening is predominantly black spaces, predominantly Latin spaces, predominantly Asian spaces and then everybody together, so having diverse spaces. I do think that it is important for each culture to have a space and we need to be able to heal from the things, especially in the US. All different ethnicities need to be able to heal from the things that we’ve experienced as a country, which then impacted our relationship with substances, and it’s different for each community, but we’re moving in that direction of not being afraid to talk about it, or at least I’m not afraid to talk about it.

45:09 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Yeah, and also helping us heal our relationships with ourselves, because one of the things that’s just wild is that I didn’t realize how much it took me putting down the bottle to realize how much personal development work there really is just to be done and how much of the healing process also involves like shedding beliefs that have been instilled in us since we were little, telling us that we were less than that.

45:33
We didn’t realize that these came like. These were like total, like colonial, imperialist mindsets that were just brought down generation to generation. That really did like trigger drinking, like I was talking about my hair the other day to someone and I was thinking that when I was little my mom would take me to the Dominican salon and put hair relaxer in my hair just to get it straight, when, mind you, all I need is water in a little brush. But to my mom it was so like, oh my gosh, this is so critical that she would have to take me to the Dominicans. And there was this language use of pelo bueno versus pelo malo good hair, bad hair.

46:08 – Kiola Raines (Guest)
Yep.

46:09 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
And I genuinely had grown to believe that there was something bad about my hair or my skin color, because I came out like my dad, who was a black Cuban, like just being told when I was little, to stay out of the sun and things like that, because you didn’t wanna get too old schooled, I didn’t wanna get too dark and those little things still would feed into my dream because, as I had low self-esteem, I thought that the things that made me black or made me worse and no, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that but I really did internalize that and I remember I used to think that I was less pretty, say, than other Latina girls, because I had the darker features and the curlier hair, and it’s so false.

46:52
But that was doing exactly what it was meant to, which was keep me small, keep me drunk, keep me invisible.

46:59 – Kiola Raines (Guest)
It’s breach. I can resonate with that. Growing up with, my mom is Creole and so she’s more fair skin with straight hair, and all my cousins on my mom’s side light skin, curly hair, which I wanted because that was good hair, you know that was. Which is so interesting, how across cultures one thing is so desired and the other is not. And then there’s my dad, who is darker and family on that side is darker and wanting to try to fit in on the one side and feeling like an outcast on the one side. And then there goes the Utah white. Oh, that was the killer. Like growing up in, and you know, predominantly white community.

47:39
But I would also hear my parents using that same dialect when they were on business calls. So I was like, well, is I talk business? I don’t know. You know like, no, actually I have a. I have the dialect of the secretary and an appraiser. That’s what it is like a business owner.

47:53
So there was all those messages which, yes, they affect your self-worth. I didn’t realize until I got into recovery that as much as I liked myself and thought I was cute and friendly and funny and pretty, and I’m like, yes, I have a good smile, I didn’t value myself. So it didn’t matter how cute I thought I was, it didn’t matter how funny I was, I had no value and that was something that I had to address. And I’m still learning how to address and be accepting of who I am, the way that I like things and how I feel about myself, learning that everybody’s not gonna like me. And that is a healing journey, because when you are the only one in the room, when you are the tallest one, the darkest one, the only one with braids, then you go to your family and you’re the one that talks white. And then you go to your church and you’re the one that talks white and you go to these. You start to wanna try to shape and shift and you don’t really accept. You just wanna try to fit in. And that is what I’m moving away from being okay with the fact that everybody doesn’t have to like me.

49:04
My coach said if everybody likes you, you’re doing something wrong, Kiola, like, if you don’t have at least one person who’s like oh, I can’t stand you, then you’re probably being nice and you’re not being kind. Being nice is wearing a mask of like. Hey, everything’s always good. Kind is I care about humanity, I care about people and I will tell you also the truth. And the truth sometimes hurts and that’s okay, but I need to focus on being kind, kind to myself, valuing myself, knowing that I don’t have to fit in, and also accepting. That mindset caused some of my anxieties. Also, I’m a person with anxiety, but that didn’t help, it didn’t lessen it when I felt awkward and felt different and it’s one of the reasons that when I walk into that space that is 99% black folks I just like, I just sit back and I’m just like I’m at, I’m home. Oh, it feels so good, it feels so freeing.

50:06 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Yeah, and you know, the people pleasing comment is just so funny too, because I can completely resonate with that.

50:12
And you know, and that’s the thing it’s like at a certain point, going back to survival mode, right, like for us, like our mothers, our Grandmothers, they had the people pleased to stay alive because not only were you a woman, you were a woman of color, you were a black woman in America. Like you had to make sure that people were liking you, for you to be just safe, right, and and that that’s wild, because again, we in a we’re in a place of privilege and like that in 2023, like it’s okay, Kiola Raines does not need to be liked by everybody, right, and that’s definitely a gift and I think that that can absolutely empower recovery. And it’s just wild, too, because I Don’t think that I there’s no way I would have done this much personal development work if I hadn’t had to get sober. So there’s times, like you know, there’s people who will ask me like, do you ever wish that you like had just been quote-unquote normal, which even like normal doesn’t mean anything anyway?

51:03
But yeah at this point. No, like I I’m not. Like I didn’t sign up for this life. But now that it’s mine, I am so grateful for it because I I can’t see my brain Living under any other like construct anymore. Like this idea of like is like leaving the alcohol behind To give myself the gift of clarity to have these conversations with other people. Like I wouldn’t change this for the world, and if it meant that I had to go through a hell of some hard years, that’s okay, because I’m here on the other side of it.

51:37 – Kiola Raines (Guest)
Yep, ah that. I agree with that completely. This is our thing. I’m so glad this is my thing.

51:45
I was always into this growth mindset and and the whole personal development world, and what that means for me or confirms for me, is my spirit and my soul knew that, like you need to grow, you need to look at these things, you need to get into therapy. I’m the first person in my family that went to therapy. We we needed it, lord knows we needed it, but my mom didn’t know that that was a tool. She didn’t know that was a resource, so it was something that was like always in me to search for, and Getting the alcohol out of the way was the big obstacle that let me live this way. You know being called to teach and be an educator. There’s that desire. Like you are a lifelong learner, you’re always looking for knowledge and seeking knowledge and ways to connect, but we have this bottle that was in the way from allowing us to grow and develop and I agree with you. It’s the best decision I’ve ever made. I, like I said, I have no shame. I’m so proud to be in recovery.

52:51
I think that there are a lot of people who need the support that we have, not for substances necessarily, for other things going through a divorce, having a child with special needs, recovering from financial Challenges, mental health, all kinds of things. We have not gotten stuck in that cycle. We have found communities and Friends and social circles that we can connect with and tools for us to grow. I, when I first started recovery, I used to always say Everybody needs to do the 12 steps, like everybody needs to do them for something. Everybody needs to look at where they are, where they want to be, how they got where they are and dig, peeled out. You know, dig a little deeper, peel some layers back and learn how they can grow and evolve. Everyone, every single person, could benefit from that, that self-discovery and that personal development. So this is, this is our thing and I’m I’m glad that this is our thing.

53:54 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Me me too. So, to wrap up, I had a question Are you currently taking clients and, if so, who should be looking for you and how can they find you to work with?

54:05 – Kiola Raines (Guest)
Who should be looking for me. So, yes, and you should be looking for me if you are open to using fitness and nutrition to support your sobriety. So if you’re someone that Loves to move or would love to learn how to move, if you’re someone who wants to learn how to incorporate nutrition into your sobriety and your recovery journey. I Work with predominantly women. I’m not opposed to taking on a male client here and there, but you have to be willing to take directions from a woman, you have to be willing to take guidance from a woman, and I’m really moving towards folks who are open to working in 90 day to six month coaching cycles. I’m not looking for 30 day at a time. I’ve learned that the work that I’m doing and the work that you need to do takes time to implement, and so, starting in January specifically, that’s gonna be the programming that I’m offering 90 days and six months of coaching, implementing fitness and nutrition for sobriety and how can people say like reach out to maybe learn more?

55:21 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
is it your website, your Instagram?

55:22 – Kiola Raines (Guest)
Yeah, yeah both of those Kiola Raines calm. If you go to my website, there’ll be a link for free consultation, and that link is also in my Instagram as well. I think all of my handles are KiolaRaines. I try to make it real, real simple. Just find me there. Thank you so much for having me on.

55:44 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
I always appreciate a good conversation with you. Mind you, I see you all the time online, but still, it’s nice to like sit and just talk with no interruptions. Yes, hey, if you are enjoying what you are listening to, I invite you to subscribe and share the podcast, but also go to my website, bottomless to sober calm, and find out other opportunities to work with me, from free workshops to Writing classes to one-to-one life coaching opportunities. You can schedule a free consultation for that. Everything is available at bottomless to sober calm. See you then.

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In this episode:

Listen in as I discuss the challenging and sometimes very uncomfortable decisions I’ve made that led me to recovery and, ultimately, saved my life. The journey to recovery has not been easy, as I share about selling my beloved house and moving into my sister’s guest room in Tampa. I also recount how I had to quit my prestigious teaching job and switch to working an entry-level sales job, a decision that, although humbling, was crucial to my recovery. Oh, and dating? My recovery definitely made that interesting.

Tune in as I continue to shed light on the other critical aspects of my recovery journey, including the use of medication and the idea that no matter when and where we start on this path, we are exactly where we need to be.

Resources:

Feeling’s Aren’t Facts: A New Year’s Eve Self-Forgiveness Workshop

Bottomless to Sober – Coaching, Writing Classes, and Workshops

Transcript:

Hey everyone. So on today’s episode, I wanted to share a list of tough decisions that I have had to make to save my life and recovery. It actually comes inspired by Deisha Kennedy. She’s a financial educator. Her Instagram handle is at the broke black roll and she recently shared a list of tough financial decisions that she had to make that essentially saved her life, and so you know, I found her list incredibly inspiring. So I figured, you know what. Let me do some reflecting and list some of the decisions that I have had to make in my recovery to basically save my own ass. So, with no further ado, here’s that list, right?

00:42
So, number one, I sold the house that I was super proud of buying all on my own in Louisville, kentucky, and I moved into the guest room of my sister’s house in Tampa. So for me, giving up that house that I bought all on my own after having gotten divorced in 2017, it was a huge sacrifice, right? And for me, I grew up in a home where, culturally, we were taught to be quote unquote strong, independent women. Right that we don’t need anybody, and you know, my parents so often emphasize that I was supposed to go to school so that I wouldn’t need anybody else’s help. And yet here I was identifying the fact that I desperately needed someone’s help and that it really wasn’t good for me to live by myself, and I sold the house that was, in a sense, like a dream little house right so that I could move with my big ass dog into my sister’s guest room. But you know what? That allowed me to move into? A home that was full of love, a home full of people who were cheering on my recovery and a home full of support. So I had to make that really, really tough call to lose a space that was online, an actual piece of property whose value would have increased drastically since the pandemic right, and I gave all that up for the sake of having a safe environment. And so I wanted to recognize that that was one of the big decisions, that it was a hard decision but it was a necessary one.

02:10
Number two I quit my job as a teacher in a school that I loved, that was a part of a community that I actually felt really involved in and loved by and accepted by, except they didn’t know I was drinking, right. But I walked away from all that and I had even been named the state teacher of the year in Kentucky the year before and I walked away from all of that in order to start fresh, right. And so when I walked away from my teaching job I don’t talk about it often but like my day job for about two years in my early recovery, I mean I still consider myself to be early on enough, but you know, at the very start my day job was I was a salesperson for a tutoring company and I was an entry level salesperson for a tutoring company, making a little bit above minimum wage as an hourly rate right, going from being like state teacher of the year to that. However, it helped save my life right, because I walked away from a very demanding job that was absolutely exhausting, that, even with all the recognition that I had, I still felt like I struggled to feel successful when my students were constantly being measured against these like standards that were being thrown on us right, and I taught students with disabilities and even though they’re just as successful as their peers, it didn’t always show on tests, right, and those tests directly spoke. Not that they’ve directly spoke, but they directly affected me in terms of my evaluation as a teacher. So for me, I needed to let go of that paperwork, let go of the increasing demands, let go of all the stress and lack of appreciation that teachers overall deal with, even with my accolades again, for the sake of seeking my sobriety, right. So I just want to recognize that like if you’re listening and you’re wondering do I need to walk away from my job? I’m obviously not going to sit here and advise you through a podcast that you need to quit your job, but it is something that you might need to look at right Next up I have, when I started dating again, that I made it a priority to discuss my recovery from addiction very early on with any man who I decided to go out and date with, even if it felt uncomfortable, even if I remember thinking, man, I might miss out on a great opportunity here.

04:31
Right, I still went forward and shared and disclosed my status as a person in recovery because I knew that there is no way that I could build a long, lasting, long term relationship and foundation for a possible family with someone who didn’t know and accept my story fully. That is so important to me. It is so important to me especially because of the work that I do being a life coach for people in recovery, facilitating support group meetings in different communities, openly writing about my story and sharing about my story. There’s no way that you could be the man in my life if you don’t see all of that and see it as an asset. You’ve got to see my recovery as a win. If you look at me and you think I’m a liability, if you look at me and you feel like you don’t trust me, if you look at me and you have your own negative perspective of what recovery looks like, if you buy into the stigma behind addiction, then you’re not the person for me. Frankly, I wanted to know that really really fast. I always brought it up as quickly as possible so that I can clear the path. If you weren’t with it, then you could go and free me up so that I can meet somebody who would see me as a value because of my recovery.

05:54
Next thing on my list is that I accepted medical assistance and I used medication for the first one and a half years of my recovery. I had to let go of that idea that I could do this all by myself and I had to accept that it was okay to work with a licensed medical doctor who can prescribe me something to assist with what I needed, and then, when I no longer felt that I needed it, I worked in conjunction with said licensed professional and let go of the medications. Now, obviously, my journey with medication is not going to be the same as your journey with medication, and just because I have stopped taking medication does not mean that other people need to stop per se. There’s nothing wrong with taking medication long term. It’s just that, for me, I decided that I no longer wanted to take the medications, and the way that I looked at it for myself, in my personal experience, was, if you break a leg and you have a cast, you have crutches. You don’t keep the cast on and you don’t use the crutches for the rest of your life. That’s the way I look at it in my experience for myself. For me, I was, once I felt strong enough in terms of having learned alternate coping tools that had nothing to do with drinking. Once I took the time to design a life that I wouldn’t want to escape from, I figured that I would be good in terms of working on gradually releasing the medication under medical supervision, and I did. Again, not to say that that’s everyone’s experience, but it is mine, and it was very humbling efforts to accept that I probably needed some crutches, that I wasn’t going to do this without the crutches, because I had already been trying for 14 months and repeatedly failing.

07:36
The next big decision that I had to make in terms of supporting my recovery was actually making time in my schedule to show up for my recovery. I clearly was able to manage the logistics of making time in my schedule to drink every single day. That meant that, likewise, I could turn things around and make time in my schedule to go to meetings, to journal, to reflect, to work with Early on. I was in a 12-step program, so I had a sponsor in the beginning. Then eventually, it became mentorship and working with the therapists and coaching. No matter what was going on, I had to dedicate the time to my recovery the same way that I did with my drinking.

08:18
The next big thing that I did was assess my spending. Listen, I used to be such a spender when I drank. I’ll give you an example. I one time when I lived in an apartment before I had built the house, so this was probably around 2016, 2017. No, I’m sorry, I’m giving you the wrong year. Let’s say 2018, approximately. In 2018,.

08:43
There was one day that I had fallen asleep from drinking and when I wake up and I come to, my apartment is full of smoke and there is a man in my apartment who was one of the managing operators of the apartment complex in which I lived in. And apparently I had gotten so drunk and fell asleep to the point that the food that I had cooking in the oven burnt. My apartment had filled with smoke, the smoke alarm had been going off and I noticed neither the smoke nor the alarm. I didn’t hear any of it, I didn’t smell any of it. Nothing woke me up until that man was keyed into my apartment and woke me up out of my sleep, right. So if he hadn’t come in and if that alarm hadn’t like tripped up the security system, could a fire have happened? Absolutely, Could I have died in this fire? Maybe, right, I don’t know, but the fact that it took someone coming into my apartment and waking me up, and that being the only way that I came out of my my like passed out state, speaks a lot. So, anyway, the following day, I had gotten a certified letter from the apartment complex stating that I had a warning and that, if that incident happened again, that I would have my lease revoked and I would have to move out, right. That I would get oh my gosh, I wanna use the word evacuated, but evacuated is not evicted. There we go, that I would get evicted.

10:05
So when that happened, rather than stopping and saying, okay, this is a sign that I need to stop drinking, I became really innovative because people with addictions are incredibly driven people, and when I was still driven to drink and I decided to transition into using Uber Eats and other food delivery services so that that way, I could safely eat when I wanted to eat without risking burning down the house right, and risking burning down the apartment complex. To me, it was an innovative solution to a problem and so but here’s the thing I was on a teacher’s salary, right, and I was my own. I lived by myself, so I took care of all my bills. I was dealing with student loans, et cetera. So my credit card took a big hit because every single night I was ordering Uber Eats, that I was, first of all, barely eating because, as I was getting sick or with alcoholic liver disease, my appetite basically disappeared. However, I still would buy food because I felt like if I forced myself to take a few bites at least. That was doing something right. Doesn’t make sense at all. But that’s drunk math, so to speak. So anyway, over time, after about a year or two years of just buying so many Uber Eats deliveries and then I started doing alcohol delivery as well all those fees, all those charges really really added up and I took a big financial hit.

11:29
So when I stopped drinking, I finally had the courage to actually, like, look at my credit card account and look at my bank account and assess the damage that I had done. That was really hard, that was really really uncomfortable. I’m telling you, right To feel like, oh my gosh, I’m at a negative right, but that was. You can only go up from there if you stop drinking, and that’s how I felt. I was like, well, I’ve got to pick up the pieces financially, create a budget and get on a plan, and so and even to this day, like I have signed up recently for a financial literacy class, and so, as I used to dedicate so much of my money to alcohol, now what I try to do is save. I’m still working on learning about investing and then on occasion, I treat myself within reason to nice things. But I really had to completely overhaul my financial situation, and alcohol made me not give a shit about how much I was spending every single day on food delivery, which was not good at all. So that was a big decision. Another big decision that I had to make was I had to stop telling myself that I was bored every time. Things were quiet when I was drinking alcohol, especially so heavily.

12:44
After my divorce, those few years between my divorce and me quitting drinking, I find myself in romantic relationships with really problematic men. Right, and there was always drama, there was always a conflict, I was always saying something that I couldn’t remember, and then there was always gaslighting happening because people were telling me that things were happening that weren’t maybe necessarily true, but there was no way that I could really hold them accountable because of the fact that I was drunk all the time. So there was just so much chaos in my life that I had gotten accustomed to. And even when I dated Ian, who passed away, obviously we were both sober during the length of our relationship, but then, immediately after he passed away, I spent eight months just in and out of hospitals.

13:30
So for me, my life, I had just gotten used to this sort of like base level line of chaos that in sobriety it went away for the most part and then it was just really uncomfortable to sit with the stillness of some evenings. And sometimes that stillness would lead me to have thoughts that start ruminating and almost like I would just start looking for problems. So I had to really just stop and tell myself that when I was bored that there was nothing wrong with the stillness. Right To not confuse boredom for peace, or rather I think that’s the other way around, so not confuse peace for boredom. Then the last thing on this list that I would say that was really important for me to come to as a decision was to accept that I wasn’t behind quote, unquote anyone else and really embrace that where I was and where I am today is exactly where I’m supposed to be. Right For me.

14:38
There is a lot of ways that if you were to say, compare my personal situation to that of other peoples, it’s very easy to be like, oh yeah, she’s behind, right, because I no longer own property, so I had no home, divorced right, so in theory, behind there in terms of like having a marriage, having a family, no children. So again, especially I mean at that point, when I got sober, I was 35, now I’m 38. But you know, like there are all these societal markers that are external things that you can say that they’re look for is that I was missing and, oh, also being in debt, right. So I had all these things going on where I would start to feel bad for myself and I would start to internalize this idea like, dang, my parents came to this country for me to just be this far behind, right, and I have had to learn to let that go because, frankly, like, yes, I gave up my home, yes, I gave up a job that I was kind of like a little like angel rock star at, so to speak. Like, yes, I was in debt, etc. But you know what y’all like, I can go, eventually I could buy a home again, if eventually I can have a career that I want, right, I can fix my financial situation. But you know what I can’t do? I can’t recover any of that shit if I’m dead because of my drinking. So, at the end of the day, right, it’s like it’s about really just having that very realistic perspective that all those external things don’t matter if I am not alive, and recognizing that I am alive today because I was willing to step away from all those external factors to work on myself.

16:16
So, with that being said, I hope that this podcast episode helped you reflect a little bit on some of the tough decisions that maybe you have had to make, or some decisions that you are sitting with that you might need to complete or move into action. What are they? Feel free to reach out to me and let me know here. Just quick announcement on December 31st I am offering my Feelings Aren’t Facts workshop. It’s a New Year’s Eve workshop on self-forgiveness. It is only $15. If you are interested in work, doing some self-development work with me, I highly recommend it. It’s going to be a beautiful 90-minute workshop where we do some serious reflecting and some writing, where we just kind of set the stage for a beautiful start to 2024. So, with that y’all, thank you so much for listening and I will catch you in the next episode.

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In this episode:

Content Warning: Discussion of pregnancy loss and abortion

As I sat down with Kenneth Watson, known as 12 Faces of Sober, a rush of raw emotions filled the room. His story of struggle, transformation, and the joy of fatherhood took me on a journey that deeply resonated with me. From his past experiences with abortion and miscarriage fueling his addiction, to finding strength and hope in fatherhood and sobriety, Kenneth’s candid revelations served as a powerful testament to human resilience and the invaluable role of a supportive community.

Walking us through the dark alleys of his life, Kenneth was open about his mental health struggles and the impact of his father’s alcoholism. His transition from casual drinking to addiction, taking him through the military, a tumultuous marriage, and multiple rehab stints, was a stark reminder of the havoc addictions can wreak. But it was equally inspiring to see how he found light at the end of this dark tunnel, breaking free from addiction and embracing the joy of fatherhood.

However, our conversation did not stop at his personal journey. We also delved into the larger implications of addiction, highlighting that it knows no racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic boundaries. Kenneth brought forth the necessity for mainstream recovery to be inclusive of people of color, and how sobriety can serve as a rebellion against historical alcohol-induced control mechanisms. Join us on this enlightening journey as Kenneth shares his path to sobriety, the joys and challenges of fatherhood, and the empowering lessons he’s picked up along the way.

Resources:

12 Faces of Sober Site

Follow Kenneth on Instagram

Bottomless to Sober – Coaching, Writing Classes, and Workshops

Transcript:

Hey everyone. I’m Jessica Dueñas and I’m so, so, so excited to have Kenneth Watson aka 12 Faces of Sober on the show today. We were literally just about to get into the conversation and I was like oh wait, let me hit record, because Kenneth’s wife is literally ready to give birth at any moment. So if this episode abruptly gets stopped, it’s because he had to go to the hospital.

00:53 – Kenneth Watson (Guest)
So this is Well. Hello, jessica. Thank you so much for coming, allowing me to come on Bottomless to Sober and share a little little something from my past. I greatly appreciate it and appreciate all what you’re doing in the sober community.

01:13 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Thank you, thank you. So Kenny, like I said, literally his wife is due at any moment now, which is really really exciting. And you know, kenny and I have had opportunities to talk a little bit like on and off, probably over the past, like year and a half, maybe two years at this point, and you know, I remember like when we both talked about like relationships and dating and all of this, and boom out of nowhere, kenny’s married, there’s a baby on the way. So tell us a little bit about that because I think, like for anybody who’s followed you, whatever you’re comfortable sharing, of course, but yeah, like Kenny, what’s been going on? Mr Soon, to Be Sober Dad, this is beautiful.

01:52 – Kenneth Watson (Guest)
I met my wife. Let me see, five years ago I was on one of my many I made it a point early in sobriety to, you know, travel and go to sporting events. And I was in Cleveland, actually, at Chargers, chargers, cleveland Browns game, and she had posted something Well, actually it was a black, a black vegan group on Facebook. And so they were like, hey, you know, post the post a picture of you know guys wearing the suits. I was like, shoot, you know, I’m doing community work or whatever. So posted it and you know, got a few likes and everything. So I’m going through.

02:32
It was like all right, well, I’m single, so let’s see. And so she was one of the first persons that I actually, you know, slid in the DM and she responded. So I was like all right, cool, so we hit it off, you know, no kids, both while I was in completion of my master’s degree, because she also had a master’s degree. So it was a lot of things you know as far as that. And so she’s, you know, we’ve been together Like I think it just I think, yeah, this past.

03:07
I think it was October, october, 14, may, five years when we first met, and then this upcoming February will be our first year anniversary of being married and probably, you know, people are probably wondering like, where did this come from? How to let feel. But I, you know, I told I made it a point to be very careful in terms of my relationship. You know, being posted on social media, learning from my past mistakes during the days of drinking, and other people on social media chiming in on my mess. You know my mistakes and mishaps, so that was more or less where I didn’t really do it. You know I’m not ashamed of my wife. I love her to death, but it, you know, I just there was times where I shared, you know, things on there, but I just felt like right now that’s not the goal at hand, and so a lot of people who were definitely surprised when I started posting certain things, but I just felt like I didn’t want that you know part of it to be, you know, in my life.

04:09
But we more or less like I don’t know, like we knew we were going to get married. We proposed, I proposed to her, like I think it was a couple of years ago and you know we took a little time off to you know, get ourselves together and then we got.

04:25
You know, she came to Minnesota in December and then the baby came, you know, and it was like, all right, well, let’s go ahead and push the waiting date up a little bit. And so we got married in April and but we were going to probably get married within, probably like within the year. You know, that was a plan even before the baby was, even, you know, a thought. We were going to do it. So but, yeah, but as far as that like it, I’m not going to lie to you. My a part of my past drinking was from situations you know, dealing with an abortion in 2008.

05:01
A miscarriage in the year that I don’t want to mention, but you know, just it, it, it. I knew that there was a part of me that always wanted to have a child, even, you know, dating back to when I was 14, being in the first pregnancy situation. And so to go all those years not having, you know, having a child, and now, you know, having one of my own. It’s truly a blessing. It surpasses anything thus far within my sobriety of almost seven years.

05:33 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
So powerful Congratulations. I know a big question that I’m sure people wonder right, especially with conversations around relationships. Obviously your wife is pregnant, so I know she’s nine months sober, for sure, but is she a non-drinker, or what does that look like for you all in your dynamic?

05:52 – Kenneth Watson (Guest)
I got lucky. I got lucky. Yes, well, I’m not going to lie. You know she has you know, drank. You know, I think she drank last year, but that was on our separation time, so I can’t hold that against her. But no, our, our home is is 100% alcohol free as long as, even when we were, you know, in Jacksonville and you know she was, you know, staying with me there there was no alcohol.

06:19
It didn’t matter who my guests were, you know so that the good thing about it is is that you know with our family.

06:25 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Now you know our son is going to.

06:28 – Kenneth Watson (Guest)
You know, we’ll be born into a sober household. Like I said, my wife I’ve never seen my wife drink and I don’t plan on it. So if she drinks outside of me that’s her business, but she doesn’t. I’ve never, not once, seen her drink in five years.

06:42 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Yeah, well, that’s super powerful. And, again, like I, I am so stinking happy for you because it’s like I know we’ve been having these conversations over, like I said, the last year and a half, two years. At this point, so to hear that is is really, really awesome. Um, you know, one of the things that you mentioned that kind of like being careful and past relationships and kind of like some of some of the loss that you’ve experienced in the past what are some of like the hopes that you have? Like now that you’re looking at parent, like this is a whole new level of sobriety right. Like now you’re looking at parenthood, like I know for me, I hope to get there at some point. You know that’s something that I have like come around to deciding, like it’s something I want and obviously it’s not just the matter of hopefully when and if right. But I’m curious, like what are like your hopes? Like now you’re about to be a father, you’re about to have a son.

07:36 – Kenneth Watson (Guest)
Right just to be the best father possible. My father was in my life and to all my friends. They thought that we were like the Cosbeads, but it’s like nah. We got our own type of issues and I witnessed my father abuse alcohol, so I know that.

07:58
I don’t want my son to ever see me intoxicated, because I saw that as a kid. From as far as I can remember, I can remember my dad drinking. I can remember issues with the police. So those are definitely two things that I don’t want my son to witness. I know that it’s no longer. I know that once I got married it was no longer about me. Now I have my wife to think about and my son to think about.

08:25
So just a different thought process. I’m not gonna lie to you. I’ve been a stepfather. I’ve dated women who’ve had kids and of course, your thought process isn’t the same, because these aren’t your kids. Yeah, they may respect you, they may not respect you, but those are still not your kids at the end of the day. And so for me, I guess I just, I just wanna I’m glad you asked that, because I just text two of my close friends from college and I was like they’re both fathers and I’m like, man, can you give me any type of advice? Man, like I got, my anxiety is just crazy right now. And they’re just like stay prayed up and there’s no right or wrong way to do it, but just be present in your child’s life. And I was like that’s all I’m trying to do and the good thing is I’m not working. So it’s like if my wife needs to rest I can do whatever, even if she’s at work. We don’t have to pay to do daycare because I’m at home all day.

09:30 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
So, well I oh no, cause I was gonna ask you actually like so what is like, what are you doing to prepare? Because I think again, like when we get sober, we get a lot of tools. And one of the things that’s been interesting about watching you very recently too, I feel like you’ve been very vocal about how you’ve kind of done your own thing and kind of worked on your own path, right, and so now that you’re, you’ve been doing your own path. That has had to work for you, because different spaces didn’t resonate with you. As black man, I’m curious, like what’s the preparation for the parenthood piece been looking like? So you mentioned your friends and I was curious, like, are you work? Like, is there any mentorship going on? Like what, what does that whole preparation look like?

10:09 – Kenneth Watson (Guest)
I have plenty of good men, plenty of good men, not only black men, it’s probably the majority. And so you know, my father’s still alive, you know we’re definitely on good terms. So I go to them. Like I’m not gonna lie to you, I did have like a mental, a mental health breakdown a couple of weeks ago and I think that it was just a harsh reality of a lot of things. It was like okay, I’m just going by, you know, the last eight months, eight months and change, and it’s like okay, I’m going to be responsible for a whole nother human being.

10:46
You know what I’m saying? That, according to the ultrasound looks a lot like me. So it’s just kind of one of those things. It’s like it’s something that I envisioned, but to me it’s like you can’t prepare for it, no matter how. You know you can sit here and you could watch all kinds of videos, watch other people’s profiles it’s still not going to prepare you for you know you being in that situation and I’ve been in it before, but to 100%, no, like this is my child, there’s no questioning. You know you shouldn’t have to deal with that, but that’s what I had to deal with, you know, and I paid the price in the process, because I didn’t know how to deal with my emotions at that time.

11:32 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
So how do you deal with your emotions now? And you’ve been sober. What is it seven years or six years?

11:37 – Kenneth Watson (Guest)
Yeah, it’d be seven years next week.

11:39 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Okay, wow.

11:40 – Kenneth Watson (Guest)
One to 15. Like I’ve been, honestly I’ve been struggling because therapists like I’m, you know, big shots out to Miss Charlene Smith. I’ve just go. You know she’s no longer my therapist but by far the best therapist that I’ve had since 2010. And it was to me like she was more of like an auntie than she was my therapist that the government was paying, you know, to have these sessions. And once I left Jacksonville, I think the last session I had with her was when all hell broke blue excuse my language last year and I had to move back up here and she was like I don’t care if you’re out of state, but I’m gonna take your. You know, I’m gonna take this call and I was like all right.

12:32
So I’ve been battling in terms of trying to find the right therapist.

12:36
You know, like in Minnesota there aren’t therapists of color and I want to have a therapist that has some type of knowledge of what a black person goes through or you know what I’m saying because they’ve experienced it when you have someone that’s not of your own ethnic background, unless they’re married to somebody and they still want 100% no. And so I had a therapist. She was black, she was in St Louis, we were doing virtual, but then it was issues because you know she would forget that we would have the appointments. And I’m like, okay, you know, I don’t know if you saw, but like I think during the summer like I would go for walks while I was having my therapy sessions and stuff like walk around the lake in my old neighborhood. So now it’s just more or less of me trying to, and even though the therapist that they have me scheduled to see next month, I got rid of her last year because it affected she was non-African-American and I’m telling her the stuff that I’m going through, but it’s just not resonating, she’s not understanding it.

13:42
And so I was just like I can’t. I’m sorry, you know disrespect, but I can’t have you as a therapist if we can’t relate. And so, and then now, like I said, they scheduled it and I just told my wife I was like, wait a minute, they just said the same the lady I had an issue with last year. So now I just how I more or less already belong with it, but how I usually handle it now I have really, really good friends. I have good friends from childhood, from junior high, elementary, college, military.

14:13
I can reach out to a lot of people, and even in the sober community, and so you know we help each other and that’s kind of how it is. So I will definitely say that. So shout out to the sober community, thankful, thank you, because I know that I’ve had some hard days and I can reach out, including you is like, look, I’m struggling, I don’t know what to do, and that’s kind of how it is, even though I haven’t met a lot of people, obviously in the sober community, but I still feel like we have that connection and of course we’re gonna meet one day, but it’s just a matter of time.

14:47 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Oh, for sure, like either something’s gonna bring me to Minnesota or I know you have connections in Florida. For sure, like one of the biggest issues in terms of access to appropriate medical care for people with addiction is that right that we don’t see ourselves represented in service providers and that can create a really big barrier. You have to feel seen and if your provider doesn’t know that, doesn’t understand that, then it’s a really difficult thing.

15:13 – Kenneth Watson (Guest)
Yeah, and then one thing I have an issue with, too, is that this is for any healthcare professional make sure you read the chart before you see the client. Because I’m gonna give you an example. I was in Phoenix, like I might’ve been, maybe like within the first six months of me being out the Army and, like I said, I was still. I was on the tail end of my addiction and I volunteered to go have a therapy session and the lady come you know, calls me in the office and was like, yeah, so what are you here for? And I’m like, did you read anything? I’m like I’m a victim of domestic violence. I struggling with alcohol. Hell, I probably smelled like alcohol the day I went up in there and I was in tears and I was like, I mean, I’ve cried before in the therapy session, but not like that was like dang.

16:06
What’s the purpose of you having me come in here for this appointment If you don’t even know anything? I mean you could have, at least, just five or ten minutes before I walked in here, looked over something. No, that lady had no clue and I said I’ll never see that lady again. Sure enough, I switched there. It’s like the next day or that same day I was like I need somebody else.

16:26 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Yeah, yeah, and I mean even just that little personal touch, right Like that, that can go a long, long way.

16:33
So, kenny, tell me a little bit about your story, because obviously you know my podcast is like pretty new, like I just started in July, so you know I haven’t been on before and for anybody who’s listening, you might be like a totally brand new human being that I’m introducing on here and so obviously, so far they know that you are super excited to be a dad. But you know you’ve done some major things. You’re a vet, right, and I think like that’s important. Um, so can you tell us a little bit about yourself and just kind of like how you, how you got to a place of struggling with alcohol and how you came back from it?

17:06 – Kenneth Watson (Guest)
Hmm, okay, uh, you mentioned florida. I was uh born in florida or raised in san diego, california. My dad was in the navy so we kind of moved around a little bit and kind of around the country in the 80s. Um, as I mentioned earlier, my dad um struggle with alcoholism, um while he was in the military, so I saw it and so a lot of the his actions Eventually carried on to me the love for music, playing it all, day and night, um stuff like that. Um I would. I’m the youngest of five, two brothers, two sisters. I was the only one who had the issue with drinking. My other, some of my siblings they drink, but no one had the issue like I did.

17:52
Um, I was like anybody, you know, I ain’t gonna say anybody, but I was, you know, an athlete. You know, growing up, you know I played baseball, basketball, football. It’s pretty good at some of those sports. Some of them just kind of kept me off the streets. Um, all right, I wasn’t. I would say I was For rather, you know, intelligent until I moved to one of the worst school districts in the county in san diego and I was in the top percentile.

18:17
I have to say this I was in the top percentile in california, all the way up until like fourth grade gifted classes and then we moved districts and then I just lost all of it and so my parents didn’t have education. So always in my mind was, like they’re working so hard. I know that once it’s time for me to get out of school, that I need to go to college, that so that I can have, hopefully, a better opportunity. So I folded around and went to four colleges and universities one, hbcu, carcass, and university um. But the problem was is, once I got the degree in 2003, um, the job market, you know, wasn’t the greatest. And so in my mind I’m thinking, like, okay, if I go to college, I invest all this time, then I’ll be able to get a job. Oh no, that wasn’t the case. And the job that I did end up getting in my field, it was only paying me seven dollars an hour. So of course I’m hustling, I’m I’m substitute teaching, I’m working at a prison out here, and that’s that was my hustle. And Because of politics and everything, me being a young, on their personality, you got these older personalities. They didn’t like it because of the fact that, like, okay, this guy’s gonna steal my job, the hundred thousand dollar job that they got, now potentially I can take. And so clashes, and so I ended up leaving there and I went to Arizona. And when I went to Arizona I’m thinking like, okay, I have the degree, I have the experience and now I’ll be able to Get a job in radio. No, I didn’t. I didn’t get a job and I had to go get a job Just like anybody else, working in department stores, post office and so on and so forth.

20:00
But in between that time I’m hanging out with my brother, my brother’s 10 years older than, or is 10 years older than me. So they’re drinking, they’re smoking. You know, at that time I’m drinking Budweiser, they drinking malt, liquor, hennessy and all this stuff. So now I’m going from, you know, as some would say, the mommy wine culture to now I’m drinking the, the street stuff. And so when I’m drinking this now it’s bringing out a whole different person. And so I’m hanging out with these guys. They’re miserable in their marriages and I’m just a guy who’s Not trying to get married, but I’m absorbing all of what they’re doing.

20:37
And so I started to pick up that habit then because I couldn’t find work. I wasn’t happy with the work that I was getting. The pay was horrible 10, 11 dollars an hour, barely surviving and so I ended up getting with someone. She got pregnant and ended up having an abortion, and he completely drove me crazy. And so I told her. I said, if you do this, you’re not going to get the same person, and eventually that relationship lasted for a little bit longer, but I ended up doing a night in jail and, you know, lost everything, was homeless and had to come to Minnesota and that was my first day in rehab.

21:15
So I did Three stints in rehab before I actually Got to where I’m at today three rehabs, two detoxes, one homeless shelter, um, but as far as where, it continued to carry over, I was in the military. I served in your army for six years. If anybody knows about the military culture, you work hard, you play hard, but then you drink even harder, and I was already with the addiction before I got in the army, and so it was magnified, and at that point I was needy, I needed the attention of a woman, and so I got married to somebody that I had no business being married to, and I was with her for for six years and she basically Told me that I wouldn’t be shit excuse my language that I would be a drunk with um, but a bachelor’s degree, and she’s all right, she’s absolutely correct, but I’m now sober with a master’s degree, so I don’t know. But, and so I, in 2016, after I got the army 2015 but 2016 Um, I was in a hospital.

22:17
I did nine days. I had issues with my pancreas it almost exploded Gained a lot of weight, lost a lot of weight within a nine day span, but I still didn’t learn. I still didn’t learn that, okay, this alcohol is taking me out. And so, finally, um, I I called my mom like I said I mentioned a few minutes ago, I was in a homeless shelter and I got kicked out. The homeless shelter Called. My mom was like, hey, can I come back to Minnesota? And she’s like but you got to get sober. I said all right. And so I was on the bench for like two weeks and then, finally, I went ahead and um.

22:53
Like I did a night of a binge. I went to the casino, spent about four, five hundred dollars. My mom was like how can I help you? How can I get you sober? How can I, you know, get you on the right path? Because I I don’t want to bury my son. And when she said that I just completely sobered up. I still drink until I went in the rehab.

23:11
But I just knew that there was that this alcohol stuff wasn’t for me, and so I did treatment. When I was in treatment, I got my furniture, my car, from Arizona. Um, I, I’m not gonna lie, I like to say it. Um, men, we do get a chance to take furniture from the women. I took a four bedroom house full of furniture In my car. My car got shipped up here when I was in uh in treatment.

23:34
And so once I knew that, when I got out of the hospital, once I knew that, when I got out of rehab, that I knew like, okay, maybe this is going to be different. I had the keys to my car, I had the keys to my apartment that day of, and then, a couple weeks later, I started grad school, because I applied to grad school when I was in uh treatment, and so that I mean I did that and and pretty much Over the six or seven years I’ve traveled. Like I said, I love sports, so I’ve tried to go to sport and then talk throughout the country. Um, I did a study abroad, and also Mandela University during my graduate studies. Um created a podcast author to book. Um, what else? Got married, have kids, you’re about to have a son. I mean, sobriety has brought a lot of stuff that I honestly did not think that I would be able to experience, and I love it and and I encourage anybody to just try and just see what happens. You never know.

24:33 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
That’s awesome. One of the things that I noticed, also that you had a kind of posted about lately, was sort of navigating your own path. So for anybody who might be listening and kind of trying to figure out what works for them especially if they’re a man, especially if they are a man of color, a black man, who might be listening right what do you recommend or like what worked for you and what didn’t work for you? Like, obviously I know you went to rehab, but once you get out, you know rehab is this protective little fortress that we’re all in, because I went to rehab too and you’re finding your safe when you’re in there, but as soon as you come out, the real world is waiting for you. So how did you transition into the real world and stay sober all this time? Like what did those supports look like? Was it just sober people? Was it all sorts of people who you were connecting with? Because you know some people will say, like you have to only be around sober people, etc. So like what did it look like for you?

25:28 – Kenneth Watson (Guest)
Did you do like?

25:29 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
step programs, etc. Things like that.

25:32 – Kenneth Watson (Guest)
Well, I had the it’s no longer open, but there was the next town over and I had been going to that AA group since like 2008. And so I would probably say like I did a combination of a lot of things because for me AA was kind of triggering, because I was going to AA and I was still drinking. You know, I would either go into AA intoxicated or the moment I left I was intoxicated. So it was more or less like I tried it but I just didn’t. I didn’t feel comfortable in the room because I was an old black person in there and it was. I wanted to be in the rooms where I can hear some similar stories, like maybe some childhood trauma, certain things that that may not. You know, because you know how it is in in in in black people’s homes, they don’t necessarily address those hotbed issues mental health, you know, addiction to a substance and stuff like that, and so that was it. But now, like I would say, like some of my friends didn’t understand, like fully understand, because they still drink, and so I was still being invited to to functions early into sobriety and I was like look, no, I can’t go, I don’t trust myself, let alone being amongst a bunch of people that this is the main focus of this get together is you’re going to be drinking. And so I had to say no and be firm, like no, I’m sorry, I don’t want to hang out. You know now, if you want to come, you know, come, hang out at my place, where I know like I’m not going to be drinking. Then yeah, so I had to be have limitations even, you know, had company, you know of the opposite sex. They knew they couldn’t come over and have it. You know, out on now they chose to drink before they came over. That state business.

27:31
But I would have to say, learning to say no, that was probably by far one of the hardest things. For me was to say no because, like I’m boring, I can’t have fun without alcohol. But then once I realized I didn’t see that I can and so I would say, like getting to know myself because of the fact that, like I was lying to myself for so many years. So it was like I had to retrain my thought. Like you don’t have to lie your way out of everything, just be honest. Now, if they don’t like your honesty, guess what? At least you know what I’m saying. You’re not intoxicated and getting caught up in lies. So I say that a lot of things that I couldn’t do, that that was key, like when I was married, like it was only going to Phoenix. When I lived in North Carolina, living Texas, we only went to Phoenix to visit her family.

28:22 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Now, you know, in the last seven years.

28:24 – Kenneth Watson (Guest)
I’d have been to more states in these seven years that I did in the sixth that I was married, and so it’s like, okay, now I can do it. I love sports, so I’m trying these things that I couldn’t do, that I was doing when I was drinking, and am I comfortable? I tried one game. Okay, let’s try another one, let’s try another one. And so that’s more or less with that. But I would say, just be.

28:50
I think that for me it was this is all I had. It was like either I get sober and continue to live this life or you might as well, just, you know, go down the road about 10 miles to the maximum prison where they got the Duke that took out George George Floyd. I can go in that prison where I used to work at, because that’s where I was heading, and so now it’s like I don’t want that and that’s why I try to spread the message like a it’s possible, yeah, try a. Try everything. If it don’t work, try something else. So that’s what I did.

29:25
I put myself, I got active in the community. I was, you know, doing community work up in St Cloud, hanging out with the mayor, the police chief, stuff like that. So it’s just kind of keeping myself busy, you know. And then I had grad school. Grad school was my therapy. Going to class every day, studying writing 2025 30 page papers was my therapy. And, like I said, now, the blessing of my wife and having an in house therapist 24 seven, you know what I mean. So it just you know. Just I guess, given myself a chance. I didn’t give myself a chance when I was drinking because I spent more time drinking than doing anything else. Now I got time. I want to go do stuff and I do if I’m financially able to do it.

30:10 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
If not, I go do something for free. That’s always a good point, thank you, and so I know earlier I had asked you like what are you hopeful for with your son coming? Is there anything that you’re like fearful of with this new transition? Um?

30:30 – Kenneth Watson (Guest)
I just, I just don’t want my diabetes to take me out.

30:33 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Hmm.

30:42 – Kenneth Watson (Guest)
You know, I said I was going to be like super healthy, super strong before he gets here, but that’s not a harsh reality. So I mean, I think, just be present, I think what’s most important, like when I played sports my dad wasn’t there, and so the luxury of now to date, is that I don’t have to work.

31:01
My dad At least that’s what he said he was working, so he didn’t have time to watch my games. Now I do. You know, I know I post on. You know I’m going to my nephew’s games on Friday nights. He plays basketball as well, so I’ll be doing that here in the next couple of weeks. So that’s kind of I’ve been preparing myself for a lot of years. I’m looking forward to whatever activity he’s involved in. I will be there. If my wife came, I will be there.

31:27
You know what I’m saying, yelling my, you know, to the top of my lungs, but I don’t know. I just as far as fear, I’m going to be honest. No, I don’t. I’ve seen enough fear in my life. I’m so that my son don’t have to. You know what I mean and I guess some of my past relationships prepared me. So this is, I don’t know, like I don’t want to. I don’t want to think about fear, because I live that life of fear when I was drinking, because it was like I didn’t want to deal with nothing in life. So I guess I don’t know. I don’t know if that makes sense.

32:08 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Yeah, no, it does so. Like well, what advice or what message would you give to anybody who maybe, yeah, like, for example, like I’m 38, anybody who’s listening, who is in their late 30s, their 40s and they’re feeling like time has passed them by, right like that? When that that voice comes out, that’s like it’s too late. What did you say to Summer?

32:32 – Kenneth Watson (Guest)
It’s never too late Because, like you said, as you, you, I want to use it. Please say, but the fear of the unknown, like I didn’t, I didn’t know what long term sobriety look like, I know what a 30 days look like, I know what a week or two or 24 hours look like. But but this, right here, and I’m living proof, just by removing alcohol, that all these opportunities have, you know, came available. I’m, you know, hanging out with, you know, like minded people in the sub community that’s trying to spread awareness to it. So I would say, on social media, find some people that are truly genuine, that, even though that they’re behind the phone and you may never met, but are these people would you hang out with, would you truly trust?

33:37
telling personal information to Just keep a diary of how it’s going right, Document the good days and the bad days, Okay, so that when you have that long, long-term sobriety on your belt, you can go back and be like okay, how did I get myself out of that situation? Okay, I was anxious, I was frustrated. Oh, I know I can go to drinking, but what are you doing now so that you’re not putting yourself in that situation? I would say be as active in the sober community, Be careful for some snakes out there, but just be as active as you can ask questions. You know what I mean.

34:24 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
That’s what I was gonna ask you about too, because that was the other thing that I had noticed on some of your shares, like on your posts, there had been sort of like a few people that made reference to, I guess, like rejection from people in the sober community, and I was curious if you could speak to that a little bit.

34:47 – Kenneth Watson (Guest)
Yeah, when I first got into the sober community, like you say, 2017, because I was in treatment and I wasn’t really using my phone.

34:56 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
I would reach out to people.

34:57 – Kenneth Watson (Guest)
Hey, I’m newly sober, what advice can you give? Okay, some people wouldn’t even respond, the majority of them would. So I was like, all right, well, all right, then I’m gonna continue to keep posting my stuff and hopefully somebody will catch on.

35:15
And then I started, like you know, after like maybe I would say, maybe like year three, so like either 2019, 2020 is when I started to like people started to. I don’t know it was. I’m dealing with this, so it was. I’m dealing with different types of people in the community. But it was tough because, like I said, I wanted to try this. You know what I mean. I wanted to really be active within it and it’s like, okay, some people have you know that I reached out to, had years under their belt. I’m like I just want some guy and I’m like, look, you don’t have to be my sponsor, I don’t want a sponsor. But you know, can I lean on you? Can I? You know, if I’m having a tough day, can I just be like I wouldn’t get no responses? And even now, like even with some of the stuff that was like that was said, like last year, like I was in an interview and someone was like, as if, like that I can’t go and study abroad in South Africa and you know the government pay for it. You know what I mean and I’m like, okay, who are you Like if that’s what happened? You know I served my country, I earned that right. Why are you upset? You know what I mean. And then they made another comment like oh, my son, he was on the airplane and he pointed out this black guy and asked me why is he so dark? I’m like, so you telling me this on a podcast interview? This is no joke. I said okay.

36:47
And then you know other instances, you know people telling me oh, you’re not promoting AA. And I said I never said that. I said you can try it If you like it, cool, but if you don’t, yeah, just know that you can. You can say that you tried it. But, like I said, it’s four, some and not for all, but I don’t know Like it. To me this ain’t a popularity contest and to a certain extent that’s where it what it, what it seems like. And with me having a master’s degree in communications in this media, I analyze this every day and I know that this is not how this community should be, but it is and I want to change it. But you know there needs to be a few more voices out here. But, like I said, when I first started there was nobody. Now there is, so it’s kind of like alright, let’s keep going.

37:48 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
What would you envision it to be like if it was like ideal?

37:53 – Kenneth Watson (Guest)
Morey, more events, more events, more sponsors, more, more inclusiveness, then you know, if you guys don’t want to include us. You know we on the panel we was in this summer Like we shouldn’t have to put up a fuss like we were seeing at least I know I was seeing I brought it up to kill. I said wait a minute, like so you telling me that this is the face of sobriety? Is nobody of color? Or you got one person, one person. Okay, there’s more out here, and a big chunk of them I ain’t gonna say big, but a handful have been on my podcast. I had to go do the legwork to find them. You know what I mean. So, and then it kind of trickled down. Now, everybody’s ever, you know, it’s cool with everybody, which is cool.

38:45
I wanted to continue to grow, like I said, I just want to be happy in this community. I want to meet as many people, however, and so on, but the other bs y’all could keep that you know. But I just I realized after what happened a couple weeks ago, I’m just not gonna address it, I’m just gonna block the individuals and keep it moving, because I don’t want, you know, those People that do support me and follow me and understand like I’m trying my best in this journey To get deterred because of somebody else. You know, because they’re of their ignorance and stupidity. You know saying.

39:21 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
I mean that’s crazy that somebody would ask you that, like in a podcast interview, like that.

39:26
That’s wild. And yeah, I mean I would say I know that I remember in the summer I was, I was out of the country visiting my mom, but I remember that’s actually it was the sober summit which is getting redone and you know, I know you spoke up about it, kyola spoke up about it and the woman who runs it, maggie, she stepped up and for the holiday version which is out actually this week, um, she was very intentional about bringing on Making it a more diverse panel. So, you know, I’m I’m glad that I remember Kyola having like a big post about it and calling it out and you know, I appreciate that, like, maggie took that feedback and did something about it. Um, and, like you said, it would be great to see that happen more, because addiction doesn’t just affect one population. Like addiction is seen in all races, all ethnicities, all backgrounds. But the way that you know mainstream recovery puts that, you would think it’s just like white folks We’ll deal with addiction right, and it’s not.

40:32 – Kenneth Watson (Guest)
It’s not like I said I, I love to see it like more and more just the you know different different pages. I’m like, okay, that’s what’s up, let me follow. You know what I’m saying. Every time I see if, if it’s something that’s tagged, like, I think j, I think j had somebody on there like somebody else, uh, like tagged him or something. So I was like I clicked on the that individual’s profile. Okay, yeah, I’m following them too. You know what I’m saying.

40:59
Because, that’s just to me is what it is. I, I love to see it. I love you, know. Even if it’s somebody’s promoting something, I try to share that too, because I know that I’m not gonna see that on other people’s pages, you know yeah, yeah, and you know.

41:13 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
And the other thing too, with addiction, I think, like you know, I remember well I don’t remember because I was a kid, but you know, when we were talking about addiction in the 80s and 90s, it was the crack epidemic and that was affecting predominantly black americans, right, and we, I feel like we didn’t really talk about addiction, it was just criminalized. Nowadays we’re dealing with opiate addiction, you know, sweeping across the country and you know, now the conversation is happening, right, because we have a certain demographic of folks that are being impacted. But the crazy thing is that there are actually plenty of people of color who are also being affected by by opiates. But you know, of course, because the majority are white folks, you know that that has had more attention, which is Wild, because I I almost feel like now, for example, like when you hear about people talking about addiction, like sometimes you would think that it as if it’s just white people who are impacted, but like no populations of color have been impacted historically.

42:14
I mean, you know, like I remember one of the wildest things that I remember reading and learning about once I got sober Was how alcohol was used, like I went to. So I went to New Orleans last year and did a tour at I cannot remember the the name of the plantation, but it was like they went through One of the ways in which like alcohol was used with enslaved populations and like you gave them alcohol and you especially gave them alcohol during the holidays so that they wouldn’t plan like to escape, right. So like, what a powerful way to subdue a population, to give them mind-altering substances, because then they’re not going to be coherent enough to like plan any escape, right? We don’t have those conversations enough about how like rebellious sobriety actually really is right like, if you’re clear-headed, you are way less likely to be controlled.

43:03
And you know, we don’t. We don’t talk about that enough, especially for populations of color Like. It’s so important to have our clear heads. You know.

43:11 – Kenneth Watson (Guest)
I agree 100%. I was just. I was on the phone with Kiehl’s dad last night and we were having this exact conversation real, because it’s it’s. It’s hard because, like you said, you know, because it’s affecting One community. Now they have, like you said, they got these initiatives Okay, but where were these?

43:31
initiatives, when you was going directly to our hoods and and putting and showing us how to cook the stuff. You know what I mean. Well, we’re gonna take you out, we’re gonna take the mail out the home, but this is what it is and you guys got to deal with. And so now it’s like okay, you got people of color talk about. We don’t want this stuff, no more. We want a different life, and sometimes we’re not as welcome. I’ve even had people who have black in their tag name and people will reach out to them like why does it have to be about race? You know, somebody matter of fact, somebody gifted me a sober black veteran. Somebody inboxed me. No, they commented on my post and was like can you make me a white sober veteran shirt? I’m like you can go make your own damn shirt. You know what I mean, but she’s not gonna come on my page with that stuff, you know.

44:25 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Yeah, yeah, and that’s the thing it’s like. To me, the most dangerous conversation is the one where it’s like I don’t see color, like no, I need you to see me. I need you to see me exactly as I am, because this color that I carry is a huge part of my identity, my upbringing and also a lot of the trauma that’s been put on me and my family for generations, you know. So it’s so important to recognize it. Well, we’ve been all over the place in this conversation.

44:57 – Kenneth Watson (Guest)
I won’t. Hopefully I didn’t talk too much, you know.

44:59 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
No, no, no, this has been great. I mean, again, I’m just really excited to have had the opportunity to touch base with you. I know your life is about to completely change, you know, in the matter of days, weeks, right. So I’m just really honored that you took the time to talk to me because, again, you’re getting ready for a big transition. I’m really honestly happy. I’m so happy for you. Like I remember when you first told me that you had a baby on the way, and then I saw the marriage announcement. You know, I’m just really grateful to see people reaping the fruits of this work, you know, and it’s like I wish more people could, right, and not everyone gets this blessing. And you know, I do feel very fortunate and I know you feel very blessed and fortunate too, like we’re definitely a minority and I’m very grateful to be here and I’m just so glad to see that you’re happy. So I was like oh, let me reach out to Kenny because you know, I appreciate it, I really do.

46:03 – Kenneth Watson (Guest)
I appreciate it all because, like I said, it’s you know, being on the interview side is totally different than, you know, me being the host, because I, at one point, that’s all I was doing was just interviewing, interviewing, interviewing one interview, you know, and then about 20 more. You know what I mean. So it was like, but it’s you know, it’s cool and it’s I’m definitely happy to be in this community and I’m happy to, you know, really meet people like you that definitely keep me, you know, on the up and up of you know, about this sobriety and not giving up. You know what I’m saying, because if there’s been too many times where I’m like man, I could just delete this account and just go live my life and I’ll be okay. It’s kind of how I is, but I don’t want that. I want to continue to spread the message and, like I said, coming from a different perspective, you know, with attitude. Basically, you know what I’m saying, but it’s people are relating to it. You know what I mean, and so I got to keep going.

47:03 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Yeah, exactly, I mean because your son is only one of many lives you’re touching, like you’ve been touching lives for years and now you have this beautiful life that’s coming and you know the work that you’re doing. It’s just like you’re planting a seed, like who knows what your son can do? Your son can do like anything, and that’s so wild because you get to be sober, like you literally are. It’s almost like you’re creating the most fertile soil for, like your son to grow. Like, if your son is going to be this flower, he’s going to be like this big, beautiful, like just gorgeous human being, because you’re giving him like the best environment to have a head start. It doesn’t mean that he won’t have like his own challenges. He’s going to be a human being in this world. That’s a crazy world, but like what, what a better parent than like a sober parent right to have? So that’s just awesome.

47:58 – Kenneth Watson (Guest)
Yeah, because I definitely don’t want to. You know, hear, you know I don’t want to be apologized to my son every single time I made a mistake because I was drinking, right. That was the only time my father apologized and it’s like, okay, but what about all the other stuff? You know what I mean. So I’m just like I don’t want that. I just want to be present as I can, and I know the only way I can be present I have to be sober, and I’m definitely looking forward to it.

48:26 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Yeah Well, kenny, thank you. Thank you so much. So if folks want to find Kenny again, his handle is 12 Faces of Sober I’ll link it in my Instagram. I’ll also link. Your book is on Amazon, right?

48:43 – Kenneth Watson (Guest)
Amazon and on Walmart. All you gotta do is type in the 12 Faces of Sober as well, as you can get it on my website, 12FacesofSobercom. I became a best seller last February 22nd 2022. I have a few more books in the works. I just I don’t know, I don’t know if I’m gonna kind of scare you to put them out, but you know, we’ll see one day. But, yeah, Okay, that’s pretty much it.

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