Addiction: How do we love an addict and how does an addict love herself? 

June 8, 2021

Glennon Doyle:

Hi, everybody. It’s Glennon. I cannot believe that you came back to We Can Do Hard Things every single week. It just blows my mind. Thank you for spending this hour with us. I am feeling sappy this morning, half sad, half happy. I’m happy because this week, my sister and her babies and her husband came to Naples to see us. I haven’t seen them for a year and I got to squeeze all of them. We missed a Christmas together as so many did because of COVID. And so I decided we were going to do Christmas. So much to Abby’s chagrin, we put up the tree, we decorated the whole house. Yes, we did. We decorated cookies. We sang Christmas carols. We had Christmas morning. We had Christmas and it was wonderful and beautiful. And they left last night. So I miss my sister already, but I’m very excited that she will be joining us in a minute to discuss something that so many people have asked us to discuss on We Can Do Hard Things and that is addiction and sobriety. How do we decide, how do we figure out if alcohol is a problem for us? How do we love addicts in our lives? How do we protect ourselves? How do we show up for them? How do we talk about sobriety and addiction and what are all the different ways that alcohol can give us or keep us from a beautiful life? Let’s get started.

GD:

Today, what we are going to talk about is sobriety and addiction. And I think this’ll just be the first of many conversations we have about this topic, because this has been addiction and sobriety have been the hard thing of my life. And because it’s been the hard thing of my life, it’s also been the hard thing of your life. One of the hard things of your life, because you are my person and you have been through all of it with me. And I have told my story, my addiction story, my alcoholism story, my food addiction story, and my recovery story so many times. And I think what has been missing from all of that is your perspective. You know, so many people say to me, I’m not you, I’m not the addict. I’m the one that loved the addict or the one that loves the addict now. And that is a perspective that we don’t hear enough. Right. So the hard thing we’re discussing today is sobriety. And it’s also being someone who loves an addict, right?

Amanda Doyle:

Yep.

GD:

So the story I’ve told so many times, but some people don’t know is that I became a food addict when I was 10 bulimic and then that morphed into many other addictions. And I became an alcoholic in my late teens and didn’t get sober until I was 25. And the day I got sober, I found out that I was pregnant. And so I just found myself one morning, just sitting on a bathroom floor, holding a positive pregnancy test and just shaking from terror, but also from withdrawal and hangover. And, something about that day, I think I was so sick and so broken and I had burned every bridge in my life. And I just think I really understood that moment as maybe a last chance kind of to come back to life. And so I actually called you from the bathroom floor and my memory is that pretty soon after that you came to me and picked me up and took me to my first recovery meeting. So that would have been the rock bottom in the beginning, but let’s go backwards a little bit.

AD:

Okay.

GD:

I just want to hear from you, I mean, it’s wild because of all of the conversations we have, we really haven’t even in private now we’ve never talked about this.

AD:

I know.

GD:

I’m kind of actually scared. I really am. I was thinking about it this morning. Like I’m scared to know, but what was it like my addictions affected your life from a very, very early age, because I think mom and dad found out about my bulimia when I was around 12, which means that you were only nine.

AD:

No, it was earlier than that.

GD:

Was it?

AD:

Yeah. Didn’t they, the first time that they saw the first time we were at grandma’s when they discovered that you were throwing up and that night they talked to me about it. So, because they were like, what do you know, how long has this been happening?

GD:

Even that. That’s so interesting, right? So the first experience from the person who the sister is, what did you know, what do you know? What was it like? And I’m sure that’s a really loaded question, you could answer a million different ways, but what do you remember about being raised in our family where one sister was sick, and you were living with that?

AD:

I obviously remember that night and, um, and I didn’t know that it was happening before, they knew it was happening. I obviously was worried, confused, you know, I would have been seven or eight or nine. I can’t remember which what the date they found out. I lose track until the next kind of pivotal moment when you were a senior in high school and you went to the mental hospital, that I remember being a real moment of fear and worry and just kind of, I would’ve been a freshman in high school and just was very, very worried and scared for you, but was proud of you for going for going there.

GD:

Do you remember dropping me off because I only have flashes, but I do remember very well you guys dropping me off. What do you remember from that day?

AD:

I remember we all we got in dad’s pickup truck. We drove to, I remember the name of the hospital. We drove there. It’s surreal when you think about it, we just deposited you at this hospital. I remember that got you to your little room, set up your stuff, and then …

GD:

Do you remember what you gave me?

AD:

The letter and the Mariah Carey song.

GD:

Yeah. You gave me a letter, it had a bunch of beautiful things about how I was strong and that you loved me so much. And then inside was the letter was this little smaller note and I unfolded it and it was the lyrics to the Hero song by Mariah Carey. And by the way, it is really moving those lyrics.

AD:

Oh my gosh.

GD:

It’s the hero inside of you. Like you have everything you need, it’s all inside of you. It’s the message I’ve needed my whole life. And I still do as a 45 year old. So you nailed it.

AD:

Well, Mariah Carey nailed it. I mean, she’s really, she’s really the hero we all need if we’re being honest.

GD:

Right, right, right.

AD:

Yeah. So, that was a pivotal moment. And then it kind of several months later you went to college and that’s when I feel like I understood things as I began to understand you as two people and instead of what, and so all through going up, I mean, we were, we were completely, we were so tight. I don’t remember playing a lot, I don’t remember having really doing much with anybody who wasn’t you throughout.

GD:

Yeah. It was just the two of us.

AD:

It was just the two of us for all the things.

GD:

We even had one blankie, do you remember? We had one blankie as one security blanket and we would share it. I slept in the bottom bunk and you slept in the top bunk. So we would share the blankie, like across the bunks. And then one day we were in a hotel room. I don’t know why maybe in Ohio and we were fighting, we were in two different beds and we were fighting over the blanket. So mom walked in and cut the blanket down the middle and gave you half and me half. And I remember you being fine with that. And me being like you thinking like, Yes, awesome. Why didn’t we think of this earlier? And I remember feeling devastated by it and I don’t remember the thoughts. I just remember the feeling and it makes me think like that was a connection to you that I needed it. It wasn’t the security of the blanket. It was the security of being connected to my sister by the blanket.

AD:

Yeah. A shared security blanket is maybe textbook co-dependence.

GD:

Co-dependency, a shared security blanket.

AD:

Also it goes back to our core issues of like scarcity and money. Like why the hell didn’t we have two security blankets to begin with? You get a blankie, kids. Enjoy your blanket.

GD:

And by the way, I took that blankie with me.

AD:

To college.

GD:

I had it in college. And my dad, when I graduated, cut a teeny piece of the blankie off and put it in a frame and it says, in case of emergency break glass.

AD:

I know that was so sweet.

GD:

So sweet. So two people, I was two people in college.

AD:

I think I just kind of intuitively understood that there was this one sister that I have always had that was still there and this kind of wisdom and love. And always would always do anything for me. And then I just understood there was this different version. I could always tell, it’s funny within like 20 seconds of a conversation or a phone call or whatever I could tell if you’d been drinking. It was just, it’s just like when you know someone that well, and it’s just like a tiny, it’s like a click, you just know that person differently. And as college moved on for you, it was just clear that you were not in possession of yourself. Like there was some moments where you were in possession of yourself and there were, and then those were wonderful. But I just understood that you couldn’t, you could not, not lie. You couldn’t tell the truth. You couldn’t, and I didn’t expect otherwise, I don’t remember being super upset about it. I remember kind of just understanding it as fact, like, I think I realized it, it was at one point in college where I’d called wherever you were supposed to be living at the time where you had told mom and dad and me that you were living. And it was just this familiar. One of the girls answered. I was like, Is Glennon there? It was before cell phones or anything. So you couldn’t get in touch. And they were like, Oh, yeah, let me see. And I was like, ohhhhh, Glennon doesn’t live there.

GD:

No.

AD:

She definitely doesn’t live there. And I think that was the moment for me where I realized, Okay, she, she can’t, she’s just living a whole nother life. And she is not in possession of herself for the remainder.

GD:

Did mom and dad used to talk to you about, you know, they kept being like little mini-interventions like I have flashes of those, flashes of, you know, sitting on the couch across from mom and dad and them, something awful had just happened that every, my whole life was just something awful happening after another awful thing happening after another awful thing happening, all tied to drinking. And I, you know, I remember mom and dad looking at me and saying, do you even love us? I’ll never forget that. And just feeling like, oh my God, I have no answer for you because every single one of my actions proves that I don’t, except that I do. Like, I’m swallowed up. I remember feeling like I’ve been swallowed. I’m like swallowed by this whale that is addiction. And no one can hear me and no one can see me, but I’m in here. But it was like one of those movies where the person’s alive and they’re in a hospital bed and they can understand everything, but they can’t speak or communicate. You know. Did you know that those little interventions were going on or did they, did the mom and dad shield you from that stuff? Or how did you all communicate with each other about my situation?

AD:

I definitely knew that they knew that, that you were struggling, that we all viewed you as having a major drinking problem, but they didn’t tell me. They never asked me thank God to be a part of one of those interventions. But I never understood the situation that way. I always viewed it as two people. Like I never, I never viewed it as my sister is lying to me or my sister is asking me for money. It was always like it was like an alter ego of you. And so I didn’t, I never, I thought those things that they thought. I don’t remember experiencing like, well, my sister doesn’t love me or my sister can’t. I knew that you in that state could not protect me and couldn’t be trusted, but I didn’t experience that as you.

GD:

Interesting.

GD:

So when people say to you, I mean, we got this miracle of sobriety, right? Which so many people desperately want and are so wishing that there was some advice or formula or reason that some people end up getting the miracle of sobriety and some people don’t. And so I know that people often say to you, how did you do it? How do I help? My sister is an addict. My person is an addict. You got your miracle. What did you do? Like, how do I help my person? How do you answer that?

AD:

Yeah. I’m so glad you asked that because I see that a lot when people are responding to you and they feel like they’re doing something wrong. And I just, I, I just want to say very clearly, if you are listening to this right now, and you want to know what I did to help Glennon into recovery, I just want to make very, very clear that I did nothing and that no one has ever loved or prayed or suffered or strategized anyone into recovery, not in all the history of the world. And I think what I did with you, Glennon, was I just loved you, and I lived my life with some really healthy boundaries so that when you were ready for recovery, our relationship wasn’t irretrievably scarred. Had I not had those boundaries, the pain from the drinking days might have made it so that it was too scarred to recover. But all I did was just have those boundaries and love you, and then answered the phone when you decided that you were going to get sober. And I do view your sobriety as a miracle. Like, I don’t think that there, I cannot see any ascertainable answer as to why some people recover and some stay drunk and why I get to do life with you, my best friend, and why other people lost theirs. There’s no reason. And so I just feel like, I feel like people are in this awful place where they feel like they can, they can work harder to get their person into recovery, but no one has ever earned or deserved a recovering loved one by trying harder.

GD:

No. Or loving more.

AD:
No, it’s just a miracle.

GD:

Or smarter, or any of those things.

AD:

And you might never get the miracle. Like you can’t just wear yourself endlessly down, just trying to earn it because you might not. And if you do, then there might be some something left of you to be able to love that person when they come back, if you don’t wear yourself down.

GD:

I love that. I think so many people think I can’t make boundaries because I love this person so much. And another way to look at it is I have to make boundaries because I love this person so much. And I have to make sure that there’s something left. If there is a miracle of that love, because addiction has a way of just ravaging love without boundaries.

AD:

Yeah.

GD:

So we did have that day, we did have that day where I called you from the bathroom and PS, like we’d had a few of those days, I think. So we weren’t sure that this was going to stick, right? Like we, nobody knew if this was going to be the actual time. Do you remember? I remember two things. I have flashes of that day. I have like a quick flash of getting into your car. I remember walking into the meeting. I remember there being brochures on the table. I remember taking the brochures to the little circle. Right. And everybody’s sitting there reading the brochures. So this is probably why they give the brochure, so you have somewhere to look.

AD:

Cause it’s awkward as hell.

GD:

It’s awkward AF. Yes. So I remember the brochures saying things like, you might be an alcoholic if .

AD:

I know it was like a magazine quiz, it was like, you can just do that. I love a quiz.

GD:

I love a quiz. So it was like, you know, you drink more than three drinks in one setting, or do you ever black out, or do you have shame where you drink in the morning. And first of all, I remember other people watching other people take the quiz and being like, this is so wild. Like isn’t the fact that we’re all sitting in a fricking church basement in the middle of the day in this gross room, like enough of an indicator that we have a drinking problem. Like, do we really need this

AD:

The jig is up. I don’t think anyone is here who is not and alcoholic.

GD:

I don’t think that anyone in this room is going to be like, actually I just had some extra time to kill and came in here. I’m fine.

AD:

I just took the quiz and I’m totally great. I’m going to go back to work.

GD:

Right. So I remember that. And then I remember checking yes to every single one of them. And I remember you putting your hand on my leg and saying, actually, I don’t know if AA is going to be enough for you we might need AAA.

AD:

Oh my God. And anything to try to make, of course.

GD:

Cause that’s how our family, like any humor we can bring in. But, I do remember that was the first laugh and that when that’s, when felt like, oh, okay, like maybe we’re going to be okay. Like that laughter has always been kind of a proof of hope for us. It’s also just a coping mechanism. But what, do you remember anything from that day? Or do you ever anything different than I remember?

AD:

I remember those things too. I remember sitting there and thinking, like trying to figure out  how I could just do it for you.

GD:

Oh.

AD:

Can I just say that I’m, just thinking there’s no way to walk her all the way through this and that being awful. And then I remember just going home and I do remember like for six hours we just cleaned your room. Do you remember that?

GD:

Oh my God. I forgot about that.

AD:

That was to me such, because as we all know, my love language is just any ability to help and had been like 10 years at that point of not being able to help in any way. And it just felt like this. We took every single disgusting thing out of that room and we cleaned and we organized and we threw everything away. And it was just this kind of hope that you didn’t have to live in a place that wasn’t worthy of you anymore.

GD:

I remember feeling like I remember you leaving that day and sitting in my room and feeling like I deserve this place. I deserve to live in a nice place. I remember picking up just like all those old gross bottles and ashtrays and just like the layers of shame and crap and disorder. And just one at a time you just loving, we didn’t even talk. I don’t think, I don’t think we talked. We just like minute by minute put stuff away, washed it, cleaned surfaces.

AD:

That was the only meeting I, after that, you went to the meetings by yourself and I just wonder, what was that, what was that whole process like for you recovery meetings and that whole, all the steps?

GD:

Yeah. I mean, I, I feel nervous talking about this because I’ve never really talked openly about my whole experience with recovery and specifically AA. It was very unbelievably lifesaving for me in the beginning. You know, I’m old school in my belief that I actually am an addict that an addict is a thing that people can be. I know there’s a lot of thought and talk now, which I respect that that is not real. But I feel it in me, like, I just, I don’t know how, how else to describe it other than like, there is a part of me that switches on and off when it comes to certain things that I cannot control. So I believe in that. I believe that I actually am an addict and there are things that I need to do to keep that at bay. I loved the truthfulness, you know, you know that the first time I sat and listened to somebody in an AA meeting, I thought, oh my God, like this, these are the people I’ve been waiting for my entire life. These are the honest people, everyone else is always acting and pretending and lying. And this is where people come to be honest, that part of it was lifesaving to me, the accountability, just to replace some, a replacement thing. Like when you’re an addict, you just, all you can think about is drinking. And so just to have something else to think about and to like plan to do and people who will notice if you don’t show up and who, you know, just the, the showing up part, super, super important to me, I will tell you that I have never spoken about this publicly before, but I didn’t do all the steps. So I was working the steps and then I got to the amends, the making amend step and had a really interesting, to me, I don’t know if it will be interesting to anyone else, an interesting experience at that step where I was unable to do it. And I will try to explain why I think the best way. So we’re just going to have to put 7 million trigger warnings on this episode. But I don’t know if you remember before I got sober, I had an experience where I had an abortion. I told mom and dad about it, and this was the depths of like just the addiction and all, they just didn’t know what to do with me. And one night out of desperation, after I told them about the abortion, they actually sent me to this priest. Do you remember this experience? So there was some little church and I think some, a priest that dad had been going to for some spiritual guidance about my addiction and just being my dad and, um, how to handle being my dad on this earth. And so in a moment of, we don’t know what to do with this girl anymore. They, they said, just go meet with this priest. I was like, oh my God.

AD:

That should do it.

GD:

And I’ll never forget. I was actually like hung over from the night before I was wearing a frickin black leather pants, stilettos, my mascara down to my cheeks, just like, whoa. And I had to walk into this small church and meet with this priest that I had never met before. And I remember sitting down on the other side of the table and I guess dad had talked to him and this priest just like, kind of launched into the speech to me about abortion and about what a sin it was and that perhaps I could be forgiven, but I needed to atone. And I needed to, the first thing I needed to do was start apologizing. I needed to apologize like right then and there. And there was a part of me that just right now, you know, all these years later, I would have had a much more formed argument.

AD:

You’ve had a few years to think about it.

GD:

A lot of things to say in that moment, some of them would have revolved around like hypocrisy and patriarchy and whatever. But at the moment, all I could think was F you just F you, and that encompassed a lot of things. The idea of all of the, you know, sexual hypocrisy that the church represented to me at the time, all of the fact that, you know, nobody had even mentioned where was the man in this situation, like nobody was just so, so much of what I understood about shame and sex and birth control and all of these things had come directly from me from the church. And I just kept like, thinking, I know that I’m f-ed, but like you too. Yeah. Yeah. Like you too, you know? So like, I’m sorry, but also F you, right.

AD:

I’ll start apologizing, if you start to apologize.

GD:

Exactly. like if we’re going to apologize, let’s both do it. Okay. So, but I didn’t say any of that, you know what I said? I’m sorry. I’m sorry. And then I left and then whatever. When I try to think about apologizing for my addictions. Okay.

AD:

Which is what making amends is.

GD:

Right. Right. For all the people you heard during the right, you go back from where your addiction started, and then you think of every single person or institution or whatever that you hurt throughout your addiction. Okay. All I could, I wanted to do it. I wanted to do all the things they told me to. I wanted to get healthy. I wanted to surrender. I wanted to whatever, but I kept thinking about, so to whom do I apologize? Where do I start when I was 10?

AD:

Right.

GD:

To whom does my 10 year old self freaking apologize or who owes my ten-year-old self up an apology. I feel like the metaphor that I would use to try to describe how I feel about this is I feel like I was raised okay. In a country, in which, on every single corner, there’s a factory that gives off toxic smoke. Okay. Some people are okay with this okay-ish with the smoke, but there are certain, you know, group in the population that has a gene that reacts negatively to this toxic, toxic smoke that’s in the air. And those people get sick. Okay. And over time, the smoke makes them so sick that they start showing symptoms. They start having symptoms. And because of those symptoms, they become a huge pain in the ass to their family, to their friends, to the community. They become a burden because of the symptoms. So eventually the symptoms get bad enough that the people who go to the hospital and they’re like, oh, I’m so sick. And I’m a burden to my thing. And the doctors are like, well, you better start fricking apologizing. You better start freaking apologizing because that’s the only way you’re gonna get healthy. Get on your knees and ask for forgiveness for getting sick. Right. I have a humility in my recovery that understands that I am an addict and I am powerless against alcohol. Like, I believe that, but it also has an F-you my recovery it’s like, hold on a second. Like, I was born in a culture where every single message I heard from the time I was a baby was it a girl’s worth is in her beauty. And the beauty, the girl’s beauty is in her smallness that girls aren’t allowed to have big appetites desire that a girl’s job is to stay small. Right. And that was plastered on every billboard, in every TV and in my home. And by the way, alcohol culture was pumped into our family. Eating stuff was pumped into our family. The messages got everywhere, right. The smoke was everywhere. I was just freaking breathing. So perhaps if there had been before the I’m sorry, phase, if there was an F you step right. Where I got to like actually line up, because I think that it’s two parts, right? Like there is the responsibility I have as an addict to do things differently and to create a different life and to stop hurting people. But there’s also the toxins, the smoke that was pumped into the air all the time. Right. So my surrender, my sobriety path is like, it’s not just on my knees, it’s like fist in the air a lot of time. Like there is an F-you to my recovery that is healthier for me than being that girl who sat and looked at the priest and was like, I’m sorry.

AD:

Right. And it’s also another reason why people who love addicts need boundaries because a lot of addicts got to addiction quite honestly, and are just as miserable as they can possibly be. And they will hurt you. And your job is not to save them. Your job is to protect yourself from their inevitable hurt. That has nothing to do with their love for you.

GD:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So, you know, people will have a lot of feelings also about that AA stuff. And I will say that I found and find so much help and beauty there. And also for me, whenever anything gets too rigid or dogmatic or fundamentalist or tribalist, I can’t do it. And so I have a major love and respect and no allegiance to the dogma or the rigidity of that path. So I think what we should do sis is I think we should take a break and get back to some Q&A and I think we’re just going to have to do a lot more on sobriety, because I love talking with you about this, and I love you so much. And, you know, thanks for making the boundaries that you needed so we had something beautiful to come back to.

AD:

I love you, Sister. Thanks for being the miracle of recovery. So I had someone to come back to.

GD:

God, I’m so glad I finally got to talk about that priest.

GD:

Okay. We are back with one of my favorite parts of We Can Do Hard Things, thank you so much for all of your questions and the topic ideas that you’re leaving. Here’s the place to call if you have a question for Sister and I to respond to, or if you have a topic idea for We Can Do Hard Things, the number is (747) 200-5307. So check in with us. We love to hear from you. We listen to every single voicemail. Okay. Here’s our first question.

Laura (caller):

Hi, Glennon. My name’s Laura. I’m just listening to your first podcast and journaling this morning and just thinking about hard things in my life right now. And one thing is alcohol and how much I’ve been using it the past year during the pandemic. And I’m confused on my relationship with it. If I want to keep drinking, if I want to just stop altogether, I go on like these different wavelengths of like all in or all out, you know? And, I just am confused on my relationship with alcohol and how to move forward with it. And any advice I would appreciate. Thank you.

AD:

I’d love to take this one because …

GD:

Yes.

AD:

I understand this confusion very deeply because I feel like the world has kind of presented to us two options of the type of drinker there is. So there either there’s like this fall down drunk who loses their job and alienates her family and has this quite conspicuous rock bottom at some point.

GD:

It’s me, it’s me!

AD:

Does that sound familiar? And kind of is forced to stop drinking or should, you know, everyone agrees they should, and then there’s everybody else. And it’s just kind of assumed that, that if you’re not in the former category that you’re in the drinker category.

GD:

Yeah. And the default is you should keep drinking.

AD:

Right. Exactly. And, and I feel like our cultural culture does not make room for people who are not in that super seriously, dramatically problematic drinking space to question, even question in any way, whether their drinking is working for them. And I feel like it’s kind of this very counter-cultural concept. If your life is quote unquote working to even look at it. And it makes everyone uncomfortable when you do so, my path is very much like this. So I got drunk for the first time when I was in seventh grade but I’ve always been on that tight rope of very high achiever and also drinker like that was kind of a badge of honor, like a big part of my identity, it was that work hard, play hard thing. And that always appeared to be working for me. And then a couple of a few years ago, now my, it started to work less well for me. And I feel like from the outside, things appeared to be still working correctly. But, my anxiety was through the roof. I was more depressed than I had been before. And there wasn’t a night that went by that I didn’t drink wine. And it would always be, you know, a glass when I was making dinner a glass during dinner, a glass after dinner. And, you know, the glasses I’m talking about.

GD:

Yes, I know your glasses. I sure do.

AD:

And that was just my routine. And I told myself it was perfectly normal for a couple to finish a bottle of wine every night. And I also very skillfully avoided the fact that my husband was drinking a glass.

GD:

A couple that just finished it. (laughing)

AD:

I mean, everybody does that, we’re so European. I was working really hard during that time. And my life was crazy and two little kids, and I just needed that click of relief. It’s like the only exhale, the only unwind that I could find in my life to take me out of the constant mental ticker that is going through my head constantly. And I just didn’t have any other way that I knew of to do that. And then I gradually started to realize that this thing that I was using to make my life work, wasn’t working for me. And it had been my door into some kind of freedom from the rest of my life, but it was actually the thing making me most unfree. And the way I realized that, and I was very, I did not want to realize it. But I just started thinking about it a lot. I was, instead of worrying about all my problems, I was starting to worry of whether I had a drinking problem.

GD:

Yes.

AD:

But I didn’t want to ever say it out loud because I seriously was wondering how can I keep up my life without this?

GD:

Oh yeah. Yeah. When you rely on drinking, it seems utterly impossible to consider.

AD:

Because you’re in this spiral of anxiety and depression. And you think that if you take away this one thing that is the antidote to that, that your life is going to be all those things except worse.

GD:

Except for no relief. It’s like that Homer Simpson quote, Alcohol, the cause of, and solution to all of life’s problems.

AD:

Well, by the way, that is factually true. I mean, not to go down a tangent, but science is clear that sustained alcohol consumption. I believe this scientific term is totally jacks up, but something like that totally jacks up your dopamine signaling in your brain and the GABA receptors in your brain. So it literally puts you on this spiral of anxiety and depression and dependence on that to get out of it, but then leads you further down the cycle. So you need it more and you think you can lose it less because of that vicious cycle. And I think for me, I was scared to say it out loud, very scared to say it out loud, because it’s kind of like that meme that you I’ve seen it a few times that it says, I would be friends with you again, but I already told my mom what you did.

GD:

Exactly for me. It’s Sister. I can’t be friends with you because I told my sister what you did. Yeah, yeah.

AD:

There’s no, it’s done. You can’t undo that, you know, it’s out there. And, so I was afraid to say it because I thought for sure that a couple of weeks after I got the bravery to say it, I would very much want to say psych, I take all of that back. But I think that, I think it just, I got to feel trapped, and I felt like, I really truly knew it when you said about, I remember thinking in the car driving one day and, uh, that part of untamed where you say, you know, what is your dragon? What is your one thing that, you know, at the center of you? And I knew it was that I knew it was that I was saying that I had all of these issues so that I needed to drink when in fact, my anxiety and worry about whether I would ever be able to stop drinking was in fact, my biggest …

GD:

Issue.

AD:

Issue.

GD:

And a reason that you could never handle your, or fix your issues. Right. Cause you’re constantly tapping out before you get to that discomfort that forces you to actually deal with the issue. So not only does alcohol become an issue, but all your other issues get bigger because all you’re doing is avoiding them with the alcohol.

AD:

And by the way, the other part of that that’s exactly right. But the other part of that is whatever your thing is. I mean, whether it was my bulimia when it was my bulimia, whether it was my drinking when I was drinking, it is this decoy issue. So, so you’re both not dealing with your real problems, but you’re also telling yourself that these other problems aren’t problems, because your main problem is your drinking, your main your bulimia. And so it displaces all of the work you should be doing, because you’re telling yourself if I didn’t have this one problem, all these other problems would go away, which is also unfortunately not true.

GD:

Right. It’s not true, tragically. And you know, another thing that you keep bringing up is that you just kept thinking about it. So whenever someone asks me, how do I know if I have a drinking problem? My first thought is always, people who don’t have drinking problems do not sit around all day and wonder if they have drinking problems. Right? If you are wondering if you have a drinking problem that might be enough evidence for you.

AD:

Right. And I think, but I think it’s fair to understand why people are confused about, about what drinking problem means. Because every movie, every book, every, there is a caricature of a person with a drinking problem, and they are arrested and their parents don’t speak to them and they lose custody of their kids. And so it’s kind of the, you don’t know if you have a right to say it and you also know, right. And there’s no place for people like that.

GD:

And it’s double worse because the same media and culture that holds up, oh, it’s just this fall down drunk that has the problem. Also continuously holds up drinking as the best life, every celebration, every, you know, social gathering that is meaningful. Everything that is celebratory, what we see in the media, it involves alcohol. Your best life will involve alcohol. When actually alcohol often keeps people from their best life. I think that’s one of the ways you just know, like, is this thing that I think is going to give me this best life. Is it keeping me from whatever I believe that my best life is.

AD:

Right. That’s right. And that is how I started to feel the thing that I was that I was relying on to untrap me from the frenetic pace of my life and my head began to feel like my trap. I mean, my gosh, people do elimination diets with gluten or dairy or whatever the hell else that is giving them hives. But the idea of experimenting with whether, if you eliminated that from your life, if your life would be better, is this kind of revolutionary thought that, and the reason it is by the way is because it shakes up the whole ecosystem around you. Because every time you stop drinking, people view that as a judgment of theirs. And as long as you keep drinking, then it, we all agree that it’s totally normal all day long. So anyway, for me, I think to the, the person who’s asking this question, it just feels like if you are thinking about it, you know, and your first steps can be, I mean, for me, my first step was I started one day kind of reached this crescendo in my head where I was like, I have to clear this mental space of my head. It’s taking up too much real estate in my brain. And I called my doctor’s office to ask for an appointment. And they, she didn’t have one for like months. And I realized that then like that moment, you know, you get all your you’re all psyched up to do something. And I’m like, that moment has passed. I’ll probably revisit this in three years.

GD:

That’s the universe, the universe. I should probably just keep drinking.

AD:

I’ll just order another case in wine. So I, the very next day I got a call from the same doctor’s office, reminding of me, of my annual physical. That was the following day.

GD:

Oh, shit. That was the universe of gangs saying that you should stop drinking.

AD:

Exactly. So I thought, you know, like the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over and expecting different results. I was like, what the hell? What if I just go in there and just tell her the God’s honest truth for the first time in my life?

GD:

Oh my God, that is a revolution in itself.

AD:

It is, it is. So I just went in there and I told I was so scared. I was shaking. I,When she asked all the questions that she asked every year prior to that consumption, I’m like, ish, just about right-ish. I told her exactly what I was drinking. And I told her that I was anxious and depressed, and I told her I was worried about it. And she was great. And she looked at me and said, okay, here’s what we need to do. Yes, that is, she was definitively, I was expecting her to be like, well, you know. She was like, that’s too much. And she said, here’s what we need to do. You need to not drink for two weeks and then come back and we’ll make another appointment talk about how it’s going. And I just burst out crying because the way she said, you just need to not drink for two weeks.

GD:

Like, it was easy.

AD:

Like I could just, oh, that hadn’t occurred to me before. So, so what I need to do is not drink. Right.

GD:

So, so I wasn’t expecting that crap. So I came in here to say I needed to quit drinking. And you’re telling me that the only way I can quit drinking is to quit drinking. That’s unacceptable.

AD:

But it’s just, yes, it was. It was too much. I knew if I left with nothing, even if it was like a placebo effect, something to make me feel like this was possible.

GD:

Advil PM.

AD:

Yes. Exactly. She just said that to her, which was brave of me because I usually am like, got it, got it. And I was like, definitely don’t got it. And she gave me this prescription for something that was, didn’t do anything for the cravings, but it was supposed to help with withdrawal. So if you go from four glasses of wine every night for three years to zero, your body has a reaction to that.

GD:

Yes, I do remember. (laughing)

AD:

And so she gave it to me to take for two weeks and then come back. And it was an emotional day, but I remember picking up that prescription from the pharmacy. And I just burst out laughing as soon as I looked at it, because on the outside of the bottle, it said, call the doctor, if you experience mood changes. I was like, should I do that now? I’m pretty much already having them. So, but that was 17 months ago that that all happened. And all of my problems are still my problems, but now I know what my problems are. And before I didn’t and eliminating the drinking has not fixed my problems, but it also is not part of the source of my problems. And it’s not tricking me into believing that the drinking is my problem. Like I can actually see kind of clears the runway to actually look at what is, and I do still feel shitty a lot of the time, but I definitely feel free and that’s what I want. And so I think that just, I think it would do each person a great service. And whether it’s about drinking or whether it’s about relationships or whether it’s about your partnership or something with your kid, if we were just brave and bold enough to not need this kind of permission slip of a dramatic rock bottom, to look at things.

GD:

Yes. To look at things.

AD:

I think that would really be a blessing for all of us because we’d psych, we need to wait until we’re no longer having sex for six months to be like, well, it’s officially a problem, or we need to wait until our kids are, you know, until the teacher’s telling us that something’s very wrong or we need, and same with drinking, we feel like we need an excuse to open that conversation because it disturbs some kind of, part of the ecosystem.

GD:

Yeah. I mean, it challenges a cultural mandate. We have that alcohol is a part of a good life. I mean, it, it challenges it, an idea that that alcohol, and you know, that’s all stuff that’s pumped in the air purposefully by the alcohol industry. This is not a mystery why we all think this. And the funny thing is, if you wonder if you have a drinking problem and the idea of even experimenting with removing it for small bit of time, it makes you feel terrified, and like, you cannot do that, that’s more information for you, right? If the idea of even removing it, if you can’t do it, that’s might be your evidence that you must do it. Tragically, I have learned many times in my life. So what does living sober mean to you?

AD:

I think it’s funny because I feel like people think of sobriety as living your entire life in deprivation. It’s like we have defined sober as not drinking. So it’s necessarily this idea of you are withholding something from yourself that everyone else gets the gets to enjoy. But I think it’s the opposite actually. I think to me, sobriety is a commitment to stop living out of a place of deprivation and to start living in the opposite place, which is possession like possession of yourself and your needs and accountability to the life you’re making, because this is what I mean by that. I think that, whether you’re abusing drugs or alcohol or food or sex or whatever it is, it’s the thing we need or want the most, we think that’s the thing. And that withhold that from ourselves is deprivation. So if I’m not allowing myself to have the thing I want the most, it is a deprivation, but with the thing we’re abusing is always just a shitty consolation prize to a higher need.

GD:

Give me an example.

AD:

Okay. So, you know, like you, I was bulimic for a lot of years. And when I go back and look at the time periods where that raged the most, it was always during a time that was not safe or sensical around me, where it was, whether it was law school and my utter overwhelm with that. And my relationship at the time that none of it, it was all overwhelming. And none of it made sense. I created this secret, terrible life of bingeing and purging all the time and it was torturous, but it was a drama entirely of my own making.

GD:

Yes, we were in control. Yes, you were in control of your own drama, your own pain, your own misery. So I was concurrently utterly out of control and a hundred percent in control and being in control in like through the reward of compulsive bulimia was a very, very shitty constellation prize to a higher need that was setting the boundaries that I needed in the real world, telling people what I needed from them saying no to things and making my actual life manageable.

GD:

Yeah. Well, I mean, this reminds me of in Untamed. It’s like the idea of when you ask a woman, why do you need that bottle of wine tonight? Like, what do you need from this? And they will tell you, I just need a break. I just need a moment of peace. I just need, and in big alcohol and in a capitalist society in any way, their job is to take a huge, real human need. That’s real and true and good and slap a product on it. And that is what they’ve done with wine and booze and all the things they’ve slapped the human need of celebration, joy, rest on bottles. And so if we can’t get it the real way, we just grab a bottle because we think that that’s what we’re going to get. And so it’s like this surface desire of the bottle of wine. It can’t really be trusted, but the desire below it, for me, I’m say below, you say high, that’s interesting, but like you go high, I go low regularly in our life. But the deeper beneath that surface desire for a bottle of wine is good and can be trusted. It’s just the freaking human desire for a woman has for just some rest, some peace, the ability to check out of her mind for a minute.

AD:

But you only know that because you went through that because here’s because here’s the most insidious part of this whole thing, which is, it becomes this vicious cycle that you never actually identify your higher need, or what you call your deepest …

GD:

Deeper need

AD:

Yes, deeper need, because you become so convinced by your shame that your life only sucks because of your addiction and not because of some met higher need that is not being met. So you never get to the part where you can say what I really want, what I really need and want is X, because you are a hundred percent convinced that it is your fault. If I didn’t drink and make my life miserable, if I didn’t spend three hours a day, bingeing and purging, if I didn’t, that is the source of my problems, but I need this thing in order to manage my life. So you can’t even see the upside. You can only see the deprivation of the immediate need.

GD:

Yeah. You’re considering it a reward like you’re telling yourself that’s a reward I’m keeping myself from, instead of understanding that it’s often just a punishment, the self punishment.

AD:

It is. For me, it’s the shitty constellation price. It’s like, here’s this little, you know, it’s the store-bought steak of the cheetah instead of the, you know, wild hunt. And I think that, I just think it’s super counter-cultural brave to say this isn’t working for me. And I require something else, whether it’s in any context. And for me, sobriety is saying, you can keep your shitty constellation price. I’m going to demand the real thing. And that’s just what, at the end of the day, what I want, I want the real thing. I want to know what the real thing is. And if I keep, if I keep accepting this constellation prize, like my treat and reward in life, I’m never going to know what the real thing is.

GD:

Yes. You don’t need freedom. You don’t need peace. You don’t need equality. You don’t need justice. Just keep drinking.

AD:

Oh, I got it. I got like package in the mail the other day. That was a set of wine glasses that said self-care on them.

GD:

Yeah. Yeah.

AD:

Like that’s, I mean, if, if, if friends with you a glass of wine, if you don’t have a problem, if you’re not keeping yourself from your higher great, but that isn’t self-care even in those situations, that’s fun. That’s enjoyment. That’s time with your friends. That’s positive. Like the actual wine is not self-care. And if, if that is the only self-care you’re giving yourself, you are accepting a shitty constellation prize actually is self-care.

GD:

We have a question here from Ashley. Ashley says to us, I think I would like to reduce my drinking or stop drinking, but my husband drinks just as much as I do and doesn’t want to stop. And he doesn’t think I have a problem. I can tell he wouldn’t really support me if I tried to stop. And it would already be hard enough with his support. So what do you do if you want to get sober, but you feel like your spouse doesn’t really want you to. This is just, I think the most predictable and probably common fear that people have, you know, despite the fact, I’m sorry, besides the first one, which is I can’t live without booze. The second one is always like, but all of my relationships will change. Right. Or the people around me won’t understand. And the people around me won’t want me to get sober. And the truth is that that often the people around you will not want you to get sober.

AD:

Yes.

GD:

When you live in a culture that says drinking is the thing. And so everyone becomes dependent on it in one way or another. And you start to say, what if it’s not? And then you stopped drinking everyone around you considers your stopping drinking as a condemnation of their drinking. Right? It’s like that, that crab analogy, the bucket of crabs where like there’s a bucket full of crabs and then one escapes and the other, the rest of the trapped crab’s natural inclination is to grab that crab and pull it back in the bucket. Right. So I do, you know, not drinking in the beginning, changed my relationships dramatically because everybody who I was friends with was big drinkers. There was no way for me to survive my life without being surrounded by other people whose drinking was as problematic as mine. So I actually lost a lot of relationships. But over time I have learned and seen that it just affects things. Right you just have to be ready for things to get weird all of the time. I mean, Abby and I don’t get invited to a lot of things. We talk about it a lot, and I think it’s because people don’t know what to do with two sober people and at an evening gathering that is revolved around alcohol. And we’ve just learned to accept it as a part, as a price of sobriety, I guess, it’s okay with us because the other way is harder. You know, causing a little bit of awkwardness in relationships is okay with us. But what about you? What would you say to sweet Ashley about her husband?

AD:

I would say to listen to the boundaries episode that we did a couple of weeks ago, because it’s exactly that. It doesn’t mean that you’ve done something wrong or there’s a problem. If there is a shift in the ecosystem around you or in your relationships or in your family unit, when you decide to stop drinking and in fact you should be prepared for it. It will happen. It is a result of setting a boundary for yourself that says, I want something different. And any time in your life, you say, I want something different. There are ripple effects throughout it because how audacious of you to want something different that you think is better? And why do you think that you are better than me? You know, it’s inevitable. I will say that you, I will say to your point Sister, about the parties and the fun. I was very worried about that. And also it doesn’t matter your, I have more fun at places now because I’m not sick because I’m not rethinking the 47 things I said. It’s liberating. But I do want to say Ashley, that is super hard. And I had a very supportive husband also, and I have my sister and all of that, but my husband still drinks in our house. I just want to say very clearly that just as it’s true, that you can’t so get or stay sober because someone else wants you to you also can’t be prevented from getting and staying sober because someone else doesn’t want you to.

GD:

Yes, yes it is. And you can’t use someone else as an excuse not to.

AD:

Because by the way, there’s a billion excuses not to. If you’re just like looking around your house to find them good luck, because there’s a, there’s going to be a thousand. So it’s, I feel like for the hardest thing to swallow when it comes to your sobriety, is that no one owes you a goddamn thing.

GD:

That’s right.

AD:

Not your partner. There’s no, like they failed to do X, so I can’t get sober. No one owes you a goddmn thing. For me, it was very liberating slash lonely. But at the end of the day, empowering to know that it’s a hundred percent, sobriety is a hundred percent about your relationship with an accountability to yourself.

GD:

That’s it.

AD:

And that if you let anybody else into your sobriety relationship, that isn’t you, that you’re sabotaging yourself.

GD:
That’s right. And I would also add to that. So, Ashley doesn’t use her husband as an excuse to not get sober. And then when she starts to get sober, if she decides to, she does not verbally try to convince her husband to get sober, this is like the curse of the freshly sober. Like you can always, it’s like, who do you want to sit next to least like a freshly sober person, someone who just started CrossFit, like all of them just are such evangelicals for their newfound path. I learned this the hard way a million times. Like you just, you go about doing the true thing for you and you just let everybody around you watch.

AD:

And you give the respect of what you asked for yourself. This is a deeply personal, deeply specific question. I don’t think, think no one should drink. I think everyone should make that personal decision for others for themselves and ask you to respect mine. And I respect the hell out of yours.

GD:

All right, we’ll leave it at that.

GD:

What do you think these people’s next right thing should be? What should the Pod Squad be talking about this week with sobriety, addiction, all of it. What should the Pod Squad’s conversations be about? I think it would be super interesting for someone to think about what is the thing that you need, that you depend on. That’s your reward, that’s your treat, whatever it is that that’s what you use to get through your life, and then spend some time thinking whether that thing is the real deal for you, or whether that could possibly be a shitty constellation prize for a higher need that is not being met somewhere. And, you know, here’s some examples, the people who are overspending constantly in ruining their life with overspending, because what they really want is belonging and worthiness. And they think if they throw these things around their body, that that will give them the worthiness that they so deeply are craving. Or, you know, the example I put in Untamed in my friend, she was about to buy a beach house who was in no financial shape to buy a beach house. And when we sat down and talked about what was this need, she was just desperate to get some time with her family back. Everybody was going in a million different directions. And so the deeper desire beneath the beach house was just some freaking time with everybody where they were looking eye to eye and their phones were down and they were so, you know, the beach house turned into an $8 basket on the table where everybody put their phones and they were able to sit and have family dinner each night. The bottle of wine, which the deeper desire beneath is for some rest, for some peace, for some non-producing time. So anyway, what is, what Sister calls a shitty constellation prize or what I call the surface desire? What is one of those that you have in your life that is not the real deal what’s beneath it, what’s the good, true human desire beneath it, that you might actually be able to gift yourself if you stop accepting the shitty constellation price. And this week, when life gets very hard, instead of grabbing the shitty consolation prize, just tell yourself that We Can Do Hard Things. We love you.