Transcript:

Julie: Tonight we’re here with Molly, Brian, and Chelsea. Molly, I’m gonna have you go ahead and introduce yourself first. Molly is our most regular of regulars, I think at this point. I think this is your fourth podcast with us? So do you want to go ahead and tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Molly: Yeah, sure. My name is Molly. I’ve been sober almost two years now. I joined the sobriety community through the I Am Sober app, and that’s where I’ve met all these lovely people. I’m a traveling X-ray CT technologist based out of Orlando, FL. I’m a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor, so I’m really advocating on those behalves too. Every time they come up I like to talk about that kind of thing because for me it plays very heavily into my drinking and my sobriety, and I think does for a lot of people. Thank you again for having me, and I really appreciate it.

Julie: Thank you for being here. And thank you for having the courage to stand up for that. I think it takes a lot of courage to talk about the stuff you talk about, so thank you for that.

Next up we have Brian, and Brian’s also been with us before on the podcast. How are you tonight Brian?

Brian: Hey, really good. Thanks again Julie, for having me back. My name is Brian, 46 years old. I live in Wayne, New Jersey, which is northern New Jersey, sort of a suburb of New York City. I’m originally from Pennsylvania, I spent a lot of my formative adult years in the Washington DC area and I still work in that area. I am on Day 110 today in terms of my sobriety. This is my fourth stint in seriously getting sober. I’ve been on this journey since 2015. It’s been a journey. But I’m feeling really good about where I’m at today, and I’m excited to be back on this podcast and talking with everybody here.

Julie: It’s really good to have you back, thank you for being here!

Steve: Good to have you back, Brian.

Julie: And last but not least we have Chelsea. Chelsea is the host of the Recovered Life Podcast and you can also find her at therecoveredlife.com How are you tonight, Chelsea?

Chelsea: I am good, thank you guys for inviting me. I met you a few weeks on Instagram. I’m Recovered Life on Instagram. My sobriety date is July 2, 2015. I’m from Washington, Indiana. I’m very active in our recovery community here locally, and online. I’m also a mental health awareness advocate, more generally as it pertains to people in recovery, and also with “normal” people that haven’t struggled with addiction of any kind. And as a former soldier in the Indiana National Guard, I do have a special focus on veterans and service member mental health advocacy. That’s a little bit about me.

Julie: Thank you so much for being here tonight, I’m really looking forward to getting to talk with you a little bit.

So in talking with Molly the other day, she suggested what I think is a really important topic for us to talk about – navigating difficult emotions. This is something we all struggle with. I think most of us with alcohol problems use drinking to numb the emotions we didn’t otherwise know how to deal with.  The hard ones – grief, sadness, depression, anxiety, regret, dread. When we decide to get sober, we have to find ways to deal with those emotions, without turning them off. I think that’s one of the hardest realizations we come to in sobriety – we no longer get to turn off the emotions, escape them. We have to learn how to accept them and live through them, while feeling fully. So we’re here tonight to talk about how we cope. How we get through the hard stuff without anything to dull the pain. I have a feeling this is gonna be a tough subject to talk about – there aren’t any easy answers. 

Steve: No there isn’t.

Molly: It’s very person dependent, too. And I think it can change a lot. I feel like we kind of want… We were just talking about control earlier, you can kind of settle into a routine. Sometimes that routine works for certain phases of your life, but other times you grow in certain areas you might have to adjust your routine and adjust your coping mechanisms. Which is fine, it’s just a new level of growth, which is inherently painful I think. Growing and healing is very difficult. So that would be the first hard emotion I would want to bring up is just how to process the hard things like grief and trauma and betrayal, whatever your unique circumstance is, moving through that on a day to day basis.

Brian: Well, I think is really going to be, what you said at the end there Julie, it’s gonna be a tough subject. I definitely don’t know what I’m gonna say. This is my third time on this podcast. And I think you both, Julie and Steve, know that I like to prep. I have no idea what I’m going to say this time, because I don’t know what to say. But I will… maybe this is why I’m on stint number four with sobriety. I definitely use, escapism is the word I use, but you numb, escape, whatever you want to say. That’s certainly the reason that I drank, and maybe the reason I kept going back to it after I tried to get sober once, twice, and three times. I hadn’t thought about that until literally this moment, but it’s just… well, I don’t know how to deal with depression and loneliness and insecurity, stress and sadness, loss. I mean, yeah, I do know how to deal with it, it’s by getting wasted and hammered and not having to deal. So I’m going to stop there for now. I’ll have more to say but yeah, this is going to be a fun one. And I hope I’ll learn something. I’m sure I’ll learn something from all of you, talking through this tonight.

Julie: Somebody sent me an article some time ago that I thought was really interesting. It was about dealing with hard emotions and it talked about how healthy people deal with really difficult emotions. It brought up things like grief and loneliness and betrayal. Things that there’s just nothing we can do about them, and we just have to deal with them. It was really interesting to hear how healthy people, emotionally strong healthy people handle stuff like that because I don’t think I’ve ever been one of those people. They talked about, depending on what the emotion is, and the severity of that emotion, some people will just sit with it and actually cope with it in whatever way works for them. Some people focus on distraction, and finding some way to not think about it at the time. And I think that’s a really good point to start with is, what do we do to distract ourselves. I didn’t even realize until reading that article that distracting yourself from difficult emotions is actually a healthy way to cope sometimes. I think it’s a necessary way, because otherwise we end up just drowning. So I think that’s one aspect is what do we do to distract ourselves. Then also the idea of coping with them, just sitting with them and not letting them drive us to the point where we want to escape.

Chelsea: I remember when I first started drinking, which was late in my high school career, even before my drinking became constant and frequent, I was getting the effect that you guys mentioned. By that I mean numbing the emotions rather than feeling them. Because at that point in my life I had experienced trauma and loss and I had the feeling that I didn’t fit in anywhere. Drinking was a perfect way to make me feel more confident, like I did fit. By the time that I got sober, which of course was years later, I didn’t have the ability to feel many emotions. Early on in sobriety, I had a couple of family members pass away and I was really sad and grieving, but I had a hard time expressing my emotions. So much so that people asked me, Chelsea, are you sad at all? And I’m like, yes, my emotions were just very shut down. So I’ve had to learn over the last seven years how to reserve my emotions for a more appropriate time to let them out. And then allow myself the space to grieve and cry, and be angry in a healthy sense. Those of us who experienced different forms of abuse or whatnot, I think it’s good to acknowledge that yeah, any sane person will be upset over some of the stuff that we’ve been through. So it’s kind of like a balance for me, learning an appropriate and healthy context to express emotions.

Steve: I think anger is healthy if you use it the right way. I think figuring out where anger starts to become dangerous as opposed to, okay, I’m angry, I’m going to acknowledge that I’m angry, and now I’m going to sit with it because I can’t do anything in this anger. I can’t react properly, I can’t function or deal with this issue when I’m in this space. And then acknowledging that, okay, I’m angry right now, I can’t do anything about this situation that’s making me angry, because I’m going to do something or say something I don’t mean. I’m not going to be able to form the sentence, I’m not going to be able to express how I really feel after it all settles out and I have an actual chance to start trying to discern where it came from. What happened, how it’s affecting me, and then how can I communicate that back so I can express. It did make me angry, now I’m not reacting inside the anger, I’m reacting on the other side of it. The hard part is not having it be the motivation that drives the conversation or the reaction or whatever else. Because all it does is make it worse. Anger has its place, but it’s hard to sit in it if you don’t recognize that’s where you are. And I think, Chelsea, you make a really good point because I’m in year 2, I’m one year 7 and a half months, and in that first is what Molly was talking about when she first hopped in. In that first year a lot of those big emotions, you feel like you just hang onto. You just don’t know where to put it. You go back to routine, whether that is some form of self care, talking to really close friends, being able to put your vulnerability in safe spots. You kind of think you’re nuts when it’s happening, and it helps you realize that you aren’t as crazy as you think you are.

Julie: So what you just said Steve, and this goes back to what Chelsea said too. This is something I learned from Molly, and all of Molly’s wisdom. Validating emotions is really important. I didn’t even know what those words meant until I met Molly. Like Chelsea said, acknowledging that this is how I feel, and this is okay, and this is a normal emotional response to this situation. I think a lot of us probably invalidated in different ways when we were first starting to really feel big emotions. For me, it was always, you’re over reacting, you’re overreacting, you’re making too big of a deal out of this. So the first thing I have always tried to do is to shut down the emotions. That got really easy with drinking. That was my go-to. And I think just accepting, this is how I feel right now, this is a valid way to feel, and not trying to find a way to turn it off, or to change it, or to make it less. If you feel like your feelings are wrong, it just makes it that much harder to cope with them in a healthy way. I think that’s a really important lesson for all of us that are in recovery.

Molly: For sure. Yeah, one of the phrases that I came across in the community very early on, and it had mostly to do with in the beginning, just straight up cravings at first. But you can apply it to anything. It’s the saying, “The only way out is through.” And I think that applies to emotions, too. You can’t just… if you’re coming up to grief, if you’re coming up to anger, you’re coming up to this big wall of whatever you feel, and you can’t just say, I’m going to go around this, and avoid it entirely. You have to deconstruct the wall, brick by brick. Sometimes it’s a very short wall, with only a few bricks, but other times the bricks take months to really deconstruct. Specifically for anger for me, it was very useful for me for awhile. Coming from a background of manipulation and abuse and stuff, I actually needed anger to be aware of things. I wasn’t even aware for the majority of my bad relationship that I was being abused. I thought it was normal. When you realize that’s not normal, you get kind of angry. So I had to balance that. I had to not apply that anger to everyone, but also… I kind of picture it like a big bouncer, standing behind me with its arms crossed, ready to throw down anytime. But also being very calm when necessary. I did it similarly too with the alcohol industry. I had a phase where I was mad at alcohol advertising, I was mad at the shows that showed people drinking. Every time I would see it I would just get angry. Like, oh, why is this so everywhere? It’s just overwhelming. In those instances I’m very grateful for my anger, because I never let it consume me, but I use it to fan the flames of my motivation I suppose, if that makes sense.

Brian: Like I said earlier, I’m going to come away from this with tools and tips and things that I can put into practice. For those that don’t know my story, which I assume is most people listening to this, I’m going through what’s going to wind up being a divorce, and it’s because I was unfaithful, it’s because of something that I did. There’s no two ways about that, it’s the truth. So I’m right now in the throes of trying to figure out how to sit with those emotions, how to live with those emotions. This started in June of last year, 2021, came to a head in January of this year. But I used alcohol from August of last year all the way through January to not have to deal with all the guilt and the shame and self loathing and all that stuff. So this is really a good topic for me right now, because I’m trying to get to the point where I can forgive myself and work on taking the next steps to make myself better. But it means facing all these kinds of things. So, all that preamble was to say what I said earlier, which is that I’m going to come away from this with some lessons learned. You talked about… when you said ‘distracting’ earlier Julie, before you then said what you later said, I thought, well that doesn’t seem right. Distracting does seem like a good thing. And then you said the same thing, it doesn’t seem intuitive, but it is… you’re saying this is from literature you’ve read or the experts that you’ve listened to, they tell you that sometimes you need to distract. I guess what I’m wondering here is… what I’m hearing from you Molly, it makes perfect sense too. Validating the way you feel is important, but to do that you have to face, this is how I feel. How do those two coexist. Validating my feelings but then maybe knowing that I also need to distract myself from them at the same time. I don’t know if I’m making any sense. But there’s an intelligent questions somewhere up there, I don’t think it’s quite coming out.

Steve: I think you’re making a lot of sense. I think once that feeling is validated, there’s a sense of relief. At least there is for me, I had a sense of relief. The greatest fight that I had wasn’t somebody else validating it for me. Someone was telling me that the way you feel is valid. But then being able to accept that this is the way I feel. This is actually… I’m not making this up, I’m not fabricating it, I’m not doing it, I am just sad. And that is okay. There’s the part in me that, I would fight it, like it’s not okay. That’s the fix it mentality. Like, how do I fix this? And then we drank – I drank to fix it so I didn’t have to deal with it. Now it’s there, it exists.

Julie: I am just going to go back to what Brian said. I was thinking about that too when I was reading that article. I tried to find it earlier because I was kind of hoping to refer back to specifically what it was and I couldn’t find it. But it was a scientific study, it was a scientific research article. I think what I came to understand is that we have to feel things. We don’t have any choice, if we’re going to get through a difficult time, but to feel those emotions. There are times, when you’re feeling something really extreme, when you’ve lost somebody very close to you, when you’re feeling that intense regret that feels like you’re just drowning in it, and I think it gets to a point where you have to just not face it for a little while. And find a healthy way to distract yourself from it so you have a break from just focusing on it constantly. Because we’ll drive ourselves crazy if all we do is just… I tend to ruminate, the same thoughts over and over and over again. And I’m not making any progress, I’m not doing any good. And I think that’s something that makes you want to escape. So I think having some healthy distractions… and I think we can probably talk about those, what those look like. Because I’m betting they’re different for all of us. But I think that’s where the distraction comes in is just an opportunity to give yourself a rest from trying to process. Like Molly said, taking bricks down. Sometimes you just need to rest.

Brian: yeah. I like that.

Molly: Yeah. Or if you want to give the metaphor even… or we can go back to the brick thing because I like that one. If you’re picturing yourself literally building something like that. You’re not just going to go at it for hours and hours and exhaust yourself. You’re going to take breaks. You’re going to have some music playing, you’re going to have some nice sparkling water. You’re going to have a meal, hopefully you’ll have a friend working on the wall with you so you’re not doing it all by yourself. So it’s like the wall itself is there, and you’re acknowledging what’s going on, but then there’s the tools you carry with you to help you get through it easier so you don’t have to do it just by hard work and grit. You can treat yourself kindly while you’re facing it, I think.

Brian: That really makes good sense. I like that.

Steve: You’re going to have some trial and error. Whether that distraction is going for a run, or working out, or reading a book or going on a hike or some form or version of a break from that that takes your mind off of it. And I think that’s what Julie is getting at is just take your mind off of it. Change focus to something else. It’s not a bad thing because it doesn’t really have to get dealt with today, in the here and now. Nothing really does have to get dealt with immediately, even though it feels like it.

Brian: Captain Obvious statement but the word health is key here, right Julie? You said that the distraction can’t be getting drunk. Maybe that’s where I was getting hung up when you were talking about that too. When you first said distraction, I was like, well shit, that’s what I was doing, right?

Julie: I think that’s escaping. I think there’s a difference between…

Brian: yeah, there’s a difference, for sure. This is good, I like that a lot. And the analogy is great, Molly.

Chelsea: What I’ve done lately… it’s different. I wouldn’t call it a distraction from my emotions but it’s related to trauma. I’m in therapy as well as part of my recovery program and community as well. But I don’t know if you guys have heard of a therapy called EMDR, but it’s trauma therapy essentially. But what it does, and there’s scientific studies behind it, it helps the brain reprocess trauma. I won’t try to explain it all, but it’s incredibly powerful. So I used to have a huge fear related to driving in unfamiliar areas. I would get terrible anxiety and it caused me to miss out on social events and important things because I couldn’t drive due to the trauma and the car accidents with semi trucks that I’d gotten into on multiple occasions. So after the therapy, my brain, the best way I can explain it, is it knows where to store those traumatic memories so now I’ve been able to not distract or eliminate them but calm them down to a degree where I can kind of move on with my life in some ways. And I like what was mentioned earlier about having our emotions validated kind of calms them down. I think so many of us in recovery have a lot of childhood issues, trauma, maybe there was neglect or emotional abuse of some kind. For me today, if I’m feeling sad or whatever, anger, any hard negative emotion, all it takes is someone listening to me for the sake of listening, not for the sake of fixing me or changing how I feel or anything, but just to say yeah, that must be hard, I’m sorry you’re feeling that way. A lot of times, that’s enough for me to become less angry, at least for that moment. That way I no longer I feel like I’m trying to stuff down my emotions, I’m not feeling like this other person is trying to dismiss me or anything like that. That’s why I think when it comes to mental health and sobriety, having community is so important. Because sometimes people who have no experienced what we have as far as alcohol addiction or trauma or what have you, they kind of have the ‘get over it’ mentality. Whereas people who are in the same boat as us are looking for healthy ways to handle this stuff just like we are.

Steve: I think an important thing is when, like I experienced some pretty big emotions this past weekend. One of the things that I find really important is that when I’m sitting in a bit emotion, that I don’t do it alone. I think it’s important to realize that doing it alone is really, really hard. And it can be really dangerous. Finding a safe place to put it, to share it. Sometimes it’s just a matter of perspective, or just sharing that pain. Sitting alone is never any fun. Finding the courage to share the hard stuff, especially when it’s live, especially when you’re experiencing it, especially when you think you’re going to burden someone with your story for the day. I know for me, if I don’t share it, I never give anybody a chance to show that I matter, or that they care. Because in those moments, sometimes that’s all you need to hear, too. Just to know that someone is there. Hey, I’m here, I’m listening.

Julie: Yeah, that is huge.

Molly: I’ve actually had a really interesting and quite uplifting experiencing at this most recent job I’ve been at. As a traveler, you have to walk into a new department and introduce yourself, and you slowly get to know everyone in the department. Inevitably, just because drinking is such a big part of every culture everywhere, there comes a time when either you’re invited to something or it comes up in conversation or someone’s telling a story about when they were drunk, whatever. And it eventually came out to the point where I said I don’t drink. I don’t drink anymore. And the immediate question I got right off the bat was, well did you have a problem? I was just very quickly like, well, define problem. Everyone’s definition of problem is different. The guy who said that, he wasn’t rude about it, he was just like, you’re right. I found that if I explain my reasons for it, even just simply… I was unhealthfully dealing with trauma. I was using it as a crutch to deal with things. Or I didn’t like how it was stopping me from doing certain things in my life. It really seems to spark something in people. They just want to talk about their own things that they’re having trouble dealing with, because you’ve broken the ice and initiated that conversation about emotion instead of drinking. I don’t think the average person really understands how tied together they are because it’s such a part of popular culture. But yeah, I actually have a party coming up this Saturday. It’s my going away party because it’s my last week here. I told everyone that I don’t drink and they were very courteous, and they asked me, do you want no alcohol to be there? I was like, oh! No one’s ever asked me that before. But I told them no, absolutely not, if this is the way you enjoy your time, please feel free. That was just a really kind of strange moment for me to let people be people, but also understand that I can have conversations with people outside of the realm of alcohol. That they’re still meaningful, even if there’s alcohol involved. Yeah, we’ll see how it goes. I’m kind of excited

Julie: You’ll have to let us know, that’s really cool.

Brian: Yeah, that is really cool. I found in a prior stint being sober, my initial thought was yeah, I don’t want to be anywhere near it. Maybe I’m not at that point right now, but you said you’re at two years, Molly?

Molly: Almost to two years, yeah.

Brian: Yeah, so I obviously don’t speak for you, everyone’s different, but maybe you’re on a little bit sturdier ground. I just wanted to backtrack a little bit. I like what Chelsea, both you and Steve touched on. I made a – shocker, Steve and Julie – I made a very short list when I was thinking (laughter) It’s really not that good. What do I want to say, what could I say? Again, I don’t have any answers here, so this is me thinking, what could be some ways for me to deal with tough emotions. And some of the things I wrote were around community; around talking about it with someone you trust; around connecting with people. I just so, so strongly agree with that. I think that community is such a big part of this whole journey for me, probably for most of us. It took me awhile. Only recently did I realize I can’t do this alone, and community is so huge. So I couldn’t agree more with the stuff that Chelsea and Steve said about community, about talking, finding a person, don’t try and go it alone. Whatever my solution is going to be personally, dealing with these things head on, it’s going to involve community. I don’t have any doubt.

Julie: I think one thing that I’ve probably said on several of our podcasts because it’s really important. It’s going to be uncomfortable, and it’s okay to be uncomfortable. So often, we try to turn it all off because it doesn’t feel good and we want to feel good. It’s okay to be uncomfortable. It’s okay sit and be uncomfortable for quite awhile. It’s not going to kill us, it’s just not going to feel good. And that is okay. We don’t have to stop ourselves from feeling uncomfortable. Almost always with a hard emotion, time is going to help. Some space between the thing that happens and where we are now almost always helps at least lessen the severity of those emotions. And sometimes you just have to go through that time, and accept that you’re going to be uncomfortable. You’re going to hurt, you’re going to be sad, whatever that is. I think that’s just been something that was really hard for me to grasp. But it’s okay, I don’t always have to feel good. And somebody else said, “Emotions won’t kill you. The way you choose to react to them could.” And I think that’s a really powerful thing to understand.

Brian: Very true.

Steve: Molly, what was it that you said about moving through emotions?

Molly: Oh, the only way out is through? That one? Just that you know, we talked about tools to handle them, but at least for me, I’m a chronic compartmentalizer. I’m extremely good at supressing my own emotions in the moment, to the point where they literally sneak up on me. I will be going about my day, totally feeling fine, and all of a sudden I’ll have this wave of anxiety descend on me. And it’ll have nothing to do with my current surroundings at all. Everything around me can be a perfectly safe, normal environment, and I’ll just be like, why am I suddenly feeling this way? I’m getting better at it. At the beginning of my sobriety, I just felt like a crazy person because I’m like, I don’t know where all these emotions are coming from, this is nuts! And now I’m realizing, oh, it’s probably from this thing and it’s often a very delayed reaction for me. I never have, even when I was a kid. Part of the whole reason that drinking was appealing to me is that I was in an environment where I felt like I needed to put the emotions of my parents before my own, even as a child. I was so obsessed with not being a burden. If I wasn’t happy, I felt like I was failing in some way. So alcohol is instant happiness, and that’s why it always appealed to me. And I always felt socially awkward. For me now, the current struggle is identifying the reasons I feel things and learning to not have such a strong, visceral, going straight to the trauma response thing. I actually have tried EMDR like you said, Chelsea. It was several years ago, and I didn’t continue with it. I probably should have, because it seemed really revolutionary at the time, but I was also still drinking at the time, so I feel like it was stunted in its benefits because I was still using drinking to cope. I would love to go back and try it sober. Is this something you’ve done recently?

Chelsea: Yeah. I was about five years sober when I started therapy. I had a friend suggest therapy in general to me, not because I was struggling with staying sober, but the more I matured in my sobriety and in my spirituality, the more I realized the reason. Probably the root cause of these emotions and the trauma responses, like with the car accidents and abuse and things like that, a lot of these things can probably be helped with therapy. So I went and my therapist was certified in EMDR. I was able to number one, find the perfect therapist for me. We had similar upbringings, similar struggles with alcohol, similar struggles with self identity, things like that. I started seeing results fairly quickly from EMDR. Any time something new happens or is uncovered, trauma-wise, or I look back into my history and think, EMDR could probably help with that, too. And the way trauma works is a snowball effect. So there’s abuse from my step-dad growing up; issues with abandonment and being forced to suppress my emotions; car accidents; things that happened to me when I was drinking. And it all just kind of snowballs. What EMDR has helped me to is unravel some of that. I haven’t heard any statistics or anything as to whether it’s more beneficial for someone with a history of problematic drinking to have stopped drinking first. I would assume it would be. But my entire experience with it has been in sobriety, and I’m getting to know, the more I talk about it, the more people I’ve heard… I’ve not heard anybody have a negative response to it. I think it’s pretty cool. Statistically right now, it’s one of the most used therapies for people coming back from war with PTSD. So it’s revolutionized that as well, which is really cool.

Steve: Well that’s really awesome. Thanks for sharing that experience Chelsea. What I find really interesting is that before this meeting, I came into this meeting with a ball of anxiety because I have something big coming up this weekend. So I felt the tightness in my chest. And I’ve been feeling some big emotions the past couple of days. So what we’ve talked about, a bunch of things here, and I feel better because we talked about it. We just talked. It’s been distracting. It’s been validating. Just because I’m here I feel a sense of community. We talk about stuff that’s uncomfortable and when we talk about stuff that’s uncomfortable, we feel better. We can’t do this alone. This is all of the stuff that we talked about today, and I literally feel better now than what I did, how I felt when we started. So a lot of the things that we shared, even just the overall care.

So I want to thank you Molly, thank you Chelsea, and Brian, thank you guys for your vulnerability, that you for sharing your experiences, and thank you guys for your time, we really appreciate it.