Transcript:

Julie: Welcome to Through the Glass recovery podcast, where we believe that connection is the opposite of addiction, vulnerability is the antidote to shame, and that recovery isn’t just rewarding, but also a lot of fun. We’re your hosts, Julie and Steve. Listen as we get together with friends to shed light on the hard things, talk about the other side of addiction and how we create a life so full there’s no space left for alcohol.

Steve: So the content of this episode really surprised us. I’m not sure what we really expected when we chose love as a topic, but we cover a lot of ground here. It’s much more than we could have imagined. We talk about romantic love, we talk about the love of a parent and child, what healthy and unhealthy versions of love look like, and how we’ve grown into really starting to understand love in a way that we can share it with the world.

Julie: We also want to invite you all to join us on Instagram where we’re hosting a 28 day sober self love challenge, trying all kinds of new tricks and activities to show love to ourselves in ways that are truly meaningful. You don’t have to do anything special to join in. Just follow us on nstagram @throughtheglassrecovery and jump in.

So we are here tonight with our friends, Lynn, Michael and Alex and as always, I’m gonna have you guys do some introductions first before we jump into the conversation, Lynn, do you wanna go first?

Lynn: Sure I’m the grandma and the group, so I’ll go first. Yeah. And so as far as the introduction, I always like to say that I’m a 69 year old churchgoing, tatted up road tripping, sober grandma and I’m just so thrilled that I’ve taken this journey to be alcohol free and it’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you Julie and Steve.

Julie: Yeah, thank you so much for being here and I will include all of Lynn’s contact information and instagram in our show notes. And if you want to send those to me maybe afterwards, that would be great. So anybody can check out your instagram. I have been far following you since we first got on instagram and then you just do so much inspiring stuff and your life looks amazing. So I’m really grateful that you share it with all of us.

Lynn: Well, thank you And I forgot to add, the only reason I know this is I just hit 600 days. So 602 days.

Steve: Alright, amazing.

Julie: Congratulations.

Lynn: Thank you.

Julie: Really cool. Okay. And then Michael, I’ll have you go next.

Michael: Hi, I’m Michael. I am in Reno Nevada. There’s tons of snow on the ground here. I have been sober, 1421 days and yeah, yeah, I work and stays over awesome.

Julie: Well, we’re really glad you’re here. And Michael is also on instagram and shares some really inspiring content. So we’ll also include a link for that and last but certainly not least is Alex. Who is back on the podcast for the second time, how are you tonight?

Alex: I’m wonderful, thank you so much, Julie and Steve for having me again, it’s so nice to meet you, Lynn and Michael. First and foremost, I’m a mom of four, that’s always fun and crazy. And yeah, this has been a journey. I’ve been on this intentional sobriety journey for about a year, and I have over 90% sober days, so I like to look at it that way, because every sober day is a win. I will never give up this journey, it’s the most important thing in my life, so…

Julie: Absolutely, really glad you’re here again. It’s really nice to see you. So, this episode will release on February 13th, right before Valentine’s Day, so, we thought love would be an appropriate topic. As I was journaling about love and preparation for the episode, I realized how much my own understanding of love has evolved over the course of my recovery. So much of the work that I’ve done on authenticity and on really feeling my emotions has affected the way I feel love and the way I understand it, and it’s also allowed me to be affected by love differently than I was in the past when I was doing everything in my power to stay mostly numb. So what is love? How do you define it, and how do you show it, how has love manifested in your life in new ways, since you quit drinking, and how has love affected your recovery.

Michael: A lot of questions there, that’s a lot of questions.

Julie: Anything you want to throw out or add or…

Lynn: Well, I like that you started out with the question of what is love because I made some notes today and reflecting back, I can remember as a teenager when I first started dating and asking my mom, you know, how do you know when you’re in love, how do you know when someone loves you? And she just kind of says, you’ll just know, well that didn’t satisfy me then and it doesn’t satisfy me now. But I guess that’s the answer that she had.

But what I kind of learned as I went along in life and matured is there’s a few things that stood out. Love, to me, is a decision. You know, I mean we think of the romantic love, you know, swooning and the butterflies and all that. But love is really a decision and part of that decision is a commitment. A commitment to this other person. And everything that goes into a commitment, which a lot of that’s discipline.

You know, there’s discipline involved in love and as I’m thinking through these things. To answer your question about how that has changed alcohol free is now I see it a lot as a spiritual practice. All the things that go into that decision and that commitment and that discipline with your families, your friends, your neighbors, people you don’t know, you know. Growing and all of that is a spiritual journey and that I don’t think I would have ever gotten to without giving up drinking.

Julie: Yeah, I think you’re, you’re spot on with that. That that made me smile when you said you asked your mom as a teenager. So I have a teenager and she’s very much at that what is love stage and I’m realizing she… I think she’s very much been in love as a 15 year old girl can be in love and that definition of love I think just grows and develops with us. It evolves with us as we become more emotionally intelligent and more emotionally developed humans. I think that definition or that the definition of love and that feeling of love absolutely just evolves with us.

It’s been kind of an interesting conversation I’ve had with her and kind of just an interesting experience as a parent to watch. But I do think that it evolves and I think that for me, my emotional development pretty much ended when I was 15 or 16 years old and you know, I think when we quit drinking that picks back up and we start developing emotionally again. And I can feel even my definition and understanding of love growing and developing again now that I feel like I’m making forward progress there again, if that makes sense.

Alex: I agree so much when you’re talking about like, the evolution of love from when you know, you’re a child to when you’re an adult, you know, because I think love is a word and it’s also a feeling it’s an action, you know? And sometimes, like you are love, you know, like to your children when they’re little, when they’re babies. Like you are love, they look at you and they see love. That is what you are, that’s how they learn love, you know. And that as they get older, they learn out of your love what self love looks like by how you treat them, how you are and how you show yourself love. You know, and and as you get older you learn about the love you have for yourself and loving other people.

So yeah, definitely evolves over time and in my sobriety, I really dove into what a self love look like for me, you know, I think I looked for love in other people. I looked for love in alcohol, right? That’s how I was showing my self love and self care was by drinking. But now in sobriety, self love looks so much different. I’m learning to love myself in healthier ways and different ways and out of that I’m able to like truly give people the love they deserve because I’m giving myself the love I deserve.

Steve: So it’s really evolved and it’s been really beautiful. I think I’m gonna talk about the difference from when I was an active addiction, actively drinking, compared to now. When I said those words, those words feel like they were very empty, like they felt like it was something that I had to say because that was the nature of the relationship. I didn’t know what it really meant. I think because when I was in active addiction it’s just there was no… it’s kind of like what Alex says. But it was just a word, there was no feeling and there was no action really that was surrounded by it. Alex, you really define that really good for me, and so it was very empty and it wasn’t necessarily that it was empty on the other side. It was very empty on my side. I didn’t I just didn’t, it didn’t feel it. There were words, I mean I cared. I don’t know if I would have called that love though. I wouldn’t have gone to the nth degree for even my children. That commitment just wasn’t there, my commitment was to alcohol completely. Alcohol came first, they came second. So when I quit drinking, much like what Julie said, was I think that’s when I started giving myself a chance to actually be introspective. Because I think it comes from inside first and then I get to show it. It comes from inside first, but I had to see it, somebody had to, I had to relearn what love is and a lot of it is this is really simple small things. I think it is the small interactions, it’s the simple little things that happen throughout a day that pick you up, that lift you up and and it’s it’s an understanding that doesn’t exist outside of your typical conversation with regular friends or whatever that may be.

It, it is an evolution for sure. And for me now, it’s a very deep feeling. It does come with commitment. It does come with a willingness to listen when I to something that I don’t want to hear. It comes with forgiveness. It comes with a lot of the things that I’ve never really understood what they meant until I was forced because the commitment portion of it. But I mean, I think if your heart set somewhere it’s a lot easier to not let things go but to talk about it because it’s important.

Michael: Yeah, Yeah, that’s a lot you guys are saying. A lot. I’ll give you my trauma informed conception of this. I think my best example what love feels like is the day my firstborn son was born and I saw him. I knew what love looked like and felt like prior to that I chased my mother for love from, you know, early on until I became an obnoxious alcoholic teenager. And when I wasn’t getting what I was getting from her, unfortunately for a few beautiful and lovely ladies along the way, I attached myself to them seeking what I didn’t understand in the first place.

So it was attachment. And it was kind of desperate and it had a shelf life because it had an attention span. It Had an attention span. I would say that I sought love and relationships. I’ve been sober more than I have not been sober throughout my life. I’ve been in recovery on and off since I was 17 years old and I sort of got it that I was an alcoholic the first time I went through treatment because it explained a lot of things to me. But what I didn’t understand was why certain things happened after certain feelings came that brought me to ultimately the relapse and why I bring that up is because at the end of that shelf life of what I attached myself to thinking was love was that same desperate feeling, trying to chase the love from my mother.

And so all of my relapses and all of my relationships have been absolutely cookie cutter from The six-year relationship that was my first, to the 16 years I was married, to the last relationship that I had before I got sober this time. Even when I was in the relationships in recovery before I was still, it was still the patterns, it was still those unhealed love seeking patterns.

And so it’s hard for me to say. I know what love feels like because right now, when you guys were talking it was triggering some stuff inside of me and I could feel those butterflies that you get with anxiety, but it’s also the butterflies that I get on a first date, right? Yeah, excitement and anxiety physically feel the same way, it’s the same sort. So I guess I love you guys, I could say that? Yeah, to me, what I haven’t quite discovered yet, but what I hope love is is you all said it, love is action, right?

Love for myself is going to meetings and taking action and getting a coach and seeing a therapist and all that stuff. It’s actions and then it’s also time, right? I never sat down long enough and the second I, what did my one therapist say? The second I owned the love that I thought I was due I was going to be successful in my sober life. Not taking into consideration the relationship. And then of course, when I was ready to enjoy that love six or 16 years later, they were like, hey, what the fuck, who are you and what do you want from me? I mean that’s really what I can say about that.

Julie: You know, that is all really insightful though, like there’s so much self awareness in there and understanding of what what you’ve experienced.

I think I realized for me, authenticity has been the big foundation for recovery for me. I spent so much time being a perfectionist and a people pleaser and everything I thought I was supposed to be. I just completely lost touch of myself and I think I was only able to love from that place. But it was also only like the love that I received didn’t feel authentic because nobody knew who I really was anyway, if that makes sense.

And so it’s been a really interesting experience to start letting people really see me flaws and character defects and all and then still be loved and so like you said Michael, like I can say I love you guys. Like I feel like when I just show up honestly and vulnerably in any situation and I am like received with acceptance, there’s so much love in there, like that feels, it feels like something I’ve never experienced in my life before. I mean it’s honest connection I think is what it is.

Steve: A sense of belonging.

Julie: Yeah.

Alex: I was going to say that to how much better I’ve been able to receive love in recovery, you know, because you are becoming authentic and showing up as yourself and I don’t know if I really knew how to receive love before because I was chasing love in the wrong ways. So now that I’m learning about the real self love that’s been a journey receiving the love and thinking like these people really do love you, they care about you really and I love very much the recovery community, I think recovering addicts are my favorite people.You find a lot of love, a lot of love in those communities, you find so many similarities with everyone and it’s fun and so much love.

Steve: Yeah, it really is. There’s a level of gratitude that doesn’t really exist in very many places and like just that amount at that level where it’s not only gratitude, it’s acceptance, it’s, you know, a willingness to listen and a willingness to be present, and I think there’s a lot just to in that just a willingness to be present. So, you know, if you having a bad day and or a you know, you’re triggered or you’re having one of those moments where you need help and you actually reach out for help. That is giving someone an opportunity to show you love. And without opening yourself up to that, asking for help, you shut the door on it.

Julie: Very vulnerable to do it.

Steve: Yes, but I don’t think you get to feel it if you don’t you don’t get to if you don’t show your true self… and I mean sometimes you gotta be picking where that shows up, but generally speaking, if you don’t show your true self, you rob yourself of that experience. If you don’t open that door to let someone see you for who you are, because that’s where you’re really gonna get a chance to feel it.

Michael: I think that service work is my best attempt at giving someone else love because I’m open and receptive and usually by the time we’re done connecting, there’s really connection for the first time in.

Steve: You know, since I’ve gotten sober, I under I have a lot better understanding of what real connection, is, as opposed to 39 years of general surface conversation where I mean, we don’t go, you know, below or past level two for God’s sake. Because I can’t tell you or just I can’t make a decision without me giving it to you. So I know what you want, so I can do that for you. Like, that’s not love at all.

Julie: They say that the opposite of love is fear and I’m guessing that probably resonates for a lot of us in a lot of different ways.

Alex: Yeah, this past month has been a little bit of a roller coaster for me on this journey. And there has been some fear on my part, fear of talking about things, fear of being vulnerable, fear of sharing my struggles. And then there’s been some intense feelings on all sides about that. And I just, I don’t know if it was an epiphany, but you know, I was angry at first for some feelings someone had and I reminded myself, you know, we came into this place of honesty and vulnerability and if there wasn’t deep love there, there wouldn’t be these intense feelings, right? Because with big love comes big feelings. And that, you know, these people care and they love me and they want to be there. So I’ll take that as a, you know, it’s a good thing as we navigate through all this.

Julie: It’s actually a really powerful statement that’s like, that’s that’s got my wheels turning now

Alex: Well, and I like, I was like, why are they upset or other stuff? And I’m like, oh wait, it’s because they love me so much and they care, you know? That they want to see me be my best self and succeed and stuff. So it totally shifted my perspective on everything and my reaction and I was able to stop and react differently.

Michael: So yeah, that is big, you know. It’s kind of crazy is I would say I’ve sort of stayed out of relationships this last four years as I was discovering my patterns in relationships. And I got myself a magnificently beautiful trauma coach off of Instagram of all places. Followed her for a long time and finally reached out and we sort of… I don’t know about we, but I sort of fell in love with her. And there was, we’ve been connected for almost 2.5 years now and the safest place I feel is the terror that she’s going to tell me the truth every time we talk. Because she can see right through that vulnerability. Because at the outset of this, I was so curious to know what love looked like and felt like, and you know what it doesn’t always feel magical. And sometimes it feels like anxiety which feels like love. At the end of every zoom call we would have, I did feel safe and that is something that I would say that’s been lacking in all of my love relationships is safety.

Steve: Emotional safety.

Michael: Yeah.

Steve: I think that’s what you’re saying. There is emotional safety where you can just let it out on the line and it’s not going to come back and slap you in the face. It’s not gonna come back and be used as a dagger or a weapon. It’s going to come back and it’s and it’s going to be handed back to you with compassion. It’s going to be handed back to you with an ear to listen. It’s going to be handed back to you on a plate. It’ll be a reflection of you through somebody else’s eyes and just a completely different level of care.

Julie: My mind is like blown right now. The idea of emotional safety being love? Like I have spent a really a huge amount of my life and not feeling emotionally safe. Not necessarily even abusive or anything like that. Just not… I’ve never felt safe being emotionally vulnerable. And then I’m thinking of that on the flip side with my kids. I’ve been a fairly decent mom, but I had no idea what to do with my kids emotions because I didn’t know what to do with my own emotions. And so I think for a really long time my kids weren’t necessarily emotionally safe with me, if that makes sense.

Not that I would ever, like, get angry with them, but just that I had no idea what to do with them, and I’m learning how to handle emotions for myself now. But I’m also able to give them a place where they can go with their emotions and like, I guess I imagine they must feel more loved. Like actually that’s a really… my mind is kind of blown right now, honestly, like, like there’s so much just churning going on, this is amazing. I’m gonna be journaling for hours after this. Um yeah, just really cool points.

Alex: I think that a lot about my Children, how I’ve seen some major changes in our relationships and it’s all down to the emotional safety because they have their emotions right? They always had their emotions but my reactions are different, so they feel safe, being vulnerable and telling me and share and knowing that I’m gonna be there like, with love, even if it’s hard, even if it’s tough love. But I’m there and they can be safe. And my 13.5 year old, that’s my oldest, she, I thought maybe she was just going through a teenage phase or other things like that and I realized, I think my active addiction was pushing her away because she didn’t feel safe. And the turnaround that I’ve seen in her in the past year has been crazy. Like she asked to make gingerbread houses with us this year! She wanted to do all of those fun things with us and is opening up and sharing more and it dawned on me just a few months ago like she feels safe. Because you know for the most part, you know, aside of being human, they know what mom they’re going to get, they know, you know? But we’ve also had some struggles, you know, I’ve been in my recovery and you know really work to make that a priority and my son will say things sometimes like “another meeting?” and I’m like all right Jake, you know, alright Jacob like this is part of me loving myself and when I love myself and work on my sobriety then I can give you the best version of me and I know that’s what you want because you didn’t like me when I was in active addiction, you know?

Michael: So yeah, I think I think that the term we’re looking for is emotional availability and and when you’re and when and when you’re when my mom was not emotionally available then it was an attachment, right? It was an attachment because I needed stuff from her. I needed her to put a roof over my head and keep the refrigerator full and she was not emotionally available to me. So I did all those people pleasing, you know all those things that kids do to try to get into that available spot, which never happened. And I think when I started to learn how to become emotionally available to myself through the work that I’ve done is when I started to… yeah, there’s a lot, there’s this is a really good conversation because because the most of the people that I come into contact with are not emotionally available.

So to practice being emotionally available is it’s kind of some of the best recovery work I could do because I get to go through my day practicing these tools and techniques about how to be emotionally available to just everyday people. Hopefully I’ll find that right person someday where I can I know when I’m being open and emotionally available before, I didn’t know. And so I would get irritated or resentful or detached or whatever. So the emotional vulnerability is really, I think that’s the key here to love.

Julie: Like Lynn said earlier to love is it’s an action and it’s something you practice. And that’s not just in a marriage or in a romantic relationship, that’s every day, all the time with every person you come across. And that’s Yeah, I think that’s huge, that’s what that’s kind of what we’re all learning. I think on a really basic level.

Lynn: Yeah, and I think that back to what Alex said earlier about self love has, I mean there’s so many gifts of sobriety, but I think maybe one of the first and foremost that shifts everything and moves you forward spiritually and to be in your best version to become who you were always meant to be is the self love piece, and I don’t know about y’all, but that was so hard for me. Self forgiveness and self love coming out of active addiction.

Um I was just so used to beating myself up and feeling worthless and just so many painful negative thoughts and emotions about myself and to start hearing that well, you know, you need to have compassion and practice self love and it’s like how do I do that? That was so hard in the beginning, and it’s just a process and it’s becoming connected, you know, in community with other people and kind of like what you said, Michael’s service work, um starting to reach out and be there to be a supporter, cheerleader, encourager. Um and that’s the beauty that I get out of instagram is that community and the support and being able to help other people and and so from that, then slowly I started, I started letting go of a lot of the baggage, I quit beating myself up. I started just taking a day at a time and um celebrating those small things like, you know, look at look at today, how you’ve grown what you’ve learned and how you’re opening up and and how other, you know, people are coming to your life and moving forward and then eventually getting to where, you know, there was self forgiveness for the… I call it the stupid, boneheaded things I did in active addiction, you know? I look back now and it’s like who was that person?

I don’t even I don’t know that person, but that person was me, you know? And so getting that self forgiveness peace and and starting to let things go bit by bit the things that don’t serve, the things that were holding me back. And start starting to accept that, you know, that I am enough and I am worthy and I can love myself and be emotionally available to myself. And that’s it’s it’s not easy.

Steve: It’s not it’s very yeah, it’s not easy to get rid of that negative energy that we were so comfortable holding on to mean, that felt like home, because that’s all all all I knew was that negative energy, that negative self talk. I mean, that’s that that place was safe, that was love. I mean, that’s that’s how it existed, you know what I mean? Oh, it just it was broken, it was a very broken version, Very unhealthy version of just everything. I mean, really incapable of coping at all, let alone expressing myself in a in a healthy way we talked about how love is shared and a willingness to listen and learn.

There was the evolution of love and you know, it was a it’s a word, it’s a feeling and above all else, I think it’s an action, and I think we all said that tonight in so many different ways from self love to emotional safety and availability and really community, I think we surrounded ourselves with examples of what we want to achieve, and when we sit in that community, whether we’re there at day, two or we’re there at 1400 plus days, we come across people in our lives that are an example of something that we want, and when you see a healthier example of what you have and it gives you another level to achieve, and without having seeing it from someone else, it gives you that next opportunity to grow, and I think that love is growth, there is a huge part in that is growing either together with another person or a community or just sharing yourself and letting yourself be available to whomever.

So I want to say thank you, Lynn, thank you Michael and thank you Alex for your time and your thoughts tonight, You guys have been fantastic,

Michael: Amazing, thank you guys,

Alex: thank you for having us.

Lynn:Yes, thank you very much.

Steve: And of course we want to thank all of our listeners for sharing this space with us, if you found the content in the episode helpful if it made you think a little bit and see things in a new way, we’d love it if you would share it with someone, you know, we found a number of our listeners aren’t even people who struggle with addiction. Most of what we talk about here is just learning how to do life. So if you know someone that might benefit from it, pass it along.