Transcript:

Julie: Welcome everybody! This is episode 33 and we have a wonderful group tonight. We actually have three people on who have never been on the podcast before. So this is super exciting, it doesn’t happen often that way. But really glad to have you guys. We’re going to do introductions first like we always do. We will start with Becki, how are you tonight?

Becki: I’m good, how are you guys?

Julie: Really good. Do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself?

Becki: Yeah, I founded soberlife.love in January, which is how I met you guys. I got sober June 8, 2020 right at the beginning of Covid. I’m from Vancouver, WA, and I’m just lovin’ life.

Julie: Awesome, so you and Steve are both Covid sober babies together, he did the same thing, it’s awesome. That had it’s own set of challenges for sure. And next we will go with Ben.

Ben: Yeah, my name is Benjamin Lerner, I am a person in long term recovery. My sober date is June 13, 2016, and I’m a journalist, musician, radio host of Clean Jams every week on 102.7 WEQX combining recovery rap and recovery advocacy. I write a weekly column called Clean in the Vermont News, and I have an album out called Clean that combines my love for classical piano and hiphop together to tell the story of my recovery. And I’m pretty active on social, trying to spread the message of recovery. I met you all through Tiktok, big love to the Tiktok recovery community. Benjamin Lerner on there and also IG and Facebook. But at the end of it all, I’m just a person in recovery trying to do the best I can to let people know recovery is possible.

Steve: Yeah, I love your stuff Ben. It’s a really good message. It’s relatable, I’m a big fan.

Ben: Likewise, thank you so much for having me on. I’ve been stoked about this for awhile, so thank you.

Julie: Yeah, it’s really nice to have you. And we will include links in the show notes for everybody that’s here with website and social media so make sure you check that out. And last but not least we have Andrea.

Andrea: Hi, I’m 40 years old from Saskatchewan Canada. While I don’t have an addiction of any kind, I do struggle with mental health on a really deep level so I can relate to a lot of content that you guys share from all of your guests. It’s nice to know that I’m not alone. It’s also nice to hear your perspectives on addiction. I grew up with an alcoholic mom, so it’s really great to hear perspectives from you guys, from your shoes. My hope is that by continuing to hear content from your episodes, content can continue to soften my heart so that I can learn to forgive my mom.

Julie: That is amazing. We’re really glad you’re here. Thank you for sharing that and thank you for being here and joining us and supporting us in this adventure of ours on the podcast. It’s really really a pleasure to meet you.

So we learned in our last episode that negative emotions are the number one cause for relapse. It can be such a battle to learn to accept emotions that are hard to feel. One of the things that causes that type of emotion is rejection. So I thought we could talk about that tonight. How has rejection or even fear of rejection shown up in your life and how has it made you feel? What have you learned about working through it? Anybody is welcome to dive in and we will take it from there.

Ben: I think a good prompt for me is that every single time that I felt the need to either escape myself through self medicating through a substance or an outside compulsion such as anything like validation, video games, I’m a late stage millennial so Pokemon cards… it was to offset feelings of rejection I had that came to me from outside that I amplified within myself. So for example, I would feel rejected in a social situation, I would withdraw, and I would seek out comfort in another way. Although it wasn’t substances at first, that was the beginning of how both my substance use and mental health issues began to escalate.

Julie: yeah, I think we all started out with some kind of unhealthy coping mechanism. In my teens I didn’t really have access to alcohol or any substances as a teen, but you could see the unhealthy coping mechanisms start, and the unhealthy thinking patterns too. If I felt rejection at school, I internalized that so deeply, in a way I want to say rejected myself, rejected who I was, who I was even trying to become. 14, 15, 16 years old, that’s when we’re really trying to come into our own and identify who we really are, so if I felt even the smallest sense of rejection, I would take that on as this means I’m not good enough, this means I’m bad, this means I need to be different. And I started losing myself and my identity before I really even started to find it. And that just affected everything, it snowballed. And into my 20’s when alcohol was available to me, and just a really easy way to run from all of that negativity, both external and internal.

Becki: For me, I was the youngest of four and my siblings did not want me or like me and want me around, but they were stuck with me. So they made me start drinking in order to make me not tattle and for me, I never was wanted or liked or anything, so I found that I really liked the alcohol. That was my escape from the get-go. Then going to school, never fitting in, throughout life I always had that. And now finding myself – I got sober at 50, not knowing how to act, not knowing how to feel, not knowing what a real feeling was – ever! And dealing with it now sober, it doesn’t come as often because you use the tools that you’re given and that you learn. But sometimes it’ll hit me before a social even or something where I’m scared of not being liked or wanted and getting that rejection feeling. Trying to push through and feel that feeling, it’s really difficult.

Andrea: I can relate to that. I thought about this topic earlier and I would have to say that rejection is probably one of the biggest parts of the center of my being. And with it comes a bunch of other feelings and thoughts. It definitely shapes how I think about myself and my worthiness. It definitely is huge for me.

Steve: I’m listening to you guys talk about rejection and the first thing that comes to mind is maybe not even just growing up, but before I had enough self worth to say this is what I liked, or this is what I thought about this, even say hockey team or movie or whatever it was. I can remember having conversations where for me, I’m not much of a reader. So people would be talking about books, and I would be smiling and nodding like I knew what the hell was going on and I had absolutely no clue. I didn’t want to say that reading wasn’t my thing when I’m sitting inside a group of people that read. Before I say anything I’m already feeling the rejection because I’m telling myself a story that doesn’t already exist. I could be accepted for that, and then maybe be explained it a different way, but I want to feel included. To feel included, I essentially have to abandon myself and say, “Okay, yeah, yeah, I get that, that was a good part!” I have no idea. I’ve done that multiple times. Even when it goes to a color, it all depends on where my self worth is sitting at that time. In the addiction, it wasn’t there at all. Even before that, it wasn’t there much to begin with. There would be times where I would agree with something and then my reaction to it would be anger. I would either try to get back at them or try and have them feel the same way that I feel, just because I don’t know what to do with it. That’s the feeling of discomfort that Ben was talking about. What do you do? I either recede, or I should you that externally in a really unhealthy way.

Julie: Yeah, and how much does the fear of the feeling of being excluded have to do with rejection and all of that? When I was first thinking about the topic of reject, I was thinking about the fear of rejection. But that’s been a running theme in my life is feeling excluded. Not feeling like I fit in, not feeling like I’m a part of any group. Not even just the ‘in-crowd’ but all through high school, and then even in my 20’s, I never felt like I belonged. I think that’s a major part of rejection and I think probably really shapes who we are and how we feel about ourselves.

Becki: Yeah, and even at work I find myself feeling on the outs when I’m really not. Our minds – or my mind, shall I say – is I’m cuckoo about things. I’ll let something go and then I’ll have one thought, just like you were saying Steve, I’ll make this whole story up. “They have this planned.” Like today, my boss and my co-worker went to a funeral and I wasn’t invited. And I really didn’t know them, so I have to talk myself off the ledge. “Becki, what are you thinking, you didn’t even know this person, why do you want to go to their funeral?” (laughs) But it’s because I felt left out. It’s just stupid, I had to laugh at myself today.

Ben: I’ve always been a chameleon. What I mean by that is, this is where the convergence of the substance use and my mental health issues and my people pleasing tendencies and my rejection coping comes in kind of tangled knot. I really related to what you said about hearing someone talk about something that was valuable to them. My father’s friends and he were very – this is going to sound pretentious, but so be it – intellectually charged people. They valued books and they valued the exchange of ideas. And when I was 8 or 9 or 10 years old, my dad would basically brief me before we went to any dinner party. He’d say, “This is what this person does, this is what that person does,” and his aim was to have me present myself as this precocious child that was an extension of his intellectual work. What it taught me to do is that every single time I would go to a party, or go to school – even though I was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder from an early age – I would look around the room in the same way. I would never look at people in the eye. I was never naturally good at connecting with people and that was it’s own sources of rejection. I didn’t feel that empathy, I always felt like I was on the outs. But I used the same thing that isolated me from people because of my neurodivergent mind state that self imposed prison I had as a kind of super charged laser tool. It allowed me to isolate everything on a superficial level, people appeared to value. I would chameleon myself on a micro level from clique to clique, from person to person, not being myself, just being an AI Artificial Intelligent in my human mind version of what I thought they would like me to be. It was exhausting but the reason I did it, that whole reason, is because I was so afraid that the way I sometimes disappointed my dad, I could see it in his eyes when I embarrassed him at that party, the same way I would feel bad when I said something I thought was really funny and I laughed but no one else though it was funny in a friend group. I hated that so much that I either drowned it out with substances or I chameleoned myself to the point where I wasn’t even myself anymore, both getting out of myself with a lie – one a lie with a substance, the other a lie with a behavior. As I progressed, it just came together and my lies and my addiction and my fabrication came together and my people pleasing tendencies all just coalesced.

Julie: I feel that in my soul. I was so good – and honestly it’s still something – I kind of have a gift. I can read people. I know what they’re going to like, I know what they’re going to want and I know how to fit in. I’m really good at fitting in. It’s dangerous because as soon as I start fitting in, I stop belonging. That’s something that we’ve – whoever has read Brene Brown is probably familiar with the difference between fitting in and belonging. And fitting in is becoming exactly who they want you to be. I’ve been really good at that since I was a little girl. With my parents, with my teachers, with the other kids, the kids in my dance classes and the kids on the cheerleader squad. I could be anybody, I was one hell of an actress. I still am if I let myself. To be who I really am and show up authentically is terrifying to me. I lost whoever that was that I naturally authentically am so long ago. Sobriety has led me to start discovering that and authenticity is the foundation of everything that is my recovery. Showing up authentically and letting people see who I really am is terrifying, but it’s also the only way that I’m actually going to be accepted for who I am and actually feel like I belong. So the relationships that I’ve made in recovery are the most fulfilling relationships and friendships that I’ve ever had in my life, probably the only real friendships, because I’m showing up as my real self. And that has been huge for me. It’s very healing, and it’s done wonders for my self worth, and it’s also taken an incredible amount of courage to get to the point where I feel like I can do that.

Andrea: I can relate so much to that. My rejection happened as a little girl, just trying to belong in my family. I was always trying to win that love and never really getting it. So yeah, the chameleon, 100% just trying to fit in, trying to be liked. I’m in the process of finding out who I am, because I really don’t know. I’m 44 years old and I have no idea. I need to love myself first and be okay with who I am. I have a lot of work to do, but I think the biggest thing is that I have to slash the lies with the truth of God, and see myself in his image. Be okay with the way I am and yeah, I can relate so much to that.

Becki: And what you were saying Julie, about the friendships. I never knew what a real friend was until I got sober. It’s “they know me and accept me for who I am” and I don’t get the feeling of being unwanted. You know you’re wanted and you’re loved and it’s amazing. I never thought at 50 years old that I was going to change my life like this. I have friends! My husband sometimes asks, “Who are you?” because I’m doing this with my friends. I just celebrated a birthday and they took me out to dinner. We’ve been together for quite a few years, and that’s never happened before. But you get that when you build authentic relationships, and it’s just amazing.

Steve: What happens when you start telling the truth?

Becki: Yeah!

Steve: You stop hiding, you stop hiding those bits of yourself, you stop trying to fit in and that’s why it’s so goddamn scary. Because for so long playing the chameleon, which is basically living a lie, and then you’re like, Okay, I’m going to tell the truth. And that first little bit of truth is absolutely terrifying. And I’m sure any of you can relate, as soon as you start telling the truth, it’s freaking scary and it ends up in tears fairly quickly, especially near the beginning, right? There’s no way I’m going to tell the truth, I haven’t told an iota of entire truth. My story is filled with part truths, little truths all over the place, enough to just hide it and mask it and everything else to put on that show. But what happens there? You start telling the truth, there’s a crap-ton of fear that you end up facing. And everything there, if there’s one small rejection, one thing I did was I took it all personally. Every single little bit of it was personal. Every no, every insult, every whatever it was, it was all about me. Now isn’t that a little absurd? The world doesn’t revolve around me. I didn’t recognize it at the time. But Jesus Christ, all of it did, it all seemed to revolve around me. “You hurt my feelings.” It’s everyone else’s fault but my own until I stop taking things personally. Which is really really hard, but if I understand that everyone’s reaction is their own, and comes from their own place, it’s not really a reaction to me, it’s a reaction to the way that they feel. It’s their own reaction. So if I can own where I sit – and that doesn’t mean that my reaction is going to be healthy – but if I can understand where that is, I give myself a lot greater fighting shot at that standing at least in front of that rejection. At least I have my truth. One of the things I’ve learned is as long as I have my truth, you can reject it or use it against me all you want, you can’t take that away.

Ben: Yeah, that’s wise. I like what you said about the world not being centered around anybody. That pre-Copernican (if I’m getting my history right) thing of the sun and all the celestial bodies revolving around the earth is a nice metaphor for how I viewed the whole world. And what’s interesting is not to get too DSM with the mental healthy stuff, but autism I believe is auto-. Automatic, self contained. I was contained in my own universe due to my diagnosis, my chemical compulsion, my need to make things about me because I felt left out. But one of the things that made it a perpetuating cycle for me, looking back, is that I wanted to be the center of attention and get positive validation. But then when people called me narcissistic for wanting that, it made me want it even more. I didn’t just want attention ,I wanted positive attention. I didn’t just want the world to revolve around me, I wanted the world to dance around me. With twirlers and a parade and this beautiful display of fulfilling all of my childhood fantasies of belonging and everything like that. What’s been really liberating for me in my recovery, which as been my form of a mental health journey because it intersects all of my dual diagnosis stuff, is that I wasn’t a bad person necessarily for trying to make myself the center of everything. I was just creating a whole lot more work for myself than I needed to do. Because although it is somewhat selfish to want the world to revolve around you, wanting the world to revolve around you implies that there’s a certain amount of control that you want. You want to control what happens in the world, but you’ve got to pull all those strings and thats a bunch of work! It never ends. And when I can kind of detach from my need, which is still there, but take a step back and say not only do I not control the world, I’m not the center of the universe, but objectively speaking I don’t want to be. Then I can get a little iota of peace. I still have that inclination of wanting to control it, but when I can really look at it. It’s like a craving. Just like I still crave drugs 6.5 years sober and clean sometimes, I crave that control. But when I can let it go? That’s bliss. It doesn’t come every day, but it’s nice. And then I don’t care about rejection as much anymore.

Steve: They go hand in hand.

Julie: What you said there – you can let it go but it’s still something that you battle. I think that that goes with all of these different things that we’re learning and talking about here. I can talk a good talk when it comes to being authentic and showing up as my real self. It’s still a battle all the time. When I start feeling insecure, the first thing I want to do is go back to the perfect version of Julie that I know everybody is going to like and I want to make everybody happy. It’s a constant battle. I think it’s something, it’s so ingrained, all of these unhealthy habits and these unhealthy ways of being. We can learn to recognize them and we can learn healthier ways of being, but I don’t think that means we ever… and maybe eventually, I guess I don’t have a lot of experience yet, but I think it’s going to remain a battle for a really long time for me to not just fall back into the unhealthy mindset. And I still, even if I do feel rejection now, I’m going to hit the ground first. I’m going to get waylaid by it, I’m going to feel terrible about it, my self esteem is going to plummet… before I can remember to take a step back and look at it with all the new tools and all the new perspective that I’ve gained. It’s a constant practice for that to happen.

Steve: There’s a whole bunch of negative self talk there. When I hear you talk Julie, that’s the first thing that comes to my mind. There’s a whole bunch of negative self talk that wraps itself in all of that. When you sit there and you let that happen and you understand that, “Oh, okay, I’m in this crappy circle right now,” and you can just navigate through the minutia of all of it. You know if I give it time and I put some air under it and I tell someone and I talk about it. If I give it the space. I think there’s something important about giving it the respect that it deserves. And a crazy as sometimes I think my negative self talk, when it starts happening, when I can’t put a positive spin on it and get myself out of that, then I need to let it go. I need to give it to someone else. And as soon as I give it to someone else, it’s selfish, I’m going to give myself some peace. Because even though I know it’s not true or it’s entirely not possible, it’s still real in my mind. Those emotions, the feelings that come along with it: the hurt, the pain, the twist, whatever that is. The uncomfortableness still exists. That’s the uncomfortable, and then I’m going to run to get to my comfortable. Now I’m trying to learn from it instead of giving it an opportunity to grab a hold and then really cause me to choose to react in an unhealthy way.

Julie: It takes – again with the courage – any of that negative self talk, any of that rejection that we take and we internalize. The negative self talk starts and all of those things… it’s all shame, right? So we’re just internalizing all of this shame and thinking all of these horrible things about ourselves. There are things that are really hard to talk about. To me, when I experience rejection – this just happened the other day, I experienced what felt like rejection. I crashed. All kinds of thoughts came in. I’m a failure, everything that I’m doing is wrong. It was bad. And it’s really hard to take those thoughts and feelings and share them with another person. Because it’s all the things that we’re so ashamed of. For me, that has become the most important thing, and I think the most important tool for moving through that rejection and negative self talk is telling somebody else what’s going through my head right now. Here’s what I experienced, here’s what I’m telling myself. Just giving that to someone else and letting them hear it, instantly – because I have wonderful people in my life – they’re going to hear it and not tell me I’m crazy, but talk me through it and show me love and show me empathy. And then also share what their perspective is, which is probably a lot healthier from the outside from what mine is inside. I think that’s a really important tool but again, something that does take a fair bit of courage to start doing.

Becki: Yes, it definitely does. I found myself at a point where calling my friends, it was hard enough to admit that, “Hey, I don’t feel right.” Any situation, I’m just in this funk, and I had to come to a realization that I needed a counselor. And I started seeing a counselor. I have all this baggage from my childhood and I’m trying to be a normal person now and I don’t have all of those crutches anymore, so I reached out for professional help to help me sort all of the thoughts in this head. I don’t know how to do it in a healthy way other than just, right now just staying sober. I know how to do it in a healthy way, I have the recovery that I work, but at a point, I get to this point where I’m going to give up hope if I don’t. So that’s where I was at. I was at a dead end, so I reached out for help. And so that helps.

Julie: And there’s a lot of wisdom in that. Recognizing, “I’m going to run out of hope”? That’s huge. To recognize it and do something about it instead of letting yourself get to the point where you reach hopelessness. Hopelessness is to me the most dangerous thing you can feel in recovery or in life in general. And if that means talking to a friend or reaching out for professional help in some way. Or even medication to even some of those feelings out. Whatever that is. There’s a lot of wisdom and a lot of strength in doing those things.

Andrea: You talk about shame, and that’s huge. Shame is all over in my life. And I know how empowering it is to be vulnerable and transparent but it’s so incredibly hard for me. I’m used to growing up as a kid, even until now, I’m used to everything being used against me so I usually watch what I say. Shame is huge. My mental health it’s a work in progress. I have a lot of work to do, to discover who I am and to work through all of my negative thoughts and emotions and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, it’s a lot to unpack.

Julie: And I think it’s important to acknowledge that you’re not the only 40 year old that doesn’t know who they are. That comes up a lot on this podcast and a lot just in general recovery conversation that so many of us at 40 or 50 years old are just now even thinking about trying to figure out who we are. It’s also really important to acknowledge that it’s a journey. It continues. And I don’t think any of us ever arrive at the end of that. It’s always evolving and I think we’re always changing a little bit. But don’t feel alone in that because we are all just now realizing, “Wait, I don’t think I know who I am.” Gosh, I didn’t even know… when I started my recovery journey, I had all these different hobbies and things that I enjoyed, and I got to a point where I realized I don’t know if I actually enjoy this at all, or if I enjoy the fact that people tell me that I did a good job when I do it. I had to break down every activity and really try to figure out whether that was a part of me or whether it was a part of that show that I was putting on for the world. It’s a huge undertaking. It’s not something any of us are going to figure out quickly, I don’t think.

Andrea: See, I don’t even know what my hobbies are. I just do whatever everybody else wants to do. I like to keep busy. Perfectionist and people pleaser. So I just like to keep busy. For 35 years of my life, it was just keep busy. Because if I keep busy I don’t think. I don’t feel. So yeah, 35 years old and my mental health took a turn and I really broke at that point. Hobbies? What is that?

Julie: Yeah, it’s all about trying one thing and really asking yourself, “Do I enjoy this? Am I having a good time?” And then keeping it or letting it go and moving it onto the next thing. A lot of people refer to “recovery” as “discovery”. And I think that’s a really beautiful way to look at it.

Becki: It is. I remember in rehab they wanted me to list out your hobbies. It was your “relapse prevention plan” and they wanted you to list out your hobbies and I didn’t have any. And then I got home and I started to fill my time up with baking and meetings. And then that changed to – I discovered I like paddleboarding and kayaking and all this other stuff. But I did it on my own, without anybody else influencing what I liked or didn’t like. Like my husband, he’s like, “You want to do what?” And I said, “I’m buying a paddle board. I’m going to go do this.” And he was like, “Who is this person?” But it’s crazy now, I don’t have any free time. It’s all filled with stuff that I like doing and if somebody asked what my hobbies are, I could list them. But boy, two and a half years ago, I couldn’t give you one thing. So, pretty cool.

Ben: It’s interesting to see how we evolve over the course of recovery. I’ve always been fairly aware of what I’ve been passionate about, but in active addiction, I didn’t think it would be really possible to do it without drugs or alcohol. I thought that everything, professional or otherwise, was facilitated by the mindset of insanity that I reached during the chaotic consequences or effects of the substances that I was using. And then when I got clean and sober, I had to completely reorient every single facet of my life to rediscover myself one day at a time. And I love that, discovery and recovery. I love words, I’ve never made that rhyme connection before, I love that, that’s great. I heard a great quote, and I wish I had heard it earlier on, from a musician. And he said one of his fans, it was one of those comment response videos. I go down wormholes of comment response videos on social media, because even though the energy is kind of angry, it’s fun and funny to watch sometimes. I guess that’s my addiction and my lesser thinking talking. (laughs) But he was saying, he made a different type of music back in the day, and now he makes a different type of music. And the fan was basically making fun of him for changing it up. And he said – in a much angrier way than I’m gonna say it now – “What I’m not allowed to grow? I’m supposed to be the same person for the rest of my life to make you happy?” And then he went on a really angry tirade and I’m not going to share what he said after that (laughs) but before he went on that tirade, the core message of not just having to change for people, but having to not change in order to not be rejected really resonated with me. Because I didn’t just think of all the times that I had changed and chameleoned myself to not be rejected. I thought of all the times I had held myself back from growth in order to not be rejected and that really struck a chord with me because it wasn’t just what I did. It’s what I didn’t allow myself to do and didn’t allow myself to grow.

Julie: That is huge. I actually just wrote a post recently about instagram kind of reflecting a similar sentiment where sometimes I feel like some of the people in my life almost liked me more when I was drinking, because it was just easier for them. My growth is making the people around me uncomfortable. And I think it’s really important that we give ourselves permission to keep growing, even if it’s not comfortable for us or the people around us.

Becki: Definitely. That’s powerful. For me, I didn’t know what a boundary was. I was such a people pleaser, I would do anything for somebody’s friendship. Just so that they would text me back. I was so lonely and sad and I would do anything for them. But boy, when I started setting boundaries and started saying, “No, that doesn’t work for me.” They started seeing, oh, she has her own way now. They don’t call. That’s something right there. There is not one person from my past that talks to me because they don’t like my boundaries and that I don’t roll over and give them, do whatever for them. And it’s growth. And it’s great.

Steve: Relationships are a two way street. There’s give and take on both ends. And when a boundary gets put up, it’s okay to ask why or where or how. You put them up for a reason. If somebody doesn’t like them, that’s their problem, not yours. You’re doing that to protect your self from something. You’ll learn, that boundary gets more comfortable, and sometimes you set it really close. It’s really tight and it’s there for a reason. But you move those. I’m going to wrap this up now.

I think this was a really great conversation about rejection. Every topic we talk about here gives us the opportunity to be rejected by someone. Whether it’s social media, some of us are on social media. Becki, soberlife.love, Andrea even with your family. Ben social media, Julie and I on social media – we expose ourselves on a fairly regular basis. But we don’t get to where we are, sitting here today, if we’re not willing to accept some sort of rejection. It is there regardless of what we do on a daily basis, I think that’s part of our growth.

We talked about being a chameleon, rejection avoidance, taking rejection personally, which is a really big one if we can separate ourselves from that. Ben, you quoted a quote there that really nailed it on the head, and I’m going to summarize it a little differently. Recovery is discovery. Inside of that discovery is opportunity for rejection. The truth is our growth, and that’s where it comes from.

Anyways, thank you Andrew, thank you Becki, and thank you Ben for your thoughts and your time tonight, this was great. Thank you.