Transcript:

Julie: Hello, hello everybody! This is episode 32, and we have an awesome cast tonight. We have Martin, Dana, and Ryan. I’m going to let everybody introduce themselves before we get going. So we’ll start with Martin, who is back for a second time. Thank you for coming.

Martin: Absolutely, it’s a pleasure to be back here with you guys again. My name is Martin Lockett, I am a substance abuse counselor, I’m an author, and I’m a public speaker on all things DUI prevention. If you want to learn more about me, you can go to martinlockett.com

Julie: Awesome, thank you so much for being here. And how long have you been sober?

Martin: A little over 19 years, so 19 years and a couple months.

Julie: That’s what I was thinking. Congratulations. And next, Miss Dana

Dana: Hi, I just want to first thank you both for having me. You’re both huge legends in my mind and in my heart, so I just want to throw some gratitude to both of you for having me back. I am Dana, I’m the founder and owner of The Yarn Consolery LLC. I consider myself a consoler and I have been sober for… I have three trackings. I’ve been sober from cocaine for 2 years and 3 months, alcohol for 3 years and 2 months, and marijuana for 1 year and 17 days.

Steve: Really incredible Dana.

Julie: Amazing. You are such an inspiration. And Dana has been one of our biggest supporters and encouragers through this whole podcast journey and even before that, so it is wonderful to have you here and have you on. And last but not least, we have Ryan.

Ryan: Hey, my name is Ryan. I am sober now 20 months, which is great. Super passionate in helping people in their 20’s and 30’s realize, hey there’s a life outside of drinking. So I’m @thesobermountain on Instagram, and that’s me.

Julie: Awesome, I love the stuff that you put out on Instagram. And I think that’s really important, it seems like the majority of our listeners are in that 40-60 year old range, and every so often we come across someone who did this early and it’s so inspiring. So I’m really glad that you share all of the things you do and I’m really glad you’re here today.

Ryan: Yeah, thank you so much for having me, I appreciate it.

Steve: Really inspiring and really impressive at a young age, making that decision and holding to it. When we see that, we think, “I wish I did that when I was that old.” So it’s really cool. We appreciate you being here.

Ryan: Yeah, I just hope I can help others.

Julie: That’s why we’re all here, that’s perfect. So you often hear the words sobriety and recovery used interchangeably. But most of us that have been in recovery for awhile understand that there is a big difference. So we’re going to talk about that today. What is the difference between sobriety and recovery? What does recovery mean to you?

Ryan: I’ll start. For me sobriety is just the act of abstaining from a substance. Recovery is more all encompassing. If you want to achieve sobriety and maintain long term sobriety, it’s what they call doing the work, right? It’s recovery, and it’s constant. I think recovery kind of shifts throughout your sobriety. When you’re first getting sober, for me recovery was like, “Okay, you just put your body through all of this sh–. You need to rest and recover. Your body needs to get back to a baseline. And then once you get some of those months under your belt, recovery starts to become, at least for me, who am I? I had no idea who I was without alcohol. Now I’m still figuring things out with me every single day. So in my opinion, recovery is that overarching theme or umbrella where you need to consistently focus on your recovery in order to stay sober.

Martin: Very well said, and I’ll just kind of piggy back on what Ryan said about it being an overarching theme. It’s a lifestyle, right? Recovery is a lifestyle. It’s not a fad diet that you pick up right before the summer to get in shape and then the summer goes and you’re back to your normal way of living or your typical way of living. It is a lifestyle that you adopt over time. Certainly when I was in my addiction, that was a lifestyle. There were certain things I did every day customarily. Go to work, get off, buy some alcohol, go home, have dinner, drink more alcohol, go to bed, get up, do it all over again. That was my lifestyle. And then the weekend would come and I would start to drink much earlier.

For me, this was something I had to learn about 12 years into my sobriety – which was also during my incarceration – where I thought I was in recovery. I hadn’t drank in 12 years, I had gotten all this education and learned all the psychology and sociology behind my patterns and the criminality and how they overlapped. But it was once I got into a drug and alcohol treatment program and then started to go to AA that I learned the difference between sobriety and recovery.

So I’ll just sum it up for me, recovery is a model. You talk about a balance, a lifestyle, filling up your life with all these things that take the place of what you were doing in your addiction. I spread that out over four aspects of my life. So the biopsychosocial-spiritual model. So biologically when I was in my addiction, I was putting chemicals in my body and not eating well and not sleeping well. Not taking care of myself and not exercising. In my recovery, which is to heal, I have to do the opposite. I have to make sure that I try to eat a healthy balanced diet – I’m still a work in progress on that! I do exercise almost daily, I do go for walks, I do try to get 7-8 hours of sleep per night to feel good physically. Psychologically, in my addiction, I was not regulating my emotions. I didn’t even know where half of my emotions were coming from and I certainly didn’t talk to anyone about how I was feeling. So in my recovery, I am sure to talk about how I am feeling with either my fiancee or my brother, or I go to AA and I talk to people there. I’m very much in touch with how I feel, and why I feel what I feel, and I allow myself to feel what I feel, and then I express how I feel. Socially, in my addiction, I had no clue what a healthy boundary was. I certainly was not hanging around with people who had my best interest at heart. So today I’m very mindful of who is around me and the company I keep. And then spiritually, in my addiction I was bankrupt. There was no spiritual aspect of my life. Today, I make sure that I’m in touch with my higher power and I go to my higher power in prayer and meditation. I try to get clarity around things that I just don’t understand. That balanced approach is what keeps me anchored in my recovery. It keeps me in a good place. So in a nutshell that is recovery to me.

Dana: Awesome. Well I have nothing else to say. (laughs) No, I was actually just clicking off all the things, all my notes, who said what. I think you guys spoke beautifully about the concept. A couple of the things that popped out for me, I know Ryan had said, “Who am I?” I always wonder, and my question for this group is, do you go back to who you once were, or I like to kind of look at sobriety as not picking up, like Ryan said. Making sure that you – like Martin said – not being spiritually bankrupt. For me, it’s becoming anew. I can’t really go back to being the person I was in the throes of addiction. It was a lifetime. For me it’s becoming anew, and I really like the idea of, “Who am I?” You’re actually developing into a new person. There’s a constant level of change. And I think a lot of that, and I know Martin said mindset, I think it’s the growth mindset. It’s the willingness to trust yourself and I know you both said healing. When we heal ourselves through addiction and recovering and not just being sober, we heal seven generations behind us and seven generations ahead of us. So I think it’s a complete metamorphosis. For me, I thought I was “Colorado sober”. I used a lot of substances to get sober from alcohol. And that’s a lot of it for me is there is so much more to recovering than just avoiding people, places and things. It’s prospering into the new you.

Steve: I feel like a lot of that is facing those people, places and things. In my addiction, I have dealt with them in a really unhealthy way. The recovery portion of it is trying to deal with it in a healthy way. One of the things way talk about is learning how to have that healthy emotional response. You try to learn to have that on a regular basis rather than have that unhealthy emotional response which leads you down the path of un-healing. I think we’re all agreeing here is that recovery is healing. Healing and growth at the same time. Kind of like what you said Dana, when you’re becoming anew. Part of that healing is that we have those wounds that are open. The trauma, our childhood, whatever it is that is keeping you stuck. Perfectionism. You name it, there are a whole bunch of those things that need healing, and that is all encompassing. That is the work. The work is the effort of digging into that and taking that trauma or that wound, becoming anew, and healing that. Let’s close that gap, finding out where the root of that is so then I can start to develop a healthy emotional response to whatever created that trauma to begin with. That wound, if you have a wound on your arm, it’s not just going to affect where that wound is, it’s going to affect the whole arm. It’s going to affect the whole operation because you’re going to avoid it. You’re going to use the other arm more because that one hurts. We put ourselves off balance when we do that. Sobriety is staying away from those things that keep me unhealthy. It is very much abstaining, an abstinence. I have to maintain that by staying in recovery.

Dana: What I’m kind of getting from that, Steve, is that asking for help feature. It’s saying, “I can’t bandage my arm with one arm. I need you to help bandage that arm.” That really brings up for me – we say self care, self care. And maybe that’s sobriety, the self care. But when you’re looking at recovery, you’re looking to the collective care. You’re looking to the communal care, like, “Steve, can you bandage my arm for me because I can’t bandage it myself.”

Steve: And a lot of that, and I’ll let you speak in a minute Julie because I know you’re itching, a lot that is, what’s worked for me is I need the opposite to heal. I have had a lot of the same thing – I can’t heal if I keep trying to use the same thing to heal something that’s broken, that isn’t healing. That’s the definition of insanity. I need the opposite. If I’ve been stuck in, say, an abusive relationship, I need someone who knows those healthy responses so I can learn that. It’s completely learned, those unhealthy behaviors because I’ve put myself in a bad spot. But it’s the community, it’s those people, it comes from everywhere. Everyone has an impact, and some people may have a greater impact than others. But I think I need the opposite of whatever that trauma is to heal that trauma. I need to see it, I need to live it, I need to almost be able to grab it. I have to put myself in that spot, because there’s a lot of action in recovery. I need to put myself in that spot and I need to face that and I need to face it with the opposite of what that trauma is, and then I can start to heal from it.

Julie: Going back to a little bit of what you said. For me, recovery is getting to the point where my natural emotional response is a healthy one. I’m not going to say I’m at that point. But it’s taken a lot of self awareness to even recognize, “This is an unhealthy emotional response.” It used to just be as soon as something was uncomfortable I would just drink it away. It took several months to recognize, “Oh, this is social anxiety.” Or whatever it is. And then recognize that the reason I’m feeling this way is that I’m insecure and I’m worried these people are thinking… whatever. And dig into the whole thing. And get to the point where I can walk into a social situation and think, “I’m equal with all of these people.” And I have enough self worth that I don’t have to worry what they think. Or whatever the situation may be – there are all kinds of situations. But for me, I never even took the time to understand that feeling. I know now there are times where I just feel itchy or off, where there’s a little bit of a cringey feeling, and now I know to stop and pause and look at it and ask myself, “What is this thing that I’m feeling?” And I think this is a constant journey. Just when I think I’m getting pretty good at it, something else happens and it’s like I’m starting from scratch. A whole new experience, a whole new emotion, I have to dig into it and go all the way back to figure out what it is that I need to fix, inside me, to make this something better.

I’ve also noticed there are times that the first response that comes out is the healthy one now. And it’s kind of amazing when that finally happens where I can feel the cringe and then the release, the instant release of it. Where I can say, “Okay, this isn’t me. This isn’t all about me. This isn’t something I need to take personally,” or whatever the situation is. The more I do that, the inner work, the underneath of all those feelings, the easier it is to move through life and not feel like I’m having all these emotions that I have to run from. It’s a major part of self awareness that is brand new to me in recovery.

Martin: And it’s really really critical that you highlighted the importance of having healthy responses, because scientifically we know that the number one reason that people relapse is due to negative emotional states. We don’t want to feel pain. As human beings, we will do almost anything to not feel that pain. And so if you can challenge yourself to get in touch with your emotions and where they’re coming from and how you can then respond appropriately with a positive coping mechanism, then there’s still other work to be done, but you’ve really kind of gotten on top of what recovery is all about. If you can avoid the internal triggers of negative emotional states leading you back to addiction, then you have figured a big portion of this thing out.

As we were talking about distinguishing between sobriety and recovery, I like for people to kind of have other analogies to look at and have it make sense in that way. So think about somebody who has been diagnosed with high blood pressure, hypertension. Would we just expect them to abstain from salt and everything is going to be fine? Absolutely not. The doctor is going to encourage them to start to diet a little more, start to exercise, get out for walks, take your medications. And we can play with a few different medications because everybody’s biochemistry is different. So we’re going to make some adjustments and tweaks as we need to, and you’re going to really lay out and live by this new lifestyle to manage your disease. And for some people who might cringe at the notion that addiction is a disease, I’m sorry but it is. Because there’s an onset to addiction as there is any other disease; it is progressive if not treated, just like any other disease; and it can kill you if not treated just like any other disease. Not to get into the biostructural markers that indicate that it is, but in a nutshell, it needs treatment. That treatment is in the form of recovery. It is a host of different things that you have to do. Not that you have to do, but that you should do if you want to stay in recovery. These are things that you want to adapt to and find naturally enjoyable, so you don’t do them begrudgingly every day when you wake up, but these are things that naturally stimulate you to produce the chemicals that we were seeking through the alcohol and substance use and things like that. So I just like to put it in those terms so people can see it through a different lens.

Ryan: I think that’s super insightful because for me, in my early recovery, the reason I would relapse or drink again is because I didn’t have a plan or anything. Seeing it as you do, Martin, as the perspective from a doctor who says, “Here is a whole plan, laid out for you.” Once I kind of realized in my recovery that you cannot just wing this – you need to have community, you need to talk to people, you need to focus on inner work. That’s when things really started to shift for me. And I know it’s a cliché but being comfortable in the uncomfortable. When I started to imitate that and go after that and find situation that I was uncomfortable in and that I knew I could grow in, that’s when recovery took on a whole new meaning to me and as I continue to recover now, it’s super insightful. I appreciate you putting it in those terms Martin. That’s literally what I did. If you did not have a plan for this, it would be very very difficult for you to recover.

Dana: I was thinking of something and then the whole group starts feeding into that. So psychic vibes! A couple of things were coming up. Julie when you were saying, kind of knowing your emotions and starting to understand those, what really came up for me was speaking your truth, being honest with yourself. I was thinking about that on an emotional level, the anxiety and knowing what you’re feeling and then dropping into those feelings. But then Martin you really hit it home for me because you brought up if you had a disease. If you had an ailment, what would you do? And I think that’s also speaking your truth. Because you go to the doctor. But how many people don’t go to the doctor, how many people don’t want to know what’s really going on? Especially if we’ve been in addiction, we don’t want to talk for the first time and the doctor says, “Oh, mental health.” We don’t want to go to the psychiatric team to figure out. And then I was thinking there’s the emotional aspect and Martin brought up the biological aspect. And then Ryan, in my brain I don’t know you, I’ve met you for two seconds. You really hit it home for me when you said you have to have a plan. I think that’s also really knowing yourself, speaking your truth. Saying, I can’t do this alone, I’ve got to get a plan in place. So the three of you really just drilled in that concept that all of that is knowing your truth. And I know we throw the authenticity variable out there. Really to know yourself, that to me is what recovery is. To not be afraid to get in there and find out, “Who am I?”

Julie: Dana and I both are really familiar with doing the work in the Rewired book by Erica Speigelman. It’s something we’ve both used extensively. And the first chapter in that book is about Authenticity and finding out who you really are. So when Dana, when you said being honest with yourself, it took me weeks to get through just the Authenticity chapter. To really look at the questions at the end of the chapter in the book and answer them in a way that was really honest. It doesn’t always feel good because who we really are isn’t always who we want to be. I think that was a big one for me. She talks about taking down all the different masks, letting down all those different personas we try to carry through our lives and try to figure out who we really are. A big part of that was also figuring out what my flaws were, and owning them, and actually being okay with admitting them and then finding ways to work through those and create that forward momentum. But that honesty can be really painful. The very first thing we have to do is admit we are an alcoholic, or have a problem with alcohol, or however you want to say that. That’s the first bit of honesty and that doesn’t feel good for anybody. And then recovery kind of continues that way a little bit where you have to admit those really uncomfortable truths about yourself in order to go forward.

Dana: That also for me, Julie, not only knowing mentally what am I doing with it, but that biological factor right Martin? I’m having these feelings in my body, I’m having a trauma response. And how I want to respond, I may want to respond logically and emotionally calm, but my body is going to do the biological factor and do that response I’m used to doing my whole life. Right? So really knowing and being honest with yourself and saying, “Can I feel what my body’s telling me?” I can always claim my brain, right? But we want to stay out of our brain and drop into our body for that biological aspect and how am I responding? Is that really me? Or is that something I learned, or my body doing?

Julie: It’s breaking down all of those learned reactions and learned behaviors. Whether they’re mental or physical or even the actions that we’re taking. We’re breaking down all of those habits, all of those things we’ve done for so long, and rebuilding each one of them separately and individually and with intention as we move forward. And I don’t think that process ever ends.

Steve: No it’s all a learned response. A lot of it is unhealthy learned response because in my addiction, it’s what I did. My response to a lot of things was really unhealthy. I operated in life, I still went to work, I still did all of the things I was supposed to do. I had a house, I had two cars, I had all of the things. The one thing I didn’t have was healthy responses to almost anything, and I still managed to figure it out and that’s the trick. The trick, the idea I was selling myself was I haven’t lost anything except for my mind. No one else can see that’s gone except for me. I’m still blind to it.

Martin: Exactly. And in sobriety, you’re forced to face all of these feelings that you’ve been suppressing through the alcohol or substances for all of those years. We have conditioned responses. We have conditioned ways of behaving and thinking and our outlook on ourselves and people around us and society at large. For most of us, through our addiction, those ways of thinking are warped, they are not healthy. Simply not using the chemical substance to not get you through those negative feelings is not going to automatically going to start making you think better or think differently about life.

Steve: It doesn’t fix the warped part, it just allows you to see that it’s warped.

Martin: Exactly! So you know what the problem is, but you don’t automatically know how to address it. So that’s when the work of recovery and like Julie was saying, breaking down everything that we have been conditioned to, and reconditioning ourselves to thinking about things in a more healthy fashion and having more appropriate responses. It’s adopting mentally and physically an entirely different lifestyle and responses and ways of interacting with people and ourselves and how we see ourselves. I don’t know about you guys but I certainly didn’t have a healthy self concept. My self esteem was in the gutter because I had no healthy self concept. So it’s rebuilding brick by brick like we’ve talked about here, my identity. What do I stand for? What are my principles? What do I believe in? What do I aspire toward? All of those things naturally become a part of the recovery process the more you sit with yourself and really understand who you are.

Steve: It gets interesting when you start picking that apart and ask, “Is this someone else’s belief or is this mine?” And you start really, when you go, “I don’t really agree with that,” it’s really hard to let go of that. It’s hard to… “Nah, I’ll leave that alone, that’s a difficult one. That one’s hard.” As much as I try and walk away from something the longer I stay in recovery I’m going to keep bumping into that sucker. It isn’t going to go away unless I pick it up and take a good long hard look at it and say, “Okay.” this is why I have community. This is why I have that plan like Ryan was talking about. Like okay, I’m going to take a bite out of this apple finally, because I’m tired of looking at this sucker on the counter. Whatever is going to happen, I know I have a safe place to talk, I know I have people that are there behind me. And that’s all part of recovery too is finding those people and finding those places. All of that discovery. And that changes as you grow.

Ryan: None of this is easy. The work is incredibly difficult, but when you start to look within yourself and you start to realize I need to face this unresolved trauma or I need to face some sort of emotion that I didn’t know I had. Martin you were talking about your suppressed emotions coming up when you stop drinking. I had no idea that was going to happen to me. And then six months down the line I’m like, “What in the world is going on? Why am I so sad? Why do I feel this way?”

Steve: Crying all the time!

Ryan: Exactly. It could be the sun is shining and I’m like, “The sun is so beautiful right now!” It’s so difficult, the work. But on the other side of that, and continuing to do the work, when you start leaning into that, your life begins to open up. It it beautiful.

Dana: I think Ryan, right there, kind of honing back in on what you had said before. It’s recovering. It’s a continuing to recovery. It’s never going to stop. We know that we can not drive by the bar or not hang out with that group of people, like Martin said stay away from those people that we like to use with and have that lifestyle change. But really making the decision that this is a continued path. We’re always going to have that warped brain in there, Steve, where we’re always kind of bowing up, and those things are going to come up. And the sun might be shining and you’re still upset. So why is that happening? So I think that like Martin said, those aspects that you look into with that continued recovery is so huge.

Martin: So again, going back to the biochemical school of thought. If I’m taking my blood pressure medication and I’m exercising and I’m abstaining from salt and everything is going well, and I visit my doctor and they take my blood pressure and it’s looking good, I don’t then stop doing everything I did to get to that point. It is continuous. That’s how I stay healthy, and that’s how I stay in recovery. The minute that I start slacking on the things that I did to get me to this point is the minute I’m going to find myself on a slippery slope back to relapse.

Dana: Right, and you’re going to go back to the doctor. You’re not just going to do those things and never go back and never get a blood test. You want to go back and confirm everything’s cool, and then check out the other bloodwork, what else came up? How’s my weight? And I think that’s the thing about having it be a disease. It is the ongoing process of constant check in, speaking your truth, and knowing what you’re dealing with.

Steve: We covered a lot of ground here in this episode. We talked about sober being abstaining; recovery is healing and growth. Recovery being a lifestyle, a model. Developing a natural healthy emotional response to situations, people, places and things, life. Getting comfortable with the uncomfortable. I think once we start that, it becomes really enjoyable and fun. We open up life how it’s really supposed to be lived and it just really starts giving it color. Recovery is discovery, sobriety is the what, and recovery is the how.

Martin, thank you very much for being, Ryan, thank you, and Dana thank you for being on today. Really appreciate your thoughts and really appreciate your time.