272. Why Sober Life is the Luckiest Life with Laura McKowen

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Unpause.

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I hit rock bottom.

It felt like a brand new start.

Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things.

Today we have Laura McCowan.

Laura McCowan is the author of the best-selling memoir, We Are the Luckiest, The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life, and Push Off From Here, Nine Essential Truths to Get You Through Life and Everything Else.

She has written for the New York Times and has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Today Show, and more.

In 2020, she founded The Luckiest Club, a global sobriety support community.

Laura lives with her daughter and partner on the North Shore of Boston.

So I was trying to remember this in the shower this morning.

I think the first podcast I ever did was your your podcast, right?

Yes.

Am I correct?

That we didn't record.

Shut up.

That we talked for one hour at least.

And then we finished.

And then two days later, I got this very upset, apologetic, panic-stricken email from you

saying

how excited you were to have me on and that you didn't really have me on.

Yeah, it was

psych

yeah there was no record button it was it was holly and i and it was the most devastating conversation she called me i thought someone died like she's like i i have to tell you something it didn't hit record well you were so nice because you made sure someone on your team got in touch with us and said glennon wants you to know she's not mad and she will record again

that is so sweet so was this pre-me

babe This is like a long time ago.

This is like 2017.

17.

Yes.

Yeah.

B.A.

I'm like the technology person, so that makes a lot of sense.

Yeah.

Well, no,

I didn't, I recorded.

You did?

Yeah, they didn't record, babe.

Oh, my God.

So you could have just recorded your part.

These were different days, first of all, 2017.

Right?

Like, it was amazing you guys even had a podcast.

I felt like it was so early.

It was.

It was 2015.

We started, and there were no podcasts.

We were like the first people talking, first women talking about sobriety.

We're like, what are we doing?

I don't know.

What do you want to talk about?

Let's just go.

Okay.

So pod squad, this is why you can trust this woman, not with technology, but with your spiritual growth.

Okay.

Because

what you need to know about Laura

is I feel like she understands and talks about recovery and sobriety and life in the same way that I've always understood it, which is that recovery is like a spiritual path for everyone, kind of, that it's not just about not drinking.

So, for all the pod squatters that are listening right now, I want you to suspend the idea that this next hour is going to be just about drinking or not drinking.

I think it's really about a way of life that can help people live with more peace and more truth and more integrity.

And Laura,

for many reasons, which we're going to explore, came up with nine truths

that are like stepping stones that are ideas about life that, if walked and if accepted, and if integrated into your life,

do bring some peace and power.

I'm going to read them right now.

Number one,

it is not your fault.

Number two, it is your responsibility.

Yep.

Number three,

it is unfair that this is your thing.

God.

Number four,

this is your thing.

Sorry.

Number five, this will never stop being your thing until you face it.

Yeah.

Number six, you can't do it alone.

That's a good one.

Number seven, only you can do it.

That one pisses me off.

Number eight,

I love you.

Number nine, I will never stop reminding you of these things.

All right, Laura.

I believe you because I've read the book

probably several times.

And I, and the reason I can say I believe you is because at first I tried not to believe you because I think that we're both skeptical non-joiners of things, right?

Yep.

But I think that you're right.

So,

first of all,

can you begin by telling the pod squad this story about the hotel room in Alma?

Am I saying her name right?

Because I've only ever read,

right?

Yeah, it's a beautiful name.

And how you got to the point where you decided

something had to change in your life.

Just take us back.

Yes.

So

2013,

my brother's wedding in Colorado.

Alma and I fly out.

She is four.

We fly out from Boston.

I'm in the wedding as a maid of honor.

Alma is the flower girl.

And the wheels had really come off for me in my drinking at that point.

I was a year after being separated from my husband.

So like no one was watching me anymore.

And it was getting really dangerous.

I had got a DUI a couple months before that, but still very

in denial, very like, this isn't the thing that's wrong.

It's that my life has exploded.

But I would approach these types of weekends and I would have this fear because I knew how much I needed to drink in order to

survive it, kind of.

And my anxiety was always so high, but I didn't know what was going to happen.

I,

the night of the wedding, I had hired a babysitter for when Alma needed to go to sleep.

She's four, she goes to sleep kind of early.

So

we started drinking at, I don't know, 11 that morning in the bridal party suites.

And I remember my mom at like two or three in the afternoon seeing that I was kind of tipsy and saying, honey, just slow down a little bit.

And

I couldn't um

we get through the wedding the dinner and all of that and the reception i take alma upstairs to be with the babysitter

and a few hours later i come back to the hotel room to relieve the babysitter send her home

and

i barely remember that

i woke up the next morning

in someone's hotel room that was not mine,

next to someone I did not know.

And

it was seven o'clock in the morning, and my phone is exploding with texts, and

it's dinging.

And that's what woke me up.

And I have texts from my mom, where are you?

I have Alma.

What are you doing?

What has happened?

You know, just the amount of horror in,

I'm still still in this bridesmaid dress.

I have no recollection of really leaving her.

But I left her.

I left her for the entire night.

And

she,

by a miracle, made it to my mother.

She wandered out of the hotel room in the morning.

looking for somebody, looking for me, and the hotel staff found her.

She made it to my mom somehow because Alma remembered that she was there for a wedding and they put together the wedding situation.

And

yeah, that was, that was what happened.

And that morning,

I mean, it is, it is the, the worst night of my life, the worst morning of my life.

It was

the one thing I thought

I wouldn't do was put her in danger like that.

And it happened.

And it was public to my family,

my brother, my sister-in-law, my mom, everybody.

And so

my back was up against the wall.

And

my mom, who doesn't get mad at me,

she couldn't even talk to me that day.

I was so physically ill that I

couldn't even speak.

You know, it was just, I was traumatized.

I can feel it in my body right now.

It was just like ice cold in my bones all day.

And

the really crazy thing that I have to mention here is that on the drive home from the wedding that next morning, I'm riding in the back of the car

like a child with my mom and my grandma in the front and Alma's with me.

And I was just holding on to Alma's body, like just clutching her the whole way home.

And we're like going to a restaurant or something.

And we sit down to have lunch.

and all I can think is like, I'm so mortified that this happened, but I'm so mad that I got caught.

And that thought that I was more upset about being caught and that I had to actually do something now

was

terrifying.

Cause it was like, this thing has you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But you said such an important word.

You said when your mom said,

slow down, you didn't say, I didn't.

You said, I couldn't.

And that is so important

for everybody who has this problem to hear Laura say, she couldn't.

It's not that she didn't.

No.

And keeping in mind, I mean, Laura's life on the outside, besides the chaos that I'm sure was happening, looked good.

Oh, yeah.

Right.

You had a good job.

You were functioning.

Very.

It was scary how much I was functioning when I look back on pictures and I look like together.

I was a master performer.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes.

Can I just say thank you for sharing that?

Every time

I read that story from you and hearing it now, it's just so

profoundly important.

that I feel like so many

of us in all aspects of our lives, but even

those of us who struggle with addiction, like it's like you can say all the things up to a point.

But that last one, I'm not going to share that.

And it perpetuates this idea that like

a mother's love covers all things,

that you can protect yourself from yourself by that love and it will never cross the threshold.

But that's just not real.

And I think it keeps people in such shame because they're like, what's wrong with me is I'm a terrible person

and a terrible mother because only I could do that, which just leads you to be drinking more because you've written yourself off.

And I just really think that's such a gift to share that.

Thank you.

So thank you.

It's got to be really hard.

I started my book that way, my first book, because

And I say this anytime I do an event or teach anything or

anywhere where I'm talking to a mother, because you can see their shame is different.

It is worse.

Yes.

And there is a special vitriol that we have for mothers who drink and

fall into addiction of any kind, but especially substance use addiction.

And

I always say, like, I wrote this book for anyone who needs to hear it, but I really wrote it for you because

this was the thing that would have killed me is this shame

that I felt.

And it's what I hear people people echo back all the time like i can forgive myself for all these things but i cannot forgive what i did as a mother i just can't and that's because it's impossible to be a mother anyway

um

but

hard stop hard stop

yes there's no winning but

especially with this you're not supposed to do it it's not supposed to happen to mothers and it wasn't until other women in recovery told me no like addiction is stronger stronger than love, even the mother's love.

Until it is

that I was

able to slowly like let that go.

Well, that's why I trust you because you tell that story.

Yep.

By the way, that's like the sign to me of a free person, somebody who actually has chosen recovery over reputation, shame, whatever.

That's the mark of freedom to me as somebody who can say that shit for themselves and for other people.

And isn't it so important to remember that we are all capable of everything?

Oh my God.

And it's, it's just to me.

It's just the grace of God.

Yeah, we are all capable of everything.

And even sometimes in my sobriety now, I can find myself getting like

in my thoughts judgy about people who I see who are in their active addiction.

And I have to remember, oh no, no, no, no, you are them.

They are you.

You are capable of everything.

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Don't you think it's interesting what you just said about it's impossible to be a mother, but it's also

It's it's amazing how we have this special vitriol for mothers who drink.

But then again, our entire culture tells mothers they should drink.

Oh my God.

The mommy drinking complex, like we love.

Mommy sippy cup.

We have wardrobes made of that mommy should drink, but not that much.

It's like everything else for women.

It's like wear makeup, but not that much.

Talk, speak up, but not that much.

Ask for, be ambitious, but not that much.

Like what is the right amount?

What is the amount that we can all agree is correct of everything for women?

The answer is zero.

There is no amount.

Yeah.

No.

That was one of the things that I got so angry about when I got sober was the culture that we were living in, especially all the moms I knew.

I mean, that's what we did.

And that's what we felt like we deserved.

It was a one thing that was ours.

You know, I get to have this glass of wine, this bottle of wine, or we get to do this.

And

all the while we're completely like subjugating ourselves because it's a drug that

pulls us out of of consciousness.

But yeah, it's a wild phenomenon.

Yes.

It's the shitty consolation prize for women.

Like sister talks about it's like the idea of like religion is the opiate of people.

Like

wine is the opiate of women.

When we say this is the one thing we can have, it's because why?

Because we don't have childcare, because we don't have equality, because we don't have enough power.

It's like we can't have power.

This is the only thing we get, which, hey, I get it.

I did it for a very long time.

But then that numbs us from the rage we should have that would actually get us the real thing.

Exactly.

Or the agency, or yes, exactly what you said.

It's a complete gaslighting because it's like, this is great.

This is fine.

There's nothing wrong with it.

Look, it's everywhere.

How can it be bad?

It's literally everywhere.

Yeah.

But

what we're not going to tell you is that it will kill you.

And it's an addictive substance, like one of the most addictive substances.

We are so culturally like duped about that.

Yeah, because then it's made to be addictive, but then when we get addicted, we have a problem.

We are made wrong.

We are ashamed for drinking the thing that you gave me that you made addictive.

They sold us.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, and it's also, for me, drinking,

it got to be later about, you know, numbing pain and just coping.

But at first, it's just connecting.

I thought that's how all adults connected because that's what I saw.

And that's what love looks like and fun and

intimacy and friendship and bonding.

That's what it looks like.

And it actually works pretty well because it lowers your inhibitions and it is a good social lubricant.

That's why people use it.

It actually works very well.

So we yoke all this stuff to alcohol that is like intrinsically, it's connected to our most primal need to belong and to connect and to be loved.

And it works.

And you get and you're like, oh, good, I found the thing.

I found, I found the like magic bullet.

And then you can't have it.

Nope.

you can't have it.

And not only can you not have it, how did that even happen to you?

Yeah.

And so you have to figure out how to do that, all that other stuff again

or for the first time.

But I don't think I really put that together until I read your work: that the threat of losing alcohol is actually the threat of not belonging anymore.

100%.

I didn't get that.

Like a lot of people's families and friend groups and everything.

So

it's not just that you're physically addicted to it, you're spiritually addicted to it because it's attachment.

It's belonging.

Yep, it's attachment.

Yes.

Yeah.

It is friends.

I had no idea how to go on a date, connect with men, have sex.

That entire world, and that's a whole other book that I'm writing.

Was

I didn't know how to do that without the help of alcohol.

I literally didn't know how to go on a date and not drink.

I didn't know how to be.

It is very primal.

It's not just about the alcohol.

If it was,

it wouldn't be that big of a deal to let it go.

And I think that

your framing of

sobriety of recovery,

not as much about

being a no,

but about being a bigger yes is so powerful.

But it's intractable until you can smell the yes, right?

Because if all of your relationships, if all of your experiences, if all of your connections are based on this

portal of drinking that lets you access them then the only thing you can see and feel and touch is everything you'll have to say no to yeah right

and so

really i think that the scales tip

when you can actually smell the bigger yes and you have something to go toward that isn't just away from everything that you know.

It's like a Monstera plant.

What?

It's like a Monstera plant.

Okay.

I don't know what the hell that is.

This is, yeah, this is going to be.

Chase told me our son is like a botanist.

Okay.

We have grand plants.

At one point, he had 50 plants in his room.

And he taught me that the magic of a Monstera plant is that it lives in the rainforests.

Yeah.

And so it will grow through the darkness.

All other plants grow towards the light.

But a monster

knows how to grow through the darkness because it believes,

the fucking plant believes, although maybe there's another word for believes in science, but it believes that there is light somewhere else.

It's going to get there.

But it grows through the darkness first

because it believes that there's light, better light, bigger light, eventually.

Wow.

I didn't know that.

I mean, it's probably not true.

We'll have to fact check it.

It's a good story, though.

I like that plant a lot.

Thank you.

Yes.

I love how you said you have to be able to smell a whiff of the bigger yes, because to tell someone who's giving up the thing that they think helps them survive and connect and live and all of those things that there's something good coming, you know, is

disingenuous and it's not going to work either.

But if you can hold out long enough to like thaw out

and to start to get your feelings back, back, which will feel terrible, but there's energy in them

and there's truth in them.

You have to get rid of the physical addiction, and that takes time.

I mean, I wouldn't be sober, I certainly wouldn't be

happy and at peace most of the time if I wasn't going towards something.

And that's another thing that I got so like frustrated with at the beginning:

I looked around and I thought, this is not a like promising enterprise.

I loved AA and I got sober in AA, but a lot of the conversations that I had there felt very like fearful

and closed.

Like they weren't expansive.

Like this is all you can hope for, but this is a really good life.

And I don't know if that's just what I heard or what was actually being said,

but for me, I had a woman tell me, you know, I have a nice little life.

And I thought, I don't want a nice little life.

That is not what I want.

Cause I had all this stuff in me that I couldn't name.

I didn't know what it was, but it was in there.

And you call it big energy, right?

Big energy.

What is that?

Even as a kid, I had,

and definitely as a young adult, like I just had big energy.

I didn't know what to do with it.

I felt like I needed to create something.

There was so much in me.

And

it almost felt and feels sometimes like a kind of mania feeling.

There's this overwhelming urge to express.

I think that's what it was, but I didn't know how to do that.

It wasn't safe to do that in my family.

And I found other ways to cope.

I played sports, which saved me.

I

had an eating disorder, which saved me at the time.

Then I found alcohol.

It was like, oh, that's where I can burn all that energy down with alcohol.

It's not that it went away, but I could temper it.

And

when I got sober, I could not anymore.

That it just.

it had to find a place to go.

So Laura, I just want to talk through how it feels feels so much like this is for everyone, because the name of your first book is We Are the Luckiest.

And it's, it's, it's true.

Like it's, it's true.

I have always felt like I was extremely lucky to have discovered in high school this world of recovery.

Our pod squad knows I went to a mental hospital in high school because of just

what was sort of the equivalent of a nervous breakdown tied to addiction and food bulimia.

But I was exposed at that point to this other way of life where you like learned stuff about how to human.

Okay.

So

I was in high school learning about hieroglyphics.

Okay.

Dying inside.

And then because I was like, I can't take this anymore.

There has to be something better.

I went to the mental hospital, which was better.

And they taught us a lot of recovery things and

about how to human.

Yes.

And then throughout my life, I experienced more and more.

I was lucky enough to have so many nervous breakdowns that I

ended up experiencing a lot of recovery, the recovery world, which taught me things that other people don't know.

Yes.

And has resulted in

a deep peace and understanding that I feel like a lot of people don't get who can cope better with the world, right?

So is that what you mean by

we are lucky that like we had a thing that was so

disruptive to culture

that was so unacceptable

that we had to deal with it.

Whereas everybody has a thing, but if your thing is like overwork and it's celebrated by culture or your thing is just like rudeness and stoicism and you're invulnerability and you're excused by the culture, you never are forced to address the pain that that behavior is covering.

And you never get to experience the world of recovery, which is sort of like a spiritual path.

Yes.

Yes, yes, yes, 100%.

And I wish everybody had the opportunity to be in recovery.

I realized pretty quickly and when I started to say, I am the luckiest, which turned into we are the luckiest, it was because

I realized that all the things I actually always wanted

to like feel the full range of what I was feeling, to

have actual connection with people, to be able to tell the truth.

I wanted so desperately to be able to tell the truth about what was going on with me and my life.

I wanted it so bad, and I

never could.

I wanted

to be able to write.

I wanted more than anything to be a writer and an author.

I wanted to be able to actually feel the love I had for my daughter that was just

like almost behind all this gauzy

stuff because I was just surviving.

I was constantly intoxicated or hung over.

And I knew I loved her, but I couldn't feel it.

And I also couldn't show up

in any responsible way for anybody.

I had no dignity.

And so

the way we are the luckiest or I am the luckiest came out was just this really boring.

It was like a weeknight, like a Tuesday night.

I was in pretty early sobriety.

I had cried because I was always crying.

And

the wave passed of emotion and I had survived it and I and I didn't drink

and

I had this overwhelming

sense of

gratitude like fall over me.

I was in the bed with my daughter.

She was asleep, her little five-year-old face.

I had clean sheets.

There was not going to be any new destruction that night.

that I would have to explain.

I would remember every part of the night, I would probably sleep.

I would go to my job the next day.

I wasn't hiding anything.

All of that hit me.

And I just thought, oh my God, this is what I always wanted.

And

I, of course, did an Instagram post because that's what I was doing at the time.

And I said, I'm luckiest.

This is, you know, I was like processing real time.

God,

if I went back to those posts,

I was processing like my recovery process in real time there.

But

I felt that and I still feel that.

I can't say it enough how strongly I believe this, that

it's just another invitation.

Like, addiction isn't even that interesting.

It's not unique.

We're all addicted.

It's just substance addiction is really gnarly and it shows up in these really

unacceptable ways, like you said.

And

the other kinds are easier to hide and sometimes revered.

This was my thing.

I can't express how much I didn't want it.

I mean, I told you the thought that I had after the worst night of my life with Alma, where I thought I was just so mad I was caught because I didn't want to give up this thing.

Yes.

And

it was absolutely my invitation to everything that I wanted.

And we all get these invitations.

They look different for everybody.

Could be a divorce, could be death.

It could be something beautiful.

For me, nothing, the rock bottoms,

it couldn't get bad enough.

Correct.

Same.

Like for some people, it has to be.

For me, it was a pregnancy test that I thought,

why is the universe trusting me with this thing?

I had to be invited in a good way.

You know what I mean?

Like, yes, that's a good point.

It can be a beautiful thing.

It can be a beautiful thing, too.

The bigger yes that you're talking about

is not something that's necessarily like i sometimes think people the bigger yes

seems so unattainable especially when you look at yourself and you're like i'm a fucking mess like how dare i even think that i would be

a person that

could embrace a bigger yes when i can't even do my daily life right.

Right.

So I think your bigger yes could be that you super know at the deepest part of you that you're supposed to write a book.

It could be that like you just want to be at fucking peace and you deserve it.

Like the line that got to me is when you said

the simple dignity of waking up without regret.

Can I tell you one thing that is that for me?

that I think about every single day.

Yes.

When we talk about the bigger yes being a big thing, for me, I remember being in college and laying in bed, having not gone to sleep from cocaine and drinking and all the things.

Not my life was such a freaking disaster.

I didn't even know how to get out of bed and put one foot in front of the other.

And I remember hearing this roommate that I had,

she was getting up for class, which I didn't do.

And I would hear her putting on lotion on her legs.

every morning.

And for me, that listening to her put lotion on her legs, I couldn't handle it because I thought, what kind of person?

Like, I don't know where my car is.

I don't have any relationship.

I burned every bridge of my life.

I don't know what I did last night.

I don't know.

But this girl has such dignity that she

has so many things figured out that she is paying attention to the moisturizing of her skin.

Like,

I'm finding cigarette burns on my, I'm finding, like, I can't even, and it it would just make me want to die listening to her put lotion on.

So for me, I think of the big yes every day when I'm putting lotion on my skin.

Whoa.

Every day.

She does it every day.

I can't believe how much lotion she puts on her body.

She is

all the time.

I never heard this story either.

This is

because it feels like her lotioners anonymous.

Here she comes.

It feels like dignity to me.

Yes.

That's exactly what you mean.

My like heart is just,

I, I know exactly what you mean.

Because the bigger, yes, I, I talk about this all the time too, Amanda, because a lot of people think, oh my God, it has to be a career or a profession or my job.

I have to, I have to have a purpose.

And that's not at all what I mean.

I actually hate that.

It's just being who you are.

Yeah.

Like the

absolute honor and dignity

of being who you are, who you already are, not who you want to be or who you wish you were.

I don't like that you could be anything you want to be because you can't.

We could talk about that forever, but

just

you can be who you are.

You can find out who that person is.

You can be curious about that person.

You can figure out how to get to know that person.

Maybe love that person.

There's an infinite well available there.

And And what happens when you become who you are is your whole life changes because all your relationships change.

You can't tolerate

the things that you used to tolerate when you were like I was pretending.

I was so good at acting and pretending that there were like 30 versions of Laura.

Which one did you know?

You know,

so my relationships weren't real.

Most of them.

They definitely weren't as deep and connected as I wanted them to be.

My job was all wrong.

And so it was, yes, I wanted to be an author, but I was just really paying attention to what was already there.

Yeah.

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You want to know what my dignity moment is?

What happens to me every morning?

Every single morning when my alarm goes off, this is not a joke.

This happens to me every single morning.

The feeling of not being hungover.

Me too.

That's the feeling of not being hungover.

Like every morning.

And it's not like I pop out of bed.

It's like I have this wave of like, good job.

Yeah.

Good job.

It's an absence of shame.

And in that absence, there's just this peace.

Yeah.

And I have it also sometimes when I go to sleep.

I'm like, damn, you are going to be so fine waking up tomorrow morning.

Good job.

I had one yesterday because my major dignity big yes moments.

Okay.

Do you remember when we went to dinner?

We actually went out to dinner.

Yeah.

We went on a date.

And do you remember how I had on a shirt and a jacket?

Yeah.

When I have two things on,

I'm like, I cannot believe that I am the type of person

who can put two layers.

of clothes on the dignity of that.

I used to look at people who layered clothes and would be like, holy shit, you have your shit together so much.

I can't even.

I know.

Okay.

I love that.

I feel like I have those moments all over the place.

I went and renewed my inspection sticker.

That's like PhD level dignity.

Oh,

God.

But yeah, the coffee every morning, that first sip of coffee where I'm not hungover.

I don't wonder what happened.

I'm waking up next to a person that I.

genuinely adore and that knows exactly who I am and vice versa.

My daughter is safe.

She thinks I'm boring and that's amazing.

Yes.

And

I, I get to have that sip of coffee and it's like, I'm good.

I think that's what that woman meant in AA.

Like that's what they mean when they say, I just have a good little life.

Oh, yes.

I actually do relate so much to that because

that is what I'm most.

dignified and proud of in my entire life is nothing big that happens.

It's like, I cannot believe that I am the type of person who is running this little world with these little people in honesty and integrity every day.

I cannot believe that.

I know.

I get it now.

And I talk about that in my book.

I hated

what I heard when she said, I have a nice little life because I didn't understand.

Now I understand completely and I love my nice little life.

The best part about my life is just what is happening right where I'm sitting.

Yes.

What's right in front of my face?

Yes.

And I think all of this connects

when you are an addiction and you're fucking up everything around you.

There is so much pressure that you feel and that you're given to stop torturing everyone that loves you.

You can't make their life so torturous.

And I think that is true.

And also, we missed the big, big

central piece of that is you too

deserve a life that isn't torturous.

It isn't just to fix what you're fucking up outside of you.

It's like you can live inside of you

untortured.

Yes.

And that is actually the most important part.

And if you get that right, out from that flows the non-torture of everyone else.

Yes.

Yes.

That's why I had.

Number three, it's unfair that this is your thing.

That's why I said that.

Yeah.

Not because nobody expects life to actually be fair, but we operate as if it should be.

And when it comes to addiction specifically,

we are given no allotment of grief.

There's no compassion there for us.

There's no one that's really looking at us unless You know, you have other people in recovery looking at you.

Most of your friends or family are looking at you and saying, what the fuck?

Please just stop and stop now.

Fix it now and go do it somewhere else.

And you are causing us pain.

And there is no

one looking at us and saying,

I see your sorrow and I see your pain.

Yeah.

No.

And I'm so sorry that this is happening to you.

I'm so sorry.

And it's not fair and you don't deserve it.

That's the big piece too.

It's like, you don't deserve this because you're bad.

You don't deserve to atone forever about your addiction and all the things that came from it because you're bad.

You have to take responsibility because those things happened.

We bypass that whole step of, I'm just sorry, this just sucks.

This sucks for you.

And it's not fair.

That's good.

That's your quote of this.

The first question is not why the addiction.

It's why the pain.

Can we talk about that?

Yes.

So we're going to explain why

we have a thing and then we're going to come back and we're going to go through the nine things and blow everyone's mind.

Okay.

We have a thing, Laura.

You're so brilliant at explaining this.

If everyone's thinking of their thing right now, all podscaros are thinking of their thing, whether it's like drinking or gossip or overshopping or overworking or control abuse or

betrayal or

things that happen.

right i'm not talking about the thing that happened to you i'm talking about the thing that you do

to avoid thinking about the thing that happened to you okay

i'm not talking about the trauma what we are talking about is a behavior that we are all engaged in we all have a thing that is

self-soothing.

What did you say, Laura?

You said that another word for addiction should be like ritualized.

Ritual comfort seeking.

Yes, It's like a comfort seeking that you have ritualized in your life.

Okay.

So

like I sucked my thumb into like sixth grade.

I had a blankie that I brought to college with me.

I have always been a self-soother.

So it's easy for me to see that, but everybody has a soothing mechanism.

The soothing mechanism can become maladaptive.

turn into addiction, right?

Why do we have a thing, Laura?

And why do we need to address the thing?

Okay.

Because

it's like recovery is ripping off the band-aid under which a festering boil

is infecting us.

Right.

Okay.

So, why do they need to address their thing?

We have a thing because we are animals.

One of our most primal needs is to be connected and to be attached, to belong.

Let's just call it attachment to

people that love us.

We also need food, shelter, water, all of those things, too.

And if you are not getting those things, you are going to adapt somehow, right?

If you're not getting fed as a child, you might steal from your neighbors or you might steal the kids' food at lunch, not because you're a terrible little shit of a kid, but because you're hungry.

And it's actually very intelligent to do that.

If, like, for me,

I have

a very angry father, unpredictable dad.

And

it was not safe for me to just feel how I felt and to express that.

So I started pretending very early that everything was fine because I figured out that's the way to get my needs met.

I will survive this environment.

And you're not thinking that.

It's totally subconscious.

That's what I want people to know.

This isn't a choice.

It's never a choice because it starts so young.

You don't start drinking young, but you start to find ways to survive your environment, to adapt, to figure out how to keep those attachments and to not lose what you have.

Sometimes it's about basic needs.

Sometimes it's about

status.

I want to be seen in a certain way.

So I'm going to do certain things to my body and I'm going to try to look as good as I can.

So, I mean, that was it for me.

Like, if I want the love that I want from a man, which was like the holy grail, as far as I understood, I have to be a certain way.

So you create all of these mechanisms to do that.

And they're almost always subconscious.

Some of them

are adaptive and they don't cause that much pain down the line.

Many of them are adaptive and then they become maladaptive, like lying.

I

have had just as much of a thing with dishonesty as I did with drinking.

Yes, me too.

And you view them as distinct?

I would say so.

I had to learn how to tell the truth.

They're related.

I had to get sober before I could do that.

But they are different things.

And that

I would, I would venture to say is a lot of people's thing.

And not because they're bad people, but we don't really like to see the truth here.

Most people don't want to hear it.

So, back to your question: why do we have a thing?

We have a thing because we adapt and we grow in the ways that work.

And

when they outlast their use, or they become more maladaptive or destructive than useful

and take on a life of their own.

We have to find a way to let them go.

And it's like letting go of

error.

It's like letting go of something you don't know how to live without.

You don't believe that you can.

And that's where everything is, right?

Because the boil is underneath.

The boil is actually a funny but real example.

It's like the alcohol.

I was just like, no, cover it.

Just cover the pain.

Just cover it.

Just more

neosporin, more band-aids.

Let's wrap that thing with gauze.

Let's put a cast on.

Your legs still, like, you know, got gangrene and it's about to fall off.

And

you think you can't live without alcohol until you take that cast off and you're like, okay, this burns, or whatever your thing is, alcohol, lying, whatever it is.

This fucking burns and I want to die,

but

there's possibility here.

It's like pain that actually has a purpose.

Yeah, because the wound is exposed.

Yeah.

The wound is exposed and it can finally get air and it can breathe.

There's actual healing possible and available to you when you let go of your thing.

Right.

So that is the key here, pod squatters, is like

when you remove the behavior, which is the band-aid, there's something underneath it.

That is what I'm have been un amazed by in this new recovery of mine with anorexia is like oh

the food control stuff was self-soothing

because what i really had to get in touch with is a lot of old shit the wound beneath was a lot of old childhood family

trauma yeah But you didn't know that all you didn't have a clue.

Subconscious, unconscious, fear, shame, whatever it is.

You can't.

Your body, your mind, everything in you just goes, nope, this is what we're doing.

And it works enough.

Yeah.

So we're going to keep doing it.

And so I guess this takes us back to like, I just love we are the luckiest to take the positive version of like, I'm an alcoholic, right?

Yeah.

When I think about

the symptoms of alcohol abuse, because that to me is what it was.

I mean, I'm seven years sober and I am now just starting to get to the, to the under belly of like the, what, what the symptom of alcohol addiction was for me, what it's been pointing to.

I do wonder,

because so many of us aren't privileged enough to to have the

therapy to figure out what these undercover wounds are.

And also, sometimes the symptoms aren't as what they appear to be maladaptive.

So whether it's like social media addiction, do you have any like ways in which somebody can uncover some of these kind of silent things that they are?

Because so many people who are listening right now don't have a drug or alcohol.

How do they know what

we uncover some of these other

maybe like silent

symptoms?

How do we know what our thing is if we're not waking up in jail all the time?

Yeah.

Yeah, I know.

When you're not, yeah, waking up in hotel rooms with strange men when you're done.

Right.

Or you're not getting DUIs or,

yeah.

So that's a great question.

As you were talking, the first thing I thought of is, you just have to be still

first

for like a minute.

So is there any other way?

I know, yeah.

Hold on.

Let's move on to the alternative to that, Laura, because that's the most horrifying thing.

So you don't have like a BuzzFeed quiz.

You're

holistical?

Yeah.

No, that's the only.

Can you make us an app, Laura?

Yeah, there's no apps.

It's the most boring thing in the world.

You have to

be with yourself

for

a few breaths at first.

In those,

you have to be with yourself enough to know

and to be able to see instead of just the doing that we do, because we all just we can skate across the top of life like forever, yeah.

And most people do because, like Abby said, there's the consequences aren't that dire, or they're actually applauded.

Yeah, I know the workaholism, like, oh, I'm a workaholic.

No one feels shame when they say that.

They're like,

it's kind of a badge of honor.

That's a humble brag that I view.

It's a humble brag.

Yeah.

It's a humble brag.

Yes.

There are so many things that just never get bad enough.

But I have to think, and when I ever get to talk to people, I've never met an individual who didn't know somewhere in there

this little voice was in there saying

small,

like almost one-word things like stop,

no,

Yes.

Do that.

Those

whisper,

I think of it as like your soul voice.

Your soul speaks in very simple statements.

It doesn't say a whole lot, but it's like, not that.

Yes, enough.

You have to be in your body.

And

still, for enough to just hear that.

And that costs no money.

That's right.

You know,

quiet, like some kind of quiet.

I mean, even if it's just you're sitting on a subway and you put headphones in and you put on

like a meditation, which can just be a YouTube like silence for five minutes.

And you just think, where am I?

What am I doing?

Is this what I want to be doing?

How do I feel?

Okay, two basic questions.

How do I feel?

What do I want?

Like, if you could just ask yourself those two questions,

really ask yourself and let yourself hear the answer.

That would start to change your life.

And that would start to wake you up to where you are, where your things are.

Okay, so pod squad, go do that.

If you are brave enough to come back, the next episode is going to be where Laura takes us through the nine truths that will walk us through the next steps after our soul tells us what we want

and how we feel.

And also when you're doing that exercise that Laura just said, you cannot

do the thing where you only give yourself reasonable answers or things that you can immediately work out.

You don't say, I want to not live in this state, but that's absurd because it would take X, Y, and Z and that will never happen.

You listen to the first answer.

Yes.

Yes.

The first answer, regardless of how ridiculous it is, because you're not trying to figure out how to do that thing right now.

You're trying to figure out whether the bigger yes even exists in your world.

100%.

Yes.

And yeah, because what you will think is, oh, no, if I feel that way, if I, if I hear myself say I'm not, I'm in the wrong marriage, then everything explodes.

If I hear myself say that alcohol is a problem, well, then everything, I will never have a relationship again.

I'll never have friends again.

I know that's too big.

But that's the small voice things.

It always will tell, it'll point right to it.

Yep.

Okay.

Good luck, pod squad.

We love you.

You can do hard things.

See you next time.

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I give you Tish Melton and Brandi Carlisle.

I walked through fire, I came out the other side.

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I'm not the problem,

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people are free

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a final destination

they lack.

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to places they've never been.

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that our lives bring,

We can do hard things

Yeah, we can do hard things

Yeah, we

can do hard

things