When you struggle with drinking, the problem (and pain) is often far beyond the glass. As my guest this week shares, this problem looks different for everybody, and it often falls into the grey zone.
This week, I’m joined by author, global keynote speaker, and professional certified life coach, Andrea Owen. Andrea helps high-achieving women maximize unshakeable confidence, and master resilience.
She’s here to share her experience with drinking and sobriety with us.
I invite you to really hear Andrea’s story of resilience and think about how it speaks to the struggles you’re facing. You might not struggle with drinking, but we all experience trauma and hardship in one way or another. Andrea shares how embracing the hard in your hardship is what gets you to the other side.
Discover why sobriety and addiction can look different for different people, the pervasiveness of alcohol addiction in women, and how to address the trauma beneath the drink. Tune in to hear Andrea’s experience of moving away from sobriety and towards recovery.
Unleash your full potential and become the leader you were born to be with Dare to Lead™. Use the button below to schedule your call with me.
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WHAT YOU WILL DISCOVER
- Why sobriety and recovery are two different things.
- Why the quantity of alcohol is not the problem.
- What “grey area” drinking is.
- The different faces of coping mechanisms.
- What secrecy points to.
- What “think through the drink” means.
RESOURCES FOR YOU
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- Apply for coaching with me! I have 1-on-1 and group coaching opportunities this fall.
- Andrea Owen: Website | Instagram | Facebook
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Koren (00:00:00) – Hey there. Ready to not just live and grind it out, but thrive in both your professional and personal life? Let’s co-create that journey together. Here are three options. One: engage in thought provoking conversations at our exclusive dinner party. Two: join Dare to Lead, my upcoming group coaching program kicking off this fall. Three: opt for personalized private coaching for a deep transformational journey. Don’t just work, thrive with meaningful work and personal fulfillment woven together. We’ll create a life that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside. Ready to take the leap? Check the show notes for more. Can’t wait to work with you.
Andrea (00:00:56) – She is dreaming, she is drifting. Never been so wide awake. Captured in the moment by the beauty all around her. There’s nowhere else that she would rather be.
Koren (00:01:12) – Hello and welcome. This is Koren Motekaitis. And you’re listening to How She Really Does It, the place where inspiration and possibility meet. Today, we have a guest on the show, Andrea Owen, who is the author of How to Stop Feeling Like Shit: 14 Habits that Are Holding You Back from Happiness and another book, Make Some Noise: Speak Your Mind and Own Your Strength.
Koren (00:01:40) – She’s also a podcaster and I’ve known her for we’ve been in the same spirit of things for a long time, and she is sharing with you her story with alcohol and sobriety. And I invite you to take a listen because it’s a different story. Andrea shared her experience with alcohol. That was a different kind of a story than one that I’d heard in the past. So I invite you to listen to our conversation about it, and I’ll circle back with you at the end. Andrea, welcome to the show.
Andrea (00:02:18) – Thank you for having me. It’s been like a decade in the making.
Koren (00:02:21) – There we go. So I’m really excited for you to share your story about sobriety with our listeners. One of the things that I think is so important is we have ideas and I’m going to learn a lot about your story. So I don’t want to misspeak, but like what alcoholism is or what is sobriety? And I think when we can have a little bit more concrete stuff, you know, if somebody’s stories can help us create a lens that we can look through, this is your story and you’ve risen up from it and we’re looking forward to you sharing.
Koren (00:02:55) – So thank you.
Andrea (00:02:55) – Yeah, well, I mean, I don’t even want to start with the drinking because as anyone who’s in recovery will tell you, the drinking was just a symptom of a much bigger problem. And that’s why I love talking about this, because for many, many people can relate to my story, but maybe not necessarily have fallen into the problem, quote unquote, of over drinking. So, I mean, it starts like any family. I grew up in a family that didn’t really talk about problems or feelings and emotions and my parents, bless them, but just didn’t have the tools to be able to have those types of things be an open conversation. So things were swept under the rug. My mom loves to put a silver lining on things and was very much like a hype girl like I am now. You know, like you can do it and are very supportive in that way. But it was bypassing a lot of the difficult stuff. And I was always the kid who felt deeply and was drawn towards people who feel deeply.
Andrea (00:03:55) – But it was terrifying for me. I grew up afraid of it. So as time went on and I entered my teen years and my early 20s, I was what some would call a love addict and a codependent. I used men in relationships and love, you know, using air quotes as my drug, as my way of steaming myself. You know, I saw myself through the eyes of other people. And when they validated me, then I felt great. And when I wasn’t being treated well, I felt terrible about myself. And so, you know, it went on through my 20s and also was heavily reliant on certainty and control and would try to control other people’s lives. You know, if everybody just behaved like I wanted them to, they had no idea how much their own life would be better, not to mention mine if they would just try to do it my way. That it was just infuriating. So I had a lot of resentments and then that causes issues in relationships. And then in my first marriage, you know, I was with the same person from when I was 17 until I was 31.
Andrea (00:04:59) – And we were married at the time talking about trying to conceive our first child. And he had an affair with our neighbor and got her pregnant. And it was such a traumatic experience because I had been with him for so long, even though I knew it wasn’t the best relationship for me. It was very close to his family. And that’s a long time to be with someone, especially at a young age like that. And so we split up and I started dating right away, which I should not have done, but I met someone that I fell madly in love with, and nine months into that tumultuous relationship found out he had lied the whole time about having a terminal illness and actually was using that to cover up his addiction to opioids. And I found myself pregnant with his child at the end of that relationship. So I found myself in the fetal position on the floor in my apartment that I was half moved out of because he and I were supposed to move out together and have this baby. But instead he went away to rehab and then subsequently fell in love with another addict in rehab who had a trust fund and that he could con because I was broke, because he had conned me out of $10,000.
Andrea (00:06:01) – And I found myself just at this place in my life where I was so ashamed of where I had ended up. I was 31 at the time, right around the time all your friends are like getting married and having babies and like, settling down in their life. And I just I knew that I was the common denominator in these two massively painful breakups. And and it wasn’t that I was putting a lot of blame on myself at the time, but it was more of an empowering place of, well, if I’m the common denominator, maybe I can turn this all around. And what does that mean? And the kind of ironic thing was that I went to go visit my boyfriend at the time in rehab. This was before I knew he was seeing somebody at the rehab for the first time. Like I dove into the group therapy that they offered there. I was there for about four days during family week, and I learned about what love addiction was. I really learned about what codependency was. And so I came home and started going to 12 step programs for codependency and love addiction and realizing that I was putting kind of all of my eggs in everybody else’s basket.
Andrea (00:07:05) – And I did a lot better in terms of codependency and love addiction in those symptoms dramatically pulled back. I had a few tools that I was using and I was so excited to venture off into this new life. And I met someone great and, you know, I had my son and I never ended up talking to the addict. He’s out of our lives and then I got remarried and we had a daughter together and we were this great, happy family. And when my kids were little, I noticed my drinking started to pick up speed. I was a stay at home mom. I was not working for the first time ever. I had kind of no direction. I really wanted to, you know, I just had my life coaching certification. I really wanted to start this business. I felt guilty for not wanting to be a stay at home mom. Also had not even begun to look at the trauma that I had gone through from these two really difficult relationships that fell apart. So I found myself starting to drink about a bottle of wine a night by myself.
Andrea (00:08:06) – And some people hear me say that and they’ll say, oh, I drink way more than that, or that’s so much. And I don’t, you know, like you kind of like you want to quantify and compare how much you drink. And I want to just say for the record, like, it does not matter. The thing that really matters is the headspace that my drinking was taking up. So it’s not even about the consumption. It was that I was constantly thinking about drinking or if I wasn’t thinking about drinking, I was thinking about not drinking or I was thinking about what other people thought of my drinking or if they noticed my drinking or if there was going to be alcohol at this party or should I drink before going to the party? And would it be weird if I asked Koren if I can just drink the rest of her margarita that’s getting watered down and she’s clearly not going to finish it. And like, I don’t want it to go to waste. Like, that sucks. I also saw my dad get sober when I was 18 and learned what a, quote unquote, high functioning alcoholic was.
Andrea (00:09:02) – I did a little bit of research and found out that for some reason, the progression of alcoholism, if you want to call it that, is faster in women. And researchers believe that it’s because the way that we metabolize sugar differently than men, we metabolize it faster. And I just honestly, my gut told me I was just not going to end well if I kept at it, like if I kept going in this path, it was a pretty clear point from A to B and B was not good. B was not where I wanted to go. Like I wanted to write books. I wanted to have this great family. I wanted to be a better human. And I was really into personal development. And I knew that if I kept. Drinking, then that was not going to help me. And so I decided to get sober. And I’ll end here because we can go in a few different directions. What I didn’t know was that that was going to be like ripping a Band-Aid off of a wound that was still bleeding.
Andrea (00:10:03) – And I was like, oh, I don’t have anything to try to stop the bleeding anymore. I’m going to have to find something that actually works because the Band-Aid wasn’t working. And so I found myself sober. But realizing that sobriety and recovery are two very different things.
Koren (00:10:19) – Okay. I want to go to that question, but I need to go back and get some clarifying questions first. So I want you you said something that was really, really important. You said it’s not the quantity of the alcohol consumption, but it’s the amount of headspace you’re drinking was taking up.
Andrea (00:10:39) – Yeah, that’s the hell. And I remember, though, as an episode of Oprah was this when Oprah still had her show. And the topic was around women, alcoholics, and they were profiling these different women. And it was kind of like the show intervention where it was pretty bad. There was one woman who was hiding bottles of chardonnay in the empty washing machine. She had another bottle of chardonnay in the laundry basket like she was showing all these hiding places.
Andrea (00:11:10) – And I distinctly remember watching it drinking a glass of wine, by the way, at 4:00 in the afternoon watching Oprah and thinking, well, that is definitely not me and feeling so smug and proud of myself that that was not me and I would never be that way. I think there was another woman who had just lost her kids or had a DUI. I had none of those things. And I think like shows like Intervention, they portray these people who are at the far end of the spectrum, who are drinking a lot, and we compare ourselves to that. But there’s also a term called gray area drinking where someone is not over there and they probably still have their job and no one even suspects that the drinking is taking up that much room in their life. And the way I describe it is I use the metaphor of, say, you’re driving to a party and you really have to pee, and you get to the party and you see a couple of people and they stop you and they start talking to you, and all you can think about is ending the conversation so that you can pee.
Andrea (00:12:17) – It’s like, where is the bathroom? It just completely takes over your mind. And it’s a bodily function that it’s meant to do that, you know, so we don’t harm our bodies by not using the bathroom. That’s what it feels like to drink where you cannot think of anything else. And of course, it’s not like that constantly. But, you know, I would wake up in the morning and feel guilty for having drank a whole bottle of wine and I would think, okay, I got to cut back. It’s like a Tuesday. I’m only going to have one glass tonight. And I would commit and then I would go to the grocery store and knowing I only had a little bit of wine in the bottle at home, but I wouldn’t buy any wine, I’d feel so proud of myself. And then I would go home and it would be 5:00 and I would drink that one glass of wine and it wouldn’t work. And I would start to feel that edge. And then the brain starts to get to work and it’s like, well, it’s just this Trader Joe’s is like right down the street.
Andrea (00:13:13) – It’s not that big of a deal. Just like, go. I mean, I need garlic anyway. Didn’t really need garlic, but you just go and like every single time, like, I would never be able to just do it. And if I did just have the one glass of wine, it was painful. Not physically painful, but just I was thinking about it constantly and then looking forward to tomorrow where I could check off the box. That Tuesday night I only had one glass, but tomorrow night’s going to be a free for all. I’m going to actually get one of the bigger bottles of wine. You know, that’s like one and a half bottles in a bottle or a box of wine and have a free for all. So it’s just it’s exactly like feeling like you have to pee just it’s the obsessing is where it was headed and that was hell.
Koren (00:13:59) – How would you identify yourself back then in terms of, you know, because you talked about your dad being a highly functional alcoholic.
Koren (00:14:09) – Right. Would you identify yourself as being an alcoholic?
Andrea (00:14:12) – I do now. And to be honest with you, if I had gotten so I got sober in 2011 and this was before it became I don’t want to use the word popular or trendy, but it just it gets talked about a lot more. And people are doing it for health reasons or just, you know, overall wellness. There are a lot of coaches now and therapists who specialize in it. And now there are terms like, you know, alcohol free instead of sobriety or recovery or people say over drinking instead of having a problem with alcohol or alcoholic alcoholic is still such a shameful taboo label. It’s definitely not a term of endearment. And I’m torn, honestly, on this topic because part of me wants to say no. Can we just not be alcoholics and just like make it be a term that just means it can mean this broad spectrum of being a person who either chooses not to drink anymore or truly cannot drink anymore, instead of having to have all these other terms that are softer and not as shameful, I don’t know.
Andrea (00:15:18) – And then part of me is like, you know what? Whatever keeps people from drinking. Go for it. But I actually identify more as an addict. There are other things in my life that also serve as coping mechanisms that aren’t healthy for me. So, yeah, I don’t know if I would have still called myself an alcoholic if I had gotten sober and, you know, say 20, 22, I don’t know. But as of today, as we’re recording this, like, yes, I do identify as an alcoholic and an addict.
Koren (00:15:47) – So I appreciate that. Right. Because one of the things that I said was what you’re doing is you’re sharing your story so that people can see a lens because so my dad was an alcoholic and he died when I was pregnant with my daughter, who’s now 23. And really, it was because of all the drinking abuse to his body, you know, in smoking throughout his life that at 60, he died of a heart attack. Right. A massive heart attack.
Koren (00:16:12) – And I remember, you know, the shame I had about drinking and the stuff that I grew up with. And so that was a very different picture of alcoholism than what you’re talking about. Right. And I think we need to see all the different kinds of pictures of what it looks like. Right. Because I remember when I was in college, I thought, oh, I only drink once a week. It’s not a problem. Right. I didn’t realize that blacking out, I was on the pathway of becoming an alcoholic. Or at least this is how it was defined to me when I was in college. And so I had to identify what one point I finally chose to identify that I had a drinking problem. And if it wasn’t something I was going to create an awareness around, I would end up in the path that I swore I’d never go down. Yeah.
Andrea (00:16:59) – And I mean, I was a binge drinker in my 20s and I often tell people I think I didn’t drink more in my 20s because I had codependency and love addiction as my number one.
Andrea (00:17:13) – That was one and two on the roster in terms of coping behaviors. And like I mentioned like when I stopped doing those, drinking became number one. So I like that you pointed that out. Like I think anyone can like look back at the trajectory of their life. There are some people that I meet who say, I knew I was an alcoholic. The first taste of alcohol that I ever had when I was 13. You know, that’s not my experience in my teens and 20s. Like, I could take it or leave it completely. I didn’t really care. But again, there were other behaviors that I was that I was butting up against. But and see, I never blacked out. Some people just don’t. And I you know, I talked to a lot of people in recovery and they were like, oh, how was your withdrawal? Did you get the shakes? And I’m like, never. I was never physically dependent on alcohol. I never, you know, had any humiliating experiences from it.
Andrea (00:18:05) – Again, like never got a DUI, never passed out. And my thong in the front yard, I mean, I had some, like, embarrassing moments like that in my 20s, but goes with the territory. But no, I just I didn’t have any of these moments, but I very well could have if I’d kept drinking 100%.
Koren (00:18:23) – So then the other is that you said a thing and I haven’t heard this before. You said the progression of alcoholism is faster in women than in men.
Andrea (00:18:32) – Yeah. And this is, you know, I cannot cite the source on this. And this is something that I remember reading like in 2010, 2011. So it was one article that I read and and looking at specifically, there were a couple of documentaries out at the time. I think like Lipstick and Liquor is one of them where they talk about the difference between and just that. And I do remember seeing stats that DUIs in women were on the rise, at least, you know, several years ago.
Andrea (00:19:02) – I don’t know if they’ve changed. They were on the rise for women and not men. They had studied off for men and women identifying as alcoholics was on the rise. And like some of this, which might be another conversation for another time, was the rise in the mommy wine culture and just how that became a marketing monster to make alcohol companies a ton of money. And it just infuriates me. Like, yeah.
Koren (00:19:31) – Well, and it’s also a I’ve had friends who have now gone into recovery, but the 4:00 loneliness, you know, and as you talk about with Oprah, like, oh, here’s Oprah, I’m drinking a glass of wine, maybe your kids are around. And I’ve had friends who were like, my husband was gone.
Andrea (00:19:47) – It’s the witching hour.
Koren (00:19:48) – Yeah. And how do I get through this? And so this bottle becomes a support system.
Andrea (00:19:55) – 100%, I think. I think it can vary person to person. You know, like I said, mine was largely stemmed from trauma that I hadn’t dealt with, uncomfortable feelings, that I hadn’t dealt with the yearning to do something more with my life and feeling so slowed down because I had two babies and like you were saying, like that loneliness.
Andrea (00:20:17) – And I think for mothers in particular, and I’m not saying that people who are childfree don’t deal with loneliness, but I think it’s a special flavor for mothers because we I don’t think biologically we were meant to raise children all by ourselves. But yet here we are behind closed doors in cul de sacs where, I mean, it was like this where I lived in San Diego, where we just didn’t, you know, all my friends were all spread out all over the city. And so it was just so hard to get together. And it just seemed easier just to hang out. And I remember just killing time, just waiting for the hours to tick by until, like, my husband got home until we could, like, make dinner and just, like, check off these boxes. And then I could do bath time and all while holding a glass of wine and race through bedtime stories just so I could, you know, get on. And this was like the birth of Twitter and Facebook were new at that point.
Andrea (00:21:08) – So it was just so fun to be able to connect with people, adults. And that’s what I looked forward to every damn day. And it was just this crippling loneliness that I didn’t even really realize that that’s what was causing me so much pain. And the alcohol worked for a little while. Like, and I need to say that out loud to like it works to make those feelings go away until it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, that’s when it gets more and more painful to continue down the path that you’re going. And oftentimes we drink more to try to get back to that place of having it work. And I remember like my husband had a prescription. He had shoulder surgery. My daughter was still an infant. My son was two. And he had had a prescription for Vicodin. He’s the type of person that can just like get a prescription and take it as prescribed. And then sometimes, like, not at all. I am not. So he would just leave it on the counter.
Andrea (00:22:06) – You know, we had like a junk basket like many families do, and it was just in the basket. And I remember, like looking at it one day and I’m like, oh, that might be fun, you know, like it’s a Friday or whatever. And I pop a Vicodin and drink a few glasses of wine, and I was feeling fantastic. And then that bottle of Vicodin ran out and I was like, If I refill it, is he going to get notified? Like, are they, could I do this? And then there’s a voice in the back of my head saying, That’s probably not a great idea for you to do. Like, that’s bad taking Vicodin that’s not prescribed to you and drinking while parenting two little children. And I kept pushing that voice away and pushing that voice away. And luckily for me, it was not long until after that that I reached out to a friend of mine who’s in recovery and told her what was going on. And she helped me. But I just want to say for the record, like, I know and there might be people listening to this who stay in that place for a long time.
Andrea (00:23:06) – And I know how confusing that place can be and frustrating and scary and sometimes comfortable, but also uncomfortable. That place can be. And I call it the point of no return. Like when you hear the voice telling you this is a problem and something needs to change. But it feels more comfortable to stay in that place than it does to actually either reach out for help or try. Quitting that place seems scarier and more uncomfortable. So we stay in that point of no return so people stay there for years. I only stayed for a couple of months and I do think I’m one of the lucky ones.
Koren (00:23:51) – How were the people in your inner circle with your drinking?
Andrea (00:23:55) – Non-confrontational, Like no one, no one knew. I kept it hidden pretty well. I think that many of us do. It became a bit of a full time job, to be honest. I would start drinking at four and that was sort of my limit, at least at the time. You know, once Oprah came on, then it was on, you know, I made sure that we were back from the pool by then.
Andrea (00:24:15) – And, you know, maybe one of them was taking a nap, but I would have a couple of glasses of wine before my husband got home around 5:35 or 5:30. And sometimes I found myself, you know, I would hear the garage door open that he was coming home from work. And I would, you know, I’d have two glasses of wine and then put the wine glass in the dishwasher so he wouldn’t know. Sometimes I would grab the bottle, pop the cork off, standing in the refrigerator with the refrigerator door open, chugging a few more ounces as the garage doors opening and then closing the garage door and then waiting like 15 or 20 minutes for him to get home and then getting a new glass out of the cupboard. So he would think that I just was having my first glass at 5:30 or 6 and I would start dinner and it was I have more examples of small things like that where I was hiding it and it wasn’t that hard to hide it. No one knew. My mom said one time at Christmas I was visiting, we were at my sister’s and she’s like, I noticed you drank a lot of glasses of wine.
Andrea (00:25:16) – She’s like, but I pushed it out of my mind. That was the only person who ever said anything.
Koren (00:25:21) – So I guess one of the things I hear you say is really important is if you notice that you’re hiding or they’re secrecy or you’re covering up, that’s a sign for our own internal awareness of this is not okay, right? We’re going against we kind of know that there’s something going on. I’m not, maybe I’m not okay. Yeah.
Andrea (00:25:44) – I’ve been telling this story for so long and so I get a lot of people who also tell me their story. And here’s what I hear pretty much universally, is that when people are in that place where they know that they’re hiding something and they know it’s a problem, very, very rarely do they quit by themselves quietly. And it’s easy. And they were like, I just stopped. And it was I don’t maybe 1 or 2 people have told me that. And I honestly, I’m a little skeptical. I hate to say it, but I’m like, are you sure? Are you sure there wasn’t anything else under there? For the most part, what people say is like they hear that voice, they realize that something is wrong and they know that they have to ask for help because even if they do quit on their own, just the sobriety part, just the abstaining isn’t solving the problem.
Andrea (00:26:43) – The problem is something else. And it’s usually emotional wounds that have not been addressed at all that are festering.
Koren (00:26:51) – So let’s talk about that, because you said there’s a difference between sobriety and recovery. So let’s talk about that now.
Andrea (00:26:57) – Yeah. And I think we’re all recovering from something, whether it’s emotional relationship with food, with our bodies, with our parents, with ourselves, grief. I think we’ve all, you know, we get to this age and we’ve all experienced profound grief and sometimes it’s ambiguous. It’s not necessarily that someone died, but it’s that, you know, it might be grief around infertility or a miscarriage. It could be grief around being an empty nester or just not having the life that you thought you would have. And sometimes people are ashamed of admitting that because they might have a great life on the outside, but it just doesn’t look like what they had always thought it would be. You know, maybe they tried a new business venture and it just did not work. There’s so much grief around the pandemic as well.
Andrea (00:27:46) – And life is hard. Like, are you kidding? I get it. I want to shut it all out sometimes, too, still. And it’s like we all have these edges and sometimes the edges are big and sometimes they’re small. And the term like, take the edge off. Well, what if facing the edge is the solution to our problem? Like no one wants to talk about that. I don’t want to talk about that because I’d rather just take a pill. Like I struggle with insomnia now, especially, it’s getting especially hard again, perimenopause. Thank you. But my doctor and she’s a functional medicine doctor and she gave me all these exercises about my nervous system and, like, this vagus nerve stuff and part of me is just like, oh, can you just give me a prescription for like. And she offered it, but she was like, I really want you to try this other stuff first. So that’s what I’m talking about when I’m talking about recovery. It’s like walking through the grief and doing things like somatic therapy and not just talk therapy, like where you go into your body.
Andrea (00:28:52) – And that’s the real heavy lifting that I never wanted to do. That’s what takes us to these places of, you know, that Brené Brown talks about like true connection and joy and love and intimacy and trust. Like, I wanted all of those things, but I was equally terrified of all of those things. I am like everyone listening, like I feel deeply, deeply. I think all of us do. And sometimes it just I felt so overstimulated by the world. Like I felt like a raw nerve, like the world was just coming at me. Like it wasn’t just like I wasn’t a part of the world. I felt like it was just all like attacking me. And booze helped.
Koren (00:29:43) – It helped with the numbing, it sounds like.
Andrea (00:29:44) – Exactly. That’s what I wanted.
Koren (00:29:48) – You know, as you talk about all this, like I think about the clients that I work with and one of the areas that we work on is emotional intelligence and being able to understand and put a language to what it is that we’re feeling in that sensation and embrace.
Koren (00:30:04) – We just got done with the group and we were working on like, you know, asking for what you need in a relationship or having a voice. It takes tremendous courage. And until Brené Brown came along, I didn’t think of that as being courageous. Right? I thought, like, I don’t know, going and fighting a fight, I don’t mean doing something else was really courageous, but asking for what you need is really, really courageous and it’s really, really vulnerable, right? And so being comfortable with that kind of discomfort and it can come up in ways of. So for an example, like I have a friend right now who’s going through cancer, and when I found out, I was like, okay, I’m not sure. They’re very private. I’m not sure what they want or what they need and what support looks like. And I have a whole lot of tools in my arsenal. But even the reaching out to say, you know, and so I got really clear about like, would you like some company? Right? Because I’m not going to cook a meal.
Koren (00:30:59) – That’s just not happening.
Andrea (00:31:01) – Right.
Koren (00:31:01) – Right. I knew that’s kind of like the cultural programming of like, oh, let me drop off a lasagna. I don’t do that. So would you like some company? And I can’t remember the other one and like here making an offering, right? And not wanting to be too much, not wanting to be in the way, but also wanting to reach out. That takes courage and it’s really vulnerable. And those are the hard things that when we can have emotional intelligence. Right. And it’s and we have an emotional language, we can have an understanding. And it’s like, oh, this is what’s going on. I’m comfortable and it’s okay because we’re moving through this to figure out what does this person need as they’re trying to figure it out.
Andrea (00:31:42) – Exactly. Exactly. And and I love that you use both emotional intelligence and emotional language because I think that emotional intelligence can feel like, oh, you’ve got it down, you know, and emotional language to me just means that the difference is, is that I still have the same amount of difficulties that I did when I was shrinking.
Andrea (00:32:05) – The difference now is that I go into these difficulties eyes wide open, and sometimes I don’t make the right choices. And it’s almost like I’m narrating, like I’m the narrator of my own life and I’m like, Oh, this is going to hurt terribly. This is probably going to end, Oh, okay, I’m just going to do it anyway. You have to have a sense of humor about it, honestly. But, you know, there’s a hard conversation I’ve been avoiding with my sister for like two years. Like, I’m just like, use that as an example. And like, I see her and I hang out with her and she’s so funny and fun and I’m like, We’ll talk about it next time, you know, like and I know better, but like, I still avoid difficult things like that. It’s like, well, I’ll get to it probably, and I have to wait until the pain becomes so intense or like, I can’t stand my own BS anymore. But, but yeah, like that’s the difference is that I know and I see my edges and I still walk through them instead of just completely avoiding them and pretending that they’re not there.
Koren (00:33:04) – When I think about the other thing and thank you for sharing that about your sister, right? Because I think so often we’re like, oh, this is the way I’m supposed to do it. And then we can use those tools, those personal development tools, as weapons of how we’re not good enough, right?
Andrea (00:33:17) – Because we’re not doing we’re not our own asses.
Koren (00:33:19) – Right? And, and really, I’m like, gosh, sometimes, like, if you can do it 40% of the time, have a brave conversation with your partner. That’s really good. I kid it that you would flunk out of school, but 40% is huge, right? Sometimes it’s 25%. Yeah, right.
Andrea (00:33:37) – Yeah. And I, you know, I have hard conversations with my husband, with my kids, with my kids, teachers, with my best friend. And then there’s like those couple of people that I’m really close to that I avoid until the last possible moment. Yes. Win is a win.
Koren (00:33:53) – Yeah, there’s so much that’s coming at us.
Koren (00:33:56) – Okay, so recovery. So you talked about somatic therapy. We talked about talk therapy. You know, so how does one, right, because you were using, it sounds like alcohol to numb the feelings and numb being a highly I’m not sure if this is the word that you use like highly sensitive person. Right. And when I and I just want to clarify for those listening because sometimes I think that can feel really shameful, like, oh, I’m highly sensitive, but I don’t see anything wrong with being sensitive.
Andrea (00:34:25) – Most of us are.
Koren (00:34:25) – And we have a lot of armor that’s been built up either from our family of origins or cultural programming, like me being a former athlete, right? Like there’s ways it’s like we do that. So how did you learn how to not numb and to feel?
Andrea (00:34:42) – I mean, I was kind of forced into it. Like, what other choice did I have? Like I had, I had let go of all of my vices. And I remember it had to have been like the first big moment.
Andrea (00:34:53) – You know, my son was diagnosed with autism when he was five and a half, I think. And it just was a difficult, you know, if anyone out there is listening who has a child with special needs like those first months of, you know, it’s like this whole progression. Like, I don’t know, we were the type of family. Like we knew that something was going on. And then the preschool teacher, you know, was like tapping us on the shoulder. Like, yeah, there is former special education teacher and then like making the appointment and going through all this stuff and, and I remember sitting at the counter in our house like crying on the phone with my best friend. It just was, it was hard. And she said, Is this the first time you’ve ever gone through something difficult sober? And I was like, oh my god. And I just hadn’t thought about it until then. And then I started wailing because I was angry. I’m like, can I not have anything to comfort me? Like you mean, I just have to feel it like it seemed bonkers to me.
Andrea (00:35:51) – As bonkers as it seemed to not have beer on a boat like who goes on a boat without a beer? Like. Like, it just. That was so weird to me. And also to me. Alcohol, when you’re going through something hard, felt like a security blanket. Like, you know, like what is it? Linus in the Snoopy cartoons who has his blankie? Like, that’s it felt like a binky to me. Just a normal, acceptable, appropriate, reasonable way of self-care. And I was so angry that I didn’t get to have it, and other people did.
Koren (00:36:30) – Whoa. So there’s two things. One is you saw alcohol as a form of self care 100%.
Andrea (00:36:37) – I felt like I deserved it.
Koren (00:36:39) – And I think that’s so important for people to hear. Right? Because think about it. Remember during the pandemic and I was at home watching a lot of television and there is a lot of alcohol. I’m like, wow, do adults really do this? Like, you know, having if you watch yellow and like if you watch Yellowstone, there’s hard alcohol that’s being drunk all the time, all day long.
Andrea (00:36:59) – Our culture is obsessed with romanticizing it and making it sexy when it is usually not.
Koren (00:37:04) – Um, so that part is how do you let go of that story, that idea that alcohol is a form of self care?
Andrea (00:37:13) – You know how I did it. I had to get space. I had to have enough space between the drinking and then my not drinking life to be able to look back with clarity and see like, oh, it really wasn’t helpful for me because I also started pining for the days of my 20s when me and all my friends would like take off and go to Vegas. We would drive to Vegas and like have these really fun, wild nights and have so many great stories and memories from that. And that’s what I started pining for. And I’m like, That was if you look at a pie chart of like my drinking career, that was such a small sliver of it. Like those nights in Vegas where most of it was just like being obnoxious. And then the later years of just drinking two buck Chuck from Trader Joe’s every night by myself as a stay at home mom like that, I just I wanted to go back to the days where it worked and it was fun.
Andrea (00:38:10) – And that’s the thing. Like, if you really have a problem with alcohol, you can never go back to that place. And we’re constantly kind of trying to go back to that place. So to answer your question, taking the long way to say it took a lot of space for me to look back and realize it. Actually it was like pouring gasoline on an already established fire, especially like in terms of my anxiety, like it just was making my anxiety way worse. And it yeah, the short answer is it just it took time.
Koren (00:38:40) – Say more about it making your anxiety way worse.
Andrea (00:38:43) – Because you know and there’s from what I understand, there’s research to back this up. I have not seen it though, but I have some colleagues that are deep into the recovery and talking about it as their niche and they talk about this and it can help in the moment. You know, it’s kind of like when you’re having an argument with someone and they say something kind of nasty to you and then you say something nasty back and like the first couple of minutes you’re like, that was a good comeback and you feel kind of good, you feel smug and like good about yourself.
Andrea (00:39:11) – But then later on you feel terrible because, like, you’re not a cruel person. You realize it’s just it’s not who you are and it’s just not you’re not really proud of how you show it up in that moment. That’s how it feels with anxiety and drinking. It’s like, okay, it kind of squelch is the hamster wheel that’s going on in my head constantly. And I was recently, within the last handful of years diagnosed with ADHD, which I feel like that is also part of one of the reasons I drank just to quiet my mind. And it was the waking up in the middle of the night in a sweat. It was waking up the next morning and feeling terrible about how much I drank. And, you know, those are kind of like the external factors that were going on. But again, I don’t understand the science completely in detail, but that alcohol is a depressant. It just wreaks havoc on your brain. It’s poison. I mean, some people really like don’t like when I say that, but it really is it’s like ethanol in there, like it truly is a poison.
Andrea (00:40:17) – And yet we are obsessed with it and drink it like it’s no big deal. Like I honestly hoped and this might be controversial. I hope we get to a place where alcohol is like cigarettes are now mean. You’re around my age. Like you remember when I was just talking to my kids about this? Like about how people used to smoke in grocery stores and restaurants, like in the car with the windows up. It was just kind of the norm. And now we’re like, Oh my gosh, I can’t believe that that actually existed. Like, I do hope that we get to a place where alcohol is like that.
Koren (00:40:50) – I was just watching a television show and it was from the 70s and the mom was smoking a cigarette after dinner at the dinner table. And as I was watching, I was like, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe and I’m not in the set right. I’m in my family room watching this. But I remember that because my parents both smoked and having that kind of air.
Koren (00:41:10) – Yes, having that air.
Andrea (00:41:11) – My dad did sometimes, but maybe like a handful of cigarettes a day.
Koren (00:41:15) – But yeah, that’s a really good point. So in terms one was you said in recovery was recognizing that. You thought of it as self care and we went through that. What was the other.
Andrea (00:41:30) – Probably a couple of things. So my dad died in 2016. And as I mentioned, he got sober when I was 18 and he was he stayed sober. He never relapsed. The thing about my dad is that my dad was born in 1936, and not exactly during a generation where men were applauded for being sensitive. My dad was a very sensitive man and I know that he struggled deeply with depression and anxiety to the point of being hospitalized, a point of not being able to work for a while. And when he died, I believe he barely, barely scratched the surface in terms of his recovery. I think he still had so much work to do personally, but he didn’t drink.
Andrea (00:42:19) – And he was never an A-hole or anything like that, but there was still a lot of work to do. And I got the word surrender tattooed on my arm after he died in my own handwriting as a reminder that I’m not in control. And the thing that brought me to my knees about that was the grief I experienced when he passed away. I had never lost anyone in my life before, and I was with him when he took his last breath. And it was just he and I. And that experience shook me to my core. And I would love to sit here and tell you it was such a beautiful experience and that I crawled into bed with him in hospice and held him as he took his last breath. But I panicked. I completely panicked when he took his last breath and calling for the nurse. And then she comes in and she’s like, got the stethoscope and she’s like, he’s actually still alive. And I had, like, yelled at her. And I’m like, Do you mean to tell me that my dad’s last memory might be of me yelling at the nurse and just the profound confusion that night of like, pacing the room after he died? And I’m like, they were like, do you want to stay here with him for a while? And I’m like, I guess that’s what I’m supposed to do.
Andrea (00:43:29) – Like, no one tells you what to do when you’re in the same room with your dead dad. And my siblings just had decided not to come. And I was angry at them. And I was angry at everybody. And that experience just rocked me so hard. And I went home and had such a tidal wave of grief one morning emptying the dishwasher. And I remember thinking what I would give for a bottle of wine right now. And I was on the ground. I had, like, fallen to the ground and. And then I thought, you know, no one would know. I could go to the store and just drink and then either find my kids or ride home or try to sober up before I need to go get them from school. And I sat there for a moment and I saw my phone was on the counter and it was just like the corner of my phone was hanging off the counter. And I looked over at it and I thought, you know what? I have two choices.
Andrea (00:44:23) – I can either go to the liquor store and probably no one would know except me and then face the consequences the next day. Or I could call a couple of friends in recovery. And I ended up doing the latter and I ended up not drinking that day. And I also realized that in terms of my emotions. I am not in control of them. I am only in control of my behavior that follows those emotions. And that’s, I mean surrender means a lot of things to me but that day that’s what that meant to me. And it was such a huge learning experience and I, I mean I like to think that my dad was like held a part of that of helping me learn that lesson the hard way. Sometimes we have to like get hit on the head with those lessons of just surrendering to incredibly profound emotions like grief and sorrow.
Andrea (00:45:20) That was the first time in my life that I had experienced true sorrow. And I don’t wish it on anyone but I know that everyone will experience it. I experienced it again when my dog died last year. But I just, I can’t control it. And I wanted to. Like I wanted to tie it up with a bow. I wanted to know when it was going to end, or at least taper off. I wanted it to look a certain way. I also wanted to know, cause you know I would brace myself for fathers day. And I would wake up and feel fine. But it was the moments of like I drove by a park and I saw a little girl and her dad flying a kite and that brought me to my knees, remembering my dad teaching me how to fly a kite. I hadn’t thought about that in thirty years. And there I was a mess driving to a kid’s birthday party on a Saturday.
Andrea (00:46:15) Like no one tells you that. No one tells you that it’s going to be hearing a Bob Dylan song in the elevator at a conference that’s going to like take you out. That’s why I got surrender tattooed on my arm of like, okay this is what pain looks like sometimes.
Koren (00:46:36) What an incredible experience of going through, and this is like an example of owning your experience and owning your story, like hey, what I would do for a bottle of wine and even walking through. Right, we have and again I was with clients and just asking the question of who here has thought of a story in their head that can bring a lot of shame because they know that this behavior isn’t okay for them. And not judging ourselves like just owning it and saying this is what I want to do cause I wanna take away this pain. I mean that’s what Brené says we own our story. Hopefully you were able to love yourself at some point through that story. Cause I think what people think is magical thinking like oh once I get here then I’m not gonna have these thoughts. I’m not gonna have these urges. But we don’t know. Like you said, there’s so much that we’re not in control of and especially when somebody that we love passes.
Andrea (00:47:35) Mhmm. And I also wanna underscore a couple of things, like my thought was not what I would give for a glass of wine. Like I was clear I wanted an entire bottle. Like it wasn’t just that I wanted to take the edge off, like I wanted to get drunk and hopefully pass out. Like that’s the kind of pain that I was in, just that deep deep sorrow and grief. And I also think that, and maybe I have an advantage in this way, that I have been sharing my story since 2007 like in the glory days of blogging. I mean you know you know this because glory days of podcasting and blogging. And I think that it’s a little bit easier for me to reach out for help more quickly than maybe someone who doesn’t have that experience. And I just want to say and underscore that it’s not easy. I don’t recommend coming and telling your story for thousands of people to hear on a podcast. Like if it’s not your thing it’s not your thing! I’m not saying that’s the way. But even if it’s just one person like if it’s your therapist or someone that you trust.
Koren (00:48:37) And I think the key thing for you right, cause that’s 2016 so this is 2023 so what is that, seven years, is that in that moment you owned your story. You said it you thought of these different strategies and scenarios cause you still needed to take care of your kids and you recognized that. But you were aware of what your brain was thinking and the plans that it was to take away this pain. And I think so often you know, that right there is being able to own our story with ourselves. And not beat ourselves up or judge ourselves because that can actually bring us more into the behavior that we may not want to have happen.
Andrea (00:49:11) Yeah. I don’t know if I was thinking of all of that then. I mean that’s a lot of self awareness. But there’s a saying in the rooms of recovery that says “think through the drink.” And you can use that for really any kind of behavior that you know isn’t great for you and you basically you think about so I know, I have the drink and then what will probably happen. You know and I have to admit to myself well I would have another one. And I would drink the entire bottle. And most likely because I’m not making good decisions at that point, I would go get more. Because I wouldn’t stop there. I would go get more. And then the next day I would probably feel terrible about it and maybe I wouldn’t drink for a couple of days but then that hangover would wear off and those feelings of shame would wear off and it would be like, well it was fine. Like, no one found out about it. Like my life wasn’t ruined. I can just, I can moderate. And that’s thinking through the drink. That’s where I knew I was headed. Because if I sat here and told you like oh it would have just been that one day, I am lying. I’m lying. It’s not just that one day. So I have to be very – and I tell people around me. Like I told all the people that I know and that care about me like if I ever tell you that after eleven years of sobriety, that I’m thinking about moderating, or that I read a book on moderation and I think I wanna try it, I am lying. Don’t believe me. Please. Yeah.
Koren (00:50:36) Well Andrea thank you so much for coming and sharing your story. And I think the context and the details are really important because it gives people a lens. Instead of that black and white thinking about alcoholism or sobriety and what it looks like. But really the different things that you talked about. Because we think, like okay once you hit sobriety you go through and you have the skills and you have the emotional language and the ability and the muscles to get through it. We don’t know. And having that moment where you really contemplated drinking.
Andrea (00:51:19) Yeah. I’m so grateful that I do have friends in recovery that I can call and would answer the phone. Like they know if the phone rings you answer it. Like a text is one thing but an actual phone call is another. And some people, this isn’t to shame anyone who relapses, we didn’t even get into the story right, I relapsed a few months into my sobriety. All of it is research. All of it is data. Whether you start drinking again. Or whether you just have an experience like I did like you think it through like all of it is data and information to show you how to be better next time.
Koren (00:51:40) And how to really take care of yourself, it sounds like.
Andrea (00:51:51) Exactly. Like what true self care is, thank you. Yes.
Koren (00:51:55) There we go. Well Andrea thank you so much.
Koren (00:52:00) Alright. So what did you think? What key learnings did you have? What insights? What windows of possibility did you get? One of the things that really struck me was the fact of how she talks about her addiction being that pull, that constant thinking about it all day long. It wasn’t that she got drunk or drank in excessive amounts. Because I know with my experience with alcoholics that would be that overindulgence that overdrinking and what was the behavior that followed. And hearing her talk about that, that gave me some insight into there can be other ways of having addiction with alcohol. And what does that look like? So I appreciate Andrea coming and sharing her story with all of us here. So, think about what are your key learnings from today? What are some of your insights? And the most important thing is as you do this, make sure that you’re constantly loving yourselves. This life that we’re all going through, it’s hard. There’s a lot of learnings. There’s a lot of insights. So if you start to notice that you had shame as you went through and listened to it for whatever reason, love yourself through that difficulty of suffering. Alright my friend, I’m smiling big for you.
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Koren (00:55:56) – All the details are in the show notes. And don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter for updates. Remember, growth isn’t just about work. It’s about creating a life that feels good on the inside, not one that just looks good on the outside. So let’s do this. Can’t wait to work with you.
Music (00:56:16) – She is dreaming, she is drifting. Never been so wide awake. Captured in the moment by the beauty all around her. There’s nowhere else that she would rather be.