Alcohol Freedom Finders

Jessie realises alcohol isn't the answer to Shame, ADHD, Autism or Trauma - Episode 5

Barry CONDON Season 1 Episode 5

 In this episode, we meet with Jessie from Boston, a trained sommelier and hard liquor aficionado who describes her family as having many generations of alcohol dependence.  We'll hear how she herself has had to come to terms with both ADHD and autism, as well as childhood trauma. 

That trauma was triggered again during the COVID pandemic, where her alcohol use came to a head.  Working 14 hour days in an essential service was tough enough, but being locked down also brought back the trauma of being trapped as a child. Jessie describes herself as a rebel down to the core of her being, and so the strict rules of AA weren't for her.

And in fact, it was a podcast that started her journey to finding alcohol freedom! 

Jessie Calkin
https://www.exit9coaching.com/

Our 30-day group programme:
https://www.cleanlifecoaching.org/aff-group

The podcast home page
https://podcast.alcoholfreedomfinders.com/

Justine Clark
https://justineclarktherapy.co.uk/

Barry Condon
https://www.cleanlifecoaching.org/
https://www.instagram.com/clean.life.coaching/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/barry-condon-577b85294/

This is Alcohol Freedom Finders. In this episode, we meet with Jessie from Boston, a trained sommelier and hard liquor aficionado who describes her family as having many generations of alcohol dependence. We'll hear how she herself has had to come to terms with both ADHD and autism, as well as childhood trauma. That trauma was triggered again during the COVID pandemic, where her alcohol use came to a head. Working 14 hour days in an essential service was tough enough, but being locked down also brought back the trauma of being trapped as a child. Jessie describes herself as a rebel down to the core of her being, and so the strict rules of AA weren't for her. And in fact, it was a podcast that started her journey to finding alcohol freedom. Let's get going. Well, hello and welcome everybody to the Alcohol Freedom Finders. Today we are super excited to have our guest, Jessie Corkins with us. And she's going to talk to us about the magic of finding freedom from alcohol herself. So hi, Jessie. How are you? I'm very well. How are you? I'm great. It's a hot day in London today. A rare treat. I must say, a rare treat. Hi, Jesse. Really good to see you. Thanks for coming on. Really, you're really excited to hear your, your story. We've obviously known each other for, what is it now? It's a year, I suppose. Um, but, um, I don't have many details on you. So I'm, I'm really, really interested to hear, uh, your background story. Um, I don't know, where would you like to start? I mean, we're obviously Alcohol Freedom Finders, so we'd be really fascinated to hear, you know, where your alcohol journey started and, and, and what's led you to where you are today. Thank you both for welcoming me and having me on. It is also a hot day here in Boston, but we just finished up a long heat wave of, let me try to convert to centigrade here, well over 27 degrees, somewhere in there. And for several weeks and not quite enough rain. So thanks for tolerating my strange Americanisms as I try to convert things to the proper measurement systems for the rest of the audience. Um, I am very honored to be here. I'm a big fan of both of yours. So I am very honored, uh, to be able to participate in your new project. The pleasure is all ours. So I can, uh, talk both your ears off or everyone else who's ever going to listen to this, so I will attempt to be concise in ways that I am not usually particularly skilled at, um, I, as you can tell from my voice, I'm an American and, uh, we're here in Boston, so you might hear me drop some R's, but not as many as perhaps people in my dialect region. Um, as you might guess from what I just said, my, uh, formal academic background is in linguistics. So if you hear me making reference to strange language things, that is why. So, uh, my journey to being a non drinker, a sober person, an alcohol freedom person, in whatever terms you would best like to use that suit your heart. To the truth, uh, started probably most accurately back in 2017, and it took a great number of years for me to move from a person who realized I had a problem with alcohol to actually doing something about it. Early on in 2017, I noticed that I had become a daily drinker and coming from a family of substance abuse, abuse, uh, in the more kind of physical, emotional sense. As well as many generations of alcohol dependent people, I knew that if I was trending in that direction, this was probably going to end up playing out the way that I had seen other generations of my family play out. And that wasn't going to be a future that I wanted to have. That being said, I was drinking every day because I didn't want to feel my feelings. I have both big T and small T trauma in my background, as well as mental health challenges. I'm also an ADHD er, and I'm also diagnosed autistic. So I have a few extra things in my brain that sometimes get in the way of being the kind of person I want to be, or that society says I ought to be, or that perhaps my workplaces would want me to be. So, uh, just being a regular person with everyday people problems like any of us. One of the ways that I self medicated was with alcohol, so I first started tracking how many days I could go without drinking back in 2017. And it turned out it was, uh, maybe two days. And I was very uncomfortable with that, and I had a daily journaling habit, and I just kept track of it. I wasn't trying to do anything with it, I just noticed it, and I lived in denial about it for a very long time. I would go through periods where maybe it was two drinks a night, and then you'd have particularly rough go, and then I would be drinking many, many, many alcohol units, uh, in a week, far more than what medicine said was appropriate for someone of my age and background. Where would you do your drinking? I would drink at home with my partner, who is my spouse now. I would, we would If I was having a particularly rough day, I would say, I need margaritas. And so we would go to our local margarita place and my spouse, he's not much of a drinker on his own. He would just try to keep up with me. So his drinking always kind of ebbed and flowed with mine. If I was having a high drinking period of time, uh, he would follow suit or vice versa. Um, I. I learned that I was celiac back in 2013, so beer wasn't my beverage of choice. I was very much, uh, I became very much a quote unquote brown liquor drinker. Um, I was a bourbon person and a margarita person through and through. Those were frequently my poisons of choice. Um, so I can, uh, fast forward toward the, let's, uh, get free from this unless there's other things you'd like me to expand upon. No, that's not good, GC. No, no, yeah. I'm loving it. Please, please continue. Uh, so 2017 saw me, uh, get married, woo hoo, um, and in 2018, I started graduate school after working in various, uh, I, besides having formal ADHD, I like to say I also have career ADHD. I have changed industries so many times after, you know, working very hard and kind of unleashing some level of success in each one, I would almost get tired of it and want to learn something else from the bottom up. So I would start at an entry level position and then work my way up into management wherever I was. Basically, if I'm learning, I'm invested in my profession and if I already know how to do all the things. In the past, I would almost become unmotivated to participate in my workplace and I'd work myself till burnout. Uh, I know that burnout is a very common thing across people of all colors and backgrounds and places of origin, so I don't think I need to explain it to anyone. And that was another thing I self medicated over. And this pressures of graduate school as well as running a small business, uh, running a bike shop here in Boston, uh, I drank over that. So we don't need to. Keep getting into that, but the, the turning point for me was, I think, like for many of us, however, the place that you live handled the outbreak of the COVID 19 pandemic, uh, here in the U. S., the local government decided to start shutting things down at the end of March of 2020. So we went from whatever you think of a normal American New England city, uh, if you have any middle model of that. very much. to absolutely everything shut down, uh, very quickly. If you're looking to take back control of your drinking, why don't you join our Alcohol Freedom Finders 30 day group program. It's a great place to start. Because we approach it as an experiment, rather than a challenge. Whereas, as well as getting a great detox, you learn the science and the psychology about why you're drunk in the first place. So whether you want to stop altogether, or just become a more mindful and moderate drinker, why don't you give it a crack? Use the link in the show notes to sign up to our next 30 day program, and you won't regret it. Because no one ever woke up in the morning and said, I wish I'd had more to drink last night, did they? Back to the episode. Because the bicycle community is a very important way that people actually just transport, transportation mechanism here in Boston, we do have public transit in the form of subway, uh, that we call the T and buses as well as. Decent cycle infrastructure here. Uh, the local government decided that bicycle shops were actually an essential service. So essential services, whether they were businesses or hospitals, were meant to stay open. And because public transit was deemed not really safe for many people or, and also they were restricting the ridership to, you know, Go hand in hand with social distancing measures. We were, as a business, a bike shop, we were deemed an essential service. So we were open during the shutdown. We would have lines down the sidewalk. We had to cut our, our staff went from 15 to 20. Three or five, depending on the day, we couldn't have anyone inside the store. Our shop is the size of a postal stamp. The reason I'm bothering to bring this up is for anyone under any circumstances. This time was perhaps the first time that a lot of us had a lot of feelings about a number of different things, or also in my case, it re birthed inside of me, a lot of the things that I hadn't felt since I was very small. When I was young and in an unsafe environment growing up, it brought up trauma trigger that I thought that I had dealt with. So, uh, I'm at work in an unprecedented time. So we have not the kind of situation that any of our frontline medical staff were dealing with, but just an in demand transportation service on the daily. You're at work six days a week, 10 to 14 hours a day. You are dealing with incredible trauma triggers and My self medication was bourbon. I was drinking about 750 milliliters every other day and that was just on my own. That wasn't counting my spouse or anything else. That was just me. And I knew I got to the point where I couldn't get up in the morning, uh, and not feel sick. I got to the point where I wasn't eating. And having Very intense alcohol dependent people in my family, I knew that if I was getting to the point where I wasn't eating, then it was probably if I stayed on that path, it was going to kill me, but also at this point in my life, I was dealing with pretty intense suicidal ideation. Maybe I should put a trigger warning on this. I don't know. Um, It was an incredibly scary time where you sort of forget about it now that you sort of look back and think, Oh, well, you know, it turned out to be, you know, pretty serious flu, but it wasn't. Yeah. It wasn't, you know, what we had in, maybe in our minds that it might turn into, but we didn't know at the beginning, did we? And to be out there on the, on kind of on the front line, uh, risking your, yeah, essentially we were, you know, people were risking their lives, you know, in as far as we knew. Um, yeah, that can, that can, that can, you know, drive all sorts of, uh, thoughts. So coming through that summer, I was. In an inner situation that I could probably attempt to put words to now, but is within your own hearts and minds, if you picture the most dire inner situation you've been in, uh, probably akin to that and I will attempt not to. How did it feel, Jessie? During that period of time? Um, give me some color. I felt trapped that I didn't have a future worth having. Um, I think every romantic relationship. Every family was put into new and strange circumstances. My relationship certainly suffered because I wasn't present. I was just, as soon as I got home from work, it was bourbon time and I drank until I passed out. And then I got up the next morning and I went to work. My spouse works in tech, so he was working from home. We couldn't see other people. Uh, I grew up in a very rural place. And after, uh, my father died when I was a kid. My household wasn't a safe place, and because I grew up in a place without infrastructure, um, it felt like you were trapped all the time. And so this feeling of having to be in the house, having to just be in one place, I felt trapped again. I felt all those feelings from my young life all over again. Um, and I didn't have access to the support network that I really needed to face that in any kind of a healthy way. So I did what many of us do when we don't know what to do and I self medicated. So when did you sort of get to the conclusion that this isn't working and you have to try something else? So toward that autumn, uh, I have, I think as many of us do, um, The whole, the sunlight goes away and you get depression, good old seasonal affective disorder. So when the sun goes away, Jesse becomes sad Jesse, not guaranteed every time, but definitely that autumn. And come that autumn, I realized that I probably wasn't going to survive the winter if I stayed as things were. So I decided that. Um, come November 1, 2020, I was going to stop drinking and I was going to really seek out some of the mental health help that I really needed that I didn't have at that time. More things were becoming available again at this point, um, this many months into the pandemic at least, how it was being addressed in my part of the United States. So, uh, I managed to get 90 days, uh, without alcohol at that time. But still the underlying issues were not being addressed sufficiently. And I went back thinking that I could moderate, uh, that February, March. And as the bicycle life started to take over again, as it had in 2020, I just went back to where I was. I was drinking in a way that I hadn't even been drinking before I stopped for those 90 days. And I knew this was not going to go well. And. That continued for all of 2021 and here, uh, in the, this naked mind philosophy is, uh, an idea and I'll, I'll get to how I came to this naked mind in a moment. Um, there's this idea of the pause where you stop trying to stop. And I kind of, before I even knew that this naked mind existed, kind of put myself through that process. In the winter of 21 into 22, I just completely gave up trying to stop or trying to moderate at all. And I just thought all the alcohol I wanted, whenever I wanted, I was spending multiple hundreds of dollars a week on top shelf things thinking, Oh, if I, if I buy the nice stuff, then I don't have a drinking problem. Um, sometimes we brainwash ourselves to an incredible extent before we can see the truth. It's. You're sophisticated. You're an aficionado. Um, once in my professional past, I was trained to be a sommelier. So I could justify spending any amount of money on any kind of alcohol because I knew its history and the artistry inside of it. But also with this brain, also with the brainwashing, it's almost a subconscious thing that's going on. You're not actively Hiding from yourself. It's almost like the alcohol personality within takes over and that's leading the, leading away, right? That was definitely the case come February of 2022. I, that process had moved from subconscious to conscious. I, There were, uh, I think they still exist unfortunately, apps in the U. S. where you could put in your alcohol order and the liquor store would deliver it to your residence. And so I was spending lots and lots of money with one of those. And I remember walking down the steps of my building to receive my multiple hundred dollar fancy order during a snowstorm and thinking, I don't actually even want this, but I know that I will drink every drop in every one of these bottles. And going, what is the point? of a me, if this is me. I produce no value. What is the point of me? What is the point of this? And that was when I started looking for app, looking for podcasts like this one, looking for people who had walked this path. And I was like, well, if, I can hear enough stories, if I can understand that this is possible, then maybe for me it can also be possible. And so the very first podcast that I started listening to was one that isn't running anymore called Recovery Happy Hour. And I heard many people on that podcast make reference to This Naked Mind, This Naked Mind, This Naked Mind. And so I was curious as to what that was, and then I ran into the This Naked Mind podcast. Um, and I added it to my queue of, uh, either sobriety, sober, curious, recovery, uh, kind of that umbrella of topic podcasts. And it really was Recovery Happy Hour that really changed my relationship with myself in terms of my relationship with alcohol. And, but in terms of operationalizing it, um, everyone who was interviewed on that podcast, their basic requirement was you had to have been alcohol free for a year. And these people were coming from different countries, different backgrounds, they were different ages, different races, different spiritual, different spiritualities, sexualities, genders, et cetera. And I, the through line that I found was that each person had to walk this journey in a way that was true to themselves. Like, there are so many programs, but if we ever lie to ourselves at any point in the process, I think that's why step four of the Twelve Step is having this, like, fearless moral inventory. And I'm putting this in air quotes because I think that's the almost verbatim. Um, Twelve Step was interesting to read about, but I knew that I needed something different because I'm a rebel down to the core of my being. And I was, I, I wasn't going to. There wasn't a resonance in my heart for what I needed. And so, but the people whose experiences spoke to me most greatly from the podcasts I was listening to were these people who kept talking about this naked mind. So I Googled as one does, and I ran across the program that TNM does, uh, called the pack. And I had at this point already picked my sobriety date. I picked a date. I'm one of those people who, if I pick something, I can hold myself to it. I have a, uh, unfortunately a lot of willpower, which can get in the way sometimes. Um, and I picked Hanamatsuri, which is April 8th. Uh, it's the traditional first day of spring in, um, Japan. Part of my family's Japanese. And it is the traditional birthday of the Buddha. It comes from a family of, uh, Buddhists on one side. So I picked that date because it's, uh, it's an idea of rebirth. And when we get to meet ourselves for the first time all over again, when we, uh, leave our alcohol life behind. Uh, why not pick a date in spring if that speaks to you? So for some folks, it's New Year's day for me. I wanted a very close to the first day of spring. So that was the date that I picked. I joined the path a couple of weeks later, and then I participated in the year long path program that this naked mind, uh, runs. And in that process, I met many coaches who were of great inspiration to me. And I decided that if I could be. If I was the kind of person who could help another person, then I could meet a part of myself that I wanted to meet and I could do the work that I benefited from and always wanting to pass forward the gifts that I have received in this lifetime. Uh, that's what made me want to learn how to become a coach. I love that. That's brilliant. And what would you say, um, so you've talked about how you got to the point of drinking way more than you wanted to, and you've talked about using the path to become alcohol free, but Is there anything that you found was the biggest, uh, thing to overcome? What was like the biggest hurdle to get from, uh, AA is not for me, uh, what is for me? How do I get myself over the line? What was that for you? I think many other folks might, uh, identify with this. For me, I was shame. I was incredibly, horribly ashamed. And, um, You know, shame predated my ever drinking in the first place. I had spent my entire youth hating myself, uh, and hurting myself with a deep and powerful loathing. There was nothing that any of the bullies in school could say to me or any horrible boss or any, uh, abuser after my father died could say to me that I hadn't said worse to myself. So the shame and how deep into like the very core of my being, as if it were the marrow of my bones, like that was something that I could numb myself from when I drank and. Not having to feel anything for a long time was all I wanted, but you can't put things down if you ignore them. You just carry them around with you, and shame is like a planet getting sucked into the gravity well of a black hole. It just keeps getting further and further and further in, and what happens when you pass the event horizon? You get crushed and atomized. So my shame was essentially my black hole, and it just kept pulling me further and further and further into this gravitational pull. And so I think it's, it's, sorry, I was just gonna say, I think it's, it's something that, yeah, it's incredibly common and in the beginning, it feels as if alcohol is helping and also with depression and with anxiety and, and all the things that we are scared to feel. Alcohol feels as if it's helping you with it, but did you at some point come to see alcohol as being part of the, of that problem or contributing to shame or to any, any other kind of, uh, negativity that you were feeling? It took a long time to be able to admit to myself that alcohol was not helping. My desperation made it just so that I didn't want to feel anything and the self inquiry didn't go much farther than that. It was, can I, at first it was, can I just get relief from these untenable feelings? I cannot deal with them. I cannot deal with this being in the present. It was the most painful and awful thing. And so that was, uh, a patch on a sinking ship, you know, Titanic hits an iceberg, big old hole breaks in half. It's like trying to put a tiny little patch on a ship. Shit, that's broken in half and sinking into the sea. On the flip side of that then, if that's the greatest struggle, shame is the greatest struggle, what's the biggest sort of takeaway from your journey, thing that you've, the biggest success, something that is maybe surprising, not the obvious, well clearly it's because I don't drink. What surprised you most about being on the other side of shame? If it is all right, I will include also how I went from shame ruling everything to present moment and the biggest surprise, if that is all right. Um. Please. So part of this came from my Buddhist practice and part of this came from this naked mind. So as we go through the methodology and this naked mind, we move from what we kind of call like asleep, like not really realizing we have a situation to awake. We move from. A place where we want to escape our lives to the idea of course, wanting to, uh, to have a life that you don't want to escape from. And when I heard that tagline, there was some part of me that's like, it's great marketing, never gonna be me. Uh, so, but it, it, it sparked inside of my heart, this idea that perhaps there was a future worth having. And perhaps it was something that I could build for myself, that it wasn't going to come from outside of me. It was something that I had to build inside of my own heart first. And that's kind of the, obviously there's as many different types of Buddhism as there are types of Christianity and other kinds of spiritual practices. Um, one of the kind of core tenets of the type of Buddhism that my family practices is that, um, all living beings have the Buddha capacity. All living beings have already as an inherent endowment, the same life potential as the being that we would refer to as the Buddha. There is no separation. It's not a deity, mortal, With a big gulf in between that all of us have that highest capacity inside of us and that Buddhist practice exists for us to access it and in a kind of metaphysical idea in your head, like sounds cool. Um, but I didn't even after at this point, what, 15 years of Buddhist practice at that point, I was still really kind of just living in the ideas of things rather than in actually living them. And in this community of people, I found others who felt what I felt and were walking their own unique versions of the same path that I was walking. Community made a big difference. Obviously, we have all the different communities that we participate in as people. Maybe there's your work community, your family community. If you have a faith practice, maybe you have a faith community. Maybe, like me, cyclist community. You have communities of practice that we all engage in. But when the shame shuts us down and makes us hate ourselves or pretend to be something we're not, we don't bring everything we are to these communities. We live these siloed lives. This is bicycle me, and this is work me, and this is family me, and this is me and my marriage, and this is customer service me. These are all these different me's. And that's incredibly taxing on our minds, on our souls, if you will, um, on our inner resources. The way that I learned. That shame didn't necessarily get to play head coach. That didn't, that shame didn't get to be in charge was one understanding that. Alcohol exists. It just exists. Chemistry. I did pre med before I graduated with linguistics, because I have ADHD and I can't make decisions. So, chemistry is interesting. We know, we have interesting brains. Alcohol. Our brains go, Ooh, tasty. I like you. I'm going to become super dependent on you. Same as with, or, other substances of the deadly and less deadly variety. We have nifty brains, we evolved in a way, our brains just get real hooked on things so easily sometimes, just because we're self medicating and leaning on something to not feel our feelings, or we have incredible shame and there's a substance, it doesn't make you a horrible person, just a brain with chemistry and there's chemicals. If you feel terrible about yourself, that's one thing to work on. If you have. Deep, medical, chemical addiction that also needs to be treated with reverence and also with respect as we would any disease of the heart, mind, or body. Each aspect of So what you're saying, Jessi, is you're saying that community is key for making that change. Community helps us understand that the shame doesn't have to win and that Yeah. The community of practice that we reside in and that we can be our whole selves in helps us change ourselves from the inside out. what would you like to know or one thing that you wish you had known right when that sort of dips of 750 mils a day or when you were drinking, what's one thing you would say to yourself if you could go back in time, uh, about your drinking? Even in the worst days, there is a future worth having, and you can build it with your own hands. Just because you don't know if something is possible for you doesn't mean that it isn't. There's a whole lot more that we will never know about the universe than what we know now. And if asking questions can get us compassion for ourselves and the people around us, something we might call being curious, if curiosity is the antidote to shame, then let's pick up some Crayon, and start drawing on the walls, metaphysically speaking. I love that. Curiosity. So, if you were able to summarize, uh, your journey, and you've been so wonderful with all of your words and story, uh, what three words would summarize where you are now? As I may have mentioned earlier, I don't have three words. I have 30, 000, so I'll leave it at It's such a wonderful story. I mean, and I think, I think It is. Yeah, I The, the, the, the, the ADHD world is, is, you know, we're, we're discovering that, that it, it, a lot of people are on that spectrum. Um, and addiction is potentially something that, that, uh, people with ADHD are even more susceptible to than, than, than others I've, I've read. Um, and, and, and, and trauma is, is, is, uh, a common theme for, for, for many people. So I think there's going to be so many people that, that can resonate with your story. Um, and it's wonderful to hear. Um, you so bright and, and enthusiastic now with, with how life is going. And, and, and so where can people find you and what, what are you doing now? Uh, cause you, you, we know you because you, you, you're a coach, uh, you trained with us, um, what sort of people are you looking to help and, uh, uh, how can people get in touch with you? Uh, thanks Barry. So, uh, you can find me at exit nine coaching. Uh, it's exit number nine coaching. com and my socials will be up there. And if you also like cycling, if you identify with any part of ADHD or autism. If you are just a person who's any regular old person who thinks that this story has helped you at all, perhaps I am a person to talk to, or not. Because not everyone is everyone's cup of tea. That's brilliant. Now, thanks. Thanks so much. both for having me on. I'm so excited about this new show. Well, I hope you enjoyed that as much as we did. And don't forget to like and subscribe and we'll see you in the next one.

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