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Thriving with Addiction with Dr. Jonathan Avery
Sobriety That Lasts: The 9 Essential Truths with Laura McKowen
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the Thriving with Addiction podcast where we explore how recovery is not just about surviving, but about truly living. Each week we'll dive into the science stories and strategies that help people and families heal from addiction and build healthier, more resilient lives. I'm your host, Dr. John Avery.
- [00:18]
B
Let's get started. I'm John Avery and welcome back to Thriving with Addiction. Today, we are lucky to have Laura McCowan. Laura is the author of the best selling memoir We Are the the Surprising Magic of a Sober Life and Push off from nine essential truths to get you through life and everything else which we'll dive into today. Her work explores the intersection of addiction recovery, emotional sobriety, and the complexities of relationships. She has written for the New York Times and has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian and the Atlantic, the Today show, and more. In 2020, she founded the Luckiest Club, a global sobriety support community. And she writes Love Story, a popular substack newsletter about sobriety, relationships, recovery and writing. She's currently working on her third book. Laura, welcome.
- [01:14]
C
Hi. Thank you.
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B
I've had so many patients and people I know on recovery who have benefited from your work, who have been a part of the Luckiest Club. It's quite an amazing impact you've had.
- [01:27]
C
Oh, thank you. It's strange to think about. It's been an interesting 12 years for sure.
- [01:35]
B
And take me back to the beginning of those 12 years. What, what led you to, to become such a champion of recovery and, and the person you are?
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C
Well, I didn't aim. I didn't. I wouldn't have predicted that this is where I would land personally or professionally. But I like so many people, I was a very high functioning, but not. But in a lot of danger drinker. Right. And my drinking got really bad when I became a mother, which was 17 years ago, and it quickly spiraled in. My marriage ended after about three years after she was born. And then it got really rough and I started to just not be able to hold up the exterior in the same way. And the cracks really started showing. I mean, I got, you know, I got a DUI and I got threatened to lose my job because I had, because of drinking and at events and stuff. And I just, you know, started. There were more problems, more and more problems. And my entree into the world of recovery came from a really brutal night with my daughter that I write about in my first book where I left her alone in a hotel room and she was just four years old. We were at a wedding and that was public enough, you know, with my family being there and scary enough to me that I started to try to seek help and went to AA because that's all I knew how to do. I didn't know any sober. I knew like two sober people, you know, and that's what they had done and that's what I was instructed to do. And so I did. And I didn't get sober right away. It took me about a year. But I did have a lot of time of sober time in that year. I started to sort of see what it was like to have days and nights that I was sober, what it was like to have a sober brain, what it was like to not, you know, wake up full of just total shame and regret. And I start to put together a lot of days and what finally, you know, was my last day, the last night of drinking. I. I didn't expect it to be. I had actually lost all confidence in myself, which is kind of the place a lot of people need to be, where I just stopped promising myself that I wasn't, that I was going to stop, you know, and I stopped saying I'm never going to do it again. And I just, I was just exhausted and desperate and totally just at the end, I guess, of my will to try to find a way to keep alcohol in my life. I didn't want to be sober at all. I really didn't. I. Parts of me did, but I still. I didn't think that that life was going to be a life that wanted. Because everything that I had, of everything that I had connected to drinking. And so I did it reluctantly and I did it just promising myself one day, you know, in the day that I wouldn't drink that day and then continuing on the next day. And the thing that happened in that time though was I started to talk and write a lot about what I was going through and tapping into this thing that I'd always. This sort of energy that I had been tamping down with drinking, this energy to create this actually very overwhelming energy that I had always had to, that, that alcohol helped to quell and sort of manage. I started pouring all of that into telling the truth about what was going on with me instead of trying to hide it, to writing. I started a blog and then I started a podcast that got to be really popular about sobriety in a non 12 step sort of view that I did with a friend in 2015 when there weren't many podcasts at that time. And so it was sort of big and I just started to all that I created started to create momentum in that direction and see that there was something I wanted more than I wanted to drink. And that's how it all started, really. And then one thing led to another. I ended up quitting my job and my career, really, in marketing and advertising 15 years in. I left in 2016 and tried to. To try to take a shot at what it is I'm doing now and really never looked back.
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B
And what did you come to understand about that energy that you were tamping down or about what it was about being a mother or some of those things that sort of escalated the drinking once you entered sobriety?
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C
Yeah. So it's funny, because I'm writing about this right now. I had, like most people in our generation and the ones before, I had no tools to deal with anything. I didn't understand what anxiety was. I. Nobody was talking about depression in the 80s and 90s. Nobody was going to therapy that I knew. And I had a relatively traumatic childhood, and there was a lot of things that happened that I just had no idea how to process. And I also, like, I had few outlets. I had an outlet in sports and, like, moving my body, which I have, has really saved my life. But I. I had this unnameable sort of energy to create.
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B
Hmm.
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C
And it would. And I didn't know where to put that.
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B
And it seems like that side of you wasn't. There's part of you that wasn't being recognized. Sort of the pain, the anxiety, the trauma. And then there was another part of you that didn't have any outlets.
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C
Yes, that's a very good way to summarize it. And I. I found ways that, like, we do. But the ways that I found had a cost, a big cost. So drinking was the biggest one. It was a huge answer for me, like it is for most people, until it started destroying me. And then there's just the stresses of life. You know, I didn't know how to. Like, I had gone through a marriage and a divorce, and I had not really honestly felt anything through that, except that I just wanted, like, I just wanted to be free of this sort of person watching me drink, really, at the end, that's what it was. And I just sort of accumulated a lot of experiences. And I thought, and had always been told that that meant that I was very resilient, that I just sort of dealt and pressed on and moved forward. And, you know, I'm. I'm very. I've always been successful. I'm pretty smart. I've always, like, I Have. I was talking to a friend yesterday and what I said was, I. Because I recognized this in her. We were marveling at the fact that at this age, in our midlife, we are just now able to feel things that happened to us a very long time ago and feel like this. The. The embodied sadness and grief of those things. Not like some intellectual, you know, processing resilience sort of performed as. As competence. Like my, My competence and my capacity to power through meant that I was strong and it meant that I was resilient. But I. It was all intellectual. I had never really touch down into the swirl of experiences and feelings and what the effect that those had on me. And alcohol allowed me to do that, work allowed me to do that, and all kinds of things allowed me to do that. These places that I found my identity. And then when drinking went away, I lost that those tools. And so energy was kind of exploding everywhere. Right. But. But like you said, I was able to. The upside, I was able to channel so much of that into things that were productive and good for me. And on the other side, I had, you know, I did found new ways to cope. Started pulling the thread on. On some actual healing.
- [11:13]
B
And it sounds like 12 step was a little bit a part of that at first, but not the critical part. Was there therapy or other processes that helped get you there, or was it more just sort of putting pen to paper and exploring it on your own?
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C
No, it definitely wasn't just writing. I would say writing has been one of the most important things for me in establishing a broader story of my life versus just the shame that I was living in 12 steps. I wouldn't say the steps were. They were. They were helpful in a way, but the community that I found in early A was huge. I mean, those people saved my life. And I learned most importantly how to tell the truth. Like, I had to actually learn how to do that. And I learned that I was safe to do that with in certain contexts and that it was actually helpful and that I learned before I ever learned it in a therapy room. And then I was able to kind of go to therapy and feel safe because I'd always performed for therapists too, you know, so therapy. I've had some good therapy, yes. I've also just been a huge seeker. Always. Like, I've always been a big reader. I'm a yoga teacher and I. I started that before. Well before I got sober. But that piece of using the body like, like embodied connect, like the mind, body connection and understanding that I'm not just A brain, but that my body needs to be involved in my healing was huge and remains huge for me. I've done a lot through just, like, physical movement and learning that I need to physically process, somatically process things that I go through. So lots of DIY pieces of just piecing together, you know, spiritual wisdom and learning. And, I mean, starting a recovery community has been huge because I am connected to all these people, and I just see how the ways that we sort of all suffer and the ways that we heal. So all of those things have been really helpful.
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B
And I like how you view it as sort of a lucky thing to have entered sobriety. I think that's sort of what really captures people about your first book, is you used to think the lucky person was the one who could drink some or drink normally. But sobriety really allowed you to tackle all this stuff in a way that we're grateful for in the end.
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C
Totally. I mean, what I wanted, all the things that I wanted were actually in sobriety. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to create. I wanted to connect deeply with people. I wanted to have really beautiful relationships, friendships, and a relationship with my daughter. And none of those things were actually, like, drinking would give me the sort of a facsimile of those experiences, but never really delivered the real thing.
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B
And you detail your journey in your first book, and then your second book is almost a guide or some ways to think about how to get through sobriety. Walk me through what led to your second book. Push off from here.
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C
Sure. So in my early days of writing, I, like I said, wrote a blog and was also on Instagram a lot. And that's sort of how I started to sort of build a voice in this space. And people would write to me, write me emails through my website. And a woman wrote me, this is 2016, so I was a couple years sober. And she wrote to me about her sister and that she. Her sister was struggling with drinking and had been for a long time, and she was worried at this point that she was gonna lose her, and she just didn't know how to talk to her sister. She didn't know the magical words to say to help her get. You know, help her get sober, but also, like, not push her away. And the sister was going through all the things that people go through when they love someone who's struggling with addiction. They're angry and scared and sad and afraid and all of that. So she wrote me and asked me what I would say, and I wrote her a very long response. And then at the end just said, you know, if this is all. If that's all too much, just tell her these things. And then they were nine things. And number one was, it's not your fault. Number two is it is your responsibility. Three is it's unfair that this is your thing. But four, this is your thing. Five, this will never stop being your thing until you face it. Six, you can't do it alone. Seven, only you can do it. Eight, I love you. And nine, I will never stop reminding you of these things. So I wrote those things, and then I kind of just kept them for myself, too. Like, I. I felt something as I was writing them. And they ended up being the epigraph in We Are the Luckiest. You know, the sort of first page before you start the book. And people constantly wanted to talk to me about that, about the epigraph. And then when I started the luckiest club in 2020, those nine points became the sort of backbone of the community. We read them at the end of every meeting. I changed the number eight to I love from I love you to you are loved to be more, you know, group oriented and or less individual oriented. And then they really stuck, like people get them. And they started meaning something. And I started to get a lot of questions about them, though, and like, what does it actually mean to take responsibility? And what do you mean? It's not fair? And I realized pretty quickly, and my agent and I. My agent and I were talking about what my next book would be, and she's like, it's gotta be these nine things that's. You gotta write about that.
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B
And, you know, I read those with my patients, not infrequently, especially those who benefited from your books and your work. And there's so much wisdom and truth in them. And let's walk through some of them because I think they really resonate with everyone about not just substance use, but about so many things in this life. And you're good at sort of describing this process as not just about the substances, but about so much more. And I think these essential truths help a lot of people get there too. But 1 and 2 are sort of related. One is it's not your fault, and two is it is your responsibility. Walk me through your thoughts on those two.
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C
Well, yeah, these points are full of paradox, right? They kind of go back and forth, putting your feet in two worlds, which is where I have found we kind of have to go for. For healing, for true understanding. What I mean by that is, like, you can't hate yourself into Change in the long term, like, it just doesn't work. You can't shame yourself into change in the long term. So, yes, you are someone that has perhaps caused a lot of harm and to yourself and to others, and you are still someone who's worthy of compassion and forgiveness and love. So it's not your fault, is just what it says. I mean, there's so many things that happen in our lives that are not our fault. Who we were, where we were born, who the family we were born into, things that happened in our childhood, the traumas we experienced, you know, our race, our gender, our socioeconomic class. We can't control any of that. And we also can't control a lot of factors that predispose us to addiction, as we've learned. So those things are not our fault. They're not your fault. And that message is really important for people to hear. I. I pushed against this message, by the way, for, like, a long time. I remember coming in early on and. And trying, you know, in my first months and year of trying to get sober, and the people that I knew, who. The couple people that I knew had come this path, were trying to tell me, like, you are not this piece of crap person that you think you are, not these things that you have done. And I just didn't get it. I was like, then who. Who am I? Because that's all I could feel. And. And they would say, you're someone in a lot of pain. Like, you're someone who's not. Who's sick right now. You're not well. And this. That's what I'm trying to communicate with this, like, you have to. There are things for which you just didn't have control. So it's not your fault. But that would be incomplete without the second statement of it is your responsibility. So even though so much of our lives and. And the things that happen to us are not our. And addiction, at a certain point, too, is not our fault. It's still our responsibility. So we do have to own our reality.
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B
Right? And I think that's where some of the messaging around the disease model of addiction that people, especially on the addiction medicine, like myself side of things, are all about all the time, is that we. We don't couple it with step two. It's. It's both not your fault and your responsibility, which I think is. They're not opposites. They. They go. They go together.
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C
Yes. Yes, they. They go together. And a lot of, you know, anytime you're into black and white thinking on anything, you're kind of in a dangerous place.
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B
That's right. And then I have someone who every time she comes in here, she says, this is my thing. Which reminds me of 3 and 4, which is 3 and 4, which is. It's unfair that this is your thing. And four, this is your thing.
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C
Yeah. I mean, that's all about acceptance. Like, it just took me so long to really accept and get that this was my thing. I couldn't. I would never be someone who could drink, quote, unquote, normally. Just wasn't gonna. That wasn't real. Wasn't gonna happen.
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B
Right. And five is this will never stop being your thing until you face it. And so.
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C
Right, okay. Right. So there are things that we actually have to do to. You know, I can wallow in the fact that this is my thing and I can even maybe come to some kind of acceptance, but this is the part where you have to actually do the work.
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B
And then six and seven are. You cannot do it alone, and only you can do it in terms of not doing alone. I'm curious your thoughts on. Do you recommend 12 steps still? What role does it place with the luckiest club or when you recommend people and what, what goes all into not doing it alone in your mind these days?
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C
Yeah, I, I would recommend anyone try anything really. I think the, the 12 steps are, you know, the fellowship of AA. It really works for some people. It just does. And it. And, and I've seen it. I have tons of friends, probably hundreds of people that I know personally at this point who have benefited from a. Got sober in AA and live by the, the principles there. So I would never steer someone away from that. But I would also encourage them to, to explore other things and realize that they're. I wouldn't say go to AA first. I would say figure out all the options that you have. Right? And man, when you're just. When you need. When you're in an acute situation and you just need help, like, go anywhere, try anything. Because what really matters to me, what made the difference to me is in not doing it alone is connecting with just at least one person, one other human who has gone through what you are going through and can reflect back to you what's possible and can bring you out of some of that acute shame that we get in.
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B
Right? Because the shame causes us to hide and, and not realize that there's so many people out there that are on the same or. Or similar journey as us.
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C
So many.
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B
Yet you say only you can do it. What do you, what do you Mean
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C
by that, at the end of the day, I mean, nobody's gonna. I realize no one is gonna sit next to me on an airplane. And, you know, you play these mental games like, no one. No one's here. No one would know if I drink on this trip, or no one would know if I drink tonight alone in my house or no one would know whatever. And only I could do it in those moments, you know, I only. I. It's back to the responsibility thing. It still. Still comes back to me. Like, I still have to make choices.
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B
Mm. Right. And then 8 and 9 are. You are loved. And we will never stop reminding you of these things.
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C
Yeah, the. The you are loved is like. I mean, that started as I love you to, you know, sister to sister, and. And the I love you is delivered after some hard truths. Right. So for me, especially when I was deep in it, I needed to know that I was still someone worth loving, that I still. Underneath all the behavior and the. The ways that I had messed things up, I was still loved. I just needed to know that. And then the last one is, I will never stop reminding you of these things because it's a process like this. It's never a once and done. We need to be reminded, and that's part of what community is for. It's part of just the reality of being a human being on a path. We encounter the same things over and over again.
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B
And so it sounds like you ended up in a really good place in your life through all this work and also giving back. What does life look like for you these days?
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C
Let's see. I'm 11 years sober. My daughter, who was 5 when I got sober, is just turned 17, which means that I've lived most of her life as a sober mom. And that is the biggest gift that sobriety has given me. I was not a safe person for her before. If I would have managed to stay alive, I doubt I would have had a relationship with her had I kept drinking. And that stops. You know, being this person has stopped a lot of generational cycles of pain and. And trauma. So we don't have a perfect relationship. She's still a teenager, and I'm still struggling with having a teenager, but it's. She knows where the ground is with me, and. And she knows that she's safe. I have a career that I can't even believe that I have. I mean, I never. I wanted to be an author. I wanted to write, but I. I thought that was, like, something for other people. I would have never had the Wherewithal or the, or the discipline to shift careers or even hope for something like that. And I mean, every area of my life is just more solid financial. I got out of a lot of debt. I healed a lot of relationships. I have far better friendships than I ever had. And you know, it's not, it's not perfect. I went through a really rough breakup a couple years ago. I have setbacks and I don't love the state that the world is in right now. And it's hard to be with that sometimes. And life is still life, but it's unrecognizable to where I was before.
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B
But to your point, it's an ongoing process. And maybe part of this ongoing process is this third book you're working on. And without giving anything away, what question are you personally trying to answer that you weren't ready or able to ask in your earlier work? What are you exploring now for yourself?
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C
Yeah, when I was writing, towards the end of writing the first book, the memoir, I wrote this one chapter. There were two chapters actually. One was called Burning Lonely and the other was called Fantasy island. And they were really about my relationships with men and the sort of way that I had yoked drinking to love and drinking to connection and sex and all of that. And I, a lot, I, I knew as I was writing that, that, oh, this is the thing underneath the thing. Like this is the pain that I was really trying to outrun. And of course it came, you know, from my childhood. It wasn't from. And then it just perpetuated sort of cycles of pain in my, throughout my life. So this book is about emotional sobriety in relationships, specifically romantic relationships. And it's another memoir. So it's not, it's not a self help book. I'm not, I have, you know, as you can imagine, when you are sober from a substance, you're either not doing it or you are, you know, the sobriety. There's a bright line that defines sobriety. Whereas emotional sobriety is not so distinct, it's not so clear.
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B
Can you maybe describe a little bit what you mean by that?
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C
Yeah, I mean our remote, our, our relationships with other people are by definition messy. We, that's our, that's where we have a lot of our, our wounding. And it's also where we get a lot of our healing, but it's not linear. You, you can't stop relationships. I mean, you, you could try, but that would be a really rough existence. You can't, you know, what is healthy behavior in love or in, in A romantic relationship versus what is not. And that's a moving target. You know, it's. It's something I firmly don't believe that we only, you know, are allowed to or deserve or can appreciate or realize a healthy romantic relationship when we're fully healed. I don't even. That doesn't even exist. So what does it look like to heal in relationships? What does. What would it look like to apply these principles sort of inside of a relationship, which is a living, breathing, moving, evolving thing.
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B
And a lot of my work with people in recovery is around relationships. That ends up being the central part, of course, of making it through sobriety and maintaining it at times, but also just in terms of living the. The best life we can have.
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C
Of course it is. Right. Because that's. At the end of the day, that's what we have. As far as I'm concerned. Like, what else really matters at the end of the day? To me, it's the relationship I have with my daughter, with my friends, with my family, with my community and who I am in that and how I relate to those people. I don't know what else we have.
- [32:30]
B
Well, I look forward to reading that, but before that comes out, Essential reading is we are the Luckiest, the Surprising Magic of a Sober Life and then push off from here, where you dive into those nine essential truths we just discussed. Laura, you're great. You've helped so many of the people I treat, and I just look forward to what comes next for you. I appreciate you spending the time with us today.
- [32:50]
C
Oh, thanks, Jonathan.
- [32:52]
A
Thanks for listening to the Thriving with Addiction podcast. If you found today's episode helpful, please follow and subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts and share it with someone who might benefit. You can also connect with me on Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube or visit thrivingwithaddiction.com to learn more. Stay tuned for next week's episode. And remember, thriving is possible.