July 15, 2021 • 39 mins
For the first time in history, women are now drinking as much as men, and the results are life-threatening. In this eye-opening RTT, Jada reveals her own personal struggles with alcohol and a renowned liver specialist shares alarming information you need to know. Plus, harrowing stories of hitting rock bottom and binge drinking from successful, high-powered women: the teacher of the year, a NYC Attorney, and a global vice president.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, fam I'm Jada Pinkett Smith and this is the
Red tabletop podcast, all your favorite episodes from the Facebook
Watch show in audio, produced by Westbrook Audio and I
Heart Radio. Please don't forget to rate and review on
Apple Podcasts. Attention ladies. For the first time in history,
women are drinking as much as men. Ask yourself a
(00:23):
serious question, are you drinking too much? I was going
for that third bottle of wine. I said, you've got
a problem. Alcohol is being glamorized Wine Wednesdays, girlified, bottomless
mimosas sold as a lifeline to sanity, wine glasses that
say wine is cheaper than therapy. It's a normalization of
(00:44):
heavy drinking. How much is too much? I could down
a bottle in like an hour and a half. These
are the new faces of alcoholism, and they're not who
you'd expect. The teacher of the Year, a New York attorney,
a corporate vice president. So us the four questions that
could save your life. That's my kryptonite. I cannot be
(01:04):
around vodka. It's a Red Table wake up call. The
real livers coming in. Those are real livers. One of
the reasons why this particular show was really important to
me is because wine for me was like kool aid,
because like I was a you know, a brown liquor drinker, voka,
(01:28):
Like I was a hard liquor drinker, Like I could
drink almost anybody under the table. Damn yeah, Will specifically.
Now Will is a lightweight, but I mean I used
to be a hard one to keep up with. When
I moved to red wine, I considered myself like, oh,
(01:48):
this is better. This is better for me, because they
say the red wine is good for you, you know.
But drinking red wine for me was like drinking glasses
of water. It wasn't even like so I not drinking it,
like you're like, I'm like goo, Google, alright, where's the next?
Because I'm used to that hard hit. I was drinking
(02:09):
hard in high school too, And when I got out here,
I was doing cocktails. So ecstasy, alcohol, weed, WHOA, what
a combination. You were having a good old time. Let
me tell you. I was having me a little bit.
I was like, this is not cocaine, this is not heroin.
I wasn't doing things that I thought was addictive, but
(02:31):
I would do those three together. That was my cocktail.
Your threshold becomes so high that what it takes for
you to to get to the place you need to
get to. It'll take me two bottles to get to Okay,
If I do ecstasy, weed and alcohol at the same time,
I'm gonna get there faster and I can keep the
(02:52):
high going because then I can just keep drinking because
I know ecstasy is gonna last me about three, four
or five hours. The weed, you know, that's just gonna
keep me just smooth, and then the alcohol is gonna
keep it going like I could just keep taking drink,
drink drink. Yeah, oh my god, I'm not like that
sounds intense. Listen, that sounds like I would everybody. No,
(03:17):
you know what that stressing under a recovery and my
family that it's not accepting on the fact that addiction run.
But I get it, literally, I got it quick. Like
once I I was going for that third bottle of wine,
(03:38):
I said, you've got a problem. And it was cold
turkey that day that day, that day, I just stopped.
Wow and never since. No. I mean I had, like
I've had a glass of wine here and there, but
I cannot touch rock. I cannot touch drum drums. Another one.
No dark liquor I'm never forgets. In New Orleans with Will,
(04:00):
they had these lavender vodka drinks. I'm like, I haven't
had vodka in years. Let me tell you, I had
that lavender voca drink. I had one, I had a
second one, and I was craving for a third one.
I haven't stopped thinking about that drink till this day.
(04:22):
Stopped thinking about that drink till this day. But that's
when I realized. I was like, Jada, you can't play
no games. And when I see vodka, even when I
opened up the refrigerator and they have those vodka spritzers
in there and I look at it, that grapefruit vodka combination,
I'd be like, and let me tell you the kind
(04:44):
of discipline I have to put in because just because
I have a problem with vodka, I can't tell you
can't have vock in the house. I'm not doing all that.
But I think also I'm a binger. Yeah, I'm a binger.
Your grandmother was when it's time to nal grandmother was
we're gonna go right. So I wasn't the type of
person that was drinking every day, you know. I was
(05:06):
like a weekend party girl, totally you know what I mean.
So it was like, yo, Thursday to Monday morning. Yeah,
Thursday to Monday morning. I would go like just but
it never got to the point where it interfered with
your being able to go to work. Did you ever?
There was one incident. I had one incident that was
(05:28):
an eye opening incident for me as well. I had
one incident or nutting, Professor, I passed out when you
told me that's the makeup trailer, That's what I never
told me that that passed out. I went to work
high and it was a bad batch of ecstasy. Lord
had mercy, and I passed out, and I told everybody
(05:50):
that I had taken I must have had old medication
in a vitamin bottle. Think, oh my god, But I
tell you what I did, though, got my ass together
and got on that set. That was the last time,
like I take heed. I would never do something like
(06:11):
That's why I was on you always. I stay on
because Jaden and Trey, because I grew up with my
mother who was a heroin attic. And still it didn't
sink into me that any mind altering substance. I don't
care what it is. All y'all young people talking about
weed is from the earth, and I like this. It's
(06:33):
a gate. You know, it's a year, all of this
from the damn every year. You know, I know my
body and it's taken me a long time to understand
what works best for me. But it's imperative for me
to stop smoking every year for at least two months.
(06:54):
This is my fourth year doing it now, I know.
But I think the day that you decided to do
it all together will be a very be day for me.
I think they'll see something's different it is. I think
that's awesome. You know, now I get it. You know,
everybody has their journey. I'm grateful that that's all you
(07:14):
dealing with because when I was your age, I was
doing alcohol. That's what I'm saying. I'm like, I'm trying
to I mean, I'm like you was much worse than me.
It can get really messed up. I would always want
like if you guys saw something in me that was like, oh,
that's a downward spiral that is going to catch her
real quick. That's why you have to trust the eyes
(07:35):
around you because you won't know. And that was the
thing with me. Don't think that people didn't try to
tap me on my shoulder. Don't think that when I
was at Debbie Allen throwing up all over her house
that she wasn't like, Hey, I had to reach my
rock bottoms. I wish I could have been a fly
on the wall to just see how crazy I wish
(07:59):
I could have too. So I'm gonna yank to as well.
Oh my god, I think back on my life. I'm like,
I'm a walking miracle. You are no doubt about it.
You are a walking miracle. People would not believe this
one is too. Yeah, I guess I'm just kind of
a little funny duddy on the side. Thank you God.
(08:22):
Right now, we have doctor Jessica Mellinger, and she is
a liver disease specialist at the University of Michigan who
has witnessed shocking trends over the past year. Thanks for
talking about this topic. It's a good one. Yeah, tell
us what you've been seeing. We've been seeing astronomical increases
in hospital days for young women with alcohol related liver disease,
(08:43):
something we previously kind of thought happened mostly just in
middle aged men. So just really really surprising. Wow, more
women are drinking more heavily, women are starting drink like men,
you know, and so they're starting to get liver disease.
Have you been able to identify when this uptick is
that really happening in a woman's life in the forties
and fifties is still kind of the biggest chunk of
(09:05):
people that we see with this, but the rates of
women in their twenties and thirties and early forties are
starting to really catch up with that. Wow, I've seen
a lot more of my peers, specifically during the pandemic
um drinking a lot more. What we do find is
that a large percentage of the population of young people
eighteen nine year olds almost one and four are reporting
(09:27):
that they had an alcohol use disorder in the last year.
That's that most severe form of addiction, right, That's not
just I misused alcohol once in a while, and that
younger age group, we're just seeing those numbers go up
and up and up. I've definitely seen friends and family
members become excessive drinkers over the pandemic, and it's really
hard to talk to people about it because I think
(09:49):
that women are targeted in a certain way in the
marketing of how you know, like wine Wednesdays and it's
been difficult to even talk to people that have had
tesseive drinking issues. I think you're absolutely correct that that's
exactly what's happening, is that we have a culture that
is really kind of promoting drinking as just what you
(10:09):
do to, you know, end your day to cope with problems.
When I walk through hospital gift shops, there's alcohol paraphernalia.
There's wine glasses, there's shot glasses, wine purses, if you
can believe this, you know, a purse that you has
a little spigot on it that you can you know,
put wine in and hide it. And I think it's
kind of a normalization of heavy drinking, and it's a
normalization of using alcohol in a way that is kind
(10:31):
of a coping mechanism. Yeah, Like it's okay to drink
alcohol when you're depressed or board or feeling lonely. That's
the thing to do. Yeah. And I've seen it when
you know, shopping out in the stores. You know the
wine glasses that say wine is cheaper than therapy. You know,
there's this, yeah, this normalization of it, this normalization and
glamorization of it. You know, you watch TV. You see
(10:52):
women relaxing with big glasses of wine. And we're not
talking about little glasses. Yeah, big glasses. What are some
of the signs of the liver disease. The signs can
be pretty dramatic. And I was able to arrange to
have a couple of livers brought in for you guys
to look at. Oh oh oh oh, those are real
(11:15):
livers coming in. Those are real livers. Okay, okay, those
are really well, you know games, she's a nurse and
so I want to see this. Well, we're gonna see
it because here we are. Okay, so that's a normal liver.
Oh that's really bad. You can see the normal livers,
(11:36):
nice and smooth, and the liver that serotic looks really lumpy,
kind of bumpy, shrunken, And that's scar tissue. That's scar
tissue that's kind of marbled all through that liver. What's
happening is just like if you get a cut on
your hand and it gets red and then you have
a scar. The alcohol is irritating your liver. And when
people do get liver disease symptoms, it could be you know,
(11:56):
your eyes turning yellow, your skin turning yellow, your belly
kind of swelling up with fluid, people will bleed heavily.
They'll help you vomiting blood, getting confused. Prior to that,
you might just feel kind of maybe nauseated, not want
to eat as much, you just kind of don't feel good.
So they can be pretty vague symptoms that don't necessarily
cue you into the fact that you've got to developing
(12:17):
liver disease problem. That's really really scary to look at.
It's going to be straightforward, but that gives your reality.
Is like, once you can see something like that, hopefully
people will be like, I don't want my liver to
look like that. You don't get advanced alcohol related liver
disease overnight. It takes years to get So if you're
getting serosis in your late twenties, thirties, even forties, you
(12:40):
started drinking really earlier. Yeah, we have to always remember too,
that there's really two diseases going on here. There's an
alcohol use disorder and there's a liver disease, and we
don't want to forget about the first one right now.
Let me ask you, because you're using alcohol use disorder
instead of just saying alcoholism, why is that we've moved
a from using terms like alcoholism or addiction because people
(13:03):
have told us that they feel stigmatized by it. Not
everybody is willing to admit right off the bat that
they have an addiction. So what I tell my patients is,
you know, I don't care what term you use to
describe yourself, just recognizing the reality of what's going on,
and I just try to stick with the terminology my
patients are comfortable with. If they want to use alcoholism
or addiction, then I'll use that when I speak with them,
(13:24):
and if they don't, we don't. And so that there's
a self assessment quiz for people to know if they're
drinking too much. Yeah, they go by the term the
cage questions. The first is do you feel like you
need to cut back? Um? And this is often kind
of that first sign. This is what I get asked
a lot by people. How do I know I'm drinking
too much? And well, if you feel like you might be,
(13:46):
that's probably a good sign that that you should really
think about cutting back or stopping altogether. Do you get
annoyed by people who talk to you about cutting back?
Do you feel guilty about your drinking? And then do
you need an eye opener. When you get up in
the morning answering any one of those, you could be
a sign that you've got an alcohol use problem. So
(14:06):
let me ask you a question. If I have a
friend who feels as though drinking a bottle of wine
by herself is okay, is that okay? I think the
straight answer is no. I'd say that's a problem. And
I think it speaks to something that many of us
are unaware of. What is a drink? What is one thing?
What one standard unit of alcohol and one drink would
(14:27):
be a shot? One shot like one and a half
ounces of hard liquor like vodka or DRISKI, one can
of beer. A standard twelve ounce can of beer is
one drink four or to five ounces of wine. So
there's about five glasses of wine per bottle, roughly, and
many people are having much more than that. I had
a patient who said she was only having three drinks
(14:48):
a day. She wasn't certain why, she, you know, had
liver disease. Come to find out that she was actually
pouring about six shots worth of um of alcohol into
each drink, and so she was actually having eighteen drinks
at night. And if you're a woman and you don't
have liver disease. This is for people who don't have
alcohol use disorder or liver disease or an alcohol medical issue.
(15:09):
Anything over one drink a day is really too much.
That's important for people to know what those recommendations are.
Having more than one drink a day is too much
without liver disease. For someone without liver disease, if you
have liver disease, you shouldn't drink at all. But if
you don't have liver disease, you should only be having one.
Wondering and there's some data to suggest that even one
(15:30):
drink might be too much, so, but right now, the
National Institute of Health recommendations are one drink a day
for women to for men. And I hear a lot
in my clinic people who are surprised that they have
alcohol related liver disease, particularly young women who don't think
that they were drinking that much. They were just drinking
wine with their friends and not realizing that they're getting
(15:52):
through a bottle of night. That's a lot. I had
to clutch my purl on the inside a little bit
around I mean history, thinking about my history, you know,
just that one drink because I mean I was a
drink a bottle, real fast drinker. What do you think
on one hour, I could down a bottle and maybe
(16:14):
like an hour and a half to oh my god,
one glass after another, one glass after another. Because you're
just they're watching TV drinking gee gee, and you're not.
And I'm thinking, is red wine? It's chilled? So I'm like,
why I need to keep my limits. That's not years ago.
Jade is twenty two, So it's been twenty two years
(16:34):
for me. So very good. Yes, Like the doctor is
shocked at right now. She's like, so, what's the latest
on red wine being healthy? So if you have any
liver disease at all, we recommend no drinking. Right. There
has been some suggestion that red wine may have some
cardiovascular benefits, and the data is kind of up and
(16:55):
down on that, just depending upon which study you look
at from a liver standpoint. By being a liver dog,
I think certainly if you have any amount of liver disease,
even red wine is really going to be damaging to you. Wow,
this has been a very informative problems. I really didn't know, right,
everybody talking about how red wine, you know, if you
have a glass of red wine a day that that's
healthy for you. I think it's really important to just
(17:17):
be aware of my craving. This am I going after
it for you know, relaxation purposes, to get to sleep
at night all the time, because that's really when I
see a lot of my patients find that it sort
of gets out of hand. Right. Well, thank you for
thank you for coming in school and the day you
gave me some information I was not aware of at all.
Thank you. Next up. Mother of three, Annie Grace was
(17:40):
a rising star in the marketing world until happy hour
turned into two bottles of wine a night. Poised, driven
and ambitious, Annie Grace was just twenty six when named
vice president of a multinational company. She never imagined her
after hours work drinks would nearly cost her everything. I'm
(18:01):
so terrified, any please rescue yourself and he found her
purpose after hitting rock bottom. Here for how she created
This Naked Mind, a program that has empowered millions to
change their relationship with alcohol. I was global head of
marketing for a company headquartered in London, in charge of
(18:23):
twenty countries flying all over the world. You know, international
trips where the booze was just flowing and drinking two
bottles of wine every single night. When was the moment
that made you go, WHOA, something's really wrong here. There
was this one time I asked my four year old
to come sit on my lap and he said, no, Mom,
you smell bad in your teeth are purple. And it
(18:45):
was just like, what is happening? Like how can I
be showing up for my kids like this? And it
was these little moments. I was coming back from a
super boosy work trip. I've been up till three in
the morning the night before. I went down into the
hotel are and said, oh gosh, I just need something.
She said, I can give you a screwdriver, which is
one of those little lines. If I don't drink hard
(19:06):
alcohol first thing in the morning, then I'm still okay.
I'm still not over the line. I'm I'm still not
It's still not a problem. And so I said, oh,
but I'm really in pain. And I had this headache,
and I said, I just have to get home to
my kids, and so I ordered one and I had
two or three, and I got to ether airport and
I'm sitting in the airport and I'm just in tears
and I'm writing in my journal and I remember writing
(19:30):
the words, am I an alcoholic? And just really for
the first time seeing that kind of in black and white.
The thing was, at that point my journey, I had
been trying to cut back. I had done all sorts
of things. I said, you know, no drinking till the
weekend for just one glass. I had all of these
rules and everyone I would break and I stopped being
(19:53):
able to really look at myself in the mirror. Yeah,
and I'm thinking, why can't I do this for my kids?
You know, I'm smart, I'm together, I have it in
control in all other parts of my life, but this
one thing, like it has got me, and why I
can't I do this one thing? And so I'm sitting
there and I'm asking the question that I've been asking
(20:13):
for years now is what is my problem? What's wrong
with me? And I had this moment that I can
only describe as like some divine moment where I said,
nothing's wrong with you. Find out why? Find out much changed?
Oh wow, that's a good one. And so I made
(20:35):
myself too promises. I said, you know, I'm going to
stop trying to stop drinking. I'm gonna let myself off
the hook. I'm going to give myself some self compassion
because this roller coaster of shame and blame and trying
these rules and breaking these rules, it was losing my soul.
I was losing touch with myself. I did not trust
myself anymore. And I said, you know what, you've been
(20:55):
doing the best you can with these tools you have.
Give yourself passion. Take a year and find out why.
And so I went on this journey and I wrote
down every single reason I drink. And I just started
learning that all those reasons I was drinking, alcohol relaxes
even THO it doesn't release his cortisol, a stress hormone. Wow,
it does in adrenaline. That's crazy. Alcohol makes things more fun. No,
(21:21):
it doesn't. It actually numbs your ability to feel pleasure,
so that you think nothing's fun without alcohol because of
all the past alcohol you've been drinking like neurochemically, that's
what happens in the brain. And so I look at
this and I'm about a year later, I walk out
of my office. I tell my husband, if you want
to drink with me again, tonight's last night because I'm
done after this. He looks at me, He's like there
(21:43):
was no trust there, so he didn't believe me. But
sure enough I really was done. You recorded um yourself
doing one of your worst moments, a few minutes of
boost and relax. I'm so much the hip addictions. Yeah. Wow.
(22:15):
You know a lot of people have those moments that
I always hear people share about calling out to God
in their final moments of recognizing that addiction has taken
over and there's nothing that they can do. Yeah. I
don't remember making those videos. I have lots of them.
I was yeah, just wow. So any you have a
(22:39):
whole program called This Naked Mind. This Naked Mind just
started as my own journey. I realized I wanted my
mind to be naked. I didn't want to be influenced
or controlled by anything else. Wiping your mind I love,
And when I put it out into the world, it resonated.
People started writing me letters. It worked where nothing else worked,
where they had tried everything, and they felt it stuck
(23:00):
as I felt. And now millions of people around the
world have been impacted and helped because they're also able
to feel really empowered to change their behavior from an
emotional place. Wow, I hear you have three pillars that
helps you stop drinking. What are they? The three pillars
are action, emotion and knowledge. Action emotion knowledge, and so
you can take the action day one. You stop and
(23:22):
then hope that the knowledge and the emotion catch up,
or you can get the knowledge. And that's what I did,
and I didn't even know I was doing it. I
got all this knowledge called doesn't actually relax me, it
doesn't actually make things more fun. And then my emotion changed.
And then when I finally stopped, it was not as
hard as it had been every other time because everything
(23:44):
had caught up. Everything was aligned at that point. Everything
was aligned because, as we know, willpower, it just runs out.
It becomes something that over time, if you get stressed
during the day, you have less will power at home
to turn down that next drink. Once I understood the science,
when I's understood, you know that all the things I
thought it was doing for me, it just wasn't doing.
(24:04):
Then my emotions changed and then I wanted it as
much as I wanted. Like a glass of motor oil,
I just didn't want to drink. And that was so freeing.
How long have you not been drinking? Over six years? Now,
that's amazing. Well, thank you so much, thank you for
having with Alright, So, Jessica Duanees was Kentucky's Teacher of
(24:25):
the Year. On the same day she won this prestigious award,
she was hiding a dark, painful secret. Welcome, thank you,
thank you. So what was the secret you hiding? Yes,
my secret was that while I was holding that trophy,
I was feeding to end the ceremony and go get
liquor and go home and black out. In that picture,
(24:46):
I was in withdrawals and that's why I'm shiny and sweaty.
It was awful. And so that's kind of like how
my days were at that point. I would wake up
around two am, do my lesson planning, go to school,
take zan X to ward off the withdrawals, and yeah,
um teach. I taught really well. I had so much
shame for being an alcoholic. I felt like I was
such a terrible person outside of school that when I
(25:09):
was teaching, I was just diving in a hundred percent.
And as soon as the bell rain, I said by
to the kids who I loved dearly. But as soon
as I said by to them, straight to the liquor store,
straight home, and I would probably be blocked out by
like six seven o'clock. Way, go back to wash prints,
repeat wow and your wor how much would you say
you were drinking. I was drinking at least a fifth
(25:30):
a day for a year and a half, so I
actually did end up with alcoholic liver disease. Like I'm sorry,
the fifth what is it? It's like the bottle that's
like this big, It's like the standard bottle. Multiple people
will share some left over. I was drinking the whole
thing one day. What was your rock bottom? I kind
of hit two rock bottoms. I started to have like
(25:51):
the swollen belly. I was throwing up bile. My vision
would start to get a little bit blurry. I would
have people cover my classroom because they thought that I
was sick, and then I had stomach issues. Know it
was that I was drinking a lot, and I was
having these symptoms all day. For thirteen years, I was
able to work and manage the double life. But one
day I couldn't get out of the house. I was
(26:11):
terrified to get in the car and drive. I was like,
there's something really wrong. I can't even pretend anymore. So
I googled and I saw that there was a rehabilitation facility.
I got sober then, and I thought good. I went
to college, graduate school twice, I lived on my own,
first generation American, and I was like, love, I can
do all this. Getting sober should be easy, right, No,
(26:31):
you know, I lasted to the holidays and I started drinking.
So I ended up in a rehab facility again. I
didn't tell anybody. I hit it from my complete family,
like nobody needs. I struggled so much, and I was
like it was just a rough you know, It's like
it was a rough break. I was afraid of losing
my job. And then my biggest, most terrifying traumatic relapse
was when I was in a relationship with someone who
(26:52):
was also a recovery. His drug of choice was heroin,
and he relapsed. With everything with COVID going on, right, like,
we lost our support groups. We couldn't go to work,
and it was just us two in the house together.
Even though we loved each other very much, it's not enough,
you know, when you're in recovery, you need to get
with your people to be in your community, and we
were just stuck. Jessica fell in love with her boyfriend
(27:15):
Ian when they were in rehab together. His battle with
drugs began when he got hooked on prescription painkillers after
a military injury. With her own sobriety hanging by a threat,
Jessica tried convincing Ean to get help. I was hiding
his disease because I was ashamed for him. I didn't
want to tell anybody that my boyfriend was addicted to heroine.
(27:35):
One day we were supposed to have like a romantic date.
A texted him to get me a diet coke and
I didn't hear anything. I called nothing, So I was like, God,
let me go to his apartment. Thing. Knock nothing, knock nothing, knock,
call the phone here, the phone ringing. I started to
get anxious, so I started banging on the door. Neighbor
comes and he's like, oh, I'm going to call the
(27:56):
police on you, and I'm like, please please call the
police because something's wrong with him. And he's in there.
When the police come and the rest of it such
a blur. I remember the like them opening the door
and they're like, there's a dead male and it was him.
I fell apart and then they were like, do you
(28:17):
have his mom's And so I had to call his
mother and say that he's gone. Then I had to
call his brother. His mom came, and I never wish
on any soul having to tell a mother that her
son is dead. Corner finally let us in. He was blue.
A few hours ago. He had just said I love you,
(28:38):
I'm going to go to the store, and then he
went from that to being gone. The corner took the body,
his family went and I went straight to the liquor
store straight home. After that, I got hospitalized eight times.
I went to rehab and they're a doctor. It was like,
you can't deal with your grief, and so you drink
(28:58):
to deal with it, and then you're were processing these
feelings and I was like, you know what, I surrender.
I'm waving that white flag. When I walked out of
the facility, I resigned from teaching, and something just clicked
to me. There was no amount of alcohol that I
could have drink to make me feel better. At that
point I stopped, Thank God, and um, I've been sober now.
(29:20):
It's like day one hundred sixty six, so I'm like
five and a half one in the universe, and like
the higher powers that be, I wrote this op ed
in a local newspaper in Kentucky, and I said, this
is me. I'm an alcoholic. I've been drinking forever. Like
I've been struggling. I've been living this double life. And
I remember the day that it came out. I was
(29:40):
so anxious. I had actually been teaching and an all
boys school, and I was like, my boys, they're not
gonna want to talk to me. They're gonna be over
me their parents. But the best thing was those kids.
They were like, you know, you're just teaching something different,
you know, and it's just funny. Yeah, like they say that,
they say that when they're just like, thank you for
telling us worth it. It's been a hundred percent worth it.
(30:02):
Every relationship I had got stronger. I think it's awesome
that your students recognize that that was a teaching moment.
You know, it's a teaching moment about life. Having struggles
and fallen down is it's that's part of life, you know,
And it's not about the fall. It's about it. It's
(30:22):
about to get up. But I would just say to anybody,
it's like, if you're questioning it, there's probably something wrong.
And the other really big thing too that I would
say is you're never alone, because I feel like for
as long as I kept my mouth shut, I was
poisoning myself. Once I finally opened my mouth, everything came out.
I've stayed sober since I've opened my mouth, you know
what I'm saying. And so I feel like people need
(30:43):
to realize it's okay to not be okay. You keeping
a secret could be the difference between you living and dying.
That's real, real, real, real talk. Right there. Had to
learn that the hard way. Thank you so much, Thank you.
I'm so grateful for the opportunity. And that was a
powerful testimony to keep doing the work, keep doing the work. Yes,
(31:07):
how many times did you re laugh? Scame? I mean,
you know, it's debatable whether you actually want to call
it relax because relaps actually implies that there has been
recovery that has taken place. I would just have periods
I call them of abstinence, and then I would use again.
I would always run back to a different meeting to
(31:30):
kind of sneak and kind of sneaking and get kind
of comfortable there and say, oh no, I was going
to these meetings and all of that nonsense. And every
time I would do that, I would feel so much
relief just having admitted it and going back and picking
up that one day key chain. It was such a relief.
And then I was like, you're making yourself feel all
(31:51):
that shame. Nobody feels that way about you. You just
gotta keep coming back totally until it clicks. And that's
the one thing, the one thing I never did well,
stop going yeah, that's amazing. I just kept coming back,
and one day the light bolt went off. Oh God.
When twenty nine year old Katie was ready to put
(32:13):
an end to a decade of binge drinking and blackouts,
she took matters into her own hands. A New York attorney,
Katie has always been an overachiever who could conquer anything,
but when it came to alcohol, she was powerless. At
one point, she was drinking so much she couldn't remember
the night before. Katie got sober to save her own life.
(32:38):
She had no idea she was about to change the
lives of countless others with her groundbreaking group, Sober Black
Girls Club. What did your binge drinking look like? I
was studying for the bar. I had my dream job,
I had my dream car. I had like a really luxury,
nice apartment. Life was good, So now why am I depressed?
(33:02):
And this is when my drinking problem as astivated to
a adduction. And this is when like binging started, literally
going to work and coming back home and just feeling
so empty, feeling like I haven't accomplished anything, feeling like
a failure. It was just a terrible feeling and feeling
that I just ran from right and then that basically
(33:25):
turned into me binging. What I realized through therapy was
that I had people telling me I was pretty and smart.
I was given awards, school always came easy to me.
And then when that was all taken away and I
was put into the setting where this nine to six setting,
where now I don't have anyone telling me giving me compliments.
I'm not I'm not a star, I'm not shiny, especially
(33:47):
when you're in settings where like you're the only black
person doing certain things, like the focus is on you.
Through therapy, I realized that, like Kat, you never had
self esteem. Your self esteem was based on what people
thought about you and your awards and your afflishments, and
now that you're done with all that, you don't know
who you are. I became deep pressed. But I'm glad
(34:08):
that you talked about your feelings of low self esteem,
because at the end of the day, part of doing
the work is getting at the root of what is
really causing you to drink or causing you not to
want to deal with your feelings. And for you it
was a low self esteem and it was that for
(34:28):
me as well, you know, and never really understanding where
all of that came from. I still don't understand to
this day. We all deal with that to a certain
and I think that we we all find different ways.
Do you remember what I said about being addicted to reactions? Yeah? Literally,
(34:50):
was like, That's why I'm connecting with you so much
on this because I'm like, I feel you like needing
validation and and arriving off of that validation is Oh,
that's a dangerous cycle. What was your lowest point that
you looked at yourself and said this is a problem.
(35:11):
Within one year, I lost my job, my hypaying job.
I can't afford my hYP paying apartment, I can afford
my hyping So I lost basically all those things in
one had to move back home with my parents. A
lot of my relationships were basically problem So at this
point I have to like turn anywhere to be like Katie,
(35:32):
what is wrong with you? Like if all this stuff
is happening, it has to be you. There's something that
you are doing. And it was extremely hard for me
because as black folks, we keep a lot of stuff inside.
But at that time, I thought I was the only
person going through this. So I never met anyone at
(35:52):
that time that I thought had an addiction. I didn't
even know what an addiction was. In my head. It
was like older white men and big bellies, No clew
what I was going through, and I just knew I
needed help. So I started to go see a therapist
and she said maybe should take a breaking drinking. And
I looked at her, like what are you walking around?
Why are you bringing up alcohol? What does that have
to do with me? Like like like that has nothing
(36:13):
to do with me, Like it's not in my family.
No one drunks at home. So after a couple of sessions,
I gave into the idea like you know what, Like
she's right, drinking is the cause I think every time
I drink, something bad or negative actually does happen. One
of the suggestions my therapist gave me was to go
to a twelve step program, so I went I was
(36:33):
the only black person, so that like threw me off,
and that just really rubbed me the wrong way. So
it was the culture that you did. I just didn't.
It didn't make sense to me. I felt like there
were rules I had to follow and there were things
I had to agree on, and if I didn't agree
on certain things and I wasn't doing something right, I
wasn't doing sobriety right, I couldn't get with it. I
(36:55):
could not understand that. So then I created Silver Bacos Club,
and then when the pandemic hit, we really expanded because
folks needed meetings and they felt like the meetings they
were going to online, they didn't feel like they belonged.
They felt like they couldn't talk about certain issues. But
I don't know if you did twelve Stop, but there
was a point where you couldn't talk about outside issues.
(37:18):
And what is an outside issue? Can you please tell
me what that means? That means you can't talk about race.
So when Judge Floyd passed away, I was actually at
a twelve Stop meeting, but I went to both support
of friends. We're talking about it. We're really upset and
I'm at this meeting, but there's no sense of the
spear of anger, of sadness, like everyone is pretending or
acting as if a black man has not just been
(37:41):
killed on national time. I'm grieving and you all are
just having a wonderful time. And I wasn't the only
one person who was feeling like this. There was a
girls all around the nation was feeling like this. And
that's why we decided to create our own meetings. If
you need to go to rehab, go to your rehab,
but on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays and Sundays, we're gonna
get together. That's beautiful. Like I'm literally sitting here going wow,
(38:04):
Like that's so important, Like the fact that there's so
much as women of color that we see in this
world that isn't designed for us and catered for us.
I'm just sitting here. I'm being very very quiet, but
I'm just trying to listen and understand because that has
just not been my experience. It's almost like finding a therapist,
you know what I mean, Like sometimes you just have
(38:26):
to keep going until you find the right one. I'm
just sorry that you had that experience. Yeah, I've definitely
felt what you're talking about. It was just culturally didn't
fit what I needed, and I felt very much an outsider.
And so because of my specific experiences of being a
black woman and the traumas that I was coming with,
(38:46):
that certain programs that I would go to couldn't relate
and there weren't hardly anyone in there that looked like
me either. Yeah, you know, and so I totally did it.
Thank you for the work that you're doing. Yeah no,
Thank you for the Black Girl Sober Club. Thank you
for sharing your story with Thank you for having beautiful
(39:07):
testimony we both have on black turbans today. It's the
name of the game, it is. That's how you succeed. Okay,
(39:33):
to join the Red Table Talk family and become a
part of the conversation, follow us at facebook dot com
slash red table Talk. Thanks for listening to this episode
of Red Table Talk podcast produced by Facebook, Watch, Westbrook Audio,
and I Heart Radio.
Hey, fam I'm Jada Pinkett Smith and this is the
Red tabletop podcast, all your favorite episodes from the Facebook
Watch show in audio, produced by Westbrook Audio and I
Heart Radio. Please don't forget to rate and review on
Apple Podcasts. Attention ladies. For the first time in history,
women are drinking as much as men. Ask yourself a
(00:23):
serious question, are you drinking too much? I was going
for that third bottle of wine. I said, you've got
a problem. Alcohol is being glamorized Wine Wednesdays, girlified, bottomless
mimosas sold as a lifeline to sanity, wine glasses that
say wine is cheaper than therapy. It's a normalization of
(00:44):
heavy drinking. How much is too much? I could down
a bottle in like an hour and a half. These
are the new faces of alcoholism, and they're not who
you'd expect. The teacher of the Year, a New York attorney,
a corporate vice president. So us the four questions that
could save your life. That's my kryptonite. I cannot be
(01:04):
around vodka. It's a Red Table wake up call. The
real livers coming in. Those are real livers. One of
the reasons why this particular show was really important to
me is because wine for me was like kool aid,
because like I was a you know, a brown liquor drinker, voka,
(01:28):
Like I was a hard liquor drinker, Like I could
drink almost anybody under the table. Damn yeah, Will specifically.
Now Will is a lightweight, but I mean I used
to be a hard one to keep up with. When
I moved to red wine, I considered myself like, oh,
(01:48):
this is better. This is better for me, because they
say the red wine is good for you, you know.
But drinking red wine for me was like drinking glasses
of water. It wasn't even like so I not drinking it,
like you're like, I'm like goo, Google, alright, where's the next?
Because I'm used to that hard hit. I was drinking
(02:09):
hard in high school too, And when I got out here,
I was doing cocktails. So ecstasy, alcohol, weed, WHOA, what
a combination. You were having a good old time. Let
me tell you. I was having me a little bit.
I was like, this is not cocaine, this is not heroin.
I wasn't doing things that I thought was addictive, but
(02:31):
I would do those three together. That was my cocktail.
Your threshold becomes so high that what it takes for
you to to get to the place you need to
get to. It'll take me two bottles to get to Okay,
If I do ecstasy, weed and alcohol at the same time,
I'm gonna get there faster and I can keep the
(02:52):
high going because then I can just keep drinking because
I know ecstasy is gonna last me about three, four
or five hours. The weed, you know, that's just gonna
keep me just smooth, and then the alcohol is gonna
keep it going like I could just keep taking drink,
drink drink. Yeah, oh my god, I'm not like that
sounds intense. Listen, that sounds like I would everybody. No,
(03:17):
you know what that stressing under a recovery and my
family that it's not accepting on the fact that addiction run.
But I get it, literally, I got it quick. Like
once I I was going for that third bottle of wine,
(03:38):
I said, you've got a problem. And it was cold
turkey that day that day, that day, I just stopped.
Wow and never since. No. I mean I had, like
I've had a glass of wine here and there, but
I cannot touch rock. I cannot touch drum drums. Another one.
No dark liquor I'm never forgets. In New Orleans with Will,
(04:00):
they had these lavender vodka drinks. I'm like, I haven't
had vodka in years. Let me tell you, I had
that lavender voca drink. I had one, I had a
second one, and I was craving for a third one.
I haven't stopped thinking about that drink till this day.
(04:22):
Stopped thinking about that drink till this day. But that's
when I realized. I was like, Jada, you can't play
no games. And when I see vodka, even when I
opened up the refrigerator and they have those vodka spritzers
in there and I look at it, that grapefruit vodka combination,
I'd be like, and let me tell you the kind
(04:44):
of discipline I have to put in because just because
I have a problem with vodka, I can't tell you
can't have vock in the house. I'm not doing all that.
But I think also I'm a binger. Yeah, I'm a binger.
Your grandmother was when it's time to nal grandmother was
we're gonna go right. So I wasn't the type of
person that was drinking every day, you know. I was
(05:06):
like a weekend party girl, totally you know what I mean.
So it was like, yo, Thursday to Monday morning. Yeah,
Thursday to Monday morning. I would go like just but
it never got to the point where it interfered with
your being able to go to work. Did you ever?
There was one incident. I had one incident that was
(05:28):
an eye opening incident for me as well. I had
one incident or nutting, Professor, I passed out when you
told me that's the makeup trailer, That's what I never
told me that that passed out. I went to work
high and it was a bad batch of ecstasy. Lord
had mercy, and I passed out, and I told everybody
(05:50):
that I had taken I must have had old medication
in a vitamin bottle. Think, oh my god, But I
tell you what I did, though, got my ass together
and got on that set. That was the last time,
like I take heed. I would never do something like
(06:11):
That's why I was on you always. I stay on
because Jaden and Trey, because I grew up with my
mother who was a heroin attic. And still it didn't
sink into me that any mind altering substance. I don't
care what it is. All y'all young people talking about
weed is from the earth, and I like this. It's
(06:33):
a gate. You know, it's a year, all of this
from the damn every year. You know, I know my
body and it's taken me a long time to understand
what works best for me. But it's imperative for me
to stop smoking every year for at least two months.
(06:54):
This is my fourth year doing it now, I know.
But I think the day that you decided to do
it all together will be a very be day for me.
I think they'll see something's different it is. I think
that's awesome. You know, now I get it. You know,
everybody has their journey. I'm grateful that that's all you
(07:14):
dealing with because when I was your age, I was
doing alcohol. That's what I'm saying. I'm like, I'm trying
to I mean, I'm like you was much worse than me.
It can get really messed up. I would always want
like if you guys saw something in me that was like, oh,
that's a downward spiral that is going to catch her
real quick. That's why you have to trust the eyes
(07:35):
around you because you won't know. And that was the
thing with me. Don't think that people didn't try to
tap me on my shoulder. Don't think that when I
was at Debbie Allen throwing up all over her house
that she wasn't like, Hey, I had to reach my
rock bottoms. I wish I could have been a fly
on the wall to just see how crazy I wish
(07:59):
I could have too. So I'm gonna yank to as well.
Oh my god, I think back on my life. I'm like,
I'm a walking miracle. You are no doubt about it.
You are a walking miracle. People would not believe this
one is too. Yeah, I guess I'm just kind of
a little funny duddy on the side. Thank you God.
(08:22):
Right now, we have doctor Jessica Mellinger, and she is
a liver disease specialist at the University of Michigan who
has witnessed shocking trends over the past year. Thanks for
talking about this topic. It's a good one. Yeah, tell
us what you've been seeing. We've been seeing astronomical increases
in hospital days for young women with alcohol related liver disease,
(08:43):
something we previously kind of thought happened mostly just in
middle aged men. So just really really surprising. Wow, more
women are drinking more heavily, women are starting drink like men,
you know, and so they're starting to get liver disease.
Have you been able to identify when this uptick is
that really happening in a woman's life in the forties
and fifties is still kind of the biggest chunk of
(09:05):
people that we see with this, but the rates of
women in their twenties and thirties and early forties are
starting to really catch up with that. Wow, I've seen
a lot more of my peers, specifically during the pandemic
um drinking a lot more. What we do find is
that a large percentage of the population of young people
eighteen nine year olds almost one and four are reporting
(09:27):
that they had an alcohol use disorder in the last year.
That's that most severe form of addiction, right, That's not
just I misused alcohol once in a while, and that
younger age group, we're just seeing those numbers go up
and up and up. I've definitely seen friends and family
members become excessive drinkers over the pandemic, and it's really
hard to talk to people about it because I think
(09:49):
that women are targeted in a certain way in the
marketing of how you know, like wine Wednesdays and it's
been difficult to even talk to people that have had
tesseive drinking issues. I think you're absolutely correct that that's
exactly what's happening, is that we have a culture that
is really kind of promoting drinking as just what you
(10:09):
do to, you know, end your day to cope with problems.
When I walk through hospital gift shops, there's alcohol paraphernalia.
There's wine glasses, there's shot glasses, wine purses, if you
can believe this, you know, a purse that you has
a little spigot on it that you can you know,
put wine in and hide it. And I think it's
kind of a normalization of heavy drinking, and it's a
normalization of using alcohol in a way that is kind
(10:31):
of a coping mechanism. Yeah, Like it's okay to drink
alcohol when you're depressed or board or feeling lonely. That's
the thing to do. Yeah. And I've seen it when
you know, shopping out in the stores. You know the
wine glasses that say wine is cheaper than therapy. You know,
there's this, yeah, this normalization of it, this normalization and
glamorization of it. You know, you watch TV. You see
(10:52):
women relaxing with big glasses of wine. And we're not
talking about little glasses. Yeah, big glasses. What are some
of the signs of the liver disease. The signs can
be pretty dramatic. And I was able to arrange to
have a couple of livers brought in for you guys
to look at. Oh oh oh oh, those are real
(11:15):
livers coming in. Those are real livers. Okay, okay, those
are really well, you know games, she's a nurse and
so I want to see this. Well, we're gonna see
it because here we are. Okay, so that's a normal liver.
Oh that's really bad. You can see the normal livers,
(11:36):
nice and smooth, and the liver that serotic looks really lumpy,
kind of bumpy, shrunken, And that's scar tissue. That's scar
tissue that's kind of marbled all through that liver. What's
happening is just like if you get a cut on
your hand and it gets red and then you have
a scar. The alcohol is irritating your liver. And when
people do get liver disease symptoms, it could be you know,
(11:56):
your eyes turning yellow, your skin turning yellow, your belly
kind of swelling up with fluid, people will bleed heavily.
They'll help you vomiting blood, getting confused. Prior to that,
you might just feel kind of maybe nauseated, not want
to eat as much, you just kind of don't feel good.
So they can be pretty vague symptoms that don't necessarily
cue you into the fact that you've got to developing
(12:17):
liver disease problem. That's really really scary to look at.
It's going to be straightforward, but that gives your reality.
Is like, once you can see something like that, hopefully
people will be like, I don't want my liver to
look like that. You don't get advanced alcohol related liver
disease overnight. It takes years to get So if you're
getting serosis in your late twenties, thirties, even forties, you
(12:40):
started drinking really earlier. Yeah, we have to always remember too,
that there's really two diseases going on here. There's an
alcohol use disorder and there's a liver disease, and we
don't want to forget about the first one right now.
Let me ask you, because you're using alcohol use disorder
instead of just saying alcoholism, why is that we've moved
a from using terms like alcoholism or addiction because people
(13:03):
have told us that they feel stigmatized by it. Not
everybody is willing to admit right off the bat that
they have an addiction. So what I tell my patients is,
you know, I don't care what term you use to
describe yourself, just recognizing the reality of what's going on,
and I just try to stick with the terminology my
patients are comfortable with. If they want to use alcoholism
or addiction, then I'll use that when I speak with them,
(13:24):
and if they don't, we don't. And so that there's
a self assessment quiz for people to know if they're
drinking too much. Yeah, they go by the term the
cage questions. The first is do you feel like you
need to cut back? Um? And this is often kind
of that first sign. This is what I get asked
a lot by people. How do I know I'm drinking
too much? And well, if you feel like you might be,
(13:46):
that's probably a good sign that that you should really
think about cutting back or stopping altogether. Do you get
annoyed by people who talk to you about cutting back?
Do you feel guilty about your drinking? And then do
you need an eye opener. When you get up in
the morning answering any one of those, you could be
a sign that you've got an alcohol use problem. So
(14:06):
let me ask you a question. If I have a
friend who feels as though drinking a bottle of wine
by herself is okay, is that okay? I think the
straight answer is no. I'd say that's a problem. And
I think it speaks to something that many of us
are unaware of. What is a drink? What is one thing?
What one standard unit of alcohol and one drink would
(14:27):
be a shot? One shot like one and a half
ounces of hard liquor like vodka or DRISKI, one can
of beer. A standard twelve ounce can of beer is
one drink four or to five ounces of wine. So
there's about five glasses of wine per bottle, roughly, and
many people are having much more than that. I had
a patient who said she was only having three drinks
(14:48):
a day. She wasn't certain why, she, you know, had
liver disease. Come to find out that she was actually
pouring about six shots worth of um of alcohol into
each drink, and so she was actually having eighteen drinks
at night. And if you're a woman and you don't
have liver disease. This is for people who don't have
alcohol use disorder or liver disease or an alcohol medical issue.
(15:09):
Anything over one drink a day is really too much.
That's important for people to know what those recommendations are.
Having more than one drink a day is too much
without liver disease. For someone without liver disease, if you
have liver disease, you shouldn't drink at all. But if
you don't have liver disease, you should only be having one.
Wondering and there's some data to suggest that even one
(15:30):
drink might be too much, so, but right now, the
National Institute of Health recommendations are one drink a day
for women to for men. And I hear a lot
in my clinic people who are surprised that they have
alcohol related liver disease, particularly young women who don't think
that they were drinking that much. They were just drinking
wine with their friends and not realizing that they're getting
(15:52):
through a bottle of night. That's a lot. I had
to clutch my purl on the inside a little bit
around I mean history, thinking about my history, you know,
just that one drink because I mean I was a
drink a bottle, real fast drinker. What do you think
on one hour, I could down a bottle and maybe
(16:14):
like an hour and a half to oh my god,
one glass after another, one glass after another. Because you're
just they're watching TV drinking gee gee, and you're not.
And I'm thinking, is red wine? It's chilled? So I'm like,
why I need to keep my limits. That's not years ago.
Jade is twenty two, So it's been twenty two years
(16:34):
for me. So very good. Yes, Like the doctor is
shocked at right now. She's like, so, what's the latest
on red wine being healthy? So if you have any
liver disease at all, we recommend no drinking. Right. There
has been some suggestion that red wine may have some
cardiovascular benefits, and the data is kind of up and
(16:55):
down on that, just depending upon which study you look
at from a liver standpoint. By being a liver dog,
I think certainly if you have any amount of liver disease,
even red wine is really going to be damaging to you. Wow,
this has been a very informative problems. I really didn't know, right,
everybody talking about how red wine, you know, if you
have a glass of red wine a day that that's
healthy for you. I think it's really important to just
(17:17):
be aware of my craving. This am I going after
it for you know, relaxation purposes, to get to sleep
at night all the time, because that's really when I
see a lot of my patients find that it sort
of gets out of hand. Right. Well, thank you for
thank you for coming in school and the day you
gave me some information I was not aware of at all.
Thank you. Next up. Mother of three, Annie Grace was
(17:40):
a rising star in the marketing world until happy hour
turned into two bottles of wine a night. Poised, driven
and ambitious, Annie Grace was just twenty six when named
vice president of a multinational company. She never imagined her
after hours work drinks would nearly cost her everything. I'm
(18:01):
so terrified, any please rescue yourself and he found her
purpose after hitting rock bottom. Here for how she created
This Naked Mind, a program that has empowered millions to
change their relationship with alcohol. I was global head of
marketing for a company headquartered in London, in charge of
(18:23):
twenty countries flying all over the world. You know, international
trips where the booze was just flowing and drinking two
bottles of wine every single night. When was the moment
that made you go, WHOA, something's really wrong here. There
was this one time I asked my four year old
to come sit on my lap and he said, no, Mom,
you smell bad in your teeth are purple. And it
(18:45):
was just like, what is happening? Like how can I
be showing up for my kids like this? And it
was these little moments. I was coming back from a
super boosy work trip. I've been up till three in
the morning the night before. I went down into the
hotel are and said, oh gosh, I just need something.
She said, I can give you a screwdriver, which is
one of those little lines. If I don't drink hard
(19:06):
alcohol first thing in the morning, then I'm still okay.
I'm still not over the line. I'm I'm still not
It's still not a problem. And so I said, oh,
but I'm really in pain. And I had this headache,
and I said, I just have to get home to
my kids, and so I ordered one and I had
two or three, and I got to ether airport and
I'm sitting in the airport and I'm just in tears
and I'm writing in my journal and I remember writing
(19:30):
the words, am I an alcoholic? And just really for
the first time seeing that kind of in black and white.
The thing was, at that point my journey, I had
been trying to cut back. I had done all sorts
of things. I said, you know, no drinking till the
weekend for just one glass. I had all of these
rules and everyone I would break and I stopped being
(19:53):
able to really look at myself in the mirror. Yeah,
and I'm thinking, why can't I do this for my kids?
You know, I'm smart, I'm together, I have it in
control in all other parts of my life, but this
one thing, like it has got me, and why I
can't I do this one thing? And so I'm sitting
there and I'm asking the question that I've been asking
(20:13):
for years now is what is my problem? What's wrong
with me? And I had this moment that I can
only describe as like some divine moment where I said,
nothing's wrong with you. Find out why? Find out much changed?
Oh wow, that's a good one. And so I made
(20:35):
myself too promises. I said, you know, I'm going to
stop trying to stop drinking. I'm gonna let myself off
the hook. I'm going to give myself some self compassion
because this roller coaster of shame and blame and trying
these rules and breaking these rules, it was losing my soul.
I was losing touch with myself. I did not trust
myself anymore. And I said, you know what, you've been
(20:55):
doing the best you can with these tools you have.
Give yourself passion. Take a year and find out why.
And so I went on this journey and I wrote
down every single reason I drink. And I just started
learning that all those reasons I was drinking, alcohol relaxes
even THO it doesn't release his cortisol, a stress hormone. Wow,
it does in adrenaline. That's crazy. Alcohol makes things more fun. No,
(21:21):
it doesn't. It actually numbs your ability to feel pleasure,
so that you think nothing's fun without alcohol because of
all the past alcohol you've been drinking like neurochemically, that's
what happens in the brain. And so I look at
this and I'm about a year later, I walk out
of my office. I tell my husband, if you want
to drink with me again, tonight's last night because I'm
done after this. He looks at me, He's like there
(21:43):
was no trust there, so he didn't believe me. But
sure enough I really was done. You recorded um yourself
doing one of your worst moments, a few minutes of
boost and relax. I'm so much the hip addictions. Yeah. Wow.
(22:15):
You know a lot of people have those moments that
I always hear people share about calling out to God
in their final moments of recognizing that addiction has taken
over and there's nothing that they can do. Yeah. I
don't remember making those videos. I have lots of them.
I was yeah, just wow. So any you have a
(22:39):
whole program called This Naked Mind. This Naked Mind just
started as my own journey. I realized I wanted my
mind to be naked. I didn't want to be influenced
or controlled by anything else. Wiping your mind I love,
And when I put it out into the world, it resonated.
People started writing me letters. It worked where nothing else worked,
where they had tried everything, and they felt it stuck
(23:00):
as I felt. And now millions of people around the
world have been impacted and helped because they're also able
to feel really empowered to change their behavior from an
emotional place. Wow, I hear you have three pillars that
helps you stop drinking. What are they? The three pillars
are action, emotion and knowledge. Action emotion knowledge, and so
you can take the action day one. You stop and
(23:22):
then hope that the knowledge and the emotion catch up,
or you can get the knowledge. And that's what I did,
and I didn't even know I was doing it. I
got all this knowledge called doesn't actually relax me, it
doesn't actually make things more fun. And then my emotion changed.
And then when I finally stopped, it was not as
hard as it had been every other time because everything
(23:44):
had caught up. Everything was aligned at that point. Everything
was aligned because, as we know, willpower, it just runs out.
It becomes something that over time, if you get stressed
during the day, you have less will power at home
to turn down that next drink. Once I understood the science,
when I's understood, you know that all the things I
thought it was doing for me, it just wasn't doing.
(24:04):
Then my emotions changed and then I wanted it as
much as I wanted. Like a glass of motor oil,
I just didn't want to drink. And that was so freeing.
How long have you not been drinking? Over six years? Now,
that's amazing. Well, thank you so much, thank you for
having with Alright, So, Jessica Duanees was Kentucky's Teacher of
(24:25):
the Year. On the same day she won this prestigious award,
she was hiding a dark, painful secret. Welcome, thank you,
thank you. So what was the secret you hiding? Yes,
my secret was that while I was holding that trophy,
I was feeding to end the ceremony and go get
liquor and go home and black out. In that picture,
(24:46):
I was in withdrawals and that's why I'm shiny and sweaty.
It was awful. And so that's kind of like how
my days were at that point. I would wake up
around two am, do my lesson planning, go to school,
take zan X to ward off the withdrawals, and yeah,
um teach. I taught really well. I had so much
shame for being an alcoholic. I felt like I was
such a terrible person outside of school that when I
(25:09):
was teaching, I was just diving in a hundred percent.
And as soon as the bell rain, I said by
to the kids who I loved dearly. But as soon
as I said by to them, straight to the liquor store,
straight home, and I would probably be blocked out by
like six seven o'clock. Way, go back to wash prints,
repeat wow and your wor how much would you say
you were drinking. I was drinking at least a fifth
(25:30):
a day for a year and a half, so I
actually did end up with alcoholic liver disease. Like I'm sorry,
the fifth what is it? It's like the bottle that's
like this big, It's like the standard bottle. Multiple people
will share some left over. I was drinking the whole
thing one day. What was your rock bottom? I kind
of hit two rock bottoms. I started to have like
(25:51):
the swollen belly. I was throwing up bile. My vision
would start to get a little bit blurry. I would
have people cover my classroom because they thought that I
was sick, and then I had stomach issues. Know it
was that I was drinking a lot, and I was
having these symptoms all day. For thirteen years, I was
able to work and manage the double life. But one
day I couldn't get out of the house. I was
(26:11):
terrified to get in the car and drive. I was like,
there's something really wrong. I can't even pretend anymore. So
I googled and I saw that there was a rehabilitation facility.
I got sober then, and I thought good. I went
to college, graduate school twice, I lived on my own,
first generation American, and I was like, love, I can
do all this. Getting sober should be easy, right, No,
(26:31):
you know, I lasted to the holidays and I started drinking.
So I ended up in a rehab facility again. I
didn't tell anybody. I hit it from my complete family,
like nobody needs. I struggled so much, and I was
like it was just a rough you know, It's like
it was a rough break. I was afraid of losing
my job. And then my biggest, most terrifying traumatic relapse
was when I was in a relationship with someone who
(26:52):
was also a recovery. His drug of choice was heroin,
and he relapsed. With everything with COVID going on, right, like,
we lost our support groups. We couldn't go to work,
and it was just us two in the house together.
Even though we loved each other very much, it's not enough,
you know, when you're in recovery, you need to get
with your people to be in your community, and we
were just stuck. Jessica fell in love with her boyfriend
(27:15):
Ian when they were in rehab together. His battle with
drugs began when he got hooked on prescription painkillers after
a military injury. With her own sobriety hanging by a threat,
Jessica tried convincing Ean to get help. I was hiding
his disease because I was ashamed for him. I didn't
want to tell anybody that my boyfriend was addicted to heroine.
(27:35):
One day we were supposed to have like a romantic date.
A texted him to get me a diet coke and
I didn't hear anything. I called nothing, So I was like, God,
let me go to his apartment. Thing. Knock nothing, knock nothing, knock,
call the phone here, the phone ringing. I started to
get anxious, so I started banging on the door. Neighbor
comes and he's like, oh, I'm going to call the
(27:56):
police on you, and I'm like, please please call the
police because something's wrong with him. And he's in there.
When the police come and the rest of it such
a blur. I remember the like them opening the door
and they're like, there's a dead male and it was him.
I fell apart and then they were like, do you
(28:17):
have his mom's And so I had to call his
mother and say that he's gone. Then I had to
call his brother. His mom came, and I never wish
on any soul having to tell a mother that her
son is dead. Corner finally let us in. He was blue.
A few hours ago. He had just said I love you,
(28:38):
I'm going to go to the store, and then he
went from that to being gone. The corner took the body,
his family went and I went straight to the liquor
store straight home. After that, I got hospitalized eight times.
I went to rehab and they're a doctor. It was like,
you can't deal with your grief, and so you drink
(28:58):
to deal with it, and then you're were processing these
feelings and I was like, you know what, I surrender.
I'm waving that white flag. When I walked out of
the facility, I resigned from teaching, and something just clicked
to me. There was no amount of alcohol that I
could have drink to make me feel better. At that
point I stopped, Thank God, and um, I've been sober now.
(29:20):
It's like day one hundred sixty six, so I'm like
five and a half one in the universe, and like
the higher powers that be, I wrote this op ed
in a local newspaper in Kentucky, and I said, this
is me. I'm an alcoholic. I've been drinking forever. Like
I've been struggling. I've been living this double life. And
I remember the day that it came out. I was
(29:40):
so anxious. I had actually been teaching and an all
boys school, and I was like, my boys, they're not
gonna want to talk to me. They're gonna be over
me their parents. But the best thing was those kids.
They were like, you know, you're just teaching something different,
you know, and it's just funny. Yeah, like they say that,
they say that when they're just like, thank you for
telling us worth it. It's been a hundred percent worth it.
(30:02):
Every relationship I had got stronger. I think it's awesome
that your students recognize that that was a teaching moment.
You know, it's a teaching moment about life. Having struggles
and fallen down is it's that's part of life, you know,
And it's not about the fall. It's about it. It's
(30:22):
about to get up. But I would just say to anybody,
it's like, if you're questioning it, there's probably something wrong.
And the other really big thing too that I would
say is you're never alone, because I feel like for
as long as I kept my mouth shut, I was
poisoning myself. Once I finally opened my mouth, everything came out.
I've stayed sober since I've opened my mouth, you know
what I'm saying. And so I feel like people need
(30:43):
to realize it's okay to not be okay. You keeping
a secret could be the difference between you living and dying.
That's real, real, real, real talk. Right there. Had to
learn that the hard way. Thank you so much, Thank you.
I'm so grateful for the opportunity. And that was a
powerful testimony to keep doing the work, keep doing the work. Yes,
(31:07):
how many times did you re laugh? Scame? I mean,
you know, it's debatable whether you actually want to call
it relax because relaps actually implies that there has been
recovery that has taken place. I would just have periods
I call them of abstinence, and then I would use again.
I would always run back to a different meeting to
(31:30):
kind of sneak and kind of sneaking and get kind
of comfortable there and say, oh no, I was going
to these meetings and all of that nonsense. And every
time I would do that, I would feel so much
relief just having admitted it and going back and picking
up that one day key chain. It was such a relief.
And then I was like, you're making yourself feel all
(31:51):
that shame. Nobody feels that way about you. You just
gotta keep coming back totally until it clicks. And that's
the one thing, the one thing I never did well,
stop going yeah, that's amazing. I just kept coming back,
and one day the light bolt went off. Oh God.
When twenty nine year old Katie was ready to put
(32:13):
an end to a decade of binge drinking and blackouts,
she took matters into her own hands. A New York attorney,
Katie has always been an overachiever who could conquer anything,
but when it came to alcohol, she was powerless. At
one point, she was drinking so much she couldn't remember
the night before. Katie got sober to save her own life.
(32:38):
She had no idea she was about to change the
lives of countless others with her groundbreaking group, Sober Black
Girls Club. What did your binge drinking look like? I
was studying for the bar. I had my dream job,
I had my dream car. I had like a really luxury,
nice apartment. Life was good, So now why am I depressed?
(33:02):
And this is when my drinking problem as astivated to
a adduction. And this is when like binging started, literally
going to work and coming back home and just feeling
so empty, feeling like I haven't accomplished anything, feeling like
a failure. It was just a terrible feeling and feeling
that I just ran from right and then that basically
(33:25):
turned into me binging. What I realized through therapy was
that I had people telling me I was pretty and smart.
I was given awards, school always came easy to me.
And then when that was all taken away and I
was put into the setting where this nine to six setting,
where now I don't have anyone telling me giving me compliments.
I'm not I'm not a star, I'm not shiny, especially
(33:47):
when you're in settings where like you're the only black
person doing certain things, like the focus is on you.
Through therapy, I realized that, like Kat, you never had
self esteem. Your self esteem was based on what people
thought about you and your awards and your afflishments, and
now that you're done with all that, you don't know
who you are. I became deep pressed. But I'm glad
(34:08):
that you talked about your feelings of low self esteem,
because at the end of the day, part of doing
the work is getting at the root of what is
really causing you to drink or causing you not to
want to deal with your feelings. And for you it
was a low self esteem and it was that for
(34:28):
me as well, you know, and never really understanding where
all of that came from. I still don't understand to
this day. We all deal with that to a certain
and I think that we we all find different ways.
Do you remember what I said about being addicted to reactions? Yeah? Literally,
(34:50):
was like, That's why I'm connecting with you so much
on this because I'm like, I feel you like needing
validation and and arriving off of that validation is Oh,
that's a dangerous cycle. What was your lowest point that
you looked at yourself and said this is a problem.
(35:11):
Within one year, I lost my job, my hypaying job.
I can't afford my hYP paying apartment, I can afford
my hyping So I lost basically all those things in
one had to move back home with my parents. A
lot of my relationships were basically problem So at this
point I have to like turn anywhere to be like Katie,
(35:32):
what is wrong with you? Like if all this stuff
is happening, it has to be you. There's something that
you are doing. And it was extremely hard for me
because as black folks, we keep a lot of stuff inside.
But at that time, I thought I was the only
person going through this. So I never met anyone at
(35:52):
that time that I thought had an addiction. I didn't
even know what an addiction was. In my head. It
was like older white men and big bellies, No clew
what I was going through, and I just knew I
needed help. So I started to go see a therapist
and she said maybe should take a breaking drinking. And
I looked at her, like what are you walking around?
Why are you bringing up alcohol? What does that have
to do with me? Like like like that has nothing
(36:13):
to do with me, Like it's not in my family.
No one drunks at home. So after a couple of sessions,
I gave into the idea like you know what, Like
she's right, drinking is the cause I think every time
I drink, something bad or negative actually does happen. One
of the suggestions my therapist gave me was to go
to a twelve step program, so I went I was
(36:33):
the only black person, so that like threw me off,
and that just really rubbed me the wrong way. So
it was the culture that you did. I just didn't.
It didn't make sense to me. I felt like there
were rules I had to follow and there were things
I had to agree on, and if I didn't agree
on certain things and I wasn't doing something right, I
wasn't doing sobriety right, I couldn't get with it. I
(36:55):
could not understand that. So then I created Silver Bacos Club,
and then when the pandemic hit, we really expanded because
folks needed meetings and they felt like the meetings they
were going to online, they didn't feel like they belonged.
They felt like they couldn't talk about certain issues. But
I don't know if you did twelve Stop, but there
was a point where you couldn't talk about outside issues.
(37:18):
And what is an outside issue? Can you please tell
me what that means? That means you can't talk about race.
So when Judge Floyd passed away, I was actually at
a twelve Stop meeting, but I went to both support
of friends. We're talking about it. We're really upset and
I'm at this meeting, but there's no sense of the
spear of anger, of sadness, like everyone is pretending or
acting as if a black man has not just been
(37:41):
killed on national time. I'm grieving and you all are
just having a wonderful time. And I wasn't the only
one person who was feeling like this. There was a
girls all around the nation was feeling like this. And
that's why we decided to create our own meetings. If
you need to go to rehab, go to your rehab,
but on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays and Sundays, we're gonna
get together. That's beautiful. Like I'm literally sitting here going wow,
(38:04):
Like that's so important, Like the fact that there's so
much as women of color that we see in this
world that isn't designed for us and catered for us.
I'm just sitting here. I'm being very very quiet, but
I'm just trying to listen and understand because that has
just not been my experience. It's almost like finding a therapist,
you know what I mean, Like sometimes you just have
(38:26):
to keep going until you find the right one. I'm
just sorry that you had that experience. Yeah, I've definitely
felt what you're talking about. It was just culturally didn't
fit what I needed, and I felt very much an outsider.
And so because of my specific experiences of being a
black woman and the traumas that I was coming with,
(38:46):
that certain programs that I would go to couldn't relate
and there weren't hardly anyone in there that looked like
me either. Yeah, you know, and so I totally did it.
Thank you for the work that you're doing. Yeah no,
Thank you for the Black Girl Sober Club. Thank you
for sharing your story with Thank you for having beautiful
(39:07):
testimony we both have on black turbans today. It's the
name of the game, it is. That's how you succeed. Okay,
(39:33):
to join the Red Table Talk family and become a
part of the conversation, follow us at facebook dot com
slash red table Talk. Thanks for listening to this episode
of Red Table Talk podcast produced by Facebook, Watch, Westbrook Audio,
and I Heart Radio.
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