October 22, 2025 • 22 mins
In this deeply moving episode, Theresa Bruno sits down with spiritual teacher, author, and addiction recovery expert TJ Woodward for a powerful conversation about healing, awakening, and the journey back to the self.
TJ shares his story of early childhood joy, disconnection, and eventual addiction—and how those experiences became the foundation for his groundbreaking work in Conscious Recovery. Together, he and Theresa explore how what we often call “coping mechanisms” can be seen instead as brilliant survival strategies, and how true transformation begins when we remember the wholeness that’s always been within us.
With honesty and grace, they also touch on themes of spiritual emptiness, resilience, and the sacred power of being seen and loved into healing. This is a conversation about rediscovering connection, not just to others—but to the divine spark that never leaves us.
Subscribe for more soulful conversations.
Connect with us:
Get your copy of "He's Not Coming Back": https://bit.ly/40qGX6Y
Connect with our guest:
TJ Woodward's website: https://www.tjwoodward.com/
Follow TJ on Instagram: http://bit.ly/3WcRIrd
Find TJ on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TJWoodwardAuthor/
TJ shares his story of early childhood joy, disconnection, and eventual addiction—and how those experiences became the foundation for his groundbreaking work in Conscious Recovery. Together, he and Theresa explore how what we often call “coping mechanisms” can be seen instead as brilliant survival strategies, and how true transformation begins when we remember the wholeness that’s always been within us.
With honesty and grace, they also touch on themes of spiritual emptiness, resilience, and the sacred power of being seen and loved into healing. This is a conversation about rediscovering connection, not just to others—but to the divine spark that never leaves us.
Subscribe for more soulful conversations.
Connect with us:
Get your copy of "He's Not Coming Back": https://bit.ly/40qGX6Y
Connect with our guest:
TJ Woodward's website: https://www.tjwoodward.com/
Follow TJ on Instagram: http://bit.ly/3WcRIrd
Find TJ on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TJWoodwardAuthor/
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hi, Welcome back, Welcome back. I'm Teresa Bruno. I'm the
host of the Soul Talks podcast, and I'm just thrilled
to get to sit today with t J. Woodward. I
have looked at his work for a long time in
addiction recovery, and I have looked at his teachings as
a goafe minister, and so I just can't wait to
share with you this incredible work, this spiritual leader, renowned
(00:30):
keynote speaker, best selling spiritual author, and addiction recovery expert
has to share with us today. I feel like I'm
talking to a guru and a friend.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
TJ.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Thank you so much for being with us. This is
long overdue for me. I've just heard so much about you.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Oh my gosh, I'm so happy to be here, Teresa.
Let's focus on the friend part. Let's be I love that.
What could be better than that? Right? Because each of
us is guru? Right, and none of us is a guru.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
I don't feel very much like a gear, but I
wanted to start with something I think will be very
interesting to our listeners and take me back to you
as a young person. I've read your story and I
don't want to give it all away. But what led
you to become an expert in addiction recovery?
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Well, I mean the expert piece is really my own
journey with my own addiction, struggling as a late teens
and into my very early twenties. I got sober right
before I turned twenty one. But going back is really
important because my earliest memories are memories of being really happy.
And I like to start there because I look at
(01:45):
what people are looking for in therapy or recovery, or
a spiritual community or a transformational workshop is actually innate
to a very young human. People want to feel their
feelings more. They want to be more present, they want
to be more open. I want to be more loving.
And the reason I like to start with that is
that was just my natural way of being. And when
(02:06):
I look at a small child, a preprogrammed human, they
seem to do that naturally. And so I start with
that because I think a lot of times we think
we're moving towards something in actuality, I think we're actually
returning to something under all the layers of the stuff
that we've picked up along the way.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
That's amazing. And I've read that you sort of had
a pivot at about seven years old, where you started
to feel a disconnect from yourself.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Yeah, it was actually a profound experience, and I can
remember the felt sense of it. I was seven years old.
I was at my dining room table with my mom
and my sisters, and I actually had a sensation, like
a physical sensation of my heart closing. And I don't
know what a seven year old's mind was telling me,
like what was I thinking at that point, But I
(02:56):
know how it felt. I became afraid and I remember
just feeling like I shut down. I can look back
now in retrospect and realize that was a strategy for survival.
I don't like to use the word coping mechanism. I
call these things brilliant strategy.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
I know. I love that you say that. That's so
such different language than I've ever heard in any kind
of recovery speak.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
I've had some pushback on it. I'm not going to lie.
I've had a couple of people saying, there's no way
you can call addiction a brilliant strategy. We shouldn't be
telling people that. So I want to like dive in
a little. The reason I call it brilliant is all
the mechanisms that we develop, usually as really small people
did serve us in some way, and so if we
look at them as bad or wrong, it's much more
(03:41):
difficult to let go of or to move beyond. But
if we look at the brilliance they once were, then
we can start to ask ourselves, is it still brilliant?
Is it still serving me? Because I have this profound idea?
Are you ready? We don't change unless we want to.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Oh, absolutely right?
Speaker 2 (03:57):
And so how do we get in touch with what
we truly want? In the addiction or that strategy of
closing my heart, it was there for a reason. I
was very afraid, and there were a lot of factors
that led to that. So it's really about unlearning that
my parents weren't a very loveless marriage. I've made peace
with both of them. We have beautiful relationships today. But
(04:17):
when my parents got divorced when I was fourteen, when
they separated, I literally said to my dad, what took
you so long? And he acknowledges now that he never
wanted to be in that marriage but felt like he
needed to be.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Yeah, and children feel every bit of that. And so you,
I mean, it was natural for you to have fear,
what's going to happen, you know, to us as a family,
What's going to happen to my mom, whom I'm so
close to. You know, I think those fears, you know,
you were internalizing. So take me from seven to I
think what it was at twelve or thirteen, because when
(04:53):
you begin to drink and then discover drugs.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
It's really close to seven year cycles. It's very interesting.
At seven I had this profound experience of closing my heart.
Somewhere around fourteen could have been a little bit earlier,
I discovered drugs and alcohol. And then at twenty one,
seven years later, again is when I got sober. So
there are these seven year cycles. And yes, when I
discovered drugs and alcohol, I mean, you know, weed was
(05:20):
given to me. I remember the sensation of feeling so
much relief. And of course I'm not the only one
saying this, but I understand or I realized that addiction
or the substance is never the problem. It's always a
solution that has lost its effectiveness.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
And I'm curious that leads me to something because you
live such a beautiful, directed, spiritual path in your life. Now,
did you live in a home that was religious, Christian, spiritual?
What were your underpinnings of spirituality?
Speaker 2 (05:55):
You know, it's such an interesting question, and there's it's
very astute that you're asking that question. And because I
think I hear a lot of people who I know
in their church they're taught there's something fundamentally wrong with them.
I was so lucky. My home wasn't particularly spiritual at
all or really religious, but I did grow up singing
(06:15):
in a very traditional men and boys choir in the
Episcopal Church, and I actually felt so much peace and
love there. I don't know if I absorbed the teachings.
I don't really remember a lot of that, but I
remember that was kind of a safe place for me. Interesting.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
That is such an unusual story. That is the antithesis
of what I hear in so many other stories. Yeah,
I love.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
That for you. I had that experience, and I feel
so grateful for and my dad also sang in that choir,
and it was a place that I felt safe. It
was a place that I felt some kind of spiritual energy. Again,
I didn't really necessarily absorb a lot of their religious teachings,
but it was a place of awe, a place of safety.
So it was kind of like felt safer than my
(07:01):
home in a lot of ways. So I had an
early I guess it makes sense because I had such
an early positive experience around all of that.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
So did you sing sacred classical music?
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (07:14):
Yeah, it's one of my loves.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
Yes, Yeah, I went Actually we went to England when
I was fourteen and sang for the Archbishop of Canterbury
and sang at Saint Paul's Cathedral.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
Oh my gosh.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Quite a beautiful experience for me. And I think the
music and I think there's a reason. There's a reason
I'm saying this. The music had so much spirit for me. Again,
it wasn't so much the teachings. It was more than energy, right, And.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
Music is transformative in and of itself, the way it
connects us to ourselves and to spirit. So yeah, I
don't think that was an accident in your life that
that was happening. Do you still sing?
Speaker 2 (07:53):
I do not still maybe in the shower, but not
even in tern No, nope.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
Okay, So we're you're fourteen, and you're feeling relief from
the drugs and alcohol. It's giving you a sense of relief.
When in that seven year period, did you know you
were an addict.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Well, it's a fascinating thing, right, because I kind of
have a different point of view around all that. I'm
not really a big fan of the framework of alcoholic
or addict. I think for me, I had lost my way,
I had disconnected at age seven. I felt so damaged
and broken, and I got so much shame that alcohol
(08:38):
brought so much relief. And then, of course, I think
the question for all of us, you know, if we're
either have a loved one who is you know, working
through an addiction or active in an addiction, or we
are ourselves, where is that line? And I don't have
that answer for anyone. I know for me one, it
kind of quit working the way it once did. My
(08:58):
last year of using was just this real low level
search for spiritual meaning, and so I felt so broken
and it was like I had my umbilical cord in
my hand and trying to plug into anyone or anything
to feel relief. And I think that the distinction from
me where we might call it moving into addiction, you know,
classically we would say it starts causing problems, but I
(09:21):
think for me, actually it quit bringing relief from this
sense of spiritual bankruptcy or emptiness. And I just kept
trying more and more but felt emptier and emptier. So
perhaps that's where the line was for me.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
Interesting to me because twenty is young to feel a
spiritual bankruptcy, so you were obviously very aware and very
awake in your spirit to feel the absence of it.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
That's such a great way to frame it because that's
exactly how I felt. I felt an absence of And
when we think about it spirituality, it's so easy to
connect it with religion, and obviously for some people they
want to, for others they don't. For me, spirituality is
that sense of peace, it's that sense of connection to
self and others. It's that sense of worthiness of purpose,
(10:15):
and all of that felt bankrupt for me, like I
felt very empty, and again I was just trying to
capture that experience externally through drugs and alcohol and relationships,
and I just felt emptier and emptier.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Did I read somewhere that you actually said addiction is
a gift?
Speaker 2 (10:41):
I probably have said that, and I don't remember when
I said that.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
Really on my wheels and went, oh, I get it.
I get it, because it's the gift that leads you
to your purpose if you can find a path.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Yes, I do think in my own journey, I can't
really answer for anyone else, But in my own journey,
that sense of emptiness led me to a place of willingness,
and it led me to a place of darkness. Right
when we think about we hear about the dark night
of the soul. The dark night of the soul isn't sadness,
(11:22):
Like a lot of us experienced sadness that you know,
any time in our life we might have something happen.
Dark night of the soul to me is having had
a sense of connection, meaning and purpose and then losing
the ability to feel that. And that really was my addiction.
That's what it felt like. And then getting sober allowed
(11:44):
me to begin to reconnect with that. So I can
say that it truly was a gift because it accelerated
the process for me.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
Yeah, you were young, So would you say at seven
versus twenty twenty one that you, in your child place
had that sense of belonging and purpose?
Speaker 2 (12:04):
Yeah, I mean pre seven, I remember just feeling like
the luckiest kid alive, like mesmerized by life, like lying
in the backyard and just feeling the sun on my
face and seeing birds and butterflies. I mean, like I
just life felt magical.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
But that's also connecting to spirit. I mean nature connects
us to spirit. Nature opens us up emotionally. I mean,
I'm getting you, I'm getting it. So the one very
curious next pivot I think was you got clean, and
I guess you had not been using or drinking for
(12:43):
what a year or two years, but you still we
had this horrible emptiness and it even felt so sidle yes.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
So what happened in my journey is putting down the
drugs and alcohol brought so much relief, and I had
experienced so much happiness, and I found community and support
groups and friends, and I was going to work every day,
you know, just very simple things that were making me
so happy. And then somewhere between a year and two years,
(13:13):
I'm going to estimate around eighteen months, all of that
emptiness came back up. And I think what happened for me,
and I'll say for me is I needed to do
some of the deeper work of healing because drugs and
alcohol were masking that sense of emptiness. And then getting
sober was still a kind of I hadn't really addressed it.
(13:35):
I did feel happier, I did feel grateful to have connection.
But at that point, around eighteen months sober or so,
I found myself feeling very suicidal, and it took me
on a new journey, but it started with reconnecting with
that sense of emptiness and despair.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
I'm going to interject something here because I think transparency
is important, and you are triggering a lot of things me,
so my mind's kind of on fire. My husband committed
suicide five years ago and just yeah, some you know,
life went away as I knew it, and I spent
(14:15):
five years rebuilding, rebuilding my life and my children's lives.
But it's very curious when we talk about you as
the seven year old and you as the twenty one
year old experiencing that loneliness. We had been working with
a therapist for about a year because my husband had
gotten very he wouldn't have called it depressed, but despondent,
(14:38):
and a lot of reasons around all of that, but
certainly never thought he was headed to SUSI I didn't
even think that that was a possibility in our world
because we were so about the kids and our lives together.
But the therapist who had been working with us, said to
me afterwards, his suicide started in childhood, and that was
(15:04):
a really unusual concept for me. But when you are
outlining these kind of phases of your life, I can
clearly see James was my husband's name. I can see
how he probably experienced some of the same and that
despondency and lack of self and belonging that he had
(15:25):
young Maybe he never and his father died, and he
was very connected to his father. You know, there were
a lot of reasons, but I just wanted that transparency
between us as we talked because you might see me
trigger well.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
I first of all, thank you so much for sharing that,
because I think our stories have so much power, and
there's no surprise that we're having this conversation together right now,
and just the weight of that and all the layers
of what it's like to be you in the midst
of that, and then obviously to have been him in
the midst of that too, And I think about, you know,
(16:00):
the roles that we play right to be a good father.
I think probably did I'm guessing keep him around maybe,
And then I.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
Think, yeah, his love for us kept him around way
longer than he wanted to be on this earth, and
you know he was trying to get two boys grown
into men but couldn't quite get that far. But anyway, Yeah,
when you talk about that period of just separation, you know,
separation from belonging, I really understand, and I just.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
I feel called to also just speak to men. And
one of my greatest passions is helping men because we
do receive messages from a very early age to be strong,
to be brave, to use our intellect, to use our
physical strength, to be the breadwinner. Like the messages are
so deep. I mean, women have their own set too,
(16:57):
and I know gender roles are changing a lot, but
most of us still receive the idea of what it
means to be male, to be strong and not talk
about feelings and not be vulnerable. And the truth is,
if we don't carve out some relationships where we can
really get into the emotional piece of it, it can,
unfortunately to suicide. And I don't know the percentage, but
(17:19):
it's dramatically higher in men and women. Not to say
that women don't have their own set of things that
can be very challenging. Obviously, you know.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
No, but you're exactly right and it leads me to
what I've read about your conscious recovery framework. You know,
the very thing you were saying in being called to
work with men because they often, with all the messaging
in our culture, get separated from their emotions. Talk to me,
explain conscious recovery framework.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
Yeah, it's intricately linked to the experience I had when
I found myself suicidal. Let around eighteen months sober, because
I met a woman. Her name is Mary Helen, and
she was this incredibly enlightened being who took me on
a journey, and the journey wasn't really her teaching me,
it was the way she saw me. And that has
become the foundational framework of conscious recovery because I think
(18:13):
we tend to many people see themselves as damaged or broken.
I certainly did so much shame, so much disconnection from
my spirit, so much trauma that hadn't been addressed. And
she came in and said, underneath all of this, she
did not, in her words as much as in her
viewpoint of me, saw there was still a place of
wholeness within me, and that has become the foundation of
(18:35):
conscious recovery. The foundational principle is underneath all addictive behavior
is an essential self that is whole and perfect, and
that the way we view ourselves if I'm struggling with anything,
a mental health concern or an addiction, or the way
we view our loved ones. And certainly most of my
work now is working with clinicians. How are they seeing
(18:58):
their clients right? Because there's so much focus on pathologizing
and identifying what's wrong, and there's a place for that,
but there's this spiritual place where what gets created when
we see someone having the ability to actually heal as
a profound effect.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
So Mary Helen, in what context did you meet her?
She was?
Speaker 2 (19:21):
It was at a recovery support group I was part of
and she had been around for like twenty years sober,
which to me just sound just unbelievable, right, because that
was beyond my wildest imagination. Now for me, it's thirty
nine years, and that's wild to me too because I
think about how nineteen years sounded to me. But that's
(19:42):
where I met her, and her greatest gift was working
with people one on one. She was a counselor when
mostly men at that time coming back from the Vietnam War,
and she would sit with men and help them heal,
and we did a lot of deep inner child healing,
which was what was required for me. But I think
the main thing was this way she saw me. She
(20:04):
used to say in her beautiful Southern accident darling, you're
so precious. And I would literally feel like I was
going to be sick because that was so counter to
how my being, like every fiber of my being, wanted
to reject that. But in that viewing, there was something
that started to thought out, and I started to ask
questions like, this is this most beautiful woman, just this
(20:28):
beautiful spiritual being she sees me as that? Who am
I not to So it started to.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
Unrap a lot of this hearing that you know, such
an it's an invitation, but it's also not I don't
I don't want to use two authoritative words, but it's
a kind of a command in life. It just it
calls me to want to do for others what she
did for you, you know, to always look with eyes
of seeing you in the light, seeing you as whole,
(20:56):
which in my mind I think, I think that and
I hope I do that. But that story is profound
for me.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
I love that because each of us can do that
and yet a lot of times the people who were
closest to it might be hard to do that. And
you know, I think about young adults. I get to
work some with young adults, and I was a young
adult at that time, right twenty twenty one, twenty two,
when I was doing this work, and I felt so
(21:23):
damaged and broken. And when I look at most young adults,
a lot of people in their lives see them as
broken or damaged, and there's so much emphasis or focus
on the behavior and the you know, the quote unquote
acting out or you know, I'll say it this way,
and it's profoundly simple. I have caused a lot of
harm to myself and the world, and every time it
(21:44):
was when I felt that I was broken. In other words,
hurt people. Hurt people, right, And that was where I
was at. The great news is healed people, heal people,
and we help heal people by seeing something different for
that front for them or in them. Then maybe they
have access to or they believe they've lost access to.
And to me, that's that deeper spiritual healing.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
I mean, you just opened up some holy ground. It's
amazing
Hi, Welcome back, Welcome back. I'm Teresa Bruno. I'm the
host of the Soul Talks podcast, and I'm just thrilled
to get to sit today with t J. Woodward. I
have looked at his work for a long time in
addiction recovery, and I have looked at his teachings as
a goafe minister, and so I just can't wait to
share with you this incredible work, this spiritual leader, renowned
(00:30):
keynote speaker, best selling spiritual author, and addiction recovery expert
has to share with us today. I feel like I'm
talking to a guru and a friend.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
TJ.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Thank you so much for being with us. This is
long overdue for me. I've just heard so much about you.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Oh my gosh, I'm so happy to be here, Teresa.
Let's focus on the friend part. Let's be I love that.
What could be better than that? Right? Because each of
us is guru? Right, and none of us is a guru.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
I don't feel very much like a gear, but I
wanted to start with something I think will be very
interesting to our listeners and take me back to you
as a young person. I've read your story and I
don't want to give it all away. But what led
you to become an expert in addiction recovery?
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Well, I mean the expert piece is really my own
journey with my own addiction, struggling as a late teens
and into my very early twenties. I got sober right
before I turned twenty one. But going back is really
important because my earliest memories are memories of being really happy.
And I like to start there because I look at
(01:45):
what people are looking for in therapy or recovery, or
a spiritual community or a transformational workshop is actually innate
to a very young human. People want to feel their
feelings more. They want to be more present, they want
to be more open. I want to be more loving.
And the reason I like to start with that is
that was just my natural way of being. And when
(02:06):
I look at a small child, a preprogrammed human, they
seem to do that naturally. And so I start with
that because I think a lot of times we think
we're moving towards something in actuality, I think we're actually
returning to something under all the layers of the stuff
that we've picked up along the way.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
That's amazing. And I've read that you sort of had
a pivot at about seven years old, where you started
to feel a disconnect from yourself.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Yeah, it was actually a profound experience, and I can
remember the felt sense of it. I was seven years old.
I was at my dining room table with my mom
and my sisters, and I actually had a sensation, like
a physical sensation of my heart closing. And I don't
know what a seven year old's mind was telling me,
like what was I thinking at that point, But I
(02:56):
know how it felt. I became afraid and I remember
just feeling like I shut down. I can look back
now in retrospect and realize that was a strategy for survival.
I don't like to use the word coping mechanism. I
call these things brilliant strategy.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
I know. I love that you say that. That's so
such different language than I've ever heard in any kind
of recovery speak.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
I've had some pushback on it. I'm not going to lie.
I've had a couple of people saying, there's no way
you can call addiction a brilliant strategy. We shouldn't be
telling people that. So I want to like dive in
a little. The reason I call it brilliant is all
the mechanisms that we develop, usually as really small people
did serve us in some way, and so if we
look at them as bad or wrong, it's much more
(03:41):
difficult to let go of or to move beyond. But
if we look at the brilliance they once were, then
we can start to ask ourselves, is it still brilliant?
Is it still serving me? Because I have this profound idea?
Are you ready? We don't change unless we want to.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Oh, absolutely right?
Speaker 2 (03:57):
And so how do we get in touch with what
we truly want? In the addiction or that strategy of
closing my heart, it was there for a reason. I
was very afraid, and there were a lot of factors
that led to that. So it's really about unlearning that
my parents weren't a very loveless marriage. I've made peace
with both of them. We have beautiful relationships today. But
(04:17):
when my parents got divorced when I was fourteen, when
they separated, I literally said to my dad, what took
you so long? And he acknowledges now that he never
wanted to be in that marriage but felt like he
needed to be.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Yeah, and children feel every bit of that. And so you,
I mean, it was natural for you to have fear,
what's going to happen, you know, to us as a family,
What's going to happen to my mom, whom I'm so
close to. You know, I think those fears, you know,
you were internalizing. So take me from seven to I
think what it was at twelve or thirteen, because when
(04:53):
you begin to drink and then discover drugs.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
It's really close to seven year cycles. It's very interesting.
At seven I had this profound experience of closing my heart.
Somewhere around fourteen could have been a little bit earlier,
I discovered drugs and alcohol. And then at twenty one,
seven years later, again is when I got sober. So
there are these seven year cycles. And yes, when I
discovered drugs and alcohol, I mean, you know, weed was
(05:20):
given to me. I remember the sensation of feeling so
much relief. And of course I'm not the only one
saying this, but I understand or I realized that addiction
or the substance is never the problem. It's always a
solution that has lost its effectiveness.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
And I'm curious that leads me to something because you
live such a beautiful, directed, spiritual path in your life. Now,
did you live in a home that was religious, Christian, spiritual?
What were your underpinnings of spirituality?
Speaker 2 (05:55):
You know, it's such an interesting question, and there's it's
very astute that you're asking that question. And because I
think I hear a lot of people who I know
in their church they're taught there's something fundamentally wrong with them.
I was so lucky. My home wasn't particularly spiritual at
all or really religious, but I did grow up singing
(06:15):
in a very traditional men and boys choir in the
Episcopal Church, and I actually felt so much peace and
love there. I don't know if I absorbed the teachings.
I don't really remember a lot of that, but I
remember that was kind of a safe place for me. Interesting.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
That is such an unusual story. That is the antithesis
of what I hear in so many other stories. Yeah,
I love.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
That for you. I had that experience, and I feel
so grateful for and my dad also sang in that choir,
and it was a place that I felt safe. It
was a place that I felt some kind of spiritual energy. Again,
I didn't really necessarily absorb a lot of their religious teachings,
but it was a place of awe, a place of safety.
So it was kind of like felt safer than my
(07:01):
home in a lot of ways. So I had an
early I guess it makes sense because I had such
an early positive experience around all of that.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
So did you sing sacred classical music?
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (07:14):
Yeah, it's one of my loves.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
Yes, Yeah, I went Actually we went to England when
I was fourteen and sang for the Archbishop of Canterbury
and sang at Saint Paul's Cathedral.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
Oh my gosh.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Quite a beautiful experience for me. And I think the
music and I think there's a reason. There's a reason
I'm saying this. The music had so much spirit for me. Again,
it wasn't so much the teachings. It was more than energy, right, And.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
Music is transformative in and of itself, the way it
connects us to ourselves and to spirit. So yeah, I
don't think that was an accident in your life that
that was happening. Do you still sing?
Speaker 2 (07:53):
I do not still maybe in the shower, but not
even in tern No, nope.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
Okay, So we're you're fourteen, and you're feeling relief from
the drugs and alcohol. It's giving you a sense of relief.
When in that seven year period, did you know you
were an addict.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Well, it's a fascinating thing, right, because I kind of
have a different point of view around all that. I'm
not really a big fan of the framework of alcoholic
or addict. I think for me, I had lost my way,
I had disconnected at age seven. I felt so damaged
and broken, and I got so much shame that alcohol
(08:38):
brought so much relief. And then, of course, I think
the question for all of us, you know, if we're
either have a loved one who is you know, working
through an addiction or active in an addiction, or we
are ourselves, where is that line? And I don't have
that answer for anyone. I know for me one, it
kind of quit working the way it once did. My
(08:58):
last year of using was just this real low level
search for spiritual meaning, and so I felt so broken
and it was like I had my umbilical cord in
my hand and trying to plug into anyone or anything
to feel relief. And I think that the distinction from
me where we might call it moving into addiction, you know,
classically we would say it starts causing problems, but I
(09:21):
think for me, actually it quit bringing relief from this
sense of spiritual bankruptcy or emptiness. And I just kept
trying more and more but felt emptier and emptier. So
perhaps that's where the line was for me.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
Interesting to me because twenty is young to feel a
spiritual bankruptcy, so you were obviously very aware and very
awake in your spirit to feel the absence of it.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
That's such a great way to frame it because that's
exactly how I felt. I felt an absence of And
when we think about it spirituality, it's so easy to
connect it with religion, and obviously for some people they
want to, for others they don't. For me, spirituality is
that sense of peace, it's that sense of connection to
self and others. It's that sense of worthiness of purpose,
(10:15):
and all of that felt bankrupt for me, like I
felt very empty, and again I was just trying to
capture that experience externally through drugs and alcohol and relationships,
and I just felt emptier and emptier.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Did I read somewhere that you actually said addiction is
a gift?
Speaker 2 (10:41):
I probably have said that, and I don't remember when
I said that.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
Really on my wheels and went, oh, I get it.
I get it, because it's the gift that leads you
to your purpose if you can find a path.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Yes, I do think in my own journey, I can't
really answer for anyone else, But in my own journey,
that sense of emptiness led me to a place of willingness,
and it led me to a place of darkness. Right
when we think about we hear about the dark night
of the soul. The dark night of the soul isn't sadness,
(11:22):
Like a lot of us experienced sadness that you know,
any time in our life we might have something happen.
Dark night of the soul to me is having had
a sense of connection, meaning and purpose and then losing
the ability to feel that. And that really was my addiction.
That's what it felt like. And then getting sober allowed
(11:44):
me to begin to reconnect with that. So I can
say that it truly was a gift because it accelerated
the process for me.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
Yeah, you were young, So would you say at seven
versus twenty twenty one that you, in your child place
had that sense of belonging and purpose?
Speaker 2 (12:04):
Yeah, I mean pre seven, I remember just feeling like
the luckiest kid alive, like mesmerized by life, like lying
in the backyard and just feeling the sun on my
face and seeing birds and butterflies. I mean, like I
just life felt magical.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
But that's also connecting to spirit. I mean nature connects
us to spirit. Nature opens us up emotionally. I mean,
I'm getting you, I'm getting it. So the one very
curious next pivot I think was you got clean, and
I guess you had not been using or drinking for
(12:43):
what a year or two years, but you still we
had this horrible emptiness and it even felt so sidle yes.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
So what happened in my journey is putting down the
drugs and alcohol brought so much relief, and I had
experienced so much happiness, and I found community and support
groups and friends, and I was going to work every day,
you know, just very simple things that were making me
so happy. And then somewhere between a year and two years,
(13:13):
I'm going to estimate around eighteen months, all of that
emptiness came back up. And I think what happened for me,
and I'll say for me is I needed to do
some of the deeper work of healing because drugs and
alcohol were masking that sense of emptiness. And then getting
sober was still a kind of I hadn't really addressed it.
(13:35):
I did feel happier, I did feel grateful to have connection.
But at that point, around eighteen months sober or so,
I found myself feeling very suicidal, and it took me
on a new journey, but it started with reconnecting with
that sense of emptiness and despair.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
I'm going to interject something here because I think transparency
is important, and you are triggering a lot of things me,
so my mind's kind of on fire. My husband committed
suicide five years ago and just yeah, some you know,
life went away as I knew it, and I spent
(14:15):
five years rebuilding, rebuilding my life and my children's lives.
But it's very curious when we talk about you as
the seven year old and you as the twenty one
year old experiencing that loneliness. We had been working with
a therapist for about a year because my husband had
gotten very he wouldn't have called it depressed, but despondent,
(14:38):
and a lot of reasons around all of that, but
certainly never thought he was headed to SUSI I didn't
even think that that was a possibility in our world
because we were so about the kids and our lives together.
But the therapist who had been working with us, said to
me afterwards, his suicide started in childhood, and that was
(15:04):
a really unusual concept for me. But when you are
outlining these kind of phases of your life, I can
clearly see James was my husband's name. I can see
how he probably experienced some of the same and that
despondency and lack of self and belonging that he had
(15:25):
young Maybe he never and his father died, and he
was very connected to his father. You know, there were
a lot of reasons, but I just wanted that transparency
between us as we talked because you might see me
trigger well.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
I first of all, thank you so much for sharing that,
because I think our stories have so much power, and
there's no surprise that we're having this conversation together right now,
and just the weight of that and all the layers
of what it's like to be you in the midst
of that, and then obviously to have been him in
the midst of that too, And I think about, you know,
(16:00):
the roles that we play right to be a good father.
I think probably did I'm guessing keep him around maybe,
And then I.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
Think, yeah, his love for us kept him around way
longer than he wanted to be on this earth, and
you know he was trying to get two boys grown
into men but couldn't quite get that far. But anyway, Yeah,
when you talk about that period of just separation, you know,
separation from belonging, I really understand, and I just.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
I feel called to also just speak to men. And
one of my greatest passions is helping men because we
do receive messages from a very early age to be strong,
to be brave, to use our intellect, to use our
physical strength, to be the breadwinner. Like the messages are
so deep. I mean, women have their own set too,
(16:57):
and I know gender roles are changing a lot, but
most of us still receive the idea of what it
means to be male, to be strong and not talk
about feelings and not be vulnerable. And the truth is,
if we don't carve out some relationships where we can
really get into the emotional piece of it, it can,
unfortunately to suicide. And I don't know the percentage, but
(17:19):
it's dramatically higher in men and women. Not to say
that women don't have their own set of things that
can be very challenging. Obviously, you know.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
No, but you're exactly right and it leads me to
what I've read about your conscious recovery framework. You know,
the very thing you were saying in being called to
work with men because they often, with all the messaging
in our culture, get separated from their emotions. Talk to me,
explain conscious recovery framework.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
Yeah, it's intricately linked to the experience I had when
I found myself suicidal. Let around eighteen months sober, because
I met a woman. Her name is Mary Helen, and
she was this incredibly enlightened being who took me on
a journey, and the journey wasn't really her teaching me,
it was the way she saw me. And that has
become the foundational framework of conscious recovery because I think
(18:13):
we tend to many people see themselves as damaged or broken.
I certainly did so much shame, so much disconnection from
my spirit, so much trauma that hadn't been addressed. And
she came in and said, underneath all of this, she
did not, in her words as much as in her
viewpoint of me, saw there was still a place of
wholeness within me, and that has become the foundation of
(18:35):
conscious recovery. The foundational principle is underneath all addictive behavior
is an essential self that is whole and perfect, and
that the way we view ourselves if I'm struggling with anything,
a mental health concern or an addiction, or the way
we view our loved ones. And certainly most of my
work now is working with clinicians. How are they seeing
(18:58):
their clients right? Because there's so much focus on pathologizing
and identifying what's wrong, and there's a place for that,
but there's this spiritual place where what gets created when
we see someone having the ability to actually heal as
a profound effect.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
So Mary Helen, in what context did you meet her?
She was?
Speaker 2 (19:21):
It was at a recovery support group I was part of
and she had been around for like twenty years sober,
which to me just sound just unbelievable, right, because that
was beyond my wildest imagination. Now for me, it's thirty
nine years, and that's wild to me too because I
think about how nineteen years sounded to me. But that's
(19:42):
where I met her, and her greatest gift was working
with people one on one. She was a counselor when
mostly men at that time coming back from the Vietnam War,
and she would sit with men and help them heal,
and we did a lot of deep inner child healing,
which was what was required for me. But I think
the main thing was this way she saw me. She
(20:04):
used to say in her beautiful Southern accident darling, you're
so precious. And I would literally feel like I was
going to be sick because that was so counter to
how my being, like every fiber of my being, wanted
to reject that. But in that viewing, there was something
that started to thought out, and I started to ask
questions like, this is this most beautiful woman, just this
(20:28):
beautiful spiritual being she sees me as that? Who am
I not to So it started to.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
Unrap a lot of this hearing that you know, such
an it's an invitation, but it's also not I don't
I don't want to use two authoritative words, but it's
a kind of a command in life. It just it
calls me to want to do for others what she
did for you, you know, to always look with eyes
of seeing you in the light, seeing you as whole,
(20:56):
which in my mind I think, I think that and
I hope I do that. But that story is profound
for me.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
I love that because each of us can do that
and yet a lot of times the people who were
closest to it might be hard to do that. And
you know, I think about young adults. I get to
work some with young adults, and I was a young
adult at that time, right twenty twenty one, twenty two,
when I was doing this work, and I felt so
(21:23):
damaged and broken. And when I look at most young adults,
a lot of people in their lives see them as
broken or damaged, and there's so much emphasis or focus
on the behavior and the you know, the quote unquote
acting out or you know, I'll say it this way,
and it's profoundly simple. I have caused a lot of
harm to myself and the world, and every time it
(21:44):
was when I felt that I was broken. In other words,
hurt people. Hurt people, right, And that was where I
was at. The great news is healed people, heal people,
and we help heal people by seeing something different for
that front for them or in them. Then maybe they
have access to or they believe they've lost access to.
And to me, that's that deeper spiritual healing.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
I mean, you just opened up some holy ground. It's
amazing
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