Hello Sunshine, Hey fam Today on the bright Side, it's Wellness Wednesday, and we're going on a journey to joy and self discovery with Laura McCowan. She's the author of We Are the Luckiest and Push Off From here. Laura's joining The bright Side to show us how her path to sobriety led her back to herself, and she's offering us all tips on how to remove the roadblocks that are keeping us from living our best lives. It's Wednesday, August seventh. I'm Simone Boyce.
I'm Danielle Robe and this is the bright Side from Hello Sunshine, a daily show where we come together to share women's stories, to laugh, learn and brighten your day. Today's Wellness Wednesday is presented by Coligard. Okay, So, when Simone and I started creating The bright Side with our production team, one of the goals that we had was to set out to produce a show that shared women stories from all over the globe, different walks of life.
And when I think about why, I guess I can only answer personally, and for me, it's that women's stories have guided me my entire life.
When I was at some of my saddest moments.
Other women's stories comforted me, and when I was at my highest moments, they guided me too. If you need to figure out how to get an agent, it's in a woman's memoir. If you need to learn how someone else got through divorce, it's in a woman's memoir. Our stories, as unique as they are, are so universal too. And so today we have the opportunity to hear a story that we haven't covered yet on the show, a story about addiction and sobriety.
Yeah, this is a first for us, and we are thrilled that Laura McCallan is the one to kick off this conversation and share her story. Because Laura talks so openly about her struggles with alcohol and her path to sobriety, and now hundreds of thousands of people both online and in bookstores, turned to her on their own recovery journeys.
In twenty twenty, she founded The Luckiest Club. It's an online global sobriety support group where she helps users navigate their new lives and answers questions like will sobriety end my relationship?
Now?
She's put a lot of that wisdom down on the page. She's the best selling writer of two books, We Are the Luckiest, The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life, and push off from here. Nine essential truths to get you through sobriety and everything else. Don't worry, we are going to be covering those truths with Laura today. And on top of all that, she teaches a course called the Bigger Yes, she's got retreats. It's all an invitation to help us choose our own potential, and she's here with
us now. Laura McCowan, Welcome to the bright Side.
Thank you, Thanks for having me. We're happy to have you here.
And Laura, you have a really big anniversary coming up. You're going to be ten years sober in September. Yes, that's got to feel pretty amazing. Congratulate, Thank you. Yeah, it's wild. If you can take us back. I have something I call PSA pre self actualization. I went through it, I'd say about five years ago. I committed to going
to therapy pretty regularly. I read a bajillion books. You had a moment of PSA pre self actualization one night, and I'm wondering if you can take us back to that night that set you on a path to sobriety.
Yes.
So in July of twenty thirteen, I was at my brother's wedding and my daughter was four years old at the time, and she was the flower girl in the wedding. I had separated from my husband at that time, we'd been separated for a year, so it's just me and her going to the wedding, And that night I drank too much and blacked out and left my daughter alone in a hotel room overnight and didn't discover that till the morning, until I received texts from my family members, my mom and my brother.
My daughter had luckily made it back to them.
But that was the most terrific morning of my life for sure. And until then I had had a lot of consequences for my drinking, but I really still thought nothing bad would happen to her, like I wouldn't put her in danger, and I did, because that's how it goes.
There are no things that won't happen.
So it was a wake up call, of course, and because my family was aware of it, I couldn't just hide like I had so many other things. I couldn't just forget about it or sweep it under the rug, and I started a week later. I went to my first twelve Step meeting in Boston, and I didn't get sober until a year later. It was really hard to pull myself into sobriety and so PSA time. Is interesting because it does don't happen all at once, right, It's a journey.
I feel like it's a lifelong journey, to be honest, The more I know, the more I realize I don't know.
Much at all.
Yeah, but I think when you recount that story, for anyone listening who doesn't know about the rest of it yet, it's pretty guttural, like it's hard to listen to when you recount the story.
How do you feel?
That's a great question. I have talked about it so much because that's what I learned in recovery, is that there are no secrets anymore. All the parts of my history and all the parts of me belong. It doesn't feel good to talk about it, but I don't feel the shame that I felt at that time.
It took something like that to get me to wake up.
As horrific as that was, I am equally as grateful, Laura.
We all will go through extreme challenges in this life, and for some of us, our worst nights are going to happen in private. Maybe it's a breakup, maybe it's
a really difficult conversation. But for you, the worst night and morning of your life happened publicly in front of your friends, in front of your family at this wedding, and of course in front of your four year old daughter, who is greatly impacted by it, and so thinking about how confronting that must have been, like you couldn't hide anymore. And I also know that as a mother, there is a really big difference between shame and a mother's shame.
For us, it just hits a little bit different.
Absolutely, mom shame is like acidic and it just goes to the core of everything we think we know about what good people do and don't do. And when it comes to addiction, I have always said there is a special vitriol for mothers who drink. It goes against everything that we've been told. It is true about what love is and what mothers are supposed to be able to do,
and we never let mothers off the hook. But man, if you are a mom who happens to fall into addiction, it kills people because the shame is intolerable and you get it from not only the inside, but the outside too. There's really no compassion coming your way except from other mothers who have been there. I mean, I had to dissociate from the full experience of that for a while until I was able to handle it, because if I would have allowed myself to feel that in my body,
I wouldn't have been able to continue on. And in that meantime, I was met by other women who told me that, yeah, yeah, I've done that too.
It's amazing how shame becomes less potent whenever you're in a healthy community and a community that you see yourself in.
Yeah, it is life saving, Berne Brown says. And I always think of this. If you put shame in a Petrie dish, it require three things to go out of control, and that silent, secrecy, and judgment. And so when you are in community, it alleviates the shame.
You know.
I think one of the most courageous parts of healing is actually doing nothing at all or acquires nothing from us. It's sitting with the emotions instead of running from them and trying to numb them and cover them up. And I think if we're all being honest like that, is it can be a big motivator for drinking, for any kind of substance. So when you pulled the alcohol away, when you took it away, what did you discover when you finally stopped running and had to sit with what you were running from.
So the first thing I noticed is my feelings were really uncomfortable. There's a saying that they come out sideways when you're newly sober, and so I had a lot of rage. For me, drinking was a way to swallow anger and discomfort, and so a lot of things that I hadn't been able to or chose not to put a voice to prior to stopping drinking started to come out.
I started to get really angry about alcohol culture because even though I was the one who with the quote unquote problem, everyone around me drank a lot, and if they didn't drink a lot, they were running in other ways. And there was this profound unfairness that I felt. But then there's also grief giving up alcohol. There's a grief period that you go through if you let go of that, because it's an identity, and it's also who get defines who you hang out with, how you connect with people,
how you socialize, how you prioritize your time. For a lot lot of people, it's connected to intimacy with.
Their partner or dating.
It's connected to celebrations, it's connected to how you mourn. Really touches so much. So many areas of our lives that are about connection. So that was a lot of what I went through is just this sadness, like where do I belong now? Who will want me?
Will I be boring when you talk about the alcohol culture. Personally, I dealt with an eating disorder in seventh and eighth grade and to this day, however, many twenty something years later, when people talk about food in a certain way, I feel stuff come up in me. I think it lives within you forever, and you just learn to live with it in a different way. I heard Glennon Doyle say something one time that I've never forgotten and I don't
quite understand. I'm wondering if you can kind of expound on it for me.
She said that people who.
Have attended AA are the only honest people she's ever met. Was that your experience and what did she mean by that?
Yeah?
What she meant and what my experience has been is most of the time when we're walking around in the world, we're not really telling the truth about what's going on inside of us. There's a culture of secret keeping. Appearances must be upheld. The way we measure success is by a lot of outward measures. And the thing why I say we are the luckiest when it comes to addiction,
which sounds like a bumper sticker, but it isn't. It's because when you come up against something like addiction, it brings you to your knees and it forces you to stop lying. So when you walk into an AA meeting for the first time, it is the most bizarre thing because pele are just casually talking about the worst moments of their lives and the hardest things they've ever been through, and that's the norm.
We have to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with Laura McCollen. And we're back with Laura McCallen.
I think we can all benefit from the principles that have guided your recovery. And that's exactly what you're doing through this class that you teach called the Bigger Yes. So how does the Bigger Yes offer all of us an invitation?
Laura?
So the Bigger Yes came to me in early sobriety, because I felt like all this potential that I had when I was drinking, that was hidden when I was drinking and that I was tamping down, started to come forward when I got sober. And for me, it was writing. I had always wanted to write, and it was something I wanted more than drinking, which there weren't many things.
I think there's a lesson about delayed gratification in there too, because the smaller, easier yes is drinking, but the bigger yes that requires you to delay those desires in the moment is writing.
Absolutely, it's the short game versus the long game. And the short game drinking is always going to be good, and it's even going to be actually fun for most of us and not have huge consequences. But what does it mean if you are Let's just use drinking as an example, but it could be anything. It could be scrolling on your phone endlessly or whatever. You feel good in the short term, but in the long term you don't get to play that long game because you're.
Not available for it.
Right And the quote that turned it around for me, I was in this book shop after I had gone to this like yoga workshop and I was twenty days sober, terrified, out of my mind, and I picked up this book called The Great Work of Your Life by Stephen Cope and open to this page, and on the page was a quote by the Gospel of Thomas. It said, if you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. And if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring
forth will destroy you. And that was it for me. It was like, Yeah, this unused potential that we each have is not benign. When we don't live into that, it turns into something dark, and it looks like depression.
It looks like despair. It looks like.
We know we know inside when we are not living the way that we could. And what I mean by that is not like, oh, you could be making more money or you could be having this very outwardly important job in the world.
It's really just internal. It's being who you actually are. Yeah, it's a ligne.
It's integrity, yes, and telling the truth about who you actually are. And see what happens when you start doing that living into that.
It's one of the three most common regrets that people share at their end of life, meaning that they didn't live the truth of who they are. They lived for other people, for their parents, for their husband or wife, etc. Now, talking to you today, Laura, I can tell that truth and untruth. It's almost like an image for me with the scales. That's how important it is to you. I can tell. And you have a book called Push Off from Here, Nine Essential Truths to get you through sobriety
and everything else. Can you share those nine truths and how you came up with them?
Yeah, So I got sober in twenty fourteen. In twenty sixteen and seventeen, I had been writing on a blog mostly for all those years. I also did a podcast about sobriety. So I had started to build a little bit of a following. And I would get letters from people who are either struggling with addiction or you know, someone they knew was or something. And I got a letter from this sister who her sister was struggling with alcohol, and she was in that place where people go when
someone they love is caught an addiction. She was angry and scared and sad and frustrated, and of course wanted to help her sister but didn't know how. So she wrote me this long letter and said what should I say to her? And I wrote her a long letter back, and I said, if all of that is too much, just give her this list. And the list was the nine things that ended up being pushed off from here. And number one is it's not your fault. Two is
your responsibility? Three is it's unfair that this is your thing? But four this is your thing. Five this will never stop being your thing until you face it.
Six you can't do it alone. Seven only you can do it.
Eight I love you, and nine I will never stop reminding you of these things.
And that was in twenty sixteen.
In twenty twenty, when I published Well We Are the Luckiest, my first book, that was the epigraph to the book, the little quote that appears in the very beginning, and people gravitated towards that. There was like a whole book to read, but people would often want to interview if you me or talk to me about those nine things. And so when I founded a sobriety support community in twenty twenty, I made those sort of our are sort of backbone, and we read them at the end of every meeting.
I hear you saying that other people gravitated towards them, and they meant a lot to other people in the community. But as you spoke them, you started breathing differently, and I could tell they mean a lot to you.
Yeah, they do.
It was I have gone back to them again and again and again for different things. You know, I'm six months out of an engagement, ending a four your relationship, and facing a whole new era of you know what my thing is right now?
So I have leaned on them again and again myself because it doesn't end. You know.
It was alcohol, and then it was then it was other things, and it will always be that way, you know. So there are nine things that I think we never stop leaning on and learning, and their paradoxical. You can't do it alone. Only you can do it. It's not your fault, it is your response. It's kind of everything I know about what we have to hold simultaneously when we go through change.
I'm sorry that you're going through change again. It's really frickin' hard, it is.
Thank you.
It's time for another short break, but don't go anywhere because we'll be right back with Laura mcowan.
And we're back with Laura mcowan. I have a personal question for you.
Okay, it's more asking for a friend.
Uh.
Everybody in my life tells me I need to do two things meditate and journal. Okay, I don't do either of those things. I have like gems in my notepad. You say that journaling can be a really powerful tool for people in recovery as well as people that are looking for that bigger Yes, what am I missing out on? Tell me about the journey?
Okay, okay, yeah, So I don't like saying that. You know, there's that this is the thing that will work for everybody. Nothing is like that. But there are a few things that I feel like can benefit a lot of people, most people, and journaling is one of them. And this is why when we journal, and especially if we're writing on paper versus typing, because it's more embodied and it utilizes a different part of our brain. We are bringing
what is unconscious into consciousness. And it's an accessible, anytime, anywhere, any day type of thing.
You can do. It's free, which is one of the things I like.
It's like you don't have to have resources to pull out a pen and paper and so many of the things that we the wellness bullshit that we say people have to do is not accessible totally. So I think of journaling as this like conversation between me and maybe my higher self, me and wisdom whatever. It's not necessarily a higher power thing, but it's like a conversation. Sometimes I'm listening, sometimes I'm asking, Sometimes I'm just documenting things
to get them out of my body. So one of the things that I think is so enormous, and it's part of push off from here, is that our bodies have to be included in our healing and in our process, in our day to day feeling and processing of emotions, and we neglect that. And so writing is an embodiment practice too. It's not really it's a mind thing, but it's so much more of an embodiment thing. And so you get that going to it brings the body in.
Are there any other tools that you found really helpful for you in a journey of self discovery?
Time and again, for me, a.
Movement is like the number one, And I think part of that is just because because I have a lot of energy, like anxiety, just energy in my body that has to move and so physical. I don't even want to call it exercise because that sounds unappealing to so many people.
But just movement walking.
I have been in this season of my life lifting heavy things like you.
I never thought that I would want to do that.
I was always a runner, and oh my god, it is just it is everything for my brain. So for me, that has been a constant tool and mainstay of my mental health. Really, I'm a sort of spotty meditator, so I can't I would.
Love to say, yeah, meditation, but I go in and out of.
It, and I think, again, it's one of those things that depending on the type of person you are, like sometimes a lot of times my exercise, my movement is the meditation. Right, those are the big things, and then the other I was a huge thing that I find very annoying because I am not a joiner and I just still want to think that I can do things alone.
Is community and being with people.
Really connection with other people, and allowing myself to not be a teacher and a leader in a space and just be a person.
Laura, congratulations again on such a huge achievement. Your sobriety journey is very inspiring, and thank you so much for joining us on the bright side and sharing your story.
Oh thank you Thanks for having me.
Laura mcowan is the author of We Are the Luckiest and Push off from here.
That's it for today's show. Tomorrow, we're talking Modern Manners with etiquette expert Sarah Jane Hoe.
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I'm Danielle Robe on Instagram and TikTok.
That's ro b A. Y See you tomorrow, folks. Keep looking on the bright side.