Welcome to the sober and happy podcast where we talk about all things recovery related, how to navigate the challenges that we will face along the way on our journey towards our best lives, and how we can go from living a life of simply just being sober to a life where we are both sober and happy.
Today I want to talk about an important topic that affects so many individuals on their journey to healing - overcoming stigma and shame in our recovery.
These are unfortunately common struggles with people in recovery. We worry that people will look at our addictions as a moral failing and that by talking about it we will certainly experience judgment, discrimination, and rejection.
Out of fear of this, for many years I kept my past hidden from many people. Like it was a dirty secret I didn’t want anybody to know about. And with each person I chose to hide it from, the stigma and shame only grew.
But what happens if we are open and honest about our past? Are people really going to judge us as we fear? Could recovering out loud instead of anonymously, start to remove the stigma and shame around our own recovery and recovery in general?
That is what we are going to talk about today. So buckle up, this is going to be a great episode.
Welcome back. A few quick reminders before getting back to the episode. Our private Facebook group has attracted an amazing, supportive group of people. If you are looking for a great community to help support you in this journey, please go check it out. You can find it by going over to facebook.com/groups/soberandhappy. I will also leave a link in the show notes for you.
OK, now back to the episode.
I remember a moment vividly from early in my recovery. I was out to lunch with a coworker and while we were standing in line I realized someone I had met in Alcoholics Anonymous was standing in line behind me.
“Hey Tim”, she said. Fear completely overcame me. What if she asks if she was going to see me at the meeting tonight? What if my coworker asks how we know each other? If my coworker finds out I go to AA, then he is going to know I am an alcoholic. He is going to tell everybody else at work. They are going to judge me. The first time I call in sick, they will think it is because I am hungover and will fire me.
My mind went on and on. The person from AA didn’t say anything and none of those fears came to pass. However, the fear of being found out always lingered.
I got sober absolutely ashamed of the person I had become. That in fact, was a motivating force for me to get sober. Like most things I was ashamed of, I felt I needed to hide it so that people wouldn’t judge me.
As I met more people in recovery I found this was common within the recovery community, especially since I was going to AA meetings when I got out of rehab. A recovery program with Anonymous in the title, which only reinforces the belief that we should hide that part of us.
I do understand the tradition of anonymity in the AA doesn’t tell you that you shouldn’t tell people about your past. It simply states that you should not publicly identify yourself as a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. It was created to protect the brand. They simply do not want someone bragging about how amazing AA is, and then relapsing and creating the perception that AA doesn’t work. That in itself creates a whole other layer of shame around relapse and how that could make AA look bad, but that isn’t the focus today.
Despite the intention around the tradition of remaining anonymous, there
is a lot of misunderstanding with that throughout the fellowship and the majority of the people I met in my many years in AA felt that we should also keep the fact that we are recovering alcoholics secret too.
So that is what I did. Here is the thing about secrets. They keep us from letting go of the past. They create a mindset that there is something we need to hide. And like that day in line at lunch with my coworker, I was always in a state of fear of being found out.
Author and researcher Dr. Brene Brown has extensively studied shame. In her studies, she has found that shame requires 3 ingredients: secrecy, silence, and judgment.
She describes shame as an “intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.” It's an emotion that affects all of us and profoundly shapes the way we interact in the world.
Most people I know in recovery struggle with never being able to let go of the shame of the past, but by remaining anonymous they are feeding all three ingredients of shame: secrecy, silence, and judgment.
I honestly never planned to let people outside of the rooms know about my past. I embraced keeping my past a secret from the world until one day, I was put in a situation where I only had two choices: continue to run from my past or be honest about it.
At that time I had been working at the job I got out of rehab for a couple of years. One day our boss called a meeting and told us that the small cancer center we worked for was being bought out by a bigger medical company. Normally this would be good news. There would be better benefits and more opportunities for growth. We were all guaranteed new positions at the company which for many of us he said, would come with bumps in our pay. We just needed to pass the background check and we would be good.
There was only one problem. The company that was buying us out was a company I had been fired from. My first thought was to repeat a pattern I have lived my whole life. Rather than face my past and see if there was a way to work through it, I wanted to run.
I sat at my desk and was thinking about just leaving and never coming back. However, there was a part of me that was urging me to be honest. So I walked into my boss's office and sat down.
“Hey, I need to talk to you about us being bought out,” I told him. “There is going to be a problem with my employment history. They have fired me before. I used to have a drinking problem, and to be completely honest when I worked for them I missed a lot of work, and when I was there, I wasn’t a very good employee”.
He looked at me and said, “I am guessing you are sober now because the person you described is not the same person that works for me.” He went on and explained that although he couldn’t guarantee anything, he would do everything in his power to make sure they hired me. He told me to go talk to the head of our cancer centers who I did most of my work for because he knew her endorsement would have a lot of weight.
So I nervously had the same conversation with her. Come to find out her dad had been sober for several decades. I shared with her how I was afraid to let anybody know out of fear of judgment. She told me that she respects me even more because she knows the level of dedication and perseverance it takes to face addiction, and those are qualities she looks for in people she hires. She looked at me and said, “You have nothing to worry about. I will make sure you are coming with us”.
She kept her word. There were other people that were not hired because of similar past employment with this company, but I was not one of them. Not only did they bring me on, but it came with a promotion and a very generous bump in pay. None of this would have happened if I would have desired to keep my sobriety a secret.
Now I would love to tell you that this experience completely changed my beliefs about remaining anonymous in my recovery. It didn’t though and I continued to carry that shame around for many more years and the shame of my past addiction never let up.
But even with that amazing experience, I couldn’t shake the stigma around addiction and I was still surrounded by people who mostly shared the belief that it is something only to be talked about in the rooms with other people like me. Society's stigma around addiction is the negative attitudes and beliefs around people who struggle with substance abuse. This leads to discrimination, and isolation, and even prevents people from seeking the support and help they need.
The best way to tackle stigma is through education and awareness. The more people understand addiction and see proof that people can change, the more likely we are to challenge those harmful stereotypes.
Open conversations about addiction and recovery help combat that stigma. When we discuss these issues openly, we normalize the process of seeking help and promote acceptance.
People only hide things that they too believe are worthy of shame. So by hiding it, we are actually reinforcing society's stigma around addiction.
It also keeps us from creating genuine connections with the people we meet. Remember the coworker I was in line with from the story at the beginning of the podcast that I kept my recovery secret from?
We had grown pretty close over the years and went to lunch regularly. When I finally decided to share with him about my alcoholism, he looked at me and said “Man, why didn’t you ever tell me before? I thought we were pretty tight”. That is the thing about secrets. It keeps us from building authentic relationships with the people we meet because we are not showing up as our true selves. We are only sharing the parts of us that we want people to see because we don’t give them enough credit to love us for who we are.
This hit me hard and I decided to share it with more people in my life. Each time I decided to be vulnerable, I found the shame lifted a little more and the majority of the people I shared it with, responded with praise rather than judgment. And with every positive experience, the desire to stop hiding who I was grew.
That was one of the big driving factors I had in deciding to leave AA. People would explain the tradition to me and how it was about just not mentioning I was a member of alcoholics anonymous publicly.
I understood that, but there is a deep layer of shame in that. It is like being in a relationship with someone and them telling you not to tell anyone you are dating because you might mess up and make them look bad.
I desired to be fully authentic for who I was and not hide my past addiction or my successful recovery from anyone, even if that meant facing the fear of leaving AA and the certain relapse that people in the rooms said happens to people that leave.
I want to emphasize that overcoming stigma and shame is not an overnight process. It takes time, patience, and the willingness to be vulnerable.
For me, it took probably another year of still going to meetings and just dabbling in sharing my past with people I met when the opportunity arose.
But it all changed with one conversation. I was at a Tony Robbins event and over the course of the first day, I talked a lot with the lady next to me. I don’t remember exactly how it came up, but I shared with her about the depths my alcoholism took me, the effects it had on my mother, how I had been able to overcome it, and how amazing our relationship is now.
As I continued to share my story, she began to cry. I asked her what was wrong. She shared with me that her son is suffering from addiction also and that she had gotten to the point where she had lost pretty much all hope of him getting better. She told me that by my sharing with her about my past, I had provided her with hope, and the strength that she needs to continue to weather the storm of her sons' addiction. It was a moment of genuine connection between two people that desperately needed it, only experienced because I decided to no longer be anonymous and hide my past.
I decided at that moment that I would no longer recover in secrecy, and to recover out loud instead. The results have been amazing.
More people who are struggling with their own addictions feel comfortable reaching out to me because they know I have overcome my own. People who never would have known they could ask me for help if I was still hiding who I am.
I hope that through sharing my past, I have helped change the stigma some people have about addiction.
I know that my relationships are more authentic because I fully show up as myself and when people love me, it is for who I am and not just the parts of me I choose to share with them.
And the best part, I have no shame around my past addiction anymore. I am not proud of the things I have done in the past, but they do not define me or weigh me down anymore, because I am proud of the person I have become.
And for someone who only remembers living in some sort of shame my entire life, I can’t even explain how amazing that feels. It is something beyond words and something that can only be experienced.
And in my experience, it was something only possible when I decided to quit hiding parts of me and recover out loud.
As we wrap up this episode, I want to re-emphasize that overcoming stigma and shame is not an overnight process. It takes time, patience, and the willingness to be vulnerable. Remember, you are not defined by your past, and seeking help is an act of courage, not weakness.
I want to thank you for listening to this episode and I hope you are finding value from listening to my podcast. If you are, I am asking for two huge favors from you this week that would help me. Share the episode with one person you think would find it impactful, and please subscribe to my podcast, both of which will help the podcast grow even more.
New episodes come out each Friday, so I look forward to connecting with you next week. And as always, thank you so much for listening, and keep living sober and happy.