Sober Motivation: Sharing Sobriety Stories - From Grief to Grace: Losing a Child, Addiction, and Finding Sobriety

Episode Date: February 27, 2026

Ashley Jo shares her story of high-functioning alcoholism, grief, shame, and sobriety after years of mommy wine culture and secret binge drinking.   A Christian mom, executive, and outwardly successful woman, Ashley struggled privately with addiction and suicidal ideation before choosing sobriety on August 14, 2020.   This episode covers: Functional alcoholism Comparing your drinking to others Mommy wine culture Faith and recovery Self-forgiveness Grief and addiction One day at a time sobriety If you feel like you “should know better” but can’t stop, this conversation will resonate.   Links:  Support Show Here Join the Sober Motivation Community  Ashley Jo on Instagram    

Welcome back to another episode of the Suburmotivation podcast. Today we are joined by Ashley Jo. This is a heavy episode, but is also full of hope. Ashley Joe shares what it was like to lose her son, carry crushing grief, and slowly spiral into alcoholism, while trying to hold everything together for everyone else. On the outside, she was showing up. On the inside, she was drowning in shame, self-hatred,

and thoughts of ending her life. This is a conversation about mommy wine culture, secrecy, comparing your drinking to others, and the dangerous lie that it's not that bad. If you're exhausted from fighting yourself every day, if you're living two lives, this episode might be the one that helps you choose differently. And this is Ashley Joe's story on the sober motivation podcast. Great to have you back for another episode. Thank you so much. If you're new here, welcome. If you've been listening for a while, welcome back. If you would like to support this show, I invite you to check out buy me a coffee.com slash sober motivation.

I'm a one-man show over here. I do the booking of the gas. I do the editing. Now we're doing the videos. Everything is in-house and it's me. And any of your support goes a long way. Just help cover the cost of subscriptions and all that cool stuff. Our world today seems to be built on subscriptions.

Also, if you would like some more support on your journey of not drinking, check us out in the community, sober motivation community. I'll drop the link down to the show notes below. If you have any questions about either of those things or anything at all, feel free to reach out to me on Instagram. I get back to pretty much every message. So looking forward to hearing from you. Now let's get into this episode.

One last thing, too, before we get into this episode, is I've released the last few episodes, this one included on the YouTube channel. So be sure to check out the YouTube channel. If you want to watch the videos, or you can watch them on Spotify as well. And what I've heard is that Apple is going to be introducing videos as well on Apple Podcasts soon.

So if you want to check out the video, subscribe, show me some love there. I'm starting pretty much from scratch. So any subscribers, any love over there would be incredible. Thank you so much. As always, enjoy the episode. Welcome back to another episode of the Sober Motivation podcast. Today we've got Ashley Joe with us.

How are you? I am doing well. How are you, Brad? Yeah, I'm doing good, all things considered. So what was it like for you growing up? So I was born and raised in a Christian family in small town, Iowa, and had three sisters and very loving parents. And overall, like as a child, I had an amazing and incredible life. I would say that for me, though, I was forced to grow up very, very quickly.

because when I was 23, I had two kids and my second child was diagnosed with a genetic disease that ended up later taking his life. And so being still that young, a kid myself, right? Only 23 years old and receiving a diagnosis for my son. And I know you asked what it's like when I was growing up, but I really look at this is when I grew up, right? Like I was forced to grow up when this. happened in my life. And it was just a horrible time. I mean, I don't think anything in life can prepare you, especially as a young mom from sitting from sitting across a doctor and a doctor saying, no matter what you do, your son's life is going to end before yours does. Unless you are struck by lightning or you leave and you get in a car accident, he will die before you. And so for me,

like that's really where I was forced to grow up. And I started caring for everyone else in my family at that moment in time. But what I stopped doing at that moment in time was caring for myself, right? I put everyone else in front of me. Yeah, wow. Yeah, thank you for sharing that too. Yeah, it's so much against the grain. I mean, I think that the way that we grow up is it's not supposed to go that way.

Going back to even some of your earlier years, I mean, for school and everything, all of that seemed to go well, like Iowa too. Do you still live in Iowa or no? No, I'm in South Dakota now. So, yeah, being born and raised in small town is unique and interesting because everybody knows everybody, right? And so for me, I will say the one thing that I learned or rather was ingrained in me growing up. And a piece of this just comes from the community I came from is that we kind of sweet. weep everything under the rug. And no problem exists if you can't see it. And I'll go, I'll go as far as saying, Brad, we went to church twice every Sunday. And in my community, you didn't work on Sunday. But yet in my community on Sundays, people would be washing their car in their garage with the garage door closed with just a crack out and you see all the water coming out. And so it's like, if you can't see it, it's not happening. And so from a very young age, I just kind of learned that, you know, if there are issues, we don't bring them out publicly.

We don't really talk about them. We just sweep them under the rug. And I did. My addiction started as a kid, not in the form of alcohol or drugs or anything like that, but in the form of coping with anxiety through cutting. And so I as a teenager didn't even realize why I was doing it. I had so much anxiety in my life that I found myself saying. in the shower with a razor blade and cutting my wrists, right?

And now years later in therapy, I've learned that that's a release of anxiety presenting itself. But I felt so much pressure because I felt like where I grew up, I had to be perfect. I had to be that perfect Christian daughter. I could not do anything wrong. And if I did, no one could see that I had done anything wrong. And, you know, at that time, my parents found out that I had been cutting. and, you know, I can't blame them for this. So if they're listening, Mom and Dad, I don't blame you.

But they did not know what to do. They were not equipped to deal with that, right? I mean, this is like the early 2000s. And so they just said to me, hey, if you do it again, we're going to have to like send you somewhere and we're going to have to get you help. And then after that, we never talked about it ever again. And so, of course, I kept doing it and I kept struggling through that. but we just didn't talk about it. And nobody asked and nobody checked and nobody looked and I did a better job of hiding it because if you can't see it, it's not going on. And so that was like my first addiction and a piece of my childhood that I feel now I have carried with me into every single aspect of my life.

Yeah. Even when I hear that too, because it definitely comes on the podcast a lot of people's stories of growing up. And I mean, with my parents, too, if you're listening. They never said it out loud. Like they never said what happens here. Maybe your experience was different. But I kind of got that impression that things, we try to just try to keep it here

and within the walls of the house. What I hear, though, and what I feel like I see sometimes is when you grow up like that, we tend to internalize things. Like instead of communicating or asking for help or sharing with others, everything just kind of gets built on. And I just reflect back to that time in my life when I'm younger, teenager, trying to fit in, trying to be cool, trying to figure out the whole world. And it feels like the pressure of high school, you have to have your whole life kind of figured out for you. I didn't know how to communicate my needs or what I was struggling with with anybody else.

So they didn't end up sending you away, though, like to get some support or help with this now. No, they really didn't. And then when it got to the point where I graduated high school, school, I launched into the real world, right? So going from like small town, Iowa, after I graduated, I left and I went to Florida and I worked at a Christian camp there. And that was like my first time out of the nest, right? And all of a sudden, I have this whole world that's exposed to me. And then I enjoyed that experience and I came back and then I went off to college. And college is where I had my first drink. I never, ever, ever drank when I was in high school. And so the very first night that I drank, it was honestly, it was after a church event. And we got invited to a party by some guys. And I picked up a

drink that was not meant for me. It was just sitting on the counter and no one was drinking it. And I was like, I should probably drink that because I'm feeling a lot of anxiety. And I did. And there were drugs in the drink. And so I was roofied the very first time that I ended up having a drink. And so Christian girl from small town Iowa, very first time drinking just out of the nest and leaving mom and dad for the first time, lose my virginity that night and don't even remember it. And then I'm up the next morning, the next day and the shame spiral just starts. Like I've saved myself for marriage. I've done all the right Christian things. And then in one night with one decision, picking up a drink that wasn't meant for me, all of that goes into the garbage, right? And that was really where like my self-worth, my self-doubt,

my self-hatred started to grow. And it just grew and grew and grew over the course of my life because I didn't deal with the challenge of what I had gone through. I did what I was taught or what was ingrained into me where it was, okay, a bad thing happened, but just don't talk about it. And I had the conversation with myself in my head, but we're really bad at troubleshooting and solving our own problems and at giving ourselves grace and giving ourselves love. And so dealing with it internally did not work, period. It just didn't. And so, yeah, that's my like early drinking career.

I took off quick and it was a downward spiral from there. Yeah. Did you, even that, even connecting the dots there of like being a little bit uncomfortable, a little bit of anxiety at the gathering, had you seen a lot of drinking growing up or that wasn't part of your life? I hadn't. So I really did not see my parents drink ever unless we were at family reunions and then they'd have a wine cooler or something like that with their brothers and sisters. And I stayed away from it in high school. In fact, I quite frankly judged my friends who did drink and they knew I was known. as like goody two shoes. I was not going to drink. I wasn't going to participate in parties. And so I hadn't really been exposed to it at all until that night. That was like my first real exposure to a party. And I was so uncomfortable. I just thought maybe if I have this, I'm going to feel a little bit more comfortable here and in my own skin. Right. And so that, yeah, that was my real first exposure. And what a crappy one, right? Like not what anybody pictures their

first drink or our first college party looking like at all. Yeah. Where was it that you went to college at? I went to college here in South Dakota. So I went to the University of Sioux Falls at the time. And yeah, and Christian college. So this kind of stuff happens at Christian schools too, y'all. Yeah. Yeah, that is quite the experience for your first time drinking too. But a lot of people talk about it's sort of checking boxes for them too and kind of in one way or another making sense or like doing what I guess what it's supposed to do you're anxious you drink it I mean you have this other horrible experience to go with it but maybe it does that for you like I feel like for me it was just a relief from everything I had been carrying around too and you know my ADHD is sort

of part of the mix too that you can only connect the dots looking back right at the time I had no idea, but when I look back, that's really what I was struggling with. And then, you know, there was this point in high school when I turned 17. I was on medication and therapy and everything all the way up until I was 17. And then I had this, I had missed a dose. My parents used to make sure I took the medication. And I had missed a dose. And my whole world just flips upside down in one day. And I felt completely different and extremely impulsive and everything. And then from there on, I had this genius idea of just lying and pretending I was taking. and not taking it. And my life just, I want to say slowly, but it wasn't slow. It quickly

unraveled. And then when alcohol kind of came into the picture, it just made a whole heck of a lot of sense. And for you, after that experience too there, it sounds like you just kept it going. Oh, I did for sure. I mean, I didn't know how to cope with it, but I knew that the night that happened was, I couldn't remember any of it. So I was like, maybe if I just keep drinking, all of this will go away, right? And I always say my first daughter saved my life because I was very quickly headed into alcoholism, like very, very quickly. And then I ended up getting pregnant with my daughter, who is now 19 years old. And I quit drinking cold turkey. I got off antidepressants, cold turkey, all the things you probably shouldn't do without the help of a healthcare

practitioner and got married to her dad, which was a crap show. It was not good. Within three days before we got married, I found out that he was back in active addiction. He was taking Vicodin, percocet, and oxy cotton that he had been prescribed something for a tooth. He was a recovering heroin addict. And you know how that story goes. You take one prescription and all of a sudden you are in the midst of a mess. So I was sober at the time, but didn't call it that. I just wasn't drinking, right? And then I'm married, and now I'm married to someone who is in the midst of full-blown active addiction that quickly spiraled into him taking severe amounts of methadone. When that ran out, he took crazy amounts of alcohol. And so here I am at the time I was 21. Then I got pregnant with my

second kid and all of a sudden it's like my world is unraveling and I was so focused on like my daughter, my son and my husband that again, I was not focused on myself. But I also wasn't even thinking about drinking at this point because my life was just a shit show. Right. I was just like, I just need to figure out life and how to keep the humans in my life alive. And if they're alive, I'm good. But the truth is I was not good. I was like slowly dying inside because I hadn't dealt with any of my own stuff. Yeah. And this was all when you were 21. Yeah. I mean, from 21 to 23 is a complete and total blur. And I ended up getting my husband into a treatment facility with my dad. And so he went to rehab while my daughter was she spent her, he spent her first birthday in rehab.

And I was three months pregnant with my son. So by the time he gets out of rehab, I'm a about to have a baby. When I have the baby, he's five months sober. When our son case is diagnosed with his terminal disease, my husband Ryan is 10 months sober. And when my son passes away, my husband, Ryan is 15 months sober. So I'm now dealing with a husband in early recovery, having lost a son, and I have a two-year-old baby that I need to take care of. And all of this, this happened from like 21 to 23. So I'm 23 years old and all of this is going on in my life. And again, I didn't even think about drinking because I didn't have time to think about drinking. I just thought like, how do I put one foot in front of the other? Make sure Ryan's okay. Make sure Adela is okay. Process my own grief.

Maybe I thought about that. Maybe I didn't even think about that because I was so just consumed on like keeping the people in front of me okay. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. Do you feel like it's a somewhat of a common sort of story? I mean, circumstance is different, but for moms to really take on this role. I feel like I hear it a lot for moms that struggle with drinking, like maybe a late onset of sort of alcohol being introduced to their life, or maybe they've always drank, but it wasn't quote unquote problematic. Yeah.

Kids come into the picture. They pour into that, which I think is incredible, but then leaving kind of maybe their own self-care and their own needs and their own happiness or joy back burner. Yeah. And I think then there's the whole mommy wine culture, right? Because you work so hard as a mom to care for the humans in your life that then there's the old like, well, at the end of the day, you just deserve a drink, right? And so by the time I got to that phase, my marriage had fallen apart and I was no longer

Mary, now I'm a single mom and I have another kid. So I'm a single mom to two kids. And I'm just like, you know what? I work my butt off. I'm an executive at day. I take care of these kids. At the end of the day, I deserve a glass of wine, right? And so I have the glass of wine and then it turns into two and then it turns into three and then it turns into over the course of years. It turns into a box of wine. And yes, it's so common for moms because we tell ourselves we deserve it. And the truth is we do deserve something, but alcohol isn't it. We deserve a break. We deserve peace. We deserve to care for ourselves before we care for other people, because unless we care for ourselves, we really are no good to the other people in our lives. But yes, I've heard story after story from moms who are also

the other common thing, Brad, we're really good at masking it for a really long time until all of a sudden it just like explodes in our life. And it's like we can't hide this from anyone anymore. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for bringing that other point up there too because that is another element. Looking from the outside, it might appear as everything is good to go, especially where you're listening there. You're working during the day. You're raising two kids at night. And then when they go to bed is, you know, I've earned this. I've worked hard and I deserve to drink. It's such a common, such a common sort of processing there. And I think, too, I mean, not to take any of the responsibility maybe away from us as an individual, right? Because I always think we, you know, have some sort of

stake in all of this. But I feel like I hear that the marketing too is really turned up. The heat was really turned on at some point. I don't know exactly when this happened, but sort of reinforcing this mommy wine culture around every corner that you needed a break. And there seems to be some point in time where big alcohol was like, okay, this could be an opportunity for us, which I think is just not right at all. I mean, I had a shirt that said, I love wine and country music, right? And I, like, wore it like it was my favorite shirt in the world. I had a mug that literally said on it, this isn't it, but it said, sh, there's wine in here. And like, I would take it with wine in it to the movie theater to watch movies. And it's like, I'm not even trying to,

hide it because it says there's wine in here and there's really wine in here. But like, it's okay, right? Because someone made a mug. And so that must mean that I'm allowed to do this. My kids are at school. I'm just watching a movie and drinking wine in a movie theater, right? No problem, right? And it's like that marketing message just tells us it reiterates over and over. You deserve this. You need a break. Trust me, this isn't a problem. This is what you should be doing right now. And for some women, they can just have a glass and they're fine and we can look at the shirt and look at the mug and think it's just funny. But for some people like me, eventually it crosses a line from being fun and manageable to being completely and utterly unmanageable. And for me, that looked like complete and total self-hatred.

And I got to the point of extreme suicidal ideation because I hated what. what I was going through and I didn't know how to process it and feel it and work through it, that the only solution in my mind was to drink more because it shut off the volume in my head, right? It was just constantly screaming like, do better, be better. Come on, Ashley. Why are you doing these things? You know better than this. And the drinking is all that would silence that. but that led to more anxiety, more depression. So pretty soon I didn't know, am I depressed because I'm drinking or am I drinking because I'm depressed?

And does it even matter? Yeah. Yeah. You just kind of introduced us to the whole cycle that you can go through of drinking. And then I look at it too, you know, zooming out a little bit, that it just becomes the one thing we're leaning on. So I think when we look back, it makes a whole lot of sense. I mean, we're not leaning into going for 30 minute walks, yoga, breathwork, meditation,

therapy. It's just a wine and the wine becomes sort of that easy reach to, you know, go through the stress and everything else that the overwhelm. And then that's what happens. I mean, it's so relatable in a different context for me, but I would commit to myself every day, right? This is it. Like, of course.

I mean, I'm going to have a big weekend. And then Monday, I'm going to shape up and I'm going to make this happen. And I could get a day or two. and then I would say, oh, I feel so much better, right? Like it's so great. Well, what's one or two going to hurt? Or sometimes maybe I would get a couple of weeks. And then I would say, oh, like, I'm cured and I figured it out.

And my life's getting better. And then sometimes I would blame it on different events or relationships. Well, now that I'm out of that, I'm obviously not going to drink it. I always went back to the same place. And often worse, often worse places. Could you ever stop at one or two? Because I never could. I mean, I could.

I could stop. one or two, but I mean, it just took willpower to the level of exhaustion and being miserable. Like, if I had to drive somewhere or something, I could, but I would always usually have a plan to continue later. So I could be like, hey, one or two, but it might not be it might not be it for the night or it depends. I mean, I would say I could have stopped, but maybe that's just me thinking I could have stopped it at the time. I told everybody I could stop whatever I want. I just didn't want to, right? So I think it's interesting. But for you, you're mentioning there, you couldn't stop.

It just kept going until you fell asleep. If I were going to drink, I was going to drink. Like in my mind, why would you ever just have one? And that's a sure sign I'm an alcoholic, right? Because I'm sitting here going, no, I would plan my day around when I could start to drink. And I could go, don't get me wrong, three, four, or even five days without drinking. But then when I made the conscious decision, like, I deserve it. tonight's the night. I'm having a drink. It wasn't one. It was seven. Always eight, nine, 10,

11, 12. There was just something about the second I got that feeling that we get. I could not put it down. And I think that existed from the very first moment that I took my first drink, maybe because of my first drink, is I'm trying to silence and stifle those memories. And, but yeah, for me, there was never such a thing. I would either say I'm not drinking. tonight or I'm getting hammered. Yeah. So it was kind of like a, I guess people would say kind of like binge drinking. Yes.

Type thing. Yeah. Yeah. Binge. Yes. I was an everyday drinker. So I drank every day. But it wasn't to, it wasn't to get that messed up every time.

I mean, that happened more times than I wanted it to. But I drank every day consistently. And then when I, I don't know, I just didn't maybe always have sort of the plant. to go all the way. I don't know. It was strange. But then there was a lot of times where I had said, well,

I'm going to obviously take it easy here. And then I would close down the bar and go wherever and, you know, make a mess of here or there and keep going and all of that stuff. But I think that is relatable too. I mean, especially with your responsibilities too, single mom working.

Like you're going to try to maybe subconsciously, if or consciously sort of pace yourself, right? Like you have to sort of not let everybody else around, do you know that the wheels are falling off or that they've fallen off? So it's like, I've got to try to keep that kind of going as well. Do you ever talk with anybody throughout this period of your life that might have a problem or anybody mention anything? Oh, people definitely mentioned, but I did a really great job of hiding it. I think the two people I couldn't hide it from eventually were my sister and my best friend. And they knew I was an alcoholic before I was

ready to admit that I was an alcoholic. But I did most of my drinking at home by myself. You're talking about closing down the bar. I'm a single mom. I put my kids a bed and I turn on TV Thursday night madness and I watch all the Thursday shows while I'm sipping my wine. Right. That was like my knee time and the only time I got to myself. So my drinking looked very different from like college drinking or partying with friends. Even my husband now, he still drinks. And like to hear him talk about going to bars. I'm like, I don't know what that was like because I was pregnant at the age of 21 and I've never really done that. Thank God, because it probably wouldn't have ended well for me. But it was all in my home. The one voice I constantly had in my head telling me I had a problem

was my own. But I did not want to listen to it. And that's because I was married to an alcoholic. I knew what alcoholism looked like. I knew what addiction looked like. And I knew that what I was doing wasn't normal drinking. I wasn't convinced it was alcoholism. I thought maybe I was just a problem drinker, as we call it. And the confusing part for me where it took me a while to get to the point of admitting, hi, I'm Ashley, I'm an alcoholic, is that I could go three to five days without drinking. And my ex-husband, who was an alcoholic, could not do that.

And so I kept telling myself, by the end of a five-day binge, Ashley, you have a problem. you have a really big problem you need to get this under control come on you got to stop but then i'd stop for five days actually you don't have a problem you're nothing like ryan you absolutely are in control of this look at how much better you are than him he couldn't stop you can and it was the vicious cycle for me and i would do what you described where i get to the end of a three to five day binge, I get sober, white knuckle it for the first two days after two days. I feel great. Day three, I stay sober. Day four, I stay sober. Day five, I'm like, man, it's been a long week. Man, these kids are pissing me up. Man, maybe I should have a drink. Yep, we're going to do it.

We're not an alcoholic. What are we talking about? Right. It's a constant dialogue in my head about what I'm doing right or wrong, the angel, the demon coming at me. And it was a mind, like, it just boggled my mind because I was so sure in some moments that I had a problem. And then in other moments, I was so sure I did not have a problem and I had control of this. And I think that's what kept me on my addiction journey for so long because I got divorced in 2013 and I did not get sober until 2020. And 2013, 14, 15, 16, I was just a problem drinker. 2017, I gave birth to now my daughter, my youngest child, and circumstances surrounding her birth

were insane. There was a whole paternity scandal that I was part of that led to another shame spiral. And my level of self-hatred just skyrocketed. And it was then that my drinking, I really started coping again with my anxiety with alcohol, self-medicating. And that self-medicating just became more and more and more. And that's when the five days on, five days off, five days on, three days off, five days on, five days on, one day off, that spiral began. And I mean, it got to the point where I was like, I can't, I just can't live like this. My kids deserve better than I am able to give them. And I don't want to live like this because this is a miserable existence.

Yeah. Well, thanks for sharing all of that, too. It's interesting there too because you had mentioned that you were seeing sort of alcoholism from your husband there or your ex-husband at one point. And then comparing that to how you were drinking and you hit the nail on the head. This is what keeps the hamster wheel going for so many people because it's like anything else in life, right? You kind of hear that expression.

There will always be somebody with more. There will always be somebody stronger, faster, whatever it is. And then there will also be other. people maybe with less. But it's interesting on the drinking journey that we find out the people who maybe drink more, their drinking looks different. We don't ever size ourselves up against the people that aren't drinking and say, I'm drinking, well, I'm drinking way more than Sally down the street, but we don't do that. We say, I'm drinking way less than whoever. So. And that was me. I'm drinking less than Ryan, right? Therefore, I cannot be an alcoholic because that's what I know as an

alcoholic, so I must not have a problem. Yeah. And it's so being in that spot right there, I think maybe you would agree that it is so difficult for an outside force to convince us that there is something, that there is a problem or that we are an alcoholic or whatever it is. Like they see it because people around us that aren't struggling with this, they can see it even though when we think people aren't picking up on it. Usually people are, but it's a very difficult spot because, yeah, I mean, you're kind of getting by with some things, right? And you're seeing a more problematic drinker over here and you're not there. That's just such an interesting aspect because I think whether people have it in the home or they have it around them,

it's a very slippery slope. You know, it's not an indicator for us not having a problem because we don't drink as much as so and so. When I think it's always easy to find someone who's drinking more than us, right? And then that's the only justification we need is like, well, so-and-so drinks more than me and they're still showing up to work. They're fine. So I must be fine. But in reality, that's like the wrong bar to compare ourselves to. Yes, very much so. Yeah. And I mean, throughout this part of your life, too, like, are you still, she mentioned work? Are you still showing up for that and doing what you need to do? Or did that ever slide in your life or no? No, it really didn't. Like, don't get me wrong.

I think there were like two days where I didn't go to work because I was super hungover in my career. But my alcoholism was very functional. Like I could still, I could drink all night and still get up for work the next morning. And I also work remote during a time where the rest of the world didn't work remote. So it added this whole like, I didn't mean to get up and drive. And I could just roll out of bed and I'm working. But I was always able to pull it together the next morning, which was a bit of the mind cycle too, where I'm like, but wait, if I'm up at 7 a.m. for a meeting, then I can't have a problem, right? But the problem was more an internal,

a soul problem, because even if I would tell myself some days, I'm not drinking today. Like, I'd wake up in the morning and say, Ashley, I'm not drinking today. But then by three o'clock, but I deserve a drink at five. So I'm going to have a drink at five. And when the kid, I'll wait to really drink until the kids are in bed. And that cycle of like appearing to be functional. I mean, Brad, I was a high level executive in a company through my addiction, through it all. And I think that's the thing is people think, some people think that addiction or alcoholism means like, you're jobless, you're losing job, you're not being responsible, you're not showing up. I was still showing up on the days I could for my kids, for my job. I was still by all intents and purposes from an

outside view successful, but I'm dying inside of here. And I hate myself every moment of every day. So the paycheck I take home doesn't mean anything if I am not okay. And that was where I realized, like, something's got to change. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. And yet that's what I was doing on the hamster wheel. And somehow, I woke up on August 14, 13 of 2020, and I decided to enroll in an online intensive outpatient treatment program because that day, I just said, I need to do something different. I've tried to get sober on my own. I've tried to get sober in the rooms. I am still successful, but I can't stop drinking, which means I need help. And so I did the hard thing and I reached out and I asked someone,

that I knew and respected in a sober community for help. And that changed my life. And I can't explain, but inside of me that day, Brad, something changed. I can't explain it. Many people still struggle with wanting and needing to drink or feeling like they have an urge and a desire. And there's something that after my first 90 days of sobriety, I've never had that urge again. Like the first 90 days, I white knuckled, but past my first 90 days, I have just,

the desire has been removed from me, but I continue doing the work, right? I keep going to therapy. I keep showing up. I keep acknowledging the state that my life had gotten to at one point in time and committing to moving forward and not accepting it as my identity, but accepting it as something I'm going to learn from and that's going to guide me in a different and better direction in this life. And now I just use that experience to inspire and help other people who are in a deep, dark depression or addiction or they're just caught in the middle of grief and they don't know how to find their way out. I am just so committed to sharing that there is hope and there is help and there is healing, but you have to make that decision inside of your own hearts and

inside of your own mind. You can't make that decision for someone else and no one else can make that decision for you. Yeah, that hits home there to all of that too. And even even going back to the functional aspect, a lot of people are that are struggling with alcohol. You would never know if you met somebody on the street or so and so. We have to, We do a really good job keeping things together. And I think it goes back even maybe to how you grew up and what you saw there and what you learned and what you took away. You know, that part of it anyway, of that experience, too, is let's do whatever we can

to make sure that nobody else picks up on this. But to the other side of it, too, it's exhausting. It is so exhausting. It's not, you strike me here as us just meeting as a very authentic, honest, person and those are that's what I'm picking up this other life you're living and I feel like that was probably always really important to you but I feel like that the other life or your previous you know way you were living was so against the grain for you that it just ate you up inside and it was it was draining it was life sucking yeah and I hear that and I see that from so many people

and it's a really tough place to get out of because it's like a sports team on paper. They look really great going into the season, but they don't always win the championship. But I think we look at our lives on paper. Some of us do. I mean, I was never a high achiever academically. But I hear from a lot of people that are in sort of perfectionism and overachievers and doing really good. And I think that that can overshadow on paper. Things look really great, but that can sort of overshadow.

sort of the internal struggle and maybe we utilize that to sort of quiet the other stuff. Like there can't be anything here. I just really wanted to hit that home because I know somebody will listen to the show that's right there that's thinking, this ring so true. But when they turn off the show and they go back and decide what they're going to do, those voices are going to creep back in that you haven't lost your job. Nobody else. You're good.

Like everything, you still got your car. You just got a promotion. your relationships are okay. Like they could be better. They could be worse. They're going to kind of come up with all of these things. But it's that voice that's telling us, that nudge tapping on the shoulder.

We've all heard it. You know, like, hey, something got to change here. Yeah. And I think I love that you're pointing out that I come across as a very honest, vulnerable, transparent person. Deep down in my heart, that's always who I was. But my anxiety and my upbringing

and the whole just sweep it under the rug led to like this really weird mask that I felt the need to put on. So it was like every day I just put on a mask and then maybe I would look behind the mask, right? And now I'm at a point in my recovery where I was just able to like rip up the mask and burn it and shut it and get rid of it forever. And like looking at myself in the mirror the first day that I got sober and saying Ashley, it's okay. You made some mistakes and this is the current state of your reality and it really sucks and you got yourself in a really crappy position. But that doesn't define who you are because deep down in here you still know who you are and

you can still live to be that person. I don't think anybody listening to this show wants to be defined by their worst decision or their worst moment or the worst thing that they have ever done. And so none of us are. That's what we need to remember. We are all human. We all make mistakes. And we need to give ourselves a little bit of grace.

And then you hit the nail on the head. When they're done listening to this and they get to that point of making the decision, only you can make the decision. Nobody else can make it for you. Yeah. And that's a home run right there too. At the end of the day, that's what we're in control of is the decision and where we decide to go with things. I'm curious too August 13th we talked a little bit before I mean that's my birthday if anybody wants to get me some gifts I'm just kidding

I mean what what kind of spurred that I mean it doesn't sound like it was it was any big sort of moment it was an accumulation of things over the years of knowing where this direction was heading but you reach out I mean are you worried too because I'm thinking about that what you do for work and everything like that are you worried that other people are going to find out about this that Things are going on? Yes. And that is really what spurred it. I had a moment of extreme suicidal ideation a few months before August 14. And I got a couple of six packs of Bud Light Platinum.

I went in my garage. I started my vehicle. I drank all 12 of them until I passed out. And I woke up and I was still alive. And the first voice I heard in my head was, you are such a failure, you can't even do that. But the very next voice that I heard in my in my head is you are here for a reason. And that day, two months prior, a few months prior to August 14, I started looking for the reason that I was still here. And something happened from that day

until August 14, where I saw the reason was me, the reason was my kids, the reason was as God had a bigger plan for me and for my kids and he wanted more than what I was currently living up to. And I did know that if I didn't make a change, I was going to lose everything, including my life. So I would lose my life. I would lose my job. I would lose my kids. I would lose everything. I was like right on the edge of the cliff and like the rock was starting to crumble. And there was just something about that. day. I was dating the man who's now my husband. So he went through all of this with me where I said, if you don't get your shit together, Ashley, you're going to lose everything. And that's what led me to make the hard call and to reach out and ask for help is it's like I saw a picture of a future

that I never, ever wanted. And it was a future that ended in death and dying and destruction. And I said, I just need to choose differently. And I don't know what it was about August 14. but today, that was the day that I made the choice to choose differently. And that was my day one of sobriety. And I haven't looked back since. Yeah. Wow. It's so interesting when you hear these stories.

It seems like we always, I do anyway. I mean, I would love to just have it cut and dry of like, what changed in your life? What happens so that we could pass that on to others, someone else, right? Like, it's just, but what I hear so many times and probably almost every, every time is that there's not exactly one thing or one formula or one moment. It's an accumulation of moments of maybe every time that we tried and it didn't work out, we maybe learned a little bit. And then we get to this sort of spot where you mentioned you're sort of at the edge of the

cliff, right, a crossroads, a fork in the road. Choose one way or choose the other and things turn out really bad. And it's in those couple of months, you know, something kind of, you know, went to work, went to work. How has your faith been throughout everything up to here? Because you had mentioned sort of the Christian roots growing up in that home in small town, Iowa. How is, does that still stayed part of your life throughout your struggle? It did. It was just so crazy. Like I would be hung over and going to church, right? And the moments in my life where I was closest to God were probably my darkest moments when I lost my son. But even through my addiction, he was still there

and he was still a part of my life. But what I had to learn, Brad, if I heard someone else say my story, like if my story was yours, I would have so much grace and love and compassion for you as a human being. But when I heard my own story and knew that it was tied to Ashley Joe, Ashley Joe knew better. So she didn't deserve God's grace because she knew all the things we were supposed to do. So it was like, God was like relentlessly pursuing me. And I was like, I don't deserve it. Trying to give a gift to someone and you're like, I don't want it. So he's sitting there and he's trying to give me this gift of grace. And I am sitting here and I'm saying, no, you can't give it to me. I don't deserve it. And on August 14, I decided I deserved it. And I decided to

take that step. And now, I mean, my life has been crazy even since I got sober, Brad. I don't want to claim that, like, one thing about sobriety has made my life easier because life still lives and crap still happens. But I'm doing it and I'm doing it sober. And when hard things happen, I know that God is there. I know that my family is there. And I know that I have the tools in my toolbox to get through the day, the crisis, the chaos, the moment, and to do it sober. And so God was everything to me, even though I tried shutting him out and shunning him, he relentlessly pursued me and thank God one day I woke up and I said, okay, fine, I get it.

Your grace covers me too. And that's part of why I share my story because I think shame is behind so much addiction. shame is the thing that like the spark that causes the fire to just grow and grow. And I think so many people are filled with so much shame. And they just need to know that there is grace even for you, even if your life is a disaster, even if you think you've messed up everything. I promise there's a way out. But we have to be willing to accept the gift of grace that we're being.

given and we have to be willing to give ourselves grace through that process. Yeah, so powerful there. I mean the word shame too. I don't know if there's an episode where it doesn't come up. And I hear a lot too. And that's why I kind of asked you about your job and your career and were you worried about kind of people figuring out and how that could impact you. But I see a lot of people kind of living in that secrecy and everybody has their own way to go about doing this whole thing and I'm not here to say this is the right way and that's the wrong way. But what I see work is when people are authentic and they own their truth. I see leaps and bounds happen for their life because this whole thing of addiction and drinking wants to keep us isolated, doesn't want

us to ask for help, wants to keep us stuck, playing small, all of those things, right? And like what you mentioned too, going back in your story, your drinking was at home on the couch, watching, dancing with the stars or whatever it was, right? That, I mean, for moms, that's where they all get. I know. All the moms are there because, yeah, you're home with the kids, right? And then it's just, now nobody's, nobody's really seeing it. So even though things could be going a little bit sideways or whatever, right?

People aren't exposed to it. And things just kind of grow in secrecy and silence. So you reach out for help. You accept the, you reach out for help. I mean, you get the help. what changes? I mean, what do you learn early on in this? And you've already made this decision, which is obviously the first step. Yeah. So I, early in my program, I had to do an exercise where I had to write my eulogy as though I had died from addiction. And that was so hard, right?

Like realizing, you said it, there's a fork in the road, there's a path. And one leads to life and one leads to death, dying, and disease. And so I had to write the story that led to death, dying, and disease. And looking in the mirror and seeing, like, how my story could have truly ended, that was, like, mind-blowing to me. And then later in the program, I got to write the eulogy again, as though I lived a long, prosperous life and just died at an old age in my sleep, right? And so seeing the two different paths come to,

play just like open my eyes to the choice that I have in this matter, that I am a player in this game of life and that I do have some choice to this. I changed my routine completely where I am up every morning at 5.20 a.m. I go on a walk usually or work out first thing in the morning. I pray and meditate first thing in the morning. I get up and shower and spend some time by myself. And with my husband before my kids are awake. So I do have me time and it's not drinking me time. Then I get them up. I go to work.

I go to therapy in the afternoon once a week. Right. So I changed literally everything about my life because I had to. I had to change my relationship with my kids, my relationship even with my husband. I had to change the way I navigated through life if I wanted life to look different. and it was really hard at first. And I did a lot of distraction at first through exercise. I worked out like three hours a day for my first 90 days of sobriety just because I needed to.

The art of distraction is a beautiful gift. But eventually I got to a point where I realized I had created a routine. And more than just a routine, I had created a life that I loved, not a life that I dreaded waking up the next morning and I didn't want to live. somehow along the way I had learned to forgive myself and I had learned to love life again. And that's the best gift that I've ever been given or I've ever grabbed and received for myself. Yeah. And even given back to the world too. I mean, with your family and I'm sure everybody else that that's around too. Five-20. I mean, I don't know. Maybe there's something that's a very specific time

to get up at. So I mean, August 14th, 2020, I mean, that was during the pandemic too. So we talked a little bit too of, you know, you plugging into things virtually, you know, at that point. And then all the things that do, you know, change. And you brought up something that I think is so important on this side of things, the F word, forgiveness. How do you get to a place with the way that things went? You know, because I see a lot of people, mom specifically again here, struggle with the forgiveness. piece of maybe saying I'll never forgive myself or how things went or whatever the situation is. But I see it as a big key to unlock the next level.

For me to do that, getting to a point of self-forgiveness was so hard. And for me to do that, it took me viewing my story as an outsider. So one of the other things that I did is I had to write my whole life story and then I had to share it with a group of 60 strangers in treatment, which like talk about like a little bit nervous, right? And through that process, I realized I really loved writing and I loved reflecting. And so for me, I wrote my story, like significant parts of it from beginning to end. And I read it from an outside perspective. And that's part of how I was able to give myself that grace and to forgive myself. I realized reading my own story, which eventually turned into a book, that if I were anybody

else reading this, I would give grace to that person. And so if that's how I was thinking, reading it with an outsider's perspective, then I deserved that grace myself. And I realized that in the moment, I was a girl who had been given a crappy hand of cards, Delta, a crappy hand and I lost a son and I married someone who was in active addiction and I got divorced and I was in a paternity scandal and I made some crappy decisions but I was just a girl trying to do the best I could to survive and I was surviving in a very dysfunctional way but I had done it and I was still alive and the fact that I made it through that fight, is part of what allowed me to see the forgiveness I needed to give myself by looking in the mirror,

looking at the story from an outside perspective and saying, oh, my goodness, you were just a girl who went through all of this, who nobody taught how to cope through grief. And nobody suggested maybe you should go to therapy. And nobody gave me, I didn't have the tools in my tool belt to deal with life. So I reached for the bottle. and the bottle seemed to solve the problem until it didn't. Anyway, very long went and answer to forgiveness, but that was my journey to forgiveness. Yeah, I love that.

I've never heard of sort of someone working through forgiveness in that sense, but I love that because you're right, and you had mentioned it kind of earlier there too. I mean, if we heard our story through somebody else, I mean, we would hug them, we would love on them, we would do everything we could to support them with kindness and not be judgmental and everything else. But then when it comes to sometimes our own struggles, that voice kind of gets going, right? You knew better.

Come on, do better. And we can really beat ourselves up. Heading towards kind of wrapping things up here. Thank you so much to Ashley, Joe, for sharing all of this, for us being strangers, recording this and for everybody else that will listen. You mentioned it.

You wrote a book. And I mean, it sounds like that started growing legs when you were in your recovery program there. how do you get to that? I'm always intrigued by that. I mean, writing a book, see, like this whole podcasting thing is one thing, right? I decide one day I'm like, I don't want to do podcasting anymore in whatever my life goes a weird way or something.

I just delete it all. And, you know, maybe some lives on and maybe some doesn't. A book lives on forever. You can never get them back. Well, how do you get into this, you know, writing a book in all of that stuff? Yeah. So for me, it did start when my son was sick. I started writing a journal to keep others up to speed on how he was.

And I fell in love with writing at that time. And then when I went through my program and they had me write my story, I fell back in love with writing again. And so I decided very early in sobriety, as many of us do, we come up with these gung-ho ideas. I was like, I'm going to write a book. And so I wrote chapter one and chapter two, like three months sober, literally no joke. And then I didn't touch it for about four and a half years.

And then I just decided, one thing that's very important to me in sobriety, Brad, is keeping the promises we make to ourselves. That's really important to me. That's a value of mine. And so I said, Ashley, you made a promise to yourself that you were going to write a book and you're going to sit down and you're going to write it and you're going to finish it. And I did not outline. I didn't do anything. I just sat down and started writing things as I remembered them. And it turned into this book here, Tides of grief, waves of grace. It's a memoir of scandal, sobriety, heartbreak, and healing. And it really starts when I was 23 years old and goes to current day. But it's also funny, you said, like, weren't you worried about like what your employer

or what your coworkers would think? Not when I was inactive addiction, but you want to know when I was worried about it when I was about to hit Publish because this can't disappear. Like, I literally hit Publish and then I ran to my husband. I'm like, oh, my God, can I take it back? Can I take it back? Am I allowed to take it back? but the story was met with so much grace from other people.

And that's the piece where it's like, I think so many of us are afraid of speaking our story out loud because maybe it's going to be judged and maybe it's going to be met with resistance. And guess what? There's going to be haters out there for every story, even the perfect story. But there's going to be a lot of love and a lot of grace.

And what I've found is when we start sharing our stories and they give other people hope and other people healing and, other people inspiration, all of a sudden, people start sharing like the water just starts, we turned on the faucet and the water is just coming. So many people are suffering and they're suffering alone. And I just wanted people to feel like they're a little less alone. Yeah, beautiful inspiration to get things going. I've heard from a lot of people, too, the process of writing a book, like you mentioned, all of those things that it could potentially do for somebody

else that it often does for the person who wrote it, a healing, you know, experience as well. It was probably the most healing thing that I have done. And I've been going to therapy for 10 years and I have done an IOP, but sitting down and like writing my own story and then reading it for the first time, I like sobbed when I got done because I was like, that's my life. And that's like my piece of work, right? Like, I feel like God put me on this world for a reason and he gave me this story for a reason. And I don't think it was to hide it in the corner of a dark room. I think it was to tell people, if you feel like you are this close to giving up, don't give up, just cling to hope and know that there is life and there is hope and there is healing on the other

side. It's just been beyond rewarding, beyond healing. And even if nobody ever read this, but I did and my kids did, because my kids have read it too, which is a whole new level of weirdness. Like, this healing was enough for me. It's what I needed was to see my story from beginning to end. And that's what allowed me to give myself that grace. Yeah. Yeah, that is incredible.

I mean, if I were to cross your path on sort of like August 12th of 2020, and I mentioned to you, this is where your life would be. I mean, how would. would I have appeared a little bit crazy? You would have definitely. I would have thought that you were crazy. I would have probably been like, I don't know if I'm even going to be here in five years from now, right?

Like, it just, life is completely different than it was on August 12. And I, in great example of two of why I, I try to mention that in some of the episodes because I think that people are out there struggling. All of this stuff is extremely difficult and heavy. and you feel and you can feel like it's never going to turn around. But the reality is it can and it will. It does turn around and it turns around that quick.

Not that our life just becomes better overnight, but we start the process to move in that direction. And even like you mentioned there, a couple days before you started, you know, this journey, it would have been out of this world if that was going to be your life in two days. So I just say that. I try to say that to hit home for anybody who's really in the thick of it,

that things could look different for you two days from now. I don't think that Ashley Joe and this kind of my story too, that we're just unique to this experience, you know, just hang in there and keep doing, you know, what you need to do. Yeah, I could not agree with that more. Anything for closing. Where can we grab the book and, yeah, And any last thoughts you have for anybody who just might be looking for something?

Yeah, you can find the book on Amazon. It's Tides of Grief, Waves of Grace, or on my website, this is Ashley Jo. Joe is joe.com, which is also my Instagram. And I think, yeah, the last words I would want to leave with people is there's a reason the cliche saying one day at a time exists. And that's because this journey and this life is truly one day at a time. So don't get overwhelmed by your future. Think of today.

Make the right choice today. Thank you so much, Ashley Jo. It was great having you on the podcast. Thanks for sharing your story with us. Thank you. Well, there it is another incredible episode here on the podcast. Shoot shout out to Ashley Jo for coming on and sharing her story with all of us. I'll drop her book details and Instagram information down to the show notes below.

Thank you so much. If you were able to connect with any part of your story, drop a comment wherever you're watching this. center over a message. Follow along. Lots more to come and I'll see you on the next one.