Sober Motivation: Sharing Sobriety Stories - Getting Sober After a Near-Fatal Crash: Olivia’s Story

Episode Date: December 12, 2025

On this episode of the Sober Motivation Podcast, I talk with Olivia about her sobriety journey, choosing an alcohol-free life, and what it really took to get sober after years of pain. Olivia opens up about growing up with severe OCD (intrusive thoughts/compulsions), trauma, and using alcohol as self-medication to quiet anxiety, feel confident, and fit in. She shares how addiction, BPD, and escalating alcohol + cocaine use led to chaos, toxic relationships, rehab attempts, and a near-fatal car crash that became her turning point toward sobriety. A “miracle” phone call led to the right opportunity, where she learned self-awareness, accountability, and built a sustainable, sober, alcohol-free life. This episode is for anyone trying to get sober, stay sober, and keep going. Proof that recovery and sobriety create a ripple effect for family, healing, and hope. ------------- Oliva on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sobercoasterlife/

Welcome back to Season 4 of the Sober Motivation Podcast. Join me, Brad, each week as my guests and I share incredible and powerful sobriety stories. We're here to show sobriety as possible, one story at a time. Let's go. On this episode of the podcast, I talk with Olivia about her sobriety journey, choosing an alcohol-free life, and what it really took to get sober after years of pain. Olivia opens up about growing up with severe OCD, trauma, and using alcohol as self-medic. to quiet anxiety, feel confident, and fit in.

She shares how addiction, bipolar disorder, and escalating alcohol and cocaine use led to chaos, toxic relationships, rehab attempts, and a near-fatal car crash that became her turning point towards sobriety. A miracle phone call led to the right opportunity where she learned self-awareness, accountability, and built a sustainable, sober, alcohol-free life. This episode is for anyone trying to get sober, stay sober, and keep going. Proof that recovery and sobriety create a ripple effect for family, healing, and hope. And this is Olivia's story on the Sober Motivation podcast.

Good to have you back for another podcast episode. Thank you, as always, for tuning in. The new year is right around the corner. And I've had so many conversations with people, and everybody has their different reasons about waiting to the new year to set that as their first day in sobriety. And I'm not here to tell anybody when to start this journey or how to start it. That's not really my style at all. I think we all learn and we'll all figure it out sort of when we put in the effort.

But I just want to push back on that a little bit, waiting for a certain day to start. I mean, what's different about that day other than a number on a calendar? I mean, we're still the same person who's going to show up that day. And I think what the difference can be is how we show up throughout the holidays, show up and be present. not have those nights that go sideways, not have the shame, not have the guilt, not have the anxiety, not have the hangovers, could really set you up as a trampoline come the new year. So for anybody who's kind of in that spot, you're obviously going to do what you want to do. I mean, that's what we do as humans, right, as adults.

But I think consider it a little bit. I mean, how you carry about this holiday season and start off the new year is going to have a big impact about how you feel and how you're going to be able to maintain the consistency of changing your life or a relationship with alcohol and getting sober and I was talking with somebody else too and it really it really stood out to me and he's a couple months into his journey of sobriety and do an incredible job I mean a beautiful job but he's like I hear that everybody around around us and stuff says it gets better but I'm having a hard time believing it and i'm like man that's so relatable like everybody can share with us that things get

better that maybe it gets easier that we get more comfortable with this new life that we're living but when you're right there in the thick of it it's really hard to believe and at times it might be impossible to believe i wanted to kind of share my thoughts on that too because i think it's a mix of a few different things i think that over time it does get easier it does change it does shift things look different but i think we also grow as humans i think we begin the healing process the second we quit drinking opens up that opportunity for us on each individual basis of what i look like what our life looked like before and everything that maybe we haven't dealt with or haven't addressed or haven't felt or haven't expressed so i think it's a mix of yeah it gets easier but we also improve

as well. We also broaden our horizon and develop new tools and skills and relationships. Maybe find purpose. Stay connected to our why. Maybe those are all things we didn't do before. Maybe we start setting goals. We have something to work towards, something to look for, something to look forward to, something that we want to achieve. So I think it's a mix of both, that this journey does get easier. Things do start to feel better. But maybe that's because, we're improving as individuals. So stay sober this holiday season. I mean,

whether or not you stay sober this holiday season is going to have a lot to do with how you're carrying yourself right now. How you're carrying yourself, what you're connected to, how you're plugged in, how are you of where you're at on the journey? Are you journaling? Are you connecting with a therapist?

Are you connecting with a community? Are you getting help and support? Are you sharing honestly? Are you connected with yourself? I mean, all of those things are going to weigh into how well the holiday season goes. So thank you guys, as always, for listening. One more thing, too, I talk with somebody that listens to the podcast and in there saying, oh, you know, it must be great.

I mean, you must do pretty well with all the people that listen to the show and everything. And they were under the assumption that you get paid like music streamers do for people who stream your podcast. And I was like, you didn't know that. you don't get paid um you don't get paid at all for people who stream a podcast it's not like music um so that was really interesting to me i was like no you don't there's nothing there's nothing really made from just publishing a podcast um other than the joy that i get from doing it and from meeting so many people and hearing their stories and giving them an opportunity to share it with all of

you so thank you for listening now let's get into livia's story welcome back to another episode of the Motivation podcast. Today we've got Olivia with us. Olivia, how are you? Thank you. How are you? Yes, I'm good. I'm enjoying the Christmas tree in the background there. Festive season is upon us, right? Yeah, definitely. Exciting times. So what was it like for you growing up? So I suffered mentally from around the age of five years old. A traumatic event that occurred. led me to have severe obsessive-compulsive disorder OCD and that OCD would keep you up all night so I'd be going around if anybody doesn't know about OCD the proper form of it is intrusive thoughts that you have to act on so I'd have to touch things a certain

amount of times move things around and I was a young child that didn't understand what this was So I never slept and I had severe paranoia, all from a very young age. But from an outsider's perspective, I wanted for nothing as a child. I had a very normal upbringing and life was good. But mentally, I never quite understood what was going on. And I'd convinced myself when I was about, I mean, my daughter's nine now, and I would have been about the same age as her. I convinced myself I'd develop schizophrenia because I saw all these intrusive thoughts were voices in my head. And I convinced myself that I couldn't speak up about it because I was crazy.

Like, nothing was ever spoke about, really, about mental health when I was a child. So I never understood what was going on. So although childhood on the outside was really good, internally it was painful, really painful. And going into my teenage years, it was I never could quite fit in. Kind of the typical addict story, you feel like you can't fit in anywhere, constantly changing my identity and not really. getting through life comfortably everything felt like a battle and I started drinking around the age of probably 14 I'd say and it was just down the park with your friends and it was what I thought was normal but I was a different person when I was drinking.

So I was a lot more confident. I didn't care what people thought of me. My OCD is quiet and down. And, yeah, it was like, wow, this is like a magic substance. Like, why doesn't everybody just drink 24-7? Like, and. Yeah, yeah. Just saying thank you for sharing all that, too.

I'm just curious even further back in your story, where did you grow up? And do you have any symptoms? Yeah, so I had a younger. sister who was four years younger than me. I grew up in the Midlands in England and it was a nice place to live and me and my sister got on well as children. Like I said, from the outside, it was all lovely. It was really nice. Yeah. And at five years old, at five years old, things shift for you. But throughout this and you said even until you were nine, did you tell anybody around you or share with anybody that kind of what was going on with you

or your best understanding, I guess, of it at the time? No, so I went through it all on my own and I ended up becoming quite an angry child because I couldn't understand what was going on. So my parents deemed me as a bit, a bit of a naughty kid at times, but it was actually fear and frustration and upset. And it wasn't until I was about 12 where my mom caught me late at night, touching and moving everything. And she was like, what's going on for you?

And I said, nothing, nothing. And then she started noticing my patterns. And she was like, I think you've got something called OCD. And she'd experienced it a bit of herself as a child, not on the same scale as mine was, but thank God she had that bit of understanding around it and she got me to a therapist and stuff. But that was just, yeah, that was just the start, really of getting help. But it took a long road before I actually got the help I needed.

Yeah. Well, thanks for sharing that too. So then you kind of shift into your teenage years, like high school, I guess. Is that what they call in the UK? High school? Okay. So you got to high school and you're trying to fit in and you're struggling in that area of thing. I mean, how did you do like grades wise and stuff like that? Were you doing well or struggling with that too? I was actually doing okay at school. I liked the academic side of school. It was the friendships I struggled with and I had friends, but I just, I struggled

with connecting on my level. Everything felt like an effort. Everything felt like I was almost putting on a show for everybody all the time. And I don't think until I got sober, I was my true authentic self, so to speak. So in the last few years. But it was hard, but grades-wise and that I did okay. And it was weird. On the outside, you probably would never have noticed anything was wrong with me as such.

You'd think I was just quite a normal teenage kid. So, yeah, it was tough. But grades wide and stuff, everything was okay. Yeah, looking from the outside, it would look a lot like everybody else, right? And then you're kind of keeping it all in. I mean, that's an interesting thing, too, because I think it's relatable to so many is that we don't know either how to share, who to share with, and then we just try to push through or deal with it all on the inside. And then I think eventually that becomes really, really heavy

to carry. So you get introduced to alcohol at around 14 and go to the parks. This is like a common thing I feel like with a lot of my guests from the UK too is going to parks and drinking like 14, which what's the legal drinking age? Is it 18? Yeah. So it's, it's 18 over here but I think especially so like my sister's generation never really did that they never went over the park and drank it kind of like I'm 30 and it kind of sort of ended with my generation but yeah it was like the the done thing like you'd lie to your mom that where you was going on a Friday night and you'd be drinking in the freezing cold in a park and it's it's crazy but you know what that is the British culture as well that has fed that over the years when

it comes to alcohol because we are a really boozy country and I mean I don't know what it's like so much for you over there but it was like it's always been the norm to drink there was like as a child I was always told you don't do drugs but drinking's fine like drinking's not we never associated it with addiction it was so culturally it was just so socially acceptable that yeah we just didn't really think we were doing anything wrong apart from mom would shout at us if she found out but like on the grand scheme of things we thought it was just normal yeah crazy yeah which yeah I mean it's a very relatable you know sort of way to go about things just normalize it did you grow up around a lot of drinking my dad was a heavy drinker

um he would drink most evenings and family would come over there was always drinking involved. There was never any bad consequences from the drinking in my family, but there was always drink about. It was a normal thing to watch my dad drink a bottle of red wine a night and weekends people had come over or we'd go to parties and people had be drunk. And like, I suppose my dad drank a lot,

but he could handle his drink. So I never really saw him like, really sloppy drunk, if that makes sense. It was, never really saw any consequences of drinking growing up, just the good side, or if there is a good side of it. So, yeah. Yeah, just the normalization, too. I think of growing up around it, that can sort of have, you know, an impact too of,

like, hey, there's, we know we shouldn't be doing this at 14, but what's the real big deal here? Everybody else is doing it even, even though. we are younger like it kind of makes sense i guess right everybody else is doing it and if you're not seeing it sort of play out poorly or or people have consequences then yeah i mean i think it's very hard to you know go out of our way to say okay this is going to be bad how do things pick up for you i mean you mentioned earlier in the episode too that the drinking had checked some boxes for you right and that's so relatable to me because i was kind of this awkward

ADHD, I never did well in school, kind of like always on the outside of things, trying to make friends, trying to keep friends, wondering why people didn't like me, why I didn't like myself, getting picked last in gym class. And I'm like, I say that now at the time, it was devastating. Now it's like, whatever. You know, I mean, that's that was like, but at the time, I was like, man, I just wanted to fit in. But when I discovered drinking, it was like, okay. And now I could, I could warm up to all of this stuff. and be a quote unquote cool um but for you you shared maybe kind of some of those things too right i mean and i had the ADHD as well and when i would drink that would i mean that sort of the effects or impacts on my life from that would really quiet down and it was like that beginning stages of the self-medication but at the time i i share like i understood this i had absolutely no idea what was happening and i was the same what about for you yeah it was exactly the same, it kind of took the pressure off everything and I felt like I could breathe whilst I was drinking almost because my brain was a million miles an hour all the time. And I found it hard

around people to kind of know my place in the world and around certain people. And I suppose I was quite a multifaceted child. So I'd be into, I was quite hippy in some ways, but then In other ways, I was a different way. I was very arty, but then I also loved the sciences. Do you know what I mean? So there was lots of different parts of my personality, and I felt like I had to fit in somewhere. So it ended up where I just didn't really allow anybody to see any parts of me.

And drinking just kind of allowed me to be a bit more myself and make friends a bit easier and be a bit more confident. But for me, the big. biggest thing was it quiet and down my brain or so I thought it did at the time. And I later have come on to realize that I ended up getting diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. I don't know if it's called the same over there, BPD. And that was like in my later teens.

And so you mix alcohol with somebody that already can't regulate their emotions. and it's just a recipe for disaster. And then by the time I was 18, my mom and dad divorced out of nowhere. So they just split up and it kind of shook my world how I knew it. And then it was like, right, that's it, full-blown addiction mode. And it was like overnight I become a full-blown addict. So there was no like, you know, and a lot of people say they can see the progression, it was like, okay, yes, I shouldn't have been drinking in the park and I probably drank more than others. But then it was like, boom, I'm an adult now.

There's this trauma that I can't cope with, I'm going to turn to my only coping mechanism I know and that was alcohol. And then it just blew up. Yeah. And my world from that age of 18 just became chaotic. Drugs got involved. I started taking it, well, sniffing cocaine. And what was once a weekend thing quickly became an everyday, from morning till night thing.

I was meant to go to university, never happened. I was too far gone and I didn't care though I suppose I still had that very young mentality where as long as my brain was I was able to quiet and down my brain I wasn't really bothered about what was going on around me I was so selfish and so not necessarily even selfish

I didn't understand the impact and the damage I was doing it was um yeah i was just so stuck in my own internal pain i suppose and it was hard yeah and this all kind of comes into your life after high school i mean do you like when you're 18 i mean do you move out or are you still staying and you mentioned your parents divorce and stuff they went there separate ways where where did you go like living wise so I lived at home until I was 18 my mom and dad split up and I stayed at home and my mom for a period of time on my mom and my sister and then this is where the crazy decisions and everything start coming in so I met my well I was working as a sales manager at the time selling car parts and it was kind of an industry where you could get

away with all the drinking behaviour and stuff. And my boss, he, um, he kind of took me under his wing when my mom and dad separated. And that soon developed into a romantic relationship. But this guy's 30 years older than me. So I'm 18. He's what, 48, yeah. so that was just devastating for my mom I mean this is like not against anybody

that have got big age gap relationships but for me it was a lot of coercive control on his part and I've spoke about this before and it's crazy when you look back I didn't think I was a vulnerable person but I was so vulnerable then and I moved out with him and it absolutely devastated my mum

my mom her husband her 30 years had just upped and gone she was on her own and then her daughter just ups and goes and moves in with a man the same age as a dad it was like whoa like my mom's life God bless her just imploded on her and I had obviously

lots of daddy issues at the time and saw this guy as a bit of a father figure in some warped sense of reality that he'd love and protect me and it was not the case. So with coercive control comes a lot of isolation and with being isolated

and forced to be isolated from the people that I love and my friendships were dwindling away because I just wasn't seeing them. So I was just at home drinking all the time on my own. And then I fell pregnant at 21. And I wasn't ready for a baby. I didn't want a baby. But I was forced into a situation that I didn't want to be in.

I didn't want to be with him at this point I just didn't know how to get out of it because he never let me out of his sight and my daughter come along and what I know now would have been severe postnatal depression looking back but it was undiagnosed my mental health just deteriorated massively

so I was a young woman with a much older guy isolated from everybody that loved me so I was completely alone with this small child that I yeah it was just so difficult and I began self-harming at this point because I was drinking not as much during the day because I had a baby to look after but I was still drinking but I was almost kind of managing it a bit um but then come the evenings i would drink heavily but what i did start doing was self-harming i was making myself sick starving myself like any any form of like self-sabotage i was i was there and it it all just got to

much. I just couldn't, I couldn't deal with it. There was a lead-up of a lot of incidences between me and him. And in the end, police were involved and he was removed away from the property and I went and lived somewhere else with my baby. And I was so alone. Like, that's the overriding emotion I've got. When I think back, I was just so lonely and isolated. my head wasn't a good place to be so what do I do go back to my best friend alcohol and drank and drank and drank going from one relationship to another one drug to another my mom basically taking over the care of my child because I was in no fit state to look after her and in my early to mid-20s it was me constantly trying to balance running away from I mean I loved my daughter more than

anything but I wasn't ready to be a mother and it was just balancing everything was too much for me so I just escaped with alcohol and I was in and out of hospital um I went to my first rehab at 23 which didn't work so here's get this so I go into treatment at 23 for an alcohol and cocaine addiction I sit and I listen to all these people for three months and I walked out of that treatment centre and spent three nights on the streets smoking crack and heroin for the first time is mental it was like who even does that addicts do that yeah i mean it there's i'm sure there's so many stories right too how you go to treatment and things are going to change and then maybe they just don't or whatever you know um what kind of brought you there at 23 too and i mean

how long were you in this relationship like at 23 were you out of it like was it a couple years span and then at 23 yes how do you end up at so my daughter was about eight months old when I got away from that relationship. So by 23 she would have been about two when I went into treatment for the first time. And that was, I got there from

being forced into it, basically. I wasn't ready. I didn't want to do it, but I did it to try and appease my family. And I went into rehab with no understanding of addiction. very resentful, and I, instead of listening to all the things that could have got me better,

all I heard was all these new drugs I hadn't tried, and everybody was so much older than me. So I was like, I'm only young, I've got, I'm not an addict, I'm not like these people, just looking at the differences in absolutely everything, wasn't noticing that we thought the same, or that we've actually got really similar stories. It was just finding anything that made me not as bad as them. And like most people tend to do, I was trying to find anything to fix my feelings while I was in there. So it was like messing around with lads in there.

And in the end, I ended up leaving just before my three months stint. full of resentment, full of anger, and I just went and scored straight away. And this homeless guy scores for me, and he says, I can only get your crack. I was like, sod it, let's try it. And then I was on the streets for three nights, smoking, cracking heroin with all these homeless people. And within those three nights, I'd got robbed a load of money and, oh, God, I'd had my shoes stolen. and it was just like another, another world, but I kind of got a kick out of the chaos of it all.

It was like, it was almost like the chaos became an escapism of my own brain. So it was like, all this is going on. They're so chaotic around me, but at least I'm not stuck in here. And, yeah, that was crazy. And I had missing persons, police out looking for me. My poor family were just,

heartbroken well they feared the worst and then yeah so you so they were really supportive though of of you and probably had lots of conversation that sounds like of hey like we should you should try this or do that or we love you they're incredible yeah they were there for you they were so incredible and my mom basically mothered my daughter for me because I was in no position to my mom kept me alive for many years she also enabled me which she realizes now but she also it's hard to get that line isn't it between supporting somebody who love and not enabling them and she did a fantastic job and she did keep me alive for a long time and and yeah i think we don't realize at the time the profound effects it has on our families

And it wasn't until I got sober that I realized the pain that she was in. And we've had long talks together, but since I've got sober about it. But I'll go on to that a bit more in a bit because, but yeah, she was really supportive. It was her who got me into treatment. It was her that was just trying anything to get me sober. And even after I'd come out of treatment, spent nights on the street, she took me back in because I had nowhere to go when I come out. so she took me back home and I suppose a lot of parents would have just left me in the gutter really

like we've sorted out three months treatment for you you've messed it up but she somehow had this understanding that it just wasn't quite ready I suppose yeah which I think that I mean the level of readiness comes up a lot in so many conversations and I think sort of the thing that I'm oh like the thing that if anything does keep me up at night it's that right there I mean how does somebody get ready before it's too late at times or before too much is lost it's like kind of that and everybody has their own individual personal journey of you know when they became willing to do things and try things differently in that level of readiness but your experience is common to many I think you go to that first treatment and it's like

I'm not there yet. My life doesn't look like that or there's more to explore more experiments to be had here and kind of go back and we tell ourselves it's going to be different or it's going to be our right. It's not going to be that bad. No, I was just going to say it's just like this just is the epitome of the addict mind. So I was addicted to alcohol and cocaine, but I thought that I'd be able to moderate crack cocaine. It's okay because my thing, my addiction is, alcohol and cocaine so in my head it was like if I start smoking crack I might not get addicted to that I'll be fine and that is that is the insanity of addiction like we literally will talk ourselves into the most wildest things and yeah sorry I didn't mean to interrupt you yeah no that's

perfect I mean I think there's there's just so much truth to that and then to I mean looking back we can see things a lot differently but I mean I can only imagine you your mom going through all of this in real time without the playbook, without the handbook, without the crystal ball of how does the future look. I think the way that she went about things bringing you back home is the way a lot of people would have went, you know, at that age, right? If it would have carried on for another two decades, maybe people would have changed things. But that's one thing I didn't understand. I thought this was my life. And I could destroy it or whatever as much as I wanted to, I failed to realize the ripple effect of the choices I was

making. And maybe that's relatable for you too. And I think it's relatable for a lot of people out there that, you know, how it's impacting our family and how it's impacting if people have children and how it's impacting those relationships and all that stuff. And I think it's very easy. It was for me anyway to get very narrow-minded that it was my life, my choices, my consequences, and now when I think I'm like, oh my gosh, that's so far from the truth. I mean, this was really impacting a lot of people. I'd get angry in addiction as well. So if somebody would challenge me on my decisions or my behaviors or anything, I'm like,

who the hell are you to tell me this is my life, my, like you said, my life, my consequences without understanding that this is having a huge effect on those around me. and yeah so i mean the ages between like 23 till i got sober then was just in and out of hospital in and out of different forms of treatments whether that would be dry houses or detoxes or or whatever and i'd get sober for a month or two and then i'd go back to it and it was just a cycle and I met and then I'd go from one toxic relationship to another toxic relationship that sounds like a big sort of theme in the story of relationships and people that you're keeping close and not to say anybody's a bad person or that you were a bad person but I had people

in my life when I got when we connected like we made poor choices on our own we were okay but you know that theme of who you're keeping around seems to be like a thing that could be maybe fueling this or I think of a lot of people kind of co-signing the way I was living as opposed to other people who would have been like, dude, wake up. This is not how you should be living. You can do better. Well, it's the saying.

I don't know if you know the saying over there, but it's birds of a feather flocked together. So when you're in that painful people group together, happy people group together. and I was just attracting all these toxic awful relationships where like you say you have two hurt people together who are both addicts etc and it just blows up and the consequences are even bigger and harder to come back from and I was with this guy for for a couple of years and in the end it all just got too much and we separated and then one night he come back to the house and demanding money off me and I was like, I'm not giving you money for drugs. He was already out of it. And to cut a long story short, I ended up getting beaten up, dragged into put into a car and he ran me off the road at 90 miles an hour, trying to kill

us both. So he ran the car off the road at nightmiles an hour. The car flipped. We come plummeting down, crash, how we made it out alive, I'll never know. Police were gobsmacks because the car just impacted on itself. So it was just a ball of metal by the end of it, really. And that event was, I'm going to sit here today and say, I'm so glad it happened. because following from that event I had six months of the worst pain I've ever been through in my life. So physically I was in pain, I'd broke my sternum and I was in a lot of pain. But mentally, I was like, I can't do this anymore.

That's where my rock, my rock bottom wasn't a consequence so much on exterior. So materialistically, I had a house, I had a car then somehow. I don't know how over the years, but I was mainly off my ex-partner's mom and stuff like that who was helping us. So at the time of when he tried to do this to me, materialistically, things were not that bad. But mentally, after that accident, well, not accident, I was super. was, I was so suicidal. I was like, how can a man who, because everything was about my, I had such lack of self-worth and everything was just like, how can someone who's meant to love me do that to me? I'm the problem. I'm this. I'm that. And I just dug myself into such a deep hole that I didn't

leave the house for six months. I drank all day every day. I wasn't even doing drugs at this point. I just drank, didn't he, didn't do anything, just lay in bed and drank for six months and isolated myself from the world. And then that's when I had that phone call and got into treatment. And I needed those six months of everybody kind of walking away from me, me isolating myself. And that pain, I needed that deep pain because, yes, it took me to the brink. and I could have gone the other way and not been here anymore

but luckily I am and it was what pushed me into getting treatment accepting the treatment or how all that happened was just a miracle in itself and yeah it was I don't have

I'm so glad that that incident happened because it was the it was the beginning of the end of everything and I think forgive my ex for doing that. I can see what addiction can do to people. He was high as a kite.

He was hurting. Doesn't mean I'd ever let him back into my life. But I accept and I forgive everything today for my own sanity. So I don't hold on to trauma anymore. And, yeah, that treatment centre, I wasn't looking at the differences this time. I got humble, I got rid of the ego that I wasn't as bad as everyone else. I got rid of the, I accepted that I couldn't do this on my own

and that I had to fight for my life. I knew I had to fight for my life when I went in there because it was either that or just anything. because I couldn't live in the state I was in anymore. It was hard. Yeah, that was a lot of events there. You just shared of things, you know, from the car accident too. And then kind of, you know, so interesting though, right?

Because you have this extremely tragic incident happen in your life. And maybe at the time. And I think a lot of people share this, some sense of, I don't know, if gratitude is the right word or thankful. that these things happened in it could have been so much worse right could have been it wasn't to where it could have been but that was sort of maybe what opened up our eyes to i have got to change things and maybe it's a starts at a subconscious level too of like maybe not even you know in our day-to-day vision of this is where my life is headed stuff like this is

going to probably maybe not exactly like this but things like this are going to be more frequent And then you isolate, you have a lot of videos and stuff too and a lot of pictures and a lot of stuff you share on Instagram. I think since it's a audio podcast, we're not going to be able to show that to people while they're driving. But is a lot of this stuff that you share in that six month time period or no? So the ones where I've been beaten up was from that night, they were took. A lot of them took by myself recording what was going on that night

before he bundled me in the car. So this was all like in the space between being beaten up and getting shoved in the car. The other ones where you can see I haven't took the photos. My mom has took those. So my mom would take pictures and videos of me and all these different things. The video whereas there's me on fire,

that was my ex that recorded that taking the piss out of me for setting myself on fire. But the ones where I'm just laying there, either in hospital or on the floor or just out my school, my mom took them because she thought that by showing them me, once I'd come around, it would shock me into getting sober.

And obviously, it wasn't that what worked, but she just wanted me to see how bad I looked and how scary I looked, because she was petrified. But she would turn up at my house. She wouldn't have heard for me in days. And she was waiting to find me dead. So she'd take pictures to try and help motivate me to move forward.

But a lot of those pictures that took over different periods of time. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That's, I mean, it really, I think to see where you're at now, it's kind of a difficult thing at times to trace back to how, it life was for you and then how you show up now how things are for you now how you articulate your journey your story your progress and so i think those pictures too like for somebody who's like not

for me anyway coming into this and not understanding the full picture i know how this stuff can go but it really paints a good picture of how much you were struggling but i i can also pick up on the pain right just sort of lost and where to go or hopeless maybe is a word too of like is this ever going to change i think we get to a spot where we don't believe that there is any possibility of things to be different and then here you are now so you have this call too we talked a little bit about it before we jumped on here right you have sort of this uh this call i mean share that with us about this opportunity in that that it's just that that i look back on that and it's crazy really because

Because, so painting a picture, my phone wasn't being used. It was, I was ignoring the world, drinking liters of vodka a day, rotting in bed, not showering, not looking after myself, planning this overdose to just end the misery. I'd already wrote letters out and everything, one to my daughter, one to my mom, One to my dad, and that was it. And then my phone went off. For a start, it's a miracle I even noticed it was going off. But the fact that I didn't know the number,

and I answered it, was just, I just felt, I just, I don't know why I answered it, what it was, but I answered it. And it was a lovely, lovely lady who behind the scenes just knew that, was struggling and she knew my mom had walked away from me because the last six months my mom couldn't do it anymore

she had to walk away for her own mental health so she knew things had got really bad and she was working behind the scenes to get me a place in treatment but a place that she knew would fit well with the way my brain worked

and stuff she just got it and yeah and she says this was like on the Monday and I had to be in treatment by the Wednesday and it was like crazy so I did call my mom and I said look my mom I'm not joking here I know I'm a mess but I've been offered a place in treatment I'm going to go for it otherwise I'm going to die can you help me so she'd come and help me because I was so weak I'd I'd lost um all control over my bodily functions

I was a right mess and I needed I had to get up to Manchester as well which was two and a half hour drive from where I lived and I said mom please I'm sorry I'm begging you can you please just come and help me and of course she did and

but she she expected me to be in there two weeks and then let me just fuck it all up again so yes it was a miracle for her that I was even in there after like a week or two let alone she was like there's

nobody can she was she never thought for the amount I was drinking that there was any way I could have sustained it but it was all to do with the mental side it's not the substance it was my brain and the way my brain worked and

and it was I had to get an understanding of how my thinking worked my brain worked and get that level of self-awareness because I blamed everything, everything and everybody for the way I was. I never looked at myself, but I was the problem. Crack and drink, they weren't the problem. I was the problem. And yeah, okay, you become dependent on these drugs physically and stuff like that, but it all started with the way I thought and the way I couldn't process

emotions. So I spent six months literally just sitting with myself, understanding myself, taking accountability and just gaining this level of self-awareness where I was thinking about thinking. I was watching every behaviour I was doing thinking, is this going to serve me? Is this going towards the life I want to live? I've really

overanalyzed myself in the beginning but I needed to do that. I needed to do that to understand where potential threats within my mind were, so to speak. Like what was making me vulnerable

to alcohol and drugs? And that's part of the work that I do now like I do a lot of rewiring neuroplasticity work with clients and stuff and sometimes you've got to understand your own mind before you can get better sometimes because otherwise you're kind of just fighting in the dark of what's really going on for you and I come out of that treatment centre a different person like I come out as me I wasn't angry anymore. I wasn't looking for someone to blame.

I was noticing the little things in life. I was, I learnt how to live life again in there. And I'll forever be grateful for that treatment centre for doing that. And every single person that was in there taught me something, whether it was how to do things or how not to do things. if that makes sense. Everybody, I learned something from everybody in there because I just noticed and listened.

Like, I was like, I told myself, if I don't listen and soak up all of this help, it's game over. Do you want to see your child grow up? Yes or no, living that's what I kept saying to myself. Do you want to see your child grow up, yes or no? And now my daughter lives with me full time and we have the best relationship ever.

And that's, like, yeah, it's the most biggest blessing sobriety has given me is the chance to be the mother I should have always been. Yeah, it makes me emotional thinking about her because it's easy when you tell your story to come across quite rigid and emotionless. and especially when you're talking about children in the mix, but I had to do a lot of work on forgiving myself around the type of mother I became. But I forgive myself now because I know in this present moment,

like we can only find happiness in the present moment. You can't find it having anxiety over the future or depression over the past. The present moment is all we've got. And right here right now, in the present moment, I know I'm a good mom and that's all that matters. I've never been able to say that in addiction, but I've been able to say it in sobriety. And yeah, it's been a journey. Yeah. Well, it sure sounds like it. And yeah, that's beautiful. You know, I think it is

sometimes you're right. I mean, you go through the story. You're trying to get it all out. I mean, there's so much and probably so little amount of time. And sometimes, it can be, I think maybe just natural to skip over how difficult it all really was. I mean, how difficult it was, but also the blessings and the gratitude on this side of things, what you brought up there, you know, being the mom you are today and really showing up in that area of your life. I take away from your story that that is so important to you. And that's just beautiful.

You know, that's just so beautiful to have that. opportunity. And you're so right. I mean, I'm obviously not a mom. I'm a dad with three kids and you know, it would be difficult for things to not be able to show up for them. But none of us can go back as far as I know and make adjustments, you know, so doing the best we can right now with what we got. It is interesting hearing your story and hearing so many over the years that you went for all these kind of interventions right rehab hospital rehab detox everything everything and then you have this six months where you kind of throw in the towel right this is the way my life is going to be and then i don't want to call it simple i don't want to call it small because

something happened there with that phone call but with everything else that happened and then kind of what trampolined you into this journey was a phone call an opportunity stars aligned, the dots connected, in a way that maybe we will never understand. And I say that because I want to get it across to others that maybe it's just that there's going to be something random that happens in your life that could be it. So don't beat yourself up if everything up until this point hasn't quote unquote worked. Maybe the seeds are getting planted in one weird way or another. And that's the thing.

You're so right because I tried a decade. I tried all the conventional different routes and lots of different ways to get sober and nothing worked. So I was at the point of giving up. But that is the biggest message of all. Don't ever give up because your little phone call could come or something else could happen that is actually on the grand scheme of thing so small, but it could transform your life. and don't give up before that magic happens because it can happen

it will happen at some point as long as you keep trying and I believe that I should have been dead that many times over it's unreal I've got more than nine lives more than any cats put together

but so I don't waste anything now because I feel that I've been kept alive for a reason and it's to live and it's to help people and it's to be a good mom and yeah I don't waste time on dwelling about the past anymore or feeling that guilt and that shame because that just takes you back there I've been accountable for my actions but the best way that I can I can I can I suppose redeem myself from all

those actions over the years is just being a good person today. That's all I can do. And my mom says to me now, she's like, the best thing you ever gave me was your sobriety and being the woman that you are today. Me and my mom are best friends. We couldn't be in the room for more than two minutes during addiction without me laying into her or it just being chaotic. She's honestly my best friend now. And it just shows that your relationships around you and everything gets better in sobriety because you get better. As much as addiction has a ripple effect, so does recovery.

And yeah, it's beautiful stuff. Yeah. Yeah, that is so true. It impacts everybody around us. It really does. you know, the decisions and choices we make too. And that's beautiful to hear, you know, even with your mom sort of exiting your life there for six months, coming back in when you called her, which I was like, that's what moms do.

You know what I mean? That's what they do when, you know, they're going to come in and help and do what they can, right? I'm sure if that doesn't go well, though, then next time it might have been different. But you stuck with it, you know, you stuck with it to go and to hear that you, the two if you're connected like that. And I think that that's really cool and important, too, with us, you know, kind of leaning forward and how we are with our kids, you know? They see everything.

I'm learning that too. My oldest is eight, and I'm like, oh, nothing gets by this young Jedi here. It's really cool. Just heading towards wrapping up. I mean, what are some of your biggest takeaways? What have you learned about yourself and what would you like to pass on to others? I have learned that it's okay to be me which is something I struggled with all my life

the main person that needs to like you is you and very much which I say all the time on Instagram and what I've kind of just touched on then is don't stop trying because it will happen for you You've just got to not give up. And everything, I spent so long as well, worrying about the logistics of life that I stopped myself getting sober almost.

It was like, right, if I go into treatment, I'm going to lose this, this, this and this, or that's not going to work, or this is, you've got nothing unless you've got your sobriety, because you'll end up in a place where you won't be here. So just keep trying and trying and trying. Your time will come and live in the present moment. That's huge for me, is I spend each day in the present.

Remind myself that my thinking isn't always factual. I don't have to run with it. I don't have to obey my thoughts all the time because they're separate from who I am as a person. and yeah just live each day in the present moment but for those still struggling just don't ever give up ever I'm so glad I didn't I was inches away from giving up like literally inches so it's really important it sounds like too not just on sobriety but for your story life as well yeah and it was mad really and it's a bit

blessing to still be here. Life is a blessing and I don't have a lavish lifestyle. I don't have anything out the ordinary. I'm a very simple girl living a very simple life, but I am so goddamn contented. And that's because of my sobriety and doing that inner work. Because sobriety comes from you it comes from within it doesn't come from taking the bottle away it comes from inside of you and working on yourself and yeah people can change their whole thinking really can yeah i didn't experience that piece that you're talking about that sense of peace about i had somebody tell me recently nobody's looking for me and i'm not looking for anybody and I'm like, man, that's just such a great place to be, other than the complete chaos.

But the chaos can serve as a distraction. I think like what you talked about earlier. And it's getting away from that and just living, yeah, a much more simple life, maybe less highs, but way less lows. It's more like in the, for me, it's more like cruising in the middle ground. It's not about like a rocket ship explosion like maybe things used to be. But that also prevents me from having the extreme. low bottoms and I've been enjoying the sweet spot and it sounds like you have to thank you so much

Olivia for jumping on here sharing your story with all of us great job with everything incredible where you've come from and what you've been through and yeah great job thank you for having me Brad thank you well there it is another incredible story here on the podcast thank you to Olivia for jumping on here and sharing her story with us incredible change in her life and everyone around I'll drop our contact information for Instagram down in the show notes below. As always, if you haven't left a review on Apple or Spotify, I have no idea what you're waiting for. Two episodes dropped this week.

How many podcasters that you listen to, at least in the sobriety space, drop two episodes each week? I can't think of any, but maybe there are a few out there. I can tell you why they don't, because it's a lot of work, but I love doing it. So thank you, as always for listening, and I'll see you on the next one.