The One You Feed - Catherine Gray on The Lasting Joy of Being Sober

Episode Date: January 14, 2022

Catherine Gray is a Sunday Times Bestselling author of five books, including debut smash hit The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober. She’s sold well over a quarter of a million books and her books have now been translated into nine languages. She’s been sober since 2013. Catherine has also written about being single later in life and learning to appreciate the ordinary.  Eric and Catherine discuss her latest book, Sunshine Warm: Unexpected Sober Joy That LastsBut wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!Catherine Gray and I Discuss The Lasting Joy of Being Sober and…Her book, Sunshine Warm: Unexpected Sober Joy That LastsThe power of getting more specific with your gratitude listsBeing several years removed from addiction and in the advanced stages of recoveryUnderstanding that addiction doesn’t have to define you, but that it’s always thereNo longer defining herself as an alcoholic after several years of sobrietyAddiction can be the difference between what you intend to do and what you actually doHow addiction is a spectrum and not black or whiteThe issues with labeling yourself as an addictWhat matters most is asking yourself if your life would be better without the substance or behaviorThe challenge with addictions that are considered socially acceptable How most experts agree there isn’t such a thing as an addictive personalitySome people may have addictive tendencies based on various traitsUnderstanding that our perception of ourselves is what shapes our realityCatherine Gray Links:Catherine GrayTwitterInstagramWhen you purchase products and/or services from the sponsors of this episode, you help support The One You Feed. Your support is greatly appreciated, thank you!If you enjoyed this conversation with Catherine Gray, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Catherine Gray (2018 Interview)Catherine Gray on Unexpected Joy (2019 Interview)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I think no matter what lexicon you use around your addiction, whether you say that you're sober or clean or alcohol-free or teetotal or drug-free, whatever you want to use, the only thing that matters is remembering the darkness, the place you found yourself, and never wanting to go back there. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear.

We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast,

or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Decisions Decisions, the podcast where boundaries are pushed and conversations get candid. Join your favorite hosts, me, Weezy WTF. And me, Mandy B. As we dive deep into the world of nontraditional relationships and explore the often taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love. Every Monday and Wednesday, we both invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms.

Tune in and join in the conversation. Listen to Decisions Decisions on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Catherine Gray, who is one of very few guests to ever be on the show three times. Maybe she'll be the first to be on four times. We don't know what the future holds, but Catherine Gray is a writer and author who lives in the UK. Her first book, which we interviewed her about, was The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober, which is so great it became a bestseller. And then today, Eric and Catherine discuss her new book, Sunshine Warm Sober, Unexpected Sober Joy That Lasts.

Hi, Catherine. Welcome to the show. Hi, Eric. Thanks for having me. I am so excited to have you back. We don't have a lot of three-time guests, but I'm so happy to have you be one of them. We're going to be talking about your latest book, Sunshine Warm Sober, Unexpected Sober Joy That Lasts. But before we do that, we'll start like we always do with the parable, which you will get a third try at here, so don't mess it up this time. You know how the parable goes. There's a grandmother who's talking with her granddaughter

and she says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And then there's a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops. She thinks about it for a second. She looks up at her grandmother, and she says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you and your life and in the work that you do. Oh, gosh. Well, I mean, that has a daily resonance for me i feel like inside me every day there's like this puppet show with the good and bad wolf and like punching each other like

sock puppets and for me it really boils down to so i have a very negatively biased brain as most of us do study after study has shown that when bad things happen to us, we give it this profundity and significance in our brain. And when positive things happen to us, we just let it slide on by. It's like that famous quote about our brain being Velcro for the bad things and Teflon for the good things. I can't remember who said it. I apologize. But every single day, I have to make sure I feed my good wolf with the good things that are happening in my life and just hang on to them so that they don't slide away and starve my bad wolf who wants to throw all of the negative things that happened that day up onto a big screen. So that's how I think about it. Yeah. And we're not going to talk a lot

about the book you wrote before this one, but I did get something very valuable from that book about this very thing you're talking about, which is holding onto the good things and giving them a little bit more focus. And what I took from that book that after years of doing gratitude practices, I never really got until I saw the way you did it in that book is the specificity it, which I go into and think about the thing that occurred. I've only been doing it since I read that in several days ago, but it just something in me sort of clicked. And just the last couple of days, as I've written out my gratitudes, they're just more alive with that specificity. Oh, I love that. That makes me so happy. That means I've done my job. So I think when people do gratitude lists, and this is something that I do every day, as I said, to help my good wolf win.

And it's something that people tend to do. And they tend to say things like, I'm grateful for my car. I'm grateful for my flat. I'm grateful for my things like I'm grateful for my car I'm grateful for my flat I'm grateful for my dog I'm grateful for my partner that kind of thing they go too big and these things don't change from day to day so what I discovered because I fell into this trap myself when I started doing gratitudes eight years ago was that if you funnel down to the specifics I can't say that word to the specifics of the gratitude, then that becomes so much more powerful, which is what you've discovered, which just makes me really happy. Yeah, yeah, it really does make a difference. So let's talk about Sunshine, Warm and Sober. At the

time of the writing of the book, you were eight years sober, I think. So where does that track to where you are now? I'm still eight years sober. I'm just a little way into it. So I'm like almost eight and a half years sober. I don't know whether you want me to go into this, but my first book was The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober. And I wrote that when I was four years sober. And I honestly thought that book was it I thought you know I've learned all the stuff I'm going to learn pretty much about sobriety and non-drinking and my drinking days and recovery and addiction and all that um you know obviously there'll be updates with the news but honestly I thought that evolvement had mostly been done in those first four years which just now I'm sure you can probably relate seems quite absurd it just seems preposterous because I've done just as much

learning in the last four years about how to be a sober adult so I think when I wrote the first book I was basically a sober teenager I think you're like a newborn for the first year of sobriety, then you're a toddler. And then you're like an adolescent. So only now that I consider myself what would be, you know, a sober adult. So yeah, that's what the second book is all about. It's sequel. You said a bunch of things in there that that I could reflect upon. But I think there is a line, it's a line that doesn't exist, where we go from, quote, unquote, being in recovery to just being a human being who goes through the same things that everybody in the world goes through. And I think at a certain point, that's what recovery starts to look like is it just starts to be about living as a thoughtful,

committed, good human being, which I think always takes effort. And there's always, hopefully, if you're doing it right, always learning. Absolutely. And I think when you're in the first few years of recovery, sorry, I've got a puppy and he's got a bone. I'm just going to try and get it off him because it's going to be very noisy. He's in a very playful mood which is great timing i think something that's also very true is that we tend to in the first years of recovery we set we if we're anxious or if we're excited or if we feel any strong emotion we sort of count that as being triggered yeah you know we think i'm being triggered to drink whereas now I don't think of those emotions in that way it's

just it's just a spectrum of emotions that everyone experiences but I think of my addiction quite differently I don't think of myself as you know forever addicted I think of it more in the neuroscientific way which is that the addictive super high ways fade over time. So just as I don't consider myself like still addicted to smoking, which I quit seven years ago, but if I really started smoking, I would become addicted to it again. Those two things coexist. So that's how I think about my former addiction. You know, it's not necessarily the norm, but it served me that we could talk about as far as what we know about addiction, what we think addiction is, how we recover from addiction. And at the same time, there is that one fairly stark, bright line that says, for most of us, our experience is,

if we drink or use again, we are going to end up in trouble again. If we drink or use again, we are going to end up in trouble again. Absolutely. And I think that's why a lot of people do feel safer. The majority of people feel safer defining themselves as an addict or alcoholic for the rest of their lives because they see that as, you know, the daily reminder that they shouldn't drink or use because they will become re-addicted. And the neuroscience supports that as well because it doesn't matter how you know i haven't drank for eight years but those well-worn pathways in my

brain even though they're cobwebbed and disused they're still there and they're almost like an overgrown highway you know it's not just a little country lane it's it's it's a proper prominent like route 66 so that's not to be tested in my opinion yeah i think once you've become addicted to something if you restart you will more than likely become addicted again why take the risk yeah well what's interesting is i was somewhere around where you are in sobriety, probably a little bit less. It might have been seven years, my first time around, and I drank again. Oh, really? Oh, my gosh. 15 years in February. But yeah, it was around eight years, seven to eight that I went back out. And it's really, it's really interesting, because I did a lot of the healing that you are describing and talk about in the book. And yet I still drank again. And like you said, it's obviously I'm on a

podcast where I talk about my recovery journey again. So we know how it turned out, right? It didn't work out going back out. I thought I could handle it. And I didn't, I couldn't. Yeah. So my dad, he's unfortunately no longer with us. But he went back out at eight years as well. And again, that was short lived. And then he came back and did 23 years. So maybe there's some sort of seven year itch or something when it comes to recovery but yeah I mean you're never immune are you and the book goes into these stats which are really fascinating so once you've done one year of sobriety you've got 66% chance of sustaining it once you've done two years oh no sorry it's 36% after one year after two two years, it's 66%. After three years of sustained sobriety, it's 86%.

But that's not 100%. So there's still that 14% falter rate, which means that you can always fall down the rabbit hole again. So I think for me, it's almost the two things living together at once coexisting that I don't want to be defined by my former addiction but I also know it's still there if that makes sense and the possibility for it to resurface is always there yep I agree it's 100% that way and that's why I was saying it's like there's a lot of gray area and we'll get into some of these how different is an alcoholic from a normal person is that even the right word to use you know how do we define ourselves which i think there's room for a lot more nuance except up to the point of at least in my case the moderation line because you said in the book, you know, the question that most people

have at some point is, maybe I can moderate now. And you said, yeah, you'd wager that most of slips or relapses, whatever you want to call them are down to the maybe it will be different thing. And that was absolutely what mine was. And mine used my healing against me. It's very fascinating because it went, look, you did all these years in AA, you worked the steps a bunch of times, you've been to therapy, you did all this inner child, childhood repair work, you've been to counseling, you've done all these things. You're a healthy, reasonable human being now. And you're fixed. And you were just young at that age. And you know, you were doing heroin, which of course is a bad idea. You shouldn't do that. But a couple drinks aren't going to be a

problem. You know, you make good decisions in other areas of life. And didn't, like I said, didn't turn out what's interesting. It wasn't an immediate disaster. You know, in AA, we were always so strident. Like, if I go back out, I'll be a prostitute and selling my body for drugs in the next eight minutes. Like, we're so dramatic about it. And that was not my case at all. I started off and I had a drink and nothing bad happened. I had a couple more, nothing bad happened. But over a period of years, it just slid back into the same abyss. Yeah, it always does. And I've seen it with all of my friends, pretty much, that have gone back out. Maybe it'll be different this time.

Voices, one, they've always found the same. There's a few months or six months or even a year of where it looks like it's going to work out and then it doesn't. It just slides back into that darkness, like you said. Yeah, I just think once you've been to that dark place, you're always going to be taken back to it if you pick up again so i mean for me it's not something that i in any way nurse a notion of wanting or being able to do again any more than i would nurse the notion that i can outrun lions you know it's just it's a bad idea for me so yeah but then people when when I explained to them that I no longer call myself an alcoholic I've stopped defining myself that way when I was about four or five years sober I did it secretly at first because I was very scared

of offloading the word I've been taught that if you offload the word addict or alcoholic then you may as well have pressed a button on the relapse machine you know you're heading for a relapse you're cruising for a bruising so I did it secretly at first and then nothing happened and I just started feeling actually safer in my sobriety but then that's my story. That's not the right way for everyone. It certainly isn't. If one of the words makes them feel safe, they should keep it.

But I think no matter what lexicon you use around your addiction, whether you say that you're sober or clean or alcohol-free or teetotal or drug-free, whatever you want to use, addict, alcoholic, the only thing that matters is remembering the darkness, the place you found yourself, and never wanting to go back there. Yep, yep. I want to hit a bunch of points in there, but let's circle back fairly early on in the book where you talk about the definition of addiction and you've got some different experts who weigh in throughout the book who are awesome but i wanted to talk about you know what do we

think addiction is if even that's the right word to use anymore well i mean i i absolutely use the word addiction but i just use it as more of an experience than an identity so a person with an addiction rather than an addict yes kind of thing yeah but for me the the definition of it would be you start out intending to consume or do a thing and then the reality is different so say for instance if i sit down in front of a cheesecake intending to eat one slice and then I eat three slices of it, then that's a bit of a cheesecake problem. Because I never go on a night out intending to drink one soft drink and then have eight, which is what I used to do when I was drinking. So it's that difference. which is what I used to do when I was drinking so it's that difference no matter whether it's spending or gambling or what have you it's the difference between what you intend to do and what

you actually do but a lot of my experts pointed out that the most recent clinical understanding of it is that it's more of a not a learning disorder because that's outdated now but it's more of a disordered learning. So it's your brain learning that this thing helps, whether it's a drug or a drink or a shopping website, you know, this thing soothes you. And so it comes back to it again and again and again and again. So it's more that your brain has just learned that something that is bad for you is good for you. And so it repeats it. Right, right. It's interesting that, you know, the learning disorder theory came up and disappeared fairly quickly. And I think the problem might be with that, that term, but I do think it points to,

yeah, your brain learned something really, really well, and then got stuck on that setting. and then got stuck on that setting. Exactly. Just like your brain classifies food and water and shelter as essential for survival, once you're addicted to something, it classifies that thing as essential for survival too. So you really do think that you need that thing in order to live, which is why it's so hard to overcome. Yeah. And when you put it in those terms, I just had that visceral moment of that is exactly what it feels like, you know, when you're trying to get over an addiction and you don't have that

substance, it does feel like you don't have something that is essential to life. And it's why I often talk about like, one of the things that keeps me sober is never wanting to be in the place again, where on one part of my brain knows very clearly that to consume this substance will be the end of me. So I will not survive if I do it. And the other part of my brain is screaming, you're not going to survive if you don't do it. And that internal tension is just a nightmare. Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. And neuroscientists would probably say, although this is vastly oversimplified, that that is a fight in your brain between your amygdala and your prefrontal cortex, which is basically the child and the adult of your brain,

if you're going to boil it down really simply, because it's your amygdala that's generally where the seat of addiction is. And it really believes that the drink is like oxygen. I mean, that's how I felt. I really did feel that way. And so did you. And, but it's very difficult to explain this to people who haven't experienced it themselves. Yeah. Yeah. And then it may be amygdala to prefrontal cortex, but it's almost for some of us, particularly if we've tried to get sober a bunch and haven't been able to, it's like the fear of drinking is so strong too. It's just like these two terrors that are like trying to outbid each other. So when we talk about addiction, the other thing that I think is a more modern understanding is that there isn't like some line where it's like, well, up to this point, you suddenly do have an addiction,

that there's a lot more gray area or scale on this. Some people would say we're all addicts to something in some way. How do you think about that now? Yeah, I mean, I think of addiction as a spectrum. And even though I was a 7 or 8 or maybe even a 9 at my worst, I'm actually seeing more and more that people are quitting when they're lower down on the spectrum when they're five or six because we're living in a world that's much more i'm sorry my problem keeps taking presents from under the tree and trying to rip them up oh no we should put him on the video

i know honestly he's been really good all day and that just now he's just become an absolute We should put him on the video. He's full on over-tried. I know, honestly. He's been really good all day, and just now he's become an absolute terror. Anyway, I've just taken everything away from him that he can do harm to, so hopefully that will be fine. I'll tell you a funny story about dogs real quick to this note. Ginny and I, my partner, we've got this program called Spiritual Habits. There's a second version of it that we lead. And at the beginning of every session, we do a guided meditation. Our dogs have decided like that at that moment, they are going to go to their worst behavior. So

like I'm guiding a meditation and inevitably one of them is like getting behind me or saying, I'm like, what are you, what are you doing? You don't even ever do this normally. Like it is just, it's just unbelievable. It's like they can sense it. I mean, he literally just got his metal collar dog tag off his collar somehow and was trying to eat it while I was trying to answer a question about neuroscience. So I was like using chicken to get it off. Oh, no, he's destroying his bed.

Okay. We're just going to ignore him. All right. Yeah. They sense that you're doing something important, I think. Just like children. Yeah. That's when they act up.

Yep. Right. I've totally lost the thread of what we were talking about. What was it? We were talking about things being on a spectrum and you were saying people who are lower down like a five are starting to quit definitely yeah because i mean i think it's probably the same in the states but here in the uk everyone is so much more sober positive and if you're at a party now and you say

that you're not drinking you don't get heckled like you used to which is just amazing things are beginning to shift and i just meet sober people all over the place now like it used to which is just amazing things are beginning to shift and I just meet sober people all over the place now like it used to be that you couldn't find them unless you went to a meeting and now I'll bump into them at my co-working space or yoga or whatever and it just feels like so many people don't drink now not that there's a right way and a wrong way you know I don't believe that I think it's nuanced and people should do what works for them but yeah it's definitely a spectrum it's not a black and white thing as we've been led to believe I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth.

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Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really.

Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You were the first person I heard this from, And I think it's such an important idea, which is before this idea became more known, you were always looking like, am I an alcoholic? Let me look at the numbers. If I am, then okay, I have a problem and I should probably work on quitting. But if I'm not, eh, no big deal, right? And at least, again, you were the first person I heard put forth this idea,

like, if your life is better without drinking, that's it. That's as simple as that. You don't have to get into this. Am I an alcoholic? How bad am I? Have I hit bottom? All these other questions. It's just, would my life be better if this wasn't in it? Absolutely. And I think, I mean, I spent so many lonely nights of the soul googling, am I an alcoholic and doing quizzes and fudging my answers. And I did that for years before I actually quit drinking. And it was only once I was convinced that I was that I quit drinking. the black and white you know normie versus alcoholic dialogue is that sometimes people think that they need to be really bad in order to quit it would be a bit like if um we said to smokers oh just no don't quit until you you're smoking 40 a day okay right until then you're a normal smoker but then you've tipped over into a smokerholic and you should quit. That's kind of how we approach alcohol. And it's just weird.

People are like, if you've still got a job, if you're not drinking in the morning, if you're not drinking spirits, then you're fine and you can carry on drinking. You just need to wait until everything is slipping out of your grasp and you're about to end up on the streets. That's when you quit. It just doesn't make any sense to me, but thankfully that is really beginning to shift and change and it's needed to for a really long time. I agree a hundred percent. I think it has needed to change. And I think it comes back to this question then of, and I get this from clients a lot, right? Which is they've got a bad habit, which is the way we might refer to it. I've got a bad habit. I'm eating emotionally. I'm procrastinating. I am spending money in a bad way. I am doing these things. And the question is always, well, is it an addiction or not? And I'm sort of

less concerned with that because I, again, I don't think you can say, well, yep, it is. You are now officially an addict. It's like, well, you're not happy with it. It's not serving you in your life. It's causing you distress. That's right. And the way that we're going to deal with it is going to be very similar, whether we call it an addiction or whether we call it a bad habit or whatever we want to call it. Some people are very quick to call it an addiction. Other people don't want to hear that word. Again, it's describing behaviors on a spectrum and you're enough on the spectrum that this is problematic for you, whatever we want to call it. Yeah, absolutely. And like you said earlier, the am I addicted to it is the wrong question, really. The right question is,

would my life be better without it? If I stop this behavior or this compulsion or this consumption of this substance, that is the question. And so it doesn't really matter if you're addicted to it or dependent on it or whatever language you want to use it's about whether it's blighting your life and if you are coming to the point where you're even asking that question then the answer is yes it is it is blighting your life because why else would you be researching that yeah yeah you know people who are who easily moderate a substance or shopping or gambling whatever they don't sit there at 3am in the blue light of the laptop Googling. They just don't. So just labels aren't necessary in order

to tackle the root problem. That's that would be the core message I would want to leave people with. But they're not wrong either. You know, it's whatever helps you. I would want to leave people with, but they're not wrong either. You know, it's whatever helps you. You talked about this in the book about this idea of, you know, do we use those terms, alcoholic addict? And, you know, you described how you've chosen to not use that term. I don't think about it very much. I would say, yeah, I am an addict or an alcoholic is the word I would use, but only because I don't think about it very much. And I love, you quoted, I think it was Tempest Recovery, who says addiction is an experience, not an identity. And that totally, I was like, yes, that's the wording I was looking for. And I don't

really go to AA anymore. I think the thing that sort of pushed me out of AA was what you talk about here. Wasn't that word defining myself as an alcoholic, the word I'm like, okay, it doesn't the word doesn't mean anything to me. But what it was, and you talk about this in several different ways in the book, talking about people, describing people outside the room is normies. You talk about describing us as having an addictive personality. You talk about describing ourselves as like, well, I'm just an addict. So that's why I do that. What eventually got to me was like, I just went, I don't think I'm that different than the rest of the world.

Except I cannot moderate drinking. Okay. So in that way, that's an experience experience but I just got so tired of seeing myself as defined by the tropes of what an addict is like yeah I mean I couldn't identify with that more as you know and I'm I'm definitely of the school of thought where I think most people are addicted to something it's just that the experience of being addicted to alcohol and other drugs because we say alcohol and drugs but alcohol is a drug yeah yeah is one that can savage your life and become a very visible and humiliating experience once you really get dependent on it So and other addictions like phone addiction, work addiction, they're very socially supported. You know, making money addiction, is that work addiction? You know,

just that more, more, more addiction that is 100% encouraged by our capitalist societies. And, you know, different addictions, they can still have, though, that detrimental effect on you. But they're just socially endorsed or reviled. So yeah, it's something that I didn't want to be defined by for the rest of my life either. But everyone's individual, and they see it differently. Yep. It's so interesting talking about that, like, what is socially acceptable, what is not, you know, I got sober that second time. And the first time I was a homeless heroin addict who was looking at going to jail for a long time. The second time I was a drinker who

smoked marijuana, who also had the best job he'd ever had was driving a very, very nice car living in a beautiful part of town in a nice house. Inside, I was just the same. It's just that alcohol was legal. And heroin was not. I mean, it was that basic. Otherwise, there was no difference in how sick I was. And I just didn't have to do the things as an alcoholic that I had to do to get heroin. Absolutely. Because I could walk to any store that I drove by and I could walk in and get my drug at a very affordable, reasonable price. And so it does speak to that idea of the way we define the substance has a lot to do with it. I also do think that drugs are a little bit different than, say, gambling or phone or sex addiction. And the way they're different is both types of addictions change the brain by what your brain is learning and by the neurochemicals that you're generating. They both do that. But drugs and alcohol, in addition to the way that sort of happens in the mechanism of addiction, drugs and alcohol actually then are chemically on

top of that, changing the brain even more, because that's what they are. Absolutely. They're brain changing chemicals, right? So it's almost like you've got the double dose of it in that case. Yeah, thank you for pointing that out. That is an important distinction. And that's why those types of addictions can be all the more powerful and also destructive. What you just said about the heroin addiction versus the alcohol dependence, I bet the second time around when you got sober, you encountered more resistance to your getting sober than you did the first time around because, you know, your life was so great and you were nailing everything and killing it at life. Yeah.

And, you know, that was very much my experience as well. When I came out and said, you know, hey, guys, I'm an alcoholic because I definitely embraced that word at first. And I need to quit drinking. I, nobody apart from a few members of my family and my best friend who I'd lived with was like, great decision. I will support you 100% with that. I got a widespread reaction of, you're not that bad. Just, you know, just, yeah, fine, take a break, but just do it for a month or so, or, you know, maybe six months at most. You know, you're doing really well at life. It's just, it's that relationship that's gotten you down or it's just, you're a bit depressed, so you're drinking more than usual. And it's just such a strange social thing because you're doing

this thing that is 100% a positive lifestyle choice and yet people resist it. Yeah. They don't want to lose their drinking buddy. Yeah. So it's legal and it's socially celebrated and championed and we're encouraged to grow up to be drinkers. So yeah, I think in that way, it is different to other drugs. Totally. And I think some of it depends where you live and the culture that you're in. But I mean, I've had a couple of clients who are in that boat where it's like everybody around them is just culture that you're in. And, but I mean, I have, I've had a couple clients

who are in that boat where it's like, everybody around them is just like, you're fine. What are you making such a big deal out of? And I mean, that I just, that's so hard. I mean, even at least, you know, when I got sober the second time, even though on the outside, things looked good, the people who were closest enough to me were like, yeah, that's a good idea. Like, I mean, you know, I mean, I was a disaster area. I just on the outside was holding it together. The resistance the second time was internal, because the first time I had just so been so been beaten up by drugs and alcohol the second time I had, but not as much. And so I had to keep saying to myself, like, do I really need to go any further with this? Like, do you really need to ride the elevator down another floor? Do you need to get in a car accident with your son in the car? Because you've

been drinking. Like, is that what this really is going to take? That's the conversation I'd have with myself where I'd be like, okay, no, I guess I don't. But it was a little bit harder. That's so interesting, that second sobriety. And so many people have a second sobriety. I mean, for me, it was relationships. As you know, I realized through, I can't remember how long it was into sobriety, but I realized that I was well and truly addicted to love and relationships and had to give those up for a year in order to recalibrate but yeah a lot of people do have that kind of second sobriety where they realize there's another addiction lying beneath their primary addiction I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the

woolly mammoth plus does tom cruise really do his own stunts his stuntman reveals the answer and you never know who's going to drop by mr brian cranson is with us how are you hello my friend wayne knight about jurassic park wayne knight welcome to Really No Really sir Bless you all Hello Newman and you never know when Howie Mandel Might just stop by to talk about judging Really? That's the opening? Really No Really Go to reallynoreally.com

And register to win $500 A guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition Signed Jason Bobblehead It's called Really No Really and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app On Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. That secondary addiction of love or sex, for me, was part of what dragged me back out into active drinking addiction again, is because that addiction was running enough of my life that the core focus of a big part of what recovery is, and we may get to this if we have time, is about, you know, getting outside of yourself and caring about other people and having their

well-being in mind. That had receded from my life and all I was interested in was me, me, me, me again. And that was a big part, I think, of what was behind me going back out. Yeah, that makes sense. So we're going to take a brief detour here to talk about, I know you must do this on purpose in your books because it's funny, but you come up with all these different ways of describing being drunk. I don't know if the English just are better at this. They just have more descriptive words. Whether you're searching them out, I don't know. But I love reading, I'm just going to give a couple of them. One of them you're describing being drunk and you said, I'm truly bat-faced, which I don't even fully understand.

Clattered, spangled, lashed. Blitzed. Lampshaded. Yeah, there's another one that says, entices everyone to get their kit off and toast their tits. I think there's actually a British thing. We have so many different words for getting drunk because it is basically a national hobby. It's like the Eskimos who have so many words for ice kind of thing. Or the Irish have, you know, 15 different words for rain.

Yeah. Yeah. That's why we have so many of them because we get drunk so often. So I think that that can explain it. I think if you ask any British person, they'd be able to rattle off at least 15 different words for drunk. I think the US used to be better at it. Because if you read the AA big book, which was written what back in the late 30s, there's some great ones in there, like, you know, boiled as an owl. You know, there's some good ones in there. I don't remember them all. But now I think America as a whole, we're just less literate. So our words have just

gotten to be less fun. But I truly enjoyed that throughout the book. I just kept looking for it. We've hit on this a little bit, but let's talk about addictive personality and the correlate to it in your book. You've got two sections and I'm just going to tie them together. You asked the experts, can you have an addictive personality? And then you also talked about this, you know, narrative that some people have like, well, I'm just an addict, you know, like as they're binging on sugar or coffee or cigarettes. Well, I'm just an addict. So is there an addictive personality? And if we have it, are we more likely to become addicted? Well, I asked four experts and I specifically

and deliberately chose experts with very different ways of thinking from the very traditional AA way of thinking right across to the more radical way of thinking, the more modern ways of thinking. And it was so interesting because three of the four said, no, there is no such thing as an addictive personality. What you can have is a predisposition to addiction. And these are things like anxiety, being somebody who's anxious, or being somebody who's introverted. But then the very opposite is also true because people who are extroverted or more prone to be impulsive and spontaneous are also more likely to be addicted so this idea of this singular addictive personality that a person can have is just not true it's not

backed up and most experts would say that it's not a thing i'm not gonna say it's not true because that's that's too black and white yeah yeah but most most experts i think would agree that it's there's no evidence for it what you do have is certain characteristics in your personality that mean that you're predisposed just like genetics or you know a traumatic childhood predispose you to addiction and the other thing is sorry i'm just my family's literally eating cotton wool i hope he's still alive at the end of this i hope so too trying to kill himself through various means um no anyway so and the once an addict always an addict something that I hear so much and it just makes me feel really sad this this kind of I'm just an addict narrative

and that people tend to internalize and therefore think that they're just going to get addicted to everything because they once got very addicted to something it's just not the case I mean for a start if you've overcome a primary addiction no matter what it was to you have beaten an addiction yeah you may not have beaten it forever you may go back but you still have that toolbox that you use to beat that addiction you know whether you've been sober for four years or 40 years so it's something that I just don't really believe in I think that once an addict always an addict is quite a destructive way to think of it I think all of us are prone to addiction and all of us could fall into an addiction. So that's more the way that I think of it. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, when we get

sober from an addiction, there does appear to be more likelihood of falling into another one. And I don't think that's so much underlying personality so much as, as you said, it is a series of risk factors that have added up to addiction. And we're still learning how to live without relying on some external thing to make us feel happy. But over time, I think that can change. It's funny, I've said this before. I answered that I was an impulsive person on personality tests up until a couple of years ago. And that is not the way any sort of description of me over the better part of the last 25 years would be except for Yeah, I did go back out and drink for a while. But I'm not an impulsive rash person. And yet I had that I'm an addict, thus I must be

impulsive, that I continue to answer those things that way. And I know you're a fan of Dr. Rick Hansen, you've quoted him in a lot of books. And I was talking with him recently. And he said something that just I was like, yes, that's exactly it. Although I think his his measurement of time is off. He said, everybody's self-conception is at least six months out of date. And I was like, that is brilliant. And for a lot of people, it's way longer than that. It could be that for people who were addicted, you know, have an addiction, and they've been sober 10 or 15 years, that personality, their self-conception may still be stuck on some really defining things that aren't true anymore.

I mean, in AA, people say this all the time around here, like, well, I'm still a liar, cheat, and a thief. And I'm like, well, are you? Like, I mean, okay, maybe you are, but maybe you're not. So it's interesting. Yeah, it's allowing yourself that room and having the permission to evolve beyond what you were. Yes. And what you just said is perfect. I mean, I used to, for many, many, many, many years, I told myself and other people told me as well, it was an echo chamber, the story that I was dreadful with money, right?

I'm terrible with money. I'll never buy a flat. I'll never be able to save money i'll never get out of debt and so obviously my reality reflected that so we have to be careful what molds we pour our stories into yes because that shapes our reality our perceptions of ourselves shape our reality so it would be like you pouring some jello into a mold and being like, oh, how strange, it's now shaped like this mold. If you tell yourself that you're terrible with money, or you're impulsive, or that you get addicted to everything, then you

will then go and become that self-fulfilling prophecy. So if you change how you think about yourself, then often that can trigger a change in yourself. Or if you just look at the actual evidence, like when's the last time I told a lie? Am I still a liar? Am I still a cheat? Am I still a thief? When's the last time I stole? So yeah, you have to let yourself evolve and become better and champion yourself when you become better. I think it's really important. Yeah, I love it. You talk about that in the book, our stories can become self-fulfilling prophecies.

And you have a line, I love the one you just used about pouring our stories into a mold. The other one that you said is it becomes like a coat hanger that you hang the rest of your life upon, which is another really good analogy. It's like a coat hanger that you hang the rest of your life upon, which is another really good analogy. And I think this is interesting because, again, I see this sort of work working with clients and the vast majority of my clients. It's not alcoholism or addiction work. Right. But what I see is this tendency to say, like, I'm the kind of person who never follows through on things. Yeah. And it's this interesting dance of and it's the same thing with alcoholism and addiction. You've got to say, well, yeah, there's a real problem here, right?

I've got to look at the facts and go, okay, yes. Okay. Up till now, I traditionally have not tended to follow through on things that I started. So, okay. That that's who I am today. But like you said, we've got to give ourselves the freedom to move forwards. And I'm always looking for like a word, like, what's the right word? Like, tendency is a word that I sort of like, I might say, I have a tendency towards X, you know, which is true. You know, right now, I have a tendency towards X, that can totally be changed and overridden. It's a very different thing. So it is a nuanced discussion. But I think the important part of it, as you're saying,

is like, don't let it harden. You know, if it's useful, then learn what you can from it, but don't let it harden. Yeah, because we can and absolutely do change. I mean, what you've just touched upon is so important to make yourself a person with the thing rather than the thing. So I used to be a late riser. Now, I'm a person who tends to get up early. But I allow that identity as a late riser to just become the thing that I always did. And in order to change it, obviously, I mean, I'm a big fan of Atomic Habits, James Clear. Obviously, you have to start changing the thing in order for the new thing to become the new tendency. You can't just, you know, say you're an early riser and then you are.

That's not what I mean. But you should allow yourself the wriggle room to evolve beyond that thing that you used to do, even if you did it for 21 years, like I drank for 21 years. You know, it's just so important to allow ourselves that room. Absolutely. Well, we are at the end of our time. I could talk to you all day. You and I are going to continue to talk for a little while in the post-show conversation. We're going to talk about two riveting things. We're going to talk about, you've got a line, we repeat what we don't repair.

You say, I think that untangling your childhood in therapy is one of the most important things to do. So we're going to talk about that. And we're also going to talk about a new hobby that we both have discovered, which is bouldering. So we're going to talk about that in the post-show conversation. Listeners, if you'd like access to that, you can get access to all the post-show conversations, ad-free episodes, a special episode I do each week called A Teaching, A Song, and A Poem. You can go to oneufeed.net slash join. Catherine, thank you so much. Always one of my favorite guests. Thank you. I've really enjoyed this conversation. May I just point one thing out, though, because I don't want to take credit for something that I didn't say.

Yeah. So we repeat what we don't repair. It's a quote from a therapist called Christine something. I can't remember her full name. It wasn't my quote, but I did. Yeah, I used it as a chapter heading, but then quoted her within it. So I don't want to take credit for that because it's such a good phrase. Well, if she doesn't have a last name, we don't need to credit her. I'm kidding. I know she does. I'm kidding. All right. The book is called Sunshine, Warm, Sober.

Unexpected sober joy that lasts. You can find it where you get books. We'll have links off our show notes also to all of Catherine's stuff. Thank you. Thank you. I've loved this. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community.

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