The One You Feed - Embracing Emotional Sobriety: Small Choices for Big Healing from Heartbreak and Anxiety with Laura McKowen

Episode Date: March 20, 2026

In this episode, Laura McKowen discusses embracing emotional sobriety and small choices for big healing from heartbreak and anxiety. Laura talks about her 11-year sobriety journey and her personal journal of navigating heartbreak. She delves into the daily choices that foster healing and emotional well-being. Laura also shares insights on the non-linear nature of recovery, the importance of small, consistent practices, and the role of relationships and self-compassion in emotional sobriety. Together, they explore how healing is an ongoing process, shaped by vulnerability, connection, and the willingness to embrace both pain and growth. Exciting News!!! Coming in March, 2026, my new book, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life is now available for pre-orders!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Key Takeaways: Personal journey of sobriety and its challenges Managing anxiety and heartbreak after a significant relationship The non-linear nature of emotional healing and recovery The parable of the two wolves and its relevance to personal choices Importance of daily practices for mental health maintenance Concept of emotional sobriety and its distinction from mere survival The role of relationships in emotional well-being and healing Understanding attachment dynamics and their impact on relationships The interplay between trauma, addiction, and relational patterns Emphasizing self-forgiveness, compassion, and community support in healing processes For full show notes:⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠click here⁠⁠⁠!⁠⁠⁠⁠ If you enjoyed this conversation with Laura McKowen, check out these other episodes: Why Community and Courage Matter More Than Ever with Laura McKowen A Journey to Self-Discovery and Sobriety with Matthew Quick By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed, and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you! This episode is sponsored by: ⁠Pebl⁠ – an AI-powered platform that helps companies hire and manage global teams in 185+ countries. Get a free estimate at ⁠hipebl.ai⁠ ⁠Brodo Broth⁠: Shop the best broth on the planet with Brodo.  Head to ⁠Brodo.com/TOYF⁠ for 20% off your first subscription order and use code TOYF for an additional $10 off. ⁠Alma⁠ is on a mission to simplify access to high-quality, affordable mental health care. Visit ⁠helloalma.com⁠ to learn more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You may have heard me mention my new book a few times, and I can assure you you will certainly hear it a few more, but now we are offering some pre-order bonuses. One of them is the Stillpoint method, which I believe is the only systematic way to interrupt negative thought patterns often enough for them to change. There's a lot out there about what you should think and not think. But there's very little that gives you a small and portable system to actually do it. You get the guide to the method and three free months of a new app designed to help you implement it. There are other bonuses too. You can learn more and claim them at one you feed.net slash book.

As we go along further in life, the big thing for me, and maybe this is true for you, that I am learning that it all comes down to how much I can forgive and love and have compassion for myself. 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. There's a version of healing that many of us secretly hope for. You do enough work, grow enough, learn enough, and eventually the same old pain stops knocking you over. But life doesn't always seem to work that way. the same lesson comes back around again. But with the work, you can meet it with a little more awareness and a little more compassion. In this conversation, Laura McCowan and I talk about

emotional sobriety, heartbreak, anxiety, and the realization that healing isn't a straight line. It's a circle. It deepens. We also explore the small practices that help us stay steady when things feel anything but steady. I'm Eric Zimmer. And this is the one you feed. If you've ever put your phone down and felt better almost immediately, and then picked it right back up 10 minutes later, you're not alone. Researchers around the world are finding that social media is making us less happy, and most of us already know this.

The harder question is why we can't seem to stop. And that's exactly what Dr. Lori Santos is digging into on the Happiness Lab. She sits down with the authors of the 2026 World Happiness Report, to unpack this year's biggest findings. What's happening with young people's well-being, why the rest of us stay glued to our feeds, even when we know better, and what the science says we can actually do about it.

I'm a really big fan of Laurie's work on the Happiness Lab because she doesn't just tell you what the research says. She helps you figure out what to do with it, and that's the part that most people skip. Listen to the Happiness Lab wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Laura. Welcome to the show, or welcome back to the show, I should say.

Hey, Eric, good to be here. Thank you. I'm always happy when I get a chance to talk to you. I've been sort of following along with your sobriety journey. It's 11 years now, so congratulations. Thank you. And you've got a great substack also where I have been reading and keeping up with. So I'm excited to talk about a bunch of different things. But before we start, we'll start like we always do with the parable.

And in the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with a grandchild. And they say, 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 the other's a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent, and they say, well, which one wins? And their grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Okay, so I'm not sure how I have answered this question in our prior conversations, but I know how I would answer it today.

I have been writing about and dealing with a lot of acute anxiety in the past couple of years, especially. I had a relationship and we were engaged together for four years and it ended about two years ago, almost two years ago. And I've always struggled with anxiety to some degree, but since then it has been really acute periods of anxiety. And so I've had to try to find new ways to look at that, work with it and think about it and relate to it. And if you have struggled with anxiety in this way or anyone who's listening has struggled in this way, it can really, really, really take over your life and take you down on the days that it's bad. It feels otherworldly. It feels impossible.

and what it has forced me to do is go back to the most basic practices of, I would say, sobriety that I really started in sobriety. Where this comes into the good wolf, bad wolf thing, if I think of waking up in the morning with like an empty stomach or two empty stomachs, the good wolf stomach and the bad wolf's stomach. The good wolf being the path that I could go down that is going to mean that I'm able to manage my day, just like very baseline expectations. The bad wolf, meaning I am going to feed the stories, the lack of discipline, which I'll get into a second, the practices, the sort of rote habits that will lead to a really horrific anxiety day.

and therefore a non-functional, very depressive day. Right. I have to, the good wolf versus bad wolf in which one I'm going to feed dials down to the like minute by minute choices I make when I wake up. And what I mean by that is I have to be extraordinarily focused and disciplined with the thoughts that I'm allowing myself to chase and nurture in my mind. And I have to sort of stack up very, very, very basic practices that help me get to a level of okayness versus like sliding down a hill. And what those are for me are no caffeine on those days, unfortunately,

writing these specific prompts and sort of practices that I've learned in my journal. And it takes, you know, sometimes it takes 30 minutes. So it's a chunk of time. It means moving my body. It means putting my phone away. It means praying for me. And it means meditating for like 10 to 15 minutes minimum. And I think sometimes the good wolf, bad wolf thing can seem a little bit esoteric and like, you know, am I looking over my

right shoulder or my left shoulder or am I you know reading this book or that book or am I giving into you know desires or am I you know going to spend my time in some fruitful way where I'm of service to others it can seem like these very sort of big grand um big stroke things that we have to decide and and I guess this is a long way of saying um it's the teeny tiny tiny things right now the seemingly teeny teeny, teeny daily wrote habits that I have to choose that stack up to me being really okay versus not okay. I have no shot at the Good Wolf winning, let's say, if I'm not doing these teeny, tiny little habits. And they're so easy to let go of and they're so easy to forget. They're so easy to let go of. You wake up in the morning and you're like, man, I just want

to have a cup of coffee and like zone out and scroll Instagram for 15 minutes. But if I do that on these days and these weeks and months where I'm in a really acute anxiety place, I'm gone. And it's like a snowball and I can't, I can't track it. So that's the good wolf, bad wolf for me right now. And it's, it really feels the, when I'm in the bad place, it really feels absolutely untenable. And it's amazing to me that these small things add up to such an extraordinary difference. there's so many things you said in there that I would like to hit on and one of the things that I've enjoyed the way you approach it not that you are going through it but that it has been the way you are writing openly about how devastating the loss of that relationship was how serious the anxiety has been and I think there is a tendency in sobriety circles for us to paint a happy picture of what sobriety is

because it is a much better picture, right? I think we would all agree at any time, those of us who are sober would say, like, it's much, much better. And you know what? It still sucks sometimes. Sometimes it's still really hard. And I think about that parable, too. I was actually saying to somebody who was interviewing earlier today,

and I said, I don't know that a decade on, 11 years on, that I would pick that parable as the way I would orient the whole show today. Totally. Yeah, I agree. But when I'm in times of trouble, that parable rings really, really strong, right? Because it points to, there are things that I know can help, and there are things that I know don't help, and I've got to make that choice. And so I think that that's really for me when it becomes, like you said, less ethereal and a lot more pragmatic. Now, I think part of emotional sobriety for me is realizing and learning how to do those kind of practices

consistently even when I'm not in trouble. Right. That's that's kind of the trick is, you know, how do we stay motivated to do the things that are good for us when we're not in so much pain? Yeah. We're saying the same thing. You said it in a different way a little bit more succinctly. I don't know. I don't know the secret to that yet.

I haven't figured that out yet because they tend to get a looser with things once I feel good. And I don't know that that there's anything actually wrong with that. I think that's sort of a natural ebb and flow of life. Right. Right. And I think we bounce back faster. We go back to our practices faster. We have built a stronger baseline of remembrance in our body and in our nervous.

service system and in our neural pathways so that it's like getting on the track is not that big of a deal. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So there's something you wrote recently that made me laugh out loud. You're talking about anxiety. I just want to find it here for a second.

You said, I know my back is against the wall when I'm really reading Pema Chodrin. Not like have her on in the background because it's a nice voice, but like I'm really reading it. And that just made me laugh because that is so true. And she's exactly the author. I would say that when I'm like really freaked out, really having like an existentially bad time, she's where I go back to. And I don't find her as compelling to me most of the time because I'm like, well, yeah, I know everything is groundless. But, you know, like, but when I am in trouble and that's just made me laugh, like, I know I'm in trouble when that's what I'm reading. I think she's that for a lot of people.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And God, I'm grateful for her. When you're really in the shit, she is my go-to. And she has been for like 15 years. I used to eat out all the time. But over the years, I've done less of it because it's healthier and cheaper to eat at home. But the challenge, of course, is making that work during a busy week.

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If you love this show, it's probably because I don't promise to change your life if you just do this one weird trick. I don't trust those I never have. What I do trust are long, honest conversations where people actually say something real. People always ask me which podcasts I listen to, and one of my go-toes for over a decade now has been the rich role. podcast. Each week, Rich sits down with scientists, athletes, artists, writers, people who've done the work, not just talked about it, for real conversations about health, purpose, and what it actually takes to grow as a person in a complicated world. In a world of soundbites and TikTok therapy, I know I can always count on Rich for that kind of conversation, the kind where you walk

away with new ideas and reminders of what matters most. Search for the Rich Roll podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts. So a couple years ago, I had, I went through a pretty difficult time where there was a lot of grief, there was a lot of anxiety, there was a lot of surprise. I was just sort of completely taken aback by what was happening. And I remember having these moments where I felt like, I thought I had done all this work. Like, you know, I've done inner child work. I've done, you know, I thought I was through all of this.

What is this? And having certain moments of feeling very discouraged. I had a therapist help me reframe that and we may get into that. But I'd love to know, like, was that your experience and how have you been able to put that in a context that's useful? Yes, it has been my experience throughout sobriety. And I think of things that have helped me reframe it. I think do you know about spiral dynamics and kind of that we heal? You don't even need to know anyone who's listening about the whole thing of spiral dynamics,

but I think we heal in a spiral trending up. But we go around and around and around. And we see the same things again. It feels like we are revisiting the same lessons. And we are. And I think we may be. revisiting them in just a different context. We may feel, we often feel, like you said, like, oh, I'm just here again. It's the exact same thing. I don't think that's true, though. I love the Pema

quote, nothing ever goes away until it teaches us what we need to know. And I think each time, say, we circle, I'll just pick an example. I have a pattern of relationships that I've had since it was imprinted in my childhood. It comes from my dad. I chase or am attracted to or in relationship with or in some kind of situation with an unavailable, emotionally unavailable person. And I could look at the entire history of all my relationships, starting from very young and until this last one, and say, God, I'd never learned anything. I just kept repeating the same thing over and over again. But if I look closer, that's not true at all. Each time, certainly since sobriety, it's gone up, like that my healing has gone up and up and up. It's not a once and done,

and it's never going to be a once and done. I don't think there will be a time while I will ever not be triggered into that type of reaction, whether I'm in a relationship with a healthy person or not. The difference is we get out of said situation more quickly. We recover more quickly. And sometimes I do think, too, this is my theory right now. And I don't have anything really to base this on other than all the sort of spiritual reading that I've done over the course of my life, meaning there's nothing scientific that I know about it. It's just my feeling and what I've learned. Things get really intense before we sort of jump a level of healing. So this last relationship for me was like, you have got to be kidding me, that I'm in this much pain,

learning this particular thing again at 10 years sober. And it was the most excruciating pain that I had ever experienced. Right. And I did in moments feel like that was a failure. Like, God, I haven't learned anything. I'm hopeless. It's just going to keep happening. But I know what's truer is, one, because of all the prior work that I had done,

I was able to actually metabolize more of the hurt and the pain and therefore absorb more of the healing and the lessons. So I think it's this strange. inverse where it's almost like the more capacity we have built, the more the deeper our sorrow and our pain. It's like it carves more out of us. But then in that, you know, the Khalil Gibran, the deeper our sorrow, the more joy we can contain. I think the deeper the sorrow, the more healing and the more joy and the more capacity we then have for the next thing. So there's that. I also think that as we go along further in life, the big thing for me, and maybe this is true for you,

that I am learning that it all comes down to how much I can forgive and love and have compassion for myself. And that has really only come online in the past few years. Yeah. I still was what I would call healing or growing or, you know, my resilience was really. based on some kind of pressure to just push forward and a little bit of self-hatred or a lot, a little bit of just, I'm going to exile that part of me. I'm still pissed. I just don't want those parts of me anymore.

And so I think the part where nothing ever leaves us alone until it teaches us what we need to know, I think the end point of what we really need to know and what we really need to learn is that until we accept all the parts of ourselves and really learn to interpret. those parts and love them and bring them along, we're going to get that same lesson. So it almost hurts worse the longer we go along because there's more accumulated pain and exiling of those parts. So this part of me that chased that unavailable person, which is really just me trying to complete some story from my childhood with my dad, with just a new person, right?

I now, instead of having done it 10 times, I've done it 400 times. And I feel that and that part has been exiled 400 times. And the pain is deeper and I'm also 11 years sober. I don't have other coping mechanisms now. So I'm feeling it more, but the opportunity to integrate that part and to bring that part along and to have more self-compassion for that part and to actually say, okay, I'm not going to hate you. I'm not going to punish you. I'm not going to say you're stupid or you're wrong or whatever. That opportunity is there and with that becomes, it comes another level of healing. It just

hurts worse. So there's a few things there. I think like overall, I think we do keep circling the same lessons. I think we get better at recovering. I think we get better at acknowledging. I think our awareness increases. But I don't think the pain gets easy. I think it actually gets harder the further we go along until we've really, really integrated the lesson. And I think it always takes so much longer than we think. The ultimate acceptance is that we just don't ever get to finally arrive at the healing place. Yeah, I don't think there is one. And I think the tricky part with all this is like you lose a relationship to someone you're engaged to, that you've been in this relationship that you've built.

all these ideas and around, what's the healthy healed response to that? It's still an enormous amount of pain. Yeah, the healthy healed response is to be in pain. Check in for a moment. Is your jaw tight, breath shallow? Are your shoulders creeping up? Those little signals are invitations to slow down and listen. Every Wednesday, I send weekly bites of wisdom, a short email that turns the big ideas we explore here in each show, things like mental health, anxiety, relationships, purpose, into bite-sized practices you can use the same day. It's free. It takes about a minute to read, and thousands already swear by it. If you'd like extra fuel for the weekend, you also get a weekend podcast playlist. Join us at one you feed.net slash newsletter. That's one you feed.net slash newsletter

and start receiving your next bite of wisdom. All right, back to the show. I thought a relationship that was really important to me was ending, and my therapist just kept bringing up my childhood. And I was like, well, of course, yes. But if I came to you and said that my partner had just died, would you be telling me right now that the thing we need to be doing is finding out what's broken about me from my childhood?

Oh, my God, yes, totally. No, we would not be doing that. Now, if my grief went on and devastated me and I couldn't climb out of it, and of course, but there's also a natural humanness that none of us get out of. And I think that the self-improvement world subtly tells us there is a way out of it when I don't think there is. No, I think you're so right. I was actually very grateful for the amount of pain that I felt and could feel. My marriage ended 13 years ago.

I didn't feel much of anything except relief. Because I was still drinking. I was deep into my addiction. I just wanted to be alone with that. And I wanted to stop feeling like I was ruining his life and his dreams. And I wanted to stop lying and I wanted to stop cheating. And not being married removed a lot of that. And I couldn't feel the pain because I couldn't access it.

I was so distant. for my own heart because of the drinking and all kinds of unprocessed shit. So I was actually so grateful that I felt it so acutely this time. I felt more real. I felt more alive. I felt more present. And I felt way more sober. Because, like, emotionally sober.

Because there's this quote that I saw maybe six months after the breakup when I was in this place of like, I just want this to go away. Why is this sticking around so long? You know, you don't want to be in pain when you're in pain. It's terrible. And you mentioned the self-help world. A lot of the self-help world, and you said not so subtly, subtly, I would say not so subtly in some cases, you know, we pathologize all kinds of forms of dependence. Like codependency is like this big thing now. Like, oh, if you are somehow emotionally tied to another person's being, and process and their heart and, you know, you're codependent. Yeah.

And I think that's bullshit. I think codependence is real. There is a certain level of pathology that belongs to that. But I think by and large, we have tried so hard not to need each other, not to depend on each other, that we pathologized any emotional co-regulation that exists in a relationship that should exist. that's very natural as the kind of animals and the beings that we are. And I saw this quote that said, this is a brutalization of it, but it basically was like, we are undone by each other. And if we aren't undone by each other, there's something wrong.

We're missing something. Yeah. We are undone by each other. Yeah. That's beautiful. I've talked before about how important therapy has been in my life. Having someone who can help you see yourself more clearly, challenge your thinking, and support you through the hard parts makes a real difference.

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But they don't dream, read a room, rally a team, and they certainly don't have shower thoughts, pivotal hallway chats, or big ideas. People do. And people, when given the best AI platform, they're freed up to do the fulfilling work they want. to do. To see how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. I actually think it's getting better. And I would say in the last several years, I feel like this is lesson. But there's a psychology version and there's a spiritual version of it, which basically said we should be these, like you said, we should be these creatures that all our happiness is inside of us. I should just be happy and be able to generate all that

just inside myself. And that's what a healthy person is. And I think that the more that I've learned about what it means to be a human, the way we are wired up, the type of creatures that we are, is that that is profoundly false. Yes, profoundly false. We should be undone by each other. And like you said, there are ways in which we should be perhaps less undone by each other, right? And there are people that it's worth letting undo us. And there's people that we probably shouldn't let in to undo us. And there's a whole lot of nuance in.

subtlety in that. But to think that that wouldn't be the case is to miss, I think, a lot of of understanding of what we are as creatures and just a lot of the beauty of being alive. A lot of the beauty of being alive and a lot of the beauty of being in relationship, which is, it's kind of all we have. Yeah. It's the number one predictor of happiness is if you have healthy relationships or not. Yeah. And also of health. Overall health. and well-being. So I do agree. I think there's some ways we are getting more of the nuance in there and getting it a little bit more right, especially as we've understood the reality of trauma and the impact of trauma, so meaning this sort of hyper-individualism and this hyper sort of

self-reliance. We've started to break that down a bit and understand the like, it's not just a matter of if you want to be happy, you will. And if you want to have self-esteem, you will. And if you want to have self-worth, you will. You just generate it yourself. It's all you need is this relationship with yourself. Some of that has dialed down a bit with the understanding of how trauma actually works and, you know, other psychological factors. But I totally agree. And I think that's a lot about what I've written about in this next book, just from a memoir perspective, not a teaching perspective, is just sort of this coming around to the fact that we are undone by each other. And that's not a bug.

Right. That's not a problem. It's a reality of being emotional beings, being biologically connected to each other. I mean, some of this stuff is just science. We attune and attach to each other's nervous systems. We do co-regulate each other when you're with another. person that you love and that cares for you, you co-regulate each other. We need each other. We need community. We need relationship. So for me, because this is my, you know, sort of my ground

zero lesson, this is what has been the hardest for me to sort of accept about myself that I can be impacted and that there's nothing wrong with the way I am impacted, that my feelings aren't a problem, that my quote unquote weaknesses are not actually a problem. They're beautiful. and part of what makes me just normal human, that I don't need to have shame about that. That's what I've written about it. My latest book is just coming around to the fact that like emotional sobriety and so much like physical sobriety is learning to how to see the humanity and the behaviors that you have and that they are only always ever a way to connect and feel okay and safe in the world. Yeah, that's a beautiful description of it because the more I have reflected on my, addiction, the more I see, that's what it was all about.

It's all it ever was. Recently, you told a man you didn't want to keep seeing him because he didn't feel safe. And you described this beautiful scene. It really moved me where you're sort of, you've told the guy this and you're crying, but you're not crying because the relationship. You're crying because you did it for yourself. You stood up and you went, okay, I'm not going to go down that path. And that's a really big moment. It was wild. And it really goes back to what I was talking about earlier about, you know, I have done that same dance 400 plus times in my life. It's the thing I know best. It's where I have

actually tried to find safety. It is something I have hated and shamed myself for so many times. it has caused me such excruciating pain over the course of my life. And specifically what I'm talking about is abandoning myself to try and be what someone else, to try to get some form of scrap of love, attention, affection, because better than nothing. You know, to have that pathological sort of hope that, oh, maybe this will, this will, this will turn into something different. Maybe this will rewrite that original story. Finally, this time, I'll get the person who can't see me to see me. And what I meant by this guy isn't safe, this person isn't safe, is I knew I could feel it. And he had said as much in not that specific

way, but he'd said he was looking for something different than what I wanted. he said it. And it was like this sliding door moment where I could go into that old dance. I could go into that old thing and man, did I want to? It's kind of like substance addiction. Actually, it's a lot like it, like it, where you really actually want to keep doing the thing. There is some kind of comfort and relief and deep familiarity with, what is going to happen.

And your biology, and there's a chase element and there's a reward element. And, you know, it's that equation that we have that's in the background when we have a substance addiction where I remember someone in the rooms

of AA when I first started and I was going to those meetings say, if there was even 5% relief left for me and drinking, I would still do it. Yeah. And I remember thinking, oh, there's still a lot of relief left there for me.

I still get a payoff. I still like it for the first couple hours, maybe even the whole night. Maybe I don't hate it until the next day. But eventually and very quickly, once I, you know, my back was sort of up against the wall and I knew I shouldn't be drinking. I knew this thing had me. The relief window got really, really, really small to where it was almost nothing. And the relief window for this type of a relationship for me, the payoff window has started to get smaller and smaller, but it's still there.

And man, it's harder to break because it's not a substance. Emotions, love, people are not a binary. It's not either you're doing it or you're not. We're all sort of doing it or testing doing it, right? And so sometimes you don't know until it's a little too late and you're already attached. this person and you've already got some history and you're attached to them and your biology is firing to like go towards this person. I think it's way stronger than substances, the biology, the biological urge to reenact the trauma. Yeah. And also substances you can eliminate.

You can eliminate. That's what I mean. It's not a binary. Yeah. I mean, it's one of the great things about if you have a substance addiction is you can just truly starve it out of existence. I'm not saying it's easy. But you will hit a point where, at least for most people, it ceases to be a problem. But relationships, you never get out of that dance. You can't. No, you can't. And like alcohol, I can remove it from my home. I can stop going places where there's drinking. I can limit the access I have, you know, the places that I go with my friends, you know, all those things. I could, like you said, I can slowly choke it out and starve it out of my life. And truly, I haven't had a drink in 11 years. I haven't touched alcohol and I don't have to.

I have to and want to be around people and I want to be in relationship and I want love. I need it. Not only do you want it, you need it. You literally can't starve yourself out of relationship. So it's messier that way. So back to this story, all of the work that I had done in the past had sort of brought me, bubbled up into this moment and I first was able to verbalize to him. And that's something I'd never been able to do before. I would have been too embarrassed to say, you're just not safe for me. And it wasn't physically

safe. It's like you're not safe for me to invest my heart into. This will not just cause me pain. It certainly will, but it will cause me. It's very costly for me. It's not just like, oh, I might have a little heartache. Like now this is, this is going to equal a, a, lot of anxiety. It's going to equal pain that I will have trouble tolerating. I will not function. I will, you know, it's, it's, it's real deep for me. So I said, you're not safe for me and decided to stop pursuing this thing. And I had never done that before, never. I had done the exact opposite. I'd run towards it while maybe putting up some like, you know, saying, oh, I'm not going to do or this is bad for me or what, saying, trying to be the cool girl. I would do all kinds of

gymnastics to try to make it okay. And it could never be okay. And I cried for all the times that I hadn't done that before. And I cried because it was fucking hard. And there was sadness there. I didn't want to do that. Yeah. But you did. It's just amazing to me. Like I just love a story like that. And again, it's not to say that you may not in two weeks do the exact same thing again. But those moments, I think, and I can recognize them in my journey to sobriety. I can recognize the moments where even if it was for a day or a week or one night where I was able to like go, no. Yes.

Oh, look at that. Holy mackerel. It's a possibility that you now have. It's a little twitch of muscle memory that you now have that you didn't have before. And people who haven't been through something like this, it's really hard to explain the knife's edge you're on in those moments, what it costs you to go in either direction. That's a great way of saying it. What it costs you to go in either direction. One of them just costs a little bit more. Actually, maybe a lot more in the long term. But yeah, and I love the way

you describe. It's so in AA we used to use the phrase cunning, baffling, and powerful. Yeah. Right. And that's what this sort of thing you're talking. about is I've got my own version. I've been in a relationship for 10 years. I've got my own version of it, which is more or less, you know, like I have to really work because I think there's a certain degree of distance that I like. And if you come too close, I want to back up. But if you start to pull away, I have a five alarm fire in your body, right? Yeah. And what I'm astounded by is I only know it now with a ton of awareness. Because it changes my entire perception of the other person. It's bizarre to me

the way like, oh, if you're moving away from me, I suddenly, it's just crazy. Like, you're the most beautiful person in the entire world. But if you're coming at me, it's different. And to recognize that like, to say it's emotional it is, but it's, it changes my entire perception. It's biology. You know, really deep way. Yeah, yeah. It's truly biology. Yeah.

I think. There's an emotional thing going on. There's probably a spiritual thing going on. But I think it's truly biology. I think that's a... Your attachment system goes nuts. And all of a sudden, this, you are in a, it's a threat to your whole body that this person is moving away from you.

And so, of course, they become more attractive. Of course they become more powerful. Of course they become... Yeah. there's a fantasy about them now. They have magical powers. They have all these things. Yeah, it's amazing because I can look back at previous relationships and see like how wildly

different I saw the same person, right? How wildly different I saw the same person. And with years of remove now I'm like, well, maybe I see them as accurate as we ever see anything, which I think is questionable. But I can look back at like my wife of, you know, my son's. 28, so 26 years ago, I feel like I can see her with some degree of, I'm not hooked up. Yeah. I'm not hooked up, right?

Yeah. And I'm like, oh, okay, that's interesting. She's neither as amazing as I thought when she was moving away. And I think biology is a great way to say it. Yeah. Because it changes perception in a really deep way. That's the only way I've been able to really understand it and explain it into the depth in which it animates you is. biology. And I'm not making that up. This is like I have have the fortune of being connected to

the foremost sort of leaders in this space, the space being, you know, psychology, attachment theory, biology, complex trauma. I'm assuming you have some complex trauma in your past. And this plays into it because when you feel safe, I'm just going to guess. because of what you just said. When you feel safe in a relationship, there's a discomfort to that almost. It's like that's the sort of moving away thing. It's like, hmm. It's safer or it manifests bored. It manifests. Bored. Yeah. Yeah. The person's not that interesting. Sometimes not that interesting. Like there's no spark. There's no electricity. Yep. And when someone's moving away from you, it's. It is familiar.

It sparks that disorganized attachment thing. Which I am, which I think is such a great term. Yeah. It's, and it's, and your body, like you don't sit there and this is not rational. No. All of a sudden your system just lighting up and you're like, oh. And I can't control that anymore than I could control my drinking at the end. This is deeper.

This was underneath the drinking. This is a lot of the reason I did drink. Yes. Was to try to soothe this sort of, it causes this extraordinary existential pain. It's been interesting to remain in relationship with somebody for 10 years and do this dance. Yeah. And a lot of it is me, I'm a lot more conscious of it now. So I can sort of just, I can't really make it go away exactly.

But I can try and relax around it. I sort of think about a lot of times. I use being sick as a really useful analogy for a lot of things. Because when I'm sick, I just know my brain isn't working. And I just do my very best to be like, okay, I hear everything you're saying, but the world isn't that black, that bleak, that, like, just settle down. And that's what I think I've learned to do. The other thing I've learned to do is name it a little bit.

And sometimes even, not a lot, but sometimes even with my partner, and the minute I do, it's gone. It's so strange. It's so strange. The minute I say, I'm feeling this and I say it to her, it vanishes. Yeah. But I don't want to be saying that all the time, right? No, because that's hard as a partner.

As another person, yeah. Yeah. But I think this speaks to the fact that we heal relationally. Yeah. That what you're talking about is like really healing with someone in real time. And that person can't be that for you all the time. We would destroy each other if we would. if we did that.

If we vocalized every weird emotional fluctuation that went through us, yeah, of course. Yeah. But being with someone where it's safe enough to speak that sometimes and to put words to that and to have them stay. And I mean, that is how we actually heal is relationally. So this is all this stuff that is really deeply present for me now and at 11 years and that I've written about in this last book and I'm still walking through. and understanding, but I understand a lot more than I did before.

Wow, it's a wild ride. Yeah. Before you check out, pick one insight from today and ask, how will I practice this before bedtime? Need help turning ideas into action? My free weekly bites of wisdom email lands every Wednesday with simple practices, reflection, and links to former guests who can guide you, even on the tough stuff like anxiety, purpose, and habit change.

Feed your good wolf at one year. You feed.net slash newsletter. Again, one you feed. Dot net slash newsletter. Well, I think that's a beautiful place to wrap up. I, as always, am inspired by you, you're writing. It's outstanding. And just the bravery that you show in this, I think is such a beautiful thing. You said something in relation to this that I just want to end us with if I can find it. You say, I'm sharing this mostly because if it's your experience, too, it might be helpful to know you're not alone or somehow you know. You uniquely fucked up. Especially in sobriety, it seems like we shouldn't struggle in this way, but almost everyone I know does. We drank for good reason. It would be completely unmanageable if I was

drinking. It's still tough, not unmanageable, but tough. And I just love that because you're normalizing this thing that everybody has. And people in sobriety, you know, there's the performative aspect of going to meetings and I'm sober and how wonderful it is. There's a performative aspect to it is wonderful to see people write about honestly. So thank you for all that. Oh, you're so welcome. No, thank you. It's, I'm, it's, I'm grateful to have this conversation. You're catching me when I'm like doing these things in real time so I don't have packaged sort of ways to talk about it. So I appreciate your patience as I fumble my way through my words. No real fumbling that I noticed. Okay. Thanks, Eric. It was really nice to see.

see you again. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought-provoking, I'd love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don't have a big budget, and I'm certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better, and that's you. Just hit the share button on your podcast app or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one you feed community.