Well with Arielle Lorre - 52: I'm Arielle & I'm an Alcoholic

Episode Date: April 15, 2020

In this episode, I am telling you my story of addiction, trauma and recovery. After a year of recording and many requests for this topic, I figured no better time than now -- especially when so many are going through their own challenges. This episode will give you insight into my past and why I have certain perspectives and attitudes; how I overcame both addiction and major traumas; provide hope for those struggling or with loved ones going through this; and continue to debunk the myth that anybody's life is perfect! I also take listener questions at the end. Produced by Dear MediaSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So, so will auto-hue without your Reis-Adviseur or SunnyCars. The following podcast is a dear media production. Hey, welcome

to the Blonde Files podcast. I'm your host, Ariel Lorry, and I'm here to talk all things wellness. From how to achieve optimal health and well-being to the best beauty tips and everything in between, no topic is off limits and I'm bringing it to you real and unfiltered. I know there is so much information out there, so I'm here to help you navigate it all. Thanks for listening. Let's get into it. Hi, everybody. Welcome to this show. I hope you're all having a good week. So since we We are just about a year into the podcast and since I have never really formally introduced myself on here, and since I'm new to Dear Media, and since I've never told my story on my podcast, novel idea, that's exactly what I'm going to do in today's episode. I guess I just always felt a little strange about doing so. Like, there are just so many things to share that I never know which parts are worth it and which parts are TMI. short answer probably a lot. But I guess it's all relevant. And my main issue with it is like, am I so self-important that I think strangers really want to hear me talk about my life for however

long this turns out to be. But that said, so many people asked for this. And especially lately, I've been getting a lot of messages regarding my story. So people ask me where they can hear it. And I always have to direct them to other interviews that I've done, which is great. But I guess it's just time I have this on my own show. The main thing that I want to emphasize is that I've learned that just by sharing our struggles with other people, we can help them if they're going through something similar. And it's cliche, but there's so much power in turning your struggle into your purpose. So especially now, if anything is going through anything hard, which I know a lot of people are, just know that you can get through it too. And while our circumstances are probably very different,

a lot of the feelings are the same. So I have no idea how this is going to come out. I may not get into the nitty gritty that I get into in interviews when people ask me really probing questions, but hopefully this will just inform you about how I came to have certain perspectives, certain opinions and attitudes about a lot of the things I cover elsewhere on this show. And maybe somebody who's in a bad place themselves will hear this and be inspired to make a change. Okay, so I grew up on the East Coast, Rhode Island, to be exact, and I had a pretty normal childhood by all measures. My dad is a doctor. My mom stayed in home to take care of my older brother and I. We went to private school. We had a golden retriever, everything but the white picket fence. We never went without,

and basically everything was good. However, I had a bit of a voice. from as far back as I can remember, even though I never identified it as such until I got sober. So what I mean by that is from a really young age, I think I was looking for external things to make me feel okay. On the outside, I was social, athletic, creative, smart, popular, well-adjusted. But I really had some darkness inside. I had some trouble self-regulating, which is a character. of alcoholics and addicts. And I think I was just kind of hypersensitive. Again, to anyone who wasn't in my direct family, I probably looked kind of like the perfect child, but I was at times just

a little fucking monster to those closest to me. So back to the void, I needed things, outside things, like cars, clothes, shoes, toys, on a primal level with a desperation. that was just absolutely not normal. I would get so angry at my parents for not providing whatever thing I needed at any given time. And I erupted in like explosive rage. I really truly felt like I needed X, Y, or Z to make it whole. Looking back on it now, it was like I said, primal. It was like my lizard brain. So things settled down a bit through middle school. And I just want to note that This is my memory, which, who knows, my family might have a totally different perspective, but this is kind of how I see things after exploring all of this in sobriety.

So high school started out okay. Then a few things happened. I fell in love and I found alcohol. And I fell in love with alcohol. So I won't get into the relationship too much, but it was intense and he also filled that void and made me feel whole. Like I needed him on that primal level and the prospect of not having. Having him was very scary. In fact, I could not deal with it. And when things got really bad between

us, I just didn't know how to let go. I didn't know how to deal with the emotions. And it was extremely painful. It really scarred me for many, many years. And I think that's because of the things that happened, but also because the age. Like, I was 14 or 15 until about 20-ish. And those our formative years and the drama and attachment was very disruptive in my life because I couldn't not prioritize it over everything else. That was kind of my first addiction now that I think about it. Anyway, at some point in there, I had my first drink. Oh, and I want to point out that the initial drinking had nothing to do with him. It just had everything to do with what high schoolers were doing. And you guys, it was like the first time in my life, I could relax, I could breathe, I could

let my guard down. I felt comfortable in my skin, all of that. I never even knew that I was uncomfortable until I had a drink. And I felt that warm sensation all over my body and felt the comfort and ease that I experienced when I had some booze in me. And it was just like, oh, I had found my solution to life. And I didn't even know I needed it. And I also knew that I would never go without again. So my drinking was problematic from the start. I, blacked out a lot. I drank and drove. I was that girl at the party, you know, the one who couldn't keep her shit together. I had to get picked up at parties because I was so wasted. I woke up in random places in my car. I would wake up in the hospital. I would get home on

any given night, puke everywhere on the reg. It was not cute. But there were plenty of times that that didn't happen. So I always just thought that I just had to get the formula down. Like, I was just doing it wrong. And that actually became easy because I found cocaine in my senior year of high school. And it was like, whoa, I can drink exactly how I want to and not black out and seem sober-ish to everybody else and stay up and all of that. So I'm going to fast forward through some of this stuff. But I went to Syracuse for a semester and left because of personal reasons, mainly relating to that relationship. And then I tried taking classes at a local college. I was working and got my own place, but it was just kind of disastrous. And I ended up getting a DUI when I was 20. So I went to rehab for the first time when I was 20 in Florida. I decided to stay down there to start over and that began some dark years in my life. It had already been pretty dark, but that was not a good, not a good few years. I can sum it all up by saying that I had the best intentions, but I just could not seem to both drink, which remember was my solution to life and be able to

hold any kind of meaningful job, friendships, complete any amount of school. It just could not be done. And then add in the shame of seeing my peers pass me by, the shame of not being able to follow through on anything, the shame of situations my drinking got me in. It was just a perfect storm. So what happened was a few years after being in Florida, I found myself in yet another very unhealthy relationship. I was drinking all the time. I was hanging out with sketchy people and I ended up going to treatment again. This time, I blamed the relationship and people kind of bought it. You know, alcoholics are smart and persuasive and manipulative and this is huge. The people who care about us want to believe us. My parents had no clue what to do with me because they,

They had no experience with this ever. And there are no alcoholics or addicts in my family. And they wanted to believe that my resolve to just get back to school and get a good job and the notion that doing those things would curb my alcoholism, they wanted to believe that was the solution and that I could actually do it. So, you know, alcoholism and addiction is cunning, baffling, and powerful, not just to the person experiencing it, but to those witnessing it as well. I'm Claire Mazer and I'm Erica Serulo and we are the hosts of a thing or two with Claire and Erica, a weekly podcast all about discovery and enthusiasm.

Well, that's how we describe it, but someone else described it even better, I think, as a unique mix of urgent discussions of non-urgent things and thoughtful conversations of important and otherwise ignored things. If you want to check it out and see what it's all about, check back every Monday where we drop new episodes. I think you'll like it. It's a great Monday morning ritual, a thing or two with Claire and Erica. So long story short, I went to rehab and got out and went right back to my old ways because I just could not. I didn't have the tools. I just simply could not. I had too much pain and shame and all of those things to not have my medicine, my solution.

So things got pretty out of control. In the following years, I had many periods of drinking around the clock, having auditory and visual hallucinations, seizures. I lost a ton of weight and I'm already small. And I couldn't even hold a bartending job, a job where it was totally fine for me to drink and use. Even that was not manageable. It's worth mentioning that by this point I had also become addicted to Xanax and Kwanapin, not in an abusive way, but just to help with like the anxiety I would have the next day after drinking and doing cocaine. So, you know, I didn't technically abuse it. I took it as prescribed, but it was definitely a problem. And because, Because my chemistry is so sensitive, if I took Xanax consistently for any amount of time and then

suddenly stopped, I would have a seizure. So this all came to a head when my best friend at the time was murdered and I found her. And I don't want to go into it into detail out of respect for her and her family, but also I'm working on it in trauma therapy and it's just very much still with me after years of stuffing it down and dissociating from it. But at that point, my parents pulled me out of Florida and my drinking and using took on a new meeting because now I had this traumatic thing. So I ended up in California after that on a whim. I'm skipping over a lot, guys, just to kind of condense this. But I came to California on what was supposed to just be a vacation to see my friend who lived out here and get a little bit of a break. I don't know from what

because I wasn't doing anything at the time, but I ended up staying. I lived in Orange County for like a year or two. things were very bad. And then I moved up to West Hollywood with my boyfriend at the time. And by that point, I was again having seizures, drinking all day, taking Adderall, doing cocaine almost daily, and taking Xanax. So I want to point out that there were times when I was able to just drink wine with dinner. I could go to work at this internship that I had and function at like a pretty normal level. And these were times when I would delude myself into thinking I finally got the formula right. And I wasn't an alcoholic after all. But then inevitably, things would come crashing down. So what happened was my boyfriend moved out because my behavior was so erratic. And I was so out of control. And when he moved out,

there was nobody to essentially keep me alive and keep me from circling the drain. So at this point, I was hopeless. I could not leave my house without drinking. I couldn't make a phone call without drinking or have any kind of human contact. I had a few lower companions, including my neighbor, who supplied me with drugs and took advantage of me and eventually robbed me when I was in the hospital. I was more or less unconscious from about December to February of 2014, which is probably a good thing. So my family did a wellness check on me where, you know, they were living in Rhode Island. They called the police and they came to check on me and saw me unresponsive in my apartment through the window. So they had to break into my apartment and take me to the hospital where I saw,

somehow got out and went right back to doing what I was doing, which was drinking and or using, having a seizure, passing out, coming to, doing whatever I could get my hands on, passing out again. I was literally so diluted. I was just snorting dust off countertops. So I want to emphasize something because there is a stigma and a misconception around addiction and alcoholism. I did not want to be doing this. This was not a choice or moral thing. failing. Yes, I made a choice at 16 or 17 to have that first drink or try cocaine, but even then, it was not a choice to continue. It did something for me that satisfied such a primal need that it just became part of my survival as much as eating or breathing. So think about that

if you're frustrated, which is understandable, with someone in your life who has a problem. People drink and use because they like the effect produced by substances, but it's also doing something for them that otherwise cannot be done. It's usually a coping mechanism for some underlying pain. Another important thing to note is that while my bottom was very low, it doesn't have to be that low to get sober. You don't have to be having seizures and hallucinations to be an addict. Okay, I'm going off on a tangent, so back to my story. Finally, my family and a specialist flew to L.A. showed up at my door. I had another grand mal seizure on the spot. I was taken to the hospital for a few days. And then I was taken to treatment where I was for 90 days, followed by an extended treatment for another 90 days, and then sober living for six months. So I was in a recovery environment for a year. So people ask me how I got sober. And while I would love to talk about this in detail, I adhere to traditions and don't discuss it on a public level. Even saying that is probably too much, but I'm active in a recovery

community. It saved my life. If anyone needs help, you're welcome to DM me and I will talk to you one on one. But just know that there are ways for free to get sober and stay sober. I didn't have to go to rehab. It was helpful because it got me away from drugs and alcohol for a long enough time for the fog to clear, but the way that I got sober and stayed sober is free. I'm not unique. I have been active in my recovery since day one, and I have never wanted a sip of alcohol or pill or anything since that day. So it can be done. So I rebuilt my life from the ground up six years ago. I had no car, no apartment, no job, no friends. I tried to be humble and just do the next right thing, which was working at a boutique, focusing on my recovery, building stuff.

sober relationships, going back to school, clearing up all the wreckage from my past. I started my Instagram account in 2016 as a fitness accountability account. Life just got better and better. And that's not to say I didn't go through hard things. I did. But I was able to cope with them in healthy ways. Thanks to the support that I had, the recovery community therapy, and a connection to something bigger than me. You really can't go through what I did and not believe that there's something

bigger than yourself. And I learned to align with that and trust that. And it's my guiding light, as cheesy as that sounds in my life today. So the main components that helped me initially in my recovery were community, so like-minded people who had been through similar things, purpose. So finding a way to make my pain and my experience is helpful to someone else. And spirituality, connecting with something bigger than me and realizing that I am not the center of the universe. So those are still incredibly important to this day. But now that it's become ingrained in me, I don't actively have to try to be sober. It's just a way of life.

So let's see. I'm going to get to some listener questions. Oh, everyone wanted to know. How did I meet my husband and all of this? Let's just say we were both sober and we met through mutual friends. You guys, you just never know what package. your person is going to show up in. I had dated a little, but the guys my age were not at all interesting to me. Not to say I was looking for someone twice my age, but that's just how it turned

out. I had to make the first move because I just knew he was too shy and he didn't want to be like a predator. Anyway, we went on one date and that was that and we both just kind of knew. And that's not to say that the age difference wasn't an issue. It was more so for him, but we just just decided it was worth pursuing anyway. So something that I learned from him is that the eye has no age, and I talked about this in the podcast that he and I did together a couple weeks ago. And, you know, people who give me shit for being with an older guy just don't seem to comprehend this. And I think they're in for a rude awakening when they find themselves older and still feel 20. I personally think my husband's age just makes him more interesting. He's had such an incredible

life, so much experience. He's brilliant. He's wise. He's the voice of reason to my early 30s anxiety brain that thinks everything I experience is the end all be all of my life. So yeah, you can go back to episode 50 to hear my conversation with him. I'm probably repeating a lot, but so many people asked when I had them send in questions for this episode. So I guess to sum up, You know, it sounds really weird, but I'm just so grateful for everything I went through because it brought me to where I am today. And it also gave me perspective and taught me so many really important lessons. It taught me humility, gratitude, perseverance. It gave me a work ethic. It gave me a means to connect with others. And basically, everything in my life is a result of what I went through and of my sobriety. Okay, I'm going to do a few listener questions. This is another one that I got a lot. What part of trauma recovery worked the most? So I think I talked about this in my episode with my therapist back in the beginning of January.

I don't know the number for reference, but you can look up the episode with Meg Newman. But the thing that has helped me the most is brain spotting. So I am going to look this up and read it from a website because I won't be able to explain it well. Okay, brain spotting is a theory that suggests that the brain can heal itself from the inside. It aims to stimulate the brain's healing ability by evoking and releasing the negative emotions and experiences that have been stored in it. It does this by identifying an eye position that triggers and releases these emotions. This procedure is based on a concept that an individual's direction of gaze can affect how they feel. It lends to the theory that the eyes have an intense

relationship with the brain. Furthermore, brain spotting is based on the fact that trauma is stored in the body and can be activated or triggered at a certain eye position. The brain spotting therapist uses a pointer to direct the gaze of people in therapy across their field of vision until an eye position is reached that activates a certain traumatic memory or emotion. This helps the therapist to assess an individual's emotions on a much deeper level and evaluate these psychological effects of a trauma experience on an individual. Brain spotting may be done with one or both eyes. It is performed by a trained brain spotting therapist who,

waving a pointer in front of the patient's eyes slowly guides the gaze of the person in therapy across the length of their visual field to identify the brain spot. When the pointer comes across the brain spot, the deep brain will reflexively send signals to the therapist that a brain spot has been detected. These reflexive signals occur without the patient's knowledge, and may include an eye twitch, facial tick, pupillary dilation, or constriction, yons,

swallows, foot movement, or coughs. I am going to skip over some of this because it gets pretty technical talking about the different parts of the brain that are activated. Brain spotting suggests that when an individual experiences a traumatic event such as a sexual abuse, the negative experiences around the event are stored as memories in the brain. The individual may attempt to suppress those memories to be able to cope and lead a normal life. The traumatized individual, not having the means to properly deal with the trauma, stores it within, and struggles with it on a daily basis. The longer these memories are held onto in the brain,

the more they create distortions in the individual's mental processes leading to a mental health disorder. So brain spotting helps the individual assess, process, and release these stored emotions to begin their journey to recovery. Let's see if there's anything else relevant. There's a lot. You can just Google it. So my experience with doing this is what my therapist calls squeezing the lemon. So we talk about the trauma, hold on to a certain memory, and then I start following this pointer. And the first time we did it, I, first of all, didn't really believe in it. And all of a sudden, my eyes got to a certain position. I was holding on to the image in my head. And I got so activated that my entire body went numb. I started sweating profusely and she held me there for like minutes and just let

the activation release. So I was sweating. I was numb. She gave me a weighted blanket. And it slowly kind of like worked out of my body. And afterwards, I was so exhausted. I had to go home and sleep. I was yawning nonstop. But the whole idea is like the next session, my activation when we did it was maybe only a seven versus that first time when it was like a 12, really like a 50. And then the next time it was a 5, and it kind of titrates down. So I've found it to be super, super effective, really helped with residual anxiety that I was having for no apparent reason. And I would highly recommend it to anybody who's experiencing like a trapped trauma. Okay, how did I attract the life I have today? I don't think I attracted it. I think I worked for it, but I do wholeheartedly believe that what you put out

is what you receive. So everything from kindness to love, to generosity, to abundance, all of that. I heard someone say that everything you want from the world is everything you should give, and that has kind of been my mantra. How did I recover from bulimia? I didn't really touch on that, but I was bulimic off and on from my late teens, early 20s to my late 20s. Wait, late teens, early 20s, yes, I said that right. It just kind of went away when I got sober, which I know is not always the case. So I was very fortunate. But I want to be clear, like early sobriety, several months sober, it definitely flared up.

I was throwing everything up, even if I just had a few berries or something. It was really bad. But once I started to straighten it. out spiritually, everything just kind of fell into place. So it did take years for me to develop a healthy relationship with food, which you can probably see if you go all the way back on my Instagram. But the bulimia itself just kind of worked itself out when I started really working on like the underlying causes for my drinking. And when I did that, I discarded a lot of the shit that was making me sick mentally and manifesting itself in other co-occurring.

disorders. How did I keep myself motivated in early recovery? I would say desperation. I was absolutely desperate to not go back to my life pre-sobriety, the shame, the dependence, the fear, the guilt, self-centeredness, being a prisoner of alcohol and drugs, all of that. I just, I knew that if I drank again, I wouldn't have any more chances. I don't know how I didn't come out of it with permanent brain damage given all the seizures and the drugs I was taking that fried my brain. But I was very lucky. And also, I just felt so good. All of a sudden, I got sober and I didn't have to drink before I went to Whole Foods and drink before I went to the DMV. Oh my God. So bad. I could show up to work. I could show up for other people and follow through on what I said I was going to do. And so I really

gained a lot of self-esteem through those things, and that kept me going. It made me want to keep doing what I was doing. Can I take narcotics when I have plastic surgery? Yes, I can. I have learned that when I'm active in my recovery, I'm safe and protected, and I can take medicine as directed if I absolutely need to. That's not to say, like, I'm going to go out and book a bunch of surgeries every year and have to take narcotics. But my first surgery that I had in sobriety, I had to have ovarian surgery. I was about a year and a half sober. And I went into it being super prideful.

And I was like, I'm going to do it without pain meds. And people, sober people advised me to just do what the doctor said. Don't play doctor. Don't overprescribe. Don't underprescribe. Just take it as directed. And I only ended up needing them for like a day or two with that surgery. And with my cosmetic surgeries, I've only needed them only for like the nose job and the browlift.

I think I only took it the first day for each cosmetic procedure. So I learned how to distinguish between actual pain and just discomfort. I am going to close with what am I the most afraid of and what am I the most proud of? I'm the most afraid of not being able to be present and experience the gifts of my life. We are always striving for the next thing. And while I know that certain milestones in life will not make me happy, I do feel so caught up in my goals a lot of the time that I tend to not experience the sweetness of life and the present moment. And I'm really working on this. But it's a daily struggle, especially with just more going on, more access to what other people are doing and achieving.

It's difficult. I'm the most proud of being a nice person and doing everything I can on a daily basis to try to help other people, whether that's through my platform and my job or in recovery or in my personal relationships or through charity. That is the thing that I'm the most proud of that and being reliable and somebody who keeps their word. That is huge for a degenerate alcoholic like me. I hope you enjoyed that episode. If you liked it, and if you like the show in general, please take a second to rate, review, and subscribe. It goes a long way, and it's actually the best way to support the show.

Also, if you want to see more about each episode, you can head over to The Blonde Files podcast on Instagram. I'm always posting about each episode there or over on my personal page at Ariel Lori.