RECOVERY MODE PODCAST: Recent Episodes
Ellie Main & Emily Sledge
Hi, I’m Ellie Main, an artist and podcast host from London in the UK and this is Recovery Mode, a podcast about the 12 steps. Each week I sit down with my friend Emily Sledge, a Recovery teacher and sponsor, and we talk about the steps, we tell Recovery stories and we interview some incredible people about their experiences in Recovery and beyond. This is a podcast for everyone, because Recovery is for everyone.
“So you dealt with dependence on pills, alcohol, and porn, but that wasn’t the real issue?” “No, the real problems were my people pleasing and pride.”
Ben Sledge’s story involves going to war in Afghanistan as a 20 year old, getting blown up and a friend bleeding out on him, divorce, and all the fall out that came after.
Don’t miss this story of a war-torn veteran whose issues began long before the USA put a gun in his hands.
"Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs."
The last of the 12 Steps is to carry the message to others and to put the principles of the program into practice in every area of your life. For those in recovery programs, practicing Step 12 is simply: "to keep it you have to give it away."
“I needed something more…because, you know, the drugs and alcohol wear off. I needed something that’s more consistent and readily available, and so I developed an eating disorder.”
After enduring nearly every form of abuse, Morgan was desperate to find a way to cope with the pain that consumed her. She tried cocaine, alcohol, and sex, but settled instead into stepping between bulimia and anorexia.
A few years into this, she felt abandoned by everyone she’d ever loved, and she was contemplating jumping off a bridge, when a commanding voice broke into the storm of her thoughts and asked a question that changed her trajectory.
“The process of enlightenment is usually slow. But in the end, our seeking always brings a finding. These great mysteries are, after all, enshrined in complete simplicity.”
– Bill W
In recovery we find that spirituality really is constantly developing and changing just like us. New situations and new people all have an effect on us and our spirituality needs to grow along those lines. The Step 11 task at hand is therefore finding ways to improve conscious contact and connection with the “God” of our own understanding. We already have a conscious awareness of a “higher power” working in our lives, which we began to develop in Step Two. Working on Step Three we learned to trust that higher power for guidance. In the process of working through all of the steps so far, we were improving our relationship with the higher power.
“That started to shift my mindset from, ‘What are all the things that I can get from other people to get my worth,’ to ‘How can I attune myself to what God is saying is true about me, and keep doing that, so that I don’t fall back into this codependency pattern?’”
Andre Bradford, national slam poet speaker on empathy, shares his story about how he sought his sense of worth in relationships, and yet found himself self-sabotaging in those relationships because he felt he didn’t deserve them. In friendships, he would constantly second guess himself, wondering whether he’d said or done something to offend someone, and cause them to not want to see him anymore. Until Recovery.
In the steps, he learned to let go of control, take responsibility for the things he has ownership of, and show up in a confident humility that allowed him to finally experience a happy and successful relationship.
“So much of that perfectionism is a big, huge piece of it. The people pleasing, because that goes along with it, if I could just be the perfect wife, my husband will stop doing whatever he’s doing, my parents will be proud of me…this is what I’m supposed to be doing.”
Abandonment by a parent and cancer in her new parent pushed Sunny to fall heavily onto her coping mechanisms - namely, “presenting well.” Though she was enduring so much, she felt that if her life at least looked good, she’d feel better. Wrapping her pride around her like armor, she felt she was better than the mother who left her, and she tried to ensure everyone knew it.
So when her boyfriend tried to kill her, she swept it under the rug, along with all the rest of her pain. But in the process of Recovery, what she saw as her superpower (achieving, excelling, shining at everything) she realized was actually her coping mechanisms. In order to find peace, she had to let go of that shiny armor, lay down her pride, and allow herself to be fully seen and known, in all the messiness.
Making amends may seem like a bitter pill to swallow, but for those serious about recovery, it can be good medicine for the spirit and the soul.
Step 9 is another one of the 12 steps, that initially appears most difficult, but the rewards of putting this principle into practice can be immense. The spiritual principle involved is that of forgiveness, not only from others but forgiveness of self, which can bring healing to both parties.
"I thought, what's the big deal? Porn is totally normal."
Is pornography normal and healthy, or does it harm people and their relationships? Nate and Taylor Hilpert share together how it impacted them individually, and in their marriage. They also explain how Recovery helped to heal how they experience their emotions, giving them the tools they needed to deal with anxiety, self esteem, parenting, and more.
Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
We have a list of all persons we have harmed and to whom we are willing to make amends. We made it when we took inventory. Step 8 is about refining and compiling the list of people that we have hurt with our negative coping mechanisms: family members, friends, etc so that we can prepare to have a conversation wherein we acknowledge the hurt we caused them, and apologize.
This step is just about our side of the sidewalk, not theirs. We prepare to take responsibility for the choices that we had control over and that we made, with no excuses.
"Every time the doorbell rang, I was afraid there'd be someone telling me my son was dead."
Expectations weigh on many of us, pressuring us to act, speak, dress and live a certain way. For Debbie Sledge, most of this pressure came from her country club parents, who demanded she present an image that would make them look good. Instead, she ran the other way, and asserted her independence with choices that did not fit with who she really was. But what drove her to the Steps was exactly what drove her away from the plans her parents had for her - control. Controlling her own life, and later her kids’ lives. She finally realized she had to “bury and have a funeral” for what she wanted most in life so she could be free to live it.
“I’m inherently worth, but I need help.”
In this episode, we come to the first true action step in regards to our coping mechanisms: asking our Higher power to help us let go of the survival strategies that have weighed on our lives for too long. We learn to replace them with healthier responses that meet those same needs, but in a way that only benefits us.
“I was leading a double life…and then I made a decision…[meth] was who I was, and I wasn’t leading a double life anymore.”
It’s easy to label addicts in our minds as “those people,” totally separate from “normal” people, which we convince ourselves we are. But all addiction finds its roots in the same kinds of struggles.
In this interview with Kenny Green, we hear how his journey that led him through over a decade of meth addiction began with something many of us can understand - wanting more attention and understanding from his father than he could get. His story revealed glimpses of how people pleasing led him to make decisions that distracted him from dealing with the brokenness in his heart and life. But on the floor of an isolation prison cell, something incredible - even supernatural - occurred to alter the trajectory of his life.
When our coping mechanisms are necessary to our everyday lives, they feel like who we are, rather than what we do. Sometimes, we connect our broken patterns of behavior with our identity, and it seems nearly impossible to let go of those ways of doing life.
In step 6, we evaluate with our Higher Power whether we’re willing to try to do life differently. He’s asking us to dream about who we want to be, and how life could look if we were free from everything that traps us in painful cycles. That way, our future can look very different from our past.
“Anger was very clearly a problem. I was having uncontrolled emotional responses to the smallest of things, and just unleashing in a way that was not natural to me.” “It was too much for me…I ended up in a moment of needing some control…I tried to take my life.” After a childhood of trying to be the good church kid, Katelyn Rogers abandoned any attempt to follow the rules. She fell into drinking and drugs to escape her pain, and ended up in an abusive relationship. But all of that was not what drove her into Recovery. It was an uncontrollable anger that took over her even on a physical level, and pushed her into recognizing she needed to do something powerful to change how she seized control with her rage.
“For shame to exist, it thrives within secrecy…it lives in the dark…it shrivels when it’s brought into the light.”
Step 5 is one of the most terrifying and freeing experiences one can have. So in this episode, we describe how this unburdening of the soul should feel, and how essential it is to live in freedom from your past. For sometimes, it is through the door we most fear to enter that the path to our healing lies.
“When I got to Austin, I stopped doing the things I needed to do to stay well…and I realized, I’m kind of good at [playing poker], maybe I can make money this way.”
We dive into Josh Jones’ story in this episode, which begins with cocaine, shifts gears into gambling, touches on alcohol, and circles back to a cocaine addiction that nearly takes his life. He was looking for adventure and a fun community, but nearly ended up in jail, a hospital, or a grave.
Make a searching and fearless written moral inventory of yourself.
We talked about Step 3, about trusting your higher power as you understand it/them. In Step 4, we demonstrate that willingness to trust our higher power. We make a searching and fearless written inventory of our lives, surveying or summarizing the thoughts, events, emotions, and actions of our life, making our inventory as complete as possible.
Doing a fearless and thorough inventory of your life will not be easy. When we say fearless, we do not mean you will have no feelings of fear, seriously! We will likely experience many emotions as we survey our life, including embarrassment or shame or fear. Fearless means you will not let your fears stop you from being thorough in the inventory process. In step 4, it means you commit to rigorous honesty as you focus on events in your life, including your own weaknesses, and not on anyone else’s weaknesses.
“I had a lot of family trauma. I was sexually abused by my dad, and I just went through years of repressing any of my feelings of what happened and acknowledging it by doing drugs and drinking.”
“It hit me like a ton of bricks to know I was loved unconditionally… like, ok, I am ready to trust you…I’m ready to give it all to you.”
In this interview, Latina stylist Joann Dickenson shares about healing from sexual abuse, and all the control mechanisms that went with that trauma. She also explains how her perspective of God shifted from an angry, shaming one, to one who unconditionally loves her as she is. It was to that Higher Power she learned to surrender.
“The same choice could have completely opposite outcomes. But I don’t know, only my Higher Power knows. So I have to choose to surrender.”
In this episode, we move on to Step 3, exploring what it looks like to surrender to our Higher Power in our daily lives, even if we don’t fully understand that Power. So whether it’s setting boundaries in your work/life balance, choosing others’ needs or our own, or finding a new perspective in marriage, our Higher Power can guide us to make healthy choices in every situation if we can choose to trust Him.
"Everything I claimed to believe about Christianity was really just knowledge, and knowledge is beautiful, [but] it is not necessarily faith." "I had to strip my faith all the way down to my studs, which was simply...I exist, and I believe there is a God (maybe)."
Jim Cornfoot shares his incredible story involving porn addiction, sex and love addiction, and co-dependency in relationships. As he dove into Recovery, he wrestled with hope and who he believed God - his Higher Power - to be.
"I think even the idea of hope brings up all kinds of emotions for everybody...sometimes hope is like, yeah, I need hope, I want hope...! Other times it's like, I remember hope...but then disappointment happened, rejection, abandonment, failure, fill in the blank, whatever crushed us."
In this episode, we cover step two, the hope step. In order to get better, we have to be open to the idea of hope in order to get better. We also have to explore the idea of who our Higher Power is, a source of strength outside ourselves. At this point, we simply need to be curious: what if life could get better? What if there's a Higher Power that cares about me and wants to help me experience change?
“I think that was really my first year in recovery…getting rid of all these voices in my head that said you’re not enough…”
Our first Recovery interview covers Kimmy Short’s transition from people pleasing as a child to struggling with an eating disorder and alcohol addiction as an adult. She explains that learning how to avoid drinking as a coping mechanism was only the first piece of her healing journey, which also included dealing with anger issues and codependency.
Kimmy moved from fooling herself into thinking she was in control, to recognizing she was powerless over her broken ways of dealing with her problems.
Kimmy is an artist, Recovery teacher and an advocate for youth and families seeking their path to self-sufficiency with Lifeworks in Austin, TX.
What are you trying to control in life?
More often than not, our reactions to our situation is an attempt to gain or regain control. Feeling in control helps us to feel safe and secure when things get difficult.
We are constantly told that we are in control of our lives…but is that really true? We wake up everyday and make decisions but the truth is we are powerless over the outcome or the consequences of those decisions.
Step 1 asks you to admit what you no longer have power over.
You can support this podcast by visiting www.recoverymodepodcast.com and clicking the ‘donate’ button.
In our pilot episode, we dive into how we use coping mechanisms to numb our uncomfortable circumstances and emotions. Ellie and Emily share why they initially stepped into Recovery, how they now define it for themselves, and why they feel it’s particularly relevant for everyone right now.
Contact this podcast at hello@recovermodepodcast.com
Donate at www.recoverymodepodcast.com