S3Ep27|| The Slow Burn
Cait sits down with guest Beth Bowen to discuss the small steps to sobriety. || Beth is the host of the Sober Stories podcast.
We're back with a new format, a new aesthetic, and a new look with the same incredible insight into people's moments of clarity.
Today's guest is Beth Bowen. Cait was a guest on her podcast, Sober Stories, and the two virtually chatted about her moments of clarity. This episode is incredibly insightful because Beth is a pro. She has dedicated her life to helping women understand the relationship with alcohol, how to make it better, and really honestly giving yourself grace when you're first trying.
In this episode, Beth talks about her misuse of alcohol for several years following her undiagnosed postpartum depression following the birth of her first son. She shares that alcohol became her way to self-medicate and although she knew it wasn’t working, she continued to do so.
Beth reveals that her moment of clarity wasn’t just one moment, but a long-drawn process. She shares how she built her self-confidence into what it is today, alcohol-free, and the tips and tricks she used over time to learn how to trust herself again and become fully sober.
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Ep 27 - Beth Bowen
[00:00:00] Beth: I had so many different parts of myself and nobody knew the full picture. I had the part of myself that was a mother. I had the part of myself in entrepreneurship for a long time. So I was the business owner. I had the part of myself that had the master's degree. I was the wife, but none of my pieces fit together.
[00:00:15] Beth: I was the sober person, but that was a really secretive one that nobody knew about that. And it became unbearable. It became unbearable to have so many splinter pieces of myself and never be fully seen by anybody, including even my partner.
[00:00:31] Cait: Welcome to the Clearheaded podcast. I'm Cait Madry, your host, and I'm so happy you're here. This is the podcast that drops in on people's moments of clarity surrounding their sobriety. Super LA of me, but I like to start every episode with a deep breath in. So if you're driving to work or you're on your way to run some errands, or maybe you're in bed, getting ready to wind down, let's just start with a deep breath in and out.
[00:01:05] Cait: Okay, let's get clearheaded.
[00:01:09] Cait: We're back. How was the beginning of your July? I know that the end of June was... rough isn't even the right word to use. It was challenging. It was hard. And thank you for giving me the space to take a couple of Mondays off before jumping back into this kind of new format, new aesthetic, new look with the same incredible insight to people's moments of clarity.
[00:01:39] Cait: Today's guest is Beth Bowen. I was a guest on her podcast, Sober Stories, and we virtually chatted about her moments of clarity. This episode is incredibly insightful because Beth is a pro. She has dedicated her life to helping women understand the relationship with alcohol, how to make it better, and really honestly giving yourself grace when you're first trying.
[00:02:14] Cait: For anybody who doesn't know, I was a guest on Beth's Sober Stories podcast during that LBGTQIA+ awareness story, sharing month. And you did such a beautiful job with just educating even me on the facts of addiction and the prominence of substance misuse in the LBGTQIA+ community.
[00:02:37] Beth: Mm-hmm.
[00:02:37] Cait: So maybe we can touch on that in a little bit, but first I just wanna get to know you and your story more. Because your incredible podcast touches on the fact that everybody has a story. And on Clearheaded, everyone I feel has a moment or moments of clarity that lead up to that story. So we work hand-in-hand, and I want to know if you can take me back to right before you made the choice to part with alcohol.
[00:03:11] Cait: What was that like for you?
[00:03:13] Beth: You know, I think part of it is that there wasn't one moment. I most certainly came to where I am now from an addiction standpoint where I was not only misusing alcohol and I actually really like the way you use that wording, because I think that our language is so important and there's already so much shame in this...
[00:03:37] Beth: ...community, in this space. And in, when we say "abuse", there's a lot of baggage around that idea. So I like this use of this idea of misuse. So I was already certainly misusing alcohol and had been for years. And came to find myself with undiagnosed postpartum depression after the birth of my first son, Will, and was using it to really self-medicate.
[00:04:00] Beth: So I had been drinking daily for years. And knew, for years, that it wasn't working for me. And knew that it was the one thing holding me back from everything else that I wanted. But there were so many pieces in my life that were not yet in place for me to be able to have the capacity, or the skills, or the support, or the confidence in myself to be able to actually quit.
[00:04:32] Beth: So, when I think about if there was a moment of clarity, it was such a long drawn out process for me. And it was such a period of having to throw the kitchen sink at it, and having to really put all of my tools together to eventually string along three days to eventually string along five days. But when I think about the moment that...
[00:05:02] Beth: ...was what I consider my rock bottom. I never had an outward rock bottom. And, you know over-time I used to say like, "Oh, I never had a rock bottom". But I did have one of those moments of clarity. And it was also a rock bottom for me because I was by myself. I had this habit of staying up past my husband and drinking on the couch. And he would go to bed and I'd stay up late drinking,
[00:05:25] Beth: cause I just never wanted to stop drinking. And it was probably about midnight. And I looked at the clock and I was about a bottle and a half of wine in, and it was not unusual. And I thought to myself, "Why can't you go to bed? Why can't you go to sleep? I hate you". And that was the moment that I knew it was untenable for me to continue drinking as I was. And I wish I could clock the date on that. Because it was probably right around the same time that I started throwing the kitchen sink at it and started doing all of the things, because I just knew I couldn't continue to hateeat myself the way I did. And continue to harm myself the way I was through drinking alcohol.
[00:06:15] Beth: And it's... I'm saying this, and I'm kind of thinking like that's kind of depressing. That's kind of a bummer of a moment of clarity.
[00:06:23] Cait: No.
[00:06:23] Beth: But it became really clear to me that I was on such a self-destructive path. That were I not to stop, were I not to do everything in my power to claw my way out of it. I mean, I don't...I wouldn't be here.
[00:06:40] Beth: Obviously, I work in this field, but I don't know that I would be here. I felt like I was hurting myself so regularly and so continuously through the use of alcohol. So I suppose that was my moment of clarity. It wasn't a beautiful one. It wasn't happy or revelatory, but it was certainly the moment where I realized this has to stop.
[00:07:02] Cait: Well, thanks for that honesty. Because I think that, you know, the messaging of you're clearheaded and that moment of clarity. And it's like the, "aaahhh", the gate's open and you realize, and you go on to just be totally better. But, so many times it's not that way. Even if you look back, like, I'm sure you look back on that with love and admiration.
[00:07:27] Cait: For the fact that you got there, you clocked it, you were present and you adjusted from that. But in the moment, it feels ugly and it feels messy and it feels like really low. So thanks for being honest about that. I'm sure...I mean, I can relate to feeling that myself in many moments of low. And those low moments for me too, have been the most clear that I've ever gotten from understanding why I wasn't feeling good.
[00:08:00] Beth: Hmm. Mm-hmm.
[00:08:00] Cait: You mentioned that confidence was something that you felt like you didn't have to make it go linear out the gate. And I wanna talk about that a little bit more. Can you tell me what you mean by that? And maybe like how you feel confidence now? Like what did that journey look like to get to where you are, with your confidence?
[00:08:25] Beth: That's a really good question. And I think what I mean by confidence in that moment is, I had no trust in myself to be able to follow through. I didn't believe that I was capable of holding promises to myself. Of keeping promises of doing what I said, of fulfilling my word of being able to say, "I'm not drinking anymore", and then do it.
[00:08:50] Beth: And I got to that space through years of breaking promises to myself of continuously saying, "I'm not gonna do this thing". And then continuing to break, betray myself through the use of alcohol. But if I zoom back farther than that specific moment, you know, I have identified over time that alcohol was a tool for me in many social situations.
[00:09:16] Beth: And that confidence and for me, social anxiety, were always kind of a hand-in-hand thing. And I learned that alcohol made me feel more confident for a moment. It made that social anxiety go away. So it's kind of twofold. It's both the like tangible, concrete confidence that I felt alcohol gave me. And of course we know it deteriorates it over time.
[00:09:40] Cait: Right.
[00:09:40] Beth: But more than that was just this belief in myself. I didn't trust myself. I didn't believe that I had the follow through, to actually wake up and say, "I wasn't gonna drink" and then do it. And you know, I've dedicated a lot of my work outside of Sober Stories in my coaching practice to the neuroscience and understanding what's happening in our physiology, and what's happening in our brains when we are consuming this substance, and makes alot of sense. One of the things that's compromised is our prefrontal cortex. And that's the part where we have impulse control decision making, our value systems live.
[00:10:15] Beth: So when people continue to betrayportray themselves, by saying, "I'm not gonna drink this", and they drink it. It's... I mean, it's brain science. It's neuroscience.
[00:10:24] Cait: Yes.
[00:10:24] Beth: But I certainly didn't know that in the moment. I certainly didn't know that I had a compromised prefrontal cortex. I didn't know that my gray matter had decreased because I was using alcohol so regularly.
[00:10:36] Beth: So all I knew in that moment is I just didn't believe in myself. I didn't believe I had the capacity that I had the strength to do it. So one of the things that I began to inadvertently kind of tiptoe my way into, was building this confidence in myself. And in the psychology world, we call this self-efficacy, the belief in one's self to be efficacious - to do what we say we're gonna do.
[00:11:00] Beth: And I stepped into this bit by bit by holding teeny tiny promises to myself. So even when I couldn't hold the big promise of not drinking, I would promise myself, I'd brush my teeth before I went to bed. Or I would hold myself to making the bed in the morning, or whatever it was that was just like this teeny tiny bit of care for myself. And performing that no matter how difficult it was, because it was very difficult.
[00:11:28] Beth: I was...depressed. I was hungover all the time. I was exhausted. I had a two- year- old, it was very difficult. But by building those teeny tiny beliefs in myself that I could do this, what I was doing over time, and what we know from like psych theory is that I was building self-efficacy, which yields confidence, which yields...
[00:11:48] Beth: ...assuredness and yields belief in yourself to be able to do something. But I couldn't quit drinking. I couldn't do the big thing. I couldn't do the big promise until I started to believe in my myself with those little teeny tiny promises. And, you know, since then it just has grown tenfold. I've really, I never used to consider myself a confident person. And there's still days where I have, you know, imposter syndrome and self doubt and the fears that creep up.
[00:12:14] Beth: But, in general, I would say I'm pretty darn confident in who I am, and what I do, and what I say. And I show up in the world with my full chest and say what I say. And that is only by way of years now of building that self confidence, and trust in myself, and belief in my decision making and knowing that I can do the things that I say I'm going to do.
[00:12:40] Beth: That is...that's a very long answer.
[00:12:42] Cait: No, that was insanely good. Because this method can apply to just about anything.
[00:12:49] Beth: Mm-hmm.
[00:12:50] Cait: Like, I feel that...overwhelmingness of, "how am I gonna implicate?". Like even working out - how am I gonna get more in shape? Okay, I'm gonna maybe running a mile, to some might not seem like a big thing, but to me I'm like, "whoa mile? No, thanks.".
[00:13:11] Cait: But starting small, like saying, "I'm gonna do 10 jumping jacks in the day", and doing it and saying like, "Hey, I'm capable of honoring a promise to myself". When you made that choice, did you know what you were doing or was it happenstance?
[00:13:26] Beth: I didn't know what I was doing. It was truly happenstance. But one of the talking about stories, the Google search that got me to where I am today is yoga to quit drinking.
[00:13:38] Beth: And I didn't practice yoga at the time. But I saw those yoga people and I was like, surely they have their shit together, maybe they can fix me. But one of the things that I observed from the outside is that they took care of themselves. And I knew I wasn't taking care of myself. I knew that I had a really deep dove into early motherhood and had sacrificed every single piece of myself in...
[00:14:07] Beth: ...honor of this baby in part cause I thought that was what I was supposed to do.
[00:14:10] Cait: Mm-hmm.
[00:14:10] Beth: But also because I just didn't know what else to do. Early motherhood is a whole, whole different beast. We could talk about that forever. But it really was like being thrown in the deep end.
[00:14:22] Beth: And so all I could do was tread water. And it was very clear to myself that, especially in that moment of clarity of how much I hated myself, like I had to do even the smallest act of kindness for myself to be able to claw my way out of all of the rest of the stuff. Because I mean, it's like climbing a mountain.
[00:14:41] Beth: That's truly like climbing a mountain.
[00:14:43] Cait: I really like that. All of the things that you listed, like brushing your teeth before bed and doing things that built that confidence were actually beneficial for you. Because I think sometimes, I can like speak for myself, sometimes when I say I'm gonna treat myself and I'll go eat candy...
[00:15:02] Beth: Mm-hmm.
[00:15:03] Cait: ...is that really? I mean...it is a treat, don't get me wrong.
[00:15:06] Beth: Mm-hmm.
[00:15:06] Cait: There's a time and place for Snickers and Twix and all that. But at the same time, sometimes those, ways of treating yourself in that thought process is kind of what led me to be as reliant on alcohol as I was.
[00:15:20] Beth: Mm-hmm.
[00:15:21] Cait: So, when you made the choice...I mean, yoga is such a health conscious example. Which I just, also pitching a new podcast here,
[00:15:30] Cait: Things I Googled to Gget Ssober, that's so good!
[00:15:37] Cait: The Googling that goes on, it's just insane. I think I Googled like...
[00:15:42] Cait: ...what celebrities are sober? Cause I wanna see...you just Google answer for everything.
[00:15:49] Cait: But, would you suggest for anybody out there who wants to try to start implementing those healthy habits, is there a guideline that you suggest people stick to in order to make sure that they're not slipping into treating themselves in other unhealthy ways that are kind of maskeds by society or in motherhood standards as an actually like a toxic thing?
[00:16:14] Beth: You know, I guess my overarching philosophy on this is a cookie is always gonna be better than a glass of wine.
[00:16:21] Cait: Yeah.
[00:16:22] Beth: Cause a cookie doesn't make me text my ex and lose my keysMickey's. Or hate myself at midnight in the middle of the night, although sometimes it eventually can.
[00:16:29] Cait: Oh yeah.
[00:16:30] Beth: So you know, I often encourage people to do what it takes to ditch the booze first.
[00:16:38] Cait: Okay.
[00:16:38] Beth: Because that's the one that's gonna harm your spirit a whole lot more than almost everything else.
[00:16:43] Cait: Yeah.
[00:16:43] Beth: Well, we'll put an asterisks on that. Cause obviously if you move to another substance of use, then it can be just as harmful.
[00:16:50] Beth: But more than that, I think that the methodology and the message that I try to convey is incremental change. And not necessarily with alcohol, because sometimes we have to take alcohol out completely, like cold Turkey gotta make it go. But with all of the rest of it, all of the ancillary stuff, all the other things that we use. I had an interesting conversation with a client recently and she used the term transformation fatigue.
[00:17:19] Beth: She was feeling transformation fatigue...
[00:17:21] Cait: Oh, that's good!
[00:17:22] Beth: ...because she quit drinking. And then she went on a diet. And then she started a workout routine. And then she started meditating. And then she went to therapy to heal her mommy issues. And it's like, when we think about...we realize that this one thing - this alcohol thing, is starting to be a problem.
[00:17:41] Beth: And like, we recognize that everything else in our life is also contributing to this problem. And, we start to see how all these moving parts are working together. And the answer is, yes, that is true. They are all moving parts. They all are interconnected. They're all working together. But our answer to that is okay, I'm gonna fix all of them.
[00:17:59] Beth: I'm gonna change all of them. And what that does is just completely burn out the system. It completely fatigues us. We get so overwhelmed. It's going from zero to 60, when really we need to go from zero to five, and then from five to 10, and then from 10 to 15. So when I think about how we begin to implement this and how we avoid this idea of swinging really hard to something else, swinging really hard to something that is also equally as mal-adaptivemild active.
[00:18:29] Beth: We have to expect less of ourselves. We have to understand that our physical bodies, and our emotional bodies, and our mental bodies cannot tolerate a 180. They cannot tolerate a complete change in every piece of our life, but they can tolerate a 1% change. They can tolerate incremental change, teeny tiny steps forward in the right direction, little by little changes.
[00:18:55] Beth: So if we think about this like on a tangible level, I think, okay, you're ditching the booze and maybe you add like one vegetable into your daily diet. Or maybe you ditch the booze and you try to go to bed 15 minutes earlier than you normally do. So when we do this more incremental change, this allows our system to avoid the overload.
[00:19:12] Beth: It allows our system to maintain itself enough that we're not gonna just completely pendulum swing to the other side, and really kind of just freak out. Oh okay, I'm gonna eat all of the... you're a frozen snickers girl, right?
[00:19:26] Cait: Yeah.
[00:19:26] Beth: Eat all the frozen snickers in the freezer.
[00:19:28] Cait: Yeah, I mean, that's makes total sense.
[00:19:32] Cait: It makes total, total, total sense. And it seems like it's kind of a theme in your journey was taking it bite by bite or not sip by not sip, and getting to where you are now.
[00:19:46] Beth: Mm-hmm.
[00:19:47] Cait: Speaking of where you are now. I mean, just in your career and your line of work, what was that moment of clarity like for you to make this commitment to really being all that you are in the sober community and for women?
[00:20:05] Beth: It's kind of, I don't even know how to explain it because it felt like such a slow moving train all in the right direction of one piece falling together, and then another piece falling together ,and then another piece falling together. So at the core, my background is in social work. I have my master's degree in social work, clinical therapy. I worked in emergency room, social work.
[00:20:32] Beth: I worked in counseling. So my background, my book learning has always been in the mental health field. Of course, when I was in that schooling, when I was in working in that field, I had a very misaligned relationship with alcohol. But my background has always been in this kind of community-based, talk-based, connection-based field.
[00:20:58] Beth: And when I first quit drinking, I quit drinking in 2017. And it was a long time before we really started talking about this. You know, there were a couple people out in the world who were starting to give more language to this, starting to have more conversations about the nuance of being a sober person in the world when you don't necessarily fit into the 12 steps.
[00:21:20] Beth: But we just weren't talking about it a whole lot. So there was still a lot of stigma for me. There was still a lot of fear. It was really difficult to let people see me and to let people in on just how bad it had been. And it's funny because we're staying with some friends right now and they've been our dearest friends for 15 years.
[00:21:40] Beth: And just last night, one of my friends said, he was like, " I just never knew it was that bad for you". And I was like, "Yeah no, I was drinking a bottle and a half to like two bottles of wine every night". And he's like, "How? I had no idea". And so it was really hard for me to let people in on this inner dialogue and what was happening internally, and what my lived experience was.
[00:22:01] Beth: So I kept it to the chest. Close to the chest for two years. I didn't really tell anybody about it. I just didn't drink and didn't have a lot of fun with it. But I was sober at least, and I wasn't drinking. And it got to the point where I felt so separate from...I had so many different parts of myself and nobody knew the full picture.
[00:22:24] Beth: I had the part of myself that was a mother. I had the part of myself, I've been in entrepreneurship for a long time, so I was the business owner. I had the part of myself that had the master's degree. I was the wife. But none of my pieces fit together. I was the sober person, but that was a really secretive one that nobody knew about that.
[00:22:42] Beth: And it became unbearable. It became unbearable to have so many splintered pieces of myself and never be fully seen by anybody, including even my partner. So I got sick of it. It got to the point where I felt like I was having to explain to every new person that I met, that I didn't drink and I just was over it.
[00:23:01] Beth: And so on Nnew Yyear's Dday, I think it was 2019. I made an Instagram post and said, Hey, I don't drink anymore. This is like my third alcohol free Nnew Yyear's Dday, or whatever it is that I said. And it was the first time I expressed this. And what happened on the other side, is that I was flooded with messages from people in my life who said, "Oh my God, me too", or "I never would've guessed that about you ", or "I've actually been struggling with this, and I thought I was the only person". Or "I don't feel like alcohol's working for me, but I don't feel like I'm an alcoholic". And so what I learned from this experience of sharing my story, and this was the first of many posts.
[00:23:44] Beth: First of many stories, the first of many connecting pieces that really moved this slow moving train forward. But what I learned is that there is nothing new under the sun. And that we are all a lot more connected and we all have a lot more shared stories than we ever imagined. And so in this space of really starting to share my own story and to open up about what it really was like to be a young mom who was struggling with addiction and how it looked fine on the outside.
[00:24:17] Beth: And I fell through the cracks in the medical system, and to share the story. It both connected me with people externally, but it finally put all my pieces together. And in this process of sharing, it really became very organic to step into the space of working with people, both by pairing my mental health background and my lived experience, it was almost like it really resisted it for a long time.
[00:24:39] Beth: ‘Causeuz it felt really personal. It felt too hard for me to touch.
[00:24:43] Cait: Right.
[00:24:43] Beth: I was like, I'll teach you anything else. I'll teach you how to use Instagram. I'll teach you how to like fold your laundry or something. I was like, I'll teach you anything but this alcohol thing, ‘causeuz it felt really personal.
[00:24:54] Beth: But then when I finally listened to both the people externally asking me for this, but also my own intuition that said like, this is your life's work. This is your calling. This is where you've always been meant to go. And this is why you went through what you did. When I finally listened to it, I mean, it's been like the most organic thing that has ever happened.
[00:25:15] Beth: So I've worked with women for almost a year and a half now in this space specifically with alcohol and it's soul work. It's incredibly fulfilling. I do coaching now instead of therapy, because I can't separate myself from my people because it's so personal and it's so intimate to me, but it's incredibly beautiful work.
[00:25:38] Beth: And when we talk about Ssober Sstories in this slow moving train, this continuation of storytelling and sharing, and then watching my clients go and share their own stories. And see the ripple effect that happens in their communities.
[00:25:52] Cait: Yeah.
[00:25:52] Beth: It became so apparent. Have you read Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert?
[00:25:57] Cait: No, I haven't.
[00:25:59] Beth: Okay, highly recommend a wonderful book.
[00:26:03] Cait: Okay.
[00:26:03] Beth: But Ssober Sstories was truly a big magic moment for me, where it was just this download of inspiration, and idea, and purpose. And it said like, you need to create this into the world and you need to bring these stories to other people, so that you can open doors for people. So that a door can be opened down a direction that they didn't have available to them before.
[00:26:27] Beth: Which is what happened with me, which is what happened with the clients I work with, which is what I see every day on this community we have. And it really... I mean, that was the longest answer ever. But it really has been this progression towards what feels like life work of storytelling, of connection of truth telling of being seen wholey of vulnerability, of resiliency and all of these pieces that have been foundational in my own sobriety. And then by proxy in the work that I do.
[00:27:01] Cait: I think it's so beautiful. And I think that there's so much freedom in being able to know that you can take it slow and you can take it...
[00:27:13] Cait: ...we hear one day at a time in this community quite often and in the sober world.
[00:27:18] Beth: Mm-hmm.
[00:27:19] Cait: But you really can take it a moment at a time and attempt at a time, a brushing your teeth at a time. You can put it down to even the smallest details and it will fuel you forward. So thank you for sharing all of your moments of clarity from your personal life to your business life. And I am so excited to stay connected with you and see what more you do. And who knows? Maybe we'll start the Google podcast.
[00:27:50] Beth: Yeah, I like it.
[00:27:57] Cait: Oh my gosh. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.
[00:28:00] Beth: Thank you, Cait. Always a pleasure.
[00:28:04] Cait: Clearheaded is sponsored by Free Spirits. Head to drink freespirits.com and use code clearheaded20 for 20% off your first order.
[00:28:13] Cait: This episode was recorded at the Wave podcasting studios and the music used was created by honeydu. Special thanks to Sara Ashcraft.
[00:28:22] Cait: For more tips, tricks and tools head to our website, the clearheadedpodcast.com.
