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Most people in recovery never tell the full story. This show does.I'm Austin Rampt the author of One Last Hit: The Remarkable True Story of an Addict's Journey to Find Himself.
I grew up in Tampa, spent a decade chasing drugs through eight different rehabs, and eventually fled the country.
I ended up in Mexico surrounded by members of the Sinaloa Cartel, hit the kind of bottom most
people don't walk away from, and somehow made it back.On the One Last Hit Podcast I sit down with people who have been through it , addicts in recovery,
people who've done prison time, survivors of overdoses,
family members who watched someone disappear and then come back. No polished stories.
No watered-down redemption arcs. Just real people talking about what it actually took to get sober and stay that way.If you are fighting your own battle, loving someone in the middle of theirs, or you just need proof that people really
do get better then this show is for you.New episodes every week.
Grab the book: https://www.amazon.com/One-Last-Hit-Austin-Rampt/dp/1968485007/
Audiobook: https://www.audible.com/pd/One-Last-Hit-Audiobook/B0GD8WCDHY
Website: https://www.onelasthitbook.com
Instagram & Facebook: @onelasthitbook
what is happening ladies and gentlemen my
name is austin and welcome to the one
last hit podcast and joining me today is
barb nangle barb how you doing i'm great
i'm really excited for this conversation i
love being on podcasts about recovery it's
my favorite
Oh, good deal.
I'm super excited to have you on.
I'm I'm a little bit of a fan.
I've been, you know,
listening to your stuff and it's it's so
good.
It's so hard hitting and compact.
I just I just love your style.
I love the way that you do it.
Not trying to gas you up too much,
you know, at the beginning here,
but it's solid.
And I wanted to.
I wanted to kind of just go into
your bio real quick for anyone listening
so you guys kind of know who Barb
is.
So Barb is a boundaries coach, speaker,
author and a podcast host,
and she specializes in helping women build
internal safety so their boundaries
actually hold.
At fifty two,
Barb's life transformed through twelve
step recovery after decades of therapy
merely skimmed the surface.
Addressing codependence unlocked healing
from intergenerational trauma.
childhood wounds and compulsive
overeating.
Learning to build healthy boundaries
revolutionized her relationships,
impacting her professional life at Yale.
Formerly masking her struggles with
substance use and overeating,
I can relate,
she shed over a hundred pounds and
confronted her deep-seated negativity and
fear.
Driven by a desire for growth and social
justice,
Barb now empowers professional women to
break patterns of self-neglect.
through boundary coaching, speaking,
and her podcast, Fragmented to Whole,
she guides women to build internal safety,
reclaim their power,
and say no to what no longer serves
them.
Fostering a world where interchange drives
societal impact,
Barb's podcast is ranked among the top one
percent of podcasts worldwide by
ListenNotes.
And, you know, I will say you guide,
you know,
we mentioned there you guide women quite a
bit, but it seems to me,
and correct me if I'm wrong,
that it's quite as applicable to men.
Oh yeah, for sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The podcast is, I mean,
it's geared towards people in recovery,
but you don't have to be in recovery,
but like my marketing and my promotional
stuff for my coaching business is towards
women.
It doesn't mean I won't coach men or
people of any gender identity or
expression.
It's just, that's, you know, who I target,
you know?
Yeah, I love it.
And so I want to try something I
haven't done yet.
I was just on a podcast the other
day and this dude asked me a great
question to start the conversation.
And I want to I want to try
it out on you.
And what he asked me was and you
form this however you want.
What he asked me was,
tell me about your last day using.
And so I'll kick that over to you.
I know using may not be the correct
term,
but tell me about your last day before
going into recovery.
What did it look and feel like?
Okay.
So I had years of substance use and
I just sort of stopped that.
So that's how I know I'm not an
alcoholic or an addict.
So for me, the real addiction is food.
And so I woke up that morning needing
to go get a blood fasting test for
cholesterol.
And when I came out of the place,
I was starving and there was a grocery
store right there.
So I went in and
Got three donuts.
And I knew like,
even though I've been a compulsive
overeater for a long time,
I've really tried to start my day with
a healthy breakfast because I knew if I
do not start healthy,
it's just going downhill.
Yeah.
And, you know,
one of the things that we say about
addiction is that it's a progressive
illness, that it gets worse over time.
And I feel like what happened to me
that day shows that it can progress over
the course of a day,
not just a lifetime.
So I eat the three donuts.
I go about my day.
And later that evening,
I'm driving home from somewhere.
And I'm like, you know,
I want some more donuts.
So I go to a Dunkin' Donuts.
And, you know,
this is very addict thinking.
I really want three,
but I'm going to buy six because if
I buy six,
then maybe they won't think that they're
just for me.
You know, right.
So I get I'm like ten minutes from
my home.
I get in the car and I start
cramming donuts in my mouth.
And I start crying and I'm like, God,
please take this compulsion away until I
get home.
Not forever until I get home and I
get home and I put the other three
donuts on the counter.
I'm like, I'm not going to eat them.
I'm not going to eat them.
And I fucking eat them.
and then i hide the donut box in
the garbage and adam i live alone okay
and it took me like two years to
realize i was hiding them from my hiding
the box from myself not from other people
and now i don't that's what i consider
to be my bottom i actually don't know
if it was exactly the next day
But I woke up on April twenty of
two thousand sixteen feeling like I was
like internally being electrocuted by
sugar.
And I had had this friend.
I was already in ACA doing the steps
there.
I was about I was a year into
the program.
And one of the women I was doing
the steps with had started sharing about
her relationship with food.
And then she started going away and she
was talking about it.
So I texted her and I was like,
listen,
I just have to tell somebody that just
today, just for today,
I'm not having sugar.
And I have not had sugar since then.
And she had invited me to go to
an OA workshop on abstinence,
but I didn't know what the fuck that
meant.
I thought she was inviting me to like
a weekly OA support meeting.
And also, here's the other thing.
So this was April, right?
I decide this morning after I text her
to go back and look at my text
from her.
And I thought she said to me,
do you want to go to this OA
workshop on abstinence on June first?
And she actually said Saturday at one,
like that is how like crazy my head
was.
So I was like,
I think I want to go to this
thing with you.
So she,
so I see her Friday night at an
ACA meeting and I'm like,
what time do you want me to meet
you tomorrow?
She goes, I'll pick you up at noon.
I'm like, noon?
Where is this meeting?
She's like, oh, it's in Berlin,
Connecticut.
We live in New Haven, right?
And I'm like, Berlin?
I'm thinking there's got to be an OA
meeting closer.
And so then when she picks me up,
she's like, by the way,
thank you so much for coming with me
to support me.
And I'm like, let's be clear.
This is for moi.
And then she goes, by the way,
it's three hours.
And I was like, three hours?
What?
And she goes, don't worry,
we don't have to stay the whole time.
I go in,
the first dude gets up there and he
goes, I've been abstinent.
So that's equivalent to sober in AA.
I've been abstinent for thirty years and
I'm down a hundred and eighty five pounds.
And I was like, I'm listening because
I had worked for Weight Watchers in the
past,
and I knew that the statistics there,
at least at that time,
were ninety five percent of people gain
their weight back.
And anybody I'd ever met that had lost
over one hundred pounds had done it
because they had surgery.
And nine of the ten of those people
had gained it back.
So I knew this guy's got something and
I'm listening.
So this is why it's so important to
tell your story for newcomers so they can
hear this person knows what I'm talking
about.
And he said he dropped a lot of
gems.
One of them was...
I learned that it was none of my
business what other people think of me.
What is my business is what I think
of me.
And I'm like, wait, what?
Because years before that,
I had been in a spiritual sharing circle
through my church.
And there was a guy from AA there.
He had like ten years of recovery when
I met him.
He was always dropping all these gems from
AA.
from AA, and one time he said,
it's none of my business what other people
think of me.
And I was like, what?
And every time I would think about that,
Adam, for like, fifteen years,
I would be like,
what does that even mean?
What do you mean it's none of my
business what people think of me?
So when this dude said,
It's none of my business what other people
think of me.
What is my business is what I think
of me.
I was like, OK,
I don't quite know what that means yet,
but oh, goodness, there's something there.
And then he proceeded to do a presentation
on the cycle of addiction as it applies
to food.
And I was like, oh, my God,
I'm a compulsive overeater.
I had no idea.
And what I got from the four speakers
that day was that the insanity could end.
And it was probably three days after that,
that it even occurred to me that I
might lose weight.
Like that wasn't even,
I didn't even give a shit about that
at that point in time because the insanity
was so bad with the food.
you know,
the game playing where you make a rule
for yourself and then you violate the rule
and then you like justify to yourself why
the rule you made for yourself about using
or not using and all that stuff.
And, um, so I, um, you know,
that's my, my bottom with like, um,
addiction to food, but I, I have,
you know, I had years of substance use.
We can get into that.
I don't know if you want me to
start that now,
or you want to stop mommy to stop
for a minute so
no, no, you're, you're kicking ass.
This is great.
So I am actually going to take you
back.
Oh, I should tell you,
my name is Austin.
Uh, not Adam.
That's okay.
But I want to tell you something funny.
My wife has had like three ex-boyfriends
named Adam.
So I'm
So that name like comes up in my
house every now and again.
I'm like, no, no, you're good.
Names are, I appreciate it.
Thank you for correcting me because so
many people don't do that.
And it's just not right.
And I'm so, I mean, I have,
it's not on the screen, but I do.
I mean,
I had it when I clicked on the
link to sign up.
Yeah.
And we've met before too.
So yeah, we have, but that's okay.
So, all right.
I was getting in the feels when you
were sharing that.
Cause I I've,
I've had my own experiences of exact,
like you just, you just told,
you just told the solution to my problem,
but I never told you what my problem
was like that feeling of, Oh my God,
I'm not alone is so powerful.
And I'm curious because I'm very curious
in the overeating side of things,
because I know, God,
I can just hear in your voice when
you're sharing that, the, the,
I guess the feelings of shame maybe that
you were in at that time.
Yeah.
And can we go back to your childhood
a little bit?
And can you kind of start this up?
Yeah, please, please do.
Yeah.
Okay.
So I'm going to share,
like I'm sharing at a recovery meeting
that they don't care if you talk about
one fellowship or another,
because I'm into fellowship.
So I have been numbing.
Since I was a baby,
I sucked my thumb until I was ten.
I did it consciously until I was eight.
But then I really tried to stop until
I was ten.
I didn't put that together until I got
in recovery,
that that was numbing behavior.
I don't know what happened between ten and
thirteen,
but I started smoking cigarettes at
thirteen, weed at fourteen,
drinking at sixteen.
And I think the switch kind of flipped
for me.
to go from being a regular eater to
being a compulsive beaver when I was like
twenty two when I quote quit smoking
cigarettes.
So I literally quit smoking cigarettes for
six months and then I started sneak
smoking and I continued to do that.
I hid my cigarette smoking for twenty
years unless I was out drinking with
friends who were also drinking and
smoking.
And I my mom secretly smoked.
So, gee, you know,
I wonder where that came from.
And, you know,
I thought I start smoking weed the first
half day of school of my freshman year.
So in my town, it was the tradition.
Lots of kids went to the local pizza
parlor.
And I went with my next door neighbor
who was a year ahead of me.
And a bunch of girls were standing around
out back and they were passing a joint
around.
And I, it never, I was like, well,
I just took it.
By then I already smoked cigarettes.
And so it was just like,
I wanted to be cool.
but I didn't even really get high because
it was like one joint and like twelve
girls.
So I said to my friend, look,
if I'm going to get high,
I'm going to actually get high.
And she got us a joint and I
got high.
I was like, oh, my God,
I love this.
And when I hear people who hated it
the first time they got high, I'm like,
what is the matter with you?
And I I would say from the time
I started smoking weed at fourteen until I
was twenty four,
I was either high trying to get high
or sleeping.
And it didn't stop at twenty four.
It's just that I started going to
community college.
And I didn't get high twenty four seven.
I mean,
I got high like when I went to
work and stuff,
but not like school and when I was
studying and stuff.
And I also I started drinking at sixteen.
I don't know if I drank abusively right
away,
but I drank abusively until I was like
in my early forties and I just kind
of stopped.
But by then I was like well into
the food.
I continued to smoke weed actually until
early recovery,
but it wasn't really
Like I could have weed in my house
for six months and not get high.
Like I had, I was like,
if I could just get high and then
make it stop, I would do it.
But obviously that's not a thing.
So I couldn't do it.
So what happened for me, Austin,
is when I was fifty two,
which was in twenty fifteen,
I had met this friend through church who
was homeless.
We became very friendly friends.
And a few months into our friendship,
we had a really bad snowstorm here in
New Haven, Connecticut.
And so because, you know,
I'm nice and I'm self-sacrificing,
I invited him to stay at my home.
And of course, he said yes.
And then he stayed another time and
another time.
And then within a few weeks,
he was practically living with me.
And I soon felt trapped in my own
home.
So he was a self-admitted alcoholic and
addict.
I look back now and I'm like,
I think he had some kind of personality
disorder because this guy fucked with my
head in a way I have never experienced.
He made me feel like I was crazy.
I was a bad person.
I was yanking his chain.
And meanwhile,
he was just messing with me.
So one day I'm in therapy and I'm
talking about Dan.
And in the middle of a sentence,
I go, oh, my God,
do you think I need to go to
Al-Anon?
And I was like, yes, absolutely.
So whatever I put into Google,
the word codependent came up and I'm like,
wait, what?
How have I never heard of this word?
So I started therapy when I was about
fifteen.
So fifteen to fifty two,
that's thirty seven years of therapy.
Now, I wasn't in it continuously,
but close.
I got introduced to the whole self-help
world at like twenty two,
twenty three and continued to.
for my entire life to just read
voraciously there.
I've been to workshops, workbooks,
you know, groups, spiritual stuff,
like you name, retreats, all the things,
right?
Seminars.
And I'm like,
how have I never heard of this word?
So I remember saying to my therapist,
what the fuck else don't I know about
myself?
I don't feel like I got hit in
the head with a baseball with this news
that I'm codependent.
I feel like I got hit in the
head with a planet because I have been
on a journey of self-discovery.
I'm incredibly introspective.
And she said, you know, Barb,
I think for you that codependence is like
a unifying concept.
It includes a bunch of things you did
know yourself.
You just didn't know they were related.
And initially, Austin,
I thought she was just saying it to
be nice.
And I realized over time as I got
to know more about codependence,
that it was probably true.
So I started going to Codependents
Anonymous and I very quickly felt a sense
of relief.
I think knowing there's like,
I think of codependent is almost like a
syndrome.
It's like a collection of things.
So there's this thing that I have that
other people have.
There's a program of recovery.
People get better.
And I remember having a sense of relief,
but I also remember very soon saying to
somebody, I think I need to be reparented,
but I don't know where I got that
term from.
I think I thought I made it up.
And then six weeks into my CODA journey,
I go to Cape Cod to visit a
couple of friends.
one of whom had been in AA for
ten years at that point.
And every time we ever talked about it,
she just raved about how utterly
transformed her life was as a result of
AA.
And I'm like, you're going to love this.
I'm going to codependence anonymous.
And she was like, oh, that's great.
Let's see if we can find a CODA
meeting.
While you're here,
and she couldn't but she found an ACA
meeting which I had heard of as a
COA adult shown of alcoholics,
and I as long as I remember I
heard the name but I never thought about
what it was never occurred to me to
think why would they need a program never
occurred to me that I qualified.
So I was like, I'll go for you,
you know, because that's me.
I'm self-sacrificing.
And so we went and I walk in
in the opening readings.
They said we reparent ourselves.
And I was like, what?
And then they read the list of the
fourteen traits of an adult child,
which is affectionately called the laundry
laundry list.
Oh, yeah.
And my friend tells me,
I sobbed the whole meeting.
I don't remember that,
but I bought the literature,
came home to New Haven.
I learned it's actually adult children of
alcoholics and dysfunctional families.
Now that I qualify for.
I started going to ACA.
Then a women's ACA meeting started like
three weeks later.
I'm a founding member of that.
That's my home group.
Now I still go to that meeting.
And then a few weeks later,
I started doing the steps in a small
group of women because there were no
sponsors around here at the time.
And I was like, Oh my God,
this is it.
This is what I've been looking for.
I didn't understand that the situation was
intergenerational family dysfunction,
which results in childhood trauma,
which is the core wound that basically all
addicts have.
And for me, it manifested my,
my core core wound is codependence.
And I can, you know,
say more about that in a few.
So I'm going to ACA,
I'm going to two meetings a week.
I go to like work,
anything I can go to.
This is pre-pandemic when people went to
meetings in person only.
I mean,
sometimes there was phone meetings, right?
And I continued to go to CODA,
but I just went to the meeting.
I didn't do anything outside.
I wasn't getting,
hearing the recovery that I was getting
and seeing and witnessing in ACA.
I occasionally would hear somebody say in
Coda that they had a sponsor,
but they didn't really talk about the
steps and stuff.
And I just felt like, you know,
it's maybe a seventy five percent ACA is
one hundred percent.
I'm going to let go of Coda.
And that turned out to be a higher
powered moment because I went to Coda on
Mondays.
And two weeks after I let go of
that is when I went to that OA
workshop and they handed me a meeting
list.
And lo and behold,
there's a downtown New Haven OA meeting.
So I just took my Monday nights from
CODA and plugged in OA.
And I,
so by the time I got into OA,
I was on step four in ACA and
there's a difference.
So all the steps are the same in
every program, but in ACA,
unlike other recovery programs where step
four is what I did.
Step four in ACA is what happened to
me.
I still get at what I did by
way of what happened to me.
So the easy example for me to share
there is what happened to me,
among other things,
is I grew up in a family that
engaged in indirect communication.
So if I had a problem with you,
Austin,
I was not talking to you about it.
I was talking to everybody around you.
And I wasn't talking about the problem.
I was talking about you.
So what did I do?
I gossiped.
So this was a pattern of behavior that
was in my family before I was born.
So I had no hope of growing up
and knowing that direct communication was
even a thing,
never mind how to do it.
So of course I gossiped.
And so for me,
understanding where this pattern came
from,
like I got to stop no matter where
it came from,
but understanding this came from
somewhere.
It was a survival mechanism in my family.
It's got to stop,
but it takes the onus off me as
this is a defect of character.
Like there's something inherently wrong
with Barb.
You're a piece of shit because you gossip.
It's like, oh,
you're a product of your environment.
And God bless the Twelve Steps of Recovery
and AA and all the programs that came
before ACA because clearly millions,
probably even billions of people have
recovered over time.
But there's something about understanding
I'm a product of my environment.
And because in ACA,
there's twelve inventories in step four,
three of them are about what you did.
Nine of them are about what happened to
you.
So I'm digging up all the trauma from
my childhood.
It's no coincidence that I hit bottom with
the sugar at that time.
So I was five months into OA before
I found a sponsor.
I kept hearing,
find someone who has what you want and
ask her how he or she got it.
And I was only going to one meeting
a week for OA.
I was listening to OA podcasts.
That's how I got introduced to the world
of podcasting, by the way.
And for my first two and a half
years,
I listened to OA podcasts constantly in
the morning, in the afternoon,
in the evening.
And that's where I got the majority of
my experience, strength, and hope,
along with my meeting and the literature.
And I remember thinking,
you know who I want?
The second speaker at that workshop I went
to.
This woman said, she said,
when I got into this program,
I knew for a fact that I was
going to eat sugar again.
I was like, tell it, sister.
And she goes, and here I am,
thirty years later, absent from sugar,
one day at a time.
I was like, damn it, she tricked me.
She also said this.
She said, you know,
when I was driving here,
I saw this bumper sticker.
Maybe you've seen it.
It says when the only solution you have
is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
She goes, well,
the OA spin on that is when the
only solution you have is food,
everything feels like hunger.
And I was like, yeah.
Oh my God.
Like that explains why I've many times
eaten.
What I know is plenty of food and
yet I still feel hungry.
And I now know that what happened for
me is something broke inside of me in
terms of the mechanism from the stomach to
the brain,
where my emotions manifest as hunger.
And I needed a spiritual solution to deal
with that.
And I will tell you, I actually,
something happened last night.
where i got some news that i was
like oh this could be bad and like
suddenly i'm starving so i texted my
sponsor and i said you know i'm set
to have my snack in forty five minutes
and i'm going to have my snack in
forty five minutes not now but i'm
starving and i know that it's this thing
So now I like hunger isn't like I
have to fill this.
It's not like I have to do this.
I'm still hungry sometimes.
And my first year and a half,
it was like not exactly white knuckling
it, but practically white knuckling it.
And then for me,
I mentioned that my core wound is
codependence and I
understand that boundaries are really the
antidote to that.
I've learned so many tools and tips and
tricks and mindset shift and coping
mechanisms and stuff like that in
recovery.
But because my core wound is codependence,
learning how to build boundaries and the
fact that they permeate every area of your
life.
was such a game changer to me that
when two and a half years into recovery,
I was working at Yale University at the
time.
When I got laid off from Yale,
I found my way into the world of
startups, innovation,
entrepreneurship in New Haven and at Yale.
and decided to start my own business and
i started my podcast immediately not
thinking it would have anything to do with
my business i started it because i was
like i've been trying for decades and i
learned all the things i learned in i
would say even my first two to three
years
in recovery that were game changers,
zero percent of those things ever came up
in all that therapy and personal
development.
Zero, zero, zero, zero.
So I'm like,
there's all this wisdom in recovery.
I want to get it out there into
the world.
I stumbled my way here.
I'm now seven and a half years into
my podcast.
I have three hundred and sixty something.
I think you're actually going to be my
three hundred and seventieth episode
guest.
And I just started sharing because, one,
I wanted the information out there.
And two,
I continually got feedback from fellows in
recovery,
especially when I have outreach calls on
the phone.
that there was something about the way
that I shared that was helpful to them.
And I'm like, I'm just talking.
And the phrase that I heard back then
often was you helped me connect the dots.
I haven't heard anybody say that,
but that was something.
And I was like, well, okay,
God helped me do something.
And like, you know,
maybe someday you and I can tell the
story of how I came to do a
podcast, which is crazy.
And my first one hundred and thirty
episodes were produced for me for free.
Nice.
Yeah.
So I started my podcast.
I started coaching and I just kind of
was generally coaching.
And then as I learned more and learned,
you need to have like a niche and
It just made sense for me to become
a boundaries coach because they were such
a game changer for me.
Every client I'd ever had needed help with
boundaries.
I was really good at helping people build
boundaries,
both with my clients and people in
recovery.
And the other thing that happened was I
learned boundaries kind of as a byproduct
of the twelve steps of recovery.
It's not like somebody sat me down and
was like, here,
we're going to build boundaries.
Um, and I,
as I got a handle on them,
like these boundaries are amazing.
I started reading about them.
And when I read about them,
I would draw these visual representations
of like, if that was, you know,
in the physical world,
cause I'm a visual person.
And I did this for myself.
Well,
eventually those drawings turned into
handouts, which turned into a workbook,
which is the backbone of my boundaries
coaching program.
I didn't know any of that.
If you had told me ten years ago
that I would be a boundaries coach now,
I would never believe you.
And just it's been, you know,
absolutely incredibly miraculous that.
that the transformation that I have had in
my life,
I looked like I had it together on
the outside.
I have a master's degree in sociology.
I've worked at Yale University for
nineteen years.
I own a home.
I pay my taxes.
I volunteered.
But meanwhile,
like I was a complete mess and I
haven't even talked about my relationships
yet.
Like I had when I did my relationship
inventory.
I happen to date men.
So I had twenty eight men.
And that was everybody from I dated them
a handful of times to I lived with
them for years on end.
And I could see the codependence get worse
and worse.
And what I always thought was my pattern
was that I attracted emotionally
unavailable men.
And that's true.
But the real pattern was codependence.
But what I learned in recovery was it's
not just that I attract them to me.
I am attracted to them,
which I had never seen.
And then as I started to internalize that,
I realized, oh, why is that?
Well, here's why.
Because I was emotionally unavailable.
And that makes sense.
Because what emotionally available man is
going to be attracted to and stay with
a woman who
Who's emotionally unavailable.
And then the other insight I had,
which is this is now it's laughable,
but I had this subconscious belief in all
my relationships that whoever the guy was,
was responsible for all the shitty things
in their relationship.
And I was responsible for all the good
things.
Like I can't even say it without laughing.
Right.
That's insane.
Like one person is not always responsible,
but that's how I acted.
Like if he would just clean up his
act, this would work out, you know?
And so like, I could clearly go on.
You're the host.
I really feel like you should steer this
boat wherever you want it to go from
here.
Oh man.
I've got so much Barb.
That was so all right.
so in in the twelve step recovery programs
that don't specifically focus on
codependence i i'm sure and maybe this is
your experience as well that that
codependency does run fairly rampant oh
god yeah yeah because it just seems to
go hand in hand with us as alcoholics
and addicts but the alcohol and drugs are
killing us quicker right and so that's the
thing we focus on and i'm curious so
I had some experiences a while back that
really reframed a lot of my belief systems
from childhood and a lot of the ways
in which I viewed myself.
And it kind of put me in a
place of being able to even say the
words, I like me or I love me.
And I know this will get us into
a good conversation.
Can you speak a little bit on the
relationship of boundaries and the way
that you feel about yourself?
Yeah,
they have everything to do with the way
that you feel about yourself.
So like I think of boundaries in many
ways.
One is the boundary building process is
you getting to know yourself.
Like I didn't know, like I didn't, okay.
I didn't even have my own damn drink,
Austin.
Okay.
When I was a teen,
I drank beer because that's what everybody
drank.
Then in my twenties,
I dated a guy who was a wine
connoisseur.
So I drank wine.
In my thirties,
I dated a guy who drank Jack Daniels.
So I drank Jack Daniels.
And then later I met a guy who
was a beer connoisseur.
And I'm like, oh, I like wheat beers.
Right.
I didn't even have my own identity.
Right.
That's just one example.
There was a lot of barb that was
up for negotiation.
So when you start building boundaries,
you start exploring what's OK with me and
what's not OK with me.
And then you start actually giving that to
yourself.
And like,
I feel like I liked myself before
recovery.
I think I had high self-esteem,
but I did not love myself.
And I also did not feel worthy.
But if you had asked me before recovery,
do you feel worthy?
I would have said yes.
No, I didn't.
When you look at the shit train of
my life before recovery,
that is not a woman who feels worthy.
And I built...
self-love, self-trust,
and self-worth through the boundary
building process.
Because you're starting to get to know
yourself.
You're starting to figure out what do I
want, like, need, and prefer?
What's okay?
What's not okay?
What's my responsibility and what's not?
Where do I end and other people begin?
and you start actually following through
on the things that you learn about
yourself and you start giving yourself the
things you want like need and prefer and
if you want to build a relationship with
somebody and get them to love you help
them discover and get what they want like
need and prefer help them have their like
i have my own back now i love
people who have my back
Right.
So and what happened for me is I
realized when people would say to me,
Barb,
how do you know what your boundaries are?
I was like, you know, good question.
And I realized, oh,
it's based on what matters to me.
And so when I started coaching,
I was like,
I'm going to start this journey with
people based on their values.
And I have them go through this exercise
to determine their values.
And because it's a lot easier to stand
firm in your boundaries by something
that's important to you.
But I had this major insight last year
sometime,
I think while I was guesting on a
podcast,
that building healthy boundaries is about
creating a sense of internal safety.
And as soon as I named that Austin,
it was like it had this retroactive effect
for me that I,
it's what I've been swimming around and
experiencing this concept for years,
but I named it and it helped me
to understand and be able to re-explain
everything that I teach.
And so when you have internal safety,
it means that you don't abandon yourself
even when you feel uncomfortable, right?
It doesn't mean that you feel calm all
the time.
It doesn't mean you never get upset.
It means you don't use upsetness as an
excuse to abandon yourself.
And when I say abandon yourself,
I mean things like let go of your
boundary,
let someone else getting upset with you
make you feel like I've done something
wrong and I have to fix it because
other people being upset is intolerable
for me.
It means if you feel guilty for setting
a boundary,
even if the other person received it well,
if you have internal safety,
you don't use that guilt as an
instruction.
You have done something wrong.
You understand the guilt is I'm breaking
an old pattern.
And eventually when I keep breaking it,
that guilt is going to go away,
that discomfort is going to go away.
So there's a distinction between the
discomfort of dysfunction of our old
patterns and the discomfort of growth and
change.
So when you're involved in dysfunction,
you're creating and recreating these
patterns over and over again.
Chances are it's probably going to get
worse unless you do something drastic to
change it.
And it's never ending.
You know,
it's just getting worse and it's never
ending.
If you contrast that with the discomfort
of growth and change,
like when you break your patterns,
that is temporary discomfort.
Because the reason it's uncomfortable is
because it's foreign.
It's new.
You don't know where this goes.
With the dysfunction, you're like, well,
at least I'm familiar with this.
I know where it's going.
But with the growth and change discomfort,
you don't know what's happening there.
And so if you remember, oh, that's right,
discomfort doesn't mean danger.
And this discomfort is eventually going to
become comfortable when I keep doing the
new patterns.
And there's healing on the other side.
There's work-life balance.
There's healthy relationships.
There's peace, serenity, calm,
feeling comfortable in my own skin on the
other side of that.
So once you understand that,
It's easy to remember discomfort doesn't
mean danger and which discomfort do I want
the never ending getting worse over time
discomfort that yeah okay it's familiar,
or do I want the temporary discomfort,
where there's like healing and peace and
serenity on the other side like I pick
that one.
So when you first start building this
internal safety.
you do what you need to do in
the moment to calm and soothe yourself.
And you tell yourself things like
discomfort doesn't mean danger.
Personally, I need to say things like,
I'm not in trouble,
I haven't done anything wrong,
and I'm not a bad person.
Because that was the stuff that I
always...
like have told myself in my head.
And so learning how to build internal
safety is the key.
And so when I look back at why
did I teach people values,
it's a way to not abandon yourself.
building internal safety is you stopping
abandoning yourself when things get
difficult.
So I didn't know that it was about
internal safety and it was about not
abandoning yourself,
but I knew like you need something to
anchor yourself,
to work towards that matters to you.
So I'm going to stop.
Oh my God.
I have, I have thoughts as you're talking,
right.
And I'm thinking back to
the original journey and I had two
experiences with it.
One was I came to the realization that
I was so wrapped up in what other
people thought of me that there was just
no way, A,
that I could be completely honest or B,
that I could hold boundaries because their
response was my only boundary was as
strong as your response back to me.
But the other thing was, you know,
so my wife, God bless her,
very healthy woman,
much healthier than me.
I always say as long as her denial
holds,
we're going to have a great relationship.
But coming from a family with fairly
non-existent boundaries,
when I encountered her and she would set
a boundary, what I interpreted was not,
hey, she's caring for herself.
And oh, by the way,
this is my responsibility to fix my own
feelings.
It was...
you're being cold or you're being mean.
Right.
And I'm sure that's very common.
And it occurred to me that had I
not had my own program of recovery to
fall back on,
it would have scared me enough to,
to potentially end the relationship.
Like it probably would have.
And she would have gone on being just
a healthy person.
That's that's setting boundaries,
you know?
And it kind of seems to me that
like, you know, in,
in the fellowship I attend, we talk about,
and I'm sure y'all do too.
Emotional sobriety, right?
Yeah.
And this seems to be like the,
the upper echelon of that even like,
you know, so it's,
it's just wild shit that you're sharing.
And I just really love it.
Yeah.
Bill W.
called emotional sobriety the next
frontier.
Like once you get physical sobriety,
you've got to get to emotional sobriety
because it's, you know,
we want to get to the causes and
conditions.
Well,
it's the emotional and emotional
intoxication.
You know, it's the drama.
It's the trauma.
It's the chaos and all that kind of
stuff.
Yeah.
And I want to say something about the
caring what other people think of you.
What I've said for years is the thing,
the core thing that switched for me to
go from fifty something years of no
boundaries to having such healthy
boundaries that I coach people on how to
build them is that I've come to care
more what I think of me.
than what other people think of me.
And it doesn't mean I don't care what
people think of me, Austin,
of course I do.
I'm a person, right?
What it means is that I care more
about being an honest woman of integrity
than what you think of me.
So if I have to lie to get
your approval, not doing it.
right?
Like I want your approval,
but I don't with claws need it the
way that I used to.
And I can see now that this also
has to do with a sense of internal
safety.
I feel safer when I don't abandon myself
and I stick to my values.
Like honestly, I lied to
constantly before recovery.
Meanwhile,
I thought I was an honest person.
And then I got in recovery.
I was like, oh my God,
like I've lied about cigarettes, drugs,
alcohol, relationships.
And the, the,
the largest chunk of my lying has been
in the people pleasing department and
being like, oh yeah,
that's totally fine with me.
I'm okay with that.
Oh, I love that.
Oh yeah, please come on over.
Oh, I'm fine.
Meanwhile, I'm dying inside, right?
That's the majority of it.
But I lied about everything.
And I thought I was
honest so for me that's one of my
top values is honesty because if i'm if
i'm dishonest that's my slippery slope to
going back into substance use you know as
a as kind of a wrap-up topic i'm
curious about
the journey you had, and I'm,
I'm making an assumption.
You had one of going from really caring
and needing the approval of other people
to it.
Just, you know, I like me.
So you're like,
as a bonus sort of thing.
Um,
was there a journey that you went on
with that?
I certainly had one.
Yeah.
God, yeah, absolutely.
And, you know,
meetings help a lot with that.
I remember like,
I don't know why this is just what
popped in my head.
In my meeting,
we do timeshares and I was the timer
one day and person kept talking.
And I was dying inside.
I'm like, is it my responsibility?
Do I set the timer for another thirty
seconds?
Do I say something to them?
And I it was because I cared what
people thought.
And so at the,
this was really new in recovery.
I was like,
I can't be the timer anymore.
Right.
Cause I couldn't handle what was happening
internally for me.
I felt like I was dying.
And now like, I'm just like time,
you know, and here's the other thing.
Oh, here's something that I did.
Somebody that I met in ACA sent me
a flyer that I thought was for an
ACA meetings,
third year anniversary party.
I email it to everybody that I have
an email address in ACA.
And then I go to my meeting and
I'm like, hey,
in case you didn't get it,
there's a flyer.
There's this meeting.
And somebody goes, that's an AA meeting,
Barb.
And I go, oh, oops.
I got to tell you something, Austin.
In the past, I would have died.
Died, died, died, died,
died for a public correction.
And I would have beat myself.
It wasn't even until the next morning when
I was writing my gratitude journal that I
was like, oh, my God,
that was a blip in my life because
I cared so much that other people not
see my flaws.
And now I know I am full awesome.
I'm both awesome.
You know,
like just because I have flaws doesn't
mean I'm not awesome.
And just because I'm awesome doesn't mean
I don't have flaws.
And that would have just, I mean,
I would have played that over for weeks.
I probably would never would have gone to
the meeting again.
I mean,
That's how much it's changed, but I can't,
it's hard to remember like the exact
journey, but I can say like,
those are two incidents like first year of
recovery and last week.
Yeah.
I remember, man,
I was just getting sober and I was
on a yoga kick,
which now that I'm saying it,
I should probably try it out again.
Uh, but I remember going to this class,
tons of people in the class and there
was this, this woman,
she's probably in her seventies.
She'd been coaching yoga for like four
years.
Um,
And she was going to show us the
poses to do,
but she said at the beginning,
I'm getting old and I can no longer
do the poses,
so I'm gonna do the easy poses.
And I just remembered watching her,
this extreme professional at this,
just basically honoring where she was at
and saying, hey, this is okay.
And the feeling I got
was that it was okay for me not
to be perfect at the same time.
And in the exposition maybe we'll say of
our flaws, and this happens all the time,
I feel more connected to people by seeing
where they're off the beam,
not where they're doing things perfectly.
I mean, this is like,
you can't have intimacy without
vulnerability.
And if you're behind all these different
masks and you're trying to pretend you
don't have flaws, that's not vulnerable.
And this is one thing that happens in
recovery when you're telling the stories
and
And you're listening to other people's
stories and you're identifying with them.
There's an intimacy, you know,
like it says in the big book,
we're like the people on the Titanic who
like, we're all,
we're all going to drown in the ocean.
We would never come together, you know,
like to people that are my closest
friends, I would never have met them.
I would never,
it just wouldn't have happened.
And they're like my dearest people in the
world because we're vulnerable with each
other in the rooms of recovery.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Much more brothers in our defects than in
our virtues.
I hear you.
Barb,
this has been a hell of a great
episode.
Thank you so much for chatting with me
and stick around.
I gotta say,
I love being in a recovery, uh,
on a recovery podcast because I can tell
the whole full story.
Whereas, you know,
people out in the other world don't
necessarily, I tear,
I tell some of it for sure.
And then also I can swear.
Cause I,
You can we don't give a shit.
We like we actually kind of like it's
endearing.
Yeah, it happens.
Well, people around.
I think I've had three people in my
all these years of podcasting that have
said anything negative about swearing,
but I've had like,
dozens of people be like, Oh, my God,
I love that you swear out shows that
you're authentic, or I swear like you do.
You know, it's like, it's real.
This is what I talk like.
That's it.
Well, I appreciate you showing up real,
man.
That's what gets it.
So for anyone listening,
if you're listening on Spotify or Apple
Podcasts, do whatever you do on those.
Leave a review or like or do something.
Whatever you're supposed to do, do that.
And my name's Austin.
Thanks for tuning in.
Barb has been joining me this week.
Thanks for kicking ass, Barb.
And we'll catch you guys on the next
episode.
Bye-bye.