Naturally High

In this powerful solo episode of Naturally High, Jeanne Foot explores one of the most overlooked yet essential aspects of healing and personal growth: emotional sobriety.

While many people focus on abstinence or surface-level behaviour change, Jeanne invites listeners to go deeper—into the emotional patterns, triggers, and subconscious conditioning that continue to shape our lives long after we’ve “stopped the behaviour.”

Whether you’re in recovery, navigating stress, or simply feeling stuck in reactive patterns, this episode offers a new lens: real freedom comes not from controlling your environment, but from learning how to regulate your inner world.

Jeanne breaks down the concept of emotional sobriety as originally introduced in 12-step philosophy, and expands it into a modern, practical framework for emotional resilience, nervous system regulation, and long-term fulfillment.

You’ll learn why many people plateau after initial progress, how unresolved emotional patterns keep us stuck, and most importantly, how to access your power through something deceptively simple: the pause.

This episode is an invitation to move beyond survival mode and into a life of clarity, alignment, and true emotional freedom.

In this episode, you’ll hear about:
  • What emotional sobriety really means (and why abstinence isn’t the end goal)
  • Why we still feel stuck—even after making “positive changes”
  • How trauma and early experiences can arrest emotional development
  • The difference between reacting and responding (and why it matters)
  • The role of neuroplasticity in building new emotional patterns
  • Why we become “hijacked” by our emotional triggers
  • The concept of the sacred pause and how it gives you your power back
  • How to stop outsourcing your emotional state to people, places, and circumstances
  • The truth about the “pink cloud” phase and why things can feel flat after
  • Acceptance vs. control: why fighting reality creates more suffering
  • The Serenity Prayer as a practical framework for emotional regulation
  • How to navigate life’s inevitable challenges without numbing or escaping
  • Why emotional sobriety is the foundation for lasting recovery, strong relationships, and fulfillment
  • How to redesign your life so it supports your growth instead of sabotaging it

Resources discussed in this episode:

Contact Jeanne Foot | The Recovery Concierge: 

Creators and Guests

Host
Jeanne Foot

What is Naturally High?

On Naturally High you’ll receive transformational tools and hear inspirational stories that will guide you into holistically healing trauma in every corner of your life. You deserve to invoke your inner healer. I'm so glad you're here!

Jeanne: [00:00:06] Hello, everybody, and welcome back to another episode of Naturally High. And today we're going to talk about something that's dear to my heart. Now, I always say that it's either super exciting or someone super special, but that's truly how I feel. And today the subject we're going to talk about is what I call emotional sobriety, which is the ability to take a moment between stimulus and response and choose how we want to respond. And when we master this skill, we come into the land of emotional maturity where we have resilience over our emotions. So if you're not someone who's actively in recovery, I want you to stay with us because many of us struggle from the same emotional patterns and we become hijacked by them. And if you've learned to put down drugs and alcohol and have stopped or have stopped any maladaptive behaviour, you may wonder what's next. You may even find yourself wondering, is this all there is? Then this episode is definitely for you. Or maybe you ponder about feeling yourself being ambushed by your own emotions and react highly to people around you. It's like they almost strike a nerve, you know? It's like a knee-jerk reaction. And that can happen on a daily basis. And we may not even understand why. But obviously something gets activated in us. And then it happens in a millisecond as to our response. So we're going to talk about how can we slow that process down? And sometimes for some people it may feel like everything is personal.

Jeanne: [00:01:31] It's about you, even when it's not about you. And I know that was true for me, especially when I first started in my recovery journey. So you could feel easily triggered by family, friends, coworkers, or just by your own human quirks. And, you know, being human as you, I talk about this all the time, is so quirky, for want of a better word, because we don't understand ourselves. And that is really part of it. Like if we really had like a user’s map, a guide map to figure this out, it would be so much easier. So this is what we want to do in this session is really unpack some of that. So why does it happen that when we have the best intentions, we somehow end up completely reacting to something that we wish we could just unwind? And that's when we know we've been activated emotionally. We really want to come back to our equilibrium or centre or, you know, put that sentence back in our mouth, but we don't know how to do it. So today, not only are we going to learn how to be emotionally resilient, we're going to talk a little bit about our brain's neuroplasticity and how we can create new habits and conditioning that makes emotional resilience easy and effortless and more importantly, sustainable. And that is the key. When something feels really hard, like we're doing the heavy lifting, it becomes really tough to stay the course.

Jeanne: [00:02:56] And we're also going to examine the crucial pause between stimulus and response, where your true power lives, in that pause. And then we're going to talk about ultimately, a lifestyle redesign, creating a life that feels so aligned and meaningful that it becomes your best protection against any relapse or regression back to some sort of behaviour that you no longer want in your life. So if you're ready to move from just getting by in life and settling to all that there is to finding genuine freedom, you're definitely in the right place. So before we go deeper, I would like us to have a common understanding of what emotional sobriety is and why it's so important. Originally, the term was merged from 12 step circles, and it was written by Bill Wilson, and it’s described as the next frontier in long term recovery. Now, Bill W really understood that abstinence was never the goal. Abstinence is what gets you into the game for growth, because without that, you can't have that. It's the same for people who don't use substances in the same way. Unless you have any sense of awareness of what's going on for you, it's virtually impossible to really be able to change any behaviour that you're not aware of. And he described it as finding freedom from emotional extremes and from relying on others or circumstances to regulate your inner state. So people, places, and things. So he was saying that we don't want to have these volatile emotional patterns, like that are extreme, like, you know, pure anger, pure inconsolable.

Jeanne: [00:04:26] Those kinds of fluctuations. And we don't want to be outsourcing our power to others, people, places or things or conditions to be able to regulate our internal state. Otherwise, we're always going to be dependent on how things need to be in order for us to be okay. So I look at emotional sobriety as a foundation for all deeper emotional healing. In other words, it's the eternal work that we, is required first before we can master any emotional maturity. Now, what typically happens for a lot of people who use substances, and this can happen even if you don't use substances or you've had a trauma, traumatic exposure, you tend to really, your emotional development is arrested at that age. So if it happened at age ten or age 12, you start, may start to function like a 12 year old. Your brain stops developing in a healthy way of development. And so you learn the adaptive way of being in order to get by. And that's where you get hijacked. You get hijacked at the actual age that there was an interruption, whether it was from drugs and alcohol, whether it was from a traumatic experience. And so unless we sort of understand this, it's going to set the stage for all maladaptive behaviours. And we really want to look at setting the stage for freedom, right? Real fulfillment in life and take you beyond just resilience, getting by, doing whatever you can to truly flourishing.

Jeanne: [00:05:59] And this is what we're going to discuss today. I'm excited. Like this is where our freedom lies. One of the things I want to talk about in emotional sobriety, it is the gateway to our freedom. So it's offering us a chance to emotionally regulate. And that provides stabilization for us. And many times people who use drugs and alcohol or maladaptive cycles, even like whether it's gaming, whether it's sex addictions, whether it's food addictions, when they're not settled or emotionally regulated, what's going to happen is they're going to go pick up, especially if they're in a heightened activated state of dysregulation when something's not going their way, which is why it's so crucial to learn this skill. Emotional sobriety also offers us the ability to have full range of our emotions without being hijacked by them. So we want to be able to navigate our behaviours without feeling the consequences of like, oh, I did that again and wish that you hadn't. Right? It's our ability to develop inner resilience, inner balance, and discernment when we're having those tough decisions and faced with challenges or triggers that typically would send us into destructive behaviours, we want to be able to have the resolve to be able to pull us back and not enter into the cycle once again. And one of the long-term benefits of this is people who do, especially for the recovery people, is that people who develop emotional sobriety tend to have more stable long-term abstinence, strong relationships, and overall satisfaction in life.

Jeanne: [00:07:38] So sobriety is so much more than picking up like that is the entry into the game of personal development and growth. You know, for people who don't use, it could be a crisis that brings us in. It could be a loss. It could be anything. We're just sick and tired of being sick and tired. That makes us want to, you know, say, okay, I'm going to change this. I'm just tired of the same pattern and I want more. And that's really what… something has to give in order for us to really want to change. One of the things I find is that people often confuse abstinence for true recovery. And that's not our finish line. You know, there's a term in the 12 step circles is called a dry drunk. I think maybe some of you have heard of that term where basically somebody’s sober, but they're just absolutely miserable. They don't have any emotional resilience. They don't have any tools to be able to emotionally regulate or be appropriate. They don't know how to communicate. And this is often why that is not the litmus test of what recovery is about. So we want to be able to resource ourselves better, that we can then have a pause in these moments. In other words, put the brakes on and be able to then be discerning about our next choice.

Jeanne: [00:09:02] And we're going to talk about this today. Well, how you can do that and what you can do. I think sometimes there's a tendency to judge our recovery and that we think it's supposed to be easier than it is. Like, you know, I know for me personally, I've judged my own process, like maybe a lesson that it took me a long time to learn. And I think, oh, I should have learned this years ago. I wasn't ready to learn what I needed to learn at a certain time. So I think we can judge our process and regress to like, you know, you're so stupid. What were you thinking? Why didn't you know this? And you know, all the self-talk that's really destructive. And these are the things that send us back to our habits. So we really want to keep an awareness on that. And, you know, typically what happens at the beginning of a recovery journey is that, you must have heard this term, called the pink cloud. It's very much like falling in love. Things are really improving. They feel better. Our relationships are feeling better. It feels very rosy, rosy and cozy, I guess. And then in time, you recognize that this is your life. Just like that new love wears off after a period of time, whether it's a year or two, and life sets in and life does life, right? And it just can feel a little flat at times. Entering into recovery and withdrawal from substances is really the doorway to the discovery journey and our freedom.

Jeanne: [00:10:30] And that is what I want for every single one of you, every single one of you. Even if recovery is not part of your language, you are entitled to have a life that you love so much that you feel emotionally free, that you can feel joy, that you're vital, that you can just transcend those limiting stories, those limiting beliefs that you've always hung on to. Because that's how we were programmed. All of us have been programmed, whether it's from our family, whether it's from culture, whether it's from schools, education institutions, whatever. And we need to learn to cope differently and understand how to mitigate these overwhelming emotions that literally hijack us in our everyday life if we don't have tools for them. So, I said life is going to do life, which it does, and we're all going to experience heartache, grief, loss, conflict, and stress. And that's just part of being human. I think the faster we can accept that, the better it is. The work is, how do we navigate these difficult moments by cultivating emotional sobriety, to stay present in these difficult moments without running or numbing? And numbing is not substance only. It can be any destructive behaviour. Food is a common one. And sex I say more so for females. Food can tend to be more so for females and sex for men.

Jeanne: [00:11:58] It's not stereotypical, but it does trend that way. You know, to pick up that box of cookies or to pick up that tub of ice cream. And it gives us comfort. There's a brain chemical alteration that happens in those moments. And then we feel like, oh, why did we do that shortly after? So the work is how do we, are we able to feel and manage the emotions without being hijacked by them? So how do we stay the course when things are running, our emotions are really running high? One of my favourite quotes by Byron Katie, which stopped me dead in my tracks. And it's something I practice often to this very day. And I'm going to paraphrase, but it is, do not fight with reality. How many times do any of us, or some of us or most of us try to bend reality because we're not liking it? And, you know, for me is, it was hard for me. So because we're talking about acceptance, we're talking about accepting what is. Like if you can change something external in your life because it's complete, like in loss, as in grief, as in a job that's over or a relationship that's over. If we cannot accept that, we're going to be bumping up against reality all the time. So we're caught up in what we desire rather than what is. And I call this trying to bend reality. I have acceptance in knowing what I can reasonably change.

Jeanne: [00:13:29] What is in my power to change. Discernment of knowing what you can control and letting go of what you can't. Which brings us into the Serenity Prayer. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Now, if we can apply this little prayer to, in our foundation of our life and embed it in the fabric of our being, we'll have much more peace. And that's something I learned a long time ago. So how we see our life rarely fits into our expectations of our life. And that leaves us trying to control everything, to fit our own viewpoint. And it conflicts with reality. The truth, and I think it further reinforces conflict within ourselves, where we're causing dis-ease. And dis-ease can literally make us feel uncomfortable and literally crazy. Or it could be decades of this, living a certain way, and eventually be a precursor to real disease. So by acceptance of yourself and your reality and leaving acceptance of is what is rather than what you desire, what you want, is such an easier way of being. It's less chaotic. You don't feel like you have to manipulate control, which was a very big part of my early recovery. I used to feel like I had to bend reality, as I said before, manipulate and coerce people into basically buying whatever I was selling.

Jeanne: [00:15:05] And it truly wasn't always in my best interest. Maybe it's a good skill to have in life and other healthier ways, but it definitely wasn't in my self-destructive manner. So if we're hyper focused on what other people are doing and we're looking outside of ourselves at their actions, their reactions, we're going to just be unbalanced. We become impulsive and destructive to ourselves and others. So how do we apply emotional sobriety in real life with everyday triggers and external events that we have no control over? So I'm going to say something. You're going to go, is that it? And I'm going to say yeah, it is. That is part of it. The pause. This leads us to recognize the patterns, the triggers, the stories we tell ourselves under stress. So I want you to take a beat and ask yourself, what am I feeling right now? When you are heightened, you could be, you call it trigger, you could call it an activation emotionally. It could be something that really upsets you. And I want you to take that pause. If you could just take a beat when that happens for you. You may not have the answer, but in between the pause and the space of you doing, the next thing is where your power lies. And this is so important because we often are so reactive. We hydroplane through our life. We're always... We're not even in this present moment. We're thinking about where we're going next, right? Like, what are we doing? What are we doing? What are we doing? How are we going to manage this, that? When we bypass the present moment. So it's virtually impossible for us to do anything different if we're not in the moment.

Jeanne: [00:16:55] And this is what I'm asking you and I'm inviting you to do, is to be in the moment and look for that sacred pause. So how do we create a pause in our heightened emotional state to where we want to be, rather than where we are? So how do we remain in the calm when we're so heightened emotionally? Whether it's an activation, it could be an activation of a severe, intense emotion. It could be an occurrence, someone coming into our space and it's triggering us. It could be a variety of different ways it shows up. The ideal is that we should be able to respond with emotional maturity, emotional clarity, and resilience. So here's a little micro-tool that you can use when you're feeling activated. And it's called creating a pause in the moment. The pause is where your power lives. The pause is simple. When craving shows up, I want you to just pause and take a breath. So basically come off of autopilot. Just be intentional with yourself with this time, and just attune to yourself and connect to the pause and say, who do I want to be in this moment? So the P3 protocol is pause, process, and proceed.

Jeanne: [00:18:13] And as I said, it's a little micro tool for emotional resilience and to help you be intentional in the moment, especially when you're struggling. Okay, so the first step is to pause. It takes about 10 seconds, scan your body, attune to yourself. Breathe, connect to your breath, and feel what's alive for you in this moment. What are you feeling? It could be tension. It could be pain. It could be a heart pounding. It could be heat rising, whatever it may be. It could be stiffness, feeling frozen. It can show up in a variety of different ways. And there's no reason to make it wrong in any single way. Whatever presents is what is presented and just witness that. Process. 20 seconds, tops. I want you to label whatever it is that's presenting itself with compassion, with kindness. What response honours my values and my nervous system? So just ask yourself that question. What response honours my values and nervous system? Then I want you to proceed. And you're going to proceed with what is one doable action I can do right now? It may be just staying there a moment or two longer. It may be making a commitment to yourself that you're not going to judge your process, you're just going to allow it to be. And it is what it is. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with who you are as a person or your worth as a person. So this is a tool, obviously, that you would practice.

Jeanne: [00:19:45] It's like anything that we need to work with. We're in continuous practice with ourselves, with our emotions, with our feelings, and also with our practices. So I hope that you have some fun with it and learn to discover a little bit more about yourself and who you are becoming in this very moment. So I have a little exercise that you can do, and we're going to put this in the show notes so that you guys have an opportunity to practice this on your own when you're really in your real life and having a moment. And it's a gentle nervous system reset to create space between trigger and response. So I call it the p squared and it's squared because it has exponential effects on it. So what we want to do is, in the pause, we want to round it to the body. We want to get connected to present self. So we're not hydroplaning out there. And just ask yourself, what is sensations am I feeling right now? You don't even have to know. You don't even have to be aware. But you want to create that pause that gives you permission to start attuning yourself to awareness. Okay, then you want to know process. What is the feeling? You want to be able to name the feeling that you're experiencing: agitated, angry, invisible, insecure, crushed, like emotionally, whatever it is for you. So the process is name the feeling with compassion. Oh, I'm feeling invisible right now.

Jeanne: [00:21:13] Oh yeah. That's a familiar emotion for me. And then you want to regulate your response that serves your healing. So what can you do? Just have compassion for yourself in the moment. It doesn't mean you have to fix anything. It doesn't mean you have to do anything, but you want to be able to really witness and validate what you're experiencing because you can't heal what you don't experience or are aware of. Proceed. Take one small aligned step forward. So what can I do? I'm just going to hang on to myself in this moment. I'm going to put this into the parking lot. I may have to come back and I think, examine this later, but I'm not going to deal with it right now because I don't have time. I'm heightening the emotion, this is not the best time to try to solve problems, and it's something that will need some more unpacking. So that's just a little exercise and we'll put some notes down for you. One of the things I see often when people put down substance or they're trying to change a behaviour of any kind, is they trade one addictive pattern for another. It's really common. So your energy goes into this one thing. Maybe it's stopping substances or, you know, even gaming. Let's take technology as an issue. Work as an issue. Like some of these things are really way more accepted socially than the others, but they're a problem.

Jeanne: [00:22:36] So some common cross-addictions are food, which I spoke about exercise, gambling, relationships, shopping, social media. Being entirely optimistic and spiritually bypassing the situation. Obviously, technology comes into their work as well. Simply put, what happens in these moments and the reason it's so common is the brain is looking for the same hit quote/unquote, that it would normally get through any other behaviour that you've stopped, such as substance, for example. So it's looking for that same hit. And from a neurochemistry perspective, your brain is getting that hit when it, you know, picks up and it uses alcohol for… I'm using one as an example, but these are all interchangeable. So just don't get fixated on if it doesn't apply to you. The brain is literally looking for the reward of dopamine, and the anticipation of that reward happening is what it’s used to. And so it's looking for it in another form or another. Your brain is quite adaptive. It says, okay, if I can't get it from here, can I get it from somewhere else? And yes, it can. And so this is why you have to be careful that you shouldn't necessarily avoid these things, but you want to be mindful of how they can impact you. So I always relate it to like, you know, that game in the video arcades of that whack a mole, the big thumper? So, you know, you hit that thumper on one thing that goes down and another crops up.

Jeanne: [00:24:09] And that's what it's like when you put down a substance or addiction, an addictive pattern, you put down one thing and the other comes up. So you may overexercise, you may be too rigid in your dieting. You may, for young adults, it could be gaming. They really haven't been in a world without technology, so it's very different for them. We, the good news is we can change all of this through neuroplasticity and habit change. So like, you can change it. You just need to get those reps in. So how we look at this is through a multi-pronged process which involves our thoughts, our feelings, emotions, and the stories we tell ourselves. And it requires practice. We got to get those reps in. But you know, as I said before, the first part of it is having awareness. So you want to have a pause between stimulus and response. And that just makes sense because otherwise you're just going to go off. You are, we work very quickly and with our subconscious brain and it's very fast. So it's very much a part of how do we see ourselves and who are we being in the choices we make in these in these moments? Can we just have a pause? That's all you're looking for because we have to be awake from our slumber and be curious as to what's driving our behaviour. You know, as I said, we all live on autopilot, and so we want some space to feel and think about what we really want.

Jeanne: [00:25:37] And when I talk about space, I'm talking microseconds here. I'm not talking about, you know, hours or five minutes or anything. I'm talking maybe, you know, anywhere from 5 to 15 seconds to 30 seconds to a minute or two. We're not talking a long period of time and we can all afford that. And if you can't afford that, then you really need to examine why you can't afford that time. We get really caught up in the autopilot of what we should, we must, we have to. We don't get caught up in the privilege of yeah, this is a gift to ourself. We're replenishing our cup, our own cup. We're filling our own cup up first. And this is essential if you want to change these long, ingrained embedded patterns and turn them around for the better. So it's time to get off the merry-go-round, guys. It's really that simple. So the merry-go -round is your subconscious programming and become more intentional and deliberate to what you desire, how we close the gap from where we are to where we want to be. So we're going to break down how we process information and make sense of our world. So what is the meaning I'm given to this? What is the story I'm telling myself? So that's why you could have two people who are exposed to the same situation, even two children, and their interpretation of the experience of something they they experienced is completely different, because it's how we take in information and decode it and make sense of it is unique to each of us, based on a multitude of different factors.

Jeanne: [00:27:19] But just, let's say common umbrella life experience. So it will mean different things to different people. So the good news is our brain is incredibly malleable. Over time, when we repeat new behaviours, just like it can happen with other destructive behaviours, it will create new neural pathways in the brain. And each time you repeat a behaviour, you strengthen that connection and that supports it. So making that action easier and more automatic over time. So for example, if you're navigating sobriety and you're in an early stage of sobriety, let's say you're just not even used to navigating socially without substance, it will feel very mechanical. It will feel like you're learning to ride a bike. It's going to feel, everything's going to feel hard. Same thing with driving that car for the first time. You feel like you've got to look in your mirrors, your side mirrors, your back mirrors like you've got to, and you've got to look in front? You've got a lot of concentration going into making that happen. It's the same when we're doing something new over time, as we are more successful with that new habit, it becomes automatic to us and that becomes our new normal. But the same happens with repetition in ways that are not optimal for us.

Jeanne: [00:28:40] So the habit of drinking, the habit of falling into picking up our phone and scrolling, this is why it's so easy. It's a self-fulfilling pathway for better and for worse. Every rep that you put in is basically a vote for the person you're becoming. What you practice today builds the brain pathway for who you're going to become tomorrow. It's really that simple. So we want to keep optimizing new experiences that are healthier for us. You guys probably know that we use a very small, minute part of our brain compared to our capacity, our true capacity. So, you know, I'm coming back to the pause again, because I want you to really understand how critical this is between stimulus and response. So creating a pause in the moment is where you really, really want to be. And so, it can happen in a matter of three seconds. So if you take anything away from you, I want you to get off that hydroplaning through your life and into the moment where, especially when those moments are very heightened emotionally and you're feeling triggered or you're feeling amplified, or you're feeling really off-centre, this is where you've got to attune to you and just cut out the noise, even if it's just moment to moment to moment. Okay. So this brings us to how do we keep emotional sobriety or emotional maturity front and centre in our lives?

Jeanne: [00:30:22] A lot of us have been conditioned through our early programming to be someone we may have outgrown, we may not want to be, we may not like, because it's just part of our history. It's part of our conditioning. And there's no blame or shame here. It's just that everybody was doing their best. But I think the problem is, is that we adapted in ways that who do we need to be in order to be loved? And so that sent us into abandoning ourself, essentially. And many of us enter a journey of recovery, of self healing, not by choice, by circumstance. We are usually presented with that fork in the road moment, like whether it's marrying someone, whether it's taking a job offer, whether it's ignoring your intuition, whether it's being presented with a set of circumstances of grief and loss. But we're forced to take a look at our life in a way that we've never done up until that point in time. And it's not what will take us where we want to go sometimes, unless we're prepared to make a change. And sometimes that may feel like it's asking too much of us, because what we have always known up until this moment has maybe worked really well for us, but it's not brought us the most fulfillment, the most joy, the happiness that we truly are seeking. So, you know, we have little faith and strength, is how are we going to move forward from a place of fear of, we have to do this, or there's external pressures, or relapse is something that is embedded with shame rather than reoccurrences.

Jeanne: [00:32:02] And so we want to build our life to move forward in a way that feels integral to who we are being. We need to build our life on desire, purpose, and alignment within our work, within our relationships, and our health, and who we are spiritually. Now, that may sound like a tall task, and it is to some degree, but it doesn't all happen at the same time. Okay, so there's priorities on staging of what needs to be done first. And it's challenging because the very thing that made your world work, which is deriving some comfort, whether it's from the tub of ice cream or from that substance that you use to just, you know, shut down all the noise, is no longer available to you. And you're going to be confronted with new levels of accountability, maybe boundaries, different rhythms in your life and environments that at first make it feel so difficult. But with time, I can assure you it becomes your new normal and your new so natural to you and more importantly, you never really want to ever go back. You thought it was good just getting by, but really, it's beyond that. So I just want to go back. So emotional sobriety or emotional maturity is giving you choice from moment to moment to moment, you know? Otherwise we leave things to chance. And so if you… failure to plan is planning to fail.

Jeanne: [00:33:40] It's very similar. Unless we're really deliberate about what we're doing here, this will be the same for us. So that's what I want for you. We're talking about what comes after physical sobriety and emotional sobriety is the silver lining in life. It really is the ability to go from just getting by to beyond resilience to truly flourishing. And that's what we want. Why not? This is your one sacred life, guys. You want the best life ever, and it's available to you. No different than it is to the person standing beside you. So my hope is that you're walking away with a deeper understanding that you're not broken at all. It's rather… not what's wrong with you, rather than what happened to you. And maybe you still have a big feeling and old urges, and that's simply just directing you to the next layer of work. It's just telling you this is totally normal. Your brain's doing what it's supposed to do, and you need to protect you and find an easier pathway that feels more kind, more compassionate, more familiar, and a way for you to feel truly better. And sobriety is a daily practice of noticing, pausing, and choosing again, moment to moment to moment. And each time you create that little bit of space between a trigger and a response, you're literally carving a new pathway in your brain and building a life that fits who you are and who you are becoming.

Jeanne: [00:35:18] So if this episode resonated with you, I want you to take a moment to ask yourself, where am I still living on autopilot? And what's one small choice I can make by design instead? So choice rather than chance. If you found this helpful, I want you to share it with someone who's navigating life after substances and leave a rating or review so we can help more people live naturally high. And I've left some questions for you guys in the show notes for your own self reflection. And if you're willing, I would love you to choose some of those questions and just give yourself some space to answer honestly. Whenever you do this work, just remember that you are the beneficiary of the work that you do. So it's not me who's getting benefit. It's you who gets benefit when you do the work. So until next time, stay naturally high. Thank you for joining me for this episode of Naturally High. If this conversation resonated with you, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Please leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or reach out to me through the links in the show notes. Together, we're changing the way the world approaches mental health, addiction, and trauma. Remember to like, subscribe, and leave a rating for Naturally High on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen so you never miss an episode. For more inspiration and resources, follow me on Instagram @therecovery_concierge or visit theRecoveryconcierge.com. Stay empowered, keep rising, and I'll see you in the next episode.