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Rise Above: a podcast from Rogers Behavioral Health takes listeners on a journey of education and inspiration as we sit down with mental health and addiction experts and past patients who are changing how the world views mental health and addiction.
The reality was that I had found myself in a situation that was very much out of my control and I was grasping at anything to try and gain some semblance of control. So Did you know that then or is this your awareness now looking at? No. Hindsight is a true gift.
Andy:You're listening to Rise Above, a Rogers Behavioral Health podcast, where we sit down with Rogers experts who changing the way the world views mental health and addiction. Welcome back to Rise Above, a podcast from Rogers Behavioral Health, where we share real stories of recovery, resilience, and hope. I'm Andy Meadow, and today I'm again joined by Paige Feller, who works closely with women in substance use recovery and helps lead the Worth It For Her program here at Rogers. Hi Paige.
Page:Hi Andy, it's great to be back.
Andy:So in our last episode, we heard the beginning of your conversation with Christina and Elizabeth and some incredibly honest reflections on Elizabeth's experiences with motherhood, substance use, and recovery.
Page:And in this next part, we'll hear from Christina and about how her substance use began, what her recovery looked like, and how it changed over time.
Andy:Now, before we get into that, I think it's important to spend a little more time on why you had the conversation to begin with and why programs like Worth It For Her exist.
Page:The big reason for this conversation was that I really wanted to shed some light on what stress, struggle, and substance use often looks like for women. Worth It For Her is built around the understanding that women who enter treatment are often dealing with complex issues unique to the female experience. There are many layers of trauma, relationships, motherhood, expectations, identity, and those layers don't just disappear when someone stops using substances. Treatment must create space to safely explore all of that, and ultimately that's our goal for Worth It For Her. The Worth It For Her program provides an authentic, supportive, and nonjudgmental environment that's flexible and committed to meeting the individual needs of each woman who enters our program.
Page:From that initial phone call and intake assessment to the ongoing treatment planning process and beyond, our team is committed to understanding each woman's unique needs, strengths, hopes, fears, abilities, interests, and goals. Really, our team works to wrap around each individual to provide the exact services and support that's desired and critical to their short and long term success and recovery. We have psychiatrists, providers, nurses, therapists, addictions counselors, and peer specialists who offer the desired level of support and involvement at a frequency and intensity that is determined by each individual as well as collaboratively with our team. Like I said, from that first call until the last contact, our team works to peel back the layers in a safe and supportive way to really allow that deep, meaningful connection and effective treatment and recovery.
Andy:So the Worth It For Her program doesn't just address the substance use itself, but like everything underneath it.
Page:Exactly. Because really for anyone, but especially for women, substance use is not the whole story. It's often connected to experiences like trauma, abuse, control, perfectionism, responsibility, stress, and feeling like they have to hold it all together for everyone else. And what came through so clearly in this conversation is how much of that was happening below the surface for these two women even when everything looked fine on the outside.
Andy:So in this clip, we really start to hear how those experiences with trauma, perfectionism, and control played out. Let's listen to the next part of your conversation with Christina and Elizabeth.
Christina:This is not unique to me. This is for a long time, I thought it was. For a long time, I thought that I was terminally unique. That's a phrase we use a lot in the recovery world. And I truly believed that nobody else could possibly understand.
Christina:I had been dating a guy. We had dated for a short period of time and I found out I was pregnant. So, we had been dating for like three months at that point. I found out I was pregnant and we made this decision that it was a fantastic idea to get married. It was such a great idea.
Christina:And at that time, like I was absolutely in love. That this made sense, right? And it was around this exact time that I started to really understand at 23 years old the situation that I had found myself in, which had turned into a very violent and abusive relationship turning into marriage. And I wanted to show everyone that I had it all together. That I could handle this.
Christina:I knew my parents were really really worried because they knew me better than I knew myself at that time, but I was hell bent on being able to show that I could handle this, that I had it all figured out. Nobody knew really what was happening in the house. He was involved with substances and that came to light throughout the marriage, but everything was supposedly fine and I that was satisfying to me. But the reality was that I had found myself in a situation that was very much out of my control and I was grasping at anything to try and gain some semblance of control.
Page:So did you know that then or is this your awareness now with you?
Christina:I had no. Hindsight is a true gift to me and I've been able to really go back and I don't want to say analyze, but I've been able to come to terms with some of the decisions or thought processes that I was making at that time leading in. But in the you
Page:weren't in aware moment of those I didn't know.
Christina:I can look back now and recognize that I had this perfect birth plan because I wanted the perfect. I wanted it just the way I wanted it. I was going to do it as natural of a birth as possible. Like, I had I had our bags packed. I had the nursery all ready to go.
Christina:Like, everything was perfect. The nursery was bubblegum pink with white trim, and my poor ex husband spent hours building exactly what I wanted. And then my water broke at one in the morning and within six hours, I was being rushed into an emergency c section surgery. And I remember like it actually makes me start physically shaking sometimes when I think about this. I had called my mom, let her know that we were on our way to the hospital.
Christina:She, of course, got up and met us there and I'm so grateful now that she did because everything was fine. We were sitting in the hospital room. They had given me an epidural at this point. We were just vibing and all of a sudden the doors burst open and we had like probably eight different individuals in the room nursing everything. They're suiting him up.
Christina:They're coming to me. They're putting an oxygen mask on my face. They're putting a clipboard in front of me. I don't even know. No one's really telling me what's happening outside of we have no heartbeat for your baby.
Christina:And I began convulsing. I had such a severe panic attack. The anesthesiologist had to come into the Operating Room and he had to hold my head and was like massaging my head and my hair just to try and get me to calm down, but nobody would tell me that she was going to be okay. And so, I was like convinced in that moment that we were losing her. And like I remember leading up to the birth that day, there were really tough days that I was living through in my marriage.
Christina:And I would go in her nursery and I would lay on the ground next to her crib and I would hold my belly and I was like, I promise we're going to be okay. Everything's going to work out. She was what was like getting me through. And so she was born very healthy. She did not have to go in NICU.
Christina:It was complications outside of probably what we have time to get into today. But that was like the beginning, right? And then I couldn't breastfeed and that was my picture perfect plan and I had it all planned out. And so it was one thing after another of little pieces that I was trying to hold on and grasp control of that were just being ripped out of my hands. Like even the tiny little threads that I was trying to hold on to.
Christina:And so, because of having this c section, I was in the hospital a little bit longer than most people probably would be. There were some complications that had happened afterwards. And so, when they gave me this prescription of painkillers that I had never touched or dabbled with in my life, I truly felt normal. Instant relief. It was like and again, hindsight is such a gift in this moment.
Christina:What I'm able to understand now that I did not understand then was that what I was really looking for and what I truly became addicted to initially was this need to escape reality at any and all cost. And I had just found an instant gratification way for me to numb everything. You were talking before about how when you came in you had a hard time like naming feelings. I didn't even know what emotion was because I didn't want to. In order for me to recognize and name those feelings or those emotions, that would have meant I would have had to have been really honest with myself and I refused to.
Christina:And so the pills in the beginning and I wasn't using more than was being prescribed initially at all, right? Like it was just truly taking them and I felt happy and I felt free and I felt like I could handle anything. It didn't matter if he was screaming at me or a million other things that were happening. I was in my own world and that was the most important thing to me in that moment and how I began in my brain, not in reality, but in my brain getting some semblance of control back. If I could just control how I'm feeling, then nothing else actually matters.
Page:When you're talking about convincing yourself that everything's okay and everything's perfect, know, up until this birth and then you could no longer effectively convince yourself and then the meds did that, right? The meds gave you that sense of relief,
Christina:of calm, of being okay. Yeah. And it just was a perfect storm of events that were happening at the same time. My ex husband had relapsed, and I did not know this, on pills, which turned into heroin at that time. And it all kind of came to a head when my prescription was running out and there were no more refills.
Christina:And he admitted that he had been using and heroin's really no different than the Percocide. It's the same thing. They're both opiates or opioids.
Page:That's what he said.
Christina:Yeah, it's the same thing. It's the exact same thing. And I eventually convinced myself it's absolutely the exact same thing. It's no problem. And so here I am and he and I are spiraling into this addiction together, I can't even say anything to him about it because I'm doing the exact same thing, which fueled codependency and the toxicity to a level that I hope I never see again myself.
Christina:And your daughter was here and healthy and in the mix of all of this? Yeah. So, like you, we did a fantastic job of hiding our addiction. Like, no literally nobody knew. I think that there were some questions.
Christina:I think people in both of our families just thought that we were wildly irresponsible with money and didn't know how to run a business at all. And we were wildly irresponsible with the money because we were spending it on a different way than we would have ever done. Right. Like they just thought, I think that these were two people who knew how to build the business, but couldn't maintain it and didn't know how to budget. The reality was we did.
Christina:It was just that not getting sick and being able to escape that reality was the priority. So, we were able to maintain that in a loose definition for roughly three years. Did people ask? Did your family? His family I remember his family asking sometimes like, Is everything okay?
Christina:Are are you guys sure everything's okay? I I remember them asking him one time like, you on drugs again? And so I I remember thinking like, okay, this facade that we're putting on there, it's starting to have cracks in it, right? And so then you just try and overcompensate. If I show pictures to people of myself in those like first three years, you would have no idea.
Christina:You would have absolutely no idea that I was struggling with addiction in any way at that time. Eilie was so cute. I always made sure she looked perfect. I had my hair done. I had my nails done.
Christina:My brain, if I looked good on the outside, I could put on enough of a show to convince you that everything was fine. No one knew about the abuse. No one knew about the drugs. Nothing until they did. Until it all came crashing down.
Christina:But those those three years were spent trying to simultaneously trying to escape my reality and convince myself that everything was fine and at the same time spiraling internally because I felt like I was the biggest failure in the entire world but nobody could know. And so, the amount of shame and guilt that I had and situations that I would put her in or places that I would take her to, like, I every once in a while will have a flashback memory And I will sit there like it feels like that was a completely different person that was making those choices and decisions, but it wasn't. Like, that was me making those choices and decisions. And like you, I know I have to deal with the consequences of those. And it does not matter how much treatment you go through, how much therapy you go through, how much work you do on yourself.
Christina:I'm I will tell you from my experience, I think that I will always carry shame and guilt with me as a mom for the choices and decisions I made, the situations that I put her in, and that I did not hit bottom, if you will, sooner. Because there should have been so many bottoms along the way that really should have been like this is is enough. This is your breaking point and it never was. And
Andy:we will be right back. For those who serve on the front lines, support should meet you where you are. Rogers FireWatch is a mental health program designed specifically for veterans and first responders. Built by people who understand your experiences, FireWatch offers proven effective care with a flexible schedule to help you work through trauma, stress, and life after service. You've had others backs.
Andy:Now it's time someone has yours at Rogers Firewatch. To learn more, go to rogersbh.org. And now back to the interview.
Page:I know you both talk about shame and guilt and efforts to overcome that and efforts to love yourself, embrace yourself, be more authentic, and you both have so much insight and self awareness. I imagine that with the growth, with the healing comes more awareness and more reflection on things that bring up more shame and guilt. Does that feel like a cycle? And can you remember back to those days, what was going through your mind at night? Were you aware of some of those things or were you oblivious and just telling yourself things were fine?
Page:Can either of you talk about what that cycle looks like both in the past of the constant shame and guilt, but now as you're working on healing and recovery when those things come up, how you handle it?
Christina:I think the shame and the guilt look different for different reasons, for me at least today. Back then, the shame and guilt that I had was very much that I was a failure as a mom. I had no business being a mom. That my parents were much better parents to her than I ever could be. And that I deserved all the horrible things that I was going through and that I had done.
Christina:Today, in recovery, recovery is such a beautiful gift and it is something that I hope that every person that is suffering with their addiction is able to find. And it is unbelievably difficult because you have to also face the very real consequences. I'm 36 years old. I just graduated with my master's, which is great, but I just did that. I am just now moving out of my parents' house with her.
Christina:Right? Like, it's always the shame of had I just gotten it together sooner, we wouldn't be at this point now. I could have done so much more. Could have been a better mom. I could be providing more.
Christina:I could be doing more. And so, I think the shame and the guilt is there, and it also feels different. I still have those memories, and I feel that shame from back then. And I also feel a different type of shame and guilt today, if that makes sense.
Page:I don't think that gets talked about enough because I think so many people who've been through it or in general talk about how great recovery is and how it gets better. And you'll see through to the other side. And people don't talk about that it's still hard, right? That it's not only this daily battle to maintain that recovery, but that the shame and the guilt keep popping up. And you didn't say this.
Page:The guilt in many ways can be really healthy reflection of self awareness that you're owning your decisions and you're making the most out of what you can at this point. And the shame on the other hand can be completely debilitating and throw you back in.
Emily:I completely relate with how she described shame and guilt back then versus now. I knew it was there. Like, I hated myself. I hated myself so much. I just I didn't think I was worth anything.
Emily:And I didn't, like you said, I didn't deserve anything. I didn't.
Christina:But yes,
Emily:now life is still hard. Yeah. Okay. Like life goes on and you still face those things that think you're going to put you over the edge. You know, one more thing.
Emily:Like, I definitely feel that like right now, like one more thing. And I think I probably said that the other day, like and I will lose it. Yeah, I will lose it because in recovery to not just from my substance use, but I deal with my mental health. And, it's interesting because the more the longer I'm sober, the more I see my mental health coming into play. And that was something I never expected.
Emily:So it's really interesting. But the shame and the guilt, yes, it's almost like, I don't know, they definitely they come back. I have flashbacks, you know. I remember those times and also like Christina saying, I should be farther. You know, I hadn't paid my taxes in three years.
Emily:I had to declare bankruptcy, like even while trying to build another business, you know, and I had nothing. I literally, when I left that last relationship, I had nothing except for debt and part time work, you know? So now, years later, yeah, I'm glad that I started pulling through that. And yeah, I've had help. But I don't have a retirement savings for myself, You know, like I actually never graduated college.
Emily:I was one credit short. Like, it's like these things that, you know, right. I'm not where I am and I'm not who people think I am.
Page:You don't get free passes now that you're in a recovery state.
Emily:Right. And I want I want people to know that. Like, I'm not who you think I am. This shit is crazy. And I don't know what I'm doing, a lot of the time.
Emily:And it's it's scary to feel that way and feel like making sure that I'm dealing with it the right way. Because, I mean, for me, thoughts of my use come back. You know? Like, thoughts of escapism come back. Like, how am I gonna do that?
Emily:Like, I need that. I just need to get out of myself for a minute. But then I play the tape through. That works for me every time that if I ever think about using it again, this is going to happen, this is going to happen, this is going to happen. And you don't want that.
Emily:That's effective. Yeah, you really don't want that.
Andy:And we will be right back. Life's changes don't come with a roadmap, especially as we get older. That's why Rogers LifeWell is designed specifically for adults 55 and up, offering compassionate, personalized mental health care when it matters most. With expert support, proven therapies, and a focus on real life challenges like grief, caregiving, and major transitions, LifeWell helps you regain balance and move forward. Your next chapter can be brighter with Rogers LifeWell.
Andy:To learn more, go to rogersbh.org. And now back to the interview.
Christina:Do you ever get, I guess we would call it like impostor syndrome?
Emily:I will have people that come
Christina:up to me and they're like, You are so incredible. Your story is so great. You are such a great mom, and look at all the things you're doing, and you politely say thank you. Thank you so much. But inside, I'll walk away a lot, and I'll be like, they have no idea.
Christina:They've got it all wrong. If you only knew. Do you feel that way?
Emily:Yeah, I do. And I don't like to because I don't want them to feel like they have to be like me or the person that they think I am. The things that I have done, you know, like where I've gotten in my recovery, you know, like, yeah, things are great. I've worked really, really hard. And right.
Emily:Yeah. And it's not perfect. Yeah. Like, so please understand that you don't have to there's a lot behind that. There's a lot behind that.
Emily:What you see and the successes that I've had and you can do it too. You are also amazing. You've done a lot of things with your life. You know what I mean? Getting sober or just in recovery like, man, that is cool.
Emily:And I guess I just I don't ever want people to think that they have to be like me or be like they think I am.
Page:A state of recovery is enough. It's than enough.
Emily:It's more than enough. Yeah, it is. And the silly one day at a time. I mean, we have all these sayings, but they really can be helpful.
Page:I don't know how much you know, Elizabeth. We are launching a new program that's focused specifically on women's needs and treatment. We are working in general on helping view treatment through the unique lens of women and unique needs and considerations both in this women's program and in general in our services when we work with women. I'm curious what either of you would have to say to people who are coming in to treat women. So therapists, clinicians, peer supports, what do you want them to know that is so drastically or maybe just a little bit different than how we'd approach any other individual that's coming into treatment?
Page:How does being a mom, being a caregiver, being a woman, any of these other identities matter in treatment?
Emily:For me, there are layers. There are layers upon layers upon layers that need to be looked at and treated. And I will fight you tooth and nail not to go there because I don't want you to know that or I just don't want to go back there or whatever, but they have to be. You know, like where it all starts, the shame and guilt, my choices to be with guys like in college and just my recklessness. And, you know, before that, who was I thinking I had to be?
Emily:And then, you know, just building on that and building on that. And, you know, I mean, it culminated with me being in a sexually abusive relationship that I was like, holy cow, how did I get here? I mean, that was, I couldn't believe the low I was. That was, you know, that was probably, that was my rock bottom because I got sober after that. I couldn't believe the person I had become.
Emily:I was disgusted with myself, even beyond the using. You know, I had no values, had no morals. And so all of that, I've never looked at that abuse, you know, Those parts of me. Like there are just a lot of different parts and layers that make up a woman, you know, again, like with motherhood. And I think even childhood as being a girl and, you know, just the expectations of women and who they should be.
Emily:And, you know, I feel like before, like the traditional roles, like you need to be like that kind of mom, you know? But in times now, like. Women are maybe more free, but then I'm like, well, should I should I be more independent? You know, like, am I not enough? You know, like, should I be climbing the ladder?
Emily:You know, like, you know, where, like, before you had to be the traditional and now it's like, you have to be the strong woman that's better than men. You know, it's just all of it. It just
Page:messy, complicated for me. Twisted, I'm thinking about to and replaying in my head the things you said about needing to feel safe, needing to feel accepted, needing to feel supported, combined with pulling back all these layers that are making you feel exactly the opposite of those things and finding a way to help it feel comfortable to be able to address those when you say no or when you give pushback. And such a challenge to do that in an effective way that really focuses on the relationship and giving you the support, the empathy, the love that you need to push through. And the time.
Emily:And then it takes time because every conversation then has reflection and, you know, you go back to the shame, but I don't know. It just takes time to work through it, think.
Andy:Well, listener, you've been listening to another part of Paige's conversation with Christina and Elizabeth and a deeper look into the realities of addiction and recovery.
Page:One of the most important things I hope listeners take away from this conversation is that recovery isn't a finish line. It's ongoing, it's layered, and it can be really hard and really messy even when you're doing everything right.
Andy:And I feel like it's safe to say that that's why programs like the Worth It For Her program matter, right?
Page:Yes, because women deserve care that recognizes those layers. Not just substance use, but trauma, relationships, identity, motherhood, and all the expectations that they carry. Worth It For Her is designed to create that space where women can work through all of that at their own pace, with support, and without judgment. And again, thank you to Christina and Elizabeth for their honesty and vulnerability. These conversations make it easier for others to feel seen, understood, and less alone.
Andy:Thanks for being here again, Paige. And listeners, if the Worth It For Her program could support you or a loved one, that information is down in the description of this episode. And for everyone else, thank you for listening to another episode of Rise Above, a podcast from Rogers Behavioral Health. Be sure to like and subscribe to be notified of new episodes. And as always, if you or someone you care about is struggling with a mental health or substance use disorder, visit rogersbh.org for a free mental health screening.
Andy:Until next time, thanks for listening.