EP52: Version 2.0 | Healing the Wound of Self-Abandonment — with Carl Caldwell

How do we move from merely admitting our struggles to accepting them in our hearts? In this episode, Carl Caldwell joins me to explore the spiritual mechanics of recovery, unlearning self-reliance, and stepping from Version 1.0 survival into Version 2.0 surrender. Carl opens up about giving up sheer willpower and getting out of the "results business" to find true peace.

Together, we unpack what acceptance looks like in daily life—interrupting fear loops, speaking hidden shames out loud, and replacing isolation with community. Tracing our pivotal moments of change, we break down how inner spiritual growth mirrors outer transformation, and what it really takes to honor boundaries and rebuild self-trust from the ground up.

Inside the Episode:

• Rethinking Willpower & Surrendering Outcomes: The crucial difference between admitting a problem and accepting it in your heart, and how getting out of the "results business" brings lasting serenity.
• The Power of Externalizing Fear: Why speaking your inner thoughts out loud and leaning on community breaks fear loops and strips hidden shames of their power.
• Healing Self-Abandonment & Honoring Boundaries: Facing the moments we left ourselves behind, measuring how far we've come, and shifting away from codependency to protect our peace.

Stepping into this next version of life isn't about perfection—it's about progress, self-compassion, and showing up for ourselves every day. Whether you're navigating recovery, learning to hold your boundaries, or making peace with where you've been, I hope this episode reminds you that you are never walking this road alone.

Full episode and show notes: netanyaallyson.com/episodes/52

Transcript

The Difference Between Admitting and Accepting 

Netanya 0:00

There are moments in life, that's what I told it. Why are we right or truth? We do not need it. Until we have no This podcast is about those moments. It's about the turning points that change up. The things I wish someone had told me that I only understand and looking at. Come on in. You belong here. And we're gonna talk about all this. I'm your host, Natanya, and this is what I do. Before we begin, a quick note. This podcast explores themes such as mental health, addiction, trauma, and recovery. While the stories here are honest and heartfelt, they're not a substitute for professional advice, therapy, or medical treatment. Please listen with care and pause anytime you need to. Take whatever resonates for you and leave the rest. Today's guest is Carl Caldwell. In this episode, we get into moving from admitting a problem to accepting it heart deep and surrendering the results, why speaking our hidden fears out loud breaks fear loops and strips shame of its power, and how to face where we left ourselves behind and learn to honor our boundaries to rebuild self-trust. Here we go.

SPEAKER_01 1:41

And uh nothing could have been further from the truth because my flawed thinking is what got me into recovery in the first place. You know, when you're drinking a half gallon of vodka a day, you don't really stop and question whether that's sane behavior or not. And that in itself implies that I'm pretty insane, right? So um the hard part for me was undoing that thinking and unwinding all those years of being my own higher power, if you will. And I think a lot of people who are successful and come from, say, traumatic childhoods, kind of like I did, they tend to uh tend to fancy themselves as self-made people. And they think they can solve everything in their own strength just because the majority of life's problems have succumbed to their efforts, right? And with that being the case, surely it's easy to stop drinking, right? It's just a matter of willpower. And willpower is what got me here. It uh there's a certain nuance to the 12 steps. Uh, you know, the first step, for example, is a great one because it says restore me to insanity. Well, hell, I'll I I was the most sane person I knew, you know. I ran a successful company and uh wrote songs that uh were doing real well for various orders. So the thing was that I didn't realize that I was only insane in a small area of my life, and that area was the area where I had triggered my addiction, my disease of addiction. And um that one little area of insanity, though, had tentacles that went all throughout every other area of my life because it controlled my base thinking. And I don't know exactly I remember when it was. It was several months in when somebody, I was reading through the uh the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous, and I came across that story that uh Paul O wrote called Acceptance was the answer. And I'd probably read it two or three times, and you know, when I was in treatment, there was a hot topic, we talked about acceptance a lot, but you don't know until you know. And it was kind of like the difference between admitting I'm an alcoholic and accepting it. Not only do I have to admit it, I have to, it is part of who I am. I have to accept it has to take root in my heart. That 18 inches from the head to the heart's the furthest distance that information has to travel to take root in your life. It's okay. It's no different than say diabetes, for instance. They they've got a disease and they do certain things to manage it.

Acceptance as a Path to Humility and Serenity

SPEAKER_01 4:14

Theirs is more physical and mine's more uh spiritual, you know, more on it's on a different plane. And acceptance can lead you acceptance can lead you to a uh humility. You know, it's the seventh month right now, and that's the spiritual principle, you know, underneath step seven is humility. Humility, the opposite of that, is pride. That's one of the seven deadly sins. And when I work with my sponsees, you know, we we try to categorize our character defects into buckets, manageable buckets, because having an addicted mind, I want to complicate things so I can rationalize, make excuses, find a reason to have a reservation, but by why I can't be completely sold out to a spiritual program with a higher power. Does that make sense? Mm-hmm. And the best example of acceptance is when something doesn't go my way, and I it have admittedly gotten out of the results business. He's the father, you know, I'm the child. He's responsible for the results, I'm responsible for the effort. If I'm out of the results business and I don't like the results, then who do I have left to play? It's my higher power. But I've already turned everything over to him, you know, in step three, relieve me in the bondage yourself, use uh, you know,

Letting Go of Results and Trusting Higher Power

SPEAKER_01 5:30

offer myself to thee to build with and do with as thou will. I've already turned everything that I own, my will and my life over to care of this uh this newfound providential friend. And in doing that act, I gave up my rights to results. And I have to invoke my right to acceptance, if you will. The reason being is he turned out the way he wanted it to turn out, and I already gave him permission to do that. So here I am playing God again by not accepting the outcome of these situations in my life. The difference between me and God is God doesn't play Carl, but Carl loves to play God. And that's part of my disease, right? So at the end of the day, acceptance really for me was that was the pavement on the road to serenity. Because every time I find myself out of source, if I can pause when agitated, right, we have to allow a little space for God to sneak in and put a little sanity in between us and the problem. And when I do that, I remember, hey, I got a phone. I got people I can talk to, and God talks to me through other people. So that's where acceptance becomes more and more part of my life. I realize up front, okay, it didn't turn out the way I wanted. What's the lesson in this for me? What's my higher power trying to show me? Or was I just being used for an example because I gave him that that right back in step three, right? Offer myself to thee to build with and do with as thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, my self-will. I accept your results. What do I need to learn from it? Or are you just using me to maybe have some experience and strength and hope that'll give somebody else a chance to believe? And I had no hope when I got here. But you were getting ready to say.

Netanya 7:09

Um, yes, because I love this. And it's something I run into a lot in my own life. I have to practice it. I use that word on purpose because I get stuck sometimes. And I'm curious of what your experience is like. Like there are there are many, many, many things that I have looked back on and seen later how that went beautifully or perfectly and nothing at all like the way I would have had it gone if it had gone all my way. But in the middle of it, right, when it's not done unfolding and it feels messy, how do you reconcile with your own like inner reckoning that's happening when you haven't gotten the thing yet and you're still in it and you can't see where it's going or the why or the reason yet?

SPEAKER_01 7:58

Boy, that is about as loaded a statement as I've ever heard because it applies perfectly to me and a lot of the other people I know that suffer from this disease. You know, the thing about it is connected addiction. I'm gonna call that version 1.0, Carl 1.0. I think Lice Burger King, and I want it my way. And

Controlling the Mind and Surrendering to Higher Power

SPEAKER_01 8:18

I want more of it, and I want it yesterday. In version 2.0, Carl 2.0, I have to learn that I'm not in control. If I stand in a hula hoop, everything inside that hula hoops amount of control, basically this thing between my ears. And it's really crazy if I can control what's in my head, and that's the only thing, I spend the rest of my life trying to give control up to something bigger than me. So it's quite a conundrum. It's an oxymoron. And I like to refer to that situation you just described as being in the heat of battle, the perfect storm. When things go wrong four or five things at a time, and out of nowhere, all of a sudden I'm off the rail. I've gone from a spiritual giant to a spiritual uh small person in one filled swoop because my disease uses those opportunities, I believe. And the way it uses those opportunities is it kind of gets me thinking in the old patterns and out of fear. Fabric of my life is shot through with fear. Fear is the greatest weapon I think that that uh addiction has against me personally. That's my experience. The moment that fear creeps in and I've got some doubt, all of a sudden I fall back on what I know instinctively and I begin reacting to life, not responding to life. When I can pause, when agitated, I can respond. I can put some distance between me and the problem so the higher power can come in and remind me. I've got a telephone, for example. And then I can talk to my sponsor, and my sponsor Robert does wonderful things. He asks questions. And he asks questions that he knows I already know the answer to. But by saying it out loud, it's kind of like a secret. The secret has power if I don't tell it. It's living rent-free in my head and bringing back that fear and that doubt and that anxiety. But when I speak it forth, it's just worse. It's hot air, it's gone. And I realize the the lunacy that people like you, and I have, in harboring these thoughts for any length of time, I'm let letting them I like to use the word fester in my mind and become these huge sasquatch level monsters instead of being a dust mouse that can we can flick away. So the way I do that, I I've got several examples. But in the heat of battle, what I like to do is say, and I've trained myself to do this through that magic word you said, practice, practice, practice. I just say, God, where are you at in all this? And that gives me a momentary pause to where I can gather my wits about me and and call someone. Or uh, worst case, if I'm on a flight over the Atlantic, I always keep several books, you know, on my phone and on my my iPad, and I go to some recovery literature. Um I particularly like the NA Green and Gold and the AA Big Book. Um I'm an equal opportunity program abuser because in addition to vodka, I was also uh cocaine's uh slave, if you will. Because that's

The Power of Externalizing and Using Your Voice

SPEAKER_01 11:14

addiction is the Roman word for slavery, right? Addictus. So it you have to practice it, but it's not enough to practice it in the heat of battle. I have to make myself practice it when I'm not driving on 440 in the morning and somebody's waving a gun out the window at me. I have to practice it and everything I do so it becomes second nature. And that's the psychic change. That's where my thinking patterns change to where I can respond and not react.

Netanya 11:43

I love what you said that about giving voice to things, right? When they say like shame only lives in the dark. And I have found one of the biggest gifts I have given myself without realizing it has been to speak. Like the things that like that inside my brain, this hamster wheel that goes on and on can take me down so many different roads. And most of them are not beneficial. Right. But when I started to understand that when I spoke it, whatever it was, it doesn't matter how big of a load of bullshit it is, you know, when I just said the thing out loud, whether it's and it didn't seem to matter if it was, if I was saying it to a person or saying it, um, I part of the way that I pray often is out loud in my car, out loud in my apartment. I will talk out loud. And I also give myself permission to have emotion around that, right? So I might yell and be like, what the actual fuck are you doing with me right now? Um but that's that space of getting it out of my body, like I don't think, I don't think I realized for so many years how much I was carrying physically. Like that it's it's I'm I'm often in my head a lot. I'm very intellectual human. And I didn't realize that I was so disconnected between my head and my body and how much of those things that happen to me, or trauma or wounds, or stories I'm telling myself, or beliefs, um, all of the things that I'm carrying, like are echoed throughout my body. And so I found when I started to speak about them or yell about them or talk about them or write it out, like I will sometimes I have a practice where I will take a piece of paper and I will write the story I'm telling myself is. And I will just write and write and write all the nonsense that comes out of my head just to get it out of me. And then I'll look at it and be like, huh. Didn't know all that was in there. Um but I loved what you said about speaking to get it out of you.

SPEAKER_01 13:44

We have to externalize because we've spent so much time as isolationists, not just not just physically isolating, spiritually, spiritually isolating. When I think about my will and God's will, I I go back to the basic principle of physics that two things can't exist in the same space at the same time. So how can there be room in my head for my God of my understanding's will and my will to exist at the same time? Obviously they can. So one of the best ways to expel that is working with another person in addiction, like you were saying, vocalizing it, getting it on the table, listening to other people's suggestions, because Lord knows we don't give advice, we've given enough of that over

The Importance of External Support and Community

SPEAKER_01 14:24

to you, right? But my answers are like yours, and they're all mess, and there's about 40 of them, and the wheels that they are on are squeaky. My head is a mess. And I can go from zero to batshit crazy in about 2.6 seconds on the on the right day. But outside of that, what happens if I can't find someone to talk to? You know, I have to have backup plans because I love to catastrophize past Armageddon in my mind when the stuff sits long enough. And dealing with a diseased brain at that level, what I have to do is get out of it. How do I get out of my head so my higher powers will can get back in my head? Well, I can go to publics, for example. I was told to go to publics early in recovery and help uh older ladies with big uh grocery carts or younger ladies with lots of kids. You know, maybe it's sprinkling rain, maybe they're in a hurry, maybe the kids are screaming, maybe they're distraught. But that one simple act of kindness, which I get nothing out of. That's the beautiful thing about our level of service, is we get nothing out of it except the satisfaction that we opened up our minds to giving without anything in return. And uh, you know, it it was a huge challenge for me to get in the mindset of, hey, and actually just realizing it in the heat of battle, in the moment that I'm in my head. It's dangerous in here. I remember telling Robert one time, I said, you know, Robert, I've been thinking, and he said, Stop. Get out of there. There's a killer in there. Go back to public, fish some grocery carts, you know? But that it's the truth for all of us because I think the NA literature says there the therapeutic value of one addict working with another has no parallel. That means there's nothing equal to it. It's all below it. And the reason that is, is because when I'm out of my head, something else can move in there and clean up the septic tank level mess I've left behind. And uh, you know, having a relationship with a higher power came hard for me. Because, you know, I'm an intellectual type guy too, plenty of college degrees and non-common sense type of guy. And what I had to do was I had to take things back to that five-year-old kid that I lost at the end of my driveway before the tr the trauma kicked in, before my alcoholic parents became abusive. Um, and you know, we were forced to go to church under the auspices of of that being the right thing that respectable people do, and then have an abusive alcoholic home to come back to. And I equated that with religion.

Rebuilding Relationship with the Higher Power

SPEAKER_01 16:52

So those two things really hamstrung me till I could fire the God of my childhood and hire the God of my understanding and figuring out what he w what I wanted him to be. I knew what I didn't want him to be. I had plenty of role models for what I didn't want him to be, but what I didn't know was what I needed. So I had to go back to that little five-year-old kid in my driveway. I had to find a daddy for him that loved him and didn't criticize him, and took care of him, and you know, picked him up and dusted him off when he fell off his bike without training wheels the first time. I needed to find a big brother that wouldn't torture me in front of his friend so he'd look like the big man on campus. I needed to find a best friend that wouldn't stab me in the back, smile to my face, and then use that knife in my back as a ladder to climb his way to the top. So with those three qualifications, I've got the characteristics. But I'm a tactile learner. I'm still hamstrung. I can tell you what he what I want him to be when I go through that exercise. So I had him know what he looked like too. So in my mind I could visualize him and displace all that noise. So once I got that done, he became a lot easier to do service because when I say, God, where are you at and all this? I can see him. He's never spoken to me except to other people. When I go to meetings, a lot of times I have something on my mind. When I say I need a meeting, that means there's something in my life that's out of order, and I need a solution. I go in there with problems and I hope to come out with some sort of solution. That solution comes from somebody sharing something totally unrelated who knows absolutely zero about my problem, and probably unrelated to my problem whatsoever, but I hear something they say, and all of a sudden that hope comes back. Something I didn't have when I came into the room, so when I came through recovery. I get that hope. That hope's just like a little flame. It's like a light bulb. It might not be Bill Wilson's lightning flash, but it's a light. And I'm in the dark, so I need the light. I tend to think he talks to other people just to keep me in community. That's the way he kind of my higher power likes me to be in community, but I don't want to be. I like to isolate. I like my own company. I'm my favorite subject. I'm all I ever think about left of my own devices, right?

Netanya 19:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:07

And that's how I think that's how my God tricks me into being in communities because I know if I'm feeling down, I can go to a meeting and something somebody says totally unrelated to what they're talking about is going to solve one of my little problems and give me a little bit of hope.

Netanya 19:30

I like that. Um you used the term past Armageddon, which I liked. And I don't know if you meant it this way, but I'm gonna tell you what it made me think of. Um someone told me once, or I heard somewhere, that most of us are afraid of the thing that already happened. And I have found that to be true. A lot of the times when I'm afraid of something, it's an echo from a past experience that really did happen that I don't want to repeat. And put that across any area of my life, right? People, relationships, friendships, work, um, financial stuff, just any situation that didn't go well at one point. And it's it sort of created a traumatic echo, right? Where I'm still bracing for impact from something that happened a decade ago. And I can remember being in therapy at one point, this is a couple years ago, um, and we were talking about relationships, men. And um I was afraid of something and I can't remember what it was in this moment. But my therapist was like, um, what did she say? She was like, Who's talking right now? And I was like, What? What do you mean I'm talking? And she said, But how old are you? And I I was like, Oh, like it's not, you know, 39-year-old me who has all of these tools and this education and knowledge and practice. It was a it was a younger version of me. And it was, it wasn't a child. The the one the person who was talking was about maybe eight years younger than I was. It was an old story from a wound that I had lived about a decade ago. And she said, Are you the same as that version of you? And I said, No. She said, Do you think, do you think that this version of you today wouldn't see it coming or would make the same choices or would ignore the things that you didn't know back then? And I said, No. Um, but it was hard to get because my my my the wound in my body was so loud, right? And it was that's trauma talking in its own form that I was I was identifying it with it as if it was me today and it wasn't. And we talked through the scenario and she said, How would you react if someone did this to you now? And she like made up a scenario. And I said, Well, I would do this and this and that. And she said, Would that version of you had done that? And I said, No. She she didn't know how to do that. And she said, So are you going to repeat the same pattern in the exact same way that you did 10 years ago? And I said, No, probably not. But it took a while for me to get that like sometimes we're looking forward so much into what we have to learn and heal and grow that I forget to measure backwards and see just how far I've come and that I actually can't repeat the same things in the exact same way because I'm not the same person.

Healing from the Past and Moving Forward

SPEAKER_01 22:28

Exactly. And you know, one of the great things about the example you just brought up is why do I fear my past? And I came up with this novel idea that I'm actually future tripping because I'm either worried about something that hasn't been exposed yet, or something, as you mentioned, that I'm liable to repeat or something that I haven't addressed or faced yet. So it's all right in the future. It has nothing to do with the past. That's why I think in the steps when I made peace with the past, you know, when I went through the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh steps getting ready to go out and make the physical amends, you know, d face that future I didn't want to face, that those wounds were a lot less uh they didn't bleed near as bad, even when you ripped the scab off of them during the eighth and ninth step. So there was a lot less uh physical and emotional trauma that went along with it. But it helps make peace with it. And if I can look back at my past almost agnostically and just tell my story, I tend to think that the the the power greater than myself uses that in my story and telling it, you know, in in an innocuous way. And it maybe even laughing about it to give somebody else hope because they've got that still locked up inside and they haven't dealt with it, and they can see people get past it, just like your past relationship problems when you tell those stories now, you're gonna tell them a whole lot different than you did when they were fresh. And that comes from experience, wisdom, peace of mind, the pieces that pass the piece that really passes all understanding because some of the stuff that you went through some of the things that I went through were so traumatic that if I think about them version 1.0 versus version 2.0, it's a whole different playing field, as you mentioned. You've grown past the pain, but there's still that instinct. That that little wounded girl or wounded boy at the end of the driveway before the trauma hit. And that's what we try to get back to. It's that simple state of mind where the entire world was nothing but a science experiment and we felt safe, we felt protected, and we didn't know pain at the level we knew it when we went through the trauma. So it's almost like a filter if you think about it.

Understanding Childhood Wounds and Trauma

Netanya 24:39

Yeah, it is. And I feel like I thought for a long time that one of my problems was not trusting other people. And I realized uh-huh, that my bigger problem was not trusting me. Yeah, because I had a lot of evidence that I couldn't trust myself. And and it was, it was that that version of me didn't know what she didn't know. I didn't see things coming, I didn't have language for anything or know how to talk about it. Um, I was terrified of a million different reactions and responses. And so I just, it was better to keep quiet and just keep going and drinking than not dealing with things. And so one of the things I realized was like, I'm why am I still why am I still functioning like this when I have grown so much? It's not other people. It's that like I haven't connected in my head that I could trust myself yet. Right. And so that was its own practice, like doing all the work and learning things and being able to identify things and name it and call it out. And oh, I see what you did there, and I'm not gonna, you know, go into that is one thing. And then being able to trust myself that I can like see what's happening, acknowledge it, know how to respond or communicate and do the right thing for me is a different, it's a different thread. And I was like, oh, I gotta, I had to work on the second part of that also.

SPEAKER_01 26:10

It's a really good point. And it it begs the question. I you know, I t I tend to like to try to boil things down to the simplest terms so I can't complicate it. Because that's what my sponsor had to do for me to get get me through the steps. You know, in addiction, we were black belt liars and nobody outside of us could trust us. Because we didn't we couldn't we weren't in the same zip code as the truth at that time, right? And you know who like who we lied to the most? Who did I lie to the most? Me. In order to keep you so I had to justify, rationalize, um, hold certain reservations and turn a blind eye towards all the things that I was in bondage to, which was myself, my will, everything between my ears is my will. So at the end of the day, if I lie to myself, how can I expect to trust myself any more than the people outside who I lied to even less than me? Trust me.

SPEAKER_02 27:06

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_01 27:07

The trust of myself gets down to a level of honesty that we can achieve a certain level of honesty with other people to where they will trust us again. And that's good enough. But for me, I'm the only one that lives in here. I have to have a deeper level of trust for myself, and to get there takes a whole lot more amends to myself and a lot more love for myself in order to guide myself through that with the help of God and you and everybody else in these programs that speaks into my life. I have to go further down the mind shaft than I do with other people in order to get to the root of the problem. And the root of the problem is I don't love me. I feel like I'm not worth loving. I'm afraid that you won't like me. And that'll make me even feel less lovable. And it's a self-fulfilling cycle that that's just about like if you flush a toilet and something doesn't go down, you know, it just circles the drain all the time. And getting to that's the journey. That's the real magic, is when we get to the point where we can see the light, that little flicker of hope. Not for a situation in my life, but for my life in its entirety, and that I'm okay. I did bad stuff, I've made peace with it, and I can use that as a weapon against somebody else's addiction because they hear my story, my lived experience, and they get hope out of it. And maybe a life saved. Maybe a kid hasn't bothered that. Maybe

The Journey to Self-Love and Acceptance

SPEAKER_01 28:34

a somebody doesn't lose their job or commit suicide just because I told what happened to me that I had made peace with.

Netanya 28:46

I'm slightly emotional, which is good. I mean, I haven't um I can feel it like coming up for me right now, which is fascinating to sit with. Because I feel like I'm remembering one of the things that happened in under that like theme of self-trust or not trusting myself was the moment at which I realized I had betrayed myself. Right? It's not just that I don't trust what I do or the actions, it was that I actively abandoned me over and over again in so many different areas. And I stayed in things for too long that weren't good for me. I continually chose to numb out instead of deal with things that weren't working. Um and and I I try to have grace for that version of me because I know she didn't know any better. But that's also a little bit of bullshit because there was a part of me that knew. At some point in there, I knew something. Right. And I still, I don't think I knew what to do with it, which, you know, again, skills you develop over time, but there is a level of self-betrayal that I can remember at the moment of which I decided to leave my marriage. I was not in recovery yet. I was still very actively drinking. But at the moment of which I decided like to pick myself up and I'm gonna go do the thing that I am terrified to do. I was sitting on a kitchen floor with a bottle of Jack Daniels and an Oracle deck. And is that surprising? No. Um I would do that. And but the thing that was, I was, I had no emotion. I was numb. I couldn't feel anything. I had no feelings about the divorce or leaving other than relief. But the only thing that I had emotion around, and I remember saying out loud to myself alone in a kitchen, was I am so sorry. And I was talking to me.

unknown 30:49

Yeah.

Netanya 30:49

Right. I am so sorry, and we are never gonna do that again. Because I had left me every possible way to die in a corner because I didn't know how to take responsibility for myself. I didn't, I had leaked and given away and thrown away all of my power, right, for years. So much so that I I didn't think I had any left. And what don't look at me. What am I gonna do about it? You know? And I had just anyone that would take anything, I threw it at them, you know. But that feeling of self-abandonment and self-betrayal was devastating.

SPEAKER_01 31:28

It's almost like you're looking at the hole left behind of where God should be inside of you. You're apologizing to the to the absence of some sort of spiritual presence in your life that can help you comfort yourself. That's what we get through to program. That's what acceptance bought me. Okay, God, you did this. Why? I don't know. Yeah. But show me. If I made a mistake, I don't want to make that mistake again. I spent my entire life making mistake after mistake after mistake and destroying myself from the inside out, and there's a good guy locked up in here. I can actually look in the mirror and say, I love you, you old formerly drunk SOB, you know? Watch and all. I love you. Because I'm all a God. This is what he gets.

Netanya 32:10

Well, and I Yes, and I love that you said that about um Oh, I just lost it. Hang on, what did you just say? It was good. Oh, about like filling the hole of God that wasn't there because that's a hundred percent true. And I it's one of the things that I loved your explanation about like not only do I get to I have to, what did you say, divorce your divorce your former God, what did you call

Firing the Old God and Creating a New Relationship

Netanya 32:36

it? Get rid of fire. You said you have to fire. Yeah. So fire because I didn't, you know, I I had this particular vision of what God was and it didn't fit at all who I was anymore. So I just didn't have anything. And then in that black hole was a whole lot of liquor and loneliness and isolation that just fueled that decade of my life. And so one of my favorite, yeah. Oh, oh, absolutely. And like I try to explain this to people, but I don't feel like it ever lands. So I'm gonna try and see if you can get what I'm saying. Is that like the same kitchen floor moment, there was a a time when I felt I was very sure. It like call intuition, call it whatever you want. I was very sure that I was dying. And I don't mean physically, like nothing was happening to me. I wasn't nothing, I was sitting on a floor, I was fine, but I was, I was spiritually leaving my body. And I was very aware, like factually, that that was happening, that I was not gonna be here much longer. Not because I was suicidal. I just was leaving. And so one of my favorite and greatest joys about, you know, this evolution and this version, the 2.0 of my life now, is that I have, like you, gotten to play with what does the God look like to me now? What do I want it to be? Is it a he or a she or a they or a rainbow or a lamp or, you know, Morgan Freeman? What do you want it to be? And it can be anything. Um, and to create it and cultivate it and spend time with it and build a relationship with something that is living and breathing and has a heartbeat that I can connect to and that moves and weaves its way throughout my life is so incredible after being dead but alive.

SPEAKER_01 34:22

You know, it's funny because in the 12 and 12, they use and this is 1939, right? When they published this, well, this was actually the 12 and 12 was in the 40s, but they used the example of electricity. Now you think about it, that was something pretty new to those guys. There was something invisible that made this light come on. How's that any different than a spiritual connection to a higher power? Because all of a sudden a switch flips in my brain and the light goes on. And is electricity not just energy? Are my brain waves not just energy that radio uh their electromagnetic energy, so therefore they're waves, so they radiate out. Who's to say that's not my soul? And when I die, that's what leaves. My mind is my consciousness of my universe. I don't know the answers to these questions, but the beautiful thing is I don't have to. I just have to accept them as being factual, as being real to me. And that's the thing. What you were doing on the kitchen floor was saying goodbye to version 1.0. It was separation anxiety with the addicted version of you. So that all of a sudden here's this higher power. I would like to say that in my world, I fired the God of my childhood and found the God of my own understanding. It was the same thing. It was my perception, my relationship with that could change. All of a sudden I'm not living in uh level ten manic or level ten depressed state of mind. I'm at a perfect level five, everything's right with the world, and I don't feel one damn thing. That's the way it's supposed to be. And if I can maintain that, a lot of people call it serenity. I call it peace of mind. If I can maintain that, then I've got a connection. That's that's the barometer of how well my spiritual connection is. Am I accepting of everything that's around me? And if I'm not, why? That's the question.

Netanya 36:12

What is your experience? You know, we've talked a lot about healing from the spiritual, the internal perspective. What is your experience of what does healing look like externally for you? Like tangible, physical, what does that look like for you?

SPEAKER_01 36:27

Well, you know, I do work in a in a treatment center.

Netanya 36:30

I do.

SPEAKER_01 36:31

And I I know what my picture looked like when I got there. What I felt like. This is not the guy that went went to uh went uh on September the twenty eighth, four days after waking up with a gun in my mouth. That is not the same guy physically that you see today. That guy lost a ton of weight, he hadn't eaten in seven days, he hadn't bathed, he'd cracked his pants and pissed all over himself, he couldn't hardly stand up, he'd fallen and broken bones, he had no coordination, he couldn't even put a sentence together. But along a rational thought, hamsters really don't meth bad back then. They were in the wheels mounted up and squeaking like crazy in my head. And if you look at me today, I don't look like I'm 66 years old. I looked like I was uh 62 going on, 80 when I came to rehab. The external representation mirrors what goes on in the inside. I went to work, I gained a whole lot of weight, now I've lost about 60 pounds. I'm able to do those things. I get to do those things. I've gone from having to do things, having to find more liquor, having to make myself get up and go to the bathroom so I don't sold the bed, to getting to wake up in the morning and have three gratitudes and three goals before my feet hit the floor, to getting on my knees because I keep my car keys under the bed to make me get on my knees and praying and meditating. I get to call three other people in recovery on my way to work. I don't have to anymore. There's a subtle shift in manual labor versus spiritual labor. It's spiritual labor when I find joy in doing the mundane things in life and getting the great joy out of mundane things where I used to always be restless, irritable, discontent, hadning to do those things. And I think change begins honestly in the heart, not in the mind. What do I value? What did I value in version 1.0? What do I value today? And you could ask my wife, she tells me now that I'm her best friend. She tells me now that she can trust me. I never thought I would hear that word again because I was just a cardinal sinner if you want to get down to a Catholic

Living with Peace and Serenity

SPEAKER_01 38:42

turn. Um leave no sin unturned, right? Um you couldn't believe a word I said. I try to be as rigorously honest, as authentic and genuine as this power greater than my understanding allows me to be, even though I have this disease on a day-to-day basis. And thank God this program doesn't require perfection because I would have failed a million times over. It's about progress. And it's like your kitchen floor moment, my mama coming out of a blackout with a gun in my mouth. There's a pivotal time there. We had to say goodbye to that version 1.0, diseased, self-torturing, self-denying person, and embrace something bigger, as scary as it was, because I didn't know how to be when I got out of treatment. To be or not to be, am I right? To live or not to live. Being is living. I didn't know how to live.

Netanya 39:37

I love that you brought that up. I don't know this I don't think I've ever told anyone the story. In I I was in um English in high school, and I was in honors English. And so I was a sophomore and I was in a senior class, and we had to write poetry. And one of the things we had to write was to be or not to be. You had to write your own poem of it and pick a different word. So instead of to be or not to be, it had to be it was something else to live or not. You know, you could pick whatever it was. Um, and mine was to lead or not to lead. Right. And so I'm having a moment right now where I forgot about that, but just the irony of that as a 16-year-old, to be now who I am in my life. And the choice that I live by is very much about leading. But I think I think I didn't know how to do that for a long time. And I mean that also like um autonomously my own life, not not just like leading other people or creating things that you're in a seat of leadership, but how to lead your own life. And I think I spent several years in there of the to not lead, how like I was not choosing that. I was choosing, you know, I used to say a lot, um, I don't know. And it's a very much a childlike term. The way I would say it, the younger version of me in my 20s was like, I don't know. I don't know what to do here. I don't know, I don't know what the answer is. I don't know where to go, you know. And it was very much a victim child voice that lived in my head when I said I didn't know. And I realized just the other day I was um doing something and something hadn't worked out yet at work. And I was talking around my house, you know, just praying out loud. And I said, I realized that I still say I don't know. But the way that I say it today is, I don't know. I'm so curious to see how that goes. You know, like there's a there's a power to it. It's not a victim and a child anymore. It's like a surrender and an ownership and a there's a leadership quality to myself, I think the way that I live my life today, just for me, owning right, responsibility of who I have who I have become, who I keep becoming, what I have left behind, where I have forgiven, where I have um said goodbye to that other version of me where I have had to, you know, let that go. But it was just a really beautiful, I haven't thought about that in a really long time, but I think I I I was choosing because to lead or not to lead, or to live or not to live, is a choice. There's a choice factor in there. And even even not choosing something is still a choice.

SPEAKER_01 42:25

It is. Absolutely. And do you realize that indecision is still a decision? You're deciding not to decide. And that's the way we keep from having to have skin in the game in life. Yeah. In in our souls, even. Because when I choose to isolate and to not deal with life, to turn my back on life, I had made a decision. And we do it under the guise of protecting ourselves when we're in active addiction. We're protecting that wounded little kid that we don't even know is in there. We're not even aware of him. But we're making a decision. And through our indecision, we think we're protecting when we're destroying ourselves.

Netanya 43:09

Yes. And I think that was that's a great summation of all of my addiction was just numb out, avoid, opt out, not deal, not address anything, not talk about anything, not take responsibility for anything. Like, how can I back out of the room as much as possible?

SPEAKER_01 43:27

Be invisible.

Netanya 43:29

Mm-hmm. And like all of it, and that's where I think that sadness came in of I'm so sorry that I abandoned you, that I didn't, you know, if you think of that version of me as a little kid, that I left her there. And I and I work really hard to not beat myself up for that, right? And at the same time to own that that version of me wasn't owning her life. And I don't wanna I don't wanna be that way anymore.

SPEAKER_01 43:56

But we fail to see how grateful that little kid was. That we finally opened the closet door and found her.

Netanya 44:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 44:03

She's just grateful to have her mommy back.

Netanya 44:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 44:07

She's just grateful she's got somebody to talk to, somebody to play with, and somebody to help her learn and grow. That's where that's where our emotional and spiritual immaturity really meets the road, is when we finally acknowledge the fact and tell ourselves the truth. That we don't have all the answers. That we don't know how to be. That we don't know how to fix it. But we can go to other people. We're not isolating anymore. And God can talk to us through other people. And we can get those little light bulb moments, and all of a sudden we grow. A little bit

The Role of Community and Connection

SPEAKER_01 44:40

first, a little bit more later, and the light gets brighter and brighter. And all of a sudden, it's almost like we're living our life in a in an armchair full of helium balloons at ten thousand feet, watching it unfold and making decisions like you know, somebody who's really attached but attached at a distance because we have that pause. We have that ability to put space in between us and our problems and our our our just day-to-day mundane things that happen in life. And it searched that little space when we pause and let God kind of sneak in there. Kind of filter in and ask him, What are you doing? What the what's this all about? Because we have the right to ask those questions. He's our dad, right? Yeah. How do we learn? We ask.

Netanya 45:23

Well, and that little girl didn't just get her mom back. She got a mom that picked herself up and said, I'm gonna do this differently.

SPEAKER_02 45:34

Right?

Netanya 45:34

So it's not even the same version of me that was good at the time. It was but Yes version one. Version 2.0. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 45:43

She got well. She got a real mom, not a pretend mom.

Netanya 45:46

Yeah. And it's so it's so beautiful to be able to, you know, much of what I do, I do this for me, but it's not me today. I do this for her. Right? I do this for that seven-year-old that was lost and broken and alone, and I get to say we don't have to do that anymore. And that I know how to ask for help.

SPEAKER_01 46:06

I think that's the circle of completion. I think my duties here will be done when I finally get back around to that five-year-old kid and we're the same person again.

SPEAKER_02 46:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:16

That's when I'll have all the wisdom I could ever acquired in life, but I will still have the curiosity I had before I knew anything. And the pliability and the open-mindedness. And I can accept everything. And that just what we're trying to do is get back to that state of being, but taking life in a in a full circle and doing the best we can to get there. I don't know.

Netanya 46:38

How are how are you with the have having grace for yourself or self-judgment for it? And I do I'm gonna ask in two parts. One is for that version of you then. How are you with grace and forgiveness and not judging yourself for what you truly didn't know? And then what is 2.0 version of Carl? How are you with grace and forgiveness with who you are today when you occasionally trip?

SPEAKER_01 47:05

For the old version, version 1.0, I've accepted to the absolute best of my ability that I can today and withstood the pain that it took to see myself as I was. To own my shit is the hardest part. To admit I'm fallible. And I'm a fucker. I I do things wrong. I did things wrong. How can I make restitution? That's what we do in the amends process to people. Now it's between me and God. Now I have to go to Him and take my dirty laundry and let Him clean it up. And that requires a huge amount of faith. A huge amount of trust. And trust and faith come from acceptance. Because without striving for acceptance, I don't have any reason to have trust or to have faith in something bigger than me. I have to accept in order to have faith. And that requires a psychic change on my part to say I didn't get it my way. What's the lesson? Because I'm no longer playing God. I'm letting him do that now. For version 2.0, you know, that's the beautiful thing about steps 10, 11, and 12 is I get to do them every day. So I get to correct those things as they come up, and at night I really take I take 86 through 88 literally. I printed them out and I have a sheet and I read it at night. Um, should uh did I not tell something that should have been told immediately in my hardware and secrets? Um, you know, was I selfish? Was I self-centered? Did I hurt somebody? Was I, you know, self-serving in general? I have to ask myself those questions tonight, and the more you practice it like you alluded to, the better we get at it because it stings a little less. We build up calluses. And what they are is emotional calluses through spiritual growth, if you like to think about that way. So I'm really I think I'm a lot better at it today. Do I have bad days? Oh hell yeah. Everybody has bad days. But I don't have to have a bad day. I can narrow that down and have a bad hour or two.

unknown 49:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 49:06

It's how quickly can I catch it? And the only way I can catch it is by being completely pliable and looking for the acceptance through asking God where he's at and everything I do every day. Making peace with the past, I did I did do quite a bit of therapy. MDR is a great tool for for taming those those thoughts that just jump out of nowhere, right in the middle of a perfectly beautiful day. And here comes this thought about being abused by my mom as a kid, and it wrecks me. Not just for today, for a conceivable period of time. If I had that thought today, it's yeah, yeah, she did some bad stuff, but she's one of God's kids. She did the best she could with what she had to do with, and she was mentally ill just like me, because the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. She gave me birth and she did the best she could to get me. I've lived 66 years, she did something right. You know? We have to we have to flip the script and look at the positive in all of the negative. And by that way, it makes acceptance of those situations that much easier for me.

Balancing Self-Centeredness and Healthy Boundaries

Netanya 50:04

How are you with when you said self-centeredness, this is something I'm always interested in, which is having been a person that for many years did not have a lot of confidence, was a doormat, right, was codependent, I didn't do anything for me, to building all of that up and having a lot of confidence and saying no and honoring myself. Where is the line between, or how would you describe the difference between being self-centered as in I am the center of myself and I make choices that are good for me, even if it may affect someone else in a way that's, you know, not for their best, but it's really healthy for me, and self-centeredness in the sort of negative, selfish term of I'm discarding other people's experience.

SPEAKER_01 50:51

You know, it's that's a really tough question, and it's a good question. That's what we have a lot of different tools that we can fall back on. Uh the first tool uh that I try to use is boundaries because I had cheesecloth before anything would pour through them. I have boundaries that protect that five-year-old kid at the end of the driveway. And one of those is has to be rigorous honesty. And you know our perception of the truth changes and shifts and moves as we grow because we get closer to it. And it becomes more part of who we are. So I have to tell my the truth, to tell myself the truth, because I spent so many years finding my identity and what other people thought about me because I couldn't like myself. So you had to like me. Boy, does that in that spells doormat in so many different languages, it's not funny. And that's where the codependency came in. I had to create a relationship with you at my expense that made me feel better about existing, about being. I don't have to live that way anymore. And you know, everybody said, Well, you're gonna lose all your friends. And I said, No, I'm not. I have two friends left from from three, four years ago that were with me in the acting addictive track. Did I plan it that way? No, but I I tend to think that God made it happen that way. They walked me through the bowels of my addiction and stood by me. But I had to give something to get their their trust back. I had to put some skin in the game, and that was how he gave me my kindergarten lesson in trust through those people, and they're still with me because we built the bond. Now they're not one of us. They don't have the disease of addiction. But we have the bond of brotherly love that's unconditional because one of those friends, his wife passed away from a second bout with cancer, and I was with him through both bounce of her cancer, and then he got a brain tumor, and I I got to walk through that with him, and now he's in remission, and we're still just thick as thieves, you know. I didn't lose all my friends because I consciously pushed them away. God took them out of my life because I devoted my efforts and my reality into the recovery community. We understand each other. The therapeutic value of one addict working with another has no parallel, right? We've already said that. So I tend to want to be with the winners, and the winners are people whose God talks to who tells me the answers to my problems. I built new friendships and the others just kind of fell away as a byproduct because if they're gonna go out and drink, I'm gonna go to the round dot. You get the we get the power of choice in our lives now. We get to choose. And by setting those boundaries, I got the power of choice back. So the codependency went away. A little bit at a time, there's still some of it there. I still feel anxious whenever, you know, my significant other um if I let her down, I still feel those panics, but I can make it right immediately because I've got those maintenance steps that allow me to go back in and say, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to hurt you. And I remember when I was getting ready to start some step line stuff, my sponsor said, I was worried about it. What if they get mad at me? What if I hurt them or you know, or they don't want anything to do with me? He said, if you tell somebody the truth, and it's your truth, and you believe it's gonna hurt them, fold up a nice little amendment and stick it in your hip pocket, and the minute you see it hurt them, pull it out and say, I am sorry, I didn't mean to hurt you. That's my truth, that's my boundary. How can I make restitution with you for that? What can I do to make this

Setting and Upholding Boundaries with Respect

SPEAKER_01 54:24

up? Can you immediately extend the knowledge branch? You're inviting love back into the equation, not just brotherly love, but self-love. Because you're taking care of yourself.

Netanya 54:34

Well, and I love this. Boundaries are by far one of my favorite topics because it's the thing I've probably had to work on the most. And what I have learned is that it's not a straight line, right? I didn't go from being a doormat to like having great boundaries and it was shiny. I I've it was more like being inside of a pinball machine where I'm like trying this thing, and I was like, nope, that was too firm. This was too, you know, I'm chill. Did I need to, did I need to be that aggressive? Um, because again, with the trust thing to go back to that, I didn't trust me to uphold the boundary because I didn't for a long time. So it took practice of with different people in different scenarios, where do I need to set something? And I have found that too, that the setting of the boundary is not the hard part. It's the upholding of the boundary.

SPEAKER_01 55:20

It's it's actually the honoring of the boundary. You have to honor your boundaries.

Netanya 55:25

But I even did this, I did this last night. This is the real-time example I'm gonna use. I was at a meeting and I there's a a newer guy, he's been to a couple of our meetings, and he asked for a phone list and I was chairing. And so I gave him a phone list and I circled a couple of people's names that were in the room. And my name isn't on the phone list because it was an all men list. Um, and so I wrote my name at the bottom with my phone number because I've topped him a couple of times, you know, good human. And I gave him the list. And afterwards, I went up to him and I said, Hey, I put my phone number on there. I'm gonna ask that you please don't abuse it. And he said, What do you mean? And I said, I've recently had experiences with men who are married who have taken that too far that they have my phone number and sort of been subtle in sneaking around things that are like, oh, I need help with this, but they're actually trying to use me emotionally to get support.

SPEAKER_01 56:19

Um There's only there's only 12 steps, guys.

Netanya 56:23

Yeah. Um and so it was just like I just I didn't want to go into the whole thing, but it's happened more than once as a female in recovery, right? That and there are many, many great men that don't do that and I love and adore. And just every once in a while, there's somebody that's broken and hurt and sees me in whatever way that's that they try to lean on that and it goes outside of the bounds of appropriateness. Um, and so I didn't say all of that to him, but I was just, I just said, you know, I've had I recently had some scenario where I had to deal with that. And I just like, you're welcome to call my number or whatever, just please be respectful with it. And he he was like, Oh, you know, he you could tell he was surprised. And then he he thought about it for a minute and he said, Well, I respect you setting that boundary. And I said, Thank you. Um, but I walked away feeling I still I walked away from it feeling like was I was that too much to like shove it a guy right out the door just to be like, hey, don't use this. Because he didn't. My old response would be, I wouldn't say anything. And if he did it, then I would go forward with the boundary. And I was like, I just it was just a recent literally had just happened this past week. And I thought, no, I just honored myself. And that's it. And I wasn't, you know, but I think you're right.

SPEAKER_01 57:34

And it we we go through the there's a section in the big book where it talks about God gave us brains to use, right? And you know, being inexperienced, uh, we're liable to make mix mistakes, but what's once was the occasional hunch becomes a working part of the mind. And it's like you said, practice gets you there. If it were me, I would rather err on the side of my boundary and protecting and honoring my boundary than leaving you know enough doubt for somebody to misconstrue motives or something like that. So I think while I'm still growing and protecting myself and growing and maturing in sobriety, I'm gonna err on the side of safety. Because I value my sobriety more than anything else in the world. If I don't have that, I'm gonna die. Period. The end. You can go ahead and order my body bag and my cremation arm. If I drink again or use again, I know where it ends this

Protecting Sobriety and Personal Integrity

SPEAKER_01 58:24

time. So I'm gonna protect the sobriety because I had a long time with sobriety. And uh I chaired a meeting today, and the the guy said, I remember when you came back in here after your relapse. And I was gone. I was out there about three years, and you said, You're a totally different person. And I said, Well, I have to be. The old me didn't work, you know?

SPEAKER_02 58:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 58:44

You either grow or you go. There's no middle ground. And I think protecting your boundaries like you did is is an an honorable thing and a noble thing, and you did it for yourself, for that seven-year-old girl.

Netanya 58:56

Yes. And that that old me, I so badly wanted to be loved and liked and nice. Like I identified with the word nice for so many years. I'm the nice girl, like in high school, right? Many, many years ago. And um she would not have said things like that, would have and like picked up on where it might have gone that way. I wouldn't have said anything. It would have happened eventually, and you know, not specifically him, but it's happened in enough scenarios. And then I'm assuming positive intent or giving people the benefit of the doubt. Like, no, he didn't, he didn't mean the thing that he just said. And he does, and he did, right? And I can pick it up, but I'm trying to like justify it and be nice. And I'm getting run over left and right by doing this. Um and I just don't do that anymore. And I have so many great men that have given me so much evidence of awesome people that don't do that at all, that are so respectful and would never do a thing like that. But just occasionally I'll pick up on it, especially with someone who is new or hurt or just hasn't really unsteady or unstable, and they want somebody to lean on.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:04

I I I think that you're going to face that in any situation we go through. And it it doesn't apply, you know, just to physical attraction. There's the whole monetary angle on it. I've seen people that you know, they're just looking to s what they're looking to do is provide a band-aid that will provide instant relief to some sort of discomfort in their life. Whether it's an empty um emotional hole due to a failed romance, whether it's an empty bank account due to way too much crack purchasing, you know, it doesn't matter what it is. They're trying to fill a hole.

Netanya 1:00:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:36

Just like we're trying to fill a hole. And it takes us a while to just to discern within ourselves, if you put yourself in the other guy's shoes, maybe they haven't grown to that point yet to where they realize that's what they're doing. And I had that conversation with with one of my clients this morning, and it's you have to help them come back around to see the truth about themselves. Because we couldn't see the truth about ourselves, but somebody on the outside helped us find out a way to the truth. But setting those boundaries up front is a powerful tool to protect ourselves in the heat of battle. So I would rather I'm with you on that one. I'm gonna protect that little five-year-old guy inside.

Netanya 1:01:17

Well, and I say that to to to I'm always big on transparency and where I'm still learning, right? And even now, at years and years of boundary practice, that I still have moments where I'm like, was that too much? You know, and it's just wanting to be a good person and wanting to not hurt people. But ultimately, like you said, if the choice is did that maybe come off too much, but I protected myself, versus play the nice card and the, you know, like that that I would have chosen the thing that I chose. But it does happen that it's still a dance and a practice as well. Aaron Powell Sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:53

It's easier to set a boundary and clean up, you know, any restitution, emotional restitution that might have to be made after the fact if you find out about it, than it is to try to underwind a messy situation that you step into through altruism by not having fermented boundaries. I mean to me that's black and white.

Netanya 1:02:10

That was great the way you said that.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:12

Is you is or is you ain't. Either I'm I'm protecting myself and and I'm trying to live recovery and give recovery away, or I'm just

The Power of Choice and Personal Responsibility

SPEAKER_01 1:02:22

I'm trying to you know, you don't need a 10-foot square doormat to clean your feet. We all get to be a small doormat sometimes, but you don't need to go back to that 10-foot size model that you had in the past. So I would say I like to try to put it in the in the context of Rule 62, if you will. Sure. I don't take myself too damn seriously, and I have to get myself down to my right size. But when I'm growing, I don't know what my right size is. And you'll go through periods of that just like I am now of, am I doing the right thing? Am I coming off too harsh? Am I trying do I sound like one of those crusty old guys with 50 years in the back of the room who's got way too many years and not enough days? Or am I trying to give away the kind of recovery and love, brotherly love and respect for myself? Am I trying to give that to somebody? Or am I just trying to lord over somebody and look down at them and you know, put put a law degree behind my name so I can judge people? Or am I trying to actually lead them down the path that fulfills me because I'm giving it away?

Netanya 1:03:24

And I love that. And it feels like too that um I think I went in the beginning from being a doormat to being a brick wall again, because I it was just I didn't know how to be in the middle. And so I swung really far into the other thing of like holding a wall up. And I did. And there were some things that were a little bit aggressive in the beginning because I didn't know how to hold that, right? But I think the way I try to approach it now, I read a blog post like 20 years ago. Not 20, probably 10. Um, and the title of it was open heart, big fucking fence.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:00

Yes. I like right.

Netanya 1:04:01

So like I have a heart, I care, I want to extend and help, and not everybody gets the key card to my suite, so to speak. Like you don't just let everybody in because I care.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:14

No, good neighbors make good fences, and that's not just in your own yard. And uh if I've got a fence, I can protect my property. My property is my sobriety and you know, the person that I'm trying to grow into. I have to protect that. It's all I've got. Recovery is job one. So if I have to make a decision, I have to it's just like indecision, it's still a decision. I have to decide is my sobriety more important than a relationship with one human being or one individual when there's eight billion of some bitches out there. I you know, we just have to make those decisions in the heat of battle. And if we still have um lingering doubts after we've made that decision, that's why God gave me a sponsor.

Netanya 1:04:56

Well, and I reserve the right to change my mind, right? I'm learning. And so there's people that even in this journey in recovery, just since I've been in Nashville, there's people that when I was new here, I'm trying to meet people and make friends, and I I haven't gotten to know anybody enough to discern like who I want to spend time with. So I'm kind of trying to spend time with different people. And as I've spent more time and been here longer, some of those people I let go of. And I was like, yeah, no, I'm not doing that, you know. But in the beginning, I didn't know better, and so I did.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:27

Um, did you ever think that maybe God put them in your life to teach you what you don't want?

Netanya 1:05:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:33

We're we're all a tool. And we're all an example. Um, and I I mean tool in a in the useful sort of way, not like I used to be in the original point. I was a real tool back then. But you know the the beautiful thing about it is when you took the training wheels off your bike, how many times did you skin your knees and your elbows?

Netanya 1:05:51

A lot. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:54

So and but and see, being new at having this spiritual awakening, we and being Inexperienced, we're likely to make mistakes.

Netanya 1:06:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:04

Those mistakes are just lessons. They're not life sentences.

Netanya 1:06:08

No. And that, you know, when you this this also happened recently. Man, you're getting all my recent stuff. This is great. Um just the other day, a person called me who I haven't talked to in a while that I had set a boundary with a couple months ago. And I saw his number come up on my phone and I didn't answer. And he left a message or he texted me after he called to tell me why he called. Was like to say hi and how am I doing. And the old me, there's a part of me, and I don't know if it's a if it's being a female thing, if it's a me thing. I want to be nice and I I should respond because someone reached out to see how I was and whatever. And I just thought, uh-uh. I know what this is. I like I set a boundary, I stepped away from it. It's been a while, and you knocked on the door again to see if it was gonna change.

unknown 1:06:58

Yeah.

Netanya 1:06:58

And it's not. But it's just it's it's on I'm talking about it because it's uncomfortable. Like that you should societally, oh, someone's checking on me. I should be kind, or I would have and it's like, nope. I know what to do.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:13

The easy access doormat syndrome is the last one to die. People pleasing is the hardest thing to get out of your life that there ever was, in my experience. And we all go back to it because of the uncertainty and and the fear that comes along with the uncertainty that we're moving ahead in life and we're in uncharted waters. There's way more in the rearview mirror that's clear than on the windshield when it's covered up with all the bug crap we threw at it when we were traveling down the road in version 1.0. So we learn our

Navigating Uncertainty and Trust in Life

SPEAKER_01 1:07:41

lessons, but that's where the faith and the acceptance really come in is I've got to accept that this instinct is right. And if I'm really doubtful about it, I do call my sponsor, call a couple other people in recovery. And just like we've had this conversation, I feel good about your decision. You probably feel better about your decision because when it comes to matters of the spirit, the grand total is way bigger than the sum of the individual parts. You get two little pieces of God together, and it's a way bigger piece of God. You know, I I know it sounds stupid and try, but uh it just works that way, and God uses these coincidences to remain anonymous in my world. I look at coincidence coincidences now and equate them with fireflies. It's another light bulb that goes off just pointing me in the right direction.

Netanya 1:08:25

I love that. Thank you. I could sit here and talk to you all night, and I can't do that because I've already taken enough of your time. But please know that we will pick this up in two weeks on a front porch at a Koei.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:38

Absolutely. And just do know, and everybody out there know that we love you, and there ain't a damn thing you can do about that because we have to give it away in order to keep it.

Netanya 1:08:48

Yes. I have one last question.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:51

Yes.

Netanya 1:08:51

If you could give permission to anyone who is listening to this episode, what would you give them permission to do after hearing this conversation?

SPEAKER_01 1:08:59

Love yourself. You're okay. You're a great person that has a crappy disease and it's trying to kill you, don't let it. You got us here to help. Give us a call.

Netanya 1:09:12

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:13

Thank you, Natalia. Thanks for all you do.

Netanya 1:09:19

Thank you so much for being here. It means more than you know. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend or leave a quick rating or review wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps more people find the show. If you want more of me, head on over to NatanyaAllison.com and enter your name and email for behind the scenes updates in between shows. New episodes air every Tuesday. We'll see you next week.