Ep 61 with Laura Mckowen

Ailey Jolie: 00:06

Welcome to In This Body, a podcast where we dive deep into the potent power of embodiment. I'm your host, Aile Jolie, a psychotherapist deeply passionate about living life fully from the wisdom within your very own body. The podcast In This Body is a love letter to embodiment, a podcast dedicated to asking important questions like how does connecting to your body change your life? How does connecting to your body enhance your capacity to love more deeply and live more authentically? And how can collective embodiment alter the course of our shared world? Join me for consciously curated conversations with leading experts. Each episode is intended to support you in reconnecting to your very own body.

Ailey Jolie: 00:49

This podcast will be available for free wherever you get your podcast, making it easy for you to stay connected to In This Body, the podcast with me, A Leisurely. Welcome back to How to Be in This Body. I'm your host, A Leis Jolie, and today I'm in conversation with Laura McCowan, writer, speaker, and founder of the Luckiest Club, a global sobriety support community now home to thousands of members across the world. Laura is the best-selling author of We Are the Luckiest, The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life and Push Off From Here, Nine Essential Truths to Get You Through Sobriety and Everything Else. She's currently writing her third book, a memoir about emotional sobriety and romantic relationships. This conversation went somewhere I didn't fully anticipate. We started with sobriety and ended up somewhere much wider, talking about the triangle of substances, food, and relationships, and how the same underlying need moves between all three. How getting sober doesn't mean the hunger goes away, how the thing we're medicating, whether that's shame, disconnection, a longing for safety, will find another outlet if we don't actually meet it. Laura and I both brought our own experiences to our time together. We talked about disordered eating, about love and compulsion, about what emotional sobriety actually asks of us. And we talk about what it feels like to be in the messy, ongoing, not yet resolved middle of that process, too. I hope you enjoy this episode of How to Be in This Body with me, Ailey Jolie. My first question for you, Laura, is one that I open the podcast with always for every guest. And I would love to hear from you. What does being in your body mean to you?

Laura McKowen: 02:45

Well, I guess I know that for me, it's the difference between being in, I can very much sense when I'm in my head when I'm running things up there. It's my like most comfortable place. That's where I usually live. And when I can actually feel the sensations in my body and feel what I'm experiencing in my body. So in my stomach or in my, you know, like it for me, it almost feels like a literal cutoff physically if I'm not there.

Ailey Jolie: 03:12

And I would love to know if that experience of the cutoff is maybe something you lived in. Cause I know that you talk about spending like two decades in advertising and the culture of performance and substance that was there. And I would love to know if that was maybe the experience at that time and how maybe it's changed as well. I think it's always been my experience.

Laura McKowen: 03:31

Like until I think I started to well, okay. I think I learned very early, I think as a woman, that was almost automatic to like absorb the message that my body was a problem. Really, really took that in around high school and rewarded for my mind for pushing through, for thinking, for rationalizing everything, for all the good things like that one can do with their brain and their mind. And the addiction, for me, it was drinking mostly, was absolutely a way to, I think, not feel the disconnection between I'm sort of using my body and myself like as one thing, like my capital S self, my true self as one thing. I was using alcohol and used it and work and so many other things as a way to both numb the pain of that disconnection, but also to to access it in a way. It was like this double-edged sword or this, like had it was a tool that worked for many different reasons. Like it alcohol also turned off my brain and so that I could actually be in my body and feel some sensations. But the flip side of that is it's it numbs you out. So it's this, I've been thinking about this a lot because of how the interplay of like disordered eating and alcohol really like worked together for me as this way to like they both had almost healing properties in a way, and they both had really destructive properties. Like they both saved me and helped me, and they both hurt me and hurt my body. I for sure feel like, and I'm also, I don't know if you follow this or care about it or believe in it, but I've learned a lot about the Enneagram over the years, and I'm an Enneagram seven, and we just sort of live in our heads. Like if someone asks me how I feel, it will be like, I think I feel, you know, it's like I even think my feelings, and I'm always running through how I feel through the lens of is this appropriate? Is this the right way to feel? Is this the rational way to feel? Is this the the way that this person wants me to feel type of thing? So it's all running through the filter of my head first, not always, much better now, but that's how I grew up and how I that was the conditioning and the programming for a long time. And I would say in sobriety, it's gotten better. And I also at the same time always like I feel like when I feel most like myself is when I'm moving my body. Like I first figured that out in sports, and then I figured it out in running, like physically running. And then I really figured it out in yoga and be when I became a yoga teacher. It was like, oh, there's something when I drop in that is the most me.

Ailey Jolie: 06:14

I would love to spend a little bit of time with you hearing about your first book and all the pieces that are there and how that book, for the listener who doesn't know, has kind of led you to what you're working on right now and some of the topics that we're getting into. Because I really love your work and want to dive in. So the first book I really want for the listener who doesn't know, if you could kind of bring them into what led you to write the book and maybe what's changed for you since it's been out in the world.

Laura McKowen: 06:44

So my first book is We Are the Luckiest, and I'll talk about what that the title means. It came out in 2020. I got sober in September of 2014, and it is a memoir of my getting sober. I had a very sort of outwardly productive big life. I had a daughter, I was married, I had a big job in marketing, I lived in Boston, I had lots of friends, I had lots of, you know, I dressed well, I had a lot, I was traveling all over for work. And all of that quickly sort of fell apart around 2012 and 2013. My husband and I separated. A lot of that was the drinking, not all of it, but there was it certainly didn't help. My daughter was three years old then. When we separated, my drinking went like way off the rails. Like it was already very bad and it got really dangerous and scary. And I got a DUI in 2013, like almost got fired from my job. And then in July of 2013, I uh and I this is how I opened the book. I left my four-year-old daughter at that time alone in a hotel room overnight because I was blacked out at my brother's wedding. And that was the most sort of public thing that had happened because of my drinking. I had had a lot of atrocities, but they were mostly private, mostly, and certainly not witnessed by my family. And this was my brother was there, my mom was there, my sister-in-law, other family members. And now people were watching me. And it was also obviously completely horrific as a mother. And so that got me started in recovery, really. It forced me to go to my first AA meeting. That was the only thing I knew how to do because I only knew two sober people. And that's what you do. You go to AA meetings. And the AA folks really did save my life. But what happened to me in those, in that first year or so, I continued to drink, although much less, is I started to dip my toe into sobriety and I started to just kind of look around at what was going on in a bigger way. Like not just what was happening to me, but what was happening with alcohol and alcohol culture, women in drinking and mothers in drinking, and the fact that, yes, I had a problem with alcohol, but everyone I knew drank a lot. And everyone I knew definitely was hiding in some way in their life. I kind of looked around and said, like, I am now the one who has to go figure this problem out. All of us are dealing with stuff and no one wants to talk about it. And I'm supposed to go into this like basement and never talk about what is happening with me out loud. You know, it was this very still stigma. It's much better now, but it was the stigmatized taboo, especially being a mom who drank thing that I was just like, this is really messed up. There are multiple conversations that we need to be having. And for whatever reason, I just had a lot to say and a lot to that I was thinking about and working through. And I started writing at that time. And I will always say, like, writing saved my life. I had always wanted to be a writer, and this sort of gave me a story to start telling. And I ran with it and started writing essays, and I started a podcast called Home with Holly Whitaker. And eventually I quit my career in advertising, you know, two years into sobriety and just like made a shot for it. So we are the luckiest is the culmination of sort of everything that I felt in those first five years. Everything I felt, everything I observed, everything I wanted other people to know, everything I needed to know about sobriety and addiction. What I found over the course of getting sober was that what I had all the things that I had really wanted so much and had been chasing all along, like to have a direct experience of life, to know its depths completely, to connect with people in a really meaningful way, to be honest about my life, to write. I always had this big energy in me that I didn't know what to do with. And I it was, I was supposed to be creating something that all came to me in sobriety. It wasn't in drinking, right? I thought drinking was like a part of a big life. And I learned in sobriety that sobriety was the big life. I just had to go through this extraordinary painful and difficult passage to get there. And so we are the luckiest. The title is like, it sounds like a very cheerful, joyful title, and it is in a way, but the book is pretty heavy and dark because of everything I just said. And the whole point is like sobriety is this not a punishment. It doesn't mean you're broken. It means you're totally human. You just happen to have this thing, and this thing could be and probably is your like entryway into a life that you can't even possibly imagine. And I didn't see any books like that out there. I saw a lot of, you know, addiction stories that were very meaningful and beautiful, but they sort of ended when the person got sober. And like I really wanted to focus more on sobriety and I had taken the AA path, but not, but I also diverged from it. I also like pushed against a lot of that. So I wanted to talk about that. That came out in 2020, right before the pandemic hit. And what's changed since then? I mean, I accidentally started a community because of the pandemic. It's called the Luckiest Club, and it's like a sobriety support community where we have meetings and everything that's involved in community, like AA, but it's it's definitely not AA. That was unexpected. And I also would say, like, what has changed now is I have focused more on the writing about, thinking about living through the emotional sobriety piece. I don't worry about drinking anymore. I don't haven't had the desire to drink in a very long time. It's not something that, I mean, I talked about it to death and gladly so for like 10 years. And now I feel like I'm in the landscape of the things underneath all of it. As I mentioned, I had always had this big energy in me. And what I mean by that is I like had this desire to like I was always a seeker. I felt like I was supposed to be doing more with my life, like I was missing something. And for me, it was this like sort of vague dream of becoming a writer, but I didn't think that that was at all accessible to me. And started to become accessible to me when I started to get sober right around like the 20-day mark. I went to this retreat at this place in western Massachusetts, and I had a whole experience that I write about it in the book about that retreat. But the sort of bottom line was at the end of it, I walked into the bookstore and I found this book called The Great Work of Your Life by Stephen Cope. And I opened right to a page, and page I opened to had this gospel of St. Thomas quote that said, if you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. And if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. And I knew that that's what had been happening to me. Like I knew that this unused potential in me was not a benign thing. That it was actually, and I think this is true for everybody. That's what I want people to know about sobriety is our unused potential is not a benign thing. I don't want this to be mistaken for like capitalistic, kind of gross, like you must achieve Western culture. The use of talking about potential, it's something much more internal. It's meaning. It's like whatever's going to create meaning in your life and purpose in your life. And I believe that that is deeply, deeply important to who we are and how we are connected to each other. I do think if we aren't able to live into that, what we could call it dharma. That's what it's called in the great work of your life and in yoga culture and in the Bhagavad Gita, which resonates to me. And Dharma just means like the truth. It's just like the truth of who you are. And I think not finding that, not revealing it, not living into it is not a benign thing. And when we don't, it turns into a darkness, a depression, a resentment, bitterness, deep regret. And I think for some people, well, we all have things that get in the way. And so for some people, that thing is addiction. And you know it when it's happening to you. Like if you're hearing this right now and you're like, fuck, it's probably your thing. It was my thing. I mean, I don't think that anyone can really achieve their full potential if they're regularly ingesting substances. I don't think that that's the case. But some people, it's like, it's like a major, major, it's a thing. It's a major block. And it was for me. So what I want people to know about sobriety is it's not, you know, we all know the things if you're in an addicted place or even a slightly dependent place. You know the things that are gonna get better that you're gonna get back if you stop drinking or using whatever. You know you're gonna feel better. You know you're gonna have more productive mornings, you know you're probably gonna be a better person at home with your kids or your partner or to your friends. You're gonna have more patience. You're probably gonna do less things you regret. You like you're gonna do better at work. You know all those things. Those are obvious, but there's so many unknown unknowns. There's so many things that you have no idea are available to you. And that I have seen now thousands of people sort of discover that in sobriety because of sobriety. Like you just don't know what's there for you. You can't possibly imagine what's there. That's what I want people to know.

Ailey Jolie: 16:42

I want to go back to something you said about the power of writing, because I know for myself it's been such a tool of healing and understanding, but also, and I'm feel quite grateful I had a therapist that this came kind of from their direction quite early on. And they invited me into the practice of writing to actually hear the addictive voice to really like, okay, like what's motivating your thought process right now. And so I would write and write and write, and then underneath it'd be like, oh, it's the like the same gremlin that's here again under all this. And so that's been a part of my love of writing. There's many other reasons why I love the process, but I would love to hear from you around how the the process of writing or the act of writing has saved you in your own words. I completely relate to what you just said.

Laura McKowen: 17:34

There's something that gets revealed to us about ourselves. Writing is an act of revealing ourselves to ourselves. I think Joan Diddy and said it's part of a much longer quote, but the part that gets used or recited most often is that she says she writes entirely to understand what she thinks. That is also true. I write my way into understanding. And like you can't overstate how powerful that is because it's this relationship that you have that's always available to you. It's basically free and it's ongoing. You can do it forever. You can always write, right? It's not like running or getting to the gym or even having even getting a therapist. Like sometimes that's not available either, but you can always write. And it's this ongoing conversation that you can have with yourself, with God, if that's for you with creativity, with even other people. I think you can engage in a conversation in whatever way that you need to with writing. The other thing, and there's this gorgeous Substack, Janine. I'm gonna I hope I pronounced her last name right, but Janine Olet. It's called writing in the dark. And I want to credit her and like send people there because she does such an extraordinary job of explaining this all the time. But writing isn't just a way to get down the things that were painful, it changes, it puts a distance between the person who experienced something and the person writing about it. And in that, the person who writes through something is changed by writing about it. Because, like you said, you discover things, you isolate voices, you learn things. It's like digging and excavating, and you find you don't know what you're gonna find. But there's something alchemical about the process itself. That for me was what was true and what has continued to be true with my writing about my own life. The other thing, and I think you'll relate to this as a therapist, and I hope I can do it justice, but it occurred to me that in the rooms of AA, which can be very effective for people, any sort of mutual support group, essentially what you're doing is you are co-creating through listening and through speaking. We need stories to understand our lives. We need them, and we need coherent stories with how we as humans sort of understand the world and our place in it. I had a very jumbly fucked up story about my drinking. There was like, I mean, it was pretty like I'm just a terrible person. That's kind of how it started. And I have done unspeakable things and I have I've done and said and thought and felt things that no one has ever felt. And what you come to realize is like, oh, other people feel these things too. Actually, they feel the exact same things and they're willing to talk about them and they do it freely, and they understand a broader context about why they might have done those things. And they are able to somehow somehow contextualize this experience and give it proper weight and meaning, even and be grateful for it. You could do that in the work with a therapist too. And so that process is like you're rewriting a narrative of your life or certain experience that is coherent and that integrates a lot more and is ultimately, I think, more benevolent. Not to say it's something that just lets you off the hook. It's like it includes paradox, it includes all the nuance that is required. And that process is extraordinarily healing. And writing is the same thing. Like I wrote to understand what happened. How did I get here? And so that's those are all the things that writing has been to me. And it is life-saving, just like any of the other things I mentioned would be life-saving. I think it's it, but it happens. There's something special that happens in writing too, because it is just you, you and the creative sort of energy that you're engaging with.

Ailey Jolie: 21:43

I would love to circle back to some of the things that you named there, because we haven't yet had a podcast guest that comes in and speaks about the intersection of embodiment and addiction. And for myself and my understanding, like they're so linked. And I think you even sprinkled a few things. There that are quite important to pick up on around how a substance can give us sensation if we're so numb, but then also at a point of our lives can take us out of the body. And that can be like a really confusing. I know even for myself, when I look back on my history, I'm like, oh, that's very confusing. What was going on there? The language feels really murky. How do I explore this? And so I would love to hear from you since I know you've dedicated so much time and energy into making sobriety something accessible and interesting and that people feel comfortable naming and being connected in. I would love to just spend some time with you, maybe exploring the intersection from your lens. You can speak to personal experience or what you've noticed around this intersection of substances and embodiment or addiction and embodiment and maybe some of the nuance that exists between those two things.

Laura McKowen: 22:49

I haven't also spent a lot of time talking about it either. So we'll sort of do it together. I've spent a lot of time thinking about it, and it's sort of this new thing that I'm trying to pull apart as I write this next book because it is so um like here's a the sort of concrete example that I've just been writing through. When I was late in high school, I developed disordered eating. It started, I thought, as a way to fix my body because my body felt like was unacceptable. It was also, I learned, and is very obvious in hindsight, about controlling something when I could control nothing around me. And there were a lot of painful things that I had gone through. And just I was graduating high school, my mom's marriage, not to my dad, that they had been divorced and she had been married a couple of times since then. But I really loved this guy, her husband, my stepdad then, and their marriage was falling apart. I was 17 and all the things that come with being 17. And it was, I was really wound tight and I had no tools, no real tools restricting my eating. I learned just by doing it, sort of on accident, like, oh, this gives me a way to control my feelings. Because when I'm so hungry, I can't feel any of that. It's like just basic, I guess, hierarchy of needs. And then that also didn't feel great either. Like that total restriction and that rigidity didn't feel good either all the time. I wanted to keep parts of that, but I also missed feeling things. I also missed, I had this all of a sudden, this like smaller body, but I was not enjoying it like I thought I would. I was getting attention and people were noticing, and that was cool, but I was like terrified inside. And so alcohol turned the volume down on that and sort of allowed me to feel my body. And so it is this wild, very confusing, very messy equation that you're constantly sort of trying to perfect and get right. And it's impossible to do that. Like Carolyn Knapp, I don't know if you're familiar with her, but she's a memoirist who wrote Drinking a Love Story, which is my favorite addiction memoir, but she also wrote a book about, I think it's called Appetites, that goes more into she had disordered eating as well, that goes into disordered eating and sort of how and the interplay between that and drinking and men relationships. And that like she really looks at this equation of appetite means you have desire, or desire means you have appetite, one or both. And those are dangerous things because they're unwieldy. Appetites and desire also come from the body. And if you can't control that, what happens? All kinds of things happen that we don't want to happen as women, as sometimes just being human. So yeah, and I think substances for me, because I drank for solid, like I drank hard for solid 15 years. It was like my first tool to manage an unmanageable appetite for things that I couldn't name, for desires that I had, like just to be maybe in relationship or be loved, or then it also helped me manage the feelings that came up that felt also unmanageable from doing the things that I did when I was drinking. Right. So it's this wild, perfect storm that just sort of circles itself. What I have tried to really tell people and communicate is that it is the most normal thing in the world to drink, to do something to make yourself feel better. You're just trying to get a need met. And some of us find that alcohol is like this magic thing. It works. It works really well, actually. But there's a cost for some of us, it's it becomes unmanageable. And that is, it's just like a natural human instinct gone awry. So yeah, I don't know if I'm getting at it, but the body is definitely like this is like the most complex Venn diagram ever.

Ailey Jolie: 27:07

I agree. Absolutely. Even just that part there, if we break it down even to what I think is a Venn diagram within this Venn diagram, is the relationship between food, appetite, eating disorder, disordered eating, substance use, and then relationship. And I can think back on my own self. And I remember substances were not in my life at this point. I was in treatment for an eating disorder. And I remember walking down the street and just being like, oh my God, all of the space that used to be obsessed with food is now obsessed with dating and sex and people. And I just broke down crying. I was just like, oh my God, like it's just changed, you know, like I have all the eating disorder language to not do that with my body anymore. But now this thing inside me is found something else to do. And I don't and I don't think that intersection gets spoken about. So I would love to spend some time, maybe even just if you won't feel comfortable sharing about your experience or some reflections on just even that triangle of those three things that I definitely don't see spoken about, even though I can definitely say mine just moved around for quite a while. And then there was also for me just this acceptance of like, yeah, I do have a lot of trauma. I have a lot of pain. I have to build in my life a way that this thing is attended to and cared for. So I'm not back on the triangle again. Yeah. What would you call this thing? I'm I mean, uh, at different stages of my life, I've got different names. You know, like what is what is the feeling? Is it like self-hatred that's coming out that I can't sit with that's making me want to get away from myself? Is it shame? Like for me, it morphs. I don't know if I agree.

Laura McKowen: 28:45

I'm asking because I'm so curious because I don't know either. I I I don't know what I would call it either. Definitely shame. It at times it's like very clearly that. Sometimes it's yeah, self-hatred, I guess, this probably taps in. I feel like it's just this longing. It's like this existential longing for home, for safety. It's also, and maybe this is one and the same as what I just said, but there's a fear. Like I'm not safe, I'm not okay, and I need alcohol made me feel okay. Like it really did, or it quieted the fear. It also felt helped me connect, like it really just did. It helps you, it helped me connect with friends, with men, with colleagues. And then the the eating, yes, same thing, sort of different architecture or different, like it has a different, it's like a different drug, I guess. If you're looking at it as like a pharmacy, right? And there's men, there's alcohol, there's disordered eating. They kind of can function the same, but they're just all a little bit different in how they impact you, the sort of game you play with them. It's really fascinating. And I, I mean, this is all really what the book I'm writing is about. And I'm in the middle of writing it. I'm not like through it. And so this conversation is awesome because I'm still very actively trying to understand it. For alcohol, for the addiction piece, I can understand that very clearly. It makes sense to me. I know how to put it. I've talked about it for 10, 12, 13 years. I know, like I have a very coherent story and I've integrated, I think, all of it, most of it, enough of it with the men on dating and love and sex and all that. I have not. I'm still like it's still very unwieldy and confusing to me. I think also, you know, substance addiction is very black and white. You're either doing it or you're not. And of course, there's a whole layer of emotional sobriety and all the things underneath, but it's a very defined, like I am sober from that. And I don't need alcohol to live. But you do need love and relationship and sex. And so I think that makes it more complicated. And same with food. It's not binary either. But I even find the food stuff to be much more manageable. It's really the relationship piece. It's like how to be in right relationship or quote unquote healthy relationship or relationship that doesn't feel addictive. I'm not using it to medicate. I don't have the answers to that. I'm still totally and like even today, just like actively trying to sort through a situation that I'm like, this is what we're doing again? Really? Okay. I think you're right. I don't think it's talked about like really at all.

Ailey Jolie: 31:30

Definitely being in the field of sex therapy and being a registered sex therapist. I mean, there's a lot of conversation around if sex addiction and love addiction are are real. I'm like, I'm I got nothing to participate to that conversation if we want to get lost in language and semantics. I can say to myself, I was as compulsive around dating and as lost and as distressed and as overwhelmed with that as I ever was with the substance. How you want to define that? I don't really care. But I do know that that is a lived experience where you can just be so overwhelmed with the attachment need that you will do anything to keep it. And I mean anything. And I found

Ailey Jolie: 32:14

myself at the bottom of that barrel once and was like, what have I done? Where am I? And it took me years to find myself again and be like, oh, that's what happened. And I don't think, I think because there's a lot of cultural shame, there can be judgment, or maybe we just are struggling or fumbling to find language. I don't think it's it's really given voice in the same way that we speak about substances and addiction and food and body. Even though when I sit with clients, I'm like, so many of them are in that grip, or just even online dating culture. I'm like, there clearly is a lot of us stuck in this, or there wouldn't be so many online coaches who also from you know my clinical lens, I can see actually have a lot of these obsessive patterns as well. If you're this lost in relationships.

Laura McKowen: 32:60

Oh my God. I feel like I've been needing to talk to you for like fucking 10 years. Yes. Yes. You found yourself there once. I have found myself there countless, countless times. I understand it better. I also like the unmanageability of it is absolutely real. I also really hate the conversation around love addiction and sex addiction. And I gotta figure that out too. Like I know you've written about Liz Gilbert's book really beautifully, and I love how you're piecing that together, especially contrasting it with like the game and the writer of that and showing, illustrating these sort of two archetypal situations and how they're what they did to the culture, right? And then where those people ended up. But when I read Liz's book, and I have followed her whole career and have so much gratitude for her and appreciation for her. And she is like come to me in a dream at a certain time and like I woke up different. Like I deeply love her as an artist, and I hated that book so much, the recent one. She says the word addict like over 200 times. It felt very much like someone in the midst of hating themselves a lot. Maybe I hated it because I'm scared that I see myself more in that than I want to, or maybe I hate it because it also echoes a certain type of language about substance addiction, like my original sobriety that I pushed so hard against, which is this sort of self-hatred, this like, I'm an addict, I'm just an addict, I'm an addict. This is my primary identifying characteristic. I always, it's waiting for me in the back parking lot, doing push-ups, just waiting for me to slip up. That's such a hard lens to look at relationships through. I don't know what the answer is, but I want to believe there's some sort of softer place than I cannot make myself accessible to relationships at all because I am a blackout codependent. I just can't, that breaks my heart.

Ailey Jolie: 34:60

It also breaks my heart. I'm so glad that you brought those two people up because I have so much profound admiration for both of them, their ability to be vulnerable and share and reading the truth that Neil Strauss wrote genuinely changed my life and his ability to in the truth that came later. Yeah, yeah. The game, not so much. I mean, it did, it did actually protect me. I read it and I was like, okay, so this is all the stuff I have to watch out for. Thank you for the hot tips, you know. But when I read the truth, I I just cried on the plane and I read it multiple times because it was the first time that I had come across a man actually showing remorse and regret for how he had treated the women in his life, and that he had seen that they were wounded and vulnerable and that he had used that against them. And for me, that was such a moment of being like, oh wow, uh I have not been just out here, you know, randomly falling into these things. People have been playing on this vulnerability and this trauma and this pain. And for me, I'm like forever like, Neil, thank you. So I go, I loved that book, but I did experience a similar thing with Liz's book that's come out, but also I think that, you know, he had, I think, a lot more time and a different journey with that. And so I am really curious to see where she ends up because a lot of the addiction language, and I knew that I I don't speak a lot about addiction, it's not something that's huge in my practice. And that's because when I went through eating disorder treatment, there was addiction there. And there was time, you know, I don't engage with substances, it's just not a part of my life. But also I have such a strong, I don't want that in my identity. I don't want that to be the full part of me, that any language like that for me also just goes, I get the icky factor. And I've always been like, I don't know if I need to lean into that more or just respect that I just actually don't resonate with that lens.

Laura McKowen: 37:07

I too am very curious where she'll end up. And it strikes me where she wrote that book from, and I say this in the most humble possible way because what do I know? But it strikes me as someone with very new, raw, sober energy. If I had it, where you have to draw very bright lines. You have to in order to create this new thing. It's required. The boundary around what you were and what you're trying to build has to be very stark and clean and clear. It felt like that. And we'll see. You know, we'll see where it ends up. But anyway, this, yeah, that's why I've just been like you are saying things that I have felt but never been able to articulate, or have you're bringing really extraordinarily profound, nuanced, important conversations into the fold. Like truly, I think you're really brilliant.

Ailey Jolie: 38:01

Thank you. I would love to know right now, before we close with the listener and our time together, I would love to know about what you're writing right now. So the topic and the details, but also what maybe you feel like is being attended to or revealed or explored or healed even through the process of writing your upcoming book as well.

Laura McKowen: 38:23

Yeah. So my my the book I'm writing right now is a memoir and it's loosely about emotional sobriety and romantic relationships. And it's touching on a lot of the things that we've already talked about. The relationship between disordered eating, alcohol, drinking, addiction, and my relationships with men. And just really trying to sort out what happened. And the focus is on understanding, like I knew that I wanted to write a book about because in my experience, romantic relationships have been like the ground zero most painful part of my life. And a part that I still wrestle with and haven't, I guess, figured out is for lack of a better phrase. And so I'm trying to write a book to figure that out. And what's being revealed to me is that it's very messy. I'm still living in it. I've got a lot more shame about it than I ever had about drinking. I'm just trying to usher steward myself through that process.

Ailey Jolie: 39:21

Thank you for your time today, all of your writing, and how you've inspired others into a place of sobriety or revealing or questioning what they're trying to soothe or what's happening inside them. Do you have anything upcoming that you would like the listener to know before we end today?

Laura McKowen: 39:38

No, I don't have I the thing that I'm most focused on, aside from this book and my sobriety work is just I write a substack called Love Story and I put my work there regularly. So if people want to find that, that's where I am.

Ailey Jolie: 39:52

Beautiful. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. Something Laura has said stayed with me that the alcohol was a double-edged sword, that it numbed the disconnection, but also in certain moments, gave her access to her body when nothing else could. I think that's one of the most honest things anyone has said on this podcast about why substances draw us in. She was able, in her words, to present an understanding of the substance as a solution to something that made sense at the time, but stopped making sense over time. Because that's the thing nobody often says out loud. The reaching was never random. There was always something underneath it. Shame, disconnection, a body that didn't feel safe to be in. And what Laura and I kept circling in our time together was that the something underneath doesn't disappear when you take the substance away. It goes looking. That's what I mean when I talk about the triangle, substances, food, relationships. Because clinically, these things share the nervous system inside you. They share an attachment history. The pharmacy, as Laura called it, can change its stock. But the person doing the reaching is still the same person until they do the actual work of being with what's underneath. There's a clinical term for this that we don't use in the episode, but I want to make you aware of. And that's the term transfer addiction or cross addiction. And it's real and well documented and well researched. I won't focus on the research and instead just provide the lived experience of it in maybe simpler terms for you today that really captures the essence. When we speak of transfer addiction or cross addiction, what we're really saying is, I close that door, but now I can't stop doing this other thing through this other door and I don't know why. And the answer to why is almost always the same answer it was before. What makes the relationship piece the hardest of the three, and I think Laura was right about this, is that even though she said it quietly, is that you can't abstain from it. You can't detox from needing people. The nervous system is built for connection. So the question is never how to need less, it's how to be in connection without losing yourself in it, how to want without the wanting taking you over. This is what emotional sobriety actually means. And it's and it's some of the least talked-about territory in recovery. It's also, I suspect, the thing Laura's next book is really all about. I want to name that even here, I'm not going into the full depth of exploring the research with cross addiction or transfer addiction, eating disorders, foods, substances in the way that they truly deserve. But I hope that our time in this episode and the things that were spoken about were able to sprinkle some seeds so your awareness can sprout and grow. Lastly, I want to sit with what Laura said about writing, that something alchemic happens in the gap between the person who lives something and the person writing about it. I think she was describing something somatic from my perspective, even if that wasn't her frame. When we can find language for what has been living wordlessly in the body, we change our relationship to it neurologically. And that's not just a poetic metaphor said by me. That's why narrative work appears across every trauma modality I know. EMDR, somatic experiencing, sensory motor, internal family systems, compassionate inquiry, cognitive behavioral therapy. The telling of the story is not separate from the healing. It's a part of it. There's one more thing I want to name before I close. The conversation about Liz Gilbert and Neil Strauss. We spoke about both of them with real care, and I want to be really clear about that. What we're doing was not a critique and more of sitting with two very different public journeys through the same territory and noticing what each one reveals about where we are culturally with desire and compulsion and shame. Laura said it best. We'll see where she ends up. That's the only honest position any of us can take, including about ourselves. I also want to emphasize that both of those people, their literature works, their ability to be vulnerable and share, I know that I have personally pulled so much inspiration and And reverence and knowledge and wisdom from the words they put on the page. And if I didn't believe in someone's work and didn't believe in the goodness they were trying to put out there when they created it, I wouldn't platform it in any way. So if you haven't read either of those two books, even though we have conversation around them and challenge and explore, I do recommend their work because I do recommend sitting down and reading so that you can piece some things together. I know for myself, their work has been quite foundational to how I understand relationships, but also my body, the scripts that I've absorbed or the scripts that have been put upon me because other people have engaged with their material. Lastly, all that to say, thank you for listening and for being in the tender, ongoing process of coming home to your body and allowing this podcast, our guest, and me, Aile Jolie, to be a part of that process for you. The piece I just mentioned on Liz Gilbert's book and Neil Strauss's book, The Truth, and what those two together say about desire and compulsion and shame is on my Substack. I'll link it in the show notes and I'd love to know what you think. If you found value in this episode, it would mean so much to me for you to share the podcast with friends, a loved one, or on your social platforms. If you have the time, please rate and review the podcast so that this podcast reaches a larger audience and can inspire more and more humans to connect to their bodies too. Thank you for being here and nurturing the relationship you have with your very own body.