But a few days before the retreat I started digging into my ancestry, and then during the retreat my ancestry started digging into me, and now it’s May and I’ve not written a newsletter but I have addressed multiple centuries of intergenerational trauma and maybe accidentally found a profound healing I didn’t know I needed, and I don’t know how to explain all that, so I’m not going to try, at least not in this essay. But that’s what happened.

Of all the revelations I’ve had in the past few months—and there have been many, and they were only made available to me by not being here, which is a type of actual and necessary creative work we don’t talk about—the biggest is that I’m not ever going to be the person this newsletter and all of my previous work promised me to be; that I’ve been operating under the assumption that I would, should, and had to be her; and that so much of my energy and creative work here has been steeped in that assumption, rendering much of what I have done here a flavor of apology for what I am still not.

The reality of my life is that most days:

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Part 1, the intro to the series, is here. Part 2, Notes 1-8 of 20: How to Be Lost, is here. Part 4, Notes 15-20 of 20: How to Be Lost, comes out next.

Notes 9–14 of 20: How to Be Lost

An incomplete collection of imprecise and often contradictory field notes on what to do when you don’t know what to do

Cont. from here. Written in March 2023. Updated minimally for clarity; original tense preserved.

9. Regression

I regressed a lot, and before anyone holds up their hand and tries to assure me I did not because that’s a mean thing to think, or because there is no such thing as regression and it’s all just forward movement (a thing I’ve said before!): let me also say that perhaps insisting that everything is The Path, or that regression is actually progression, or God’s plan, or anything that sets us up to absolutely fucking hate ourselves when we return to behaviors we thought we’d outgrown, is part of the problem we have to unwind. Because when we think in these terms—as everything being forward movement and the point of all this work as a means to the end of becoming better than we were before—it becomes its own kind of sickness.

Anyway, as I was saying, I regressed a lot.

There was this day last summer1 —after I had just repeated the same humiliating pattern with a man and then I drove across the country to start a new life in California and then a tornado hit my house back east and I had to go back there and sort that out and then I caught Covid on the plane ride there (lols) and then I came back to California and went directly to a family vacation—when I got into the most infantile fight with my sister. And I mean, I really did a number, really lost my shit in a big embarrassing way. And there were all these reasons to point to for why I acted so badly, like I was tired and I was confused and my life wasn’t working out like I wanted it to and a tornado hit my house and I got covid on my way to fix it and blah blah blah sad sad—but the truth and reality was that I acted like an eight-year-old, and I had to sit with that.

Sitting with that was just awful but also monumental, and while I don’t write about my family so I can’t really get into the details, what I will say is it wasn’t like some part of me or my life that I’d fixed had broken at that moment on that day. It was more like I had coped for years with a part of me that was hobbled—not healed—and I was finally strong enough to go back and revisit it, work with it, and heal it.

Marlee Grace writes in their book Getting To Center: “There is a part of not knowing that can also call us to deeper knowing. If I don’t know something about myself, about how I walk through the world—it may be time to know it deeper. To seek teachers, books, resources that bring me into a greater knowing of myself.”

This is how I imagine regression—that it is not a step backward so much as it is a step deeper. We thought we knew ourselves completely, we thought we had this thing licked, we thought we were so grown up, and then there we are, standing in front of an Airbnb, a 43-year-old author of critically acclaimed self-help, all red-faced and throwing a tantrum so colossal the kids get scared and cry.

Oof, that was a bottom. But also oof, what a hell of an invitation to do some digging around, to go back, to go deeper. Which I humbly did. And which yielded me a kind of growth that was far more important than the proud illusion I’d held about the kind of person I was and was not.

A lot of what happened over the past few years has felt absolutely humiliating, and not only because of what was actually happening but because of the idea that we all know is patently false, but all kind of collectively uphold, which is that growth is a leveled thing, a video game where you never have to save the princess twice. I am probably a hundred years wiser than I was in 2020, but that’s only because the last few years I was such a regressive fucking mess who made almost all the mistakes she once swore she never would again.

So you regressed. So you did it again. So you fucked up wildly and embarrassingly. Fine. Me too. Now what?

“We can meet our match with a poodle or with a raging guard dog, but the interesting question is—what happens next?” —Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart

10. Non-resistance

As we all do: I had the opportunity to go to war when things started to fall completely apart. Instead, I made the conscious choice to move with and not against, and I’ve maintained that position throughout. Like, I didn’t fight one fucking thing. I let it all happen to me.

This doesn’t mean I gladly accepted what happened, or didn’t react and do petulant things, or that I didn’t feel resistance, or didn’t carry the weight of it all around with me, or that I didn’t fall to my knees and sob-scream a stream of profanities at God for unfairly taking my life away, etc. It means that when unwanted things happened—and many, many, many unwanted things happened over a protracted period of time, as if they were all stored up and waiting to happen all at once when I was at my absolute lowest—I took the thing in, did whatever I needed to do to get right with myself (stared at a wall for hours, screamed, went on a run, phoned a friend, binged TV, drove to the nursery to buy 30 plants, eat an entire pie), metabolized it, and then I just kept going.

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I made as little drama as I could about most things, and I consistently prioritized my peace of mind over anything else. I kept asking myself What is the easiest path for me to take in this situation?, and that’s the path I took each time—even if it meant losing a shit ton of money, ownership in my company, my intellectual property, my reputation, my future job prospects, friendships, or any number of things the choice for peace will often cost.

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Ten years ago, the weekend I turned 33, I was so fucked up. I was the walking dead, and as some kind of Hail Mary to fix that brokenness, I booked a weekend at Esalen to learn how to meditate.

I almost didn't go, almost stayed in bed and passed my birthday alone with a lot of weed and alcohol and 30 Rock. But at the last minute, I peeled myself out of bed and packed a bag and rented a car. 

Esalen is about three hours south of San Francisco, where I was living at the time, and you have to drive along a cliff-hugging patched together stretch of Highway 1 to get there. I didn't get out of San Francisco that Friday until dusk, a storm hit an hour or so into the trip, and just ten miles away from the entrance I was caught in a rockslide that took out my front tire.

It was late, dark, empty; there was no cell service; I was stuck in the rain by myself. Eventually a tow truck driver dragging the area for folks like me came by, fixed the flat, did not kill me as I'd definitely expected, and I rolled into Esalen around midnight. The whole circus of getting there felt like an appropriate metaphor for my life at the time: I would try to be good, and God threw rocks.

I spent the weekend learning to meditate and it opened a portal in me (I saw the light, for sure), and by Sunday afternoon I believed I’d had a full spiritual conversion and would never drink or use drugs again.

Hours later, at a Super Bowl party back in San Francisco, someone passed me a joint and I forgot, totally, about my conversion experience. It took another year of walking around like the living dead—another year of actively trying to murder my own person—before I finally took my life seriously. 

I thought about all this last Wednesday, on my 43rd birthday, which I didn't celebrate.

I ran four miles, I edited a podcast, I got a jalapeño grilled cheese sandwich from The Roost, I watched the final episodes of Station Eleven. I didn't downplay this birthday because I don't believe I'm a person who deserves to be celebrated, which has been true in the past. It was just that this year I was too fucking tired to care, as I'm sure you all understand at this point in time when we're all too fucking tired to [insert everything here].

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I can't stop watching post-apocalyptic films, especially since the pandemic began. The Leftovers, Patriot, Station Eleven, Don't Look Up, Years and Years, (Finch, Midnight Sky, Arrival, The Road, Dune, Children of Men…). This is also true of survivor-type films or series, such as Lost or, more recently, Yellowjackets.

When I say this to enough people, the reflex response (from those who are v. unlike me) is that it reflects something dark, something off, something gone; a sick part of me revealed. At the end of Don't Look Up my mom tried not to vomit and I clapped, which is the exact reversal of our corporeal and psychic responses to Twitter: she hate-tweets like the future of the world depends on it, and I try not to vomit.

Who's to say which one of us is stomaching the right thing? To me her tweets feel reminiscent of someone screaming into a telephone when the wire has been cut; she believes Twitter is somehow preventing the ice caps from melting—her last attempt to give her grandkids some kind of shot at a non-post-apocalyptic future. She can't stand the post-apocalyptic scenario—the world completely imploding in on itself—and I love it because I'm pretty sure that's already happened and at least in those films, we're getting on with it already. She's trying to preserve, and all I see are ghosts. Her approach is hopeful. Mine is, too.

I could probably spend a year writing about what fascinates me—and emotionally and physically releases me—when I watch humanity's worst-case scenario. There's the whole communal thing, the connections formed when we're forced to rely on one another for survival: If you're in a post-apocalyptic film, you almost certainly form a new post-apocalyptic dysfunctional family (whether it's you, a dog, and a robot, or you and Jennifer Lawrence), and that always seems so much better than the kind of community we have in the pre-apocalyptic scenario.

There's the aliveness that comes when you're in the Canadian wilderness and your soccer coach needs to have his leg amputated: you find your strength, your power, things inside of you that you Did Not Think Were There, and you grab the fucking hatchet. Sometimes everyone gets a tan, always everyone stops counting calories. Your hair somehow gets better, sinewy muscles often form, and survivor fashion is how I tend to dress anyway. In enough cases, you're in nature all the time* (*if there is any left). Sometimes the earth is regenerating itself with so many fewer of us around that even ferns grow up through your 42nd-floor apartment. Perhaps you learn to cook things and kill things and skin things and make fires from obscure objects or soups from foraged goods. You can stop relying on phones or clocks or Google Maps and live by the sun and the moon and the stars. 

You have nowhere to go; all the people who hated you probably die; your career, your purpose, your reputation, your calendar, your unanswered email? Gone. You lose the internet and the backlog of comments, the petty fights, what even is a troll? Fashion stops mattering, so too does productivity hacking, and you don't have to learn about NFTs or crypto or TikTok or Keto. Forget warfare, forget organized religion, forget Who Wore It Best and Botox and taking hair out of your ass and planting it into your eyebrows because now we're supposed to have eyebrows again. There's no professions so degrees don't count unless you have one of five meaningful skills. You have nowhere to be and nothing to do but survive and all that matters is what's in front of you, the people around you, the shelter above you. Do you have food and water? A knife? Can you start a fire? Are you breathing? You're good, come with me, forget LinkedIn, how Robin Arzon Gets It Done; forget your morning routine, how many steps you took yesterday, your dirty dishes, your last dental checkup, the taxes you owe. Forget all of that, the past is dead, anything is possible. 

How is that not paradise? 

To be clear, I don't wish for this kind of outcome. I am not excited about human extinction, earth-ending asteroids, exploding flus, or plane crashes in the Canadian wild.

But the thing all these kinds of films make so clear to me is that one day, in my exact life, be it now or fifty years from now, the things I am worried about—that I spend most of my time fretting over, that are primarily responsible for my adrenal fatigue and high levels of cortisol—will not matter.

And so if there's a period of time in the near or distant future where none of this counts (because I'll be dead, or everyone else will be, etc.) then is it possible to act like none of it counts now either? Is it possible to just let it all go, today? Is it possible to live like all that matters is what's in front of me and the people around me and the roof over my head and the food in my fridge and the water in my well? Could it be so stupidly simple that just pretending the exploding flu or a hostile alien invasion was coming TODAY, every day, might guide me in a different way, give me the ability to say "I don't fucking care!!" about things that, well, I don't fucking care about? That won't matter to me in the end? 

I saw a tweet last week by @PallaviGunalan that said "I feel insane that everyone (including me) is trying to further their careers while a virus that has unknown long-term effects rages on wtf are we even doing." Adele, fucking Adele!, broke me with her heartbreak over not being able to make her tour work because the world is burning down and things don't work like they used to and it hurts in this specific way, in the way where we are supposed to carry on like nothing happened, supposed to care about the things that mattered in the Before Times, but it's all happened, and we're still stuck pretending to have to care about things that do not fucking matter.

This week, for my birthday, thanks to way too much TV and way too many fictional narratives where it all falls apart and we cannot pretend any longer, I got a sneak peek at what it could feel like to focus only on the things that fulfill me, to let go of all those petty things that rip me apart cell by cell, slowly, drip drip drip.

Not because I meditated some certain hours, not because I did a lot of yoga, not because of therapy or sobriety or the hundred thousand million zillion things that people like me have to do to not use drugs all the time, but because of all those things, and because of the pandemic and what it actually means, what it has actually done to me.

I remember an article by Glennon Doyle that she wrote years ago about why we need the addicted and mentally different, and in it she said, and I'm paraphrasing here: "Fine, I'll stop doing the drugs and the booze. But if I'm going back into the world without these things, I can't pretend anymore." (A direct quote found from a second source: “We are too smart to rejoin a party we couldn’t stomach.”)

The world is sick; we are not. We are not supposed to keep trying to make this work. We are supposed to meet on Midsummer’s Eve at the Old Gas Station so we can make something better; bring whatever you have left, it’s enough.

This week, I told my therapist this revelation, of playacting like it’s actually the end of the world and taking inventory of what matters and proceeding accordingly. She asked what it felt like in my body, and I said freedom.

All these things that keep me up at night—career and reputation and purpose and productivity and did I sound too needy in my text to this person or nasolabial folds or mean shit on the internet or the growing bags of clothes I need to get to the dry cleaner or the fucking toilet leak that I keep putting off fixing—all these things that haunt me! All these things that will absolutely not matter in a post-apocalyptic scenario!! All these things I don’t have to wait to lay down because by some measure, we’re already there. We’re already in it. It’s happened. We can start the sorting process; the piles of what matters go on the left; they will be small; the rest we can burn.

Maybe this newfound perspective will only last like that first weekend of meditation, until I take a drug three days into it and fall back asleep. But in that case, even then, I came to again. I saw something that weekend—the light—and I couldn't unsee it no matter how hard I tried. Maybe that’s what’s happening to all of us. Maybe we’re all just seeing something that we can't unsee that we don't know what to do with yet. 

I don't know why we are experiencing what we are right now. I do know that it’s begging us to choose differently and that our future as a species depends on us choosing differently. Maybe our way out or forward isn’t complicated at all; maybe it’s as simple as imagining we’re the last people on earth, and everything that mattered—except what counts in a post-apocalyptic scenario—doesn’t.

This essay was originally written in January 2022. I turn 47 in a week. Everything in here remains truer than ever. Love you.

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The Long Game of Boundaries

May 2021

In my mid-thirties I met up with a guy from Tinder while extended vacationing in Italy. We’d matched that day, the conversation had been fun and easy and charming and it was a no brainer whether to meet him corporeally. By then I’d discovered my tendency to lower my standards for company while abroad to soften my loneliness. With him, at least from our initial conversations, it appeared I could keep them.

We met in a piazza where he looked so different from his profile that I ducked him when he approached me directly and familiarly, believing he was one of the hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of Italian men that are under the impression American women swoon at their unsubtle misogynistic overtures; kissing noises and fast advances and hands on you before you can remember that No in Italian is No. We walked past each other, sent a few more messages on Tinder, and minutes later realized yes, that was me and that was him and let’s meet at the fountain in the middle. When he told me he was thirsty and we should find a drink, my sober-pickled mind walked mechanically to a mini grocery to buy a liter of water. Looking for a drink, by that time in life, was looking for mineral water stored in single-use plastic. When we got to the threshold of the store and I asked if he wanted sparkling or still, he laughed, said No, a drink, like wine. I said Oh, right, of course, I don’t drink but yes we can sit somewhere. This was before I learned to avoid such situations by explicitly stating I am teetotal in my dating profile, a descriptor still missed by most even though it is now prominently advertised.

He was struck by my abstinence, intrigued, and he ordered two quartini of terrible Chianti (I assume because of the location of the restaurant and the price they were terrible though I have no real way of knowing that) while he spent the rest of the night discussing whether or not he had a drinking problem. He was vexed, working out a possible addiction against my unicorn of abstinence, and I was tired by the end of the night, but then recall at the beginning when I told you: Sometimes we lower our standards when traveling, compelled by the simple ache for companionship.

“Maya Angelou begged us: When someone shows you who they are believe them the first time. And I find that it generally takes me a total of ten showings to believe.”

I was not attracted to him at all, at first. When I took him later that night to show him where Caesar was really murdered, and he asked if I was trying to seduce him, I was genuinely surprised because my demeanor screamed No thanks. But then again, my history has shown men are mostly attracted to indifference at worst and repulsion at best and never to what feels mutual.

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The fawn response sees managing other people as a survival skill; recovery culture calls it codependency, disease, and a character defect.

SHOW NOTES

Dr. Ingrid Clayton, author of Fawning, joins me for the fifth installment of her series on how neurodivergence, hormones, and CPTSD reshape recovery. Ingrid shares her journey from getting sober at 21 to decades later finally understanding that her “codependency” and people-pleasing were actually survival mechanisms rooted in complex relational trauma. They explore how fawning develops when other trauma responses are unavailable or dangerous, why recovery spaces can inadvertently pathologize these protective patterns, and what it actually takes to “unfawn”—from building tolerance for being in your body to risking authenticity on social media. It’s a conversation about the difference between performing helpfulness and genuine vulnerability, why relational trauma requires relational healing, and how moving from “something’s wrong with me” to appreciating your protective patterns changes everything.

“I know that my coping was fucking genius, and the only thing available at the time. Stop telling me that it was a problem to solve until you acknowledge the solution that it was.”

—Dr. Ingrid Clayton

TOPICS COVERED

What fawning is and how it differs from fight, flight, or freeze responses; Complex relational trauma versus single-incident trauma; How fawning develops when other trauma responses are unavailable or dangerous; The intersection of fawning with addiction recovery and 12-step programs; Why codependency and people-pleasing language can be pathologizing; How recovery culture’s emphasis on humility and ego deflation harms fawners; The relationship between self-betrayal and relational safety; Why fawning disconnects us from our bodies and internal experience; The unfawning process and what it requires; How childhood experiences of asking for help shape adult fawning patterns; Nervous system regulation in healing from chronic fawn response; Why trauma is about the wound inside us, not the event itself; How relational trauma requires relational healing; The difference between performing helpfulness and authentic vulnerability; Why perfectionism is a brilliant coping strategy; Moving from “something’s wrong with me” to appreciating protective patterns.

"I wasn’t broken — I was surviving. And no one had ever helped me see the difference."

—Dr. Ingrid Clayton

ABOUT INGRID

Ingrid Clayton, PhD, is a writer and clinical psychologist in private practice in Los Angeles, California. She’s the author of Fawning, Believing Me, where she uncovers her personal experience of childhood trauma from a psychologist’s perspective, and Recovering Spirituality: Achieving Emotional Sobriety in Your Spiritual Practice. Ingrid is a regular contributor to Psychology Today. With a Masters in transpersonal psychology and a PhD in clinical psychology, Ingrid has a holistic approach to psychotherapy, incorporating trauma-informed modalities like Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, and other experiential ways of working with the nervous system. Ingrid has been using a relational approach to therapy since 2004, bringing her whole self to the work—including her personal experience, intuition, and education. This enables her to be in real connection and collaboration with her clients.

LINKS

Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves, and How to Find Our Way Back

Ingrid’s Instagram

Ingrid’s Substack

Ingrid’s website

I’ve previously explored the fawn response with Meg Josephson if you’re looking to go deeper: Why We Think Everyone Is Always Mad at Us; and How To Stop Thinking Everyone Is Always Mad at You

CREDITS

Original music by Adam Day

Sound engineering, editor: Adam Day, adamdayphotography.com

Producers: Holly Whitaker, Adam Day

Original art by Misha Handschumacher, cmisha.com

This is the FIFTH part of the series After Quit Like a Woman: Exploring how neurodivergence, hormones, and cPTSD reshape recovery I talked about here.

Part 2, Relapse isn’t what you think is here; Part 3, Can you moderate alcohol? is here; Part 4, We got sober. Then we got our ADHD diagnosis. This is what happened next. is here; Part 6, The long game of boundaries, is here

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Part 2, 20 Notes on how to be lost (notes 1-8), is here. Part 3 (notes 9-14) is here.

As some of you know I’m in the middle of writing my second book which has the working title Lost is a Place (see footnote; this has changed)1. It is kind of a book about recovery, like this newsletter is kind of a newsletter about recovery, but it’s mostly the book I needed about four years ago when the center of my life stopped holding, and it all felt like one large failure or one big punishment or both those things and so much more and nothing at all. People often think lost starts when we lose things, but my center stopped holding on a mountain of accomplishment. I got interested in lost not because I felt so lost when I lost things, which I did, but because I felt so lost when I had them too.

I’ve talked around this subject and sometimes directly at it in this newsletter, but I’ve also wanted to keep a lot of the things I was working out within myself and on the page separate and for the book. That’s been helpful and it’s probably a good business plan, but it has started to feel like a dam has formed inside me in the shape of that book, and all my passion and all the new ideas and all the things of consequence I want to talk about are a collection of debris behind it, stagnating. And so I’ve decided to use this newsletter as a way of working out some of that material the same way I used my old blog to work out some of what ended up in QLAW, and trust instead of hoard.

“Hanging on to your work is like spending years writing the same entry in a diary. Moments and opportunities are lost. The next works are robbed of being brought to life.” - Rick Rubin, The Creative Act

This is the first of a three-part series on that subject, on being lost and in transition, focusing on the later parts of my own experience, the last two years. This essay is about living fully into liminality and accepting what Simone de Beauvoir called the fundamental ambiguity of existence. The second is 21 meditations on being lost, and the third is about what I’ve learned in between 2022 and now. They aren’t really three pieces that build on each other or anything like that, they’re just three pieces connected by my own experience, that I want to write to get on with my process already.

Liminal.

March 2021. The day I knew I was not going to work at Tempest (the company I’d founded and was, until February 2021, CEO of) anymore I was in Mexico. If I were a different kind of person I might have known before, but I’m naive when I should be suspicious and suspicious when I should be curious so it wasn’t until I was sitting in a palapa drinking bitter black coffee and Trying To Relax on Vacation But Checking My Email Anyway that I considered the gravity of the situation.

What happened was I got an email from Google, and Google told me a document I’d made that had my job description in it was being edited, and then Google showed me a summary of changes which were just a collection of strikethroughs, deletions, ablations. Google asked me if I wanted to go into the document and see the changes for myself and I said Why not, which is how I managed to see, in real time, both my role being reduced to nothing, and a conversation in the comments between the new CEO and the head of HR about my future at my own company, or lack thereof. There’s that scene in a Christmas Carol where the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come shows Ebenezer Scrooge his funeral and it horrifies him because the mourners are not really mourners but shitposters who are glad for his death. And that is the only thing I can think to use as an example so you understand what being in that document was like, like being ghost at my own terrible mean funeral.

I think this happened toward the beginning of my vacation but I can’t remember because I can’t remember much from that time. I can’t remember my feet on the ground or the water on my skin or how I took a breath or anything that would suggest I was alive and there. But there are pictures that prove it so I must have been. I know I slept a lot. I know I kept choosing not to fight for my job or my company or my future or my reputation, and that was in part because I was exhausted and in part because I believe in moving with reality and in part because fuck them.

A week later, a Thursday, still March, back in the U.S. and staying at a friend’s, I slept until noon and then I woke up. I took a shower. I did my hair. I put on a button down shirt, three gold chains, bright pink lipstick, and I joined the board meeting of the company I’d built surrounded by people I’d hired; a pariah. I sat serious yet smiling on camera, silent and nodding, and I was rewarded for that. For my calm, for my reserve, for my professionalism. What an adult they said after I resigned without protest or verbosity, which they thought was a choice I had made but was really a freeze response to an unfolding I could not metabolize.

The next day I went back to my mom’s house in Fresno where I put on her blue fleece robe and stayed in it for as long as I could. Unhinged is a good word to describe this part of my life, and I don’t mean that pejoratively. Unhinged is the description I place like a crown on that woman’s head because she was regally out of her fucking mind.

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This is not the story of how I lost something, or even of my grief, but the story of what happened when just like that, the thing I had yoked my identity, entire future, success, career, income, self-worth, life structure, love, reason for being, way of knowing my place in this world, exploded. It was there on a Wednesday and gone on a Thursday and it took all the furniture and the photo albums, the kids and the friends and the house. I didn’t see it coming and I had not planned for it at all and I did not know what to do.

Right after: I was tired and empty but I was also feral and furious and finally suspicious so I started to delete everything I’d ever written from the public domain. I harvested. I made a new website and I started a new blog and I set up this Substack you are currently reading.

I imagined, or rather schemed, a future of doing the same thing I’d been doing. Writing so many books about addiction. Going back to school to get my PhD and some letters behind my name to make me more serious. Getting hired by a competitor? Everything I considered was panicked and it didn’t deviate from the course I had set a decade earlier. I might have said to myself or to my friends or to my therapist or to you: The universe has something new and wonderful and mysterious in store for me, as evidenced by this bullshit. But inside I plotted to not do something new, to keep doing what I had done, because so much had been invested in it and maybe I only mattered if I was talking about alcohol or sobriety. Maybe there was no point to me but this and so it just had to be this.

“The things I thought would destroy me saved me, and the things I thought would save me, destroyed me.” —Martha Beck, Quitted podcast

But then two inconvenient things happened that made those plans for staying the same impossible, which were that I stopped giving a shit entirely, and no opportunities came anyway. It occurred to me that a person could feel really free in this situation, the slate being wiped so clean, enough savings to really let yourself get open to finding the next wonderful bigger thing. But I was not one of those people. I was just fucking scared. I just wanted none of it to be happening.

It’s hard to, in a short-ish essay, explain what that first year was like. I vacillated and cycled furiously. I inhabited the wise Self who trusted the whole damned process, the one who knew I was becoming the next thing and who could truly understand everything that was happening had its place, its own secret meaning. I fully comprehended that caterpillars lose their form before they become butterflies, that they turn into goo, and that I was that exact goo, my form dissolved. I inhabited the animal self too: The one who just wanted solidity and instruction, a next thing to do, an answer, an end; the one who pitched a series of delusional and half-baked ideas of what she’d do next to her agent and friends. There was sanity and insanity, certainty and fear, acceptance and rejection, forgiveness and rage, and they were all mixed up, rendering me into an unreliable version of myself that was paradoxically no version at all; a ticking, barely breathing thing. I might say on a Sunday: “This is wonderful” and mean it, and on Monday I might wish to be hit by a bus and mean that, too.

I had never known myself without a next thing, without a job or a way to prove my worth through objective contribution. And there I was with no plan, no next step, no comeback or anything like that, and I couldn’t force myself to even conjure the idea of conjuring the next thing. That article on languishing started trending around then, and it was so laughable because languishing sounded like a fucking beach vacation compared to what I had. What I had was a total loss of the plot of my life. What I had was nihilism interspersed with moments of a cheap, fleeting hope I kept trying in vain to tether myself to. I wanted the next new thing already, because the next new thing, so all the books said, would retroactively heal what had been broken, transmute all that lost and grief into a firmer set of bones from which the rest of my life would flesh.

There is a formula to these things.

In other words, I kept trying to create a new fixed identity, or rather waiting for a new fixed role in the world, in order to escape the absolute horror that is living in between. Liminal. I might not have rationally believed that my life only had value if I was doing what came after or making something of what had come before, but in my spirit or my animal body or whatever courses through you that accounts for your actual state of mind, it all felt like such a waste. Like a lack of something I was supposed to have. Like failing at my failing.

In the Three Commitments, an audio recording of an eight hour talk given by Pema Chodron, she explains how we are, as humans, “a whole consensus reality that resists the fundamental truth of our situation,” and the fundamental truth of our situation is that it’s completely ambiguous, ungiven unstable uncertain. Our resistance to that ambiguity, as she puts it, shows up in the creation of a fixed identity. We solidify into versions of ourselves, into the lives we lead, as a way to protect us from what’s actually happening here (chaos, all the time), and that when this fixed identity crumbles—when we lose our job or relationship or a person or whatever it was that gave us an illusion of control, or how to be, or our place in the world—it’s a crisis. We feel like we are coming undone and falling apart and that we have made some grave mistake because we don’t know who we are or how to be anymore. So we scramble to build the next identity, the next version of ourselves or shape of our lives, because to actually give into the nature of all our reality, which is that we don’t know what’s going on and we never have and we never will, is too much for most of us to bear.

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I listened to that talk in November 2021, eight months later, still in my robe. It was maybe the third or fifth or tenth time I had heard it and I had never picked up on this part of the the talk—the passage about our consensus reality and losing our shit when we lose our identities—because my identity was in tact in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, any of the years before when I would have listened to it.

“Honor the space between no longer and not yet.” —Nancy Levin

But it was 2021, and I was in crisis because all the things that had made me make sense were gone, and this is when it occurred to me that I might not try to reinvent myself, or grab hold of the next thing to save myself. That I might take advantage of my situation, and instead of seeing how fast I could get out of it, see how long I could stay in it, see what there was to see without distracting myself by building the next version. And in the same way not drinking alcohol gave me passage into a world most people refuse to even try to inhabit, so too did this.

I’ve said before this period of my life felt the most hateful, and I meant that and I mean that still. I didn’t have some satori experience, transcend myself in some profound way, there was no aha moment or flashing white light or the voice of God. It was just a during and an enduring, and it was all so very basic and often quite boring. But it was also a lot like visiting a thin place, where heaven and hell and earth get close enough for you to touch all three at once, and I did.

The next part, thoughts on how to live when your lost, posts next week.

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This year I read about 50 books. Most years I read closer to a hundred but this year, well, I have no idea what happened this year. Is it even still this year? Are we still counting years?

As usual, I’ve split them up into categories that make sense to me: [1] Non-fiction: addiction, anthropology, feminism, philosophy (the meat of what I tend to read); [2] Non-fiction: spiritual, self-help (side-meat); [3] Non-fiction: lit, memoir, poetry (tertiary meat); [4] Fiction (ummm…I didn’t read any fiction which I only realized while compiling this); [5] Older/notable (books I read in 2024 that deserve recognition; I didn’t send a list last year); and [6] DNF, or Did Not Finish. I like including what I didn’t finish to normalize not reading what’s not for you.

Lastly, I’ve been thinking about sharing how I read (in general and for research) along with how I research for my books and this newsletter (annotate, collect quotes, organize information, plus a bit of my writing process). If that’s something you’d be interested in, let me know and I’ll write it.

Lastly lastly: While I don’t use affiliate links in any other case, I do use them when compiling booklists, especially since they tend to take hours. If you find value in this list, please consider purchasing through one of the links.

xxHol

Non-fiction, Addiction, Anthropology, Philosophy, Feminism etc.

1. What is Wrong With Men: Patriarchy, the Crisis of Masculinity, and How (Of Course) Michael Douglas Films Explain Everything | year. 2025 | author. Jessa Crispin | A tour of what happened to men in the wake of their non-response to feminism, traced through Michael Douglas films over time; one of the most brilliant books I read all year.

2. Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves | year. 2025 | author. Sophie Gilbert | This is the best book I read all year. A heartbreaking overview of what happened to girls who came of age in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, years shaped by teen-celebrity objectification and sexualization, reality-TV humiliation cycles, hyper-sexualization (music vids, etc.) early-internet pornification, and the advertising machinery that sold all of it back to us as empowerment. It gave me an entirely different and chilling perspective on my high school and college years and reveals how many steps we took backwards and how that long cultural arc delivered us to this moment of fully normalized toxic masculinity.

3. Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires | year. 2023 | author. Rushkoff | This book changed me so much and was responsible for this article and many decisions I’ve made about how much I need, accumulation, wealth, and community. also has a great newsletter.

4. People of the Lie | year. 1998 | author. M. Scott Peck | This wasn’t the best book but it did give me some ideas that won’t leave me alone, like how evil exists, and our refusal to acknowledge or look at it directly is what allows evil to bloom like mold.

5. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion | year. 2013 | pages. 528 | author. Jonathan Haidt | While JH is a controversial figure and a lot of stuff exists out there calling out his work and bias, this was one of the best books I read in the past two years that totally shifted how I think about morality.

6. The Science of Weed: An Indispensable Guide to Cannabis | year. 2024 | author. Godfrey Pearlson | An essential for anyone who uses weed or thinks they understand it. Pearlson lays out how little we actually know about modern high-potency products and cannabis in general. I was genuinely shocked reading this book how little is understood about cannabis, and how much use is mushrooming (for instance, daily weed smokers passed daily drinkers for the first time in modern measurement, and Cannabinoid Hyperemesis Syndrome (CHS), a condition in which heavy or long-term users develop cycles of severe vomiting, has become so common it was just added to the DSM).

7. Society of the Spectacle | year. 1967 | author. Guy Debord | For the nerds and something that has helped me think about this particular point in time differently. Here’s a podcast that summarizes it.

8. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds | year. 2017 | author. adrienne maree brown | What I said about it in this book roundup: I had this book for years and tried to read it and couldn’t, at first because it felt like a personal attack (I couldn’t hear about how deeply problematic charismatic leaders are while I was still trying to crush being one) and then because I just could not get into it. I tried so hard. I thought it about it all the time. I moved it around and put it in different book piles. But then a month ago in whatever post-election fugue I was in, I picked it up and couldn’t stop. The best way for me to describe this book to you is that it’s my actual operating guide for this moment—it is the answer to the questions I have. Read this if you believe love is how the story ends, you’re burnt out on performative activism/ cancel culture/ post-modern deconstruction /pessimism/colonialism/ capitalism (all the isms), and looking for a no-nonsense guide on how to navigate multiple post-apocalyptic scenarios with grace and a love ethic.

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9. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism | year. 2024 | author. Yanis Varoufakis | What I said about it in this roundup: I’ve read many books on what comes after capitalism and this one takes the cake. Yanis suggests we are already beyond capitalism, in what he calls a new kind of feudalism (Technofeudalism!) where we all pay rent to a handful of wealthy landowners, except in this modern case the real estate is digital and the landlords are Elon, Mark and Jeff. The gist is that the wealth gap is growing, that money that flowed into the markets post-2008 was essentially siphoned out of the economy by the wealthiest and turned into super yachts, leaving the majority of the world impoverished and blaming one another and not the five fucking men who own and manipulate all of it. Read thi if you want to stop getting dopamine hits from frictionless online consumerism but need a better case for it. Related content: This podcast that summarizes the book.

10. Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World | year. 2023 | author. Naomi Klein | What I said about it in this book roundup: [Recommended] for her specific arguments about why the real conspiracy is capitalism, and how until enough of us internalize that idea we’ll continue to remain polarized and blame many people caught under the heel of the same system (think about how the recent assassination of the UnitedHealthcare CEO brought shared outrage from both sides of the political divide—this was in part (IMO) because the guts spilled out and everyone had to talk about it; instead of it being Obamacare/the left is stealing your money, United is.) In my discussion of the assassination of the UnitedHealthcare CEO (bottom of this newsletter), I wove in some of her ideas from this book because they were spot on. I can’t recommend it enough. Read this if you want to understand this moment in the broader context of social media, technology, and capitalism or why your formerly liberal friend voted for DJT and got hot for Joe Rogan.

11. The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning | year. 2012 | author. Iain McGilchrist | From this 2024 booklist from . This book was so good! About moving away from abstract/hierarchical to enmeshed and relational; a short 30 page book that will potentially blow your mind.

12. Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism | year. 2023 | author. Robert Chapman | A tour through the history and machinery of “normal”; how standardization, psychiatry, industry, capitalism, and the social sciences engineered an imaginary benchmark of human behavior, then disciplined us by treating it as real. I underlined 1/3 of it.

13. Beyond Addiction: How Science and Kindness Help People Change | year. 2025; 2014 | author. Jeffrey Foote; Carrie Wilkens; Nicole Kosanke | The best book that exists for family and friends of loved ones experiencing addiction. I wrote the foreword for the 10th anniversary edition.

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14. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness | year. 2024 | author. Jonathan Haidt | Again, this book has been massively criticized; still, I found a lot within it that made me think differently and act differently and the overall impact of my reading it to be positive.

15. Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind | year. 2024 | author. Mike Jay | A book about the very weird departure we took in the 20th century into how we conceive of drugs, drug use, and drug users, and the legacy of that departure.

16. Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight‑Loss Drugs | year. 2024 | author. Hari | A book about Hari’s (author of Chasing the Scream) use of Ozempic while researching the impact of Ozempic/GLP-1s. I thought it was great.

17. Slaying the Dragon: The History of Addiction Treatment in America | year. 1998 | author. William White | An actual textbook that traces the entire addiction treatment and recovery movement. I underlined 1/3 of it and took 80 pages of notes…

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18. Queer Ecologies | year. 2010 | author. Bruce Erickson; Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands | Similar to Du Bord and McGilchrist, a reorientation of how we imagine nature itself, showing how Western ideas of the natural were constructed through heteronormativity, hierarchy, and control. And in the same way Debord and McGilchrist argue for the real and relational and embedded over the abstract, symbolic, and simulated, this book exposes how our ecological imagination was flattened into ideology, and queers it up again.

19. Metamodernism (Brendan Graham Dempsey) What I said about it in this booklist: This one is hard to talk about without immediately worrying I’m putting you to sleep. I need you to know the words METAMODERNISM or SPIRAL DYNAMICS are awful boring words that sound like a corporate seminar but that are actually representative of some of the most fascinating frameworks that exist in explaining human behavior—from why we get addicted and recover to why masks became a political symbol to why half the country feels like they are living an entirely fucking different reality. Understanding human and cultural development models (like Piaget, Wilber, Loevinger, Maslow) has been foundational to my work—I’ve studied them since 2014 and it would be fair to say most of what I write about is somehow either influenced by or rests on my knowledge of them. And of all the books I’ve read on them, this one is one of the easiest to understand and the one that has the most relevant cultural examples, and is most specific to this exact point in time. (I recommend this piece by that summarizes the book.) Read this if you’re ready to stop being mad at everyone for being where they are at, and want to be part of a solution that takes into account that we live in a global society with many cultures and people at vastly different stages of development.

Non-fiction, Spiritual, Self-Help

20. It’s Not You | year. 2024 | author. Ramani Durvasula PhD | What I said about it in this booklist: Because of all these intersecting factors—my sensitivity, my cyclical nature, my family dynamics, my undiagnosed neurodivergence, my relational trauma and fawn response, my history as both scapegoat and “identified patient,” my addiction patterns, my deeply ingrained belief that everything is always my fault—I’ve come to understand myself as a classic target of narcissistic abuse. This book names what recovery spaces often mislabel as codependency, “bad boundaries,” or “self-sabotage,” reframing these behaviors as predictable responses to specific relational conditioning. Dr. Ramani writes with clinical precision but profound compassion for those of us who’ve spent years wondering why we attract the same painful dynamics, why we’re perpetually “too sensitive” or “too much,” and why traditional recovery advice about boundaries never quite sticks. This isn’t about demonizing anyone—it’s about understanding how certain personality types exploit trauma histories, neurodivergent traits, and people-pleasing patterns to create predictable cycles of harm. Essential if you’ve ever felt like the common denominator in every relationship disaster, or if you find yourself constantly apologizing for taking up space.

21. The Covert Passive Aggressive Narcissist | year. 2017 | author. Debbie Mirza | Same as above, this is a book for targets of narcissistic abuse. This and It’s Not You saved me.

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Part 2, Relapse isn’t what you think, is here

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Inevitably, we get into discussing whether or not it’s possible to moderate (anything, especially after addiction), and I bring up this article I wrote in 2022 (see below), before I used cannabis, where I answered a reader’s question about whether they can moderate alcohol. I was certain I was going to want to change a lot of it and it turns out I stand by pretty much all of it.

Carrie makes it clear in our episode that she would never answer someone if they asked her if they could moderate; she thinks it would be wholly irresponsible since every single one of us is different, and that you cannot answer this question for someone else; it can only be answered by ourselves. I agree.

Dear Recovering:

Is it possible to drink alcohol in moderation? I am now reading Mindful Drinking by Rosamund Dean who says that it is. I know the continuum of alcoholic on the left and nondrinker on the right. I like to drink and would fall somewhere left of center. There have been long periods of time when I would drink every day. We have a country house and Thursdays are cocktail hour where we could have as many as a dozen people. Not unusual to have 3 plus vodkas, a bottle of wine and after dinner drinks.

I should point out that years ago, I quit drinking for several years. During this time, I was the leading candidate to become [big job] of [redacted]. During an interview, [redacted] brought out a bottle of wine, and I think the fact that I did not drink cost me the job.

I do give up alcohol every year during lent. AND, I stopped drinking February 1st as part of a weight loss competition and have not started again. I would like to enjoy alcohol in moderation, but do not want to go back to where I was with a habit of drinking every day.

Sincerely,

Wondering

Dear Wondering,

You’re asking whether I believe people can moderate alcohol. The short answer is: sure. The long answer is long.

1. Disclaimer

This past winter when I was interviewed for the Well + Good1 podcast, the host asked me what advice I had for someone who was going to brunch and not drinking alcohol. The question wasn’t about cravings or dignity or addiction, it was about being left out, not having as much fun as everyone else, or having to explain your virgin orange juice. And because either I was really tired, or because this same “wellness” company had that day posted a meme about how wine was self-care, or because I’d just spent a week in zero-degree weather without heat or electricity due to a biblical-ass ice storm, I sighed, and said something like “My advice is this: the world is on fucking fire, if your biggest issue is you can’t get brunch-drunk or you might have an awkward moment turning down a mimosa, you’re doing fine.” Then I went off on some tangent about alcohol as a government sponsored drug meant to keep us complacent and out of power, blah blah blah.

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that they didn’t air any of this. They edited it to make me sound like a likable, aspirational lady here to help you crush your first Sober Curious Brunch (which, to be fair, is not outside my range), instead of a woman who has possibly spent too much time with her cat reading books on totalitarianism and raised-bed gardening.

I’m not opening with this story to answer your question, but to set an honest expectation. You’re asking someone who hasn’t had a drink in over nine years whether I think you should keep trying to make alcohol work, and I want to be clear that I’m biased, that my answer is subjective. I recently made it through getting kicked out of my company, losing most of my wealth and pretty much all my future plans, an ego death, a global pandemic, and two lonely lonely years in the deep dark woods without using alcohol or drugs2. I am not the kind of person inclined to believe one needs alcohol to survive the worst years of their life; I am also not kind of person inclined to believe one needs alcohol to enjoy the best ones, either.

That being said, I don’t have a horse in this race—I don’t care if you drink. I don’t care if anyone drinks. I care that you are true to yourself, that you make decisions that feel in alignment with your values and true desires. I care that you are at peace and living your best life, whatever that looks like.

Okay, enough throat clearing! Onto your question. The best way I know how to answer whether someone can moderate alcohol is through a series of observations I’ve made over the years, and then try and sum it up at the end.

2. There’s a reason people don’t “moderate” cigarettes

I’ve given about a hundred interviews over the past 7 years, give or take. Because of the entrenched beliefs we have about alcohol in the U.S.3 and because of the normalization and sheer ubiquity of drinking, in maybe half of those interviews I’ve been asked whether or not we can’t just moderate alcohol. Think about that: There I am, a person who has suffered from the use of alcohol, who has written a book about how terrible and pointless drinking is, who ran an entire company dedicated to helping people not die from drinking alcohol, and interviewers—instead of being alarmed by the damage caused by alcohol!!—are alarmed that someone would suggest none of us should use it.

I usually answer those moderation questions with another question: If we were talking about cigarettes, would you ask me about moderation? Do you think there’s a safe level of cigarette smoking that qualifies as moderate? If not, why not? Do you know anyone who smokes and isn’t addicted? Can some people use cigarettes without being harmed or harming? Is it extreme to suggest that none of us should use tobacco products?

We have very different cultural and societal attitudes and beliefs about cigarettes than we do about alcohol and I don’t need to get into them here; you know them. I use the cigarette as an example only because those commonly held beliefs about smoking are as entrenched as they are around alcohol, in almost opposing ways. Part of why you’re asking whether or not you can moderate alcohol is because you’ve been conditioned to believe ethanol is a good drug you’re supposed to use, that your life will be better with, just like you’ve been conditioned to believe nicotine is a bad drug you’re not supposed to use, that your life will be better without. These are constructs—not full, objective truths.

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When you say “moderate” alcohol you’re using it as a verb, and in our current zeitgeist, we don’t “moderate” any other psychoactive drug (you probably haven’t come across books on mindfully using meth, for instance.) This language exists specific to alcohol, and, IMO, exists to reinforce a false narrative that alcohol isn’t dangerous, problematic, toxic, or addictive, that we can control it if we try hard enough, that we should try hard to keep it in our lives versus just not use it at all.4

3. People who don’t have a problem with alcohol don’t have to work at moderating alcohol

When I first got sober I believed everyone cared to some degree about alcohol the way I did—they just controlled it better. It was a revelation to learn that I was wrong, that there are many, many people who don’t care about drinking alcohol (like at all). Alcohol is to them what something like prunes are to me: I like prunes enough, I’ll have them if they’re around, I can eat just one, and if I never have a prune again in my life I wouldn’t even think to miss it.

One time I had a partner (let’s call him George) who invited me to a bar on our first date without realizing I didn’t drink alcohol; he switched to seltzer when I told him, and he didn’t even finish his drink (?@!?). A month into our relationship he confided he’d “Just stopped drinking” that first night like he’d just stopped using fluoride toothpaste. To recap: This guy had one date with me, considered my stance on alcohol, gave it up on the spot. Over the year+ we dated I think he got drunk on a trip with his friends or something, probably had a few beers when I wasn’t around, but he basically went teetotal. No effort or anything like that.

When we’re asking if we can moderate alcohol, I think we’re sometimes asking if we can be like George—if we can just not care so much about it—without realizing that George has probably never once hoped he could moderate alcohol like you and I have. Alcohol is his prunes. Alcohol has no meaning to him.

George is not moderating. George isn’t efforting at all. You cannot be like George.

This doesn’t mean you can’t “moderate” alcohol, but this does mean if you keep it in your life, it won’t be a breezy, fun little affair, or an afterthought, or something you throw out entirely for a year without effort because you like a girl. If you decide to keep it in your life—to moderate—it will be work, just like it’s always been work.

(Also see: Know what you cannot fuck with)

4. It’s not a question of whether you can or cannot moderate; it’s a question of what kind of life you want

I can’t peak into your life and count what matters to you; I don’t know how important alcohol feels vs how important everything else does. We each have our own sets of values, our own priorities, likes and dislikes, and so forth, and because I am not you I cannot say definitively that your life will be better if you remove alcohol entirely or if you manage to successfully moderate (and successfully moderate, as we’ve discussed, is subjective. No one knows what that means).

I can tell you at one point, the thought of never drinking again felt like a death sentence. Unfathomable. Extreme. Costly. It turned out to be all those things. It was an extreme choice with unfathomable results and costly, expensive consequences. It also purchased me a number of things, namely, the freedom to never have to think about alcohol again, and a life that continues to exceed expectation—a very big, beautiful, complicated life that I fully live into, that I would not trade for all the best drinking days in the world.

If it were not you I was talking to but 2012 me—the one with all the reasons to to make it work, the one about to buy a book called The Easyway To Control Alcohol even though she was shitting blood and ruining her relationships and toeing the line of unemployment because KEEPING THE ALCOHOL WAS IMPORTANT—I’d be blunt. I’d say you don’t get both; you don’t get the really big life and winery tours. I’d say trying to keep your feet in two worlds is a really great way to not live at all.

But I’m not talking to 2012 me. I’m talking to you.

5. In summary

I could keep going on and break out into tangents. I could write a whole book on this topic (and in some ways, I did). But I’ll stop here.

You asked if I believed you could moderate alcohol, and I’d like to point out you already are moderating. It also seems—at least based on the information you’ve provided—you’re doing a very good job of it. Honestly? A number of people reading your letter will wish they could control alcohol like you do.

I don’t think that’s what you’re asking though, and I can’t answer what you’re asking. Only you can. Isn’t that terrible? Isn’t that great?

What I can tell you, with certainty, is that it isn’t about what decision you make. That you have the question at all, that you’re asking it, that you’re brave enough to look in all the corners of the internet and all the corners of your psyche and soul, that you’re here doing this scary big work of examining yourself and your life: this is the point. THIS is the work. And you’re doing it. Right now.

With love, admiration, respect, and excitement for you,

Hol

This is the THIRD part of the series After Quit Like a Woman: Exploring how neurodivergence, hormones, and cPTSD reshape recovery I talked about here.

Part 2, Everything we know about relapse is wrong, is here

Part 4, We got sober. Then we got our ADHD diagnosis. This is what happened next, is here

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Please see footnote about abstinence-based methods, and other footnotes, including updated ones about my change in substance use (or see this article, On using cannabis in recovery).

Part 3, Can you moderate alcohol?, is here.

Part 4, We got sober. Then we got our ADHD diagnosis. This is what happened next, is here.

Par 5, Does recovery re-traumatize fawners? is here

Part 6, The long game of boundaries, is here

What’s a relapse?

SHOW NOTES

What if the framework we use to understand addiction is actually making it harder for people to heal? Carrie Wilkens has spent over two decades building an alternative at the Center for Motivation and Change, one that starts with a radical premise: behaviors make sense. Instead of diagnosing and demanding abstinence, she asks what the substance is doing for someone, what pain it’s masking, what regulation it’s providing. This conversation explores why the word “relapse” itself is a trap, how families inadvertently push substance use underground, and why compassion—not control—is the foundation for real change. We talk about the complexity that gets flattened by disease model thinking, the scapegoating that keeps us from examining collective suffering, and what it actually looks like to create space for curiosity rather than judgment. It’s a conversation about unlearning fundamentalism, understanding co-occurring struggles like ADHD and trauma, and recognizing that people using substances aren’t morally corrupt—they’re in pain.

SHOW NOTES

The founding principles of CMC and how evidence-based treatment differs from traditional abstinence-only models; why “behaviors make sense” reframes the entire treatment approach; how substance use is almost always secondary to underlying issues like trauma, ADHD, anxiety, and depression; why moderation isn’t necessarily harder than abstinence; the problem with the word “relapse” and reframing it as returning to an old behavior; creating environments where people can talk openly without shame; the role of families and why labels like “codependent” miss the complexity; balancing structure and flexibility across different recovery stages; the unique cultural stigma around substance use; why people with ADHD and neurodivergence are at higher risk; the importance of self-awareness and curiosity in behavior change; how “in recovery” identity can be both helpful and limiting; practical communication strategies through CRAFT and Invitation to Change; the connection between suffering and substance use; natural recovery statistics; CMC’s nonprofit arm empowering families; how societal scapegoating of addiction prevents examining collective failures around trauma and systemic issues.

ABOUT CARRIE
Carrie Wilkens, PsyD, is a clinical psychologist and Co-President/CEO of the CMC:Foundation for Change, a nonprofit improving dissemination of evidence-based addiction treatment. She co-founded the Center for Motivation and Change, which operates outpatient centers in NYC, Long Island, DC, San Diego, and a residential program in the Berkshires. Dr. Wilkens co-authored the award-winning Beyond Addiction: How Science and Kindness Help People Change and its companion workbook, both grounded in CRAFT (Community Reinforcement and Family Training). Her Invitation to Change approach empowers families to stay engaged and support positive change without requiring abstinence. She’s been featured on CBS Morning Show, NPR, Ten Percent Happier, and HBO’s Risky Drinking documentary. Her work challenges traditional treatment by treating substance use as learned behavior connected to underlying struggles like trauma and ADHD, prioritizing curiosity and compassion over judgment.

CREDITS

Original music by Adam Day

Sound engineering, editor: Adam Day, adamdayphotography.com

Producers: Holly Whitaker, Adam Day

Original art by Misha Handschumacher, cmisha.com

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Anyway, it is a very popular book. It is also very good book, which I know not because I wrote it, but because I read it for the first time two months ago, and when I finished I thought, Damn, that is a good book. I was genuinely surprised because while so many people have thanked me for it, many others have hated me for it too and it’s always the latter ones whose opinions I trust more.

That it was controversial was part of the reason I could not bring myself to read it (and further could not bring myself to write a follow up to it; it’s coming). But also part of the reason I could not read it and could not write a follow up to it is because of what happened to me after publication, which are things that happened to a lot of us, but also things that did not happen to a lot of us.

I lived through a global pandemic and uprising and an insurrection and a second Trump presidency and now fascism or maybe just the plot of Idiocracy. I moved to the woods. I lost my company and my confidence and my purpose and the point of any of it. I got diagnosed with ADHD. I entered perimenopause. I lost more confidence. I got in an earth-shaking fight with my sister that put me on a path to understanding my family system and my role in it as the scapegoat and identified patient and finally extracted myself from my role. I learned about relational trauma, cPTSD, fawning, and narcissistic abuse, which changed a lot of how I saw myself, and who I let into my life, and how I am in the world. I tried psychedelics for therapy. I tried cannabis for fun. I tried letting my grays grow and nixing the Botox. I entered the first healthy relationship of my life. This is not an exhaustive list.

Anyway, the point is that a lot changed and I changed a lot, but the biggest parts of that change were all related to each other (clinical burnout, ADHD/sensory issues, hormones, cPTSD/relational trauma/relational patterns, chronic fawn response)—and they were all related to my recovery.

Over the next few months I’m going to be pulling the thread on these things in a series (including both podcasts and writings) called After Quit Like a Woman: Exploring how neurodivergence, hormones, and cPTSD reshape recovery.

The line-up as of now is as follows. We’ll also be doing chats and threads for each topic to crowd-source your questions and experiences. (We’ll be adding to this if there is continued interest—like vagus nerve/nervous system regulation, narcissistic abuse, IFS for addictions, etc.).

This series is for everyone but espeically for folks who: have trouble making abstinence stick/are white knuckling; feel like their recovery is no longer working; with hormonal fluctuations, neurodivergence, learning/processing differences, cPTSD, relational trauma, etc.

Please note that at least half of this series will be for paid subscribers only (a lot of work went into this series, and it’s extremely vulnerable)—you can access it all by becoming a paid member of this community.

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The series starts this week and continues through the end of the year. I would LOVE to hear from you about this below (I always love to hear from you).

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After Quit Like a Woman: A Series

We got sober. Then we got our ADHD diagnoses. Here’s what happened next.

How hormones impact drinking, addiction, and recovering

Does recovery retraumatize fawners

Relapse isn’t what you think

Can you moderate alcohol?

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Transcript

Hi, you all. This is Holly and this is a short solo episode to set up the series that I have been working on for a while for co-regulation that we are going to be releasing instead of through podcast channels here on my recovery newsletter.

I’m gonna start just a little bit about my experience because really what I’m calling this series is like what came after Quit Like a Woman? And what came after Quit Like a Woman kind of happened before Quit Like a Woman was even published. As soon as the book came out,

In late 2020, or actually two days before it came out, I published a really controversial op-ed in the New York Times. And it was called The Patriarchy of Alcoholics Anonymous. Sorry, The Patriarchy. I was corrected into saying patriarchy years ago, and now I can’t not say patriarchy, but no one I know says patriarchy. The Patriarchy of Alcoholics Anonymous. And.

My book was not highly about alcoholics anonymous. It was about a lot of things, but this was just kind of one of those unfortunate and fortunate choices in that it forever cemented my book as this anti AA book, which it was not. and it also just brought out so much vitriol, as like I, that, that was all directed at me. So pretty much immediately, even before publication, people hated me over this book. I’m a sensitive person.

I am a deeply, deeply sensitive person. And I’ve since learned I’m ADHD and what comes along with that. But it just immediately, the blowback was really, really hard to stomach. I didn’t have a lot of support. I really didn’t have any support at the time. I was the CEO of a company. People that worked for me were not my support system. They were people that worked for me. And that was who I was surrounded by plus

Yeah, I mean, was basically it with some few friends that were really close to me. But it was a lonely time. And I pretty much hated every moment of my book tour just because I was waiting for someone to come out and throw red paint on me or something. And then I’m already in this. then I’m running a company. At the time, that company had like 50 or 60 employees either like waged or.

W2s or contractors, but it was a lot of people that worked there a lot of attention on me a hard company to run anyways Then you know global pandemic I moved from Brooklyn to the woods by myself. I’m the CEO of this company from from the woods during my you know, like my book tour got cut, you know cut early and then and then after that like there’s there’s uprising and the

the amount of dedication that our company had to that was large and that was so much to manage through. And then there was the election and the insurrection. right around February of 2021, well actually in October of 2020, I stopped being the CEO of Tempest. I said I wanted to step down. I went to hire my replacement. I’ve written about this.

and I’ve talked about this on my podcast with Emily McDowell, quitted. pretty like, I hired someone to replace me and as soon as this person walked in the door, they wanted me out. And so, you know, it was the end of a very, very long slog. I was exhausted and I, you know, there’s a lot more nuance here to describe it, but the way that I’ve chosen to describe it is that I was forced out of my own company. And it really, you know, humiliating and...

painful, painful way. And that was just a few weeks after Chrissy Teigen shared on Instagram that my book had saved her life, or not saved her life, helped her quit drinking. So I went between, I had these two competing things happening. My life is, I am at the end of my marathon. I am done. My hair is falling out. I am living in the woods by myself.

My company, it’s just been one thing after the other after the other. And then I hire this person to make it easier and this person kind of guns for me. And then, you know, like as, as I am blowing up in culture, right. And so I’m, I’m on Good Morning America and the Tamron Hall show and giving talks for the Wall Street Journal, Future of Sobriety. And I’m getting canceled at my work by this new CEO. And for, and just like clusterfuck, right.

And if you’ve been following my work for a while, just never came back around for me. So I was in this stage where I’d lost all my structures, like all of us did. I was in this period of time where I didn’t have purpose or meaning. I was really beat up at the end of all of this. And then I just was like, something’s wrong. And that something is wrong was really, really with me. And it was probably late 2022 where I was at, not late, it was actually

summer 2022. No, maybe it was fall. Anyway, I went out with a friend and she had been recently diagnosed as ADHD and she was kind of in a CEO type position. And I said the same thing. I like everyone has that, you know, and the same thing that many people say to me now. It’s not real. I had always known I had it quote unquote, you know, that I was hyper or whatever. But this person was just like,

It is no one doesn’t know. No, not everyone has it. This is a thing. You need to go get tested and diagnosed. And I did. And I had it, which I knew. And then I just for me was like another thing that I just didn’t have the strength to reach. I was so done at that point. It was like I was you know, I’ve written about this. This is the part where I’m passively suicidal. Just means you don’t want to live. But you know, you wouldn’t mind being, you know, killed off, but you’re not going to do it yourself. And

So I think the ADHD diagnosis just kind of sat on the shelf for a while. And I slowly started to pick through it. At the same time as all of this, starting in 2020, I start losing my hair. Actually, in 2018 and 2019, I lost my hearing in my hair. But that was more stress related. So I didn’t really realize that I kind of slowly enter paramenopause. I have.

I have major hair loss. I have major hormone fluctuation. And also, during this time of my life falling apart and me trying to look for what is it, what is it, what is it, I finally get a different type of therapy. And I start doing parts work and somatic experiencing. And in that, I really, really understand. I’m the scapegoat in my family.

I have massive CPTSD and relational trauma. you know, all of this stuff is related. And then in there, I start using cannabis again, which is its whole other experience. And, you know, so in this period of time, right, like this is a lot, it’s kind of hard to shape, which is why the book I’m about it has taken a really long time, but there’s so much happening and yet, and yet all this stuff is fucking related.

All of it. So if you stand back of what I just told you, I had an addiction, I was in recovery, I was sober. Let’s go next to ADHD. We know that undiagnosed, untreated ADHD pretty much turns into addiction. There are studies that show about 40 % of populations in recovery settings have undiagnosed, untreated, not treated, or diagnosed, untreated, undiagnosed neurodivert ADHD.

We know there’s a high correlation with addiction and dyslexia. We know there’s a high correlation with addiction and autism. These things have to do with so many things. The dopaminergic system, it has to do with our stress levels. It has to do with the way we sue. It has to do with our coping mechanisms. But it also has to do with our nervous system and our nervous system management. And then you go to hormones. Well, ADHD and hormones are related.

taking birth control pills can regulate ADHD for an adolescent girl. Me taking hormones in paramanopause regulated my ADHD. It also helped me with my addictive tendencies. And then a relapse, a relapse happens because of nervous system dysregulation. A relapse happens because of not having effective coping mechanisms. CPTSD, oftentimes.

is something that is at the root of all of this, is separate from nervous system regulation, but is not separate from nervous system regulation. And so you kind of see like, it’s almost, I’m not doing this justice, but there’s a lot of layers here, a lot of overlap. so for me, know, Quit Like a Woman, everything I wrote in that book, I recently reread it. I had never read it since I published it. It was too hard.

And that’s, write about that in the book that I’m working on. But I recently moved from Random House to a different publishing house. And in that move, I, with my new editor, read my old stuff. And it was the first time I’d read Quit Like a Woman since it was published. It’s an incredible book. Like, I’m not saying that to toot my own horn. I had a really hard experience with that book. I just, it was like having, I don’t know how to explain it. It’s just too painful. And so I didn’t really.

love that book. I never felt love like, I mean, I love what that book has done for people. I love that that book exists. I did not like it for a while. It was too painful. And I recently read it. It’s an incredible book. Like I was very impressed with it. And not only that, it really holds up. It actually, like I had these fears that like so much had changed. And when I read it, I was like, fuck, shit has not changed. So

Quit Like a Woman is an incredible book that was written by a woman in her 30s who had not yet encountered paramenopause or major hormonal fluctuations and who did not know at the time that she had ADHD. And so in the last five years, just kind of in my own collective grief and pain and transformation and these different diagnoses and these different realizations and reevaluations,

there’s some new information that I have to share and new information that I want to explore and thus this series. And so I’m just gonna leave it there. Like a lot of this stuff, I wanna like one thing I wanna say, you know, I am writing a book on relapse as I’ve already mentioned. don’t like the, I don’t think that’s a pejorative thing. I don’t also necessarily use that word to describe my own experience.

It’s just a universal term that explains a phenomenon a lot of us understand, but relapse can be defined, like if you look it up there’s this paper called 50 Ways to Fall Off the Wagon. And there’s no universal definition for relapse. It can mean literally like having a tincture that accidentally had alcohol and you relapse, gotta reset your day count all the way up to.

You gotta be drinking for a long time or be doing drugs for a long time again before we really count it as a rel- Like there’s so many different definitions. So I’m using it here just to indicate the experience of being in recovery or being sober and using a substance again after you have made some changes with it, which is something that happens to, I think it’s 85 % of people. And so again, I’m gonna leave it there. I wanted to set it up kind of with my story and my narrative, but what we have coming up, I’m kicking this off with a conversation I have.

with Kerry Wilkins, this conversation ends up just being about moderation and relapse. And then after that, I will be having conversations about the FON response. I’ve already had two conversations with Meg Josephson. You can find that under the co-regulation podcast. But I’m going to be going forward having more conversations about relational trauma, the FON response, relapse, and neurodivergence, and then hormones. There’s so many of them. I always forget to.

say all of them and I probably just repeated some of them. And so this is going to be probably like a seven, eight, nine part series that I’m going to be picking at and exploring over the next few months as I work to finish the book that I am working on. The next conversation will be released on October, I think it’s October 16th. We’re going to try and release these on a specific day. But I’m going to be dripping them over a few months.

there will be a lot of different content in between. And so this is not just the only thing that’s gonna be on this newsletter going forward, but this is a series that we have been pulling together that I’m really excited. It’s again, not meant to like draw any conclusions, but really just meant to account for things that don’t get accounted for in our existing understanding of addiction. I mean, this is like, it is wild to me that it is 2025 and we know what we know and yet we don’t know things like.

you know, let’s just talk about hormones. Well, there’s a relapse day. Did you know that? There is a day that folks who are in recovery in that cycle relapse more than others. There’s also windows in our cycle that are better to start quitting something. And so we don’t want to quit during our luteal phase. We want to quit when we’re feeling juicy and good and on top of the world. And so there’s a better quit date.

and based on our hormones. It’s just one thing. Another thing that became so powerfully apparent to me is that a lot of my behaviors were stimming. I have ADHD. This is a very well-known thing. But when you look through most of the literature that exists on addiction and recovery, you’re not finding this stuff about hormones. You’re not finding this stuff about autism. You’re not finding this stuff about ADHD.

And you’re also not really finding stuff about relapse. Relapse is this other thing. Happens to most people that go through some type of abstinence-based recovery or even harm reduction. And yet, it’s something that we don’t talk about or know about. And all these things are deeply related. And knowing about them helps us to be healthier and to have easier recoveries and to make better decisions for ourselves and to have greater success.

on this side of things, knowing what I know about myself now, it wouldn’t change what I put in Quit Like a Woman. Like everything that I needed in my recovery, I needed in my recovery. But after going through what I’ve gone through and being exposed to what I have been exposed to and what I know now and experiencing the benefit I have received from that knowledge,

and then doing something with that knowledge is night and day. Even though I had a very strong recovery prior to knowing all of this, there were massive holes in it because of these things. And they’re not there now. Now it’s a whole picture. And so this is not meant to fix you or solve you or give you all the information, but really it’s just me inviting you along.

into some of the places that I have been poking around so that hopefully you can find some keys for yourself. And I am really excited to do it. It’s been a long few years. think that enough of you have been here through a lot with me. I’ve written through a lot of this in recovering. I’ve written through a lot of this experience. And I am now...

in a really good place. I’m healthier than I’ve ever been, but not necessarily physiologically or mentally. when I say healthier, I mean I’m more rooted, I’m more grounded. It’s sustainable. It feels good. My life feels good. I would say the biggest difference is that before it really felt like keeping balls in the air.

On this side of it, it more feels like just maintaining in a kind of lovely way. So I’ll leave it at that. Thank you so much for listening. I deeply appreciate you being here. And I hope that this is a benefit to you.

OFFICE HOURS! Starting Saturday, October 11th, at 10am PT/1pm ET (6pm UK) I’m going to be hosting office hours for paid subscribers. This will be a call for us to come together, do a little breathing, and either share what’s happening for you or ask questions of me. (If you were in Hip Sobriety School, this will be a little like the Q&A format.) Registration link is at the bottom, below the paywall. The call will not be recorded.

On Not Going

Links are at the bottom. Be safe out there buddies.

A few weeks ago I was driving down our windy country road when a tiny little woman of about 80 in what looked to be a panic flagged me down. I pulled over and rolled my window down when before I knew it she was getting in my car; what she needed was a ride to the bottom of the hill to catch a bus. It ended up that she was going to get her hair cut in Woodstock next to where I do yoga, and I told her I’d drive her there instead. She is French; 84; an artist and a mountaineer. She lost her license 3 years ago from a stroke, and she does the whole panicked hitchhiking thing regularly which is how she gets around.

On the way to yoga she told me she was born in France in the middle of the Nazi occupation and that I had no idea what war does to people, what your parents do to keep you safe and fed, what her mom did with the soldiers. Before we departed she told me World War III was coming; “They want what they have always wanted which is all the humans gone, and they will succeed.” I came home and sat Jeremy down and told him I had some bad news about WWIII; it was coming.

Later that night I told a “politically connected” friend about Marguerite and asked what they thought of WWIII, and they’d just been to dinner with even more “politically connected” people who said no such thing was happening and just wait for 2026.

What struck me was how equally firm they both sounded.

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From Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind¹, Shunryu Suzuki talks about four kinds of people horses:

It is said that there are four kinds of horses: excellent ones, good ones, poor ones, and bad ones. The best horse will run slow and fast, right and left, at the driver’s will, before it sees the shadow of the whip; the second best will run as well as the first one does, just before the whip reaches its skin; the third one will run when it feels pain on its body; the fourth will run after the pain penetrates to the marrow of its bones. You can imagine how difficult it is for the fourth one to learn how to run!

His basic point is that excellent people horses aren’t better or worse than bad people horses; but notes the worst horse might find more meaning in their practice or life, or even develop more because of their struggle.

Pema Chödrön talks about the worst horse in a few places and most notably, in her book The Wisdom of No Escape², points out that all the venerated teachers of the Karma Kagyü lineage of Tibetan Buddhism (the lineage in which she is trained) were worst horses; real disasters; people who “blew it time and time again.” Tilopa was a madman, Milarepa was a murderer, Naropa was overly intellectual and stubborn, Marpa flew into rages and beat people, and Gampopa was arrogant. If you aren’t familiar with any of these names or this lineage of Buddhism, these are the wise ones; the ones “to whom we prostrate when we do prostrations.”

I first read about the worst horse thing in 2021 and I’ve returned to the the concept often because I am a worst horse. The pain has to penetrate to the marrow of my bones; I’ve been known to blow it time after time; I can be a real disaster.

Over the years, a majority of the letters I’ve received are from other worst horses. People that keep trying and making the same mistakes; people who find living more difficult than the rest; people in recovery who wonder when they will have achieved some sense of completion; people who ask why they have to do all this bullshit work other people don’t seem to have to do. They are asking me the same questions I have. When is it enough? When can I stop? When does it get easier? When is it less messy? When do I become an excellent horse?

I don’t know the answer to those questions. I could guess and probably come up with some great sounding answers, but the truth is I don’t know when it gets easier. I don’t know when we feel grown up. I don’t know why it’s harder for some of us. I don’t know when it gets less messy.

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