SUMMARY KEYWORDS

drinking, alcohol, purpose, sobriety, stay sober, pivot, partner, drinks, problematically, quitting drinking, quit drinking, beliefs, dreams, mindset, alignment, values, security, convenience, give, emotions, household, wife, husband, spouse, kids, marriage, married, couple, couples, sober, sober curious, AA, alcoholic, therapy, self-help books, sober coach, take a break from alcohol, sober coaching, life coaching, break the cycle, conversations, personality, character, morality, health, navigate, align, shifting, focus, accountability, freedom, time, money, energy, happier, loving yourself, self-love, taking care of yourself, deep sleep, joy, grateful, enjoy, pride, removing alcohol, alcohol-free, journey, recovery, parenting, mental health counselor, certified Gottman therapist, relational life therapist, not drinking, stop drinking, marriage therapy, challenges, issues, struggled, substance, relationships, tools, strategies, hope, raw, vulnerable, Dry January, day one, boundaries, Gottman method, take care of yourself, drug of choice, anger, resentment, self-esteem

SPEAKERS: Casey McGuire Davidson + Zach Brittle

00:02

Welcome to the Hello Someday Podcast, the podcast for busy women who are ready to drink less and live more. I’m Casey McGuire Davidson, ex-red wine girl turned life coach helping women create lives they love without alcohol. But it wasn’t that long ago that I was anxious, overwhelmed, and drinking a bottle of wine and night to unwind. I thought that wine was the glue, holding my life together, helping me cope with my kids, my stressful job and my busy life. I didn’t realize that my love affair with drinking was making me more anxious and less able to manage my responsibilities.

In this podcast, my goal is to teach you the tried and true secrets of creating and living a life you don’t want to escape from.

Each week, I’ll bring you tools, lessons and conversations to help you drink less and live more. I’ll teach you how to navigate our drinking obsessed culture without a bus, how to sit with your emotions, when you’re lonely or angry, frustrated or overwhelmed, how to self soothe without a drink, and how to turn the decision to stop drinking from your worst case scenario to the best decision of your life.

I am so glad you’re here. Now let’s get started.

Hey there. Welcome back to the show.

A lot of women who decide to stop drinking tell me that they feel so much better without alcohol. But a challenging point is that their partner is still drinking and their partner has no desire or interest in stopping as well.

 

And if you are in that position, you are absolutely not alone. It’s hard enough to take a break from drinking. But it can feel almost impossible when your partner is still drinking, possibly problematically and doesn’t want to stop.

 

So in this week’s episode, I’m sitting down with Zach Brittle. He’s a licensed mental health counselor, a certified Gottman therapist, and a relational life therapist.

 

[00:02:00]

Zach is the host of the Marriage Therapy Radio, and the author of the bestselling relationship guides the Relationship Alphabet and the Marriage Therapy Journal. And Zach’s also lived this exact struggle in his own marriage. After 20 years of drinking, Zach got sober in 2020, but 18 months later, completely sober, sitting across from his wife of 28 years, Rebecca, at a restaurant.

 

A new challenge arose. Over the years that Zach’s life was in chaos. Becca held everything together, but as Zach recovered, Rebecca’s drinking worsened.

So, Zach will help us understand what happened and how she decided despite initial reluctance to join him not drinking and now they’re in recovery together.

 

Zach can also talk about challenges he’s faced in parenting where their teenage daughter withdrew completely and struggled with her own issues around substances and relationships. So, we’re going to dig into all of that.

 

[00:03:00]

Zach’s here to share his tools and strategies and hope, and thank you for being here, Zach.

 

Yeah, yeah, you’re welcome. It’s wild listening to you, I think today in particular, I’m feeling a little raw and vulnerable and that hearing that again, was like, whoa, you’ve been through a lot.

It’s a lot. Yeah. It’s a lot of stuff. Yeah, but I’m grateful. That’s what I feel mostly. I, I’m coming up on 5 years and people, I don’t know if you’ve had this experience, people will say congratulations, and I don’t resonate with congratulations at all. Like, I don’t feel like I’ve accomplished anything.

It doesn’t feel like a, a badge or a banner. It feels, I just feel grateful to be in the spot that I’m in now with my family, and I’m happy to share more about any of that with you and those of you who are listening.

So, yeah. Will you start kind of at the beginning or what made you decide to stop drinking in 2020?

[00:04:00]

Yeah. What I found, or some language that I found in the time that I’ve been sober is that my problem with alcohol actually began before I ever touched a drink. My first drink was on my 21st birthday. It was a Zima. If you remember Zima.

So, I do remember it. It wasn’t good.

No, it was terrible. But I was actually terrified. I was terrified that when I finally drank that I was going to turn into, like Mr. Hyde or something. Like, I thought it was going to do something to my whole self. And that comes from some story that I collected. Watching my parents and some, just some stories that I had seen with my friends and I kind of had taken the role of being the responsible together one in my friend groups.

And I just thought if the second that I touch this thing, it’s going to turn me into a monster. And it didn’t, of course it was, but I was like, huh, that’s not too bad. My second drink was actually a rum and coke. And then, I was off and running and I wouldn’t say that, but like I sort of, had, you know, unleashed the beast maybe, or like I just sort of opened Pandora’s box or whatever it was.

[00:05:00]

And for the longest time I just felt like it was an experiment. It was an experiment for me to kind of figure out like what were my limits and how did I do? And I think my problematic drinking probably started right around the time my first baby was born.

Or at least I started to notice it was problematic.

Certainly in retrospect, that’s when I kind of go, oh yeah, that wasn’t normal or that wasn’t okay. She’s 22 now. So like 22 years of well, no, no, no. I don’t even want to really do the math, but like I had this thing that was just like a problem for me.

And then, you know, in 2020 by 2020, I would say I probably tried to quit drinking 6 or 7 times. Like, different reasons. I would, I would do Dry January or I would. Train for a triathlon, or I would just say it’s time for me to quit. And you know, I had all these different, like little p little mini pauses and I felt like a lot of people do like, oh, I can quit anytime, like, and then, and then, you know, February 1st would roll around and I would be like, oh, great, I can start drinking again.

 

[00:06:00]

And then it would, I would just kind of get back to wherever I was at, you know. So by the time. 2020 rolled around. I knew I was in trouble. And I was starting to investigate asking people for help. I joined like an accountability group. I, I, you know, I read some of Annie Grace’s stuff. You might know her name.

Like, I was like, it was all about that. And for a second. And then, the pandemic started. And once the pandemic started I just, fell off a cliff. Like I just, it was by the end of the summer of 2020, I could, my, like I was drinking during the day. I was drinking while I was working.

I was seeing clients on Zoom and was drinking while I was in client meetings. If you go to YouTube right now and you type in my name, type in Zach Brittle and Vanity Fair there’s a whole bunch of videos that we did that summer. For Vanity Fair, and if you just look at the stills of those videos, like just the, like the, the, the cover pages of those videos, my face is just saturated.

It’s just full of alcohol. Like, I just look like, and I was a really high functioning alcoholic. I’m very high functioning alcoholic, but I could do a lot of stuff or at least I thought I could anyway. But I look at some of those images and I’m like, I don’t even know who that guy was. And by October, I was ready to end it.

I was ready to take my own life. Like, I just, like, there’s no way out. I couldn’t, I was overwhelmed with the alcoholism. I was overwhelmed with the pandemic. I was overwhelmed just with just like the, my memory. I couldn’t, I couldn’t remember stuff. I couldn’t remember like my friend’s names, like it was bad.

And I had a very specific. Plan to kill myself that my therapist, kind of, held me accountable around. It was on a very specific weekend which doesn’t quite matter the details, but I got back from that weekend and I didn’t do it.

[00:08:00]

And then, it was like, okay, I got to fucking do something. And. I called a guy who’d been in my life and had been kind of a, he’s about 70 maybe, and he was just a non-drinking guy.

He was active in AA and I was like, I got to do this. And he was like, okay, let’s do it. And he, he was funny. He said, if you can get sober any other way than AA, go for it.

 

Absolutely. If you can do it without AA, absolutely. I do it. But I was like, I don’t know if I can. I tried so many different things and I was at the powerlessness part.

I was at the step one part and, it was funny. I just found the other day this note card that I had. ’cause right around the middle of October I started counting days sober and I had to have one day, and then I have like 3 days and then I’d go back to day one. I had little hash marks and I just, I have this note card just filled with hash marks. But I’m a little bit of a rare bird because I got into AA. I didn’t quit drinking.

 

[00:09:00]

I started going to meetings. I found this meeting, in South Africa, ’cause all the meetings were on Zoom at that point. Yeah. And found this meeting in South Africa that I loved. I immediately connected with the vibe there.

I think that’s an important thing that I usually tell people who are interested in AA, like, joining AA is kind of like going to church, like, like, okay, fine. But like do you go to a Catholic church? Do you go to non-denominational church? Do you go to a church that meets in the forest? Do you go to a church that is highly, like church isn’t a thing?

There’s all kinds of different expressions. Yeah. Of a church. Just the same way I feel about AA. Like, oh, I don’t like AA. Well then, you haven’t maybe just found the right meeting or whatever. But anyway, I got into this meeting and I was counting my card, had my card every day. I was like, here’s my card.

I’m on day 4. And then, I’d be like, on day one again, and then I’d be on day, whatever, and I finally got my wits about me. And I, I, I found enough like stability, and this is where I am a little bit unusual.

 

[00:10:00]

I stopped drinking on November the 13th. I picked 13 because it was my favorite day. I just kind of was ready.

 

I drank all day. I had a 6 pack starting, I mean, I was drinking like normal and then I got a 6 pack in the evening and I was about 5 and a half beers into my 6 pack and midnight rolled around and I was like, I’m done. I just poured out this second half of this last beer that I had teed up and I haven’t had a drink since.

Like, I, I literally put it down. I’ve never, I haven’t even at this point I don’t even think about alcohol. It’s not even like part of my, like it’s just, that happened, that happened later. But like, I’m unusual in the sense that like, I picked my day, I decided, and I never drank again. I didn’t have, at that point, in that part of my story, I didn’t have the relapsing, you know, going out kind of stories.

And certainly I might at some point, who knows, I’m not immune. But yeah, I just put it down. And the thing that’s really important for me to say about that is.

[00:11:00]

Part of why that was easy is I pretty quickly came to understand that my drug of choice wasn’t alcohol. My drug of choice is anger and resentment, and when I was able to name that, it’s actually what I feel like I’m in recovery from now.

 

I don’t really feel like I’m, I mean, a hundred percent I’m in recovery from alcoholism and I cannot, I do not want to drink. But the drug for me is anger and resentment, and that’s actually the beginning of me even getting close to thinking about drinking.

I like to ask people this question, do you know when you will drink again? Like, do you know what your next drink will, the context of your next drink? I know the context of my next drink. I will be alone. I will probably be in an airport or a hotel.I will be very angry. And I will be I’ll be at, I’ll be at some bar and I’ll just say, line ’em up. That’s, that is what I will do.

[00:12:00]

That’s, that is the context in which I will drink. Next. The cue for me though is anger. Like, anger is the access to that and loneliness.

Yeah. It’s not access. I can go to any fridge, open up any fridge that can be loaded with the, and I don’t, I’m not, I’m not going to grab a beer out of that fridge. I’ll go to a wedding with an open bar. I’m not going to, I’m not worried about it. I go to drinks with friends, no big deal. I go to a very nice Michelin dinner. Where like they have wine pairing.

Doesn’t even, don’t, I don’t even flinch. And I’m grateful for that. That’s where my gratitude is. But I start to get angry and pissed off kind of like I am today. I be, I begin to become susceptible and so then I have to pay that much more attention and I start the work. Of like recovery work.

So, I don’t know. I think I answered your question. I hope that is, I don’t know. Yeah. That’s, that’s my story.

[00:13:00]

Yeah. About how I kind of came to putting down, you know, half a beer, what was for the last time. And then, but now, I really feel like I’m clear about what my work is, which is around anger and resentment.

 

So, did you have to pretty quickly after you stopped drinking, start to address the anger and resentment? ’cause that’s a huge trigger for you obviously.

Yeah, I mean I was working the steps I had, I was with this guy Dave and Jim, they were kind of a tag team sponsors for me and I was working the steps with them and you know, kind of once I got clear with their help and with their wisdom that.

They, they would, they would like to say things like, the big book never once says, quit drinking, never once talks about stopping drinking. It always talks about addressing the spiritual issue. And when, when I was able to tap into that, I actually felt a great deal of relief. And yeah, when I started working the steps, I started working the steps around my anger.

There’s a, there’s a there’s a process that everybody kind of understands, you know, maybe subliminally, this idea of making amends.

[00:14:00]

It was, the way it rolled out for me was surprising. I thought you were making amends to all the people that you had harmed, and then maybe in some traditions you do, but that’s not what happened in my process with Jim and Dave I started to make a list of all the people I had anger and resentment for, and it was a long list.

And at the very, very top of the list was my dad. The most complicated one is, is the one I held the most resentment for was my dad. At the bottom of that list was an inanimate object. It was an aluminum Christmas tree stand. That in 1998, I beat the shit out of I destroyed this thing. I was in the middle of destroying it while trying to put up a Christmas tree, you know, holidays.

Happy joy. Yeah. Drove to a hardware store, bought a sledgehammer, came back and. Finished it off and what Didn’t buy a second better Christmas tree steak? No, no, no, no. I wasn’t even close. No, no, no. But, but the thing that was notable about that story is that two things.

[00:15:00]

One is I was alone. I had no audience, no one was watching me do that.

I was totally by myself. And the second one, when I, I wasn’t drinking, I was completely sober. So I, but I was drunk. I was drunk. So I wrote this Christmas tree stand a letter like an immense letter, and it changed my life. Writing a letter to a Christmas tree change changed my life because it was, I mean, I couldn’t, I wasn’t going to get a response.

I couldn’t hold it responsible for anything. Like what? You didn’t do what I wanted you to do, so you deserve to be treated this way. Like, no, that’s not it. And to be honest, like after that letter, the second letter I wrote was to my middle school bully. Who objectively harmed me, who was like, who terrorized me through middle school.

And by the time I’d written that second letter, I was done, not done with my recovery, but I wasn’t angry at my dad anymore. Mm-hmm. I was like, okay, he’s dead. He’s been dead for 10 years.

[00:16:00]

So I, this was not like I was ever going to get anything from him, but I, I just sort of was like, this is about me.

This is about me and my stuff. And yep, people can harm you. People can, you know, not raise you, right. They can, whatever. But at the end of the day, it’s just me, alone with myself. And I decided to kind of just do, continue to do that work. So, I worked all the way through the steps, got to 12.

I’m not active in AA anymore. I don’t. I attend about one meeting a year, and that’s in South Africa. I usually go back around Thanksgiving time just to participate in the community and to be a part of the kind of collective gratitude. But I, I’m not beholden to meetings. I don’t. I’ve only been to 3 in-person meetings in my entire life, like mm-hmm.

So, one was in Ireland, which was kind of fun. Went to an AA meeting in Ireland with my wife. At 10 o’clock in the morning it was packed.

Oh my gosh. So, you did all your step work virtually with someone from the group in South Africa? No, no. Jim and Dave are local.

[00:17:00]

Oh, okay. We would meet up at Starbucks and we would just read through the big book.

And the thing about that is you read the first 162 pages and I think it took us almost two years. ’cause we’d read three pages and we’d talk, and then we’d come back and we’d pick up where we left off and we’d read, you know, two more pages or 10 more pages and it took me two years. And that. Was just, that was what I needed to do.

And curious, how does the work that you’ve done as a therapist, as a Gottman therapist sort of intersect with the big book? Or how do you put those two together? Or do you?

 

Yeah, I would, well, I wouldn’t put the Gottman work there. I think John Gottman’s work is incredible, but it doesn’t account for humanity.

It doesn’t account for your, it’s Science. The work that I’ve done with relational life therapy, which is Terry Reel’s work is, it’s almost in exact parallel. So, I started Terry’s work is really about relational recovery. It’s about recovery from, well, anger and resentment for me, but it’s recovery from codependence, recovery from shame, recovery from grandiosity.

[00:18:00]

It’s about recovery from childhood trauma, you know, and it’s, it, it’s almost in parallel. So, what was really good for me was to gain access to some of that training professionally, which was just a fluke of timing. But I’m doing this like recovery work on the 12 step side on the, on the AA side, while I’m learning about.

Relational life therapy and deepening my expertise in that space. And it’s the same invitation. It’s the same invitation, which is to really examine self and become responsible to and for self as you try to do relationship with your dad, your aluminum tree stand, your wife, your husband, whatever. So it’s actually been I think that, I think there’s a lot of, a lot of overlap, particularly in that methodology. With regard to kind of how you find sanity again.

[00:19:00]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so it sounds like you had a lot of work to do on your own. Mm-hmm. Both before and then after you stopped drinking. In terms of moving through that anger and resentment, and also moving through the 12 steps and reading the big book.

Yeah. At what point did you look at your wife and say, okay, how is this working? Or was that Yeah, the whole way through. So, Rebecca was my drinking buddy for the longest time. We were like, we would totally, we were, we actually joked from time to time about going to rehab together and she was always a part of my like, support group whenever I would try to quit drinking and, and, you know, she had problematic drinking for sure, but I was always the worst. I was the worst of the two of us. I was always the worst. Yeah. And so it was never like, it was my drinking that needed to get fixed first. When I got sober, she was a cheerleader. She was grateful. She was happy about it.

[00:20:00]

She was onboard. But I honestly, like at once, I, I mean, I was going to kill myself. I wasn’t like thinking about my marriage, I was thinking about my life. And so, when I got sober, I just started to like do focus on that completely. I wasn’t focused on her. I wasn’t focused on my kids. I wasn’t worried about her drinking.

I was literally worried about trying to stay alive, stay sober, stay away from anger and resentment.

Did she know how bad it was for you in terms of suicidal thoughts?

I don’t think so. Like, I don’t really think so. I certainly didn’t loop her in in real time. That was me and my therapist and like, one other person.

And so, as I was kind of getting healthier and getting more confident and getting, finding my own space, I think it probably took me about a year. I don’t have hard dates on any of this, but it probably took me about a year to feel like I’m in, I’m good. Like I’m, I wasn’t patting myself on the back.

[00:21:00]

I didn’t take any credit. I got a lot of people celebrating for me on my one year anniversary on, on November 13th, 2001, I was at Disneyland. And I got a bunch of phone calls and I was having the best time, but I, I almost forgot it was the day. People knew it was the day, but I had, like, I don’t want to say I almost forgot.

Like, I definitely knew it was the day, but it was still like just a day. And then she, but she had spun out and I think, you know, Jim and Dave both. Dave in particular was like, you know what happens is you’ve got a system, you’ve got a family system, and the family system is moving around like a, like a mobile that hangs over a baby’s crib, like it has all these different like things hanging from a string and they’re all kind of moving around.

If you grab one of them and you stop it, me, all those other pieces start to flip out. They start to like, they start to go crazy because they’re used to the rhythm and then the rhythm stops and those other pieces start to spin or start to kind of go become erratic. And that’s what happened for Rebecca.

[00:22:00]

She just, I don’t know if it’s, would’ve been inevitable. I certainly didn’t cause it, but she, her drinking got a lot worse. She just started to just, yeah, just succumb. I don’t know if that’s the right word, but the thing about it that’s wild is that her drinking and her drug of choice are just really different than mine.

We’re really different kinds of drinkers. And she would hide it. She hid it. She hid it a lot. Like, she would hide it a lot. And it was weird. I didn’t get it really ’cause it was just so different than mine. And her recovery’s been really different. She’s very active in AA. She goes to maybe 4 meetings a week.

She is invested in that community. She relies on it. It’s important to her. I’m happy for her that she has that space. It’s just, we’re just really different. She’s relapsed, I want to say like, I don’t know, 5 or 6 times since she first got into the program. It’s always for one night.

[00:23:00]

It’s just one night and then she wakes up and she gets back on her horse. Like, I just, I don’t have that same story. Right. It’s just different. Yeah. I wouldn’t even really call a relapse.

A buddy of mine called it a lapse. Mm-hmm. Like it is, it’s not a relapse, it’s a lapse. Like she just lapsed. But I probably had a year under my belt before I was like, okay, this isn’t going to work.

This. Her thing isn’t going to work. Not because I was worried about having alcohol in the house or not because I was worried about her bringing me down, but because she, and she wasn’t healthy. I was a healthy person and she wasn’t a healthy person. And you know, that just doesn’t work. And you can take alcohol out of the equation.

And I do this with clients all the time. If you’ve got one client who’s committed to relational health, or sorry, one, one partner who’s committed to relational health, no matter what their relationship with alcohol is, and you’ve got another client cup partner who isn’t, no matter what their relationship with alcohol is, that’s not going to work.

[00:24:00]

Hmm, it’s not going to work. So, particularly if one of ’em is really committed to getting healthy, if that person’s really committed to getting healthy and their partner’s not coming along, it’s not going to work. When you say committed to relational health, what does that mean? Well, it’s a whole other, it’s a whole other thing we could spend a ton of time on if you want to.

But very simply, if you think about it in the context of relational life therapy, it’s, very, very simply, it’s healthy self-esteem and healthy boundaries. Mm-hmm. When we’re, when you have healthy self-esteem and healthy boundaries, we would label that being in the center of health. When you have self-esteem, that’s too, you have too much self-esteem.

 

That’s called grandiosity. You have too little self-esteem. That’s shame. So if you’re too high or too low, that’s problematic. If your boundaries and what I’m talking about are psychological boundaries, I’m not talking about. Fidelity. I’m not talking about financial boundaries, I’m talking about psychological boundaries.

 

[00:25:00]

If they’re too rigid or too porous, then you’re outside of health. And so people who have, who have a commitment to finding healthy self-esteem where they’re not grandiose and they’re not shame-based, and having healthy boundaries where they can kind of adequately and responsibly deal with, you know, primarily distressing emotions, but also any emotion.

Then you, you have a chance, like you have a chance from that place to be a good partner, be a good parent, to be a good, but if you’re outside of that, then you’ve got, that’s like thing one, you know? Yeah. To grapple with your self-esteem issues and grapple with your, your, your psychological boundaries.

Like that’s thing one, I think in any recovery process. And so when you, you know, in your bio it talks about sitting down to dinner with Rebecca and having this conversation. Yeah. What did that look like? Yeah. And you know, what, what, what did you communicate to her and how did she take it?

If you’re listening to this episode and have been trying to take a break from drinking, but keep starting and stopping and starting again, I want to invite you to take a look at my on demand coaching course, The Sobriety Starter Kit®. The Sobriety Starter Kit® is an online self study, sober coaching course that will help you quit drinking and build a life you love without alcohol without white knuckling it or hating the process. The course includes the exact step-by-step coaching framework I work through with my private coaching clients, but at a much more affordable price than one-on-one coaching. And The Sobriety Starter Kit® is ready, waiting and available to support you anytime you need it, when it fits into your schedule.  You don’t need to work your life around group meetings or classes at a specific day or time. This course is not a 30 day challenge, or a one day at a time approach. Instead, it’s a step-by-step formula for changing your relationship with alcohol. The course will help you turn the decision to stop drinking from your worst case scenario to the best decision of your life. You will sleep better and have more energy, you’ll look better and feel better, you’ll have more patience and less anxiety. And with my approach you won’t feel deprived or isolated in the process. So if you’re interested in learning more about all the details, please go to www.sobrietystarterkit.com. You can start at any time and I would love to see you in the course.

 

[00:26:00]

It was probably the third conversation that we’d had, and it was the first time that I found the right message.

‘Cause I’d had a conversation like, maybe the tone of it would sound something like, I need you to fucking quit drinking. Like, I’d had that conversation. I’d had the other one, which was, I’m really worried about you. Like I’m really worried about you and I think you need to do something about this.

I’d had that one already didn’t work. This one was Hey, I need to let you know something, which is I am not drinking again. I am healthy. I am healthy. I like being here. This feels really good to me. I have a lot of freedom. I have a lot of gratitude. I love being here. My body feels good. My brain feels good.

I feel really great about my relationship with the girls. We have two daughters, and I’m not leaving. I’m in the center of health. Let call it that if you want to. I’m, I’m in the center of health and I’m not leaving. And I would love it if you came here.

[00:27:00]

I would love it if you came over here where I’m at because I’m not coming back out there where you are.

I miss you as a drinking buddy. That was fun and it served its purpose, but I can’t, I’m not going to do that anymore. And I’m not, there’s no threat here. I’m not living, I’m not telling you or else I’m not talking about divorce. I’m just saying this is where I’m going to be and I’m staying here. And if you want to come.

I will support you in any way. I know how and, but I’m not, I’m not leaving. This is, what it is now. And she got it. She blink. Blink, you know, blink, blink, blink. She understood exactly what I was saying and it still took her 6 more to get into rehab or to not rehab, but get, to get into recovery.

She had to have a bottom that wasn’t her bottom. Yeah, but she got it. It was a pivot point. It was the first time she started thinking about aa. It’s the first time she started investigating help, but she just couldn’t, you know, ultimately she couldn’t do it on her own until she, until she hit her bottom, which was Thanksgiving weekend of 22.

[00:28:00]

And at that point she started her process and she’s been in that process for, you know, now almost 3 years. Again, she’s probably had 3 lapses, or not 3. She probably had 5 or 6 lapses in that time. But she’s hustling and she’s healthy. And I, and we love our relationship now. We, we are getting along great.

Our girls love it. When Rebecca’s and the mobile stopped, when we grabbed it and it stopped. Our younger daughter who was living with us, the older one was in college, so she wasn’t, she had her freakout moment.

She had her like crazy, like kind of what, what is my orientation thing? Because you know, a totally separate issue is when you’ve got alcohol problem in the house or you’ve got this codependency problem in the house, the whole system organizes around that. Yeah. And when the whole system organizes around that, it’s actually sustainable.

[00:29:00]

You can do it, you can manage you, you create systems that help you survive and it feels okay, feels like it feels doable. And so when you’ve employed all these like really wonky back ass strategies to sustain a system that’s not healthy, and then the health, the system starts to get healthy and all your wonky strategies don’t work anymore.

You freak out a little bit, you know, and for Rebecca, she freaked out and started drinking more and hiding more. And, you know, I’m sure she felt a, a little bit of embarrassment and shame about having a sober partner who, you know, was kind of magically sober. Like, again, I don’t, I’m grateful because I, like, I just, my personality, my biology, just let me put it down.

But I was just sort of like, I. Nope, I’m done drinking. You know, like, which isn’t everybody’s story, but it was mine and it it was after like many years of thinking about it. Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, once I hit my bottom, you know? Yeah. And my bottom was relatively soft. Again, I was high functioning.

[00:30:00]

I didn’t have a DUI, I didn’t lose my job. I didn’t like, you know, but I did. I stared. I stared at the abyss in the face, you know?

Yeah. And said, Hmm, something’s got to change. Yeah. One question I had, because I feel like this is where a lot of the women listening to this might be, if they have a partner who also drinks problematically or struggles with alcohol, what were those?

Maybe 18 months or two years, like when Rebecca was drinking more or drinking problematically when you were sober. And then, you know, you said you’d talked to her a few different times in different ways. Like how did you navigate or manage that? Because a lot of women are like, I don’t know what to do. I, yeah, like you said, I’m.

No longer drinking. I’m healthy and this is a problem in our household. This is a problem in our marriage.

[00:31:00]

And, you know, yeah, I don’t, I don’t know how to change, I can’t change this, but how do I live with it? Yeah. I don’t know if my answer’s going to be all that satisfactory, to be honest. You teed this question up before we started recording and I think you know the answer is don’t fucking worry about them.

Like, literally stop caring about what they do. Which is lonely and aggravating and hard. But you can’t, people aren’t, I don’t, people are not going to quit drinking until they’re ready to quit drinking. That is what I have come to understand. It was true of me, it was true of Rebecca. It did not matter again, how many different conversations I had with her.

 

And even the one that changed everything, still took her another 6 months. And I was angry about that. And I was lonely, and I was sad. I was confused because she was saying one thing and doing another. But I was clear that I wasn’t going to drink and that I needed to be healthy.

[00:32:00]

And I was grateful for my own journey. I was grateful for the relationships I had that were working and, but you know, as a guy whose drug is anger and resentment, I had all kinds of opportunity to get angry with her. Yeah, and I just used it as an opportunity to, to, to work my program, work my work myself. So I don’t, I’m not, I, I don’t, I don’t have a strategic answer.

 

I have like a philosophical answer, which is, take care of yourself. Take care of yourself. If that means you got to get into Al-Anon or divorce this guy, or this, you know, or whatever, but you know. Being healthy doesn’t necessarily include staying married. And I don’t, I hope it does. Like I’m so glad for our story, but our story only is our story because I stayed on the path and when I was clear about where I was at, I said, Hey, come here. Come over here.

[00:33:00]

I didn’t say you better come over here, or you need to come over here, or I can’t go over there if you’re not coming over there. You’re keeping me from going there. Like I could, I had to abandon all of that.

Yeah. Because I, there I was with my Christmas tree stand, I was alone and I was sober and I was, and I had to decide if I was going to pick up a sledgehammer or if I was just going to go buy a different Christmas tree stand.

You know? Yeah. And I, so your advice is focus on yourself, keep yourself healthy, invite them over. But you need to, you know, manage your own emotions. ’cause you can’t control what they do. Sort of, I don’t want, I really want to say this because I don’t want it to sound trite.

Hmm. Yes. That is my advice. But that is not trite advice. Just work on yourself. Yeah. Do you know, take care of your own business. That’s not, that’s not it at all. It is. The absolute commitment to vigorously defend yourself, your soul, your, your spirit from the consequences of being unhealthy.

[00:34:00]

And, and you, if your partner’s not going to help you do that, fuck ’em. Like, leave them behind and then come back and get them. Then build a lighthouse and shine it real bright and say, here I am, come here. But like, you cannot count on or depend on somebody else to help you do that. Like, it’s would that, you could, and I wish you could.

And right now, Rebecca and I, we, we have a chance we can, we kind of do, you know, in days like today where I’m a little bit angry and I’m a little bit vulnerable, she’s like, can I help? What do you need? And that, I believe her because she’s sober and she’s, she’s done her work. I believe that she can be of help for a while I didn’t, I was like, no, you cannot help. No, you can’t help. You know, or you could help.

[00:35:00]

But it’s just me, like making you feel good about your desire to help. But so yes, that is, that is my advice.

But also it’s not like I wouldn’t, it’s not the kind that I would have you like put on your On a little sign in your kitchen.

Yeah. It’s, it’s really like a clarion call almost, you know? Mm-hmm. Yeah. One of the things that we were going to talk about isParenting and what happened with your daughter after you got sober because that again, is something a lot of women listening to this are probably struggling with.

Can you tell us a little bit about that? Only thing I can say is, my kids had to learn how to grow up with two alcoholic parents, and they had to create a lot of wonky strategies for how to survive. And they didn’t even know it. They had to normalize things that weren’t normal. They had to accept things that weren’t acceptable and they didn’t, they didn’t know, like that wasn’t, I mean, it just was their life and that’s sad for them.

[00:36:00]

I’m sorry about that. For them, that. It’s bonkers, you know, because they learn to accept things that they shouldn’t have to accept in life. And I’m glad we, we got on the train when we did, when I started, when I, it’s, let’s see, in 2020, I had a middle schooler and a high schooler, and who had observed me many times quitting drinking in quotes.

So when I quit this time, they. It wasn’t a thing. They didn’t even, they were like, okay, whatever. We’ll see how long this lasts. So I didn’t even tell ’em, I didn’t even tell ’em when I quit drinking. I just started doing the work and they started to experience dad who was healthy. Thanksgiving rolled around and they were like, you’re not drinking. Well, actually, you’re not drunk. Yeah, right. Christmas rolled around. You’re not drinking the holidays, you’re not drinking.

 

[00:37:00]

Yep. New Year’s Eve, dad, what’s going on? I was like, yep. And I think what, what I appreciate about that for them is they got to live into a healthier place. They weren’t directed or told or shown.

They just got to experience it. And you know, one of them left, went to college and then mom freaks out and the other one has to kind of find her way. And she and I spent a lot of time bonding inside the home while mom was spinning out. And so, that was a thing that we had to navigate. And then, she spun out.

Which was her thing and I’m, and we just gave her the freedom to do it. Like, I think with parenting, I have found that I think parenting young adults is harder than parenting young kids because they have thoughts and opinions and they’re not props. You can’t just move them around. You have to actually grapple with them as people.

[00:38:00]

And the thing that I found, or that have come to is kind of exactly what I just said about health, which is my kids know that they are loved. My kids know that there are consequences, there are boundaries. And that, that I think is the secret to parenting. They know that they’re loved and they know that there are boundaries.

 

And beyond that, like we couldn’t control what she, what either one of them did. What either one of them said, what either one of them felt. We just committed to making sure that they had a place to be and that. That when they did or said or felt things that came with consequences. Some of those were great consequences and some of those were not so great.

Hmm. But you know, I, I kind of abandoned my own. Like sense of, I, I knew what was right. I don’t fucking know what’s right. I don’t, I don’t have any idea or like what the best, what’s best for my kid. I don’t know what’s best for my kid, except for that they, you know, that they’re loved and that there are consequences.

[00:39:00]

Because, you know, sitting in AA rooms anyway, like people’s journey is people’s journey. It just kind of is what it is. And nobody has a story of, and then my parents made me, or then my parents saved me. You know, it’s like, yeah. So, I just decided to be a steady presence and, and what I really, really, really wanted to do was model Grace for mom, like, and I’m not patting myself on the back, but I made a decision. I was like, I’m going to hang in there for her ’cause she put up with a lot of my bullshit.

Yeah. For a lot longer than 2 years, you know? So, I just said, what am I going to do? I, you know, like, I’m not going anywhere. I’m not going anywhere.

Like, I didn’t have anywhere to go. I didn’t have anywhere I wanted to go. So, I’m going to. I’m going to build my lighthouse, plant my flag and be like, this is where it’s at. You know? Yeah. So that’s how I feel about that. And I think I’ve done, basically, I feel like I’ve done the same thing for my kids.

[00:40:00]

We’ve done the same thing for our kids. And they want us to, they want us from time to time to be unhealthy. It, it makes their life easier when we’re unhealthy. So they provoke and they prod and they poke and they try to wedge in between us. Which by the way, they do from birth. Yeah. If, if, if at birth you said to your child, would you like 100% of my love and attention and care and energy, even if I don’t have any leftover for your mom or your dad, they would say, yeah, yeah, I’ll take it.

You know, not maliciously, but it is. Yeah. That’s what they do. So, they’re, they want, they want us to spin out, but we just kind of chuckle and Yeah, that’s okay. You know? ’cause they’re still figuring it out, right? They’re 18 and 22 now. They’d have no idea how the world works. They sure think they do. But our parenting philosophy, particularly in this new phase has been we really, really want to be in a healthy friendship with our adult children.

[00:41:00]

So we let them try to become adults in the best way that we can, and we try to provide a context of safety and friendship. But I don’t know, maybe they don’t want to be our friends. That’s okay. They’re, they’re leaving soon, so, you know. I’m curious about this because obviously you’re a mental health counselor.

You’re a Gottman therapist, relational life therapist. You host, host marriage therapy radio, and you’ve been through. All this shit. Right? Yeah. And so, I mean, your own mental health struggles, own challenges in marriage, own cha, challenges in, in relationships. When I decided to be a coach, my husband, who is very sweet.

You’ve talked to him, Mike, on your podcast? Yeah, Mike, he sort of turned to me and, you know, was like, I don’t know how to ask you this without offending you. Yeah. And I was like, all right. Go ahead.

[00:42:00]

He was like, can you be a coach if you’re, you know, basically kind of fucked up, right? Like, can you be a coach if you are on anti-anxiety meds and have been through a shitload of therapy and struggled with alcohol and all this stuff?

 

And my reaction to him was immediate and with zero offense. I was like, oh yeah, absolutely. I would not trust a coach who has not been through this shit. Mm-hmm. Like, they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. Yeah. But for you, do you feel like it helps you be a better mental health counselor or therapist because you’ve been through this, or do you feel like it.

Is something that you have to like overcompensate for or how, you know what I mean? Like how does that feel? No, a hundred percent. Like I, again, I have so much gratitude for my recovery and for my sobriety because I have access to a hopeful story. I have access to like, no, this is what the work is.

[00:43:00]

And people say, and I can tell, I look at alcoholics, I look at, you know, couples who are struggling.

 

I go there, yeah, there’s a way you can do this. You can get there. Like there’s a path. It’s going to be hard and you can, you cannot do it. You, you get to choose that if you want to. You do. Nobody’s telling you, you have to. You’re fucking grown up. If you don’t want to get healthy, you don’t have to get healthy.

You are allowed. But I tell you what, man, it’s pretty fun. I love it. I love being sober. I love the lessons that I’ve collected along the way. I love practicing practice is a big part of it for me. Like when I identify something that I’m bad at particularly around anger. And I practice a lot in the car.

Like, if somebody cuts me off in the car, I’m like, fucking bitch, you know? And then, I’ll be like, hold on a second. That’s not who I want to be. I want to be a different guy. I want to be like, I’m going to listen to the song on the radio. I’m going to look at the mountain. I’m going to maybe slow down a little bit ’cause I’m not really in a hurry.

[00:44:00]

And then, maybe, I’ll get up to that car and I’ll look over and, and it’ll be like an old man and I’ll be like, that’s so crazy. ’cause I was a hundred percent sure it was a lady. Hmm. And I was wrong. Do you know how wild that is to be a hundred percent sure and also wrong? Yeah. Like if you can make room for that in your brain, like it’s fun to practice that to go, Hmm, I wonder if I’m wrong about this thing.

I think mm-hmm. And you know, there was a time in my life, honestly, when I was a hundred percent sure, I was not going to be able to quit drinking and I was better off dead. I was a hundred percent sure and I was wrong.

 

Yeah. Because this is really fun and my, my daughter and I, the younger one and I were going away this weekend, just the two of us for a little daddy daughter like getaway before she leaves for the year.

And man, it’s going to be amazing. We’re going to have so much fun, but Awesome. But you know, the last time, not the last time, but another time that we did this, I barely remember it ’cause I was drunk the whole time. Mm-hmm. You know, I was just like, yeah. She remembers it.

[00:45:00]

She definitely remembers it. But I am like, sorry babe.

I, I have no, you know, so we’re going to go back to that same place and we’re going to kind of reclaim it. It’s going to be fun. That’s great. Yeah. I’m excited about it. That’s awesome.

Yeah, I was, I was smiling when you were talking about being cut off and you being like, I was sure it was a woman, because in my mind when that happens, I’m positive. It’s a man who would tell me, well, listen, I talk about this to clients all the time. Listen, this will be an interesting experiment for your, for your, for your listeners. When someone cuts you, when a car cuts you off, think about it right now. Can you see the car? Yes you can. Yo, it’s a truck.

It’s a, it’s a Prius, it’s a Tesla, whatever. It’s, who’s driving? It’s a man. It’s a fucking dick. It’s a fucking bitch. It’s a, it’s a kid with a phone. It’s a Korean lady who cares. Whatever. It’s the story you make up in your head about that car and about that driver that says way more about you than it does about them.

Oh, yeah. And because you have no idea. Literally, you just made it up in your head just now and I think there’s data there.

[00:46:00]

I think there’s real data there for you about like, why is it a fucking dick? Well, because you got some story about men that is relevant to your life and the way you organize your emotional life and you know, but I ask clients this question all the time, and I get an array of answers. A lot of times it’s a guy, it’s an aggressive man.

Sure. Because they’re all over the place. But a lot of times it’s some old, it’s an old lady. Why’d you pick an old lady? Well, because, and then there’s a story there, and that story Yes.

Says a lot more about you than does about them. And that’s, that’s actually the way I think about alcohol, because again, my story of alcoholism starts way before I ever picked up a drink. Like, it’s way more about me than it is about, you know, bourbon or IPAs or whatever. Yeah. The substance itself. Yeah.

 

No. Yeah. So, are there any specific tools or strategies you recommend for a woman who might be listening to this?

[00:47:00]

Who’s in that situation? I mean, I know you’ve talked about taking care of yourself and keeping yourself healthy, but say you’re dealing with a spouse, is there any like Gottman or relational life therapy tools you think might be useful?

 

I mean, there are of course communication tools that you can use and the Gottman method is full of them. It’s amazing in that way. Terry’s methodology, relational life therapy, really begins with this core question. The question is well, not a core question, but Terry likes to say, other methodologies will give you tools and we want to work with the part of you that doesn’t use tools.

 

What’s the part of you that is keeping you from doing it? And it might be childhood trauma, it might be style of relating, it might be your own addiction. And so the premise is that you can’t, you can have all the tools on the planet, but if you’re not equipped to hold them or use them, and if you go to Home Depot and you buy a tool, you buy a really sharp saw and you try to use it while drunk, you know?

[00:48:00]

Yeah. You’re going to cut your hand off, you know, so you. Again, part of it is like really grapple with the, you grapple with your part. And then, the only thing I would say is, when I finally sat down with Rebecca and had that conversation with her, we were in Berkeley, California.

We were eating chicken hearts, just crazy. But when I finally sat down with her to have that conversation, the one that changed everything, I was talking about me.

Mm-hmm. I was not talking about her. I was saying, this is where I’m at. This is what I’m about, this is what I want, this is what I think. And I would be cool if you came over here. I like you. I like you. I like you a lot. When you’re over here. I’m not going to come over there and hang out with you over there.

[00:49:00]

So, if you can learn to talk about you, if you can learn to, to in your communication process confidently, accurately with integrity and your dignity intact to talk about you, then, then your partner doesn’t.

 

Then they have to grapple with you. And that’s. That’s all that we can ask for really. But yeah, I, again, you teed up this question beforehand. I don’t know what to do with the people who are, they sort of need their partner to do something in order for them to change. Like that’s a tough spot to be in.

Hmm. And I think there ought to be some, some boundaries. Like you, you ought to be able to ask for, Hey, can you not have beer in the house? But if he says no, then you got to come up with plan B for you. Yeah. Because, yeah. We can’t change him yet.

 

Yeah. Yeah. Yet. So, I want to ask where people can find you and follow up.

 

It’s easy to find me. The internet is easy. My first name is Zach. My last name is Brittle. You type that into the Google and you, you find me on marriage therapy radio, which comes out every week.

 

[00:50:00]

I try to have conversations with couples who are making it work in a variety of different ways. You guys came on. That was really fun to hear your story. I think if you’re interested in relational life therapy, you can Google Terry Reel’s name. Terry is TERY. His last name is real, like real nice, REAL.

 

He’s got a handful of books that kind of outline his whole philosophy and theory. There. I am. I personally am an advocate for AA, not as a solution, but as a tool, too. If, and again, I’ll repeat what Dave said, If you can get sober without AA, go for it.

 

Amen.

 

Do it. If you can find a coach who can guide you, by all means do that. But if you can’t, it’s great, but even then, it’s really about the spiritual journey, not the liquid journey, you know? So, I don’t know, man.

 

I am. I’m grateful, really grateful for the opportunity to come on here and talk about my story. It’ll be a healing thing for me today.

 

[00:51:00]

I’d say find gratitude and find that part of you that is absolutely committed to getting healthy.

And there’s no shortage of resources out there that can help you do that. You just got to find the one that works for you. I always tell people like, I don’t think therapy works. I don’t think AA works. I don’t think coaching works. I don’t think self-help books works. I think people work. People work, or they don’t.

And you just got to figure out how to do the work.

 

Yeah. So, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your experience and being so open. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, yeah. It’s my pleasure.