Angela (00:54.232)
Hello, my friend. Welcome back to Addiction Unlimited. I’m your coach, Angela Pugh. Thank you for hanging out with me today, listening to the pod. I hope you’re having a fantastic day. I want to say something right up front here because I don’t want anyone tuning out in the first 10 seconds thinking I’m about to talk you out of your own recovery. Alcohol is a problem. I am never ever going to tell you that it isn’t.If alcohol is costing you your peace, your relationships, your health, your confidence, it has to go. Full stop, no asterisk. No, but maybe I can moderate it. You’ve tried moderating it a thousand fucking times. It doesn’t work. It has to go. But here’s the thing I need you to sit with today because it’s the thing that changed everything for me. It’s the thing I wish someone would have told me on day one.Alcohol isn’t the whole problem. It’s the top layer. And this is really the heart of something I say all the time. Something I want you to have in your back pocket for the rest of this episode, and honestly, for the rest of your recovery. Sobriety is quitting the drink. Recovery is healing. Those are not the same thing. They were never supposed to be the same thing.

And so much of the pain I see in this community, the relapses, the white knuckling, the why do I still feel broken even though I haven’t had a drink in months, it comes from treating sobriety like it was the whole assignment, when really it was just the prerequisite. Now let’s talk about why.

Angela (02:42.131)
Let me give you the picture. Because once you see it, you can’t unsee it, right? Think about pulling weeds in a garden. If you go out there with a pair of shears and just cut off everything that’s poking up above the dirt, guess what? It looks great for about a week. The yard looks clean, the neighbors are impressed, you feel like you handled it. And then a week later it’s all back, thicker in some cases, because you didn’t get to the root.

You got the part you could see, the part that was inconveniencing you, the part that was ugly. But the root system underneath, the thing actually making the weed never even noticed you were there. And that’s recovery for so many people. You remove the alcohol, the house looks better. People say, Wow, you look amazing. You seem so much happier. And you are in some ways, but underneath, untouched.

Still fully intact are the actual roots. The anxiety, the insecurity, the trauma you’ve never actually looked at, the perfectionism that’s been running your life since you were nine, the fear of rejection, the loneliness. And I mean the loneliness that existed long before you ever picked up a drink. The constant, exhausting feeling that you’re not enough, the belief that.

Everyone else got some kind of instruction manual for how to be a person, and yours got lost in the mail somewhere. Those are the roots. Alcohol was never the root. Alcohol was the thing growing out of the root, the part that everybody could see, the part that got you in trouble, the part that showed up on a breathalyzer or a bank statement or on your kid’s face when you missed something important. But it was never the source.

This is exactly why sobriety and recovery have to be separate in your mind. Sobriety is the shears. It’s necessary. You can’t do any of the deeper work while you’re still drinking over it. And I want to be really clear about that. I’m not saying skip sobriety and go straight to the roots. You have to stop drinking first. But sobriety by itself only ever gets you the top layer.

Angela (05:04.991)
It gets you the visible, measurable, look how much better things are result. Recovery is the part where you actually go down into the dirt. It’s slower, it’s less visible. Nobody claps for you the same way they clap for a sobriety milestone, but it’s the only thing that actually changes what’s producing the weeds in the first place.

Angela (05:32.6)
I want to walk you through what those roots actually looked like for me because I think a lot of you are going to recognize pieces of your own story in mine, even if the surface details don’t match at all, right? I can trace mine all the way back to very early childhood. I never felt like I fit anywhere. Ever. I didn’t fit in my own family. I was the kid who felt like she was watching everyone else from slightly outside the room.

I didn’t fit with the popular kids. I wasn’t pretty enough to belong in one group. I wasn’t rich enough to belong in another. I wasn’t the smartest kid in class. And I wasn’t the athletic one either. I was just different, off to the side, watching everyone else who seemed to know the rules of a game that nobody even explained to me. And when you’re a kid who feels like that, you don’t have the language for it. You don’t sit there at 10 years old and think,

Yes, I’m experiencing a sense of social displacement rooted in trauma. No, right? You just feel it in your body as a low, constant hum of something is wrong with me. I carried that my whole life, quietly, the way so many of you have carried yours. And then alcohol showed up and it solved the problem, at least for a little while. Suddenly,

I wasn’t overthinking every single sentence that came out of my mouth. I wasn’t laying awake replaying a conversation from three hours earlier, wondering if I’d said something weird. I wasn’t so painfully, exhaustingly aware of myself in every room I walked into. I wasn’t awkward anymore. I wasn’t quiet anymore. I was funny.

I was interesting. I was comfortable. I felt for the first time in my life like I actually belonged somewhere. That’s why I drank. And I want you to really hear this part because I think it’s the piece that gets skipped over in most conversations about addiction. I didn’t drink because I loved alcohol. I drank because I loved what alcohol did for me.

Angela (07:57.226)
It gave me relief from things I didn’t know how to manage on my own. It did a job, a very specific, very effective job. Right up until it started doing enormous damage at the same time. Right. But here’s the thing nobody warns you about. The job alcohol did for you doesn’t disappear the day you quit drinking. The anxiety is still there on day one.

The feeling of not fitting in is still there on day one. Actually, it’s louder on day one because for the first time in years, you don’t have anything muting it. That’s why early sobriety feels unbearable for so many people. It’s not that something is wrong with you, it’s that you removed the thing that was managing the roots. And the roots are suddenly at full volume with nothing standing between you and them.

Angela (08:56.525)
And this is where I think the phrase matters most. Sobriety is quitting the drink, recovery is healing. If nobody tells you that healing comes after, in its own time, on its own track, you’ll sit there in month two thinking, I did the hard thing. Why does this still feel this way? And that question, unanswered, is exactly what sends so many people back to the bottle. Not because they don’t want it badly enough, but because they thought the job was already finished.

This is why so many people, and I mean smart, capable, motivated people, get recovery wrong. They think the goal is to stop drinking. That’s not the goal. That’s the entry fee. That’s the thing you have to do before the actual work can start. The real goal, the thing that determines whether you build a life you actually want to be in or just a sober version of the same miserable life. That

goal is to stop needing alcohol to do those jobs in the first place.

The goal isn’t just an empty glass. The goal is learning how to calm your anxiety from the inside without a substance doing it for you. It’s building confidence that isn’t poured out of a bottle and doesn’t evaporate the next morning. It’s feeling like you belong in a room without having to change your own brain chemistry to tolerate being in the room. It’s becoming genuinely.

Comfortably okay with being exactly who you are. The quiet one, the different one, the one who didn’t get the manual without needing to alter yourself to make that bearable. That’s the actual work. Alcohol was never the job. Alcohol was the coping mechanism you found for the job you didn’t know you needed to do.

Angela (11:03.883)
And here’s the part I really need you to hear, especially if you’re early in this, or if you’ve white-knuckled a stretch of sobriety before and watched it fall apart. If you only remove alcohol, but you never heal the reasons you reached for it in the first place, your brain doesn’t just sit there peacefully. It goes looking. It’s not being self-destructive on purpose. It’s doing exactly what it was wired to do. It found something that worked once.

And when that something gets taken away, it starts hunting for a replacement. Sometimes that shows up as another substance. Sometimes it’s food. Sometimes it’s shopping or overworking or a relationship that gives you the same intensity alcohol used to give you. Sometimes it’s just scrolling on your phone for six hours a night because the silence is unbearable without something to numb it. None of that means you’re doing recovery wrong.

It just means the root is still there, still producing, and your brain is doing what unaddressed roots do. It’s sending something new through the dirt.

Angela (12:19.947)
Now I want to get into something else too, because I think a lot of recovery content skips right past this. If you are newly sober, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, your nervous system is fried. Okay, not metaphorically, but actually fried. You’ve spent months, years, maybe decades escaping every uncomfortable feeling the second it showed up.

The moment sadness, fear, or shame or loneliness started to rise, you drank and it went away. That was the pattern over and over for a very long time. So when I say get to the root, I’m not saying that in early sobriety you should be sitting down doing deep emotional excavation, right? I’m not saying you should be able to identify a feeling, name it, sit with it, and calmly ask yourself what it needs. For a lot of people in early recovery,

That’s not just hard. It’s genuinely not possible yet. I could barely form a sentence some days in my first 90 days. I certainly couldn’t have told you what I was feeling, right? I hadn’t practiced that muscle in 15 years. I spent 15 years doing the exact opposite, getting as far away from a feeling as fast as I possibly could the second it showed up.

Angela (13:41.762)
So if that’s where you are right now, I want you to hear this clearly. You’re not behind. You’re not doing this wrong. The deep root work is not a day one assignment. In early recovery, root work looks a lot smaller and a lot more physical than people expect. It’s not about understanding your emotions yet, it’s about surviving them long enough for your nervous system to remember how to come back down on its own.

Without a substance forcing it down for you. That might look like literally nothing more sophisticated than I feel awful right now and I’m gonna breathe through it until it passes instead of drinking. It might look like putting your feet flat on the floor and just noticing the floor is there because that’s genuinely as far as your brain can go some days. And that’s enough. It might look like calling someone.

In saying nothing more articulate than today sucks. And let someone else hold that with you instead of holding it alone the way you always used to. It might look like sleep or water and food or getting outside for 10 minutes because your body has to come back online before your mind can do any of the reflective work at all. This is the part nobody tells you. Healing doesn’t start with insight.

It starts with your body learning over and over, thousands of small times, that a hard feeling can move through you and out the other side without you needing to escape it. That’s it. That’s the whole first stage, not understanding the feeling.

Just proving to your nervous system that you can survive one.

Angela (15:36.972)
The identifying your roots work, the where did this belief come from and what am I actually afraid of, that comes later. It comes when your system has enough stability to actually reflect instead of just react. And trying to force that kind of insight work onto a nervous system that’s still in survival mode, that isn’t healing. That’s just another way of asking too much of yourself too soon.

And it’s exactly the kind of thing that quietly convinces people recovery isn’t working when actually it’s working right on schedule. So if all you did today was not drink and get through a hard hour without a substance, that’s root work. That’s the beginning of the healing, even though it looks like nothing more than survival. Sobriety is quitting the drink, recovery is healing. And healing, especially at the start.

looks a lot more like your nervous system slowly remembering how to settle than it looks like some enlightened emotional fucking breakthrough. Okay, I want to bring this back to something practical because I don’t want you to just nod along and feel understood. I want you to actually do something with this, right? If you’re in that stage where you’ve stopped drinking or you’re trying to and you feel like you’re just gritting your teeth through it.

That’s a signal. That’s your body telling you that you’re cutting weeds at the surface without touching the root. It doesn’t mean you’re failing. It means the real work hasn’t started yet. And that’s actually good news because it means there’s a next step. You’re not at a dead end. And if you’ve had a stretch of sobriety before that fell apart, I want you to hear this without an ounce of shame in it. It probably fell apart.

Because the root was still there the whole time, quietly waiting, and something eventually grew back up out of it. That’s not a character flaw. That’s just what happens when you treat the symptom and skip the source.

Angela (17:50.338)
The work now is different. The work now is going after the anxiety, the insecurity, the trauma, the perfectionism, the belief that you don’t belong. Actually going after it instead of just hoping that removing the alcohol will make it disappear on its own. It won’t. It never does. But it can be healed. I’m proof of that. 20 years in, still doing the work. And I

I promise you, it feels way lighter. When you get good at it, you just have to practice the skills of not freaking the fuck out the second you feel something, right? When you start practicing that and you get good at it and you’re like, okay, this sucks, but I know what to do to get through it. I don’t need to drink. I’m fine. I’ll figure this out. We’ll feel better in a little while. You just have to practice that skill instead of freaking the fuck out and reaching for a drink.

Angela (18:42.805)
I also want to say there’s no prize for rushing this. I meet people every day who are so frustrated with themselves at six months for still struggling, right? As if healing 15 or 20 or 30 years of survival patterns should take less time than it took to build them. It won’t, and it doesn’t need to. Sobriety can happen in a day. Recovery happens in seasons, years.

And that’s not a failure. That’s just what actual healing looks like when it’s real instead of rushed. So wherever you are right now, day nine or year nine, the question isn’t why haven’t I fixed this yet? The question is just, am I still doing the next small piece of the work? That’s all this ever asks of you. The next small piece of work.

Angela (19:41.142)
And if everything I just described feels like you, if you’re sitting, if you’re still in that phase of figuring out what your roots even are, if you need a community of people who actually get this instead of feeling alone in it, that’s exactly why I built the sober society. It’s not just accountability with meetings for not drinking, it’s a place to start understanding that root work alongside people who are doing it too. And

This is my private member community. We have meetings almost every day. you can find it at addictionunlimited.com forward slash society. And if you’re further along, if you already know you’re done just managing this and you’re ready to actually start getting into the roots, that’s what a call with me is for. You don’t need a call with me for sober society. It’s literally zero commitment and super inexpensive. I don’t need to walk you through that decision, right?

But if you’re at a deeper level, ready for real transformation, real commitment, real change, and real relief, that’s what a call with me is for. To work together to get specific about what’s actually running the show for you and what it’s going to take to change it. You can grab a time with me at addictionunlimited.com forward slash call. You’ll answer a couple of questions, then it’ll take you directly to my calendar to book.

Whatever day and time works for you. AddictionUlimited.com forward slash call. That link is always in the show notes. Either way, I want you to walk away from this episode with one thing. And I want you to say it to yourself the way I say it to myself, even now, 20 years in. Sobriety is quitting the drink. Recovery is healing. Quitting alcohol was never supposed to be the finish line. It was supposed to be.

the moment you finally create enough space and enough clarity to go find out what was underneath it the whole time. And to start gently one small piece at a time, healing it. I love you guys. I hope you’re having a fantastic day. And I will see you next week.