This week we’re beginning our series on the 12 Steps. We begin, naturally, with Step One which reads “We Admitted We Were Powerless Over Alcohol, that our Lives Had Become Unmanageable”. Critical to overcoming any problem is recognizing & accepting there is a problem in the first place. Step one at it’s very core, is a surrender to our powerlessness and the unmanageability that manifests in our lives as a result. We’ll unpack the key elements of understanding what Step One means, what causes our powerlessness and unmanageability, and practical ways we can work Step One in our own recoveries. Plus we share feedback from the Sober & Serious Community and take your calls. Listen Up.

Step One Worksheet:

https://www.12step.org/docs/Step1_WS.pdf

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This week we’re discussing action –  the chief activator of Recovery and the gifts that come to us as a result of the activities we carry out in our programs of recovery and on a daily basis. Action is more important that desire, willingness, and knowledge combined. The truth is, willingness is extremely helpful but not required to recover. The reality is knowledge is beneficial, but not necessary in order to achieve recovery. Right action is the central ingredient in attaining meaningful and continuous recovery. We can’t think our way into right living. We must act our way into right thinking. That’s the central truth of the solution to our core problem – we must continue to carry out the actions in order to attain and sustain a spiritual experience sufficient enough to arrest our disease – or if you will our spiritual malady. We discuss in clear terms why action is so critical, what actions activate recovery, as well as the daily actions necessary to maintain our spiritual fitness and as a result our recoveries. Plus we share feedback from the Sober and Serious community and take your calls. Listen Up. 

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This week we’re examining a rarely explored and often overlooked aspect of a whole and complete recovery. Vulnerability, and our ability to embrace this in our own lives, is at the foundation of our ability to be willing to do the necessary work, take the necessary steps, in order to truly recover from our disease of addiction and/or alcoholism. To the extent we can recognize, acknowledge, and indeed embrace the most broken parts of ourselves and then show them to the world so that we may tap into a until then untapped resources of community and spirituality, is the extent that we will recover completely. When we walk through the fear, backed by our newly found community and spiritual power, we come to know a new freedom and a new happiness as Bill W. wrote. So we invite you to talk a walk with us, right now, as we examine and explore how embracing vulnerability could very well be the key that unlocks your recovery. Plus we share feedback from the Sober and Serious community and take your calls. Listen up.

Click here for the documentary on Co-host Jason!

 https://youtu.be/wwvHh-5AmYI 

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This week we’re peeling the curtain back on the act of Asking for Help. Asking for help in life and especially in Recovery can be one of the difficult tasks we perform. As difficult as it may be for us; the reality is that this simple act has the power to transform our relationships and enhance our recoveries and lives as a result. We reveal why asking for help is SO difficult; and there are concrete and universal reasons this is so; as well as why asking for help is so vital to a meaningful and lasting recovery. I hope you can bear with some goofy audio courtesy of the buffer monsters invading the Zoom connection as well as my tortured vocals due to an ambitious chest cold I’m enduring – you’ll be rewarded with some serious spiritual gems. Plus we share feedback from the Sober & Serious community AND take your calls. Listen Up.

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This week we’re discussing a fundamental and root characteristic and phenomenon of addiction. Perhaps the distinguishing feature of addiction is the cycle that manifests itself universally in the alcoholic or addict, and is the defining experience of a undeniably hijacked brain. We discuss our own experiences around the cycle of addiction, explain each phase of the cycle, and how we broke that cycle in order to achieve enduring and meaningful recovery. Plus we share feedback from the Sober & Serious community and take your calls. Listen Up. 

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This week we’re bringing you a powerhouse discussion on Family in Recovery thanks to two absolute dynamos whom have dedicated their lives to families in Recovery. Pam and Shelly are disrupting the classic paradigm of how families deal with and recover from addiction and alcoholism in a fundamental and phenomenal way. Embracing all pathways to recovery from a family perspective to achieve the ultimate goal of breaking the cycle of addiction and achieving whole family recovery. They wonderfully detail the role each family member has in breaking this often deathly cycle, and the role each family member can fill in moving the entire family to Recovery. Plus we share feedback from the sober and serious community and take your calls. Listen Up.

Resources mentioned on this episode:

https://familyrecoveryconference.com/

https://pamlanhart.com/

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This week we bring you a special edition of The Way Out Podcast. Each one of us has hand selected one of our favorite recovery talks to share with you, in hopes you’ll enjoy them at least as much as we do. What these speakers have in common is rather instructive – they all inject a healthy dose of humor, vulnerability, honesty, and spiritual truth into their talks, and they all leave you feeling less alone and unfixable and more connected and full of hope that in fact there is a solution that provides us the relief we’ve all so desperately sought in drugs, alcohol and other addictions. In the interest of time; each talk has been abbreviated; and I’ve provided links to the full talks in the show notes of this episode. I encourage you to listen to the rest of each one of these spectacular talks; they are worth every second of your attention. Prepare yourselves to relate, to laugh, and to reflect my friends. Without further delay, we give you The Way Out Podcast’s curated Recovery Speaker Episode – Listen Up. 

Full talks available Here:

Adam T:

Ousmane D:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHGFfwZWkJ0&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR34B40h2UwCzuwhhOth-iINCiWi0QDBqIb9EThzXHZ_dd9W-bZXTx2BC0Q

Clancy I:

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This week we’re talking growth in Recovery. We get off to a bit of a rocky start this week with Louie the Recovery Dog loosing his mind over various humans and animals passing in front of the window  that catch his ire; combined with an unexpected juvenile laughing fit over the synonyms to the word “growth”; suffice it to say we all clearly have some more growing UP to do. When we do finally get down to business, we illuminate what growth in recovery has looked like for each of us; and what it looks like for us today. I drop a metaphor that, I hope, will give you some insight into why growth in recovery is so critical. We also discuss what tools we can practically implement in order to activate growth in our own recovery journeys; regardless of where we are in our recovery journey. Plus we share feedback from the Sober & Serious community and take your calls – Listen Up!

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This week we’re bringing you an enlightening discussion on the idea that All Pathways to Recovery are valid, important, and worth considering and sharing amongst one another in the Recovery Community. There are an array of formal recovery methodologies that have worked for many of us whom are in active and long term recovery including 12 Step; Faith based, Peer led, cognitive behavioral, among others. There are those too, whom have found their own unique path using a blend of existing modalities or have flat out invented their own approach that works for them. No matter the approach, what matters is that the outcome results in meaningful and enduring change for those whom need and often more importantly, truly desire recovery from addiction and/or alcoholism. We discuss in practical terms why all pathways to recovery are valid and worthwhile; what many of these methods are, and how we can go about selecting the best pathway for us – regardless of where we are in our recovery journeys. Plus we share feedback from the Sober and Serious community and take your calls – Listen Up! 

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This week we’re delving into the topic of Sponsorship in Recovery. If you’ve spent any time at all around the rooms of 12-Step recovery you no doubt have heard more than a few folks spout the virtues of sponsorship. We tell you what sponsors are, and perhaps more importantly what they are not as well as what a sponsor does and again of at least equal importance, what they do not do. Plus we share feedback from the Sober & Serious community and take your calls – Listen Up.

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This week we’re undertaking, pardon the pun, the heavy topic of Grief in Recovery. Grief is often a complicated, difficult, and down right messy process we all must endure during our time here on earth. It’s as core to the human experience as experiencing love and human connection, and indeed is an unpleasant and direct consequence of our profound capacity to bond with our loved ones. We discuss how active addiction and alcoholism often complicates the grieving process, how the grief process works, and how we can apply the tools of Recovery to aid us in this process we work through, however imperfectly that may be. Plus we share feedback on this topic from the Sober and Serious community AND take your calls – so Listen Up. 

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This week we’re breaking down a subject that quite often played a critical role in our active addiction and alcoholism, and is if supreme importance to as many as 80% of us whom have a substance use disorder. And that is the issue of Mental Health.  Those of us whom have a mental health diagnosis know all too well the perils of having to navigate the pitfalls of both alcoholism and/or addiction along side a mental illness such as depression, anxiety, bi-polar, or any number of mental health issues. We break down what mental health means, how it affects addiction and alcoholism, and practical actions you can take to improve your mental health and as a result your daily life in Recovery. Plus we share feedback from the Sober & Serious community – you all had a LOT to say on this one, and we take calls from The Way Out Podcast Listeners. Listen Up.

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This week we’re discussing boundaries in Recovery. Emotional & Physical boundaries often were all over the place while we were in active addiction and alcoholism. An untoward side-effect of ritualistic masking and numbing emotions with substances produced the side-effect of being disconnected from the boundary warning signals our emotions are sending us. Recovery is often a process of discovery. Getting to know how we feel given certain behaviors and situations informs what our boundaries are. Some boundaries are abundantly clear – such as overt physical or emotional abuse, and others are less so – requiring us to pay close attention to those newfound emotions and what they’re trying to tell us about ourselves. We’ll define what boundaries in recovery are, how to define them for yourself, and how to communicate them to the people in your life. Plus we share feedback from the Sober & Serious community and take one very interesting call – Listen Up! 

Great article on setting Boundaries in Recovery by Hazelden:

https://www.hazeldenbettyford.org/articles/boundaries-in-addiction-recovery

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This week we’ve got a compelling interview with Author Kristin Casey. Kristin is the Author of Rock Monster: My Life with Joe Walsh as well as an intimacy coach and a person in long term recovery from addiction and alcoholism. Make no mistake; the hook of Kristin’s book is Joe Walsh. Joe is an enigmatic character who commands a “look at me, look at me” kind of attention and Kristin does a superb job of bringing Joe to life over the course of the story laid out in the pages of this remarkable memoir. More striking is the way in which Kristin’s very identity becomes inextricably connected to Joe and the rise and fall of their relationship – a dynamic all too many of us can intimately relate with. The remarkably dark and desperately lonely place King Alcohol took Kristin after her identity was stripped from her as a result of the demise of their relationship is nothing short of horrifying – a true miracle she’s here with us today. The only part of Kristin’s story more remarkable than her wild ride with Joe Walsh and the shocking events that followed is that of her extraordinary comeback powered by working the 12-Steps, a good sponsor, and yes, being of service. We’re suckers for a good ‘ol fashioned comeback here at The Way Out Podcast and Kristin’s story doesn’t disappoint so Listen Up.

CODA Self-Evaluation:

http://coda.org/index.cfm/meeting-materials1/patterns-and-characteristics-2011/

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This week we’re breaking down the oft overlooked and perhaps even more so dreaded 12-Step concept of Character Defects in recovery. In short order, you’ll get a practical definition of what Character Defects are and why we want to shed their dominance over our day to day thoughts, actions, and interactions with others. Understanding the what and how of it will lead is into what actions we can take in order to free ourselves from the stronghold character defects such as fear, anger, selfishness, control, among many others, have on us. Plus we share feedback from the Sober & Serious community and take your calls so Listen Up.

Drop the Rock:

https://www.hazelden.org/OA_HTML/item/6666?Drop-the-Rock-Second-Edition&utm_source=hbf&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=droptherock

Drop the Rock…The Ripple Effect

https://www.hazelden.org/OA_HTML/item/367136?Drop-the-Rock-The-Ripple-Effect&src_url=itemquest&utm_source=hbf&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=droptherock

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We’re talking relapse and recovery. Relapse often can be a loaded term; often bandied about in discussion on recovery spurring heated debates on whether relapse is a part of recovery or if it is the antithesis of what we’re trying to achieve in recovery. Make no mistake, relapse can be and is a part of many of our journeys to long term and meaningful recovery and assinging shame or judgement on those who experience relapse has no place in recovery. That said, relapse is NOT a part of recovery itself – no relapse is fundamentally the total absence of recovery and is antithetical to everything we’re seeking in recovery. We take a closer look at the stages of relapse, what behaviors mark each stage, and what we can do to thwart the onset of relapse thinking and behavior. Whether you’re new in recovery or been around a few 24 hours, you’ll get a mega dose of relapse defying insight and practical tools you can apply to your recovery. Plus, we hear what the Sober & Serious community has to say on the topic and take calls from The Way Out Podcast Listeners. Listen Up.

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I’m Charlie and this week I’m bringing you a special presentation of perhaps one of the if not the most influential talks in modern 12-Step recovery. We’re bringing you this in lieu of our regularly scheduled podcast on relapse in Recovery. We had a bit of a technical snafu causing us to push our weekly recording to Wednesday. Parenthetically that caused me to work through some character defects like perfectionism, pride, and ego which I’ll talk more about in the Recover Revealed segment later in the podcast. Nevertheless, stay tuned for Wednesday’s episode on Relapse in Recovery as I am SUPER excited about what we’ve got in store for you in that episode. I’ve isolated the audio of Fred Holmquist’s lecture on the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous and the 12-Step program it outlines for all of you to easily listen and take in as you would with any other podcast you might listen to. Fred distills the quintessential dilemma of the addict and alcoholic in such a way that cuts straight to the heart of the matter which then sets up his distillation of the solution perfectly, which is a program of action as outlined in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. Perhaps nobody has done a better job than that of Fred Holmquist relating our core problem and the solution contained in the 12-Steps since Joe & Charlie’s talks entitled “The Big Book Comes Alive”. My hope is that you will find this talk as enlightening and as useful as I did when I watched the videos while in treatment at Hazelden more than 4 years ago, but even if you only find them a fraction as useful that would still be a tremendous addition to your recovery. 

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This week we’re talking Complacency in Recovery. Complacency can be a formidable and subtle foe in maintaining meaningful and lasting recovery. It is without question quite human to experience complacency in any number of facets in our lives; and recovery is no exception. For those of us in Recovery however, complacency often can and indeed does precede relapse.  We’re going to discuss what complacency in recovery means; how to detect it, where it stems from, and what practical action we can take to ensure we’re not falling victim to this all too common pitfall in Recovery. Plus we share comments on this topic from Sober & Serious AND take your calls! Listen Up!

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This week we’re talking right to and all about the Newcomer to recovery. It’s often said the newcomer is the most important person in a 12-Step meeting, though it doesn’t necessarily feel that way when you are first entering a program of Recovery. We give you, the newcomer, straight forward, practical actions you can implement straight away that will yield remarkable results as well as helpful insights into why these actions make such a big difference in Recovery. For the person in long term recovery, we remind you of how vitally important it is to your own recovery to reach out and help the newcomer in any way you can. Plus we take calls from the Way Out Podcast listeners. Listen Up.

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This week we’ve got a fantastic discussion on tap for you with Mr. Mike Govoni. Mike has been in long term recovery from addiction and alcoholism to the tune of 14 years, works on the front line in emergency rooms on the opioid & addiction crisis, and is the founder of Breath by Breath Wellness – where mindfulness and breath are cornerstones of his approach to total wellness coaching. Mike has one amazing Recovery story to share, along with incredibly insightful lessons he’s learned on his journey to wellness. He speaks of ACE’s – or adverse childhood experiences, a topic we’ll dive into in greater depth in our Recovery Revealed segment, as well as what he learned from each of the TWO bottoms he’s hit in his Journey to recovery; one of these bottoms while in sobriety. You won’t want to miss a minute of this gem of an interview so Listen UP.

Mike can be reached here:

Website: www.breathbybreathwellness.com 

Instagram : mikegovoni

Facebook: mike govoni 

Adverse Childhood Experience Test (you’ll need to find it in the article):

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/03/02/387007941/take-the-ace-quiz-and-learn-what-it-does-and-doesnt-mean

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