At a table for 3, Karen joins Mike & Glenn to talk about sponsors in the 12 steps. What is a sponsor? How do you pick a sponsor? How do you fire a sponsor? What about paid sober coaches? What benefits have you received from being a sponsor?
Join Karen, Mike & Glenn as they get real in their discussion of sponsors, the value of sponsorship, and talk about their own journey along the 12 steps.
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Karen joins Sober.Coffee at a table for three, talking about owning your own shit. In her words, “It’s your fault, asshole”.
How does owning your own shit affect sobriety? Human nature is to find fault. Instead of looking inward, we look outward for whose fault it is. Karen talks about her own recovery journey and tells us when she can own her shit, blame herself for her own problems, then she can truly recover – because if she can’t be honest with herself, she can’t recover.
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Darren joins Mike & Glenn in the coffee shop to talk about Celebrate Recovery. Darren has dealt with alcohol addiction in his own life for 30 years, off again and on again. He went to hundreds of AA meetings but never really connected with it – then found Celebrate Recovery.
Celebrate Recovery is about hurts, habits and hangups. While Celebrate Recovery is still a 12 step program with very similar steps to AA, Celebrate Recovery talks about God and Jesus and is very religious based including prayer, scripture and worship songs. Each of the 12 steps adds bible verses that connect to the step and members participate in a step study as a group instead of with a sponsor.
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When things are off and you’re left feeling restless, irritable, and discontented – it might signal an emotional relapse. But how do you identify these feelings? Can you trust yourself to know them? What do you do if you’re restless, irritable and discontent? Explore these questions and listen in with Mike & Glenn as they walk through their own experiences and recovery journey.
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Is there 100% proof that sobriety can work for you?
Recovery Research Institute says, “AA has helped countless tens of millions of individuals recover from addiction” and Stanford University tells us, “AA is the most effective path to alcohol abstinence…the fellowships help more people achieve sobriety than any therapy does.”
Listen in as Glenn and Mike talk about AA, introduce a real life case study of someone 12 months into the program, and discuss what their response is to someone who says AA doesn’t work. Sometimes it’s a matter of following AA because you have faith it will work, until you get to where you see the fact that it does work.
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Claire joins Mike & Glenn at a table for three in the coffee shop with a message: Drug use and overuse of alcohol has been glamorized in the media for a long time – but drinking is not sexy. It’s chaos and vomit.
Claire’s mission is to glamorize recovery and she’s going big! Claire launched her apparel brand earlier this year: Rehab Studios. Inspired by Claire’s personal recovery from addiction and struggles with mental health, she designs apparel, jewelry and accessories to celebrate and talk about recovery and fight back against stigma.
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Talking about challenges in sobriety, Mike & Glenn are in the coffee shop and the conversation isn’t all unicorns and rainbows. From challenges like emotions, habits, relationships, money issues, loneliness, boredom, mental health issues and the fear or relapse – the biggest challenge for Glenn? Change. “If I wasn’t open and willing to change, then I wouldn’t have been able to take even 5 steps in this program.”
Psychic change is the change that’s going to take away your obsession and make you acknowledge cravings for what they are. Then there are physical changes. Glenn had to physically stand up off the counselors floor at some point and put his left foot in front of the right foot and say: what challenges are in front of me right now?
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How is your recovery program like a chocolate chip cookie? Everyone has their own recipe that they think is best and it all has to do with the ingredients. Will those ingredients include AA, or will they include a different recovery program like Refuge Recovery?
At a table for 3 in the coffee shop talking with Tori, a substance abuse counselor, and her own experiences with Refuge Recovery. Refuge Recovery and the Buddhist path to recovery is all about the path to awakening – awakening being the end of suffering. Craving causes suffering. Addiction causes suffering.
Dive in and listen as Tori talks about Refuge Recovery, how it works, what the guiding principles are, and how it differs from AA.
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At a table for three, Quint shares his experience with alcoholism from growing up with a father who drank, and his own road to recovery. Quint began drinking at 15 and gradually discovered anxieties and concerns would be magically misted away through a haze of beer and wine – and that started a pattern for the next 40 years.
Eventually deciding his future was more important than alcohol, Quint started his road to recovery. The first 5 years were spent trying to stop drinking with bargaining, “I’ll only drink this much” or “I’ll only drink between this hour to this hour”. The “I can outthink this” and “I can outdo this” didn’t work because sure as eggs is eggs he couldn’t do it by himself. Quint recalls his experience with alcoholism felt unique – he didn’t relate to others in AA who had flipped cars, lost their jobs, or manhandled significant others. But when he finally found the right AA group and a sponsor – that was the start of his recovery journey.
Quint is currently leading the company Shoot You Animation & Video production with employees in Amsterdam, New York and Los Angeles.
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