In this episode, Laura McKowen explores why community and courage matter more than ever in making change in your life. She dives into the “messy midle” – theu ncertain space between giving up what umbs us and becoming someone new. She shares the story of the Luckiest Club, a global sobriety community.
Key Takeaways:
- Understanding that real transformation is messy
- Learning how sobriety isn’t the finish line, but the starting point for deeper healing
- Understanding why community is so important and powerful
- Discover fawning as a trauma response and how it shows up in life
- Learning to balance honesty with fear
- How discernment and clarity often comes in conversation with others
Laura McKowen is the founder and CEO of The Luckiest Club, a global sobriety support organization, and host of Tell Me Something True podcast. Laura has been published in The New York Times, and her work has been featured in The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, the TODAY show and more and is the bestselling author of We Are The Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life,
Laura McKowen: Website | Instagram
If you enjoyed this conversation with Laura McKowen, check out these other episodes:
How to Tap Into the Longings of the Heart with Sue Monk Kidd
A Journey to Self-Discovery and Sobriety with Matthew Quick
Special Episode: Finding Hope on the Path to Sobriety
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Episode Transcript:
Eric Zimmer 00:57
Transformation rarely arrives with a clean line or a tidy plan. It comes instead in the messy middle, the space between who we’ve been and who we’re becoming. Laura McCowan calls this the threshold where everything feels uncertain, uncomfortable and even sometimes unbearable. In this conversation, we talk about what it means to stand in that in between place, why change isn’t the end of pain but the beginning of healing, and how we can start to build a life that can actually hold us because the truth is, giving up the thing that numbed us, whether it was alcohol control, work or anything else, isn’t enough. We have to become someone new. I’m Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi, Laura, welcome back.
01:46
Hi, thank you for having me again. Yes,
Eric Zimmer 01:48
I am so excited to talk to you again. I loved our first conversation, and I’m excited for this one, but we will start like we always do with the parable, and I’ll give you another chance to answer it, because your first answer was unsatisfactory. Oh, probably I have no idea what I don’t have no idea what you said.
Laura McKowen 02:06
I was trying to remember, and I have no Yeah, I would
Eric Zimmer 02:10
imagine few of our listeners would remember, although I know a bunch of them loved it. And I often recommend your book to people early in sobriety, particularly people who love good writing. I think it’s such a great book about sobriety, but you’re also such a good writer, and people who appreciate literature appreciate your book. So yeah, in the parable, there is a grandparent talking with her grandchild, and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear, and the grandchild stops thinks about it for a second, and looks up at their grandparent says, Well, which one wins? And the grandparent says that the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
Laura McKowen 02:57
Yes. So I couldn’t remember how I answered it the first time, I almost went to look it up, and then I thought, don’t bother. But my what it means to me right now, in my life and my work, the battle exists in having the courage to say the truth, speak the truth, even when it is going to disappoint and possibly piss off and possibly make people really hate me, and knowing that that’s not personal, I guess, another way of saying it is the bad wolf is playing it safe, or thinking that there is such a thing as safety when you have a public voice, and desiring that. And the Good Wolf is wanting to be free and doing whatever that means in the moment, especially when it comes to telling the truth. I had no problem. Well, it’s not that I had no problem, but I’ve been talking about hard things for a while, and I had no problem really doing that in talking about sobriety, because it was saving my life. But I feel like I’ve reached this point where, now there are other things that I really want to talk about, but I’ve got a bigger platform. There’s more people listening, there’s more people watching, and I get afraid. That’s a good wolf, bad wolf thing in my life right now. Yeah, I
Eric Zimmer 04:14
think it’s a really interesting point, because I think there’s two things that start to happen, at least this has been my experience. Thing. One is just a genuine fear, like, I don’t want people to not like me, etc. The other is I don’t want to drive people away from what I feel is like really important content or messaging. Like, for you, you’re talking about people about getting sober, it’s, it’s life and death, and feeling like I don’t want to drive people away from that by sort of moving, quote, unquote, off topic in a way that starts to drive certain people away. And so for me, it’s been this balance, particularly as I’ve begun not begun to as I’ve thought more about, how do I bring issues that are beyond personal development that I care about i. Two. There are things I want to talk about, there’s things I want to advocate for, there’s all that. And so how do I do that in a way that is helpful and useful, but I also don’t want to drive people away who can be getting something valuable out of what I’m doing. I mean, obviously there’s the like not wanting to drive away people, because you don’t want your numbers to go down. But then there’s a genuine there’s a genuineness. So I find both those. I find both. You know, I’m battling a variety of factors when I start thinking about those things.
Laura McKowen 05:27
Yeah, all of those things are true for me too. I think 2020 and 2021 were traumatizing. I mean, that’s an understatement for everybody, and one of the things that I experienced was being a person with a public voice. It can be really nasty in the online spaces and less so in the real world, but a lot of what I do is trying to present, distill and present information in an online space, and I’m choosing to do that so it’s like, I don’t want to be light and fluffy and easy and always be safe, right? I actually don’t want that at all, but I find myself challenged to, as you said, bring in other topics and not get sucked into the dark side of it. Yeah, it’s tough to put out what I put out with integrity and then let whatever’s gonna happen happen. Yep,
Eric Zimmer 06:18
and I think I’ve always sort of been like, well, we’re not a political show, right? Like, that’s not what we do, right? And then you hit these points, at least I did, where I went. Is this a political issue? This feels like it’s a issue about basic values. But even conversations about basic values seem to be political these days. And it’s, it’s challenging, you know?
Laura McKowen 06:38
Yeah, everything’s political now. So we, I mean, this is a whole rabbit hole, but everything is political now, you know, up to a vaccine being entirely political, yeah, so what? That’s just the world we’re operating in. So I’m learning how to have courage in that space. And it’s honestly, for me, it’s really humiliating, and like it brings up a lot of my old junk around people pleasing, and that made me really sick. You know, it was dishonesty at the end of the day and really feeling like I lacked a center that was not a good place for me. Yeah, there’s
Eric Zimmer 07:13
a line that you said in a blog post not too long ago. You said, there are some things that still undo me. The worst feeling like someone I care about is mad at me, and I completely resonate with that. I think that is my biggest Achilles heel, is that very thing is like, when someone is mad at me that I care about, it’s really difficult,
Laura McKowen 07:36
really difficult. Yeah, and it’s a small circle of people that can undo me like that. It’s the people that like that I actually care about. But it’s so easy for me to snap into just my my therapist says one of my defense mechanisms is called categorically wrong. I just go, you’re right. I’m wrong. Everything I’m everything I do is wrong, yeah, everything I’m wrong, and it’s like this really dark shame spiral. Not helpful. In
Eric Zimmer 08:10
that blog post, we hear about flight and freeze, and you mentioned that there’s, you know, something called fawning. Say more about that.
Laura McKowen 08:18
Oh, yeah, that was a big learning for me that we know of the fear response is typically as the fight, flight, freeze, the three F’s, but that there’s actually a fourth. I can’t remember the psychologist that coined it, but it’s called fawning, and it’s in response to fear. We fawn over someone, we go towards them. Instead of running or freezing, we go towards them. We kiss their ass, we try to appease them. We abandon ourselves entirely and our needs entirely. And that’s me. That was. My primary coping mechanism is fawning, not always, but with a certain type of person, you know, and of course, it mimics childhood stuff and everything like that. That was really helpful to me, because it named something that I’ve experienced so acutely. And you know, when you’re doing it, it doesn’t make sense. It feels terrible, but it’s all an appeal for safety, for keeping the attachment. It’s like keep your enemies closer, type of thing. If I just get closer to them, whatever I need to do to make myself Okay, in their eyes, then I’ll be okay. Yeah,
Eric Zimmer 09:28
it feels terrible, and so does staying sort of centered in myself and what I think and what I believe, which I think is the way we try and change a lot of old patterns, sobriety being a great example. It’s like, early on in that change process, it’s really difficult. Like, which of these feels worse? They both feel pretty bad. Yeah,
Laura McKowen 09:50
no kidding, it’s a true dilemma in the Greek tragedy sense of the word, you’re not thinking between one nice, peaceful road and one, you know, terrible road. It’s both. Both feel terrible. It’s just right, which is gonna, you know, good wolf, bad wolf type of thing. It’s like, yeah, it does feel terrible. I mean, for me, you know, I found it was intolerable to sit with myself, discomfort if someone was mad at me, was absolutely intolerable. So, you know, I have to give myself some credit that I don’t do it so much anymore. But there, of course, still in instances here and there where, you know, one is where my partner and I got into a fight about three months ago, and we’ve been together for almost a couple years at this point, and have a really beautiful, solid relationship. And when we got into this fight, and it wasn’t like World War Two, it wasn’t even a big fight, but this is where we go, right in conflict. For me, it felt like the relationship was on the line. And I it took everything in me not to just try to fix it, just immediately fix it. And the couple days where the storm was brewing between us and just had to, like, wait for it to settle, were really, really difficult for me. And when I told him, you know, after we finally did talk, that it feels to me like the relationship is threatened, he was shocked. It’s like, what do you really, you know, we’re just fighting like this is settle down. Laura, yeah, we’re just fighting like this is, this is fine, but that’s trauma stuff kicking up. That’s right.
Eric Zimmer 11:24
It doesn’t feel fine. I think that with stuff like this, I think we often think that we’ll get to a point where we’ll do enough healing and enough inner work, where we’ll be able to do that sort of thing, like I’m going to say something’s not okay with me, and then I’m going to step back and I’m not going to fawn. I heard this from somebody recently, step into my power, and I was like, Well, yes, you are stepping into your power, but it’s really important that you recognize you’re not going to feel powerful. Probably in that moment, you’re going to feel terrified. If you wait until you feel powerful to do it, there will be no doing it, you know. And so I think what you’re saying is so important, is like, yeah, I was able to do it, but, boy, it didn’t feel very good. No,
Laura McKowen 12:04
it felt terrible, not sleeping, not eating. You know, the full the full catastrophe. But you do it, and that’s what it means to be in love with someone, whether it’s a partner or a sibling or a friend, if you feel comfortable 100% of the time, and you’re never afraid and you’re never hurt, and you’re never feeling the weight of loving them. My friend Jim zartman, who’s a coach and a pastor, says, you know, like get being married. This is quite gruesome, but it’s like each of you has a revolver that you put your partner’s finger on the trigger, and you just trust that they don’t point it at your head, and you trust that they’re not going to pull it, you know. So that’s just the way it is. If you’re really open, you’re going to risk being shot,
Eric Zimmer 12:52
you know? I think that’s an interesting idea. I’ve seen more and more of this. I feel like when I first got sober, which was like 1994 but I think even probably around when, when you got sober, and when I got sober again, the second time, you know, there was a lot of talk about CO dependency, and I think some of this I got from Buddhism, which can be interpreted this way, if you’re not careful, the sense was that the psychologically healthy person was this independent, whatever you do doesn’t affect me. I’m so secure that I don’t get ruffled by anything. And what I’ve seen really change over the last, really, probably last four or five years, is more of an understanding that kind of like you’re saying that Healthy Love means that we are vulnerable to someone and we can be hurt. So I think it’s sorting that out, like, what’s trauma informed response, what’s unhealthy response, and what’s normal? Human like, my partner’s upset with me, so of course, it feels bad. God,
Laura McKowen 13:59
yes, absolutely. I’m so glad you brought that up. Codependency is real. You know, there, there is very dysfunctional codependency. But I think the truth is always somewhere in the middle, as we know, and healthy places in the middle, in balance, it’s murky. I’ve said to him many times, you could really hurt me. You know, at the beginning of our relationship, it was like, wow, you know you could really hurt me, and I hadn’t really been in a partnership like quite like that before. It’s wonderful because you’re all in and it’s terrifying because you’re all in and we do depend on each other. It is murky. I definitely don’t have the answers to that. It’s like, you know it when you feel it kind of but to give a point by point description of the difference is really difficult. I think even healthy relationships can have a small amount of codependency. You know, if you’re an attuned person, I mean, I’m very attuned to other people’s energy, then my daughter too, and when they’re upset, I feel upset. Yep. Is that? Does that make me. Are unhealthy, I don’t think so. It’s I guess what I do in response to that, if I need them to be okay, for me to be okay, then we are drifting into unhealthy territory. But I think otherwise, it’s just loving
Eric Zimmer 15:16
I think what you said there’s really important, like, how do I respond to them in a way that doesn’t make it about me, exactly, doesn’t make them being upset, them being down into suddenly about me. And there are people I’ve had in my life before. Maybe I was one of these people at some point where, no matter what it is, it immediately sort of flips into like they feel bad, you know, I no longer even feel comfortable feeling bad. Yeah, now
Laura McKowen 15:45
I have to rescue you. Yeah, exactly, yeah. It’s a responsibility thing, I think at the end of the day, but it’s overlapping circles. You know, there’s not you exist here and I exist here, and we never cross, we do, but at the end of the day, you feel responsible for your own experience.
Eric Zimmer 16:02
Yep, you mentioned fight flight freeze, fawning. I heard another term recently for it, which was flopping. She made me laugh. I was like, that kind of just, yeah, that’s that sort of describes me, fight
Laura McKowen 16:18
freeze, yeah. So none of those are flopping. That’s hilarious. You
Eric Zimmer 16:22
You just use kind of collapse in on yourself. Yeah, go to sleep.
Laura McKowen 16:26
Yeah. I that I’ve flopped. The flopping and fawning feel more true to me than the other three. Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 16:34
Exactly Me, too. Yeah, too. Yeah. We were talking about this a little bit beforehand, but maybe we could hit on this as a general topic. You recently published something on one of your social channels about some books that you’ve loved recently, and maybe before we go into what any of them are, the books you’ve talked about were fiction books. Talk to me about what fiction specifically gives you that feels so important, valuable. Okay,
Laura McKowen 16:59
I love this topic. You know, I would say I’m traditionally much more of a non fiction, memoir lover like that would be my first love, maybe. But ironically, several of the books that have been instructive to me and helpful to me, I would say the top three or four of them are not memoir or non fiction. They’re novels. And I’d have to say it’s the mythology of it all. What we get to experience in fiction is some representation of a myth. So then it kind of widens the aperture of what’s possible, because real life is just real life. It can only get as strange as real life gets, or whatever. But fiction, I mean, you can include magical surrealism, you can include fantasy, you can include, you know, historical fiction. You can include things that are true and not true, and anything you know. And so you can use those tools to create a myth. And to me, the myths are what we’re always after, this timeless stories, the archetypal stories that live within us. And so, for example, one of the books that I posted was the book of longings, which you and I talked about, which is a fictional story about an alternate story of Jesus, obviously summon kid wrote, obviously researched widely. And there was, I mean, it was beautifully researched. You could tell she abided by what we know to be true about the story of Jesus, but also had to add, like, all kinds of things. And there’s something in that that made it feel more real and more true, because she allowed her imagination to fill in the blanks. So yeah, I just also love the writing the literature of fiction. You can see that sometimes in memoir, but in memoir, you know, they’re trying to tell a true story. So the writing tends to be different. I won’t say always, but it tends to be different, even if you look at writers who do both memoir and fiction writing, the fiction writing just has a different feel. It’s, you know, there’s more prose, it’s more lyrical often, so it feels like you just can get immersed in that world. Yep,
Eric Zimmer 19:16
it’s one of the things about doing this show that is hardest for me, is I have so much reading to do for guests that I don’t get to read as much fiction as I used to, but I still try and squeeze it in. There’s something about it that I deeply love, that book of longings, book I found so fascinating to see her describe somebody who is in relationship with Jesus. Like, what might it be like to be the intimate partner of somebody who’s that single minded
19:50
of Jesus Christ, of the like, most meta, yeah,
Eric Zimmer 19:56
yeah. And character in history you. You know, it’s not easy, you know. You think like, well, you know, but if you really think about like, Well, Jesus was kind of a, not always an easy to get along with guy, like, you know, like, it’s, it’s just, it’s, it’s amazing. But that’s not all it is, because she is an amazing character in her own right. I know you’ve got a line from that book that you love, which I’ll let you share in a second. My favorite line from it was, I think it was a prayer she offers or something, which was, bless the largeness inside me, no matter how I fear it.
Laura McKowen 20:30
Oh, I just got goosebumps. Yes, that was also one of mine. Bless the largeness in me. Yeah, I love when I am dust, singing these words over my bones. She was a voice
Eric Zimmer 20:42
that’s so good. Yeah, I know I was going to interview her. I think I had read something of hers years before, but hadn’t in a while. So we just, I just kind of immersed myself in her world for like, three weeks. And it was just lovely. You know, when Jenny and I drove to Atlanta and back, we listened to some of the books on tape, and I read that book, and it was just because they’re not books on tape anymore. I guess it’s not what that’s not really what it
Laura McKowen 21:06
is that’s okay. I understand what you mean. I listen to books on tape too. Okay? On my iPhone. Yeah. She is an extraordinary, extraordinary writer and woman, and her female characters are some of the best that have been written. You know, her first book, The Secret Life of Bees. That was when I fell in love with her work. And I think when a lot of people did first or it was their first novel, and with the women in that book, and then, you know, Anna in the book of longings, was among the best I’ve, I’ve ever read, too and strong female characters. The Divine Feminine is what she really captures
Speaker 1 22:02
you. Let’s
Eric Zimmer 22:13
change directions a little bit and talk about you know, your book was called the luckiest but you’ve created something called the luckiest club. Tell me a little bit about what that is and what’s happening there
Laura McKowen 22:25
the luckiest club. So TLC very nice. Makes it easy to remember, and it’s also kind of meaningful. So yeah, I created TLC in Well, what happened is in around early March of 2020, when the world started to shut down, I remember sitting on my couch. School had already been canceled, so my daughter was home, and we were still in that stage of where is this, like, how okay, it’s gonna be for a couple weeks, or, you know, it’s like it was all new. We weren’t quite sure how big it was or how long it was gonna last. And I remember sitting there working, and Facebook posts from the AA group in my local town saying we’re not hosting live meetings from you know, here on out, and we’ll stay tuned. And I went, Holy, okay, for some reason it was that not not school closing, or because that that room had stayed open in every blizzard. I’d never seen it get shut down. So I thought, This is bad. People need that meeting, those meetings, to be open. And of course, it wasn’t just my town. It was like everywhere. So I thought, I know how to host meetings, not AA meetings, but I I can host a meeting, and I put together this format. My experience in a helped me actually think of a format, but I included different readings of my own choosing. So I got to include poetry and literature and whatever I felt like reading, which was really fun to me, and I just kind of decided to do it. I didn’t think through much. I posted something on my website, people could sign up. When they signed up, they came to a page that showed the schedule. And I just and I was hosting all of them, and I was hosting one or two a week, right? So seven meetings at least a week, a couple times a day. And you know, I did that for two months, and it was awesome. It actually helped me so much in that time, and hundreds of people started to show up. And you know when you just know something is happening, like something was happening. And so many of these people had never been to a meeting because they never did A a or they weren’t even sober yet, but they had been on my email list, or followed me, or whatever. So this was their first experience of community and sobriety. And that’s life changing for people. If you’ve never felt that, never experienced that, and they could do it, you know, especially with what was going on, it was really neat. But it got to be obviously, like, Okay, I can’t keep doing this, because this is a lot. And. Yeah, so I thought I was like, in real time, in meetings, talking to them, like, I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I’m thinking about it. I’m trying to figure it out. And then I set a date. I was like, I’m gonna and I’m gonna stop them. At this point, it was like, three or four weeks out, right? And people who are like, please don’t stop them. We would pay money do what you need to do. You know? We hope these continue. And I, over a couple weeks, put together a team, hired people to lead the meetings. Came up with a format essentially, you know, rolled up a quick like business and TLC was born. So we started with about 10 meetings a week. I led one or two of them, but the rest were led by other people that I knew in sobriety, which was really neat, because people that from all different traditions and backgrounds and demographics and experiences, and it was just really cool to see what was going on. So we started, you know, having we had a private forum off of Facebook where people could talk, and then just the meetings, that’s all it really was. There was nothing much to it. And then, of course, it evolved, because it was really working, like it was giving that core group that I started with where, like, some of them had been in sobriety for 20 years, and they were like, this is I needed this. Like, this is revitalizing my own sobriety. And, you know, we have a guy named Mike B who’s in his early 80s, who’s a host, and he has been sober for 35 years, and he’s like, this is the best thing that’s happened to me. And you know, we have younger people older people. It’s something that I knew was really special, and we all felt that. So fast forward to now, February 21 2022 and we have 35 meetings a week. We have newcomer meetings and beyond one year meetings and bipoc meetings and queer meetings and newcomer, or did I say, Yeah, newcomer and all kinds of other programming too. Beyond just meetings, we have something that’s called the academy, because, as you know, like we get sober and then it’s like, okay, then what? Now? What? Yep, so we have content to help people. The way we sort of look at it is like your life is a relationship, you know, with several different things, and in sobriety, you have to strengthen that relationship, go from unhealthy to more healthy, if possible, in that relationship. So the relationship with self, the relationship with others, relationship to body, the relationship to money, finances and the relationship to work are the ones that we focus on right now. And it’s been quite a ride, I bet. And, you know, it’s got its own culture. And I’ve seen people, you know, just like you do in AA, get sober, miraculously and change and then go on to, you know, start a subgroup in their own area, or for their, you know, like something that they’re interested in. And this will be our two No, I can’t even remember what year we are in 2021 this will be our two year anniversary in May. It’s wild to think that this didn’t exist at some point, because it’s just this, like, almost fully formed child. Now, I’d say it’s like a teenager. I was saying before we got on that, I didn’t really expect to do it. But it’s also like, of course, it makes sense that this is what was going to happen. Yeah, this is what was coming. Everything was sort of in preparation for that. And it’s probably the most special thing that I’ve ever been a part of.
Eric Zimmer 28:19
You know, in AA, there are different aspects of what make up. Aa, there’s obviously the fellowship, the getting together, the meeting with people. And then there is the program, which is you follow the 12 steps. I’m kind of curious, in the luckiest club, is it primarily fellowship? I know you’re starting to offer program related things. Say a little bit about that. And what I think this raises the more interesting question, is we see more and more recovery modalities starting to pop up, which I think is wonderful. You know, as I think about that, I’m like, Well, what is it that makes a modality more successful or less successful? And I’m kind of curious what your thoughts are on that, having been through a bunch of the ones that already existed, and now having two years of working on your own, great
Laura McKowen 29:06
question. So, you know, we read a script. There’s a few things we say at every meeting. We do have a culture, but I wouldn’t say yet that we have a program we don’t have. Okay, here’s the steps that you work or here’s what you go through, and that’s being developed right now. That’s actually the book that I’m writing. What I wanted, actually, was not to have that in the beginning. And what we say is we respect all paths to recovery. We don’t do dogma. We lead with compassion. We welcome you as you are. That’s who TLC is today. And I don’t, I don’t ever want to do dogma, right but, but I have also seen the need for something, for people to work against, to apply themselves against, kind of, yeah, a program, an actual program. Say what you mean by the word against. Like, we need, we need a program. You know, I’ve seen people go, Okay, I love going to these meetings, because right now it is, I would say, 99% fellowship. It’s community. It’s not that we just get on the meetings. It’s. Very intentional. The meetings are very structured. We have speaker meetings and topic meetings, and there’s a lot that goes into those. So it’s not like this free for all, but it’s mostly Community Fellowship, and that’s great, and it’s a big part of it. But people want something to work. They want to be able to do the work of sobriety against a program. And of course, I would say what we have as far as a program goes right now, which isn’t really a program. It’s more like a mission statement or a credo or something. Is at the beginning of my we are the luckiest book. The epigraph is actually a list of nine things, and says, One, it is not your fault. It is your responsibility. Three, it is unfair that this is your thing. Four, this is your thing. Five, this will never stop being your thing until you face it. Six, you can’t do it alone. Seven, only you can do it. Eight, you are loved. And nine, we will never stop reminding you of these things. And that is what we say at the end of every meeting, and that’s what my new book is built on, is those nine things. So to answer your question, it’s been largely fellowship up until this point, and then we’ve started to add in programming. And the reason I think that’s interesting is because I think there’s this idea that modalities show up fully formed, you know, but the best ones are built in community. Yeah, yep, you know. They’re built as a response to a community need not dictated from on high. Even Dr Bob and Bill Wilson did that. You know, they weren’t. Yeah, they wrote the book. They wrote the big book. And I think one of the places where it’s unfortunately fallen short is that they haven’t updated that literature to be inclusive of modern times. And every spiritual tradition that is the marker of whether something stays relevant or not, and it’s usually done as an oral tradition. You know, it’s it gets modernized and relevant to the context of the times, but that is what we’re doing with TLC, what we’re trying to do, you know, it’s imperfect. Also, as soon as you nail something down, you’re saying what you think is important, yeah, and you’re excluding other things, right? You can’t do all the things. No program can be all the things. And that’s something I’ve had to come to terms with. Like that. I just have to say, this is what we’re about, and make it as expansive and open as possible, and open to interpretation, but also be clear, right?
Eric Zimmer 32:33
Yeah, there’s a little bit of that idea. Like, if you stand for everything, you stand for nothing, kind of thing, right? Like, if you hit a certain point, you have to start to say, well, there is something here that works. But I think you’re right that these things emerge over time, and AA emerged over time. I mean, Bill Wilson didn’t suddenly sit down one day and be like, Oh, I’ve got aa figured out. Like it happened by meeting, you know, Dr Bob, and these things happen, and
Laura McKowen 32:58
Carl young and all these other people, right? Yep, that we don’t hear about, but it was very much a project of many minds.
Eric Zimmer 33:07
Yeah. And the thing I’ve heard, also, just to tag on to that, is that there were some people in AA who really pushed on that line at the end, God, as we understand him, that they pushed for that, whoever the few people were who pushed for that saved millions of lives,
Laura McKowen 33:24
absolutely. Well, it’s like founding father language, you know, it’s, you kind of look back and you go, how, how did that decision get made? And it was very prescient at the time. You know, yeah, yeah, that did save millions of lives. God, as we understand him, it’s been really interesting. You know, for example, a lot of people have said, well, what about like, moderation and what about harm reduction? And why can’t that be part of this? Or California sober? You know, What’s your stance on marijuana? And it’s like, I know I’m not
Eric Zimmer 33:57
close enough to the recovery community that I hear that term very often. So every time I hear it, it makes me laugh. Me too.
Laura McKowen 34:02
Me too. But it’s like, no, we’re not about moderation, management, we’re not a harm reduction we’re abstinence based community, and that’s okay. So, you know, stand for something, you fall for anything, or try to say everything. You say nothing, all those things. It’s a good check for me, because, as you know, we get pretty self righteous about certain things, and I’ve had my mind changed about a lot being in community, and that’s why, as my friend Jim says, There’s sanity in community. Yeah, right. That’s why we have it, because one person doesn’t know that is
Eric Zimmer 34:33
a great line. There’s sanity and community. Makes me think back earlier in this conversation, we were talking about, like, how do you know when you know something is like sort of Healthy Love or dependence and and the word that came to my mind was, well, it’s really about discernment. And one of the things that I certainly have come to believe, I think I believed it a lot earlier in my recovery, and then maybe I lost it a little bit, and I’ve really picked that thread up much more strongly, is that like, well. Discernment happens in community. It happens with other people. If you’re trying to discern all by yourself, it’s not to say that none of it’s possible, but you know, for me, I almost feel like true discernment needs a community, even if that community is one or two other people, 100%
Laura McKowen 35:14
that’s why we talk about relationships. We’re always in relationship to things. We’re not islands. As much as we like to think. We do things alone. We don’t not well. You know, ultimately, it is a relationship, and discernment happens in community, and everything we do is a negotiation with the world. It’s a call and response and a conversation that we have, right? I think when something gets to be unhealthy and cult like is when there is no conversation, when there’s only rules, when there’s only one way. Again, it’s that middle way, that fine balance. Yep,
Eric Zimmer 35:50
and some people might say A is a cult, but I think the fact that the traditions were created is what sort of to me, stopped it from becoming truly cult like, because nobody had the power. I mean, in cults, very few people have all the power as brilliant as I think maybe the steps are in some ways or what they did. I think the traditions are the thing that most blow my mind, that I’m like, how did they see that coming? Like, how on earth did they design a decentralized organization like that in like 1940 I
Laura McKowen 36:24
think there’s God in that. You know, not God is a creator person, but Christ consciousness, God consciousness. Yeah, it makes so much sense. Mere Mortals did not create. You’re not that good at that stuff. You know, our egos get in the way they
Eric Zimmer 36:38
were certainly working from a deeply inspired place, yes, regardless of how you want to quantify that they were Working somehow from a non egoic place, absolutely yes. You so I want to go to the nine things that you read at the end of the meeting, which were the epigraph to your book. We covered some of these in our first conversation, but given the fact that you read them in every meeting, means you like I probably believe you can’t really hear these things too often, and I love it that at least some of them are just pairs. They’re paradoxes, right? That you sort of put in there. And I’d love to talk about it’s not your fault, but it is your responsibility, because I think this is such a critical piece of recovery, regardless of what it is we might be trying to recover from, whether it be alcoholism or addiction or trauma or any number of different things, but this idea that it’s not your fault, but it is your responsibility, and share a little bit about why that’s so important, and maybe share what happens if you get stuck on either side of that? I agree,
Laura McKowen 38:03
this isn’t specific to recovery, even this is just life. This is, I think, what delineates the difference between, like what Carl Jung called the morning of life versus the afternoon of life, or what Richard Rohr called the first half of life versus the second half of life. You know, in the first half of life you’re usually very entrenched in one or the other of those things, and in the second half of life, you hold them both. So what they meant to me and why I wrote them that way, I think people tend to fall well, I don’t think I know from talking to lots of different psychologists in the research for this book that our tendency is to blame. It’s sort of our innate reaction as kids and even as adults, is to not take responsibility, because we’re not really taught how you know something you have to learn. And so a lot of what we do going throughout life is either take on all the blame or put all the blame somewhere else and or we mistake responsibility for things like duty and obligation. So we think we’re being responsible, but we’re not. We’re doing something out of obligation, and women especially do this like I am being responsible to my family. Let’s say I do everything they ask me to do. I show up everywhere I am at the mercy of everyone else’s needs. No, that’s not actually responsibility, because you’re not in there. You’re not taking responsibility for your experience. You are excellent at duty and obligation. But that’s like below the line of responsibility, as Christopher Avery developed, it’s called the responsibility process, and he was really helpful at explaining these things to me. So when we enter into recovery, or when we’re mired in addiction, our self blame or other blame, blame on others is very thick. It’s a world that we’re living in tons of shame. Not only is this terrible, but I’m terrible, and nothing happens there. We can’t get anywhere. With just it’s my fault. It’s just all my fault, and obviously, for cultural reasons, do believe it is our fault. You know, we still very much live in a world that doesn’t understand addiction, that addiction, where addiction is a moral issue, where people who get addicted or just need to make better choices, they lack control, will power all those things. It’s getting better, but unfortunately, that’s still very, very true, and so we feel, you know, like pieces of crap. So when people first hear it’s not my fault, it gives them permission to breathe, essentially. And then when you say, but it is your responsibility that also actually gives them permission to breathe, because people actually really want to take responsibility. They might not think they do, but we actually really do, but we just have it confused. Like the reason we want to take responsibility is because that is actually where our freedom is. That’s where our power is. That’s where we can actually effectuate change. That’s where we can have peace. For me, I thought everything was my fault. I never was. It’s that person and this person, and you know, the world’s against me. I was never that. I was like, very much the opposite, which is equally as damaging, right? Because it’s not true, and they’re two sides of the same coin. As long as I’m blaming myself or other people, I am unable to be effective right now, right? It’s just a bad story. I
Eric Zimmer 41:28
think what you just said there really caught my attention, which was when I say it’s not my fault, I can breathe right? Because up to that moment, even if I do think it is my fault, there is still I’m trying to defend and justify myself to some degree. Of course, if I think it’s all my fault, I’m sort of in a battle. Whereas, if I can go, oh, it’s not my fault, like you said, I can draw blame for a second. I can stop fighting something for a second, and then, yeah, oh, it is my responsibility, opens that up. I want to go back to something you said a minute ago, though, because I’d love to get your thoughts on this. You talked about duty or obligation, and I’m really interested in values. What are our values? Living out of our values, but living out of our values, and duty and obligation are very close cousins, right? Like, if I go, Well, my value is that I have a value that caring for family members is important, okay, there’s a value that very quickly can bleed into duty and obligation, right, in feeling. And so I’m kind of curious for you, how do you keep those apart? Do you think?
Laura McKowen 42:37
Yeah, great question. I’ve had a lot about this, because it’s complicated. If you’re truly operating out of your values, that means you’re living in choice, and if you’re living in choice, then you are taking responsibility. But a lot of times, people their actions, in the way they’re running their lives, are actually not in line with their values, they’re in line with someone else’s values, with society’s values, with their parents values, with someone else’s script, and then they’re just resentful, even if they won’t say it. So it’s not that when you live in responsibility, that suddenly your life looks different and you’re not doing anything you don’t feel like doing. It’s that you’re choosing, and you know why you’re choosing, even if it’s things that are terrible, that feel terrible, I mean, or that aren’t your preferences, necessarily, you can be in responsibility in them by making the choice and knowing why you’re choosing it. It’s when we follow script that we either aren’t aware because we’ve never actually thought of what our values are, it’s and for good reasons, like, it didn’t occur to us that we could, yeah, you know, we just took what was given, we did what we were supposed to do. We don’t know why we’re so miserable. And someone telling you like, Have you thought about what you want and what’s really actually important to you? That can be a revelation, and then letting that animate your choices is another revolution, and it might mean your life looks wildly different, or it might not mean that, but it’s the energy of which you approach things. Are you just reacting to your life, or are you consciously choosing the things that you’re doing because they’re based on your values? And look, this is a lifelong process, but that’s the difference to me, is that I
Eric Zimmer 44:31
totally agree, and I think that the thing that’s important in there also is to sometimes keep circling back to choice, right like, I think that we can get clear on what we value and what’s important. This happens with me taking care of my mother, right? Like, sorry, Mom, if you’re listening, but it starts from a place of, like, I care and I want to do it, and it’s a value. And then if I’m not careful, it starts to start to feel like duty and obligation, because I forget. It that you’re choosing I forget that I’m choosing it. So then I have to go, stop. Hang on. Nobody’s making me do any of this circle back. What’s my value, you know? So it feels like there’s a loop that needs to be maintained, you know, which is like totally value driving choices. Choices start to become habitual, because we habituate right, and then going, all right? I don’t want to be driven off habit, back to choice. Oh, yep, still lines up. Okay, you know? And it’s this looping process. It’s
Laura McKowen 45:27
an active living process that we are in every day. It’s not and your values change over time, you know, of course, yeah, that’s another thing people don’t necessarily get or appreciate or feel they have permission to do the things that were important to me 10 years ago are not important to me really anymore. Part of that is I’m older. Part of that is I’m sober. We change, we evolve. And I would say, you’re allowed to change. You’re allowed to change. This is such a fascinating topic to me. I am actually about to start on a two year program in existential psychology. It’s very popular in Europe. It hasn’t quite come to America, but it’s this merging of philosophy which talks a lot about the concepts of freedom and choice and responsibility, but also psychotherapeutic models. You know, how do you humanize that? So I spend a lot of time thinking about responsibility and the difference, because it can get really murky for me and other people, it’s probably one of the most worthwhile endeavors, is to commit yourself to discerning the difference to that in your life and to finding a way. Because look, the other thing is, like we don’t have control over so much, so it’s always done through the lens of your own skills, your reality, your present circumstances, your values at the time. It’s always very contextual, right? Yeah, there are, of course, many times in our lives where we’re faced with things that we didn’t choose. You know, you’re taking care of your mother, she didn’t choose that, and you didn’t necessarily choose it either, but it’s something that you’re faced with making a decision about now, the way to not become resentful of that is to be in responsibility in that choice.
Eric Zimmer 47:11
Yeah, yeah. I think the other thing that’s really difficult, and I’d love to keep hearing from you about this as you go through this program and as you learn more and get your thoughts now, but like, determining our values and which values are really ours and which values are the ones that we inherited, and recognizing that. What’s the way to say this, everything about us is conditioned by the past. I get kind of not hung up, but I spend a lot of time thinking about like, well, what’s my real value? Well, okay, what does that mean? Like, how do I know? Because, yeah, like, who am I? I’m a combination of the forces that have acted upon me, and so I don’t want to be just that, and that’s very real. And I think this idea of figuring out what we value is an easy phrase to say, but is extraordinarily difficult work. Yeah,
Laura McKowen 48:04
it’s some of the hardest work we do, because it often means rejecting people and institutions that have many times done well by us, you know, have sometimes even raised us. And you know, I read something amazing from Adam Grant the other day. I don’t know if you’re familiar with him, but I shared it actually. He said, Too many people spend their lives being dutiful descendants instead of good ancestors. The responsibility of each generation is not to please their predecessors, it’s to improve things for their offspring. It’s more important to make your children proud than your parents proud.
Eric Zimmer 48:39
Amen to that. Yeah, in the spiritual habits program that we do, we’ve got the main program, then there’s a second program in intensive and we were talking about legacy recently, and the phrase legacy sort of being like a connective tissue between generations, right? Like, I inherited a legacy, and I’m passing one on and getting really clear on which parts of that like, yep, keep that flowing and Nope, that stops here. You know, that’s
Laura McKowen 49:07
right, that’s a beautiful way to put it, like a river. You know, we’re gonna keep this part of it going, and we’re gonna put a block up here. Yeah, I love the word legacy, and I think that has a tremendous amount to do with values. It is the hardest work that we’ll do. I mean, some of the values that my parents had are not mine, and some of them aren’t mine because I just weren’t part of my DNA, like written in not literal DNA, but it’s like not in my soul. I was born not valuing those things, and maybe I assimilated and tried to value them for the sake of pleasing my parents and just getting along. But then you grow up. You know, Carl Jung thought that the highest evolution of a person is individuation, and I think that has everything to do with values and being in touch with yourself. I mean, that’s the prerequisite, is you. You have to actually be in touch with yourself. At any given point in time. And what does that mean? You know, get be in touch with with what I think. There’s a couple answers to that and shit. I don’t know this is like, well, out of my depth, but this is how I understand it. Is my unique blueprint, you know, my dharma in yoga philosophy, my fingerprint, my soul, what I was set here to do. And I look at that as the part of me that is most connected to God, as I understand God, I feel we all have a role that we’re here to play. I mean that quite literally. If you think of nature, everything is sort of by design, you know. And I don’t look at this like there’s a big creator and it’s all, you know, pulling strings. It’s bigger and more weird than that. But animals, for example, don’t get confused about their dharma. You know, like a cat is not trying to be the dog or the squirrel or the frog or whatever in my yard. They’re just freaking cat. And we’re a lot more complicated than that, but I do believe that we have in us a blueprint of sorts. And this isn’t something I made up, like this is the story deals with archetypes, but it’s also the story of like Arjuna and Krishna and the Bhagavad Gita. You know, it’s this idea of dharma. And I do believe that. And I think that ironically, when we do that, when we take on that mission fully, it actually destroys the ego, and we become less us in the egoic sense, and more in service of world.
Eric Zimmer 51:30
Boy, I could unpack that for about six hours, because I have so many questions in there and so many thoughts that we can’t follow that down its deep rabbit hole. At some juncture I would love to, because I’ll just say this about it. As I’ve gotten deeper into my various spiritual awakenings, it’s almost the deeper I’ve gone, in some sense it’s been that the personality sort of dissolves. And so the question that I end up with is, is there a particular nature of quote, unquote, Eric that exists beyond the genetics that I came into this world with, and things that have happened to me is that I’ve just sort of brought that form into my source energy that came flowing in, right? Or which just means that then, okay, you know, there are these elements, but at which point do I go, Oh, that experience was part of my dharma. That experience is part of my conditioning that I don’t want you know, yeah, gets very philosophical very quickly. Well, I think one
Laura McKowen 52:36
way that makes sense to me, this is why I really love the first half of life, second half of life, idea I’m rereading right now Richard Rohr book, falling upward, so it’s fresh in my mind, but that the first part of life is all about building the container we actually need. The first part of life, it’s not that it’s less important, or it’s somehow stupid, or like it’s not, you know, we need ego. We need to have a healthy ego. It’s like you need to learn all the rules so you know how to break them. Type of thing. We need a healthy ego to establish ourselves in the world, to build that container and to begin the individuation process. And then the second half of life is deciding what to put in that container. And I think as we put the things in the container, we kind of disappear at the end of my book, one of the last lines was, what I’ve come to understand about sobriety is like this unfurling, and over time, it’s become less me and more God. And I didn’t even write that like I I know that’s true. I don’t want to sound like this religious person, because I’m really not, but I am becoming more and more spiritual as time goes on. And I’m I’m just drawn to those teachings because it’s what feels the most true
Eric Zimmer 53:47
to me. There’s a quote I used in this spiritual habits program yesterday that I love from Jack Kornfield. He said there are two parallel tasks in spiritual life. One is to discover selflessness, the other is to develop a healthy sense of self, both sides of that apparent paradox must be fulfilled for us to awaken. Ah, that’s
54:06
beautiful. I need to look at that. Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 54:08
So we’re kind of doing these two different things in our desire to be like, is it this or that? Right? You know, I’ve often been like, which is it wisdom would say, Well, of course, you’re doing both, you know, and whether you’re doing them in parallel, whether you’re doing one of them at one point in life, another at another point in life, paradox, as you were talking about Dharma and Christian I was thinking about, I think there’s so much wisdom in some of the older Hindu teachings. And one that has always struck me has been that there are different things that you do at different stages of life that makes sense, that are absolutely like they’re all part of your spiritual path. Like there’s a period where family and career are part of your spiritual development. It’s not a distraction from it’s part of it you go through it. And I just love that. Instead of saying, like you just said that. That early part of building the container is like, it’s only there so you can get to the later part. No, it’s all important. And all part of it. It all belongs.
Laura McKowen 55:09
It’s all important. Yeah, the second part wouldn’t be meaningful if United did the first what Richard Rohr says, and what Carl Jung has said, is that most people don’t get to that. They don’t accept the mission of the second half, and I think that’s absolutely true. That’s why I get excited when I actually talk about sobriety. I’ve learned that’s what is most animating to me about it is because I knew, even when I didn’t want it, with every cell in my body, that it was my invitation. I knew it,
Eric Zimmer 55:38
yep, yeah. Well, we are out of time. Like I said, I feel like I could go down 50 different rabbit holes here, and hopefully we’ll get to do it again sometime. But thank you so much for coming on. You’ve got a new book coming that’s really exciting. Got the luckiest community. We’ll put links in the show notes, where people can get access to your book, to that community and another wonderful place for people to have a chance to work on recovery. So thank you so much, Laura, thank you. This is awesome. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better, and that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together, we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one you feed community. You.
