The Sober Living Stories Podcast
Welcome to the "Sober Living Stories Podcast." Every Tuesday, Jessica Stipanovic, your host, shines a spotlight on individuals who have undergone remarkable transformations in their lives.
Each guest shares their story giving examples of bold beginnings disguised as endings and life lessons that teach how the darkest moments often hold the key to unlocking the brightest light.
This podcast is designed for those in search of inspiration to make positive life changes. Whether you're sober curious, living an alcohol-free lifestyle, or supporting someone suffering from addiction (sugar, food, drugs or spending, etc.) our episodes promise to leave you feeling understood, hopeful, and motivated to create meaningful transformations in your life.
Join us for powerful new episodes every Tuesday where even the most harrowing of experiences can serve to uplift and inspire. Regardless of your background or belief system, "The Sober Living Stories Podcast" is your ultimate destination for uplifting narratives where hope shines from the most unexpected places.
In addition to featuring our weekly guests, each month on the "Sober Living Stories Podcast," we have the privilege of sitting down with a new addiction author, delving into their story and the wisdom they've shared in their book.
Here's the exciting part: their book becomes the giveaway for that month.
Tune in every Tuesday for brand-new episodes and your chance to win the gift of a transformed life.
The Sober Living Stories Podcast
Beyond Trauma: Stephanie McAuliffe's Journey Through Generational Alcoholism
Welcome to another episode of the Sober Living Stories Podcast. Meet Stephanie McAuliffe, author of two international best-sellers, as she shares her personal story. From surviving sexual abuse and growing up in a family overwrought with alcoholism, to navigating a high-powered Wall Street career and marriage to an alcoholic, Stephanie's story is nothing short of transformative. Stephanie offers an honest perspective on the challenges of healing from deep-seated trauma...and solutions.
We explore the importance of rebuilding internal safety and trust, and the vital role of therapy, 12-step programs, and energy work in healing. Stephanie sheds light on the toxic culture of alcohol on Wall Street and how it impacts personal lives. She also opens up about the therapeutic power of writing, discussing her book "Message in the Bottle: Finding Hope and Peace Amidst the Chaos of Living with an Alcoholic," which aims to provide peace and possibility to those in similar situations.
Join us as we uncover the path to overcoming trauma and addiction with Stephanie McAuliffe. She brings awareness to and helps people heal from the impact of their internalized trauma. She’s found incredible transformation in her journey through healing sexual abuse, and multi-generational addiction.
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After a 27-year career on Wall Street, Stephanie is the founder and CEO of the Way of the Diamond Warrior and author of two international bestselling books. As a personal transformation consultant and energy healer, she builds bridges for clients to step more deeply into their own path. Today, she's sharing her personal story about overcoming sexual abuse and multi-generational alcoholism and addiction. She's passionate about how we heal individually and together. Lean in for an exciting, insightful episode. Welcome to the Sober Living Stories podcast.
Speaker 1:This podcast is dedicated to sharing stories of sobriety. We shine a spotlight on individuals who have faced the challenges of alcoholism and addiction and are today living out their best lives sober. Each guest has experienced incredible transformation and are here to share their story with you. I'm Jessica Stepanoich, your host. Join me each week as guests from all walks of life share their stories to inspire and provide hope to those who need it most. Hi and welcome to another episode of the Sober Living Stories podcast. Meet Stephanie. She speaks, writes and teaches on the human condition. She's passionate about helping her clients heal from trauma and live a life free of its constraints. She is one that deeply understands that, as she has found incredible healing in her own story, and today she's going to share that story with us. She healed sexual abuse, as well as multi-generational alcoholism and addiction. Welcome, Stephanie. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Thank you, jessica, it is such an honor to be here. Thank you, jessica, it is such an honor to be here.
Speaker 1:The disease of alcoholism is often, in many instances, a family disease, and you talk about healing multi-generational alcoholism and addiction, so I'd love to hear your personal story. Go back as far as you want to take us and let's see what we can learn along the way.
Speaker 2:Thank you, as far back as I can remember, there were always cocktails that started in the afternoon, drinks on the weekends, parties, and nothing was out of control, including our emotions. It was just a normal day-to-day thing of. Cocktails, like I said, meant to late afternoon and one of the chores that when I was in junior high school that I had to do was to make ice cubes. And it's amazing how something so small can be so impactful to us. Because I would hear at that point my grandmother was living with us and I was there with my mother, my stepfather and stepbrother and younger brothers and I would hear you know, steph, go make the ice cubes. And I would pop out the cubes from the tray from yesterday and refill the trays again for tomorrow. And it meant and I didn't fully understand this at the time, but that the rest of the afternoon and evening was lost and what I craved was connection. And what I didn't understand until much later is that the adults were numbing their own pain. We didn't have big conversations about life, about what was happening, and at the time I was being sexually abused by my stepbrother. It was known and we didn't talk about it.
Speaker 2:And that was the age when I first found drugs. I really had no interest at that point in alcohol and yet when I was high and it was my neighbor diagonally across the street who introduced me to pot when I was in eighth grade and I remember sitting out in the woods with my friend Jean and when I got high it was like I could feel and I could laugh and I connected with feelings within me that had been buried because nothing was expressed. In my household back. My grandfather was an angry drunk and kind of terrorized. My mother and my grandmother and I am at least the fourth generation of women in my family who were sexually abused and not protected by their mother, because women were very powerless, women didn't have a lot of agency. Women didn't have a lot of agency. And when you're tormented within your own family, you're not taught how to speak up for yourself, how to stand up for yourself, how to create any form of healthy boundaries, if they even exist. And so I decided also at that age, about a year after I started smoking pot and friends started getting into pills, and I found the Percodans that were in the medicine cabinet for the dental work and it was like I'm never getting married, I'm never having children, I'm going to college and I will never be financially dependent on a man, because I did not want to be like my mother. So I did go to college and I had the career and I worked on wall street for 27 years. I did very, very well in project management and systems, so I supported the trading and the clearing. I wasn't on the front lines and yet behind the scenes was just as stressful, and I thrived in chaos, and I thrived in the same chaos that I lived in when I was a child and I married two alcoholics.
Speaker 2:So 10 years twice, and within the course of a year my second marriage ended, of which we went through rehabs with him, and he's still drinking to this day. I love him dearly and he is on the other side of the country living his life, and I wish nothing but the best for him. And yet I knew that I couldn't stay. I was doing more for him than he was for himself. I was doing more for him than he was for himself. I was doing more for him than I was for myself, and so I ended the marriage, even though I was still in love with this man?
Speaker 2:I couldn't. My health was in jeopardy. I had two heart attack scares. I wasn't taking care of myself. I was working 14 hours a day and then coming home and finding anything that I could do to distract myself from what I didn't want to deal with, which was the exact thing that I grew up with. And then, a year after my marriage ended, my 27 year career on Wall Street ended and all of a sudden, I had this time and was like what am I going to do with myself?
Speaker 1:You know it's interesting. I heard I heard you may. When you were speaking, you made a real decision to become self-sufficient. You said you were not going to be relying on a man for finances. Do you feel like that was a result of not getting the protection that you needed from your family at a time that you needed it most, when nobody spoke about the abuse? Like, if they're not going to help, I'm going to do this myself. Where do you think that sprung from?
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and that was, if we're into fight, flight or fear. That was my fight. That was me putting up a hard shell around myself and saying you know what I'm going to do, what I need to do for me, because I am not going to continue to open myself up to the hurt from people who you know. As children, we have expectations that those who are raising us are going to protect us and care for us and nurture us, and I grew up with the trappings of the white middle class. I had a home, I had food, I had clothes and, and everything from the outside looked perfect and it was a shell. And it was that same shell that I realized that I was living within, that I created for myself, because I created this hard boundary around me so that no one could get in, and I think this is part of why there's so many people who feel like I have to do this all on my own. There's a lot of lone wolves running around this world.
Speaker 1:It's like a survival mechanism.
Speaker 2:It absolutely is survival and, like I said, it's actually a combination of fight and flight, because I'm fleeing from the rest of the world and creating separation and I'm going to fight to protect the shell that I've created around myself. And yet what I found is we still yearn the connection, we still yearn to be seen, and it's when we start to let down that guard that we've created for ourself, as scary as it may be, that's when we really begin to call in what it is that we've wanted all along.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's the exciting, like as you were speaking, it just it hit me in my heart because I can relate to that so much. I too formed a heart exterior for many years throughout my life and then I could just tell like from if it's anything like my journey has been like, when we get better and we come into our own, the the big, the most wonderful thing is that you can begin to take that down Right and then it just it's life-changing, it's absolutely your edges get softens. You know you don't have to carry all that because you're not in survival mode anymore, and that's like an exhausting lifestyle. You, you don't have to carry all that because you're not in survival mode anymore, and that's like an exhausting lifestyle.
Speaker 2:You wouldn't have told me that at the time, but once I came, through that I thought, wow, I'm so glad I don't have to do that anymore. It is incredibly exhausting and we don't realize how much so when you think about how much internal energy physical, mental, emotional that it takes to maintain that shell around us like it's no wonder why we're always exhausted. And yet there's a beauty in and it comes in layers. You know, we didn't get here overnight unraveling and unwinding these layers that we created for ourselves. Yes, this is where we get to give ourselves some grace. So it's not like all of a sudden.
Speaker 2:I'm wide open and I know how to create healthy boundaries and I know how to stand up for myself, especially with the toxic codependency that comes with a lot of addiction within families. It's in stages and we get to build those muscles. One of the things that we lose is the feeling of internal safety, and so as we unwind some of the old layers, we learn to trust ourselves more. We become more safe in saying no, I don't want that, or for asking for what it is that we want. And, like I said, we will never be given more than we can handle. And sometimes it is taking one step forward and two back and we learn a little bit and we integrate, and then we can take three steps forward.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think it's a lifelong process, you know, and the trauma for some may be from your family of origin, would you agree? But, like for myself, that wasn't true. It was from an abusive relationship I picked up along the way in my teens. That's when my decision to become self-sufficient and put up my wall started. But I didn't realize that here I am years, decades later and not knowing where it started, and I can pinpoint that today, regardless of where that traumatic incident happened, I think that's when we start to add on those unnecessary layer well, necessary at the time, but then shedding them later is the real freedom.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and there is trauma that we also inherit through the DNA. We're in our mother's wombs for seven to 10 months, depending on when we're pushed out into this world to take our first breath, and there are studies that show that you know, newborns and infants and young children can smell fear in their mothers. There are studies that are happening looking at war veterans and how anxiety is passed through the sperm. There's a lot more science behind this, and so there are also times where we can feel like I don't know where this came from, and yet when we look at our family tree, we can see where some of this has been passed down, and that's why I also say healing comes in layers.
Speaker 2:Like I did therapy, I did 12 step for many years I was an Al-Anon. It helped give me a voice. It actually helped me. It actually helped me, helped give me the power and the forthright and the strength, asked my second husband actually tell him that I wanted a divorce, and it was a support group for me. And yet then I saw how stuck a lot of people were in their stories, just as I had been. I played the victim for a long time. I pointed the finger and I think, as you know, in the rooms we say when.
Speaker 2:I point a finger, three are pointing back at me, and so when I decided to get out of that mode and I also saw how stuck a lot of people were in their stories they wanted to blame their parents, they wanted to blame the friend, they wanted to blame the coworkers, and yet I am the common denominator.
Speaker 1:Right, right, and I agree with that. You know, 12-step work absolutely saved my life and then therapy helped me get back into it and understand it. You know, and the the greatness about 12 step programs, I believe, is that it is never about anyone else and because they understand that, that you know you're helpless If you're, you're relying on other people to change. The only person that can be changed, that I can change, is myself. So that's very empowering. So the focus is on what did I do? You know where was my responsibility and my part, and then we can move forward.
Speaker 2:And there's more that we can do as well, and this is why I focus on the energy work as well, because I think it comes in layers. Whether you're doing 12 step before therapy or after it, those are or together or together, which I did, and I loved 12 step and the different therapists that I went to. That helped me deal with some of the layers of the abuse, and therapy was good for giving a voice, initially, to some of the traumas in my story, and yet I found that they weren't the two of them together weren't enough for me, and I have a sentence, a phrase that I like to say is energy work completed the sentence sentence. Because we have energy that gets stuck in our meridians, in our chakras, and if you think of it, you know when you're blowing bubbles outside and you blow air through the little soap thingy and a bubble gets created, when the bubble pops, the energy and the air that created it, as well as the soap, dissipate.
Speaker 2:When we, no matter what age, aren't able to express what it is that we're feeling, you can think of it as if we're swallowing that bubble, and when the bubble pops, the energy and the soap stick to ourselves and a lot of our feelings, like fear is stored in one certain place in a body for the most part, as well as anger in another. So fear a lot of times is stored in the kidney and the bladder and anger in our gallbladder and our liver. High blood pressure is a lot of times a result of swallowing a lot of those bubbles and internalizing a lot of that anger and anxiety. Over half of the population is walking around with some form of disease that doctors want to give a pill to, and yet when we do all of these layers of work, we actually have the ability to heal ourselves.
Speaker 1:So can you speak a little bit to the multi-generational angle of alcoholism and addiction? I know we talk about not knowing well, there's a genetic predisposition to it or not, and people sometimes get hung up on that. So what did that look like of you not being an alcoholic but you being part of that whole system?
Speaker 2:I numbed my pain, just as I saw my parents do and my grandparents do. I had, when I worked on Wall Street, I had a wine collection and I used to have wine shipped in from Napa, california out to New Jersey and I got obsessed with the whole thing and I had an Excel spreadsheet and I knew what to drink, when and where it came from and when we bought it. And, excuse me, I would come home from work and then drink a bottle or two of wine with my husband both of them so I followed in the same tradition. You could have called me a functional alcoholic, which I think most of my family was. And there is this shame around the word alcoholic because we think of it as the person living in a van by the river or the drunk on the street. And yet a lot of the people I worked with on Wall Street, drinking was a huge part of the culture of when I started on wall street the three martini lunches or going out after work and having the couple bottles of wine and sealing the deal.
Speaker 1:Right, like networking and social socializing, stress management. Sure, it just goes with. It absolutely would go with wall street right. And any any other high powered position.
Speaker 2:Yes, and so if you went to one of these things and you didn't drink, you were looked at kind of like what's wrong with you? Maybe it's just like I don't feel like having a drink yeah, there's yeah, that's so true and I think that's changing.
Speaker 1:I do think that's changing, or I'm hearing more that is becoming acceptable to navigate through those business networking events without alcohol. There's other options today that I don't think were available, say, 10 years ago, 20 years ago.
Speaker 2:I wasn't even aware of the cycle that I was in. While I was on Wall Street I just numbed my pain in any way that I could and, living with active alcoholism, I remember I would take a boat into Manhattan and then drive home and as I would turn onto my street I would just have this feeling of dread because I didn't know what I was walking into and I'd pull up into the driveway and a lot of times, and I didn't even know, hated, and so he would drink to numb his own pain, except I still was highly functional as he spiraled, and yet me working 14-hour days was another part of my addiction.
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Speaker 1:Now back to our guest. Yeah, and so you can normalize it. I'm not as bad as him and I'm still. I still have my job. I worked on wall street, too, for a little bit, and I remember, at five o'clock this, the like sea of people going down to get the train, like you could just see this whole pack move through in their suits. It's just a cycle, and then you get up in the morning you head back, head back in, and you, you know, but you were functioning. You were going home and saying I'm not as bad as this man. You know my husband. So in a sense you know, but you were still in a cycle.
Speaker 2:I was, and I was doing exactly as I had been taught, as my mother had been taught as my grandmother had been taught a lot of times we don't realize that what we think of as normal isn't healthy and the men would drink. And then the parties on the weekends that were like networking things for my stepfather and his business associates and also that, well, you can come into the living room but children should be seen and not heard. There were so many messages of silencing of we don't express, we don't talk about these myself, and it was fascinating to me in I guess it was about a year after got me on to social media. I had been talked to the hand up at that point because I didn't want anyone to know or realize how I felt about myself, because I didn't feel very good about myself. My career was over, my marriage was over, and yet this was an eight week program and on the first call she asked the question how do you want to feel? And it cracked me wide open because I realized I couldn't answer the question. I could say, how did I feel, which was based on external things, but how did I want to feel was an internal question that I couldn't answer, that I hadn't connected with since I was a child. So how did you want to feel? I wanted to feel free. I wanted to feel heard, seen, free, empowered.
Speaker 2:Every year now I pick a couple of words that are my theme for the year. This year is expansive, but it's like looking at what does expansive mean to me, you know, it's allowing myself to be seen. It's expanding in the work that I do. It's multi-layered, just like we are. This whole journey of healing is not about looking at the external, outside world, as many of us are taught to do Again. It's coming back to whole new layers of safety and trust within ourselves, and I'm forever grateful for the first coach that I worked with, as well as myself, of saying yes to this journey of I want something better and different for myself, because, even though I don't know where it's leading, I don't want to continue to live as I am right now.
Speaker 1:What a difference from being quiet for so many years to now doing what you're doing. So I know you wrote a couple of books and congratulations on that. Because they're two international bestselling books. Can you talk about how and why you chose to write it down?
Speaker 2:So my first book, which was published seven years ago this week, is the Message in the Bottle Finding Hope and Peace Amidst the Chaos of Living with an Alcoholic. This was I initially started working with families of alcoholics. This is where I came from. This is where I did a lot of my initial healing work when my ex-husband first went to rehab back in 2012. And I had been in recovery for a few years before that. I saw the changes that I had experienced in saying yes to myself and I wanted to help families of alcoholics, and in each of the chapters there are a lot of introspective questions. What I found is that a lot of friends who are in AA and are alcoholics or have had their own experiences with drug addiction also resonate with this book, because the subtitle of finding peace amidst the chaos of living with an alcoholic is sometimes ourselves. It is finding the peace within us, and so this first book is a lot edgier than my second. It's where I was seven years ago or eight years ago when I started writing it, and yet it is the journey of the coming back to yourself, and it shows a lot about my own story and of living and marrying two alcoholics.
Speaker 2:My second book, the Impact of Silence. Heal Generational Appropriations. Reclaim the Sovereignty of your Soul is a deeper journey into our spiritual journey my own story. I realized how pervasive it is within society and families to not talk about our feelings, to silence what it is that we're feeling and the impact of that. My second book goes a lot more into the science of how our brain waves are, for instance, up through the age of eight, and we are so wide open. We're basically taking on the energy of everything and everyone around us. We don't know discernment, we don't know how to create boundaries and if we're living in a dysfunctional situation, we learn dysfunction. We learn to not speak up, and this is I wrote this book.
Speaker 2:After my travels, I actually in January of 2018, sold everything but my remaining things in storage and traveled for eight months, and it was a journey of self-discovery. For the first time in over 30 years, I had no pets, no partner, no rent and no mortgage, and I found safety in having a few of my cherished possessions in my six-speed Mazda and traveling around the country. And it was the beginning of going deeper into my own spiritual quest and a feeling safe and wandering and not having to have a plan and take control over everything, because that was one of the other things in my old life of I needed to create control. So I felt safe in a world that that did not feel safe. And and there's there's a lot more to the story, and yet so the second book is is more of a spiritual healing offering, and there again, in each chapter, is an invitation for the reader to go deeper into their own story.
Speaker 1:I like the word invitation. I think that did you do the majority of the writing on that when you were on your eight month quest of. Is that where you wrote or is that where you just acquired the information for the second book?
Speaker 2:I acquired some of the information and then I ended up moving to Utah, where I just moved from. I was there for four years and it was while I was in Utah that this, this thing around boundaries and our energy and how we stand up and speak up for ourselves, was really where I started to write this book. What's very interesting in that I got through the second developmental draft of that book and only about 10% of it went into what was published. Books have a life of their own.
Speaker 2:They sure do yeah, right, and what wanted to come through was something very different. I was also undergoing the journey of healing breast cancer. While I started, actually, I was diagnosed in the middle of writing the book. I put it down. When I picked it back up, that was when it had a completely different voice.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, understood, yeah, yeah. So you hit on two very big things that I think are so relevant to listeners is the family piece of addiction and alcoholism, and also it you know the title of your book the impact of silence. I've heard people throughout the years talk about how they were never able to talk about anything in their home and how that didn't serve them. So I think that these two books are really going to be something that, if anyone would like to look them up, I'm going to put them in the show notes to find you. Like to look them up? I'm going to put them in the show notes to find you. So if you could just let listeners know what are you doing now, because I know your purpose is dedicated to helping people overcome trauma and what you went through as well, so you're helping other people do that. Can you speak to that a little bit and let other people know where they could find you and let other people know where?
Speaker 2:they could find you Absolutely. So currently, right now, I work one-on-one with people. Okay, and it's a mixture of both coaching and energy work. So it's the alchemy of it, because there's times where we can have the awareness of something, and yet just having the awareness doesn't clear the energy of it, because if we think of a situation or a person and continue to get triggered, just having the awareness doesn't clear the energy of it, because if we think of a situation or a person and continue to get triggered, there's something more to do.
Speaker 2:So I work one-on-one with people and I actually just finished the first round of an eight-week program entitled the Energy of Boundaries. And yet the people that work with me are like they're ready, they've done a whole bunch of work, they want to be done with this, and we typically work together in three-month increments, because that gives them a safe container to give a voice to some of the things they may never have given a voice to, as well as clearing what they've internalized. So it's an incredible journey and honor to be able to do this work with people, because when we have that freedom of no longer carrying the story and I like to say there's no story that can't be healed, sharing the story and I like to say there's no story that can't be healed and people can find me on my website, which is Way of the Diamond Warrior.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for bringing out some real good insights on multi-generational addiction the impact of silence, being heard and just living free living a freer version of yourself. Thank you, it's been an honor. Thank you for tuning into the Sober Living Stories podcast. If you have been inspired, consider subscribing and sharing with anyone who could use hope in their lives. Remember to stay tuned for more inspiring stories in the episodes to come. To view our featured author of the month or to become a guest yourself, visit wwwjessicastepanoviccom.