479. From Addicted to Empowered with Becky Garner

Have you ever wondered if maybe your challenge or problem is just too big for coaching? Maybe it requires something more clinical, something different. Well, maybe it does, but also maybe not. Maybe coaching is the thing you’ve been looking for. Or maybe coaching in addition to some other tools and resources can really get you the transformation you’re seeking. 

Today’s episode is one I’m so delighted to share with you. My long-time client and friend and now fellow coach, Becky Garner has the most amazing transformative story to share with you. This is episode 479, From Addicted to Empowered with Becky Garner.

This is Better Than Happy. I’m your coach, Jody Moore. And on this podcast, my objective, just so we’re clear, is to change what you’ve been taught and have likely believed about yourself up until now. Here’s what I believe about you. I believe that what you think is real is mostly imagined And what you imagine is actually creating what’s real. I believe that in the ways you desire to achieve, you 100% have the capacity to succeed.

And finally, I believe that joy, love, and miracles are your God given natural state of being. And any time you feel far from them, the way back is much simpler than you think, but that’s about to change. Are you ready? Let’s do this.

All right, so I’m very excited to share with you this discussion I had with Becky. She’s going to tell you all about herself. She’s a coach. She is a mother. She’s a member of the LDS church. She is a beautiful woman and I’m so appreciative to her for coming on and sharing this story. This is extremely vulnerable for her to open up and share all of this.

I know you’ll recognize that when you hear her story, but she’s doing it not to try to show off or promote anything specifically of her own, but simply to try to help each of us with whatever might be going on for us. I want you to take Becky’s story and translate it to whatever’s going on for you. You may not be able to relate to her specific challenge, but I guarantee you have an area where you’re stuck, or you have an area where you just believe that it’s hopeless for you, that you’re not capable of changing, or that what you want is not possible in your life. 

And I want you to listen to how Becky changes and evolves through this trial to get to an entirely different place, and I want to invite you to do the same. If you want some help doing it, we are going to be offering a complimentary coaching workshop that I’d love to have you join me for. You can head to jodymoore.com/freecoaching. I’d love to provide you some free coaching if you’ve never experienced coaching before.

Becky Garner is a master certified life coach who empowers women who feel stuck to create lasting change by kicking anxiety, worry, self-doubt and self-loathing to the curb and creating a life they love living. After overcoming 30 years of anxiety, depression and a love affair with self-loathing, Becky knows how to help her clients break free from what is holding them back.

She believes that everyone deserves a big full life they love living and that everyone can change. Her most impressive feats include running in the heat of the scorching Las Vegas desert, dressed as a member of Motley Crue, skydiving over the North Shore in Oahu, and learning to love herself unconditionally.

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Jody: Becky Garner, welcome to the podcast. I’m so excited to have you here today. 

Becky: Thank you. I’m so excited to be here.

Jody: Becky is here in a couple capacities. So Becky is a coach, an amazing coach, who has extensive training and experience, but also Becky has been one of my clients and friends. So I really want to begin with your story. You have such an amazing, powerful story about how coaching helped you. 

And I think it’s helpful for people to hear whether they’re struggling in the ways that they can relate to you, or in other ways, I think sometimes understanding the application of the tool helps us then apply it. So let’s just dive right in. Tell us a little bit about how you found coaching and what changes you’ve seen and I might interrupt you and ask other questions as you speak.

Becky: Totally interrupt me because I can drone on. 

Jody: Me too, girl. This might be a really long episode, everyone. No, just kidding. We’ll edit it down.

Becky: Yeah. So I came across coaching when I – gosh, let me think about this for a second. So it makes sense to me to start a little bit at the beginning, we’ll get into all the dirt here. But when I was about 11, 12 years old, I just started noticing that I was really different than my friends.

I remember sitting on my couch one night and my friends were running around and having so much fun and they were laughing and like really hyper. And there was cute boys over and everyone was having a great time. I was sitting on my couch just observing all of this and I was thinking just really dark thoughts. 

I started thinking about, you know, like death and dark things. And I was like, “Why am I different? Why?” I used to be able to laugh and run and play with them. And suddenly I’m sitting on this couch, just shut down, not really wanting to engage and not relating to them anymore.

And so I really started to struggle with depression and anxiety at an early age. And I think looking at my history, I had anxiety as a really young child. I remember like being in first grade and having a lot of anxiety and nervousness about like turning pages or being too loud or saying the wrong thing. And I can even watch my daughter. She’s going to first grade right now. And I see a lot of the similar like anxiety in her coming up.

Jody: Wait, sorry, I want to interrupt you because I know a lot of people listening have kids around that age or kids who they suspect might be struggling without getting too far off track, what do you say to your daughter? Is there anything that you wish, you know, maybe adults in your life would have said to you to help guide you through that phase?

Becky: It’s a really good question. I’m constantly just trying to teach her to be friends with her emotions. Like we make up little characters. Like we make up little characters and we talk to anxiety and I teach her every day to like look in the mirror and tell herself that she loves herself and to like, give herself a little hug and to self soothe. And so I’m constantly passing on a lot of those skills to her. And we’re always talking. 

I mean, I give them – I give both of my kiddos just straight brain talk. We’re talking about the amygdala and fight or flight. And it’s amazing to me at six years old, she will understand that. And she’ll talk to me about her brain. Like, “Mom, my brain’s telling me to do this, but I want to do this.” And she can kind of talk herself through it a little bit now, but I don’t know if that kind of answers your question.

Jody: Yeah, no, that’s good, that’s good. Okay

Becky: It’s a lot of like little birds. I think of it as little birds. I want to just drop a little bit on her, not a whole lot, because her brain goes fast, right? Well, just little tidbits at a time.

Jody: And as you share more about all the work you’ve done on your own self and to understand this, it just shows up a little bit more naturally in your language. Like what I kind of like that you’re saying is like, you’re not doing anything hugely, drastically different. It’s just, you think about emotions maybe differently than probably our parents’ generation did. And so you’re addressing it a little differently.

Becky: Yeah. So when I was about 13, that’s when the depression really hit. And I got into like an eating disorder at that time too. So I struggled with an eating disorder for about 15 years and it just got worse and worse and worse as it went on. And by the time I was 16, 17, it was like eating disorder, suicide attempts, and even like self-harm, like my brain was just so dark and so negative.

And I really hid a lot of it. Like people really didn’t know any of that. My parents weren’t very clued into that. And by the time I was 19 years old, I went to college and I stopped just functioning essentially. I slept all day. I’d sleep all night. I stopped showering. Like, we’re just going to get really real.

I would go two weeks at a time without showering. And my sister would be like, “Why is your hair wet all the time? Like, why is it wet?” And it got to a point where lifting my arm to like, even move was a hard thing. It was like, I couldn’t even pick it up to like feed myself or brush my hair or wash my hair. It was so hard to just exist and live.

And at that point it got really bad where I had a suicide attempt that, you know, I ended up in a psych unit, nearly lost my life over it and ended up going to the Center for Change in Orem, Utah for three months for the eating disorder. Went through all of that, came home, and still struggled with a lot of things. 

It was really helpful. I did have some therapy. I did that inpatient treatment, and it was helpful, but it just wasn’t the right tools for me. And then I had another suicide attempt that that one was really, really, really bad.

And that one, once again, just almost took my life. And when I kind of came out of that one, I was like, “I’ve got to do something. I can’t seem to die. We’re just going to, like, it’s not working, Becky. God wants you alive. He wants you to go, and we got to figure this out.”

And at that point, I started reading self-help books. And I was like, oh, this is really interesting. I kind of got into like cognitive behavioral therapy just on my own through some self-help books and got kind of interested. And I started taking psychology classes. I ended up graduating in family and human development because I was so fascinated with the brain and with the development and how that all works together.

I ended up working in residential treatment with eating disorders. And then I worked with teenagers and then I went to the psych unit as a staff member, not as a patient this time. And I worked with little kids at the psych unit and I just loved working with them and helping, but I was still struggling with a lot of the stuff at that time as well.

But I’d say by the time I was like 26, I was like, “Okay, girl, like you got it.” I finally could say like, “I want to live, like, I want to be here. I’m feeling a little bit better. I’m feeling more in control of my life.” The eating disorder totally gone at that point, which is amazing because I had been told, “You’ll probably never recover from this.” And I’m just rebellious enough that I’m like, “Watch me.”

Jody: Oh yeah, watch me. Yeah, watch me.

Becky: Like, yes I will, watch me. Cause they’re like, “You’ll probably have depression all your life. You’ll probably have this eating disorder all your life. You’re going to just have to monitor it, take medication.” And I was like, “No, I’m not doing that. I’m going to figure this out.”

So I went to town, like just studying about mental health and everything I could to just help myself. And sometimes I’m like, man, I went after it like an Olympic athlete goes after the gold. Like everything I could read, everything I could watch, everything I could listen to.

So I get to 26, I’m like, okay, I think I’ve arrived, right? And then I end up herniating two discs in my back. I was working at the psych unit with the little kids and we were playing a game called noodle hockey and I just twisted my back wrong and something twinged and I sat down to tie my shoe and I never got back up. Like I couldn’t get back up and I ended up in the emergency room.

And I remember laying on the table there and I told the nurse, I said, “Do not give me pain pills. I like them too much.” Like I already knew at that point in my life that like, I was the person who looked forward to like getting my wisdom teeth pulled because I liked the medication. So I’m like, “Don’t give me anything.”

And she comes back 20 minutes later and she said, “Hey, there’s this other medication called Percocet. It’s non-addictive. Would you like to try it?” This is 2006. We should have known that it was fairly addictive at that point, but she told me it was not addictive. I’d never heard of it. And I was like, “Okay, that sounds good.” If it’s going to get me out of pain, cause I was in such excruciating pain, it’s non-addictive. Let’s try that.

So she gives me the pill, about 15 minutes pass, and I am hit with so much love and gratitude and connection and my wall of anxiety and depression and everything I carried around Jody, it was just gone, completely melted away. And I was – I’d always had this block where I couldn’t connect with people and suddenly I could connect and express to them how much I appreciated them. And I was like, “Oh my gosh, I love my husband. I love this nurse people. I’m out of pain.”

What I was experiencing was euphoria from the opioid. I didn’t know that. I thought it was just like connection and love and gratitude. It’s what it felt like to me. So she sends me home and they send me home with a bottle and it doesn’t take me too long to figure out that’s what it was. But at that point, the emotional addiction was already started.

I mean, I had probably twice and I was like, “I never want to be without these pain pills again.” It solved every problem for me in my head. I was like, this is the most effective antidepressant I’ve ever had. That’s what it felt like. It just wears off really fast. And then I need more.

Jody: Oh my gosh. I appreciate you sharing that because I think it’s easy for us to accidentally move into judgment when we hear something about somebody taking drugs or being addicted to drugs or painkillers or whatever, and just write it off as foolish. Sometimes I even see people that you can tell are on something, and the judgment just is the first thing I feel like, “Oh, they’ve made bad choices or what have you.” 

But when you describe it that way, when you describe it as like complete love and gratitude and ability to connect with people and ability to share with people, how much you love them and appreciate them, that’s different than I think what most of us initially think of when we think about someone taking drugs, like that is the ultimate that we’re striving for. And that is a good, righteous, maybe spiritual feeling that we’re all seeking for anyway.

Becky: And I hadn’t been able to access it until that moment. I mean, isn’t that crazy? That was the first time I was like, “Oh my gosh, I actually feel love for people.” And it’s confusing in your brain because it is euphoria, but to me, I felt like love.

Jody: Yeah, yeah. Wow, okay. So continue on. So you realize right away that you’re-

Becky: Yeah, I realized pretty quick that like, oh my gosh, I like this. And I can tell it’s the medicine, but I’m also in excruciating pain. Like I couldn’t really walk or crawl or do anything for about seven months. Just stuck like on my back on the floor. They were trying to see if the discs would heal and it took them a month to figure out I’d even herniated the two discs because they thought I just had sprained my back. So it took a while to figure that out.

But I remember a couple weeks into this, my doctor looked at me and he said, “Hey, if you continue to take this medication, you’re going to get addicted.” And my thought was, “I already am.” Like it already happened. Like it was so quick for me. And I’ve talked to other people who were like, they take it for about three days. And they’re like, after three days, I can already feel like the desire to take more.

So back then, I don’t know what they tell people now, but back then the theory was you have about 30 days until you get physically addicted. For me, the emotional addiction was right away, but the physical addiction, meaning my body actually, like your receptors in your brain is craving the opioid in order for you to feel normal. That happened for me in about 10 days. It was really fast because I would miss it and then I would start to like notice the cravings for it, the withdrawals for it.

Like you get little tears in your eyes, you get like runny nose, like you’ll start to yawn a lot. And when it gets worse, it gets like, it’s equivalent to like a heroin addiction. Percocet is a chemical equivalently to heroin.

Jody: Wow. Now, at this point, were you married? Were you still single? Were you living alone?

Becky: I was married, yeah.

Jody: You were married. Okay, so did your husband realize what was happening?

Becky: No, I mean, I talked to him about it a little bit, just like, okay. I remember, so I had back surgery. And after back surgery, I knew it was time to give up the pills and it was really, really hard. And so I talked to him a little bit about that because I was like, “Okay, I could tell this is really tough for me to give up.” And I flushed all the pills down the toilet and I cried for like a solid day because I knew it was over. So we had talked about it a little bit. And at that point, I was still taking the medicine as prescribed.

Jody: Right, okay.

Becky: Okay, so I wasn’t abusing it or taking too much or anything. And so he knew a little bit, like he understood, but I kept a lot of it back. Then we go on and I end up herniating another disc. So once you herniate one disc, you get like almost like a domino in your back. It’s called degenerative disc disease where you can just like herniate another one. Like I would sneeze and herniate a disc.

I would bend and pick up my car keys. I would herniate a disc. And the scar tissue from the surgery actually grew and attached to my sciatic nerve. So the problem we tried to solve became permanent. So the solution was like, let’s just go back on more painkillers. One, because if I’m honest, I liked it. I was like, let’s bring that back in my life. Right? And then two, it was so painful for me to like stand. Like I couldn’t stand more than 15 minutes. I couldn’t sit more than 15 minutes. I was constantly having to shift. I was up all night. It was a really hard way to live. 

So it gave me a life and I’m grateful for that because it gave me a life to get up and start moving again. But what happens is as you start to take them, your body gets used to them. Now one pill no longer works and you’re like, did I take that pill? I don’t think I took that pill. Maybe I’ll take another one.

 And then you realize, oh, I did take two, but that feels even better. And then two becomes three and three becomes four. And I started just abusing them really quickly. And this went on for a long time. And it got up to where I would take like 15, 20 pills at a time.

Like I very much should have been dead at this point. Your body can’t handle that, right? You just have to build up a tolerance to it. And the withdrawals would get more and more intense. Like if I missed medication or if I went more than 24 hours without it. I mean, we’re talking one time I went off of it and I got rid of the pills.

I’m like, “I’m done, I’m over. Like my life is crazy right now. We can’t do this.” And I ended up under four giant blankets. Like four big, huge piles of blankets and I’m just shivering and I’m freezing and I’m just aching to the bone and I had a non-stop panic attack for two weeks, like with my heart just beating out of my chest constantly, you know, just all of the things.

And I tell people like there’s the physical withdrawal that you get with it, like the throwing up and the tears and the nose and the eyes and the sickness and the stomach problems and the chills. But what people don’t talk about a lot is there is no serotonin in your brain. 

So as soon as you go off of Percocet or any opioid, your brain essentially has all these receptors and has no medicine for it. And you go into massive amounts of fear. Like the fear is so intense because there’s no serotonin that like can keep up with everything that’s been created in your brain.

And I feel like it’s like if God was taken out of the world. Like if you were to take God completely out of the world and there was nothing good left, there was nothing beautiful or spiritual or love and you have pure fear, that’s what withdrawal feels like. And it lasts for about two weeks. And you would think like, okay, do that once and you’ll never do it again. But the way addiction works is you go right back to it.

So like for 15 years, this was my pattern. I would be on it for three to six months, sometimes nine months, I would get off of it. I’d be like, “Okay, I’m done. Like I can’t continue this, I’m going to die.” And then I would go through these massive, horrible withdrawals. And then I’d have about three months where I could stay clean. And it was almost around like the three to four month mark that I would end up just going right back into it.

My brain just like, it lights back up. The problem is that when you go into an area where like maybe you’re used to getting it from a pharmacy or wherever you’re going, you know, a street or whatever, you know, I never went to the street, but for me going past the pharmacy, my brain would actually go back into withdrawals.

So it physically will put it right back into withdrawals. So you think that you’re all clean and good, But then all of a sudden, once again, your eye starts running, your nose starts running, the cravings go up really loud. It’s hard.

Jody: Wow. 15 years.

Becky: 15 years. And I was a mom, right? So I had two children during this time. Okay. And I was a primary teacher, and I was the primary chorister. And I taught a music studio. I taught group piano lessons all during this, and I just kept it completely hidden.

Jody: Did you have a lot of self-judgment during this?

Becky: Oh my gosh, yeah.

Jody: I just can imagine that I would. And in trying to pretend, right?

Becky: Yeah, trying to pretend, the self-loathing, yeah.

Jody: What was that like?

Becky: It feels like two personalities, right? Like you’re like, I’m loving and I’m kind and I did everything for my kids. My oldest son is autistic and I was constantly like taking parenting classes and trying to figure him out and help him. And there was many years when he was younger that our house felt like World War III. It was just, you know, he was biting, he was kicking, he was screaming, it was so intense. And I was a really good mom, like I was a dang good mom, and I was an addict.

Like it’s that, you talk about that a lot, but I’m like, it’s so true. I was a dang good mom, I tried so hard. I took him to all the OT, I took him to all the things, we did everything that we could possibly do. I was constantly teaching him about his brain, loving him, helping him. And getting my pills, right? It’s hard not to have a lot of self-judgment for yourself in that situation. But that’s really what I had to heal myself from, for sure.

Jody: All right, so then what changed for you?

Becky: Well, this person came in my life named Jody Moore. That’s what changed for me. I mean.

Jody: That was a perfect setup. I didn’t plan that. I really don’t know the details of how you found me or anything. I know the parts of your story, but-

Jody: So what happened is I had gone to outpatient rehabilitation. So I was going to that. And at that time I was like, “I got to tell my family.” So I had told my sister, I had one sister that I told that I’d been struggling with this. And she called me like two months later and I happened to be – I had finished the outpatient treatment and I happened to be like clean and sober at the time, but it was hitting that like three month mark or I typically would go back to it.

Jody: So wait, sorry to interrupt you. I just, I’m not as familiar with these processes. So an outpatient rehabilitation center is like where, typically where someone would go to like, okay, I wanna get clean. I wanna get off of this. And outpatient, meaning you’re not staying there overnight. But you’re going regularly.

Becky: Yeah, so it’s a day treatment program. No, I would go in. So I would, at the time I had a one-year-old daughter. So I would take in my one-year-old daughter every single day and wait with all the other addicts and I would go in and we would just go over my medication and what they do is they slowly wean you off the medicine that you’re on.

So they give you a substitute, Subloxone is what I want to call it. I think that’s correct. So they give you that so you’re off of the medicine and I want to clarify too, I got really addicted to Percocet but what I ended up being super addicted to is called Tramadol and I think it’s important people to know because tTramadol is also an opioid medication.

It’s more frequently prescribed because people know about the dangers of Percocet now. But there are those of us who get really addicted to tramadol as well. It was actually more effective for me.

So that’s just something to kind of be aware of because a lot of people think, “Oh, Tramadol is like, it’s not that big of a deal.” But your brain can get super addicted to it. The withdrawals were actually harder for for me on Tramadol, that it worked better.

Jody: Okay. 

Becky: Okay, so they take you off the medicine that you’re on, and then they give you like a substitute that is just a little bit less so that your body doesn’t go into withdrawal, and then they can slowly wean you off. So every day I’m going in, they’re just checking on me, and then they’re slowly giving me a smaller dose, and a smaller dose, and a smaller dose. And we’re doing that over about 45 days. And the goal is to lessen the withdrawal effect so that you have a better chance of actually getting off.

Jody: I see, okay. So that’s what you’d done, and then you could go about three months and then the emotional kicks back in and the cravings and urges.

Becky: Yeah. So prior to that, I had always just ripped myself off. I just like finished the bottle and I’m just going cold turkey.

Jody: I see.

Becky: So this is the one time I was like, I’m going to have somebody help me. And I was hoping that I would get like more therapy and more help. It was really just kind of like a medical withdrawal approach.

Jody: Okay. Okay.

Becky: Yeah. So at this point, I am, like I said, about three, three months sober. And my sister called me up and just said, “Hey, I have this thing in my life. It’s called life coaching. You may be familiar with it, you may not. There’s this person named Jody Moore and she does this program and it’s, you know, for life coaching.” And I was like, “That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard of.”

Jody: Yes, I love it. That’s what I thought too, actually. 

Becky: I was like, that is not going to help me. Because here I am, I’m like, a professional at cognitive behavioral therapy at the time because that’s what it sounded like to me. I’d already worked in residential treatment. I had a degree in this stuff. I was like, “Oh my gosh, girl, this is not going to help me.”

So being like the good sister that I am, I was like, “All right, I’ll, we’ll give it a shot, whatever.” And I listened to your podcast on decision-making. That was it, I just turned it on. I listened to it for 20 minutes and I was blown away, Jody. I was like, “What, what is this? Like, Oh my gosh, what is this?” I’m so curious. I listened to a few more podcasts. I’m like, this is different. Like there’s something different that I have never heard here before.

And so I decided to join your program. I signed up for it. And I have such a stark memory of sitting outside in my raspberry bushes, Like I’m, you know, supposed to be weeding my raspberries, but really I’m like staring into space because I’ve got this trowel and it’s like full of dirt and it’s like spilling dirt on my pants. And I’m just staring off in the distance, just listening to you coach. And I was blown away by it.

And I think one of the first calls I heard as I listened to you talk to a mom with a son who was smoking a lot of marijuana and you had no judgment in your voice. Like I could hear that you love the mom. I could hear that you love the son. I could hear you walking her through all of that. And I was like, “Oh my gosh, somebody is smoking marijuana and somebody can love them. That’s incredible to me. And they can hold all of that for them.” 

I was just so in after that. I just dove in and I’m telling you, like I never touched a pillow after that moment. Never, never had a relapse. It’ll be four years in November for me.

Jody: Wow. Now you also have done a lot of other work on yourself. Please be clear, everyone. I didn’t bring Becky on to be like, “Hey everyone, I’m the magic solution.” But there was something about then it sounds like understanding the power of like choosing your thoughts, right?

Becky: There was the power of choosing my thoughts.There was the power of questioning what I was believing, the power of questioning like, where did this come from? And how did it get in my brain? And do I wanna keep that? There was so much work in being able to tolerate feelings.

You know, like when you’re an addict, you’re just used to shoving your feelings away, right? And learning to make friends with my feelings and bring them into my body and witness them and see them and understand them.

And then really for me, it was healing my relationship with myself, like learning, as you were talking about with self-judgment, learning to love myself, learning to see myself, learning to forgive myself and have compassion. And I think that moment that I remembered with you speaking about that mom, it’s like that little door that opened up that I could have that possibility too, like maybe I could have gone through this experience and I can love myself.

Jody: Oh, that’s powerful. I want to get in in just a minute to what you do today because that’s largely what you help people do today, right? Talk to me about, I know I heard you teach one time about sometimes we separate out, well, these problems need therapy and these ones need coaching.

And I’ve even taught people that before. I’m like, there’s certain things that coaching doesn’t handle. And I thought it was interesting the way you presented the idea that actually it’s up to your client to decide or that maybe, maybe it’s not as black and white. Would you speak a little bit to your thoughts on that? Your experience with both?

Becky: Yeah. So, I mean, I loved – I have so much respect for therapists and I love the therapists that I work with. It just wasn’t the right tool for me. So I just think about it in terms of tools. It was really good for me to talk and feel validated in that sense.

Jody: But at what point did you end up trying therapy?

Becky: I went to therapy first when I went to the Center for Change and then I had a therapist that I loved. For my eating disorder, I had a therapist after that for about a year and a half. And then I did therapy a couple of different times after that. And I definitely tried therapy for the addiction.

Jody: You did, okay.

Becky: That did was not, that did not work for me.

Jody: Okay, why not?

Becky: I think part of it was the therapist himself was not a good fit for me. He honestly, like he diagnosed me with a personality disorder within three sessions of meeting me, which is really weird without like testing me or anything. And I was like, “No.”

Jody: I feel like it’s sometimes when we have this discussion on the podcast or in places about like coaching or therapy or what’s the difference or whatever, whatever bad mouthing therapy, but also it feels a little unfair to just say therapy. It’s like such a big umbrella.

Like there’s so many different kinds of therapists. And I do think you have, just like there’s so many different coaches and you have to kind of find the right one for you that has the right approach, the right connection or whatever. And there’s so many different methods of therapy. And so for whatever reason though, whatever you tried, you weren’t making a lot of progress with, right?

Becky: Yeah, I wasn’t making a lot of progress. Like I said, it was validating, it was good to talk, it was nice to have someone to hear me. So when I went to therapy for my addiction, the first thing, of course, that happens is I was given a diagnosis. Like I was told, “Okay, you’re an addict, you have a substance abuse problem,” and a diagnosis can be super, super helpful, right?

My son, when he was diagnosed with autism, it was one of the most helpful diagnoses out there because I realized it wasn’t me, It wasn’t my fault, I wasn’t a horrible parent that was causing all these problems. It’s just that he was differently wired. So a diagnosis can be so helpful.

Also, when I went for addiction, they explained my brain to me, which was also really helpful. This is how addiction works in the brain. I was told that addiction is a brain disease. I would have it all of my life. And I was told that, you know, I probably need to attend like meetings, like an AA meeting or, you know, the church’s recovery program meeting, have support around me, make sure I’m never around pills, like different things like this. And then I was also given statistics on my recovery rate.

So the first year, an addict has about a 95% chance of relapse. The second year, it goes down to about 90%. Third year, he told me about 85%. And then after that, it’s about 50% chance of relapse. The brain just kind of keeps healing and getting better and better and better. 

So I think what happened for me is my brain made a transaction during that conversation, which sounded like, “I’m an addict. This is permanent. I’m going to have all of my life. And I only have a 5% chance of making it through this first year,” 5%, which filled me with fear and panic. And I don’t know how I’m going to do this.

It was also helpful because it helped explain why I’d been struggling with this for 15 years, like why I could never make it past three or four months. So that was very validating and good to know, and it was really good to understand my brain.

But this transaction that happened of this identity that I took on, this thought that is absolutely permanent, and I only have a 5% chance of making it, that’s what made it really hard for me.

Let’s contrast that with my experience in coaching, talking about addiction. So the very first time I was coached, I was coached actually by Chantal Allen at Be Bold Masters. She was there coaching. And she challenged me on my identity that I was carrying around of being an addict. She just said, “Hey, you might want to consider this identity that you have of being an addict and how it’s affecting your life.”

And I thought that was kind of silly because I was like, “Well, I’m an addict. Like I have lots of evidence. I know what this is. Like, that’s kind of weird.” But I just took it home and it started spinning around in my brain. Okay, when I think I’m an addict, like how do I feel? And how does that affect my behavior and what I’m doing? And what is that creating for me in my life?

And then the next time I was coached, I was challenged on my beliefs around the recovery rates, but these are absolutely true. Like I only have a 5% chance of recovering. I was challenged on the statistics I was given and the coach even challenged me on the brain disease theory. Like this is a theory. This is one person’s theory. It doesn’t mean it’s a fact. There’s lots of other theories about addiction out there in the world. You might want to go explore them.

So it just started opening up my brain and expanding it in ways that I had never thought about it before. And as I’m doing that, right, that reticular activation system in your brain that wants to like start focusing and looking on the evidence for what you’re starting to believe, it started to notice other people who had recovered really quickly, other people who didn’t fall into that 5% chance of recovery like they just recovered and they were done. They didn’t relapse over and over and over again.

I read a story about a man who’d been a raging alcoholic for 30 years and then he just decided he was done. He was like, I’m done. And the crazy thing is, is he went on to drink like one glass of wine every day for the rest of his life, but he never fell back into alcoholism. It just blew my mind that that was possible because I thought, “Oh, if they have a drink, they’re out of control. Like this is something you got to be scared of. You can’t be around the thing you’re addicted to. You can’t ever have it. You can’t ever be near it.”

And it just started challenging my thinking and expanding my brain. Also when I was in master coach training, I was challenged around a lot of the shame that I had around my addiction, the shame and the self-loathing and the guilt that I was carrying.

I hit my two-year mark of being sober. And I told the group, I’m really grateful. And everyone was like, “I’m so proud of you. We’re so proud.” And I was like, “I’m not proud. I feel terrible. Why would I be proud? I don’t want to be proud of not taking pills when I’m a mom. I don’t want to be proud of like, oh good, I didn’t take pills and go to primary today. Like that sounds terrible to me.”

But they really challenged me around my thinking about that. And after a couple coaching sessions, I really did learn to find that proud feeling in my body that I had overcome such a hard thing, that I found love and gratitude for the experience, just so much love for myself and appreciation for myself.

And I’ll just be really honest, I made more progress in nine months of coaching than I did in all the years of therapy, all the inpatient, all the outpatient, all the different therapists that I went to. Coaching was just such an effective tool for me. I remember when I went to coaching, it felt like I discovered that I was in jail and I didn’t even know I was in there. I was like, oh my gosh, I’ve been in jail this whole time and I didn’t even know I was in there because it felt like somebody like let me out and took my handcuffs off.

I had the freedom to start challenging different beliefs, the different ways I think about things, and my mind just expanded and became adaptable and flexible. And I think what’s really cool is ultimately that very first coaching session where Chantel challenged me on my identity as an addict, ultimately I decided to keep that identity.

When I thought about being an addict, I didn’t feel like shame or remorse or guilt because I’d had so much coaching, I worked on it so hard. It just felt like true and it felt protective and safe. Like, yep, I just want to let people know I’m an addict. I want to go to doctors. I want to let them know I’m an addict, like keep the pills away from me. I don’t want to be around it.

And what’s cool is as I’m talking about it right now, that identity of being an addict, it actually kind of feels really far away. So at some point I’m going to be like, I don’t need that identity anymore. And I can just choose to release it and it’s no longer a part of my life.

To have somebody question and go like, “Okay, you were told that you were going to have depression all of your life, but is that, you know, let’s question that, let’s talk about, like, is that helpful to you?” And it really came to the conclusion that like, for me, it’s not. You know, for some people it might be helpful to see that, but for me, I was like, “I’m going to just stop thinking of myself as somebody who’s depressed. And it changed so many things to myself. 

Jody: Isn’t that crazy to think like, you’re just allowed. You’re allowed.

Becky: You’re allowed.

Jody: And some people are like, “Well, I can’t believe that. My doctor told me this.” Okay, that’s fine if you can’t, but if you can and you want to, you’re allowed.

I was listening to somebody on YouTube the other day and he’s talking about business and marketing and abundance versus scarcity mentality and stuff. And he said something about the recession. What was it, 2008 or whatever, when we had a recession.

Becky: Yeah, 2008.

Jody: And he goes, he just casually goes, “And then there was a recession in 2008, which I chose not to participate in.” And then he just went on and I was like, yeah. Yeah, no, not participating.

I mean, we have a lot more choices than we realize, and it starts with what’s happening in your mind. And it seems like that’s what you caught a glimpse of, right, even when you’re talking about me coaching the mom with the son with marijuana. It’s so interesting because like marijuana seems like mild compared to what you were struggling with, right? 

But you can see, you were able to see the connection of like, oh, we don’t have to make somebody right and somebody wrong and somebody’s in trouble and somebody needs, like, we can just like step back from all this and find the loving way to approach it. And I love that light bulb for you.

Becky: It was such a light bulb. And I think just to wrap up this conversation we’re talking about like therapy and coaching, right? We’re kind of talking about that initially, is it’s just finding the right tool. Which one works for you? Coaching was like the right tool for me. And I coach all the time on things that people would normally take to therapy.

The people who end up coming to me, they’re people who have just struggled their whole life. Like most people are like, they have a lot of anxiety. They have a lot of depression. They’ve had it since they were just like me, 11, 13 years old. I get a lot of women say that it happened right about then, about 13 years old. And they’ve tried therapy, they’ve tried medication, and it’s not the right tool for them. But coaching has been an absolute life-changing tool for them.

Jody: Yeah. I’ve had a lot of that. 

Becky: It’s not one’s right and one’s wrong. It’s just like, let’s find the right tool.

Jody: And it’s also not an either or. I’ve had a lot of people in your same boat who say, “This is just a better fit for me,” but also a lot who, you know, have said, “Okay, like the therapy was helpful, but now I needed more.” Or sometimes when I’m coaching someone, I just like to make sure no one is shutting down any options that to them feel like they could be helpful.

So sometimes I will say like, “It’s not a bad idea to check with a therapist or, you know, somebody clinical.” And we just want to be open, I think, to whatever could be helpful and not shut down anything, I think is the best approach.

Becky: Not categorize it, like this person handles this and this person handles this because I can go to somebody and if I feel really good and comfortable and they feel good and comfortable, man, we can get a lot of work done.

Jody: And for those people listening who are coaches like us, we have a lot of coaches that listen to this podcast, to make sure that you’re not like turning away clients or like letting your own fear shut down help you might be able to provide somebody, right?

I do think that you can be open to like, first of all, I can’t prescribe medication. I can’t, there are certain things, right, that I can’t do, but the basics of mental and emotional health are what we do as coaching. And that is not going to be not useful to anybody, right?

I love what you said, Becky, which was, you said that for you, coaching was the better fit and you were glad that it was available to you because it’s really not up to the coach even to decide or a doctor to decide, right? It’s up to the patient and the client ultimately to decide in the end what is going to help.

Becky: I mean, for me, life coaching is what saved my life. When I came across your podcast, when my sister referred me over to you, I was at a point where I knew like deep in my gut, I was like, if I don’t fix this, my one-year-old daughter’s going to find me on the couch dead very, very soon. It had gotten so bad. So to me, life coaching is life-saving. It absolutely saves lives.

Jody: And then you came to one of my, at least one of my live events, right? Like a coaching retreat thing. Yeah, you’ve been to a few. So fun. And then you decided to become a coach.

Becky: Yes. So I loved it so much. I went into coaching like many coaches do just because it was so transformational and helpful to me. I wanted to understand the skills and the tools even better. And I just dove deep in. And I think before I went to, into coaching, I had actually gone to your Be Bold Masters. That’s the one that I went to.

Jody Which was like a multiple day kind of coaching retreat thing.

Becky: Yeah. It was like a five-day multiple, yeah, we coached like eight hours a day, like almost 40 hours a week. That was the last time.

Jody: We should do that again.

Becky: Oh my gosh, we should. It was so good.

Jody: That was fun.

Becky: Anyway, that was life-changing to me because I watched for eight hours a day just listening to other people get coached and I kept seeing this theme just like kind of pop up all the time.

And it was a big theme in my life. And I don’t know if you remember, I think it was Christine was coaching me. It was the very first day and we were all kind of like nervous and we were in the smaller room. There’s just 20 of us. And Christine was coaching me and she was talking about, or I was telling her about my son who had stomped on my dog’s back. I don’t know if you remember that, but that was a long time ago.

Jody: I do actually vaguely have a memory of this, actually, now that you’re saying it. Yeah.

Becky: So we had been camping the night before and I told my son, the one with autism, like no screens. That was, I was like, “You can’t have screens. We’re in the mountains, screens are off.”

And he’d come up to me and said, “Mom, can I turn on the phone?” And I said, “No, there’s no screens.” And his response was to scream and stomp on the dog’s back as hard as he could. At which point I grabbed his shoulders, yelled at him and I pushed him to the ground.

And I started crying because I felt so horrible about grabbing his shoulders and pushing him to the ground. And I had these urges to like, I wanted to hurt him. I wanted to hit him. I wanted to push him down. I was worried about my dog and then I was angry at myself.

I was trying to explain this to Christine and she kept pointing out to me that I was judging myself. I was like, “I’m not judging myself. I’m a terrible mom.”It was just such a fact to me. I grabbed my kid. I yelled at him. I pushed him on the ground. I’m a terrible mom. And I could not see the judgments that I was having for myself.

And I remember you standing up in front of me, because this is my first experience like seeing you. And it was like the laser beam Jody eyes staring into my soul.

Jody: I’m so scary.

Becky: I know, it was intimidating in that moment. You said, “When you stop judging yourself, you will stop judging your son.” And that moment changed so many things for me. First of all, I was angry because I was like, that was the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Like, I’m not judging myself. I just need you to fix me.

Jody: Help me stop yelling at him.

Becky: Yeah. Help me stop yelling at him. Tell me what’s wrong with me so I can fix me. But then over the next like four days, I just watched that theme come up over and over and over with people. Like every time I heard people get coached, I saw them either judging someone else, but mostly I saw them judging themselves and getting stuck in that judgment.

And I walked away from that retreat just knowing if I could stop judging myself, I could change everything about myself. And that’s what I went to town doing. It’s like with all the coaching I started doing, I’m like, “I’m going to just work on my self-judgment. I’m going to stop hating myself. I’m going to stop putting myself down. I’m going to stop the self-loathing and really working on that.”

And that’s one of the big things I focus on with my clients, because I find when we can move out of self-judgment, then we get unstuck. And it opens that door and start getting traction to where we want to.

Jody: And it feels so counterintuitive. It feels like, well, help me stop yelling at my kid and then I won’t have to judge myself. Help me be better at it so that I don’t have to judge me. Help me stop eating junk food. Help me stop succeeding my business or whatever it is.

And what we mean is, no, stop judging yourself where you are. Not like get a little bit ahead and then you’ll stop judging. Like where you are right now, stop judging you.

And I think that people, I don’t know, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. I know we’re running out of time, but like, we think that it’s either I judge myself and say I’m a terrible mom because of how I just treated my son, or I have to go, “No, I’m a great mom. It’s okay to yell at kids. It’s okay to hit kids or push kids or whatever.”

Like, I’m like, what, if those are your only two options, then you’re back to what we’ve talked about earlier, which is like not realizing that you can think about this any way you want to, any way you want to. And there are millions of possibilities, right?

Like, I don’t know. I just want to be like, what if we just went to something, it doesn’t have to be so negative, and it doesn’t have to be super positive. It could just even be a little bit more neutral like, “Well, some days I’m a great mom and some days I’m not, and that’s okay. I’m a human mom.” It’s a little bit more neutral.

You don’t have to be, go all the way to like, “That was awesome how I treated him,” but that’s why, like what we literally say is stop judging. When you’re supposed to not tell kids stop running at the pool, you’re supposed to say walk at the pool. So I think the question that is in people’s minds is like, well, if I’m not going to judge myself, what am I going to do instead?

Becky: Yeah, yeah. And for me, it was learning to love myself where I was at. 

Jody:Yeah.

Becky: It was learning to be with myself right where I was at.

Jody: How do you do that? Or what did that sound like for you, especially in the beginning?

Becky: Yeah, like I’m angry and I’m upset and I don’t like what I did. I don’t like that choice that I made, but there’s a reason why I made it. There’s always a good reason why I think the way I do.

There’s always a good reason why I act the way I do. I don’t know what that is, but I’m just going to try and love myself through it. That’s what it sounded like to me. We’re all just doing the best that we can, right? We’re all doing the best we can with the emotional capacity that we have. We all do the best we can with the emotional capacity that we have.

And if my best in that moment was to grab my son’s shoulders and push him down, that was my best. I couldn’t have done anything else because we’re always doing our best.

And I’m just going to love myself and just like try and understand myself and give myself grace and compassion for that moment. Just like I work on giving myself grace and compassion for the addiction I went to. I even found a lot of gratitude for the addiction I went through.

My sweet little husband, he had me sit down like the last time I had a bottle of pills and he said, “I think you should tell your pills thank you.I think you should sit down and just like them thank you,” and we sat down together.

Jody: What do you thank them for?

Becky: I thank them for – we said a little prayer together and I held them in my hands and I was like, “You know what thank you for getting me through autism. Thank you for all helping with all the pain that I had in my back, for all the suffering that I had in my back. Thank you for helping me to feel connected to people. It was the first time I ever felt connected to people. Thank you for getting me through a miscarriage. I don’t know how I would have gotten through losing a baby and losing a child without the help. Just thank you for being there and thank you for helping me. And I don’t need you anymore. And I have the skills now that I can help myself and I know how to manage myself now and I can say goodbye to you.” And then we went through it.

Jody: What I love so much about that is when you said that you’re even thankful for the addiction and everything in the pills, I feel like our tendency is to go, I’m so glad I had that terrible, hard thing because now I’m stronger, better, wiser. I discovered – you discovered coaching, you became a coach, et cetera.

But what you’ve done is you’re still not even villainizing the pills, you’re still recognizing. And that’s, I think, the ultimate power, right? Because if we’re still afraid of the pills and we’re still making them really bad and really addictive and really scary, we’re still giving them a lot of negative power that we don’t want.

So what you’ve done is you’ve acknowledged like, no, these, first of all, can be used in a lot of good ways. And second of all like made me happy and made me, right? Like we, you haven’t even villainized the pills. And it just takes the power away a little bit. It neutralizes a little bit that power, right? So that you can say, and I don’t need you.

And that’s true in so many areas of our lives. That’s true in relationships, right? We don’t have to find a reason to hate someone to leave a relationship. We don’t have to villainize anything to just decide either we’re done with it, or it’s just not for us.

Becky: Yeah. For villainized sugar or junk food or anything like that.

Jody: Yeah. I’ve found that I can find a lot more success saying, I love that kind of food and I just don’t need as much of it as I used to. I’m not going to be allowing as much of it. It doesn’t love my body back. Right? So anyway, that’s so good. Well, I know you have a really great tool also that you offer that feeling stuck. So tell us about that.

Becky: Yeah, for sure. So I think because self-judgment and self-loathing was such a big thing in my life and being able to work with it and know how to, you know, I would say ditch self-judgment, but you’re right. It’s more like holding self-judgment’s hand, right? Being able to just like be with it.

So I created a video course for people who just feel really, really stuck and feel like they’re just on this rinse and repeat. And what I found over and over again, especially with my clients that struggle with a lot of anxiety and depression and mental health issues is what is keeping us stuck is that self-judgment.

And so I made a video course series. It’s just four short videos. You get them once a day and it talks about how to get unstuck, troubleshooting that unstuckness, and then get unstuckness. I think I just made that word up.

Jody: I like it. I’m in.

Becky: And then it’s like a little bonus practice in there. So it really just walks you through that process of how do I stop, like, number one, why does self-judgment keep us stuck? And then how do I work with it in a way that I can start loosening it and get that engine going so I can start doing the things that I want to do with my life and really to start creating lasting permanent change in my life.

I had a story I really wanted to share. It’s a pretty vulnerable story, but I think it’s really powerful. And at least it was really powerful for me, and I hope it’s powerful for everyone who’s listening.

So let’s go back to when I was at the end of my addiction. I, not the end, but I was towards the end and I had just finished this outpatient program. So 45 days of taking my one-year-old daughter down to outpatient program, kind of detoxing and weaning off all of the meds.

It was a big sacrifice for my family. It was a financial sacrifice. It was like I had tried everything at that point to be able to get clean and I couldn’t do it. This had to be it. This had to be the thing or I didn’t know what I was going to do. 

And even like the withdrawal that I went through during that program, it was so horrible. It was two weeks of not sleeping at all. And I would stay up all day and I would be up all night. I would try and fall asleep, but you’d wake up about 10 seconds later because your adrenaline is so high from the withdrawal.

And I remember looking at the temple out my back window. The South Jordan temple is just bright and beautiful in my back window in my front room. And I would sit all night and wait for the lights of the temple to come on.

They would turn off at midnight and my whole house would feel so dark and scary and horrible. And I would just wait all night for those temple lights to come back on at like five o’clock in the morning. It was a really, really difficult time in my life.

So I finished that up and I was about three months out of that experience, from that withdrawal experience, from going to the outpatient program. So I was clean for three months when I found myself in my kitchen with a bottle of Tramadol. And I couldn’t even tell you where I got this medication from. I don’t even know how I got it, where I got it, how that came about. I just, I had it, it was in my cupboard.

I put it in my cupboard and all I wanted was to have it in my cupboard and to not touch it. Like, could it just please be in my cupboard and I can just leave it alone. But I find myself walking back to the cupboard, opening the cupboard, walking back to the cupboard, taking it out, looking at the bottle. Third time, I fiddle with the lid on the bottle.

Fourth time, I open the bottle. Fifth time, I pour a little bit of pills into my hand and just kind of count them. Sixth time, I go back, pour out the normal amount that I would take, put it back in the bottle.

I keep doing this over and over again. Finally, I pour out the normal amount I would take, kind of just think, screw it, I don’t care, and I take the pills. And I’m instantly hit with so much shame and self-loathing and guilt and anger and upset.

It was just a wash of intense emotion. And it was really confusing because it was also mingled with relief. Relief that I no longer had to face all of these cravings. I knew that this thing that my body just craved so much, my brain craved so much was on its way. And there was also like a little bit of excitement that I get to feel it again. So a lot of intense emotions.

And in order to try and get away from the emotions, I decided to just distract myself by running to the store really quick. I was like, I’m going to just run to the store. I can make it there. I can make a home before the medication kicks in. It’ll be fine. So I load up my daughter who is, she’s probably like 14 or 15 months at that time, get her in her car seat, put her in her car, drive out and just run to the store really, really quick.

And I am about a mile away from my home when the pills hit so hard. And they had never hit me that hard before. Normally when I took medication, I just felt energetic and light and a little bit happier. Like I would felt like I was a more engaged mom. It was just kind of like this nice little upper. And I don’t know, I felt better. I felt more like myself.

But in this moment, the road went blurry, my eyes went blurry, and I felt like I was getting brain shocks in my head where I couldn’t think or concentrate. And I instantly knew that I had put my daughter’s life in danger and I had put every single person on the road in danger. And I was also really terrified of getting pulled over by the police and being arrested and being taken away from my family for the choices that I made. I’m going to cry, sorry. So I turn off the side of the road and I go down into my old neighborhood and I’m just sobbing and crying.

And once again, those emotions of remorse, self-loathing and shame and so much intense emotion happening in my body because I had just put my family through this whole experience of the outpatient experience. I’d gone through this whole withdrawal and I barely made it three months and I didn’t know what I was going to do.

With like a thousand swords of pain in my chest. All I wanted to do was get home, get my daughter home safely, get her to a babysitter so I could take my life, so I could end this pain. So I just couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t be here anymore. I had spent 15 years trying to get sober and trying to get clean and it wasn’t working and it wasn’t fair to my family.

So I pulled out into the road, and I remember sitting at a stoplight when the spirit hit me really, really hard. And I knew in that moment that God’s love for me was no different than it had been 20 minutes before. My value, my worth as a human being hadn’t changed one bit because of my choice. He saw me exactly the same before I took the pills and after I took the pills.

And it was so powerful to me that if he could love me in that moment, sitting in the car with my daughter, that I could learn to love myself. And understanding that, understanding that moment and that infinite value that I have, that you have as well, is what allowed me to start healing my relationship with myself.

And if you only hear one thing on this podcast today, I really want you to hear this. Your value, your worth, it cannot be lost. It cannot be destroyed. It can only be remembered or forgotten. Your value is infinite because you have a spark of breath because you were created by a loving being. It doesn’t matter what choices you’ve made. It doesn’t matter what choices that have been acted upon you that you feel like may have tarnished your value. It can’t. It can’t touch it. 

You are loved and you are worthy no matter what you’ve done in your life. And I want you to know, like, please know this, any of my friends out there who are, I don’t want to call you for strugglers, you’re fighters, you’re fighters, because you keep fighting for your mental health, you keep fighting for your happiness, I want you to know that you are not stuck the way you are. 

Our brains and our bodies are designed. They were designed by an all loving, all knowing God. And they were designed for hardship, and they were designed to overcome our hardship. And our brains were designed to adapt and flex to change every single day. We can change, we can feel better. We’re not stuck the way we are. And just really wanted to share that. Thanks for listening to me, Jody.

Jody: Becky, thank you for coming on. And I know that takes a lot of courage to share your story. But it’s so inspiring. I’m so delighted just to know you and to see you out there helping other people in the world. It’s just amazing. Thanks for coming on today.

Becky: Thank you so much. Love being here.

If you find the podcast to be helpful you’re going to love The Lab. In Better Than Happy: The Lab we experiment with applying all of it in your real life. Whether you’re in the middle of a challenge and ready for some relief or you’re ready to commit to pursuing your dream goals and making them a reality, come join me in the lab at jodymoore.com/thelab. That’s jodymoore.com/thelab.