Meet the coach

Hello again, I think we met on the home page, but if you’d like to get to know more about me and why I’ve created Sober & Alive, please read on. I’m so glad that you are here, thank you for taking the time to get to know me a little better. The greatest joy in my life has been working with other people who want to remain sober and are looking for solutions to live a better, healthier, happier life. 

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During the pandemic, I found myself in sober spaces all over the world via zoom. The need and demand for experienced guidance for sustained recovery from alcohol use disorder (AUD) became critically apparent.  In this spirit, I created Sober & Alive as a platform for positive support for those who want to live a sober life, with a focus on maintenance.  There are so many treatment centers that help people to get sober, but Sober & Alive is about learning how to fortify ourselves to stay sober and to become more fully alive.

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How did I come to this coaching practice? I did not learn about Alcohol Use Disorder from reading in books or studying in school.  Alcohol Use Disorder and recovery from it are my lived experience.  I am someone who was very thirsty long before I ever found a drink. A lot of people with AUD are like that, but not always. I have heard thousands upon thousands of stories from so many different types of people from all walks of life. There is so much diversity in our experience, Sober & Alive is never about conformity, it is about finding and embracing our individuality, and cultivating unity from that place.  So, here’s my history in brief (okay, maybe not so brief) my victory in earnest, and my sincere hope that Sober & Alive will have what you are looking for.

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I grew up in a wild, eccentric, and large family. I am the youngest of eight. Even though we had very little, my family was always taking in people in need. My mother would say, “we are not poor, we are rich in love.” While this was true, at times we had so little it was scary, and life felt unstable to me. There were many forms of dysfunction in my family, as in so many families, and we all did our best to make things work. In this environment I felt lost in the shuffle and unseen. I was always uncomfortable. I tried to comfort myself by imagining that there must be some kind of cosmic specialness about me.  I was misunderstood, but maybe one day I would be rewarded.  I was filled with self-doubt and self-consciousness.  I deliberated constantly about every possible thing I felt I did wrong and was certain that I didn’t measure up.  Being the youngest with many siblings much older, I was often charged with taking care of my nieces and nephews, who I loved and who loved me.  This responsibility and purpose kept me going through difficult times- and kept my suicidal ideation at bay.

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Then my life changed. When I was twelve, I found that magic genie in the bottle that made me feel invincible.  Finding, drinking, and hiding alcohol became my constant preoccupation.  Within a very short time, I had traded in everything that a normal person clings to in favor of being able to feel the incredible superpower of drunken drinking.  Drinking made me feel like I exchanged that self-conscious, anxiety ridden, nerdy girl–who was too smart and too stupid at the same time, who never fit in–for a glorious, mysterious, poetic, misunderstood hero in an exciting story of which I was the star. Anyone observing me would have told a very different story. It was clear I was living a life of self-destruction.  By fourteen I was a nomadic punk rocker squatting in abandoned buildings, panhandling to survive, a ward of the courts, in and out of juvenile hall, and rapidly losing any real connection to anyone or anything. 

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By the age of 17 I was showing signs of late-stage alcoholism, but I had no idea what that was. I knew nothing about Alcohol Use Disorder, or alcoholism.  In fact, people still know very little about these disorders, and they are often conflated with some idea of moral deficiency or weakness. I had it in my head that an “alcoholic” was a businessman who drank in secret. Of course, the proverbial “wino” who drank out of a brown paper bag was more like me, but I figured I was still too young to be that.  I made up lots of stories about what I thought an alcoholic was, and by every imagination judged myself to not be one. In fact, I pondered this question an awful lot for someone who supposedly didn’t have a problem! The main reason why it was so important to me that I wasn’t an “alcoholic” is because I knew if I came to terms honestly about my relationship with alcohol, I would have to do something about it.  I couldn’t afford to think this way because I had no idea what to do, as the only hope in the world that I had was to be able to drink to get relief from all the terrible noise in my head about everything.  

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One night, I got tricked into going to a 12th step meeting. If things weren’t bad enough, after this they were hopeless, because it totally ruined my drinking. I started attending meetings, and the weirdest thing happened.  After I admitted that I actually was an alcoholic, something shifted that was almost imperceptible yet notably profound. I began to live sober and learn about my condition. Everything in sobriety was strange to me. It did not take long for me to remember why I drank in the first place.  I sincerely did not want to go back to the streets, but being sober was horrifically uncomfortable.  I could not shake the feeling of being awkward and left out.  It was 1987, I was young, I was a punk-rocker (back then I was the only one in the meeting with green hair).  I felt dirty and disgusting.  I felt like I was too far from humanity, and I was very embarrassed by that.  I could not imagine how I would ever find my way back to any type of normalcy.  After what I had been through, the thought of a ‘normal life’ made me feel resentful anyway, and utterly trapped.  That self-conscious, nerdy girl who didn’t fit in was back in full force, with no way out of my relentless ruminations about myself. Now in addition to that I had stacked 3 years of trauma from living on the streets to my already traumatized early childhood.

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After attending meetings for a while and eagerly trying to understand how to do the 12th step thing, I did not think I was getting it.  I figured there must be something more wrong with me than “alcoholism.”  I sought help from psychiatry, psychology, spiritual books, and still attended lots of meetings. As I was approaching two years of sobriety, I heard an AA speaker who caught my attention.  As she shared, I experienced something entirely new. I was so attracted to her that I literally felt like I could taste what she was sharing about like I could once taste a drink- when I would see someone else drinking and wanted to join them.  She sounded like she had a concrete solution, and it was very attractive to me. I thought to myself, if ever there was someone who I wish I was like it would be her.  Yet somehow it wasn't personal. I could feel that she was sharing something tangible; doable, and it wasn’t just her personality.  I asked her to show me what she was talking about, and she did.

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We sat together and she asked me a couple of questions about my drinking, and if I was willing to accept spiritual help.  She said I didn’t have to believe anything or “be good.”  She instead showed me how to find good, to feel that good by clearing away what was blocking me from it. She showed me a very simple writing exercise that, when I was done, felt strangely similar to the effect of alcohol.  I felt comfort, and lightness, and mental and emotional freedom. I found myself smiling.  I don’t think I had done that for a very long time- smile.  She told me to do this same exercise again, and to do it like I drank.  When I got home that evening, I did it again.  I showed my roommate and her friend how to do it.  I did it again the next morning just like she suggested.  I felt freer than I had ever felt in my life.  I wrote about my mother, and I could not believe the way I felt after.  It was as though a little slice of a lifetime of pent-up resentment had been totally removed. 

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I kept doing the writing practice she showed me, no matter what.  Surprisingly, I kept getting the same results.  She encouraged me to learn to meditate. At her suggestion I went to the TM center in Berkeley.  After I learned meditation, I began to experience real emotional balance.  Following her suggestions, I was amazed at how these two things together as a daily practice began to completely transform my life.  I was able to slowly repair past incompletions and damage I had done and had been done to me.  This was not just from a life on the streets, but deeper things that were so hidden I could not imagine them coming to the surface with ease. I grew to be able to look people in the eye, talk to them, be honest, laugh, grow, make mistakes, and repair them.  With all this newfound freedom in my life, even though I only had an 8th grade education, I was able to go back to school, and eventually was accepted to UC Berkeley.  I was the first person in my family to attend university. 

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I have had so many amazing and fascinating experiences sober. I have been married and divorced, experienced countless personal victories and failures, been through heartache and loss, fallen in and out of love, learned how to stand up for myself and to keep my mouth shut (the second part is harder).  I worked as a preschool teacher, made beanie propeller hats, been written up in local papers as the featured “warbling waitress” at an art café, I sold quirky vintage and niche toys, and created a high-end bi-coastal shoeshine business employing recovered alcoholics, touted by Vanity Fair as the “Best Shoeshine in the World.”   Creatively, I have sung on and off stage, been part of a professional improv group, acted on stage and in independent art films, choreographed and danced in small productions, and done stand-up comedy; including participating in a stand-up comedy show to benefit teaching meditation in underserved communities.  I am also fortunate to be the mother of two honest, brave, and delightful teenagers. My dear doggo keeps me walking in and connecting to nature daily. Life is full.

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Never ever in my wildest dreams would I have imagined such a rich and full life. This is mostly because I never felt really good without a drink. But I do feel good. From the place of feeling good, there is so much that a person can do. It seems like most of the time I hear the opposite- do good and then you will feel good. This may be true, but people like me rarely get to find that out because we feel so bad, we can’t do anything good- or at least not good enough.  So, I coach people on how to feel good. Immediately. I hope to get to know you, hear your stories, and share the Sober & Alive method together. Feeling good only gets better when the feeling is shared.  What good is a party if no one is invited and no one comes?  You are cordially invited to a life that you can’t imagine, because you don’t have to imagine it.  Life can be so much better when it’s real.  You don’t have to fake it till you make it… let me show you how to make it instead.