You’re Not Broken: Understanding Emotions After Addiction

What happens after the chaos quiets down? After the addiction stops… but the feelings don’t?

In this episode, I reflect on my conversation with Lillian Blake and unpack the part of recovery we don’t talk about enough: the emotional aftermath. I share what it really means to feel again after numbing, why we aren’t broken but unequipped, and how our emotions are not the problem but the pathway back to ourselves. If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by what’s inside you, this episode will help you understand it and begin to move through it with intention.

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Transcript

Processing Lily’s Sobriety Story

The Shock Of Feeling Again

The Myth Of Not Emotional

Numbing, Scrolling, And Escaping Life

Anger As A Mask For Pain

Name Emotions With The Wheel

Feel It In Your Body

You Don’t Have To Fix It

Write It Out To Let Go

The Open Door Prison Quote

Replace The Pattern With A Pause

Emotions As The Path Back

Heather 0:02

Hello friends and welcome back to the Free Advantage. I'm your host, Heather Davis, and I want to invite you into a new season of Real Stories, Real Recovery, and Real Freedom. This show has always been about self-discovery, authenticity, and recovering a life of freedom. And this year, we are taking that journey together in a deeper way. You're gonna hear raw, honest conversations with people walking this path in real time. Stories of growth, healing, purpose, and becoming whole. You'll also hear from me as I reflect on these themes that rise from the stories, answer your questions, and offer small, meaningful takeaways that you can carry back into your week. This is not just a podcast you listen to, it's a place you belong where you are part of the conversation. Welcome back, everybody. I am just reeling still from last week's conversation that I had with Lily. If you all have been listening in, last week I had a guest on. Her name is Lillian Blake, and she came on to share her story of being young, being 20 years old, and her struggles with addiction and her struggles with sobriety. Just thinking back so much about all of the themes that came up in that conversation and preparing for the next few episodes of things that I really wanted to like dive deeper into and talk about. And one of the things that when I sat down with Lily that stood out to me was not so much that she was just 20 and she was really young and she got sober, but it was kind of what happened after the fact and the things that she really struggled with after she got sober. Because we talk a lot about the struggles in addiction. We talk a lot about the struggles like when we're in the trauma, when these things are happening, and we're very familiar with those. But what does it really look like afterwards when we're in the recovery process, when we're in the healing stasis and the struggles that still come up for us, how are we dealing with those things? And one of the big things is that, you know, I talk up on here about is about being a whole person, right? You know, being whole-bodied, whole-hearted, whole-minded, whole-spirited, and and connecting with our identity and who we truly are. And one of the things that stood out to me the most was when she was talking a lot about how she felt about her emotions, how she didn't really feel like an emotional person before she got sober, but afterwards, she started having a lot of issues with things that were popping up and she was feeling a lot of things. And what I've learned is that a lot of the the coping mechanisms that we have, you know, to keep ourselves numb, to kind of escape into, they're there because we don't really know how to regulate. We don't know the right kind of tools to use to keep us in a space where we can actually be in a state of growth versus a state of escape or numbing. We start to avoid. And, you know, the one of the things that she said is that whenever I quit drinking, I had no idea what to do with what I was feeling. And that's that's really where I want to just take a moment and think about what that really means. Right? Like I didn't know what to do with that. How many times have we found ourselves in a place where we don't know what to do with what we're feeling? Right. And, you know, she talks about like she in she come has learned and has come to the awareness of the fact after the fact, after she's gotten sober, that she started drinking for fun, but it led into really, I started drinking so I didn't have to feel anything, you know. You know, we do this to any type of addiction that we experience. I mean, I I want to know that we're talking about alcohol today, but there's so many different things that we can be addicted to. There is alcohol, there's drugs, there's sex, there's food, you know, all the way down to our phones. How many of us find ourselves escaping, you know, they don't call it doom scrolling for nothing. You know, we just to escape the reality that we're kind of living in, to numb ourselves, to um even just shut it all out, right? And we do these things to get away from the stress, the pressure, um, the times that we're feeling disconnection, you know, and sometimes we do it just so we don't really have to connect with the fact that we don't know who we really are. And I see it all the time. I mean, I've seen it in myself. I there's still things in my life where I find myself doing it, right? But, you know, even having the conversations is that so many people who do struggle with addiction, they're just like, something's wrong with me. I'm broken. But the truth is, is you're you're overwhelmed, you're overstimulated, and honestly, you're just unsupported. You don't have the right things to help support you in the right way. And one of the things that Lily said to me was that we talked about just she wasn't an emotional person, but after she quit drinking, she started feeling all these things, and she started to guess, oh, maybe, maybe I am. Maybe I am an emotional person. And that statement right there really, really sat with me. And it's why I wanted to lead in with this conversation today. Because I want to know where did we ever get this idea that some people are emotional while others are not? Where did this idea come from? I mean, I want to know what is the de facto standard for emotionality? Is it crying? Is it hysterics? Is it being moody? Is it women in, you know, in their hormones? Or is it angry fits? Is it throwing a fit like a toddler? What is it? You know? I I mean, it's hard for me and it does kind of fire me up in a lot of ways because I'm like, what why is why is this something, right? Like, or if I get worked up about something, you're like, oh, she's being emotional, you know, or um when somebody's getting really angry and like, oh, he's you know, he's very passionate about that. And the truth is it's none of those things. It is absolutely none of those things. The real honest truth is that if you are human and you are listening to this right now, or you can look next to you and see somebody else, or you can look out your window and there's other people there. If you are human, you are emotional. Period. There is no debate about it. It is not up for opinion. We cannot get away from it at all. You know, some people may express their emotions outwardly while others keep them inside. But the truth is that we all feel it. We all feel it. And when we don't understand emotions or we don't know how to handle or regulate them, we seek out ways to help us cope. And that's when we tend to lead to any of these other things that we said earlier. Right. And, you know, uh with Lily, there was, you know, when did it become an issue for her? Right? She was very young. She was, you know, barely a teenager at all, you know, 13, 14, 15 when she first started using. So those kinds of things are like, where did that really come from? Right. And, you know, at first she had talked about how, well, I thought I was just having a good time. It was thought it was to be fun, but it was really when she made the powerful distinction, even in herself, even in that state, was that the she said the difference was I realized that I could not be happy without it. I couldn't be happy without it. And she goes, when I was drinking, I didn't care. I didn't feel the things the same way. You know, and she started to recognize that, oh, when I do drink, I feel numb. I don't feel this. It takes my mind into another place, so I don't have to think on it. But then she also went on to say, she goes, that after she quit, certain things started to bother her that didn't bother her before. And she said, I had no idea what to do with it, right? And those are the feelings or the emotions that are coming up that we're talking about, right? When we have been in a situation for so long, whether it's addiction, living in toxic relationships, surviving trauma, you know, when we've been in those places for so long and then we stop doing those things, or we start to try to heal, or we start to remove ourselves from those situations, the emotion of it all, the things that we've been ignoring, avoiding, escaping, numbing, they come crashing back in and sometimes with a vengeance. You know, our sensitivity can increase, our tolerance can low, but all of the things that we've been avoiding, all of those things that we've been trying to like push out, we come to find out that they're really just still there waiting for us. And what do we do? What do we do when that happens? You know, Lily started to feel very overly sensitive. She said her feelings were getting hurt, she found herself crying, and eventually she started to feel very confused by this. And I also found this very interesting because for me, even when I was going through all of my problems, like if you've listened back, you've heard my story. I always had a real strong sense of how I felt in all in all that was happening. I've been very grounded emotionally my whole life. It's the nature of who I am. And, you know, even as I've grown, I've learned a lot more, yes, but I never really struggled with who I was and how I felt about things. And for me, I'm very grateful for that because when having the conversation with her, she was like, I started feeling confused about even who I was. Like, I don't feel the same way. I don't look the same way as I did when I was younger. When she looks back, she's like, I don't understand why, if I wasn't an emotional person then, why am I an emotional person now? And the truth is, she's always been an emotional person because she's human. You know, when we spend so much time avoiding our emotions than we do facing them, when we start to heal and feel it, it can feel overwhelming and scary. Almost like we don't even know who we are anymore. And this is especially true the younger we are. So with Lily being 20 years old and then going through a lot of these things in her teenage years, she's still developing. Her mind is still developing, her brain is growing, she's not even fully in the understanding of who she is yet. So when you are trying to form those thoughts, you're trying to form those patterns in your life, you're trying to form that identity, and you're doing it under the premise of an addiction, you don't know who you are at all. Because every, like she said, everything that you're living is through an addiction lens. So once that was removed, you know, the overwhelm set in. It's it's definitely not an easy road. You know, she said, but before, while she was drinking, anger was kind of her mode of operation. You know, and what do we know about anger? Anger is a masking emotion. She would drink, and that numbed her vulnerability, and it gave her the courage to be mad about it all. And then you could stand up and say whatever you wanted because then she didn't care, right? And this happens with so many of us. I know when I was younger, I worked the same way. I wasn't drinking, but it was very much in that way. I used anger to control my situation. I used it to control other emotions that I had when I felt sensitive, when I felt vulnerable, when I felt scared. It was very much a, I mean, how do I even say it? I'm just my words, I'm, you know, they're getting all jumbled up. But the truth is, is like I would just be angry. If I lived in a state of anger, if I lived in a state of like constant irritation, then when things came in to bother me, when things came in to hurt my feelings, it was very much easier for me to face it and to, you know, confront it being angry than going, oh, well, you've hurt my feelings. That made me feel too vulnerable. It made me feel weak. And so it was with her, right? So once she stopped, her vulnerability was just sitting there on the surface. It was just waiting to be unveiled. It was waiting to be there, right? And there was no longer a drink to hide behind, you know, and she's like, Yeah, I she's realizing I am sensitive. I do get my feelings hurt, and I don't like that. I don't like it. And then what do we do when you feel that way and you're sober to not run back, to not run back to the drink, to not run back to her addiction, to not run back to, you know, the the bad relationships. What do we do? You know, addiction equals avoidance, and anger equals protection. But vulnerability, it equals truth. And it is our connection. It is where we can finally connect with others and ourself. You know, Lily was always sensitive, she was always vulnerable, just like we all are. None of us want to get hurt. None of us are seeking out pain. None of us are seeking out confrontation. None of us want that. We all want to belong, we all want to feel connected, we all want to be loved and supported. But when we don't, we tend to fall into these things because really what else is there to do? Right? And if we haven't been taught and we haven't been given the right things, and we don't have the right people there to support us, it's very, very easy for us to fall into that. But now, if you come into this place where, okay, I've decided I've seen the light, I want to be different, I need to be different. Things in life are happening where it ha things have to change. Where do we find ourselves on the other side? And how do we continue forward if some of the things are still the same, right? Because getting sober doesn't mean well, for Lily, it didn't mean that everything changed. It didn't mean that all of a sudden she was having the support she needed. It didn't mean that her relationships were different. It didn't mean that pain wasn't still there, it didn't mean that the past trauma wasn't still just alive and well. I mean, like I said, it was right there waiting for you as soon as you're right there, right? Because, you know, she just never stayed present long enough to feel it all. The truth is, and I'll say it again, we're just not taught how to deal with these things. So how do we deal with it? How do we deal with it? Um, I've been told pray about it, ignore it, push through it, distract yourself from it, you know, so we didn't fail at it. Right? We just pushed them over there. Like if we try and we fail, then what does that mean? The truth is, is we can't fail at it. We've just not been equipped. You cannot process what you can't name. Okay? When it comes to your emotions, there, you know, I did a study and I did an episode on it a while back that most humans can only understand and name five emotions. That is mind-blowing to me. It is absolutely mind-blowing to me. And if you cannot understand the breadth of what emotions are, how many there are and what they mean, and how they work within us and within each other, then it's gonna be very, very difficult. So one of the things you know is what am I feeling? Um, I have it right here. You know, I have an emotion wheel. I know that there's so many of you out there who have probably seen it. There's one on the internet. Download one. Get yourself familiar with the wheel of emotions. It's upside down, right? Get yourself familiar with it. Because it's, you know, it's not just gonna be happy, sad, mad, fear, you know, all these things. No, there's so look at all of these. Look at all of these. If somebody were to ask, how are you feeling? and people are like, Well, I don't really know how I'm feeling, I hand them one of these. I'm like, here, look. Read it, pick one. And what's super interesting about this wheel of emotions, if you hand one of these over and you ask people how they feel and they start to read it, you'd be surprised how many they can actually circle because they're like, oh, that that's how I'm feeling. And it may not have been anything in which you would have even thought about. You know, I if you go to my website, I'm gonna put up a wheel of emotions for you guys to download for free. It's for you to take home, do whatever you want with it, and get yourself familiar with it. So go to my website, theriskypath.com, and pick yourself one up there. But once we start to understand what we're feeling or we can identify the emotion, then you can name it. And when you can name it, you can start to feel it in your body. Go, where am I feeling this in my body? Right. And I talked about being whole-hearted, whole-bodied, because we have to listen to the things that our bodies are telling us. It's not just like working out and keeping myself healthy. It is also like, what is my body trying to tell me? And if we're not paying attention, if we're not asking, if we're not seeking those things from ourselves, we're not gonna know. So it's one of the tools is being able to identify it, familiarizing yourself with what emotions are, what they are, what they mean. And then when you start feeling something, stopping for a second and identifying where you feel it in your body. And two, the second tool I really have is to understand is that you don't always have to fix it. When we feel certain things, they only last in the body when they actually happen just a short time. It's just a few seconds, and then it will pass. The residual that we feel is our mind hanging on to it, causing us to relive that emotion over and over again. It keeps stirring that same synopsis or synapsis back up. Like it clicks on, we feel it, it lasts and it fizzles out and it goes away. But then our brain starts thinking about the thing that made us feel that way, and then we feel it again over and over and over again. It's not that we just are feeling this way and we live in a constant state of that. When I learned that, I was like, whoa, how do I, how do I get control of that? Right. And it's it's controlling your mind and your thoughts and the way that we can let them go. Right? We let our we let our thoughts go. We either let them go in one way or the other. We either let them go out the door never to be dealt with, or we let them go where they just keep cycling themselves over and over again. So what are we gonna choose? Learning how to do that, and that's a whole ball game on its own. Right? But the next tools, yet, like I said, not you you don't have to fix everything. Sometimes, like I said, the emotion because it comes, it's to sit with it and just let yourself feel it. And I know that that is very difficult for a lot of people. It's even for me who does feel all the things all the time, it is still difficult. I mean, I'm when somebody says something that stings, I mean, my first reaction still deep down is like, what? You know, it it makes me angry. I there I that fight comes out in me and I have to pause. And I have to feel it because what's really happening is the anger wants to come first, right? Because I've I've been hurt. So it's pause and letting yourself feel it and letting it wash over you. Right? And the third step that I talked to Lily about and is something that she just kind of naturally did, but it's something that I do and I talk to you guys about a lot, is writing. Write it out. You know, people are like, I don't want to write that down. What if somebody reads it? Then put it away, write it and burn it, write it and shred it. I don't care what you have to do, get it out. We want to hang on so badly to all of the negative thoughts, to all of the negative emotions that you think you've got going on inside that are making you not happy. Why are we hanging on to so many things that we don't want? You know, and a lot of people are like, well, I don't know how to let go of that. Write it down. It is one of the Simplest, cheapest, and greatest ways that you can get the stuff out. Right? Get it out. There's things that we do that's you know, we have there's all kinds of massages, there's all kinds of somatic release that we do for things to get out of our body. But what about get out of our mind and write it down? I don't care how you feel. If you're angry, write it down. If you just want to tear somebody a new one, write it down. You know, be specific. And then get rid of it if you don't want to keep it. Get rid of it. Right. I mean, I talked back in my stories that I had been carrying around trauma and a pain that I've been dealing with for over 20 years of my life. I live with this every single day. And I relived it in my mind over and over again when the thoughts would come up, when a picture would come up, when somebody would say something, something on the TV. I mean, I would be taken right back into that space like it's happening to me all over again. And I did that for 20 years. I am 47, and over half of my life, I have let that trauma have that much access and control over me. And when I decided to sit down and write it out, just I just wrote out what happened. I didn't even write down things that I felt about it. I just wrote down what happened. And I had my daughter paint me a picture. If you didn't hear it, go back and listen. The I had her paint me a picture of just how I felt. I'm like, can you paint this for me? Talk about artist therapy. Goodness gracious. And when it was all over and I had written it all down, and then she had this piece of art and to put in front of my face, I was like, oh man, the difference that getting it out of me and out over here instead of in here was it was completely life-changing. It brought so much healing to something I couldn't heal for 20 years, no matter how much I thought about it or you know, talked about it. So write it down. Write it down. You know, she said, Lily said, I was constantly writing. It helped me understand what was happening. What was happening with her mind, what was going through her mind, what thoughts were actually coming, because sometimes we don't realize what is actually going on in our minds until we stop and we pay attention to it. You know, the things that the things that we run to, the things that we used to numb ourselves whatever little addictions we find ourselves in. They are our prison. Lily said, I want to quote it because I don't want to I don't want to say it wrong because it was so good. She goes, addiction is a cell with an open door. But you choose to stay. You choose to stay. What makes us willing to continue to stay in a cell we're not even locked in? Um the next tool I would like to talk to you is just about replacing the numbing pattern, right? When you get angry, pause. When you start to scroll, pause. When you go to react, pause. When you go to drink, pause. Whatever it is in that moment, before you make that phone call, pause. You know, I think we take for granted the simplicity in life that sometimes just a simple moment, a simple few seconds, can make all the difference if we just pause. You know, I heard a mortician say, she goes, you know, somebody had asked her, what is the greatest lesson you've ever learned being a mortician? And she said to wait three seconds when the light turns green before you go. Because it can literally make the difference between life and death. That is the power of the pause. Three seconds. Can you give yourself three seconds? Feeling and our emotions are not the problem. They are our path back to ourselves. They are our path to connection with one another. And the thing that we have been avoiding, it's actually the thing that will set you free. So if you've been numbing, if you were lost in addiction, if you were struggling in your sobriety, if you were struggling in your recovery from anything, anything, if you've just been trying not to feel, pause for a moment. I want you to know there's nothing wrong with you. You're not broken, you're human. You're just human. And there are things out there for you to feel supported by. There are tools that you can use to help you. And I hope that I have given you some of those here today. If you're struggling with addiction, you or anybody else you know, I'm gonna put a number up that you can call. You can always reach out to me on my website, you can reach out to me on my email, you can find me on any of the platforms, you can DM me, find me in my instant messages wherever you need to go. I'm here for you. The path to freedom is a risky one, but it is one worth taking because freedom is the advantage you already own. I love you guys. Stay safe, and I'll see you next week.