As we sat at the bar, facing a wall with a “Drink alcohol!” slogan, sipping on a NA beer and eating our fried pickle appetizer, my husband wondered aloud what folks in the My Sober Girlfriends community would think about this scenario.

I looked around to take in the noisy scene as I checked in with myself for any signs of discomfort or tension.

Do you know what a hologram is? It’s those 3-D pictures, right?

Something you may not know— Every single piece of a hologram contains a different perspective of the whole image.

There is also the concept of a personal hologram. It means that a way you show up in one area of your life can give you insight into a way you show up everywhere else in your life.

I started an internal conversation, going back and forth quickly like a ping pong match between two different perspectives.

Let’s not serve booze. Obviously A. won’t be drinking alcohol, and neither will I.

But many of her friends are regular drinkers.

Yes, but there will only be a few guests.

So? More than two will want to drink.

….

I felt like my energy and awareness were free to expand into the entire room. No fear. No constriction. And yet, I was sitting at a bar counter. In a bar.

What I’ve learned the hard way, is that we have to give space to our feelings for them to process. It's taken me time to trust that I can do that, and not drown!

But I’m learning that by giving them space when needed, that is exactly what keeps them from being too much.

How do I give my emotions space?

In my family, you didn’t ask for help.

If anything was going wrong, the appropriate response was private prayers to God. Otherwise, asking for help felt like a request to be punished for doing something wrong.

More questions answered in this video blog!

In this video I answer questions from my last video and add another layer to how you can increase authenticity in your relationships.

This blog post is in video format— What is that one thing that changes everything?

Around the time I made that scary and glorious leap to sobriety, I remember one night, my husband was doing his bicycle commute 14 miles home from Nike— along the Sunset Highway, past Hoyt Arboretum as he made his way over the hills in the pitch dark—and I imagined myself getting a call from the hospital that he’d been hit by a car. Who would I call for support, I wondered? I honestly didn’t know.

Vacation in Spain sober? Just watch me.

Getting sober over three years ago meant that I eliminated alcohol and weed from my life.

Those things were making me feel bad. But what happens if all you do is take away the thing that makes you feel bad? You feel “not-bad”.

I didn’t want to just feel “not-bad”. I wanted to feel better than that, to feel more of the pleasure of life.

Not that I wanted to feel a bubbly, juicy pleasure all of the time. Challenge, and hard things are also good. But I was pleasure deficient, as many people are.