This is Annie Grace and you're listening to this naked mind podcast where without judgment,

pain or rules, we explore the role of alcohol in our lives and culture.

Hi, this is Annie Grace and welcome to this naked mind podcast today. I am here with Harvey. Hi Harvey. Welcome. Hey, Annie. How's it going? I'm going really good today. It's a good day.

So you wrote in because you do all sorts of really cool stuff, but you also really changed your drinking with this naked mind, which is so cool.

So I'd love you to just tell us your story like maybe even, you know, you're specifically alcohol story, maybe even just started the beginning and take me through it.

Great for sure. So, all right. So I guess we'll just go chronologically. So the interesting thing is that I come from a strict no drinking family.

My I was raised, well, for a part of my childhood, I was raised in the Mormon religion, which is strictly no drinking. And yet my father's family was sort of split down the middle of the drinking.

So I was exposed to alcohol in a sort of different way in that it was this outside thing that I didn't have access to as a child.

I only had my one alcoholic uncle from San Antonio, Texas and his wife.

They were their names were Roger and Winona, but we called them at Winona and Uncle Ra Ra and Uncle Ra Ra was super cool. He would drive in from Texas to California in his sports car and show off. And he was always just a super cool guy.

And he drank so I thought, okay, well, that's really rad. And then being pretty close to the Hollywood culture, I always sort of idolized, you know, the fact that they made cocktails in episodes of Bewish and things like that growing up.

So I just thought that alcohol use and all that was just this really neat kind of thing that one day when I became an adult, I would start engaging in.

So there is some predatory, you know, there's some genetic predisposition to alcohol abuse in my family, you know, it's in my genes for sure.

And as I got older, my parents died when I was a child. So that's when the real trauma started in my life. When I was a young child, I was abruptly taken from my mountain home and I thought it was interesting.

And you grew up in a cabin because I grew up in the National Forest in California also and actually live in a cabin now.

And I abruptly taken from my childhood home and really had a pretty rough childhood from there on out starting about age seven.

So when I became old enough to actually have access to alcohol, it was really for some reason or another, it just became a component of what helped me cope and helped me feel.

I just couldn't wait to become an adult like I felt like I got into an unfair shaken life. I, my siblings, I have six siblings, they were all quite a bit older than me.

And I would, and I was fortunate to be raised by my sister. So I didn't have to go to an orphanage or anything, but it was very difficult because they had young children and they were quite a bit older. So I would look at pictures of all of them as children playing together and I always felt kind of left out.

I was always sort of the bait and switch youngest child, you know, they would call me into a room, you know, before my parents died and I would run into the room all excited like I finally get to be a part of my siblings and then they would like trip me on the way and stuff like that.

So my entire life story up until now has been a huge bait and switch trick basically. And I am, and I was like the victim, right.

So so growing up was hard and I always felt really resentful about all of that. So as soon as I started having...

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