A note to the listeners, this episode briefly mentions sexual assault and child abuse.

Please listen with care.

Hold on to your headphones. It's season three of Recovery Happy Hour where we talk about life beyond the

bottle and what happens after we get sober. I'm your host Tricia. Thanks for joining me today.

So last week we started off a three week series about our past dictating our future and digging

into our traumas to get to the root of our drinking.

Your feelings can be a heavy load to bear when you first get sober.

Believe me, I was totally overwhelmed at times and physically exhausted from feelings.

And that happened for my first six months of sobriety, I was just so tired.

And if you're like me, you drink to numb your feelings. I know I did. I drank when I felt stressed out, anxious, sad, angry, lonely, you name it. I wanted to control how much or how little I felt it. This is like having a

credit card that you put all of your expenses on without having any income to pay it off.

The debt piles up, interest gets added, you start missing payments and before you know it that original debt you started off with

has grown bigger than you ever imagined and it only

continues to grow until you finally face it and start paying it off. From a

distance that debt can seem like a mountain and so overwhelming that you don't even know where to start.

Some people let it go so far that they file bankruptcy.

Have you ever felt bankrupt from your emotional debt? How about

physically bankrupt? The good news is filing bankruptcy isn't the only

solution. You can also decide to face it head on, start making

payments consistently over time, patiently watching that debt get smaller and smaller.

And I love metaphors just like a credit card.

Sobriety and recovery are handled the same way,

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