You're listening to this naked mind is Annie Grace, and welcome to the Snick and Mind podcast and I'm here with

Linda. Welcome, Linda, how are you?

Oh, I am awesome. I'm so happy to be here talking with you today, Annie.

I'm so glad to, this is great.

So why don't you sort of take us back to the beginning in your journey with alcohol?

Where did it all serve? Oh, well, sure, it probably begins with the fact that my family's business was in the alcohol industry. So it was very normalized in my home to drink and drink often and what the heck's wrong with you if you're not drinking.

So there was alcoholic behavior in my home that I grew up with. It was also that I'm an

adoptee and my brother was an adopted person from a different family. So there was

always that whole identity crisis going on of being sort of a square peg and around hole and then you pour alcohol on top of a volatile situation. It just created a lot of it was a

tumultuous childhood let me say. And so as I grew up and I had more of a relationship with alcohol as I grew older because it started to show me that I don't know, I was more popular, I talked better, I was sex sex here I was all this and that I you know that I thought that I couldn't go into a social situation without alcohol it just grew and grew for decades.

So I was a real high functioning alcoholic.

I don't know if I ever was like really,

I don't know if I'm an alcoholic,

but I drank alcoholically because that's what I was shown in my childhood home.

And so it didn't become a huge issue to me until seven years ago. I've been sober since September 18th of I think it was 2016 and I was told

I had a high liver enzyme count and I was like what the hell's that and I thought oh there must be a mistake not even believing the doctor when she told me that there was something wrong.

And by that time, I was just, I was an empty nester with my children basically being gone,

and all of my trouble that I'd never dealt with all my life of adoption angst and growing up in a dysfunctional home had all come to a huge head and I was drinking almost day and night. And so it became like a do or die situation and I landed in a rehab center where I had to detox because I was going through some severe withdrawal.

I found myself just a month and a half later again in the same rehab situation.

I hadn't changed anything. A fact I had gotten a lot worse with my drinking. But the second

go around was when things started to change for me and I was given a book called This Naked Mind and it was from a good friend of mine her name's

Michelle and another one named Nicole and they showed me a different way in looking at my relationship with alcohol and how it wasn't my best friend and it wasn't my lover and it was lying to me all these years.

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