You're listening to the Recovery Happy Hour, where we talk about life beyond the bottle and what happens after we stop drinking.

I'm your host Tricia and I've been in a cameo dot-com black hole for approximately three full days

so I'm grateful for the break and thank you for joining me.

On today's episode we've got a very complex and layered interview that covers some

really heavy subject matter and I wanted to include it in this three week series of episodes just for the moms because we talk a little bit about postpartum depression.

We also talk about bipolar disorder and of course alcoholism and in this particular story all three of

those play a part together it's a lot and the thing that interweaves itself between all of

them is shame we haven't talked about shame on the

podcast and now that I say that out loud I realize how strange that kind of is

because we've all felt it and we all have experience with it and how it keeps us from asking for help.

Shame is defined as a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the

consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior.

So let's break this down.

It's a feeling.

It's not a tangible thing.

So it doesn't exist on its own.

It's basically an emotional parasite

that can only live when it's attached to a human.

And it's caused by realizing that you've done something

less than perfect, which is impossible to begin with anyways right so it's

based on a subjective impossible experience so for something that is as helpable and real as shame you know that causes us to stay in our heads to

dwell in the past to stay stuck in negativity and even worse so to choose to do all that regularly. It's really quite incredible that it has the power to completely

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