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. As always, I'm so excited to bring you

today's guest. Today's guest is a friend of mine, her name is Jen and she has a beautiful story and a beautiful

business, which we'll get to talk about in a bit. But first of all, as always, I just want to start with this story. So welcome, Jen.

Thank you so much for being here.

So much Annie for having me. It's my pleasure to lend my voice. So I come from three generations of

inter-intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues. And so I for a long time,

I've personally hit me at a very young age. There was a lot of chaos in our family system.

I had a baby sister who died, a mostly absent mother, a father who was working and an older brother.

And my older brother felt prey to heroin addiction by the time I was 12 and he was six years older than me. He was well into

heroin, IV heroin use. And so I didn't know what normal was because that was my normal.

And so at the teenager due to my former deaf years, I found drugs.

And what I was looking for was I waited to feel better and I didn't recognize it was any other healthier ways to feel better

because nothing else was introduced to me. And so by the time I was 18, I recognized that I had a problem. I didn't use like everybody else.

So alcohol never became part of my story until much later in life into my 40s because it was so much more socially acceptable to have a drink.

Then you know, roll a joint or something like that at the table.

So by my time I was 40s, I found alcohol. I just back up once I went to treatment in 1993. And that was my first introduction to that maybe there was something abnormal about how I was using substances to sort of just check out and not

and not lean into what I needed to feel in process because I didn't have those tools back then. But so I would just do that bypass them. Okay, I need to feel better.

And so that's why I went to I turned to drugs. So by 93 I married I have a very young family and my husband said you need to get it together and I said, okay.

So my children were my non-legotable and I needed to clean that up. So I felt that they deserve better. And I came from a chaotic system. So I knew the value of better parenting is not that my parents were good parents.

And I was not as bad as they could, but it was very dysfunctional and very chaotic. And so what do you mean by a chaotic system that sounds like a very mental health-esque word that's chaotic was, you know, there was always a crisis.

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