Dru Jaeger + Victoria | The Grief + Alcohol Club

 

SHOW NOTES SUMMARY: 

This week’s episode is a collaboration with my friend, Dru Jaeger, co-founder of Club Soda and author of How to Be a Mindful Drinker: Cut Down, Take a Break, or Quit.

Dru woke up one morning a happy child with two parents and went to bed that night without a mother. She died suddenly and unexpectedly of a massive brain hemorrhage. Within six months, his father would relocate their family to another country.

Like many of us, Dru learned that you suppress it, distract yourself, keep yourself busy, and pretend that the trauma did not happen to you when it comes to grief.

Dru shares how his grief changed and manifested over the years. Also, how only in the last several years has he found peace within where he’s learned to live with himself (and his grief) well.

Enjoy this week’s episode as we both share how parent loss in childhood shaped our adult lives, particularly our relationships with alcohol, and learn if alcohol has become a way for you to cope with your grief. And, to be clear, if you think this episode isn’t for you, you don’t have to be a daily drinker for alcohol to be a “problem-solving band-aid” in your life.

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If you or anyone you know is struggling with grief, free resources are available HERE.

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CONNECT WITH VICTORIA: 

 

Victoria Volk 0:00
Hi this is Victoria of theunleashedheart.com and you’re listening to grieving voices, a podcast for hurting hearts who desire to be heard. Or anyone who wants to learn how to better support loved ones experiencing loss. As a 30 plus year griever in Advanced Grief Recovery Methods Specialist, I know how badly the conversation around grief needs to change. Through this podcast, I aim to educate grievers and non grievers like spread hope and inspire compassion towards those hurting. Lastly, by providing my heart with yours. In this platform, grievers had the opportunity to share their wisdom and stories of loss and resiliency. How about we talk about grief, like we talked about the weather. Let’s get started. Hey, good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, wherever you’re listening from. I’m your host, Victoria Volk, and this is another episode of grieving voices. And I’m thrilled to share this episode because it only happened because I had an idea. And I followed through with the inspired idea by sending an email and reaching out. And this episode is collaboration with Dru from joinclubsoda.com Dru’s professional background is as a writer and researcher. And along the way, he is trained as a facilitator, coach, NLP practitioner and mindfulness teacher, day to day and club soda Dru designs and delivers courses and workshops to help people cut down, take a break from alcohol or stop drinking for good. He also writes regularly about alcohol and mindful drinking, and hosts the club soda podcast, do now drinks rarely. And as a passionate advocate for a world in which people drink more mindfully and live well. Club Soda is a community for people who want to either give up alcohol or drinking, cut back, or just really changed their relationship with alcohol. It’s a very supportive community. And I was thrilled when I got a yes to do this. And we recorded and it was an amazing recording. I hope you enjoy it. And we do plan to do this again. So if there is something about this episode that you would like us to dig deeper into as in terms of grief and alcohol and the topics that come up during the conversation, please reach out either to dru@joinclubssoda or myself at [email protected]. And we’ll make it happen. Because I think we are both enthusiastically excited about, I don’t know, enthusiastically excited, I think we’re both really excited to have this conversation, and more importantly, to share it and to share what we both have learned over the years about alcohol and our relationship to it because it really truly is indeed a relationship. And so enjoy this episode. And if it helps you, please share it with someone else who may be struggling with their relationship with alcohol. Or leave a review for Dru and myself on both of our podcasts because it is on their podcast as well. And I will put the link in the show notes if you would like to leave a review. Thank you so much for listening and enjoy.

Dru Jaeger 3:37
We thought it’d be good for myself and Victoria to share a bit about our own experiences of alcohol and grief and how those two stories have been woven together through our lives. And then I’ve got some questions for Victoria, which will be gonna be I hopeful, super useful for people listening to the club soda podcast, and then you’ve got some questions for me. So that’s where we go. And I guess for me, I guess one of the things that I was reflecting on as I came to preparing for this, is that when I was drinking and my most heavily through my 30s I don’t think I would ever have reflected that that was in any way connected to my experiences of childhood loss. But looking back at it now that is such an unavoidable conclusion. But I wonder how it ever is that I could have imagined I was doing anything else is such a glaring thing for me now. recognizing all of these ways in which I wanted to transcend my experience escape the emotional pressure that I felt inside me feeling this sense of disconnection of not belonging, all of these different things which are going on when I was drinking and taking a lot of drugs, which I partied really hard in my 30s A lot of what was going on then. I wouldn’t couldn’t have articulated it that way, but it really was about My experience of childhood loss my mum died when I was nine years old, she died very suddenly, I, she died of a massive brain hemorrhage. And I literally woke up one morning as a nine year old, and have a mother and went to bed that night and didn’t. And, you know, it utterly pulled my life apart, not just in the experience of grief, and that gaping void in my life that suddenly opened up. But actually in all the consequences of what happened. As a result of that, within the course of about six months, my family had relocated, I’d lost contact with my childhood friends, I was living in a different country. And so many of the messages that I heard as a nine year old, this is almost 40 years ago, but so many messages that I heard as a nine year old, were, you just have to kind of grin and bear it and get through the next few days. And it’s all going to be fine. And I was taught very much a model of dealing with grief, which is that you suppress it, you put it away somewhere else, you might occasionally be upset, but you distract yourself, you keep yourself busy. And you throw yourself into this new exciting life that you have. And we pretend that this traumatic experience that you’ve been through, is not something which happened to you at all. And I, you know, I can only have the life that I have, you know, I can’t, one of the things that I want to talk to you about is this urge that I have to fix my grief. But of course, I can’t go back, you know, I can’t change the experiences that I had as a nine year old, I can learn to live better with them. And I can learn to be compassionate and forgiving as far as I’m able to the other people who were implicated in that story. I tell you a little story about how that’s come up recently, but But you know, I can I can, I can do the work now to live as well as I can. But one of the things which I am really very aware of now in my in my approaching life forces, but I will say that quite yet. No, really, I’m 48, late 40s is that this story of loss is always going to be with me. I, you know, there isn’t a moment in my life that’s going to come where I will ever put this behind me where it will ever stop being an issue. And I guess if I were thinking about the loss that I carry, it’s not like that raw, confused, terrible, painful experience that I went through as a nine year old. It’s very different now. But it doesn’t go away, you know, my life has grown and expanded around it, you know, I’m able to contextualize it, I’m able to see the effect that grief has had on me and continues to have on me, but it never goes away. It’s like this

Dru Jaeger 8:20
Thing that I carry with me all of the time. And sometimes, you know, we have this conversation on the on the on our podcast, just before Christmas coming up to Christmas, inevitably, I will cry every Christmas at some point. Because I miss my mom. You know, I have been doing that every year for the past decades, I will continue to do that until I’m in my 70s Hopefully eight years, you know, however long I live, that experience will always be with me. There are there are moments still when grief surprises me when it comes out of nowhere when I find myself crying for no particular reason and a very obvious reason. And it all gets mixed up together. So you know, I I feel like I’m somebody who is now almost 40 years on finally learning at some level to live with myself and this experience that I had, and all of the impacts of it. And yet one of the ways in which I tried to effectively deal with this experience and all of the things that flowed from it in my 30s was that I threw myself into living life as hard as I could, you know if there was an experience of life that I could get, I was going to throw myself at it. I want it to consume all of the alcohol and take all of the drugs and become a person other than myself and I tried really hard and I had you know I had actually had an amazing time. I’m not gonna deny that I do had, I had I had an extraordinary period of my life, I made some great friends, I lost some friends, I, you know, it was a it was a transformative experience for me. But in the end, it ended up doing more damage than I was able to sustain. And, you know, my abiding memory by the time I got to my early 40s, my abiding memory of my 40th birthday is not the amazing party that I put together and all of the people from different parts of my life that came to celebrate with me, it was being on my own, late at night, hugging a toilet, and formatting because that’s where my drinking had led me to. And I didn’t know how else to be with and celebrate with all of these people who were important to me apart from getting out of my face on alcohol. So yeah, and so over the past, I guess, decade, I’ve been in this journey of a learning to live well with myself and learning to live with my mental health and all of the impacts of grief and that have had, and trauma that I continue to carry. But recognizing alcohol and drugs on solving these problems for me, I’ve tried, I tried, you know, I tried escaping into religion in my 20s, I tried escaping into alcohol and drugs in my 30s These solutions are going to in the end cause me more damage than they are going to solve for me. And I need to find better ways to live. And so for me, that’s meant that I’ve really kind of over the past few years pretty fundamentally reshaped my relationship with alcohol. I do drink, but vanishingly rarely. And now my relationship with alcohol is actually thinking does this drink and value to life, as opposed to what problem is this drink going to solve for me. And that has been such a fundamental shift that I’m, I’m basically alcohol free by default, most of the time. But that’s been really important, because actually, it’s given me space, and build some emotional resilience. And it’s let me learn to approach the difficult feelings that I carry around in a more respectful way. I guess I’m not, you know, pouring fuel on them. I’m listening to that sadness. And I’m listening to that loss. And I’m, hopefully in a better relationship with my nine year old self, and his experiences of pain than I have been ever in my life. So far. That’s really where I am on this whole journey of alcohol and grief. How are you?

Victoria Volk 12:47
Wow, I thank you so much for sharing that I saw me writing as you were speaking not to. I was really, truly listening. But there are so many things that I want to circle back to. And I will. In a nutshell, my experience was my dad died when I was eight. But he was sick for two years, almost 16 months, but he was given two to three months to live. But he lived for almost 16 months. But he was gone much of that time because he was doctoring, and it was like three hours away to the VA hospital. And so I was bounced around from house to house between age of six and eight until he passed away. And it really, you know, that year that passed away, it was really traumatic, not just losing my father, but also my sister who was like a second mom to me, join the Air Force. She graduated from high school two months later, and she was gone. So I lost her. And when my dad passed away, eventually we lost. I lost relationship with all of his family. So I not only lost my dad, but I lost an entire family. I grew up in a very, I mean, it was just my brother, my mom and myself, and then she remarried about two years later. And it wasn’t a healthy relationship. And so I was surrounded by arguing and, and alcohol was very much a part of our home. And that led me to, you know, and my brother was five years older than me, so I kind of grew up by myself and a lot of ways because he was doing his own thing. He was a teenager. And by the time I was while in high school, I really I drank and I went to parties and things but it wasn’t I almost knew like right from wrong like I had still this sense of I don’t you know I didn’t want to

Victoria Volk 14:52
I had it was like a consciously was choosing to not go down this path that I saw other people in my life going down due to other reasons and other circumstances in their life, by the time I was 21, I, on my 21st birthday, I hadn’t even been to a bar didn’t even go to a bar. And it wasn’t until a friend, she’s like, you’ve never been to a bar. And I said no. And but a lot of loss happened in the meantime, too. I ended up joining the military. And when I was gone at my training, my mom sold her house, she got a divorce. And so when I came back from my training, my childhood home was essentially not my home anymore, I had nowhere to go, but to this new city where I knew no one, and to live with my mom. And so that was a huge transition, partially why I hadn’t been to a bar, because I didn’t know anybody. But that one ask. And starting to go to the bar is what really set me up for a downward spiral. And I knew every drink special every night of the week, and my license was nearly suspended. I had so many fender benders and speeding tickets, I should have been fired from my job. I can’t believe they didn’t fire me, they probably saw that I was kind of a train wreck. And I had been taught to but no one was holding me accountable or responsible. And I certainly wasn’t doing that for myself. But by the grace of God, they didn’t. But maybe that would have snapped me out of my mess sooner, I don’t know. But I ended up getting myself in a lot of not a lot of but several dangerous situations, being a female, and going to bars and, you know, meeting people that I didn’t know. And it was really a really transformative time for me, and not a good way. And it’s what really changed was that I ended up toxic relationship that kind of set me on a downward spiral until my husband came into the picture. And we had been friends for seven years before we even started dating. But he just I don’t know, he was like the knight in shining armor, I suppose. And that’s really what turned my life around in the in that in that timeframe. And so, my drinking Eska escapade, although it was a good year and a half, I really made up for lost time during that time. But alcohol didn’t just go away. And it didn’t really creep in again, until I became a parent. Until I had three kids in four years. My husband was gone a lot. He commuted for his job. And so he’d be gone, sometimes a week at a time. And I was raising these kids and isolated because we had moved and I didn’t really have any friends. And then I started to meet people on things. And it was through alcohol, how I met people. And that’s how bonds kind of formed. And so that’s when alcohol became this social, a way for me to come out of myself, because I didn’t feel comfortable with myself in my own skin. And so to feel like I would fit in or to feel like I was fun. I thought I needed to drink. And so that’s really, and I found myself just like you in front of the toilet many times, my kids becoming teenagers and seeing their mom and and feeling the shame and the guilt around that.

Victoria Volk 18:43
We know what kind of example was I setting for my kids. And I don’t believe that you have to be a daily drinker to have a problem with alcohol. If alcohol is causing you to become someone you’re not because you’re not comfortable with who you are. Or you’re drinking to avoid feeling a certain way or to avoid addressing certain emotions, then it’s a problem. Whether it’s binge drinking on the weekends, or binge drinking on a Wednesday night and a Tuesday night or whatever it is, or you’re having four drinks every single day. If it’s a problem, it’s not going to look the same for everybody, I don’t believe and so I had a bender one night and I woke up the next day feeling like I always did like crap. And I would I would get sick every time it didn’t matter what I drank or how much I just would get sick. And I’d be a pile of crap for a day or two and useless to my family and to myself and and finally I just woke up that next day and there was a conversation I’d had or someone had shared something with me they were kind of going through the own thing with alcohol On this shirt, you know, why do I need this? And that one question she posed, I asked myself, and I didn’t have a good answer. Why do I need? Why do I think I need this? And that day, I decided I’m done and done, cold turkey. And I applied what I knew in Grief Recovery, what I learned the tools, and I applied that to my relationship with alcohol. And it really helped me sustain my sobriety for 638 days, I think it was, until a weekend with friends, I consciously decided I was going to share in a toast. And I did drink that weekend. And then I felt like it was something that I had control of, like, I decided this, it’s not that I alcohol decided this for me, like, I didn’t feel like I had to do it. But boy, for two, it took about two weeks. And then it really hit me like, What did I do? What did I do? There I go again, you know, and then the guilt and the shame. And my kids Oh, I thought you quit drinking? And people would say I thought you quit drinking? And? And to answer that question. You know, it was really, it still really takes me aback. And I don’t know how to answer it. Sometimes, but ever since then it’s really become this. It really is about self discovery. Like every time I drink or every time I go into a situation where there’s going to be drinking, I’m having this dialogue in my head. If people could see my, my thought bubbles above my head, as I’m contemplating like, my relationship with alcohol and, for example, met with someone not that long ago and a family member and you know, just in my daughter, was there my youngest. And she’s like, well, let me buy you a birthday drink. It was my birthday. And I’m like, Yeah, I suppose. And I thought, I’m going to have a pop. And then I said, Well, are you going to have something? And she said, Yeah, I’ll get my, my usual or whatever. And she doesn’t drink that often. But and then I get up to the counter, and I’m ordering. And I’m like, I even told her a pop. I said what kind of pop in and then I changed my mind. But this dialogue is continuing in my head, like, Should I do it? Should I not do it? Like, what does this say about me? What does this say about you know, like, it was like, ridiculous like that I was torturing myself in this way. And I just thought, you know what, she’s buying me a birthday drink, it’s my birthday. I can drink, have a drink with my family member, and the world isn’t going to collapse around me, I am not a lesser person because of it. But I am consciously choosing to make this decision right now in this moment to share in a drink with my family member. And I’m gonna let that be okay.

Victoria Volk 23:10
And it’s just this continuous evolve of in conversation and dialogue with yourself to, to because I don’t want to go back to that to what that was right. And I’ve been in situations since you know, where I’m going out with friends and things and, and I have my limit now. Like, this is my limit. And I keep track I like you know, save the tabs, and I’m keeping track and I don’t want to lose my sense of agency. Because when I lose my sense of agency, it’s not me anymore. It’s not me anymore. And I want to be okay with me. And I want to show the world me, not who I am when I have five, six or seven. And I’m embarrassing myself and they’re getting a good laugh. Or I’m obnoxious or I’m funny, I get really funny, but sometimes stupid funny. You know, it’s it really is we become a different character. And I think we just need to get really comfortable with the character of of who we are. First and foremost. And so that’s been quite the journey for me. Yeah, that’s been kind of my experience with alcohol.

Dru Jaeger 24:31
Yeah, thank you. Thank you for sharing. Likewise, I’ve scribbled some things down, which I wanted to come back to. One of the things which struck me and it’s something which I’ve reflected on is how your how the experience of childhood loss isn’t just about the loss of that individual, but about all of the subsequent consequent loss of family and that feeling of family that He comes along with it. And some of that being, you know, natural change a sibling going away to college or going away to start a job somewhere else. But you know, life continues to change. But that, when that’s all framed from a childhood experience of I’ve, I’ve, I’ve lost something and I can’t control this, you do end up with a feeling that your family is falling apart around you. And then that sense of isolation that comes from that I’m the only person in this experience. But the thing that struck me so much about your experience of, of drinking and meeting people, my experience in my early 30s, of going out in London, and partying was this was all about rebuilding a sense of connection and wanting to feel a sense of belonging. And I really wrestled with the extent to when I continue to think about this, the extent to which my experience of childhood loss makes me different. I feel like I’m an outsider, you know, I looked in envy, people in their 40s Complaining about both of their parents. I’m like, I wish I had two parents to complain about only have one, drink is lovely. But you know, I, I feel different, I continue to hold that, that sense of feeling different, feeling isolated, feeling outside. And actually then, yeah, drinking became a way to create community and a sense of belonging around myself. And I, you know, even in this conversation, I’m beginning to see how much that has driven from this kind of core sense of isolation that I carried from my experience as a nine year old.

Victoria Volk 26:41
Now, what happens though, and I even wrote this down is that alcohol is then also very isolating. It is because within ourselves, right within ourselves, like we isolate, it’s, it becomes this block to intimacy. Because you can’t become have intimate conversations, and you can’t have deep content. I mean, you could, but they’re not going to be rich, and and you’re not going to remember them. Right? It becomes this block to enter intimacy. So it’s a false sense of community, I think, in a lot of ways.

Dru Jaeger 27:15
Yeah. I mean, I do say this to people, you know, when you think about alcohols, physiological effects on you, you know, the rush of warmth to your face, the feeling of looseness in your body, perhaps you kind of lean in more to others, you know, you get a bit louder, you get a bit, one of these kinds of things. Actually, our experience of drinking feels quite a lot like love, it’s hardly surprising that it gets wrapped up in the way that we create relationships, because many of the feelings that it gives us are exactly the feelings of intimacy that we want with others. But you’re absolutely right. You know, certainly, you know, that experience of hugging the toilet late at night, or even late earlier in the evening. You know, I noticed this now, when I’m out with people, and I’m not drinking, and they are, I begin to notice two or three drinks in, but conversations keep going around in circles. And I’m like, Tell me Tell me again, you told me like literally half an hour ago, but it’s still important to you. So I’ll listen once again. But you know, that kind of sense of I like my social connection is closing in on itself, and I am getting stuck. And I lose my sense of empathy. For others. I don’t, I’m not present for other people. I’m not really hearing them. I’m not building this conversation in a good way. I’m just repeating these little patterns over and over again to myself until I pass out. How is that building a sense of belonging? I mean, I thought that it was but you know, experience 10 years on, I see that it really doesn’t work that way.

Victoria Volk 28:47
Well, and again, it just highlights for people listening to. So when you meet someone in a bar, and you’re both intoxicated, and you think you’ve fallen in love. That’s why, you know, when the alcohol isn’t in the equation, oh, it’s really different than like different people. Right? Like it’s a different situation and different experience, because that level there is it’s a false sense of intimacy.

Dru Jaeger 29:14
Yeah. How do you find it now? If you are in social settings, and you are not drinking alcohol, how do you find the business of making connection and getting that sense of belonging with others.

Victoria Volk 29:27
I miss the connection. I miss it. I miss, you know, I still have fun, I can dance the night away and I don’t have to drink and that’s been many times but I find that there isn’t this sense of, of true connection, right of like you said, it’s like these looping conversations and and yeah, it doesn’t move. It doesn’t progress relationship forward. So if that’s the only time you’re with those people You know, it really is, again, false intimacy, in friendships and marriage if alcohol is a huge part of your marriage, you know, it’s Yeah, I have a bottle of wine in my fridge, I bought a bottle wine for New Year’s. And to for HUD, my husband and I to share and I’ve poured half a glass, the bottle is still in there. That’s how I know that I’ve transformed my relationship with alcohol because that thing would have been gone that night.

Dru Jaeger 30:38
Yeah, my my mid 30s Drinking self would be in utter wonder, the fact that somebody can keep an eye local bottle of wine in their house overnight. How and why would you do that? That seems the only

Victoria Volk 30:56
It’s possible. And what we were talking about before and I wanted to, this is what I want to circle back to is I want to ask you, and I want to get back to your story, too. But what are your thoughts on this all or nothing approach to being in a, you know, addiction recovery, like recovering in addiction and alcohol? And I don’t want to minimize or dismiss that people truly do lose their lives due to alcoholism. But yeah, what can you share? For my listeners, and yours, too, I suppose you know, your thoughts on that, because it’s come to my attention recently. And just really, I feel like it’s doing a disservice to a lot of people.

Dru Jaeger 31:39
Yeah, I suppose where I’d want to start is by being clear about a few things. One is, addiction is real. It is possible to find yourself in a compulsive out of control relationship with a substance which becomes all consuming to the point that you don’t know how to do anything else. Apart from Pursue your relationship with that substance. That’s a real phenomenon. It is also, however, a really complex phenomenon. It has my logical components, it’s got social components, it’s got psychological components, it’s a whole mixture of different things. It’s not one thing, and removing the substance doesn’t solve the problem. You know, if you are the kind of person who is has a compulsive relationship towards alcohol, it’s just happened for alcohol got in the way, when you were bringing all of those life challenges to the world. And alcohol helps solve some of those for you in a way which has got really messy and difficult and complicated. You found alcohol, another person might have found cocaine, or meth, or compulsive shopping, or dangerous compulsive sex or losing themselves in Facebook for days on end, or intensive gaming, there are all sorts of behaviors that we adopt as ways of soothing ourselves as well as a way to think better about themselves. For some of us, we’ve ended up wrestling with alcohol. Now, it’s important to say that alcohol has some properties, which means that we can become physically dependent on alcohol, alcohol withdrawal symptoms are unpleasant, at best, actively dangerous at worst. Alcohol is the only substance that can kill us. As we withdraw from it, you know, many other substances are deeply unpleasant to withdrawal from alcohol withdrawal can be fatal. If we experience fear, alcohol withdrawal symptoms. It’s really important that people don’t stop drinking suddenly, without medical support, if they think they may be dependent on alcohol physically dependent. So it’s got these two components. We’ve got this all this psychological stuff with all this physical stuff. And it is complicated. One of the other things that we know, though, and we know this from the research, is that the story that we’ve heard, that once you’re in that relationship with alcohol, the only thing that you can safely do is to stop forever. What we actually know is that that isn’t true. It’s a really it is a solution. For some people, I need to be completely clear about that there will be some people, particularly if you have a history of severe mental ill health. If you have been significantly physically dependent on alcohol, and have needed support to stop, it’s probably safest that you just don’t drink. You can build a very happy life that doesn’t center on alcohol at all, where you just push it out of the picture, but that’s not going to be true for everyone. There are very few long term studies about what happens to people’s drinking habits over time. But the one which I think is really interesting in this regard, it’s called the Birmingham untreated heavy drinkers. As project, it’s a bit of research that was conducted in the UK in the early 2000s, where basically, a group of 500 people who were drinking very heavily were followed for a decade untreated, with no intervention, just to see what happened. At the end of those 10 years, they had kept in touch with about 250 people. And they found something really interesting. So about 70% of those people were still drinking at dangerous and damaging levels. That should be unsurprising, right? People who are wrestling with alcohol, a decade on are still going to be in that same position. 10% of people had found their ways, just through their own effort to being completely alcohol free, they had decided that life beyond alcohol was going to work for them, and they’d stopped drinking completely 20% of those people were drinking within safe limits 20%, they were twice as likely to find a way to moderation than they were to complete abstinence. And the reality is that that is if that’s true, just through the natural progression of our relationship with alcohol, it puts puts paid to a couple of myths. One is that alcoholism is progressive, that it only gets worse, we know that that’s not true for 30% of that group, they found a way a decade on to find a relationship where alcohol was only marginally present or wasn’t present at all. It didn’t necessarily get worse. But it also gets paid to the idea that abstinence is the only answer 20% of those people have found a way to moderate consumption of alcohol with no intervention and no support at all. That’s where they ended up. So I think that’s a really, I think that’s really hopeful for people actually, because one of the things I know from my work with individuals is that people can become overwhelmed by two things. One is the idea that I can never drink. And the idea is that I can never drink again, at all forever, the forever thing and the not at all things can be really scary for people. Now, it might be that that is the right thing for you, and you should push towards that. But it also might not be the right thing for you. I’m a real believer in helping people find a relationship with alcohol, that works for them. Not what anyone else says is the right thing to do. You know, so if your relationship with alcohol looks like having an occasional celebratory toast, because a member of your family wants to buy you a drink and include you in that moment. And you can do that from a place of conscious intention. And that isn’t going to then lead into a spiral and continuing to drink. I think, go for it. You know, you may have had a troubled relationship with this substance in the past, but your past doesn’t have to define your future. You know, that’s as much as we know, from the world of grief as anything else, you know, I have these experiences that lead me to this moment, I can begin to make conscious decisions about how my life plays out from this point. So yeah, does that answer the question? Now? I can go on on this subject for literally hours, so probably best to cut me off.

Victoria Volk 38:10
No, I know, I it was perfect. I absolutely love that. And, you know, I think to what I guess what I’m wondering too is, or what I want to share too is how the grief evolved for both of us. Right? And how we, because I think childhood grief, obviously, as a child, and you experienced grief or trauma because I was also molested after my father passed away. It wasn’t just that one grief experience. And then, you know, your life becomes a train wreck later, it’s you, I’m assuming to you had many grief experiences along the way, because grief is cumulative. And it’s cumulatively negative and just what you were saying how so many of us resort to these behaviors to feel better. We call them in Grief Recovery to call them disturbs short term energy relieving behaviors. So whether it is shopping or gambling or, or alcohol. We find ourselves trying to replace something within us with that thing, so that we can feel better. Yeah, and I know what’s true for me is you can look back, right because I’m I’m in my early 40s It’s I’m 35 years out from my loss, but it you can look back and see how that grief evolves with you over through the years and over time. It’s it is something that you take with you. It’s not something you just put in a shoe box and put it on the shelf and forget about it. You can try you can try. And so my question for you is what what was that like to unpack all of that grief in that moment of awareness that you had what when was that and what what led to that Out of all this is my grief that’s really at the heart of all of this.

Dru Jaeger 40:05
I don’t think that has been one moment. I think it’s been an evolving conversation with myself. I remember, I was reflecting on this earlier, I remember this moment when I was around 18 years old, and I suddenly realized that I had been alive for longer. Without my mom that I had been with my mom, that was a moment for me. You know, there was a moment when I became the age that she was when she died. There was an age when my son turned nine years old. You know, these big kind of transitional life moments, I’m living through one of those right now. Actually, my, my dad, who’s in his late 70s, is downsizing from big house into a one bedroom apartment. Just really good for him. It’s exactly what he needs. new lease of life, you know, big house has gone out of control. But one of the things that’s come up through that is, I came across in helping him clear out, I came across a couple of drawers of my mom’s belongings, things that she’d held on to I found my weight record, from my first year of life. Whether health visitor wrote down, I was a big baby, write down how big I was, you know, her jewelry box, her little collection of clay figurines, even her wedding dress and veil, these belongings left behind. And I had this conversation with my dad. And I asked him about these things, you know, we had a conversation, and I said to him, you put these away because you didn’t know what to do with them. Did anyone know? I didn’t know. But I didn’t want to throw them away. And you know, so now, that’s an active problem that I have now inherited, you know, the, there are these belongings, there are these things which belong to my mom, which are, you know, tangible connections with her life. And now, what do I do with them? You know, how do I how do I honor these keepsakes? How do I you know, it feels like, you know, bits of a shipwreck washing up on the shore of my life. And now my job is what do I make of this, you know, I don’t want it to drift back into the sea and be forgotten, I want to make something of, of these things which have come to me, one of the things which has come to me is actually all of the letters of condolence that my dad received in the wake of my mom’s death. And that feels like the most extraordinary gift because I’m in a kind of a historical way, I’ve now got all of this third party evidence of the kind of person that my mom was, you know, one of the things which I’ve really felt, as this sense of loss through my life, is that when my mom died, I was nine years old, she was a bigger person who gave me hugs and was talking to me and cooked dinner. But she wasn’t a human being yet. So I don’t have any connection with my mom as I would with another adult, I don’t know who she was, you know, I don’t know what she was interested in, or the kinds of things that motivated her or what her personality was like, or all of these kinds of things. And now I’ve got this treasure trove of third party witness of who she was the impact that she had on people and that feels like an extraordinary gift. And then I got other things, what do I do with a wedding dress? You know, I see what I do with a wedding dresses. Now I look at it, I go, my mother was tiny. You know, I in my head, of course, nine year old self, she was an enormous human being. And her shoulder width is less than two thirds of mine, you know, she was a small person, it’s given me this whole new perspective on areas. So as a human so it’s not. It’s there’s not been one moment it’s been it’s an ongoing thing. You know, and, and this business of bringing my mom’s possessions from my dad’s house has been really hard. I’ve cried a lot about this whole situation over the past few months. It’s really difficult, but I’ve also then got to have conversations with my sister to say, look at these things, which I’ve found. What are we going to do now? You know, and that’s been a really good thing, as well

Victoria Volk 44:46
As an open up a dialogue between your father and yourself.

Dru Jaeger 44:50
It has in a way I think it’s I it has in a way you know, he’s never we’re never going to be able to have that conversation, you know, the conversation that I would long to have. I’ve tried, you know, I’ve tried it, it’s never going to happen. But actually, being able to acknowledge this is our shared experience. These are things that you’ve been holding, because you didn’t know what to do with them. And now I can do my best for care for those things. I can talk to you about what I’m doing with these things, you know, that that’s something you know, and I that’s so far, you know, it seems like such a small thing. But it’s such a massive step on from where we have been in our lives of not being able to have that dialogue at all, I’m actually really, I’m actually really grateful for just that little bit of conversation that we’re able to have.

Victoria Volk 45:49
Well, and I imagine too, that your relationship with alcohol has been transformed. And it is what it is today, because had you still been in that in that phase of your life of using alcohol being this big part? You wouldn’t have the same feelings about these things. You may not even want to look at them.

Dru Jaeger 46:10
No, no, absolutely, I wouldn’t have the capacity to do it. I mean, for me, what what absolutely prompted my reflection that I needed to do something about my relationship with substances is that I had an experience at the end of my 30s of significant mental ill health. And in my recovery from that, I suddenly began to realize the extent to which alcohol and drugs didn’t help me, didn’t help me live well didn’t help me live with the complexity of my mental ill health I live with. I think you might politely say a wider range of emotional experience is typical. And, yeah, alcohol and alcohol and drugs, absolutely. Don’t help me be in good relationship with myself and with other people. And when I drink and take drugs, I can act in ways which are actively damaging to myself and to others. And I don’t want to perpetuate that. I want to, I want to learn to be okay with being me, even in those moments when I’m not okay. And so yeah, absolutely. You know, I’ve had long periods of not drinking at all. I do you drink very occasionally. But literally months can go by drinking is not part of my everyday experience at all it is I’ve become, you know, the you know, the grandmother who has a glass of sherry at Christmas, I’ve become her that’s that’s my drinking style. Now, you know, it’s high days and holidays. Anyway, ways which enhance life and add value and meaning to specific situations, not because I love what you said about, it’s not, when it’s not you that makes the choice, but alcohol that makes a choice for you. And that is very much my experience of drinking. Now, it is always me that makes the choice, you know, and it’s always about drinking slowly enough, so I can appreciate and savor this situation not plowing on to the next drink, because I haven’t given myself time to feel the effects of the drink that I’ve already drunk. So now it’s very occasional, you know, my my story that I tell, you know that the moment where I chose to have a drink was actually my son’s 21st birthday. I went to the pub with my son and my brother. And I definitely always said I had two alcohol free drinks. My first round I bought, I bought myself something alcohol free, my brother bought me an alcohol free beer. And then my son on his 21st birthday, offered to buy me a drink. And I had a pint of Chandi. And you know, I had a tiny amount of alcohol. And I got a little bit giggly because I got zero tolerance for alcohol these days. So what happens when he stopped drinking, and we had a really lovely evening and it added value. And it’s something that I, I really treasure that memory, hell, it was really special and special. For me, it was special for him to be able to share that with me, and it made that situation better. And I am not going to feel the made to feel guilty about that. It was a good thing that happened. And I think, particularly for those of us who have a moderate relationship with alcohol. In fact, somebody challenged me about this a little while ago I was I was wrestling with a particular situation in which I drunk and I told them the whole story and they said to me, so what you’re telling me is you had a very clear intention about how you were going to be in a particular situation. You made some decisions and plans in advance about what your alcohol consumption was going to look like. You stuck to that you revise those plans as you were going along. You looked after yourself. You came out on under experience the following morning, having an added value to that situation waking up without a hangover. What on earth do you have to feel guilty about? Yeah, you’re absolutely right. This is a situation these are not stories about things which have gone wrong. These are stories about things which have gone right. And we should celebrate them.

Victoria Volk 50:11
I love that reframe. I love that I just I love how you said, I love that. Yeah, I’m not going to forget that truly, you know, because what can happen is when people say something to you, when they believe that, you know, you, you committed to not drinking and you weren’t going to quit, or you were going to quit cold turkey or whatever it’s been however many days or months or weeks, whatever. And then you have a drink. It’s like, Oh, I thought You thought you quit? And then you feel that guilt or that shame within you. Right? And so I think if it’s just exactly what you said, there is no guilt or shame if it’s coming from a conscious awareness and intention.

Dru Jaeger 50:47
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Can I ask you some grief related questions? Because at least you know, for people listening to this on the club side podcast, as you know, some basics around grief that I think would be really helpful for people to hear, you know, I’ve talked about my own experience, I’m almost 40 years on from the death of my mom. And realizing grief doesn’t get fixed. You know, it’s not I can’t go back in time and make these things which happened to me not have happened, I have to live with the consequences of that loss long term. And I wonder what practical tips and suggestions if you got either for somebody in a situation like mine, when you’re coming into a fresh awareness of loss earlier in life, or if you are in the midst of experiencing grief right now? How can people care for themselves through this?

Victoria Volk 51:45
Well, you bring up a good point in what you said earlier, you have an urge to fix your grief. And my I would challenge that and say was it to fix your grief or to fix yourself? Because often when we feel like we are out of control in our grief, or once we have an awareness, first of all, I think you have to have an awareness that the really deep rooted issue is your grief or trauma from especially in childhood because Childhood Adulthood is childhood reenactments. So if we had, would have developed a relationship, like let me backpedal. If you’ve had grief or trauma as a child, and it was never communicated to you, and it wasn’t emulated for you what healthy grieving was, you will create your own method, you will create your own stories. And you’ll those stories and those patterns and those ways to cope with what you’re feeling. Become your beliefs about how to process or not process your grief. And so we carry those lessons, whether they’re self created, because we’re children, we’re imaginary, right? We have wonderful imaginations, those will follow us into adulthood will will rely on what we know. And what we know. And what we learn often are those things that you said, keep busy and to grieve alone. Don’t talk about your feelings, because it upsets me, right? You know, if you would have talked about your mother around your father, would he have gotten upset well, then you learn why don’t want to upset dads, I’m just not going to talk about it. Because when I do, it makes him sad. And I don’t want to make him sad. And so as children, we just That’s how, why so many children appear to be okay. That’s why so many people say children are resilient, because they see these children and they outwardly, especially if they are the type of child who became like myself a wallflower, who didn’t speak unless spoken to who was very shy, who’s very much in their own head. And that’s just how I’m wired. I’m more in my head. Or you can be a child that really is just craving love and attention and you act out or you, you know, are an angry child. And so you act out. It can look like many different things in children grief. So I think it is first addressing that grief is the issue. And then surrounding yourself with people who are not where you’re at. Because you’re not going to move forward, you’re not going to see that there’s hope. You’re not going to feel like you’re progressing. If you’re surrounding yourself with people who are stuck in their own misery. Neil they say misery loves company. Surround yourself with people who are going to who are proponents of growth who are moving along and in their own personal development and who’ve maybe experienced similar losses as you doesn’t have to be But can bring a different perspective of, of loss from their experience, because I think too, and sharing stories with each other, we learned so much. And it’s a lot of why the reason why I started my podcast, I wanted people to have an understanding that grief just isn’t about death. And the reason why it feels like a shipwreck, and you’re feeling all these feelings is because it was the loss of hopes, dreams and expectations. For many years, you didn’t have your mom, it’s things that you wish would have been different, better or more. And so that’s grief. That’s just this reminder of what you didn’t have. And so it’s we kind of feel crazy. As we’re going through all of this as children into adulthood, and it makes you feel grief, just it’s you feel like you’re on a different planet. And especially as children, I think you’ve that’s where you kind of feel different, right? Because I didn’t know anybody who was going through what I was going through, and nobody knew what to say or do. So they did nothing. And so it’s also that indifference that again, I created my own stories. I pees in the ground, he’s, he’s dead. There’s nothing else. Nobody talked to me and said, You know what, you can still talk to him, you can still keep this relationship going in a healthy way and have it feel that connection. It was like, Nope, he’s gone. That’s it.

Dru Jaeger 56:33
Yeah and so powerful that you say that because my experience was, it wasn’t until I was 31 years old. And a very good friend supported me to go to the public records office to see my mother’s death certificate. It wasn’t until I was 31 years old, that I let go of the idea that she was coming back. I mean, I look back at that. And I’m just, yeah, I’m just in wonder that I held on to that hope for as long as I did, I just wasn’t reconciled to a very fundamental fact of death for so long. But what you say about, you know, people not knowing what to do, and doing nothing. I absolutely lived through that, you know, that making up my own stories about what had happened. And I’m gonna make sense of this experience the best way that I can. One of the other things which I reflect on as well as I had experienced couple of years ago, when my father was really unwell, he was admitted to hospital quite suddenly. And I found myself in the car park sitting in my sitting in my van outside, how will end with tears, because I didn’t have another way of expressing my fear of loss. And my fear of grief, it was just it was I was reenacting my nine year old self. And that, you know, actually came as a massive shock to me to go, okay, there is this fundamental core here, of this grief that I’m carrying around that I need to be in better relationship with, I need to understand better I need to find different ways to confront the reality and my fear of death. And do that in ways which helped me live life well, rather than being in retreat from it all the time.

Victoria Volk 58:36
Yeah. I think too, like just looking at, you know, looking when we’re thinking about, like, the practical things of dealing with grief, I think it’s looking at your behaviors, and asking yourself to that question, like, Am I doing this to avoid? Am I doing this to distract myself? Am I doing this? Because, you know, whether it’s keeping busy or replacing the loss, that’s another myth of grief is you know, so often, as children, we’re often taught, you know, if you lose a pet, that’s okay, we’ll go get another one. And you do you get another pet and never really addressing the loss of the first pet. That’s generally speaking, the first loss that many children experience and that’s an opportunity for parents to really show and emulate what it’s how to grieve and that it’s okay to not be okay. You know, you don’t have to mask and say you’re I’m fine you know, that’s so many people say that I’m fine. How are you? I’m fine. And in Grief Recovery, say fine as feelings inside not expressed. And so like you just said you didn’t know how to express it. You didn’t have the tools to know what to do with all of that. And it can be so overwhelming. It just feels so overwhelming. And so like you said to have compassion With yourself to know that it’s not going to happen overnight to be patient with yourself. My personal personal development journey started in 2014. And it was five years of me trying to fix myself. Because I felt so screwed up. And there was nothing wrong with me, there was nothing that it needed to be fixed with me, I was just, I, all of that grief was just coming to the forefront, and I didn’t know what to do with it. You know, we’re taught how to acquire things and people, but we’re not taught what to do when we lose them.

Dru Jaeger 1:00:34
Yeah, Yeah, it’s so interesting to say about that, you know, that spending time trying to fix yourself. And then realizing this is really much more about self acceptance. I mean, to be completely clear in the context of alcohol or changing a relationship with a substance, there are things to learn, you know, learning how to say no learning how to stop learning how to socialize without alcohol, learning how to be in relationship with others. Without alcohol, there are real practical skills to learn. But those skills are not the same as addressing what is the core reasons which are driving me to using alcohol as a way of solving the solving these problems in the first place. There will be a moment and most people will experience this when you’re changing your relationship with alcohol or another substance, where it suddenly gets a lot worse, all of a sudden, because you’re suddenly confronted by some of the reasons that you were drinking in the first place. And being brave at that moment, reaching out for support, beginning to talk about these are the things which have hurt me, this is the pain that I’m carrying, this is the challenge that I’m facing, I would have used alcohol to mask this or numbers or try and make it go away. But I want to find other ways of coping other ways of living? Well, I think as a really, there are these moments of realization where you go, I have to find a different way of being in the world, which doesn’t revolve around a substance which shuts everything up, but actually is about listening to myself and all of my experience and honoring.

Victoria Volk 1:02:07
Yeah, and finding those people that you resonate with that will be in with you through to the end, right? Because you’re gonna lose people along the way. And that’s more grief, right? You’re gonna lose people, and that’s more grief. So you really do need support in that way and being and have the discernment of, it’s not just going to be anybody, like not just anybody can. Because what happens is too, like in relationship, we all bring our stuff to the relationship. And so it’s having that discernment of, you know, maybe surrounding yourself with people who are a little further along than you. They don’t have to be at the end game. But just a little bit further than you.

Dru Jaeger 1:02:52
Yeah, absolutely. It’s one of the reasons that the club soda community exists to be frank is that, you know, creating that space for people to make connections with other people who are going through the process of change, just like they are. And you know, it’s your right doesn’t need to be somebody. In fact, in some ways, somebody who’s 10 years on and has got everything sorted out, is such an unattainable ideal of a person that you may feel no connection with them at all, somebody who’s three or four steps ahead of you who can go, don’t trip over that route in the path, you know, don’t trip over that crack in the pavement, because they’ve just missed it themselves. That person can have real value to your journey of change. I wonder whether we can kind of shift into a last little bit of conversation, which is to talk about how people can connect with us if they want to do that. If they want to carry on these conversations either about grief or about alcohol. Why don’t you go first, Victoria, tell us about where people can connect with you.

Victoria Volk 1:03:53
Yeah, my website has all the links to all the things theunleashedheart.com. My podcast link is on there grieving voices, it’s everywhere podcasts are available. And I have a program called do grief differently. And it’s 12 weeks, working one on one with me and we deep dive into I mean, we didn’t even get into values and how people dishonor their values. And like there’s so so much we could talk about Oh, so much. We could talk for two more hours, I’m sure but because I have a lot to say on the topic of grief. But But yeah, there’s I free resources on there as well. So energy quiz. I’m a Reiki Master. So I also offer Reiki and kind of dabble in several different things, but all in the sphere of grief and energy healing, so

Dru Jaeger 1:04:42
fabulous. From my perspective, joinclubsoda.com is the starting point entry point into Class loader world. We’ve got advice on choosing alcohol free drinks. We’re all about helping you create and sustain change. So we’ve got two in depth programs that can help one called How to Drink mindfully and one called how to stop drinking, they come with lessons that you can work through your own pace. But really importantly, they come with a supportive community of people who are going through the process alongside you, I run weekly face to face workshops. So we talk about all sorts of different things. And then we’re about creating connections. So we’ve got a big Facebook group, we’ve a little telegram group around our courses, we run real world events, festivals, other ways to meet other people who are shifting and changing their relationship with alcohol, whether they are taking a break or cutting down or stopping completely. We are all in this together. That’s a really important thing for us that we don’t do black and white thinking about alcohol. If you are interested in changing a relationship with alcohol, even drinking one drink less, then there is space for you in the club soda community. So yeah, join Club Soda calm, is where all the good stuff happens. Love it. Thank you so much for this conversation, I have learned so much I have so many notes to go and reflect on and so many things to think about, but really, really so insightful and useful. And thank you for sharing your story. So honestly, and for the work that you do, in supporting people to live well with the grief that they carry. It matters so much. I really appreciate it.

Victoria Volk 1:06:16
Likewise, Dru, I think what you’re doing for just the example of it’s not all or nothing for everybody in that there’s a space for people who just want to bring some more mindfulness to their relationship with alcohol and it is it is a relationship. So thank you for the work that you’re doing to

Dru Jaeger 1:06:34
Mutual love first. Shares thanks so much.

Victoria Volk 1:06:39
Thank you, from my heart to yours. Thank you for listening. If you liked this episode, please share it because sharing is caring. And until next time, give and share compassion by being hurt with yours. And if you’re hurting know that what you’re feeling is normal and natural. Much love my friend.

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