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EP #27

Let Go & Be Free: 100 Daily Affirmations for Adult Children of Alcoholics

alcoholic minimalist podcast

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EPISODE #27

Summary

In Episode 27 of “Breaking the Bottle Legacy,” Molly interviews Ron Vitale, the author of “Let Go and Be Free: 100 Daily Reflections for Adult Children of Alcoholics,” delving into his journey and the significance of his books in helping individuals improve their lives. Ron shares his decision to write daily reflections, drawing on over 25 years of therapy and self-help experiences to address the challenges faced by adult children of alcoholics. The conversation touches on emotional maturity, the importance of expressing emotions, and the role of understanding and processing feelings in breaking dysfunctional patterns. Molly and Ron emphasize the value of learning about the brain, neurology, and diverse techniques to overcome challenges related to alcohol. The episode highlights the need to accept responsibility for one’s actions and encourages transparency and ownership of personal stories. Ron’s daily reflections are presented as a valuable resource for those seeking different perspectives and tools to navigate their journeys toward change and personal growth.

You’re listening to breaking the bottle legacy with Molly watts, Episode 27. Hi, I’m Molly, after a lifetime living under the influence of family alcohol abuse, spending more than 30 years worrying about alcohol and my own drinking, believing I had an unbreakable daily drinking habit, I changed my relationship with alcohol forever. If you want to change your drinking habits than breaking the bottle legacy is for you. My goal is to help you create a peaceful relationship with alcohol, past, present, and future. Each week all focus on real science and using your own brain to change your relationship with alcohol. Nothing has gone wrong, you’re not broken, you’re not sick. It’s not your genes. And creating peace is possible. I’m here to help you do it. Let’s start now. Well, hello and welcome or welcome back to breaking the bottle legacy with me your host, Molly watts, coming to you from a steamy hot, really warm, or again. It is barely June, we’ve been having some 90 degree weather. I do not know what that means for our summer. But you know me if you’ve listened at all, you know, I love the sunshine. So I have been loving it. So this week on the podcast, folks, I am joined by a fellow indie author, and someone who is also a fellow adult child of an alcoholic. His name is Ron Vitale. And Ron is the author of let go and be free 100 daily reflections for adult children of alcoholics. He’s actually written four volumes of these daily reflections. And I was just thrilled to be able to sit down and talk with him a little about his journey and why he wanted to write these books and what he’s hoping to share, and why I think they’re a great tool for anyone that’s trying to just improve their lives, and to really understand maybe the journey that you’ve had as an adult child of an alcoholic that I’ve had as an adult child of an alcoholic. So here is my conversation with Ron Vitale. Hey, Ron, how are you? Thanks so much for joining me on breaking the bottle legacy. I am doing well. Thank you so much, Molly, for having me on your podcast. I appreciate it. Hey, I am delighted it was you know, I mentioned this to my newsletter, subscribers. But we connected via something else when I was looking for some formatting services for my upcoming book. And then this just really bizarre coincidence where your nonfiction books that you write, actually are for adult children of alcoholics. And I said, Well, gosh, that’s just kind of Kismet. So we got to have a conversation about that. And I shared the first book with my newsletter group. And I’ve read that one. I haven’t gotten through all of them yet. But they are called let go and be free. And they are all about. The first one is called let go and be free. 100 daily reflections for adult children of alcoholics, Volume One. And I think that there’s just volume 123 and four if I’m correct, right. That is correct. Yes. Yeah. So very awesome that you decided to go ahead and write these. And let’s talk a little bit about that. What, obviously, you and I are both adult children of alcoholics. So talk to me about what inspired you to, to write books about that or to write these daily reflections in this model that you came up with? Yeah, I had decided at the end of November 2019, that I was kind of tired of living like a double life, like, you know, I’ve got my day job. And then I do my fiction writing. But when it came to being doled child of an alcoholic and growing up in a dysfunctional family, there was a lot of shame around that. And that’s something that was more private that I didn’t really want to kind of talk about. And then I thought, You know what, I want to own this story. And the way I can own this is by basically writing about it and sharing what I’ve learned over the 25 plus years of, you know, therapy and self help books and willingness to change. So I started that progress of I challenged myself, end of November 2019 that I was going to do a daily blog. And then I was going to collect the blog posts, put them into a book and I was going to release them at the time. I did not know that a pandemic was going to happen. I was going to lose my job due to the pandemic I just did not first see everything that was going to happen from the rest of you and the rest of the world right. None of us could foresee gosh, so you know what I look back the the You know, the original intention was, well, I’m going to write these, you know, I’m gonna write these blog posts, and then I’m going to compile them together. And it will basically hold myself accountable to saying, I’m going to put this out into the world. I’m going to, you know, basically work on this talk about what has helped me over the course of my journey. How can I share that with others, and then that kind of morphed into, once the pandemic fully hit the lockdowns, awesome job, I kind of really fell back on this writing on a daily, you know, aspect that it really helped me get through some of the dark times that we all went through. So it kind of matched up nicely with what I was going through personally, with all the challenges and seeing news reports about you know, people were drinking more people were eating more people were dealing with lots of stress. And they didn’t necessarily have an outlet of how to handle that a lot of times, you know, people don’t talk about these things. And this is something that I was like, you know, what, I’m going to take the risk, following, you know, Brene, browns, you know, attitudes of let’s be vulnerable, being willingness to be vulnerable, and putting myself out there. So that’s, that’s the genesis of how this all came about. Yeah. Awesome. Gotta love me some Brene. Brown, that’s for sure. So when you are going through this, and, again, I’ve looked at this is really not. So in my book that I’m writing I talk a little bit about, in one of the chapters, not a little bit, I talk in depth in one of the chapters about the characteristics of adult children of alcoholics. And I’m guessing that in your journey, to learn about this dysfunction that was in your family, you came across these resources for adult children of alcoholics. And were those helpful for you tell me about that process for you? Yeah. So again, going way back, when I first decided to go on this recovery process, back, I guess it was in my 20s at the time. So again, it’s been like 25 years, you know, when I look back at that time, I was in a serious relationship, things broke, in that it didn’t work out. And I started seeing patterns in the relationships that I had. And I started seeing like, I was acting a certain way. And I was duplicating and replicating some of the things, some of the behavior patterns that I’ve seen, in my own family, in the relationships that my family have had. And I said, you know, I don’t want this to happen anymore. I want to find a way to kind of overcome that. So you know, is what most people do you go to therapy. And half the time, my therapist suggested going to adult children of alcoholics meeting, I didn’t know what that was, I had no idea what the 12 steps were, I didn’t know anything. So I started that journey. And over time, what I’ve learned is, there’s no necessarily one set path that’s going to you know, do these four things, check, you’re suddenly going to magically be healed. That what I’ve learned over the course of my journey is that the important thing is to look holistically at your life being willing to change and realize that you have that ability within you to be able to make that change. There’s like a switch that needs to kind of happen within so one of the things my therapist, my first therapist I’ve ever gone to had said to me, that he had said, Imagine that your brain and this will be dating me is like a record, you know, and there’s grooves in the record. And you know, your your mind gets set your your neural pathways get set into repeatable patterns, that when you go through certain stress, that you act a certain way or worse, you react a certain way. And he taught me different aspects to be able to overcome that. And I basically use that looked at what I learned through the adult children of alcoholic meetings of how adult children are typically para alcoholics, they take on characteristics of those who drink and repeat those patterns in their relationships. And, you know, to be very honest, and be very transparent, I could see that, again, the relationships that I had, I was failing at those because I kept trying to repeat the same patterns that I saw wasn’t working, you know, in my nuclear fat nuclear family that I grew up with. And I wanted to find a way to overcome that. So over the course of you know, the last 25 years, the various different techniques I’ve learned on, you know, meditations, visualizations, some I take from the adult children of alcoholics, the 12 steps, I basically decided to put that all out together in these daily reflections. So there’s these minute tiny little bits of reflections per day. One of the things that I really am not a proponent of is, you know, the quick fix diet or do these things and suddenly, you’re not going to drink anymore, you know, that is not reality, you can’t just like take a pill and you’re magically cured or do these two things. And suddenly you’re 20 years of, you know, trauma that you’ve had is all gone. It’s a process. It takes time. And it takes dedication. And there’s times where you’re going to fail. And I wanted to write about that. And be honest and share that with what has worked for me over the course of these past 25 years. Yeah, I love that. One of the things that you mentioned it just now, and I know I read it in the book, because at first I was kind of reading through everything. And I was a little concerned about your, about the focus on being an adult child of an alcoholic. And I’ll tell you why. Because for me, one of the things that really became important to me in changing my own relationship with alcohol, because unlike you, and I believe that you’ve told me that you’re not a drinker. And so we’ll get into that in a minute, I’ll ask you about that and your relationship, your your beliefs about alcohol, and how that shaped your own relationship with alcohol. But for me, when I was trying to change my relationship with alcohol, one of the things that I needed to do was to stop looking backwards at my past, and to understand and what I, the teaching that really stuck with me and really resonated with me was that my past only exists today, in what I think about it today, it doesn’t exist anymore, except in what I think about it today. And for so many adult children of alcoholics, the past can be so self limiting. We get we hold on to these stories and these notions and these ideas, and there does come and even in Dr. tantalite, it’s his book, adult children of alcoholics, she talks about the fact that at a certain point, no matter how messy and horrible, and whatever dysfunction you lived in, there’s a certain point in your life where you got to accept responsibility for your you know, you can’t keep blaming everything that’s going wrong in your life, on the past. And so I’m glad to hear you say that you said that, you know that you everybody’s capable of changing. And I say this all the time on this podcast, because honestly made a 30 plus year daily drinking habit. And I used to believe that it was due to some of my genetics, I believe that I just had a stronger desire, because I was an adult child of an alcoholic, I had a lot of stories that I held on to that did not help me change. And I had to rewrite those stories to actually do that work and to change, but I was capable of doing it. And I’m not some special snowflake. But it does take work. And it does take you being mindful of it and deciding and making the decision to think differently about your past or to decide to think differently about your future. Yeah, you hit on a lot of really good points there. And that, you know, what I’ve learned, you know, in my journey is that, the more that you kind of hold on to that past and kind of get sucked back into that, you know, and you know, blaming people and holding on to that there came a moment in my life in which I needed to let that go. And that’s part of the, you know, the book, let it go is that in order to grow, I needed to come to terms with what did happen to me in the past. And you’re correct, it’s the past, I don’t have a time machine, I can’t go back in there. The challenge that I found, you know, in growing up in my especially my early adulthood, is that I kept getting stuck in my brain have like ruminating on different thoughts, and having a really difficult time of like letting those things go in the past. And what I have learned is that, you know, from a neurological standpoint, you know, getting more into the science aspect of things, it’s really important to understand how your brain works, and what you can do to kind of overcome some of these challenges. And to your point, it does take work. You know, if you go to therapy once a week, that could be, you know, 50 minutes to an hour session, how many other hours during the course of the week, you might be still stuck in the same behavior patterns from before. So the question is, what are you going to do on your day to day life? how do you deal with work stress? How do you deal with family stress? So you know, I’m looking at my my table here, I’ve got books on the Power of Habit, I’ve got, you know, glorious diamonds revolution from within. I looked to learn as much as I possibly can from as many different sources to see, how did this work for other people? What, what worked for them? What can I take from that and how can I apply these changes? Simple, tiny little changes on a day to day basis, rather than I didn’t want to define myself as like, I’m a victim, I’m stuck. I you know, I have to carry this burden forever that that’s not what defines me. And I think that’s why I wanted to kind of come out and say beat transparent say, Yeah, this is sometimes difficult. There are some times where I fail, that I am not doing as well as I might on this particular day. But instead of hiding that, and being feeling shameful for that, I decided I want to own this story. And I know that there are millions of other people that are going through the same struggle, and hopefully it might help them. Absolutely. Well. That’s the reason that I’m doing what I’m doing as well. It’s like, there’s so many great tools. And you talked about science. And of course, I talk about science a lot here on the breaking the bottle legacy podcast, it’s a big deal for me, and you talked about neural pathways before and this whole idea about learning how your brain works, and learning the different parts of the brain. I just read a book called The Biology of Belief. It’s awesome, folks. I think on the podcast, you heard Dr. Addy Jaffe talk about it. And truly, it’s, it’s really, it’s sciency, for sure. But it’s super interesting. And one of the things that you really have to understand is how your brain and your subconscious brain, our subconscious brains are literally controlling about 90 If not to 95 to 98% of our lives. And it takes dedication and work to pull all of that into pull more of your life into your conscious mind, and make choices and make decisions and make and to actually get to where you’re recognizing those unconscious stories and those past beliefs and those limiting stories that you may have held on to. So again, I’m going to go into this a little bit about the alcohol part. So sure, you said in I think in the book, at some point, you had a love hate kind of relationship with alcohol, but you don’t, you don’t drink and you haven’t drank and you do other things, and it didn’t benefit your running, I think is what you mentioned in the book as well. So talk to me about how your experience with your, with your alcoholic parent framed alcohol for you as you were growing up. It is it’s a very mixed bag. When I look back, you know, I have a lot of memories as a child and, you know, in seeing drugs being done and alcohol and you know, just anger being expressed in the, in the family from that from my father. And when I look back at that, there’s a lot of that negative emotion, yet at the same time, as I got older, you know, after my parents divorced, and we moved in with my grandparents, being in an Italian family, you know, having a glass of wine at dinner, you know, was like a normal thing. And so, you know, it went from seeing alcohol as like, Oh, it’s this horrible thing. And it can, you know, it makes people do these G’s, you know, go off the deep end, and I just don’t want anything to do with it, too. You know, it was more normalized. When I was like, in my, you know, I’d say like, teens when I was living at home with my grandparents. And then when I went off, you know, college, I just never had the desire to get into the party scene, it’s just was never my I don’t know, I never really got any enjoyment out of anything like that. So I was always like that, if I’m out with friends, I’ll have a drink or two, that that was, that was my comfort zone of, you know, I want to be sociable, want to go with people, we’ll go out somewhere, we’ll go to a restaurant. And so I’ll have a I’ll have a drink or two. And then, you know, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve seen, you know, especially during the pandemic to you, I just would see so many people that would talk about the importance of like drinking, like heavy drinking, you know, friends I knew and co workers of like, that’s how you would obliterate any of the difficulties that maybe you had at work or your family life. And I would look at that and say, I don’t want to go into that. Because I I have seen and I have lived through the potential path that that can leave you down. And I’m like, You know what, I just don’t feel comfortable with that. So I had to define for myself, what is my own relationship with alcohol? And now I think it’s been about I haven’t lost track, I don’t know, it’s two and a half to three years. I just don’t drink anymore. There was a co worker of mine at the time, he and I are both runners. And he had said, Do you have you ever tried like not having any alcohol at all for 30 days? And I said, I said no, I haven’t really, you know, I usually have a couple beers through the course of you know, the week, you know, Friday night or Saturday and he’s like, with being a runner, there’s a lot that alcohol does for inflammation. So if you’re running the next day by having that alcohol, it’s going to take you longer to recover and I just was like I don’t believe that I don’t believe that at all these like we’ll give it a try. And then I tried it and I have to say that I did feel better by not having the alcohol I mean alcohol is a drug and it does affect you know your body in a certain way it’s depressant there’s there’s a lot to Demick systemic effect, quite honestly. So. So yeah, that that Do you know love hate, hate relationship was, you know, when I was younger, I saw how I just didn’t want to drink at all, then I drank a little bit. And then now as I’m getting older, at least at my current phase of life, I’m like, You know what, I’m fine. For now. I’m not really missing it. Let me just try without and see how it goes. And again, it’s been a couple of years, and I just don’t drink. The interesting thing that I have found is that when you make it publicly known that you’re no longer drinking to your friends, or your family, and a lot of social events turn into people just want to drink as much as they can. And they look at you and they, you know, you’ll, you’ll get these questions like, well, kinda, why are you doing this? Or do you have a problem? And you have to kind of be prepared with what are you going to say? And now just honest, I’m like, I just don’t want to, you know, and I think I’ve realized that my decision is a personal decision for me, I don’t have to defend myself, I could turn around and a week from now and say, I feel like having a beer or a glass of wine, it is really up, I think, to the individual, of defining and understanding that relationship with alcohol, not being afraid of it not hiding behind your decision, but to question it. And then to kind of see on a, you know, on a basis of checking in with yourself, what how does it work for you? Or how is it not working for you? Yeah, well, what you mentioned there, and the idea that it is considered more abnormal, right to not drink than it is to drink alcohol, which is a very interesting idea when you’re talking about a illegal drug, you know, and this is something that I’m really wanting to help shift the conversation about, because if we are anything about alcohol, we should definitely be mindful. And we should never, we should always be erring to the side of not drinking, really, I mean, because that’s the, that’s the healthiest thing that we can possibly do. And I say it all the time. I consider myself an alcohol minimalist now. And I don’t, it’s funny, I actually ran two half marathons three years apart. And in both instances, I was drinking the entire time that I was training for him. And I drank the entire time. And I drank probably, I think the night before, the the first one I did, we were out drinking, not like a lot, but I know I had a couple of drinks. You know, I’m thinking to myself, hmm, probably didn’t do myself any favors on that. At the time at the time, like the idea of a 30 day break from alcohol was like completely just was not even happening in my mindset. So now it wouldn’t be anything, I would think, Oh, yeah, absolutely, I’m going to train for something, I would just take a complete break from alcohol. And I would be excited, just like you said, to figure out how it made me feel to do so. So with the book, the book is The books are set up into groups of 100 days. So almost kind of goes through a year, basically, or over a year now with 400 of them. So was your thought process? Or your The idea is that everybody needs, you know, the whole year to get through? Or was it just? Or is it even just less like more about being able to come in and come out and come back to a resource anytime that you need it just to kind of get a refresher or get a boost? Along the way? Yeah, there was, there was a book and I cannot remember when I was in my 20s, I had a book and it was it was adult and some adult child of alcoholic book. And it was like a daily meditation book. And I remember just picking it up. And I would read it, you know, like a passage every day. And that kind of stuck in my brain. And I you know, back in November 2019, my original intention was, I’m going to commit to this for 365 days for one day. And then, you know, obviously, as we talked about the pandemic happened. And when we got to that point, in the pandemic was still going on. And I had published, you know, I been putting the books out, when I got to the fourth book, I said, you know, I don’t want to just do 65. So let me just finish it out to 400. We’ll do 400 calls a day. And then I wanted to reflect and see how things were the purpose of the book, it’s not that you need to pick up volume one and read day one straight through 100. Maybe the first time you want to do that to get a sense of like, what my mindset is, and the tools that I talked about in the various resources in the book. But, you know, as I’ve learned over the course of my lifetime, I like to pick things up. And sometimes you just randomly turn to a page. Yeah. And then you see what something is the book has been written in that way that there are different. There are some exercises that are hidden in, you know, the book, so that way you’re thinking like, oh, today I’m just going to do, you know, a short reading and it might be a writing prompt. You know, there’s different things that I’ve kind of seen it through the course of the book because I wanted to So I wanted to kind of broaden the horizons of a little bit of a traditional, these are the things you must do. If that’s not the purpose, you’re not going to read off for 100 days, and then suddenly be magically, you know, Jordan any any hills, that’s, that’s not the purpose. But what I’m hoping is, is that, you know, people can turn to these books, and then they can find a way to learn something from them that’s going to help them or look at something from a different perspective. Question something, you know, from a lot of what I’ve seen, you know, over the course of the years of working with other people with Don’t you know, who who call themselves adult children of alcoholics, there’s a lot of shame, a lot of embarrassment. And there’s a lot of like, putting oneself down, you know, that, that, I guess, challenge of overcoming that, speaking your your story, and then finding tools to be able to help you that’s the purpose of these books. So it’s, it’s really a sense of, here’s what you could do pick up a book, randomly look at a, you know, a page and see what you can learn from that. And, as you had said, Before, there is just, there’s so much good information that’s out there. And being able to find that curate that share that information. I have found that sometimes the most simplest of things, has helped me see life from a different perspective and question something. And when I learned something new now that I’m understanding more of the neurological aspects, creating those different pathways in your brain, you know, an opening up something from a different perspective, that really is a game changer. To me, getting back to what you said earlier. If you’ve done something for 30 years, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you are forever doomed to repeat that. That’s not true. And I agree 110% with you on that? Yeah, no, you’re not it’s, it’s what they know about the brain, they really is so much less than what they don’t know about the brain, and still to this day, and really, it’s only in the last 20 years that neuroscientists have realized that we are building neural pathways until we die, they used to think that the brain, you know, finished developing early in adulthood, you know, we’ve all occurred that, you know, the prefrontal cortex doesn’t get formed until the late 20s. And but then we really thought that we stopped at a certain point in time that the brain just stopped, but it’s not true. And so we have no excuses, folks, you’re not too old, you’re not too broken, you’re not too sick, you can absolutely change. We talked a little bit about the adult children of alcoholic characteristics. And I know that you mentioned and in the book, adult children of alcoholics by Dr. whiteheads, she actually, she gives a laundry list of those characteristics. I actually talked to quite a few adult children of alcoholics when I was writing my book. And what I found was interesting is that nothing was unanimous amongst all of us about list. And then the but more importantly, she does talk about the fact that it’s those behaviors of the alcoholic that were not as aware of that we actually learn from them. And when I looked at those, those characteristics, those tended to be the ones that were really significant in my life. And what I’ve seen mostly in the people that I’ve spoken to, seems to be this the same and a few of them kind of fall under the umbrella of emotional immaturity. And emotional immaturity is basically folks just and I’ve talked about this on the podcast is being able to deal with your feelings. And that is part and parcel really, I think, for me has been the biggest aha, for me in figuring out my past was realizing that I had a lot of learned behaviors, and it sounds kind of like it was the similar similar to you. It was definitely a lot of learned ways of coping, that were not successful in terms of dealing with or figuring out my feelings and my emotions. Yeah, I’ll say this, you mean listening to just sparked a memory, you know, in me and that, in one thing, looking back at my childhood, you know, I was very lucky that once my parents divorced and you know, moved in with my grandparents, at my mother, who was obviously a single mom and she was working and doing the best you can to help raise us and my grandmother and having too strong, feminine. You know, matriarchs in my life helped me understand the importance of expressing emotion. You know, part of the reason why, you know, I’ve written these books too, is that you know, as a male, often, you know, the stereotypical male is supposed to be, you know, strong and not show weakness and you know, all that stuff, which I don’t believe in. What I’ve learned is You know, getting in touch with your feelings, and I not to get woowoo or anything, but we are human beings, and all of us have emotion, trying to repress that emotion through sex or drugs or alcohol or whatever, it’s not going to make them go away those emotions, often what happens, they come out inappropriately in other ways, you know, you might have a difficult time at work, you come home, you take it out on your spouse, and then you say, what just happened here, what just went on, getting in touch with your feelings and understanding how best to process them, and express anger in a healthy way where sadness or grief. So, you know, I was lucky enough to be able to grow up after my parents divorce with two matriarchs in the household, my grandmother, and my mother. And when I look back, at how I was raised from that period of time, they impressed on me never through sitting me down and talking with me, but impressed me the importance and the necessity of expressing one’s emotions. And as a male, you know, in, you know, the current day, it’s not very popular to express emotion, you know, male is supposed to be, you know, men are supposed to be, you know, strong and not show weakness. And I don’t believe any of that, you know, I think it’s important to understand, you know, the full range of emotions and understanding that from a perspective of, if you want to cry, and you’re a male, go ahead and cry, you know, if you want to talk about being afraid, if you’re angry, how do you find ways to, in a healthy manner, process this emotion, and I’m thinking of this, and that there’s a book that I recently picked up, I heard Dr. Mark Brackett, he wrote permission to feel. And he has this amazing chart in the beginning of his book, it’s color coded by like, it’s red, and blue, and green and yellow. And it has a list of, you know, it’s close to 100 different words for various types of emotions. And so instead of just saying, you know, I’m angry, there’s other phrases that he wants you to think about of like, what, what level of anger, are you? Are you hating someone? Are you disgruntled, are you, you know, what is that, and his whole story of hearing, you know, the abuse that he went through how he overcame that, how he went on his path, you know, kind of shines a light on, you know, there are men who have suffered and have gone through trauma and who have been abused, and have lived through difficult times. But there, there’s almost this stigma or embarrassment for, you know, for men to say, I’ve been through this rough time, I need help. And I’m, you know, I’m here to say, don’t listen to that yet to help you go on the journey. And that’s part of, you know, the process of, again, why I wanted to write these books, and I wanted to focus on, you know, my recovery, because it’s not been an easy journey. Yeah, that’s really I appreciate you saying all that. And I appreciate you the perspective. It’s interesting that you say that, because I actually grew up with an alcoholic mother, so I didn’t get the lessons I needed to learn from her, she never dealt with her own emotions very at all. And so it’s definitely been a process for me being being a girl. And even though you know, we’re supposed to be the ones that are always more in touch with our emotions. So yeah. And, and really, being emotionally mature folks is not a matter of and I’ve said this in the podcast before, too, you can be a highly successful person, you can have looked from the outside, like you’ve got it all together, you can be doing well, quote, unquote, in life, and you know, still be emotionally immature. We see examples of it all the time in professional sports, and celebrities and all these people have that have all the hallmarks of success all around them. And it often leads to addiction and dependence on drugs or other things or inappropriate behaviors, like you talked about, because that is being able to process emotion is really the and figuring out your feelings is really what drives everything that we do in life. And that’s why I talk about the results cycle here on the podcast, our thoughts, create our feelings, our feelings, drive our actions. And so the feelings are at the, at the core of everything that we do. And we have to be able to not only recognize it when we’re having negative emotions, but we need to be able to manage our minds. And to understand that we actually are in control of being able to generate how we want to feel when we want to feel better. Alcohol doesn’t do it. outside circumstances don’t do it. It’s really in our control. So well, I absolutely love this conversation. I’m sure you and I could probably end up to keep on talking for an hour and my podcast was Should you be like, Wow, that is a long episode. So I just want to make sure that everybody knows where they can find you and where they can look up all of the books that are available to them all, of course, link it in my show notes as well. But tell me where folks can find you and learn more about let go and be free. Yeah, they can go on my website, Ron vitale.com. And the books are available on Amazon and all the other major platforms. So yeah, if you just Google me let go and be free. Ron, you’ll see me I’ll pop up. Perfect. Well, like I said, I will link that all in my show notes, folks, it’s really a wonderful, you know, a daily tidbit, right? It’s just a little spoonful of a meditation and whether you’re an adult child of an alcoholic or somebody who’s just struggling to make a change in your life, because that’s the bottom line. We all have pasts. Right? And these are specific not and really, they’re really not specific to adult children of alcoholics. Totally. Right. I would say that that’s true. From what? You’re correct. Yes, yeah. But there, but having shared that journey with you, and being someone that is also an adult child of an alcoholic, I, you know, can appreciate wanting to help that specific audience. Right, right. So, okay, well, I appreciate it. Ron, thank you so much for taking the time and being on the show and everybody hope you have a great week and look for the books. Let go and be free all income in the notes. Thank you so much, Molly. It’s been great to be on the show. Appreciate it. Thank you for listening to breaking the bottle legacy. This podcast is dedicated to helping you change your drinking habits and to create a peaceful relationship with alcohol. Take something that you learned in today’s episode and apply it to your life this week. Transformation is possible. You have the power to change your relationship with alcohol. Now, for more information, please visit me at www dot Molly watts.com