#1: Slippery Slopes & Choices in Early Recovery

From Alchemist Recovery Podcast · 25:23

Show by Where addiction ends, transformation begins.

For me, choosing recovery with full consciousness and whole-hearted intention meant accepting tough consequences. Ones that, until that point, I hadn’t been ready to face.Specifically: Giving up drugs and alcohol would mean giving up my dream of making a living as a musician. There it was. Sobriety equals Not a Musician. It doesn’t have to be that way, of course. But for me, it was. I knew that I couldn’t separate the slippery people, places, and things from the music. I knew I couldn’t get and stay sober if I stayed in that field.Then came the next question—one that I was deathly afraid of facing: “If I’m not a musician, who am I?” Separating “musician” from “I am” meant disintegration of identity, communion, and community. In addiction, life as a musician and using were inextricably linked. In recovery, the first thing I encountered was profound loss.Loss of identity. Loss of community. Loss of the Magic Moment that came with performing. Loss of the rituals of communion that passed as “daily life,” but which were actually participation in the cycle of addiction.All of this meant loss of Home. And while it may have been an unhealthy, dysfunctional Home, it was the only one I had.Who will I be when I let go of all this and enter recovery?Today, I’m talking with someone who faced kindred yet very different challenges.Upon getting sober, Jim Coley made the choice to stay in his career—as a wine professional!That couldn’t have been easy, but he’s making it work. And, as I say in the Alchemist Recovery Program: Addiction is predictable, but you are unique.Listen in by hitting play above or reading the transcript below as Jim shares his unique path and story.Time Stamps* 0:00 Getting sober as a wine professional* 2:30 Identity and dealing with changing identity* 6:45 The Magic Moment for wine drinkers* 10:10 Spitting or swallowing? How does sobriety work with tasting wine?* 13:20 Community: Support from the wine community* 16:50 Peers: Others who’ve gone before* 19:05 Yoga: Movement is medicine* 21:20 Spirits: Choosing yoursTranscriptRandal Lyons 0:00 Jim Coley. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you for joining me here today, I greatly appreciate you taking the time to talk with me. Jim Coley 0:08 Yeah, thanks for having me.Randal Lyons 0:10 And I think I've got my notes here. I originally sent out questions about the intersection of food, recovery, and spirituality. And you were like, well, it's I'm not exactly in the food business. I'm a wine professional. And so, if you don't mind, you know, I've been in addiction treatment centers treating for 13 years. I've heard of one individual who had your profession, and I'm not sure how he's doing. I hope he's doing well. But you're the only other person I've known. Who has dived into this. Can you tell me how your experience wherever you want to start?Jim Coley 0:57 Yeah, obviously, it sometimes confuses people, when I, you know, introduce myself, you know, and what I do and mentioned that I've got four plus years of sobriety now. It made getting sober a really high hurdle. Because I've loved what I've done, I've been doing it for 20 plus years, I got into it as a hobby in my early 20s, I rotated out of I was in the internet 1.0 era in a tech company, and when that bubble burst, the wine shop, I'd been frequenting had offered me a part time job, because they saw that I really loved being around it. And it just became, you know, a career thing for me.Jim Coley 1:40 But it also became very much how I defined myself in not just my professional life and my personal life. And so when I realized, going further along that I had a problem, it became something that was that much more challenging to deal with, because it wasn't just, you know, how I manage pain, it was also something that gave me, you know, my living, it gave me a lot of my identity as a professional. I'm, you know, without trying to sound like too much of a big headed guy, I'm prominent in the community, in my town and in my region. And so walking away from that was walking away from at that point, what I thought was, you know, the entire life I've lived for the better part of my mid 20s onward. Randal Lyons 2:29 That is exactly one of the pains that I had. And I did have to walk away because I identified as a musician, and you've got the same color hair as I do there. And so back in the 80s, and the early 90s, when I finally got it, and when it finally stuck for me, you know, people, places and things, all those slippery situations, I could not separate. And it was a real ego dissolution, it was a real dissolution of my identity. And so I was not able to do that. How were you able to navigate that?Jim Coley 3:06 Um, I think there are a few things that happened for me, from the spirituality perspective, I'd always been curious about a meditation practice, one of the things alcohol gave to me, and it gave it to me at a relatively young age was it made my head quiet. I was, you know, I was raised in an alcoholic…

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