X
Feb 18
  • Written By Guest User

    • #34 – Michele Murphy

    #34 - Michele Murphy

    Michele Murphy’s Story

    Michele turned to drugs and alcohol at a young age to cope with the pain of her childhood, and found herself deep in the grips of codependency. Her recovery from drugs and alcohol ended up being her gateway to healing.

    She found sobriety at age 18, but life didn’t immediately turn around the way she thought it would. As you’ll hear Michele say in her interview, “just because you’re sober, doesn’t mean you’re well.” She has had so many different life experiences since then, and she shares how she’s been able to stay sober through them all.

    She has a beautiful daughter named Scarlett, two dogs and is now engaged to the love of her life. She also owns a virtual long-term post discharge company that offers a comprehensive aftercare program called Modern Recovery. She loves to teach and practice yoga, and she owns a yoga studio in Mesa, Arizona called Exhale Yoga.

    Connect with Michele

    Our Sponsor

    Lionrock Recovery: http://www.lionrockrecovery.com

    Follow Us

    Additional Information

    ****

    Episode Transcript

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Hello beautiful people. Welcome to The Courage to Change, a recovery podcast. My name is Ashley Loeb Blassingame and I am your host. Today I interview Michelle Murphy. Michelle turned to drugs and alcohol at a young age to cope with the pain of her childhood and found herself deep in the grips of codependency. Her recovery from drugs and alcohol ended up being her gateway to healing. She found sobriety at age 18 but life didn’t immediately turn around the way she thought it would. As you’ll hear Michelle say in her interview, just because you’re sober doesn’t mean you’re well.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    She has had so many different life experiences since then and she shares how she’s been able to stay sober through them all. She has a beautiful daughter named Scarlet, two dogs, and is now engaged to the love of her life. She also owns a virtual longterm post-discharge company that offers a comprehensive aftercare program called Modern Recovery. She loves to teach and practice yoga and she owns a yoga studio in Mesa, Arizona called Exhale Yoga. All right, episode 34. Let’s do this.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Michelle, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for being here.

    Michele Murphy:

    Thank you for having me.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    This is super fun. We have a lot of similar friends in common from the recovery world and so our stories have overlap, which is always fun.

    Michele Murphy:

    Yeah.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    So where do you live right now?

    Michele Murphy:

    I live in Mesa, Arizona.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Okay. I ask that because you’ve lived a lot of different places.

    Michele Murphy:

    Yeah, a lot.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    A lot.

    Michele Murphy:

    A lot.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    How long are you sober?

    Michele Murphy:

    I actually just celebrated 20 years last Friday.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Dop.

    Michele Murphy:

    Yeah.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    You’re not old enough to have 20 years.

    Michele Murphy:

    I know.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Oh my gosh.

    Michele Murphy:

    I know.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I know. And my husband just celebrated 17 years two days ago and I’m starting to freak out because our friends group is starting to celebrate decades.

    Michele Murphy:

    Decades.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    We shouldn’t be old enough to celebrate decades.

    Michele Murphy:

    And when I first got sober, people would be like, “Oh, you’re not old enough to be sober.” And I would be so offended by it. I was embarrassed. And now people are like, “Oh my gosh, what age did you get sober?” And I’m like, “Thank you. Thank you.” I feel like I look so young and-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Three?

    Michele Murphy:

    Yeah, I’ll take it. In my early days I was so offended.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Oh, I remember that too. I remember thinking, because I got sober at 19, how old were you?

    Michele Murphy:

    I was 18.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    18. Okay. So I got sober at 19 and I remember thinking, “Do you know how bad it has to get in order for a 19 year old, 18 year old to want to stop drinking and using? Do you have any idea how horrible things have to be?” We are resilient. We’ll push through anything. And we wanted to get sober, so that tells you something.

    Michele Murphy:

    And you feel like your life is over immediately. Right when I got sober I was like, “It’s all over.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Oh it’s done. It’s done. One of my big things about getting sober at that age was like, “Okay, so I guess the rest of life is going to be really horrible and not fun and not sexy and not cool. So I’ve just resigned to that.”

    Michele Murphy:

    Oh, absolutely. I was like, “How do you go to college sober? How do you get married sober?” That was my biggest reservation. I was like, “I’ll give this thing a try, but when I get married, because I’m so codependent, that’s what I was focused on, when I get married, I’m definitely going to drink because you can’t have a wedding sober.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Okay. So we are kindred spirits because that was my biggest concern. It’s in some of the podcasts. That was my biggest, Christina is laughing. That was my biggest concern and this is what my sponsor said to me. I was like, “Well, how am I supposed to get married sober? What am I going to do at my wedding? Everyone’s going to be toasting.” She goes, “Do you have someone who wants to marry you right now?” And I’m like, “Well no.” She’s like, “Why don’t you worry about that when someone actually wants to marry you?”

    Michele Murphy:

    I feel like there’s five people that want to marry me. They just don’t know yet. They haven’t asked me, nor are we dating. It’s in my head.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Pretty sure I could find someone.

    Michele Murphy:

    I’m visualizing it.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Exactly. I’m manifesting this right now.

    Michele Murphy:

    Irony is, when I did my first marriage, I did get married to somebody sober. He was sober at the time and his whole family is sober too. Dad is a circuit speaker, 35 years.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    So it was not an issue at all?

    Michele Murphy:

    We had a 400-person dry wedding. And the alcoholics were tailgating in the parking lot. It was hysterical. And I was like, “Oh, here I am sober.” It was a dry wedding.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Who knew? We didn’t have a dry wedding but I remember being with the planner and they were talking about a signature cocktail, cause my mom and dad had all their friends. Your wedding ends up being for your family apparently. And so they were talking about a signature cocktail and I remember thinking like, “So you’re only going to let people choose between three alcohols? I’m so glad I’m not drinking right now.” Cause making that choice and you get cut off. Oh my God. I was like, “Wow. All right, well I guess I didn’t need to drink at my wedding.”

    Michele Murphy:

    Yeah, me neither. Me neither.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Who knew? Who knew?

    Michele Murphy:

    I was like, “This is a miracle. Here I am.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    And our biggest concern-

    Michele Murphy:

    That was my biggest concern. It’s like, “How am I going to do that?”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I love that someone else shared that cause I was like, “This is a real showstopper for me. I mean, I recognize I’m dying, but honestly what am I supposed to do at this juncture?”

    Michele Murphy:

    If you can’t do that. You can’t get married sober. And I did and it was, yeah.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    You got sober at 18.

    Michele Murphy:

    I did.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Where did you grow up?

    Michele Murphy:

    I grew up, I don’t know.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I know. Okay.

    Michele Murphy:

    Where do I start? Okay. If somebody was to ask me where I’m from, I say I’m from New York. So I was born and raised in the early years of my life in New York, on long Island. A majority of my family still lives there. And summers I would go and stay with my grandparents in New York. So that is my home base.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    The closest?

    Michele Murphy:

    If I felt at home anywhere would be New York. So I grew up there, but I’ve lived in 10 different states at this point, all over the place.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Okay, so you grew up in New York. Your mom had you super young, right?

    Michele Murphy:

    Yeah, she had me when she was 20.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Okay. Which is probably not super young at the time cause I’m pretty sure all my grandparents were 20 but now it’s pretty much infant hood.

    Michele Murphy:

    Exactly. Yeah. I think all of her friends got pregnant at the same time. They were all 20. Unfortunately. My mom was 20. She was in college actually, ironically at ASU. She lived in New York, she went to ASU. She flew home for, I mean this is my mom’s story, but we’ll tell it. She flew home to New York and hooked up with somebody on summer vacation and came back and she was pregnant with me. So she realized, she went to ASU’s health clinic and they were like, “You’re not sick. You’re pregnant.” At that point she flew back to New York, moved back to New York. I was born in New York.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    And was Dad around?

    Michele Murphy:

    No, Dad was not around. I think he was around for the first maybe three or four months. After that, they did divorce. They even got married. They did everything very quickly. They hooked up, they had a baby, they got married and divorced all within a year.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Wow. Pamela Anderson would be proud.

    Michele Murphy:

    Yeah. I mean, it was a whirlwind. I can’t, I mean, thinking about me being a year sober at the age of 20, that’s a whole undertaking that my mom went through.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I wouldn’t have been able to figure out how to divorce, let alone-

    Michele Murphy:

    No.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Where do you go? The paperwork. Brain fog.

    Michele Murphy:

    Yeah, and I think my grandparents made them get married, really pushed for that. I have never had a relationship with my biological father. He didn’t stay in the picture.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Have you met him?

    Michele Murphy:

    You know what? I met him one time when I was seven years old. I went to therapy. I’ll get there, my mom is a therapist.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Actually.

    Michele Murphy:

    My mom believes in a lot of therapy. So I was a perfect poster child for therapy. I had this young mom and she was a therapist and then I had no dad and we’re moving all the time and she’s like, “You need therapy.” And I’m like, “I’m not really the problem here.” And I knew that at a really young age, like, “I’m going to therapy because you can’t stop moving and pulling this inconsistent lifestyle away from me, or creating this inconsistent lifestyle.”

    Michele Murphy:

    So I went to therapy when I was seven. I was really mad at my mom and I told the therapist that I wanted to go live with my dad. I had never met him at this point, I mean maybe between the ages of birth to one. So the therapist told her to call my bluff and we were living in Virginia at the time and she said, “Call her bluff, take her to New York and have her meet her dad.” And it was probably one of the most traumatic experiences I’ve ever had.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Oh no. Why?

    Michele Murphy:

    Because it was not what I expected. He was [crosstalk 00:00:09:13].

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    You were seven?

    Michele Murphy:

    I was seven and I had this idealized picture of my dad, like he had been waiting for me, waiting for my mom to bring me back. And he clearly smoked and drank and did some drugs cause his teeth were kind of rotted. Not that this is bad at all, but he was a New York City junior high janitor, you know what I mean? He was very not motivated. He wasn’t engaged with me. So I go and I meet him.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Not like a Matt Damon janitor?

    Michele Murphy:

    No, no, no, not at … No, no. And I just remember feeling so uncomfortable. We went to an Ihop.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    She left you with him?

    Michele Murphy:

    No, all three of us went to the Ihop and this was the part that was very sad for me. We go to the Ihop and we sit there and we’re talking and he talked to my mom the entire time. He didn’t talk to me. And this was the theme of my life already, my mom always had a lot of boyfriends and we were kind of always chasing these men. And I was like, “Here I am meeting my dad for the first time and they’re just talking like it’s about her in this moment.” And it was really, really tough. My mom still says that was a terrible idea, she should’ve never done that. She was young though. She was, what, 27 at the time. I mean, she was taking the advice of another therapist and it just was a bad deal.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah. It’s the kind of thing I think you would do if you were fifteen. Seven, maybe not so much. But yeah, that definitely, you know, I think there’s a lot of stuff around, and I don’t have this experience, but I know lots of people where stuff around what the picture in people’s heads and children’s heads of their biological parent is, and then when that reality meets the fantasy and what happens there. And I wonder from your experience, do you think that you would have been better off if you had always just had the fantasy or do you think that at some point you needed that reality check or what do you think about that?

    Michele Murphy:

    It’s a really good question. A lot of people have often asked me, “Why don’t you try to have a relationship with him now? Or why couldn’t you?” And I’m so grateful I got it young because it’s not that I’m scared and it’s kind of like, why am I going to go somewhere where I’m not invited? Do you know what I mean?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Totally. It’s a terrible feeling.

    Michele Murphy:

    I spend a lot of my life in my codependency chasing that same sensation, that sensation of abandonment. And at some point I need to come to terms with, how do I start giving myself those things instead of getting … And it’s going to be the same thing, if I go seek this man out, who if he wanted a relationship, he would be able to find me very easily. I’m glad I had it young and I’m grateful cause I watch a lot of people get forced to have biological parents in their lives that are super destructive and I don’t have that experience. I don’t actually, and that was a big problem when I was growing up because my mom was like, “Oh, your dad’s not around, your dad’s not around.” And I was like, “I don’t actually feel sad about it.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah. Cause you don’t have anything-

    Michele Murphy:

    “You’re projecting your healthy great relationship with your father and you’re sad that I don’t have that, but I actually don’t know what I’m missing out on. It’s not in the forefront of my brain because I’ve never experienced it.” It would be really confusing because I would be like, “Should I feel sad about it because I don’t. I don’t know what I’m missing. I don’t have a vantage point here.” So I’m really grateful because I don’t … Yes, I struggle immensely when I feel like I’m being abandoned. I do. It really scares me because people in my life don’t come back. They just don’t, and that’s okay. And I’ve had to work through that sensation. But if he would’ve stayed in my life or if I would’ve tried to learn later on, or I had this grandiose idea of who this man was that really desperately wanted to have this relationship with me, I feel like it would have affected me way worse in areas that I wasn’t affected in.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Right, right. Yeah, totally. Totally. That’s a useful, helpful perspective. So your mom, I love that codependency is a big part of your story cause I think it’s so common. When we get sober, this piece of us comes out and it is, I mean, to feel the feelings that you feel when you get into deep codependency sober. Oh man, it’s brutal. But you had that kind of modeled, it sounds like, with mom following these guys around. Can you talk a little bit about growing up with lots of wannabe step parents?

    Michele Murphy:

    Yeah. And honestly, I want to kind of define codependency a little bit more.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yes, please. Please.

    Michele Murphy:

    Because I think that I always had this idea of what … Actually Nicole used to be like, “Oh, you need to work through the CODA steps.” and I’d be like, “I don’t really care.” If I go into a gas station and someone looks at me weird, I’m not carrying it around all day. I thought that if you were codependent you were gravely affected by people all the time and I didn’t feel that way. I’ve always been pretty independent. I’ve never piggybacked off anybody for anything. I’ve always worked six jobs and I’ve always been very resourceful and independent in most areas. However, when I did hit my bottom in codependency, I did go see the founders of Codependents Anonymous. They live in Scottsdale, Mary and Ken Richardson, beautiful, amazing people. And I saw Ken and I saw Mary for years and they explained it. This codependency is, you have this shame that got instilled in you when you were small. For me, it’s that abandonment with my dad.

    Michele Murphy:

    And then with my mom, my mom is very boundary-less. So I have two polar opposites. I have a lot of abandonment and then I have feeling overwhelmed all the time, boundary-less, I have to go along for the ride, I’m responsible for feelings. So I have these two polarities happening and I have this shame that I experienced as a small child and I’m living my life either recreating that sensation or avoiding it. And so we’re not really codependent on this person, we’re codependent on this shame, and we start to live life avoiding or recreating.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Can you talk about the shame a little bit. Even as it relates to you. So when you say codependent on the shame, how would you describe the shame that people feel? I think to the layman, they might think, “I’m ashamed. I’m ashamed that I blew my nose too loudly in a public crowd.” What does that look like for people in terms of that feeling?

    Michele Murphy:

    I think that there’s, and what I’m learning now in therapy, cause I had a very uncomfortable relationship with therapy and now I have a healthy relationship with therapy. And what I’ve learned recently is that there’s toxic shame and healthy shame. Like, if I blow my nose and I get that, “Ooh, I feel ashamed about that”, I’m not going to do that again. But there’s a difference between guilt, I did something wrong, and something is wrong with me.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    So talk to us about toxic shame.

    Michele Murphy:

    The toxic shame is, and I think people get those really confused, the toxic shame is like, “Something is wrong with me inherently.” So for me, what I can explain my shame, my whole childhood, I guess, from a very small age, what I learned was that I’m not chosen. I’m just not chosen. I don’t get chosen. I’m not considered. Those are that shame.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    “There’s something wrong with, there’s something about me that causes me to not be chosen.”

    Michele Murphy:

    Right. Yes. Something is inherently wrong with me that I’m not going to get chosen and I’m not going to be considered in any equation. And thematically my whole life has played out to where either I’ve recreated that or avoided that. So if I start to feel that sensation, I either run or I come closer. In return, both causes pain and both places aren’t healing or authentic.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Right, right. That makes total sense. And you had you with your situation, it reminds me a little bit of, I don’t know if this is kind of off topic, but Running With Scissors. There was a book, Running With Scissors, and it was very, very similar. And Glass Castle, which was another really amazing book, kind of same story where how do you not … It’s one thing to have the avoidant parent or the parent that’s not around and then one parent that’s doing all the different roles. It’s another thing to have fear of abandonment and fear of being enveloped. At the same time, there’s just no way that you’re going to come up with something perfectly in the middle with your own healthy coping skills. They’re not modeled anywhere and you don’t stay anywhere, so you moved around and you can talk about that, you’re not staying anywhere long enough for someone else to model it for you.

    Michele Murphy:

    Right. And that was really confusing for me as a child because that shame kept getting reinforced over and over.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Why did you keep, why didn’t she date anyone in the area? What was that about?

    Michele Murphy:

    You know what? I’m not … She did. She dated, there was a man who was like my father. They were together for about seven years, but they would break up a lot. So what would happen was when we moved away from New York, she needed to get away from Chris. So they broke up, we moved to Ohio for six months.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Okay. So she’s moving places to get away. I see. And I so relate, I don’t know if you relate to that, but moving away from someone.

    Michele Murphy:

    Oh yes.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    And not towards them.

    Michele Murphy:

    Right. So that’s what she did. She was like, “We got to get out of here. We got to get away from Chris.” So then we moved to Ohio. We moved to Ohio for six months. I started kindergarten there and my whole support system was my grandfather, who was my best friend. He was also an alcoholic, but he was brilliant. And my aunt, who I absolutely adored, and they lived in New York, and my grandmother lived there and all my other aunts and uncles. But my two people in my life were my grandfather and my aunt. And we moved to Ohio. Nobody. I go from New York city to living in this tiny town, Lima, Ohio. I went to this tiny school, Bath Elementary School, and it was a culture shock.

    Michele Murphy:

    And not only that, she found a boyfriend right away. So then this new guy comes in and then her and Chris get back together. But Chris lives in Virginia now. So I’m in Ohio, I’m in kindergarten, we leave because her and Chris get back together. But we don’t go back to New York. We follow Chris to Virginia.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Got it. Okay.

    Michele Murphy:

    So it’s always been that back and forth.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Got it. Okay. And I so relate to that because I have broken, actually the boyfriend we were talking about before we started the episode in Prescott, I was like, “We have to break up and I’m moving. I can’t break up with you and stay here, so I’m going to have to leave the state.”

    Michele Murphy:

    Completely relocate. “Nothing can remind me of you.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    No. How could I possibly break up and live in the same state? It’s ludicrous. But that logic is so wounded based like, “I can’t handle any discomfort or any reminders, so I have to leave and remove all semblance of this person. Otherwise it’ll be too painful.” And that’s coming from that wounded state, except I was the same age as your mom, but she had a child. So I mean, that tells you a lot. And then someone in your life was in the military, so that was?

    Michele Murphy:

    Yeah, so that was my stepdad.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    She got married, sort of.

    Michele Murphy:

    We moved back to Ohio, or we moved from Ohio to Virginia, when I was six and she married my stepdad when I was twelve so there was a lot between six and twelve.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Okay.

    Michele Murphy:

    Yeah. I went to go see my dad in that year her and Chris broke up a few times. There was lots of other boyfriends. But the theme, to go back, was that I was never considered in each one of those moves. It was, she needed to satisfy an urge within her and not stabilize.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Have you talked to her about that since then? I mean, obviously again, this isn’t to bash your mom because I would’ve-

    Michele Murphy:

    I know, it’s tough. I hate it.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    It’s so hard in these situations. If I had had a child, my child would be saying the exact same thing. So I totally get that. It becomes your children’s story, so we kind of have to … What’s your relationship with her today?

    Michele Murphy:

    We don’t have much of a relationship. And here’s another thing, this is a theme, I got sober and everybody started, “I made amends and my parents are so happy.” And they have this blossoming relationship. That was not my experience. I celebrated 20 years last Friday and my mom doesn’t know my sobriety date, nor does she ever has said a word about it since I got sober. I mean, she did in the very, very beginning. But it wasn’t that I needed to get sober. It was I needed to do all this other stuff and stop acting a certain way. So our relationship, our perception of what happened is very different. She thinks, “Oh, we did all this fun stuff and we went to Disney World and we did this. We were always moving, and you’ve experienced so much.” Yes. That’s true. Balance, we have to have an honest perspective. Yes. However, I never stayed in one place longer than a year, so I was panicked all the time because nothing was ever going to stay the same.

    Michele Murphy:

    So what her perception is is in those years, the one year that we stayed in this place, we did a ton of stuff. Yes, but I was holding on for dear life. I was like, “We’re going to move. We’re leaving. It’s all going to end. All these people are going away.” Because that was my experience.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    That’s the experience.

    Michele Murphy:

    I was waiting for-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    And it did happen, right?

    Michele Murphy:

    And it did happen over and over and over. And we stayed in Virginia the longest, but we moved back and forth. So she did get married to a man in the military. He was an officer, a Major in the Army. And he was a helicopter pilot and he was very militant, and my mom’s this liberal free-bird therapist that moves everywhere all the time. And then we started moving and hanging out with military people. Not that that’s bad, but it was definitely a major culture shock, a major culture shock.

    Michele Murphy:

    I’m from New York, I moved to Virginia, which is, for the most part it’s not too rough of a transition. And then we moved to a very tiny town in Tennessee and it was rough. I was 12, I was 7th grade.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Which is a rough year for anyone anywhere.

    Michele Murphy:

    Rough year, yeah. Rough.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    No one gets out of that okay.

    Michele Murphy:

    Yeah. And my stepdad wasn’t receptive to me. He didn’t talk to me. He didn’t engage with me and my mom, I remember she would always be like, “Go tell Larry you want to go do this.” She would purposely send me in to try to shift the dynamic, knowing he didn’t want a relationship with me. So I would just get set up for failure over and over and over.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Rejected.

    Michele Murphy:

    And I know her intentions were good. She wanted, “Maybe if I send her.” But I was 13. I wasn’t responsible for that relationship. And so that was really hard. That was really confusing as well. And then trying to transition to this military lifestyle where it’s constant moving, constant relocating. But most of the military kids grew up like that, so they would see each other on bases and relate. Here’s the other thing, my mom didn’t want to live on base, so we lived off base wherever we went. I was with kids in Tennessee who grew up together and they had very different ideas of society and then the base kids all went to school on base together. So I didn’t even get assimilated into the military culture. I was put off base. I was always trying to fit in, always, always trying to fit in, find new friends, make new friends.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    So at some point you started using. When did you start using to cope?

    Michele Murphy:

    Right before we moved. So when my mom did marry my stepdad, I was really, really, really upset. Part of the backstory of was I was in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program when I was little and I had a big sister and she was amazing. I mean, I had her for years and we were really, really, really close. And she got married and I was the flower girl in her wedding, but my stepdad was one of the groomsmen. So that’s how that happened.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Oh.

    Michele Murphy:

    I know. Very uncomfortable. So then they got married shortly after that.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    That’s how they met?

    Michele Murphy:

    Yes.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Oh. Yeah, you’re like, “I can’t do anything right.”

    Michele Murphy:

    Like, “Wait, this is the story of my life. What? I’m not considered, they could consider me here. This is my big sister.” I just was constantly navigating stuff I shouldn’t even be navigating. I was scared to do or want anything in this fear of being taken over. So they got married and I was in the wedding, but I refused, I was so upset.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    You were 12?

    Michele Murphy:

    I was 12. I wouldn’t do anything. I’m not in one of the pictures. I refused to be in the pictures during the reception. I swam in the pool downstairs the entire time. I would not come up. I walked down the aisle and I sat in the pew and then when it was done, I just went and swam in the pool and that was that. And then we moved to Tennessee. And then right before we moved to Tennessee is when I started using. I was 12 and I was in sixth grade and I was never raised religious per se I guess, but I was raised in a church environment. I was raised in the Unitarian church, which I’m super grateful for. I actually look back and that was probably one of the most stable times in my life when I was a part of that community. They were so welcoming, so loving. And they’re not Christian-based, they’re just non-denominational, but even more than that, they’re just a total welcoming community.

    Michele Murphy:

    And I was on a camping trip at the Unitarian church and there’s Wiccans and Pagans that go there and Buddhists and I was exposed to so much when I was little, and that I’m really grateful for, and that church was amazing. And there was this Wiccan camp out or something, and the moms were doing these Wiccan things for celebrating the earth and there was these older kids there and they were in eighth grade and me and my friend Emily, we were like, “Okay, we’re going to drink but we won’t smoke weed. Let’s make a pact.” But the eighth graders were chanting our names and we felt so cool, cause we were in sixth grade and they were eighth graders. And I don’t remember if I got drunk. I don’t know if I got stoned. All I know is that I felt a part of something that I knew that I could find no matter where I went. No matter where I went, there was this sense of comfort.

    Michele Murphy:

    There was this place of acceptance where I was not the girl without the dad or the military girl or the girl who’s moving or the new girl at school. I felt like they genuinely wanted me to experience joy and I felt a part of it. And me and Emily, we drank, we smoked weed. I think some girls were tripping acid and some girl was like throwing up and another girl was helping her and I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is great.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Community.

    Michele Murphy:

    “This is fantastic.” And so that was the beginning. And at that moment I didn’t use. I wasn’t a daily user, I wasn’t even a weekend user, but I did significantly take a turn. At that point I started stealing, remember the cigarettes were right by the front and you could just take as many as you wanted?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    And they were in-

    Michele Murphy:

    In the carousel.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah. They were in singles. You could buy a single.

    Michele Murphy:

    Absolutely.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    That was amazing.

    Michele Murphy:

    I know. I was telling that to somebody the other day.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Singles, baby.

    Michele Murphy:

    Yeah. Just right at the register, you’re just dumping in your bag.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I was in Vegas and I came up to the register and somebody was buying a pack of cigarettes, 18 dollars, one pack. I was like, “It is not financially feasible, you have to be wealthy to be a smoker.” Unreal.

    Michele Murphy:

    Yeah. So I remember we started stealing cigarettes around that time and smoking them really fast to get high.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Totally.

    Michele Murphy:

    People were like, “Drink lots of gallons of water and you’ll feel drunk.” I just started acting out. Anything-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Anything they’d suggest. Yep.

    Michele Murphy:

    The way that I explain it now is, anything to not be in my body, because being in my body was really scary. And so that’s when I started just acting out in all areas. And when I moved to Tennessee, that’s when I realized those are the friends I’ll always find. Instant, this is going to fix the inconsistency because drugs and alcohol will always be consistent everywhere I go. And those type of people, I will always be able to find.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Did you have that, do you remember having that thought?

    PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:32:04]

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Did you have that? Do you remember having that thought, or was it a fee or was it a feeling?

    Michele Murphy:

    It was actually a thought when I moved to Colorado later on when I was in high school. It was a very distinct thought. And so the evolution of that experience drove me to… When I lived in Colorado, I started 10th grade and the system that I came up with, was I would bring a cigarette and I would light it in the bathroom first day of school, and any of the girls, they’d be like, “Girl, you’re brave.” And I’d be like… They’d be like, “Can I have a drag?” We would all take, and they were my new group of friends. I made that decision after moving two more times after Tennessee that that’s how I was going to find my people.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    That’s a great system.

    Michele Murphy:

    I know. I’m so proud of myself. I was like, “This is what we’re doing.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Oh yeah.

    Michele Murphy:

    Because these are kids that will know where the drugs are.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Totally. I love when people are like, “How did you know where to find them?” I’m like, “You know all the places you avoid? I just go over there and say, Hey, how’s it going? I’m Ashley, let’s party.” The same way you would know where the drugs are, I know where the drugs are too.

    Michele Murphy:

    Absolutely.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    So how did it go from… On this podcast we talk a lot about alcohol and drugs saved us. They did something for us at a time where there weren’t any other coping skills that we had access to, or knew about, and there was no one there to teach us about them. So they saved us during this period of time. How did they go from being this thing that got you community to being this thing that made you want to die?

    Michele Murphy:

    For me, the moving was the turning point for all of that, because I was so sad. Every time I would move, I’d have a boyfriend and I’d have to break up with them-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Oh, I didn’t even think of that.

    Michele Murphy:

    Or any whole new group. I think one time I was… When we left Tennessee, I don’t even remember his name, but I remember I was just screaming at my mom. I was like, “I was going to marry him.” And she was like, “No you weren’t.” And I was just like-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I didn’t even think of that, the relationships that you would have to forcibly leave. Oh God.

    Michele Murphy:

    All of them. All of them. And I was always in transition, always bracing for impact. And so I started using drugs and alcohol and it took the intensity. It wasn’t that it wasn’t there, it just took that intensity down enough for me to dissociate from what was going on. And not in a multiple personalities dissociation, more of “I don’t want to be in my body and experience this right now.”

    Michele Murphy:

    And so… Actually, my stepdad, he went to South Korea for a year on duty, and my mom didn’t want to be in Tennessee. So we’re in Tennessee, he got stationed in South Korea, so she was like, “We can’t be in Tennessee, this place is horrible.” And I was like, “Yeah.” I’m getting bullied at school because I have a New York accent. I consciously made it go away when I was living in Tennessee because it was so… It was nothing I had ever experienced before in my life.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I do know. I had a Boston accent when we moved to the Bay Area in first grade and no one would sit next to me because they were afraid of the girl with curly hair and a Boston accent. And it was one of those things, and I’m sure you had this, where you don’t even realize that you’re that different, it’s news to you that this is problematic.

    Michele Murphy:

    Right. 100%, because I… And I didn’t even realize it the other moves, but Tennessee was so polar opposite. There was… I didn’t know about the KKK. There’s things that were still… They still whipped you at school? Paddled you? They called them licks. So I go from this public school system in New York that’s very progressive and positive reinforcement, and then I move to Tennessee, and they’re paddling kids daily, all the time, teachers hitting.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    In what year?

    Michele Murphy:

    1994-6.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Wow.

    Michele Murphy:

    Still paddling, they called them licks. So you would get… The teacher would be like, “Four licks.” And you would go down to the principal’s office and he would paddle you four licks. I didn’t get hit because my mom signed the waiver not to, but-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    You had to allow it.

    Michele Murphy:

    You had to not allow it.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Not allow it. You had to opt out.

    Michele Murphy:

    You had to… Yeah. But most kids, they got hit at school. So it was such a polar experience, polar opposite experience, of what I was used to. So my mom was like, “We got to get out of here.” And I’m like, “Okay, where are we going?” She’s like, “We’re going back to Virginia.” So we move back to Virginia just for a year while he’s in Korea.

    Michele Murphy:

    But all my friends go to this high school called Tallwood. My mom makes me go to Kentsville, this whole other high school. All my friends are at Tallwood. Nothing… I was like, “Why don’t you just put me at Tallwood. Why are we public?” Because the house she wanted wasn’t in that district, she didn’t want it. So it was just this-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Not considered.

    Michele Murphy:

    No.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Even when it was really actually feasible to consider you?

    Michele Murphy:

    Right. 100%. And then we went, when he came home, we moved directly to Colorado. So I reengaged with all this new group of friends and started hanging out with my old friends before we had moved to Tennessee. I had a boyfriend, I was in ninth grade at the time, and freshman year, at the end of freshman year, we pick up, we moved to Colorado, because he came home from the military. And that’s when I made the decision this is how I find friends, then I was 15.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    What went wrong? What… Ha ha. What happened in Colorado and how did you get from 15, like, Okay, this is my coping skill,” to 18, “I need to be sober and never do this again.”

    Michele Murphy:

    When I was 15 in Colorado, it started with the normal drinking, smoking weed. And I think I had enough of a community in Virginia that freshman year in high school, that I had a little bit of self-esteem pulled from some of those past relationships, I had enough connection. And then when we got to Colorado, that’s when I was like, “I’m going to smoke this cigarette, I’m going to have all the people come, those are my friends.”

    Michele Murphy:

    And even in Colorado, I went to a different high school every year. It was nonstop. Nonstop. And so I do the cigarette thing, and then moving forward, I… I’m trying to think what the turning point was. I got a job at Sonic, and everybody was doing meth in the kitchen. And that was the turning-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    The service there was amazing.

    Michele Murphy:

    Even the car hops were just natural drug dealers.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    That’s so amazing.

    Michele Murphy:

    Oh, it was perfect. It was a drug dealer’s… We had a drug dealer that worked in the kitchen, and he would give the drugs to the car hop, and somebody would come up and she would bring it out. It was such a racket. But anyways, so one day, I was miserable, honestly, I was really miserable. I was really, really miserable. And at this point-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Sonic, was that a great job?

    Michele Murphy:

    No, it wasn’t. But in Colorado Sonic was-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    The coolest spot?

    Michele Murphy:

    Yeah, the coolest spot. Everyone was like, “Whoa, you work at Sonic? How’d you get a job there?” It was next to my high school, we had open campus, so everybody would go over there-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    And then they had meth in the kitchen.

    Michele Murphy:

    Well, then the older guys were in the kitchen doing the math. School girls were the car hops that would [crosstalk 00:07:44]. So then I started getting into that whole crowd. But I think what really happened, two things happened, and I’m not saying that my mom didn’t want the best for me. Do you know what I mean? But she got married and my stepdad did not really want… Later on, my mom has told me that my stepdad did tell her at some point, “I married you, not your child.”

    Michele Murphy:

    And so my mom’s told me that in later years, so that made sense. When she said, I’m like, “Oh, no shit. I always knew that. Why did you keep me…” So I think what happened was that I was really, really angry. At this point, I’m 15 and I’m pissed. I’m f’ing over it. I’ve been doing this? I’ve been doing this since I was five. And I was tired, really tired.

    Michele Murphy:

    And I was not pleasant to be around, I was angry in the house, I was pissed, I was running away a lot. I didn’t want to be there, but I knew that they didn’t want me there anyways. Two things were recurring, yet it was a disaster, but I knew that they didn’t want me there. And they definitely didn’t want me how I was.

    Michele Murphy:

    So I started… I think I was causing a lot of chaos in their new marriage that was already shaky because he had already been away to Korea. And I just remember I was probably in trouble for something, and there was a drug dealer selling meth in the kitchen, and he had me go run it out to somebody.

    Michele Murphy:

    And I was like, “What is this?” He’s like, “It’s meth. You’ll get everything done, you’ll get homework done, you’ll get everything.” And I was like, “Dude, I’ll try it.” And he’s like, “Take.” And he gave me a little bit for not telling on him and car hopping it out, he was like, “Just do this, go home…” He put in a little tinfoil. He tried to explain it to me how you smoke it, and I was like, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Tinfoil and a straw, but they’ll burn this trough.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Totally.

    Michele Murphy:

    Me putting it on a stove-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Real complicated.

    Michele Murphy:

    I was like, “That does not feel safe. I’m going to light the house on fire.” He was like, “Just crush it up and then snort it up your nose.” So I was like, “Okay, cool.” So when home alone in my bedroom, crushed it up, snorted it, and next thing I know it, it’s like 6:00 AM, I have watched probably 10 episodes of Jerry Springer, all the nighttime TV, the infomercials, my mom is getting up, my bedroom’s clean, my homework’s done, I’m ready for school, I was like, “This is a game changer.” Do you know what I mean? And the beautiful thing for me about meth was that I wasn’t in my body, but I was in my body. Yeah. Because I’m-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    It’s not taking you out the same way, totally true.

    Michele Murphy:

    No, because the weird thing about me is that I don’t check out. When I feel things, I feel them veer very deeply. I may walk away from a scenario, but trust me, I am in my closet at home experiencing extreme sadness over it. I may not show somebody, but when I feel deeply about things, I really feel deeply. I feel hate deeply, anger deeply, love deeply, joy, all of the emotion.

    Michele Murphy:

    And I remember I was like, “Oh my gosh, I’m not checked out high like smoking weed.” Do you know what I mean? Because at this point I’m a daily weed smoker, I’m drinking on the weekends, I’ve dabbled in a few different things, but at this point, 16, is when I started the meth. And I felt in my body and in control, very much so, but in a very alive, I felt it very deeply. And that’s what I loved about it, but you’re also high as a kite. Reality is not like, “Oh my mom’s awake? Oh my gosh.”

    Michele Murphy:

    I was not… And not only… That was the first time I had done it, and that was the high that I tried every day. And I’m saying… I eased into the other things this the moment I smoked the meth or did meth, I smoked it every day until the end. It was on. I found my drug of choice and it spiraled out of control very quickly.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    And we talk about people here, like what’s your drug of choice? And I always like to revisit this, which is, drug of choice… You’re probably 20 years sober, you know what I’m talking about, which is when you hear someone or a parent say, “He did coke, the weed isn’t a problem.” Or the alcohol isn’t a problem, or whatever. Your drug of choice is the drug you would choose over anything else every day, that’s the one that works with your chemistry.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    But if you’re truly alcoholic or addict, or have the ism, then you’re still going to, like you said, smoke weed every day, you’re going to do alcohol, cigarette, you’re going to replace that, if your drug of choice isn’t there. Don’t be fooled by that, but the drug of choice is the one that that works perfectly with your chemistry.

    Michele Murphy:

    I’ll get into that too because it was a significant… The beginning of the end was a very different experience for me. But the meth did for me what nothing else had ever done for me. I was in my body, I felt everything very deeply, I was experiencing life, and everything was just like sensory overload.

    Michele Murphy:

    My nervous system was like on full speed, and I tend to operate more in that space, I’m really good procrastinator. I thrive under chaos, always have, because I’m always moving. My whole life I’ve always had to reinvent myself. And so I gravitated towards that drug and I ran with it. Within a few months I was kicked out of my house, I was living with my drug dealer at 16, had gotten kicked out of school, multiple schools, I was going to alternative school-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Love me some alternative school.

    Michele Murphy:

    It was such a bad alternative school, that I begged my old school to let me back in.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    You didn’t like it?

    Michele Murphy:

    Listen, it was so bad, English was literally reading, cat, dog. Social studies was… Or geography was learning the States. It was so… Math was like one plus one. It was so bare bones. I think PE was walking across and swinging on the swings at the park. Like I was like, “I literally cannot do this.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    So you couldn’t do enough drugs to make that doable?

    Michele Murphy:

    Absolutely not. And the way that I am, I’m not somebody who just wants to get by, even getting high. I’ve always been like, “Okay, what are we doing? Where are we going? How is this going to end?”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    What’s the plan?

    Michele Murphy:

    “What’s the plan?” I’ve always been educationally book-smart, if that makes sense, and not in the way where I’m like, “Oh, I’m super smart because I’m pretty-“

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Curious. You’re curious.

    Michele Murphy:

    Yeah. And so I’ve always… I always did good on tests. I don’t have to go to class everyday, but I would do well on the test. I’m a really great test taker. To regurgitate the information a month later, absolutely not. But I can take any test and pass it. So I’m at this alternative school and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I’ve got to get back to my old school.” So I beg my principal. I’m like, “Please.” And he was like, “Look, anything less than a B, you’re gone.”

    Michele Murphy:

    And I’m like, “What about the days? I can barely…” I’m taking the city bus, I live at my dealer’s house, which… At this time I’m living in Colorado Springs, down at the base of the mountain, there’s a place called the Broadmoor, there’s apartments over by the Broadmoor. I’m living in the penthouse. I’m 17 at the time, I’m living in the penthouse with, not my dealer who’s now my boyfriend, but then his dealer.

    Michele Murphy:

    So we have this penthouse apartment, I should not be there, the cops come often, and I’m taking… The alternative school was right by there, so it was super convenient. But I’m like, “I can’t.” It’s so far away, my old school is so far away, but I’m high all the time, and I have plenty of time on my hands. So I stay, I just do a lot of drugs and I take the city bus at 4:45, and I make it to school, because the city bus took like three hours to get to school, I would take it all the way to my school, and then go to school.

    Michele Murphy:

    I ended up graduating. I don’t know how I did it. I did graduate. I think I was number 319 out of 320 kids.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Taking meth and phentamine.

    Michele Murphy:

    I think I had a 1.75 GPA. It was bad. But I did graduate. And the reason why, is because my mom at the time, I’m not living at home, I’m living in these just terrible scenarios, and I’m just like… I so badly… I just want, I don’t even know how to explain it honestly, I think in my head I was just like, “She thinks I’m a failure, she thinks I’m a loser, I just got to graduate high school.” Do you know what I mean? And then it’s not a drug problem. .

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    If I graduate high school, then I can keep doing meth. If I graduate high school, then maybe I’ll be considered in whatever scenario. And so-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    You were trying to get that acceptance from her.

    Michele Murphy:

    Yeah. And then also with myself, like, “See? It’s really not that bad. A lot of your friends dropped out, a lot of your friends have had babies and you’re still going.” And so I did graduate high school, which I’m super grateful for, but in this time period, this is where… The meth stops working at some point. I don’t have a perfect attendance, but I’m a disaster.

    Michele Murphy:

    My boyfriend who was my drug dealer, he’s violent, extremely violent. So I’m in a physically abusive relationship when I’m 17, I don’t even know what that is, honestly. I am hanging out with crowds, I hung out in… The majority of my friends were in bike shops, they’re all in like biker gangs, and we would hang out in motorcycle bike shops and do a bunch of meth, because my drug dealing boyfriend was a car mechanic and he worked on bikes and stuff, the route I’m going is really bad.

    Michele Murphy:

    And so one day I’m driving down, I pick up a bunch of drugs, and we go up to Garden of the Gods, and I think we smoked meth up in the mountains. And then came down, and a drunk driver ran a red light and slammed into my car, my car flipped a few times, and I had like five people in my car. Everybody, remarkably, was actually somewhat okay. I had like three broken toes, and the drunk driver was passed out in her wheel, at her wheel.

    Michele Murphy:

    And so I climb out my window, and I run over to her car, and I’m yelling at her, and I’m like… I still have a teener of meth in my sock. And I’m like… And I go over to her car and I’m freaking out. I don’t know if she’s drunk yet, and I just see her at the wheel, and the horn, and the airbag, and all this stuff, and I’m screaming. I’m like, “Get out of your car. What are you doing?” But in my head, you’re going so fast on meth, I’m like, “Did I run the red light?” I don’t know. I don’t know what color the light was.

    Michele Murphy:

    I’m so high. And at this point I’m so, so high because my adrenaline just skyrocketed a thousand percent. And so I’m yelling at her, and I look over, and her two year old son is underneath the dash of the front seat.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    No.

    Michele Murphy:

    Yeah. And I had a moment of clarity and I was like… I looked, and I was like-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Please tell me he was alive.

    Michele Murphy:

    I don’t know at the time. I just see him, and I was like, “Oh f, I have meth in my sock.” I ran to the bathroom, I ditched the kid, I didn’t give a shit. I ran to the 711 on the corner, because I’m in downtown Colorado Springs, pulled the math out of my sock, don’t flush it because you have to come back for it, so I put it in the fourth liner of the trashcan, put the lid back on it, and then I run back out to the car, the kid is alive.

    Michele Murphy:

    When I got there, some of the witnesses had pulled him out, he is alive, he’s like two. He was completely in shock, he was catatonic, she was passed out at the wheel. There was a bottle of alcohol in the front seat, and at that moment I got stone cold sober and I was like, “You cannot do this. You cannot do this. It’s over. You have to stop.”

    Michele Murphy:

    And I turn around and I see all my drug using friends coming out of my car and they’re a mess. And I was like, “This cannot… This has to stop.” And so my mom has to come pick me up because I’m 17, she doesn’t know that I’m high, and I go back to her house for the first time in a long time, and they don’t take me the house… They’re like, “You need to go the hospital?”

    Michele Murphy:

    I’m like, “No, no, no.” Because in my head, I’m like, “They’re going to drug test me.” And they’re like, “Your heart rate’s really elevated.” And I’m like, “I know, I’ve never been an accident before.” And I’m like, “Oh my God.” And so I go home, and then I go back to my apartment the next day, and that was literally the last time I ever used meth. And it was really hard, really, really hard.

    Michele Murphy:

    I was almost 18 at the time. It was right before I got sober, and in my head I was like, “It’s my boyfriend, it’s the friends that…” Because when I had the moment of clarity, I turned around, I’m like, “This has to change” when I saw my friends. And I was like, “I got to get the f away from them, and I need to get away from the abusive boyfriend.” Because he punched out my car window one time, dragged me out by my hair, he was always cheating on me, and he was very violent.

    Michele Murphy:

    And so my 18th birthday came around and I white knuckled it. I’m trying so hard, I don’t do meth, but I can’t not smoke weed and drink, I can’t not do it, I can’t not be in my body-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    You don’t have the skills.

    Michele Murphy:

    I have no skills. And everything that I know, my grandfather was an alcoholic, I’ve witnessed alcoholism in my family, and I have absolutely zero skills. And so I started, at the time, I started tripping a lot of acid. I know it’s really weird, I go from meth to acid, but then I start tripping acid. It literally cannot be in my body. And I knew this was the beginning to the end, because this is not sustainable. You cannot trip acid multiple times a week. This is not good.

    Michele Murphy:

    And I had probably one of the worst trips… It was the worst trip I’ve ever experienced in my life. I went backwards, I was an adult, and then I started going back, I saw myself as a fetus, it was a whole… It was the worst experience in my life. I tripped for two weeks, I couldn’t go to sleep, it was beyond a bad trip. There was… I saw the line, there’s a line, I know why people don’t come back. I had to make the decision every day to not go over the line mentally.

    Michele Murphy:

    And it took a few weeks for me to pull a little bit of semblance together after that, and then I started to… And then after that I started, this is going to sound really weird, after that I started doing weird stuff like reading the Bible secretly in my bathroom, I started sleeping with a knife underneath my bed, I started to get really paranoid about things. Something chemically happened at that time that I don’t know.

    Michele Murphy:

    Now I know I have clarity on it, but it took a really long time to bring whatever came out of balance back into balance for me after that experience. And I started fake smoking cigarettes because I didn’t want anybody to know that I wasn’t using drugs. I was so terrified.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    How do we even do this?

    Michele Murphy:

    Yeah, how do… I don’t know what to do. But I was seeking. It was the beginning of the end. That’s why I keep saying it’s the beginning of the end, because I started to seek. I started going to this youth group of this church, I started going back to therapy, I found this… My mom found me the service, and me and my mom… My mom’s like, at this point our relationship, she drops off groceries at my house, my apartment with my boyfriend.

    Michele Murphy:

    And so finally it just got really bad, it got really bad. I try to white knuckle, I’m 18 at this time, and I tried to white knuckle, not using anything, and it wasn’t working. And so I started drinking again. I started smoking weed, but then everything got worse. I started to get extra paranoid. Something really happened to me after that. That acid-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Sounds like something chemically shifted.

    Michele Murphy:

    Yeah. I couldn’t use normally, everything… I was like, “This is terrible. My only solution, I can’t even do.” I think I tried cocaine one time and it was not good. Everything started to unravel, but drinking was okay, I didn’t get the paranoia and I didn’t feel that reaction. And that’s when I decided that I needed to get away from the boyfriend, I needed to get away from my mom.

    Michele Murphy:

    Oh my mom, at the time, my mom and my stepdad, they got pregnant, and so they started their own other family during this time period. So my mom’s pregnant, they’re having a baby, I’m suffering, nightmare. So then I’m like, “I’m going to go to college.” I graduated high school and I’m like, “I’m going to go to college, I need to go.” And literally, my mom was like, “Where are you going to go?” And I pointed to a map and I was like, “Arizona, I’m just going to go to Arizona.”

    Michele Murphy:

    And when college time came, I drove to Arizona, and I had a panic attack all the way, blue, couldn’t breathe the entire way, pacing, pacing, pacing, the boyfriend, the drug dealing boyfriend came with me, I tried to have him not come, and I started driving without him, it was such a nightmare. He ended up coming, and I got an apartment and I was going to one community college class.

    Michele Murphy:

    My mom moved back to New York with my stepdad and had a baby there. They were across the country from me cause he got stationed somewhere else. And then I come to Arizona, and the abuse doesn’t stop with the boyfriend, I thought it was the friends, I found the same friends where I worked and at school, and I thought… And I wanted to move because I was like, “Okay, it’s been three years. I’ve got to get the f out of here.” That’s the only thing that I knew to do, was to get-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Leave.

    Michele Murphy:

    Leave. And so I was getting squirrely anyways, and the boyfriend came with me, and he was still equally abusive, and I still found the same friends that I had found the 12 years prior when moving, and it just started to spiral again. I started smoking weed, and I started drinking, the paranoia had subsided because I had created some space there, and then one night he beat the crap out of me, and I still went to work. I worked at Denny’s on I-10 and Baseline, and… Do you know where that is?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Mmh-hmm.

    Michele Murphy:

    Okay good. I was hoping you did. It’s the most important part of my story, because I had a manager, and he called. My ex boyfriend would sit outside of Denny’s all night while I was working, he was like, “This isn’t… You’re young, you’re like 18. What is this guy doing?” And he beat me up one night, and my manager called the police and got charges pressed, and he moved back to Colorado. The police said, “You can either go to Colorado,” because he wasn’t a resident yet.

    Michele Murphy:

    I think like the deal was, “Either go to Colorado or we’ll press charges.” So he moved back to Colorado and I was in Arizona alone. Alone for the first time ever. And I waited tables at Denny’s, and these people, they came in every night… I’m such a crier too, I should’ve warned you about that.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I don’t need warning, I can do emotion.

    Michele Murphy:

    Yeah. And so I, these people came in Denny’s every single night, and they left me really big tips. They were young and they asked me weird questions like, “What’s your favorite color?” And I’d be like, “No one’s asked me my favorite color since I was in third grade.” And they’d be like, “Ocean or mountain” or, “Pick between two cars, what’s your dream car?” And they asked me all these questions, and they would bring coloring books and make me these really, “We love you, you’re so awesome. Have a great night, thank you for your service.”

    Michele Murphy:

    And they always left the restaurant cleaner than it was when they got there, and they remembered things that I told them, like I had… My 19th birthday was coming, because I got sober a few weeks before my 19th birthday, and they got me this blue fish cake, and they brought it to me, and I didn’t understand. You know when people see you for the first time in like a really long time, I was considered in this equation of their life, and they didn’t even know me.

    Michele Murphy:

    And so I had my last use on January 23rd, I tried it again, this group of people that I met from, I don’t even know where I met them, we went to Sedona, and we did cocaine and we got drunk, and I pass out in some guy’s truck, and it was like six o’clock in the morning outside the Kokopelli Inn, you know the Kokopelli Inn?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Oh my God. I do.

    Michele Murphy:

    And the people that I’m with, they’re setting off the car alarm, waking me up, and I just look, I sit up and I look over and that was it. I was like, “This sucks.” That was my bottom. And that night I went to work at Denny’s, we drove back and I went to work, and they brought me this thing that they colored and I was like, “You guys are so nice.” And I asked them something, I was like, “Can you die of being sad all the time?” I asked him some random question like that, and I started crying, and they just started talking to me.

    Michele Murphy:

    And then somewhere in that conversation, I was just like, “I did cocaine last night and I’m scared I’m going to start doing meth. And I get really paranoid because this is what happened.” And they were members of the 12-Step Group. And the next day they took me to my first meeting, and I’ve been sober ever since. And I will be forever grateful for that group of people.

    Michele Murphy:

    And I want to say anonymity is so important, because if they would’ve told me that they were sober, or members of alcoholics anonymous, before the time that it was necessary to tell me that, I would have never talked to them. That would not have been my solution. My solution would be to avoid them. And so they didn’t disclose it until it was necessary, until I was ready.

    Michele Murphy:

    So I think that’s really important to touch on, because a lot of people, especially when you get sober young, you’re like, “I’m sober, I’m sober, I’m sober.” And everyone’s in Instagrams, and everyone’s like, “I’m sober.” And sometimes you miss it, you miss that person. And I was not that person that would’ve been like, “Hey, are you sober? I need to be sober.”

    Michele Murphy:

    I was different, I didn’t… I needed the attraction rather than promotion. And they were so attractive. They were the most beautiful people. And after that… So they were all a part of that young people’s program that I ended up getting sober with at the three year long program.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    So there’s been some controversy, I just want to touch on this, there’s been some controversy about this specific program, but it was a really positive, beautiful experience for you, not so much for some people. Do you want to just touch on that a little bit? I just think it’s an interesting thought experiment to talk about how one circumstance could be seen so negatively by some people, and change someone else’s life in such a beautiful way.

    Michele Murphy:

    Yeah. I think that because my whole… I don’t… Because of my experience when I was little, this is my perception with what’s happening here. I’m moving a lot and I don’t feel joy.

    PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [01:04:04]

    Michele Murphy:

    … What’s happening here. I’m moving a lot, and I don’t feel joy, and I feel like that was so disregarded in my childhood, what I was experiencing, and my mom was experiencing it differently. It’s really important to say, those people are right. They processed this young people’s enthusiastic sobriety program in the way that they did. Whether it was-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Wait, let’s back up. When you say those people are right, can you elaborate? What do you mean by that?

    Michele Murphy:

    The people that had a really bad experience. I don’t want to discredit the pain, or the trauma somebody has experienced. It’s like when you date a guy, and someone’s like, “Oh, it was the worst.” You’re like, “No, it’s fine.” It doesn’t mean he wasn’t the worst, both can occur.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Simultaneously.

    Michele Murphy:

    Both can have different experiences, and they can both be honored in the same space.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Totally agree.

    Michele Murphy:

    So I get sober, and I knew something was a little off. My first sponsor, I was like, “Are people transferring their addiction from drugs and alcohol onto this group?” I remember being like, this is a little meshed, it’s boundaryless. There’s ideas that shouldn’t even be brought in. It’s a very conservative, very conservative. First time I voted I wanted to vote a certain way and they were not wanting me to vote that way, by some of the counselors and owners of the program, instilling their belief system very aggressively, honestly, on a lot of the members. I think I had, me and my friend … Okay, so I’m going to also say this, I went through this program, majority of my friends also went through this program.

    Michele Murphy:

    We all have 20 plus years of sobriety, so I don’t want to throw the baby out with bath water. But I think the people that ended up … One of my oldest closest friends, actually my first sponsee, she’s still sober today. We always talk about it, you want to be mad at the dysfunction that was going on. It was a bubble and everything was founded on enthusiastic sobriety and the counselors had certain members that they put in positions of power and they ran the show and then they would match, they would be like, “Oh, you should date so and so.” They would match up dating after a certain time periods and certain things were not acceptable, which was none of their business. Certain ideas or ideologies or things that girls couldn’t wear bikinis because we would turn guys on and then that would be our fault.

    Michele Murphy:

    So even at lake events, we’d have to be fully clothed, or why are you trying to get attention like that? I’m like, “Wait a second.” Being promiscuous was never a part of my story. I watched boyfriends come in and out of my life, that is never going to be a thing for me. It’s just not. I’ve always been longterm relationship girl. Well then, you’re turning on newcomer guys and you should feel bad about that and it was really toxic. A lot of the principles of the program or the interpretation of some of the staff. I had so much dysfunction as a child and I was so used to people saying one thing and doing another all the time.

    Michele Murphy:

    Right. It didn’t really affect, [crosstalk 01:07:31] what I mean?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    It didn’t deeply, that’s a really interesting perspective because that makes a lot of sense. I’ve actually had that experience as well. My moving looked different, but it, there was a lot of it as I was sent away for summers, I never spent a summer in California even though I lived there for a long period. We were always shipped off somewhere and to different cultures and so strange things happening or whatever was just okay, just an ability to let it roll off. So that’s really interesting, an inability to have the chaos be there and not be so deeply wounded by it.

    Michele Murphy:

    Right. Yeah, Jenny was the same way. So my best friend Jenny, same exact way. She had a really chaotic childhood, moved around a lot bounce between mom and dad, so I feel we were just, Oh we got this, this is familiar. But some of the kids that came from maybe stabler homes or with some bootstraps, when they left, because once you left, they cut you off in a sense and you lose everything overnight. I went on and I was a counselor for that program. Jenny was not. However, when I was in the group here in Phoenix and the person who owns the place in Phoenix is an amazing, we’re still in contact today. I still talk to my first sponsor. From there, I still talk to the owner from there, we’re very, very close. I mean, we work actually in conjunction together a lot, oftentimes with a lot of adolescent and young adult referrals with what I do now.

    Michele Murphy:

    So that’s why I love the program and what it gave me in Phoenix. It gave me stability. It gave me people who considered me. It gave me ways of thinking. It gave me direction. It gave me purpose. They built me up in ways that I had never experienced somebody building me up before. I found joy. I found my center. I found some of the closest friends that were still, all of us are still friends today. I found my ex husband there. My daughter is a byproduct of that program. So does it have perception? Could it could people come out really, really damaged from some of the cult like undertones that it’s not actually, I would say an organized cult, but some of the ways of thinking and the lack of flexibility within certain constructs are especially damaging too. The foundation of it is all for peer support, so the foundation is how do we get adolescents to stay clean and sober?

    Michele Murphy:

    So they use it in a peer support model. The counselors instill their will and their own beliefs, which causes some issues.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    It’s always people’s meddling, right? These organizations are set up with the foundation is based on we’re going to do good in the world and then people get involved.

    Michele Murphy:

    Yeah. So I went and worked for the sister program in Missouri and I understand why people experienced, here’s the deal, just because we get sober, we’re not well. I’m not well the way I perceive things aren’t well, sometimes what happens to me, my interpretation, I know this, I moved to Missouri and worked for a program and a similar program and it was not like Phoenixes. It was so dysfunctional and it was so abusive emotionally and mentally and physically too because you had to work like 90 hours a week and you got paid $1,000 and you had to do it because don’t you want people to get sober and if you do it for money then you’re selfish.

    Michele Murphy:

    There was a lot of things, if I said words wrong, because I still had a little bit more of a New York accent and if I said words wrong they would ask me weird questions. There was always an agenda and if you didn’t do what they wanted you to do or perceptionally your life wasn’t going in the direction that they wanted it to go in, they would shame you, like where’s your relationship with God? What are you being dishonest about? You’re about to get drunk and they would start using all these fear tactics to corral you into this position they felt like you needed to be in, and I understand maybe when I was in Phoenix, I didn’t have that relationship with the staff that way when I got sober, but I understand that maybe that’s what they were experiencing that I didn’t experience until later on.

    Michele Murphy:

    Yeah, I did leave working for that program. I left very positively and I actually still talk to… Every time someone quits there they always call me because when I left I was I’m not going to be this weird resentful and that’s okay if you are, it’s okay if you are weird and resentful, but I was like, I’m going to work through this. I’m not going to use and drink over this.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    So this particular situation, I just want to clarify for people who don’t know the, how 12 step programs work, and I’ll use Alcoholics Anonymous in particular, which is a 12 step program there. The 12 step program does not have any one person in charge. There are a lot of service commitments that change. You can believe what you want. There’s a lot of freedom in that and what you’re describing is as actually something I experienced as well.

    Michele Murphy:

    I thought you did.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I was laughing literally picturing the people saying to me you’re about to get drunk and you’re like okay, sure, how am I going to get drunk in the middle of nowhere? Alcoholics Anonymous 12 step programs in general and what you’re talking about are not the same thing but the program that you are discussing uses 12 step foundations is that?-

    Michele Murphy:

    Yeah, they use a 12 step base. They change some others to apply for to make it more applicable to the younger population, but we don’t work the steps really quickly or anything like that. I think I worked them over a course of three years.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Oh wow.

    Michele Murphy:

    They really focused on enthusiastic sobriety.

    Michele Murphy:

    How can you have more fun using than you did when you were or how can you have more fun sober than you did when you’re getting high?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Which is so important in the adolescent.

    Michele Murphy:

    It’s so important.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    And we did that too, and I think the same people were involved in our treatment centers, but that for me was a very positive, despite the negatives I was in the same boat with you where it was a very positive experience to learn that I could have fun sober and had that not been forced upon me, I would not have done it.

    Michele Murphy:

    Right. 100% and I still live my life in that way. If I am not enjoying what I’m doing at a cellular level, I need to shift the course immediately.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Right.

    Michele Murphy:

    It’s not the fear base that I’m going to use today, it’s not that. I’m going to have anxiety, I’m going to have some depression. I’m going to maybe co dependently start having these shame experiences. Now do that for long enough then yes, maybe the thought to drink would come in, but it looks a little bit different. But I have to live my life.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yes, I 100% agree with you.

    Speaker 1:

    Stay tuned to hear more in just a moment.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Hi, it’s Ashley, your beloved host. When I’m not hosting the Courage to Change, a recovery podcast, I’m running the recruiting department at Lion Rock Recovery. We are always looking for amazing licensed mental health counselors along with various other sales and operations positions that pop up from time to time. The Lion Rock culture is one of collaboration, support and flexibility. Our employees work from home offices all over the country utilizing technology to connect to one another. We are always hiring, so if you want to have the best job ever, check out our open positions and apply at www.lionrockrecovery.com\about\careers.

    Michele Murphy:

    So slowly but surely I started to have a functioning life, within some aspects. I mean cleaning my car was an undertaking. Even at the age of 25 there was like trash in my car and so I would have oftentimes my sponsors, I mean when I left that program real honestly when I left that program and had to really live in my authentic self, not what I thought they wanted me to be, it got scary because I didn’t have everybody being like enthusiastic Friday and I want to say this, everyone’s like get out of yourself, get out of yourself, get out of yourself.

    Michele Murphy:

    And it drives me insane when I hear people say that to people in meetings. We don’t use people to get out of ourselves. We use people and give to people because we are whole and then we find ourselves within that relationship, right? So we’re bringing from a place of wholeness, right?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Great point.

    Michele Murphy:

    Cause I got told, all my earliest writing, Oh go get out of yourself, go call someone in need. I’m like wait, when are we going to honor this? Can we hold space for this first? Can I be whole first and then be able to go to someone with wholeness instead. So, and I just want to say that because it ties into being very confused when I had my child because I did get married, I married the man that I met in that young people’s program and he worked for them as well in Missouri and we quit, moved back to Arizona together and we got engaged, we got married and then a year later we had our daughter and I thought I was really confused because I had all these ideas of what I wanted. I really desperately wanted what I didn’t have. So I wanted a marriage and I wanted to stay married and I wanted four kids and I wanted to be the stay at home present mom who was available, and I had my daughter and none of that happened. I was really depressed. I lost my sense of identity pretty quickly. I’ve always been really free spirited, even when I got sober, I’d be like beach trip to California, when? Right now, let’s go, let’s go to Mexico, when? Right now let’s go. I was road trip girl.

    Michele Murphy:

    I’ve always been there… A lot of positives that came out of moving a lot. I’m really resourceful, really resourceful. I will figure out the best way to do something in the most effective way, in the moment, I am really good in chaos. Crisis intervention is my jam. I’m good on the fly, I am good in chaos, I’m good in crisis’s.

    Michele Murphy:

    A few things happened when my daughter was born, was that I felt like my life was over because I’m so independent and I’m so on the fly. So I was trying to simultaneously be this stay at home mom that was very square and very structured. But I’m not that, I kept shaming myself for feeling, watching my mother. Do you know what I mean?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    That’s what I was thinking, this must’ve been exactly how she felt.

    Michele Murphy:

    Yeah. I was like Oh my God, I’m my mom. I desperately was like, I can’t be a single mom, can’t be a single mom. Because my mom was a single mom and I remember my whole life, her being like I’m a single mom, I’m a single mom and then being so resentful at that word, so I was like that is not going to be me and so I desperately clung to this. The relationship should have never gone past three years and at this point we’re at 12, me and my ex husband got together when we were like 19 in this treatment center or 20 and now I’m 30. I had my daughter when I was 29 so a lot of time has passed. I was 10 years sober when I had her or 11 years sober when I had her.

    Michele Murphy:

    So I guess we were together a full 12 by the time we got divorced. So, I’m not going to do what happened to me. I’m not going to do that to her. I’m not going to do that to her. She was a year old. I mean, we had problems from the beginning. I knew I shouldn’t have married him from the beginning, but once again you have to honorable spaces. I knew that, it’s a learning lesson but I also have Scarlet.

    Michele Murphy:

    So I can honor both and see the purpose in it. I woke up one day and I’ve never really been a jealous or a check anything. But he kept flying back and forth to California a lot and his interactions with women made me feel really uncomfortable all the time. I had an alarm and I confronted him about it. He said I had postpartum depression. So I went to the doctor, got my hormones checked and it wasn’t that so and so I checked his Facebook and overnight my life fell apart. There was a lot of stuff on there that was pretty traumatic, and we separated. We tried to work it out for a very small time period. He at the time had, I guess he had 12 years sober at the time. Shortly after that we got divorced. I had to go through all of that sober. He ended up drinking. He’s still drinking. He doesn’t think he’s alcoholic. I was married to him. So even sober was pretty painful for me. So our perceptions are different and that’s okay.

    Michele Murphy:

    We co-parent our daughter now but that journey was the beginning of the end of the codependency. I didn’t choose to work on it. I have this, so right here’s the full circle. Here’s the lesson. I didn’t choose to work on it. I have this one year old daughter, I’m getting divorced. I’m completely in a shame spiral constantly. My codependency is off the charts. I don’t even know. I’m just a pinball.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    What does codependency off the charts look like for you?

    Michele Murphy:

    Not in my body. I was decompensating at everything. I would hear a song and fall apart. I couldn’t drive past the gas station in which I checked his Facebook at. I couldn’t go to that corner. It was so bad. I was experiencing shame constantly, like abandonment. But what my codependency did was I made a decision, so this knight in shining armor sweeped in and he was like we’ll get through this together and nobody should have wanted me in that condition. Literally I was a… I had a one year old daughter, I was an elementary, I had to go back to work. I was an elementary school teacher. I was crying from morning to night, not functioning, going to therapy twice a week, not eating, not sleeping. I wasn’t even fully divorced yet and this guy is like I’m in love with you. He was the opposite of… So my ex husband in my codependency felt more like my dad, emotionally distant, abandoner I was alone all the time in that relationship. Then this guy comes in and he’s overwhelming, like my mom.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Right, right, right.

    Michele Murphy:

    Completely overwhelming. Let’s go here, let’s do this. He was very obsessed. Guess what I did, I mean, can you guess what I did?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I mean you followed him somewhere.

    Michele Murphy:

    I did. Absolutely. Because that’s the story, I take my two year old and I moved to New Jersey and I live there. I isolate myself, I cut myself off from all my friends. I’m in a such an emotionally abusive relationship.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    What does that look like? Because I don’t think a lot of people realize what emotional abuse is or looks like.

    Michele Murphy:

    Oh my gosh, what it looks like is my reality was questioned constantly. It looks like he didn’t want me to talk to people so I wasn’t allowed to talk to people. But he would go through my phone and then he would say, he would be like, Oh you did talk to somebody for four minutes. So then he would put a timer down and make me replay the verbal conversation.

    Michele Murphy:

    And then if it didn’t make four minutes, he would start badgering me about it and I’m such a liar and then I started lying about things because I was terrified to even talk about it. But then he would find out I was lying because I think there was some sort of tracking on my phone or maybe he mirrored something to the iPad or the Apple TV because I would have conversations with people and an hour later he’d be like, when was the last time you talked to Mary? I’m just throwing out a name and I would be like, I haven’t talked to that person in months. He was like, Hm, interesting. Then I could start to feel it, it comes in these waves. Then I was always in trouble. He did an intervention on me and I needed a pathological lying treatment.

    Michele Murphy:

    So he presented me with a treatment program to go to and he was really worried about me because my pathological lying because I wasn’t reporting to him all my conversations, not with males, all females, the abuse was-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Insidious.

    Michele Murphy:

    Oh yeah. There was days he would lay in bed cry and he’d be, look what you’re doing to me and I would be like I don’t, and I have Scarlet. I don’t remember that. I don’t remember her eating. I know she ate, she was fine. She was in daycare from 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM because I was constantly managing his emotions and how the day was going to go. It was nonstop. I was on all these service commitments. I had to come off all these service commitments because I was always affecting him.

    Michele Murphy:

    This is affecting me, this is affecting me. It was so bad. My daughter, I put her through exactly what my mom did and luckily she was two. She doesn’t remember anything. But I do know this. I had a moment of clarity. I don’t remember. It was a COTA blackout, I will be like, Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I did that or I said that that one time, it was worse than any drug I’ve ever done. It was the most painful detox I have ever had to experience. It was the precursor to all of my alcoholism. That moment when I was in the woods with those Wiccan, we were smoking weed and drinking. It was a moment before that. Do you know what I mean? I was at a turning point and I couldn’t leave.

    Michele Murphy:

    I physically couldn’t leave. I called my mom, me and my mom got really close to this time and I called her. I’m , mom, I need to go to treatment. I cannot leave. I’m calling her everyday crying, please put me in somewhere. I cannot leave. I’m going to die. I was suicidal. I called the suicide hotline multiple times. I was hiding knives around my house. I cut on myself twice and if you know me and you see me here today and you see me in the past, that’s not my personality. I had been so disconnected from self and authenticity that I was literally falling apart. I was so far out of my body. I was so disconnected and so popped out that I was trying to desperately get back in and so it just escalated and he would require, every time I talked to somebody, I would have to write an email to him and put the dialogue, write out everything that I said in each conversation.

    Michele Murphy:

    And then he would call people to try to figure out if that was true in a very sneaky manipulative way. I was terrified all the time. It was so dark and so all I know, I had another moment of clarity and my codependency and it was with a two year old child and I’m upstairs and my daughter is screaming downstairs and I come out down the stairs and I’m like, “what’s going on?” And he goes “she, she won’t give me a hug”. I was like, “well, she doesn’t want to hug you.” He was like, “well, she needs to give me a hug.” I’m like, “no, she doesn’t.” He goes, “I don’t want to teach her. It’s okay to play games with men at an early age.” I was like I’m f’ed, he thinks saying no is playing a game.

    Michele Murphy:

    I have no voice, zero voice. I had a moment of clarity. I needed to leave. I called my ex husband and at the time we were on decent terms. I called him immediately and I said, you need to come get her and he was like when I said now, and he said, okay. So he got on a plane, came, got her the next day, turned around, flew directly back home to Arizona with her. I stayed out there fantasizing about this. I even contemplated never going back to Arizona, just dying in this relationship, you know what I mean? Gallivanting around the world, being swept off my feet, then beaten down, swept off my feet and beaten down. It was almost better to just maybe do that forever than experience and go through the pain. Honestly we gallivanted around New York city, spent $600 in two hours, went to all these amazing shows when any of this amazing dinner, swept off my feet.

    Michele Murphy:

    We went canoeing down this amazing river, and we parked around the down Times Square. We parked around a corner and it got really silent and he was like, did you talk to somebody earlier today? I was like, this is never going to change. I cannot do this. I cannot do this, you’re going to sweep me off my feet to beat me down later for something I shouldn’t even have to answer to. It doesn’t even make sense. So he’s yelling at me and I’m just, I bought, I bought a ticket for six hours later.

    Michele Murphy:

    I went to the airport and I didn’t have any friends left because I had isolated myself and cut everybody off. I had to call my ex in laws that I was really angry at. So they picked me up from the airport. That was a mess. I was hysterical. I just felt like my tail was between my legs and they were so kind. They bought me a house to live in, and Nicole saved my life and not in a codependent way, but she held the space, it took three years to stop thinking every day to tell myself everyday cause I felt so tied to him.

    Michele Murphy:

    If it didn’t work out then it was all in vain now I have to still experience my ex husband’s pain, ? And it was really hard to go through sober, and it wasn’t necessarily the steps that fixed it. The step work and the service work that I did in the beginning was just a savings account to buy me some time to get through this period.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Totally. Yes I do.

    Michele Murphy:

    Nicole picked up the phone seven to 10 times a day and at one point I bought a plane ticket in the middle of the night at two in the morning for $900 to New Jersey.

    Michele Murphy:

    Nicole was like you’re not going. I’m like, I’m going he [inaudible 01:31:07] me. I’m still in it, a year later, not really. I think it was six months.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    How did you get to the founders of Coda and that piece of your recovery?

    Michele Murphy:

    So at the time I was on the Icky PLA International Conference of Young People and Alcohol Anonymous host committee at the time. So we had bid for nine years and then we got the host committee. When we were hosting the conference, I was a co-chair of the host committee. The conference was coming I think July and six months into being on the host committee was also six months I had been on in that relationship. He was also on the host committee as well and he just started the thing again who are you talking to?

    Michele Murphy:

    What are you telling the people on the host committee? He had a lot of paranoia. He didn’t want, people know this is before. So this is how I found Ken and Mary Richardson. So ironically, ironically he wanted me, and this was my codependency, he asked me, not directly, he, but he asked me to step off of the host committee and just work on the relationship I did. we actually went to counseling with Ken together. We’d only been together for six months. I mean that’s red flag central and I’m, I’m such a green flag. I’m going to paint every red flag green until it’s the ship is just sinking hard because I don’t want to be in my body. I don’t want to feel, I don’t want to feel abandoned. I don’t want to feel disconnected. I don’t want to feel sadness or not considered or , in the interim, I’m not considering myself the entire way.

    Michele Murphy:

    So I step off the host committee, which I was, I mean I was so resentful at this point because there was times where I was standing on the stage, alone, not really alone but there was two other people and we’re like bidding. I was this vigilante to just definitely get [inaudible 01:33:11] and then here I am, I’m trading everything in for this guy. Everything in, slowly one at a time we went to go see Ken and Ken in counseling, saw what happened. He saw me collapse. He saw me fold into myself. He saw the dysfunction, he saw everything and he was like this is not good. This guy is not well we left there. Oh it was blatantly obvious cause he confronted him. He exploded and it got bad and he was like look, she’s terrified of you.

    Michele Murphy:

    And he was just, she talks to her friends, she wants an intimate relationship but she talks to her sponsor. I mean it was just, you couldn’t have both. I couldn’t have me and him, both things couldn’t exist. My whole thing is how my whole life is how can both exist? I keep getting into scenarios where I and this other person cannot exist or I can’t feel poorly about something and joy or I can’t experience things simultaneously. It’s either I’m out, I abandon this or I’m idealizing it, this is the best thing ever. That planted the seed because when I came back I was like I need to call Ken. He’s saw it. He’s the only one that saw it because I’ve been isolated.

    Michele Murphy:

    He will help me. So I called him and he was full and he said, see my wife Mary. So that’s how I got to Mary. I saw her for two years and I learned, I was like a sponge. Everything about codependency, be in your body. This is a shame spiral. I’m reacting like a 10, the situation is a four how do I come back down? She taught me all the skills on how to do that, how to stay in my body, how to get through it. I can genuinely say in the last, I’ve been back for six years now, I was single when I got out of that relationship, I was single for five years. Nothing. People would come to me and be like “hi Michelle”. I’d be like, don’t touch me. I was like, don’t validate me because I was everything that I feel perceptionally that I need from others, I need to learn to give it to myself.

    Michele Murphy:

    Even if they have the ability to do that, I still need to know that I can do it for myself. I woke up everyday at four 30 in the morning. I hiked up this mountain in the middle of Phoenix called Camelback. Every single morning I cried and I hiked and after that I went to yoga and I didn’t practice yoga. I lay there on my mat and I cried the entire class. I left there and I would go to work and I taught elementary school at the time. After that, I would jump on… When I was in New Jersey, I couldn’t talk to my friends or go to meetings. So I did phone meetings all the time in New Jersey and they saved my life and so when I came back, I would go to, even on my lunch break, I would be teaching elementary school.

    PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [01:36:04]

    Michele Murphy:

    I would go to, even on my lunch break, I would be teaching elementary school, sorry Mesa public schools, but I would be teaching elementary school with my headset in listening to a meeting brcause it was so chaotic. I was ,like “Oh my God.” Listening to a meeting constantly. I had speaker tapes on constantly. I was trying to override the system and just do everything in my power to stay in my body. Right? Some things worked, some things didn’t. Some things I still do today. Some things I don’t, but I was willing, I was like, “I have to get to the other side.” This is never going to end. I have to do this. I have to experience the depth of pain inside my soul and maybe it won’t be healed. Maybe it’s still comes up.

    Michele Murphy:

    Maybe I still get a little codependent sometimes, but I have to know I have to get to the other side and I will say in the last five years I was totally single. I did not seek out validation in any form. People would be like, “Just go on a date.” And I’d be like, “No, I’m not doing that. I don’t want to misrepresent or start to idealize something and start to get into that cycle because it feels good.” And that’s when I was like, oh my gosh. I started to experience this pain, the sadness, but joy at the same time. And I started to feel myself, whatever broke, whatever thing that literally shattered at some point in my life, it started to start to come back together, you know?

    Michele Murphy:

    But not in a way that I was broken and now I’m fixed. I started to be able to how to incorporate it, you know what I mean? It started to come into this space of, it wasn’t shame that I was running from, it was what I started to share. And me and my mom, before this point, we were in a good space, but I was really broken. I was always a little bit of a mess and then I realized I started to have, and we were okay. When I first got sober we would do okay, but she started this whole other family and I always felt on the outside. I’ve never been connected to my stepdad. Then moving forward, when I was in New Jersey, I really needed her.

    Michele Murphy:

    I begged her to put me in treatment. We were really close at the time, but I was super dark and toxic. And then I started to realize I started to interact with my mom. The more I got in my body and started to fuse these things back together, I was like, I really believe every experience that you’ve had puts you in a position to be able to experience it so you can heal. So the relationship with the last man, the New Jersey person, when I would start to talk to my mom, it started to create that same sensation. And I was like, this is familiar, this is familiar. I felt that with him and I cannot go down this road. I can’t go down this care taking, feeling responsible, not considered. It felt very similar. And then I was like, oh my God, I needed to experience him so I can have the strength to go through this with her.

    Michele Murphy:

    So, you know what I mean? And then in return, not do this with my daughter because when I saw him hug her and not let go, I was like, that was me at three. Do you know what I mean? And my mom didn’t leave. She kept chasing and I was like, “I can’t do this. I have to consider her.” And I’m a single mom. My worst fears came true. My worst fears came true and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I was a single mom, I was broke, I was teaching first grade, I was crying in yoga classes constantly. I’m in therapy with two different therapists trying to help me, and I was really resentful at therapy because my mom was a therapist and I started to feel those sensations with my mom. And she once again, oversteps the boundaries. She does a little bit of the, “Who you talking to?”

    Michele Murphy:

    And I was like, no shut it down, you know what I mean? And it’s been really painful, but I’ve had to set up boundaries. We don’t talk regularly. I did go over there for Christmas, but I have so much anxiety and I feel so much pressure around that relationship. Until I can show up consistently who I am, I can’t participate in the way that she wants me to. I feel sad about that, but I have to honor what I know is true. And for me right now, I’m still not in the place that I’m capable of engaging in intensity. She’s really intense. And so I’m really intense in a lot of ways and it comes out differently. And so I had to put up boundaries and I cut her off for time periods and it’s been really painful for her and it’s been painful for me that I’ve caused that.

    Michele Murphy:

    But what I learned early on in recovery wasn’t working. You know what I mean? You don’t keep showing up for something that isn’t serving you and you don’t just be of service and just constantly try to find your part. It worked for a time period and Coda was all about, I experienced this form of shame and oftentimes you take things on. So what happens is, when I started to do the work with Nicole, I started to give people back. So what happens is in codependency, you take everything on. So then you suffer other people’s consequences because you’re carrying it. So in the work and codependency, you emotionally and mentally and spiritually, an inventory is giving people back their stuff that doesn’t belong to you. Not going and owning something that has nothing to do with you. It’s finding like how can you move forward and who do you need to give back their own stuff.

    Michele Murphy:

    I carried a lot of weight for moving around for my stepdad not having a relationship with me, for my dad not having and my mom’s, “Oh, you need to go to counseling about your dad.” And I’m like, “I feel like you need to go to counseling about my dad.” That’s what I finally told her six months ago. I was like, “You have the relationship with him. I think you need to go back and heal that because I’m doing this over here, right now.” And so I started to put these pieces back into place through working through the steps in codependency, but also in conjunction with, I had a therapist for a while after my divorce. I continue to see her and then I also continue to see Mary Richardson and I started to connect. My whole theme as a child, I was not considered, do you know what I mean?

    Michele Murphy:

    So I find these relationships where I’m not considered and I continually do those over and over and over. Now, early on when I got sober, I was definitely considered. My ex in-laws have really considered me a lot. There was points with my ex husband. I never fully move through it until this time period when the New Jersey situation happened and I came back. I’m so grateful. I learned so much about myself. I learned so much about relationships. I learned so much about being a mother, being present, being available, being unavailable. I learned how to move through things not gracefully. And that being okay, I learned how to ask for help in a different way. Because I always had this learned helplessness thing. And slowly I started to empower myself.

    Michele Murphy:

    And through this journey of working in co-dependence anonymous and working with Mary and Nicole, I started to find this alive-ness. I went to yoga teacher training, everybody in 12 step groups, they, I won this photo contest for this pose. I posted this pose and I won this photo, but everybody in recovery voted for me and they shared it and they sent it out on email threads and I won across the world. And I got this yoga teacher training in Thailand and I went to Thailand for two months. And then after that experience I opened up a yoga studio, and so I own my own yoga studio and I’m still teaching elementary school. I don’t know exactly when it happened, but I do know that at some point I really started to enjoy being with myself.

    Michele Murphy:

    At some point I was like, “I really like my relationship with myself. I really liked spending time with myself.” I was going hiking every day by myself. I’m doing yoga every day by myself. I’m doing a lot of things that ground me, that in the past I was so focused on meeting other people’s needs that I didn’t even explore these options. And then I go to Thailand and I fall in love with Thailand and I realize I want my daughter to experience these things. I want her to be brave. She saw me cry a lot.

    Michele Murphy:

    And then I want her to see how you can be resilient and pick yourself back up and be a better version of yourself. And so we started, in the summers we would pick a continent and since I taught elementary school, I Ubered and I was teaching yoga and I was working front desk at a yoga studio and I was teaching elementary school and then I would save all this money and then in the summers we’d pick a continent and just go for two months and backpack it and she’s been all over Europe.

    Michele Murphy:

    People in recovery. We stayed at people’s homes in recovery that we’ve known all across the world from places like ICYPAA from those conferences. My ex father-in-law was a circuit speaker, so we went all over Europe and he would speak at conferences all over. So when I was married we would do those things, but I still have those connections and those relationships. So we would go, me and her just backpacked through Europe and she’s been all through Asia. I mean she’s swam with sharks and Thailand. She’s bathed elephants in Chiang Mai. I mean, she’s ran on the great wall of China. She’s been to South America, Panama. And I started realizing I just want to experience, I want to spend quality time with her and I want to experience life with her.

    Michele Murphy:

    I want her to be considered. Even some of the times she was getting really tired and we would do, in Barcelona we would alternate. We do fun city park. Then museum, then fun city park. And then we got to Paris and she was bored. So we took the train and we went to Disneyland, Paris and we’ve done the most amazing things. Not because I have any money because it was really important for me to take the time and just spend it with her. I wanted her to know that she was considered and super important and I wanted to spend time with her and I wanted to share with her because what I was realizing was that, I love traveling and I started doing all this stuff by myself.

    Michele Murphy:

    I would go to Argentina for a week or show up in Singapore for a week or do all these things. And then I was like, I want her with me. Becuse I never felt a part of with my mom. And so my daughter has been all over the world. I mean she found a puppy in Thailand. I always talk about this because it was so cute. She found a puppy in Thailand and he wouldn’t leave us alone for two months. We were on this tiny Island and he would follow us everywhere to the pool and when we’d ride away on our motorcycle the guard gate would have to grab him. And she was just like, “Can we bring him home?” And I was like, “Let’s try.”

    Michele Murphy:

    And I say this because she loves this dog. You should see them. They are the closest thing to soulmates. And she’s in love with this dog. I remember, she’s going to think about him every day for the rest of her life if we don’t bring him home. And I know that sounds like, I don’t know why I’m crying over this. So we brought him home. I found a rescue. I don’t know how I did it, but I found this rescue and he’s been here three years now, two and a half, and he’s the best dog I’ve ever had in my life. He’s the best. He’s obsessed with her. They’re still soulmates.

    Michele Murphy:

    And as a result of that moment, now she was on the news a few months ago because every few months she hosts these huge lemonade stands and we get everybody in recovery to come out and we get the news teams to come out because my ex father-in-law sponsors some people that works for the new stations and the yoga studio participates that I own and this big community comes out and she raises money for the rescue that does all this work in Thailand. Do you know what I mean?

    Michele Murphy:

    And so I’ve been able to nurture, not because I’m this great mom because I’ve experienced pain, right? These things within her, it’s allowed me to be present enough with my own pain to help maybe get her to a place of using that momentum as self esteem instead of stifling it. And it’s only because I’ve been able to be in these scenarios and put myself in these scenarios and it’s been such a gift to see her take some of this stuff and run with it on her own. It’s been great. And it was for us, five years, I was alone just alone for five years. And Nicole would always be like, “Oh, what are you going to get in a relationship? What are you going to date someone?” I’ve never done a dating app.

    Michele Murphy:

    I got in a relationship before cell phones, honestly, with my ex husband. So then when I came back in the dating scene, people were like, Tinder. I was like, I don’t even know what that is. I don’t know how to operate in this world. And dating to me was so, I’m good in a relationship after six months, but the whole dating process is absolutely terrible for me. I don’t wish it on anybody.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    It’s brutal.

    Michele Murphy:

    It’s absolutely horrible. And so I was single for about five years. And in this time period, I’m doing all this stuff. I’m traveling, I’m all over the place and I start experiencing life, these things that I’m scared of. And so one of the things when I was in this enthusiastic sobriety group, they’re like, “Don’t go to concerts. You’re going to get high if you go to them. They’re so dangerous and you’re definitely going to relapse.”

    Michele Murphy:

    So we couldn’t go to concerts, there’s a lot of things like that we couldn’t do, very fear based. And so for a long time I was like, oh my God, I can’t go to concerts. I’m so scared I’m going to get drunk. So anyways, in this time period when I’m figuring myself out, I start going to Coachella. I have a really good friend of mine and she calls me and she’s like, “We have to go.” So we go to Coachella and we’re both a mess. My ex husband was there, I saw him bouncing around, and I’m just like, this is too much, this is too much.

    Michele Murphy:

    Her ex boyfriend was there and we’re like, this is too much. And I was like, I think they have meetings here, let’s go to a meeting. So we go to the meeting and there’s there’s these two guys there and they’re from California and they’re super kind and they’re like, “Hey, are you guys here by yourselves?” And I was like, “Yeah, are you?” And they were like, “Yeah.” And they were from California and they’re in our same age group. And, ironically I think the LA Times was, they were sitting in the meeting that we were in and they did an article for sober Chella, the sober meetings. So our quotes are in this newspaper article-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Oh, how funny.

    Michele Murphy:

    [crosstalk 01:51:30] in the meeting. They named us Linda and Janet or something. So then the rest of the weekend we hang out with these two guys, but we’re just friends. There’s no, there’s nothing. And then me and one of the guys, we just always, actually I’m friends with both of them still. But me and one of the guys, we always stayed in contact. We had very similar interests but he had, I think he had a year and a half at the time and I had 15 years. So in my head I’m like, that’s definitely a newcomer. This is definitely a red flag. So we always remained friends. And then finally, a year, when was that? May of 2018 and I ended up going out to California and asking him, “Hey, do you want to hang out? Yada, yada, yada, can I stay with you?” So I ended up staying with him and I mean we’ve spent every other weekend together since and it’s really hard to explain this part because I was so never going to be in a relationship ever again.

    Michele Murphy:

    I was so at peace with me. I wasn’t looking for anybody. I literally was like, “Hey, I just want to go to California for Memorial Day.” And I can hang out with him. He’ll go hiking and go to the beach maybe, that will be fun. I wasn’t looking for anything and that was not even my intention. It was just that we were going to go to Coachella again or Life is Beautiful or something. We had met up every year at these events and nothing had ever happened. There was nothing, there wasn’t even emotional or sexual intensity or anything like that. It was really normal conversations and it’s so hard to explain because there’s really nothing to say. Do you know what I mean?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, it happened so organically.

    Michele Murphy:

    It happened organically, but not only that is I have no frame of reference. Usually I know how to be, right?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Right.

    Michele Murphy:

    I know this is familiar, I can experience this and I know how to act. This is normal. You’re abandoning me or you’re pressuring me. And the second I met him, nothing felt familiar and because I had no point of reference, I just had to be myself. Right?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Right.

    Michele Murphy:

    I just had to be myself and I was like, “I’m really weird and I have done some really bizarre things in my recovery and here’s all my baggage.” Not like that. And it was appropriate because I had diarrhea of the mouth too. So I started to learn, how much do I really want him to know? When do I pull back? Where do I stop and then him begin? And then vice versa?

    Michele Murphy:

    And do I need to tell him everything in the first three months? Or can some things wait later, you know what I mean?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I do.I didn’t do it, but I know what you mean.

    Michele Murphy:

    Is this real or is this past trauma and how do I decipher it? And it was so beautiful because it was a long distance relationship for a long time and we went every other weekend back and forth. It was so amazing because what I needed was I needed go there, spend time with him, and then I needed to come home and I needed to process, right? To not [crosstalk 00:18:40]. Yeah. Because if he was like, “Hey, you want to hang out tonight, you want to hang out tonight?” And then I’m like [crosstalk 00:18:45].

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Totally.

    Michele Murphy:

    And I’m idealizing it and I’m not going through the emotions. And he was super slow too. It was so authentic and we both genuinely liked hanging out with each other. We genuinely love to be around each other and every day, it’s hard to explain. So anyways, we’re engaged.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    What happened to [crosstalk 01:55:13].

    Michele Murphy:

    We were together for not even a year. We knew. We didn’t talk about it, but we knew when we knew. He met her daughter. My daughter adores him. And so let’s talk about rewriting the story. My stepdad did not want me [crosstalk 01:55:28]. He wouldn’t want me in his life. My fiance now, Joe, he has a house in New York and we went, I’m also born in New York and we were out at the Hamptons and we walked out on the beach. And it was totally ironic because I’m like, here I am in my birth place. The only place I consider home, and this guy has his house there, but I met him in California at Coachella, like what?

    Michele Murphy:

    And we’re walking on the beach and he proposes to me, right? And then he turns around and he proposes to my daughter and he gets her a necklace and she has this little Tiffany necklace and I just remember being like, it’s over. Do you know what I mean? The story is done. Whatever toxicity, I’ve rewritten it a little bit. I’m doing a little bit better than the past generations before me did. And, so that was this July. And he lives here. He moved here in January. He relocated out here. And in this process over the last, I mean he does dishes, he cooks dinner, but he wants to. It’s really bizarre. I actually have a partner and every day he’s like, “Babe I’m so proud of you.”

    Michele Murphy:

    But he genuinely means it. Anytime I communicate something, he knows how terrified I am to communicate. And he holds the space. And he said this, he was like, “Just always communicate with me.” He goes, “Even if it’s outlandish and doesn’t make any sense, I’m never going to make you question your reality. I’m never going to say it’s crazy. I have no desire to make you feel that way.” And you know what I realized? It’s not that, oh, he’s so great or anything like that. He is, but I’m mirroring the work that I did. I did a lot of work. I did a lot of work and I felt really, really deeply about what I never wanted to experience ever again.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah.

    Michele Murphy:

    And I’m mirroring that. I don’t have a point of reference, right? My system has no idea what’s happening, but I keep getting these reinforcements.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    But it will. It has or it will become the new normal and the new set point. And when that happens, it just, it elevates that standard to that next place.

    Michele Murphy:

    Yeah. And honestly through all the codependency work, I didn’t believe that that was possible.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah.

    Michele Murphy:

    I believed a lot of things was possible, but I did not believe that was. And it’s amazing. It’s not intense. There’s no roller coaster. There’s no rollercoaster. There’s no suspicion.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah. It’s a very different feeling.

    Michele Murphy:

    People used to always be like, you want to find a relationship that makes you want to be better. And I really truly feel like, oh my gosh, I really want to be a better version of myself, so therefore I can be more available and present to my partner, to my daughter too.

    Michele Murphy:

    And it started with my daughter. First to start with myself, then my daughter, and now I’m wanting to do that with somebody who wants to do that with me. It’s amazing. So we’re going to get married soon.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    That’s awesome.

    Michele Murphy:

    It’s exciting.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    If you or when you talk to people who are coming into sobriety, who are in those emotionally abusive, which is I think more confusing than the physically, emotionally abusive relationships in sobriety, where do you think people should go? What are some of the things, where do they start? How do they reach out?

    Michele Murphy:

    I think that they need to find somebody. There’s a couple of things, a therapist for sure. Therapists can really help navigate those type of relationships. Sometimes when they’re really, really early in sobriety, they just need to talk about it because sometimes it’s too much, too quick to remove all of it.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Right. That’s huge, yeah.

    Michele Murphy:

    Yeah. Because oftentimes, it’s founded in trauma. You’re in that relationship because, for me at least it felt familiar. So I’ve experienced that before. And to pull off that bandaid, sometimes you just need to hold the space of the possibility that it’s okay to leave. When you’re ready, I am here.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah. Don’t push, just say, Hey listen, when you’re ready.”

    Michele Murphy:

    There was times where Nicole really thought I was going back. She never shamed me and she never not held this space. She was like, “Okay, if we got to do this, we got to do this. Or go do it and then call me back.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Find your people. I mean, I think that’s the overarching story, which is find your people, find the people who get it and keep coming until whatever it is, therapy, church, whatever you find, keep going until you find the person who has your story because they’re out there and they can help you do what the winners do and you’ll get what the winners get.

    Michele Murphy:

    Yeah. And I think you have to really keep seeking because that’s the common theme for also with my recovery is I never stopped. I never stopped. I was like, this can’t be it. This can’t be good enough because this is not enjoyable. Because I feel things so deeply, I either need to keep doing it or I need to get out immediately.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Right.

    Michele Murphy:

    Which it’s also, it’s a blessing and a curse. So I think that they have to find somebody that relates and that can hold their hand or at least carry them until they’re ready.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Well, I think you’re an amazing, amazing woman with so much to give others and such an experience of being able to reshape the generational trauma and the patterns that come into play even when we don’t want them to. I think that’s such a great example of, I don’t want to become my mom. I don’t want to give my child my childhood. And then you see yourself doing it and how do you make those changes and coming out the other side. And really having to walk through the pain from start to finish, but coming out the other side, it’s really, you’re just really incredible. I’m so grateful that you were able to come here today and talk to us.

    Michele Murphy:

    Yeah, I’m really grateful. I mean the experience, just being able to share and really come out with a little bit of clarity. It’s different when you try to go to a meeting and share about it. It’s hard to put into words what’s transpired. I work with people in recovery. Again, I don’t teach elementary school anymore. That wasn’t a really, I was able to come because I worked in the treatment world and then I was able to come back into treatment in a completely different way now, in a way that nurtures the work that I’ve done and what I truly in and that took a long road to get there.

    Michele Murphy:

    And I kept working for these people and they were just not aligning with my spirit at all. And so I’ve been able to come into the treatment industry in a completely different way, which has been such a blessing. Such a blessing.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    That’s amazing. Yeah. That comes with all its own complications and definitions of treatment and it’s like anything else. When humans are involved, things get messy.

    Michele Murphy:

    Yeah. And I’ve had to apply a lot of all the codependency work to my job because all the people that I employ are all in recovery and I have to set up boundaries and there’s things there. All the people that we work with are all newly sober and that comes with a whole line of issues and boundaries and working with the families. And it’s been such a learning process to be able to put everything that I learned in the relationship that I’ve formed with myself. It has changed every area of my life across the board.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    That’s amazing. Oh, I am grateful to have you and thank you so much for coming on.

    Michele Murphy:

    Thank you for having me.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I will definitely check in for an update on the wedding and all that. So thanks again.

    Michele Murphy:

    Thank you.

    Speaker 2:

    This podcast is sponsored by Lion Rock Recovery. Lion Rock provides online substance abuse counseling where clients can get help from the privacy of their own home. They’re accredited by the joint commission and sessions are private, affordable, and user-friendly. Call their free helpline at 800-258-6550 or visit www.lionrockrecovery.com for more information.

    PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [02:04:39]