#1 – Ashley Loeb Blassingame

Get to Know Your Host, Ashley Loeb Blassingame

Welcome to the Courage to Change – A Recovery Podcast! For our inaugural episode, we have our host, Ashley Loeb-Blassingame, in the hotseat as our producer interviews her. We figured it would be fun for you to get to know her before we kick off all the amazing guests we have planned. Ashley got sober in January of 2006 and just celebrated 13 years of recovery. She graduated from UCLA in sobriety. She is the director of HealthTech Women OC, the co-founder of Lionrock Recovery, she is happily married to a sober husband, and is a sober mom of 2-year-old twin boys. And you won’t want to miss a second of this episode because Ashley’s story will have you on the edge of your seat!

Ashley’s experience with substance abuse started from a very young age, and took her to the brink of death. From drinking in her closet at age 7, to using cocaine in middle school, to being kidnapped, to hiding vodka in her water bottle at her first NA meeting, to going through multiple treatment centers and almost dying in an overdose…she is living proof that recovery is possible for anyone, no matter how bad their situation is. Tune in to listen to her journey from the depths of addiction to the life of sobriety and recovery that she enjoys today.

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Episode Notes

0:00 – Introduction

3:31 – Diving into Ashley’s story

4:02 – The beginning: “I was born with the disease of ‘more’”

10:26 – Cocaine in middle school

12:22 – High school: “a disaster waiting to happen”

18:17 – The Alternative school: “Pulling myself out of mainstream, more and more”

19:37 – The older guy, and being introduced to heroin at 15 years old

22:54 – The “exponential downward spiral”

24:28 – Crossing the invisible line

27:30 – “I have locks on my doors to keep people like you out”

36:54 – Broken resolutions, being kidnapped, and getting kicked out of alternative school

41:36 – The private lockdown facility & the overdose

47:56 – Treatment centers & struggling to stay sober: “Wherever you go, there you are.”

50:40 – The first real turning point: “I had rendered myself incapable of giving myself more substances”

56:25 – Getting sober & starting the journey into recovery

1:00:02 – Sleeping with water bottles filled with vodka hiding in the sheets

1:07:08 – How will I ever have fun again?

1:10:00 – Being a sober mom: “Everything you put in front of your recovery you will lose.”

1:14:11 – Wisdom for listeners who are struggling

1:18:04 – Sponsor: Lionrock Recovery | http://www.lionrockrecovery.com

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Episode Transcript

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Hello beautiful people. Welcome to The Courage to Change: A Recovery Podcast. I am your host Ashley Loeb Blassingame. Today, I will be in the hot seat with my producer Christiana interviewing me. We figured it would be fun for you to get to know me before we kick off all the amazing guests we have planned. All right, episode one, let’s do this.

Christiana Kimmich:

Welcome to The Courage to Change: A Recovery Podcast. My name is Christiana and I’m one of the producers of this podcast. I get so inspired by listening to podcasts. I love listening to stories about people who have overcome very difficult times, great adversity, and can also give that inspiration to others through their story of how they’ve overcome. So we wanted to create a podcast that did the exact same thing. That was full of stories of courage and inspiration and where we could connect with people on a human level.

Christiana Kimmich:

And so when finding a host for this podcast, we wanted to find someone who had that ability as well, someone who’s really real, who can connect on a human level, who can tell a really good story, but also has that specific story of how they’ve overcome deep trauma. Because we’re starting to find that there’s a lot of people who have trauma and that they’ve experienced whether it’s in their adult life, if it goes back to their childhood, and it’s really real. And we really have to deal with the stuff that’s in front of us. So why not find a host whose able to do that and also bring some entertainment and give us a good laugh at the same time.

Christiana Kimmich:

So I’m so pleased to introduce our host, Ashley Loeb Blassingame. Ashley got sober in January of 2006. So she’s celebrating 13 years or just celebrated 13 years of recovery this year, in January. Congratulations.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Thank you.

Christiana Kimmich:

She graduated from UCLA in sobriety. She’s the Director of Healthtech Women OC, the Co-Founder of Lionrock Recovery, and is also happily married to a sober husband, and she’s a sober mom of two year old twin boys. So please help me welcome Ashley Loeb Blassingame to the podcast.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Awesome. Thank you. Thanks for having me. This is so exciting and to kind of flip the script that we’re planning on having with me as the host.

Christiana Kimmich:

Actually, quick question for you before we get started and jump into your story. What is the thing that you’re the most excited about being the host of this podcast?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Oh, gosh, I have to distill it down to one? Okay. So if I had to pick, because I’m excited about a lot of things, I’m really excited about this podcast because I get to pull stories out of people that show the amazing courage that they have had overcoming adversity. The fun, the joy, the pain, all of it, it’s just so real. And we get to talk about it here and show people that you can change if you want to change. That there is recovery, whether that’s for substance abuse, or anything, other mental illness, whatever it is, and we get to talk about it here. And I get to lead in that discussion. So I’m really grateful for that opportunity.

Christiana Kimmich:

Okay. So let’s dive into your story.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Okay.

Christiana Kimmich:

You’ve been through a lot, and you’ve come out of the other side. I know you share your story on a regular basis to help others and see that they can recover too. As our host, I really want listeners to have that baseline of exactly where you came from and what you’ve overcome. Can you give us a little intro into your early life? So for instance, where were you born? Did you grow up in an alcoholic home? Were there substance abusers around you? Would love to just start from there?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Sure. Okay, so I was born in Providence, Rhode Island. My family, they are all New Englanders and go paths. And I was born to a really loving good family. I had all the material things that I needed. And my parents were not heavy drinkers. I did not grow up around substance abuse in its purest form. I think there were a lot of people who had addiction, substance abuse traits, the kind of isms that we talked about. But there was not a lot of usage or heavy drinking that I grew up around.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And so then we were in New England and my dad decided to leave Finance and move us to Northern California, the Bay Area so that he could work in video games actually, moved and he got a job at Sega. And so, I think, I was like six and a half or seven when we moved to Northern California from Boston. And I had some early trauma in Boston, but I really didn’t realize much about that until later. I truly believe that I was born an alcoholic. I have the disease of more. I always wanted to feel differently than I felt. I wanted to be anyone else, anywhere else doing something else. And I never really fit in anywhere. Not at least until I got sober.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

We moved to Northern California. And I was put into Catholic school and was really great school, but I showed up there with curly hair and a Boston accent and not being Catholic. My dad is a Jewish New Yorker and my mom is Protestant from Rhode Island and the culture I just did not fit in. I was taught to ask a lot of questions and to have strong opinions and that was really not welcomed where I was at the time. And it was pretty painful experience for me where the alcoholism … And I want to just preface this and say that I use the term alcoholism, but that encompasses all substances for me. It’s all the same, anything that is affecting me from the neck up. So yeah, that was the start is I had this difficult transition very young and not fitting in. And that’s when we started to see my coping skills come out.

Christiana Kimmich:

Okay. So that sounds like a really huge transition for such a young kid?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yeah.

Christiana Kimmich:

But you’re saying that that wasn’t the cause of your alcoholism, which is really interesting. And it speaks to the saying that says, “Genetics load the gun and environment pulls the trigger.”

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Exactly.

Christiana Kimmich:

So when did you actually pick up that first drink?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Okay. So I had my first drink at seven years old. I stole a beer from my parents fridge and drink it in my closet. Took me a week to finish. At the time we were living … We’d just moved to Northern California and we were living in Foster City in an apartment rental while our house was getting ready. And I think it was a really painful transition. And I was looking for something to feel better, which is a common thread in my story. And this was something I knew I wasn’t supposed to do, and therefore it had attraction to me.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And I didn’t drink ongoing at that age, that was just my first drink, I remember it very vividly. I don’t remember getting drunk, or I don’t remember the change, but obviously, there was something attractive to me. And over the years, I have memories of stealing cough syrup and drinking that as a kid, kind of elementary school era. And I think I was just always seeking something to feel differently than I felt.

Christiana Kimmich:

Okay. So let me clarify this. You had your first drink at seven, and you drink it in the closet?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

That’s right.

Christiana Kimmich:

So you were literally a closet drinker?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

That’s right. I was actually a closet drinker and as we get into my story later on, I would turn out to really enjoy drinking in the closet, in general, by myself.

Christiana Kimmich:

Oh, my goodness.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yes, yeah.

Christiana Kimmich:

Okay. So going back to what you said, you said that you had this void. And there was like a pain right there. And so you wanted to fill that void and you were trying to make that void go away. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? And were you ever able to fill that, as a child?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yeah, so I believe I was born with a void. In different recovery communities, some people say, “God shaped hole,” and we have different groups of recovery, folk have different ideas around this. I’m just going to go with a void. I believe I was born with this void, and it’s a bottomless pit, never able to fill that void. And I tried to fill it with everything I could possibly think of, whether that was beer in the closet, cough syrup, sugar, boys, illicit drugs, whatever it was.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And that void is kind of the underlying basis of my story of getting sober and figuring out how to feed that piece of me. And after the elementary school kind of secret experimentation, I hit puberty very young, to add insult to injury and I started to feed that piece of me with male attention. And I began smoking and drinking more, and this is kind of in the sixth to seventh grade range and it escalated. There was more trouble at school. I always noticed the adults could feel that I was out of place or it were socially advancing at a rate that was not comfortable for anybody, including my own family. And that just continued.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And then in middle school and probably about eighth grade, I started using cocaine with some friends who did not go to my Catholic school, and that sped things up exponentially.

Christiana Kimmich:

Did your parents have any clue that you were doing any of this stuff?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Great question. So they knew something was up, but they definitely didn’t know the extent. There was a lot of sneaking around and lying, but I was always getting good grades. And I don’t know who was more focused on this, me or them. At the time, I thought that the pressure came from them, but I actually, in retrospect think that it came from me. I was a perfectionist and I put a lot of pressure on myself.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And so that, with the cocaine, it … Cocaine is the drug of more. I think the high is the feeling of wanting more that is, in and of itself, the high of never being satisfied. And so that was the drug that really spoke to me. And we call it, our drug of choice. And your drug of choice is just whatever fits with your particular chemical imbalance or balances. And that for me, even though that wasn’t the thing that brought me to my knees to hit my bottom, it was the drug that took me to the next level where things escalated and removed me from experimental stage to real abuse stage of my use.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And I was definitely doing that with people who were not using it as a party drug or a social activity. It was a very isolating experience and I ended up using alone often and using it to function.

Christiana Kimmich:

All right. So this takes us to eighth grade. What happened with the cocaine usage when you got to high school because using cocaine in Middle School, I mean that’s … You’ll hear sometimes middle schoolers experimenting with drinking. I know some people will experiment with weed. You’re not happy about it, but you hear that sometimes. Cocaine is pretty heavy to be experimenting with in middle school. So when you got to high school, where did you go from there?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yeah, it was … You look back, and it’s hindsight it’s 2020. But it was a disaster waiting to happen and that is what happened. I got to high school, and I immediately found the people who use like I did, and we partied. When I say party, that’s what we thought it was. But really it was using together because I don’t think that the other people that I went to school with who did party in high school, they didn’t end up where I did. So we thought it was partying, but really, it was incredibly heavy abuse.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

I experimented with methamphetamine. And it’s so funny when I share … I always heard about peer pressure, the story about peer pressure, and I saw it in the DARE Campaign and people would talk about, “Oh, you got to resist peer pressure,” I’d see this probably mostly in the media. I have yet to experience peer pressure. I looked for it high and low. I was so motivated to hunt down these drugs. I didn’t know people who sold them, and I would go and ask around and find them. I once walked, like … oh, gosh, probably a mile and a half to go to some drug dealers house. I was so many motivated again to fill that void. And there was no one standing by me telling me that I should try something. It was motivated by me.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

So I got to high schoo l and started increasing this usage, experimenting with other drugs. And I think that I was able to keep it together on the outside for a little while. Mostly freshman year, but it did start to really go downhill from there.

Christiana Kimmich:

So, I want to go back real quickly. It’s really interesting that you say that you weren’t under any influence from peer pressure.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Not that I of.

Christiana Kimmich:

Not that I know of. Because then, I remember DARE Campaigns, whenever I was in eighth grade and, “Dare to say no to drugs. Don’t let people influence you.” And I know I experienced peer pressure, which we’re not going into my story, but it’s such a common thing to experience peer pressure.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Right. Totally.

Christiana Kimmich:

So it’s interesting that you say that you were so motivated that, and then you gave the example of walking a mile and a half to get drugs.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Oh, yeah. Really motivated.

Christiana Kimmich:

No one was with you, telling you, asking you?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

No, I didn’t know where to find this stuff.

Christiana Kimmich:

Wow.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

It was like, “Oh, I want to try it,” I think with the meth, I heard that there was a drug that could make you skinny. And so I was like, “Well, I’m going to find that.” And so I started asking around and people who, “You look like you might do drugs. Do you know. Where do I,” I might probably offended some people in that process. But I’ve always been a very ambitious, motivated person. And what you find, what I have found is that you take whatever you had before and the whatever got you to the unmanaged ability and the powerlessness that you found in your disease of addiction and you bring that with you.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame

When you get sober you have that too. And so people will say, “If you just took all the ambition that you have using and put it to something good you’d accomplished so much, Ashley.” And I was very motivated user. I was very ambitious. I was willing to work hard to find things. It was an interesting looking back on it and looking back on hearing other people’s stories of being pressured into things. I don’t relate to that.

Christiana Kimmich:

Well, so when did it become clear to everyone that there was a problem? So when you were no longer able to hide behind, getting good grades, playing on all the sports teams, kind of keeping up this persona where people might not have thought that there was as deep of an issue as there was?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yeah. So yeah, that was my veil. I played all sports that were offered, literally, which, I think it was seven or eight. And I got really good grades. I had a position in student government and I made it pretty on the outside so that people would theoretically leave me alone.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And after eighth grade, the school that everybody was going to out of eighth grade in my class, from Catholic school, they were going to the high school and they made you do, almost like a, courtesy apply. And in my courtesy apply, I wrote some explicit words. After my parents reviewed the application, I went back and wrote some explicit words so that I wouldn’t get into the school, because I wanted to go to the local public school with my other friends. And so ultimately, I didn’t get into that school and I did end up at the local public school. And so this was like it was gradual, and then it was exponential.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

So there was this downhill like, “Okay, I don’t want to go to school with these other people. I want to go to school with my friends who are smoking weed and doing drugs and partying,” and those happen to be at this other … I was moving in that direction, and it could be felt. And at the end of eighth grade, that was really when my parents knew there was a problem, but they really didn’t know how deep the problem was. I don’t think that they saw … I think they still thought they could turn it around with parenting.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And then I started to … At one point my parents, my freshman year … I’m not sure why or how this came about, but for my sophomore year, I got moved to an alternative school, which was the coolest thing ever. It’s this school for kids who can’t make it in mainstream. And it’s typically they have public and private and I went to a private one. And they start class at 9 a.m., they’re out at three, you have smoke breaks. It’s like for delinquent kids and it was awesome. It was so much fun. I loved it.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And I don’t think everybody loved that I was going there. So I think that was an indication like, “Okay, if things aren’t going well. You’re going to a special school.” I did very well at this special school, I’ll have you know. As my parents sort of when we talk about it, like pulling myself out of mainstream, just slowly, just more and more and more not fitting into peer groups, not fitting into what people are doing and not in a good way. Not in like an excessive achiever way, just pulling myself out.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

When I went to this school in Mid-Pen, which I think they’ve made it not an alternative school now. So if you know of it, it used to be. When I went to Mid-Pen, I saw it as an … It just was another opportunity for me to continue use. I met new people who were using, and I’d started dating a guy. I dated a lot of guys that were older than I am, and I was. This is a very common story. This is a very stereotypical story for young women and girls who are using, struggle with addiction, is that we find this older male figure in the process.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

So I did and my boyfriend, he was 14 years my senior and we used a lot together, a lot of cocaine. So when we started dating, I didn’t know that he was a heroin addict. And I had never seen heroin, I’d never come in contact with heroin. But we had been dating a little while and I come to find out that he is, indeed, a heroin addict and has been for a long time.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And my first response to this is to fix him, which it says a lot about me and my whole life in general, but that’s neither here nor there. So my first I was like, “Okay, you can’t do this. You have a problem.” I’m doing cocaine probably four or five, six times a day. I do it when I get up, I do it before I go to bed. I mean, I am heavily addicted at this point. And I’m talking sitting him down and saying, “You have a problem. We have to deal with this.”

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And we were an interesting pair, aside from all the obvious things, with age and what have you. But, he actually took me to my first Narcotics Anonymous meeting because he felt that my cocaine problem was a very serious problem. And so my first Narcotics Anonymous meeting, I went and I drank a water bottle of vodka in it because it wasn’t Alcoholics Anonymous, it was Narcotics Anonymous. I didn’t totally understand what was going on.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And so this just the crazy insanity. This is the person who I’m using with, who I’m seeing, all these complications, and we’re trying to fix each other because we both think that the other has a drug problem. So I’m talking to him about his heroin problem and how terrible that is. And over time, I get curious. And again, this isn’t peer pressure. The use is not peer pressuring me to use with him. But I was curious.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Eventually, I wanted to try and so he put a needle in my arm for the first time I was 15 years old. And I overdosed that first time and I vomited. I was a terrible experience. This experiment was just so unpleasant. I could not, for the life of me, figure out why anyone would do this horrible drug. Oh my God, you just throw up, you’re itchy, you pass out, you vomit. Oh my gosh, it’s just terrible. Why would anyone do this? I mean, really, that was my reaction to my first experience with this.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And it was also really scary. My little sister was there. She was involved in a lot of my story. And I just said, “I’ll never do that again.” And of course, several months later, the curiosity came back. And I’m always looking for new ways to fill that void. Throughout all of this. There’s always looking for new ways to fill that void. And three months go by as I’m getting more and more addicted to the cocaine, though the effects of the cocaine that, this is more drug, I call it, they’re starting to wear off. They’re starting to work. The cocaine starting not to work for me anymore.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

I can do it and go to sleep. I do a line before I go to sleep, I do a line when I wake up, it’s not working. And we talked about this a lot in recovery. The drugs were the solution to the problem. The drugs and the alcohol are the solution to the problem, but then they become the problem. And this is this invisible line you cross and I crossed it pretty young, but I did cross it and the cocaine was now no longer making me feel different. It was just part of what I did.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

So the curiosity about the heroin came back and I thought, “Okay, well, maybe I did too much. I want to try it again, but I want to do less. I want to do a little, make it so that I won’t overdose and maybe I’ll have a different experience,” and that was my downhill, exponential downhill spiral started there. From that point to my first treatment center, it was a rapid descent. And it started with the use of IV heroin.

Christiana Kimmich:

Wow. So IV heroin. So you were using needles?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yes.

Christiana Kimmich:

From a young age? I mean, you were 15, to clarify?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yes.

Christiana Kimmich:

I’m terrified of needles. Were you scared to use?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yeah. That’s actually the funny part. So people are like, “How did you do that? That’s so terrifying. I’m terrified of needles. I could never do that.” And I’ve totally heard that from people. I’ve heard that from people in recovery who never use needles, and say to me, “Oh, I could never do that. I’m scared of needles.” Well, I was terrified of needles for a very long time. My mom tells stories of trying to having me get shots and having me run around the doctor’s office and having it be a total scene and totally terrified. Absolutely terrified, more than my sisters.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

But when you are desperate to … And this is the level of desperation that really we feel, those of us who’ve experienced this disease, you are desperate, you move that line. We all have this line that we believe that we won’t cross, I would never do this, I would never do this, I would never do this, this line. And you don’t know who you are, who you become when that piece of your survival brain is activated. It’s a different, it is a piece of you that we, in this country, for the most part, many of us are not in touch with, this survival piece of you.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And that was the piece of me that I was operating on. And so when my survival was threatened, needles didn’t seem so bad because the feelings, the void that I had was worse. It was more painful than the thought of needles, which terrified me. And so I crossed that line.

Christiana Kimmich:

Wow, that’s really interesting that you said that because there’s that saying that says that, you’ll move forward or … Help me out with this thing because I’m totally going to mess it up but, you’ll change when the pain of staying the same …

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Is greater than the pain of change.

Christiana Kimmich:

Exactly. And that actually applied in a negative way.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Right, the pain of staying the same, of not using the needles was too big for me because the other things I was doing had stopped working. And this is the story of addiction, of alcoholism. This is the story, it stops working. I always talk to people about this like, you know that you’ve hit your bottom when you cannot live with it and you cannot live without it. That’s how you know. When you feel that, you are coming to the end, you are circling the drain. You cannot live with it and you cannot live without it. You can’t imagine in either direction. And it’s very, very painful. And that’s really where we get to that place of just being out of options.

Christiana Kimmich:

Thank you so much for saying that. That’s very eye opening. It’s something that I actually never thought about either in regards to coming to the end of yourself. So want to go back for a second. I’m so curious because you said this boyfriend of yours, he was 14 years your senior?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yeah.

Christiana Kimmich:

And you’re a 15-year-old child?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

I was.

Christiana Kimmich:

Okay. So the question that everybody want to know-

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Everybody … Yeah, I know it.

Christiana Kimmich:

What did your family think about this guy? Did you bring him around your-

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

I know. My poor parents, yeah. So, oh man, my parents are going to kill me for this being out there. But sorry, mom, dad. And this is the fear, right? Yes, so number one, my parents did know him. They knew him while I brought him around. I was very precautious, to put it nicely. I did not care what my parents thought about what I was doing. But at that point, I was not afraid of them. I went and found out legally they couldn’t lock me in or out of the house. I refused to be grounded. I understood that they only had as much power over me as I gave them.

Christiana Kimmich:

You found out legally?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yeah. Yeah, I went and found out legally, they could not lock me in or out of the house. So they couldn’t tell me … Like grounding was a joke. And some people say, “Well, your parents should have kicked, beat your ass,” or whatever these things. But there were violent altercations, and they were from me. And I was just hostile and you couldn’t take anything from me. That was all the normal things that parents do, “I’m going to take your phone, I’m going to blah, blah, blah.” You couldn’t take anything from me that I wasn’t willing to give up.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

There was a period of time where I preferred to be homeless than … And we told ourselves we were camping, but let’s be real, live in my parents home because there was nothing. I basically stripped myself down to this place of, “No one can take anything from me. I’m in charge,” because I was so afraid of being hurt and so much. There was so much pain and so much anger that was how I protected myself. I had all these survival mechanisms.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And we’ll touch on that. When I did get sober, I learned that these survival mechanisms were in place for a reason when I was a child, and I used them to protect myself, but when I got to past those stages, they stopped working for me as well. Kind of all the same things is, it all stopped working. At one point it worked and then it stopped and I did not adapt. That was the P like I could not adapt. And that was what took me all the way down. So yes, this boyfriend.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

So this boyfriend, he was … It sounds really dramatic, but I liken him to being a part of Charles Manson’s community where he convinced me of so many things. I would do anything for him. I crossed moral boundaries that I would have never crossed on my own. I believed everything he said. He just got into my soul. And I used to watch the Charles Manson things where it’s like this man controlled these women. It was like Stockholm Syndrome. They did things that … And the law ended up holding him accountable for.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And I can’t tell you how many things that happened, where he convinced me to do that or he was just incredibly physically abusive, incredibly verbally abusive, and then would again gave me love that I thought I would never get anywhere else. And it was a really, really toxic, sick, painful relationship that took me a very long time to unravel and get away from, fully get away from.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

So at the time, my parents were so afraid that I was going to die, that they actually let him live with us. So I was 15 and he lived in my room with us. And that was the only way I would come home. And my parents knew that if he lived in our house, that I would come home every night. And so, again, it was a survival mechanism. And, of course, you know, in treatment, there was a lot of questions around this, “Why would you do this?” And they didn’t know what else to do. They also had two other daughters. And there was so much fear he and I were very manipulative.

Christiana Kimmich:

Wow, Whenever you are dealing with someone who is in the throes of addiction, it’s these types of choices that are the most difficult. How do you go forward?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Totally.

Christiana Kimmich:

How are you … There’s no manual that says how to deal with this.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

There’s no manual.

Christiana Kimmich:

And how do we go forward and function in everyday life? And if we make the wrong decision, will we lose this person. Therefore, we’re going to push the limits of-

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Right, the lesser of two evils.

Christiana Kimmich:

Right.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Okay. So we either make a stand and she doesn’t come home, she’s a missing person, she’s out there. Or we go against all of our instincts and let him stay here. And we know she’s home at night.

Christiana Kimmich:

And we can actually sleep at night knowing that she’s here?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yeah, like we can know she’s in this house.

Christiana Kimmich:

And that’s the trade off?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Right. Because that was the level of control that was it. So yeah, that was a really crazy thing. And so one of the things that happened while I was with him, I had an ex boyfriend before him who his mother was a meth addict. And I ran away with her. Yes, that you heard that correct. I ran away with my ex boyfriend’s mother while still dating a different person. And so she and I ran away together. Like this was the kind of decision making stuff that I was doing. And part of the reason … I’ll tell you a couple stories, which are reasons why my parents felt so strongly about having me in the house.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

I ran away with her to Mexico, we didn’t make it to Mexico, but that was the goal. And I hated meth. I hated the way that it made me feel and me just awful, awful, awful. And when I ran out of coke while I was on this runaway binge with her, that’s when I started doing. I started doing the meth with her and, I look back and like I did drugs that made me feel terrible, and I did them over and over and over again because feeling terrible that way was better than feeling how I felt without any substances. That was just the level of depths of where I was.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And so she and I ran away. I have no idea what precipitated me coming home. I know I was the missing person. And my parents were looking for me, police were looking for me, and it was a big upset. And somehow someone dropped me off. I had no shoes on. It was three in the morning, and I’m approaching my parents house. And I see 300 people on the front lawn. And I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what these people are doing here. And so I’m terrified and I run shoeless around the back of the house. People are following me. They’re still there. They’re just staring at me. And I’m telling you, they were there. I saw the 300 people to this day, I’m telling you I saw 300 people.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And I go up to my sister’s door, it was a back door and I start pounding on the door and she comes to the door. And I’m like, “Let me in, let me in,” freaking out because there’s all these people standing behind me and I’m terrified and, “Let me into the house.” And she looks at me and then runs away. And what I didn’t know at the time, she was going to get my parents but my parents had told her not to open the door to just come get them if I came. And my dad, not long after that, he told me that he has locks on his doors to lock people like me out of his house, because I was so dangerous and untrustworthy. That I was the type of person that caused him to lock the doors at night.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And years and years later, I’ll remember when he presented me with a house key again, to his house. And it’s an emotional moment where I became a person that he didn’t lock the doors against intrusion. And that was where I was. And so that was my first detox. I was taken from the house at that point. I said goodbye to my meth induced 300 people hallucination, and they took me straight to the psych board. And I detox there, which was a really terrible experience, but where I was in my life.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And this was still 15. So 15 was a big year. And I got there and was like, “I am never doing this again. I don’t want to use anymore. I don’t want to drink anymore. I don’t want to do drugs. I’m done. I’m done. This is just killing me. It’s killing my family.” And so I had a sound resolve to change and I think it was a 72 hour hold, I got out a couple days later and linked back up with my boyfriend.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

He and I went to an Avril Lavigne concert. I could not, for the life of me, tell you why. I wasn’t an Avril Lavigne listener. I mean, just a bizarre, these things in my story are like, “How did that even come to be?” But that did happen in San Jose. And at the time, San Jose was not a hip, slick and cool place. It was a really downtown San Jose. It was a dangerous place. It was not certainly not a place for a 15 year old girl at night.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And we met these guys at this concert. They were just following us and talking to us. And when the concert ended, they followed us out. And we were all walking to the parking lot and I had to go to the bathroom. And so my boyfriend found a bar where I could go to the bathroom. So I went into the bar and these two guys followed us in there. And I went to the bathroom and one of the guys followed me into the bathroom and was talking to me and he was telling me that my boyfriend was going to leave and he was going to leave me. And just manipulation and the other guy was out, apparently, in the bar telling my boyfriend that I was hooking up with this guy in the bathroom.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

So my boyfriend got really upset. And he left the bar. And so I came out, and the two guys were like, “Yeah, he left you.” And again, 72 hours earlier, I had been in a psych hospital, had this meth detox, I had been in so much trouble, I had this resolve, I wasn’t going to drink, I was going to turn a new leaf. And in that moment, I had all those feelings. All those feelings came up. I didn’t have the tools to deal … I didn’t have the tools to be sober. I didn’t have the tools not to use drugs and alcohol. I had no idea how to deal with life at all. And so I did what alcoholics do and I would was handed a drink by one of these guys. I don’t know if something was in it or what the deal was. But I know that that’s all I remember.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

The next thing I remember is being helped into the back of a truck, the cab area behind the two seats. The type of pickup truck where there wasn’t a seat in the back and there’s that little space. And so I was put in that space. And I remember that and then I don’t remember anything else until I come to the next day and I don’t know how I knew that they were using meth, but that is something that I did know. I woke up the next day in a bed, in a house that I didn’t know and all my stuff was gone. No shoes, because apparently that in the closet or my signature moves. And I heard a woman upstairs scream, “Oh my god, she’s awake.”

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And I did not wait to find out what that meant. I got up, I found the nearest door I ran, I ran down the street, I ran down a major street and I ran as fast as I could for as far as I could until I got to a Safeway. And these poor people working at Safeway, oh my gosh, if you’re listening, I’m really sorry. I walk into the Safeway. And I’m like, “I don’t know where I am. I woke up in a house this morning. My name is Ashley, can you help me?” And I’m like, bam barefoot, and these poor people working they’re like, “Oh, my God, what’s happened,” I’m just traumatizing people I don’t even know.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And so I could only remember one phone number and it was a phone number of a girl I went to middle school with years earlier who literally, I hadn’t spoken to in years. And it was her personal landline. And I called her and I said, “Ali, this is Ashley. I know we haven’t talked in a long time. I woke up in Livermore and I don’t know where I am. And I don’t know how I got here. Can you please call my parents.” And I gave her the address. And I literally had to leave my parents … When I got on the phone with my parents, I was giving them the address of where I was like, what city trying to figure out asking other people, just really traumatic.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And then I got asked to leave school, from this alternative school. I had one of the highest GPAs in the school and I was asked to leave and it just kept spiraling from there.

Christiana Kimmich:

Actually, I’m on the edge of my seat hearing this even though I know that your story ends, because you’re sitting here, you’re alive today, in front of me, but you were kidnapped, held against your will, ran away. You’re two, three hours away from where you were.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yeah, it was really bad.

Christiana Kimmich:

I’m just so glad that you’re okay from just this myriad of experiences and I know it doesn’t even stop there. So I know that you had a really close call with an overdose. And this is after this situation.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yeah.

Christiana Kimmich:

Where your family was able, thank goodness, to get to you in time to keep you alive because as you know, I mean, unfortunately lost a lot of people to overdoses. And that’s very public now. People understand more about overdoses now.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Right, yeah.

Christiana Kimmich:

Can you tell me more about what happened there?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Right. So after the kidnapping, really just things spiraled out of control from there. Traumatic stories, the abuse in my relationship got worse. There was physical abuse, but honestly, the mental, verbal abuse was so much worse and I was just an absolute disaster. I started to lose my hair. I broke my foot. My boyfriend, at the time, he had a 1979 Volkswagen bus that we would sleep and we would go to these different shows and different festivals. And at one of them, I broke a bone in my foot. And I never went to the doctor, I was just crawling around and hopping around for, I think like three months. My foot was just a mess. I was so unwilling to ask for help.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And that was just a perfect example of like, “My foot’s broken, but I’m not going to treat it because, screw you. I’m not going to come ask you for help.” And it just went downhill from there. And eventually I had an encounter with law enforcement that prompted my parents to send me away to a private lockdown facility in Utah. And they have these different levels. At Level 5 is where they have locks on all the windows, all the doors, like there’s different levels that talk about the level of freedom that the people in the facility have, and I was in a level four.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

So I didn’t go to the bathroom by myself or if I did I had to count and leave the door open. I had three minutes to shower and brush my teeth. There was a light shined in my face when I was sleeping every 15 minutes. At a certain point, I wasn’t allowed to wear anything but scrubs and I wasn’t allowed to have shoes, because that was a run risk. So it was as a very intense, pretty awful experience, to be honest with you, but I think it kept me alive for that year.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

So I ended up there and then my parents started to see that something wasn’t right. I was not getting better. I was not doing well. And I had been there for about nine months. So at this point, I am almost 17 years old. And I come home … My parents pulled me from the program. And again, I’m thrown back into my life. Now, I have no friends in the area because I’ve been gone for a long time. I’ve been off the map and my parents have turned my bedroom into a sitting room because it was so painful just to like leave my bedroom the way that it was that it clear I was not going to come home. They’ve packed up my stuff. I was 17 years old and that was it. It was a physical like, “You do not belong here. You’re not coming back here.”

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

But I did come back there. So I stayed in this bedroom that used to be mine and I slept on this pull out couch and it was really terrible. And I don’t remember, I was home for several months and there were some really dramatic of crazy stories, events. And at the end of it I don’t remember getting heroin. I don’t remember getting needles. I don’t remember getting anything. I don’t even remember making the decision to do heroin again, but I had been drinking. I had come home and started drinking in my closet, obviously, preferred location and I was experimenting with, “Drinking like a normal person.” This was my idea of drinking like a normal person, wine in a closet.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And so I don’t know what happened, to tell you the truth, other than I woke up from an overdose and with the paramedics pounding on my chest, with Narcan in my arm. They’d cut my shirt off. So I was totally exposed and my family was screaming. And my grandmother had been performing CPR on me because my dad came in to get me for a doctor’s appointment, and I was blue, and still had a needle in my arm.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And to this day, I cannot tell you how that happened. I don’t know. I don’t remember any of the getting it. And that is just so terrifying to me. That’s more terrifying than the overdose. That the fact that I would relapse, go through that slow … Actually, if not slow, go through the rapid descent of the disease. And it’s so powerful that I would end up using my drug of choice probably loaded. I probably made the decision while I was loaded and not even know how I got there.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

People talk about, “Oh, I’m going to drink again, but I won’t use drugs.” And the truth is that if you do have this disease, you may not be in control of what you do while you’re under the influence. And that was the reality for me. So I had this overdose that was incredibly traumatic for my family and not that traumatic for me. Because I just woke up. I just woke up and to be honest, I was like, “Man, I’m just sentenced to another day of this life.” I’m, “Oh, God, I’m here again. Maybe it would have been over. Maybe that would have solved the problem.”

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And my middle sister at the time, was so angry with me that she actually wasn’t speaking to me, did not come to see me at the hospital. And I ended up in another psych ward and then I went to another treatment center. And the treatment center I went to, after the overdose, was this place in Arizona called GateHouse and it was an amazing, amazing experience.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

I was 17 and living in this community of young adults, learning how to be sober and I was taught how to be in a 12 step program, taught how to cook and clean and all these life skills that I had completely skipped because I had been using in my life everything had been so life and death that when I got to treatment for me, recovery has been about learning how to live like a normal adult. I had no life skills like real true life skills. Some of the things I did in sobriety, trying to get these life skills are just horrifically embarrassing and funny.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And so GateHouse was that place that I learned how to do that. But you know what, I didn’t stay sober there. I ran away and I got drunk again, because I got into a relationship and couldn’t handle the emotions of that. And so it just that cycle I. Wherever you go, there you are. And there I was in this situation where I really wanted to be different, and I wanted to get help and I used that coping mechanism again.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

I ended up at this wonderful treatment center called the Meadows after that to do work on more relationship work because that was the thing that looked like it was keeping me from getting sober. I learned the day in, the day out life skills, but I really hadn’t learned how to process the emotions and the pain that led me to be in a relationship like the one I had been in. Which I was still being drawn back to even in recovery and years away.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

So I went to that and I learned how to have self-esteem and I learned how to create self-esteem and do self-estimable acts, and I still didn’t stay sober. I went and lived at a halfway house and started working as a piercer at this tattoo company and started dating the lead tattoo artists who was 17 years my senior, and he’s actually a good dude and really wanted me to stay sober. He really cared about my sobriety much more than I did. And I did the test. There’s a saying in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous that says that, the great obsession of every alcoholic is that they can drink like a normal person.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And so I had come to terms with the fact that I had a very serious drug problem, but I was still fighting this alcoholism thing like, “Is the alcohol really the problem?” And so I started drinking, trying to drink like a normal person and eventually, I ended up one day getting some … Being in a horrific fight with this boyfriend. And I was living in Prescott, Arizona, and I got in my car, in my Jetta and I drove to a part of Phoenix that at the time was basically the skid row of Phoenix, a street called Van Buren.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And there was a trailer park there and I went around knocking on all the doors of the people in this trailer park and I’m sure that they were as confused and shocked about this whole thing as you are. And here I am just going around knocking on the doors. And I finally did find someone with heroin because that’s what I was asking for. But they only had used syringes. And it was a time of day where I was not going to be able to get syringes. I didn’t know the area, I felt like this was my only option. And I had that desperation of that void and those feelings and I could not deal with them.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

So I used the junkie folklore using Clorox and pumping through the syringes 10 times and said a little prayer and hoped it worked. And I also was trying not to overdose in this situation. And so I shot up probably about 25 times total in each arm small shots of heroin so that I wouldn’t overdose. I was trying to pace myself. And what ended up happening is I Lost my vision and my hearing for a period of time, which was really terrifying and being in this place they didn’t know, with people I didn’t know.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And then I blacked out and woke up, what would have been hours later back in Prescott, which is two hours north of Phoenix, with two guys in my house, that I didn’t know who they were, how they got there. My car was gone and my boyfriend was banging on the door getting in and I was in a fight with one of the guys because he had taken the heroin from me. And I was in fighting with him because I could no longer give myself drugs. My arms were frozen and bent out in front of me. I had infected all the veins in my arms, and it was incredibly painful to move them I could not move them.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

So this was my bottom, so to speak. I had rendered myself incapable of giving myself any more substances. I was completely incapable. I was relying on another human being to get me high. And there was just no other way to show me so deeply and painfully that it was no longer working. That this was just not working. And my boyfriend call my mom and my mom flew in and I was in the hospital and my mom, who doesn’t cry very often, sat next to the bed. And I’ll never forget this. And she looked at me and she started crying and said, “Are you going to make me bury you?”

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And she had said things like that. People had said things like this to me for so many years, but I was so tired of … That was the overwhelming feeling of just being tired. As we say, “Sick and tired of being sick and tired.” And I just was like, “I’m not dying. I’m not dying.” I’m living in this horrible purgatory. And I don’t want to do this anymore. I just don’t want to live like this anymore. I’m killing everybody else. I’m killing myself. But I’m not even dying. It’s just torture.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And so that was the change for me. And after that I knew what to do, how to get sober from all of the treatment I had been through. And so that was when I started to put that into place.

Christiana Kimmich:

There aren’t even words. I was already on the edge of my seat hearing about your overdose and hearing about everything that brought you up to that point. And then it seemed like circling back to what you said towards the beginning of the interview that it was that relationship. It was the toxic relationship that then triggered, out of nowhere, you’d go searching for heroin, and then that desperation where you would knock on someone’s door, who you didn’t even know, use a dirty needle that you cleaned with … I mean, it’s just absolutely heartbreaking to hear everything that you went through and just the level of desperation that you were at as a human being. I mean, this must have been really tough on your family?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yeah, it was horrible for my family. Part of my recovery is being a living amends. There’s not a sorry, or an amend verbally that I can make to my family for what I have put them through. But every day when I wake up clean and sober and I function and give back as a clean and sober adult and have been a productive member of society, I am saying, “I am making amends for what I have done.” And what happened to my family, they’re the best. They have supported me and eventually I got my relationship back with my sister and my relationship is wonderful with my parents and in this process they had to learn about the disease of addiction and it’s painful. It is a devastating disease to the person experiencing it and and the families.

Christiana Kimmich:

So Ashley, can you talk to us about getting sober and your journey into recovery?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yes, absolutely. So I left Prescott, Arizona on September 1, 2006. When I say left, I mean run away. I just called my dad and was like, “I have to get out of here. I am not going to survive and stay sober.” I just knew I wasn’t going to be able to stay sober there. When I packed up my three bedroom house, God bless Arizona’s cheapest dirt and I moved in with a friend who I’d met through that tattoo artist boyfriend, who I knew was sober in Laguna Hills. And my dad and I drove a U-Haul truck with my Rottweiler tattoo, and with all my stuff, and then I drove my Jetta in front of him, and the Jetta’s engine blew on the way to California from Arizona. And we ended up having to get the Jetta towed away.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And so when I came to Southern California, I had no car. So I moved into the den of my friend’s place with my three bedroom worth of furniture and my Rottweiler and my queen bed, the dens doors closed on, they touched the end of the queen bed. That’s how small it was in there. And I’m super grateful for that experience and for that place, it was a wild ride. And we will get Emily on the show to talk about it. So that’ll be fun.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

So I moved in with her and I think that it was a blessing that I didn’t have a car. I think I may have gotten afraid and run away again had I been able to get away, but I wasn’t. And I told myself that I was just going to give it another shot, Alcoholics Anonymous and recovery. That I was going to really, truly, 100% do this thing someone else’s way. I’d never done that before. I’m a person who tends to, I’ll do it 95% your way, 98% your way and 99.9% your way, but I’m going to add my flair to it. And I needed to do it 100% somebody else’s way in order to really get the recovery that I ended up having and do have now.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And Emily took me to my first Southern California Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and oh my gosh, it was spectacular. We went to this really she-she sexy meeting in Laguna Beach. It was September 1st, 2006 and a meeting called, The Talk Show Meeting where they interview someone. It’s an interview format, and they have a raffle and it’s really, really funny. Really fun. A lot like a late show format.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And this is my first meeting and I got a commitment there. And actually, I met my husband there. I didn’t know he was going to be my husband, but he had a commitment there. And at the time we both had … He was in a relationship with a lovely woman, and we didn’t end up seeing each other then but I that was the first time I met him. And the women and the people of Alcoholics Anonymous just loved me until I could love myself. They opened up their arms and their … I was really intimidated coming into Orange County and all these beautiful people and oh my gosh, how was I going to become … My experience has been women were really competitive and backstabbing. And I just had this totally different experience where they just invited me, we had so much fun.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

I was 19 years old and I hadn’t finished high school. I had no idea what was I was going to do with my life. I had been a piercer in Prescott for the years preceding. So that was like my way, that was my occupation. And I got here and I started to dream again and I started to see that things could be different and just felt like I was in the right place.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

I went to meetings, I went to conventions, young people’s conventions, dinners, bowling, and sober group of us would go to raves and for my 21st birthday, in sobriety, I took a bunch of my friends and we jumped out of a plane. And it was fun. We had so much fun. We stayed out late and people didn’t know that we were sober because we were partying, we were doing all the things were having so much fun and just so alive. It was such a beautiful time in my life. It was hard. There were a lot of hard things. There was a lot of 19-year-old related drama with boys and friends and who said what, but all the normal stuff.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And I grew as a person and I started in community college, studying political science and got back on my feet. And moving in a direction of where I had always truly wanted to go. And my dream was to go to UCLA. I didn’t really see that as a possibility at the time, but I just started trucking along in community college, and I got jobs and went to meetings and took care of myself and learned how to be sober. It was a tremendous, tremendous experience and time of my life. And I attribute that to creating the foundation of my sobriety.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

One thing I do want to address that, in the first few years of my recovery, when I was building that foundation, I still grappled with the thought that maybe I wasn’t an alcoholic. And I have this story. I was actually talking to my sister about it last night. It was a turning point … There’s all these turning points in recovery. And that’s why recovery is this vast subject to cover because it’s just life with this disease, this disease in our head and it does go away. So you’re just learning how to live with it without the substances, how to fill that void with positive things and use those ambitions towards positive and joyful goals.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And in my first couple years of sobriety, that obsession about whether or not I could drink like a normal person again, was really intense. I still joke with my sponsor, my friends and my parents, like, “I still questioned whether or not I was an alcoholic.” Now, you guys have just heard my story. So that’s ridiculous. But that is my truth. And I made the commitment to myself that I would not drink until I was 100% sure, one way or the other, whether or not I was an alcoholic. So I was going to stay sober during that time while I was figuring it out.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And one day my youngest sister came to visit me, Tori, and we were talking and she was in her young High School, maybe 14. She was telling me a story about when we were young and I was in middle school, and then in high school and she was telling me about how she used to crawl into my bed and move the water bottles out of my sheets, move them around. And this was just in passing conversation. “Oh, I would get in your bed and I would move the bottles out of the way.”

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And it triggered memories for me that I had not thought about. I mean, maybe even ever. That I’ve had all these water bottles full of vodka in my sheets for years, because I would drink them at night. I would drink them when I woke up, but it was so normal like brushing your teeth that I didn’t even remember or think about it. It’s like if someone asked you remember all the days that you brushed your teeth when you were 13 years old? Well, I don’t remember. I mean, I know I did it, but I don’t remember that it was so uneventful.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And it was so uneventful for me to drink and drink alone and drink in my bed that I did not remember that until my sister mentioned it in a story she was telling me and it blew my socks off. And it triggered so many memories. So many days of drinking. I drank all the time. I was a raging alcoholic. I wasn’t just a person who used drugs and sometimes drink as well. I was a raging alcoholic. And I didn’t remember that.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

As a result of this conversation, I obviously ended up staying sober. I made the decision to continue to stay sober. And that turning point of admitting to my innermost self that I was an alcoholic, really changed the game for me, because there were no back doors, there were no trap doors, there were no ways out of this anymore. I knew it was all the same thing. And I knew that in my innermost soul, and it changed my recovery. It changed the questions in my head.

Christiana Kimmich:

That’s incredible to hear. That you still struggled with whether or not you are an alcoholic after everything that you’ve been through.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

It’s crazy, right. Crazy, I know.

Christiana Kimmich:

And I think you’re right. I think hindsight is 2020. So it’s easy for myself and for our listeners to say, “Well, of course you were,” is we’re literally listening to all this and-

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Right, like I’m laying it out. So it’s obvious now, but at the time, not so much.

Christiana Kimmich:

Right. So I think what that says, absolutely, to me, at least is this disease is a disease and it’s very powerful. It’s a disease of the brain and it affects your thinking. And it’s just so interesting that it took after … You said it was a couple years you really grappled with it?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yeah, I think I was like two years sober when we had this conversation.

Christiana Kimmich:

Wow. And I took your little sister talking about something that triggered something that would to you again-

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

The memories, yeah.

Christiana Kimmich:

The memory, yeah, saying that it just like brushing your teeth.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yeah, I had no recollection of this because it was just … I mean, I remembered in high school drinking at school, there were things but I didn’t remember how common place like that was the thing that it triggered. I didn’t remember that it was very, very normal for me to have water bottles of vodka in my bedsheets.

Christiana Kimmich:

Wow. And then she is sitting here as a kid thinking like, “Oh, these are water bottle.”

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And what’s funny was when we had the conversation, we had the conversation last night she said, “I didn’t know they had vodka.” She that I was hydrating, which I thought was great. I was like, “Oh, well, at least a little less traumatic for her.” So that’s good.

Christiana Kimmich:

It’s a few levels up from just stealing liquor out of your parents cabinet, right?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Right. Exactly. There were a lot of things when I got sober that I was really concerned about, one of which was like a things I thought about getting sober. “How will they ever have fun again?” A big one was, “What will I do at my wedding? How am I going to toast at my wedding? What am I going to do for my 21st birthday? What am I going to do if … How am I going to enjoy this? How am I going to … like all these different if’s. And it was so funny.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

My sponsor at the time when I when I was telling her like all the reasons why, I didn’t know if the sober thing was going to work out. And I was worrying about what I was going to drink at my wedding and she said to me, “Ashley, do you have someone banging down the door to marry you?” And I was like, “Oh, no.” She was like, “Well, why don’t you worry about that when you find someone who wants to marry your hot mess and Vanessa.”

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And I was like, “Yeah, okay, that’s blur,” years later when my husband who’s also sober and when we were getting married and we were sitting with the planner and she was talking about like what the signature cocktail would be. I had this flash to being 19 and being so concerned about this moment, and of course, when it actually came down to that moment, I had my mom pick because I had no idea what the … I don’t drink like that, this mixed drink situation and a glass I don’t know what’s happening. So I had her pick. We toasted with Martin alleys and it was no big deal.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

But, of course, these were things that may or may not have just blocked me from sobriety. They were significant questions in my mind about whether or not this was going to work out for me. And the truth was was that all the things that I was so worried about, came and went and they worked themselves out wonderfully. I had my 21st birthday, like I said, I jumped out of a plane with my friends because I couldn’t figure out what crazy thing I hadn’t done. I’d done so much that it was like, “Oh, well, I haven’t jumped out of a plane. Let’s do that.” Of course, and my mom was like, “After everything you’ve survived through, this is how you’re going to,” sorry, mom.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

So we just did so much cool stuff in those years and I ended up … I worked through community college, and I applied to several. the UC schools in California and ended up getting into UCLA which was crazy and moved to Los Angeles and studied and graduated from UCLA. And just one of those things where there’s just no way I could have ever done that loaded and being supported in recovery, the self care, all the things that I learned, led me to be able to even function at that level. And UCLA is a tremendous school and it was a tremendous experience.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And then my then boyfriend, now husband and I moved back to Orange County and started our life here and got married in 2015 in Idaho and in 2017, I gave birth to fraternal twin boys and they will get to grow up with sober parents as long as we stay vigilant and work our programs and our recovery and make it number one in our lives. Even the scary thing is even making that recovery and putting that in front of your family. Because if your recovery does not come first, everything you put in front of your recovery, you will lose. I was taught that very early on. And I do believe that.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And having kids is a wonderful experience. And it’s also very trying experience in recovery, particularly twin boys. And I’ve had to work much harder in the last few years, having the twins and this whole big beautiful life. I’ve had to work so hard to find that time for self care and make it a priority. And remember that all the things that I have today are as a result of the work that I have done over the past 13 years. And that if I stopped doing that work, because I want more time at the gym, or I want more time hanging out with the kids or whatever my reasons or rather excuses are, that I put all of the things that I have gained at risk.

Christiana Kimmich:

Ashley, that’s such an amazing story. It’s really truly a story of the will to survive against all odds. And not only have you survived, but you’ve turned that into thriving and learns and given us amazing examples on how you can have a full life and sobriety. Not just a life and just going along and missing out on fun, but learning and experiencing the different ways that you can have fun, that you can connect, that you can grow community and have a family. Even though twin boys, that must be a little-

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

It’s crazy. It’s absolutely crazy.

Christiana Kimmich:

So you’ve gone from one chaos to another?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yeah, it’s like a circus at my house. I have a South African Mastiff, a Boerboel and poor guy, he’s like, “What happens here? We were all doing fine and then you brought on these twins,” and it’s just crazy. It’s so good. And it’s so wonderful and it’s terrifying. And I feel great about the fact that my kids are going to grow up with sober parents and I also feel terrified that they are going to have the genetics and I have to stay right where my feet are. I have to remind, “Where are my feet,?” They’re right here. They’re recording this podcast. That’s what’s happening. It’s stay in the present moment. And if I can do that, then I stay in the joy of life. And the moment I move away from that, I am now in the fear.

Christiana Kimmich:

Right. Similar to what you were saying about when you were first getting sober and you were concerned about what you were going to do at your wedding?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Totally, ridiculous, absolutely. No one wanted to marry me. I don’t know what I was worried about. And all the things I worried about getting sober, it’s so funny because I was so worried about having fun in sobriety, getting married or doing all these things, none of which were on the table when I was using at all. I wasn’t having fun. I wasn’t going to get married, I wasn’t going to make it to my 21st birthday. All these crazy, but that’s the disease. It’s the only disease that tells you you don’t have a disease. And it’s just one of those things you cannot fight alone because you will convince yourself … You know we have a built in forgetter. We forget the pain, and we relive it over and over and over again.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

And it’s not until you’re in a community of people who understand and you do the intense work that you’re able to get out of that cycle to stop the cycle for you and your family.

Christiana Kimmich:

Absolutely. That’s such a great point. I want to just ask you one more thing before we end this podcast.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Yeah.

Christiana Kimmich:

If there’s someone out there who’s listening who is struggling, maybe they’re struggling with whether or not they are an alcoholic. Maybe they’re struggling with the same questions that you were asking yourself. Maybe they’re asking themselves. Can you give someone just a piece of wisdom if they are struggling. What could a good first step be?

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

So a good first step is to reach out to somebody who knows how to be in recovery, someone who’s done it, someone who knows how to do it. So find someone, whether that’s a community, Alcoholics Anonymous, a 12 step programs, smart recovery, treatment center, call and talk to someone who knows and understands what you’re going through. That will be the first step. Being honest about that. Hearing the advice and the path of other people listening to the stories and what other people did to change. You cannot fix your broken brain with your broken brain. If it’s just you helping you, sorry, but you’re screwed.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

So you got to find other people who know how to move through the things that you are dealing with, who’ve done it, who’ve walk the path before you. Find those people, ask them how they did it and do what they did. Do it 100%. If you want what they have, do what they did. Do what they do.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

This is not a pitch for Alcoholics Anonymous, but I am personally a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. And the people there have embraced me and helped me through trying times. And if you’re concerned about the God aspect, which is a huge stumbling block for many people, I totally get that, it was for me as well. And I just ignored it, literally, just ignored it and I just made God, group of drunks or good orderly direction. And I prayed to good orderly direction or group of drunks and that was my higher power. And that was the best I could do.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

So you don’t have to be religious in order to participate in 12 step programs. I know that’s a common feeling that people have and it’s just that hasn’t been my experience. If you feel like you need treatment, reach out to somebody. Oh, my gosh there’s so many amazing treatment centers, reach out, call, ask for help.

Christiana Kimmich:

Ashley, that’s such great wisdom. Thank you so much. Guys, this is Ashley Loeb Blassingame. She is your podcast host for The Courage to Change: A Recovery Podcast. We’re so excited.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

I’m so excited too.

Christiana Kimmich:

I cannot wait. I’m just sitting here trying to get this information pulled out of you. But you’re honestly, the way that you connect with people and just the stories that can come out of it and also how deep you go in addressing real things, but in such a human way. I just cannot wait for this podcast just to keep getting published and every other week for these stories to keep coming out. Guys, you’ve got to tune in, subscribe to this podcast, tell your friends about it.

Christiana Kimmich:

These inspiring stories are just going to keep coming and I hope that you’ve had an incredible time hearing Ashley’s story of not only survival through difficult times, but also in hearing her courage to change and how she’s been able to overcome the trials and the adversity in her life. And now be all these amazing things, a mother wife, a business owner, UCLA graduate, the director of Healthtech Women OC. I mean, you’ve accomplished so many amazing things. And we’re just so excited to have you as our host here.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

Thank you. I’m really excited and looking forward to this experience. And I hope that we can bring so much inspiration and joy and entertainment to all of our listeners. So thanks for having me.

Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

The Courage to Change: A Recovery Podcast would like to thank our sponsor, Lionrock Recovery for their support. Lionrock Recovery provides online substance abuse counseling, where you can get help from the privacy of your own home. For more information, visit, www.lionrockrecovery.com\podcast. Subscribe and join our podcast community to hear amazing stories of courage and transformation biweekly.