X
Mar 17
  • Written By Guest User

    • #38 – Ashley Morgan

    #38 - Ashley Morgan

    Ashley Morgan’s Story

    Ashley Morgan is an Interior Designer based in Los Angeles, California, who has had a tumultuous journey to find her recovery. Ashley moved around Europe and Asia a lot as child, following her father’s career in finance, until she landed back in LA, where she spent the majority of her childhood.  She found drugs and alcohol at a very young age only to discover that her illness would progress quickly.  After being in and out of 13 different treatment centers and hospitals, Ashley finally came to the realization that she wanted to live, and the only way to do that was by a complete lifestyle change – and most importantly – being completely honest with herself.  

    Ashley now has the privilege of owning a business and has worked hard to repair relationships with her family and friends over the years.  As you’ll hear in her story, an integral part of her getting and staying sober has been working the steps along with the incredible support system she has surrounding her.

    Listen & Subscribe

    Episode Resources

    Our Sponsor 

    Connect with Us

    Interested in a Career at Lionrock Recovery?

    ****

    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 we have Ashley Morgan. Ashley Morgan is an interior designer based in Los Angeles, California who has had a very tumultuous journey to find her recovery, to say the least. Ashley moved around Europe and Asia a lot as a child following her father’s career in finance until she landed back in LA where she spent the majority of her childhood. She found drugs and alcohol at a very young age only to discover that her illness would progress quickly.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    After being in and out of 13 different treatment centers and hospitals, Ashley finally came to the realization that she wanted to live, and the only way to do that was by a complete lifestyle change and most importantly, being completely honest with herself. Ashley now has the privilege of owning a business and has worked hard to repair relationships with her family and friends over the years. As you’ll hear in her story, an integral part of her getting and staying sober has been working the steps along with the incredible support system she has surrounding her. All right, episode 38, let’s do this.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Ashley, welcome to my podcast booth.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Thank you for having me.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Thank you for being here. So fun. Are you totally nervous?

    Ashley Morgan:

    I wasn’t, and then all of a sudden, I just got super nervous cause you’re looking at me weird.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Okay. Sorry I won’t look at you. I’ll stare up.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Once I start talking and laugh a little [crosstalk 00:01:44].

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Ashley, you are here. You are one of my best friends in the whole wide world and I love you and thank you for being here.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I love you too. Yeah, of course, this is so exciting.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I know. The booth. This is our booth.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I love it. It’s very cozy in here, like I want to take a nap.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Well, not yet.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I just always want to take a nap everywhere. It’s basically what I want to do. Always tired.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Always just generally want to take a nap.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Always tired.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Okay. How long are you sober?

    Ashley Morgan:

    12 and a half years.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Wait, what?

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah, August 4th, 2007.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Oh my God.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Just at 12 and a half.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Which is so weird, isn’t it? How old were you when you got sober?

    Ashley Morgan:

    A week before my 19th birthday.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Before your 19th birthday. Okay.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yes, I spent my 19th birthday in a treatment center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Not thrilled.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Let’s see, I spent 16, 17, no, not 16. 17, 18.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I spent a lot of other years too but the last, the final one.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, I’m trying to think of treatment birthdays.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Exactly.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Did they give you one of those really botched cakes?

    Ashley Morgan:

    No, no.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Oh no. There was no cakes.

    Ashley Morgan:

    No, there was no cakes. I was seven days sober, so I got sober exactly a week before my birthday and I woke up being like, hey, I’m ready to go home now. They’re like, yeah, no that’s not a thing, which is a total pattern in my using and in my trying to get sober, specifically this last time where I would make a mess and then try and clean it up for a day or two. My poor father would pay for this 30-day treatment and after sleeping it off for a few days and then giving me medication to detox, I’d wake up and be like, “Well, I’m okay. I can go.” They’re like, “Yeah, no, that’s not a thing. This is a 30-day program.” I’m like, “No, it’s cool, keep the money. We’re good.” Mind you, it’s not my money. It’s a lot of money and it happened numerous times. I think that that last time … I think it was good that there was a birthday there.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I remember that. I remember it. I still have friends from that place that I go to regularly, and I think if it wasn’t for them, a rehab relationship is like you can be best friends within two hours and it feels like you’ve known somebody for years when really you met them a week ago. I think that’s what kept me there for a little bit.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, it’s like those are life changing bonds.

    Ashley Morgan:

    100%.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Where did you grow up?

    Ashley Morgan:

    I grew up in LA. My mom is from LA.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Where in LA?

    Ashley Morgan:

    The Hancock Park. My dad was an army brat and then ended up in San Diego as a teenager and then grew up there. I was not born in LA. I was born in New York, but that’s because my parents were both living there when I was born and then we moved like all over Europe and Asia and then came back to …

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Why?

    Ashley Morgan:

    My dad’s job. He was in finance. We kept bouncing around and then move back to LA.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    How old were you when you moved back?

    Ashley Morgan:

    I think it was three because six months later my sister was born and I’m three and a half years older than she is. At some point in those travels, we lived in France and I spoke French. They put me in a French school in LA because they didn’t want me to lose the language. Also, it was one of those schools that have campuses all over the world. If, God forbid, we had to move again, it’s the same curriculum, so I could on Monday leave LA and Tuesday go to school in London and it would be all the same thing. We didn’t end up moving again. My parents divorced shortly after that, shortly after my sister was born.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    You were like four?

    Ashley Morgan:

    I was four. Yeah.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Do you remember?

    Ashley Morgan:

    It’s so funny. Yes and no. I remember fighting. Then I remember my dad, right after they divorced, I think they had bought a house here like in Studio City or Toluca Lake, because my grandparents had bought a house in Toluca Lake, which is like by Universal City. My grandparents lived there, so my mom … we bought a house there and then they divorced and my mom moved into like a condo nearby. Then my dad got an apartment and my dad, right at that time took a job in New York again. He moved back to New York.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    When you were four?

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah, but he came back I think around that. Then he would come back every other weekend to have his weekends with us. Then it went like that. What I do know is that for many, many, many, many years after they divorced, it was a fight and there was a horrible custody battle for many … until the point where I must’ve been 16 or 17, they were still fighting over my sister, but at that point, I had made such a mess and I was heavily into my addiction and they were … I think it says somewhere in court papers like forget about Ashley, we don’t even need to worry about her anymore. They had written me off. They didn’t want to deal with it. Yeah, a lot of fighting, a lot of chaos, a lot of …

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Okay. You are four, they divorce. Are you at the French school? How long did you stay at the French school?

    Ashley Morgan:

    From kindergarten to the beginning of eighth grade like after seventh grade.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Do you speak French fluently?

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Then, at that time, the fighting that you remember, the custody battle, in your early years when you were seven, eight, nine, 10 around those times, what did the custody battle look like? What does a custody battle look like?

    Ashley Morgan:

    I think because my dad had moved away, was primarily living in New York, and like I said, that’s a lot to come back every other weekend. Now as an adult, I see the dedication that that takes, but at the time I was very confused. My dad is a very, if he ever hears this, I don’t want to …. we have a much better relationship now. I think growing up I saw him as … his father was in the military, so there was this very strangeness there and not wanting to talk about feelings, not want to ask us how we’re feeling, and not because he didn’t care, but he just … Now I see it as he didn’t know how to do that, but a much more reserved person, very strict. There were consequences for everything.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Then there was my mom who was very kind of social, very loud, a lot of oversharing. I think I didn’t realize it, but at the time, she made me her best friend. I’m the oldest of two. Instead of being the mother that wants to protect the kids from … my sister was I think a bit more sheltered from it. It showed up in her life also, but we just had a different relationship with her. I became the best friend and which obviously forces you to grow up really quickly. Things were being shared with me that probably shouldn’t have been shared, details about what happens in court. I do remember them making us go to a therapist and for years we had to go to therapists. It was the time, and I’m sure we’ll get to that, but I went until I think I was about … it was before I started using. Because in the beginning, I guess to answer your question, it was like shared custody. Then over time, they started using us as like a pawn.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    What does that look like?

    Ashley Morgan:

    The physical and legal custody would constantly change whoever won in court at that time. It started with my mom would get the majority physical custody. I think they always had 50-50 legal, and then my mom would be erratic and do crazy things. My dad would take her back to court and then he, at some point, I can’t remember what age got 100%, or majority percent custody of us physical and legal. There were periods where we were going back and forth every other day from each other’s houses. We always had nannies who picked us up from school. It’s a lot for a kid now thinking about it. You have to bring your clothes with you to school, right?

    Ashley Morgan:

    You have an extra bag. You have a backpack and then you have like a closed bag to go spend the night at whatever parents’ house. Part of it was fine. I played sports and I was very busy, but it was definitely very chaotic, very hectic. Anytime my dad would do something to my mom that she didn’t like, she would share it with us. Now as an adult, my mom ultimately ended up being diagnosed with like mental illness. At the time, I didn’t know that and there was always like something off, that she was like a socialite and look like a Barbie doll. She hid it for a long time.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    She was a very accomplished interior designer, right?

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    In LA area.

    Ashley Morgan:

    That didn’t happen till later. She was more around when we were younger.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Now we know it was mental illness. What did her mental illness look like then that you didn’t know that’s what it was?

    Ashley Morgan:

    That’s a really good question. I guess I haven’t stopped to think about that. I’m not a doctor, but I feel like there was a lot of like narcissistic personality disorder traits, everything happening to her all the time. Lots of really close relationships and then big fallouts a lot. There was not a lot of stability. There was not a lot of … if she had an emotion, she was sharing it with us or taking it out on us.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Okay. Were you like, “Oh, my mom just has a lot going on?” What did you think of her?

    Ashley Morgan:

    I don’t know. I think I enjoyed the role of best friend for a long time until it started backfiring on me until I was a teenager and started using and then she all of a sudden tried to be a parent again and I was like, wait a second, what? My dad was very controlling in his own way. My dad was very militant. He was very, again, never spoke off feelings. None of that. Didn’t really speak about much actually. I always was wondering what he was thinking like one of those that was always quiet, never overshared about custody stuff always. I joke that when he gave me the sex talk, he came in, he had read a book about how to have, it literally was called How to Have this Talk with the Kids, and took notes on his yellow legal pad and came into my room one night and was like, “We have to talk,” and proceeded to talk to me about sex.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I still remember where I was sitting. Now anytime I see it, everyone who knows me, I see a yellow legal pad, I’m like, “Oh no, somebody is having a talk with me.” I’m scarred by these legal pads, because everything, but he was methodical and well thought out. I like to joke with him that if you ask him what the color of the sky is and he’ll tell you, “I have to sleep on it and get back to you.” My mom just would say whatever was going on and my dad was definitely much more well thought out, much more logical. Then if he made a decision about something that was it, because he had thought it through, whereas my mom was so erratic, always acting on emotion. It was just this kind of like …

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Polar opposite.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Completely. Going back completely going back and forth from these two situations on a regular basis. You’re just like, you don’t know how to be, I guess.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Did you and your sister commiserate over? Did it bond you? I would think it would bond you.

    Ashley Morgan:

    If you ask her now, I think we had completely different experiences. The other thing I need to note is I don’t remember the majority of my childhood, pre-using, pre all of that, there was a huge blockage.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Normal for trauma.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah. There’s times where I call her and I’m like, “Hey, I just had this memory, is this real or not?” She does the same thing with me. I don’t know. Also, the way I remembered things, obviously when they’re explained back to me, whether from an adult that knew me at the time or whatever, it was completely different. I remember being very in my head and the head being very loud. But I also remember myself like only internalizing that, and as much as I was social, I was the top most talkative person. Every report card was like smart, talkative in all upper-case red letters.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Like T.A. …

    Ashley Morgan:

    We’d sent out a class every single day. I remember that, but I also remember the inner dialogue and somehow in my memories that wins. If I don’t correct myself, I’m like, oh, I was just this quiet overthinking kid, which I was an overthinking kid. I was just super loud on top of it. It was like chaos. Then my sister, my sister was much more emotional than I was, much more outwardly emotional. She was a huge crier. She was very much, much better about talking about how she was feeling.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Definitely not you.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I was like Fort Knox for me. Because I didn’t trust that my feelings would either be taken seriously or that they mattered. This is not anything that I knew in the moment, but being able to look back on it and some of what I’m saying right now is literally coming to me in the moment, but there was no room for it I felt like. They were so busy fighting each other that there was no room to have a feeling about it.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Did you think to yourself they’re fighting, or at least in the beginning, oh, they’re fighting to spend time with us? For kids who go through, and I’m grateful I haven’t been through this, kids who go through custody battles, you’re fighting … I picture you’re fighting for your kid. Right?

    Ashley Morgan:

    Totally.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    But like that’s not the experience for the kid. Right?

    Ashley Morgan:

    No, and I think, as much as …

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    What do you think?

    Ashley Morgan:

    Being an adult gives you a different perspective. Life is really hard. Then to have kids and then be going through a divorce and then fighting about the kids. I said this, I feel this thought came to me at some point in sobriety that they just wanted to fight more than they loved us. That doesn’t mean they didn’t love us. They were just almost addicted to the fighting and the winning of that. In my case, money equaled power. There were constantly fighting. I remember my dad being like, “Your mom traded you in for a car.”

    Ashley Morgan:

    She wanted a new car, and my dad was like, “Give me more custody.” At one point she was like, “Okay.” Does that mean she traded us in for a car?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    No.

    Ashley Morgan:

    No, but as these are the things that you hear and you’re like, okay, well that … I think there was a lot of an insane amount of suppression. It just was all too much. The other thing I learned with my family was, just make it look good no matter what is going on. I come from a country club background on my mom’s side and old Southern background on my dad’s side. No one was running around telling everyone how they felt. It just wasn’t a thing.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    That’s the other thing. You grew up having all the things on paper, looked really good and you grew up with all the LA celebrity kids and elite kids. Were you aware of that and what did you think about those types of … where you like, Oh, I don’t know if any of the … were the celebrity kids’ celebrities at the time? No.

    Ashley Morgan:

    The celebrity that are celebrities now and the parents? Some of them. Yeah.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah. What did you think is like, Oh, this is …?

    Ashley Morgan:

    It was normal.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    It was just normal. Yeah.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah. I mean it was normal to have all these people around or people coming to pick me up from school. No one else thought it was weird either. You know what I mean? It wasn’t like this friend of my mom’s who was a very famous person coming to pick me up, no one batted an eye. It wasn’t …

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Right, it was just part of it.

    Ashley Morgan:

    It wasn’t like people were freaking out like, “Oh this is such a unique experience,” because it was happening with them too. But my dad was really against it. My dad hated it. My dad hated LA, hated everything it stood for.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    He was talking to you about the fact that this was a thing?

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    You got perspective that this wasn’t how it was with everyone because or no?

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yes.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Because he told you.

    Ashley Morgan:

    It just seemed like his intense views because everything was an intense view, so I just filed that away as like, I don’t know, just the rigidity of him.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, not relevant.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I will give him credit. The older he gets, the more he calms down so I can get into that later. I don’t want to make him sound like this like … But that was my upbringing. I will say he absolutely wanted the best for us and was the most hands on dad you could be with being the CFO of a company and still coaching both of our soccer teams and showing up for swim team and all of these things. He was …

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    He was tying.

    Ashley Morgan:

    That’s how he was raised. It’s like you excel academically, you do extracurricular activities, you have a lot of structure. He was just doing what he knew. I think that his father passed away when he was 10 and his father was Navy. He was a like a fighter pilot. Apparently, he was not a nice guy. Apparently, there was alcoholism there. There was a lot of rage. Once again, it took me years into sobriety to realize that he didn’t know how to be a dad because he didn’t have one, and the one that he did have was a terrible example.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I think it gave me some compassion and some sympathy for that and it allowed some of the anger to dissipate because I had a mother who showed every emotion, and when she was happy with you, you just felt like you were the center of the universe. When she was upset with you, watch out. A lot of rage and misplaced. Mad at my dad, takes it out on us, which is not a unique story in any way, but it was very prevalent in our upbringing.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    When were you introduced to substances?

    Ashley Morgan:

    I remember, I have an aunt. My mom’s like the second oldest of six. Three boys and three girls and then her youngest sibling, they’re the same age difference apart as the youngest sibling and I are apart, which is 12 years. She was 12 when I was born. She was like my friend and my … still …

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    This is your aunt who was 12 when you were born?

    Ashley Morgan:

    My aunt, yes. I remember she graduated from college. She was in school in Oregon, and we went to the graduation. I just remember it was like in this open air barn. It was very hipster cool now. I remember being really thirsty because I’d been running around. I think I was in fifth or sixth grade and I saw this cup and I was like, oh, there’s Sprite in here. I took this giant drink, and somewhere in there I knew it wasn’t Sprite, yet I continued to drink it. Right. It’s obviously tastes disgusting. I remember having a really fun night and then nothing for a long time. It’s a long story, but at the end of seventh grade, my dad sat us down. At this point, he had had full custody, majority, like we saw her maybe once or twice a week.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Was he back from New York?

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah, he had moved back.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    He came back.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I don’t know. A few years after that.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    And mom’s stability was waning.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yes.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    She was deteriorating.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Now looking at it, it was already deteriorating, but it would take another decade for it to actually … And then another five years after that, maybe 10, I don’t know. Five, seven years after that for anything to happen. So, it was a long process, but yes, it was starting to come apart. My dad I guess accepted this position in Seattle towards the end of my seventh grade year. He had gotten remarried at this point and sat my sister and I down and said, “Listen, I’m taking this job. So we’re moving to Seattle. You have a choice. Do you want to come with us or do you want to stay with your mom and you’ll stay in your school?” Of course, my sister and I were like, why would we want to do something so drastic? We’re going to stay, and apparently that was not the right answer, because we went anyway.

    Ashley Morgan:

    It was moments like that where if I trapped a lot. Oh yeah, I guess it wasn’t even up for discussion. I don’t know why they even sat us down. It was that false sense of I have a choice in this, and that happened a lot in my …

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Where they asked you and then did it?

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah, or something was talked about and the decision had already been made or we didn’t have a say in it. We ended up moving to Seattle the end of my seventh grade year. Being a teenager already is so brutal. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. Then you add in moving to another state to a different climate even, and having to meet all these new people. So we moved up there, immediately I hated it. I’m from LA where it’s like sunny most of the time and rained every day. It was depressing. As much as I didn’t necessarily have trouble making friends, I think that thing about where I grew up and how I grew up was very different. We lived on an Island up there, that the celebrity up there is like … my next door neighbor was like Paul Allen or you know, every Starbucks VP lived on this Island, every Microsoft VP.

    Ashley Morgan:

    It was just a different kind of situation. People were like, “Oh, you’re from LA. Do you know this? Do you know that?” And I would just answer honestly because I came from a situation where that wasn’t weird. Then everyone was like, “Oh, that’s cool.” And then the next day you’re labeled like a liar. It just happened so quick, and I was like, “Wait, what? You just asked me a question. I just answered it honestly. It was weird. It was just a weird thing.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Like you just didn’t …

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah, I think that that Christmas break, there was a lot of manipulation. I learned how to manipulate early on, and my mom really fell for it. My dad never did. But we were telling my mom how unhappy I was. I don’t know the details of this so I don’t want to speak to it too much, but what ultimately ended up happening is my mom lied on a police report and she got full custody. So we ended up coming down. We were going to spend a week with my mom over break and we never went back.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I do remember a conversation, I don’t remember any of this, I guess I wrote something out. I wrote like a statement. I wrote a statement, I signed it, or maybe my mom … I don’t know. I truly don’t remember and there was no drugs or alcohol yet. I remember my dad saying to me, “You’ve made your choice. I’ll never forgive you for this.” Then, we lived with my mom. My school, I had already kind of started getting in trouble in school, ditching, obviously that talkativeness now, it only got worse. It didn’t get better. Super disruptive. So the small private school that we were in ultimately ended up saying, sorry, we gave away your place, which maybe they could have made room, but they were not …

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, that happened to me as well.

    Ashley Morgan:

    … interested. Yeah. So we went to public school for the first time in our lives. That is where the using really, really began almost immediately. Because I grew up here, we were members of a beach club, had a lot of friends, and some of those friends ended up going to this middle school. Luckily, it was kind of a soft landing. They were smoking weed. I think within the first few days, I smoked weed for the first time. I remember not liking it and then the next day being like, I can’t wait to do that again. Weed was a part of my story for two years, three years, every day. Then within a week, I found my people pretty quickly, I guess I’ll say. Within a week, I had this friend who will remain nameless, who showed me harder drugs. It was basically speed.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    How old were you?

    Ashley Morgan:

    I was in eighth grade, so 13 I guess. Then that was it. I found this friend had secretly given me these pills, so it wasn’t like maybe he saw something in me that I would appreciate these and I didn’t tell a single soul. I would smoke weed with everyone. Sometimes we would drink. I would do hallucinogens, but these pills were my lifeline. I felt like I could cope. At this point, the chaos at my mom’s house, it was fighting all the time. My mom didn’t know how to handle us, and this is where that being the best friend backfired because she would try and reprimand me and I’d be like, “Who are you? I’m sorry.” Her response to that was to call the police. When she couldn’t parent us, she would just call the cops. It was me, mostly. She never called the cops on my sister.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Calling cops and say what?

    Ashley Morgan:

    My daughter’s being a disaster. It started out with more of the truth. Then over time …

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    What did the cops do?

    Ashley Morgan:

    They would come over. They would come.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    And do what?

    Ashley Morgan:

    We’re a white family in the Palisades. My mother was very dramatic and knew how to say what she needed to say to do it and to get whatever she needed.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    And then, they would do what?

    Ashley Morgan:

    Most of the time they would come over and be like, “Be nice to your mom” It was a recurring thing to the point where I remember being in the kind of village near my high school with friends after school one day and there were these cops and they knew me by name and they were like, “Have a good day. Nice to see you Ashley.” And somebody was like, “Is your mom dating that guy?” And I was like, “No, no, you don’t understand.” It was so …

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    She called the cops regularly.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Regularly. They were like my second parent.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    When the cops get home, you’re going to be in so much trouble.

    Ashley Morgan:

    100%.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    When she would call them, what was your …? When she was like, “That’s it. I’m calling the cops.”

    Ashley Morgan:

    She’d be like, “My daughter’s being …” Truly, I don’t fully remember because I was intoxicated all the time like that other girl said. From the second I started, I knew that this is something that I was going to do forever, that I needed to cope with each and every day. I just didn’t want anyone taking that away from me. I was so used to telling a secret of mine and then having a blow up in my face and my family. I protected that with everything that I had, that I had these tools, these became my tools for living and she was incredibly controlling But she also worked all the time at this point and had a new baby.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Okay. Had she gotten married?

    Ashley Morgan:

    No, she was engaged and my stepdad ended up passing away.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Back up, back up.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah, I ended up finding him during this period passed away. It was not …

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Wait. okay. Who’s the stepdad?

    Ashley Morgan:

    He was this guy that my mom had known for forever.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    And they had a baby when you were …

    Ashley Morgan:

    They didn’t have a baby. This is where it gets a little complicated. She got pregnant at one point and decided to keep the baby. My stepdad who was in and out for a lot … who was also an active alcoholic for a long time. I always thought that he would disappear. Turns out, as I got older, I found out my mom would push him away a lot. He came back around and was like, “I’m going to raise this baby with you.” The only times it was common in my house was when he was around. It was crazy, and heavy, heavy drinker, full-blown alcoholic. So this was a period where he was back around and there was peace in my house. She wouldn’t go crazy all the time. Then, I think he was only home for a few weeks or something and he went to bed one night and the next day my mom called and asked where I was after school and I said I’m on my way home. I guess we had a live in nanny.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    How old were you?

    Ashley Morgan:

    I don’t know, 14. We had to live in nanny because my mom had had a new baby and she was working full-time and my mom called me back and said the housekeeper called and said that he hadn’t come out of the room all day. Usually, he would stay up late and then sleep till like 10. I think he had just been back from Europe so there was like jet lag in the beginning. She said he hasn’t come out. It was like four o’clock. She said, “Can you hurry home? I’m scared.” I got home and, and I’m standing there. My mom wouldn’t go in the room and she sent me in, and of course he had been dead since like, I don’t know, five o’clock that morning.

    Ashley Morgan:

    My mom was trying to sleep, the baby was in the room. He had this like portable DVD player. There was a chaise at the end of like a lounge thing at the end of her bed and she made him go lay on that with his headphones on to not wake her or the baby to watch whatever movie he was watching. She got up, went to work. I never went to school ever. For some reason, that day I happened to go to school. The nanny thought it was weird that he hadn’t come out and turns out he had had a heart attack in the middle of the night or …

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Whatever time.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah, five o’clock in the morning. And it was because it was a cocaine overdose basically. He was 36 I think, years old.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    So you go in and he’s …

    Ashley Morgan:

    Find him. Yeah, he’s cold, he’s white. I don’t know that I ever processed that. I think for me, the biggest thing is I absolutely loved him. He was French so we could like speak French and my mom would know. There was this like … I had someone on my team and she’s calm when he was around. I think to lose that was the biggest thing. That was just another thing to pile on. None of this stuff made me an alcoholic. It was another thing to pile on to the trauma, I guess, if that makes any sense, and not that I was aware of that in the moment, but that’s what ended up happening.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    What was your mom’s …? Did she …?

    Ashley Morgan:

    My mom was dramatic and everything was about her. She’s been getting help for her mental health stuff in the last few years, but there was never a time where you could say, you did this, and it hurt me. There was no room for it. In that time it was very much that this had happened to my mother. There was never a question of, how did this make you feel? There truly was no …

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Or I just sent you in to the room to find there was no …

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah. Oh, no, no, no.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    So, the …

    Ashley Morgan:

    Then it would turn into, as the story progressed with telling people, I found him, like that she found him, so there is this …

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah. And your sister, this was [Landon 00:31:43]?

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    And how old was Landon?

    Ashley Morgan:

    I don’t know, six months. Okay. 10 months maybe. She was under a year.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    How did you feel about your mom having another baby?

    Ashley Morgan:

    I loved her. She’s just my little angel. She’s going to college soon. She just got accepted to a bunch of colleges. It’s so weird. Yeah, no I was not … but my other sister, I was horrible to her. My mom was working all the time and every night I would have parties at my house or I would take my mom’s car in the middle of the night and we’d go joy riding heavily on drugs. Not so much drinking at this point. I think I could count at this point on one hand the number of times I’d been drunk. It’s easier to get drugs. I went to a public school in a really rich area that was also a charter school. So they were busing kids in from other areas that brought all the drugs and we had the money and zero supervision.

    Ashley Morgan:

    So, it was this perfect, I think it’s still, and I could be wrong, in the top five drug high schools of America, and it has been for decades and decades. It might not be any more, but I can’t imagine that that would have changed. So it was this perfect, everything collided, for me perfectly, because I could get the things that I needed to get through a day. So I would always have these parties and my mom would always do this thing where … She would work all day and then go out at night and come home. And we had a live in, so she wasn’t necessarily worried about the baby and she would always call 30 minutes before she was coming home. It’s like somewhere in her, she knew that something was going on at her house and just didn’t want to deal with it.

    Ashley Morgan:

    So she’d be like, “I’m on my way home, be home in half an hour.” That was when I knew to like … everyone would just scatter like cockroaches and leave and clean up the house and then nothing was ever spoken about.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    The nanny never said anything?

    Ashley Morgan:

    Mm-mmh (negative). It’s so crazy.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    She’s like, I don’t want to get involved in that. When your mom was going out to these parties, was she like getting drunk when was going out at night?

    Ashley Morgan:

    Well, and so this is something I should touch on, that at some point, so my grandfather passed away with 25 years of sobriety. I have an uncle who I think is about 25 years now sober. My mom, I think I was maybe seven, decided that she had gone through a period, she needed to get sober. So she got sober from the time I was seven to the time I was 10 okay. I grew up …

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Like AA sober?

    Ashley Morgan:

    AA sober like log cabin in the morning before school, all the fancy LA meetings. So I was never afraid of AA and I immediately knew I was an alcoholic. From the first time I took a drug or drink, I knew and I wasn’t scared of it. I just always thought to myself, you’ll just go to AA once it gets bad enough.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Oh my God, that makes total sense.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Which as a 13 year old. You’re not really supposed to have thoughts like that. Not supposed to, but it’s not a normal thought.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    No, but that’s a really interesting thing because if you see these positive outcomes, like I never thought of it that way, but if you see these positive outcomes, and I always think of in terms of my kids, like they see mommy and daddy. They go to a program, they’re sober, their life is good, they pulled it together. And then they know what the description of alcoholism is and then they feel like, oh, I’m an alcoholic. In their mind, as the alcoholic would do, they skip to the happy ending.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Totally.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    That makes sense.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Right, which we all know it’s not normal, the happy ending unfortunately, statistically is not normal.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    No.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah. Then I turned into my mom started drinking again and she was like, oh, I just went through a period of emotional drinking. I’m like, okay. Do I think that might’ve been the case? Yeah, maybe. But yeah, she was incredibly social and incredibly out every night. I don’t know if she’s an alcoholic. I think she has a lot of other ism stuff, which she would tell you herself at this point. But yeah, I don’t know.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    When did your drinking start to … when did you, I use drinking generally, when were some of the things starting to like get really out of control for you?

    Ashley Morgan:

    Almost immediately within that first year. I started running away from home. At one time my dad called me, which is another reason why my mom would call the cops, and I got arrested at one point. I got arrested for assault and battery when I was like 14 or 15. Oh, this day was so bad. I never went to school. My mom had never made me go to school, but this day, she was leaving for work. She’s like, where’s your phone? Or she had to run out really quickly. She’s like, “Where’s your phone?” I’m like, “I don’t know.” I’m already high, I’m already super intoxicated, and I just didn’t care. When you’re high, you just don’t care. She was getting really angry about this. And she’s like, “If you don’t find your phone, I’m going to call the cops and tell them that you’re truant.”

    Ashley Morgan:

    Now mind you, she never cared that I went to school any other day. We proceeded to get into a fight. She calls the cops, and I think … I’m doing a lot of uppers. I think I walked by her and was just frustrated there, bopped her on the head. Just like out of frustration, just listening to the, can I say a bad word?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Just the shit that was coming out of her mouth, and then of course it was, “Oh my God, my daughter just hit me. Get over here right away?’

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Oh my God.

    Ashley Morgan:

    The cops come and they immediately put me in handcuffs. Of course, my mom was like the typical boy who cried wolf? And she was like, “Oh wait, no.” She’s like, “Arrest her, get her out of here.” Then they’re like, “Okay.” They did. And she’s like, “No, no, no, wait, it’s fine. It’s fine.” And they’re like, “No, the laws changed in California for domestic violence where the state now presses charges.” There was always this like, she would make these messes and somehow … and this was one of the times that she couldn’t undo it. The best part about that was she was filming a TV show in our house that day for work. I come out of our house in like UGG boots.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    This is how reality TV started.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah. UGG boots and a Juicy Couture sweatsuit in handcuffs. The camera crew’s across the street filming the front of the house for this show. And I’m like being walked away in handgun like this and saw my life … there’s nothing.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    It’s a perfect depiction of how …

    Ashley Morgan:

    So ridiculous. I went and they said, take me to jail far away. Everyone’s always like, oh, it’s in Sylmar. And I’m like, oh, I’ve been to jail there. I’ve never been back since. I don’t know what’s there. Then of course she scrambles to get me out and then we just don’t talk about it anymore. A, there were consequences. There were consequences, but on the flip side, it goes like doing drugs in the back of the classroom with the other kids and the teachers knew and no one … the were like, “Oh, Ashley’s just being crazy again.” The was also this thread of like always getting away with it, but ultimately they ended up sending me to boarding school.

    Ashley Morgan:

    They were going to send me the following year to an all girls Catholic boarding school up North. This was, I don’t know, February, March, something like that. I don’t know. Somewhere in there in the spring, and I couldn’t even wait that long. I kept running away, and then my dad was like, “Nope, you’re going to this other boarding school in Arizona. Basically for bad … like a college prep school for bad kids. They put me on a plane that night. I didn’t even have time to go home and get my stuff. My mom met us at the airport and that was the first time where I was like, “Wow, I need to clean up my act a little bit.” I was like, this’ll be good. I’ll go to a place where I don’t have access to anything. Then within an hour my dad drove … my dad literally pulled the car up to the school, went in, wrote the check to the headmaster and left. Didn’t even say goodbye. He was so over it.

    Ashley Morgan:

    He was like, take her, I want nothing to do with this. Within an hour someone’s like, “Hey, do you want to go smoke a joint?” And I was like, “Yes, of course I do.” That whole thing of like, okay, really, I’m going to clean my act up, it’s going to be [crosstalk 00:39:30].

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Right. That thought came to …

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yes, and that is where I learned to drink was there. It was basically like going to college at 14 years old. So, I was drunk for like a year, and once again, people knew, no one cared until things started to happen. I kept getting into severe trouble. I knew enough to say, A, I was scared. I remember I had a friend who looked at me one day and he’s like, “Wow, you’re an alcoholic.” And I was like, “Yeah, I know.” He was trying to help me by giving me this information and I was like, “Yes, so?” Unfortunately, he passed away like a year ago from an overdose due to this disease. There was a bunch of us that were just like heavily active in our addictions at the time. I kept getting into trouble and I knew to be like, okay, I got to go to rehab now. I knew enough. My mom, to get like a fun job, when she got sober was the head chef, was the chef at Promises.

    Ashley Morgan:

    So I grew up around … none of it scared me. All of that was really so normalized. So I was like, “I’m going to go to rehab.” So they sent me home. I really truly was hitting a bottom for sure. It wasn’t fully a manipulation. I really was struggling and could not drink every day. They were going to send me to Visions, which was like the adolescent Promises. At some point they ripped that checkup and sent me to a place in Orange. I think I was one of three kids that weren’t court ordered there. You could smoke there in those days. That was one of those things, my mom was such a pushover, but every once in a while she would hold to something and it was like, she wouldn’t sign the waiver for me to be able to smoke cigarettes.

    Ashley Morgan:

    And I’m like, “What are you doing? What are you doing, lady?” I’d go in the back of the building and sneak cigarettes and I ended up burning the next door neighbor’s shed in the backyard down. Just crazy. Just crazy, somehow got away with that. I have gone back since and made my amends to them. That started another kind of manipulation for me. I didn’t want to be there. It wasn’t cushy, it wasn’t cozy. I felt like everyone was mean to me, mainly probably because they were just calling me out, but I was just not about it. I started working on my mom to manipulate my way out of there. I was like, “I’ll go to meetings, I’ll get a sponsor, I’ll do these things.” And I did.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I came home. I wasn’t living at my mom’s house. I was living at my grandparents’ house in Pasadena at this point. Got a sponsor, and bless her heart, but the way she guided me through the steps was not … I don’t think anyone’s advice on how to go through the steps. It was like, okay, just every day, write down all the people you’re mad at and what they did. That was it. So you’re just walking around with this like ball of anger. There was no anything else. Ultimately, I ended up drinking. Then it was into a bunch of 51 … not 5150s. My mom was checking me into psych hospital. Now the real consequences started piling up on each other.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Just to kind of fast forward through a lot of this, I got sober and then I would relapse and then I would get sober again because consequences would get worse, things would get worse. The progressiveness was very apparent in my story. Hen, would get sober again and get a new sponsor and then maybe I would start to work the steps a little bit. Maybe I’d get to a fourth step and then I would relapse. But on the flip side of that, my life always was getting better every time I got sober. It was getting bigger.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Right, you had that experience.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yes. My life was getting bigger and better. Part of it was I was getting too busy for AA. I was getting too busy for the thing that saved me, but the majority of this, I was still a minor. So I was still living in an abusive, chaotic household, and I was still having most of my decisions made by someone who I didn’t trust. There was like all this chaos always. I ended up, after a few relapses, my mom’s friend ended up taking me in who was sober a while.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    How old were you when that happened?

    Ashley Morgan:

    17 I think. And she’s like, “Now you’re coming to live with me.” I couldn’t say sober at my mom’s house. I wouldn’t give myself the opportunity to because I just wanted to drown out all the craziness. I went to go live with this friend of my mom’s, and thank God for her, she saved my life. I was able to get friendships that I still have to this day. These people took me in and they just surrounded me. I went to meetings every day. I got like a get well job and things were going well. Things were moving in the right direction. I had a boyfriend who was also sober. Then, it was right before I had a year sober, and my mom was also spending a lot of time in Orange County at one of my godmother’s houses. So she was gone a lot so then I started to live at my mom’s house without her there. Everything was fine. No one was really fighting.

    Ashley Morgan:

    My mom calls and says that my sister was in a car accident. Actually, I was spending the night in my mom’s house while my mom was there. My sister had stolen my mom’s car. She tried to take mine, but she couldn’t turn it on.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Campbell?

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah, Campbell. I think it had a kill switch on it or something, and so she took my mom’s car and proceeded to get into numerous car accidents with parked cars and then crashed into a palm tree and was MIA, was missing.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    She left the scene.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah. It took us 12 hours to find her, and by the time we did … the cops basically said she walked away from this, obviously, but the internal bleeding, because she was drinking, she might not know, but she’s probably dead in an alley somewhere because you can’t really survive a crash like this. You couldn’t even make out the car. We looked for her for long time. The whole city of LA was looking for her. This is really before heavy social media so there was a lot of like calling around. She had left the scene, went somewhere else then and ended up taking a bottle of Tylenol and not telling anyone about it and then went to a friend’s house and got in touch with my grandma. My grandma brought her back.

    Ashley Morgan:

    She had had a few suicide attempts before that with like Tylenol or Advil or whatever, which can do severe, severe damage to you.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah. Not a good way to kill yourself though.

    Ashley Morgan:

    No. But she knew not to say anything about it. She knew to keep it quiet for a certain number of hours because within those … the beginning time, they can give you something to make it better. So we didn’t find out about that for a long time and it was just this … she was in the hospital for … I think she was at UCLA for like a month. In the ICU, for the beginning part, her liver failed. She basically said, “If you give me a new liver, I’ll kill myself.” It was just a very … she flat-lined too. She flat-lined and I don’t remember for how many minutes, but she flat-lined.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    From the attempt or from the car accident.

    Ashley Morgan:

    From the attempt. From the pills.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    From the pills.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I don’t think that the car accident helped anything but her organs were shutting down and she refused, not that they were going to listen to a 14 year old kid, but there’s hundreds of thousands of people that are waiting every day by the phone for a healthy organ. They’re not going to give it to some ungrateful kid. The reason I’m telling this story is I think I was just before a year sober. My girlfriend flew out from New York and I looked at her at some point and I said, I think I need some cocaine to stay awake for my family. The scary part is I really believed what I was saying. I really, truly believed that was my reasoning behind it. Not like this is too heavy for me, I can’t deal with it. So I did and I got that cocaine. I had had a bout with it before. This was like on a whole another level. The difference with this is I wouldn’t drink. I wouldn’t drink. I remember ….

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    That’s unusual.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah, because I didn’t want to get sloppy. I lived with my sober boyfriend at this point. My whole world was sobriety and so I just didn’t want anyone to find out.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Okay, you were still …

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah, it was a big liar. I was a big hider of my substance abuse and all that because I was so scared that they were going to take my solution away because that’s what had always happened, is they would find out and put me in a treatment center, put me here, put me there and take away the only thing that’s making me feel better. So I kept it to myself. Everyone I think started to figure out very quickly because doing cocaine alone all day, every day, just cocaine and not drinking to balance it, I was a psychopath and I weighed like 82 pounds. I’m 5’9″. I was bruised all over my body. I was going to go somewhere with my mom one night and she looked at me in the car and she said, “I just want you to know, I know. I know you’re not sober anymore.”

    Ashley Morgan:

    We went to a bar and I took a drink. I had also turned 18 at this point. At this point, no one really could put me anywhere against my will anyway. It took me …

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I so relate to that. My 18th birthday, the literal thought, because I was in treatment on my 18th birthday, and my literal thought was, but I was warded at the State of California, and my literal thought was …

    Ashley Morgan:

    [inaudible 00:48:25].

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    All right. But was like, I’m 18, they can’t put me anywhere. That was my happiest …

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah, 100%.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    And it’s such a good feeling.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah, it’s such a good feeling. I can drink now and I can maybe try and balance this out. By the end of that relapse, I was drinking like two liters of vodka a day and two eight balls of cocaine a day. That was just to like maintain. It was very isolating, I didn’t really want to be around other people, but over time, the boyfriend found out that fell apart. Then I started meeting people that were doing what I was doing through one way or another and I had people to do this with. But I was the person that would go to a party where everyone was doing cocaine and I would take my own cocaine and do it in the bathroom as well as their cocaine. I liked the isolation of it.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    The secret.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I was basically living in my car. It was a nice car, but I was basically living in it or hotel room, whatever. It was just a very … I relate to people who say it was a full time job. I was not one that’s like, okay, my career comes first and then … There was no career. There was no anything.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I don’t know why people go to school or like …

    Ashley Morgan:

    There was none of that at all, nor did I-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    [crosstalk 00:49:33].

    Ashley Morgan:

    That’s just what I wanted to do. Then it starts to get bad and worse and worse and worse. At first, it was like, this is what I’m dedicating my life to. I’m fine with it. Then, it started to scare me a bit because that thing that I said about always being able to go to AA when it got bad enough, I physically couldn’t go. I was like, okay, tomorrow I’m going to go to a meeting, tomorrow I’m going to … This is like not … I put myself in very dangerous situations with very dangerous people and some of which I probably don’t even remember to this day. It just was starting to kind of weigh on me. My mom used to come find me. I would be with friends in hotel rooms doing drugs for numerous days, and my mom would come there and hang out because she had said later that she didn’t know if that was the last time she was going to see me alive.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I was deteriorating, and I was not … my sister had the suicidal ideations, suicidal tendencies. I’d never try to take my own life, but I think I was …

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Suicide on the installment plan.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah, 100%. I was like, if I don’t wake up, I’m cool.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, I’m good with that. Yeah.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I was ready, but not willing to … Also, there was a vanity to it. Like, what are these people going to do without me? I was a disaster. I wasn’t allowed within five miles of any of my family members’ homes. I was a true train wreck, but I’m like, they’re going to miss me. You know what I mean? That was the flip side of it. There was this vanity of this like, don’t you know who I am kind of thing. So I kept trying to get back. Then it got to the point where I was calling my dad and asking to go to rehab, go to detox. The secret was out. Everyone knew at this point. That’s when I would do that thing where he would put me into us a treatment center and then I would run away. For a relationship that had no trust to begin with, that really wasn’t helping the situation.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, right.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Then he just stopped taking my calls. Every phone call because him like $50,000 with nothing, no return on his investment. Why would he even …?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    You had the legal pad out doing the math on that.

    Ashley Morgan:

    100%. No, he was not about it. Our mutual friend was someone that took me in. I will always be grateful to him. He was sober companioning at the time and he took me in and he called my dad and was like, “Your daughter’s dying. You need to know that. So then that started another series of detoxes. This friend of ours facilitated.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Some real great stories.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Oh my God. I can’t believe I’m even saying this, did you hear about the one where I peed on the sofa?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yes.

    Ashley Morgan:

    In a blackout?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I thought I was going to take it to my grave.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    No.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Years later, he was like, why did you think you peeing on the sofa I wasn’t going to notice? It smelled like pee in the house. Oh my God, so bad. But yeah, so this started this. I guess I got a little more willing each time, but not enough to actually do anything. The last time I remember I was at this, I don’t know if it was an after hours, I was at this guy’s house with a bunch of people that was known to have … his place was like the coke place. I’m in the bathroom doing coke alone while everyone else out there is doing coke like. It was very isolating. He calls me, it’s like two in the morning, I think he was like driving home and he was like, “I’m just checking on you.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Who?

    Ashley Morgan:

    LW calls me. For some reason I was like, “I’m done. I’m done.” He’s like, “Okay, come. You can go sleep in the spare bedroom or on the sofa, whatever.” Just come here now,” and I did and I left there. He had to keep me drinking. Medically, he had to keep me drinking because I was having seizures if I didn’t drink. But he would always take the cocaine away, so I would just immediately black out and do really weird things. I woke up from this blackout and, and there was a paper on the table and it said … it was a release form to go to a wilderness program in Utah. I looked at him and I was like, huh, no. 100% no.

    Ashley Morgan:

    It was like, you know when a puppy is being trained and there’s an alpha in the room and they bark and bark and bark until they calm down and then they realize that that’s the alpha and that they can chill?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah.

    Ashley Morgan:

    That’s exactly what I did to him. He was like, you’re crazy. No way. He just stared back at me. The thought in my head was, you’ve tried everything else, why not? So I signed it and I went off to detox in salt Lake City for like 10 days or something. Then they put me in this wilderness program for nine weeks. I thought that too in the beginning. I thought it and I bought it and I fought it and I ran away, like good luck running away in the middle of Mormon, Utah. I tried to hitchhike, which I’ve never done before in my entire life. Then I went back and it was the first real willingness that I was always like, they would call … my dad called me on the satellite phone as I’m like huffing and puffing my way out of this place, this is like national forest. He was like, “Turn around. What are you doing?”

    Ashley Morgan:

    Mind you, there’s like … because there’s a safety net. There’s a bunch of pickup trucks and all the staff that’s driving behind me. But I’m 18 so they can’t actually restrain me and bring me back. It was just ridiculous for anyone who was driving by. And I was like, well, maybe I have this problem so I need to go to this treatment. And he finally said to me, “Finish one and I’ll send you wherever you want to go. How about complete something, finish something and I’ll send you to every rehab you want to go to, but do this one first.” That resonated with me because I had never completed a single thing in my entire life. So I did and that was an incredible experience. Of course, it turned out to be an incredible experience.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I thought it was going to go home after and then I started to get more and more scared as I got closer to me leaving. So they sent me to a sober living in, not in Denver, in what’s it called? In Boulder. I think that was maybe a bit too much, too quick and I ended up relapsing. Then they sent me to the final treatment center that I went to where I spent my 19th birthday in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I’m very, very, very grateful for that place. It was like a secondary treatment center, so it wasn’t just alcohol and drug addiction. It was like everyone’s everything, an insane amount of trauma work. Even there, in the beginning I was like holding onto that will and holding on to …

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    It’s hard not to when you get put in those situations. Even if you want it, you feel like …

    Ashley Morgan:

    It’s being pushed on you.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    It’s default. They have to help you undo that before, even if you want it.

    Ashley Morgan:

    100%. But then they were going to kick me out, and not for drinking or using, but for doing something else stupid and not listening. Somebody said to me, they were like, “You’re going to die if you don’t get honest.” I don’t know why I heard this woman, she barely knew me. I wasn’t there that long, but she just looked at me and was like, “You’re killing yourself.” The first time I didn’t want to die and so I threw myself into it. It was like 10 or 12 hours a day of heavy trauma therapy. Then it came time for me to leave after a few months and I came back to LA and that friend of ours ended up sponsoring me. I was too scared. I didn’t trust women. I had really bad trust issues with women. I had had a bad experience with a woman’s sponsor. Yeah, it was gross.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I asked him to sponsor me because I trusted him and I felt he had my best interest, but he was in Japan or something at the time. I called him and I’m overwhelmed now living back with my mom who is still continuing to deteriorate and my dad is mad because I left there. He was like, I don’t know if he’s out of the country or something, but couldn’t get ahold of him. They’re like, “You have til five o’clock to leave here. My mom bought me a ticket back to LA.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Stay tuned to hear more in just a moment. 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 Lionrock 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 Lionrock 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 he want to have the best job ever, check out our open positions and apply at www.lionrockrecovery.com\about\careers.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I think that’s a big thing for a lot of women who come into the program. It definitely was for me, which is why I gravitated so much to LW. People don’t understand like it looks strange, like an older gentleman helping this young girl. But for me, I didn’t trust women and he was the person that I could hear the message through. I don’t know why, and now, all I work with is … I have zero interest in having a male … not at all. At the time, when I was 19 or 20 when I met him, he was the only person that I, honest to God, did not feel judged by.

    Ashley Morgan:

    A million percent.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I could hear the message, like he would say things. I remember he said to me, I said like, oh, well, I’ll never forget this moment because I’m sure lots of people said this to me. He looked at me and he goes, we were having breakfast and we always had these breakfast and he would have these like long silence. And I was like …

    Ashley Morgan:

    Mix on …

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah. So I would be like talking or whatever and he had this long silence, and I’m like, “What are you thinking? Why are you not talking?” I said like, “Okay, well, when I’m a year sober or when I’m two years sober or something,” I said, and he goes, if you are a year sober,” and I was like, “What are you talking about? You don’t think I’m going to make it to a year sober?” And he was like …

    Ashley Morgan:

    The audacity.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah. I’m like, screw you. I’m going to stay …

    Ashley Morgan:

    But he also knew how to not react.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Oh, totally.

    Ashley Morgan:

    You know what I mean? Crazy.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I didn’t react. I was just like, “Oh, oh yeah. Oh yeah, just watch.”

    Ashley Morgan:

    Just watch.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    There were were lots of little things like that. You hear the message, whatever that message is, you need to hear from the person you need to hear it. It’s okay, whoever that is. Because it’ll change, and for people listening, it’s really normal for women to come in not trusting women. It is normal to come in. I think we were pretty much all this like, well, all my friends are guys.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah, 100%.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I couldn’t find a woman friend anywhere in my life.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    No, and so like that is completely normal. Okay.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah. I think that he did a lot. think that I like to tell that. I do want to say the only difference between the sobriety and any other sobrieties that I worked all 12 steps in a row, start to finish without like cherry picking what I thought I needed, what I thought I could get away with not doing it. He was the person for me to do that with. Obviously I had issues with trust, but also fear of getting honest because that never worked out well for me in my life. There was always like the thing of just tell us. It won’t matter, you won’t be in trouble. And then there was these severe consequences like oh, I want you to trust me. Please. Then it just was a disaster.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    It blew up in your face.

    Ashley Morgan:

    But for him, I kept like testing him almost. I didn’t get the reactions I was used to getting and I didn’t get the judgment. If anything, I got like, oh, that’s stupid, I did one way worse and then I felt like an amateur.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, totally.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I remember doing my four-step finally, and writing down, I think it was like two notebooks full of names. The poor guy listened to the whole entire thing, but whenever. I was obviously very angry and it was incredibly suppressed. But I remember there not being … there were secrets that I had in my life that I wasn’t resentful about. It was like for me, like a loophole, like oh, I don’t have to put this down. I’m getting away with it.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Totally. That is a really great point. I love that because I remember like, okay, write down all your resentments, you get out all your dirty laundry. I remember thinking to myself like, my dirty laundry is not in my resentments.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah, 100%. I’m just mad about these other things.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah. That’s not the dirty laundry.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Not mad at myself, but I remember there was, and maybe we’ll go into it, but there was a situation. Oh, so I read my fifth step to him. This poor guy listened to it for … I don’t know how many times we had to get together, and then he goes, and meanwhile I’m like patting myself on the back. I’m like, you got away with it, your secrets are safe. Then he goes, okay, now sit down and write a list of all your secrets. And I was so mad that it’s like he knew what was in my brain. I did though. I did and I was mortified and felt like this was going to be the end of our relationship. Like, well, here we go. We had this great relationship and he’s really helping me and we’re never going to talk again.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Why did you decide to do it anyway then?

    Ashley Morgan:

    Because I trusted him.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    And you had no other.

    Ashley Morgan:

    No, I had no other and I wanted what he had, which was peace of mind. At least on the surface looking like he wasn’t walking around just in one constant anxiety attack. He was like comatose compared to what I was. So I did it and then we continued through the steps. I would like to share what happened with that, if that’s okay. I get to my ninth step, I’m starting to make amends to people, and my life is getting really big. I’ve started a company out of nowhere. I was planning on doing one thing. At some point. I moved back to Arizona to be with a guy. Not recommended. Then I ended up back, and I had stayed sober through that process. I think I had two something, two plus year sober, and I’m doing life and then all of a sudden, I’m on my way to do one thing and to get my license for this thing and then this other thing comes up. I’m working. I’m making money and I’m making …

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    As an interior designer?

    Ashley Morgan:

    No, but this was before that, with the events. I started working for a catering company, and all of a sudden, I’m like doing my own events. One thing leads to another and I’m super busy. I’m supporting myself and moved back from Arizona with basically nothing, have no idea how I’m going to support myself and then just like make it happen. That’s not a Pat on the back, but when you don’t have another option, you do it.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    No, I’ve seen you do it.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I’m working and making a lot of money and things are good. I think this was the time, maybe it was after that relationship. I can’t remember. There was a period where I just wasn’t able. I remember sitting him down one day and I’m like, he knows I’m doing well and I’m talking about how I can’t hold onto money. No matter how much is coming in, it’s just going back out again. Very matter of factly, very calmly, he just looks at me and he’s like, “Well, yeah, that’s because the money you’re bringing in doesn’t belong to you. You owe people money.” Like in a very sweet, loving way but like dah. I was like, I don’t know about that. He’s like, so maybe we look at … there was one very significant financial amends that I needed to make.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    The shed in the back of …

    Ashley Morgan:

    No, I made that one and I was so scared because the woman that worked there hated me and she still worked there all those years later. I was like, she’s calling the cops, 100%. But I did, I went down there and I made that amends. Then they asked me to come back and speak on a panel there, which was really great. But this was another one. I worked at this company, the last place I worked before my last relapse and I took a lot of money from them. Nobody was really paying attention and yeah and it was supporting. I was going to go to my grave with it because they could absolutely 100% put me in jail for it. So he brings that one specifically up. He’s like, “Maybe we think about the biggest financial amends you have.”

    Ashley Morgan:

    Everything else was pretty self contained with me, so I didn’t like … It’s not like I had child support to pay, children, none of that stuff. I was like, “Ha-ha, that’s cute. But anyway, I got to go, bye.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    How much money …?

    Ashley Morgan:

    I had no idea. But I wasn’t even like willing to entertain it. Then over the course of the next like seven days, I run into like five people that I worked with at that company. Hadn’t seen them ever out before, have not seen them again to this day. I’m like, Ugh. I just knew and I called him. It couldn’t have been more obvious that the universe was like, we’re doing this. I call him and I’m like, “Okay, I hear you. Fine, let’s talk about this.” I had to make this call to the man who owned this business who was just the nicest, kindest … had always been nothing but nice and kind and a family man. Just like a good guy. I had to be willing to go to jail. I said this the other day that had it come down to it, whatever happened after that, if that was it, I don’t know where my willingness would have been, but I had to be willing to make the phone call to make it right.

    Ashley Morgan:

    So I go to LW’s house and I make it with him because I’m way too scared to make it by myself. I call this man and I say, “Listen, this is what happened and I took money from you and I want to pay it back.” He’s quiet for a second. The first thing he says is, “I just want you to know that I see how hard this call must be to make. Already off to like …

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Oh my God, that makes me want to cry.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Totally. And I’m like, huh? You’re like, what? I was like, thank you. He goes, “Well, how much money do you think it was?” I said, “Honestly, I have no idea.” He was like, okay.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Well, you think it was more than 10 grand?

    Ashley Morgan:

    Maybe it was about that. I wrote all [inaudible 01:07:04] … and he goes, “I want you to come up with a number and really try and think about it, and then I want you to give that money to somebody who needs it. I’m looking at the phone away from my ear like, I’m sorry, what? Did you just hit your head? I was like, okay. My pattern was to run and to completely evade responsibility my entire life. I could have absolutely hung up the phone and just been like, “Cool. That’s taken care of. That’s finished.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, [crosstalk 01:07:31]. That would that would be so hard, especially in early sobriety, I would have been like, cool, so he said I don’t have to pay it.

    Ashley Morgan:

    100%.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    That’s all I would heard.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yes, one million percent, but I did. I wrote that check every single month, and I was about a month away from my … I was, I think on my last check.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Did you send him like …?

    Ashley Morgan:

    No, he didn’t need to know anything.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I know, but you didn’t tell him?

    Ashley Morgan:

    No.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Oh, I would have been like, see, I’m doing it.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Totally. I think I even talked to LW about it. He’s like, “No, just do what he said.” And I was a month away and I run into him at Swingers on Beverley. I walk in and he’s standing there with his son and they’re both dressed in all white, like little angels. I felt like it was nighttime and there was still this light on him. He looks at me and he starts crying. There’s tears in his eyes. And he comes and gives me the biggest hug. He says, “I want you to know, I tell your story to whoever will listen.” I told him, I said, “I’m on my last check.” It’s weird because I had just left talking to a newcomer at a rehab and told her this story, and I think she’s with me actually. The newcomers with me to eat and I have just told her the story that sounds like complete bullshit, and then I run into the guy. It was just like one of those moments in sobriety that you’ll never forget.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, and you try to explain to other people and they’re like …

    Ashley Morgan:

    You can’t get the significance of it. I wrote that last check and something about that, I was able to hold on to money after that.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    How interesting.

    Ashley Morgan:

    To be fair, I’ve also made amends to people who are in the program, who are like, I don’t care what you have to say. I won’t to see you anymore. You know what I mean? That is not a typical amends story. Don’t expect that.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Right, [inaudible 01:09:10].

    Ashley Morgan:

    But for me, that was like one of those things that are more experienced, that if I show up, because I had never showed up for anything in my life, if I continue to show up and face the hard stuff, ultimately, no matter what happened with that phone call, my life is going to get better and I’m going to start to heal a little bit and I don’t have to take this stuff to my grave because taking this up to my grave is what’s killing me in the first place. Things started to get bigger and bigger and bigger and I’m traveling the world. You remember, I was never here. Then I started to burnout.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    At this time, so you’re in your early 20s.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Wait, so maybe I didn’t start traveling yet. What I do want to touch on, I’m in my early 20s. What I do know is around four years sober, my life started to fall apart. I think now looking back on it, it was completely of my own making where I was in a relationship that probably wasn’t working for either one of us. I was not happy at work because I was also working other jobs. I’m doing all this stuff and one day I kind of blow my whole life up and I end our relationship, and my friendships were attached to this relationship. Because I’m the one breaking up the relationship …

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    You’re the bad guy.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I’m the bad guy. So, all my friendships go away as well, and they were mostly male friendships. Yeah, I do want to say that from years four to five, I never thought about drinking because I just knew where that led. I feel very fortunate to never forget how bad it was the last time I got sober and that last day of drinking and using, but I wanted to check myself into a hospital and have no responsibility for a minute.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Totally, I do know.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Just sit back, let somebody else with it.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I got to go somewhere.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I want it to not feel right. That doesn’t mean there was no … I didn’t want to end my life. I didn’t want to drink. I just wanted to numb.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Numb.

    Ashley Morgan:

    That is the first time, besides LW who I did take direction from, that is the first time in my life I started talking to people that had been through the same things before me, who went through a painful breakup in sobriety. I think I ran into … we, you and I talked at that point, Don’t you remember that? That was crazy for both of us.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Right. So LW, our mutual friend, he would always talk about the other Ashley. So he was like, “Oh, the other …” because we would be going through things very similarly, simultaneously.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I feel like for our whole lives we did. We have similar …

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah. Then with the breakup and things falling apart, I feel … so one of my mentors talked to me about, he’s like, “In order to stay sober a long time, you have to upgrade your recovery to where you are.” I did what worked in the beginning for a long time. I’m a creature of habit so I’m going to just going to do the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over again until it completely blows up in my face. It’s just like, I don’t know how to do anything else. It doesn’t occur …

    Ashley Morgan:

    Until somebody physically picks me up and turns me to my little like okay, keep walking this right now.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I’m like this little doll that goes in one direction, you have to turn me around. When you’re talking about that bottom in sobriety is what you’re talking about, I had to change, my sobriety needed something new. This has happened to me in other parts of my sobriety. It happened to me when I had kids and it took me a lot of pain to come to that like, Oh, this is a recovery thing again. I’m like, I need a doctor, I need a neurologist.

    Ashley Morgan:

    It’s happened to me numerous times too.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Somebody come, just lift me. I need a psychic.

    Ashley Morgan:

    This problem off my shoulders with just minimal effort.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah. I was like I need anything. Just like maybe a plumber, I don’t know. But then it’s like, oh, this is a recovery, this is recovery. This is my alcoholism. When I say alcoholism and when you say alcoholism, it just stands for all of the isms, all of the things that I used to numb because the feelings are too big and I just can’t deal. Hitting bottom in sobriety, it was funny because I was literally talking today about the post that was like, I wouldn’t trade my worst day in recovery for my best day using it. I was like absolutely incorrect. Absolutely unequivocally my best day using was wonderful and my worst days in recovery have been horrific.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Because I had to feel every ounce, you’re literally as present as you can get. I remember thinking like, should I get the beat of the vegetable peeler and just peel my skin? I don’t know what to do here. I have been in a situation where I’ve been in the shower like when [Darc 01:14:00] and I broke up in the shower crying and I don’t know where to walk.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah, inability to …

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Like I don’t know what to do. Not with my hands. Completely, I was so used to …

    Ashley Morgan:

    Well, that’s the same time you and Darc broke up around the same time. I remember running into you and both of us, just like very skinny.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Very skinny.

    Ashley Morgan:

    You can see it in another person’s eyes when the world is falling apart. You know what I mean? You have that, no words have to be spoken.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, I don’t know what I’m doing.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I remember that conversation like it was yesterday.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    That’s an important … I suspect it happens to everyone. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t hit a bottom in sobriety, but that is …

    Ashley Morgan:

    I don’t know that it’s spoken about that much though.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, maybe not. Yeah, I speak to a lot of people who tell me about it, so I don’t know what they tell people publicly, but they do tell me. A bottom in sobriety, those are the moments where you either grow, they say grow or go. You either grow or go because that pain is everything. It’s like you’re driving a station wagon, full of thousand years of your bullshit in the back and you hit the brakes and it all comes and decapitates you. That’s what it feels like.

    Ashley Morgan:

    It is so brutal, which is the time that I decided to get a female sponsor. I had no idea how …

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    That’s the change, right? That’s like, okay, something has … You were done with that. You needed something new.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I was such a mess. I saw this woman and I was instantly attracted to her. I think I was speaking at a meeting and she was there and she ended up sharing, and I was like, oh, she looks good and she’s not crazy. Awesome. You know what I mean? You don’t always get both, right? I called her and I asked her to sponsor me, and now she jokes, she’s still my sponsor to this day. Now she jokes that she ended that call, my energy was so off at that time, that she said she hung up the phone with me and she was vibrating over the phone.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    You used to, during those days, I’ve never met anyone who literally like, I was like, “Is she sober?” You talk so fast and your body like you moved so quickly.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Truly uncomfortable in my skin, the most possible.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I was like, I don’t know, you were like busy doing nothing. Every thing, every cell in your body was going in a different direction.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Running away from me.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah. It just looked so uncomfortable.

    Ashley Morgan:

    It was, for like a year, I couldn’t really sleep. Anyway, I found this woman and she’s like, “Okay, I’ll sponsor you but this is how we’re going to do it. We’re going to go through the book, we’re going to go through the steps and we’re going to go line by line in the book,” and I would show up at house every Saturday afternoon. Because I was so busy judging myself and feeling so insecure and so just like a fish out of water every single moment of the day, I was uncomfortable all the time. She’s this woman who has 30 … Now, I think she’s what? She’ll kill me if I don’t … 32, 33 years of sobriety and 20 something years of sobriety who’s like completely comfortable in her skin because she continues to work a program. She continues to go to meetings, she continues to work with other people. So she’s good.

    Ashley Morgan:

    She doesn’t need anything from me. I’m there uncomfortable, just crawling out of my skin. I remember a few, or maybe a month or a few months into it, I blurted out at her house, “I’m so uncomfortable right now.” Because in my brain, I’m like, oh no, we’re not best friends already. She doesn’t want to be my best friend. I have literally nothing to offer.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Right, you’ve never had a relationship like that.

    Ashley Morgan:

    No, where you have to build it organically. She literally said that to me.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    She’s the adult. You’re not used to adults someone embodying what it really means to be loving and an adult.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Well, that and to build a relationship over time. I was so used to like, oh, we have things in common, we’re best friends. She really had no interest in being my best friend. I’m very close to her now and she’s still not my best friend. She has friends. It just was a matter of …

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Special relationship.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yes. She said to me in that moment, she started laughing when I was like, oh, I’m freaking out. I’m so uncomfortable. She’s like, “Give a time. We’re building the relationship.” So used to this like out of thin air. It isn’t real. That’s not lasting. It’s not built on anything real. But I did, I went and I had to tell her some really shameful things, that I thought for sure some of the things that I had done, she had been on the receiving end of in her life. That were like things that completely changed her life, and I had to be like, I’m actively engaging in this thing right now. All she said to me was, “To get self esteem, we do esteemable acts.” That’s all she said. It broke my brain. I had heard it a million times before that, but she could’ve been like, gross, get out of my house. People that did something, whatever. She could’ve brought herself into it and she chose not to.

    Ashley Morgan:

    That’s all she had to say for me to be like, I’m out of this situation that I’m in that is making me feel awful and I’m ashamed of it. I’ve had so many experiences like that. So I went through the steps then. I’ve gone through them numerous times and I just finished going through them. I do want to touch on, I had another bottom in sobriety. After that, my life was getting bigger and I was traveling all the time and just burnt out after a couple of years. I didn’t really have roots anymore. Luckily, I had great friends that I was able to leave and come back to some normalcy a little bit, but definitely starting to kind of spin out again. I made a decision in that time on a trip to, I don’t know, Africa or Europe or something that I needed to come back and reroute myself because I need consistency.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I do. I’m one of those people that just loses it. I can travel the world and I can be in a different city every day, but I need to be able to come home for brief periods and have and feel like I have a routine because otherwise I’m just all over the place. Such a creature of habit. I decided that I was going to stop taking on events all over the place and stop doing this and really root myself here, that I was going to start this new business. It was a business that my mother was in, so I told myself like, oh, you got it. From driving around after school and sometimes paying attention, you’ll do great. And I didn’t have it and I put my time in my savings and my energy and every single thing I had into .. and stopped bringing in a paycheck to do this.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Then, my brain was like, oh, because my last experiences were like things grew organically and they grew quickly and things were good. And I was like, oh, it’ll just happen right away. This business will build … Somewhere in me it was like, it’s going to take five years to build this business, but the one, the instant gratification thought worn out. It’ll be five years and it’s finally getting there, but I will say, I’ve never been in the last, until about last October for maybe two years before that, I’ve never been in that much fear in my entire life. You heard about it and you saw me.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    A lot of it was financial fear that you’d never experienced before.

    Ashley Morgan:

    That’s the thing is, it was a new kind of fear. As much as I’ve had so much stuff happened in sobriety, that was one thing I never had to deal with. It was always, the amount of energy and effort I put in, I was getting back equal or greater without fail and usually it was greater, not equal. In those few years, the amount of whatever I was putting in, I was getting less than back and it was costing me a lot of money. I don’t think anyone does well with uncertainty, but it was affecting me in areas of my life that A, had nothing to do with finances. It had nothing to do with job stuff, but I was like reverting. I know myself. I’ve always, I think been that person that, what you just spoke to those years of me being uncomfortable, so I’m just go, go, go.

    Ashley Morgan:

    That was always my kind of fight or flight response was like, just push through it and just move three times as fast and it’ll be okay. This was paralyzing. I was not reacting to it the same way.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Well, and I think your relationship with money was a big thing that didn’t get addressed.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I didn’t even know it was there.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I think that that is so … All of us have a relationship with money, an emotional relationship with money except maybe your dad, but I’m sure he does too with his legal pad. When you grow up and money is used as power …

    Ashley Morgan:

    Which of is 100%.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    … and custody and mom traded you for a car. It’s all about that for a long time, but it’s also always there. I think that dealing with that, dealing with how it relates, because for me, money affects all of my relationships and particularly my romantic relationships, but it affects all of my relationships.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I had no idea.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    There isn’t enough money in the world for me to feel safe. I had to learn that. I had to learn that.

    Ashley Morgan:

    We had this conversation years ago, I remember.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, at one point, I had plenty of money not to be scared and I have never been more afraid of financial. I was like, oh, this is not that because for me, and I think, maybe you relate to this was because a dollar bill, it had a consistent currency, it was constant. I knew what you could purchase. It was always going to be the same. So, you couldn’t rely on people. People were …

    Ashley Morgan:

    Changing all the time.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Changing at all times. You didn’t know if they were going to show up, but you always knew that money could buy you a shelter or could buy you food or could buy … so it was safe. By definition, it was not changing. So, it felt safer. I can rely, if I have $20 I can purchase or whatever. If I have $1,000, I can go and stay somewhere for a couple nights. If I have you, I have no idea what I’m going to get.

    Ashley Morgan:

    You could leave, you could [crosstalk 01:24:31].

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    You could leave. I don’t know if you’re going to contribute.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Well, that goes back to the control thing.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Right, but this total fear. That was another thing LW was like money is just energy.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I can remember that.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    And I was like, you’re insane. That’s an insane thought. You’re an insane human. This is insane.

    Ashley Morgan:

    But you’re also right.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    But weirdly, yeah, but I’ll never … that’s still stuck in my head. Money is just energy. He’s like, it comes and it goes, it comes and it goes. And I was like, no, it literally … I had put my faith in that, even though it’s not like I had a lot of it, but it didn’t matter. I put my faith in that and turning that into like you have to do enough work that you’re willing to have relationships you put your faith in.

    Ashley Morgan:

    100%. I can bring it to present right now is I was on the phone. I’m really good at overall knowing as far, as the higher power goes. I grew up, not religious, but we were taken to church. I think it was maybe for the custody battle, the purpose of the custody battle to make one parent look better than the other and more stable and more. I’ve always had a resentment, but there was always something, even at that time knowing that everything happens for a reason. I didn’t know what it was. So there wasn’t this like coming in here, I didn’t have that issue.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I knew, but as an idea, as a theory, that’s how I felt. But in my day to day, the most stubborn, the most … So I can tell people like, oh well, it’s God’s will. You know what I mean? You could just be doing God’s will and don’t get in the way and then turn around and do something terrible in my own life that was a very much 100% my will.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    It’s fear.

    Ashley Morgan:

    100%, the lack of control.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    So much lack of control. Oh my God. Then I think back to like wanting to use as if I was in control, but that’s like the irony.

    Ashley Morgan:

    completely.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    There were a couple things that happened in your sobriety with your mom as that relationship deteriorated that caused you to like really be the adult. We talked a little bit about her mental illness in the beginning. How did that situation play out with her?

    Ashley Morgan:

    She really started to deteriorate after I got sober the last time. Truly to the point where I didn’t talk to her for five years, and that was a decision that I made, not alone, but I needed it, I wasn’t going to stay sober. Because it was incredibly volatile and it was incredibly blaming and it was incredibly … I needed a break from it. I had spent my entire life with it. The more sober I got, the more I realized that it was a sickness. I think for a long time made it about me, why she’s so mean to me. It’s like, okay, I know there’s a sickness, but that doesn’t mean that I can engage in it.

    Ashley Morgan:

    It doesn’t mean that it’s healthy for me right now to engage in it. I don’t have the tools to engage with her, so I’m just not going to do it. So I had to take a step back and my family was very supportive because they knew. They experienced it.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Well, and she was hallucinating.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah, towards the end, she was fully having crazy hallucinations. Not to say she’s a crazy person, but they were so elaborate, the hallucinations.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Sober hallucinations, right?

    Ashley Morgan:

    I don’t know, she was diagnosed with cancer at one point and earlier, and I think I’m jumping around a little bit, but at some point in my early sobriety she was diagnosed with cancer and she was on a lot of medicine. [crosstalk 01:27:50].

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Okay, medications.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Pain pills. I don’t know what she was taking. I don’t know.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Well, she at one point something had …

    Ashley Morgan:

    But something broke in her, something snapped in her from that experience I think. At one point, she was not in her house, she was living in her car. Electively yeah.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Electively living in her car and you …

    Ashley Morgan:

    With my little sister.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    And you took Landon.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah, so I ended up taking my little sister. I didn’t take her. My mom took my sister’s dad to court who really hadn’t been … early on he was apart and then he wasn’t. My mom was like, you need to pick one, and he picked me away. And then all of a sudden you want it to be back. I don’t say that lightly. But there was a point where my mom tried to take them to court and it ended up backfiring on her and she lost custody of my sister. I had to go to court and testify. Probably the hardest day of my life. Maybe the hardest day came after when I had to go meet my sister at the police station and tell her she wasn’t going back to my mom.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    And she was upset about that.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yes, because she was told that her father was just a bad guy, and which is not the case. I need to make that very clear. And she had to go live in a house with her dad who she barely knew and was told horrible things about, and her step mom, who was an angel sent from heaven, this woman, and I think that was the reason that my sister didn’t try and run away then. She had to go through it. It was the most heartbreaking day of my life where I know that she was resentful at me because I was the face of being pulled away. This little girl who’s now, not little anymore, should be 18 this year, is probably more adjusted than anyone I know who’s lived a lifetime. Where realizing my mom was sick happened really quick for her and you’re realizing …

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Interesting. Okay, so she really …

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah, it took a minute and to come around to her dad, and now they all have a great relationship. The craziest thing that has happened in my sobriety, my mom was the kind of narcissist, and I’m putting that label on it. I’m not, again, not a doctor, that it was never her fault. Nothing was ever a fault, to the point where if you put a gun on my head, I would say there’s never going to be a time where she will admit that she has had any part in anything that has happened to her, to us, any of it. One day I got a call from my uncle that she said, “I know I’m sick. I want to get help.” That was a couple of years ago and she stuck to it. Our relationship is constantly changing. I still didn’t talk to her for another year.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Because the last couple of years you’ve had some semblance of a relationship.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yes. When I first saw her, she had like Parkinson’s symptoms. She couldn’t talk. She couldn’t form words or sentences. I think for me, our relationship was very volatile and it was very loud. All of that. I think that was the only way that I could see her.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Interesting, like to lose the speech.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah, she physically couldn’t fight me back. Then over time, with working with doctors and all of that, she’s gotten her speech back, but a lot of the anger has dissipated and she’s in Al-Anon now, which she had gone to before, but I think it was always as a weapon before. Like, when are you going to give me my amends? I think she’s also in OA for eating disorder stuff. She is heavily in therapy. She’s medicated and she’s really making the effort to try, and I’ve gotten amends from her. For us, it was a very like five minute thing because who wants to go through a whole lifetime of stuff? We both know what happened and we’ve left it at that right now. And if it needs to come out more, we’ll talk about it more. Those are the things, I have a relationship with my father today.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    And you didn’t talk to your dad for a long time?

    Ashley Morgan:

    No, I had to stop talking to my dad. I was really hurt. I felt very judged all the time.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    He and his wife ended up having children.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yes, two of them.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Two children.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Two children.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    And they moved to Orange County.

    Ashley Morgan:

    From Seattle they moved to Orange County.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    And they built like a real family life, like a structured …

    Ashley Morgan:

    Very structured, yes. Once I got sober again, I think there was no trust there on my dad’s side. I don’t blame him, but I kept wanting this relationship out of thin air. Because I had pushed him away when I was a teenager. He wasn’t about it. And so we stopped talking for the first few years of my sobriety and then we started talking again, but I still felt judgment and I felt like … and then it all kind of came to a head and I stopped talking to him for a few years because I just felt like it didn’t feel safe for me. Not that he did anything, but I also have to respect that he’s a parent of two other children and I’m not a parent and I don’t get to judge how he parents and what he sees. It’s all out of love, right? He too had no coping skills and know ..

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    These are all hard decisions.

    Ashley Morgan:

    He can make business decisions, communicate that, but when it’s emotional stuff, none of us had tools. And so I had to back off for a few years. He started calling, and I remember telling my therapist like, “Oh, well, he called again, but I’m not calling him back.” And she said, “No, no, no.” My therapist was sober, is sober like 40 something years. And she said, “That’s actually really punishing behavior to not.” In my head I’m like, I’m not engaging so I’m not making it worse, so it’s fine. But she’s like, no, that’s punishing. He’s making an effort. That doesn’t mean you have to be super try and forge this like super intense relationship right now, but you’re being punishing by not … you’re holding the power right and you’re liking it.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Anyway, I ended up sitting him down at one point. I wasn’t talking to my mom at the time, and I said, “Listen,” I talked to him like an adult. He was so used to me, anytime he would say anything, I’d just start crying. I’m overly emotional, and who wants to deal with that all the time? No one. I said, “Listen, the older I get, the more I want a family. I’m respectful of the way you live your life. It might not be what I’m doing, but you’re my parent and I would really like to make a go at this,” and we have. It’s been years and we talk about business stuff now. I can call him about that. I heard somebody speak at a meeting recently that they never felt like they had anything to relate to their parent about and that the parent didn’t relate to them, so they in turn tried to see what the parent was interested in.

    Ashley Morgan:

    This girl was talking about her dad liked tennis and golf, so they would watch tennis together and slowly but surely, they would build this …

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Relationship?

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah. And now they go on to a golf tournament every year together or tennis. They have a real relationship. Like my dad, we talked about business. My dad likes to surf, so we talk about that. We talked about my little sisters. One of the biggest gifts I will ever have gotten in sobriety, I was told when I was a teenager, hopefully you can just have a glass of wine with … There was no education on that side of the family about alcoholism and drug addiction. It was more like, why won’t you just get your shit together? Come on, you’re embarrassing yourself and you’re really being a pain. But I got a call a couple of years ago that the oldest of my dad’s daughters was being a teenager and dabbling in things and it seemed like it was get going a little too far and they called me and asked me for help. To me, forget the cash and prizes, forget the financial security, forget all of that. I was not someone that they would ever go to for advice. That’s like the understatement.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, putting it lightly.

    Ashley Morgan:

    She didn’t want to go to college, she didn’t want to do this. I got to help them through it. She’s at a really incredible college in New York. The partying has really settled down to a normal amount because she’s a teenager and that’s what they do. And they asked me, do you think we should put her in rehab? And my answer was, “No, I don’t.” I think that that will be a place where she learns things.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, she’ll come out with a PhD.

    Ashley Morgan:

    She will be like a [crosstalk 01:36:01] in heroin. No one needs that. I don’t know. I can’t say enough. One last things I can say is like, speaking to the last few years, the really, really brutal last few years, as scary as it was, and still can be. I’m a human, I have a pulse so I’m going to worry about something. The only change is there has been this feeling, this almost like a warmth in my stomach. You know that that warmth you would get when you would drink and that it would go down and warm your stomach? That same kind of feeling that everything’s going to be okay, and then it will work out. It never works out in the timeframe I wanted it to work out. That would be lovely. But that has been my experience, and that doesn’t mean that I don’t fight against it.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I was talking to a girlfriend the other day who was having some relationship issues or something or she was struggling with something. I don’t know if they were having an issue, but she was having a hard time with something. She talked to somebody and they’re basically like, “You’re great. So it doesn’t matter what the other person is doing.” The message she took from that was maybe this relationship I’m in doesn’t work out, but that just means that that the universe or my higher power, God has a bigger plan for me and I need to stop fighting against that. I’m listening to the story and me going through my own personal stuff right now, I’m literally like, that’s an amazing message. I’m like, for you, that’s an amazing message. Literally, in my head I heard it like, oh, that works so … There’s no way that can apply to me right now.

    Ashley Morgan:

    My situation is different, it’s unique. Then later that night, I think, or the next morning it hit me. I’m like, no, no, not that special, 100% that applies to me. The second that I can remind myself that I will strangle a situation to death. It is my way or no way at all and you need to do it at the time I want you to do it and you need to figure it all out when and how and why I need you to figure it all out. As long as all that happens, it’s fine. Once people start exercising their own will, forget about it. It’s just not my business to do that. It’s not my place to do that. It’s been a couple of days since that happened and I’ve had like this whole new … just trusting the process.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    It’s so hard.

    Ashley Morgan:

    It’s by far the hardest thing.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    It’s so hard, and you stay long enough, you stay clean and sober long enough and you remember, your brain that you have … you make it habitual, it’s like, oh yeah. It’s habitual to go to meetings, habitual to call people. You create these habits that are like your safeguards, but you have to … I have to bump up against them to remember them.

    Ashley Morgan:

    It’s so crazy.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    It’s not like I just remember them because yesterday I did it.

    Ashley Morgan:

    No, I need to be like paralyzed by pain.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    100%.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I just think it’s so funny after all these years that I was like, oh yeah, that works for you. That’s a great message for you. That was the inner dialogue and then I’m like, wait a second, what? I’m going through a similar thing she’s talking about. Why in the world would that not apply to me?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    There’s a couple of reasons. Because the universe has a plan for you sounds insane.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah, totally.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Like what?

    Ashley Morgan:

    My scientific mind doesn’t really appreciate that.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Right. Like, I’m sorry. You’re like, no it doesn’t or whatever. Then also like, okay, if that’s true, I’d like to see this plan. There’s a lot of questions that come with that.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Completely.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    That’s part of why it’s like, wow, that sounds like really nice, but obviously I don’t believe that.

    Ashley Morgan:

    For you.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    For you. Yeah. Then, I think what really changes over time is the situations that you had with the guy who you paid back. You get enough experiences and you live through enough things working out okay that you start to believe it because there’s evidence of it. When people are like, “Well, I don’t believe in the God thing. I don’t, dah, dah, dah, dah.” It’s like, cool. You don’t have …

    Ashley Morgan:

    Just stick around for a little bit. Let it happen to you.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    The evidence will pile up that things are going to be okay. I always think back to when has it not been okay, when has it not turned out okay. What situation? It’s always somehow turn out okay.

    Ashley Morgan:

    And not always looks the way I want it to look.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Oh, no.

    Ashley Morgan:

    And most of the time it doesn’t. It’s when I hold on to that idea of what I think things need to look like. I’m shortchanging myself every time. I have girls that I sponsor and women that I sponsor and watching them go through relationship stuff, work stuff. I’m like-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    It’s so easy to see it too.

    Ashley Morgan:

    You know what the worst part is? They do it, they’re listening to me and then I’m not doing it myself.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Oh, I know.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I called myself out the other day to a sponsee. I was like, I’m telling you to do all these things and I’m not doing them. So here’s where I start doing it. It just doesn’t make any sense. And I’m also seeing the things I’m telling you to do work, so why wouldn’t I?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Because there’s this resistance. There’s this inner resistance like …

    Ashley Morgan:

    This one is going to be different.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Well, I was diagnosed with oppositional defiance disorder, ODD when I was at when I was a teenager, which I think is so hysterical.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah, and very fitting.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, and my dad always goes ODD. But it’s like I just have to fight against it just on principle and then I’ll do it. I just can’t bring myself.

    Ashley Morgan:

    But the pain of the fighting at this time in my life …

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I fight for much shorter.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah. Because it’s too painful. We’re just too aware. I don’t have the tolerance.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I don’t have any tolerance for pain anymore. I’m like a small, small baby and pain comes and I’m like, someone help me get out of my pain.

    Ashley Morgan:

    The difference between being a small baby and us is like we’re adults and no one feels bad for us,

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Not at all. We’re like, I have to get up and go to work and pay bills, and it’s like these are the hardest things in my life. You put an emergency in my life. You put like a massive fixed 10 volcano in …

    Ashley Morgan:

    [crosstalk 01:41:57].

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I am Johnny on the spot. I got emergencies down like … you give me like …

    Ashley Morgan:

    A glowing in my element.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Oh yeah. So in my element. Any ambulance, I’m like, I’m ready to go. What do you need? Then, like a day, like a normal day …

    Ashley Morgan:

    The post office. [inaudible 01:42:19].

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Just like an extra insurance phone call.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I still [crosstalk 01:42:23] when I talk about the phone service.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Or like filing tax, calling. I fall apart.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I’ll things off for months.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I can’t tell you, and this is going on record, I can’t tell you how many times I have paid the late fee, which is significant.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Every time. To me the late fee is just part of the fee. It’s part of it.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    On my car registration where it goes up like …

    Ashley Morgan:

    I had to pay $1,500 a couple months ago.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I literally was like, what is wrong? It’s up there and I’m like, I can’t, I look at it, pass the [inaudible 01:43:00] too. I have had to train myself, but that’s the thing about being an alcoholic that I don’t see with other people quite to the degree, which is like, it’s the normal life living that is impossible for us.

    Ashley Morgan:

    That’s too much. I wish I could be here 12 and a half years later and being like, “Well, it gets easier. I don’t know about that. I’m not intoxicated, but I still … it’s funny, those things that I put off, it’s like I’m addicted to the anxiety of putting them off, what that anxiety does to me.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Well, I tell myself it’s going to be four hours, then I don’t have time.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Then it’s four minutes.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    100%, four minutes.

    Ashley Morgan:

    You don’t even have to talk to a lady person.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    It’s like a robot format. It’s like, it’s not even talking to someone. They’re just like, hey, pay it.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah, you can scan your credit card where you literally don’t even have to input anything.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, exactly. Just do what we tell you. That’s crazy. But yeah, I mean it’s that is what ….

    Ashley Morgan:

    This is a very expensive lifestyle. I’m coming to learn.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, it’s very …

    Ashley Morgan:

    I’m like, where did all the money go? Oh, yeah.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    To the late fees.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah, literally.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    When I lived in LA, when I did my budget, I literally budgeted in parking tickets and I put them as a charitable contribution to the city because I was like, I 100% get at least two parking tickets a month. I had a garage, so I didn’t need to pay extra. I was like, okay, so this is my version of like a garage fee. I couldn’t figure out the signs. Yeah, I think you grow or you go. It’s really that simple.

    Ashley Morgan:

    The longer, I don’t want to speak for you, but I feel like you will agree with this. The longer I say sober, the more opportunities I have for grow or ago. They’re just closer together. Like I said …

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I really would like to slow down on the opportunities.

    Ashley Morgan:

    My tolerance, and I’m an asshole, sorry for the language. When I’m not taking care of myself, I’m not a nice person. My default is like, and I can put a smile on it and make it look good, but it’s not nice. It’s not nice. And I’m relentless when I want to be. I’m sure you’ve heard that word before. I know your husband. I know your husband. We’re the Ashleys for a reason.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, exactly.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Relentless is a good one.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Which has served us in other areas of our lives, but when we’re not taking care of ourselves, it’s not that … the relentless doesn’t go away. It’s just directed, and it’s either going to be directed in a positive way or it’s going to be directed to find every fault of yours and let you know about it on a regular basis.

    Ashley Morgan:

    A million percent. It’s so awful.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Just like down to the microscopic. What role has therapy, you talked about therapy, you’ve been in therapy, what? All sobriety?

    Ashley Morgan:

    No.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    No?

    Ashley Morgan:

    What I didn’t mention before was when I was a teenager going to therapy, I had this therapist, and that’s the time when boys come into play and all this weird stuff and you’re going through puberty and everything’s awful. I had a therapist that I started to finally open up to and she ended up turning around and telling my family everything that that was said for court purposes. It kind of broke it. I already had trust issues and it took me like years to build up to this woman.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Because she had to.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Well, she had to, but I think there was more to it than that. She didn’t have to, I think there was extra incentive for her to overshare.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    You think they paid her money?

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah. For somebody who doesn’t have any trust to begin with, it was like … and I was like, I’m out. That’s just a way to like have things thrown in my face. It took me until my mom was diagnosed with cancer again. Obviously I went through treatment and all of that, but to actively as …

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Seek it out.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yes, to seek it out, it took about, I was in a relationship at the time and I think I found out my mom was diagnosed and obviously everything that that comes with, which is we have a terrible relationship. There’s so many feelings that I kind of shut down like a zombie, and I was in this relationship with this poor guy who finally like six months later was like, “You got to do something. I’m done dating a ghost,” which was valid, and I went to go see this therapist who was LW’s therapist who just helped me so much. He did. And I saw him for a few years and then I ended up again getting a woman therapist and she saved me. I was able to be completely honest. And she was sober as well, so there was that aspect that she understood.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I stopped going a few years ago. Not for any reason other than it felt like an okay time to let … I feel like therapy is that thing that I’ll go to forever. It’ll just come in spurts. It’s like, if there’s not something I’m actively working on, I’m lucky to have through therapy and through the working in the steps and through all that, I have a lot of awareness about trying to hook stuff in. That’s not to say I know everything, but I know enough to be able to get through the day. So I took a break and unfortunately, she’s really sick right now and I don’t know what’s going to happen with that. I actually want to go see her this week. I guess it might be close to the end. Everyone can benefit from therapy, and have I been thinking about maybe going to therapy again? Yeah.

    Ashley Morgan:

    It’s just a matter of finding … I’m a huge supporter of it. I’m a huge supporter of it on my own and I’m a huge supporter of it in a relationship situation. I’ve been in a relationship where I went to therapy to learn to communicate and effectively did that. For me, I am like I need results kind of person. I think a lot of us are, I need to know that I’m going to get, when I do X, I want Y to happen and I need to know that’s going to happen and so when I have a history of that happening …

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    You have the evidence.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah, right. It’s the evidence of believing that this can then again happen again. I’ve had great experiences with it. It’s really just a matter of how little I want to lie to myself anymore, right?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I’m tired. I’m just exhausted.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Totally, it’s exhausting.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Yeah, life in itself is exhausting, so to carry on this … it’s just easier … I’ll say this. I, for years and years and then years into sobriety, it took me, I don’t know, I want to say almost 10 years, but probably maybe less than that, to realize that I never fully committed myself to the program and worked all 12 steps because there was some deep seated fear in me that what if I do this and it doesn’t work for me? What if I’m unique? Because this is the last house on the block, I don’t know where else to go. So what if I do this and I’m the person who doesn’t work for? Again, that was never a conscious thought. I didn’t have the thought until after I’d worked the steps numerous times and it did in fact work for me.

    Ashley Morgan:

    But it was always this like, I’m going to fail so I don’t want to try kind of thing. I can’t live like that anymore. It’s just, why not try it? That doesn’t mean I’m not stubborn here and there. That doesn’t mean that I don’t try and come over the top from time to time. But overall, it’s like, no, I’m just not actually … I’m not that special, and thank God for that because then I can do what everyone is doing to feel better.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah. Now, there’s a recipe and it produces and it works, and if you do it, you will get those results. The nice thing about it for me is that I don’t have to like figure out how it’s gonna work. That’s the piece for me, because I’m always trying to figure out how it’s going to work.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Too tired for that. Explain.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Now I’m like, okay.

    Ashley Morgan:

    I’m okay to not know.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, like whatever. Yeah, I’ll do the crazy, the thing that sounds woo or crazy, I don’t care.

    Ashley Morgan:

    This is a sobriety podcast, but last year when I was really going through it financially, freaking out, my friend’s like, “Do this 40 day meditation.” Before I’d be like, “Yeah, cute, huh, cool, bye,” she gave me the book and the next morning I started it and I did it every day for 40 days. I don’t know if it’s because of that or the timing was supposed to shift, but things shifted. I’m just, I’m not as willing to argue it anymore because I don’t have the energy and I also know that when I finally do the thing, it usually yields results, so why not just try it?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I certainly don’t lose anything. I’m certainly not losing anything.

    Ashley Morgan:

    At the very least I’m meditating for 15 minutes a day. That is not going to hurt anyone around me. You know what I mean? That’s not going to take away from any situation.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    There’s no downside. Well, thank you so much for coming. I love you very much and I’m so grateful that you’re sober and you shared all that and I know this story is going to help a lot of people.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Thank you. It’s nice. People getting honest with me is what made me feel like I can open up and be honest, so if it even helps a single person, I’m so happy.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    It will.

    Ashley Morgan:

    Thank you for listening to me ramble.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Thank you. This podcast is sponsored by Lionrock Recovery. Lionrock 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.