When Sobriety Is Not Enough with Dr. Sam

Sobriety can be a miracle and still not be enough to make you well. When mental illness or childhood trauma is underneath the drinking or using, quitting substances will only reveal the real problem you were trying to survive. I’m getting honest about the overlap between addiction recovery and mental health, and why so many people are unknowingly self-medicating with alcohol, drugs, or even “harmless” prescription use. 

I share what it was like growing up watching a parent rely on pills and only later realizing a mood disorder was part of the picture. We talk about how depression can be the most visible symptom for years, how mania can show up in frightening ways, and why loving someone with a true mental illness can pull you into rescuing, fixing, and losing yourself. That’s where boundaries come in and I break down the definition that actually gives you your power back: boundaries are about what you will do, not what you demand someone else will do. 

Then I go into my own recovery story, including postpartum depression and crushing insomnia that made all my tools feel out of reach. We tackle the stigma inside recovery spaces around antidepressants and other psychiatric medication, and why following a doctor’s orders is not relapse. If medication, therapy and psychological support are what keep you stable and sober, there is no shame in that. 

If this hits home, listen, share it with someone who needs permission to get help, and leave a review so more people searching for addiction recovery, mental health support, antidepressants, and boundaries can find us. What part of this conversation do you want to talk about next?

To book a FREE discovery call with Dr. Sam, click the link below:

https://calendly.com/drharte/free-discovery-call-w-dr-harte

Transcript

Why Mental Health Gets Missed

SPEAKER_01 0:14

Welcome back everybody to the truth about addiction. Today is a solo episode, and we are gonna get into a pretty deep topic that straddles attention between addiction and mental health disorders. I think this is a topic that needs more attention. Here's why.

Watching Prescription Abuse At Home

SPEAKER_01 0:40

A lot of people who are substance abusers are unknowingly self-medicating because of a mental disorder. I literally grew up watching this in my house, but I had no language for it. I had no idea that this was what was transpiring. I watched my mom abuse prescription medication my entire childhood. Only later in my life did I realize that part of this was that she had bipolar disorder. Now, growing up, what I really remember is not mania, but depression. My mother was absolutely clinically depressed, refused to go to therapy because she was smarter than everybody else, but self-medicated. And it was so confusing to me because I didn't know that there was an actual thing wrong. And when I watched her take the pills, that felt wrong to me. But then, as I've shared in previous podcast episodes, it was completely justified by her as something she just needed to do to function. Not function on a brain or mood level, but just function in the world in the way of I just need to get a good night's sleep. That's why I take this. And so all of my intuitive senses around like something isn't right here, this isn't adding up, were just completely gas-lit and put out. When I got sober in 2009, that was the beginning of reconciling with all the things that I was drinking and using over. And that's true for everybody. Now, fortunately, in my case, I didn't unpack or discover that I actually had a true chronic inherited mental illness underneath. I had a lot of trauma, a lot of learned behaviors and coping mechanisms from my childhood that I had to heal in order not to relapse and use again. But in my particular case, I didn't have a mental illness, but I know a lot of people that did. And it's so tricky because some people will get on prescription medication for a mental illness but still be substance abusing. Some people will stop using substance and get sober, and then believe that that should be enough, even though they're actually really suffering from depression and really need prescription medication in order to live well. And so we get back to this idea of it's not either or, it's both and really understanding with curiosity rather than judgment what it is that we uniquely need.

Postpartum Insomnia And Unstoppable Crying

SPEAKER_01 4:00

In my case, I remember being well into my sobriety and very happily getting pregnant after a horrific marital crisis where we very much almost didn't make it, and then we did. And in our reconciliation, we knew we wanted to have a family, I get pregnant, all I ever wanted to be was a mom. I have this baby. And in the first few weeks, I'm crying, I'm crying a lot, but I also did a lot of research. I read about the baby blues and all the hormonal swings, and I thought, okay, this is kind of par for the course. But then six weeks went by and seven weeks went by, and eight weeks went by. And two things were very, very apparent. One, everyone who said sleep when the baby sleeps, I wanted to punch into perpetuity because I couldn't. I literally had such severe insomnia to the point where I would just be awake for almost 24 hours in a row, having to care for a baby. The second thing was that I could not stop crying to save my life. I couldn't stop. Now I'm sure one played into the other, right? If you're not sleeping, you're totally dysregulated. And so your prefrontal cortex goes offline and your emotional centers get flooded. So you're just sort of constantly hijacked. I had enough sobriety to know that even though I had all the tools, I had been in therapy and 12-step programs, I had all the tools. It was as if they were all around me in my periphery, but just out of reach. I just couldn't access them no matter how much willpower I used. And I was like, I need help. I literally need professional help. This feels chemical. And there were people in recovery that had really strong ideas about what you can and cannot do in sobriety.

Antidepressants In Sobriety Without Shame

SPEAKER_01 6:23

Meanwhile, in the actual literature of recovery, there is a whole section on the need at specific times and places in your life for professional help, for prescription medication. So long as you are following it as prescribed by the doctor, it is not a relapse. But for whatever reason, there's a whole subset of people in recovery that look at that almost as a moral failure, as a relapse, and that is so dangerous. And don't you know, I got on an antidepressant, I got my ass back into therapy, I did rigorous self-compassion work, and I was on the medication until I got stable. And then I slowly weaned off of it. There have been multiple times in my recovery where I have needed to go on prescription medication. There are very much situational bouts of depression, depending on what we're coming up against in our lives. And some people can get through them. Some people can get through them without medication, they have hopefully a great support system, but some people can't. And number one, there's no shame in that. And number two, if that is going to be the difference between not just a happy life and a miserable one, but maintaining your sobriety versus potentially relapsing, why are we even questioning it? We get sober not to be miserable, we get sober to be happy, to be free. And when you have the tools and you are living and breathing by them and using them, and something's going on chemically, situationally, that is taking you to your knees, and you've got thoughts in your head like you don't want to be here anymore, that don't go away, you're crying all the time, you can't sleep, you feel like shit, you just don't feel like yourself. Why are we not going to advocate for outside help? At the very least, just making an appointment with a therapist who, if they believe it's in our best interest, can give us a referral to a psychiatrist who's the one that can write the script for the meds, that's not a crutch. That's not a band-aid. It can actually be life-saving.

Bipolar Mania And Loving Someone Sick

SPEAKER_01 9:23

And all these years later, my mom has very clearly presented as bipolar, which is kind of fascinating to me because mania is very distinctive and very scary when you're watching it. It's erratic, the person can't stop talking, they have racing thoughts, they have grand delusions of what they're going to accomplish and who they're going to become. Everybody's their new best friend. They don't sleep, they write and text incessantly. They're literally insane. And when I think back to my childhood, I don't remember feeling afraid like that. I remember feeling afraid at how sad my mom always was. So I don't know if she always had bipolar or if she had depression and bipolar sort of spiked in adulthood, which is more rare. But either way, you know, the presentation of that and loving someone with a true mental illness is its own battle to fight. And what I have learned, not just myself and getting on and off prescription meds at different seasons in my life and knowing damn well not to judge anybody else who needs to do that. But what I've learned in loving someone who struggles is that that is a place where if you're not careful, you can really lose yourself. And since I grew up wanting to fix and save my mother, you know, the natural inclination when she would have these acute episodes of her bipolar would be to fix and save, protect, promote, rush her into the doctor, beg her to get on her meds. And eventually I learned what's actually required, which is what is the level of self-care that I need to practice right now so I don't lose myself in this person's sickness.

Boundaries That Keep You Whole

SPEAKER_01 11:34

What is the boundary that I need to set? And let's just go over again what a boundary is. A boundary is not what you want that person to do or not do. Because when we ask that, we're just giving our power away. We're only okay if that person does or says the thing we ask them to do or say. A boundary is what I am willing to do or not do. Eventually, in the times where my mother's mania in particular was so severe and so acute, I ultimately had to cut off complete contact with her. When she showed up at my house enough times with strangers and tried to walk in with my kids there, wrote horrifically emotionally abusive things to me nonstop. I had to block her. I had to literally cut off all communication. And this is, by the way, after losing my dad and my sister. My mother is the only living close family member I have left to me. So it was as if she died too. But I had spent so much of my life trying to fix and save and push and beg and plead, and I knew better. I just knew that that was gonna crush me. And so whether it's you learning how to love you in whatever season you're in, and figure out what your boundaries are for yourself, or whether it's you loving someone else who's suffering, we need to understand that the conversation is nuanced, it's complicated, it is not an either-or, it is not black and white.

A Permission Slip For Professional Help

SPEAKER_01 13:20

If you're on a sober journey, stay open to the possibility of what's going to be revealed to you and all the layers of why you self-medicated. And if prescription medication is part of what makes you well, knowing you are also doing the spiritual work, the emotional work, the psychological work, let me be your permission slip. That is completely okay as long as you're following doctor's orders. And if you're someone like me, because we often are as addicts, people who grew up around other addicts, if you are overcoming codependency and you're loving someone who's sick and suffering, whether it's from a self-medicated addiction because they have a mental illness, or just somebody who has mental illness and who's refusing to take their meds, like my mom did for years and years and years, then what is the greatest act of self-care around that circumstance? Because without your sobriety, without your sense of peace and wholeness, what's the point? What's the point? What's the point of getting sober? What's the point of loving someone at the expense of yourself? It will not end up well. And by the way, the person on the other end will not receive it.

Stability Can Change By Season

SPEAKER_01 14:58

My mother today is stable. She has been on her meds for about a year and a half. It's probably the longest stretch in over a decade where I've had my mom back. And I've been courageous enough to lift the boundaries. Yeah, it's hard to watch. My time is limited with her. But she's safe and she's stable. And I'm choosing to have her be a part of my life in whatever way she can today, in this season where she's on her medication, knowing full well that that might change. And right now, I'm not on any prescription medication. I'm four years out of the loss of my sister, and I'm stable, and I'm doing well. But if that should change, I will change with it. And I hope that you do too. I'll see you guys next time.