Therapist Breaks Up With Booze And 'Booze Bonds'

You can learn more about Sarah White or follow her on Instagram.

Transcript

CONTENT WARNING: A head’s up we mention a sexual assault and an eating disorder. For resources go to 2lives.org.

As a child Sarah White became an incredible liar. She lied to her parents. She lied to her classmates at her school in Hudson Valley, New York.

I would make up like really horrendous lies. Like I had a brother who died in a car accident and teachers would try to comfort me and it would get back home. I lied a lot as a child and it was all attention seeking. 

When she got to middle school and the “cool girls” started to pay attention to Sarah, the lies grew even bigger.

Boys started to pay attention to me … the girls were kind of mean.  There were some mean girl things happening there. I remember them being angry with me and that I don't remember what the lies were, but I remember spinning them and getting caught by them.

Sarah had spun a web of her own doing and now her classmates were on to her and she needed to find a way out, a way of transferring to another school. So she came up with another lie.

I just spun more lies to my parents, knowing where to hit on their insecurities of just really exaggerating the drug situation and that I needed to get out of this school. And they arranged for me to go and live with my aunt, who lived about 40 minutes away in a different district. So I finagled that. 

She moved from an isolated farm house in the country to a small city development where there were a lot of kids around all the time.

I manipulated the situation for sure to work for me. I had no coping mechanisms. And it was just the old strategy to be visible in the world where I felt very invisible.

It wasn’t until much later in life that she realized why she lied.

I didn't know how to connect with people. That's the truth of it. I really didn't. I didn't know. And even if I did and I was seen visible, it made me uncomfortable. You know, it was very much in mistrust of the world. 

This is a story about how Sarah White learned to trust and make meaningful connections. 

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.

Minimize and Dismiss

Sarah White grew up a very anxious child because she didn’t know what to expect from her parents. One minute they seemed easygoing, the next it felt like the earth shifted beneath her feet.

That inconsistency was so confusing that I was constantly walking on eggshells around them, not knowing what to expect from them. My father had a very significant learning disability…And got really involved with drugs and alcohol early on and also got really involved with a cult, the Children of God, notorious for being sexual predators towards women and children. He had several, several DUIs throughout my childhood, so much so that he lost his license…And he never got help. I mean, multiple car accidents in and out of medical detox, both of my parents. 

Sarah says her parents entered their marriage with their own childhood traumas. And that manifested as two very insecure people who criticized everyone else.

So I would not only would hear criticism from them to me. But I would also hear them criticizing everyone. 

Sarah also felt insecure and had trouble trusting people.

There was so much minimizing of what was happening throughout my childhood that that became a pattern for me… you know, had a really hard time making friends when I was younger. And I can recognize that that was a lack of trust.

Sarah had nightmares and difficulty sleeping. It didn’t help that she had an especially thin mattress. She recalls one time getting so fed up that she stormed downstairs to the kitchen where her parents were sitting.

And just having kind of like a pre adolescent freak out. My hormones are raging..And like, this bed was just I was so angry with this bed. And at the time there was that commercial, the 1-800 mattress commercial … and they told me, ‘well call, call and order a mattress.’ And that's all they said. So I said, I'm kid, I pick up the phone, I dial the number. I didn't know payment, I didn't know the size of my mattress. I didn't have any of these details …she's asking these normal questions, ‘what size is the mattress?’ And I didn't know. And she said, ‘call me back when you have some information, stupid.’ And she hung up. Yeah, really rude. But I remember telling my parents about that and they started laughing. And it was so mean cuz I was in this like this heightened state of having all of that like pre-teen angst and, you know, wanting a solution. And really, when you think about it, like a mattress is pretty important to your general health. I wasn't sleeping well. I was uncomfortable. And then just to be laughed at and mocked at ... Like that just gives you one story into a theme which made me just shut down and asking for my needs because I didn't know what was going to come from it. It made things feel worse.

Another time in those adolescent years Sarah remembers going through a particularly awkward stage in her body, when she had gained a little weight.

So I remember when my body was changing like that and, you know, grandparents commenting on it. And I was aware that my body was changing. And one day in my kitchen in a fury, my mother freaked out and screamed at me, ‘I'm so tired of looking at your fat face!’ And I mean, I felt like daggers just went into my heart and soul. 

That was a turning point. Sarah began to skip meals and she’d exercise all the time.

SARAH: It started as anorexia and just being exercise obsessed. I went from a very healthy 135 pounds to about 90 something pounds. LAUREL: Oh, my gosh. SARAH: I had stopped getting my period. I had bruises all over my body. I was having sores around my mouth. They referred to it as my ‘yo yo dieting,’ you know, just dismissive.

It was around this time when Sarah discovered her mom was having an affair.

I was aware being in my bedroom, my window opened up to the back porch where she would be outside smoking cigarettes talking to this dude, and I overheard it.

So Sarah found a way to numb herself from her inconsistent reality – whether through binge eating, or listening to heavy metal and punk rock. That was the farthest thing she could imagine from her father’s religious music. And at 13 she discovered alcohol.

I was living in a very, very rural area, farm country. Left my house, and I walked to the top of a hill where there was a park. There was two neighborhood boys … neighborhood I use the term very loosely for farm country. I mean they probably had to walk a couple of miles… I can't remember what the alcohol was, but I remember the feeling of washing through my body and just feeling like, oh, like I put all the heavy things down. I remember that experience so well because it felt like I had found the magic thing, you know, like, oh, this is what I've been looking for. I feel comfortable in my body. I'm not walking on eggshells. I'm not afraid to, like, say what's on my mind or be goofy. 

The numbing out started with eating disorders…

The eating disorders, just completely obsessive and compulsive and dictating all of my life. And then I started drinking pretty early on, too, and I started smoking weed and then going into psychedelics … I just remember having this feeling of not caring.

‘Booze Bonds’

At the same time she’d been exposed to a lot of drinking in her family and extended family who would get together often.

It was kind of like this unwritten law that nobody went too far, you know. So everybody was pretty local and we got together constantly. My uncle, you know, he had a beautiful in-ground pool. We would be there all summer. 

It was at one such get together, her uncle’s wedding, held at her parents' farmhouse that Sarah’s dad cornered her to talk about “Children of God.” He’d brought out the book, more like a graphic novel, written and illustrated by the cult leader. 

There was a book called “The MO Letters.” And in these letters it was some sort of a prophet who drew these pornographic type of comics. And, you know, this is in the seventies and… he would promote women going out as missionaries. But the way that they would do their missionary work was called flirty fishing. And it was very seductive, sexually very dysfunctional. This book, he would show it to me all of the time. That in itself is so sexually inappropriate and abusive…One of the lessons was that we experienced connections with God and Jesus through sexual pleasure. I have one memory as a child of my father asking me if I wanted to see how adults kiss and I was a kid, so I want to see how adults did everything. And he pulled me in and stuck his tongue in my mouth. In that moment I know that there was a me before and a me after I remember the details. I can still feel the imprints in my body of being so violated. I remember pulling away and screaming and him laughing again. Right? Minimizing through humor. I had told my mother about that some years later. Nothing was done. Nothing was done.

Driven to find answers

At this point Sarah was living with her aunt during the week going to school there but coming home to the farmhouse on weekends.

I remember for my 16th birthday on the cake they had the bakery put 16 and zero calories, like as a joke again, right? Yeah. Like all of that joking, which is really just jabbing and really insensitive and cruel and again, just constantly shut me down.

There was a lot of acceptable diet culture in the nineties. But Sarah knew, even at the time, that something wasn’t right about it. 

I'm very curious. I've always been able to see the world as a wide range of grays, not black and white. And there was a lot of black and white thinkers around me growing up, particularly my mother and my father. Right and wrong, good or bad, pretty ugly, those kinds of things. And even as a child, I remember that not feeling correct with who I was as a person.

So she started to look for answers.

I didn't even know what anorexia was. I really didn't. I didn't know that that was a thing until I did my own research at a very young age. I remember going to a bookstore and looking through sections – psychology and wellness and trying to figure out what this was and I came across a book called “Reviving Ophelia.”

“Reviving Ophelia,” a popular book written by a psychologist about adolescent girls and the problems they face. 

It was either freshman or early sophomore year. And I really recognized that I was in a very bad mental place. Where that comes from, I don't know, that I have always had this drive to figure things out about what is going on. But I remember being in the bookstore looking and opening books and thumbing through them and then coming across the language for what it was.

Learns To Connect Through Honesty

In high school Sarah noticed a boy who was into punk rock. He was kind and made her laugh and quickly they became friends.

He's super funny.  Music was a big thing. Yeah, and he was nice. You know, like a lot of a lot of guys were just, like, constantly, especially the girls that were, like, into punk rock, you know? Like, a different type of bravado and machismo.

It was also in high school that she finally had a best friend, someone who she felt she could talk to. And for the first time in her life she didn’t feel compelled to lie to either one of them.

It was more of that feeling of safety and true connection that it didn't feel like it was a need. I never had any of those issues with them. I didn't need to get their attention. There was genuine caring and love and fun and laughter. 

She discovered she had longed for these meaningful connections. She wanted to be like Oprah and talk with her new friends about their issues.

I was actually visiting my grandparents down in Florida. And one of my cousins came with me and we were swimming in my grandparents pool…I remember talking about him a lot and she finally said something just like you love him. And I was like, ‘oh my God, no.’ It almost felt like incestual in some way because we were such good friends. And then I really did. I realized like, ‘Oh my God, I do. I really miss him.’ So I remember being on the plane from Florida back to New York. Like, oh my God. I realized that I was in love with him.

They soon transitioned from friendship to a romantic relationship. 

Over time of just being with him, he's very kind, very loving and have never doubted for a second that he loves and cares about me deeply. And there was so much friendship prior to us becoming in a romantic relationship. That love really began to heal me. It was like nothing I ever felt before. And a lot of those  maladaptive coping mechanisms began to dissolve on their own. 

At 23 Sarah figured out that she was really fascinated by how the human brain works and why we act the way we do, so she enrolled in psychology courses.

SARAH: It was like the gong went off, you know, and I just felt something resonate with me, like, oh, this. But I also knew I had to get healthy.

LAUREL: Yeah, what was that like?

SARAH: So hopeful and so empowering because I also am neurodivergent. So I was diagnosed… ADHD and dyslexic.

And I remember sitting in that classroom learning about like perspective and not just cognitive perspective, but also like the way information or even color comes in through our eyes and how we see the world. It was fascinating to me and I was excited to read and study, which I had never felt before in my life, and I wound up doing so well. Because that's the thing with ADHD is it's really more about motivation dysregulation. Right. Like your brain, if it's not getting any kind of like dopamine hit from the information coming in can just flush it out. It just it doesn't stick. But this was so exciting to me and I just kept going.

She recalled wanting to be Oprah and thought being a therapist fit that idea.

That was kind of like the whisper. Like, you want to sit with somebody and just now hold that space for them. I know that's overly use term, but it really is holding space for somebody. And that as I kept studying and it was just so fascinating and interesting to me and really focused, applying a lot of it to myself. And I did end up going into counseling. Because I remember starting in graduate school, one of our professors talking to us and telling us how important that was, that if we were going to go into the field of mental health, that we better do our own work or else we could become dangerous. I really appreciated that. And I took it very seriously. And I did start to go into counseling.

In counseling she became aware of how she talked to herself.

I remember one of my therapists early on would say, ‘that's a thought. I asked you how you felt,’ and I was like, ‘oh, those are different.’ Right. So… I began to shift and think about my thinking, which is a completely different lens to look through and experience the world. When you begin to think about your thinking, is that thought true? Is there something else behind it? Is there a defense mechanism? Am I trapped in anger? What is this? And you have to be able to do that with curiosity and compassion. So my self-talk began to really change just in the process of talking in a therapeutic way with somebody. 

Purple Bolt Of Lightning

At 25 Sarah married her high school sweetheart. For their honeymoon they went to Hawaii. While they were there, Sarah decided to get a massage. It was on that massage table that something strange happened.

SARAH: He hit this spot, like, under my neck, which is where I hold all of my tension. I was laying down. He pushed and I had my eyes closed, and I saw this purple bolt of lightning with my eyes closed…I remember shooting up and being like, ‘whoa!’ And I felt nauseous, like I was going to throw up. And this guy was so chill about it. It was like he had seen it a million times before or something. And I was like, ‘what just happened?’ I thought I had like an exorcism or something. And I was like, what was that? He was just like, It's just to release emotions, get trapped in the body. And I was like, well, shit, I just experienced that, so there's got to be something to it. And I felt really like out of my body in this really calm way. And as he was leaving, he said, you need to do yoga. And it was such a powerful experience that I was like…LAUREL: I’ll do whatever you say. SARAH: Whatever, whatever that was. I am sold so, when I came back to New York, I took my first yoga class and I was like, you know, hardcore gym rat at the time, like, you know, armored up and all my things are punk rock and, you know, all this stuff. And I walk in there and I'm like, I'm not taking off my socks. I'm not singing ohm you know, I'm not doing any of that. I'm not doing it. Of course, she's like, ‘unroll your mind. Take off your socks and ohm.’ Oh, my God, this is awful. And I was so arrogant I was leaving walking to my car and I felt so good. And I took a schedule and I found myself looking at when's the next class?

Sarah wound up becoming a regular yogi and even got her certificate to teach.

And it has just been one of the greatest loves of my life, this practice for the past 20 years. There's been so much research too about the how yoga practice or mindfulness practices in general are so incredibly therapeutic, you know, anxiety, depression, addiction, trauma. There's so much research and peer-based evidence out there that it's incredible. I wanted to be able to have the practice of being a clinician and a therapist, but also getting people in their bodies.

Hard No

In 2007 Sarah and her husband had a son.

He was colic. So it was just a really awful experience. He wouldn't latch on my breast and I was pumping. It was not fun. It was terrible. And yet I couldn't stop staring at him. It was just the most profound love that I had ever experienced. And it also terrified me how much I loved him and still still do. 

As he grew older Sarah found the role of mother to be both challenging and surprisingly healing. 

One day Sarah dropped off her son at a family get together and he was wearing a DARE T-shirt that said, ‘say no to drugs.’

And my mother had commented on it and then had said to him that, you know, your mom used to smoke pot to my young, you know, like ten year old son. And now he doesn't know the difference between pot or crack or, you know, whatever. I remember having to explain that to him, have this conversation with him and also confront her was like, ‘what in your right mind would make you think that that is appropriate to say in any way?’ And her response was, ‘what were you not going to tell him?’ And I remember just being like, Oh my God, And that's such a typical type of thing, right? Like bait switch and deflect. And you're the problem and you're too sensitive. I hearing that my whole life. But again, it landed on my son. So there was like a roar of like, oh, hell no. Oh, hell no. 

On another occasion Sarah’s dad called her son crying. 

… about how, you know, ‘Mom should talk to me. I miss you, I miss her.’ And my son then told me and he said, ‘it scared me.’ And again, I felt that like no, enough, enough with your manipulation and just your games. So those were two very defining moments where I just felt that fierceness of like, you will not you will not bring my child on the emotional rollercoaster that you brought me on. It's like this overinvolved, emotionally manipulation and then just disregard and disengage, like that confusion.

Sarah suddenly found herself able to create a hard boundary for her son, and herself as a result.

Being a mother has been incredibly healing, incredibly healing for me… I found myself. The ways that I would falter in saying no and having boundaries, particularly around my parents and their dysfunction. Became a hard no. When it came to my son. So the ways that they would emotionally manipulate, distort, ask too much of of me criticism, all of those things that were in the theme of my growing up. When I began to see those things land on my son. The fierceness. Of that protective love and that hard no that I couldn't garner for myself was finally available to me. What I couldn't do for me, I absolutely could do for him and then ended up also being for me.

Summer 2021

A couple of years ago Sarah found she had to create another boundary. This time around alcohol. 

Trauma of not trusting and fear of being criticized has always lived inside of me from those formative years of my upbringing. And despite my success with my with my marriage and solid friendships and my education and my career, those old ghosts were still very much alive inside of me. And soothing to be numbed, particularly in social settings. 

She and her husband decided to give up drinking for a year to see if that might shift things for the better. And when she took the alcohol away things got real.

That was a such a difficult time because the majority of my socializing had been alcohol centered with both sides of my family with friends. That was so normal. And how I knew to get air quotes ‘connect.’ When I stopped drinking, it was so much feeling the imprints that of my childhood that I never really wanted to feel fully or acknowledge their impact to the degree that they actually lived inside of me. And I knew that I had to. And my numbing agent was gone. So I had to feel the world so deeply and so much sadness. There was no pink cloud for me. None of that. I had to feel everything and it was very overwhelming. 

Sarah reached out to the people closest to her to let them know – people like her family and friends. Her cousins who she grew up alongside felt more like siblings.

I love them all but, man, taking that away, there was nothing left. And that was hard. It was hard to see that there wasn't anything of real substance without that, which really means there wasn't any deep connection. It was very much rooted in attachment, codependency, the need to be needed, the need to feel that I'm a part of a tribe, that I have first family, all of those things and recognizing that I was numbing and playing small because I couldn't really get what I needed there.

She realized prior to this year she only had meaningful connections in controlled settings like her office or the yoga studio. It was in that moment that she discovered something new.

I could do it in controlled settings where I'm the therapist and you're the client or I’m the yoga instructor and you’re the student but flip that around terrifying for me was never safe to be vulnerable. Those connections and those bonds when booze was removed, because I call them the booze bonds, they really disintegrated. And what was so shocking to me is how many people didn't reach out to check in. 

It was a really hard time, a time she would have normally reached for a drink.

My father was suicidal… actually called the police on himself and was brought into hospital. He received psychiatric treatment. It turned out while he was in there that he was so behind on his rent that he got an eviction notice. He had nowhere to go. He wound up being placed in an assisted living. He's not that old, but he's very unhealthy. And the years of addiction and, you know, caught up at the years of dysfunction, the obsessions with the religion, it's really just a cult. All of that it caught up to him.

But when Sarah lifted the veil of alcohol, she was able to see the truth. 

And it was devastating because I knew that I couldn't help him. I couldn't because I would sink. I would sink with him. So it was very lonely. It was a very, very lonely time.

Her aunt was trying to manage her dad’s care kind of like a case manager, a role that Sarah had taken on for many years.

And I had let my aunt know that I'm no longer doing this. I have very firm boundaries. I said some of it I'm okay to talk with you about. I said some of it I'm not. And she got kind of quiet. And I said, I'm not withholding anything from you. I just don't want to hurt you. And she said, I think I know, which I was shocked. And she had mentioned that my father a few years ago had gone out to visit her in Arizona. He was under the influence of something she didn't know what. And that in a confessional type way had told her that something happened at my uncle's wedding. I never told anybody that it was at my uncle's wedding…So it hit me because he had denied that this ever happened and it was just all minimized and dismissed. And therefore, I minimized and dismissed it. The knowledge of that he knew. He did remember.

Sarah hung up the phone with her aunt and called her mom.

And I told her about this conversation. And her words to me were, I never didn't believe you. I just didn't know why you stayed connected to him. Was it just to get stuff? Which is one of the only ways my father knew how to show love was was bombarding you with stuff and money. And it was like the second dagger, you know? And. I knew at that moment, there's no point to trying to even have these conversations. I had them so many times. So it was like this great storm had come to a head. 

It wasn’t easy to go through all of this sober but Sarah knew she had to face it if she wanted the relationships that mattered to her – to her husband, her son, her close friends – to survive.

My father being suicidal, going into the hospital, being placed into a long term facility because he didn't have a home. Talking to my aunt, finding out my father did remember this particular incident that he had denied for decades, telling my mother that that comment, disclosing where I was at with my cousins that I had been so close to, and not having them check in, I was so heavy in my body and my mind, in my heart. And I knew that I was no longer capable of having connections with people who didn't genuinely care about me that were only there for the good drunken times. I couldn't do it anymore. There had been too much inconsistency throughout my life. I wanted my marriage to survive and grow stronger through this valley that we were in. I knew that it was if I didn't cut cords that were anchoring me down, that I wasn't going to be the person I wanted to be. LAUREL: How did you let them know? SARAH: Not gracefully. I was raw. It was just kind of like this shut down and awkwardness. And really, that's what it was. It was like this loud, heavy, awkward silence. I remember saying to them, like, if anybody wants to do something different that doesn't involve alcohol, if you have any questions for me, if you I'm going to open book, I'm here. And there was just no reaching out. That was very painful.

They tried to participate in a family get together, an annual trip, sober.

We went down there and everybody was just drinking, blackout, throwing up that whole thing, which okay, that, you know, I was always a heavy drinker, too, prior to then. But I was so disconnected.

But Sarah’s finding ways to be in the world with the people she really connects with. And after a year of abstaining from alcohol Sarah started looking into a way to drink that wasn’t so all or nothing.

I started looking into like, what are other ways that people have recovered? Because I really did miss, like a glass of wine with dinner…And I was like, ‘man, I just want to do that.’ And I was at a point after a year of not drinking that I truly felt like I could because I had done so much trauma recovery with an incredible therapist… Hear me out because I know that a lot of times when people are talking about recovery, they talk about it in this very narrow scope of like it's abstinence forever, which can be really damaging to certain people the way that they use. It's like, well, maybe I can just get it under control if I do some deep work. 

So she came up with some rules for herself: No drinking on an empty stomach. Only enjoy a drink with people you feel truly relaxed and connected with that you’re able to be your full self. She never drinks when she’s in a bad mood. No drinking to take the edge off.

So if I heard in my own head, I need a drink. That was a hard no. 

And she discovered that she doesn’t crave it the way she used to.

Over the weekend, I went out with a friend. We went we had a really nice dinner, we had some sushi and I had a glass of wine and like that was it! So I came home, I took a bath, I went to bed and it was like that was not me, you know, One meant three at least. Yeah, I feel different, my brain feels different, my values, my beliefs, and all of these boundaries that I've had to have with a family are really necessary because I'm too compromised around. It's too much history. 

As we wrapped up our conversation I couldn’t help but notice Sarah’s tattoos that covered her arms. One of a large candle struck me as unusual.

I remember seeing a painting called Sharing Your Light, and I love that idea because I do feel like that's what I try to do in the world is I try to share my story or be in spaces with people that are wading through the deep. 

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.