#137 – Episode 137 – Ask Us Anything

VeronicaValli

We are celebrating our third podcasting anniversary. In this episode, Chip and Veronica answer a variety of questions from their Soberful Life members.

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What This Episode Is About

It’s our 3rd birthday!!

Today we’re doing a fun celebration to mark our third year of podcasting birthday.

If you’re new around here, the first 20 episodes are chock full of our stories and how we got better so if you haven’t checked them out yet, go back and take a listen. Chip and I both have very different stories and we share all about our experiences before finding sobriety and how we’ve been able to sustain our sobriety for 20 and 30 plus years.

For this episode, we asked our Soberful Life members to ask us anything, personal or professional, silly or serious, and they came back with some really great ones.

We love hearing from you and what you think about the show. We appreciate you so much and we love doing this. It really makes a difference to us to know that we are reaching people and that people are being helped by the stuff that we say on the show.

Thank you for a great three years!

Here are some of the questions we dive into in the episode.

How often do you go to AA meetings?

Both Chip and I still go to meetings at least once a week, but lockdowns were a hard time for us. Zoom fatigue from being in meetings all day meant that we stopped going as often as we used to. Now that in-person options are available, we try aimt for at least once every 10 days.

In early sobriety, who should you confide in? I don’t want to shout to the world. But I also don’t want people thinking I’m being secretive.

Coming out that you’re in recovery is a very individual process. Everybody needs to do that at their own pace and time and be discerning about who they come out to.

Know that you don’t need to tell everyone. Trust yourself and if you think someone is not going to be supportive or ridicule you or persuade you, that’s probably not the person to tell.

That’s one of the big benefits of groups and meetings. We’ve all been in the same place as you so it’s a safe space to share without judgement.

Did either of you relapse after starting trying to get sober?

We both spent around a decade looking for help before we discovered what worked for us. Neither of us relapsed once we got into recovery but it was quite an up and down process getting there in the first place.

Did you maintain any old friends long term after sobriety? Or did they all get replaced in time? If you did keep them? How and did things change?

For Chip, all the people he hung out with before getting sober were heavy users so there was no way for him to maintain those friendships. Funnily enough, some old friends have come back into his life 40 years later and friendships have been rekindled. Sobriety has been where he has found wonderful friends, that he hadn’t imagined possible before.

Once I got sober I discovered that I had a lot of fairweather friends that I didn’t have anything left in common with. Luckily, I’ve been able to maintain friendships with quite a few friends from my teenage years and we’re still friends to this day.

What’s the best experience you’ve had sober?

For both of us, it’s so hard to pick one. We’ve built lives we never thought possible and achieved things beyond any expectation we set for ourselves when we first got sober.

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