Welcome back to the Embrace Family Recovery Podcast. Today, I conclude my conversation with Jaclyn Brown. We discuss how grief has affected her personal life and marriage, and how she has navigated this along with her own recovery journey. Jaclyn also shares her approach to advocacy and how you can learn more about it as well.
Jaclyn works as the Family Advisory Committee Liaison for Mobilize Recovery. She owns Stay Golden Coaching & Consultingand Jaclyn Kane Creations Recovery.
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See full transcript below.
00:01
You’re listening to the Embrace Family Recovery Podcast, a place for real conversations with people who love someone with the disease of addiction. Now here is your host, Margaret Swift Thompson.
Intro: Welcome back to the Embrace Family Recovery Podcast. Today I conclude my conversation with Jaclyn Brown, who is a fierce advocate within the team of Mobilize Recovery. We discuss how grief has affected her personal life, her marriage, and how she has navigated this and developed her own recovery journey. Jaclyn also shares her approach to advocacy, and how you can learn about personal advocacy within your world. Let’s rejoin Jaclyn.
00:51
The Embrace Family Recovery Podcast.
Margaret 01:08
And I think that the thing that you bring up is what I teach from a 12-step perspective. And I think sometimes we throw the baby out with the bathwater. CRAFT’s model is an avenue to assist people in getting themselves to get care from a loving approach. So is Al-Anon.
Jaclyn Brown: Yep.
Margaret: The difficulty is, is there’s all these catchphrases out there that people associate with different programs.
Jaclyn Brown: Exactly
Margaret: There’s a lot of education to be done. You know, I think there is no family member who goes through recovery who doesn’t on some level, want to show nothing but love?
Jaclyn: Yeah.
Margaret: And they’re seeing abhorrent behavior that hurts them that they have the right to protect from. It’s finding that balance of how do I stay engaged and love the person while setting boundaries against the disease that is potentially hurting us, and isn’t able to be stopped by us? So, it’s a complex thing. I really appreciate your, your discussion on harm reduction, because I think that, again, like people have thoughts about, like lumping Al-Anon, and tough love, and bottom and missing all of the other stuff. I think harm reduction people lump into a certain way as well. Ask a question that I can imagine a family member might ask you. So, I’d love your input on this.
So, I get that having harm reduction, safe supplies really important. When we say that a person who is using a mood-altering substance to the level of someone who’s injecting or drinking daily, numerous ounces of alcohol, we know that it changes their ability to make healthy decisions.
Jaclyn Brown: Yep.
Margaret: So, do I love the idea of reduction to a point where they get well, and I do think that is very possible? How do we navigate that in between time when they can’t know themselves well, because they’re so mood altered, they’re not present to themselves in a way that someone would be who is sober or not using to the level they’re using.
Jaclyn Brown 03:26
Right. Like you said, it’s, it’s all about finding that really delicate balance. And I think a lot of times from the family side, or just from anyone who just is seeing someone, their friend, whatever it may be, we really want to impart what we think would be best for them. And we think we know better and that yes, while it is mood altering, and they are taking these substances, it’s almost like we need to change the focus on potentially the substance but the why.
Like, why are you using this substance so much? What is this helping you cope with that is underlying, and I think once there becomes bigger conversation about the motivation as to why someone is using the substance, and kind of opening up that communication channel with them, like understanding and just being blunt and being like, hey, I noticed that you’re drinking a lot. Like is what why do you think that you’re drinking a lot and you’re always gonna have that, you know, hesitation obviously from a person because they’re gonna think you’re attacking them, you know, they’re used to being attacked. They’re used to being criticized,
Margaret: Judged.
Jaclyn Brown: Exactly. But what I would do with my brother when he was out of rehab and at my house, I would do like a temperature check every day I would be like how are you feeling today? Like, are you feeling any sort of like, urge to use? Or, you know, is there anything that has happened today that might have set you off or would normally. And I know it’s such a labor of love to get to that point with someone where you’re okay with their substance use at the time, cannabis and alcohol. But you’re also letting them know I’m here with you. And I’m here with you to walk through this, and I get that you’re drinking a lot. And I can tell you all day long, like the effects that this is going to have on your body. But that logic is not in their head at the time. So, you can talk about all the things till you’re blue in the face, but also identifying when are good times to talk about this.
Now, if they are like blackout drunk is it the best time to give them a lecture?
Margaret: No.
Jaclyn Brown: So there, unfortunately, there isn’t like a at this time, you should do this. And at this rate, you should do this. But I think once you change the focus off this substance, how much this substance, how much and you switch it to why the substance why this much? I think that for the person who’s using drugs, they are no longer being attacked, someone’s now, they feel like there’s someone on their team. And it feels like, it’s not me versus my mom or me versus my sister. It’s this is an us problem, and how are we going to figure this out? I can say this now, because my brother’s not here. And in reality, if he was here, I would hope that this approach would work. And I’ve heard of other people using a similar approach, and it does work.
But I think when there’s such, it’s so rooted in stigma and shame, when we keep focusing on the quantity, the amount, the substance, it adds to that and I think understanding the underlying reasons or helping to identify what those are, because that may make the person think like, oh, shit, maybe I should, like, speak to a therapist, or maybe and start to unpack some things.
Everything’s so interconnected that like, you can’t just pull the substance out and the person’s fine and in recovery, are they really in recovery, though, if there’s still so much unhealed trauma, or undiscussed, trauma. Yes, they’re abstinent from substances. But if this has not been taken care of, that is how a reoccurrence can occur, you know, and so, it’s more like, it takes a lot more time. And it’s gonna get very frustrating. Because it’s not a quick fix.
Margaret: None of it. There is no quick fix.
Jaclyn Brown: No, and I think that’s when people see rehab and detox, they think, oh, here’s a time limit. So, by 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, they should be good. And unfortunately, that’s really framed expectations in our head in a really bad way. Because for me, too, when I was drinking, you know, doubles every night, four nights in a row for years. And then now I maybe have a couple cocktails every three weeks. Like it’s taken a lot of work on my end to deal with my own stuff to really understand my relationship with substances. So, I think that’s also what makes me a weird person in this advocacy world is that I support if you want to be abstinent. I absolutely support that, because if you can’t have a good relationship or a relationship in general with substances, I completely support that. But I also know me, and I don’t need anyone to tell me, hey, I don’t think you should be using this, or you should be using that. Like, it’s a weird dichotomy, because people think that since I’m an advocate, I would hate all drugs, and I would hate things, and I don’t I don’t like trauma like that. I feel like that’s the biggest piece here. But the mental health piece like that’s another.
Margaret: Yes.
Jaclyn Brown: Most times they’re co-occurring.
Margaret: Yes.
Jaclyn Brown: And there isn’t enough discussion about that.
Margaret 09:29
You’re right. And there’s the chicken or the egg. People get stuck on that. And then there’s can we help someone with trauma if they are still mood altered?
Jaclyn Brown: Right.
Margaret: So, there’s all the different theories out there. What I’m grateful for is there are many paths for people to find their way to a wellness in their own life. And I agree with you, I don’t think anyone telling someone else what they should or should not do is effective. Yeah, I do also, in my own addiction as a recovering woman struggle with trying to figure out the why, to get me well, because I spent decades trying to figure out the why on my own and I couldn’t get well, I needed help to get well. And I think that’s the piece of it for all of us. It’s like, what are the outside resources that work for us? What avenue helps me get to my truth or find me a path that gives me a quality of life that feels better than what I was living.
Jaclyn Brown: Yes.
Margaret: I think the other thing that is often negated, which I think you have a similar passion for because of your journey, is the impact on families. To have an expectation that families are not living in constant fear, preoccupation, my words, monkey chatter of what are they doing? When are they doing? Are they okay, let me deny it. Let me not look, oh, they look better day. Great. You know, like,
Jaclyn Brown: Yeah.
Margaret: I think that anyone living in that place is going to be able to go. So how are we doing today?
Jaclyn Brown: Yeah.
Margaret: Are we doing, okay? They’re not even regulated enough to be in that place, because they’re so freaking terrified of what could happen. So I think another avenue of harm reduction to use the language, which I think is important, would be as you’re doing is teaching families, a. about the education around this, b. about how they’ve changed as a result of living with this, I call it illness in their life, and getting help for them to then be able to have a calm, non-judgmental, non-threatening, or ultimatum making relationship with their person.
Jaclyn Brown 11:40
That is such a great point. Because as family members, we don’t take care of ourselves.
When our person is in crisis, we sacrifice everything, I’m not going on vacation, I’m not doing this, I’m not going to do people underestimate the collateral damage of someone’s addiction within the family, and how it affects all of us, and how we now approach different things in our lives.
Because in my family, guess what, I’m the only advocate, I’m the only person who still talks about it. And that’s me, and how they’re grieving and not doing like, I think a lot of times, we think other family members should be feeling the same way that we are. But we’re also experiencing a very different relationship with whoever that person is. And it’s one thing when, again, I only learned about CRAFT probably about a year and a half ago, but the fact that they really focus on like, you need to take care of yourself, because you think in your head, if I want to go see this movie, I’m neglecting my duty of potentially something happening and me not being there for it. But in reality, I can’t control anything outside of myself. And that is a very hard pill to swallow. For you to process in your head, I’m going to go to a movie, I’m not going to feel guilty about it. And if something happens during the movie, it’s not because I went to the movie, because I feel like we as family members have all these reasons of why we can’t do something and how just I need to physically just be available.
You know, and it tears us down even more than we realize, because now we’re operating from this constant fight mode. And it’s just constantly hyper vigilance, hyper aware. And we can’t maintain ourselves. We’re not doing our person any justice, because guess what, they’re getting a tired, annoyed, irritated version of ourselves. And it’s hard to take a step back when you’re in the midst of that, because I didn’t do that. I can say this now, looking back, and that’s fantastic. But I think that’s why it’s important for those of us who have gone through it to share that insight. Because maybe someone’s have this lingering creeping guilt of going to get a manicure you know what I mean? Like when you think about it in retrospect, it’s like me getting a manicure is not the reason that he went and you know, used again, that’s not the reason.
Margaret 14:24
Nothing a family member can do makes another person use or get sober. My opinion.
Jaclyn Brown: Exactly.
Margaret: It’s interesting that you bring that up to CRAFT that is a fundamental principle step of Al-Anon Nar-Anon, every Anon of 12 steps. It is all about how do we get back to self-care to make us healthier for the person we love when they need us?
Jaclyn Brown 14:47
Yes. And that’s a really great piece to pull up because I did have people who told me to try out Al-Anon or Nar-Anon and I never made it and to be quite honest, before he died, I didn’t do any sort of support group or any sort of support anything
Margaret: Yay you said no therapy.
Jaclyn: No, no. Why would I do that?
Margaret 15:03
Well, judging yourself for that. But understanding I was the same way, if you’re a certain personality type, and this addiction illness comes into your life as it did in a different way, in my life, and in yours. The way we go through life works for us. And we are dealing with this and we keep hitting our head against the wall, because somehow this doesn’t work the same way.
Jaclyn Brown 15:25
Yep. And I think that’s a great thing to call out. Because I think a lot of times now, with understanding that there are multiple pathways to recovery, I see a lot of people want to bash other people’s recovery methods, I hear the AA and the NA, and I’m sure for those individuals and their experiences, they probably have personal experiences where they were harmed. I know people who, you know, ride or die by AA/NA, and it has done wonders for them. So, what I have realized now is that I’m not who am I to judge anyone else on how they recover? Like, and who is anyone to judge me on how I’m recovering? If I can still, I always kind of gauge this and go, am I still sticking to like responsibilities and duties and things that I would normally do? Yes.
And I do this with my substance use all the time I factor in has this negatively affected me, is becoming chaotic, but I have become very self-aware, to know, okay, is this going to trigger me to use more because now I’m more stressed, or now I’m more whatever. So, understanding that even if your person is on methadone, or Vivitrol, or whatever it may be, there’s a lot of stigma around that to, any sort of MAT, and you’re just trading one drug for another. I hate hearing that. Because it’s like, it’s the science of it, you’re feeding that receptor that’s like, hey, I need this. But then you don’t have that effect of the high or being high. And I used to think like, oh, that’s a short-term thing until you get to abstinence. But in reality, if someone is on Suboxone, or something for the rest of their life, but they have the rest of their life, who am I to say anything?
Margaret 17:24
Yeah, I was, uh, you know, I was in a place, Jaclyn, where I was able to watch in a treatment center, medicated assisted treatment in become a norm and a part of, and I have to tell you, one of the most difficult things to watch was watching when a person got to a point of regulating to having the amount that didn’t impact them to make them look mood altered, but kept them having withdrawal. That was a tough journey. We had a lot of education within that system to learn what that’s going to look like, what we’re going to do different, how we’re going to approach it. But I like you, I don’t believe that as using one for the other. I am a big proponent of abstinence I always have been, I always will be 12 step based. However, I have had the privilege of working with so many people who they found their recovery through different avenues. And so again, it is not mine to determine what a person’s level of wellness is. It’s mine to assist them in reaching what they feel. Helps them get there.
Jaclyn Brown 18:24
Exactly, exactly.
18:28
This podcast is made possible by listeners like you.
Bumper: When I reflect on my decades of work with families of people with the disease of addiction, I have seen few siblings get the same resources provided to partners, parents or even children. Numerous siblings have told me they felt they couldn’t share in traditional Al-Anon or Nar-Anon meetings as the parents and partners pain seems so much more significant. The Embrace Family Recovery Coaching Group for siblings will meet for six group sessions this summer, including education on the no fault disease, connecting with other siblings, so feeling less alone, strategizing together regarding communication, boundary setting and more. The summer course for siblings begins Tuesday the 16th of July. The group is for people 16 years and the total cost for the six sessions is $180. To find out more, head to my website
and click the work With Margaret Page.
Go down to coaching groups and you will find sibling groups click on that to learn more about this group and how to register.
20:13
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Margaret 20:25
I want to full circle that back, when you were saying the impact on family, you know, we don’t. I was saying it too, we don’t talk about that. You said it beautifully in the beginning. And that was that you and your partner went to couples therapy because of the impact on the relationship.
Jaclyn Brown: Yeah.
Margaret: And if anybody out there is living in this, there is an undeniable impact on every relationship we have when we’re living in fear, worry, chaos, confusion, anger, and a hell of a lot of love underneath it all.
Jaclyn Brown 21:02
Yeah, agreed,
Margaret 21:03
I’m so glad that you sought those services. And that you to have that resource because I think that had to have been very healing. On top of the primary loss of your brother, which is so painful, there’s a secondary loss of, “normalcy” for whatever that means.
Jaclyn Brown 21:20
With my husband, he had never, neither had I experienced grief on this level. And for him to not know, and he will never know the depth of my grief because he didn’t have that relationship with my brother. So, for him his response in situations where he doesn’t know what to do. He flights, and I didn’t understand that. I was coming from a spot where hey, I really need you to ask me about my brother, I need you to ask me about my grief, I need you to whatever. But something in his head was telling him the more you bring it up, the more it’s going to set her off, even though I’m like, please do it. He’s thinking like, is this really a good thing to do?
And it finally got to the point where I’m like, it was negatively just affecting everything in our marriage, because I felt like, are you truly even listening to what I need? Because I’m being so blatant about this. But for him, it’s this big, scary topic. And honestly, what ended up saving our marriage because it got to the point where I said, look, if this does not work, I’m gonna have to separate because I cannot continue to exist in a relationship where I don’t feel supported. Because what am I doing here? What do you know? Because once someone dies, you reevaluate everything in your life.
And the biggest thing that saved our marriage was him getting diagnosed with ADHD. And that was something that wasn’t even on the radar of, how is our own mental health affecting our communication and our interactions. And realizing he had untreated ADHD, he got diagnosed at what 37 I want to say, so that changed so much for me, because I kept thinking, this guy is so narcissistic, he’s only thinking about his stuff. He only cares about him. But in reality, in this ADHD world, that wasn’t the case. And then as things continue throughout the years, like, like I said, my brain honestly broke. And so, things I used to do really easily and really well. I loved cooking, cooking was my favorite thing. It’s been almost five years; I haven’t cooked consistently since my brother died. But that’s something that used to bring me a lot of joy. And so, I’m thinking, you know, there are a lot of things that I used to do that I just, my brain can’t process it. I feel very overwhelmed. And a few months back, I was diagnosed with ADHD on the hyperactive end, because I used to, you know, tell my therapist, I’m like, I have constant running thoughts, but they’re not. And I thought it was anxiety. So, I thought, I’m always thinking about these things. But now I know, there’s hyperactive thoughts where your brain is just always running about who knows what, and then there’s anxious thoughts where there’s like the doom and gloom and all that. But getting our mental health appropriately assessed by someone and understanding why we’re reacting in the way that we are, saved us and I cannot recommend it enough. Like we started in 2020. We still go every six weeks for like a tune-up session. And I know that a lot of people might think that’s very like taboo and like Whatever.
Margaret: No,
Jaclyn Brown: But it saved our marriage. And I’m so grateful for that.
Margaret 25:05
I love that you did it. I think it says a lot about your intention to be with the person you love, and to make it work. And I think that one of the things that also comes up with all of these types of subjects, and especially around addiction and the compounding pain of the illness. Who likes to see someone they love, internal ailments and pain, raw? I mean, it’s, it takes a very strong person to sit with somebody in the hurt of grief. When you love them, and you feel like if I bring them up, they’re going into that hurt of grief. And I made that happen. I feel horrible.
Jaclyn Brown 25:43
Yes, yeah, that’s a really great point to call out, because it is hard to sit there. Because Jordan, my husband would always say, I just feel so helpless. Like, I’m just, there’s nothing I can ever do that will pull you out of this or replace that hole. And I feel like I, what can I do? What is there I can do?
Margaret 26:08
Very similar to how you felt about your brother in a different way.
Jaclyn Brown: Exactly. Yeah,
Margaret: that helplessness feeling most of us don’t like sitting in it.
Jaclyn Brown 26:20
No, so a lot of people will either jump into action, and I’m a jump into action. And Jordan’s a flight, and I’m gonna hang out until I know what to do. So having that understanding, again, not everyone will react the same way than I do. That’s been like the biggest teacher for me. And all of this is that what I think is best for you, what I thought was best for my brother was not and I should have listened to him more when he was saying, look, treatments not going to be effective for me because this this this, I was like, anyway, you don’t know what you’re talking, I should have listened more. I should have been more open to he knew about all these other things like MAT, but I didn’t even give him a chance to discuss it. So that that’s my big thing is just now I try to be more mindful and listen to like, instead of thinking this person shouldn’t be doing this, well, why are you doing this and understanding where that person is coming from?
Margaret 27:22
I hope you stop shoulding on yourself.
Jaclyn Brown 27:25
I know. Everyone says that, everyone says you need to stop that. But I like that perfectionist mentality.
Margaret 27:34
I have compassion for you on it. I get it. I think that if I were in your shoes, I would be looking back and trying to look at what I coulda, shoulda, woulda have done. The thing that I think your brother got from you was a consistency.
Jaclyn Brown: Yeah.
Margaret: Which is huge. Because a lot of family members don’t get to be consistent because of their fear.
Jaclyn Brown: Correct? Yeah,
Margaret: He knew, you knew, and you loved him. And you offered him the help that you were educated to know to offer. And that’s amazing. That’s amazing. That is no small thing.
Jaclyn Brown 28:13
That’s the one thing that I will repeat to myself when I get in that self-deprecating I should have mode is that I did the best I could with the knowledge I had at the time.
Margaret: Amen.
Jaclyn Brown: To say that I’m absolved of everything. No. It’s always going to come back, there’s always going to be a part of me that will blame myself for something. And will I ever get to a point where I stop? I don’t know, I think that just could be just this inherent survivor’s sort of guilt of, especially as I learn more, because as I learn more and teach others more than I’m like, only if I learned the six years ago, you know, it’s hard.
Margaret 28:53
Yeah, I’m sure, I’m sure. And yet, you continue to advocate for others, which is quite magnificent that you’ve chosen to do that.
Jaclyn Brown: Thank you.
Margaret: So, would you want to share anything about the advocacy work that you do mobilize recovery, anything you want to share some of the resources out there to maybe look at?
Jaclyn Brown 29:13
So, Mobilize Recovery is kind of a we say a movement, but it’s the big there’s a big event that usually occurs during Recovery Month and the focus there is to bring in advocates and people who are just wanting to get into advocacy from around the country, bringing them together and providing education, providing different resources, perhaps examining different ways to do things and bringing in different voices of people with lived experience, especially people who are in recovery from substances.
And family members have been a piece that has existed but in the beginning you know, the focus was recovery, you know, people who are in recovery, but then it was like, hey, but family members are here too. So, the first Mobilize I went to was in 2020, and that was online. And I remember having my own sort of doubts, because I had never heard of this. And I’m like, okay, Mobilize Recovery, that has nothing to do with me. I work in IT, like, I don’t even think I should be going to this. But it was 2020. And I had PTO to burn, and I wasn’t going anywhere. So, I was like, whatever, I’ll check this out.
And I remember being in a breakout room. And I was extremely intimidated, because everyone’s peer support, owns their own nonprofit works in a treatment center. And I’m like, I do IT at an insurance company and has nothing to do with this. And on top of it, my brother’s not in recovery, I was just so, as soon as we got in the room, I felt like I don’t want you all to think I’m a fraud. My brother passed away from an overdose. I don’t know much about advocacy; I speak up about stigma. I’ve written a few blog posts, I’m really not that like, I don’t know why I’m here. And one of the women who’s still one of my friends today, she said, but you are in recovery, you’re recovering from the loss of your brother. So, you do belong here. And it was the first time I’d ever had people truly get what I was saying.
Because my friends that I grew up with, no one had gone through anything like this. So, here’s this community of people who are not only people in recovery, but their family members, their harm reduction, people, policy, people, all these different facets that are key to making meaningful change. All coming together to share ideas and see how can we make this better, and the family component? I started to build that out 2022, our big focus, we have like a monthly meeting that occurs. And my big focus was education. And there were definitely people who were like, why are we going to spend so much time on this? Like, shouldn’t people just, you know, educate themselves on their own. But I still continue to push because I found that just even the interactions with people and having discussions, I learned a lot from other people. So, while yes, I could tell you to look up, here’s the textbook definition of harm reduction, here’s the textbook, whatever. Having open discussions about it, is what has really helped change the way that I view things as well.
And this year, we did a very big focus on, I ran a workshop on how to empower family members to tell their stories. So, say, for example, you want to testify for or against a bill, you typically would get about three minutes to go in front of Congress and mind you, advocacy can be going in front of Congress. Advocacy can also be writing a blog or a letter to the editor or social media posts. So, there’s like a range of advocacy, but teaching them how to tell their story in that three minutes sort of succinct way where you can, let’s be honest, legislation gets passed, because there’s facts to help support it. And then there’s a story or emotion and the family members are the ones that get things pushed through. Let’s be honest here when it comes to anything substance related, but also, how can we advocate from a space of education and not just anger and emotion? Finding that balance? Because it’s very easy to advocate out of anger, and just stay angry. But teaching family members, how can we advocate in a long-term sense, and really examine what are we pushing for? Like, yes, we can support this, how is this going to affect people long term?
So that’s why I’m very much on the side of, you know, increased punishment is not really the way we’ve seen that incarceration punishment, that model is not working. This is a public health issue. This is a health problem. And so, because you think drug dealer, bad must go to jail, but also under the law, a drug dealer could be the person that your brother shared drugs with, and who was his best friend so that it’s like, understanding, yes, we’re gonna go off. People think we’re gonna go after El Chapo or whoever, these big players, but a lot of times these bills are affecting the small, low-level sort of people that have no impact on the greater thing, but now we’re just throwing more people into jail and not treatment and it’s a hard thing. It’s very hard, it’s very hard.
Margaret 35:01
It’s hard all the way round. I mean, I think it’s a hard thing because I think of someone who’s lost a person to fentanyl poisoning. In their grief and anger, wants someone punished.
Jaclyn Brown: Yeah.
Margaret: Right. So, you have all of these dynamics to navigate, which goes back to what we said earlier, Jaclyn, which is someone has to have, I call it dignity, to find their way. And I think that same in a grief process that everyone who wants to advocate can choose the way they are ready and able to advocate and what topics, what they fight for, what they get behind. If there’s someone listening, who would like to do more advocacy, or would like to find a way to use their voice, how do they reach you around Mobilize Recovery or around advocacy?
Jaclyn Brown 35:46
Yeah, so like I said, our family caucus, we have meetings on the first Tuesday of every month at 7pm, Eastern 4pm Pacific. And this is for people, if you are a family member, or if you’re affected by substance use and family is how you define it. I’m not going to do a blood test to confirm that this is your blood sister, blood brother. But what I’ve also I’m going to start is on the third Tuesday of every month, a little bit earlier in the day. So, 4 Eastern, 1 Pacific is kind of having these open forums to have conversations kind of similar to this. So maybe we focus on a specific topic, for example, like drug induced homicide, or a hot topic that’s really like, because I see both ends, I see the anger and the grief, and how do you balance that with the idea of justice? And how do you do all that, so I’m opening that up to have these conversations. And additionally, to kind of like gauge where your advocacy is out? One workshop I’m working on is like kind of gauging, like, what’s the temperature of your advocacy? So like, are you angry, this, you know, like, are you really in a good spot to expose yourself to all of this, or maybe you can just grieve. You don’t need to, you know, there’s a lot of people doing this work, so you can hang out and just take care of yourself. And I will give the signup link to where people can sign up.
Margaret 37:26
And those will all be in the show notes. So, we’ll have all the links to reach Jaclyn in the links.
Jaclyn Brown 37:31
Yeah, and I’ll also include my email (jkb@nullstaygoldenjaclyn.com) as well. And I’m always willing to hop on a zoom call, because too, sometimes, I really want to emphasize that this is not a grief group. Because there are a lot of grief groups that exist, I am not trying to reinvent the grief wheel. I feel that they are very important for those people who are in that beginning grief and need to just be angry. But this is definitely a group for people who, you want to make some sort of change. Grief always is going to live there. So yes, grief will come up. But it’s not our sole focus. My sole focus is empowering and making sure that you can move forward and advocate in the way that you would like to advocate, but also, just always being open to the idea that maybe your views are going to change. Mine changed completely, I would have never dreamed six, seven years ago, I’d be sitting here and talking about this. So, I would definitely invite any family members who are curious to check it out. You know, we really focus this past year a lot on just this year, you know, telling her story, but also learning more about harm reduction and kind of going into what the cultural differences might be, especially like in an indigenous community versus a Latinx community. So, understanding that even culturally how substance use is treated is very different. So yeah, I mean, I would love to invite anyone. And, again, it’s a space of learning, ideally, not a space of like anger and arguing.
Margaret 39:16
Clarification, a clarification for the listeners. Do people have had to have lost someone?
Jaclyn Brown: No.
Margaret: Right. I just wanted to make sure that was out there.
Jaclyn Brown 39:26
Yeah, you could have someone who’s an active use still, I will say, I’m really astonished by the amount of amazing family members who have lost someone and still continue to do this work. I mean, in essence, there are times pervert re traumatizing yourselves talking about certain things. And some of these advocates are some of the most amazing people because and I feel the same way. We don’t want what happened to us to happen to other people. So how can we share that information? And if there are people especially still in active use in your family member, maybe there are things that you can currently try. And I’m not saying it’s gonna work, but at least it’s another avenue to kind of at least get some support. That’s really the big thing.
Margaret 40:17
Thank you, thank you for your time, I want to recognize the courage and the tenacity of your personality to go from IT to diving into advocacy. I want to say, it seems appropriate to end with you sharing some lovely story or something you would want to share about Marc. That feels like the right thing to do to close out.
Jaclyn Brown 40:43
So, Marc had a very big personality, he was very outspoken, true middle child, he was a very sensitive person as well and extremely compassionate, extremely.
He’s a, he was the type of person who would find a way to form a relationship with anyone, he was not judgmental, he was very open to people’s backgrounds. And one thing that he would kind of like, share around the holidays was he would say this phrase called
“stay golden,” and that was an allusion to the golden rule, and talking about treating people, you know, how you would want to be treated, and I know there’s, well there’s the Platinum Rule, and there’s less, okay, that’s great.
But he would always say, stay golden, like, and just try to remember that other people have other things that they’re going through. And so, when he passed away, that it’s something that always kind of stood out to me. Because even in the depths of his own shit, he was trying to help people, like, get sober, you know, like, what type of person you know, is struggling with their own stuff that they’re trying to achieve, but I’m going to help you over here.
So understanding that everyone has a background, and a story and that we should be kinder, so I ended up I got that tattooed on my arm as a reminder to me, but I named my coaching and consulting business after it so it’s called Stay Golden Coaching and Consulting because I would not be in this I wouldn’t be in this world unfortunately, without his death.
I’m trying to turn it into something good and my big piece that was very big with him is empathy and compassion and I think is stuff has allowed me to be bigger and bolder like he was, more authentic because I’m not masking anymore. Uou know I’m not masking, that’s a whole other episode but
Margaret: it is
Jaclyn Brown: a family member masking is a huge piece but being genuine and authentic and letting people see there are highs and there are very low lows. It’s been very freeing for me so even still; my brother inspires me to just be true to myself. And as long as I’m true to myself, I don’t have to worry about what I said to one person or another person, I’m just me so.
Outro: Thank you, Jaclyn, for sharing your story with us and introducing us to your brother Marc. Your journey is one far too many people will relate to, and I thank you for being a voice in the world of advocacy and harm reduction. Come back next week when I introduce you to Terra, who describes herself as a “human who gives a damn.”
Margaret 43:51
I want to thank my guest for their courage and vulnerability in sharing parts of their story.
Please find resources on my website, embracefamilyrecovery.com
This is Margaret swift Thompson.
Until next time, please take care of you!
