Bumper 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.
The Embrace Family Recovery Podcast.
Intro
Welcome back! Today I’m incredibly honored to welcome 2 guests whose personal stories of resilience recovery and friendship are truly inspiring. Bob and Joe are not only men in long term recovery but also dedicated fathers who have faced challenges of addiction with their own families.
With years of experience navigating demanding careers and the complexities of parenting through recovery their bond as sponsor and friend has shaped their journey.
Both are committed to working their programs daily knowing that it’s the foundation for everything else including their intervention and recovery coaching business. East West Recovery Coaches.
Please meet Joe and Bob.
Margaret:
So welcome everybody. I’m actually excited today because I get to introduce you to not only one person, but two wonderful human beings who have made it their mission, from what I can tell, to help the fellow sufferers of this illness.
So what I’d love you to do, Bob and Joe, is introduce yourself how you would like to be known from the point of view of people listening. Who are you, and if you’re willing, and there is someone in your family who were qualifier around who has the disease, share that, or whatever part of your recovery you’re comfortable sharing. So, I’m gonna invite Bob, why don’t you go first, and then we’ll pitch to Joe.
Bob Muncil 02:03
Sounds good. My name’s Bob Muncll. I grew up in the Northeast US, and, oh, I have plenty of qualifiers in my family. I grew up in an alcoholic, dysfunctional home, and I often say, I’ve been sober, clean and sober, 31 years, myself and I have three children, and I look at my role in life as breaking that chain. We look back in my family history, and its generation after generation of looking like this, successful, well, educated, whatever outside and the inside of the home being that alcoholic dysfunction. And it was those two divergent things that I was like, when it hit me. I’m like, oh my god, I’m a link in this chain. I’ve gotta break this. And so, I had my last drink at 34 and I had two children at the time, and I have three, and I saw that juncture like I’m either going to join the new team or I’m going to stay on the old team, like everyone in my, every male in my family has that looks great and is a dumpster fire at home. And so, I got clean and sober, had a had a really great business career, and then retired little over a year ago. And you know, this is going to segue into what Joe is going to say as well. I still sponsor Joe, so we’ve been friends for over 25 years. We met in an AA meeting, and so when we were both getting ready to retire from our business lives, we talked. Like, what are we going to do? And this just the term Ikigai. Is really what is at the bullseye of this? I don’t know if you’re familiar with that Japanese term.
Margaret: Say it again,
Bob: Ikigai.
Margaret 04:00
Ikigai.
Bob Muncil 04:01
It’s the confluence of what I love to do, what I’m good at, what the world needs, and what I can be compensated for? Where those four things come together. That’s your Ikigai. Joe is doing some work. Like, what am I going to do? I’m doing some work. What am I going do, we’re talking and then this just happened like so organically, we’re going to do this, we’re going to do interventions and recovery coaching, and I’m going to stop talking to give Joe a chance. But it’s just been the greatest.
Margaret: Wonderful.
Joe O’Connor 04:33
Okay, all right. I love when Bob brings that up, too, because that’s really it. I will send that to you. You know I will jump off a little of what Bob said too. We had had these careers and Bob, and I have always been close friends since we met 25 years ago. And how this developed was, was really incredibly organically. We weren’t planning to do anything together.And it just happened.
So, for me I am one of seven children. I grew up in the northeast as well, close to Bob umm and you know there was a disease on both sides of my family, but my mother and father didn’t really have it. My mother needed to kind of medicate herself each evening, more and my father did but I never saw my parents drunk.
Margaret: Mmhmm
Joe O’Connor:
But in their family, immediate family, deaths at early ages from alcoholism before it was really recognized and not necessarily denial but life just kind of went on and it wasn’t talked about, which was kind of interesting. I have five children and when I went into treatment 25 years ago, I had 4 the oldest was nine years old and today three of them are in recovery
Margaret: Amazing!
Joe O’Connor: with long term sobriety so you know qualifiers for me to be honest with you Margaret I wasn’t planning on getting sober. But I knew myself for a long time that I needed wanted to change and needed to change it was affecting my professional life it was affecting my family life, and I had an intervention done on me by a couple of brothers and while they were not as aware as some other people were because there wasn’t necessarily drinking and drugging around them as I was around friends. It was a friend of mine I won’t mention his name here but a dear friend he remains a dear friend today who called them, and he had seen me kind of at my worst, and said I think Joe needs help. And so, I had an intervention done we had that relationship with Hazleton I I went home I told my wife kind of what had just happened in a parking lot, in a motel parking lot. That’s how it all went down for me told my parents the next day took the next day to kind of get my affairs done at work and off I went.
I worked for a family company for 30 out of my 40 years of my professional career I was in a related business for the 1st 10 and lived in New York and so my boss was my father.
So I went over to their house, he lived very closely to me, and they were incredibly supportive from the moment I told them and all the way through it.
And so, I think I was certainly a better father as a person, but I was also a better person when they developed their own issues around drugs and alcohol.
My wife came in three weeks after me after attending the any program at Hazelden and they said to her and she’ll tell you this the $64,000 question tell me about your drinking and so she went home she never went to treatment so by the time I got home she had not drank for about a week, and she’s been in the program and very involved as I have been for 25 years. Sponsors a lot of women and so you know Bob and I won’t speak for Bob but we have sponsored a lot of guys over our years and so when we put this whole thing together as you know all too well there’s a difference between recovery coaching and sponsorship.
So as we build kind of the model for the business we had to kind of know what that is because we’re not their sponsors
Right
So that’s how I would like to be thought of as a guy that came in not having any idea what this was about and today first and foremost I’m a family man but my sobriety always comes first because I lose everything else if I don’t do that
Margaret
Amen, interesting I uh was in the family program for majority of my tenure at Hazleton and many times had the privilege to witness people who engaged in their own recovery as family members when they got through the family program and realized wow I need and deserve help my use as well it’s not just my loved one who’s in treatment. So what a beautiful story to hear that your wife had seeds planted and awarenesses given to her that she then followed through and chose to embrace recovery for herself
Joe O’Connor: You know and while I could say her use wasn’t as bad or tragic as mine. She grew up in an alcoholic come highly functioning parents’ alcoholic home. So, it was the behavior that she had grown up with for a long time, so she was ready.
Margaret: You are both examples in the stories that you have shared so far of we hear a lot about the devastation of the disease which no one can deny we live it we’ve seen it we’ve experienced it firsthand in the work that you do and I do.
What i love about your mission your passion your story and the fact that you now are helping people in your business, is that you offer the image of the impact of recovery on the whole family, because you are walking talking examples that not only has recovery gifted you so much, but it’s gifted the people you love so much. Whether it’s been them finding their recovery, you being a role model to know that it’s possible, or your partner, or being a better human around the people who you love because of your recovery.
So, I’d love to touch on that a little bit from both of your perspectives, because we do hear a lot about the risk of death, and the chronicity, and the pain of the disease, but we don’t often hear about the hope of recovery as that domino effect within the family. And both of you have a story that shows that.
Bob Muncil 10:46
You know, I’ll just say this when, when Joe and I were website together, you know, we’re trained interventionists. We’re trained recovery coaches. I’m a certified meditation instructor and a certified yoga instructor. I’ve done first aid, Narcan, that we have all those boxes checked.
I was saying to Joe, Joe, our superpower other than the fact that we have these crazy careers, and we’re used to dealing with intense situations where we have to hold our space. Our superpower is we held down jobs, raised kids in in new sobriety. And when we were putting this on our website, I said, you know, it’s going to go last but in reality, the conversations I have with families, you know, they’re always pointing at the person, the client, the intended patient, not realizing the whole system, right? And this is something that you know well, Margaret, and when, when we get into that, I find so often that I’m explaining a little bit of my story so they can touch the reality of how that works.
You can get a certificate in whatever, but boots on the ground, raising a family. In my case, going through a divorce, raising my three children, intense career. You know the balance piece? Because, as we know, I was an alcohol was my drug. There’s no balance,
Margaret: Right?
Bob Muncil: And so now, when we deal with families, we find we Joe and I talk almost every day in every case that we get, whether it’s recovery coaching or interventions, one of the things that I think sets us apart is I’m calling Joe. Joe, this is my situation. I have. The last one I just did was a heroin, benzo addicted couple living in the basement of the male, the male’s mother. And so, every intervention is a 3d puzzle. That one because it was a couple and I had two families, and had to explain to each family, you’re not only a system for the male, a system for the female, now you’re a system for two families. And I can’t even start to say how important that that discussion was, so they could get a toe hold in the fact of what their role was going forward.
Margaret 13:05
How about you, Joe, what do you think the hope of your recovery story brings?
Joe O’Connor 13:09
Well, I think it’s interesting. I think when Bob and I show up, we don’t look like alcoholics or drug addicts anymore, right? And I think the appropriate time we share our story. And you know, for me, drugs were a big part of my story. I found my home in AA, but I’ve been to a lot of NA meetings, but drugs were a big part of my story. And a lot of the younger kids we would do interventions on it’s usually more drugs than it is alcohol. Combo of the two, right, older tends to be alcohol.
They don’t believe that we kind of went through the same thing. Now. It’s all changed in the last 25/30 years. I think it’s a lot scarier environment out there. So, with fentanyl and opioids and Bob and I kind of missed all of that, my children didn’t. Couple of my children did not, which was the scary part, but I think sharing their, you know what our story is, and they don’t want to hear a lot about kind of the rah, rah, AA stuff either. That doesn’t resonate well with them. So, I think we’re both very careful of just kind of introducing ourselves. What Bob and I too are. We’re creative when we are approaching a new client and a family, and we’re really, really good listeners, and Bob touched on it too. I think that our professional careers with a lot of responsibility, has served us, continues to serve us very well in this business, because we bring all of that with us in terms of interactions with different kinds of personalities and people, and there’s not a lot that kind of ruffles us, when we’re in an intervention. And all of those get, you know, it’s a tense time, it’s scary.
I had a family, I haven’t done the intervention on it yet, but the IP male, 60 years old, um. Had a wife, his three sisters, and eighty three year old mother on a zoom last week, none of them stopped talking. I had to interrupt them about 15 times just say, ladies, so let me ask you a few questions about him, right? But I know where they’re, where they are, because, you know, they’ve been scorned, they’ve been lied to, right all of that is there.
And so we come into situations with our experience, where we kind of cut through all of that, we recognize it, we can identify it, with it, and we just kind of we start to kind of build that foundation and I think because of kind of our time and treatment, our time doing other things, and to Bob’s point, of raising families, there isn’t a dynamic that we haven’t kind of encountered.
Bumper 15:51
This podcast is made possible by listeners like you.
I am Margaret Swift Thompson, and I am so grateful you’re listening to this podcast, it means more to me than you know.
As a result of the growth and continuation of my mission to help more family members find resources and enhance their toolbox with things that can help them navigate this journey of recovery, I wanna let you know that I’m coming back with the family coaching group.
So I’m starting the Embrace Family Recovery Coaching Group again and I want to make sure people know that this is a group and it’s a coaching group and it’s open to anyone impacted by the disease of addiction from a family’s perspective. So it could be your parent, your partner, your child, a sibling anybody.
If you would like to be a part of this educational and supportive community please go to my website embracefamilyrecovery.com and look into the coaching group.
We’re going to have it for all people impacted so we’re not going to divide the group into parents or partners or siblings we’re going to just have an Embrace Family Recovery Coaching Group so if you want to know more please head to my website and find out more, learn more, and if you have any questions at all, please reach out to me by e-mail at
Margaret@nullembracefamilyrecovery.com
You’re listening to the Embrace Family Recovery Podcast; can you relate to what you’re hearing? Never miss a show by hitting the subscribe button.
Margaret 17:08
So, you’ve touched on the fact that you are coaches and interventionists. What is your business? Called
Bob Muncil: Go ahead. Joe,
Joe O’Connor 17:15
East West Recovery Coaches
Margaret 17:19
You Mentioned your superpowers being two men in recovery, I would add as well, two men like you say, who’ve worked in a career that was highly demanding and that you have navigated recovery with a growing family with children who have struggled with the same illness you experienced. Your own personal relationship as sponsor and friends for years, actively working your own program still, because that’s your priority, because you know everything else goes away, those are all incredibly powerful things you bring to the table when you work with a family, because you intrinsically understand your own journey as a recovering person in the disease aspect, you also understand the impact on the family side, because both of you have sat on that side, which offers your clients a tremendous amount. And I think that’s wonderful.
I’m curious about the intervention component, because there’s a lot of feelings about interventions and lots of judgments or assumptions, one of the things that I would always tell my clients when I worked in the treatment center who came as a result of an intervention, I would have them look at the fact of how absolutely terrified their loved ones were, and the courage it took, and the care and love for them it took to actually come up with an intervention for them. Because it is one of the most risk taking in one way and loving gesture a family member can make. And not everyone can do it, and not everyone will do it. But what’s your experience of that when it comes to being the person in the room doing the intervention? Would you agree that it’s a highly courageous and loving act. I’ll
Bob Muncil 19:03
I’ll start Joe, if it’s okay. I so. The way we do interventions is have the family meeting the night before. Ideally, you know, there’s all kinds of variations, but ideally, I sit with the family for several hours the day before. We’re writing the letters, the various letters, which we can get into or not.
But part of what I talk to the family about, they need to buy into me right. Here we are now. We’re all sitting in a room. Things are really real. And I explain the infrastructure of how I think this should go. But I said, I’ll always tell people our fuel is love, okay, the most loving thing that you can do, like you were saying, Margaret, is to be here now. What we all people who haven’t been through either the intervention process or training, think the most loving thing to do is what we’ve been doing, which most often is. Is codependency.
And when I sit with the family and do that, you can see when we talk about the most loving thing, you can see the room just deflate a little bit as far as that high pressure tension. And when Joe said something about creativity, you know, because I’m a meditation instructor, and not a lot of people have done meditation or comfortable. I do a 90 second breath work with people. And it’s another thing where just you start to feel the room just come down a little bit. And we do it at the family meeting, and we do it prior to the intended patients arriving at whatever location it might be for the intervention. And those are just some of the things that Joe and I, you know, we think, okay, what would we have wanted when we were getting an intervention or clean and sober? And so, we integrate those things in.
I always reassure the family that when you really dig into this, you’re going to see most people aren’t brave enough to be sitting in this room right now with us,
Margaret 21:05
Agreed, and you brought up something that that I think is really important to dissect a little more, and that is that meditation that you bring in, what I know my language is family members live with this perpetual monkey chatter in their brain. It is a voice in their brain that keeps them fixated and focused on fixing, managing and controlling the person they love and adore, who they see crippled, if not, dying in front of their face, and they can’t seem to reach them.
I imagine, in the middle of an intervention, every instinct of trigger response that monkey is screaming at them. He’s going to hate you; she’s going to walk out. It’s never going to work. You’re never going to be able to do this. You’re never going to have a relationship again. What is wrong with you? But you’ve got to do something. And what are we going to do?
And it’s probably going the whole time.
So I think of the people who are so dysregulated emotionally because of the monkey screaming at them that 90 seconds is such a gift to learn to be here and now, be in your skin, be in your body, and know that, yes, this is scary, and you’re doing a great, courageous thing to assist your loved one in getting the help they deserve, and the outcome is beyond us. We have to trust the process.
Bob: Yeah,
Joe O’Connor: yes, you just don’t know, right? But we’ve also found too is, is that we could do an intervention and the loved one storms out, and they don’t want it, but then they might come back a week later or two days later, because part of obviously, what we talk about is if that happens. And this was, you know, Bob and I just playing off one another, but I loved what he said is the boundary consequence portion of this, which is the end. And let’s just say they said no, needs to be as if they’re running down the driveway. And you can say it in 10 seconds, right? But I also say to families when they come in, and you’re absolutely right. Margaret, they come in and they’re not in a good state. And so, they are worried about confronting this person who, you know, usually there’s been behavior that is angry, belligerent, really unhealthy. And you know, we have to kind of get in the middle of that and say, listen, they may not love it now, but they will love it and see that when they get on the other side of this thing, right?
So, it’s easy to convince the client that in your in a room full of family, you’re going to lose all these family they’ve had it, you’re going to lose all of them. But the family, on the other hand, by standing up to them, is worried that they’re going to lose him or her, like, if I do this, they’re going to like you. Said they’re going to hate me. I said, no, they won’t, they won’t hate you.
So that dynamic there is, is, you know, and it’s a bunch of chess pieces. It’s, um,
Margaret: Right,
Joe O’Connor: I had one recently where the father just said to himself, I can’t be there. I can’t stand my daughter. I can’t I’m going to say the wrong thing. And when we’re with families, you know, it’s really important that that you do not if it’s not going, well, give out ultimatums. It’s not ultimatums like I will have to leave you today. It’s, I’m not sure this relationship can continue. I can’t do this anymore, that kind of talk. And the father didn’t want to be there. The father had not seen his daughter in a year and a half, and we concluded after a couple of days that he should be there. And it was fine if he said nothing. I said, if you’re going to say anything angry, don’t say anything at all. But I think it’s important, and Bob and I have to figure out who those right people are, because that may not have been the right person, and just be there, and that’s going to mean a lot to your daughter, that you showed up, and you’ll find yourself saying something.
So, all that coaching beforehand to get them settled in as much as you can, because when that client, that loved one, walks in the door, that’s a scary couple of minutes, right there.
Margaret 25:11
I’m sure, I’m sure, of course, I can imagine my listeners are angry. So what did the dad do? Was he silent? Or did he speak?
Joe O’Connor 25:18
He spoke and basically said, more than once, I love you and I want you to get help, which is what I told him to say. If you can’t say, you know, it’s not a time to bring up anything that has happened in the past, nothing, zero. We’re all done. What got us here is not important. It’s looking towards the future. And that’s what he said.
Margaret 25:40
And to that point, isn’t that ultimately, what every family member who reaches out to you wants, no matter how angry, hurt, confused, bewildered, frustrated they are, they want their loved one to be well. And they do love them. And you know, it’s interesting with that point that you just made, that I think is really probably important for family members to get a repeat of. Is in the intervention, it’s not a time for the past. It’s not a time to bring that up. It’s not a time to rehash or blame or any of that stuff. What aligns so beautifully with that is 12 step recovery. Because if the person accepts the gift of treatment, accepts the offer of recovery, leans into recovery, and chooses to work a 12-step program, they will come back and address the past. They will come back and make amends, and higher power willing the family member engages their own recovery, will do the same parallel journey through their steps work and do the work they can, to heal their past. And I think that that’s such a gift to an intervention, if people understand that that is the journey of 12 steps. Because not everybody gets that. Not everybody understands that. This is the only correct me, if you have any other knowledge, the only program of recovery for any chronic, progressive and potentially, fatal illness that has a requirement in it that we clean up the wreckage by the disease, but we don’t beat ourselves up for having the disease, and families don’t understand that, because if they’ve not been in a 12 step meeting, not heard the beliefs of the foundation of recovery, how would they know that? So, I would think that would be part of the coaching. On the upfront part, there will be time and place for that to be done, right? It won’t be rapid. I mean, I don’t about you two took me a good solid year before I made amends to my family. I had to work the steps to get there. I don’t know about the both of you. Do you have a willingness to share that how long it took before you were cleaning up the wreckage the disease caused in your lives?
Bob Muncil: Go ahead Joe.
Joe O’Connor 27:54
Well, me longer than a year. Margaret, longer than a year. I sat with it. It, of course, makes me think about my sponsor gave me a lot of homework assignments.
Bob Muncil: You needed the right sponsor.
Joe O’Connor: All right? I Margaret. I flunked a few homework assignments, right? But, but, but it was me just
Margaret: Guilty,
Joe O’Connor: Guilty, right? You know, Bob is incredibly well read, and today, actually, when he when he picks out a book, I usually get it right away, because I always get something out of it. When I was in the middle of it, I kind of didn’t know where to start first, right,
Margaret: Right?
Bob Muncil: I loved being sober. I loved that I wasn’t telling lies, but I was ready when I was ready to do that. And you know what’s interesting, my parents were both still alive, and they died. I was six years sober when they died. They died a couple months apart. I don’t think I ever did a proper amends to them, almost like they weren’t asking me to do it, because they were incredibly loving and supportive. I went to their graves because I’ve done, you know, gone through the steps like we have a number of times, and did it again, and did it at a grave site. And I can’t tell you how emotional that was when I was just kind of looking at their names on a like I said, sorry. They weren’t looking for a sorry. I knew that, right, but I needed to do that. They never left my side through all of that.
Margaret 29:21
They loved you unconditionally. And the other thing that, that I’m sure you did, as I did on whatever length it takes, and Bob will get to your story, because I’d love to know, is we were making living amends by being honest, by showing up, by being trustworthy, by having integrity, until we got to the point of the actual formal amends.
So though we don’t actually necessarily speak to people, plus, if you have a good sponsor, which I have a feeling you do, they will direct you as to whether it’s appropriate to do it in person, by a letter, when it’s not appropriate, when it’s a living amends, because all of that is part of the work.
And for families listening that process is so vital for taking time. And this is what I’ve always said, It’s because when we first land in recovery, you don’t trust us. You don’t have a reason to trust us. We don’t trust ourselves. And so, when we do those steps, and we get to that work, and we come to you and we say, Here’s my list. I want to sit down with you, and I need to share these. And then we say, is there anything we left off? And we actually hear it, and don’t get defensive. You want that to take time, because otherwise, are you going to believe it? Probably not.
Joe O’Connor: Right
Margaret 30:28
Yeah. So, Mr. Bob, what about you? How long did it take you to make amends?
Bob Muncil 30:33
Well, I’m going to start by going to the end of the story, because I last know a year ago, November. So I’m at that point, 29 years clean and sober, all right? I’m like, super healthy, whatever. Well, I was taking a supplement, and it affected my heart. And you know where they always say, check with your physician before you take the supplement. Well, I thought that’s baloney, so I didn’t do it. And I in the middle of night, I go into this whole like AFib thing, I end up in a cardiac unit and my heart stops
So, this is a year ago, November. And so, I went offline like I was gone in, going into the next realm, whatever that is, for a little while. And so, when I came back online, and all sudden, there’s a room full of people, and I was like, okay, what the hell is this? And I came back online, having done all my steps counseling for years, all the stuff I did, I was like, and the meditation was part of it. The first thing that came to my mind is, okay, take a deep breath. What’s going on right now. Check in what’s going on right now. First thing that comes to my mind is, I’m lying there right and it’s like I have no regrets.
Now, that’s the first thing that came to my mind. Now, go back to newly sober. I had shipping containers full of regrets. I was an active alcoholic, you know, and everything that I had done in that realm.
When I describe this to people, I say it’s like the alchemy, the 12 steps I love. AA, right? That’s how I got clean and sober, takes, takes the lead, so to speak, of everything that I had done, and turns into the gold by working the steps and making the amends and all the things that we do. And the proof positive was literally, when I came back from some other place, my heart started again, and I could say I have no regrets, like,
Margaret: Wow,
Bob Muncil: Clean living. Wasn’t you know that that’s something where way, you know, way back in my past, looking over my shoulder metaphorically or otherwise, is kind of how I lived. And I live unapologetically clean and that’s to me, like it took me a lot, the first sponsor I had to get to your original question. Margaret, I said, like, a week and a half into it. Alright? I think I’m on step four. I want to cook because I’m like, one of these guys, right? Everything is going to happen. And he said, I remember his exact words. I’m literally at this point, two, three weeks sober, \
Margaret: Right?
Bob Muncil: He said, Bob, I’m not going to do a drive through McDonald’s version of your steps with you. If you don’t like it, put me on your list of what’s the list people you’re mad at?
Margaret: Resentments
Bob Muncil: Yeah and get somebody else. So needless to say, I had to go back to the drawing board, and it was probably three years before I did my amends.
Margaret 33:38
So I appreciate both of you being so honest about your own story and sharing that because I think because I think it’s really enlightening for family members when you came to get sober and you were working your program of recovery and starting to have life come together, when you were sitting in that moment of facing, this is my journey. This is what I’m going to be doing. How long did you think it would take before the people you love the most would trust you again? How long did you think that would take? How fearful were you about that when you sat in the treatment experience or the rooms of AA, when you first started
Bob Muncil: Go ahead, Joe,
Joe O’Connor 34:17
I would say Margaret that in my own immediate family, there was a lot of fear on behalf of my wife, more than anywhere the person closest to me.
Margaret: Right?
Joe O’Connor: And it wasn’t an angry resentment. It was a fearful one. It was just, you know, I hope he can do this. I like this. The other people in my life. It didn’t take long, because I always say it’s the most courageous, honest thing I’ve ever done in my whole life, and I kind of I still wear it very proudly on my sleeve every day, quietly. And people started to notice that. And, immediately, kind of got into, you know, people, places and things. Maybe I changed some things, but immediately, was pretty comfortable with telling people where I was. I really was.
I remember, and I don’t think that that my wife will mind me sharing this, but I was probably six months sober, and she accused me or thought I had been drinking, and I got so upset. And I don’t know if Bob remembers it, but I got so upset, like, how dare she, and I hadn’t.
And Bob said to me, you know, he always calls me OC said, OC, for 25 years, you’ve been doing this,
Margaret: Right?
You know, please get off your high horse. She’s scared something triggered something. So, if you haven’t, you haven’t, right? And I just needed to, it’s the attraction, that promotion piece, right? Just do my work and just go about it each day and show up. And, you know, part of me was doing that. I was, I would say, I think an okay father in terms of that, the physical part of raising children, but I was so much more present, really listening and paying attention and being there and supportive. So, I think the people that were closest to me were the ones that took the longest,
Margaret 36:20
But far shorter than you imagined when you first landed in treatment. I’m guessing, because most of us, when we land in that place, think it’s never going to heal. How will we get it back? And the irony is that I think family members, when they sit at the precipice of their loved one going to treatment, have similar fears. Will we like each other? Will we trust each other? Will we be able to connect? Will this ever be better? I don’t like where it’s at, but I know it. What the heck’s coming? What if they don’t want to be with me anymore once they get sober? There’s a lot of fears on the family side that sound very familiar to what I used to hear on the unit sides at Hazelden when I was working in the treatment. It’s incredible the parallels on both sides of the journey.
Bob Muncil 36:58
Margaret, you couldn’t have given a better segue to my situation. This is a great setup. So, I was, let’s see, I got divorced when I was, I think it was eight or nine years sober. So, my closest family members, I have, I have three sisters, two long term sobriety before me. So, there was a great understanding in my family of origin about, oh, this is really good, you know, stay with this course with Bob, because this is really good stuff.
But, you know, my wife at the time, you know, and if she’s listening, she would, she would say the same, it was a real challenge. And then I got sober, and we did counseling for a long time try to figure out a way we had three kids to make it work. And I think it’s really important to say just because you get sober, it doesn’t mean every relationship is going to stay the course,
Margaret: Right?
Bob Muncil: In fact, I’ll even go one step further my father, when I got sober, we sat down and I said, Dad, you know, this is new paradigm. We have to have a new relationship that’s real and and we’re going to it’s going to get real, or it really can’t be, because this is not serving either one of us, and not my new life as a sober man. It’s going to be authentic, or it’s not going to be, and we couldn’t see eye to eye on it, and our relationship kind of fell apart. And I didn’t do that any with any spite.
It was just my core said it has to be authentic or it’s just not going to be in my new life, because non authentic, baloney type relationships I had a lot, and I grew up with that. And so, I don’t look at it as collateral damage, but I look at it more as the people to move forward with who could understand what I’m all about, really did. And here’s the proof. My children now are 35 to 29 three kids. I have, I don’t know if I could have a better relationship with my children. And it’s, it’s real and whatever needs to be talked about. So, they were really young when I got sober. But you know, to me, that’s the proof. It’s like the people who understand and can accept authentic me as I understand and accept authentic them, move forward that way.
Margaret 39:25
So, what I hear is boundaries, not collateral damage.
Bob Muncil: Totally
Margart: I hear you made an effort with the people that you loved in your life to make this relationship move forward in a healthier way together, and when it couldn’t, you set a boundary you needed to set to take care of yourself.
Bob Muncil 39:42
Right, to keep myself sober
Margaret 39:45
and have authenticity and integrity,
Bob Muncil: Right?
40:42
Outro: Come back next week where Joe and Bob continue to share their insights into their self-care practices and we discuss the importance of the family dynamics in the recovery journey.
I want to thank my guests for their courage and vulnerability in sharing parts of their story.
Please find resources on my website, embracefamilyrecovery.com
Margaret 41:50
This is Margaret Swift Thompson, until next time, please take care of you.
