Welcome back to the Embrace Family Recovery Podcast! Many of you have asked for more solo episodes, so I’m bringing my Moments with Margaret series from YouTube and weaving them into my lineup alongside incredible guest conversations.
Back in 1996, as a student at Hazelden Betty Ford, I was introduced to the term AFGE – Another F’n Growing Experience. These are the painful, challenging moments in life that, while difficult, offer profound opportunities for growth—if we’re willing to lean in, embrace the discomfort, and work through them.
Today, I’m sharing one of my own AFGEs—one of those tough but transformative life experiences. I hope it resonates with you!
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Margaret 00:15
Hello, everyone. I’m Margaret Swift Thompson of Embrace Family Recovery and I wanted to hop on and chat about the awarenesses and the growth that I have experienced through the summer and fall of this year, 2024.
To say it’s been humbling, enlightening, scary, joyful, adventurous, playful and even relaxing at times, would encompass a lot of it. The biggest lesson I learned, and I know I’m not alone in this. There’re other family members who found as they’ve gone on this journey while loving someone with the disease of addiction that they have evolved, changed and coped differently at different stages in their life. My MO for coping has always been crisis. I’m there, first responder on the scene, attentive, full of energy, able to cope, able to manage multi things at once, and afterwards have a crash. A day, maybe a couple hours, highly emotional, tired, different reactions. This experience taught me that my ability to bounce back after crisis and high stress times takes longer and is not as easy as it once was.
Could that be age, sure. Could that be the fact that through my recovery journey, I’ve afforded myself the ability to connect with myself, my feelings and understand better what I need, what I can’t do, and set boundaries accordingly. I’d like to think that’s most of it. Could be everything.
So, let’s catch you up. Every summer I take some time off to not do podcasting, to lighten my load to play. And this summer, I really did that. I played. I brought into my life a side hustle, if you call it, where I bring joy to other people’s lives through jewelry. And that’s been a lot of fun, and it’s been very creative, and it’s been light, and playful. Really, really playful. And in doing that, I’ve met new people and developed a different community that has been really rewarding and fulfilling, and I’m grateful for that.
Along with the play time this summer, as my good friend Dede says, you’re going to camp, which I did, I realized in processing the joy I was experiencing that through my childhood and my sexual trauma, and my makeup of always being the helper and the fixer and the mediator and the one who looked out for others, I didn’t play, not in the true sense of the word.
If it was involved in athletics. I was so self-conscious because of my weight and my body that I wouldn’t even try if it was a summer camp with beach attire, very difficult. And I grew up in Bermuda, so that was common. If it was hanging out with friends when I was little, we played for sure, we had skate clubs and we did things. However, I always feel like I’ve been a pretty serious-minded person, concerned about people, worried about people, vigilant to people’s emotions. And I think part of that was what I went through. Part of that is probably my makeup. So, it was really fun to go to camp and actually enjoy it and participate and let my hair down.
What came on the heels of that was an incredible opportunity to travel with my father, who’s 85 years old, and we lost mom, and he’s wanted to travel, and I had the privilege of going with him to Amsterdam and getting to go to the Taylor Swift concert, which was his idea, and witness him truly enjoying and in awe and playful and funny in an experience that was so out of the norm of what I’ve ever done with my father. I will cherish that forever. Also, Amsterdam, I’ve never been, never been to parts of Europe. I’ve been to with my father, and those were great experiences. And I said in a post early on, time is precious and short, and we don’t know how long we have here, and we don’t know how long we have the people we love. And so am I going to choose to live when I have an opportunity in the moment and practice what I preach and I did, and I’m grateful I came back. COVID, and recovered from that pretty well, and then went on another trip with my father to Europe, and we went on a river boat cruise. This came on the heels of my dad having been through a hurricane and no power, having been in hospital and being ill, and when we went on this cruise, he was weak, and it was probably not a good idea to go, but we went. My dad is tough, and he wanted to, so we went. Again, saw parts of the world I’ve never seen, Lucerne, Switzerland. If you ever get a chance to go, please go. It is spectacular.
We ended up back in Amsterdam, and my dad got very, very ill, influenza and COVID at the same time, and ended up in a hospital in Amsterdam. And to say I didn’t think I’d get him home would be an understatement. It was a very scary situation. We rallied. He rallied, and he and his caregiver, Teresa, we were all together, both got COVID, I did not and so it was a lot of caregiving, and it was right where I needed to be doing what I needed to be doing. Meanwhile, while we were on this trip in western North Carolina, Hurricane Helene happened, and my husband was here alone with our dogs on the side of a mountain in a hurricane that has caused more destruction in this part of the country than probably ever before, or at least for a very long time in history. I couldn’t reach him. We had no communication, and if we did, it was very fragmented and spotty. I was worried about him. Thankfully, he the house, the animals all okay, but he was shook up. He’d never lived through a hurricane. I’ve lived through many. When I returned home to my just my neighborhood and saw the mud slides and the destruction caused by enormous amounts of water coming down a mountain, making their own river and path and over flooding creeks that were already there, it was absolutely humbling to realize once again, I am small. this universe is bigger, way bigger and more powerful. And there are times where you just have to trust and wait out a process because you can’t stop it or control it. Which is very much what we go through when we love someone with the disease of addiction.
It is bigger than us. It is outsmarting us. It is controlling them and us, if we let it. And it is important to rely on our faith, our belief in a higher power, the universe, whatever we can believe in and be in community to navigate that reality. Got dad, home safely, came back here, no Wi Fi, if anything, we got Starlink, and it was very spotty for a while, and I could not believe how shaky I was, how vulnerable I felt, how out of sorts I was, how shut down emotionally I was, and what I think it came down to, I was on high alert and crisis intervention for a strong, solid period of a week and a half, and I had to just get through it. And when I got home, saw my husband, was in my home, realized that even though we may not have the amenities, we are fortunate, I was able to come back to my body and feel some of the feelings.
About two weeks into being home, my youngest daughter, Amelia, got a very serious case of mono after having strep, and I got the call from Miss Independent Amelia, and it said, Mom, I need you. Can you come and help? I am so grateful I had those two weeks before that call came, because I ended up in New York City, which anyone who knows me knows that it takes a lot for me to go to that big city. It’s intimidating to me. I don’t know it very well, and I do my best, because that’s where she’s living, to show up for her and engage in the city life.
So, I land there, and my daughter was really, really ill, and so I spent a week and a bit on the living room couch with her new kitty, who likes to make biscuits at four in the morning. And I managed to get her some nutritious food in. I managed to get laundries done, bring in nutrition, vitamins, minerals, take her to doctors, get her situated, and thankfully, she’s doing better, also.
I share all this with you because I think sometimes, we in the seat of a professional are really good at sharing our learning, academic skills, life learning, with our clients. And many of us come into the field of working with the disease of addiction, because it touched our life in some way. What was really humbling about this experience was my inability to do my job, my inability to show up for clients. And I was grateful that clients were patient and gave me grace, and that meant a lot because it allowed me time to recoup my resources.
I also think it’s humbling to realize that when I went through what I went through, I have to really have even more compassion for my clients who are living in what feels like life and death day by day, experience when they love someone with this disease, and that their bandwidth may be absolutely minimal to cope, to make change. And to offer grace and patience when working with people who are trying to change, when every ounce of their body says, do not do this, it is not going to be okay. And a monkey screaming at them that if you give up your job, what’s going to happen to them.
Where do we go from here? We’ll see I am grateful to be home until Christmas, where we have a family vacation together, and not traveling. I feel like I’ve had a fill of travel for a while, for the most part. Though, it was had amazing experiences. It was a lot. I want to get my routine back and my rhythm, because I feel like it’s been very discombobulated for a big chunk of time, and I want to find out what my new rhythm is going to look like, you know. How many clients I’ll see, how many groups I’ll offer my podcasting schedule, which we launched last Sunday, the passage from The Big Book of AA that has always resonated and referenced in the time I’ve been in recovery comes from the paragraph about ‘Acceptance is the answer to all my problems today.’ For someone who has railed against acceptance and wanted to do things my way, I’m grateful that during this time period, as hard as it was and as counterintuitive as it was, I was able to practice acceptance, and I want to thank each and every one of you who have patiently waited for me to return, and are willing to continue working with me.
For those who move on, I understand you need to take care of you and get the services and resources you need and deserve, and we’ll see how Embrace Family Recovery moves forward. One thing I know is the podcast will continue, because I love that service project, and I will continue to see families and individuals in coaching sessions within a limited time frame. It won’t be five days a week, and I’m going to allow myself to have, like a semi-retirement feel I’m too young to retire. I don’t want to retire. I’m passionate about this work, but I am not going to spend the next three years trying to build a business, working 24/7 on it, and not living my life and finding play, time, and joy.
So fall is a time of shift and change. Thanksgiving is a time of gratitude. I’m mixed up and filled with all of the above, and I wish each and every one of you wellness, kindness, grace, and most importantly, I hope you will take care of you!
Until next time. Margaret Swift Thompson of Embrace Family Recovery.
Please find resources on my website, embracefamilyrecovery.com This is Margaret Swift Thompson, until next time, please take care of you.
