Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families ft. Melinda

In this episode, Sober Steve celebrates 1,186 days of sobriety and welcomes Melinda Dixon, the first member from Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families (ACA) to join the show. Melinda shares her powerful journey toward emotional sobriety, shedding light on how ACA has profoundly shaped her life. The conversation explores the importance of emotional regulation through human connection, the power of community, and the impact of understanding one's core wounds on maintaining healthy relationships. Steve and Melinda also discuss the evolution of their queer identities in sobriety and the pride they’ve found in their unique personal journeys.

- Celebrating Sobriety: Steve marks 1,186 days of sobriety and introduces Melinda as the first ACA guest.
- Emotional Sobriety: Melinda’s journey to emotional regulation through connection and ACA meetings.
- Understanding Core Wounds: How this understanding has helped Melinda establish healthy boundaries and relationships.
- Queer Identity in Sobriety: The pride Steve and Melinda have found in their unique queer identities within and apart from the LGBT+ community.
- Self-Care Practices: Exploring the role of gratitude lists, exercise, and fine dining in maintaining recovery.

Tune in for a heartfelt conversation on emotional sobriety, queer identity, and personal growth in recovery, and leave a rating and review to pay it forward for the next person who might find the show!

**Where to Find Us:**
- More Information on ACA
- gAy A on IG 🟢
- gAy A everywhere else 🖇️
Email Melinda at: melindadixonpbc@gmail.com

Transcript

Steve: 0:00

Hey there everyone. It's sober. Steve, the podcast guy here today with a 1186 days of continuous sobriety. And I am so excited to bring you this conversation that I had with Melinda this week she was an amazing new perspective on recovery focusing on emotional sobriety because she is here to talk about ACA adult children of alcoholics and dysfunctional families, which is a program. I was not as familiar with before getting to know her, which just shows that even over three years into sobriety and after going to several different roundups, there's still different ways that we can learn and grow and challenge what we consider ways that people can get and stay sober. And what sobriety means. Same thing with over 200 episodes of this podcast. So I'm very excited for that. And I am grateful for my opportunity this coming weekend to do out Viber. So if you're a fan of knowing what's going on in my real life this weekend is labor day weekend. And the Orlando sports league is for queer people. Is putting on a survivor themed competition for the third year in a row. It's my first year doing it. But it's their third year doing it. It is horror themed, and I am psyched as well as grateful for the opportunity to be able to take the time away from out of town, with my husband and my best friend. And we're going to make it like a three-person little getaway and hopefully one of us wins, hopefully it's me. So if you're listening to this, when this episode comes out on Thursday or over that coming weekend of labor day of 20, 24, semi-good vibes. And with that. Yeah. That's what I'm grateful for. So I'll let us get into my interview with Melinda. enjoy. Hey there, supeR sober heroes. It's Steve here with Melinda. Welcome to the show. Yay. Hi. I am so excited to get to speak with you because with over 200 episodes under my belt, you are our first guest whose primary fellowship is ACA. So this is going to be exciting. I know that's really cool. And I really appreciate you letting me hang out with you guys.

Melinda: 2:03

That's awesome.

2:04

Yeah. So before we get into more about you, for people who don't know about ACA, why don't you explain what that is?

Melinda: 2:11

So ACA is awesome. It stands for adult children of alcoholics and dysfunctional families. It originally got started as an offshoot of AA. The teens aged out and there was this really cool guy named Tony A who said, these teens still need a fellowship just because they're 18 and a half now or 19 doesn't mean they don't still need help. he saw this niche and he started ACA, like I said, Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families, and really the fellowship is about emotional sobriety. Most of our members do come from AA and NA and SA and all the other A's and it's really about finding out why we're doing what we were doing and for most of us, what we are still doing. It's really about emotional. sobriety. It's really about regulating your emotions and tolerating your emotions. Accepting and processing your emotions, which most of us, ACA are not very good at.

Steve: 3:10

I can relate to that. I drank to get away from all of that. If I wanted to deal with emotions, I wouldn't have been drinking so fucking much. So yes. What is your favorite part of being emotionally sober today?

Melinda: 3:23

We're going to start this podcast off with making me emotional already. That's crazy. I'm crazy in a good way though. I think I spent the majority of my life trying to stave off painful feelings and painful emotions, and it took a lot of time and energy and I had no clue that's what was going on. I think probably my favorite part of the fellowship is twofold. One is. The ability to emotionally regulate, to emotionally process, to not feel like I'm being constantly abandoned and crapped on and therefore I'm not worthy. Not feeling broken anymore because I never was broken and I never needed fixed. I just needed to learn a lot of things. That I never learned because my parents were doing the best that they could, and they came from trauma, abuse, neglect as well. So I think that's part of it that I don't live my life in anxiety and self doubt and having worthiness issues anymore. I've never had more powerful, more close, more integrity filled, more honest friendships before I found ACA, I maybe had one friend in my life that. I could have called and said, I'm on the side of the road 3 hours away and it's 3 o'clock in the morning. Can you come and get me? I'm broken down. Now. I have probably 20 of those types of people in my life. It's security of being surrounded by safe people. Money can't buy that. It's really, truly life changing.

5:05

I truly resonate with so much of that as well, like for sure. I got sober for myself because I was selfish and I wanted to save my marriage and my career and my job. I didn't expect that I'd find myself more connected to these amazing humans than I've ever had more like amazing, wonderful people in my life until I entered sobriety. And that's not what I was expecting, but it's been my favorite part probably of staying sober is these connections. Yeah. And speaking of connections, we met through the here queer sober group and are going to be working towards the big roundup in New York city next September. So with connecting through a queer group, what is your favorite part of being a member of the queer community today?

Melinda: 5:43

Like Steve, that's an awesome question. I don't think anyone has ever asked me that I'm 58 years old. what it's making me think of is back when I was a kid. And it's partly because I didn't know it at the time, but I just always felt not complete and I always felt unworthy. There's a lot of, history that goes into that. But what made me special was being gay. I, was born gay. First of all we're not recruited. There is no secret sauce. I didn't eat some crazy food. No man hurt me. There's none of that stupid bullshit. You're just born this way. But even though it was really difficult to come up in the eighties, when I was in high school, I graduated high school in 84. It was not an easy road to be gay back then. I was a person who was going to marches on Washington just to be acknowledged as a person, let alone what we, were able to do through the years with gay marriage and getting into the military. And I was in the national guard for a long time. I had to be. Silent or careful about who I talked to and what I did and how I acted in public. It was a very different time. But being gay, it was never anything I was ashamed of. It was actually something that made me different. And I liked being different. And I think even now It's just something to be proud of. I'm just proud of who I am.

Steve: 7:12

Yeah, and that's what we want to get to. That's the goal is, not just one month a year where we're proud to, wear rainbows, but just that at the end of the day. our sexuality, our addictions are like everything that we've come through and everything we're working towards that we're okay with ourselves. And so that's beautiful that like the being like embracing your queerness has always been like a part of something that you love about yourself.

Melinda: 7:36

Yeah. And I think you just hit on something that I haven't thought of either. I tell people all the time I wear my recovery on my sleeve. I actually am proud of my emotional recovery too. I have a tattoo that is all about, my recovery. It's the words that are important to me. I'm going to tattoo my emotional recovery on my body. I'm going to be out and proud because I'm proud of who I am. I'm okay with who I am. I was not okay. With all the anxiety that I had, but I was never not okay with, the gay part and the sobriety thing, what emotional sobriety does is it solidifies who you were always meant to be in the first place. Because for most of our lives, until we got emotionally sober, we were not being our true selves. So the emotional sobriety enables me to live authentically. As a human having feelings and human experiences the gay pride part is just, why do you care who I love? What difference does it make to you? You're mad at me because I love. That doesn't make sense. So of course I'm proud of who I love.

8:45

Excellent. Love that for both of us. And so tell us a little bit more about what your journey to ACA was like, especially the kind of the signs that you belong there so that people who might not have heard about it before might know to seek it out.

Melinda: 9:00

So this is an awesome story. I went into ACA on a breakup, like most people do. I have a friend that says nobody comes in here on a winning streak. Most of us enter the ACA rooms full on snot, tears everywhere, shaking, mad at the world. And how I got there was I was going to therapy and I was in a really bad breakup with a woman that I thought I would ultimately marry and we both have the same core wound. We just. Let our lives reacting to our same core wounds completely differently. We were button heads all the time. We loved each other, no doubt. But we were stuck in toxicity because we didn't know how to have a mature relationship. We didn't know how to do that. We weren't reared with that. And we didn't know it. We had to be taught what we had never been taught. So we had to go our separate ways, but anyway, I was sitting with my therapist one day and I was just really, having a lot of problems. And she said listen. You need more help than I can provide one hour a week. And I'm like, what are you talking about? And she's I want you to go to ACA. And I'm like, what is that? And she said, it's adult children of alcoholics and dysfunctional families. And I did come from a lot of dysfunction. There's a lot of trauma, abuse, and neglect. I was a kid who was what they call, I had pre verbal abuse, which means I was neglected and physically abused, even as a child, even before I could speak. My abuse was, from birth really. I said, listen, I tried Al Anon. There are a bunch of Bible thumpers. I don't believe in God and I'm not going to go. And she said, I hear you. I just want you to go to one meeting. And I told her I'm not going to go, but of course I'm a good student. So of course I went and I went to my first ACA meeting and we have this thing called the traits, 14 traits. There are 14 traits that are common to folks that come from a background, like I came from. And they read the trait at the beginning of the meeting. And I'm like, okay. Someone just told my life story and I'm doing the ugly snot cry and I can't control myself in this meeting. And then they start the sharing, and I'm relating to everything that everybody says. And at the end of the meeting, a woman across the meeting came up to me. And she sat down right beside me and she grabbed my hand and she said, it's okay, you're in the right place. And I was like crying uncontrollably. And I said, I just don't want to feel like this anymore. And she said, it's okay. You're in the right place. She, to this day is one of my best friends. I actually had lunch with her yesterday. She is someone that I even travel with. And for ACA ers traveling with other people is a problem because we have a lot of isms. We need things to be a certain way for ourselves to be safe. When I tell you this person is someone that's gotten so close to me, 10 years later, it's amazing. But she was right and my therapist was right. And I needed more help and I started going to the meetings. I finally got a sponsor who is one of my best friends to this day. And I found myself going to either a meeting. Or seeing my sponsor or going to my therapist six days a week for almost a year and traveling a half an hour each way to do these things. And I was in the worst breakdown a person could be in. I didn't work for four months. I traveled from my bed to my couch and back again. It was awful and horrible and ACA really pulled me out of it. And I eventually moved to the city that I live in now, Palm Beach gardens, Florida, which is where Tony A used to live. And Tony A is the founder of ACA. So it just so happens that I live like in the Mecca of ACA. Which is awesome.

13:00

Yeah. Talk about destiny or a higher power thing. That's awesome. And so over the years of working and being a part of ACA, how have you grown and what have you learned about yourself?

Melinda: 13:13

There's a million things I've learned. One I already touched on. I was never broken. There was just a lot of stuff that I never learned because I had parents. Who were traumatized, abused and neglected and didn't learn what they should have or could have learned this is a generational disease. So I think I've learned that I was never broken. I've learned that I'm not special. That was a real bummer for me to learn because if I'm broken and I'm special, then I can't be fixed. Then there's a reason why all this is happening. But if I'm not broken and I'm not special, that means I got to start doing some work on myself and that sucks. It's hard. I remember being about four months into ACA and I talked to one of the guys that works on the world service organization. And I was talking to him on the phone and I'm like, I'm crying every day. When is the crying stop? He said, how long have you been doing it? I said, about four months. He said, you got a solid eight more months ahead of you. He said you've got years and years and years and years of crying that you've never done of burying painful emotions because it was a way for you to survive because you had to learn how to be good and acceptable. So you wouldn't get hurt. And there's a lot of unpacking to do with that. That was, a huge part of the journey and a huge part of the learning curve. And then I think the other like really big thing that I've learned. And again, there's so many lessons, there's a million things that are coming to my head right now. But the other big thing was I spent most of my life trying to make sure. That you were okay so that I could be okay. I was trying to live my life by managing your experience of me. So that doesn't allow me to be authentic about who I am. And it doesn't allow me to do anything except live in anxiety and the fear of abandonment and abandonment was my core wound. So there was really a lot of processing and learning. How do I be okay with me first of all, and then how do I stop caring about what you think about me so that I can be okay? And it's crass. But one of the other greatest things I've learned is your opinion of me is none of my fucking business. And once I let that go, it lifts so much anxiety. It sounds mean and rude, but it's actually a protector of me. If you're not okay. With what I'm okay with, that's okay. And it's none of my fucking business.

Steve: 15:53

Yeah, I learned it a little bit in sobriety, but then when I was doing my life coaching course, the coursework and everything like that, they really hammer home the whole like this. And then like recently I even read the courage to be disliked and it's not separating like that's their problem. Like even what they think about you is their problem cause you can't control it. Like you can only control the things you can control. If you can't control what they think of you, put it out of your mind cause you can't control that.

Melinda: 16:16

Because the only thing that you can't control is what's going on between your two ears, right? Nothing else. Everything else is outside of you. That's like another big thing we talk about in ACA is 90 percent of what we're worried about, what we're fearful of what we're anxiety written about is made up in our heads, a lot of us. And really now that I've done this program for so long, I really think this should be stuff that we should be taught in school because we'd be. So much nicer to each other as human beings in the first place, but 90 percent of what's going on is a story I made up about what you did or did not think or say, or how I took it or how I thought about it or whatever, and there's a lot of, in a CA for me, I've learned to pause and be inquisitive. Where before a CA, if you said the slightest thing and I took it a wrong, weird way. Oh my gosh. The earth is ending, the sky is falling and you're abandoning me. And that's a horrible way to live.'cause I was anxiety ridden 24 7 and the ability to pause and to. Be inquisitive to say, Steve, you said that thing the other day to me and it hit me weird. I think it's probably like my old, that old, if I'm hysterical, it's historical, it's probably that. But are you okay with us talking about this for a moment and having safe people around me to say, of course, what's going on? What did I say that bothered you? And then we can both say, Oh, that's crazy. That is my own stuff. And your friend can say, yeah, dude, I never met that. Let's go chill out and have fun. So it's so much anxiety that gets lifted because I've learned how to pause and be inquisitive and then have safe people around me that I can talk to instead of staying what we call an ACA stuck in story.

18:10

Yeah I can relate, and I've experienced that recently not only personally with a friend, where We had a disagreement and I was like, dude, that was weird. And he was like, that was weird. And we talked it out and we got better. But like back in my addiction, that would have been like a whole week long, month long, odd, awkward, uncomfortable thing on both sides. I also just recently went through a lot of trauma with my family and seeing all these rules that everyone has because they're not communicating with each other. They'd see so and so do this thing. And so to them, they're like they did that. So that must mean that they feel this way about this thing and this thing. And they make this whole story in their head when they could just be like, why did you do that thing?

Melinda: 18:45

It's called triangulating too. Like where I used to do it. I'm going to talk to a thousand different people about how you harmed me and how wrong you are. And I'm the martyr and I'm the victim

18:56

instead

Melinda: 18:57

of just going to you and saying, I love you and I know you probably didn't mean to hurt me, but that thing you did hurt and can we talk about it? Cause I love you and I don't want to stop hanging out with you. Like you're important to me. And it gives them an opportunity to, but yeah, I spent the majority of my life gossiping to anyone who would listen about any of my important relationships because I was playing the role of the victim in the martyr because that's what I did to survive, to grow up. And then I'm asking all these other people. Isn't this wrong? Isn't this wrong? Am I looking at this wrong? Cause I don't have a gauge of what's wrong. I don't even have a gauge of toxicity. I remember the first time my therapist said to me she, we were talking about my ex girlfriend and she said, she's abusive to you. And I was like, I'm paying you cash for you to tell me that I'm in an abusive relationship. I'm about to get up and walk out the door. Fuck you. You don't know what the fuck you're talking about. But because I was abused. From pre verbal until I was nine years old, physically abused and also neglected. I didn't have a gauge of abuse. My therapist was a thousand percent, right? My ex was abusive to me. She was neglectful. She was abusive physically, mentally, emotionally. And I allowed all of it cause I didn't know what the fuck it was. My greatest hope in life now is that when I meet the real girl of my dreams that we're not going to have a toxic relationship and we're going to live happily ever after, I don't go back to any of that type of behavior. But I'm also seeking a different type of person. Water seeks its own level. I was sick, so I was only attracting sick people. And my ex is not the villain, and I'm not the martyr. We were both just sick, and we were just trying to do our best, and we didn't know what we didn't know. And that's part of it. One of my favorite things about being in recovery is anybody can do it because it likely is you just haven't been told some stuff that you need to be told. You haven't been taught some stuff that you should have been taught. You need some knowledge that nobody's ever imparted to you, but you don't have to be smart or rich or classy or whatever, to get this. You just have to be teachable, and all of us are. That's what I love about recovery. All of us are teachable.

21:37

Yeah, I love that. And I'll make sure I link over to one of those search engine things that can show you ACA meetings for people who want more information. But what would you say is part of your self care recovery practice today that you've been doing since the beginning that still works?

Melinda: 21:52

I can't tell you what I've been doing since the beginning because that shit wasn't working my self care. I didn't know it. So listen, I thought self care was eat really bad food. That's going to make you sick to your stomach and sit in front of the TV and watch really bad TV. And all that did was just made me more depressed and more sick. Think what works for me is staying in connection because the longer I stay in connection, the longer my emotional sobriety. Is maintained, right? And I want this for my life. So going to my meetings, hanging out with my sober friends. Going to therapy when I need to do that. And I think the other thing is practicing what now does work for me. And again it's literally tattooed on my arm. Whenever I was struggling, I needed to do this or be reminded of it or get back to it, right? Invite love, crave joy, Own courage, release fear, stay present and accept growth. If something's going wrong and weird, I look down at my arm and I'm going, what am I stuck in? What's happening? It's those things that keep me paused and inquisitive. So I can process my feelings. I can feel my feelings. And then I can go out in the world and be productive in work or school or with my friendships or my family

Steve: 23:21

I love that so much. Thank you, Melinda. And did you have an email you wanted to add if someone wanted to connect with you old school?

Melinda: 23:28

Yeah, if somebody wants to email me, it's my name, Melinda Dixon, PBC, like Palm Beach County, where I live. At gmail. com. So it's Melinda Dixon, pbc at gmail. com.

23:39

Excellent. I'll include that as well. Thank you listeners for tuning in to another episode. Make sure you're following so you can get new episodes every Thursday. Thanks, Melinda.

Melinda: 23:49

Thank you. This was awesome. I loved it. Thank you.

23:52

Yes. Until next time, everybody stay sober.