NOTE: This episode contains explicit language. [Adapted from Amy's book bio] Growing up in Beverly Hills, Amy Dresner had it all: a top-notch private school education, the most expensive summer camps, and even a weekly clothing allowance. But at 24, she started dabbling in meth in San Francisco and unleashed a fiendish addiction monster. Soon, if you could snort it, smoke it, or have sex with, she did. Smart and charming, with Daddy's money to fall back on, she sort of managed to keep it all together. But on Christmas Eve 2011 all of that changed when, high on Oxycontin, she stupidly "brandished" a bread knife on her husband and was promptly arrested for "felony domestic violence with a deadly weapon." Within months, she found herself in the psych ward--and then penniless, divorced, and looking at 240 hours of court-ordered community service. For two years, assigned to a Hollywood Boulevard "chain gang," she swept up syringes (and worse) as she bounced from rehabs to halfway houses, all while struggling with sobriety, sex addiction, and starting over in her forties.
NOTE: This episode contains explicit language.
[Adapted from Amy's book bio] Growing up in Beverly Hills, Amy Dresner had it all: a top-notch private school education, the most expensive summer camps, and even a weekly clothing allowance. But at 24, she started dabbling in meth in San Francisco and unleashed a fiendish addiction monster. Soon, if you could snort it, smoke it, or have sex with, she did.
Smart and charming, with Daddy's money to fall back on, she sort of managed to keep it all together. But on Christmas Eve 2011 all of that changed when, high on Oxycontin, she stupidly "brandished" a bread knife on her husband and was promptly arrested for "felony domestic violence with a deadly weapon."
Within months, she found herself in the psych ward--and then penniless, divorced, and looking at 240 hours of court-ordered community service. For two years, assigned to a Hollywood Boulevard "chain gang," she swept up syringes (and worse) as she bounced from rehabs to halfway houses, all while struggling with sobriety, sex addiction, and starting over in her forties.
Subscribe to The Courage to Change: A Recovery Podcast
Apple Podcasts | Google Play | Google Podcasts | Spotify
Stitcher | iHeart | TuneIn | Overcast | SoundCloud
Resources Mentioned:
Our Sponsor:
Connect with Us:
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Hello, beautiful people. Welcome to The Courage to Change: A Recovery Podcast. My name is Ashley Loeb Blassingame and I am your host. Today we have Amy Dresner.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Growing up in Beverly Hills, Amy Dresner had it all. A top-notch private school education, the most expensive summer camps and even a weekly clothing allowance. But at 24 she started dabbling in meth in San Francisco and unleashed a fiending addiction monster.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Soon, if you could snort it, smoke it, or have sex with it, she did. Smart and charming with daddy's money to fall back on, she sort of managed to keep it all together. But on Christmas Eve of 2011 all of that changed when, high on Oxycontin, she stupidly brandished a bread knife on her husband and was promptly arrested for felony domestic violence with a deadly weapon.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Within months, she found herself in the psych ward and then penniless, divorced, and looking out on a court ordered 240 hours of community service. For the next two years, assigned to a Hollywood Boulevard chain gang, she would sweep up syringes and worse on Hollywood Boulevard as she bounced from rehabs to halfway houses, all while struggling with sobriety, sex addiction, and starting over in her forties. Ladies and gentlemen, you're in for a wild ride. All right. Episode 47, let's do this.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Thank you so much for being here, Amy.
Amy Dresner:
Oh my God, thanks for having me.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
How are you doing?
Amy Dresner:
It's a difficult time.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right? Yeah.
Amy Dresner:
It's a really, really tough time. I'm not going to lie.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, I think a lot of us are crawling out of our skin here.
Amy Dresner:
Yeah. It's cabin fever plus financial insecurity plus isolation plus ambiguity. It's gnarly.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. Have you been doing a lot of speaking in this time? I know you tell your story a lot.
Amy Dresner:
Yeah. Some podcasts, mostly been writing some articles. I wrote a piece for The Fix about addiction and recovery during the pandemic, and then I wrote a piece for Workit Health about what to do when a friend relapses because I'm starting to see a lot of relapse.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Are you?
Amy Dresner:
Yeah. Among my friends.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
As a result of the pandemic? Yeah. What do you think is triggering that? Obviously the things you went through.
Amy Dresner:
Yeah. I think it's the perfect storm for an alcoholic or an addict. A lot of people have lost work and so they're totally freaking out about money. I think a lot of people are in fear. I think that the ambiguity of what's going to happen, that we don't do well with.
Amy Dresner:
If you're in rehab, they're closed to the family and friends. All IOPs have been mostly shut down. That whole social support network has gone and that's kind of what we rely on. Now it's all online, which is a completely different experience.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. So in your friend group you're seeing relapses.
Amy Dresner:
Yeah.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I'm sorry. That is-
Amy Dresner:
I think it's going to be just the beginning. I think we're going to see a huge relapse from this.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Amy Dresner:
What I've heard is there's already a big rise in domestic violence cases because people are cooped up. The cops are just overwhelmed with that. There was a huge rise in, also, drug possession. A lot of cops are just letting that go.
Amy Dresner:
They're just like, they can't deal with everyone. They're talking about now there's coronavirus in prisons, so they want to release the most vulnerable prisoners and because the staff are getting it, and then they're going to spread its population. It's a huge problem. Alcohol and cannabis sales are booming. Everyone's staying at home and anesthetizing.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I don't blame them.
Amy Dresner:
Yeah. No, I don't either. But we can't do that.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
That's the thing. I think about child abuse, kids that are home stuck home where school was a safe Haven, domestic violence, all those things. I'm stuck. I'm sober, I'm stuck at home with my twin three-year-old boys in a relatively small space. It's stressful for me. I can't imagine a situation where you didn't have any tools. If I was using or drinking, it would be an absolute [crosstalk 00:04:51]
Amy Dresner:
Yeah. Also, what if your family is your trigger and you're stuck at home with your family and that's your trigger situation?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Totally.
Amy Dresner:
It's a nightmare. Like I said, it's the perfect storm for relapse. I think we're going to see a lot of it. This is just the beginning. Also, you're going out and the people that I'm seeing, they're going out and of course they're hooking up with strangers, there's sex involved so that's exposing you to coronavirus. You know what I mean? Fentanyl is the least of their f’ing problems.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right, yeah.
Amy Dresner:
The isolation is what's doing people's head in, and mine too.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Because alcoholism is a disease of isolation.
Amy Dresner:
Of course, the loneliness and isolation. I'm so grateful that my roommate from New York is in town. He's kind of stuck here. And though we don't have much privacy, we have each other and I'm just so grateful to have another human being in the house right now.
Amy Dresner:
He's a normie so I'm doing like Zoom meetings and he's having dance parties in the bathroom with lights and six changes of fabulous outfits. And I'm like, "Man, I like your life."
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh my God, so funny. Yeah, this is such uncharted territory and I think that those of us who've been sober a long time, also, this is the opportunity to figure out ways to use those tools and pass that on and share the message. Just really support one another in every and any way that we can.
Amy Dresner:
Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, I wrote this piece for The Fix and what I'm seeing when I go out to markets unfortunately is a lot of every man for himself mentality and people fighting over toilet paper or Clorox wipes.
Amy Dresner:
I talked about this one woman walking in an Erewhon, someone threw a banana at her and said, "Get the f out of here" because she was coughing. I want to feel more connected to people but when I go out into the world I feel less, because you've got to have six feet of distance and we're all wearing masks and gloves.
Amy Dresner:
I don't know, the whole thing is frightening and depressing but I do see kindness among people too. I mentioned modeling the behavior you want to see in other people. How can you be selfless? How can you be generous? How can you cut people slack? How can you be there for people? How can you make people feel safer?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, because it's what we choose to look at, because there's so much shitty stuff going on but there's also so much good stuff. There are people doing incredible things, but it's hard. The shitty things are really loud. That's what it's really saying.
Amy Dresner:
[crosstalk 00:07:52].
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
So it's really about seeking out that positive reinforcement about what's going on.
Amy Dresner:
Yeah, it's really hard. For people like me, I've already been someone who's worked from home, but I really, really looked forward to having dinner with my friends or going out to my meeting every whatever, getting hugged, holding hands and blah blah blah.
Amy Dresner:
Now I don't have that. And for me, being stuck in the house, I'm already prone to depression. That's part of my story. This reminds me of my depressive episodes. It also reminds me very much of my using episodes because I used to use alone in the house. It's a little bit triggering.
Amy Dresner:
I want to be like, "I can write my second book. This is fantastic." There's all this pressure to be super productive and instead I'm staying up til three in the morning watching Ozark and I'm like, "Oh God, okay. Obviously time to schedule, get a routine honey."
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
It's hard, man. That stuff's hard and you've got to cut yourself a little bit of slack. There's a lot going on and pressure to take advantage of the time, but-
Amy Dresner:
Yeah. Alphabetize your pantry or whatever. "You can get a great body, by the time you leave quarantine you can have abs of steel."
Amy Dresner:
I'm like, "Oh God, I'm just trying to get through."
Amy Dresner:
Everyone I know has lost their jobs. Everyone. Everyone's broke. Everyone's terrified. I know people who've gotten coronavirus, they've survived, thank God. I have 82 year old parents, my mother is in an assisted living and my father just got through with chemo. So it's scary. Thank God I had already gotten my sex addiction in check. Otherwise this would have put it into place quickly. You know what I mean?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Seriously. Anything and everything would have been sparked. You wrote a book that has done very well called My Fair Junkie. How long ago did you write that?
Amy Dresner:
The hardcover came out in 2017, the paperback came out in 2018. And for some reason, right now, with everyone stuck inside quarantining a lot of people are discovering it. It's really weird, like "I have time to read!" There's also an Audible and there's also a Kindle version.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Awesome.
Amy Dresner:
And we're doing pilot.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh, cool.
Amy Dresner:
To make it a new TV show.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Tell me about where you grew up and what started your using?
Amy Dresner:
I grew up in Los Angeles, Beverly Hills and Laurel Canyon. My parents split when I was about two years old. I have an enormous amount of alcoholism, addiction and mental illness in my family. I inherited a proclivity towards this. I just got all this cancer testing done with the BRCA, breast cancer gene.
Amy Dresner:
I have no cancer, genetic cancer markers. Just crazy! Just crazy and a drug addict, that's all I inherited. Otherwise, I'll live forever, and be crazy till I'm 93. Fantastic.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh my God.
Amy Dresner:
So grew up decently wealthy. My father made a bet with me. He's like, "I'll bet you'll do drugs, drink or smoke before you're 18."
Amy Dresner:
I said, "I bet I won't."
Amy Dresner:
And he said, "I bet you a thousand dollars."
Amy Dresner:
And I always make this terrible joke that that's how Jews raise each other. We just bribe each other. My mother's a recovering alcoholic.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
When did she get into recovery?
Amy Dresner:
It was after I was born. Maybe I was three.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay. So you've only known her in recovery?
Amy Dresner:
Yeah. I don't remember her drinking. My father has been a heavy drinker but always functional, can stop and start on a dime. He's been married a couple of times. If a wife is like, "Hey, I don't you drinking."
Amy Dresner:
He can just stop. When he was having chemo, he just stopped. But my mom was a model and a designer. She was an amphetamine addict and my uncle, her brother, was a schizophrenic and an amphetamine addict. My grandmother was also a schizophrenic.
Amy Dresner:
On my father's side, well on both, there's a lot of depression, a lot of just mental illness, psych wards, medications, electroconvulsive therapy and suicides. All that good stuff.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Was your dad in the entertainment business?
Amy Dresner:
Yes, he was a screenwriter. My mom moved to Mexico when I was about 13. I'm an only child but I always had that weird feeling even prior to anything. Just like something was wrong with me, I was different. I felt lonely. I felt disconnected from other people. I felt like I was on the outside.
Amy Dresner:
I didn't feel pretty enough or good enough. I just felt different and not in a good way. I waited til I was about 19 to drink, at college. My drinking was out of control, but it looked like everyone's drinking at college in the late eighties. Everyone was throwing up, blacking out and f’ing each other.
Amy Dresner:
It didn't look that crazy. It wasn't until I found crystal meth at about 24 that things really started to speed up for me and really go downhill quickly. I tried crystal meth. I hated it the first time and the second time I tried it something clicked for me. I just went, "Oh my God, I feel normal for the first time in my life. No one's going to take this away from me."
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
You were out of college by the time you tried it.
Amy Dresner:
Yeah, I was living in San Francisco doing spoken word, doing a variety of jobs and that kind of stuff. It's all in the book. I worked for a quadriplegic, I was a waitress. I'd had, I don't know, a second nervous breakdown. I went up there and went against my Beverly Hills roots and was working as a dishwasher, that kind of stuff.
Amy Dresner:
I ended up living with gutter punks and skinheads in Lower Haight, before it was all gentrified. All these junkies were doing poetry. It was fun at the time. It was just a crazy time and I didn't really know what I was messing with. I had never been around drug addicts before and I had never really seen drug addiction, so I didn't see my own progression.
Amy Dresner:
I just thought I was experimenting because I'd been such a good girl my whole life. So I was like, "I'm just experimenting." And then, all of a sudden it got really, really out of control.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Did you think, I was talking to someone about this earlier today, the D.A.R.E Program and when people explain why you shouldn't use drugs, they typically leave out the part where drugs make you feel good and they're a lot of fun. There's a piece of this missing that is like, "Hey, we had some fun. We just did, it's part of it."
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
What was your viewpoint going into this of what a drug addict looked like? Did anyone talk to you about it? Did you think that drugs are fun but they're bad, or did you only think they were bad?
Amy Dresner:
I was afraid of them. I was really afraid of drugs and sex. I was into purity. I think that as drug addicts and alcoholics, we're extremists by nature. So we're either getting high and f’ing everybody or we're... I've always made this joke that we're either smoking meth or we're vegan and doing CrossFit. There's no moderation.
Amy Dresner:
I was afraid of drugs. I thought they were a cop-out and they scared me. I didn't lose my virginity until I was 19, I didn't drink til I was 19, I was obsessed with purity. That was my own weird extremist, fundamentalist...
Amy Dresner:
I remember when I was in college, I walked in and my roommates were doing coke on my computer and I freaked out. I totally judged them and blah, blah. Cut to five years later when I'm smoking meth and staying up for five days. Careful what you judge.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, seriously.
Amy Dresner:
No one really told me about it. I wish people had told me about my genetic vulnerabilities.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Do you think that would have made a difference? You think you would have done something differently?
Amy Dresner:
I don't know, it's hard to tell. I don't really know. I know that I was so depressed and I felt so out of sorts, and that when I found drugs, they made me feel normal. And who doesn't want to feel normal? Who can really shame me for wanting to feel normal?
Amy Dresner:
What I've learned from Dr. Wetsman, who's a psychiatrist, he's also sober, he used to own rehabs, I quote him in a lot of articles, is that for many of us, we have a genetic abnormality. You can get tested for it. It's called MTHFR. Are you familiar with it?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Mm (affirmative).
Amy Dresner:
Okay. MTHFR for people who aren't familiar with it is a mutation in the enzyme that breaks down folic acid into L-Methylfolate, which is the building block of dopamine and serotonin. Basically, we can't create enough dopamine and serotonin. We can't create enough L-Methylfolate. I've started to take a supplement and it's helped, but there's no fix for this.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right, there's no quick-
Amy Dresner:
I think that's part of the reason that we feel weird before we even pick up is we have low dopamine tone, and I think that's a big problem. There's a brain component to this.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Absolutely.
Amy Dresner:
And even if you believe that it's a trauma thing, trauma affects the brain in a way that it grows and [inaudible 00:17:41].
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
You can see on brain scans, PTSD and blunt force trauma look the same on brain scans.
Amy Dresner:
Incredible.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
That is wild.
Amy Dresner:
That's mind-blowing. Yeah, I've been over at that. That's incredible. And I'm not surprised.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
To be honest with you, even with all the experience I have, I was surprised. Blunt force trauma? And it looked the same, indistinguishable.
Amy Dresner:
Yeah, that's f’ing incredible.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I was told that by a company that does brain mapping and it floored me. I knew it was bad. I just didn't know it was indistinguishable.
Amy Dresner:
Wow.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. It's wild. There's definitely, I think-
Amy Dresner:
Yeah. I don't think we understand the impact. I think that we're all have pieces that [inaudible 00:18:27] is a piece with the trauma. Other people have a piece with the brain chemistry and the genetics of it. But I think that it's much more complicated. I think everyone's situation's a little bit different too, how they get there.
Amy Dresner:
Some people get there through an injury and then get addicted, or some people get there through totally trauma. Some people get there through pure genetics. Where they just bap and it's like boom! A vacuum opens and it's on, and that was kind of my experience.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
It just was on.
Amy Dresner:
Oh, it was a nightmare. Yeah. I smoked crystal meth for about two years. I would stay up for 17 days writing a Bible. I thought I had the mathematical equation for God. Refinished furniture, all that weird shit that you do as a tweaker.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Tweakers are so busy. They're just f’ing busy.
Amy Dresner:
Doing nothing though. Taking apart [inaudible 00:19:23] and then you can't put it back together. Just doing nothing, dumpster diving for garbage. I wrote a whole book on speed and I just don't dare read it ever, ever.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
It's probably amazing.
Amy Dresner:
It's in this plastic thing, and I'm just terrified to even look at it. I'm just like, I can't even imagine how crazy that book is. I walked into a market and I woke up in an ambulance, I'd had a seizure. They said, "Did you do any drugs tonight?"
Amy Dresner:
And I said, "Well, obviously some really shitty ones cause here I am."
Amy Dresner:
They took me to the hospital and I agreed to go into treatment. That was the first of six or seven treatment centers that I went into. It scared me, enough.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
The seizure you had?
Amy Dresner:
Yeah. I went to treatment, dual diagnosis treatment center. When I got out, I decided I was a drug addict but I wasn't an alcoholic, which is classic, right? I'm a tweaker but I'm not and alcoholic. Drinking made me so naked, violent and out of control. You know what I mean?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Amy Dresner:
It was such a nightmare immediately. So I tried to not drink because I'd get kicked out of bars, and I'd lose my car, and it was just so horrible. At least with drugs, I was sort of coherent. I was like, this is kind of more controlled. I tried drinking and I was in a blackout for three weeks and I thought, okay, that's not working.
Amy Dresner:
Then I stayed dry with no program, with nothing, for about seven years. Until I had a suicide attempt when I was living in England, drank and then came back to LA. And had that same thing that we all think like, "Oh, well I haven't drank or used any drugs for seven years. I can drink, will be fine"
Amy Dresner:
And now I'm drinking in the morning. Or, "Well, I was a meth head, but Coke's natural, so I can smoke."
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
[crosstalk 00:21:29].
Amy Dresner:
I can do coke, coke's natural, it's different. It's going to be different. It's not made from gun bluing and Drano, it'll be a totally different experience. I think I first started off smoking pot because I hated pot. So I thought, well I hate pot, so I won't smoke it every day.
Amy Dresner:
And of course I'm smoking it every day and hating it, totally paranoid, but doing it at everyday anyway because I like to feel different, doesn't matter. Then I land in my second rehab and when I get out I start shooting cocaine.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Naturally.
Amy Dresner:
Because I learned from other junkies, "Why are you wasting drugs?"
Amy Dresner:
I used to make this terrible joke when I was doing stand up, "If you had to go to Uruguay, would you take a rickshaw or a rocket? Let's get to where the f we're going. Let's get there."
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
It's so true.
Amy Dresner:
Yeah. Other junkies were like, "What? You're wasting drugs." And "IV is so much it's so much more fun. It's a better rush." And blah blah blah.
Amy Dresner:
At that point I was like, why the f not? I'm going to die a drug addict, okay. But unfortunately, I had developed epilepsy by that point from crystal meth, during the seven years I'd been clean and about five years sober, I started having a grand mal seizures.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I didn't even know that that was the thing.
Amy Dresner:
Yeah, it's not super common, but it does happen. The neurologist was like, "Did you do a lot of drugs?"
Amy Dresner:
I was like, "Ooh..."
Amy Dresner:
So I have hyperactive lesions on my frontal lobe and I've had grand mal epilepsy now, I guess for 15 years. I've been on medication, I've lost my license twice. I've broken teeth, I've gotten stitches, I've cracked my head open. It's been pretty intense. So now I'm finally on some medication that holds it.
PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:23:04]
Amy Dresner:
So now I'm finally on some medication that holds it. But I had epilepsy and I shot coke anyway. And I would have a seizure, and instead of going, "Hey, you probably shouldn't shoot coke with epilepsy," I shot coke in a bike helmet.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh my God. Yeah.
Amy Dresner:
And I was like, "Well f it, it's a f’ing high impact sport. Let's wear protective gear."
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Totally.
Amy Dresner:
That's alcoholism. That's alcoholism. Like I want to get high and I don't want the repercussions, so how do I protect myself. So there I am, shooting coke-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
That was like my adult diapers. I wore adult diapers, I kept peeing myself, right? So I would wake up in urine and it was like, "This is out of control. I need a solution." So adult diapers was the...
Amy Dresner:
I get it.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
That's the helmet, right?
Amy Dresner:
Of course. Of course. So I didn't crack my head open when I was seizing, shooting cocaine.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I bet you looked amazing.
Amy Dresner:
I'm sure. It was my friend's red bike helmet. It had a Grateful Dead sticker on the front. I f’ing hate the Grateful Dead. No offense to anyone who like the Grateful Dead, just not my vibe.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh God.
Amy Dresner:
Yeah, but there I am in my long '70s nylon nightgown and a red bike helmet. Just shooting cocaine in my neck, in my feet, in my arms, and doing my laundry with a bike helmet in my nightgown and my neighbors are like, "Oh, there she is. Okay."
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Nothing makes-
Amy Dresner:
"What's up, Amy?"
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Nothing makes you look like a functioning person like wearing a red bike helmet walking around shooting coke.
Amy Dresner:
Oh my God. So that should have been a warning to me but you know, it wasn't. That was not my bottom.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. No.
Amy Dresner:
Just kept digging. So I've been a chronic relapser. I've gotten clean and then relapsed, gotten clean and then relapsed and had years and then relapsed. So what really happened for me was, the big bottom was on December 25th of 2011 I had been prescribed Oxycontin for a shoulder injury in sobriety. And I thought, "Well it won't be a problem because I don't even like downers." And of course it was a problem. I was in a miserable marriage and I started to abuse the medication. And because just that veil went up between me and reality. And I was like, "Oh my God, I don't care. What a relief. I don't give a f what you think or what I think. I don't care if my marriage is falling. I don't care."
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right.
Amy Dresner:
And I never really got the high. I would just throw up and everyone's like, "You got to push through and you got to puke through the high."
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Amy Dresner:
Puke and then you get the high. And I was like, "Well, that never happened to me." I don't... My brain is like I don't... Opiates made me very aggressive.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Which is unusual.
Amy Dresner:
I know. I know.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
yeah.
Amy Dresner:
And I was drinking Four Loko, which is really classy. I don't know if you know what that is. Do you know what that is?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I do, because when it came out I was like, "Okay, you got to be kidding me. I'm sober and Four Loko is on the... This is caffeine and booze."
Amy Dresner:
Oh yeah. It was the shit.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh my God, I was so jealous.
Amy Dresner:
I know. It's like 12% alcohol or something. It's like one can equals like five beers and four cups of coffee. And I was like, "Oh yeah." And you can buy it at 7-Elevens and gas stations.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I was so jealous. I was like this is-
Amy Dresner:
It has malt liquor. It fs you up. I mean, you'll throw it up. And that's why it's in different flavors, because it's going to come back up.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I don't think they... they don't make it anymore.
Amy Dresner:
I think it's illegal.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Amy Dresner:
Yeah. But there's a new stuff called Joose or something like that.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay.
Amy Dresner:
But actually it was funny. I did a fundraiser and this woman came up to me and she goes, "I don't know if I should even tell you this, but my son created Four Loko." And I said, "Your son's a genius."
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Your son's a genius. Genius.
Amy Dresner:
I mean that shit brought me to where I needed to be. It also made me want to punch babies. It made me f’ing bananas and I tried to kill myself a bunch of times on it and whatever. But anyway, on December 25th, 2011, I got in a fight with my now ex-husband and I pulled a knife on him. And he called the cops and I got arrested for felony domestic violence with a deadly weapon and I went to jail. And I'm a Beverly Hills Jewish American princess. And I'd never been to jail. And I'm 42 years old and college-educated and this was not where I saw my life going.
Amy Dresner:
And I ended up being left... I tried to kill myself after that. I ended up being left penniless in a psych ward by my ex-husband. And I went into treatment again and I relapsed again. And I went into another sober living and I relapsed again. And then I finally moved into another sober living and I got it. I just... I had lost everything. And I hope that's not everyone's experience, but that was mine. I didn't ever want to take care of myself. I was very much a child. I was very entitled. And I think you meet your destiny on the row you go to avoid it. I was like I had a trust fund and then I married a rich guy and I didn't ever want to take care of myself because I didn't really think I could.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. Yeah.
Amy Dresner:
And I was afraid. And so the universe was like, "Oh, you don't want to take care of yourself? Enjoy, bitch. There you go." So I was left penniless. And so then I was in a sober living for two and a half years, doing a year of domestic violence counseling, going through a criminal trial and a divorce on Medical disability and sweeping the streets.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Amy Dresner:
On a chain gang. Me and 40 Mexican guys. Sweeping up f’ing human feces and syringes and that's where I had my epiphany. That's where I had my epiphany.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And what was... I mean I can assume what the epiphany was, but what was your epiphany?
Amy Dresner:
Well when I first got there I was like, "Oh my God. These people are criminals. What am I doing here?" You know? And everyone was like, "What you in for whitey? I'm in for a DUI. What you in for?" And I was like, "Oh, I'm here for felony domestic violence with a deadly weapon." And they were like "Oh shit," you know? And so no one really f’ed with me. And so it became clear that I was one of the few people there for assault and I had more time assigned to me than anybody else. And I was like, "Oh, I'm the criminal. Hi. Hi." And I was sweeping the streets and I felt really sorry for myself. And I had lost everything and I was in my early 40s. And I was like, "Oh, poor me. The cops suck and my lawyer sucked. My ex sucks and f..." and then I went, "Wait a second. This is the result of all your choices. This is a crossroads. This could be the best thing that ever happened to you, Amy. Or it could be the worst thing that ever happened to you. It's your decision which it is."
Amy Dresner:
And I thought... So my book opens with a quote from Will Rogers saying, "The worst thing that happens to you can be the best thing for you if you don't let it get the best of you." And I went, "I wonder if I embrace this, if this could be that transformative sort of moment in my life that I've been needing." And I embraced it. And I thought, "Look, you can... We're going to learn how to take care of ourselves. And we're going to learn to finish what we start. And we're going to learn how to sweep. And we're going to learn teamwork. And we're going to learn ethics. And we're going to learn humility."
Amy Dresner:
And I just embraced the f out of it. And I was posting it all on Facebook. "Another day on a chain gang, this is what I learned today," or "This is what I found on the street," or whatever. And people were like dying and they were... Well everyone else on the chain gang was like, "I'll be friends with you on Facebook, but everyone thinks I'm on a work trip so don't say anything about [inaudible 00:30:21] labor." And I just owned it. I was just like, "F it, I'm not going to be ashamed." That's the way I deal with shame is I flip it. I just own it. So everyone knew what I was doing. Everyone knew what had happened. And then what is anyone going to say? You tried to stab your husband? I'm like, "I f’ing write a book about it, bitch. What else you got?" You know what I mean? Like, "Oh, you were... you got arrested for felony domestic violence?" Yeah, I f’ing posted about it on Facebook for a f’ing year and a half. What else you got? Bring it. If you own it, no one has anything on you.
Amy Dresner:
I wasn't proud of it, obviously, but I just refuse to be ashamed of it and I had to see the humor in it to get through it. And it changed me. It absolutely changed me. I started writing a lot and I... My editor at the time at The Fix just said, "The community labor is the framework for your book." And I was like, "Oh my God, you're right." And I pitched it to an agent and I got a deal. I wrote the book. It's not made me rich and famous or anything like that. My life's not changed that much. But I grew up and I learned how to depend on myself. And I think what I did differently in this sobriety that I never did in... That's the other thing. People go, "Well I've never been this." I've been in four psych wards. I've tried to kill myself a bunch of times. I've battled drug addiction and mental illness for 25 years. I mean, it's a miracle I'm f’ing alive. And what I did differently in this sobriety is instead of listening to my feelings, I took action. I had a sponsor and he said, "You don't have to be a good person, Amy, you just have to act like one. No one knows the f’ing difference."
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
It's so true.
Amy Dresner:
And I was like, "Oh, but that's not seen very truthful." Like, "What?" And what I've learned through neuroscience is that you take contrary action over and over and over again and you create a new neural pathway in your brain that eventually becomes your default mechanism and that becomes you. So it's not really like fake it til you make it, it's like fake it til you are it.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. Yeah.
Amy Dresner:
So I just, in this sobriety I really had nothing. And I was so f’ing desperate. And I just did whatever the f my sponsor said and I did the work and I, no one would... There was no net. My parents, everyone was out of money. My parents were like, "We're tired of you at the bottom of the well, bitch. I don't know what to tell you. We're exhausted. And we're financially and emotionally drained. It's on you." They always loved me and they're like, "We believe that you can get it together and you can accomplish amazing things, but there's no more money."
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right.
Amy Dresner:
So I just transformed myself through what I think is basically cognitive behavioral therapy I guess, and neuroplasticity. By acting like the person I wanted to be. And that's sort of where I'm at now. The book's been out a couple years. It's very strange to receive messages where people are like, "Oh my God, I'm fangirling out, you wrote me back, and da da da da," and it's like, "I'm just a junkie that wrote a book, guys. That's it."
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I wanted to ask you about that. So for me, when I tell my... If I speak too many times in a month, you know what I mean, like you're asked to speak at too many meetings or whatever it is, I'm burnt. I'm burnt on it.
Amy Dresner:
Oh yes.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And I would... You have got to be burnt on telling your story.
Amy Dresner:
I'm not fascinated by it anymore, to be honest with you.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Amy Dresner:
Between speaking at meetings, between podcasts, between fundraisers, speaking engagements and book readings, I'm pretty sick of my story.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Amy Dresner:
But what I do find interesting is that people seem to like, what they like about the book is my honestly. I didn't try and look good. Some people think I'm an asshole in the book and yeah, I was an asshole. I was mentally ill and on drugs. If you're not an asshole when you're mentally ill and on drugs then why would you ever get sober?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right. Those are some high expectations as well.
Amy Dresner:
Yeah. And also where are you going to go with it? And I just feel like I wanted to be as honest as possible. I didn't want to candy coat it. I didn't really care if I looked good. I cared that I helped people. I cared that someone else read it and felt like, "Oh my God, I'm not alone. Oh my God, I don't feel as broken. Oh my God, I'm not as shamed." I can laugh at something that I was ashamed of. I say this all the time, but if you're trying to look good in an addiction memoir, you're just not being honest enough.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right, right. Right.
Amy Dresner:
I'm sorry. And Jerry Stahl, who wrote Permanent Midnight, who blurbed my book was like... he has a famous quote, "If you had the nerve to live it, you should have the nerve to write it." And I was like, "All right." And so that's why I wrote about everything. And in this sobriety, early on, I have seven years now, but in the very beginning I developed a sex addiction. And it was f’ing pretty brutal.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. Tell us about that.
Amy Dresner:
Because I had to get out of my body.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Amy Dresner:
And I couldn't get high. And I just couldn't feel my feelings. I felt abandoned by my ex-husband. I had no money. I was terrified. I was newly sober. I was facing a felony charge. I had been cutting myself in treatment, which I had never done before. And I just needed out. And I needed validation. And I needed... I don't know. So I had never been really promiscuous... well, kind of promiscuous.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Depends on who asks.
Amy Dresner:
Yeah, right. If you talk to people in NA they're like, "Hmm."
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Amy Dresner:
I don't know why it became my go to. I think that that's pretty normal for alcoholics and addicts. You put them in their rooms and you take away their drug of choice and what do they go to? They go to food and gambling and nicotine and caffeine and sex and workaholism and exercise. They'll do anything again. Your brain doesn't know. Your brain's like, "We need dopamine, bitch. So get it." Whether it's from a hookup or a piece of cake or whatever. Yeah. It's like we need dopamine. And so it felt very much like my drug addiction. Where I'd be shaking on the way to go meet someone from Tinder. Like in anticipation like when you're shaking to go meet your dealer. You're like, "ah," you're so excited and your brain's just like... you know. And then I would literally be crying, driving home. And going, "I don't want to ever do this again." Or sitting in the shower in a ball, just going, "Oh my God, I'm so mortified. What am I doing?" And then I'd do it again. And I did that for probably two or three years. Until I just hit a bottom that was just brutal.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And when you hit a bottom, where did you go with that? Especially as a female sex addict, that has to be difficult to bring up and talk about, right? It's not as-
Amy Dresner:
It's super. Oh yeah. The whole book is the ultimate stigmas. Hey, I'm a perpetrator of domestic violence. Hi, I'm a IV drug user. Hi, I'm mentally ill. Hi, I'm a female sex addict. No wonder I haven't had a date since the book came out. But I have changed souls. I have saved lives.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
There you go.
Amy Dresner:
Who cares if I end up marrying, if I marry my cat. That's fine. No, I know I'm not the only person who's experienced that and it's really hard to talk about. And that was the hardest stuff to talk about in the book, was the sex addiction.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Amy Dresner:
Because there's nothing f’ing cool about it. Sorry. If you're a guy, you're a stud. But if you're a girl, I don't care how many SlutWalks you want to do and how much sex positivity, you're still looked as a slut.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Amy Dresner:
And I don't think that... For me, I was really looking for love. It was never about sex. It was about validation and it was about connection and it was about checking out. And I wanted each of these people to be my boyfriend. I really wanted love.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Amy Dresner:
So I went to SLAA and I went to SAA and it's all in the book. And I didn't really dig it. And there's one scene where it's me and 12 dudes in a Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting. And I'm like, "Yay," and everyone's talking about jacking off for seven hours or hookers. And I'm like, "I met this really hot guy on Tinder and then he never called me again." It's just like, "Ah," just completely different. But the feeling's the same of being out of control, the humiliation, the going, "Oh, I don't ever want to do this again," all that kind of stuff. And I don't know where I was getting the dopamine hit. Was I getting it from the chase? Was I getting it from the validation? Was I getting it from the orgasm?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Or all of it?
Amy Dresner:
Was I getting it from... Yeah, who knows. Doesn't really matter. But I had an experience that was so humiliating and so mortifying. You can read it in the book. That I just... That was the end for me. And then I just put it down. And my sponsor at the time said, "You put down a behavior when what it's doing to you is worse than what it's doing for you." And that's what happened. I just hit a bottom that was just... It was so... Incomprehensible demoralization. And I stopped. And then I fell in love and I was in a relationship for two years and then that ended. And so I don't really know how to sort of navigate now. It's like how do you navigate after you've been a sex addict?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Amy Dresner:
You don't want to be... It's like I've sort of just been shut down. I've just been kind of... you know.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I think the bottom line behavior I really liked... Take what you like, and the bottom line behavior where there's a behavior line that you just don't cross. And to me I think that was something that was super helpful, making that like this is just the line that I'm not going to cross. And that was a really great start for me.
Amy Dresner:
You're talking about bottom lines and that kind of stuff? Is that what you're talking about?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
It was just bottom line behavior. Yeah, the bottom lines. The bottom line behavior was-
Amy Dresner:
That worked for you?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Amy Dresner:
Oh, it did not work for me. I would say, "I'm not going to do that," and I would do it. I would say, "This is off limits," and I would do it. That was the same with... I never thought I would be an IV drug user and I crossed that line. I think that with addiction, we keep moving that line in the sand. That's what's so terrifying. You know what I mean? We go, "This is the line. I'm not crossing this." And then all of a sudden you move the line. And that's what I found in my life, what I did in everything. And it was horrifying. And so, now...
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I think it was just for clarification. For me it was like, "I am not going to sleep with someone who I'm not in a relationship with." And that was... I was able to. And in order to do that, I had to not put myself in situations where I would end up sleeping with them. So I'm not going to dinner at their house. Or it was this whole thing. And when I was committed to doing that piece of it, I could backtrack to the bottom line, if that makes sense. But I couldn't just say, "I'm not going to sleep..." I had to set the system up, so that here are the things I'm going to do. I'm going to keep my clothes on. In order to keep my clothes on, I'm going to be in public places. It was like-
Amy Dresner:
Oh, okay. Here. I did finally have a coffee date with someone and I had it in a public place.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay.
Amy Dresner:
I love [inaudible 00:42:02] work and health, about dating after sex addiction. Had it in a public place. I had it at a Starbucks. We had coffee for about two hours and then he walked me to my car and I just lunged at him. It had been almost two and a half years since I had had any human contact, because that's, again-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right. Black and white.
Amy Dresner:
Yeah. It's, you're either sexually anorexic or you're acting out. And I didn't know how to find that. When I was in a relationship it was okay, but once I got out of the relationship I just didn't know what to do so I just kind of shut down. I was also pretty heartbroken, and so I just was like, "I don't want to get hurt again," and whatever. And then both my parents got ill and the book came out and I was just like, "Well I don't really, dick is not on my priority list right now." And I'm scared about how I'll behave around it, you know what I mean? So it was like... So anyway, I kissed him and then things started getting really heated and we started touching each other and then I was like, "Okay, this is getting really out of control, I got to go." And I got in my car, and then he got in the car. So.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Amy Dresner:
So that was my... Even though I tried to set it up, that happened in the parking lot pavilion. So then I was like, "Okay. You can't do it."
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Now you have to stay at the table. You can't, nobody can walk you. You just got to keep backing into that one. Oh my God, that's [crosstalk 00:43:30] a car. So that's the thing. A car is a private place, right? It was like... But that was the kind of learning stuff where I was like... See here's the thing. I can't believe I'm going to say this on air, but I had this thing where if you don't take your pants off, no matter what happens, if you do not take your pants off, it just doesn't happen. Right?
Amy Dresner:
Okay. I'm going to say something.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh you're going to, okay.
Amy Dresner:
I didn't take my pants off. I am a female ejaculator. So that started in my 40s, just getting honest here. I can't be the only one. And it's cool if you're into it. And if you're not into it, it's like getting waterboarded and people are freaked out by it. And he touched... I was so turned on by this individual and it had been so long since I had had any contact, he touched the outside of my jeans and I exploded all over the car.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Still not, you still didn't have sex with him.
Amy Dresner:
No. But I did have an orgasm, and I didn't take my pants off. So there goes your f’ing theory about taking your pants off.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I didn't say you can't have an orgasm. I just said you won't have sex.
Amy Dresner:
Yeah, but then I got obsessed.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right.
Amy Dresner:
I got obsessed because I got a dopamine hit from hell. My body was like... and even though it had been two and a half years since I had had any sexual interaction, I was, my whole body was like, "Huh," and I was absolutely obsessed with this person and it was a nightmare because he was very emotionally unavailable. And it was another whole painful cycle.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right.
Amy Dresner:
And then I just, all my old behavior came back. It was like, I think I saw him a second time and I was like, "Just jack me off in the car quickly," and I was like, "Oh my God. I'm sorry. "I'm sorry." Just like a whole other person came out.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right.
Amy Dresner:
It was just horrible. It was like years of celibacy and not shaving, and then all of a sudden I'm at his house, I'm like, "I shaved my asshole for you. Do something," and I'm like "Oh my God, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry." It was just awful. It was just... obviously we're not together. He was like, "Calm down, things are going to happen. Relax." I was like, "Oh my God." I was just like-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
You're like, "I can't relax."
Amy Dresner:
I was just back to... yeah. I was just like, "Thank God for coronavirus," is all I have to say. It's made me stay in my house with my gay roommate and there's just nothing happening. Nothing can happen.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
This might be the opportunity to practice dating with a social distance.
PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:46:04]
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Did a practice dating with the six social distancing maybe you're-
Amy Dresner:
Oh, I know. I was talking to someone, but I'm not sure that person's for me. I think he's too much of a Pollyanna. He's like, "You're negative." I'm like, "no shit, Birch. Read my book. Like "I'm a f’ing depressive Jew." Like I don't think we're the same...
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Cut from the same cloth.
Amy Dresner:
I'm the Grim Reaper, motherfer. What do you mean? I don't know. I think the whole thing for me, I'm an addict to my core in every single area of my life. I had an eating disorder prior to finding meth and I know a lot of people that have relapsed on nicotine. I'm one of them during this crisis. It's really difficult, you know? And I don't know if you've heard that the people are like, I mean Zoom meetings are great, but it's not the same. I'm someone who likes to violate people's personal spacial boundaries.
Amy Dresner:
Everyone knows me for that. They're like, "Oh my God, Amy," like don't, like I touch strangers. And I mean, I'm just on law. I just, I really have some brain damage. I've had 12 grand mal seizures and I've had a traumatic brain injury. Like I'm in on, I've done a lot of drugs. There's just something, whatever that filter is, it's like, don't do that. Like I don't...
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
It's not there.
Amy Dresner:
I've literally been kicked out of Trader Joe's, just overly caffeinated. They're like, "Um, hi. Are you on drugs? Like what's going on?" They're like, "you need to come back another day." I'm like, "no, I'm sober! I've just had a lot of coffee." You know? It's like something's wrong with me.
Amy Dresner:
People are breaking into Zooming goodness, I don't know if you've heard. And that makes me really sad. I mean get a life, get a f’ing hobby. These are people are trying to connect and save their lives. And I just think it's just like people that are bored and miserable and think it's funny to say shitty things and flash porn, you know where I mean, I'm seeing a lot of people relapse and this is their only f’ing lifeline. And you know that as an online rehab and an online recovery service like just the lack of respect is kind of stunning to me.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I think it was always happening and now it's just in this crazy concentrated space. Stay tuned to hear more in just a moment. Hello everybody. This is Ashley Loeb Blassingame, the co-founder of Lionrock Recovery and your host. Lionrock Recovery has introduced a support meeting specifically for people struggling with anxiety related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Structured as an ongoing workshop, the COVID-19 Anxiety Support meeting will teach coping skills and to be a place to share and connect with others, also feeling the effects of this crisis. Everyone's struggling with anxiety about COVID-19 is welcome. Let me repeat that: everyone's struggling with anxiety about COVID-19 as welcome. To view the meeting schedule and join a meeting in session, visit www.lionrockrecovery.com and click on the orange banner at the top of the page. You can't miss it. Together we will learn to feel more centered and empowered in the face of this great challenge.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
This is one of those times where like we're all having to take all of our coping skills and figure out in some ways I had a mentor who always said you need to upgrade your recovery to where you are. You don't do the same thing for your recovery that you did when you were a year sober at 10 years. Right? You need to upgrade your recovery, update it. And so this whole thing has forced me, I was actually a lot like motherhood for me where it you become confined. You lose a freedom and so, but just still need to treat the problem. And so you have to find different, you have to change things and find different ways to be well and I think that this is all going to, this is in some ways forcing us to upgrade our recovery to like "okay, what do I need to do for my recovery?"
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
How do I survive? How do I handle a situation like this? Is it ideal? No, definitely not ideal. But now I'm hyper focused on the fact that instead of going to the meeting and just naturally getting everything you need from that interaction from the space, you have to sync about what you need and then try to get that right from the car. Like you, it's like super proactive in a way that I don't think most of us, like I'm not like, "I need sunshine, I haven't had sunshine." So I like specifically go out and think about how much sunshine I've had. That's not something I normally do. I don't think about it that way. And I think that it's forcing us to go to think about all the ways that we recover.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And the way that you were talking about like physical interaction is one of the ways that you recover your recovery. That's part of your recovery is like going into those halls and being in rooms with people who understand where you've come from and sharing that space. And so really thinking about like what are the ways I recover, what are the different ways I recover? And finding some temporary solutions hopefully. And also making do with what we have because we have a life and death disease, and the truth is that no amount of substance or sex or anything is going to change the fact that we're quarantined in the house.
Amy Dresner:
For sure. I mean, I'm going to more meetings now than I ever had.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
That's what everybody's saying.
Amy Dresner:
Kind of like, I'm like, "wow, all right, I'm about to meet a good day. Excellent!" You know? But definitely for me, I found myself to be really struggling with routine and scheduling and depression and...
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I struggle with that.
Amy Dresner:
Sleeping in much and watching too much television and financial situation is totally f’ed. And I'm trying to find that balance between being productive during this time and also allowing me to have my feelings, which is this is f’ing terrifying, you know? And I mean, the upside of this is it's shown a light, I think on all the problems in our country. The overcrowding of prisons, the lack of universal healthcare, the elimination of the middle class. The fact that there isn't that the people aren't financially stable, all of that kind of stuff.
Amy Dresner:
But it's difficult. I've never lived really when 9/11 happened, which is the only thing that's even kind of comparable to this. I was in Paris`, so it didn't really hit me. And I was like, "Oui, oui! [foreign language 00:52:56]." I had to pretend I wasn't American cause they weren't really f’ing super hot on the Americans during that period. And it was, remember the French fries were called Freedom fries, not all that shit. So it was, so this is the first time I've really experienced something like this. And you know what I wrote about, I'm seeing really selfish behavior and how can we model behavior that's more like, as the recovery community we're used to fighting for our lives. We're used to being isolated.
Amy Dresner:
We're used to all this kind of stuff. It's like we're kind of made for this shit in some way. And it's like, I think it's on us to model the behavior of selflessness. If there was ever an opportunity to model selflessness for other people, this is the time to do it, whatever way that is. You know, in reaching out to other people for emotional support, giving them emotional support, asking, you know also there's people that have a difficult time asking for help. If you need know this is the time to go, I need help financially, or emotionally or I need dry noodles or I need a f’ing mask or gloves or paper towels or whatever it is. And it's just a challenging time. It's definitely a time to up your game.
Amy Dresner:
And for me, what I find in my recovery is that I sort of right before a growth spurt, I sort of, I flip out. I wish I could not...
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Me, too.
Amy Dresner:
Have that right. I wish I could not have the tantrum. So I have my chance from, so I don't want, I don't like this. F you. You know, blah, blah, shut down, crying, depression, taking to my bed, whatever. And then all of a sudden I go, okay, what's the action now?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I get uncomfortable enough.
Amy Dresner:
I would love to skip the flip out place. Not been able to get there without going through that kind of flip out place first as sturdy. I had my flip out and today I'm like, "all right bitch."
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I feel like my flip-outs look different. They're still flip outs. Over the years they've gotten a little smaller and a little less crazy. Still crazy, but a little less so. It's kind of like you talked about like I don't change until the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change. You know, like I just, man, I just don't or I haven't, I haven't yet. And so the best that I can do is get better. Recognize, "Oh, I'm," like, you did, "Oh, this is a flip out. I'm going to be unhappy right here and then I'm going to grow," and try not to abuse my children and husband in the process.
Amy Dresner:
That's the thing, that's the thing I've gotten, I think better about is not let it get out on other people and creating a wreckage more internal now. Yeah. Where I just kind of turn like turn inward and shut down instead of raging on people or acting out in some weird way. I just kind of shut down, you know? And it was like, that was yesterday I just crying and I was just like, okay. And then today I was just like, okay, how can we, what can we do? What's the next action? Like, okay, you can write these articles and you can finish this. You can work with your trainer via Skype. You can take a walk. I mean, we took a drive, my roommate and I took a drive for like an hour yesterday just to get out of the house and get some air. And also cutting myself some slack. Not so much slack that I'm like, it's cool. Like stay up all night watching Netflix and sleep all day and don't do anything, but also letting yourself have your feelings and going, "okay, that's enough."
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right? Like it's not the end of the world that you did that. And so giving yourself the space to be like, man, I'm human and I'm upset. Like this is crazy. This is scary. This is crazy. I'm having feelings. Those are my feelings. And you know, we are people who use against our will. So, and feelings happen whether we're participating in them or not, right. That's kind of what we've learned is that they're happening, it's happening, it's happening. So forget, stop worrying about like, I'm not going to feel that I'm going to whatever you're feeling it. You just, maybe you're not, you're not joining it yet. So like if we can have those feelings, feel them and maybe somehow you need to feel them is by sitting in bed and watching Netflix all day and then the next day like to me compared to the wreckage that we used to, cause that shit is amazing.
Amy Dresner:
No, it's like, Oh, you bought a vape, you bought a disposable vaping.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Totally.
Amy Dresner:
I'm like, I'm okay with that.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Totally.
Amy Dresner:
Versus a 20 year old in your car and shooting up, something in your neck that some guy on a corner spit out of his mouth. I'm okay with it.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
We've made some progress. Exactly.
Amy Dresner:
You know, but it's like people who are just don't let you have your feeling, don't feel that way. Be positive, don't dah dah, dah. And it's like f you. You know what I mean? Like I'm not saying let your feelings run you, but it's also really hard to not have your feelings because for so long I was my thoughts and my feelings. That's what I thought I was. You know, and they drag me around like a dog on a leash this way, this way, this way, this way.
Amy Dresner:
You know, I talk about it in the book, so I talk, I can't remember if I even talked about it now about discipline, creating stability versus stability, creating discipline that I talked about that...
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I remember.
Amy Dresner:
To you. Great.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
So let's say no.
Amy Dresner:
So my father said to me years ago, discipline creates stability. Stability doesn't create discipline. It's like a disciplined-routine life gives you that feeling of stability inside. But as alcoholics and addicts, I think we wait for the feeling before we take the action. If you're waiting to feel ready to go to the gym or meditate or go to a meeting or write your book or whatever, you wait forever, you take the action and it changes the feelings. I'm still at seven years sober. It's still hard for me to do that. It's like whoever feels like going to the gym? Never. And when you go and you're like, "Whoo-hoo! I feel amazing! I'm going to go every day." And then you don't go again for two months. You know what I mean? Like it's really difficult. I mean, I was meditating all the time and then I stopped because it made me feel too good. I was like, I'm feeling too good...
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Totally.
Amy Dresner:
And if I miss one day? [crosstalk 00:59:35].
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Done. Over. See ya!
Amy Dresner:
One f’ing day. And that's out.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Why in many ways it's why the recovery is remarkable because the way that our brains work, the things that it tells us the way that it works. I mean if we didn't do anything we would never get anywhere. Right? So like finishing a book by reaching out, doing those things is remarkable because that's not the natural way that we would live if we followed the roadmap in our head. We are basically to get out...
Amy Dresner:
Yeah. My head is like, you're going to be broke and homeless and sick and die of Corona. So just like...[Crosstalk 01:00:26].
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Just drink, and f’ing jump out the window.
Amy Dresner:
And just f’ing fold, fold, fold your hands.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
You know, I was like, I'm going to get Corona so I should go get Corona. That was I had, [crosstalk 00:14:38].
Amy Dresner:
Oh I had a moment..
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I should just go get it and get this over with. [crosstalk 00:14:47].
Amy Dresner:
I had that, too. I was like, I will have it over with, cause then maybe like I'll have immunity for like a little bit and then all this'll be over, it was like...
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I didn't think it, I wasn't even thinking about the immunity. I was like, I'm just going to walk into a hospital and like get this shit over with. Cause like, like I can't wait for this shit to hunt me down. F that. I'm going to get it. Like just the so... [crosstalk 01:01:04] It's so stressful.
Amy Dresner:
Go lick a toilet seat like that f’ing that influencer. Oh my God. I know. Really?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I legitimately do not understand things that are happening on this planet sometimes. Like I like and I'm like,
Amy Dresner:
okay, well I love the people that gets a hoax. They're like, it's a hoax. I'm like, "Hmm, really? And the Holocaust didn't happen either. Okay." Like it's not a f’ing hoax, man. You know what I mean? But I felt the same way. I was just like, I mean, what's funny to me is like, I think there's two types of alcoholics and addicts, and I talked about this in this recent Fix piece, so it's like one is like beat a deadly disease. No one is going to stop me from my recovery.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh yeah.
Amy Dresner:
You know, f you man. I've just choose to be positive and we're going to have our meetings and it's like, "Umm..."
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
If you stayed at this hotel, you're immune to COVID.
Amy Dresner:
And it's like, and then there are the other ones that are like, where now I used to not give a f about my health or anything. I thought I was indestructible. And now every headache is a, is a brain tumor. Every f’ing weird stomach pain is like my liver exploding. Like, you know what I mean? Like I'm a total hypochondriac now that I'm clean. I'm like, what?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
You would have been like the person who comes in with the 60 pound tumor and they're like, why didn't you call us when it was at 10 pounds? You know? But now it's like, I feel a tiny speck...
Amy Dresner:
I know. What is this? They're like, it's a mole. I'm not sure what it's strange. Just a hard time with faith right now. I will be honest with you, it's not something that I, it's something I struggle with in general. And I know I've landed on my feet a lot and if you read the book, you're like that. It's amazing that bitch alive like, Jesus Christ. But I still struggle with faith and my friends make these jokes. Like you fell into a f’ing pool a pond and you woke up in a new suit. F you. You know and it's like, I feel scared about this. I'm not going to lie. And I don't do well when I'm scared now. And everyone's like, you need to have faith. And it's like people are f’ing dying, man. You know? It's affected everyone's financial situation. It's terrifying, you know? And I don't really know where's the place of having faith and also just kind of versus putting your head in the sand and ignoring the reality.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
What I've been trying to do is if more information is not going to change the way the things I'm doing and the way that I'm acting, then I try not to absorb that extra information. Like I don't need an update on every death. Right? Like I don't, I don't need to know that like three more people died in New York or whatever it is because it's not going to change the way that I'm living my life. If there's information that's material to my actions, then that's important for me to absorb. But beyond that it's a little masochistic where it's like I'm just, I'm just trying to absorb as much as I can, reading all about it. That how bad it is about it is how about like there's only so much I need to know and then I need to live my life and show up in the way that I would want to.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Even if it's like, Hey, this is my last go of it. Like if it is my last go of, I mean, know what I mean?
Amy Dresner:
You're not going to die. You're going to be fine.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
But whether or not I'm going to die... It's like, Whoa,
Amy Dresner:
But young people are dying too, but no, I totally hear you.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Do I want to spend my time? That's what I have to remind myself as like, it's less about like the faith is important, but it's almost like I come at it from trying to come out from the logical perspective of okay, this is not like this is unmanageable. Like my consumption of bad news is a miserable making me. I'm powerless and my life is unmanageable and so I need to only consume as much as I need to consume to change my behavior.
Amy Dresner:
Oh, yeah. My sponsor was like, turn the f’ing news off, Amy.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Why is that so hard? Right. Like that.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And I was like, we don't know. We still don't know enough. We don't know enough. Do you have immunity? What really? How? How has it really transmitted? I mean there's so many, but it doesn't change your behavior if you're still going to wear the gloves and the mask and go get the stuff at the grocery store and come back and you're just going to, if it doesn't change my behavior, why am I trying to create the vaccine from the news article I'm reading. Probably not going to work. Like if we're, if we're being, I'm just torturing myself. That's been my survival mechanism. I don't know if it's, you know...
Amy Dresner:
I'm just trying to be, I'm just trying to take the time to be safe, tell people I love them. Reach out to people. Like I said, a close friend of mine relapsed and...
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
That's brutal.
Amy Dresner:
He's back. But that's something that I wanted to talk about is what I see. When people relapse, people seem to scatter that they did with me. At least when shit hit the fan, a lot of people scattered. They didn't know how to handle it or they, it's like, okay, if we know that alcoholism is not contagious and it's a f’ing disease, then why are you shaming them and treating them like it's a f’ing moral issue? Why are you not making them feel welcome back? Why are you not talking to them? Why are you, it should be inclusive. And it's like, I know that for me as the chronic or I just didn't give a shit what people in the room saw.
Amy Dresner:
I was like, what? I want to be queen of AA. Like who gives a f? Like I just didn't care. Queen Loadie, that's what I'm going for. I want the crown. You know? I just didn't care. I was like, I'm going to die if I don't keep coming back. So it's like let people go, Oh God, she relapsed again what a loser. And it was like, fine, and it was like whatever. But I stayed connected to this person and although it's hard to, you have to have boundaries and you have to, you know what I mean? It's not fun. It can be very triggering to talk to someone who's loaded. It can be very painful to watch someone kill themselves, all that kind of stuff. You know? And sometimes people aren't ready, but at the same time you have to be that loving connection when they want to come back to sobriety.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Amy Dresner:
You know, to feel safe talking to someone. Yeah. I mean I think we've all been in that place where it's like we want to stop and we can't, we want to want to stop. So I see a lot of judgment and then it's like don't forget when you were in that place or maybe they weren't ever in that place.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, maybe not. I think this is all about unity and coming together and supporting each other in the end game and the end game is to be happy. It's to be happy, joyous, and free, man. Like that's the end game. That's what it is. So you know whether your journey looks like mine or not. Like that's where, that's where we have to come to. I think people are afraid that relapse is contagious. That's how I think, yes, you're right. I think they know that theoretically it's not. But I do think people think so. I think people think that if, you know the old adage, like if you hang out in the barbershop, you're going to get a haircut. And I think that eventually we get a haircut. I think that, I think some people think that "stick with the winners" means abandon the people who don't get it. And I never, I've never really understood that, but I think it looks, from up close, it looks like fear to me.
Amy Dresner:
Absolutely it is. I think it's fear and not knowing how to process their own feelings around it and fear that it's, that it can be them. And also not knowing how to be loving, but to have boundaries.
PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [01:09:04]
Amy Dresner:
... and also not knowing how to be loving, but to have boundaries. You can do both.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Mm-hmm (affirmative) Right. Right.
Amy Dresner:
You can be loving but also have a boundary.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Amy Dresner:
I mean, I don't think tough love is always the way. I don't think we know what the answer is. If we knew what the answer was, then we'd have the solution. You know what I mean? I think it depends on each person. So, I try and take it each situation individually, but all I know is my parents kept throwing me into treatment after treatment after treatment, and did they keep me alive? Yes. Would I have gotten sober earlier for good if they hadn't, I don't know. Would I have died? Maybe.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, but that wasn't a risk they were willing to take, whether or not it was. I mean, that's what it comes down to, right, is that wasn't a risk they were willing to take. Whether or not-
Amy Dresner:
No. Yeah, it was their...
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Some of that is about them too.
Amy Dresner:
Yeah, but I mean, for me, what was key is that they believed in me, because I think that when you continue to relapse, you stop believing in yourself that you can ever get it.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Totally. Totally.
Amy Dresner:
And you think I'm in a die an addict. I'm one of those people who is not going to be able to get it, and you give up on yourself, and so the fact that they believe that eventually I would get it. That I believe that they believed and that was what I held onto.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. I mean, it's amazing.
Amy Dresner:
And I prove them right. You know what I mean? I mean, getting loaded is not going to help anything in this situation. We're all in it together. I mean, that's what's weird is the whole world is in this together. I think that as sober people, we can't anesthetize like other people.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, so we feel it. All of it.
Amy Dresner:
All of it.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. Yeah. I think that's the beauty of your story is, truly that you can relapse and relapse and relapse and still get... You're not, it's not a lost cause. Don't stop trying. Don't give up.
Amy Dresner:
Yeah. That's why I said this is dedicated to anyone who thinks it's too late, and I mean, people are like, "Thank you for giving me f’ing hope that I could get it." Like, "I've gone back into treatment, or I'm going back to meetings."
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Amy Dresner:
The book ends with me three years clean and I have seven now.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. Yeah.
Amy Dresner:
I mean, I went from pariah to example to inspiration, which is so weird to me. It's really bizarre. I was a relapser for so long that when they go, "Are there any newcomers," still seven years later, my hand almost goes up every time. I was like, "You're not dude. You're not. You have sponsees. You have a sponsor." You know what I mean?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, I do know.
Amy Dresner:
You're not.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I do know because I remember that. I remember thinking, I remember being like, "Don't raise your hand." Because I would relapse a lot, and I remember it took a while to not feel like I was... And sometimes, when I'm not feeling right, I'm like, "Are there any newcomers?"
Amy Dresner:
Yes. [crosstalk 01:11:50] Exactly. Exactly.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I legit am like, "F me man."
Amy Dresner:
Yeah. I'm like, "What the f?" It's easy to judge yourself and be like, "I have seven years. I should be blah, blah." That's a head game in itself. Everyone's journey is completely different, and I've got days where I'm completely on the ball, and then I've got other times when I feel like, f, I can't.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yep. Yep.
Amy Dresner:
You know what I mean? The financial worries and two sick parents and blah, blah, blah, and I'm just like, f’ing... I don't have a partner. I mean, thank God my roommate's here.
Amy Dresner:
But its feeling... I've felt an aloneness that I've never felt before and my own mortality when both my parents got sick at the same time. My mom got dementia and then I was leaning on my dad, and then my dad got cancer. And I'm an only child, and I felt, "Whoa, I don't have any brothers and sisters and I don't have a f’ing romantic partner. I'm not married right now," and I just thought, "F." If it made me feel alone in a way I hadn't felt since I was using. I just thank God for my friends. Thank God for my f’ing recovery family, who f’ing had my back and carried me through all of that.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. Well you have an amazing story, and I think that, I know that you've touched so many people.
Amy Dresner:
Oh, thank you. Yeah. I'm getting so many messages now, which is so weird. Like I said, everyone's like, "I'm f’ing bored. Let's find a juicy story." I'm like, "Okay."
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I love it. I love it.
Amy Dresner:
That was what I wanted. I just wanted to f’ing help people. I didn't give a f about looking good. I didn't give a f about making money. I cared that I gave one person f’ing help.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And you have.
Amy Dresner:
You know what I mean? No matter how far f’ing down you've fallen. Because everything I thought would never happen to me happened to me, man.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. Yeah.
Amy Dresner:
Everything.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, It's wild. It's wild, and, I mean, I think especially in this time...
Amy Dresner:
And it looks great on a match.com profile. You can be like, "I'm handy with knives and I can't get into Canada, so hopefully you don't want to go to Canada."
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
That's so amazing. You should make...
Amy Dresner:
I don't touch f’ing Tinder. I was on Hinge for two seconds and I was like, "Ew." I can't do it. I can't do that shit anymore. It freaks me out. It becomes obsessive. I'll get an instant connection with someone and I'll romanticize and I'll be like, "We're going to get married. I like rose cut diamonds." I'm like, "Are you f’ing 13. Grow the f up. Oh my God, girl. Get it together."
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. I mean, the problem lies in our brain. It's a pretty hard one to fix your broken brain with your broken brain, man.
Amy Dresner:
I know, right? The f’ing future tripping, good or bad. Right?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Amy Dresner:
[inaudible 01:14:58] We're going to get married on this farm, and I'm like, "Oh my God, Amy, you don't even know him. Calm down." You know what I mean? Or "I'm going to have Corona and die in a cardboard box."
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Mm-hmm (affirmative) Yeah.
Amy Dresner:
Maybe it's in between one of those.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right, right exactly.
Amy Dresner:
I mean, that's the difference between also process addictions and substance abuse addictions. Is with food, with eating disorders and sex stuff, you have to find a moderative route.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yes.
Amy Dresner:
It's really hard. Versus for drugs and alcohol, okay, I support whatever works for you. If harm reduction works for you, right on. If you are someone who used to shoot dope and now you can drink normally, f’ing more power to you. That's not my experience. I've tried that experiment 9000 times. For me, abstinence is the only f’ing way. It's much, much easier for me to be abstinent than it is for me to try and control my drinking and using.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yep. Me too. Yes.
Amy Dresner:
Do you know what I mean?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yes.
Amy Dresner:
But for the love and romance stuff...
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. You're still on your journey.
Amy Dresner:
I'm like, "Oh, I'm trying to do things differently and coming up with similar results." Like someone who's, "I'm emotionally unavailable." I'm like, "Challenge accepted!" I'm like, "Oh God." Right?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, but I mean, it's just part... You're still on the journey. It's not all soft, you know. I mean that's my experience. I'm 14 years clean and sober, and I had dealt with [crosstalk 00:07:35].
Amy Dresner:
When did you get sober? F’ing 12? Jesus Christ.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
19, and after I had my kids, all of my old trauma came back. An eating disorder and all this stuff that I had basically managed for a long time, but I didn't know that. I didn't know that until... So, they came back after I had twins. No time to do self care, self work or any of that shit. I was like "I am 14 years sober, this is what is happening. This is absolutely unacceptable. I should be better than that." This isn't-
Amy Dresner:
I know we're so good at self-shaming, aren't we?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
This is insane.
Amy Dresner:
We're so good at that.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And I have to remember, nope, I needed to get to all the layers. I had to find all the different pieces. I had to exhaust all the other options, right? Sex, love, whatever, all the different things. You get married, that's done, theoretically, if you want to stay married.
Amy Dresner:
Well, unless you try and kill them. Once you try and kill them, they don't really like to stay married to you. You can even be like, "Oh, just you chopped the rest of my lab. You know? They just don't it really? Yeah. Yeah,
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
that'll do. I'm going to write that down and like top 10 things don't try to do. Let me just tell you that you think about it-
Amy Dresner:
That was shocking to me too. Like, Oh,
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Of course.
Amy Dresner:
I've heard everyone say, that's not me. I'm not who I normally am. You know, when I'm drinking and using, I'm a f’ing monster. I don't recognize that person. And when I was writing the book, I was like, who is that person who did those things? Like, stop, don't do that. You know what I mean?
Amy Dresner:
And that was... Writing the book, everyone's like, was it cathartic? It's like, no f’ing, it was not cathartic. It was really painful to put myself back into a head space of active addiction with absolutely no denial around my behavior. With complete clarity with no, you know what I mean?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Amy Dresner:
Like how you changed and having to be really honest about it and having some recovery. It was, it was horrifying to write that and be honest.
Amy Dresner:
It was like my standard experience with doing my fourth and fifth step. I wasn't like, yay, I'm walking with the hand of the universe. I like saw who I was from other people's point of view and I was like, yikes! I'm not who I thought I was at all. I cried for like three days. Then my sponsor was like, okay, now that we've uncovered who you really f’ing, are which is manipulative, lustful asshole. Now we get to start changing it. And I was like, okay, you're not stuck with who you,
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I mean that's why I get aside from all the things that go into, what happens when I use drugs and alcohol. I do not like the person that I become.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And once I put those things into my body, I am not in control of that person. And so I have created someone on the planet that I do not like. So same thing. I look back at things that I did and I've done, not the crazy stuff, the horrible stuff like the mean stuff. The crazy stuff, it's like, I mean a lot of that's, wearing diapers or you know, whatever like you know.
Amy Dresner:
(Laughs). That's the stuff you laugh at. The mean stuff is hard to laugh at.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Because the really nasty stuff that I did because someone threatened my addiction or whatever. That's-
Amy Dresner:
Totally, totally,
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
That stuff is really hard to look at and that is exactly the reason why I had to stop. Because I can't... I did this experiment where I put that chemical in my body over and over and over again and I became a person I didn't like. That doesn't happen to everybody. It's not the chemical.
Amy Dresner:
Yeah. And the other thing is too that what it feels for you and what it looks like to other people.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh no. Oh no.
Amy Dresner:
That's right. That's it.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Because in your head there's a perfectly logical explanation for this.
Amy Dresner:
But also you're like, I feel good and that was that horrible. And I like blah, blah blah. And other people are like, "what a f’ing hot mess." Like, you know what I mean? Like it's like when you're sober and you see people super shit faced or high and it's like, what if, and you know what it feels like.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Amy Dresner:
to be loaded like that.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Amy Dresner:
But it's not what it looks like, right? To other people.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
The one thing I like to also point out is like, it's not the drugs. The drugs aren't bad that you can, you can put, you can put cocaine and to somebody else and they don't become a monster. You know what I mean?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
But we see... I know a lot of people are like, Oh drugs, there's this intense feeling around drugs and alcohol around the actual substance. Like, look, this is a molecule. It just happens to go into my body and react this way. That doesn't happen to everyone.
Amy Dresner:
I agree with you.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
But it doesn't happen to everyone. And so I always have to, I remind a lot of new people like, Oh, I can't. That person drinks a lot or that person, blah, blah, blah. You know, it's like, look, if it doesn't turn them into a monster, it might not be a problem.
Amy Dresner:
Yeah. Well that's what I mean. A lot of sober people get very judgmental about other people's use and abuse, because they're using a lot. Then they think they're an alcoholic or an addict. And like you said, it's not about the substances.
Amy Dresner:
I know plenty of people who can f’ing do Coke and they're fine or have bag of Coke in their house for three months and it's like completely different. You know what I mean? It's like, it's not about the drugs. So it's like people... This war on drugs, it's like, it's really, we really need to look at.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Mental health.
Amy Dresner:
Yeah. I mean, cause it's not everyone becomes addicted. That's not everyone... A very few portion. I mean, sure Purdue lied about how addictive Oxycontin was and that it lasted longer than it than it did. And blah and they forged a lot of stuff.
Amy Dresner:
But I still know people. Even my mother who f’ing, even as a recovering alcoholic, broke her hip. They gave her Oxy. I was terrified. And she was fine. They used it. There are plenty of people who can use that as pain management and they're fine.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Amy Dresner:
Not everyone becomes addicted and it's like, I think that's something that we really need to look at. It's like that comes from your own genetics. I know people who would try to Meth and hated it. I'm like, are you kidding me? That's like Prozac with wings. What are you talking about? That's the shit
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I tried. I did a lot of Meth, and hated it. But I did a lot of it. It was like your weed.
Amy Dresner:
I did a lot of it and hated it.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I hated it but I continued to do it because that's what was there. So just kept doing it. I'm like, I hate this. I hate this stuff.
Amy Dresner:
I didn't like Oxy. It made me yell at parking lots and karate chop people. I'd karate chop, karate chop strangers. It was horrible. I was really a weirdo on it. It was terrible.
Amy Dresner:
I thought it was supposed to make you a nice and mellow and it made me really aggressive and f’ing crazy.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
That is, that is an adverse reaction to opiates, my friends.
Amy Dresner:
(laughs) I know, it was like, Hey man, I'm mellow it. And I'm like, ahhh!
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah this woman, takes Meth to calm down and opiates to karate chop people.
Amy Dresner:
Someone once said, "I know when you're high because you're actually emotionally stable when you're shooting cocaine." I was, "that's frightening." That is a frightening thought. He was like, "I know you're high right now, cause you're completely rational.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh my god.
Amy Dresner:
I was like, I knew it was self medication.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Totally. You're like, so you're saying I'm a doctor? Cause that's definitely what I heard.
Amy Dresner:
Right Dan? I had like my physician's desk reference and I would like be, okay, what do I want? So then I go into the psychiatrist office and I'd be like... I'd have these symptoms. That they give me, what I needed.
Amy Dresner:
But then eventually they catch on and they were like, "I think you need to go to AA." I was like, "f you man. I'm not a drug addict!"
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Worst prescription ever.
Amy Dresner:
(laughs) Worst doctor... But it was like they gave me like Methamphetamine, but it was slow release. I'd get it home and I tried to get it out of the f’ing like slow release capsule and boil it down and crush it. I'm not like a chemist. Okay. Like I'm a writer. I just burn them. I went and I was like, "the slow release aren't working for me." And she was like, "Oh really? I think you need to go to AA." I'm like, "Go f yourself!"
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh man. There's no desperation like needing drugs while having to scrape off a slow release. Like [inaudible 01:25:30] "slip". There's just no like, oh man, I don't miss that.
Amy Dresner:
Well, I was never successful at it, ever. I was supposed to... I didn't have the f’ing, I was like, they were like, "this is how you get it off and this is how you shoot it." And I was like, "Aw man. I was like cooking, I don't like coding." It's like too many steps. I was like, f this. Like no. I don't have the patience for this.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I've never been good in a kitchen, you know what I mean?
Amy Dresner:
It's like, no, I can't. F this no.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh my God, that's amazing. Well, you are amazing and I'm so grateful that you came on the podcast and shared your story and share what's going on with you and just told the truth. Right. That's what we have to do. So-
Amy Dresner:
I would love to be some Pollyanna and be like, Oh my God. Like I am totally modeling the epitome of recovery. I'm just a beacon of hope and light and blah blah. But it's like, you know, I mean, I thought about rescheduling and I was just like, you know what? I'm f’ing scared. I'm scared. I'm scared of money. I feel I'm having a hard time disciplining myself. I'm sleeping too much, I'm watching too much TV. I'm, you know, I'm finding myself to be in a negative place. I'm, you know, and, and that's the truth.
Amy Dresner:
I am going to meetings and I'm trying to share solution, but I'm also struggling with... And I'm just kind of like, "bitch, just get through this, one day at a time. What's today? What are you going to do today? That's it." Can you do something that makes you feel productive, today?
Amy Dresner:
No one's going to let you fall on your ass and you know, and be homeless and starve to death. Let's just try to not catch this thing and stay clean. That's it.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
That's it.
Amy Dresner:
And be kind to others people. You know what I mean?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Absolutely.
Amy Dresner:
But there's very few places where I'm finding that I can find any relief. Like I'm taking a lot of baths was candles and corny shit like that. Do you know what I mean? Like for real.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
You got to do, what you have to do.
Amy Dresner:
You know what I mean? It's like I can't go get a massage. F’ing self care has gone. I mean, my, all my fake nails are falling out. All my eyelash extensions are falling out. I'm like, "Ooh, I'm looking good!" You know? I'm like-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
We're all-
Amy Dresner:
Everyone's hair color is coming in. Look how long my bangs. It's just like, okay, f’ing am I the Ramones? What's happening? F man, I'm not cutting my own bangs. I've made that mistake before. I'm not doing it. I'm not doing that, quarantine bonnet. That's like, f it. You know?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Well, everybody's going through it. So we're all surviving quarantine together with our own... Locked in our homes and all our own demons with it.
Amy Dresner:
I know right. Everyone's a starting to get cabin fever and you know.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, yeah it's going to be is, it might be some real interesting things that come out of this as well if we can survive it. You know, we probably have more tools than everyone else, so.
Amy Dresner:
Sure. Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, I mean, I definitely am, running things by my sponsor. Like, "hi, how do I respond to this text?" Because I just don't trust myself right now. You know what I mean? But you know, I just, if you're new, just go to the Zoom. Just do online support. However you can do it one day at a time. It's like we're all in this together. It's a really tough time. I mean, I just feel like if people could get sober during this period, they can get sober through anything. For real. It's a difficult time for people with time.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. It's an incredibly difficult time, but I really do believe that we're going to get through it.
Amy Dresner:
Yeah, of course. I mean, I just think we have to have empathy. We have to be kind to each other, even when other people are being assholes. So you just have to be kind. There's no other way out.
Amy Dresner:
You have, we need to model that behavior for other people as best as we can. Just say thank you and smile through our masks. Smiling eyes or whatever f’ing Tyra Banks says, "Smizing!" I don't even know. So out of my mind, I've been in the house for f’ing weeks. AHHHHHH!
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh my god. Deep breaths. You are amazing. Thank you so much for being here.
Amy Dresner:
Thanks for having me.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And we'll have you come on when your next book comes out.
Amy Dresner:
Yeah, or the pilot. We're writing the pilot now.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Awesome.
Amy Dresner:
That's my dream is to, to have a show that shows addiction and it's reality. Not exploitive, not hysterically funny, but not super depressing either. But not intervention, not f’ing sober, celebrity rehab where they cut to just like the gross. The reality of us as human beings struggling in pain.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I know it's going to happen for you.
Amy Dresner:
So that's my, my goal. And a female driven thing. You know, where we can talk about, like I said, all this stuff we've talked about. The stigma that's attached to being a woman that's an IV drug addict or a sex addict or a perpetrator of domestic violence or all that kind of stuff.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Well thank you for leading the way.
Amy Dresner:
My vagina says you're welcome. My vagina that has closed hermetically over the years.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Thank you Amy's vagina.
Amy Dresner:
Well, it's so great to meet you and I think that I'm so happy for what you guys are doing. Being able to provide for people right now.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Thank you.
Amy Dresner:
So yeah, follow me on Instagram. Follow me on Facebook, follow me on Twitter. Check out the new Fix piece, addiction recovery.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
We're going to put it all in the links. So my [inaudible 01:31:04] and your articles.
Amy Dresner:
You get it on Amazon and it's a super juicy read. Whether in you're in recovery or not. And you know, funny, which is what I think people need. We got to laugh right now.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, keep me posted and stay in touch.
Amy Dresner:
Sounds good doll face. Big kiss, bye.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
This podcast is sponsored by Lionrock recovery. Lionrock provides online substance abuse counseling where clients can get help from the privacy of their own home. They're accredited by the Joint Commission and sessions are private, affordable, and user-friendly. Call their free helpline at 800-258-6550 or visit www.lionrockrecovery.com for more information.
PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [01:31:54]