She Tried Therapy for Decades… Then 12 Steps Changed Her Life | Barb Nangle | 195

What if the patterns that have shaped someone’s entire life were never actually the problem but the solution waiting to be uncovered?

In this deeply honest episode of Manders Mindset, host Amanda Russo sits down with boundaries coach, speaker, and author Barb Nangel, whose life transformed at 52 through 12-step recovery after decades of therapy only scratched the surface. From growing up in a dysfunctional environment to years of addiction, codependency, and emotional struggle, Barb shares how hitting a breaking point became the doorway to real healing.

Throughout the conversation, Barb unpacks the powerful shifts that changed everything from recognizing codependency and victim mentality to learning how to build boundaries that create true internal safety. Together, Amanda and Barb explore the role of spirituality, the impact of unresolved trauma, and why lasting transformation requires more than just awareness, it requires action, community, and a willingness to look inward.

At its core, this episode is a reminder that it is never too late to change, heal, and reclaim personal power... No matter how long someone has felt stuck.

💡 In this episode, listeners will discover:

🔥 How 12-step recovery can create breakthroughs where therapy alone may fall short
🧠 The hidden signs of codependency and how it shows up in everyday life
💔 How unresolved trauma and family dysfunction shape behavior and relationships
💡 Why boundaries are the key to breaking people-pleasing patterns
⚡ The shift from victim mentality to personal responsibility
🪶 How spirituality and community support long-term healing
🎯 Why it is never too late to transform your life and rewrite your story

⏰ Timeline Summary

[6:40] Childhood, family dynamics, and the early behaviors that pointed to deeper struggles
[12:15] Addiction, compulsive overeating, and the patterns that followed her into adulthood
[18:40] A breaking point, discovering codependency, and the moment everything began to click
[25:10] Finding ACA, CoDA, and Overeaters Anonymous and why 12-step recovery changed everything
[32:45] Grief, family loss, and reconciling with her brother in a powerful new way
[38:20] How recovery led her to boundaries work 
[49:10] The biggest mindset shift of all

Growth and healing are always possible and sometimes, one conversation can be the beginning of everything changing.

To Connect with Amanda:

Schedule a 1:1 Virtual Breathwork Session HERE

📸 Instagram: @thebreathinggoddess

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To Connect with Barb:

Schedule a Free 30 minute "Say No Without Guilt" call with Barb: http://barbchat.net/

Transcript

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Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Manders Mindset Podcast. Here you'll find both monologue and interviews of entrepreneurs, coaches, healers, and a variety of other people, where your host, Amanda Roosevelt, will discuss her own mindset and perspective, and her guest mindset and perspective on the world around us. Amanders and her guests will help explain to you how shifting your mindset will shift your life.

SPEAKER_01 0:27

Welcome to Mandarin's Mindset, where we explore the power of shifting your mindset to shift your life. I'm your host, Amanda Breakstein, and I am here today with Bio Flanders. And she is a founders coach, speaker, author, and podcast host. At 52, her life transformed for 12-step recovery after decades of therapy merely skimmed the surface. And we are going to delve down her journey. Thanks for joining me, Bob.

SPEAKER_02 0:59

Thank you so much for having me, Amanda.

SPEAKER_01 1:01

I'm excited for this conversation.

Identity As A Helper And Seeker

SPEAKER_01 1:04

So who would you say Bob is at the core?

SPEAKER_02 1:09

Oh, that's a really good question. Who am I at the core? I am a growth-oriented being. I cannot not grow. It's not even like it's a value of mine. Um, and I'm also thirsty for knowledge. I identify pretty strongly as a spiritual being, which for me means I know that I am part of something greater than myself. I do forget from time to time, but it's momentary. I mean, I there's so much, but I think that those are pretty, pretty big. Wait, I gotta say, I'm a helper. Like as a recovering, like codependent, rescuer, fixer, saver person, and I don't overdo it anymore the way that I used to, but I I am a helper person. I just that's just what I've always been. I don't know how I didn't say that in the top three, but yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:04

Have you always had a thirstful knowledge?

SPEAKER_02 2:07

I I don't think I realized it until I was, I think, 24, 25. I had gone to college and then dropped out. I went because my parents told me to go. And I never thought I was dumb, but I didn't know that I was smart until I was working in a warehouse and I took a class there after hours offered by the local community college. And that was the first time that I realized it was smart. I needed that, like the external validation for that, which ended up becoming the theme of my life. And I started taking classes and I realized that I had this thirst for knowledge that I just didn't know that I had.

Childhood Chaos And Early Numbing

SPEAKER_01 2:49

Now, can you take us down memory lane a little bit? Tell us about childhood, upbringing.

SPEAKER_02 2:56

Yeah, I mean, I I I talk about this all the time because my journey into becoming a boundaries coach has everything to do with my life story. So I grew up in Tolland, Connecticut, which is a suburban, predominantly white town in sort of Northeast Connecticut in New England, north coat northeast of the United States, for those who are listening internationally. My dad was a pharmacist, my mom was a secretary at a variety of different places. When I was four, when my dad graduated from college, I remember him being a member of a fraternity. And actually, my brother and I, he's a year and a half older than me, going to frat parties with my parents and sleeping on the coats on the bed with all the coats. And then my parents bought our house, which my brother just sold in 1967 in the summer. My dad had graduated in May. And so then those parties happened at our house. And I remember like trying to sleep, and there's like, I don't know, 50 people drinking and carousing in my house. Um, I also like in addition to like that kind of chaotic stuff, I lived in a fantastic neighborhood. We lived on a dead end street. There were 10 houses, probably seven of them had kids in our age range. We could ride our bikes on the street all the time because there was almost no cars going on. We played outside a lot. I really didn't understand until I was an adult how dysfunctional my family was, because it just was. It was just the way that it was. Um, then I when I got my bicycle, it was like, oh my god, it was the best thing ever. It was like freedom. But I started like now I know that me sucking my thumb until I was 10 was numbing behavior. And then I started smoking cigarettes when I was 13 in the eighth grade, and then I started smoking weed the first week of high school at 14. I started drinking at 16. And then I think the switch sort of flipped from me becoming I was going from a regular eater to being a compulsive overeater in my early 20s. And I just thought all that stuff was normal. And I I just like everybody around me, we call it partying. Now I understand. Like partying is when you like dance and have fun and play games and stuff. But back then it was called partying and it was just basically getting wasted all the time. And, you know, like I said, I went to college and I dropped out my second semester because I was there because my parents told me to go. And I would go, I would get high and go because I commuted with my mom, because by then she was a secretary in the music department at the University of Connecticut. So I would commute with my mom, but I'd go to my friend's dorm and sleep all day or get jobs or get high. It's not that I didn't go to classes, I did, but I also didn't know how to study, didn't know how to plan my time. I made it through high school by going to school every day, not because I was good at planning or taking notes or anything like that. And so when I dropped out, my mom was like, you know, you got to get a job. So I went back to the full-time job I'd been working the year before I went to college and just really did a lot of parting. Then when I got this thirst for knowledge, I didn't stop getting high and drunk all the time, but it wasn't constant because I really enjoyed learning. You can't do that when you're like drunk and high and stuff. But what I have said for a long time is from when I was 14 until I was 24, I was either high trying to get high or sleeping. But when I was 24, it it subsided a little bit just because of like going to school and stuff like that. And I even had jobs where I like got high, like I left work, got high, and came back and stuff like that. So even though I was working, I was still, you know, I keep wanting to say partying, and I just realized now partying isn't the right thing. So um I mentioned to becoming a compulsive overeater in my early 20s.

Food Addiction And The Weight Spiral

SPEAKER_02 7:02

In my 20s, I battled with about 35 pounds. And then when I was in my early 30s, I got into graduate school and I had been working for Weight Watchers before that, which is the only way that I was able to keep my weight off because you had to be a member to work there and you had to stay within two pounds of your goal weight. And I was always on probation. So I started grad school, quit Weight Watchers the day before, and then I also started peeling apart this like 10-year relationship I was in. And I gained, I really don't know exactly how much, but between 80 and 100 pounds in about 15 months. I mean, it was rapid. And then my whole 30s and 40s just battled with like it was more like 100 pounds. I'm now down over 100 pounds for my top weight. I've been at my goal weight. It's coming on eight years pretty soon that I've been at my goal weight, and it has everything to do with my 12-step recovery in the program called Overeaters Anonymous. But, you know, I'll fast forward through all of the like dysfunctional relationships. I've never been married, I've never had kids, I've lived with a number of men. I ended up getting a master's degree in sociology from the University of Connecticut, and then I got a job at Yale University as a program coordinator for urban education, prevention, and policy research. So we ran mostly college access programs. And I did that for 19 years.

Codependence Bottom And Finding Recovery

SPEAKER_02 8:23

About 17 years into that journey, I hit what I call a codependent bottom. Are you familiar with the term codependent, Amanda, yourself? Yes. Okay. Some audiences are not. So do you think it's important to kind of talk about what that means for your listeners, or do you feel like people very much get that? You could explain it. Yeah. So a codependent person, like the typical codependent, is someone who's in some kind of a relationship with an addict or an alcoholic, but it doesn't have to be the case. So when you're codependent, you are completely fixated on everybody else and what they're doing, maybe what they're not doing. You do a lot of rescuing, fixing, and saving. But what you essentially do is ignore yourself and either act like you have no needs or don't even worry about your own needs and just put everyone else first. And so I hit what I call a codependent bottom, which was the most emotional, the most excruciating pain I've ever been in my entire life. And it happened as a result of me inviting this guy, Dan, who was homeless. He had become a parishioner at my church right around the same time that I had volunteered to serve in a leadership position running a project serving homeless people. And I remember thinking, like, oh, this is amazing. Like, God brought this homeless person to me and my life at the perfect time so that I could get a better understanding of what I like to be a homeless person, so that when I'm serving homeless people, I'm not serving the homeless, but I'm serving homeless people. And it was true. Like he was actually very, very helpful. So, about I don't know, three or four months into our friendship, we had this massive snowstorm here in New Haven. So I invited him to stay at my home, which I now know was not normal, but then I didn't because I thought I was nice. Um, I knew he hated homeless shelters, so he stayed, and within a few weeks, he was practically living with me, and then I soon felt trapped in my own home. So he was a self-proclaimed addict and alcoholic. I think on reflection now that he may have also been had some kind of personality disorder because this guy fuffed with my head in a way I had never experienced. So one day I was in therapy, I was talking about Dan, and then middle of a sentence, Amanda, this is me. I go, Do you think I need to go to Al-Anon? And my therapist is like, Yes. So, in case people don't know about Al-Anon, they probably know about Alcoholics Anonymous, which was the very first 12-step recovery program ever developed. It was created in the 1930s in the United States. It was the first time in the history of human beings that droves and droves of alcoholics got and stayed sober. Well, the second 12-step recovery program ever created was called Aladon. And this was for the loved ones of alcoholics. And people might wonder, well, why do the loved ones of alcoholics need a program? And it's because alcoholism is actually a family disease. The person who's the drinker is the main symptom. You know, so what happens for the loved ones of alcoholics is the things we do sort of naturally that we think are going to be helpful to the alcoholic end up being like super controlling when we're like that. We're trying to do all this stuff to get them to stop drinking, to get them into rehab, to get them to detox, to get them to go to recovery meetings, to get them to do stuff. And we start putting all of our energy into them, and then ultimately we become resentful of them, and then they become resentful of us, and they start to use us as excuses for drinking. So I had heard of Al-Anon. And so I went home from that therapy session, and whatever I put into Google, the word codependent came up, and I was like, What? What is this word? Now, Amanda, I started therapy when I was 15. I've read 70 Gajillion self-help books. I've done workshops and workbooks and work groups and seminars and retreats and support groups and spiritual, like you name it. Like all of that stuff. Never never heard this word codependent. And I remember saying to my therapist, okay, what else don't I know about myself? This news that I'm codependent isn't like getting hit in the head with a baseball, it's like getting hit in the head with a planet. What the fuck else don't I know about myself? Like, how is it possible that I've been this deeply introspective person on this self-help and also outside help journey for decades, 37 years of therapy when this was going like by the time this happened, and I've never heard this word codependent. And she said, you know, Barb, I think for you, codependence is like this unifying concept that pulls together a bunch of things that you did know about yourself. You just didn't know they were related. And initially, Amanda, I thought she was just saying it to be nice. But as time went on, I think it was really true. So I started going to Codependence Anonymous, which is another 12-step recovery program. And I very quickly felt a sense of relief. I think the relief was partially knowing there's a like this, it's almost like it's a syndrome, kind of like this thing that explains me that other people have it. They've recovered, there's a program of recovery. I was starting to like understand things. And I also very quickly said to somebody who may have been Dan, you know, I think I need to be reparented. But I thought that I made that term up. I didn't know reparenting was a thing that people do. Well, six weeks into my I'll call it Coda is like the short name for codependence anonymous, just like AA is the short name for alcoholics anonymous. I went away to go visit some friends, one of whom had been in AA for like 10 years at that point. She'd always raved about how amazing it was. And I said, You're gonna love this. I'm going to codependence anonymous. She was like, This is great. While you're here, let's see if we can find a coda meeting and we'll go together. Well, she couldn't find a coda meeting, but she found an ACA meeting, which I knew of as ACOA, Adult Children of Alcoholics. I didn't think that I'd qualified, but I was like, I'll go for you because her dad's an alcoholic. So we walk into the meeting, and in one of the opening readings, they said we reparent ourselves. And then they read the list of the 14 traits of an adult child, which is affectionately called the laundry list. Now, my friend Heidi, who brought me there, tells me I sobbed the whole meeting. I don't remember that, but I do remember I bought the literature, came home to New Haven, started going to ACA. I continued to go to Coda. And then a few weeks into going to ACA in New Haven, an additional women's ACA meeting started. And I started going to that. And a few weeks later, I started, I got together with three other women that formed a small step group, and we started actually working through the ACA 12-step workbook together. What I learned over time is that ACA is actually adult children of alcoholics and dysfunctional families. Now that I qualified for, but I hadn't heard the and dysfunctional families. And I started really like understanding what happened to me. I didn't know something, quote, happened to me, and that is that I grew up with intergenerational family dysfunction, that the result was childhood trauma, and that this codependency and this lack of boundaries that I had was the result of trauma, as were many other things. About a year into my 12-step journey, I decided to let go of CODA. I was only going to meetings. I wasn't really actively working the 12 steps in that program. I also felt like it was more like a maybe a 75% fit, whereas ACA was 100% fit. And that turned out to be a higher-powered moment for me because I let go of a Monday night meeting. And then one of my friends that I was working the 12 steps with in ACA was gently trying to get me to go to Overeaters Anonymous. And so I went to this workshop with her and I was like, oh my God, I'm a compulsive overeater, which I didn't even know it was a thing. Turned out, lo and behold, my Monday nights are now free. There was a Monday night downtown New Haven Overeaters Anonymous meeting. And I've been going to that meeting ever since. Um, and the first two years in recovery, Amanda, I learned so many things about myself that just never came up in those 37 years, not continuous, but almost, of therapy and all that other work that I did. So I didn't know that I had trauma. I didn't know about intergenerational dysfunction. I didn't know that I had no boundaries. I didn't know that I had victim mentality. I didn't know that I had wildly unrealistic expectations of myself, other people, and the world. I didn't know that I lied all the time. I truly believed I was an honest person when I got in recovery. And yet I had lied about cigarettes, drugs, alcohol, relationships, and I especially lied in the people pleasing department. I didn't know that I just really was not accepting of what was going on around me. Like none of this stuff came up, and there's more, but none of it came up in all those years previous. And I had been trying, so I can't even imagine what it's like for people who have not been trying. So I'm gonna stop there because I know I've been talking for quite a long time, and I imagine that since you're the host, you'd probably like face some stuff.

SPEAKER_01 18:15

No

Family Loss And Brother Reconnection

SPEAKER_01 18:16

worries. Now, backtracking a little bit, do you have just one brother?

SPEAKER_02 18:21

I actually have two. So my older brother, Steve, is a year and a half older than my brother Pat was eight years younger than me. He died in 2006 at the age of 35. He also had a mental health substitute problem. He died of Legionnaires' disease. Um, he was severely debilitated by his bipolar disorder. So he had a psychotic break when he was 20, and he was in and out of the hospital many times in the next 15 years, and he couldn't even hold a job. He was on disability, but it was just super debilitating. He was mostly on the depressive end of the bipolar spectrum and just really didn't have a will to live. When he died, I I became undone. I mean, it was like for two and a half years, I didn't even wear makeup because I just cried it off all the time. And it was really, really, really rough. But, you know, my older brother is actually, he's been sober since he was 24, but he stopped going to recovery meetings. And in fact, we have just in the last six months reconciled after years. He was in a super depressive state and living very much like a hermit. He had this wake-up call earlier this year when an old friend of ours went to go visit him, and my brother says he read me the ride back. And my brother started getting help, and he's just he's since like sold the our family home, and he's been staying on and off with me because I want him to. And I'm still like, who am I that I want my brother not just around, but in my home? You know, I told him you can't live here, but you could stay here from time to time. So this has been an amazing year for me for many reasons, but that's the highlight that I've reconciled with my brother. And we're we're being super honest and vulnerable with each other in a way we have never, ever, ever been. And we've both like really apologized, made amends. We've done a lot of processing. We go in and out of like processing the past and just living in the present, processing the past and living in the present kind of thing. It's been really incredible. I'm sorry about your younger brother. Yeah, yeah, me too. You know, he didn't want to be here, and I truly believe that we returned to the source, and so I truly believe he is in a better place. So I was grieving for me, not him.

SPEAKER_01 20:48

So now I'm

Education Comeback And Yale Career

SPEAKER_01 20:49

curious. I want to transition back again to Chad. You were going to college, commuting with your mom, and you post that. What was your next step from there?

SPEAKER_02 21:00

I stopped going back after spring break. My mom was like, Are you gonna finish? And I said, No. So she's like, Well, get a job. So I had previously worked my senior year as a cashier in a retail store. And then that year between that when I was 18 and 19, between high school and college, I worked full-time at that store. And I stayed there as a Sunday only employee while I was in college. And it turned out that I was able to get a full-time job when I was there, which was great because I could still get high. And I drank and smoked weed and stuff with my friends after work. I worked in retail, and then I got a job in a warehouse doing data entry. That's where I took that first community college course. It was called the business and learning. It was like an introductory business course. And the thing is, I've had an income since I was 11. I started a paper root when I was 11. It started babysitting when I was 11. I started working for my dad for pay in his pharmacy when I was 12. Well, and I'd had an income since I was 11 years old. So I understood business principles. I just didn't know they had names and that people studied them. So it was like I was drinking this stuff up. And I honestly believe before then that I think I had a reading comprehension problem. What I would say to people is it goes in one eye and out the other. You know how we say that about hearing in the ears. And, you know, granted, I was high all the time, but that semester when I took that class, I was driven. I remember thinking, I think there's something to this education thing that my parents, because my parents were like college, child, child, college, child, child. It was mostly my dad. And but they didn't tell me like what that actually meant or helped me prepare for it. Like it was weird. So I started realizing, you know, I've worked in retail, I've worked in a warehouse. This is not what I want my life to be. So I was motivated to learn. I was studying a topic that was familiar to me. And the textbook was fantastic. So it was a textbook that had the vocabulary word in bold and then defined on the margin. And it just really, really helped me a lot. And I remember thinking, I don't care if I have to read this seven times. I'm going to read it until I comprehended it. And it's like I broke through this reading comprehension barrier or something like that. And so then I started taking classes one at a time at the community college. I left the warehouse and worked at a bank, and they actually paid for classes. So then I started taking two at a time. Then I left there and I sold, I don't know if you've ever heard of Jaffra Cosmetics. It's one of those direct marketing companies where you have a party in your home and they sell skincare and stuff like that. I started doing that and going to school and cleaning houses. And then I got into the restaurant business. And my last two semesters at the community college, I took four classes each. And by then I decided I wanted to major in sociology, which I only decided by reading course catalogs. I couldn't make up my mind what I wanted to study. And by then I knew, like, oh my God, I love school. I did so I had like a 3.9 GPA, whereas when I was at Ukraine, I think I had like a two point something. I don't know what it was. It was really low because I didn't do the work. And I remember saying to my advisor, like, I can't believe I'm the same person. Like I was a fucking pothead when I graduated high school. And he's like, What what do you think happened? And I was like, I really think that I went back to that value of education that my parents taught me about. And I applied for graduate school, but I didn't know what graduate school was. I had no, I thought it was going to be like more undergrad. It's not, by the way. And I got in, I stayed by the skin of my teeth. So I lived within 15 minutes of the University of Connecticut, which is where I went and got my master's degree. And I didn't get accepted until six weeks before the semester ended. And I know it was because they had someone else on their waiting list that they wanted instead of me. And I got to graduate school, and I was not groomed for graduate school the way all of my peers were. I didn't know anything about the whole publishing the papers and what journals were. I didn't know about things like the American Sociological Association. Meanwhile, my peers in my same cohort had participated in conferences. They had written journal articles. They had been taken under the wing of their advisors as undergrads and knew what they were going to study. I was like, uh what? My first semester, I remember feeling like it was intellectual boot camp. And you know how, like in a military boot camp, they say, like, we're going to basically tear you down and then build you back up in the image we want. And that's essentially what I felt was happening. And I have been extremely proud of my bachelor's degree because I worked my fucking ass off to get it. And I had it nicely trained and I had it on the wall in my bedroom. I remember laying on my bed looking at it, going, how did I get that? Like I felt dumb. I felt stupid. And I eventually got over that. And at one point I thought I don't have what it takes for grad school. And then I realized I actually do have what it takes. It's not what I want. Because I got what I call the backstage view of academia. Now I loved the rigor and the knowledge of academia, but I hated the egotistical bullshit. I hated that, you know, I felt like as social scientists, we know what we need to do to make the world a better place. We're not doing it. And we're writing papers to each other in these journals that people out in the world are not benefiting from. And I left. And luckily for me, I got a job at Yale. And one of the things I liked about where I worked was that it was very much at the crux of the academic world in the community. So I worked at a place with a bunch of people that called themselves community psychologists. And so they were taking what is the cutting-edge stuff of academia say, bring it to the world the community, the actual people that live in the world, and sharing what they learned, and then also taking what they were applying and bring it back to the academic world and saying, yep, this is working. I really appreciated that. I was there for 17 years working for the same boss who I loved dearly, but who also drove me crazy. And I now know I had ultimately a 19 or codependent relationship with. So I hope that answers. I know I gave you a lot of detail, but I most of the time I'm on a podcast. I don't get to share any of this stuff.

SPEAKER_01 28:13

It makes sense that you tapped back into the value of education. And that's how you were able to make that shift.

SPEAKER_02 28:21

And you know something that I didn't realize until I was in recovery, the therapist that I was working with when I got in recovery, who was like, Yeah, you're codependent. She's the one that pointed out to me, like my dad's message with college, college, college, college, college. What did I do? I worked in a college access program. I was like, oh my god, I'm my father's daughter. Now I would say, like, I've never believed college is for everyone. It's just not. But now with the way that like the internet is and the the and AI, like even before AI, just learning is at your fingertips. And if you want to know something, you can find it probably for free. And so many people graduate with just ridiculous amounts of student debt that I just don't think formal education is necessary for and anywhere near as many people as used to go. I mean, certain things, probably lawyers and doctors are the first ones that come to my mind. Yes, they should have formal education. But you know, not everybody needs it.

SPEAKER_01 29:29

I completely agree. I'm curious when you shifted into being a boundaries coach and how how that officially came to be for you. Sure. I'd love to tell that story. It's my second favorite story.

SPEAKER_02 29:44

So I got laid off from Yale

Layoff To Entrepreneurship And Coaching

SPEAKER_02 29:47

in at the end of June 2017. So by then I'd been in recovery for about two and a half years. And the week, the last couple days that I was working there, one of my colleagues invited me to lunch. And she had come to Yale as a postdoctoral fellow and had recently become a new faculty member. And she had written a grant. And when she was writing the grant, she had come to me and said, You know, Barb, I've never created a project from the beginning. Can you help me think through what I need to write in this grant? And the reason she did that was because she was doing a study on our project and she wasn't getting the kind of traction and data that she needed to get. And I was like, that's because you're trying to do things too late. You need to set up a schedule. She was trying to interview academic advisors working for us in the schools with students and have them audio tape their sessions with their students and then analyze them. And she just wasn't getting the data. And I was like, that's because you need to set up a calendar for the entire school year before the school year starts of when you're gonna meet with them, when they're gonna meet with their students. You may switch them around a little bit, but if you don't have them on your calendar, it's never gonna get done. So I'm making these numbers up, but let's just say the first year that she tried to do the study, she got like 20% of what she wanted. And after me helping her think through, she got like 80% of what she wanted. That's why she came to me to ask me to help her about the grant. So two days before I, my last day, we're having lunch together. And she's like, Barb, guess what? We got the grant. So the way that it works in a university is you'll be like, we're gonna pay 17% of this person's salary and 17% of their effort is gonna be on this grant, and this person's gonna be 25%, and we're gonna pull these different people. And so she said, I like, is this real? So I read over what she had written, and I said, if you can get people who can kind of like hit the ground running, you can absolutely do it. But if you have to train people up from zero, no. And I said, you know what? I'm laid off, and I know that I may come back in three months because we'd written another grant that, if funded, I would have come back. And I knew that I had up to eight months of severance pay coming to me. So I'm like, I'm gonna at least have the next three months. Tell you what, I'm gonna volunteer for you four hours a week. Well, her project was called Innovation to Impact, and it was teaching substance use researchers about entrepreneurship. Given my time in recovery, I was like, substance use researchers, these people are right up my alley. So this project exposed me to the world of entrepreneurship, startup, innovation in New Haven and at Yale. And I, once I started volunteering for her, I got exposed to more and more and more. And I was like, oh my God, these are my people. Like I knew people in recovery were my people. I was like, oh my God, entrepreneurs are my people. Now, my dad was an entrepreneur. He opened a pharmacy when I was eight, and I literally got off the school box at Mangles Pharmacy, starting at eight. So I literally grew up in a small business. So this shit is in my blood. And I didn't end up getting back at Yale. I ended up being, you know, not finding the job, going on unemployment. But in the meantime, I had found a job at that what's now called Psi City. It's the Psy Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale that used to be called the Yale Entrepreneurship Institute Entrepreneurship Institute. There was a job there that I really wanted. And I applied for it. And I just started acting like it was my job. It was like, it was something like the mentor, entrepreneurship, and network coordinator. And I'm like a networker connector person by nature. And it was so so I started just doing the job and like gathering all this information so that when I went to the interview, I'd be like, here, here's my plan for what you should do. And I did all this work, and I actually went back to the woman I was volunteering for and another guy I was volunteering for in February and said, I've got to stop volunteering for you because now I need to look for a job. And what the guy that I was volunteering for said to me, Barb, tell me why you don't have your own coaching and consulting business because that's what you do. And I was like, not the first time that I've thought about this, but when I had thought about it years ago, I actually did a survey of seven small business people years prior to see what they needed in their business. So they knew I wanted to help small business people. And I realized from that effort that though I am a self-starter, when I work for other people, when it comes to myself, I don't even show up for myself. It's not gonna like I'm not gonna run my own business. So he planted this seed. Then I found out I wasn't even gonna be interviewed for this dream job I'd been doing, which just blindsided me because the policy at Yale was that if you were if the HR said that you were qualified, then the hiring department had to interview. Well, they changed the policy maybe because of me. I don't know. I literally, when I found that I wasn't getting interviewed, I busted out crying for like 30 seconds, and then all of a sudden I went, Oh, maybe this is why work and have my own business, like he just suggested to me. The very next day, Amanda, this is a total higher powered moment. This woman that I had met in Cape God at an ACA meeting was supposed to come and visit me the week before, but she hurt her leg and she couldn't come. So the next day, after I find all this out and I'm boo-hooing, she comes to visit me. I forgot she's a business coach. She says to me, You've done more work in the last seven months unemployed than I have, and I have my own business. You've got to stop saying that you're a self-starter for other people and not yourself. The you tell me that, like this course that you took years ago that taught you this thing where you do the job before you have it, it got you all this stuff. So that course was not a waste of money. So stop telling yourself that. And you're a different person now, Barb. You're in recovery now, so you do show up for yourself. So these are all mindset things. You know, I'm sure you're bing, bing, bing, binging as I'm saying all this stuff. And I was like, oh my God. So long story short, I just started doing stuff. And I eventually started my podcast, which is called Fragmented to Whole Life Lesson Turn 12 Step Recovery, never thinking it would have anything to do with my business. It was all about carrying the message of recovery to those who still suffer. It's now the number one way that I get clients. But I did, I wanted to start it because I learned so much in recovery. I'm like, there's so much wisdom in recovery that's just not getting out there. And then I started coaching, and I thought I wanted to coach entrepreneurs who were in recovery. And then I realized I'm not really a business coach. I probably shouldn't be coaching entrepreneurs, and not everybody wants to know they're in recovery, but I did learn I had to have a niche. And so I decided on boundaries because they had such a dramatic impact on me as a codependent. You know, I think of my core wound as codependent. Boundaries are essentially the antidote to codependence. So I learned boundaries as a byproduct of 12-step recovery. And after I got a handle on them, I was like, these boundaries are amazing. So I started reading about them. And it helped me retroactively, Amanda, to understand what happened, like how did I not have boundaries? And then what was I doing as I was building them? And as I was reading, these books were just like words, words, words. And I'm a pretty visual person. I would start drawing these images to like visually depict what I was understanding about boundaries. Well, those drawings turned into handouts, which turned into a workbook, which is now the backbone of my boundaries coaching program, which is a multimedia program. So I retroactively figured out what helped me. And then I've recreated it for people. And so I do PowerPoints with visuals, I have podcast episodes, I have articles that I read. Of course, I do live coaching with people. I do a lot of feelings work with people because that's the number one reason that people either don't set me to u set boundaries or they cave on them because of the feelings, especially guilt and shame. The big, huge insight I've had this year is that learning how to build healthy boundaries is really about creating internal safety so that you can withstand the vicissitudes of light. So I I've had to do a lot of somatic work. I did yoga for 12-step recovery my first two and a half years. I've done trauma release exercises, I've done tapping on and off. I'm doing it again. I'd still do yoga, I do a lot of written meditation, exceedingly important in my life. I do other trauma exercises because the issues are in our tissues. And so my becoming a boundaries coach, it's literally all of this stuff together. And I want to tie this up neatly, and then I promise I will stop talking again. When I got out of grad school as a sociologist, I was like, my mission is to level the playing field because I really got as a sociologist that it's at the societal level or the macro level that these structures create inequality in our society. And it's at the micro level where we do our individual interactions where we can weaken and disrupt those structures. So when I got in recovery, it's not like that mission went away. It just went to the side because my mission was to heal people in the ways in which I wanted and needed to be healed. And what I've realized in the last couple of years is that these commissions are combined because my ideal clients are professional women like I was, who say yes when they really want to say no and who neglect themselves because they're so focused on others. Well, women are not going to make inroads into the social structures of society when they keep saying yes to shit they don't want to do and when they keep neglecting themselves. So now I'm like, oh my God, my mission as a boundaries coach is not just to heal the individuals, but to help them move up in the social structures and then ultimately heal those structures as well.

SPEAKER_01 40:20

That's amazing that that guy that said that to you. There's so much power in even just one other person believing in us.

SPEAKER_02 40:29

Right. One phrase. Why don't you have your own coaching and consulting business? Because that's what you do.

SPEAKER_01 40:37

Look where I am. But it's so true. You know, sometimes we need to hear the same thing from somebody else. It seems like it struck a different light bulb when someone else.

SPEAKER_02 40:46

Well, I was also a new person because of the recovery. So it was probably, I think it was 2014 when I took a course or I bought an online course called 1K on the side by Ramit Seti to learn how to like create an own your own business on the side just to earn like maybe a thousand dollars a month or something like that. And and I I told myself that was a waste of money, and no, it wasn't. And that was probably 2014. So this was 2018 when he said this to me. And I got into recovery in 2015. So I had been through this incredibly transformative journey and really figured out like who am I? Where do I end and other people begin? What do I like, want, need, and prefer? I didn't know that stuff before because I was such a chameleon.

SPEAKER_01 41:34

That makes so much sense. And I think that's awesome that you got to almost like test it out by doing by volunteering to help these two people that you did it with. You were doing a nice gesture, but it also gave you the experience. And then you're like, oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_02 41:49

Yeah, right. It exposed me to worlds like through Yale University. You know, like there's a lot of smart smart people at Yale University. Then once I started my own business, the woman from Yale ended up reaching out to me and asking me, can I pay you to come and be like part-time on this project? And I ended up doing that for five years. And then I also ended up working in a co-working place, which my job was community manager. So I worked with entrepreneurs in both of my part-time jobs. And it was mainly my job for both of them was to connect people to the people and the organizations and the resources they wanted needed to grow their business.

SPEAKER_01 42:29

Now, I want to transition it, Chad. I have a different type of question. You've attended a few different types of the 12-step processes. Would you think that that type of meeting is

Who 12 Step Programs Help

SPEAKER_01 42:40

beneficial for anybody who's struggling with whether it's alcohol, whether it's eating whatever it is? You think that type of program would help?

SPEAKER_02 42:50

So for me, the 12 steps are where it's at because of all the things that I try. So I do know that it's not for everybody. So if you usually it's someone who has hit some kind of a bottom. You're not like I was talking to somebody the other day who was in over Years Anonymous and then left and just came back. And she really she just wants to lose weight. And I'm like, this isn't a weight loss program. This is for someone who struggles with eating compulsively. They don't want to eat compulsively. That's why it's called a compulsion. I'm like, you should probably try Weight Watchers, right? So so typically it's someone who they've tried everything and then they go to a 12-step program. So, but also sometimes you don't, you might just hear about it and be like, I don't need to get to the actual bottom, you know, level. I don't need to be like living in a pit or whatever if I see that this thing is gonna work for me. They are spiritual programs. And as I said earlier, to me, spirituality is about understanding that I'm part of something greater than myself. So you do not have to believe in God. You can be an atheist or an agnostic. You just have to recognize that there's something out there that's greater than you that you can tap into. And what a lot of people who are atheists and agnostics do is they use the power of the group or the power of the entire fellowship as their higher power. Because the what we say in 12 step recovery is your problem is allowed. Of power, and when you have a lack of power, what you need is some other power greater than you, a higher power. Um, I grew up agnostic, and then when I was in my mid-30s, I read the book Conversations with God by Neil Donald Walsh over the course of a weekend, and by that Monday, I was a believer in my own conception of God. And then 15 years later, when I was 52, I got into 12-step recovery. So I had I had defined myself as a pretty spiritual person by the time I got into recovery, but my spirituality just magnified and exploded when I got into recovery. I consider myself to be a very spiritual being. I pray multiple times a day. I call it making conscious contact with my higher power. I choose to use the word God and I often say he, I don't mean it. Like to me, God doesn't have gender, just like clouds and well don't have gender, you know. But I say he because it's expeditious. But when I first became a spiritual person, if I wrote the word God, I would write G-O-D-D-E because it was like halfway between God and goddess. And now I'm like, I just don't. It's just expeditious to say God and to say he. And um, so there are spiritual programs that turn some people off. And then also they're run by other people who were addicts, alcoholics, codependents, compulsive overeaters. And, you know, hopefully you find a healthy meeting. Sometimes there are meetings that are not that healthy, so you go to other ones rather than leaving the fellowship. And to me, there's really three reasons why 12-step recovery works so well. Number one, it's a spiritual program. So this is not just about you need some tactics. This is about being this. Number two, it's a stepwise program. There are 12 steps that you take, starting with one, then two, then it's a you know, stepwise program. And number three, it's a group program. We do this together. I heard someone say, I'm I'm obsessive and compulsive in isolation, and I heal in community. We heal in community. And like my ACA program is all about human relationships. I was traumatized and damaged inside of human relationships. I need to be in relationships to heal. And it starts with the relationships with people in the rooms of recovery. And the beauty of being in recovery with a bunch of different people is you've got people at all different levels of recovery. So you've got people who've been there for decades and have all this wisdom they can pass down. And you've got people that have all different kinds of life experiences. And humans connect through story. And the way 12-step recovery meetings typically work is people are sharing their story. They may be just sharing three minutes of their story at a time, but it's frequent to have a speaker speak for 20 to 30 minutes to share their story. And when other people hear it, they're like, oh my God, they just put words to my experience in a way that I never I wouldn't have ever said that about myself, but you just spoke the truth to me. And so we can see ourselves in other people's stories, and we know that we're not alone and that we're not uniquely flawed. You know, that there are other people like us out there, and they've recovered. So if they can, well, maybe I can too. Now I think there's something like 200 and something 12-step recovery programs. But like the most common ones are Alcoholics Anonymous, narcotics anonymous, cocaine anonymous, al-Anon, Codependence Anonymous, Debtors Anonymous, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, Food Addicts Anonymous. But there are others out there too. I heard there's something called couples anonymous, which is actually for couples where both people are in a 12-step recovery program, but not necessarily the same one. You know, I just heard about that recently. I was like, that's amazing.

SPEAKER_01 48:22

Thank you for that detailed explanation. That makes a lot of sense. And I think then not being alone and not feeling like you're alone. You mentioned shame and guilt. And like I feel like that would often come up with all of this. So I'm curious. I I tend to ask most of my guests this, and I'm sure you've had multiples, but what

The Aha Of Victim Mentality

SPEAKER_01 48:44

would you say is the biggest aha moment you've had in your life? In my life.

SPEAKER_02 48:52

So this has never come up before, but a God is real, you know, like that becoming a spiritual person. But next to that, it's coming out of victim mentality. I just had no fucking idea that I had victim mentality. It's just that's by far the biggest paradigm shift of my recovery. Yeah. Like I just didn't know. And the way that I came to see it was when I did my relationship inventory, I realized that for every single man I ever dated, I was like, well, if he would have just done this and if he would have done that, and if he should had only, and if, if, if, if, if, and I started to be like, oh my God, I'm acting like I had nothing to do with the status of any of those relationships, that it was entirely up to them. Meanwhile, over the years, when I would talk to friends about and they would complain about their partners, I would be like, listen, you're 50% of that relationship, that means you're 50% responsible for it. Yet I couldn't see that about myself. And a couple of like huge insights I got in this regard in recovery was that like I knew that I attracted emotionally unavailable men, and I thought that was the pattern. It is, but the real pattern was codependence. What I didn't know until recovery was that I was also attracted them. I didn't know that. And then the other insight, this is a little crazy, but I'm sure people will identify, is I had this subconscious belief that I was responsible for all the good things in my relationships, and whoever he was that I was dating was responsible for all the bad things, which is laughable when you say that. There's no way that one person is always wrong and the other one is always right. It's just not possible. But that's how I operated, and I didn't even know it. And so it was like basically, if only he would change, everything would be okay. Well, that is victim mentality. I thought victim mentality was, and it is woe with me, the world is against me, I can never win, nobody loves me. That was not me. I have always been a very positive, optimistic person. I've always felt like a powerful woman of agency. So finding out I had a victim mentality was like, what? So some of the other indicators, if you're someone like me who's not the obvious victim mentality person, is you do a lot of blaming, you do a lot of complaining, you do a lot of gossiping. That's those are all indicators of victim mentality. And there is an overlap with people with poor boundaries. And what we do when we learn how to build boundaries is we start to make choices in our life. Like victims don't perceive choice. And so when we start to build boundaries, we realize we have a lot more control over lives than we ever thought that we did. We start perceiving choices where we never saw them before. And so for me, I would say so, so, so many gifts of recovery. The number one gift is freedom of choice. And of all the freedoms of choice, the most incredible choice is the freedom of what to think. Like I didn't know I wasn't choosing my thoughts. And even though, like, a large part of my job as a coach is mindset work with my clients, I need mindset stuff too. I need other people because it's everything, it's everywhere. Our mindset goes everywhere with us. And though we may have cleaned up a lot of stuff in this area of our lives with our mindset, well, maybe there's this. It's like the subconscious mind is what's beyond measure of how deep it is and how much stuff is in there. So it's like a lifetime journey to work on that stuff.

SPEAKER_01 52:34

I completely agree. Well, thank you so much, Bob. I really enjoyed this. Oh, good. I'm so glad. Have you heard of a man named Jay Shetty? Yeah, of course. Yep. So I'm a

Rapid Fire Questions And Core Advice

SPEAKER_01 52:48

big fan. He's got a podcast called On Purpose, and he ends it with two segments. And I borrowed those two segments, and I end my show with them. First segment is the many sides to us, and there's five questions, and they need to be answered in one word each.

SPEAKER_02 53:05

Okay, you may find it hard to believe. Saying something in one word is gonna be very difficult for me.

SPEAKER_01 53:14

What is one word someone who was meeting you for the first time would use to describe you as energetic? What is one word someone that knows you extremely well would use to describe you as?

SPEAKER_02 53:31

Uh the word that just popped in my head is powerful. I'm not sure why, but going with it.

SPEAKER_01 53:38

What is one word you'd use to describe yourself? Spiritual. What is one word that if someone didn't like you or agree with your mindset would use to describe you as? Controlling. What is one word you're trying to embody right now? Receptivity. The second segment is the final five, and these can be answered in a sentence. What is the best advice you've heard or received? Keep the focus on yourself in the here and now.

SPEAKER_02 54:17

Why is that the best? Because that's really my journey. I have been so other focused and focused on the past and focused on the future so much of my life, and focusing on me in the here and now is really the only point. It's the point of power in life. It's where you can make choices. It's the only real moment. The past is gone and the future's not here.

SPEAKER_01 54:42

What is the worst advice you've heard or received? Just go along with it. What is something that you used to value that you no longer value?

SPEAKER_02 54:56

Drugs and alcohol. There was always hope. It's never too late and no one is beyond the line. And I'm living proof.

SPEAKER_01 55:18

I love that. If you could create one law in the world that everyone had to follow, what would it be? And I want to mind your own business.

SPEAKER_02 55:29

Mind your own business. Because if everybody in this world had healthy boundaries, so maybe all of the problems in the world would clean they get get cleaned up. But everybody's in everybody else's telling people you gotta do this, you gotta do that. Like I get to be me, you get to be you.

SPEAKER_01 55:53

Which is so true. Thank you so much, Bob. I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_02 55:58

Thank you. I really appreciate it, and I appreciate the ability to go into levels of detail that I never share on podcasts. So I really appreciate that. And I hope that hearing those details is actually meaningful to people.

SPEAKER_01 56:12

Absolutely. Absolutely. I really appreciate it. And I do just like to give it back to the guest. Any final words of wisdom you want to share?

SPEAKER_02 56:22

I usually say keep the focus on yourself. And what I mean by that is like focus internally. It's not about becoming selfish, it's about really like staying in your lane, minding your own business, asking yourself what you want and need, and also taking really good care of yourself. It's not you're not benefiting anybody by running yourself ragged. So please keep the focus on yourself.

SPEAKER_01 56:46

That's so true. Thank you so much again, Barb. I appreciate it. Thank you too. I appreciate you. Thank you guys for tuning in to another episode of Mandy's Mindset.

Final Wisdom And Listener Request

SPEAKER_01 57:02

In case no one told you today, I'm proud of you. I'm booting for you. And you got this. As always, if you enjoyed the show, I would really appreciate it if you would leave me a five-star rating, leave a review, and share with anyone you think would benefit from that. And don't forget, you are only one nine step shift away from shifting your life. Thanks guys, until next time.