Confident Sober Women

Master Your Emotions: Unlock Calmness in Sobriety Today

• Shelby • Episode 213

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In this powerful episode of Confident Sober Women, host Shelby welcomes Julie Bloom, a recovery coach and mental health trainer who shares her inspiring 7-year sobriety journey that began with an unexpected "gift of illness."


Episode Highlights:

Julie reveals how severe burnout, PTSD, and vertigo became catalysts for her sobriety journey after 20 years as a college Spanish teacher. As a former "well-caffeinated and chardonnay working mom," Julie describes how her alcohol dependence developed while balancing career demands with raising a young daughter.

The conversation explores how serious health challenges—including debilitating vertigo—forced Julie to stop drinking and began her recovery, initially through audiobooks and podcasts like The Bubble Hour while isolated "in the corner of her sectional."


Key Insights on Recovery:

  • Identity Transformation: Julie discusses how sobriety required creating a new identity after leaving her tenured teaching position, leading to certification as both a professional and recovery coach.
  • Emotional Regulation: Learn practical techniques for managing emotions, including mindfulness, journaling, and "adaptive thinking"—giving the appropriate amount of time, space, and energy to situations.
  • Creativity in Recovery: Discover how breaking free from addiction cycles unleashes creative potential, providing the "clarity, bandwidth, and energy" needed to envision and build a fulfilling life.
  • Midlife Challenges: The episode addresses how perimenopause, career dissatisfaction, and relationship issues often intersect with recovery journeys, creating what Julie calls a "shitty planet alignment."

Julie shares her journey of professional reinvention, becoming a mental health trainer and speaker who helps others develop resilience and adaptability. She emphasizes the importance of community and altruism in recovery, including her work with SheRecovers.

Shelby and Julie discuss how ADHD symptoms can intensify during perimenopause due to decreasing estrogen levels, highlighting the need for neurological approaches to healing beyond traditional talk therapy.

This episode provides valuable insights for women seeking sobriety and emotional well-being, particularly during significant life transitions. 

For more information, follow Julie at 

juliebloomworld on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, or email julie@juliebloomworld.com.


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Oh, and by the way, if you didn’t know, my remote Neurofeedback Therapy program is up and running. Learn more here!

If you aren't part of the Confident Sober Women Facebook group, it's a great place to be. There are over a thousand other sober women there building lives they don't want to escape from. Come on over and join us.

And if you haven't read my memoir, grab a copy today and maybe a second one for a friend. There is so much hope in recovery, and I shared my story so raw and vulnerable so that others would know they aren't alone and that there is a way to live well, manage relationships, parent your kids, and have a healthy body, all while staying sober. Grab a copy of Recovering in Recovery: The Life-Changing Joy of Sobriety wherever books are sold.

Speaker 1:

Well, hey there, sober ladies. Thank you so much for joining me today for the Confident Sober Women podcast. I am Shelby and your host, and today I'm going to share with you an incredible conversation I had with my friend, Julie Bloom. Julie is an executive and recovery coach, and she's also an organizational trainer and a speaker. Her whole mission truly is to empower individuals to get themselves in the driver's seat of their lives. I love that, and we talk a lot about nervous system regulation, about some very powerful tools to navigate through the storms of life and to thrive. She also shares some things about her experience with ADHD and her own story and also some menopausal experiences, because she and I are both similar age and this is a unique time of life. So we really dive deep into some of the practical tools that you can utilize right now. So grab a pen and paper if you feel like it, if you're not driving, or just really listen closely for things that you can start doing right now. And then some of the bigger options like EMDR therapy and remote neurofeedback. I know I've shared about those things before on the podcast and with you guys on social media, but if you are interested in learning a little bit more. The remote neurofeedback program is really unique and very dynamic in the natural healing process at the neurological level. It's an opportunity for you to use operant conditioning to train your brain and really heal the symptoms that you're experiencing, like anxiety, depression, ADHD, even sleep problems and insomnia. So if you don't know much about it or you want to learn more, you can get that information on my website. It's just shelbyjohncom. You can even schedule a consult call there to talk to me about more details if you're curious. Everything that you need to know is on there and I'd love to help you out with getting started. So grab your big glass of water or your favorite mocktail and enjoy this conversation with Julie Bloom.

Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to the Confident Sober Women podcast. I'm your guide, Shelby John. I'm the mother of three, wife to one and sober since July 1st 2002. As sober women, we have something huge in common and when we share our lives and our stories with each other, we feel that sense of belonging and connection. So we know we are no longer alone.

Speaker 1:

In this podcast you will hear real life talk about building confidence and transforming your life beyond recovery. So come on, let's talk. Hey, it's me, Shelby. Have you ever wondered what's really happening in your brain during recovery? Are you ready to take control of your anxiety, sleep better and finally feel focused and confident? I want to introduce you to a game changer that's transforming women's recovery remote neurofeedback therapy. I want you to think of this as a personal trainer for your brain. It's helping you build new neuropathways right from the comfort of your own home. So if you're dealing with anxiety that just won't quit, if you have ADHD that's making life chaotic, or sleep issues that leave you exhausted, neurofeedback could be your missing piece. It's science-backed brain training that works with your natural healing process, helping you regulate emotions and build lasting confidence. The best part is, you don't need to add another appointment to your busy schedule. My remote neurofeedback program brings professional guidance and support right to your living room. Do you want to learn more about neurofeedback therapy?

Speaker 1:

You can go to my website wwwshelbyjohncom to download my free guide. Is Neurofeedback Right for you? Together, we'll create the calm, confident future you that you deserve. That's wwwshelbyjohncom. Take the first step towards training your brain for lasting change. Well, hey there, julie. Thank you so much for being with me today on the Confident Sober Women podcast. I'm so excited to have our conversation and to share a little bit more about your story and your work with my audience, so I'm going to turn the mic over to you now and let you share that story, and then we're going to chat.

Speaker 2:

Hi Shelby, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Hi everyone, where to start? I'm a woman in recovery. I'm a woman in recovery seven years sober since March Very, very proud of that.

Speaker 2:

My journey started in a funny way. It started with the gift of illness. Actually, I in 2018, fell ill to burnout and PTSD mainly, and I used to be a college teacher in college and university teaching Spanish. I had done so for 20 years and, sadly, doesn't only happen in the States. There were dangerous events that happened in my place of work that made me super sick with PTSD, and it took a long time for me to be diagnosed. But at the beginning, what it looked like was being sick both physically and psychologically, so I broke bones. I um, I had pneumonia. I would catch anything that any viruses, my immune system was down and actually I got vertigo. And that is how my journey to sobriety begins and to recovery.

Speaker 2:

Um, I was your typical well caffeinated and chardonnay working mom. I had been drinking for a long time and you know what, thinking back, like my I'm 53, my generation, like the activity to start to do as teenagers was to Everything was about partying, drinking, shooters and who, and so that's what I had always known. And as you get older, dinners with wine and I was your typical two to three glass a day of wine, you know, at happy hour, and my husband is a drinker. So I think I developed an addiction when my daughter who's 14 now was really little, so you know kind of the perfect storm that built um full-time working mom, teaching. My husband was often away on sets in Vancouver or LA and my daughter was small and that's when I really kind of anchored the addiction to alcohol so fast.

Speaker 2:

So I had wanted to stop drinking for quite some time. And you know when, at three in the morning, when you're hot and you're saying, oh, I'm not going to drink tomorrow, but when four or five o'clock rolled around the next day, saying yeah, no, don't care, and I kept on drinking. So there was already a part of me that felt like, although I wasn't drinking like spectacular amounts, it was affecting my life. It was like a little black cloud on top of my head. So as far as mood, it affected me, as far as energy, and later I will find out, you'll hear later that I have ADHD and there's a correlation with that and I'm also highly sensitive so it was affecting me.

Speaker 2:

So finally, with um, the vertigo, I didn't have a chance, a choice but to stop drinking, and even caffeine, like I couldn't handle anything, and it was severe vertigo, like holding on to walls. So I lived in the corner of my sectional for many, many, many months and because I couldn't do anything else and I was forced to stop drinking, which at the originally I wanted to but didn't want to, and I'm sure a lot of you know that you want to stop but you don't want, and I so wanted to be someone who moderates. It wasn't going to be possible for me. So in the corner of my sectional with my eyes going like that, I couldn't even read. But what I could do about the only thing that I could do?

Speaker 2:

Because later on with the PTSD I also lost pretty much the ability to speak. I still have a stutter so and especially when I talk about it, so there wasn't much that I could do. So I started to listen to audiobooks but to podcasts, and I started to listen to the Bubble Hour podcast, which really helped me because I didn't have actually the luxury of joining fraternities or community At the beginning. I was really isolated at the intersection of my sectional and that's where my journey to abstinence and sobriety began. And it wasn't easy. It wasn't easy, but looking back, it was the key to healing my life and the most beautiful gift I've given myself.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much, julie, for sharing all that, and in such a vulnerable way.

Speaker 1:

You know, this is truly how it works.

Speaker 1:

You know, when we get kind of honest and down to the nitty gritty and share all these sort of tender parts of ourselves, it helps us to continue our healing journey, but then also spreads the message of hope that, no matter who you are and what you've gone through, what is going on now, that you do have the ability to get and stay sober, just like we have, and also to be well, you know, like stopping drinking, you know, is only the beginning.

Speaker 1:

I always say that sobriety is only the beginning. You know there's so much more that comes and I know typically the ladies that are listening here are a little bit further along, you know, usually a little bit more like a year to more sober, but not always. And that's when, like, even more of the work begins, as they say, begins, as they say, emotional sobriety piece and that just learning how to manage those things, learning who you are as a person, what you even like, what you want, and I know for me that was like a big part of that kind of first phase of you know, after the first year of sobriety. I don't know if that was your experience.

Speaker 2:

Well, yes, and to me it meant, I think, really creating a new identity, because the one identity that I had, which was to be a tenured teacher in college and university, I no longer could do. So that was a huge part, and so within that healing journey was a career transition, which was forced, and that was really difficult. So the learning about myself, the healing the wounds of the past, so making sure to do a big cleanup and, at the same time, quite often and that's the message that I want to have for anyone who is listening Quite often you have like the shittiest planet alignment possible, one that will bring you down to your knees, that you would never wish on anyone. But quite often a high enough level of suffering is needed to create change. To create change to stop drinking, to really look at who you are, because quite often, identity-wise, especially women, we still in our 40s have the identity of ourselves and we are hard and critical on ourselves of when we were 20, and we're no longer that person. So, having such a crash, having abstinence and some sobriety under your belt, you actually have the point, and that's where the gift is to have the bandwidth to start to get clarity, to start to change, to start to use tools of emotional regulation and to have the bandwidth, energy, productivity and creativity Because that's a big part of what I think drinking or substance use steals. So you actually have the opportunity to change, create a new identity and change the different spheres of your life. And for me what that meant was it was all-encompassing my work life, my personal life, my relationship, my parenting, my health. Every sphere has been made better by that journey of sobriety. And now I'm lucky enough, and I so.

Speaker 2:

When I decided to change careers, I did a coaching certification, so I was still not feeling well, so I did it part time and I went online, took a nap. So that really motivated me and, as my executive functions were really affected, it allowed me to bring to build my brain back. And I have to say also that with all that happening, I worked with two neuropsychologists simultaneously, one for, worked with two neuropsychologists simultaneously, one for. So when I had PTSD, I also had an ADHD diagnosis which was exacerbated because of PTSD apologies, lots of letters. And so I worked with one for brain reconstruction and with another one for psychotherapy, emdr, hypnosis to deal with the PTSD. So slowly but surely, I learned a lot about that did the coaching certification for both professional coaching and recovery coaching.

Speaker 2:

But, shelby, I still wanted to be a teacher, right, right. So I started to build workshops. So it was just before the pandemic and so there was already a mental health epidemic. So I started to really study what were the biggest problems or challenges within organizations as far as mental health well-being and I started to build workshops. So today I'm a coach, but I'm also a trainer and speaker for mental health well-being. And I started to build workshops. So today I'm a coach, but I'm also a trainer and speaker for mental health and well-being.

Speaker 2:

And that was part of my healing journey, right, reinventing myself professionally and helping other people. And we can't underestimate that power of community, of altruism, right, it's compassion in its essence and it's what brings us most joy, what lights up our reward system. So, yeah, contributing, and I also started to get close to SheRecoversvers, the organization, and then became a volunteer facilitator after I was and give workshops with them after I was certified. But, yeah, so what a journey, what a gift. And I would love to talk about two things actually about emotional regulation, which I think is the best gift that we can give ourselves, and also about creativity because I find that we okay, so let's go with creativity.

Speaker 2:

When we're on the cycle of addiction, the rinse repeat which quite often for a lot of us looks like we have rules. So maybe we drink on Thursday and Friday and have a big night drinking Saturday and we're, you know, decompressing or hangovering on Sunday, and then we repeat that cycle. When we're in that cycle, we don't have the capacity to think outside the box, to dream bigger dreams, to have the clarity of what do I want to do with this one and only precious life? We don't have that and to okay, I'm gonna start this way, I'm gonna find solutions, I'm gonna study. Normally it's not possible and quite often when I accompany women in recovery, they find that again and quite often it's hard for them to put words on what they're feeling. What is it that you want? They don't know so for a long time. Alcohol or the substance can be a shadow to that knowing, to that connection to yourself, to that identity.

Speaker 2:

And finally, that's one of the what of the things that are on the other side is that you will have energy and bandwidth and clarity and solution, finding the creativity you need to create the life that you want. So that is so, so important, and you know, it's funny because one of the most popular workshops that I give is resilience and adaptability, which I've identified as the two components that are most needed right now for us to do well in this era of constant change, right? And one of the most important components of adaptability is that creativity bit, so we really really need it, and when we have, when we choose to do the work, we have access to all our beautiful resources. And as far as the healthy detachment or emotional regulation, that's something that I had to learn on my own and I don't know about you, but I wasn't thought taught to meditate or to self-regulate in primary school. That's what a lot of us have to do as adults, with a lot of humility, right.

Speaker 2:

And so when I was learning everything that I needed to learn, I travel. You know, I went to Stanford to do compassion cultivation studies and to Yale science of well-being, but I traveled virtually to Mexico to take some trainings on emotional regulation that were really amazing and that idea that there is space that exists for you to claim no one is going to bestow it upon you so that space can be time, it can be physical distance, it can be a breath. So to know that you have the power to instead to respond instead of react. So when there's a stimuli to actually look how am I feeling, why is that? To get curious and to actually choose how you respond is the most empowering thing that we can do for ourselves to live in a place of calm and to develop tools also to say you know what? This conversation is going nowhere. Let's revisit, let's talk about it tomorrow instead of things getting nasty. So all those beautiful abilities I encourage everyone to learn. They've been the best gift for me, honestly, to navigate in a more healthy manner, differently.

Speaker 1:

That's amazing in a more healthy manner, differently. That's amazing. And obviously you've done, you know, a lot of extensive work on this, including, you know, and professionally, and it's nice when our professional worlds kind of collide with some of our personal needs, don't you think? And so the benefit of, like you know, this is kind of the things that I need or I needed, and so now I want to learn those things so that not only I can help myself but I can also transfer that into into my clients, which is amazing. I'm curious.

Speaker 1:

I know emotional regulation is kind of a. It's a term I think that people are probably familiar with If you've been around for a while. It's, it's a little bit of a newer, I think, modern term. But really what we're saying is and correct me if I'm wrong is just, you know, how do we manage this right? You know, sometimes it's even a matter of like, what are our feelings? You know most of us who lived in active addiction for quite some time and obviously if we have we all have you know trauma history and you know years of other things. You may not have even been kind of taught or modeled at all what emotions are. I mean, you saw emotions, but you didn't know what they were called, you didn't know how you personally experienced those things and what you named them. And so I think, once we get sober, you know this emotional regulation piece we use that term and it's really about like yeah, how do we manage those emotions? So we don't be so, we don't act out reactively and we can become much more responsive in life.

Speaker 2:

So.

Speaker 1:

I'm wondering if you can say a little bit more. We've talked a little bit about it but very specifically, what would you say? Are a few of the things? Like symptomatic experience, I would say. If for somebody to identify with being emotionally dysregulated, so like, how would you know that you don't have good emotional regulation in any moment or in any time period?

Speaker 2:

You know what? There's two big spheres for me. There's the sphere of stress and anxiety and then there's the sphere of either anger, taking things personally, uh, what hurts us relationally right, and when do you know they're not working optimally is when you're suffering, when you're suffering from that frontal striatal loop, geeking out here, but the, the, what do you call it? The hamster wheel right of repetitive um thinking. Then you know there's something that needs to be done. When, relation, relationally, you feel angry, you take things personally, you react and it affects how you feel about yourself and it affects your relationship, then we that's our cue that we need to do something. And it's like when, with active addiction, you know if you need to ask the question is probably because you need to change um, because people who are either regulated or well will not ask themselves that question. But at the end of the day, it's the suffering aspect.

Speaker 2:

And when I was actually in um in therapy with both my neuropsychologists, they both came to the conclusion they're French, from France. My accent is French also, I'm from Quebec, so French is my first language. Um that I needed to learn about adaptive thinking. I was like what is that adaptive thinking? And adaptive thinking is so simple. It's giving the appropriate amount of time, space and energy to an event or situation. That sounds easy. Giving the appropriate amount of time, space and energy to an event or situation and not more. That's the hard bit, right, because we tend to go on tangents and we'll have the ruminations and constant thinking about it and not being able to control. So with mindfulness, with, I don't know what your tools are, but to me what helped the most in that also was journaling doing a nice healthy brain dump every single morning for a few minutes, and then the first two pages of my my journal are illustrations, words, affirmations.

Speaker 2:

so those are the thoughts that I put into my mind every day before I begin my day. And that is that combination of brain dumping and I do automatic writing. It's not pretty. Sometimes I underline the things that I want to put on my to-do list I lit up my ADHD big time and then, once that's done, I put the thoughts that I want in my brain and really we can't underestimate that.

Speaker 2:

It sets the tone for the rest of our day to have that intention and we have that power with that, that intention to do better, to regulate emotionally and emotional regulation is not linear. We tend to think, oh, I'm going to get better. It's really like one step forward, two steps back, kind of thing. But so what does it look like, for example, when you want to be less reactive? If you have that intention and say, today I'm gonna do what I can, could be that, oh no, something happens. You catch yourself shelby and you're like shit, I did that again, next time I'll do better, and could be the next time. You catch yourself mid-sentence and say, oh no, julie, not going there today, taking a step back, and then with time you're going to feel, for example, the surge of emotions come and you're going to say not happening today. I'm going to put it in that nice little box to revisit, so to create that distance. But again, what all that is is to choose, and it's power over yourself and your life.

Speaker 1:

That's wonderful. I love those kind of practical tools and strategies that we can begin to put in place. You know, right now, as we check in with ourselves, you know, I mean the why I asked that question originally is that so often you know, we are the I feel like we're the last to know, um, what's going on with us. Sometimes, you know, um, we might be having a symptomatic experience for quite some time, and other people in our lives, in fact, might even be saying like, oh, wow, you really, you really have a lot of anxiety. Or oh, like, you look like you struggle to kind of express yourself or speak up for yourself. You know, you might hear things from other people and then, but we're not really aware of you know how we're behaving or how we're presenting ourselves to the world, and so we may not really realize that that is what we're experiencing, you know, sometimes, until we put words on it or labels, which I'm not always a big fan of. But when we start to begin to understand, like, oh, what I'm experiencing is, you know, anxiety. You know what I'm experiencing is a difficulty dealing with conflict, you know. Or what I'm experiencing is when I have a need or I don't agree with somebody like maybe my partner or a child or a parent or something you know, or a boss I it's very difficult for me to speak up for that need, so I don't have like the confidence in myself to be able to do that. So when we start to name those things and identify those in ourselves, again a lot of times we're the last.

Speaker 1:

I think we're the last to know, because most people 70 percent in fact are not self-aware. That's what the research says, right? So? So people think they're self-aware but really in fact they're just, they're really not. And when we do this deep dive into, like you know who we are, how other people view us, which is a part of self-awareness we can really learn a ton of content about ourselves.

Speaker 1:

And then then that helps us to sort of correlate that with, like, the expression of those emotions, like, are you an outburst or you know, are you somebody that's you know? When, when, when, when a thing is happening, are you, do you start yelling, you know? Or are you a crier, you know? Or or an isolator, you know? Maybe you want to like retreat to your room, or you just, maybe you just get quiet, you just start, you just kind of you're just silent, so like you're isolating. You're still in the room but you're kind of just you're not really going to participate anymore. So all of these kinds of things are indicators to us to say, huh, there's like a something you know and we all have this. I think you would agree like. We all have these kind of natural tendencies and oftentimes it's quite a bit of work for us to identify them and then begin to think about changing them.

Speaker 2:

And you know how interesting. Because the tragedy, I think, is that people don't give themselves that power, they don't know that it's there's, to claim so to say. You know, we kind of have that fatalistic approach to say, well, that's just the way I am, accept me or not, when we know that there's something that's not feeling good to us and you are so right, I, you know what. The basis of all of this, to remove a lot of the negative feelings is that ability to acknowledge, to identify our feelings, to and also identify our needs and to fulfill them and to name and communicate it appropriately, to ask for what it is that we need. And it's something there's so many beautiful resources right and people willing to walk you through, and sometimes like in executive coaching, that the communication strategy bit is a lot of what I do and, believe it or not, for some people it starts with body language how do you say hello, how do you do small talk, how do you wish to be perceived and then start to embody that, to have that intention. But like anything, I would say, communication. But it's an art, it's a science, it's a science, it's mechanics, it's systems. And when you're willing to start to put things into place and to put work into it, you can really change your life.

Speaker 2:

And women, I think, have a harder time right. We weren't taught to express our needs, to identify them, to think of ourselves. But there's a healthy form of egoism or narcissism that is healthy. We need to think about ourselves first. We need to know our inner workings and what we need and want. And you are so right. Quite often, when we're not well, the first symptom quite often is irritability or being impatient. Right, but people see our symptoms before we see them ourselves and quite often we don't even have the words to name what we're going through. And that's why it's so important to have the help of a therapist, to have the help of a coach, someone that sees you, hears you and, believe me, coaches have coaches and coaches have therapists also and therapists have therapists. We need other people to help us because quite often you know when I was talking about shitty planet alignment.

Speaker 2:

Sometimes it's not even funny. Life will bring you down to your knees and in midlife quite often it aligns with. I don't know if you all know about the happiness you curve, the your perceived happiness is higher when you're younger. It plummets when you're 47 to 49, really low perceived happiness, and it goes back after. But right before then, quite often you know dissatisfaction with your work, relationship problems, a sprinkling of addiction and symptoms of perimenopause.

Speaker 2:

And you're like where am I? And I want to tell you that I've been there. You've probably been there Also. Never feel ashamed, because when you're intelligent you're going to think okay, so this is going going wrong in my life. This is going wrong in my life. This is going wrong in my life. What's the common denominator of me? There must be something wrong with me. No, it's a shitty planet. Alignment and work with someone who's gonna help you untangle it, one step at a time, and we choose, you know, one objective at a time, and we heal and we make progress and, before you know it, we are able to change our lives that's so true and I I couldn't agree with you more obviously.

Speaker 1:

I am a mental health clinician most of my community knows that and I do EMDR therapy, which is a neurological based form of trauma treatment, and I and I love it and the reason why I got trained that way and really promote it and think it's the best is because this is its exact job.

Speaker 1:

Right, its exact job is to heal our past trauma and clear out those neural pathways, but it's also based in a direct correlation with emotional regulation. So in doing that clearing out through EMDR or neurofeedback I also have that remote neurofeedback program, which is incredibly powerful as well, to help train the brain through electromagnetic training based on Pavlov's dogs operant conditioning. So those forms of treatment are way more dynamic and effective than traditional talk therapy, which is also great for a lot of things too. But when you start getting into these neurological approaches or brain spotting, some of the somatic work, this is where we get the tremendous amount of emotional regulation support and also the clearing out of things like trauma that are stored in our body, because now we know more from science about how those things get stored, and so those practical things that you can do at home, you know, to help regulate yourself, are so valuable. You know, when we start to get in touch with you've mentioned a lot of things about you know negative thinking patterns and I talk about that a lot too, and some of that is just literally like taking an inventory, you know, like really learning what are your particular negative thinking patterns? They're probably different than mine. And then when do they show up? Is it right after your husband gives you that weird look? Or is it when you get the phone call from the school that says your kid just did this terrible thing? Is it when your boss, you know, says, hey, I want to talk to you about this project. You did Like when. When are the when are the things that happen that are creating those negative thinking patterns for you personally? Like, we all have our own little personal expression of that, because then you have something to work with and once you have those, you can start utilizing things like you mentioned about affirmations and journaling, and like EMDR or neurofeedback to really undo those patterns and rewrite them in a much more positive way in the front part of your brain, where things are happening with intelligence right. So and you mentioned, you know, later life stage I that's like a whole nother episode.

Speaker 1:

I feel like we should come back and just talk about perimenopause and menopause this year and it for sure is like a real thing. And I know in our conversation before a couple months ago I think, I shared with you my experience with ADHD, which I do believe has been a part of my life, my whole life for me, through really good EMDR, really good, just good therapy, nutrition, like all those other layers. But then once, about two years ago, I started to notice things were really, probably even before that, ramping up as far as like symptomatic experience and I really was getting for lack of a better way to say it it's like just I just couldn't stand myself anymore. I couldn't sit still in my kid's theater thing. I my nails were bleeding, which I still have problems sometimes with that.

Speaker 1:

I just all of that stuff was like coming back and come to find out, cause I was finally like, okay, I need to do something about this. And when I talked to the psychiatrist she said menopause, the decrease in estrogen, causes a major increase in ADHD symptoms, and I was literally not even aware of that. So, yeah, I do think to normalize this, these experiences for us as older women is really helpful, because I was sitting here thinking like what is going on with me? I knew I already had this kind of bent about myself, but it was just so aggressive, you know, to the point where I was like reaching out, you know for a different kind of help and I'm glad that I did.

Speaker 1:

But when we do bring that kind of stuff up, it helps to let other people know they're not alone. You know you're not alone in this and everybody's sort of perimenopause, cell ash menopause experience is very personal and different. Some people have lots of symptomatic experience, some people don't. But the nervous system regulation and emotional regulation during this particular time of life for us as women becomes really critical. So I really always say, like, whatever you can do to learn and educate yourself about these things that we're talking about, like through people like us, through good coaching, good therapy, other podcasts you know people who specialize in older women, these kinds of things whatever we can do is going to very much benefit your ability to regulate your emotions and then also maintain a healthy nervous system.

Speaker 2:

And I think, as we get older, it's also the acceptance of change, the acceptance that we need to invest more time, more effort, more money, more energy into our brains and bodies. Right, what used to be easy might not be so easy, and you're right, different periods of life or different situations can really exacerbate symptoms of adhd. And when I was in therapy, right for the brain reconstruction, I did a harvard program and I'll share it with you. Probably you know about it. It's called, um, the mastery of adult adhd and it's kind of a 12-step process that's not based in 12-step but for self-esteem, for organizing your environment, for fragmenting in life. But these concepts and these tools for memory, right, brain fog also um, these tools are not only helpful for people who have adhd, but sometimes, when you need to befriend your new normal and you need more tools, there are modalities and you're still right, I'm glad that you brought that up. You know about emdr, neuro feedback, the somatic work. We didn't have that information and that talk.

Speaker 2:

Therapy is not always the only way of dealing with life's difficulties, right, and it's quite often in a combination. It's trial and error. It's finding role models who have been able to learn to heal themselves, because, just as oral tradition, you know, before we could read and write. How did we learn? We learn through the experience of others, of songs, of poems, of what the elders shared with us. We still need that human connection to learn and the more we like like. Science is telling us more about menopause and perimenopause, about how our brain works, about the somatic modalities that help, and quite often it's a few things in combinations, but it's so well worth the investment, always, always.

Speaker 1:

I totally agree with that, and when you do invest in things like that, typically, uh, effectiveness and length of treatment will be a lot less. You know, like emd I'm like I always say I'm not a long-term therapist. I'm here to come there, clean out this stuff for you and help you get on your way, and then you come back when you have like a, a thing that goes on. So you know, it's not meant to be like years of all the stuff. Now some people, depending on your trauma history, are going to take longer than others, but it's way more effective and you get a much more lasting experience because you're truly healing your brain at the molecular level. So, julie, I just want to say thank you so much for being with me today.

Speaker 1:

I do think we're going to need another conversation to kind of finish up some of this other stuff and bring that to light, because, as a woman who's in that stage of life and I know many of my friends and colleagues are as well we do need to be talking about it a little bit more, and I'm glad that we are normalizing it in our generation. You know, I feel like our mothers really would have benefited from that, you know, but they didn't have all of the information that we have now, and so, since we have such a wealth of knowledge, I really feel like we need to use it and spread it. So, yeah, glad you're a part of the story. So if you, if people do want to get ahold of you or find out to me via email at julie at juliebloomworld, and that, is my instagram, facebook juliebloomworld, and you can find me on linkedin also at that name.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much for having me and I'll make sure I link to all those in the show notes below and thank you again. So much for being here. Thank you, shelby. Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of Confident Sober Women. If you enjoyed this conversation, hit the subscribe button above so you won't miss any upcoming episodes. And, hey, if you really loved it, leave me a review. You can learn more about the sober freedom inner circle membership at wwwshelbyjohncoachingcom. Forward slash inner circle. See you next time.