Sober & Strong: Embracing Inner Child Work for Emotional Resilience / Ep. 028

Welcome to the “Feel Lit Alcohol Free Podcast”! Today, we’re diving into a topic that touches the very core of our emotional well-being: “Mother Hunger.” Have you ever wondered how unmet childhood needs can shape your adult life and relationships? Or how re-parenting yourself can be a powerful tool in your alcohol free  journey?

In this episode, your hosts Coach Ruby Williams and Coach Susan Larkin are joined by the inspiring Cybele Botran, who has been alcohol-free for an incredible 13 years. Cybele trained under Kelly McDaniel the author of the book, "Mother Hunger." Cybele explains the profound impact of mother hunger on personal development and the path to inner healing.

What does it mean to become your own inner loving parent? How can addressing these deep-seated emotional needs transform your sobriety journey? Our speakers share their personal stories, shedding light on the importance of self-discovery, meditation, gratitude, and the strength found in a supportive sober community.

Get ready to uncover the emotional, physical, and spiritual dimensions of alcohol-free living. This episode promises to be a transformative experience, offering profound insights and practical resources. So, sit back, relax, and join us as we embark on this journey of healing and self-compassion. Let’s dive in!

Speaker Bio
Cybele is an International Coaching Federation Professional Certified Coach (PCC), a SHE RECOVERS® Coach, a Mother Hunger® Trained Facilitator, and holds a Master's Degree in Education with over 40 years of teaching experience. She coaches self-identified women and nonbinary people who identify with women's communities. She runs workshops and courses on Mother Hunger, inner child work, and reparenting.

Find out more about Cybele at: https://www.cybelebotran.com/
Follow Cybele on Facebook, Instagram and Threads

Leave a review on Apple Podcasts, and ask us any questions you have about breaking free from wine or living an alcohol-free lifestyle. Your question could be the highlight of a future episode!

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Websites:
Susan Larkin Coaching https://www.susanlarkincoaching.com/
Ruby Williams at Freedom Renegade Coaching https://www.freedomrenegadecoaching.com/

Follow Susan: @drinklesswithsusan
Follow Ruby: @rubywilliamscoaching

It is strongly recommended that you seek professional advice regarding your health before attempting to take a break from alcohol. The creators, hosts, and producers of the The Feel Lit Alcohol Free podcast are not healthcare practitioners and therefore do not give medical, or psychological advice nor do they intend for the podcast, any resource or communication on behalf of the podcast or otherwise to be a substitute for such.

Transcript

Sick and tired of your love-hate relationship with wine?
Welcome to the feel it alcohol free podcast. Hi. I'm coach Ruby Williams. And I'm coach Susan Larkin. We are 2 former wine lovers turned alcohol freedom coaches exposing the lies about alcohol and giving you, our listeners, the tools to break free so you can feel lit. And when you're lit, you'll feel healthier, freer, and more in control of your life. So relax, kick back, and get ready to feel lit alcohol free. And don't forget, grab a copy of our wine free weekend guide after the show.

Susan [00:00:39]:
Hey. Welcome back to the feel it alcohol free podcast. We are so excited to be with you today, and I am super excited because we have a special guest who I met at an alcohol free retreat, with Zero Proof experiences in Tampa. We sat together at our super fun dinner, and I was just fascinated by the work that she does. So we have Cybele Botran with us today to talk about her alcohol freedom journey and the work she does around this book called Mother, Hunger, and Reparenting, and I'm really excited to hear more about that. So, Cybele, can you just introduce yourself and provide a little bit of a background about your alcohol free journey. Absolutely. Hi.

Susan [00:01:27]:
Welcome.

Ruby [00:01:28]:
Welcome.

Cybele Botran [00:01:30]:
I'm so glad to be here. Thank you so much for having me, Susan and Ruby. So my name is Sabelle. I live in Miami, Florida, coming up on 13 years alcohol free. And I was a full time stay at home homeschooling mom when I got sober. And, you know, like many people, I was using alcohol to kind of numb out the feelings of perfectionism, hyper busyness, and it was a it was a great coping mechanism at the time until it wasn't anymore, you know, very socially acceptable to drink wine at the end of the day. But I decided to kind of take my life back into my own hands at 47 years old, and I stopped drinking altogether. And that was the beginning of my inner healing journey.

Cybele Botran [00:02:19]:
You know? I had no idea what kind of the way I like to look at it. I'm on a parallel track in my life, so my life on the outside looks really similar to when I drank, but, on the inside, everything's changed.

Susan [00:02:35]:
Wow. Isn't that amazing? I feel like the same thing, and you know what? I just realized I didn't read your bio at the beginning, so let me do that now. Yeah. So Cybele is an International Coaching Federation Professional Certified Coach, and a she recovers coach and a mother hunger trained facilitator and holds a master's degree in education with over 40 years of teaching experience. So you're a coach now, which is amazing. I love that we give back, and you coach self identified women and non binary people who identify with women's communities, and you run workshops and courses on mother hunger, inner child work, and reparenting. So, that is what I'm excited to learn more about is this mother hunger, inner child work, and reparenting. So can you tell us a little bit about that?

Cybele Botran [00:03:29]:
Yeah. Absolutely. So I'll start with mother hunger. Mother hunger is a term coined by Kelly McDaniel, who is a counselor. She is a licensed professional counselor and therapist, and she wrote initially about her first book called Ready to Heal. And in that book, she was writing about eating disorders and kind of love addiction stuff, And she came to you know, in one of her chapters, she mentioned something called mother hunger, which was her way of basically talking about a primary attachment wound with your primary caregiver who's often your mother. And it was just one sentence, but it resonated so much, and she got so much clientele from it. She decided to write a whole book, which was published in 2021.

Cybele Botran [00:04:19]:
And I so to speak, yeah, very recently. And I learned about her actually through a mental health Monday kind of live Zoom class, you could call it, given by She Recovers. It's also on their podcast. So I became very interested in mother hunger and started to join her workshops and whatnot. At the same time, I had already become a She Recovers coach, and Kelly offered to kindly put out an application to anyone who wanted to become a mother hunger trained facilitator, and I applied and was accepted. And there were about 23 of us in that program, and it took about a full year to complete. We did live classes with her, which basically just means that I can teach psychoeducational courses on mother hunger. So what's mother hunger? Mother hunger is, like I said before, a primary attachment wound, and she kind of describes mothering as falling under 3 pillars, and that would be nurture, protection, and guidance.

Cybele Botran [00:05:23]:
So nurturance, protection, and guidance. And the idea behind mother hunger isn't about blaming moms at all. It can be very difficult for people to even identify. Mother hunger in that term either resonates or it doesn't. But the idea is not to really be, you know, in a place of blaming, but just looking at what was absent, and what was missing. So it could be nurturing that was missing for many different reasons. This could be from systemic racism. It could be from poverty.

Cybele Botran [00:05:59]:
It could be that your mom was in an abusive relationship. It could be that you moved a lot. There could be so many siblings in the home. Many reasons there was a lack of nurturance. The second one is protection. So you can think of anything, you know, like how animals protect their babies if there was a lack of protection for any reason. And then finally, guidance. Guidance comes kind of in between teen years, and that would be looking up to your mom as a role model.

Cybele Botran [00:06:27]:
So for whatever reason that was missing, you would also be experiencing some mother hunger, and it's kind of looked at in different degrees, like, on a spectrum. So you could have a little bit of mother hunger, or you can have what Kelly talks about as 3rd degree. So just like a 3rd degree burn, 3rd degree mother hunger, which is also called disorganized attachment, if you're familiar with attachment CRE.

Ruby [00:06:51]:
Mhmm. Okay.

Susan [00:06:53]:
Yeah. That's so interesting. I mean, in my experience, my mom had polio. So as a parent with a baby, she couldn't carry me.

Cybele Botran [00:07:04]:
Mhmm. 

Susan [00:07:04]:
You know what I mean? Like, how we carry our babies around. So, like, I couldn't be held maybe as much. I mean, this is what I was thinking. And I love not blaming Mhmm. Because it's so hard, you know, to go there. You know? Because I can't blame her for that. You know what I mean? But I wonder because I think sometimes when I do my own work, I don't have language for it, so I think the wound came as an infant where I don't have any language for it. But then I also think about maybe how I did this to my daughter, you know, and where she might have, you know,

Susan [00:07:37]:
I was thinking about this, where I might have wounded her through nurturing. I know she has issues with feeling abandoned because my stepdaughters came to live with us and felt like she lost part of her mom. You know what I mean? Like so, this is just fascinating to me.

Ruby [00:07:51]:
It's very fascinating. And what's also coming up for me is because a lot of my 1:1 clients or our clients have alcohol addiction, and maybe they're not providing the guidance as well as they could with this teen and tween age that you're talking about. If we're checking out as mothers by drinking, coping with our own stress, yeah, this is very powerful work. I'm so excited to learn more about it. Thank you, Cybele.

Cybele Botran [00:08:17]:
Yeah. Absolutely. I will add that, you know, it doesn't mean that we can't feel angry. There's, you know, part of healing from mother hunger is feeling that anger of what wasn't and also, you know, expressing it in a healthy way and also feeling the grief. So doing grief work is definitely a part of it. And what Kelly McDaniel talks about is the celestial mother, like, creating your ideal mother. What I refer to, the term I use is reparenting.

Susan [00:08:50]:
Yeah. So what does that look like? What are some of the things you do in that? Yeah. Learn about it.

Cybele Botran [00:08:57]:
So you could say, like, mother hunger is the problem and reparenting is the solution. So reparenting is becoming your own inner loving parent and taking care of your unmet needs as an adult. So the idea it's it's kind of, yeah, similar to parts work by Richard Schwartz, Internal Family Systems. So the idea is that you have, like, an inner child, an inner teen, maybe you have several parts. And most of us are very familiar with our inner critic who tends to be very loud, and that's definitely where, you know, alcohol can come in. We are trying to actually quiet that inner critic and self soothe ourselves with the alcohol, or it could be food, or it could be relationships. And the idea in reparenting is that you're everybody has the capacity to be compassionate. If you think about, like, a small animal or or a young child, that natural ability to love that little person or that little fur baby. We all have that capacity.

Cybele Botran [00:09:57]:
So the idea in reparenting is that we're growing that capacity to be compassionate and loving, but we're directing that energy towards ourselves. So we're inner inner child. We're seeing ourselves as the inner teen who does need that love and protection and guidance.

Susan [00:10:11]:
That's so beautiful. It sounds a little bit like what you do with our RAIN meditation work, Ruby and I. That's how we met, Ruby and I, as RAIN partners. We both took a course with Tara Brach, and then went, wait a minute. Aren't you with the Naked Mind coach? And then we got together, and we were and we, for 2 years, did RAIN together weekly. Yeah. And the self compassion part of our alcohol free journey, which is so key, right, But that's something I really struggled with, and many, many of our clients struggle with showing themselves compassion when, you know, in their journey. What do you think, Ruby?

Ruby [00:10:48]:
Yeah. As you were speaking, Cybele, I was writing down notes around this reparenting, and I think that is accessible to everyone, and self compassion can be learned. And that is what I also say, picture how would you say that to a younger child or someone you loved or or an animal, or maybe it's a child or grandchild, and then they can actually tap into that language. And they would say, oh, sweetie, I'm so sorry that happened to you, or whatever. And then I say, okay, how could you say that to yourself? You know? And you could start to say to yourself, oh, sweetie, oh, dear one, oh, lovely, and just the kindest, sweetest words like giving yourself a hug.

Cybele Botran [00:11:37]:
That's exactly it. That's exactly it. I absolutely love Rain, and I love Tara Brach, and I've also gone to her event. So I love that the 2 of you met that way through this Naked Mind and through Tara Brach and Rain. That's beautiful.

Ruby [00:11:53]:
It's a big part of my life, and the nurture piece is at the end of RAIN.  Nurture is the most powerful part of the process. Is this finding either it's a she says something like, is it a wise guide? Or sometimes I go to my future self, or they or you can go back and give your, you know, your younger child self a hug. There's all the different ways you can access this. 

Susan [00:12:19]:
It's so funny.

Cybele Botran [00:12:20]:
Yeah. Yeah. And it takes time. Right? It's a practice. It doesn't happen overnight. It takes time. Sometimes we have to do deep self forgiveness work for, you know, the shame or or the kind of the feelings that we're carrying from our past behaviors. And we need to, you know, do the practice of nurturing ourselves, and then over time, we do begin to feel more compassion for our younger selves.

Susan [00:12:48]:
What is this? I love the celestial mother, just that image of creating that for yourself. How would you go about doing that?

Cybele Botran [00:12:55]:
Well, that Is that something you can share? I mean, that's definitely Kelly's Kelly McDaniel's term, celestial mother, and she talks about it in her book, which is probably right behind me or something. Anyway, “mother hunger”, if you want to look it up. And it's just the idea of creating this ideal mother. I mean, an exercise that your listeners could do is write down the kind of the people who were your role models as you were growing up and what qualities did they have. So a lot of times, I'll talk about in my reparenting courses, like, the trustworthy adult, somebody who you can count on. And you usually gravitate towards things that were missing in your own life. So maybe that's consistency. Maybe that's calmness.

Cybele Botran [00:13:44]:
Oh, and another thing I wanna say before I go on, just because, like, Susan, you brought up your own daughter. Mother hunger work is not about blaming yourself either. So it's really easy, and this is one of the first things that Kelly McDaniel says in her book. It's really easy for us to read mother hunger, and if we ourselves are parents, is to use the information against ourselves. Oh, I didn't do this. Oh, I did that. And so she really recommends that you read the book or listen to the audio because it's great. It's Kelly McDaniel's one reading it, so it's really soothing.

Cybele Botran [00:14:18]:
But really listen to it or read it as a daughter and not as a mother. Okay.

Susan [00:14:26]:
Yeah. Mhmm. That's good. That's good. Mhmm. Okay.

Cybele Botran [00:14:29]:
Because I'm already

Susan [00:14:30]:
feeling I can tell you. I'm already going, oh, yeah. Thank you so much for that. That's so good. That's so good. Yeah. So the exercise would be to come up with all the qualities in, like, that ideal mother or the role models that you gravitated to to receive the things that you needed if you didn't get it from your mother. Or maybe you even gravitated to alcohol as a teen to receive the nurturing or soothing or acceptance if, like, drinking with your social group made you accepted or fun or you know what I mean?

Cybele Botran [00:15:05]:
Yeah. I mean, that part of my story is that alcohol was like love in a bottle. It was like a way to connect with people, to feel at ease with other people. And I learned how to drink and become a party girl in high school. And so, yeah, so back to that exercise, you could just make a list of either fictional characters or real people that you know, maybe an aunt or a neighbor or anybody who you or the qualities even of your own mother that you do that you that you did enjoy or you, you know, did benefit from. So you're just making up this list, and then that's how you become your own inner loving parent, or as Kelly McDaniel says, your celestial mother. And, you know, that can really go on onto a spiritual plane too as you think about celestial. Right.

Susan [00:15:56]:
Yeah.

Ruby [00:15:56]:
That's where I took it. That was cool. So there's these three levels. Right? 

Susan [00:16:03]:
There's what.

Ruby [00:16:03]:
It was nurture, protection, and guidance. And you said that this is where I had a question, that there were, like, people that have a little bit of mother hunger or a lot of mother hunger. So I kinda was seeing this as like a spectrum and that people probably are on the spectrum somewhere and most people could probably do a little bit of work in this area. I think it's really related to many, many, many people out there.

Cybele Botran [00:16:37]:
Yeah. So Yeah. Research or scientists say that about 50% of the population is securely attached to their primary caregivers and the other 50% are not. Kelly McDaniels thinks the number's higher.

Susan [00:16:53]:
More people

Cybele Botran [00:16:54]:
are insecurely attached. And there's also, of course, father hunger. She doesn't write about father 's hunger. That's not her population. She's always saying, I hope somebody writes a book on father hunger, but, you know, you can think of just how important the primary caregiver is to the development, the brain development, the socioemotional development of a child. And so, yeah, that's that's the idea. I mean, the hopeful part of all of this is that we can rewire our brains as you both know. If you are both coaches in this area, we can rewire our brains, and we can really kind of shift and change how we are and how we interact with ourselves.

Susan [00:17:39]:
That's beautiful. Yes. I love bringing up hope, and, absolutely, we do believe in rewiring the brain. And, also, so when we coach clients, a lot of times we're saying when you want to drink, what you really need, but then having the tools to be able to provide what you really need to yourself, which is what the tools that you would learn in this mother hunger, if if you use alcohol for things like connection or I love that you said love in a bottle. That is I'm sure so many people can relate to that, you know, but then you need the tools to be able to provide that for yourself, so they're not looking for that outside substance to provide that for you. And that's what, you know, real empowerment

Cybele Botran [00:18:25]:
is.

Susan [00:18:25]:
And that's part that's most of the coaching and most of the work that we do when we're trying to quit drinking because we need to replace whatever you're using the alcohol for, whatever jobs we gave alcohol, with something else to fit to meet that need, because it was filling a need. When it becomes an addictive substance to us, it's usually because it was filling a need more than just, let's have a couple drinks when we go out. Right?

Cybele Botran [00:18:52]:
Exactly. Yeah. I mean, we could think about the nervous system. If a mother is dysregulated because she has mother hunger, and a child becomes dysregulated, so, you know, really, alcohol is a way to self regulate. Right? So we're looking at a way to self-soothe. So the whole idea around work in sobriety that we do is in recovery and the work we can do around reparenting and mother hunger is how do we self-soothe in ways that are healthy and nurturing to us?

Susan [00:19:25]:
Yeah. Yeah. Those things are really important. I use “havening” a lot with clients. They really like that.

Cybele Botran [00:19:33]:
is exactly what Kelly talks about is havening. She actually just did a workshop on Havening. I love that you brought that up.

Susan [00:19:40]:
Yep. Yeah. My clients are loving it. So I'm so glad I have that as a resource. I actually learned about it through I just got certified with Jolene Park through her gray area drinking course, and she's all about regulating the nervous system through food, through, you know, things like havening, walking through nature. So having those resources for my clients has been great.

Cybele Botran [00:20:03]:
Oh, I love all these connections.

Ruby [00:20:05]:
I know. Yeah. I gravitate more towards meditation, breath work. I've done a lot of breathing courses, and meditation, as well as yoga, getting into your body, and then compassion, which there's so many wise teachers around compassion. You know, there's Kristin Neff, and we already mentioned Tara Brach, but just all these wonderful, wise people we learn from. I just love learning, and now I'm learning from you, Cybelle.

Susan [00:20:33]:
I know. I'm really excited to read this book. Really, I think this is something that I would like to get more into, and I know that you have some workshops. I might even take one of your workshops. You have some coming up.

Cybele Botran [00:20:45]:
Parenting class. It's just an hour long class called 3 easy ways to reparent yourself about once a month. So you can find that on my website. I also offer a 90 minute class called inner child work for beginners, and I offer that about once a month. And those both come with materials and recording. And then I have a reparenting class that's starting in September 2024, depending on when you're listening to this. And you could certainly join it at any time during the year. It'll be 10 months total, so September to June, and it'll be once a month.

Cybele Botran [00:21:22]:
And, I've had quite a lot of interest in it, so I might open up a second day. So maybe on the weekend. Right now, it's only Tuesday, but that class is an hour and a half long, and it's just “reparenting”. It's a class on reparenting. So we'll be talking about boundaries. We'll be talking about self soothing, a lot of the topics we just discussed. I also teach my mother hunger course about 4 times a year. I offer it on Saturdays.

Cybele Botran [00:21:52]:
It's an hour and a half for 3 weeks in a row. And we go over you don't have to have read the book, but we just, it's a psychoeducational class, so I go over all the terms of mother hunger, and there's some exercises and journaling that happens in there. And then my kind of biggest offer is called Reparent, which is actually an acronym, and that's a group coaching experience. And it's a small group. It is 10 weeks long. I'll be offering it in the fall, and all the information can be found on my website. Okay?

Susan [00:22:25]:
Yeah. What's your website? All that.

Cybele Botran [00:22:27]:
It's my name. It's my name. It's about botrar.com.

Susan [00:22:30]:
Okay. Well, we'll be sure to put a link in the show notes for sure to all that, and I'm gonna join one of those. I'm gonna look at them all.

Ruby [00:22:37]:
Me too. I'm going to join one too. Maybe we'll do it at the same time, Susan. We'll see. But, yeah, I really am interested in this. This will really also help our clients if we have a better understanding of this. I do see this as coming up all the time. Mother mother daughter things come up so often.

Ruby [00:22:54]:
It's just very often, I've noticed. So Yeah. Super cool.

Susan [00:23:00]:
So how is this? How has this changed your life?

Cybele Botran [00:23:03]:
Yeah. What a good question.

Susan [00:23:04]:
This work.

Cybele Botran [00:23:05]:
You know, I love the link between sobriety and then mother hunger and reparenting because, you know, mother hunger says that we are we're gonna be, as toddlers, looking for to get our needs met. And so that might be toddling out and looking for food in the kitchen cupboard, and then as a teenager looking for alcohol through relationships. And so, you know, it really ties all together getting sober, not using alcohol anymore, and then kind of now what? Right? And how do I do what I do now? I can't live kind of raw. I need to figure this out. And so how it's changed my life has been very profound. You know, one thing I didn't didn't really talk about, but I'll just talk about briefly, is discovering my inner child, and that happened to me. It wasn't something that I cognitively, you know, mentally went out and sought. I was at a retreat in Canada with Taryn Strong, who's an amazing trauma informed yoga instructor, and this was probably about 6 or 7 years ago.

Cybele Botran [00:24:12]:
And my inner child was around 9 or 10 years old. Her energy, not like a vision, but her energy was suddenly on my yoga mat. And I was like, what? What's going on? I could just sense her there, and she was very angry. And so this was right around the time of me too. The me too movement was, you know, coming around again. And then the TV show Stranger Things was out, and there was a character named ‘Eleven’ who was very angry. There were a lot of things that kind of tied into it, but I really tapped into the needs of the 9 year old me, and that opened a door for me. That got me very curious, and I began to do inner child work, and then I redis I discovered my inner teenager and began reparenting work, which then led to the ‘mother hunger’ work.

Cybele Botran [00:25:02]:
So it's absolutely been life changing for me, and I feel like it's just enhanced my sobriety, you know, because it's really helped me work on that emotional stuff. Then, you know, we take away the liquid, but then Mhmm. We've got all that other work to do. And so it's really helped me with that.

Susan [00:25:19]:
Yeah. Yeah. And that's what we talk about. That's how we feel lit. Right? It's this work that we do after we quit drinking, how we mature emotionally, and and then we feel so much better physically, obviously, because we're not putting poison in our body. And that's that, I don't know. That's, like, the reward to me of alcohol free living is this idea of that we are always growing, always learning, and always wanting to feel better in our bodies and in our minds, and that's what this work does. Right? It's just it's been, like, getting and becoming alcohol free has just been life changing for me too.

Susan [00:25:59]:
It's because of this type of work and finding out about these kinds of things, which, of course, if you're just sitting around on the couch drinking every night, you're not doing. Right? Like you said, you got

Ruby [00:26:07]:
curious. So And and and just eliminating the alcohol is the tip of the iceberg. It's really about self discovery. And like you said, Susan and Cybele, just this learning and continuing to grow and continuing to practice, whatever makes you feel better and feel good, whether it's ‘avening’ or tapping or the meditation, yoga, all of these. It's what works for you. We're also different, but we also are similar. You know, I also love the communities we can form. So cool.

Susan [00:26:46]:
Yeah. So this is the time of our podcast where we ask our guests what you do in your life, Cybele, to feel lit. What activities or hobbies bring you most joy and fulfillment and really help your

Cybele Botran [00:27:01]:
Yeah. I love this question. So my non-negotiables are they're so important to me, are sleep, getting into nature. So I love walking. My favorite things are putting on headphones, going out, listening to my favorite podcast or music and walking in nature. I love spontaneous solo dance parties. Like, you'll find me with my headphones on, just rocking out. I have a gratitude practice that I've been doing.

Cybele Botran [00:27:32]:
I'm actually in two different gratitude groups email that I've been in for maybe 12 years. So

Ruby [00:27:41]:
How? What does that look like? It's an it's an accountability group

Cybele Botran [00:27:46]:
as people participate as they want. So some people participate more, some people less, but it's just a daily practice. There are sometimes weeks where I go, you know, a few weeks will go by, and there are some weeks where I'm writing 3 or 4 times a week. So just the idea of checking in and reading other people's gratitudes, is, again, about changing the brain.

Susan [00:28:09]:
Yeah. Yeah. Oh my gosh. That's a neat thing to do, to keep you accountable to your gratitude practice. That's really awesome. All these things are amazing. Walking and nature, sleep, and gratitude, are so important. Yeah.

Susan [00:28:23]:
It just makes our life better. Right? It changes our brain to keep looking for the positive. That's so great. Oh my gosh.

Ruby [00:28:32]:
The sun is always there behind the clouds, and that's where gratitude comes in for me as well. You can look at the clouds in the dark skies, but the sun is always right there, right, on the other side.

Cybele Botran [00:28:46]:
Absolutely. It's. And these are all, of course, women who are also in recovery, who are in the gratitude group. So it's about that connection, community building, being seen, all those all those things that are good for us.

Susan [00:29:00]:
Yes. Yeah. What I love about this is it's not like you know, people sometimes clients are like, when am I gonna get there? It's like, there's no there. Like, this is an ongoing journey. Not that you'd want you know, people are like, really? You know, but it's good. It's a good ongoing journey. Right? And that's, you know, that we're always, we're always connecting. Connection is the opposite of addiction.

Susan [00:29:23]:
You know, we're always looking to continue our journey forward, which is so important, I think.

Cybele Botran [00:29:32]:
Yeah. Yeah. And if somebody is listening who's, you know, either still drinking or trying to quit or, you know, wherever you are at, if you're so curious, wherever you're at, just know that it definitely gets better. It takes time, but it gets so much better, and it's so fun. It's so fun to be on this side of it. I've had so much fun today talking to both of you.

Ruby [00:29:55]:
I have had so much fun too, Cybele.

Ruby [00:29:57]:
Me too. I have a new friend in the sober community, and I definitely wanna look into your courses. I'm very interested in this topic. I'm and you brought it forward so beautifully and explained it so well.

Cybele Botran [00:30:10]:
Thank you. Mhmm.

Susan [00:30:11]:
Yeah. Yes. I'm so glad I connected with you, and that's what's so wonderful about things like the sober retreats and things where you can connect with other people on a similar journey and learn from each other. So it's super exciting.

Cybele Botran [00:30:23]:
That was so much fun. We sat next to each other at dinner and laughed and had a great time.

Susan [00:30:31]:
Yeah. I just Love it. It's so funny when I tell people there's nobody and we've talked about this before in the podcast, but there I've never met a sober person who's like, bitch, it's okay. It's like, no. We're all like, it's amazing. Right?

Cybele Botran [00:30:45]:
Absolutely.

Ruby [00:30:46]:
It is… it's Lit. That's why we started this podcast.

Susan [00:30:50]:
But we're not, you know, just talking about toxic positivity. We know it's hard, and we know it's a lot of work. But the hope is that it is amazing on the other side. And we want to have people get there.

Cybele Botran [00:31:03]:
Oh, so good.

Susan [00:31:05]:
Well, thank you so much.

Susan [00:31:06]:
We could just talk all day. I know, but we try to keep the podcast to about 30 minutes. So we're gonna wrap up and just wanna remind everyone that we are gonna put everything that you wanna know about Cybele and her work in mother hunger in the show notes, so be sure to go there. Look for the links, and also join our Facebook group, the Feed and Lit Podcast group. We'll put information there, especially if Ruby and I join one of your classes. We'll also put the information there to see if anyone in our community wants to join as well. Yeah. So thank you so much, Cybele.

Cybele Botran [00:31:39]:
Take care. Okay.

Ruby [00:31:42]:
Thanks, Cybele. Bye

Cybele Botran [00:31:42]:
Take care. Bye bye.

Ruby [00:31:44]:
Thanks so much for listening to the Feel Lit Alcohol Free Podcast. Do you have a question you'd like us to answer on the show? All you need to do is head over to Apple Podcasts and do 2 simple things. Leave a rating and review telling us what are any questions you have about breaking free from wine or living an alcohol free lifestyle. That's it. Then tune in to hear your question answered live. Don't forget to grab your copy of a wine free weekend at www.feellitpodcast.com. 
And remember, do something today that will help you feel lit. See you next time!