This episode will remain open to the public for 2 weeks and then go behind the paywall.

Bridget Phetasy and her co-host/husband Jeren Montgomery, a licensed marriage & family therapist, discuss the struggles of early sobriety. They cover what their individual rock bottoms were, and how different they looked, the lives they were leading at the time which finally led to the decision to get sober, why facing the wreckage of your life and past mistakes is the only way to change, how difficult large life changes in general can be, not realizing something’s a cope until you’re on the other side of it, feeling like their lives were never going to be any different, and how they can both honestly tell any newcomer that it does get better.

Questions:

* When has there been a time in your life that you’ve had to make a drastic change and you couldn’t see a path forward? How did you get through it?

* When was there so much pain or fear keeping you from making a change and what got you to make the change? What prevented you from making the change sooner?

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Factory Settings is a podcast exploring politics, culture, relationships, mental health, addiction, and media, through the lens of how our built-in biases affect the way we consume information and form opinions.

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This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.phetasy.com/subscribe