How to Be Your Most Loving Self

Announcer: Welcome to Addiction and the Family, “Episode 37: How to Be Your Most Loving Self.”

Casey Arrillaga: How has addiction affected your family?

Female Speaker: It robbed me of my father.

Female Speaker: Addiction's affected my family in absolutely every way.

Male Speaker: It has caused a lot of turmoil.

Female Speaker: It goes back to what I understand is at least three generations.

Female Speaker: It robbed my daughter of her mother. It robbed my mother of her daughter.

Female Speaker: Addiction has made our family quite challenging.

Male Speaker: Addiction has affected my family tremendously.

Male Speaker: It's affected my relationship with my sister where I wouldn't – I'd go for months without talking to her. It's a very difficult thing for everybody involved. It doesn't just affect the one individual. It's a disease that affects the whole family.

Male Speaker: Addiction is spread not only genetically through some of my relatives and I assume ancestors.

Female Speaker: It's generational.

Female Speaker: I think of him every day.

Casey Arrillaga: Welcome to Addiction and the Family. My name is Casey Arrillaga, and I'm a clinical social worker and addiction counselor at both Windmill Wellness Ranch and InMindOut Emotional Wellness Center in Texas. I’m the author of the books Realistic Hope: The Family Survival Guide for Facing Alcoholism and Other Addictions and Spirituality for People Who Hate Spirituality.

Kira Arrillaga: I’m Kira Arrillaga, addiction counselor intern and recovery coach at Windmill. Casey and I were in our addictions together for over 10 years and have now been in recovery together for almost twice that long.

Casey Arrillaga: I've led hundreds of family workshops, but just as important is that Kira and have lived the experience of being family to addiction as both a children and adults.

Kira Arrillaga: Join us as we offer experience, strength and realistic hope about how you and your family can find recovery together.

Casey Arrillaga: In this episode, we interview Dr. Gigi Langer, who talks about her journey of recovery as a family member and someone in recovery from her own addiction and actually learned to remove her internal roadblocks to being her most loving self. She shares about her journey to wholehearted living, how it led her to be a writer, and her new book, Love More Now. All this and more after a break to hear from one of our sponsors. [Commercial] Welcome back. Let’s go ahead and hear that interview. All righty, so welcome. Thank you so much for being on the show. I want to let you know I loved your first book, and I’m getting a chance now to read an advanced copy of your second book. I love those two. We want to talk about all those. Before we jump into any of that, why don’t you take a moment, if you don’t mind, and introduce yourself to our audience and let us know what are you doing on a show called Addiction and the Family?

Gigi Langer: I’m really glad to be here. I’m Gigi Langer. I do have a PhD in learning psychology from Stanford, and I have over 35 years of continuous sobriety for which I’m very grateful. I also am an author, and I’ve written two books so far. The first one is Worry Less Now, 50 Ways to Worry Less Now, and the second one is Love More Now. I’m here because I have struggled with addiction myself and addiction of my loved ones, and over the years of working with those issues, I’ve learned a lot of ways to help myself and other people navigate through and find a place of strength and wisdom and courage from which to operate. It’s a delicate dance, and it’s a dance of growth. I’m here to share the hope and hopefully, some ideas that’ll be helpful for people.

Casey Arrillaga: I’d absolutely agree with that having read both books now. To really see your approach is just very easy to ready and, yet, still runs very deep.

Gigi Langer: Thank you.

Casey Arrillaga: That’s an amazing combination to find.

Gigi Langer: Thank you so much.

Casey Arrillaga: I’ve read some things where I think this is great information, but you have to have studied a little bit to understand what they’re saying or it’s surface and simplistic. I didn’t find that with either one of yours. It just really feels like it’s written from your heart, and I wonder, would you mind talking a little bit about that writing process and that idea of writing from your heart?

Gigi Langer: Sure. I had been in recovery for my own alcoholism and had been working Al-Anon with other issues for about 20-some years, and I had been on a visit with my family. I came from an alcoholic family, so the healing that had happened between my mother and me – my father had passed away, but a lot of healing had happened there too. I was on the airplane returning and it just hit me that wouldn’t it be wonderful if more people could learn the tools and the ideas and get the support to heal with their relationships with their loved ones? By healing, I want to always qualify it by saying it doesn’t mean that you don’t put up boundaries and take care of yourself. I said how could I boil the 12 steps down to 4 life strategies? I’ve always felt compelled – even though most of the people who read my books are in recovery and read my blog and so on, I do have quite a few people who are not, a couple of cases where they read the first book and it 12 stepped them and got them into recovery, which was exciting, but also, people just wanting a clear explanation of some tools that they’ve never been able to find before and how to apply them to their own life challenges, worry being the topic of the first book. That’s how it started.

Casey Arrillaga: Let’s talk about that a little bit. Your first book, you want to let our listeners know a little bit about it and what inspired you to write it? What are some of the things that you’re trying to communicate through that book?

Gigi Langer: First, I was going to write a memoir, and then I thought, no, I think I’m more of a teacher. I’m going to try to help people learn how to use these ideas, so it started out with the title of Whispered Lies, which is how I define and describe that committee in our head that’s so critical, the self-critical voice. It’s one of the main themes of the book, so I was going to name it that. Then I thought people might think it was romance novel or something, so I ended up calling it Worry Less Now. When I counted up all the strategies in there, there were 50 of them, and so I made it 50 Ways to Worry Less Now. Then the subtitle is Reject Negative Thinking to Find Peace, Clarity, and Connection. That is really the description of the book. How do we get rid of our negative thinking, or not get rid of it but not allow it to drive the bus? How do we learn to notice it and make a choice about whether it exerts control over my life, my negativity. I think a lot of people, especially those in recovery who are listening, might realize that, once we stop drinking – and even in Al-Anon and other codependency programs, even though the primary concern that we went there with is getting better, we find we still have to deal with our own thinking, the constant predisposition for seeing things negatively, which is so common for those of us who grew up in alcoholic homes, or dysfunctional families, or the many causes of it being highly sensitive. Yeah, that’s what the book is about. I had these big sheets of paper all over my office, the four strategies and then which stories might illustrate them and which tools might fit with that strategy. One thing I like about the book is I’m a former teacher, so I make it very concrete. I say here’s a paragraph about why this is a good technique to use. Here’s the research, not deep but enough, and then here are the directions for how to do it. I like that about it. Also, it has a lot of stories about my personal struggles and how I discovered the tool. We don’t usually just dance along in life and say, hey, I picked up a tool for making me happier. It’s usually because something has gotten my back up against a wall emotionally, and I’ve needed to find more tools to reconnect with: hope and love and care. That’s why I wrote it.

Casey Arrillaga: That’s beautiful. Now, I love the expression whispered lies, because a lot of times we’re not aware of those things that we tell ourselves unless we really dig in and do some exploration. What was your inspiration for that idea and that phrase?

Gigi Langer: I don’t know how it came to be. I don’t think I’ve read it anywhere else, although sometimes things do come out that we read years ago, maybe in a novel or something, but I’m not sure. That was inspiration, and I have to say that any creative endeavor or work endeavor – and I’m sure it’s true for you to that eventually we learn that our best products, our best results come when – in my case at least, when I’ve meditated first, or prayed first, or said may this writing be useful and helpful to others to bring them to a place of loving, acceptance, and ability to love themselves and others. I think saying those prayers, having an affirmation – I used vision boards you saw in the book. I did a lot of things to help myself have the courage and the openness to receive whatever was supposed to come out in the book. I have no clue how that came up, but it did.

Casey Arrillaga: That’s a wonderful thing. I feel like what I hear in what you’re saying is a very spiritual approach to writing.

Gigi Langer: Yep. Because I got sober in 1986 and started working Al-Anon not too long after that, those are both steeped in a – in the language, which you wrote about in your book so well, that sounds spiritual, and even that term can freak people out. I didn’t know what it meant, but I certainly was freaked out by the God language. In 1986, that was the only game in town, pretty much, so I am steeped in that tradition of a spiritual awakening. As I write about it, I try to explain that it’s a deeply personal thing, and it can be so many different things. It doesn’t have to be a Godlike thing. In my new book, I’m referring to loving energy, and then I’m referring to finding the strength and courage and wisdom in our true self, which I believe has always been there. That was one of my ahas in recovery was that I am not a piece of dog dung. I have been created beautiful, just didn’t know it and covered it all up with my own shame and all the behavior and so on. It’s a wonderful thing to discover our true self, and for me, the 12 steps have done that.

Casey Arrillaga: I will say that mirrors a lot of my own journey, which is probably some of the reasons that I love your work so much, and I think a lot of people will and should if they don’t know about it yet is that idea that underneath everything is a beautiful, perfect version of us. I think everybody starts off with Plan A, which is I’m just going to just be myself. There’s my plan. I’m just going to show up in the world as myself, and some of us, due to circumstances which we can point any number of fingers around but, really, just the circumstances in which we grow up, many of us come to a conclusion and I certainly did that Plan A wasn’t going to work out. I can’t do that. What’s left? Okay, well, let’s try Plan B, Plan C, Plan D, until at some point I hit a plan where I’m like, okay, this will be it, but we can’t really be comfortable that way.

Gigi Langer: Exactly.

Casey Arrillaga: We’re stuck with, well, okay, so I’m doing this, but it never feels right. I think, some of the reasons that people have maybe a traumatic midlife crisis, or a mid-20s meltdown, or start turning to all kinds of addictive behavior including alcohol, other drugs, sex, food, shopping, gambling, you name it, because there’s this inherent discomfort because we’re not getting to live as ourselves.

Gigi Langer: Exactly.

Casey Arrillaga: Even worse, we are convinced that it’s not safe to do that, so this idea of being able to rediscover and uncover who we are and to find out that that’s good news – because I’ve worked with any number of people in early recovery. “Casey, I don’t know who I am, so I don’t know if I should do this work.” What I hear beneath that isn’t just I don’t know because that could just be curiosity or even excitement. Let’s find out, but often, it’s fear, fear that I’m going to find something awful or that it's going to be a terrible idea to be that original version of myself. I see in your work leading people back to that idea of, first, it’s okay and safe, and second, it’s even better to rediscover and live as who we really are.

Gigi Langer: Yes. It, in part, depends on who we surround ourselves with. I call it in the first book the invented self, and in the second one, we created a fake ID. In my case, I watched what other people did to get approval, and then I did that. Then I constructed this whole house of cards thing. Even when I fell in love, I just kept pretending that it was all pink this and that, roses, and then I pretended and pretended until it wore off. Then I just went and found another place to pretend. It’s a very painful way to live. I mean, for me, the biggest thing was, if they find out who I really am, they’re going to go running in the other direction, and if I find out who I really am – because by that point, we’re so confused about who we are, and what led to a lot of my drinking and promiscuity and drug use was my fake ID not working. Getting the good grades worked in my 20s, following the recipes. Then somewhere mid-30s, somewhere around in there it quits working, and all of a sudden, we’re stuck with me, myself. I and why isn’t working? It’s that crisis you were referring to, which is a beautiful moment but very painful. Thank God for God therapists, and in my case, 12-step programs that help us figure out that, really, all along we’ve had that beautiful true self inside. We just didn’t know it.

Casey Arrillaga: I’m going to ask you now to talk a little bit about the new book. We’ve started to touch on that, and by the way, I love that idea of the fake ID. I quoted that to someone just the other day.

Gigi Langer: Oh, thanks.

Casey Arrillaga: Referred it back to your book again. Hey, this book is coming out. You’re going to want to check this out. What a great phrase: this is my fake ID. A lot of us used those in real life. That idea of my fake ID and maybe even having a wallet full, which one do I need to pull out today to get through this situation versus just showing up? Can you talk a little bit about what got you to write that second book? You already got a great first book. What tells you, okay, there’s another book that needs to be written?

Gigi Langer: Right. By the way, the fake ID I saw in a blog somewhere. Someone’s blog used it, and I thought, oh, that’s cool. I’m going to use it for one of my blogs. When I got ready to publish the first book in 2018, I self-published so do it yourselfer. I’m retired. I have a lot of skills from my former career, so I thought, well, I can do this. The first book was everything for the first time, but just the right people showed up at just the right time. I was running up to my office to write it. I mean, it was scary at times and I had lots of inspiration and enthusiasm for it. After 2018, ‘19, ‘20, ‘21, they started saying are you going to write another book? I’d say, no, it was so much work, blah, blah. Because I knew I had to be marketing and making sure my name was out there in media and social media, I was writing a blog every week. That was original writing, so I had been noticing some of these people saying you can blog your book. Just take all that original writing, so I printed out all the blogs. I sorted them into piles and tried to find some glue. I had the theme opening our hearts to our true selves. The actual title now is Love More Now, and then the subtitle is Facing Life’s Challenges with an Open Heart. I love the title. That we came up with. It was great. The manuscript was obviously blogs strung together, and that was a year and a half ago. I decided I would hire a development editor, which is a person who helps you find the themes across and the logic and the flow in the book so that you can write to that, so she really helped. We worked together for six or seven months working on all these chapters. It fell out pretty easily because it was like, okay, what is an open heart? What’s a closed heart? What are things that close our hearts? What are our fears? What are our things that get in the way? Then how do we open our hearts and what things help that? Then how do we do relationships with open hearts instead of letting resentments and fears get in the way and then the life challenges of aging and illness and other things that are in that chapter? Then I did add one on addiction because I feel like that’s the ultimate heart closer, and I’m hoping the people not in recovery who read my book will benefit from reading that part. That’s how we found the shape of the book, and I love how it’s come out. It’s not as prescriptive. I don’t have a little exercise that’s embedded in it like the other one, and I often refer people to my first book because that’s where all the very rich descriptions of how to do a particular strategy are found. This book is a lot of stories about me and how other people use the tools that I’m offering in this book who face life challenges and get through them with courage and wisdom. We can’t do that if we allow fear to just close our hearts and go get drunk, or shop, or whatever else we do to shut ourselves down from ourselves, kind of a dead-end way to handle trouble.

Casey Arrillaga: Yeah, can you talk more about what you mean by approaching and accepting life with an open heart to yourself and others?

Gigi Langer: I have an image of the open-hearted person and a closed hearted person. I believe that each of us has access to loving energy, to spirit, however – that can come into us, that we can bring into us if we choose. An essential ingredient for that is that, if we’ve closed our heart down with fear, resentment, worry, obsessing about other people’s safety, all the things that scare the heck out of us and – if we shut down our heart, you can almost see it folding in on itself. Then this wisdom and true self that is the essence of us that I’ve located inside that heart is unable to receive and take in very much love, nor can it really send it out to others in our lives, so that person with a closed heart is in a pretty unhappy situation. Everything we try isn’t really working because we’re not functioning out of the best part of ourselves. We got one arm tied behind our back, maybe two. The person with an open heart, you can see how the heart is open and this love is coming in, and it’s able to enter in. Our lives are like a channel. We can channel this love, accept it in if we open ourselves to it, and we can direct it to ourselves and others. Now, the hitch is what gets in the way? I borrowed some of Earnie Larsen’s early work on Stage II Recovery from the ‘80s where he talks about perfectionism closing our hearts, and I identified the whispered lies. If I’m not perfect, nobody loves me. Boom! My heart’s closed. I can’t love me. Nobody can love me. I can’t love anyone. People pleasing, I can’t speak up, caretaking. Workaholism is another one, tap dancing, and there’s one other. There are six of them. They’re all false beliefs about who I have to be to be okay in this world, which many of us formed in our childhoods as a way of staying safe or in our early adulthoods, and then they stopped working. When I’m only a caretaker in a relationship, that means I don’t know what I need because I’m not in touch with myself. I’m just a puppet for the other person trying to be who they want me to be. That’s six of the patterns that close our hearts. Then, in the AA literature, they always refer to four main fears that get in the way of everything. Fear is one of them, but I believe fear is the overarching glue among them all. It’s honesty. Self-condemnation I added because that’s not one of them. Resentment is a big one, self-centeredness. These are the four things that are always brought up in 12-step programs that are blockages. I think they block our hearts. They’re barriers to love. I’m very influenced by A Course in Miracles, which is a spiritual study of a rather mysterious sort, but it teaches us how to reject fear and claim love, and the easiest introduction to it is that book by Marianne Williamson which was a bestseller in the ‘90s called A Return to Love. The point is that our job here is to remove the barriers to love so that we can open our hearts and be a source of love to others and to ourselves. We can’t really, I don’t think, find much happiness when we’re running around with resentments and fears and anger and criticism. That’s just a pretty crummy way to live, and it definitely poisons our relationships.

Casey Arrillaga: One of the things that I love is that you do weave your own story and your own narratives into your books.

Gigi Langer: Thanks.

Casey Arrillaga: In that spirit, would you mind talking a little bit about your own personal journey from the closed heartedness into open-hearted living?

Gigi Langer: Oh, boy, well, I certainly was closed hearted when I entered recovery because I thought I was a full defective person. I’d been married three times. I was in my third marriage. Already, within in a year, I had moved from Michigan from my grad school place, and so I was running around when he was traveling going to bars and picking up strangers. I mean, I had this brand-new PhD from Stanford in one hand, and I had this awful secret, shameful life in the other hand. It was excruciating. Finally, I went to a psychologist. He said, “Well, you’re in the early stages of alcoholism. You have it in your family,” dah-dah-dah-dah. He said, “Try having two drinks, no more, no less.” No one would’ve classed me as an alcoholic or a drug addict because I didn’t use every day. Sometimes I could stop after two drinks, but what I couldn’t do when I did that experiment was predict when the two drinks would lead to more drinks and seeking drugs and men and sex. Sometimes I’d have two drinks and stop, but I couldn’t predict when I’d have the second drink, the third. After six months of doing the experiment, thank God I lived through it, driving home drunk and whatever. I realized that I needed to stop drinking if I wanted to stay safe and have any chance of happiness, so then they suggested I go to a 12-step meeting. I was always a loner, right? I had my girlfriend that I used drugs and alcohol with, and I had my main man. That was my life. All of a sudden, I was supposed to make friends with these women. I didn’t know how to manipulate them, but they were so loving and welcoming. Eventually, after six months, I got a sponsor. I started to trust that love that was there. I got myself over having an attitude about the God word, and I started to work the steps. In the first layer of my housecleaning where we do the inventory and share it with our sponsor and discovered what I would call the blocks to love, which they call the character defects, and then ask our loving power to remove those when we’re finally totally disgusted with them and ready to admit that they’re not helping us be secure at all – they’re doing the opposite. That whole housecleaning process, while it’s gradual for me, it came in layers. The first time it was the alcoholism and the drugs and the promiscuity and how much I couldn’t stand myself, or trust myself, or think anything was in there was good, so I just had to drown it all with drugs and alcohol. That was totally closed state. In the inventories, I realized, oh, my heart’s closed towards myself. I didn’t use that language, but I certainly realized I didn’t like myself and I was constantly critical. I had a wonderful therapist and my sponsor and the steps. Then I hit a layer, which was the dysfunctional family, and I then went to ACA, Adult Children of Alcoholics & other – Dysfunctional Families, and learned a lot there. When I saw those characteristics, perfectionisms, many of the same ones I mentioned, I thought, oh, my God, that’s a whole other can of worms. Not just the addiction but this other stuff. How’s that going to heal? Again, with therapy and the 12 steps and staying honest and so on, I started to free myself of those patterns. During this time, I did go to therapy with my third husband, which I’d never done before. Other times, it was like I’m out of here, but with the third husband, I was in recovery. I knew not to do anything sudden. For a year or so, we did therapy, dah-dah. Finally, decided not to stay with him, to go ahead and divorce him and live on my own, which I’d never done before. I did start finding that worth within myself because the women in the group loved me without any of my little flirtatious things being necessary. My sponsor loved me. People started appreciating me just for me. I could shed the fake ID. I could start shedding the people pleasing and get more honest and so on, so those things started opening my heart up to the goodness that was inside of me. Then I started studying in A Course in Miracles, which teaches that the essence of us is perfect, innocence, beautiful, pure. It’s who we’ve always been, but we have this ego, fearful self running around in our head making us think that everything’s awful and other people are bad. We’re threatened all the time, and we have to fight for survival. Then it teaches us how to choose love instead of fear, so that helped me see, oh, my worth is already established by God, by my higher power, by love. It isn’t established by my job, my career, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean, then when our heart’s open, other people respond to it in an amazing way, so it starts cascading like a snowball because we feel affirmed for who we are. Then we open more. Now, I have to say there was a third layer, and that was about five years into recovery when I realized that there had been sexual abuse of me in my family. I immediately found a good book that said you do not have to remember every single instance of. You do, however, have to get in touch with the feelings and how it’s affected you since. I had a new therapist who was fabulous and a sexual healing group. Boy, knowing all of those things explained so much to me. No wonder I had been promiscuous. It was scary. That was not an easy journey, but with a good therapist and a sponsor and a program, I eventually was able to talk to my father. I wrote the angry letters and all that but never sent them. I did all the venting and the processing of all the ugly in my groups with my therapist. When I finally was ready to set the boundary with my father, I just asked to meet with him. I said, “When you hug me and touch me in this way, it makes me very uncomfortable. I want you to stop.” He was still touching myself and my sisters when he hugged us in that way, and he said, “Oh, okay.” He never did it again. It was so empowering because the lesson from having been touched that way for years and who knows whatever else happened was you’ll never be safe. No wonder I was scrambling around for a fake ID and all these other props. Getting rid of that shame and healing it, which maybe somewhere seven years in recovery, the good news is I had already met my fourth husband after the year sober, divorced my third husband. Didn’t know this man was going to become my fourth husband but stayed in therapy, lived on my own, didn’t allow myself to see him more than twice a week because my pattern was to – and somehow, my loving power allowed me to be healthy in that relationship and that be the man that I could be myself with and not pretend. I was graced with a very healthy relationship, and eventually, we married. We’ve been married for 33 years now. No, I don’t think finding the right partner opens our hearts to ourselves but, certainly, finding people who love us as we are. Then it comes the whole service part, Casey, where we find ourselves being an asset and a resource for someone else’s pain, and boy, does that ever open our hearts. How could these words be coming out of me? Sometimes, we don’t even know what we’re going to say, but they’re just the right words for that person. We have to believe that there’s something inherently good in us that’s producing that love and that care and that wisdom, so yes, I feel very open hearted now. I think, when fears come, that last chapter on facing common life’s challenges – there is one about work and fears about work and worry about loved ones, but the other one is aging and illness. I’m not ill now, by the grace of God. I have older siblings and my husband, and I just am aware of that whole body thing which, by the grace of God and A Course in Miracles, I learned I am not my body. I am free. That’s a long answer, Casey, but it’s been a long journey.

Casey Arrillaga: We’ll hear more of our interview with Dr. Gigi Langer after a break to hear from one of our sponsors. [Commercial] Welcome back. Let’s hear the rest of our interview with Dr. Gigi Langer. In your second book, you talk about having a moment on a lake.

Gigi Langer: Yes, that was in my third marriage. Shortly after marrying him, we went on a trip in the West, and it became very clear to me that, once again, I had made another terrible mistake. I just was hating myself, really, and we stopped at this mountain park in the Tetons in Wyoming. I don’t consider myself the most poetic writer, but that part of that scene came out in a rather poetic way, which I’m grateful for. I heard this beautiful singer, and I got her CD. That stayed with me during my journey. I went outside and I perched on this rock. I looked across this beautiful lake, and the Teton Mountains, the white peaks were reflected right back to me. I felt a moment of opening, like this wasn’t the end, that things could change. I didn’t know how, but I just felt this ray of hope coming into me. That was before I got sober, so that was just a moment where that – what I call loving energy. I don’t think we always make it come to us. I think sometimes we get serendipity and angels and all kinds of ways or just special moments like that where, if we’re open and I was because I was miserable, I received it. It didn’t change everything at once, but it changed the essential thing, which was my hopelessness and my self-hatred. It did send me a message of love, that you’re worth saving.

Casey Arrillaga: That’s beautiful. In the new book, you talk about three techniques that jumped out for me. One of them said stay awake. Second one you said hold hands while crossing the street of life, and third one, it says use specific practices. Would you mind talking about those a little bit?

Gigi Langer: We can’t grow if we’re numbing ourselves with food, shopping addictions. I mean, we just can’t be honest with ourselves, so that’s the end of that story. The second one, we can’t do it alone, so I have this thing. I don’t know if it’s an adaptation of that book, everything I learned in kindergarten or what, but I have this image. I always say it with my beautiful posse of female friends now who – I have to say, the ultimate security is not necessarily this amorphous higher power thing. It’s the open-hearted love that is shown to me here on earth through my loving sisters. That is my ultimate security. I think, if the worst of the worst happens, they will be there around me with love. I think trying not to do it alone is essential. The third one is like the catchall for we have to work our asses off to open our hearts to diminish our fears, but we don’t do this all on our own. What we direct our efforts at is not fixing the problem in and of itself. The events, or the actions, or the circumstances, we direct our energy toward bringing that loving power into our lives, connecting with our true self, opening our hearts, and that’s the biggest surprise of all. We don’t fix our problems by working on them directly. We fix them by working on us and opening our hearts and allowing our fears to be dissolved by whatever loving power we come to understand. That’s the third one. That’s why there’s 50 tools in the first book, and there’s many in the second book.

Casey Arrillaga: I notice, in the second book, you talk a lot about love as the higher power.

Gigi Langer: Yes.

Casey Arrillaga: You use those terms pretty interchangeably.

Gigi Langer: Right. A Course in Miracles does that, and I’m lucky to study it with a woman whom I’ve always admired as my writing hero. She wrote in 1982 one of the million seller books for Hazelton called Each Day a New Beginning, and it’s reflections on recovery for women. She’s just releasing this year the 40th anniversary copy. Younger people in recovery may not know of Karen Casey, but she’s written many books, wonderful, and things on A Course in Miracles, anyway. I’m graced to be in her A Course in Miracles study group. She’s one of the people that has been a teacher and has helped me have the courage to write and to open my heart to the courage and love. Yeah, quite often, if there’s a word like sin, it’ll be substituted for separation. When we separate someone from us, we’re closing our heart toward them and labeling them in our own mind as unlovable for some reason, and I don’t believe that’s what we’re here for. Even if we separate from them and soften our hearts and say, okay, you are at your core a loveable, beautiful person, it’s just you’re operating out of your ego and fear right now, and I have to set boundaries to not be around that. It doesn’t mean I hate the other person or fail to see that there is a true self there that can be brought out. It’s not my job to bring it out. Yeah, I use love. I struggled with that, love, loving energy, true self. I didn’t want it to seem like there was only one way, and I didn’t want it to seem linear like, okay, first you have to open your heart. Then you have to do this. It is mysterious how it works. Sometimes we get that spark of inspiration, or sometimes someone comes to us with a wonderful resource that opens our hearts and heals something. It isn’t linear, but it’s definitely real.

Casey Arrillaga: That is very cool. In my own work on spirituality, I talk about spirituality as being a sense of connection, and that is just a sense of connection to something greater in ourselves. My definition of love and this isn’t in the book but is also a sense of connection. It might be a sense of connection to our ourselves or to one other person or a group of people. Those ideas, of course, can very much bleed into each other. It struck me that similarity of love is spirituality and it’s all connection. I think, as human beings, simply as tribal animals, we thrive on connection, and we suffer without it. Being able to guide people towards connection and thus towards love for themselves, love for others and towards greater spirituality, I think, at the moment, there’s no higher mission.

Gigi Langer: That must be what’s had me running to my desk to work on the second book. In your book, what I love is you said a sense of, and you had pulled that out and set it apart as a significant concept, that it isn’t a belief in or some solid hard thing. It’s a sense, a knowing. It comes to us. I just thought you expressed that so beautifully there.

Casey Arrillaga: Thank you. I appreciate that. In your work, in what I’m going to start calling the now series…

Gigi Langer: Oh, yay! I didn’t know that.

Casey Arrillaga: I can see that. You got two books now that are now. I have this vision for you of like a long series of books that something now, something now, something now. That’s where the juice is. It’s in the here and now and not in some day this thing is going to make me okay or my past has to define me, but instead, being able to bring it to right here and right now where we live.

Gigi Langer: Yep. It’s right here, right now you and I connecting in this loving space of interest in one another and cheering on one another’s efforts to grow ourselves and to help other people grow for the good of all. It’s like the ultimate joy pill to connect like this.

Casey Arrillaga: Absolutely. It’s funny. You were talking about your writing process. I found that, when I finished my first book, that day the title for the second book popped in my head.

Gigi Langer: Oh, yes!

Casey Arrillaga: I thought, okay, I’ve got the two books. That’s going to be it for a while. I got plenty to work on. You got to go market and hustle and all the things you have to do to get a book out there, but the day I finished the formatting on the second book, the title for a third book popped in my head.

Gigi Langer: Oh, what is it?

Casey Arrillaga: I’m not allowed to say it.

Gigi Langer: Okay. Okay.

Casey Arrillaga: It’s probably got six months to a year before it’s actually out, so I don’t want to pre-stage it too much but that third book moving in that direction. Then somewhere along the line, somewhere someone said, hey, children’s books are really cool. I was thinking what would – actually, children’s book and stuff that I’m writing about? Then I got home that night and the idea popped in my head, and I found that one wrote itself over night. I think the third book is probably actually going to be something different than I anticipated, and what was going to be the third will be the fourth book. I know that that kind of creativity, especially as we try and live in a more open-hearted way – and I think I’m using that expression more now as a result of having read your work.

Gigi Langer: Oh, thanks.

Casey Arrillaga: Just serves everybody…

Gigi Langer: Thank you.

Casey Arrillaga: …that idea that – I think it puts us in a position to best offer our gifts to each other and to the world.

Gigi Langer: That is so true, and I think that’s pretty much what we’re here for.

Casey Arrillaga: Beautiful. Gigi, it’s been such a pleasure having you on the program. I’ll ask you to let people know where they can find you and your work and get ahold of you if they wanted to.

Gigi Langer: Yes, I would love to hear from people. I have a website. It’s a really easy one, G-I-G-I, GigiLanger, L-A-N-G-E-R.com. I have blogs on there. You can buy my book for about half what Amazon charges, and I will ship you a personalized signed copy with free shipping if it’s within the United States. I also have YouTube videos posted up there, just Gigi Langer, search for it, lots of podcast appearances. Just search Gigi Langer, and you’ll find me.

Casey Arrillaga: Is there an email address or a social media that you’d be wanting to give them?

Gigi Langer: Yeah, I’m on Facebook, Gigi Langer; Twitter, Gigi Langer, and also Instagram and then my email. I’m happy for people to contact me, and if you would like a copy of the book, I have extras printed. If you email me, I’d be happy to send you a copy, even if you don’t want to pay for it yet or can’t. It’s GLanger, G-L-A-N-G-E-R,2202@gmail.com.

Casey Arrillaga: That’s our interview with Dr. Gigi Langer. Thanks for being with us through another episode of Addiction and the Family. As they say in many recovery meetings, take what you liked and leave the rest. Go out and explore the possibilities for recovery in your life and give your loved ones the space and dignity to make their own choices. If you like this podcast, please subscribe. It means a lot to us. If you know anyone else who could use what we have to offer, please tell them about Addiction and the Family. If you have comments about this podcast, have a question you’d like answered on the show, or want to contribute your voice, or just want to say hi, you can write to us at addictionandthefamily@gmail.com. We’re also happy to be your friend on Facebook, and we can be found tweeting on Twitter.

Kira Arrillaga: Addiction and the Family is produced, written, and engineered by Kira and Casey Arrillaga, with music by Casey.