The Tension of Emergence: Thriving in a world that remakes, not breaks

Don't Take the Edge Off: The Gift of Sobriety with Madeleine Shaw

• Jennifer England • Season 3 • Episode 13

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To survive hustle culture, family and career pressures and world affairs we often decompress with social media, our phones or alcohol. In this episode Jennifer talks with social entrepreneur, author and cyclical wisdom devotee Madeleine Shaw about the gift of sobriety in a culture that just wants to take the edge off.  

In this intimate and honest conversation, they explore- 

  • The rise of hustle culture and #GirlBoss 
  • How drinking is a socially accepted prescription for exhaustion + burnout 
  • The question you should (and shouldn’t) ask about any addictive tendency
  • What actually helps to ‘take the edge off’

Join Jennifer and Madeleine for a heart-opening conversation on how to face the messy middle of “gray area” drinking  and attune to what deeply nourishes our bodies, minds and relationships instead. 

Links & resources—


Gratitude for this show’s theme song Inside the House, composed by the talented Yukon musician, multi-instrumentalist and sound artist Jordy Walker. Artwork by the imaginative writer, filmmaker and artist Jon Marro.

S3 Ep 13 Don't Take the Edge Off: The Gift of Sobriety with Madeleine Shaw
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Jennifer: When I look back on my life, I realize, there have been many times when edgy would have been the way you'd describe me. And I think about all those moments when my edginess rubbed people the wrong way. You know, I remember when I was a little girl and I'd have this impatience to get going for summer family camping trips and My parents just seemed to take forever to get organized and that's a real, innocent one, but I could recall as I look back, especially around emotions, 

where anger, frustration were in the room or when I felt stretched to perform in my career while also taking care of myself and my family. I think back around surviving graduate school, working in a community directly impacted by really high rates of violence, or mothering, or and leading a fast paced department, or when work became the primary focus for both my partner and I, for a time when really our relationship needed a lot more tending and nurturing.

Those times, I was edgy, and edgy for me is a heightened nervous system, you know, where I feel quick to scan, make decisions, react, where reactivity is really alive and hot for me, where there's this quality of constant pushing to make things better, a degree of critique. To push myself to do well and to move work along, especially where I thought social change needed to really be pushed along.

And after a day of edginess, fighting, Bracing, striving, fighting some more. I often felt the desire to quote, take the edge off, unquote. And this idea to take the edge off is interesting on a couple of different, fronts. One, for my own nervous system, it gave me this quick access to decompression.

And for me, for many years, that was often a drink after work. Not a lot. But more frequent. And after the advent of social media, because I was in the work world long before it, decompression for me also included scrolling on Instagram. And Netflix, that as well.

I've been really curious about this relationship to the, quote, edge that I often wanted to round off. Over the last couple of years, I've been appreciating writers and thinkers and embodiment practitioners on this importance of feeling.

And this has been a theme this season and I'm grateful for some of these thinkers who've exposed this assumption, we even need to take the edge off in the first place, the intensity of our feelings, how we cope with the insanity of our lives in our world. Can be explored more wisely and compassionately Working and being with these messy middles we find ourselves in and I'm so grateful for my next guest Madeline Shaw.

I first ran into her at a social impact conference many years ago, just before COVID. She's a social entrepreneur, a writer and a cyclical wisdom devotee. And she is the author of The Greater Good, Social Entrepreneurship for Everyday People Who Want to Change the World.

And she writes regularly on Medium about gray area addiction, recovery, and sobriety. And recently I came across her piece that really resonated with me. And I especially loved how intimate she got in this article, courageously exploring this issue. Interconnection between current cultures of entrepreneurship and hustle culture, and the gray area of addictions, when we move away from a more alive way of feeling and towards a numbing tendency, how those are interconnected.

And I love her invitation to actually embrace the edge, whether it's in our anger, our rage, our brokenheartedness, our joy, our confusion. There's something about the edge that reminds us that we're alive and we can attune and learn from this gift of life.

So enjoy this conversation with Madeline. I hope it encourages you to reflect and think in some new ways. Enjoy.

I am so, so grateful to have you here on the Tension of Emergence, Madeline. And I'd love to start with what kind of entrepreneurial culture you grew up in, you came of age in. And I'm curious to what extent it reflected or encouraged this hustle culture that so much of us are pushing back against.

So love if you could start there.

Madeleine: Right. I love that question. And so I started my first venture in 1993 at the age of 25. So to kind of contextualize that, like, it was just before the dot com boom and bust that was going to hit in the late 90s. It was before the Dragon's Den TV franchise kind of popularized a very kind of sensational form of entrepreneurship.

So much of what we now think of as entrepreneurship is associated with a very tech heavy model Silicon Valley type of, oh, gosh, there's so many things about it that are sort of swashbuckling, and we're seeing it play out right now in the AI space, for example it's incredibly entitled and arrogant behavior and highly individualistic, highly masculine But when I started, it wasn't like that.

And, you know, I'm someone who started my career as a social change activist and as an artist. And I, I didn't go to business school and I didn't like for me, entrepreneurship was a learned skill that would enable me to enact a social change agenda. And so in my case, it was around having developed some products.

Reusable menstrual products. In this case I was one of the first people in the world to develop these products that are now very popular. And it's, it's very exciting. And I'm incredibly proud of that. And so I started a business in order to make these products that had changed my life, that had brought me into a wonderful new relationship with my body and my cycle and all of those things.

And, so my rationale for starting it was. Was not to make money. Not that that's an inherently bad goal. I think it depends on, you know, it's a form of energy. It depends what you do with it. So I was sort of getting my feet in this on impact. Like it was before there was even talk about social entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurship, but that was exactly what I was doing. But I became sort of disillusioned as this, There, appeared to be a new model of entrepreneurship. That was this hustle culture that you mentioned. There are some people, Trisha Hersey called it grind culture which is another great frame. Where it's this 24 seven and move fast and break things.

There are all kinds of, you know, big, hairy, audacious goals rocks like there's, there's this really interesting language around it. That is very. Kind of harsh and sort of I experienced it as quite dehumanized and I remember going to a networking event with some colleagues and I was like, Hey, how, how are you?

And pretty much everyone there said either exhausted or busy as their answers to that, like, how are you? But they, they weren't like, Oh, I'm exhausted. This is killing me. They were like, I'm exhausted. I'm, you know, I'm really busy. And this, you know, kind of, they were sort of proud of it. And I was like, Oh, wow, this is.

This is not the model of entrepreneurship. Like, look what it's doing to these people on a human level. But then on a more systemic level, the nature of the work itself had changed, for me, I was making a product and selling it like there was this very, very basic timeless quality of an activity, right?

My work making something and then exchanging it for value with other humans in various ways. And I loved doing that. And then with the advent of Dragon's Den and the increase of an interest of venture capital. There evolved this culture where the raw work of entrepreneurship shifted to being about raising capital, pitching, raising capital, scaling the business, and then exiting the business, selling the company and extracting the value from it.

And that those 2 activities are very different

in terms of work. And it just felt very jarring to me. And I don't know, it's persistent now. And to me that typifies that hustle culture is, is what you are in support of that business model of pitch, raise scale and exit. That's what it's for.

Jennifer: And it feels as you, describe this, there's a jarring experience I have when you're talking about, you know, you developed a product. To honor the cycle to actually move you closer to in relationship with your body, and that feels like a very nurturing and creative act.

And so just such a different contrast when you're talking about, yeah, going to these parties and having these conversations with folks who are in it for a very different purpose. But reason and maybe to solve a problem, but I'm detecting that the way in which one attempts to solve a problem through entrepreneurship is what you started to sense was was shifting,

Madeleine: Yeah, exactly. And just the values behind it and the, how the actual, the raw work, like, where we place our life force that the activity and it also became with the advent of e commerce. It was a huge shift. So again, when I started, it was pre internet,

Jennifer: right?

Madeleine: so there was no Facebook. There was no Instagram.

And I know we're going to get into that topic a little bit, but like, so the transactions that I was creating was in person with other people or on a telephone. There wasn't this kind of looking at a screen. And then kind of optimizing for that, like, like feeding money into the marketing machine of, the attention economy, right?

Of Facebook Google and search and all those things. And so that became. You know, a present in fact, an imperative over time that I personally felt a sense of alienation from, or just lack of comprehension that, of course, I blamed myself for, for being kind of out of touch or resistant or, you know, just the fact that I didn't like looking at a screen my entire day felt like there was sort of the problem was with me or that. These companies were taking such a huge amount of margin as just part of it. Anyways, it just felt very extractive to me and yet necessary and sort of feeling a bit trapped in that model after a while.

Jennifer: And I'm curious about, there is a whole contingent of feminist entrepreneurs. And did you also find that despite the quote unquote title of feminism sort of claiming power, did you also feel that some of that was co opted in that container as well to some extent, or did that tend to escape it?

Madeleine: I think there's both. I, or I've observed both and I mean, definitely this girl boss, hashtag girl boss culture, very hustly, very, Glamorized very you know, Internet centric. Absolutely. And a lot of that culture to me just sort of sought to replicate the existing male paradigms and archetypes in that world and and sort of, you know, insert women and stir and then you've got this pseudo feminist kind of Leadership model that I, the only way I can really come to terms with it is as as a stepping stone to something that is truly innovative or truly feminine centric as a business practice, but it's so hard, like, to your point around, you know, my lifelong interest in cycles and cyclical wisdom and pattern and.

Understanding, like, I've always felt like. And I often say that we're cyclical beings living in a linear world. And that is a great example of it. It's like, how do you reconcile that? Like, if the power paradigm is linear is, the classic hockey stick of growth and women are seeking power in the world.

And that is the form of power. So, okay, I've got to be a girl boss and seek to emulate this whole hustle culture, pitch, et cetera, paradigm. Where does that leave other forms of wisdom or other identities, you know, who fall outside of that? And I guess that's really the battle, if you will, and I don't use that word lightly, that I feel like I've kind of been fighting my entire career, is just trying to survive.

As an entrepreneur, remain true to my values, do business in a regenerative way lead gently, lead thoughtfully and seek sustainability, and it's very much at odds with those, paradigms in the business world that are so persistent. And yet. As a feminist, I don't want to take down other women for seeking power in whatever way they can find it, you know, and whatever way feels true to them and they're on their journey and they're learning as am I but what I'm really hopeful of is that we are in a time of such change, which is what your whole podcast is about.

But I love is that there are some new paradigms coming out of this and I'm, part of some communities. 1 in particular that I'm thinking of called Coralis. That centers women and non binary entrepreneurs who are seeking to shift the paradigm, not simply conform to the existing ideals of late stage capitalism.

Jennifer: Yeah. Beautifully said. There's so much to unpack there, but where I'm, I'd love to take us is this, Kind of drinking culture, and you've been such an inspiring and brave and vulnerable voice around drinking culture and sobriety and recovery, and so I'm curious, like, what, where did you start to see the sort of intersection between a normalized drinking culture, especially daily With Hustle Culture, like, where did those two pieces, if at all, get connected for you as you were surviving, essentially, in really trying to hold down the fort of your own values as an entrepreneur, but then up against this big monster of a different way?

Madeleine: Yeah I love that question. The phrase white women and white wine comes to mind. And just recalling like so many women's business networking events that are lubricated by white wine, you know, and it's mostly white women drinking white wine and trying to figure out how to survive and be successful and sort of reward ourselves for this Surviving and in this world and yeah, I I mean, my, relationship with alcohol is it sort of descended into something that was problematic took many, many years, but interestingly, kind of dovetailed with my relationship with starting.

You know, becoming an entrepreneur and this idea that's, you know, working hard and playing hard. It's very much part of the hustle culture thing. And this idea of taking the edge off and which is a very interesting concept because now. In my post menopausal years, I very much like, I love the edge. Like I am the edge, you know, and like,

Jennifer: love it.

Madeleine: go there.

Jennifer: I love it.

Madeleine: but yeah, I mean, they dovetailed in the sense of becoming a coping mechanism for me, for sure. Because that again, that cyclical being linear world, like you're running up against those edges and just, there was something that wasn't working for me as a human. And as much as entrepreneurship is It's just a hard thing no matter what you're doing, like, you can be leading the most heart centered.

You know, sustainable grounded amazing that happens to be a great market fit. La la la. And it's still going to be a challenge to figure that out. And because that's not easy to be working outside, you know, more of a dominant corporate, like, this is my title and this is my pay grade. And, you know, you've lived this, like, you know, right. Where it's all kind of laid out for you and you just have your job description and your pay grade and you go and do it. And then you take your holidays and. You know, okay, not to say that that's easy. That's not easy. You're still in some kind of a box and a framework to some extent, but with entrepreneurship, you've got to figure it out for yourself.

And I, I just knew. Something wasn't working for me, but it was hard to articulate. You know, it's something so big and so systemic and so celebrated. Like, that's the other thing is it's celebrated to work your ass off in our culture, right? It is also celebrated and normalized. To be a wine lover, or to appreciate craft beer, or to, you know, knock back a couple cocktails with your pals, you know, it's like, I think that's really where my interest lies right now is in these very normalized, what I call everyday addictions, that people aren't warning you off, it's like, you're not saying, oh, you know, I'm thinking about trying heroin, and then your friend would say you know, I don't think that's a great idea, but if you're like, hey, let's go for a glass of wine, they're like, yeah, that's a great idea, nobody's like, Going, hey maybe, maybe there's a slippery slope here and that it's not just about addiction.

It's about health and the other just to sort of. Try and get closer to answering your question. There's this kind of breathless imperative quality to the hustle culture. Like, this is how I have to run my business. It has to feel like this and that I parallel with substance addiction because it's sort of omnipresent in one's mind and it becomes a belief system.

It's like, I need to engage in this behavior. In order to survive, and that's what literally happens in our brains when we develop an addiction, right? Like, that's what dopamine does is it it's a reward for doing something that supports our survival, essentially, and alcohol, for whatever reason, ethanol.

Provokes that in the brain, that response of dopamine that isn't just about pleasure. Some people think it's just about pleasure, but it's actually about survival. So if I'm believing that, you know, I've got to hustle and I got to work 24, seven and I got to, you know, disrupt something in order to survive.

And in the same way that I come home and my nervous system is so depleted from being part of this mentality in this world all day. And I reached for my white wine that makes me feel better. Takes the edge off. It replicates that in the brain, think.

Jennifer: Yeah. That's such a good point. And what I appreciate in how you're bringing this up around, cause this is not, an easy topic because I think there's still so much shame around any kind of addiction. Especially in our culture, it's either You don't have an addiction or you have a serious addiction and there's nothing in between.

And so I, I think it's brilliant what you're saying around this, it's to take the edge off. And as a creative response, you know, it's a creative response to a institution or culture that is extracting of us. And that feeling like there's, No more energy or gas in the tank like you, you laid it all out. And that's, that's the check is sort of the way we check.

Well, I gave it my all, you know, I gave it my 150%. And that's what's expected. If you want to be successful, especially when you're working against a whole bunch of different grains, like you say, when you're an entrepreneur, and you're outside of a particular institution, but then when you're a kind of impact driven entrepreneur and you're also outside of a particular culture, then there's almost a sense.

And I know from my own experience, like you could work all the time, you know, to because you need to learn it. So using alcohol is in a way a creative resistance to survive in a culture or a place that doesn't feel ultimately supportive of your wholeness. And so I just want to double click on that.

And the other piece that is coming up for me is like, you know, and I know for me when I've used alcohol to take the edge off, it's often because I don't want to feel a certain way. You know, there's a huge avoidance around, I don't want to feel my tiredness. Because I still have to work tonight, or I don't want to feel my frustration, or I don't want to feel my disheartenedness when I've worked so hard and nothing's really shifting.

So, I'm curious if you want to speak to that, because it feels like the hustle culture is an extractive nature of our bodies and our minds, but also of our hearts. So I don't know if you want to chime in there. at all about your experience around, you know, these patterns and, and it can be, and we'll, we'll move into there in terms of phones and social media, but there's a piece around trying to avoid feeling the hard things.

Madeleine: Yeah, I would agree with that. And, in that context, it makes perfect sense. It is too much because it is asking too much of us. Oh, there's, it's so rich. Okay. So 1 of the things I look to when I'm trying to understand what's happening with me.

In terms of, it's something kind of a behavior becoming harmful to me. I'll ask myself, like, how do I feel when I engage in this? How do I feel afterwards? Is it replacing something that I actually need? Because it feels to me like that action of taking the edge off almost, it disables our ability to an extent to really ask for what we actually need.

Or perhaps set a boundary or perhaps perform some form of self care that might be more authentically serving our needs. But the thing is with that edge when that that's it's a double edged edge, as you know, or maybe it's around the edge where there's a big perimeter of things Where there's a truth to that edge, right?

And maybe that truth is like, you do need to slow down or this is harming your health or compromising your values or burning you out or ruining your relationships or just sucking out your attention, your life force, whatever, in a way. That isn't serving you there's almost a glamorization of that, like to the point of that exhaustion and burnout and all those things in it.

And it's not glamorous. And it's not weak. Like the thing with addiction is, is I think there's a persistent sort of perception that it's a moral failing.

Jennifer: Yeah.

Madeleine: And I reject that with every fiber of my being. I think that we are just a bunch of. Little scared animals, clinging to a gigantic rock that is hurtling through space at 67, 000 kilometers an hour and that to even get out of bed between the state of the world and all of these.

social mores and marketing and like we're all just in a perpetual state of overwhelm due to the world and heartbreak, right? So how do we cope with like, is it any wonder we reach outside of ourselves, right? It, it makes all the sense in the world. And so to me, the task is to try and really tune into what it is that we actually really do need and asking good questions about that, connecting with one another and.

Also normalizing the conversation about addiction, because I think it's another 1 of those black and white. Like, I got stuck for so long on the 1 single question of, am I an alcoholic and I could never figure that out. And so I kept kind of. Drinking and then not drinking and then doing dry January and and then blaming myself and then repeating this behavior that was becoming increasingly literally painful to me like I was losing sleep and feeling lousy about it.

Whereas, looking back the question that really took to get me over it is like, is this taking more than it gives. And that one really got me, and that's thanks to Holly Whitaker, who's an amazing thinker in this space, or would it feel good to be liberated from this behavior, or this thought pattern, or this substance, like, those are the types of questions that I ask now, not am I an addict or not, like, and I think especially with alcohol, it's like, the health risks associated with ethanol kick in well before one becomes addicted to it, and yet, and yet, I think there are certain interests who want to kind of reduce it to this.

Are you an alcoholic? You're not an alcoholic. And to which there's no real answer to that question. There's no moment when I knew that I was kind of crossing over a line. Of control, because the arbiter of that was just that 1 question.

Jennifer: I think we hold it in our minds as a particular extreme. And so if we are not that, Then there's that realization like, okay, well, or the, or the thought process of, okay, I'm fine. And I think your point, I love your point about the edge matters. That whole piece around taking the edge off like, what if we didn't take the edge off?

Because when you don't take the edge off, the edge gives you a clue. And I think in your beautiful article on medium. You said, I started to pay attention to the French word malalaise, you know, ill at ease, and that is more subtle and I think maybe that's your point about how do we normalize that conversation, you know, that the conversation about addiction.

is our capacity to pay attention to our edges. And when we start, and we all have a very different edge, depending on the conditions and stages of our lives and our personalities and, experiences of oppression. But I feel like that's so fascinating to me around, you know, because then, you know, it enters in. All these other soothing, addictive things, like you've shared about social media and our phones, and maybe we could weave that in, but that becomes these everyday behaviors that start to, again, take the edge off, to numb out, and it detracts us from our curiosity and our compassion with that edge.

Madeleine: Yeah, totally. And so, yeah, to me, the edge is a place of truth. Like, it's pointing you to something really, really important. And where we can be very powerful, like, I mean, when we take that edge off, I think it can, it has the impact of silencing us. We literally quiet down, like we are fooling our nervous system.

I wish I could remember the quote from Christy Coulter, another amazing writer, but like, we shouldn't construct our lives to be such that we need to fool our nervous systems into tolerating them. It's an approximation of what she said in an essay called Anjali. So there's that, but when we take the edge off, we also reduce our ability to experience things like joy and pleasure.

So, when we take the edge off, it's not selective. It's like putting down kind of a yucky, fuzzy blanket across, our ability to pay attention to anything. When the edge is off, then I'm kind of not maybe paying as much attention to my kids. Or I'm maybe not hearing that tone in, you know, my partner's voice that's telling me that they're not okay, 

like, you're not as present. And to me, presence is one of the greatest, like, in a way, I kind of feel called to talking about how great sobriety is now, because it's like, when I am in my edge, I'm in my joy and I'm in my pleasure and I am tuned to things that, like, I can hear better. You know what I mean?

I'm not distracted. And whether it's, you know, when I'm not looking and scrolling through my phone, I can hear birdsong and I can notice the quality of light changing. And I just. That slowing down that you speak to so beautifully. It's like there's so much power in that. There's so to being truly fully present and when and the edge is kind of What is the actually it sounds like a bad place.

It sounds like sharp and cruel and, but it's like, it's not it's presence is in my heart of hearts. That's what I really, really believe. But the catch is that you don't get to be selective with it.

Jennifer: Yeah. It's

Madeleine: when we. When we numb it out, it's numbed out across the board and that's kind of the price you pay.

And so to feel, I think that's what I love about sobriety is that just feels like a more heightened version of being alive 

Jennifer: Yeah, it's beautiful. And as you're saying this, it reminds me of, you know, the, for the last couple of years I love to dance almost any kind. But definitely electronic dance. We have a, an amazing community up here in the north of electronic dance, DJs and folks who are dancing, and I've gone to these sober, completely sober.

The heightened joy that I have, I don't need long, you know, maybe an hour and a half or two hours and I'm good. But I've noticed that piece around versus if I have one drink in me or zero, there is a difference. And so I just love that your point is that, you know, addictions, whether it's alcohol or whether it's your phone, there is a dampening effect on our capacity to feel and not feel just the hard stuff that we want to avoid, but also, as you say, the pleasure in our own bodies as there is a different quality of it. And so, yeah, I just love that. You're sharing, like, Oh, all of a sudden feel more present and I can feel more. And in my earlier conversation with Prentice Hemphill, who's an embodiment facilitator, their whole point is when we can feel more, when it's actually becomes a more nuanced communication.

system within ourselves, and when we can feel more, we can discern what is the right action, but when we can't feel as much, there's less information, less to work with in a way, in order to discern what's right action for me in this moment.

And I think, just circling back to, all the women entrepreneurs everyone chatting and sharing. Around sort of entrepreneurship and how hard it is, there's an element of, of how that can also dampen our capacity to be sharp about what is the right action we need to take.

For example, it might be a sabbatical, it might be rest, it might be, you know, a really easeful collaboration that takes the edge off in quotations of, of it being a solo journey, for example. What it's coming up for me is that, you know, this, this kind of addictive tendency or to drink or to take the, the edge off can take down our ability to see what's needed based on the challenges we find ourselves in.

Madeleine: And I think, I mean, when I'm in one of my more, I guess, extreme moods around, like, I'm, I'm still very angry at alcohol and I'm. A very joyful, grateful, almost ecstatically sober person now, at least when it comes to alcohol. I certainly have a deep passion for sugar and love, you know, if I'm feeling a bit down, we'll go and buy myself a new item of clothing or whatever.

Like, I, I still do these things but I'm, I'm just trying to be more mindful around what's happening. 

Jennifer: Let's circle back to this perspective that there's a big spectrum in terms of the ways in which we use substances, to make ourselves feel better or to numb out. So, talk to me about this. Insight that you have around why it's so important to talk about and normalize a conversation around addiction with these gray areas and feel free to weave in the phone and social media and anything else that you feel is, is relevant.

Madeleine: 100%. Yeah. So, so gray area substance or behavior use or addiction is I think a really truthful way of framing it. Like, I think there's been until now a largely all or nothing black and white, you know, you are an addict or you weren't, you are an alcoholic or you aren't. And furthermore, that once you sort of.

Or given that label or take that label, it's kind of with you for life. Like, you don't necessarily get the opportunities to heal from that. Or, move on with your life. And so for me, the gray area, like part of why I had trouble identifying that I had a problem with alcohol is because I didn't actually drink that much.

And it wasn't like I was driving drunk or getting into bar fights or doing hugely embarrassing things or whatever. Like none of that was true. I saw myself as a very hardworking person. Who, you know, had a family and lots of responsibilities who really like drinking white wine.

But then after a while it started, you know, interfering with my sleep and various things. And then I struggled to moderate my consumption of it. And when I finally, and it took me years to getting around to asking for help, because I didn't want to. Honestly, I didn't want to go to 12 step meetings.

Like, I didn't feel like, quote unquote, that kind of alcoholic. And I didn't necessarily, I don't know. Intuitively, it wasn't what I connected with. But when I started finally telling my family and my friends that I felt like I had a drinking problem, people, like, literally told me I didn't.

Jennifer: Mm hmm.

Madeleine: Because my drinking looked like theirs to an extent, like it was not what they wanted to hear. And it's surprising how often. When even I tell people now that I don't drink and I don't drink because I feel like I fell into an addictive pattern with it and it doesn't serve me and, you know, whatever language I want to use to frame that, like, they'll, they'll just start talking about their own drinking and why they don't have a problem with alcohol.

And it's just this funny reaction that people have. And I just wish that, we could talk about it more openly, like, this idea of it being a spectrum is not widely accepted. I wish it could be like mental health where it just feels like it's so much more normal now than it was even 10 years ago to say, I'm feeling depressed.

I'm feeling anxious. I'm having some really, you know, troubling thought patterns and go to someone and ask for help and for that to be taken seriously, as opposed to getting slapped with a label. That you're an addict, you've got to go into this program or you've got to go into some kind of treatment and or you don't look like an addict this type of thing, or you're fine. Oh my gosh, and we just need to listen to ourselves and listen to one another, 

Jennifer: how did you know for, for yourself that it was starting to feel problematic? Like what were the signs or the clues for you that other people couldn't notice?

Madeleine: There was literally a voice that started talking to me. Inside my head and the voice and I eventually named it. I called it the whiner and the whiner would say things like, is there enough wine in the house? And, you know, how many bottles are there and. Well, shouldn't we get more in case people come over and the whiner would keep an eye on things.

Like if I was in a restaurant setting and somebody ordered a bottle of wine, the wine would notice how much wine was left in the bottle and get stressed out that maybe somebody else might drink the wine. And I, and I wouldn't get quote enough. There were so many little, like, it was always justifying things.

It was always telling me why I deserved wine. Because I'd had a hard day, like, when it flipped from, you know, a nice dinner out or a wedding or some kind of, celebration, and you'd have a glass and it's this kind of celebratory activity but when it became something like a consolation, I started linking it with things like loneliness or because I would often make dinner by myself because my husband was still working, my daughter was doing homework, and so it was almost like keeping me company, like it became kind of a surrogate friend.

And. Just when it became a daily habit, wasn't a good thing either. And the whiner just always saying, Oh, you put so much work into dinner. It would be a shame for you not to have a glass of wine and treat yourself and, and this kind of purring kind of quality.

And so that was probably the biggest one. And then also looping spinning through that was another voice going, am I an alcoholic? Am I an alcoholic? Am I okay? Is this too much? Whatever. And so it's sort of an angel and a devil on either shoulder kind of experience of just listening to these two voices, like this internal me going, I'm so tired.

I just want a decent night's sleep. You know, I was getting into perimenopause and postmenopausal, I was having trouble sleeping and I'd wake up in the middle of the night with You know, because of the wine and then, yeah get back to sleep and then be woken up with hot flashes and just be like, okay, I I can't do this anymore.

And actually that felt like a gift from my kind of inner wise woman, just letting me know that it, it just wasn't agreeing with me anymore. She couldn't be her full self and the wise woman is the edge. She is edgy.

Yeah. So it's a combination. Yeah.

Jennifer: Thank you for being so transparent and honest. This is the kind of vulnerable sharing and conversation that I feel like collectively we need to be having with our friends and our family members and our colleagues, because I appreciate it. You know, when it becomes that degree of preoccupation, what I sense is that your wise woman was like, okay, you're not as present, you know, present to your loneliness, present to your what, what needs to be nourished, that wise woman was very discerning around what the whiner, the whiner voice, inside of you was looking for, and recognizing that the promise of what the alcohol might give you You, bigger you, wasn't actually what you deeply needed.

Madeleine: Yeah. A hundred percent.

Jennifer: I think this is also really key and maybe part of the reason we don't talk about it so much is that, you know, if we recognize any of these patterns in ourselves, and I'm sure many of our listeners, whether it's maybe not with alcohol, but it could be with your phone or social media or shopping or who knows what it might be, where it becomes this.

You know, once we notice it, do we want to dominate the behavior, you know, like that, shut it down, dominate shaming aspect of ourselves that can be so harsh and self critical, where I'm curious for you, how did you treat the whiner voice? Like, in what way did you approach it such that it could speak, it had room, and at the same time, maybe you didn't shame it, or maybe you did.

I'm curious.

Madeleine: That's a wonderful question because that again it's like there can be levels of berating ourselves that just kind of build on one another. This is what I love about sober curiosity is because it's curious. And to me, curiosity, it's sort of kind and it's like, What's this about for you? Like, what does this mean? What is this thing, as opposed to going, I need to label this. And all those, so many of the labels associated with addiction are very shame filled and very pejorative and I think harmful. It's like, what's going on with you? And and I think that was really the wise woman part.

I don't feel like she so much rescued me from the whiner as she just offered me just reminding me of who I really was and asking me what I really needed. That's it. And sort of almost like a very sort of maternal, like not judgmental, not because that again, the voices in my head with social media. Oh,

so mean.

Yeah, like, 

Jennifer: Can we talk about that? Social media 

Madeleine: yeah. 

Jennifer: Yeah, I'm excited about this because I feel like there can be just such this edgy, shame, angry, frustrated aspect of ourselves, like, shit, you got caught up in your phone again, or you scrolled again, or like, look how much you're checking, or you're looking for the likes and the validation.

But I bring this in because your wise woman knew that you needed something else. And yet there was these other elements of you that were also using. A different process to fill a need.

Madeleine: Yeah. And so I knew with historically that social media was always, I felt ill at ease as I speak to in my essay with it because I felt very vulnerable and kind of exposed. And also, I don't like the medium, like, I don't like screens very much. And when I find myself, like, the physical act of looking at a screen can really start to grind me down.

But I noticed. Over time I would get a similar dopamine hit with social media and I was going to it for the same reasons. I'm looking for the likes and I'm looking for the hearts and I'm looking for this kind of validation that my life is good and I am a good person because somebody is telling me, somebody is seeing that and Validating that for me, and then in one way, it's a very healthy thing.

Like, we all want to be connected. We want to feel seen. We want to, be with our people and that's what's kind of taking you in. But once you're there, there's this very. Kind of false commodified energy and also an addictive energy for me that sort of takes over that I I'm getting something.

It's activating this part of my brain in a way that is encouraging compulsive behavior. And we now know it's relatively well understood how social media, why it is addictive, why it's designed that way. It's been very intentionally designed that way. There's some really good books out there about it.

And when I realized that the ethanol in wine was carcinogenic. Like this thing that I loved and brought me what I thought was pleasure and relaxation and all these things. It was actually toxic for me and there's sort of a toxic base to it and and that's kind of how I regard social media.

Now but it's messy as you say, because we want to be with people and my, and I, you know, I'm a writer, right. And I'm trying to, get my work out into the world. So how do I do that in a way where I don't feel consumed by it. And you know, I don't feel like I'm being co opted and having my attention harvested for profit, which is essentially how those business models work.

Like, in the way, for me, giving up alcohol and embracing full on sobriety has been incredibly liberating, wonderful, and I can't say enough good things about it. With social media, I'm either not there yet, or I'm still, okay, I'm just gonna have half a glass of wine a day, or something like that, I don't know what it is, but I'm working through it, and at least I'm being more present to the questions around when it is getting out of hand and I am getting that feeling of hankering and then buzz and then regret, as opposed to, okay, this is, this is serving me, and and I'm in control of it.

Jennifer: I love that. And what's coming up for me as, as you share this around the deeper desire underneath social media is that desire for connection and a recent, distinction that I've made for myself is this experience of. Mistaking visibility or being seen, versus being met, and I realized that I actually was craving the experience of being met and not seen.

And yet, as you say, the manufacturing of the attention economy it's another example of hustle culture, right? Hustle to be seen, hustle to share, hustle to grow your audience, all those messages that come through, especially in the realm of entrepreneurship, gets us confused between what you talk about the very beginning of our conversation today is like that exchange, that exchange between me and another human for a beautiful value.

And that question that you pointed to in the middle of our conversation am I getting, is this taking more from me, or am I getting deeply nourished? Feels like just such important questions to help any of us, including listeners, really sort out. How do we know when too much is too much and where we are not being served by this experience?

Madeleine: I love that distinction between being seen versus being met. And to me, it does speak to the heart of that kind of relative value. To what extent is something serving you into what is being, what is the exchange? What is the nature of the exchange? And I think that with social media, a lot of people don't understand that their attention is essentially the raw material for someone else's product.

Right? You know, that's why I have these companies make so much money for a quote, unquote, free service is because you are essentially product. Right. And to me, that's it's highly manipulative. Like, it's not a true exchange. For example, when I write on medium. I feel like I'm being provided with this awesome platform that helps me to like, put my ideas into the world and share with other people and whatever.

And there isn't like, I don't know. I don't feel like it's something that is being extracted from me. I feel like it's being provided and I'm as a paid member. I'm like, I'm paying for a service that I'm receiving. And I like that service. It's a pretty clear. relational transaction that feels equitable to

me and doesn't feel deceptive.

It doesn't feel like I'm being told one thing, but then I am somehow being, you know, my profile and my age and the things I click on and whatever are being packaged up and sold, you know, to someone else for lots of money.

Jennifer: Or you're being tracked and surveyed and then sold products based on your private conversations.

Madeleine: Precisely like that your entire email isn't, you know, is being raked like if anybody, you know, it's like, oh, how did, why is that ad popping up when I was just talking about this to my friend? This is weird. It's like, that is real. That is what is happening. It's like every email you send is being, commodified in this way that to me feels deeply disingenuous and extractive.

And very manipulative. So I think those are questions to ask too is like, just really trying to understand the nature of the transaction and what it's giving you, as opposed to what it's taking from you. Yeah, these are wild times that we're in, like, and I'm, I'm just still struggling with it.

I'm obsessed with my phone. It makes me feel needed and wanted and I look at it all the time and. When's the next email when's the next thing? And I'm like, oh, my God. 

Jennifer: Know, I get it. Oh, I get this. I mean, I can just see my own behavior sometimes where I'm flitting between my inbox and a various number of social media channels around being needed, you know, like there's some like hit that comes in. And to me, I mean, these are all clues around it.

Like you say, you're, you're wise woman, what she's attentive to about what we deeply need. And so maybe as we, start to tie up our conversation, you talk beautifully in your article about the benefits of your recovery journey and sobriety and these beautiful qualities and you talk about, the revitalization of rest, you talk about reclaiming your attention, you talk about intimacy, relational intimacy, and, you sort of wrap all of this up in terms of this idea of attunement, and I'd love you to speak to what is attunement to you?

What are you attuning to, and how is this pointing towards a wider version of yourself that maybe you've never known. Maybe you've always known.

Madeleine: yeah, I thank you for that question. And I think it's no accident that. The concept of attunement for me was partially inspired by reading Jenny O'Dell's book, How to Do Nothing. And in it, she talks a lot about hearing and listening to bird song.

Jennifer: Mm.

Madeleine: And I realized, like, I'm heavily into gardening and I love it, but I would often put on music or a podcast when I was in the garden.

I wouldn't listen or give myself into like a full spectrum experience of just being in the garden and working quietly. And just even the value of silence, it's almost like an antidote to feeling overwhelmed by too many things like our brains are not even capable of doing more than one thing at once.

Like, they're really not, we're not supposed to be multitasking. That's another form of wild addiction. And so to me, attunement means you're listening far more deeply to just the sounds of the earth. The sounds of the sounds of other humans. Like, even the timber of someone's voice and the cadence of, like, the, you know, language is so limiting, like, what else is there?

And how can we be present to body language and the language of animals and, you know, the unseen world and all these things. And so to me, attunement feels like I'm just bringing myself. I'm making myself more open to be present. And to receive all of that, and not even necessarily to respond to it, but just to take it in, like.

That receptivity and to be in the beauty of it. Feels like wisdom and it just calms the nervous system. And I just feel more in tune with being a human on this earth. And yeah, that's been the gift of sobriety. There are no more voices in my head. And I can just listen to the earth and I can listen to what's going on with me.

So what's going on with you?

Jennifer: Yeah, beautiful. And for you, the biggest surprise in all of that? 

Madeleine: It's so much more like we think sobriety is boring and colorless and it's like, it's the opposite. It's like the promise that alcohol and other substances make us that life will be more fun and interesting and sophisticated and whatever. It's like, that's what sobriety is. It's a richer, like you just need to be present to it and tune into it.

And. Not take the edge off because the edge is a beautiful, powerful place of presence and you get it all you get your full self and the full spectrum version of the world and I, I don't want to miss it, even if it's hard and challenging. I want to be here for all of

Jennifer: that's, that, it just gave me chills as you said that. Because I think for me, that's where this Gift of my own work. And it's been hard over the last five years, transitioning out of a very secure and amazing career and to pivot into doing deeper work with folks and writing and podcasting.

But there's something about that. I've been able to slow down and all of that and to start to just like you attune to Sort of the ordinary, you know, and the ordinary terrors of my, you know, the imagination of where this world is headed. But also this beauty of the smallest of, of experiences that I often skipped over because I was too busy or not present.

And I think for me, being here for all of it and feeling more means that we have to be in this messy middle together. The messy middle being like the confusing cultural storm that we're in that feels so scary and we have an opportunity we can, we can either check out and hide or avoid or ignore, or we can open more fully and I think what I'm here for is, how do I and others how do we develop this capacity to be with what is unfolding.

While also, you know, and I love, I have a conversation with my beautiful teacher, Cynthia Bourgeot, and she says, you know, how do I give trust even when the world is not trustworthy? How do I give faith or how do I give love even when I'm not guaranteed it in return? And I think there's something that you're saying that being alive and on edge means that you're trusting.

This world to give, to give everything you have without the guarantee that you're going to get the hits or the likes or the. Promise of certainty back and something tells me that you're this await being that has said yes to to trusting that. So I just want to say thank you so much for your courage and your vulnerability, especially in your willingness to share with all of us through your writing and through your entrepreneurship modeling and, leadership and yes, your vulnerability of being human.

I just so appreciate you.

Madeleine: Thank you, Jennifer. And likewise, and I will hang out with you in the messy middle anytime friend.

Jennifer: So here's the essence of what I'm taking from this conversation with Madeline. She reveals a common assumption that I think many of us hold dearly, is that the edge needs to be rounded off. The edge being the sort of intensity of how we feel. Often it's the more uncomfortable emotional experiences and that somehow they need to be dulled down.

in order to survive, especially when we're feeling stretched. And I want to honor the resistance of taking the edge off. It is a creative act of resistance and one, I need to remind myself to hold it compassionately and to understand all the upsides of it. taking the edge off.

There's a lot. And yet there's these downsides too. And I appreciate her point that when we take the edge off, we also dull our capacity for joy, for presence, and the beautiful range that we can access.

I feel like she's inviting us to return to feeling and to engage in the wisdom of the edge, that sometimes the edginess of our own selves is what's needed to provoke change, and to be deeply empathetic and compassionate about the wide and difficult ups and downs of our own lives.

I'm deeply touched by her courage to bring this really awake conversation into the messy middle of productivity culture, 

where entrepreneurship, capitalism, our career drives is deeply linked with a kind of a numbing and I love what her own recovery journey has brought in terms of her own realization that attunement and presence and feeling the wide range of day to day ordinary life are deep gifts.

And so what if, what if we didn't take the edge off? What if we embraced the edginess of ourselves and our experience? The splintery ends that are rough, that poke, that jaggedly remind us of the full breadth of what it means to be alive.

I think Madeline and this conversation is pointing to is the capacity to come into a deeper relationship with what needs to be nourished, such that we can stay creatively responsive, and still contributing with this full range of gifts to what is needed now.

Our bodies hold a wisdom, our feelings bring a wisdom. And so why shouldn't we feel, even when it hurts?

Thank you for being here on the Tension of Emergence. You can find resources and links from this episode in the show notes to learn more about Madeline's work. And if you know someone who'd appreciate this conversation, please tell a friend, share this episode, leave a heart on Spotify or Apple if this has touched you in any way. We're weaving a wholehearted web based on kinship, not kingship, at the speed of one heart opening conversation at a time.

And to stay in touch with me. Jennifer, and receive radical encouragement and unique offerings to support your creative emergence as you lead and live. Come sign up for my newsletter today at jengland. substack. com. And, before we close, I want to remind you that after each Deeper Dive, which is released Tuesdays, 

I offer you a bonus episode on Fridays. They are micro, less than six minutes, and are designed to help you apply what you've learned today into the field of your own life,

That's all for now, my friend. We are more than halfway through season three. I am so grateful for you being here for your shares, and all All the wonderful feedback we've received so far this season.

Thank you. Thank you. I'm Jennifer England. Talk to you next week.