Many thanks to everyone who reached out with well-wishes for my partner after last week’s newsletter. He’s doing well, and we got very lucky (as far as that’s possible with strokes).

In addition to Making A Scene, I’m excited to add an interview segment to the newsletter’s mix. Hearing others’ experiences of substance use and recovery has been invaluable to me throughout my sobriety, and I hope it will be similarly useful and thought-provoking for you.

Melissa Petro is herself a sober lady and the author of Shame on You: How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification. She knows the subject matter all too well. In 2010, Petro was an art and writing teacher at a public school in the Bronx. Then, the New York Post published an “exposé” about her previous experience as a sex worker. She was promptly removed from the classroom.

We talk about the role shame plays in compulsive substance use, being in (and out) of “the rooms” of AA, and the importance of finding friendly weirdos.

Petro is teaching a Writing for Shame Resilience workshop at Esalen next month, with a few spots left. If you’re interested, you can find out more information here.

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The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

KM: Hi Melissa, thanks for doing the interview. Shame on You was a refreshing read—both as a woman and as someone in recovery from alcohol addiction. Shame was so enmeshed with my drinking. I would get drunk, feel ashamed about what I did or how something happened, and the solution for dealing with that shame was to numb myself out all over again.

MP: Exactly, and it becomes part of your identity. It’s not, “Oh, my behavior was bad.” It’s “I’m a bad person.”

KM: In the book, you blend research, interviews with more than 150 women, and, of course, your own experience. How did the broadness of those experiences affect your understanding of shame?

MP: On a spiritual level, it was so healing to truly know in a researched, methodical way that it wasn’t just me. For so long, my story was this searching, fearless inventory of myself—turning that lens outward and speaking with other people was so freeing. It’s exactly what happens in [twelve-step] rooms, right? We learn that we’re not unique. In the rooms, we attach it to this idea of alcoholism; in the book, I looked at it through the lens of shame and the way it makes us behave in ways we wouldn’t otherwise. It’s not representative of who we are.

KM: And we’re so scared that it is representative of who we are that we’re scared to air it out, when that’s actually what needs to happen most.

MP: Getting it out right sizes it, as they say in the rooms [of Alcoholics Anonymous]. You realize that it’s not the most terrible thing—no matter what it is—but it’s not the best, either. It just is what it is.

KM: I often say the most valuable part of rehab for me was that it kept me away from alcohol for 28 days and put me with a bunch of other people who had also destroyed their lives. I have mixed feelings about it, because I’m not sure it should have cost what it did, so I could sit around and be like, “Oh, you sickos have all done this too,” and we could laugh and trade stories about it and cry. But at the same time, that’s what made me feel so much less alone and started to alleviate that shame for the first time in my life. And in that sense, it was priceless.

MP: I love that you say you have mixed feelings about something, because the world really demands black and white thinking, and most things are more complicated than that.

When people find out I had experience in the sex trade, people kept asking, “Well, was it consensual? Was it empowered or are you a victim?” But the reality is it was very in between, which is the truth of the human experience. That’s why I loved the rooms. People could laugh about something tragic, or inspire you to think more critically about something you once thoughtlessly enjoyed. That kind of reflection is a lost art in our culture.

KM: Definitely. Speaking of self-reflection, you talk about it in the book, but can you tell me a bit about the process that led you to recovery and the rooms?

MP: I hit such a bottom with sex. That was what I admitted I was powerless over, and that I needed something beyond me to stop me from acting out sexually. The SLA [Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous] meeting was on a Saturday, and there was an AA meeting on Friday. I’d gone to it months earlier with a friend and remember thinking, “Wow, these bitches are cool. Too bad they don’t drink.” And I kind of dismissed it. But that Friday, I was in so much pain and fear of acting out that I didn’t want to wait another day. I went to the meeting and started counting days.

My therapist had been recommending AA for a very long time. It wasn’t a secret. I had a terrible experience with an outpatient program for alcohol, and AA turned out to be so much more helpful than the outpatient program.

KM: I’ve always thought the real brilliance of AA is simply having a place where anyone (with a desire to stop drinking) is welcome, you don’t have to pay, and you can talk about your issues and people listen.

MP: It’s so liberating for people like us, who have shit, who’ve done shit, who’ve seen shit but never felt like they had the words or agency to talk about it. That’s one of the things that was so therapeutic about writing the book. It was an opportunity to get into emotional granularity—how emotions are layered. Underneath rage, there’s very often grief. Or there are tender feelings underneath hard feelings. Shame is like black paint; it can cover everything. But there’s more underneath that. Writing and talking about it lets us pull some of that black paint up and see what else is there.

KM: Yes! It removes so much of the charge of shame. There are some things I did when I was drinking that I’ll never feel okay about. I never want to feel okay about having done them. But it’s not shame anymore, it’s regret. And I no longer see them as a reflection of who I am as a person—or even who I was as a person then.

MP: It’s such an important distinction. If we can say, “I feel so much remorse for that behavior, and it will never happen again. I’m not that person, and I will not behave that way again.” Then we can make a change. But as long as you’re mired in shame, you can’t really reflect on the gap between who you are, what your ideals are, and how you’re behaving. You know, when we recognize there’s that gap, then we can change things. Oftentimes, it takes verbalizing it. It takes telling the story more than once.

KM: Which ideally leads to being accountable for it, too. One of the aspects of the twelve steps I appreciate most is that it taught me how to apologize in a real way. Not just “I’m sorry” over and over again, which everyone in my life had heard a thousand times before. I had a lot of work to do before I could get to a true apology. It’s not just something that you say.

MP: It’s an opportunity, because instead of waiting for someone else to apologize, you can start to reflect curiously on your own part and find something that you are responsible for. Then you can apologize, which, remarkably, oftentimes opens the door for someone else to apologize.

KM: The idea that [amends] weren’t about getting forgiveness for your actions was revolutionary to me. It’s about recognizing past behavior, apologizing, and making a concrete commitment not to repeat it. There’s something very liberating about not having it be tied to the other person’s reaction.

Email me with questions or suggestions!

MP: Instead of apologizing in a shame-rooted way where ‘everything is bad and I’m bad,’ which is just an attempt to appease others and pretend that you’re not the terrible person deep down that you actually fear you are. When we live in shame, there’s no behaving differently. We are inherently wrong; inherently bad.

KM: Can you share a little about your experience with Dharma Punx (a secular Buddhist community)?

MP: I started practicing secular Buddhism after being in the rooms for years. I love Dharma Punx. That space felt more appropriate for me because it broadened the experience. It viewed things less through the lens of alcoholism and more through the lens of human experience. But the practices are similar; they’re very much about holding space and that pause between feeling and action.

Both AA and through secular Buddhist groups taught me skills I didn’t have before—right speech, right action. I didn’t have any sense of that growing up.

KM: Compassionate self-reflection was such a foreign idea to me before getting sober.

MP: No, there was no space for that, because it was punitive. If you’d done something wrong, you hid it, and what was right and wrong was really confusing, because I didn’t understand the rules.

It’s great to have a kid and have to question things so you can explain them. I remember when my kid was three, and he was like, Why do ambulances get to go through red lights? There’s an explanation for that. There are explanations for things. Sometimes the explanations aren’t ideal, but that’s the way things are. Having those conversations is such a gift. I didn’t have any of that growing up.

KM: Yeah, growing up, I instinctively knew that I was better off keeping everything a secret and that I was boiling with rage at all times. And feeling like I had to pretend I wasn’t those things, that I was fine and normal and happy.

MP: The feelings of shame come with that from the constant pretending and the constant ignoring of those feelings. Shame is a very primitive feeling because it’s about survival, like, “Will my needs be taken care of if I am truly who I am?” The fear is that you won’t, but what if you were? What if you could be exactly who you are, feel safe, and be more deeply connected to people? That’s what happens in recovery. You admit the “worst” of yourself, and people move towards you rather than away. That is so profoundly healing.

KM: For me, so much of letting go of shame has been getting comfortable with being the “weird one.”

MP: That’s shame resilience. Every time we say, “Hey, this is the truth about me, yes,” and someone doesn’t reject it, we reveal more truths both to ourselves and to others. We become resilient beings who can walk through the world unfazed. When someone rejects or shames us, we recognize it, but it doesn’t hurt as much or affect our self-worth because we’ve developed a certain resilience to it.

KM: It opens your eyes up to other people, too. I’m always on the lookout for the friendly weirdos.

MP: Yeah, I’ve always been attracted to the space where the weirdos are because they’re people who, at times, have no choice but to be themselves. And I’ve also felt this urgent need to be myself.

KM: How do you maintain your recovery today? What does that look like for you?

MP: I do feel some guilt when I’m asked that question. Everything I say next is going to sound like an excuse, but I don’t have a ton of time. I’ve got young kids, I’ve got a career, but I do have a practice. I listen to a couple of Dharma talks a week. Sometimes it will include a meditation. Sometimes I pause during that meditation and feel my feet on the ground, but usually I keep doing the dishes. And if I meditate, I am always drinking my coffee while I meditate. And that is 100% okay. If I am sitting cross-legged meditating, are you fucking kidding me? It’s fine that I’m also drinking my coffee.

So, I listen to dharma talks. I run once a week. I eat right, I sleep right, and I am in individual therapy. I take medication. I have creative projects. That’s my practice.

KM: It’s really interesting to hear you say that because there was a time when I would have thought, if I’m not going to meetings, I’m a dry drunk who is just white knuckling it, blah blah blah. But, no, my needs are allowed to change. Your needs are allowed to change.

MP: I felt it in my last year of meetings. I realized that I wasn’t relating to this anymore. It became a human experience, not an alcoholic experience, and that’s why Dharma talks became so much more instructive for me. And it’s very similar to the comfort I felt when I first started going to meetings. That said, there’s something very unique about what happens in the rooms. There’s something relational that you can’t get in a meditation practice.

KM: Yeah, I haven’t found anything that can replicate a meeting (when it’s a good one). But my recovery today is less about abstaining from alcohol and more about trying to stay sane.

MP: I’m not going to drink today, but I might get really angry at someone who takes my parking spot, which is stupid. I don’t need to do that, just like I didn’t need to drink as much as I did. But [recovery] is about maintaining one’s spiritual fitness. Do I want to let myself walk around like a jerk? Maybe I’m gonna be lazy and be that person today. I might feel some guilt about that, but I’m not going to be ashamed of it. Or I might take the more spiritually minded option and try to accept that we’re all doing the best we can.

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